After the Blues

by Kathy Lette

  ‘Billy, you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll end it with a proposition.’ Hidden by the table cloth, he slid his hand between my thighs. ‘You wanna hit the Roberta?’

  Roberta Flack, sack, I decoded, and crossed my legs hard. Retrieving his mangled hand, Billy continued his meal, a little crestfallen.

  ‘You honestly think, Leon, that a few superficial concessions will result in the prisoners losing – Billy, do you have to eat with your fingers? – the unity of hunger and discomfort?’

  ‘Jeezus! Why do we have to talk about fuckin’ jail all the fuckin’ time?’ Billy slammed down his fork and hurled himself back into the plush red velvet booth. ‘Julia, I don’t want ya goin’ to the debates no more. It’s a jungle in there. Debatin’ days was only good for their rort value. All them mind-game crim capers. Sure, we mouthed off about corruption, but it was you babes we wanted to corrupt!’ Billy flung himself up from the table and announced that he was off to shake hands with the unemployed.

  A tepid smile pinched the corners of Leon’s lips. As soon as Billy had disappeared into the men’s toilets, Leon fished a pickle out of the jar on the table with his fingers, crunched it between his yellow teeth, then offered the other half to me.

  ‘How long do you think physical attraction can last?’ He didn’t wait for my reply. ‘Week? Ten days?’ It was only after I’d bitten into the gherkin that I noticed the cold sore in the crease of his lips. ‘Masturbation’s no big deal inside. Just like taking a piss, apparently. Plastic wrapper from a Drum packet is best. You’ve just got to smear a ton of margarine round the inside. Or they get a bum chum. Some of the guys inside are double adaptors, but most become Hocks. Hocks give it. And Cats take it,’ he pronounced in a half-mocking tone. ‘You did know that, didn’t you?’

  Billy slid back into the booth and placed his warm hands round my throat. I jumped in alarm. ‘I brung you this.’ A gold chain slithered down the front of my shirt. ‘Take a butchers. It’s clean,’ he emphasises. ‘I just made the bloke an offer he couldn’t knock back.’

  ‘What?’ I jolted away from him. ‘To break both his legs?’

  ‘If you promise that you’re through with all that jail reform stuff, I’ll steer clear of all me old crim mates. Otherwise,’ he brooded, ‘we’d better call it quits …’ He ran his fingertip across my nipple, sending electric currents zinging southward. ‘So, what is it?… Chinas?’

  ‘China plates.’ I shook his hand. ‘Mates.’ And sealed the deal with a kiss.

  Leon gave a disdainful smile and began a close study of the ashtray.

  ‘God, you’ve ruined me forever, you foxy lady. And anyway,’ Billy said when he finally came up for air, ‘you can end a sentence with a “but”, ’cause,’ he smirked victoriously, ‘“but” is a conjunction … but!’

  After lunch, Leon drove us to Brisbane to visit Billy’s parents. They lived in a suburban bungalow which Billy called ‘The Fibro Majestic’. A ceramic Mexican man, complete with cactus, lounged against the electronic doorbell. The crew-cut lawn was adorned with statues of miniature Aboriginal men, spears poised. A brass plaque above the door christened the house ‘Robjune’. It was the whole kitsch catastrophe.

  Robb Bridges opened the door to his son. He glared at me suspiciously. ‘Happy Oyster,’ he said fiercely. I looked at Billy, bewildered. He shook hands with his father.

  ‘Happy Easter to you too, Pop.’ Easter, next year, was Billy’s actual release date. ‘Where’s the cook?’

  Billy’s mother, June, was holding court out the back by the keg. The family were as thick as what they were – thieves. Billy’s father grunted at my rounded vowels and moved away. Australia is not a classless society. But whereas in England the born-to-rule right-wingers may feel themselves to be superior, nobody here feels inferior. Billy’s father dredged up some phlegm and, eyeing me coldly, hawked into the garden.

  ‘You’re not one of them feminists, is ya?’ Billy’s mum scrutinised me. ‘Like Ger-maine Greer. Sittin’ round talkin’ about their …’ She glanced about to ensure the exclusivity of our conversation. ‘… vageenas.’ June lowered her amplitudinous body into the banana lounger and motioned for me to sit beside her. ‘I brung me boys up good. They’re not real burg-u-lars. They’re dark sheep, that’s all. Ya know,’ she said conspiratorially, ‘black horses. Billy’s gonna git somewhere in this world but. Not like his effing father.’ Her face darkened. ‘He don’t look ya in the eye when he talks to ya, ya know?’ She squinted into my face. ‘Billy’s father would steal the milk out of his grandmother’s tea.’

