by Kathy Lette
He’d hired one other masseuse, a punk-looking girl called Mouche. About ten earrings dangled from each of her pendulous lobes. She wore striped socks, coloured gym boots and an op-shop tangerine-coloured organdie ball gown. It was the sort of dress you have to be poured into, and nobody had said ‘when’. A couple of years older than me, she was terribly suave. Through the panty liner–thin partition separating our two cubicles came a low wolf whistle. ‘What do you want me to do, mate?’ I heard Mouche snarl in reply to her lecherous customer. ‘Bark? Or just piss on your leg?’
When I’d finished massaging my customer, I retreated into the grotty waiting room and flicked through a prehistoric copy of Cleo magazine. In between the ads for Modess and freckle-removal creams was a story about Roxanne, who had hungry thighs and walked on the wild side of New York nightlife devouring men. I had just got to this really tacky part where Roxanne had entered Plato’s Retreat, a bar where you check in, not your coat, but all your clothes, and was deciding whether to go into the Group Grope or the Lezzo rooms, when Mouche emerged from her cubicle.
‘Finished?’ Her fingers, like mine, were blackened with dead skin.
‘Nah. I’ve just left the creep in there with the box of Kleenex.’
‘He’s not?’
‘He is,’ she said casually. I watched her slip off the casing of a lipstick and tattoo the floral wall paper. Men suck, she wrote. ‘I wanna get the sack s’arvo.’
Mouche told me that the dole office were suspicious that she never attempted to find work. This stint would shut them up for a bit, she said. Say … it … with flowers … I dangled on every Hawaiian Sunset Max Factor letter she wrote. Send … your … man … a triffid … Mouche was what you’d call street smart. I, on the other hand, was middle-of-the-road.
My next customer lurched up onto one elbow. ‘What size bra cup, love? I’m a photographer. Professional. Get orders for everyfink. Big rumps, little tits, amputees … Some guys just wanna come and watch the modelling sessions frew a peephole.’ Urging him to lie down, I attempted to give Mouche some SOS semaphore through the porthole in our partition. ‘If guys can get their kicks jerking off over a photo or two, saves birds like youse from being raped, right? One of the little girlies who’s working for me – started two months ago – now she’s hit the big time. Got her own Ford Laser, a flat and everyfink.’ He sized me up. ‘B cup …’
Hearing the outer door wheeze open, I extricated myself from his conversational Glad Wrap. Two massive men in suits swelled into the waiting room. My fingers ached at the sight of their mounds of muscle. I looked at Mouche. She was scrutinising the tips of her bleached hair for split ends then peeling apart the delinquent strands. My vile customer appeared in his birthday suit at the cubical door.
‘Detectives,’ Mouche hissed at him. It was like vocal Mortein. He withered and was repelled out of sight, no doubt to dress then disappear out a window. They were looking for our boss, Ron Smart. ‘Well, he obviously wasn’t,’ Mouche snorted, retrieving our day’s earnings from the desk. ‘He’s not a roolio troolio chiropractor, is that it?’
‘Warrant for arrest,’ the detective’s delivery was like a pneumatic drill, ‘on a murder charge.’ They asked for our names.
I prepared to give a dossier of dates, hobbies, favourite colours, vital statistics, political preferences. ‘Debbie Vick–’
‘Kimmy Wonderley,’ Mouche interjected. ‘… And I’m Karen James.’ (It was news to me.)
‘How old are you?’ the other D asked me.
‘She’s seventeen,’ Mouche lied with ease, ‘and I’m eighteen.’
He proceeded to lecture me about the importance of self-respect and how easy it was for girls to be led from the path of virtue. I nodded. I nodded at everything he said, like I was one of those dogs who sit in the back windows of cars in the Western suburbs. ‘Well, Kimmy,’ he addressed me, ‘you should just thank the Lord it’s not you sprawled out on a meat tray down in the city freezer.’
I did. I thanked Him, then and there. And we weren’t even on speaking terms. See, I come from a spiritually schizo family. My mother’s a tyke. And my dad’s a Prot. Every night my mum would tuck me in and we’d do our ‘Hail Mary, Mother of God’ prayers. ‘Go to Catholic scripture class this week, darling, won’t you?’ Next, my dad would come to my room and we’d go through our flipside religious repertoire. ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild … Church of England Scripture class this week, I’m counting on you …’ Caught between the poles of my devout parents, I grew up an ardent believer in atheism.
