Alex in the front room didn’t like her. She knew this because he would tell her when he drank. She wondered what it was about her that he didn’t like, but wasn’t going to ask. He took moody black and white photographs of highways and had an older girlfriend, Lea. They would stay in bed all weekend stoned on heroin. He dealt it too, just enough so that he didn’t have to pay for it. Marnie watched them impassively. Alex was tall and skinny, with the white ghost skin of someone who didn’t like the outdoors, and white bleached hair that made him even more ghostlike. Lea, equally tall and laconic, stayed in Alex’s room and ignored them all. The couple in the hallway were Bess and Simon from England, who had been found at a party needing somewhere to live. They were illegal, having overstayed their visas, and were hungry and homeless. Simon had a shaved head and wore all black, while Bess was small, had a cockney accent and gave them all a new way of speaking with her rhyming slang. Bess did shifts for cash in a brothel on Hindley Street, and on those nights she would come home and smoke Kent cigarettes in the backyard. Simon sat around reading most days, then sat up in the evenings with whoever was home, drinking and smoking and sometimes shooting up while Bess was at work. He didn’t talk to Marnie much either, but she didn’t mind. She was amazed that he could be inactive for so long and be happy to live on Bess’s earnings.
Then there was Danny across the hall from her, a pretty redheaded boy with pearly skin and pale eyelashes and clear green eyes who liked going to beats and coming home to tell the stories. Danny was naturally warm and playful with everyone, and was the house favourite who somehow gelled them all together. Judy was the youngest, silly, sweet and flirtatious, and a hedonistic drinker. She would go to parties and to the pub, and bring home a succession of different boys, all with hair in their eyes and second-hand clothes. This made them look like children playing dress-ups in old men’s trousers and too-big suit coats, button-up shirts and trilby hats. Marnie never knew who would be in the house in the mornings, but she was always up first, way before the stirrings of the visitors.
Alex, Danny and Judy were all at the art school. Alex liked Judy and said she was fun, and he adored Danny. Marnie had never met a gay person before. She’d never even thought about it, and these were the first people she’d lived with apart from her mother and sister. The first night Danny brought someone home she was nervous. But Danny took the boy, smiling and giggling, into his room, and in the morning everything was the same.
The house was chaotic, and furnished from the streets. No one cleaned. Dishes cascaded over the kitchen benches. On cold days they would burn any furniture they could find on the street, breaking up ladders and chairs and piling them into the fireplace. Or they left the gas oven on with the door open and played cards in the kitchen: Five Hundred, and sometimes Canasta. The record player was always going, the records their most prized and cherished possessions. The Fall, British Beat, Psychedelic Furs, The Stranglers; Marnie hadn’t heard of those bands. Despite everything else being haphazard, the records were cleaned and put back in their sleeves. They lived on rice and spaghetti or toast. They all stole things. Danny was the most proficient, coming home triumphantly with bottles of spirits and criminally expensive designer clothes.
Small change was gathered to buy flagons of wine. Alex would lead, priestly in black with the collection plate. Pockets were gone through, the couch pulled apart, the floor inspected. Coins were counted excitedly. He stole photographic paper from the shop at the school, and only had one pair of shoes, which were winklepickers with great holes in the bottom stuffed with newspaper.
She dug them a vegetable garden in the neglected backyard, earning grudging respect from Alex and incredulousness from Judy and Danny. Simon came and helped her dig, happy to be relieved of his boredom. They had a house competition to steal seeds from the hardware shop, as well as tools. Danny won when he came home with a wheelbarrow.
At night she had a job as a kitchenhand in an upmarket wine bar called Frenchies. Danny called it Pretenchies. The chef ignored her completely. The pay was dismal and the Asian cleaners got even less, but she got a meal at the end of her shift. If she saved up it meant she could buy the heavy, creamy paper to print on, more important than going out, or shoes, or books, or any other number of things she already went without. One night the owner came in, his shirt straining over his belly, blond hairs poking out from his sleeves. He followed her into the cool room and pressed himself into her back, his breath boozy, his hands meaty. She squirmed out of his grip on her arm, out of the room, and out onto the street with him laughing after her.
‘You should be flattered! No one else is gonna want you looking like that.’
Simon and Alex were up smoking bongs and playing Bob Marley records when she burst into the house, hot shame choking her. In an unexpected show of chivalry, Alex offered to go and beat him up. Marnie knew she couldn’t go back. She was wretched, she couldn’t breathe properly, and started to fracture.
She had no money for electricity, gas or bus fares, let alone paper. She tried to get another night job, but her resolve was shaken, no one would take her, and she couldn’t use the wine bar as a reference. She desperately wanted to be able to stay at the school and follow the curve of her intuition. She tried to imagine working in a bank or an office, but the pictures called to her like the call of the sirens. She imagined herself shrivelling and decaying if she wasn’t able to shake them free from her being; infant monsters, like the slunk skin cow hides taken from unborn calves.
Eventually, she called her mother from the phone box near the pub, humiliated, but her mother refused to help, still smarting from the abandonment.
‘You’re on your own,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Marnie. This is what you wanted.’
