praise for
nothing but my body
‘Far beyond the body Lawless takes us to the hypnotic anxiety and ecstasy of a mind that will not relent. You will not regret the ride.’ Yael Stone, actor
‘Tilly Lawless has managed to distill a perfect essence of authenticity into her novel—full of moments of raw honesty, powerful intimacy and memories that leap off the page and into the reader’s mind. I was left with certain stories echoing in my mind for days afterwards. A crash course in the delicate nature of human relationships.’ Etcetera Etcetera
‘I inhaled this book in one sitting. Tilly’s stream of consciousness crackles with honesty, vulnerability and heart. A captivatingly rendered love letter to friendship, the world we live in, and choosing life, in spite of it all.’ Yassmin Abdel-Magied, author of Yassmin’s Story
‘Dirty, smutty, tender and beautiful, Tilly Lawless’ Nothing But My Body is masterfully crafted stream-of-consciousness poetry punctuated by real-life scenes of Tilly’s life. A must-read that will remind you of all the most joyful times of your life while holding you through the pain of the tougher ones. A true gift.’ Nevo Zisin, author of Finding Nevo
‘So intimate, and yet so immense. A sweat- and tear-soaked love cry to contemporary youth, friendship and queerness. From a girls’ room in Sydney, to a filthy dancefloor in Berlin, to the creek banks of Northern NSW, Lawless transforms every environment into a playground of fresh questions and heartfelt honesty.’ Brenna Harding, actor and activist
‘A poetically uncensored tour through Australian queer culture, sex work, womanhood and a world on edge. You won’t put it down. Captivating, gritty, authentic and relatable. A must read for the girls, gays and theys.’ Ailie Banks, author of The Book of Bitch
‘An absolute knockout. Lawless writes with such fresh determination and joy. I tore through this for the sex but made myself slow down for the philosophy and deep thinking.’ Bri Lee, author of Eggshell Skull and Who Gets to Be Smart
‘Carnal, aware and magnetic—Tilly’s literary flex and ability to carve out intimacy in surprising moments radiates from screen to page and into the body.’ Amrita Hepi, choreographer and artist
‘Tilly writes from the deepest parts of herself. Nothing But My Body is unflinching, warm, cool and big. Tilly’s goal isn’t to prove anything to anyone, she’s just telling us what happened and how it felt, but in the process she’s given us something deeply tangible, personal and special. You know you’re reading something significant. This is a story you’ll be reading the rest of your life.’ Caitlin Stasey, actor
‘Nothing But My Body reads like a long talk with a friend that I didn’t want to finish. Tilly allows access into her world in a way that is incredibly intimate and unflinching. Never rose-tinted, her writing paints a picture of the complexities of mental health, love and identity. A really special book that will stay close to my heart.’ Celeste Mountjoy, @filthyratbag
First published in 2021
Copyright © Tilly Lawless 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100
Email:[email protected]
Web:www.allenandunwin.com
ISBN 978 1 76106 514 9
eISBN 978 1 76106 249 0
Set by Bookhouse, Sydney
Cover design: Jo Thomson
Cover photo: Getty Images
To all the friends who have listened to me cry and made me laugh
Contents
saturday
sunday
monday
tuesday
wednesday
thursday
friday
saturday
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
saturday
ENLISTING THIS EIGHTY-YEAR-OLD CLIENT TO TAKE PHOTOS of me. I’m surprised he even knows how to use an iPhone. He’s excited, thinking they’re for his benefit. He’s already slipped me his email, even though it’s against the rules – but who am I kidding, everyone does it. He’s wanting to banter with me about it; I want to say, Mate, don’t forget, this is a customer service job. You might be a sweet client, and by that I mean an easy-client-who-tips-well client, but you’re still a client and I don’t bother with photos for clients. Don’t forget, mate, that though you see me as nude, naked of clothes and context, I am in fact crackling with emotion, a cellophane snap clinging to me from my personal life. That’s how I came to be sobbing in this room two weeks ago while a client fucked me in doggy. He hadn’t done anything wrong, mind – he was a sweet client, and by that I mean an easy-client-who-tips-well client – but a Teyana Taylor song came on that got me