The monotony of the detective’s moralistic voice set my smiling head nodding on its spring once more. Mouche was shovelling everything portable into her bottomless Mary Poppins bag – clock radio, tissues, towels and a year’s supply of baby oil. While the detectives ransacked the premises for clues, she yanked me out the back by the elbow. ‘Come on, Kimmy.’ She hurled her bag, discus style, over the paling fence and shinnied up after it. Shell-shocked, and with the theme music of Miami Vice blaring in my head, I rushed after her. We thudded down into the back lane. ‘Never give a cop your name, dickhead.’ She looked at me for the first time – at my Sportsgirl spotted dress, filed nails and pink clip-on earrings. ‘And change your clothes. You look like a suburban wanker getting round in that clobber. Hooroo!’
I was having enough trouble coordinating my speech, let alone my clothing. I trailed her up the laneway, dragging my backpack. She cast disparaging glances over her shoulder, then stopped, whipped a small wad of notes out from under the elastic of her underpants and swivelled towards me.
‘Here y’are. In times of panic …’ She peeled off half the notes and thrust them at me. ‘… keep cool and collect. That’ll get you safely back to the Lamington Belt.’
‘I’m not going home.’
‘What? You’ve pissed off?’
‘I wanna be a singer. Or a dancer. Or a poet. Or a novelist …’
‘Which one?’
‘Dunno yet … Whichever comes first.’
‘Great,’ she said with a crooked grin, sizing me up. ‘Go for it. Nobody else in this shitty country gets off their arse to do anything, “Oh, it’s not The Done Thing.” But once you do it, it’s done, right, so then it’s the Done Thing.’
The city-bound bus lumbered into view. I flicked through my address book. Besides Garry and the old surfie gang, it had about two people in it: the family dentist and my relief English teacher, Imogen. Nobody wanted to teach at my school. We’d had relief teachers to relieve the relief teachers who were relieving the relief teachers. The surfie gang I grew up with would have liquid-papered me out of their address books by now, as would my rellos. The bus belched blue exhaust.
‘Didja know in New York there are nightclubs,’ my words did somersaults to get over the top of each other, ‘where you don’t just check in your coat, but all your clothes?’
‘No shit?’ she laughed. ‘Do you know how to catch a bus?’ I looked at her as though she was a few beers short of a full slab. ‘Giggle a lot,’ she shouted above the roar of the diesel, ‘blush a bit, look down lots, stand pigeon-toed, forget where you’re going for a minute, chuck him a cheesy and then ask for half fare. Got it?’ And she yanked me on board.
Steaming hot water pummelled my back. I scrounged a flimsy piece of disintegrating soap from the floor. It was encrusted with pubic hair. Plump women, their skin deeply flushed, scrubbed away at dimpled thighs and cellulite.
One scrutinised a mole under her left breast. Another blew her nose into her fingers and flicked the snot down the drain between her feet. Girls with India-rubber breasts arched lithe bodies and razored fresh crops of pubic stubble.
Mouche had blackmailed a university student into giving her his sports union badge. Every second day she came down to the sports centre for an illegal shower or a swim in the chlorinated phlegm.
I’d been nurtured in cottonwool wadding. My suburban upbringing hadn’t prepared me for Mouche. She was exotic. Not only did she live in
a squat, write songs, wear no under chunders, carry a switchblade and dye her pubes the same colours as her hair (‘collars and muffs’ she called it), but she could also execute fanny farts. ‘It’s just a burp,’ she explained, ‘backwards.’ She played a tune then and there. New Blue Clinic foam frothed in disgust around us. ‘I could teach you. What tune do you want to learn?’
I thought for a moment. ‘“Auld Lang Syne”.’
She laughed. ‘May old acquaintance be forgot?’
‘And fast.’
‘Anyone in particular?’
‘Just men in general. After my boyfriend cheated on me with my bestie, I’ve gone off them.’
‘What?’ She doused me with cupped handfuls of water. ‘As a genre?’
But the best thing about her was her laugh. It was a tropical noise that warmed everyone around her. Mouche could do anything: pierce earlobes with an ice cube and needle, tell the size of a man’s penis by the length of his index finger, play guitar and piano and sing. In the showers she started to make up a song about men ‘eating up their ladies … a perfumed lunch …’
‘In the back of the Mercedes,’ I added, and she wove it into her melody.