After the phone call, Marnie went back to the house and got into her bed, a mattress on the floor left behind by the last person in her room. They’d also cracked two of the windows, and cold gusts of air rattled them and punched around the room. She was freezing and broken. She lay her greatcoat over the treasured op shop blanket and sobbed until her eyes puffed closed and her sleeves were soggy with snot. Bess tiptoed in, got into the bed behind her and spooned her, stroking the jagged hair like a mother with a sick child. Marnie surrendered, and they went to sleep.
In the morning, with the pale blue light, Bess had gone. Marnie found her in the backyard wearing her coat over a thin dress and smoking a cigarette.
‘Well you look like a million bucks,’ she said, eyeing off Marnie’s blotchy face and slitted eyes. She touched her shoulder.
‘I’ve an idea. You can make some money at my work. You won’t have to touch the johns. You fuck me, I fuck you, and they pay to watch. I’ve done it once before with one of the other girls. We just do it like they’re not there. I can sort it.’
Startled, she looked at Bess differently. At her milky English skin, her freckly nose, her tiny breasts and pale hair. At her plucked eyebrows and golden eyes and her neat little hands. Bess was older, twenty-two, a traveller.
‘No!’ she said.
‘Think about it,’ Bess said. ‘It would solve your problems.’
‘I couldn’t,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a show, that’s it.’
Her heart raced. ‘I couldn’t.’
But she thought about it, over and over. Maybe she could do it once, just the once, she thought, to tide herself over.
A week later and with no work prospects, she found Bess. She heard herself breathing and then whispering, ‘Okay’. She was terrified. She’d had sex with Richard Hopkins from school on the oval at night, sneaking out more for the inky vastness of the sky and the way everything felt electric in the darkness than for his furtive hands down her pants. It wasn’t great, and she had crept into the bathroom afterwards to wash her thighs.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Bess, ‘it doesn’t mean you’re a lezzie. But you’ll have to clean yourself up.’
‘You’ll have to tell me what to do. I haven’t,
um, with a girl . . .’
‘You’ll just have to shave everything. Everything. And I’ll have to do something about your hair. Just don’t let on to Simon, okay?’
Marnie walked behind Bess into the brothel, and into a dimmed room. Five men, so ordinary looking, were seated on chairs, circular around the edges. A bed was on the ground in the centre, lit with a red spotlight. Marnie looked down and held on tight to Bess’s hand. She had got Judy to cut Marnie’s hair even shorter but neater. Marnie felt stripped even before she was undressed. Bess had given her instructions.
‘Treat it like a play in the round, and make a point of keeping everything visible. Make all of your movements larger than reality. If you’re not sure, just keep moving. It will look better to them if we actually enjoy it too. Smile. Make sounds, they like that. Remember, they’re all voyeurs: they get off on watching and they’ll definitely spank the monkey. Look at me, not them. I’ll lead and you’ll be fine.’
A strange thing happened. She liked it. Not the men, not being watched, but being touched with tenderness. Bess rolled her around, kissed her all over. She kissed back. Bess touched and touched her, her hands confident, spreading her wide. ‘Pretend to come,’ she whispered, but Marnie didn’t need to pretend, and it was Bess who was surprised.
Doing it once turned into doing it more. It meant she could draw and print and study, incredulous at how the other students wasted their time and their opportunities to learn. She felt even more different from the other students with her secret double life. Her new job started seeping into her art. There had already been the portraits of some of the housemates depicted as saints: Danny as St Sebastian, tied to a tree, with shining arrows in his beautiful young body; Judy as St Philomena, the patron saint of youth, wrapped in a chain and anchor and with flowers in her hair; and Bess as St Abigail, with nine white deer and a trail of bees. Alex and Lea she etched not as saints, but as Tristan and Isolde, banished to the wilderness, lying in a bed of leaves, opioid stupefaction in their eyes. She drew herself as St Theodora, escaping being sentenced to a brothel and going into the wilderness dressed like a man, herding camels. She drew herself leaping from the door and into the sky, cloaked, the camels in the distance. She made other drawings and prints too. A group of men huddled together, in shadow, looking at a baby rabbit in a spot-lit circle, semi-dressed women on barstools with wings and fur, and men in suit jackets and ties, their faces obscured, their pants missing.
True to her word, she kept quiet. When they were at home Bess spent her time with Simon, and Marnie felt herself shifting, her familiar sense of internal disquiet easing. She told her flatmates she was working in an illegal casino and being paid cash. On her off nights she started going out with Danny to the Mars Bar, somewhere she could go and not feel like she had to hide herself to avoid being harassed. He adopted her like a brother. They got drunk and he crawled into her bed and held her hand while they slept. He posed for her to draw in his glorious, naked perfection. He gave her a nickname, Captain Marvel, and called her Marvs. His warmth was big enough to hold her too; he loved her and hugged her and shared his friends with her, and eventually she had a small circle of people she could begin to trust. Marnie had never really had friends before. In her school she had been an outsider, misunderstood for being different, for wanting to be with the trees and the dirt rather than her classmates, teased for her angry mother, her unwillingness to speak and complete indifference to sport. Now she found other outsiders. They were queers, drug takers, drag queens and prostitutes. None of them had much, but they gave her acceptance and became her people. They adopted her, too.