  Billy’s father was scrutinising me for the slightest trace of distaste at the crocheted dolls’ dresses covering the toilet rolls or the painting of the street urchin trickling pastel tears.

  Mrs Bridges sighed despondently, then cheered up in a flash. ‘I like him going with a better edjucated girl and that. You can act as a bit of a, you know … detergent. From crime and that.’ She beamed at me. ‘You could learn him a lot.’

  ‘What’s wrong, babe?’ Billy said protectively on the drive home. ‘Has someone insulted ya?’ Billy’s cousin was a car dealer. He’d given him an old Dodge and we were cruising back to Surfers Paradise through Florida and Miami, migratory suburbs which had clearly flown south to escape the American winter.

  ‘Were you a Hock …’ I gulped, ‘… inside?’

  ‘Why? What’s Leon been saying to you? Don’t worry about him. He’s weak as a railway cuppa. Couldn’t spread marg on a Sao.’

  Relieved, I reported that his parents were good, salt-of-the-earth types. Basic.

  Billy’s body tensed. ‘Don’t patronise me,’ he hissed. ‘I’ve bin a specimen all me life. Poofy psychologists and social workers, pokin’ and proddin’ me. “Oh … He’s bright,”’ he mimicked. ‘“How amazin’. And his father works in an iron foundry.” There’s only one good thing about the workin’ class …’ He swerved to avoid a squashed wombat. ‘… and that’s gettin’ out of it.’

  Making love that night he bit my lip too hard, till it bled. Being in love with a man in jail is like being in love with a priest. It’s a no-risk romance. Cloistered in the confessional of the prison Contact Room, you present censored versions of yourselves, passions telescoped by the pressure of frustration. It was only now that I began to realise how little I knew about Billy Bridges. I don’t know how long I stayed with him on the Gold Coast. The days and nights blurred into each other through a haze of heat and confusion.

  At first, I dismissed the tension between us as a symptom of jail withdrawal. I’d assumed we would reach an equilibrium in time, but time was something Billy didn’t wait for. Drink, dance, rage, pull bongs, screw, eat, drive fast, make money, drink … for weeks we did it all at once.

  Then I blamed the deterioration of our love affair on prison hierarchy. Inside, Billy had been King Pin. Outside, he was a nobody. Our pact that he’d go straight had exiled him to a limbo land between the criminal and white-collar worlds. I awarded him a cultural tourist visa and took him to concerts, the opera, the art gallery. But he was ill at ease, convinced everybody was looking at him. At the beach, I slathered his anaemic muscles in sunscreen. Billy didn’t really have a great Aussie tan; it was more a billiard-ball white. Not only that, he couldn’t swim. He looked conspicuous and vulnerable on the sand, like something just washed in. And he compensated for his unease by becoming brash. When the surf lifesaver told him to stop playing frisbee with beer cans, Billy inquired whether he liked travel and sex. When the bemused lifesaver smiled and said that, yes he did, Billy wanted to know why didn’t he fuck off then! When I snapped back at him to calm down, Billy’s eyes narrowed to slits of mistrust. That night I shrank from his raised arm – but he was only scratching his armpit.

  My next excuse was the fact that he’d missed the advent of the Women’s Movement. Not in theory, but in practice. Taking boys’ homes into account, Billy had been inside for most of his life, which was why he expec
ted me to make the toast and change the toilet roll. Billy thought PMT was the express train from Newcastle.

  Jail was also to blame for his bedridden brain. Our sex was frantic, masturbatory. He wanted me to pretend things, that I was a young boy, or to make noises as though it was the first time, and to comply, at the appearance of the Vaseline jar, to what he called ‘an excursion up the Khyber’.

  When he’d had time to rehabilitate from all these things, I then blamed our tensions on sunburned brains. Too much sun sends you troppo north of the border. This explained his musclebound ‘friends’ dropping round at midnight to drink XXXX Gold and swap tales of rorts and rampages. It explained him disappearing in hire cars and returning drunk or drugged. It explained his insistence on frantic exercise, jogging in the equatorial sun, up the highway, down the stormwater drain, urging me on when I felt nauseated from the heat, then tackling me down in the lantana and wrenching the leg of my shorts to one side for quick, urgent sex. It explained why I felt frightened.

  And yet, still, I refused to believe that my feelings for him were fraudulent.