good, and I pretended I was gagging to be pounded so I could have my private mourn into the massage parlour table. He didn’t know; thought my shoulders shuddered with pleasure, I suppose. Just like you don’t know that my orgasm just then was fake, that I was watching the clock in the reflection to time it out perfectly, that while your head was between my legs I winked at myself in the mirror, as if my reflection was another working girl who was in on the joke. Hey girl, I said to myself, you’re going good, you’re looking good, you’re moaning good, you’ve got a lot to offer the world and with this old man you’re hitting $360 – not bad for a Saturday day shift. And then I counted the money again, realised my moan had turned into a metronome, had a beat like the monologue in my head, and I needed to stop flirting with my reflection and come already. Mate, you wouldn’t even know that last time my orgasm with you was really real, that I was disgusted that I managed to come even through the dusting of dandruff falling on my torso, that I wanted to scrub my clit off with a rock, expunge your saliva from where your mouth had sat like an engorged tick. So, mate, you really have no idea, mate, what is going on in my head at the moment – just take the bloody photo. So I can look hot on my Instagram, coz I’ve already spent enough time playing hot for you.
He takes them. They’re okay. I might post one later, if I’m up for the interactions that follow. I selfie less than I used to. For such a long time it was a part of my daily life. At fifteen I took photos of myself to send to strangers online, sounding out my sexuality and coming to terms with my body as a ‘desired’ object, awkwardly posing in an attempt to be alluring, digital camera on self-timer, background more interesting than me. At eighteen, it was a way for me to reclaim that same body from the touch of men on the street, a way I could assert my control over it and block those who made me feel vulnerable within it, when in the real world you can’t block, you’re so often at the mercy of, scared. Through my uni degree I selfied as a form of procrastination, just as I masturbated far more than I ever have before. In my single early twenties I sent photos to entice, to feel excited and build a flirtation with a person, to feel a thrill of power with the exposure, knowing that they wanted me and I was gifting them with the knowledge that I wanted them too – it was simply foreplay.
In the last few years I’ve stopped taking them. Don’t feel the desire or the need. Why not? Is it because I’m in a relationship and don’t need the validation? But I never thought selfies were about vanity or insecurity; t
hey were a form of self-expression. (I don’t masturbate anymore either, because I use clients to satiate me, close my eyes and come on their cock if it’s an okay shape and they’re not fucking me too badly.)
The irony is that it’s weakened my words, because without a ‘hot’ photo of me to interest people, my posts are less likely to show up in people’s feeds due to the awful algorithm. Instagram deletes a woman for nudity but encourages us to post thirst traps to be seen. I just can’t be bothered with them, though. I see enough of myself reflected in buildings as I walk through the city to a booking, or in the mirrors of a brothel room. I feel sickened by the oversaturation of images, just as I am deadened by compliments after years of being showered with them by men I do not care for. My body has been a tool that I’ve wielded, but it’s also something I just live in every day, that I’m comfortable with and no longer itch to record in order to assert my personhood on the world. I can’t tell if that means I’m missing a curiosity I once had, or if it means I’m feeling satisfied in ways I wasn’t before.
So what does it mean that I’m now asking a client to photograph me so I can post it online? Am I finally recognising that my relationship has come to an end? Is this me subliminally shouting that I’m single? Have I reached the closure I was unable to reach in that cursed tarot reading, when I just wanted someone to tell me if I should stay with her or not, and instead that Catholic scammer told me I would meet a wonderful man in the next year and have three children with him? ‘I’m gay,’ I cried, ‘and none of this makes any sense! I don’t even like gardening.’ (The tarot reader had also seen me running a wholefoods market from my backyard.)