We ad-libbed lines, groping for rhymes, letting the tune gel and then harmonising.
By the end of three verses and a chorus we had dead men’s fingers.
‘Where ya gonna crash?’
I didn’t exactly have a string of Hiltons offering me poolside penthouses. Before I could answer, she nudged me, indicating the girl in thongs flapping her way across the tinea-infested tiles. Mouche chucked her a cheesy. ‘Excuse me, but like a complete moron I forgot my shampoo. Do ya reckon I could borrow just a smidgen?’ Mouche returned with a small, green pool of chemicals in the palm of her hand and frothed my hair into a luxurious lather. ‘You can crash at my place.’ She scrutinised me. ‘You’re a bit straight for it, though.’
‘I’m not! I’ve done everything. Gone with guys, smoked dope, done magic mushies, shoplifted, hitchhiked, sung up on stage, been to Bali …’
‘Shit!’ She snorted. ‘You’re world-bloody-weary.’ She gave me a hairy eyeball. ‘I like you.’ There was a sudden acidic smell of urine. All the showering women glared at each other accusingly, toes curling back from the communal drain. ‘You make me laugh. Let’s get away from these pissants, literally.’
In the toilet cubicle, I camouflaged the seat in layers of dunny paper. In all my fifteen-and-three-quarter years, my mother had imparted only a few pieces of wisdom. Never end a sentence with a preposition, never take the Lord’s name in vain, always press lift buttons with your knuckles and turn off taps with your elbows, and never sit on a public toilet seat. Not wanting to contract any trendy venereal fauna, I kangarooed it. Poised there in a crippled leapfrog, I craned to decipher the graffiti on top of the door. ‘Why bother to squat?’ it mocked. ‘Germs jump ten feet.’ I got the feeling that, unlike Roxanne, I would only have checked in my coat at Plato’s Retreat. When it came to walking on the wild side, I still preferred to tiptoe.
The squat was in Woolloomooloo. Plaster dandruff hung in flakes from the ceiling. The walls shed their striped felt and pastel pastoral scenes. They all needed a rub down with Vaseline Intensive Care to prevent peeling. During redecorating binges, furniture too heavy to shift had obviously been painted over and around. In the absence of tenants, the squat now displayed fuchsia pink and lime green walls interspersed with large slabs of purple. Reproductions of works of art were nailed, glued or smeared over all the walls. From the concave roof dangled an amputated chair leg. Dodging it, I then bumped my head on a stolen street sign. ‘WRONG WAY,’ it read. ‘GO BACK.’
‘Welcome,’ Mouche said, ‘to the Cockroach Capital of Sydney … Max?’
A young, spindly guy emerged from the debris. Anorexic and cultivating a very healthy crop of acne, he was more pretzel than person.
‘This is Debbie.’ Mouche explained. ‘I thought she could help us with the rent.’
Max’s eyes, encrusted with mascara, puckered with mischievous glee. ‘Absolutely. And the phone and hot water bills and interest rates and loan repayments and electricity.’ He smirked. I was yet to see how we did survive without all these things. ‘The pipes sweat like they need an antiperspirant. And you can only put loo paper down the dunny after lunch.’
Mouche laughed. ‘Max is going to put a sign out the front.’
‘Out of Order. Use squat next door.’
I liked him instantly. Max didn’t dance on thin ice, he did his callisthenics there, in Doc Marten boots. Drug-rehabilitated and on a good behaviour bond, he had just been released from his parents’ protective custody. I noticed he was holding a plate of melted Kraft cheese on toast. There was a thud from upstairs.
‘Mong.’ Max informed us through the strands of cheese now glued to his teeth. ‘He’s been there all arvo.’
Mouche paused. Her mouth, then her whole face contorted into a look of disdain.
‘Mong?’
‘Lloyd. The love of her life.’ Max explained. ‘We call him Mongoloid. Hence the Mong.’
‘We had this bizarre night. In Paris … not the city,’ she responded to the surprised twitching of my eyebrows. ‘The Paris Pub. In the dunnies. I was a bit off my face and he came into the Ladies’ after me and we locked ourselves in a cubicle and drank more piss and then all I can remember is my bum in the air, pink tiles, the toilet bowl and lying on my back. And then when we came out, I chucked a glass of wine at him and then I fronted up to this band rehearsal one day – they’d advertised for a singer – and he was there and I hadn’t shaved my legs, and he said, ‘Love ya hairy legs’ and I thought, ‘Fucking creep’, and he asked me if I wanted to re-enact that night at the Paris and I told him I didn’t root short men, and soon after he moved in.’