  We pulled up outside a marshmallow-pink mansion in Surfers Paradise. The manmade canals seemed to breed speedboats that buzzed up and down continuously till dusk. Billy homed in on the beer-gutted billionaires by the far side of the pool. Though grunting illiterates, they all spoke fluent Tax Evasion.

  The women, corralled by the dips and chips, were clad in gaudy lamé dresses and sequin-studded ensembles. Lips, teeth, eyes, thighs, every bit of them glittered as they raised their talons, ready to sink into a high-rise developer divorcee. In brassy affected voices they spoke passionately to me about the merits of wallpapering a dining room in Moroccan cream.

  As we walked around the pool, I slipped my arm through Billy’s. ‘It’s prehistoric. Men and women on different sides at a party.’ The men eyed me up and down as if I were a housing prospect. ‘You’d think you were all gay, the way you cluster together.’

  ‘Banned! We don’t have homos or bisexuals in Queensland,’ Bazza the real estate entrepreneur boasted. ‘This is a family state.’

  ‘Here you are, love.’ Prawnhead, a dentist-cum–oyster farmer, offered me something from his plate. ‘Wrap your laughing gear around that lot.’ They all watched me swallow the oyster.

  ‘Cripes,’ a National Party politician called Porky said to Billy, ‘she didn’t get that mouth sucking strawberries.’ The men guffawed. On the pretext of assassinating a mozzie, Billy jerked his arm out of mine.

  ‘Did you know that oysters are bisexual?’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘You’ll have to arrest Prawnhead’s oyster leases under the Family Law and Decency Act.’ The live band was playing muzak: dull cover versions of the latest hits. The chandeliers hanging incongruously from the canvas roof of the marquee shed a garish light on my companions. They were drinking with exaggerated gusto, attempting to mask their confusion at the notion that they’d been eating poofters.

  Billy ordered me a cab. He said he had to talk business. ‘Porky’s got a few propositions.’

  I knew that any propositions made by these men would end in a sentence. ‘Do you want to go back inside?’

  ‘Runnin’ a bit short, aren’t I, of sausage and mash.’

  ‘So, I’ve got plenty of cash …’

  ‘Every time we go into a fuckin’ shop, or down the fuckin’ pub, you’re payin’. How do you reckon that makes me feel? Everyone looks at me like I’m a weak bastard. There’s no way me old man would’ve let me mum pay for nothin’. I’ve had a gutful. Look, love, I don’t wanna be a shitman forever.’ He steered me out of earshot of the cabbie. ‘I could just do one job to get us set up an’ that. Then I could look after ya …’

  ‘What about our pact?’

  ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I’ve hit the Johnny Rapers in Steak’n’ Kidney. They’ll be lookin’ up here soon. I’ve gotta get on the right payroll. It’s best you shoot through,’ he said with feigned cheerfulness. ‘You’re about as popular round here as a fart in a spacesuit!’

  The next morning, while Billy slept off his hangover, I was up early and went with Leon out to Boggo Road jail for a meeting of the Prisoners Action Group he helped to run. Leon said he’d value my input on effective ways to bring political pressure on responsible ministers. The car radio warned we were heading for a heatwave.

  Billy was waiting for me in the hallway when I got back. ‘Some guy’s bin putting work on you.’ His face wore a predatory expression. ‘A guy I used to share a yard with’s cellmate’s brother seen you at Boggo Road talking to Jimmy the Toe-cutter.’

  ‘Talking, yes.’ Unnerved, I wriggled past him. ‘Not all men talk with their crotch.’

  ‘He’d charm the pants off of his own grandmother.’

  ‘What guy you used to share a yard with?’ I asked suspiciously, crossing into the kitchen. ‘You promised not to see any of your old crim mates.’ The mince hadn’t been thawed. I ran it under scalding water.

  ‘It’s okay, babe.’ He exhaled a blast of brandy and bong breath. ‘I’ve hung up me gloves.’ He kneaded my breast. ‘It’s just that it’s dangerous goin’ into jails. Psychologically as well as friggin’ physically. Not to mention your reputation.’ He tugged down on my fly. ‘I’ve already defended your honour today, twice. The boys reckon you’re slumming it, that you’re just usin’ me.’

  I sliced into an onion for spag bol. ‘I can’t just toss it in! There are submissions to be made for the women back at Mulawa, play rehearsals, poetry readings …’ It was still forty degrees. The house sweated so much it needed its own deodorant. Even lifting the knife felt too burdensome.