Oh, time’s up! He showers and I ask him about his plans for the rest of the day while I replace the towels and mop up his mess. My wrist aches, that old RSI inflamed from pulling him off – I really need to move back to brothel work, which will mean looking up brothels I haven’t worked at before as I can’t bring myself to go back to any of those other ones, the idea of those fell places now sickens my soul – but my mind is on that same tired track it always is. What should I do, what should I do? I love her and I want to be there for her but she’s frozen me out, won’t even touch me (I touch myself, soaping between my arse cheeks to ready myself for the next client, don’t forget the sperm on my stomach, don’t want to have to scratch it off, a dried snail trail, while I blow the next guy), till I crave the touch of strange men just for the illusion of intimacy, and then I hate myself, it’s pathetic, and wild and sad that you can feel more alone in a relationship than you do outside one. (What’s he saying? What days do I work? Oh yeah, babe, just call and ask for Maddy.) And worse than that is the gambling. How can I make a life with someone, have children with someone, who I can’t rely on not to spend it all, up in the early morn, crouched over the pokies, intent on them in a way she never is with me anymore, reaching a relief in their depths that I wish she could reach in mine, wish she would skewer me on her fist like she once did and chant into my loins that she would never let anything happen to me, but her addiction is happening to me and she can’t protect me from it because she can’t protect herself from it. But I don’t want to desert her when she needs me and it’s about being there for each other during the tough times and putting the other person first and –
‘Oh, look at that, it’s a beautiful day out there! Have a lovely rest of your afternoon, mwah mwah.’
It’s always disorientating when you see the outdoors during a shift. Massage parlours are only ever lit by artificial light. I don’t know whether it’s too great a privacy risk to have windows letting in the sun, or it’s meant to trick the clients into thinking it’s night-time and the sordid infidelities they commit will be somehow concealed from the daytime glare, or it’s an alternate universe, like the cinemas where you go into those dank, dark rooms and crunch spilt popcorn under your feet and copulate in the back row and emerge squinting into the light.
Did she call intro? Must have – they’re all putting their shoes on back in the girls’ room. Unfolding numb legs from beneath flannelette robes, switching from Batman boy legs to lace thongs, tottering fawnlike on towering pleasers, ready to please. The Pakistani woman who pretends to be Persian comes back from the intro saying she’s seen him before. ‘Oh really – what’s he like? … Oh, what a cunt! Did you tell her? You know not paying for an extra is legally rape coz, like, you guys had an agreement for consent and he didn’t stick to it … Yeah, I’d get why you didn’t wanna make a fuss. If he picks me I’ll make sure I get the money upfront. Thanks for telling me.’
I head down the hallway to the intro room; fuck, it’s FREEZING! They really need to have central heating not just heat the individual rooms. Like, how can we be expected to wander around in lingerie in the middle of winter? At least my nipples look good, none of that cow teat, thank you very much. Goddamn, the girl ahead of me is taking so long, what are they even talking about? Talk in the room not the intro. Here she is, finally, my turn.
‘Hey, I’m Maddy! You have any questions? No, babe, I don’t do natural and neither should you. You know things can get passed from throat to penis. Lovely to meet you!’
It’s steaming in the girls’ room and someone’s perfume is giving me a headache. Eight bodies makes it close, and the heater on with the door closed makes it even closer. The two Thai girls are watching make-up tutorials and chatting. They’re two of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen in my life, and if the modelling industry wasn’t so tilted towards whiteness and thinness they would be famous and wouldn’t be here. The Venezuelan woman – who is forty-seven but looks thirty-three (sex workers really do age better; is it the cum or the coconut oil?) – says he’s walked.
‘He’s walked? Fucking time waster.’ The Bosnian glama has terrifying tattooed brows and rock-hard tits, both done ten years ago, when the fashion was for obvious artifice.
‘It is because none of us would give him what he wanted.’ The Estonian fitness fanatic – what’s she doing here? I thought she didn’t work when other Eastern Europeans were on. Or maybe it’s just the Russian girl who she avoids; they despise each other, warring over seating arrangements and issuing blunt criticisms of each other’s outfits and bodies. What centuries-old country rivalry is channelled through their competitiveness? Or is it purely a personality clash, no one but me considering where they came from?