Quinn from the brothel kissed her at around the same time that Danny started to get sick. He had a cough he couldn’t shake. He lost weight and looked even more beautiful. For a long while they thought he was just run down, but then he started to get strange brown markings on his skin, and they knew something was really wrong. Quinn worked as a mistress. She smoked joints on the back step of the brothel where, over a few months, they had struck up a friendship. They could be quiet together, the smoke coiling up and around them both. Marnie started staying over at Quinn’s, sleeping naked for the first time. She discovered that Quinn had white feathery lines all the way up both her arms which she kept hidden, and when Quinn was asleep Marnie would trace her fingers over the scars. Quinn was happy for her to come and go, to stay up all night scribbling in an ecstatic state and fall asleep at the kitchen table with her head in her arms. They didn’t talk about the brothel, or that Marnie was now seeing clients alone. She didn’t want to care about them, the men with their needs: nice men with wedding rings cheating on their wives, single men with tides of loneliness, old polite widowers wanting conversation. Or the red-faced young tradies in groups, elbowing each other, and the entitled men in pinstriped suits who faced her to the wall. But it was her nature to be observant, and she saw how they wanted to delve inside of her, beneath her, around her, to either lose or find something of themselves.
At school, the end of the year came, and the assessments. The students’ work was displayed and judged. The teachers asked her about the disturbing images, where they had come from, and why she, a nice quiet girl, was making them. She refused to answer them. She shrugged and looked at the ground. They treated her as an oddity already; she didn’t want to become an object of their titillation. ‘Fuck you,’ she thought. ‘You don’t just get to have me.’
Via the school she received a letter from a gallery. They had seen her display. She was invited to take her works and go and meet the director, with a view to having an exhibition once she had finished her degree. The studio head was jealous, and belittled her in front of the other students. After months of prompting by Quinn and Danny she went, with a folder of etchings and drawings. The gallery director wore a linen suit and spent a long time looking at the work. She felt sick. He was alert and straightforward. He picked the strongest pieces. They set a date, the director not wanting to wait, and she signed a contract.
Alex started being nicer to her. He took some photographs of her for the promos, very happy to be paid professional rates by the gallery. The whole household came to her show, each of them posing for the press, delighted when they were recognised from the images. Marnie dreaded having to go to the opening. She had found a second-hand black dress to wear, and Bess had put makeup on her, which had the desired effect of making her feel like she was someone else, set apart from herself. She got very drunk and left early.
The exhibition sold out.
The gallery invited her back to have another show the following year. She spent the year making lithographs, relishing grinding the smooth stones, their weight and heft, peeling off each print, adding more with ink, and crayon. Her works were always black. There were portraits of Quinn, unrecognisable in her costumes, of herself and the other girls at work dressed as animals, or in armour, of groups of men corralled in holding pens. There were dragons with elaborate scales and fire, unicorns and other creatures. These works also sold. At her opening, an expensively dressed middle-aged man approached her, smiling.
‘That’s me. That’s me in that picture, which makes you the magic rabbit. I know exactly where I’ve seen you before. Nice work. I’ve bought it. Wouldn’t it be delicious if everyone knew who we were? I won’t tell if you won’t.’ And he winked before disappearing into the room. Her legs wobbled, and anxiety made her retch. Later in the evening, the gallery director confided that the piece had been bought by a famous lawyer, and pointed to him.
She was featured in the paper and in several prestigious art magazines. The state gallery bought one each of her whole print collection, as well as three of the big charcoal drawings, and she went onto a ‘Most Collectable’ list. They called her work mystical magic realism. Her fellow students stopped ignoring her and started to invite her to parties, which she didn’t attend.
At her third show she included the dark horror charcoal drawings and portraits of witches she was working on. They had serene expre
ssions of rapture on their faces as they were being tied up, burned and drowned. There were tiny velvety mezzotints of cats and foxes and other familiars, and lithographs of sleeping babies wearing protective talismans. Other state galleries bought the works, as well as collectors. Her work was feted across the country, and she was represented interstate as well.
Suddenly she had more money than she could ever have imagined. It made her skittish, but she knew what she wanted to do. She quit the brothel and moved out of the house, taking Danny with her. He was getting sicker, with a new virus the papers were calling ‘the gay plague’, and the others were becoming scared to live with him. Because of this, Alex and Lea moved out, as did Bess and Simon, and Judy went back to her family, marking the end of the share house.
Marnie found a modest little house near the sea, again with a big backyard, thinking the air would be good for Danny. Their friends banded together to care for him. She drew portraits of him: in bed, resting, reading, sleeping. Lying on an old couch in the garden. Or in drag, his face beautiful, his body skeletal. Quinn moved in to help with the lifting and washing. Quinn and Marnie would lie in bed in the next room, listening to his scratchy breathing, crying over the disintegration of the beautiful golden boy they loved so dearly. When he coughed up blood, they took him in to the hospital, where he became more and more transparent, and died. He was twenty.
Hope Shines Page 7