  ‘Let’s stay in bed for three weeks straight.’ He bit my earlobe. ‘Bin shakin’ hands with Mrs Palmer and her five daughters for fifty-eight months straight.’ He wrenched at my jeans. ‘Up until I bolted to be with you, the only stimulation the old boy got was the odd dip in crab emulsion.’ He pushed me up against the fridge door.

  ‘Billy.’ My voice faltered as I shoved him away. ‘You’re cunt-struck!’

  His eyes went dark. He turned and leaned on the sink, breathing steadily. ‘Look, babe, what with me boyish looks and charms, I ain’t never had trouble findin’ a bedmate.’ He forced a smile. ‘Weak in the pants, I am. But you’re my woman now.’ He lunged and began to caress me, but I recoiled.

  ‘I’m not your woman. I’m not anybody’s woman. Look, Billy. I think it’s time I went back to Sydney. I’m on committees. I’ve got professional commitments. Deadlines. And I’ve neglected my friends …’

  ‘Ask them to come up, Leon won’t mind …’

  ‘I like to have my own friends.’

  His affected affability dissolved. ‘Embarrassed of me, aren’t ya? In front of your friends. Your Deep Waterfront Socialists. ’Cause I can’t make jokes about herpes and holistic healing and inter-fucking-facing.’ He hurled me up against the back door. ‘You’re trainin’ me to become your tamed pet so that you can take me on a leash to premieres and dinner parties. You’re just like them middle-class housewives frontin’ Prisoners Aid Meeting’s ’cause it makes ’em horny. Are you horny? I could make you really slum it.’ He was grinding me into the door. ‘Like some bruises? You can wear ’em like trophies. Tell everyone about your animal. Licks his bitch all over.’ He grabbed the knife off the cutting board. ‘Whose bitch are you?’ He pressed the cool gleaming blade against my larynx. ‘Whose bitch are you?’

  From somewhere far away I heard my own voice, pale with terror. ‘Billy’s’, it said.

  I was still huddled out on the back verandah when I heard Leon arrive home. I could detect Billy’s booming baritone drifting across the boards, then Leon’s wheedling voice harmonising.

  ‘Oh, yes. I knew her type. They pontificate that “sex is a lubricant of the consumer society”, but why do you think they become obsessed with crims? They want to be dominated. Thrown across a bed and ravaged. A bit of rough trade. It’s the latest fad for middle-class, well-educated women. Scum can be
fun.’ His laughter rose to a lilting shrill.

  I slumped against the rail, overcome by my own insincerity. A good middle-class girl, I was secretly horrified by the way Billy ate, and irritated when he put his running shoes in the fridge to cool them off.

  ‘How will Bruce the Tooth react, eh? He gets out soon … Beer?’ I heard the hiss of a ring-pull can. ‘And he’ll be straight up here after you. He’ll squash her, like a cockroach. Squelch.’

  ‘What the fuck are you insinuatin’?’

  ‘Look. I know you were on with Bruce.’

  ‘The Tooth and me were fuckin’ mates. You fuckin’ queer. You’re the fuckin’ Cat. Don’t lay your shit on me!’

  ‘Bruce told me you were his boy.’

  A sob of fury ripped out of Billy’s throat. I realised then that what I had mistaken for strength in him was nothing more than nerves and bravado. What I had mistaken for love was nothing but a love of his own bleak notoriety. Our ideologically sound commitment was nothing more than a slightly seedy, blackly comic Mills & Boon romance, only with tatts instead of tiaras. After all the effort I’d put into changing him, I could now only complain that he wasn’t the man he was when I first met him.

  In bed that night he was manic. He pushed my head down into his lap. He wouldn’t let me come up for air. These things did not happen to me. I was a university graduate; a promising journalist. I was studying law part-time … I had a St. George Building Society account. I drove a Honda Civic … He was now insisting that I must never leave him: that he’d be lost without me. I was an NRMA subscriber. A paid-up member of the Labor Party. I wrote articles on the changing face of feminism … He said he’d been betrayed that much, he’d become suss of everyone. ‘But I thought I’d seen loyalty and honesty in you.’ I was famous back in Sydney for holding forth over morning muesli (unsweetened) about feelings being transitory, that it was beliefs that mattered. And here I was getting RSI of the mouth. In the still air, he cried into my hair that I was his woman, that no other bastard would ever have me now. He would kill, he said, to keep me. I had all of Mozart’s symphonies on compact disc and could jack up a car to change the tyre. I was capable. Energetic. Efficient. Liberated. Rinsing out my mouth, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and decided that I would confront him first thing tomorrow, talk reason and stand my feminist ground.