Normally I could fall asleep in here, but I’m so wound up with what’s going on at home, wondering where she is, if she’s woken yet, if she’s eaten, if she’s okay, that my anxiety is zapping me awake even over the soporific waves of the heater. The ends of me teeetch like a bristling cat. Clients can be simple in their tastes but not so simple that they don’t pick up on the static. What cock wants to rest in that? I might be wearing war paint on the outside, but inside is a panic that screeches louder than a brash red. Where is she what is she doing is she okay when will she answer my text – the questions coil around my mind. What do I do should I stay with her should I break up what if I regret this I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE I don’t want to be dead but I don’t want to be alive oh god why can’t someone just tell me what to do tell me can I help her can I save her how much longer will it be like this or should I step away save myself –
‘What? Oh no, I’m fine, thanks – don’t like lamingtons. Yeah, it’s the coconut: reminds me of dick. Can’t even drink coconut water; tastes like watered-down sperm to me now. Thanks, Baby Bird … Oh, it’s my joke name for her, coz Aussies can’t pronounce her Thai name and the way they say it is like the Thai word for baby bird. But Baby Bird sounds the cutest, don’t you think?’
Okay. I gotta calm myself. Think about this rationally or I’m going to break. Breathe in, breathe out. My mind is a fog. Has she texted yet? I need a booking just to get me away from myself. But seriously, how can I bring children into this scenario? How can I inflict this stressful situation on them when I can’t even handle it myself? I have an obligation to my future children, don’t I? Obligations to myself, t
oo – didn’t I say I would never date another addict? That’s all I go for. Hot addicts. My friend was right when she said I was repeating the paradigm I learnt in my youth, with a charismatic but financially irresponsible father, in all my romantic relationships. Gotta break that pattern, for the future generation as well as for myself.
‘What’s that? Booking at three o’clock? Thanks. Oh, slow sex. Yeah, that’s David – white guy David. He drives me crazy but the money is good.’
That’ll take out an hour and a half of the day, one terrible chunk of time gone. Sometimes I feel like it’s time I’m fighting with, having to endure. It stretches ahead of me, unending hours that I have to live through. Hours of waiting in which I bite the skin around my nails to shreds. Waiting for a text from her. Waiting till she comes home. Waiting for the dregs of her time, any little bit of attention she’ll give me, direct eye contact or a touch on my arm. I’m iced out and put on ice, a meal for her to enjoy when she decides the time is right, but it never is. The only thing I look forward to is sleep, but even then I’m waking every few hours to find her still not there. 2 a.m. … 4 a.m. … 6 a.m. … Will she ever sleep? 8 a.m. and I’m up for work again, and I have to get through thirteen hours till I can sleep again. And she’s not even home yet. Sometimes I won’t see her for days; she’s turned into a nocturnal beast. But I know she’s been home because of the trails and nests around the house, allowing me to trace what she’s done. The paintings have been taken off the walls and are on the floor; presumably she meant to rearrange them but didn’t finish the job. A knife on the living room floor. Wet clothes in the dryer that hasn’t been turned on.
Setting it all to rights, drying her clothes, folding them and putting them away, becomes a labour of love. I can’t nurture her in person, I get no time with her, so I nurture and pay tribute to her through my actions. I ready the house so when she chooses to come home she doesn’t come home to the mess she left. I hope she sees in that how much I love her. I won’t tell her I did it. I don’t want anything in return. I just want to do something for her, and this is the only thing I can do. But, oh, these tasks get done and I’m still alone in the house. Not knowing where she is. Not wanting to walk up to the pub to see if she’s at the pokies, because I don’t know if it’ll make me sadder that she is there or sadder that she’s not. So many hours to live through yet. I begin thinking about death simply because it seems an escape sweeter and longer than sleep. I know it’s not healthy to be thinking of it, and I hate myself more for my lack of stoicism. People have endured far more than this! Friends say, You shouldn’t have to put up with this, you shouldn’t be in a one-sided relationship, if it makes you this unhappy there’s no return in it for you. It’s not about should or shouldn’t, though. It’s about can or can’t. And I can endure it. So I keep enduring it.
Nothing But My Body Page 1