‘Jeez, how romantic.’ It made my friendship rings and gropes under the bowling alley (the Finger Bowl, as it was known locally) and close encounters of the Garry kind look like a Hollywood rom-com. Mouche disappeared upstairs and a moment later I heard her hand Mong his emotional eviction notice.
‘Youse feminists are fucked. You was only usin’ me. For me body and that,’ he spat, stomping down the stairs.
She agreed and hurled his baritone ukulele and homemade bong down the stairs after him. ‘I loathe wimpy men,’ she explained to me.
So he was out. And I, apparently, was in.
Mouche’s room consisted of a disembowelled mattress and a tarnished mirror. Tights and strangled T-shirts spread in a spaghetti entanglement of coloured cotton around the perimeter of the room. The back bedroom had been sort of scalped, the roof removed for repairs and just never replaced. That meant the only place to sleep was in Mouche’s bed, with Mouche.
I didn’t know why she had brought me home. I had caught her eye, like a dress in a window. She had got a crush on my cut and colour combo. Nothing Gucci, mind you. I was your very basic drip-dry nylon. But I think she liked me most ’cause I let her squeeze my blackheads. She loved to do that. I would lie with my head in her lap, holding a torch over my face, and we’d talk, listening to Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. She was tougher and more worldly than my old friends.
‘Would you eat me – hold still, wouldja – if our plane crashed in the jungle?’
You could have great convos with her. All the shallow shit you’d mostly be too embarrassed to talk about. Comparing navels, innies or outies. Deciding whether or not you’d give in under torture. And what would make you snap – knives, cockroaches, spiders or being locked in a room full of real estate salesmen.
‘Ouch! Not so hard!’ I squealed. ‘All they’d have to do is threaten to send me back to my parents, and I’d tell them everything!’
‘Couldn’t threaten me with that. Thank God. Must be nothing worse than having to bring up your oldies.’ Mouche had told me in the showers that she was the by-product of foster parents and youth hostels.
‘Well, what would make you break?’ I peered up into her face. H
er acid-green eyes had more than a glint of larrikinism. Mouche wiped the residue of a whitehead on the leg of her jeans. Her fingers read the bumps in my face as if they were braille. ‘No more orgasms.’
I felt a melancholy pang for the salty tang of my boyfriend, followed by the inevitable stab of betrayal in my heart, but Mouche’s banter soon distracted me. That first night we talked till our faces fell off. Finally, we wormed underneath the malnourished blanket. The curtain-less room, bathed in the neurotic glare of a street light, felt like a stage set. The night noises of sirens and cat shrieks were new and scary. For as long as I could remember, I’d fallen asleep to the whirr of the dishwasher and the sound of my parents’ slippers working their way through the super deluxe shagpile. The more I tried not to think about my parents, the more I thought about them. They had always had really high hopes for me, you know, that I’d become a kindergarten teacher or a bank teller. Ever since I’d announced my intention to pursue a creative vocation, my dad and I had only been on grunting terms. He would come home every arvo from work, grunt, then go out the back to water the above-ground Clark pool. He was always watering the pool. I guess he hoped it would grow into an Olympic. Mum had been so relieved at my return from Byron Bay, that she had pretended to handle the announcement of my chosen career, yet for the last few weeks, instead of detergent, she’d been regularly pouring guinea pig pellets into the washing machine, so that all our clothes emerged a slime green.
I replayed their reel-to-reel rhetoric. ‘Leave school and you’ll fail life.’ ‘You’ll come running home pregnant and in trouble with the police.’
With my bank book having reached its low-tide mark, after another week I’d be stuck on the monetary mudflats. I gazed at Mouche’s profile on the pillow. She had extraordinary looks. A strong face, dark features, not the kind of beauty for advertising tampons, but mysterious and compelling, in a quirky, punky way. Her hair was a spiked, coiffured creation that could have been used as the base of a flower arrangement. And the bitch had no blackheads. Yep. I had found a friend. I curled up against her naked back for warmth and, cupped together like two spoons, we fell asleep.
