A
whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiile.
Is that what’s passed? And – coming to –
I’m vomiting into the rose-pink bathwater and I feel the best I’ve felt in months. Sick-feeling stomach is now sick-making, and I’m purging it all up in toxic upchuck. Fishing around through clumps of food to find the plug and let it all down the drain. The empty sac inside me heaves and it’s just bile coming up now because I’ve bled and spewed out all that emotion. Tallied the bad on my body, one limb a voodoo doll to pin with all my self-hatred and terror so it can’t contaminate the rest. Imbue it with all the sorrow from this relationship so it no longer comes sloshing out and ruining my days, all the caring, the disappointment, the expectations and the tenderness. I feel no turmoil, just the physical reality of my distressed body in the now. Distressed enough that I can hardly breathe between each yak, it’s running out my nostrils too; distressed enough that there’s no space for my mind to even think. Yoga is meant to embody you but I am truly in myself now. I lay my head on the cold rim of the bath and feel nothing but relief, pungent seeping drool released in a slow trickle from inside me. Stillness.
This stillness will pass, though. Unless I do this every day, a lifestyle I promised myself I would never enter into again. I need to escape, but where? Home. It’s a hallowed term in my mind. Tucked beneath the Great Dividing Range, the rainforest encroaches. Diamond pythons in the roof, bats nesting in my cupboard, satin bowerbirds at the fruit bowl, green tree frogs in the toilet, goanna chasing me on the verandah. That green on green on green. Ferns mark soggy bits of ground, a crossing in the creek, the cool place I like to sit. When it rains the house fills with huntsmen and mole crickets. I rush my outdoor shower when the lightning rocks around the valley, thrown from curve to curve in moments of supreme illumination. Each tree cut stark like the backdrop of a cardboard puppet show or a primary school diorama.
People talk about grass in Sydney, but it’s only ever lawn grass so they don’t differentiate. Heavy-headed wild oats, hated Parramatta, soft-tipped paspalum, emerald kikuyu, fast-spreading bamboo, grass stained with urea, velvety clover, grass patched with scotch thistles ready to bite at your ankles – all these are unknown and unmentioned. What do they know of castor oil plants rising in the sandy banks in the aftermath of a flood? What do they know of casuarinas, cobwebbed with mist in the mornings by the riverside? For them there is no desperate searching for dock leaves to abate the sting of nettles; there are no farmers’ friends to be pulled out of school socks every morning; no cuts on hands from pulling yourself up the river on your belly, one handful of reeds at a time. They talk of trees, but you have to search among the houses to find them. Where are the white cedars with their two-toned leaves; the red cedars, a few majestic survivors of the age of logging; the flame trees, erupting on the mountain; the bunya pines that would prick through my clothes when I went to feed the horses; the hoop pines with the letter-winged kites nesting at the top; the jacarandas whose branches held me as I read; the massive fig tree next to my window with the tawny frogmouths, flying foxes and kookaburras? Where are the sour flowers to eat, the lilly pilly berries to throw, the ferns to watch tentatively unfold? Sydney has the saltwater baptism and the eucalyptus cleanse in rain, but it can’t give the consolation of home. It may not be the house I grew up in, that’s lost to me forever, but my dad still lives in a rental in that area, so I can retreat to the same landscape of my youth. I could curl up in that green and heal. It’s only a 530-kilometre drive.
A 530-kilometre drive is too easy to return from, though. I would be back in two days, tail between my legs, eager to make it work, believing that I am only as good as how hard I fight for us. I know this. I have gone down that road too many times before: cried out the back of the truck stop in Coolongolook, had a crisis at that halfway point next to a dam abundant with waterlilies. Strangely poetic that I fought with my first girlfriend at that same truck stop, seventeen and sobbing. Seems it draws more than road trains.
I have to go further. Somewhere not easy to return from. Why not London? The other side of the world. And I have friends there.
I buy a flight for three days’ time. I have already cleaned up the mess in the bathroom. Never again. I am not going to burn myself on the pyre of romance, on a future that exists only in my imagination. I text her, my thumb clumsy in its bandaid. I’m leaving for London.
sunday
I’M HAVING A SUPREME MOMENT OF EUPHORIA. EACH STEP I take on the dance floor imprints the world with my mark, as lasting and significant as a hieroglyphic. I have no urge to text her, no desire to hear from her. For the first time in two years my mind is completely unrestrained and it sweeps around the globe, pressing briefly and lovingly against each friend. What are they doing? How are they? The continents appear like playrooms of promise, I can go anywhere, see anyone. Say anything.
I should text that girl, the one in London. Hey, I’ve got a crush on you. It’s true, so true, and shouldn’t the truth be shared? Proffered like fruit on a plate for the other to do what they like with it? Hope she’ll swallow me whole, the tart ’tang a drip from her lips. I’m best enjoyed in summer, I tell you now. When I can lie languorous and nude on a patio with joint in hand. Fuck me slow and feed me grapes. Fuck me brisk so we have more time to swim.
My phone is too slippery to unlock, been jammed down my boot as I’ve got no bag or pockets. Do a quick check now to make sure everything else is there. Apartment key is way down, a bulge against my ankle. That’s a rolled-up euro note of some kind. Ahhh, there’s the ket in its cute little plastic top hat. The Germans are so much better at this than us with our saddies that flutter to the floor, lost, till they reappear stuck to a stranger’s sweaty arse.
My phone screen has depth to it; the paddocks of home are elongated columns of green as if I could step inside and be within a Grecian temple. Maybe I shouldn’t text her. I’m a bit fucked up. Not that it’s embarrassing or wrong to text when you’re inebriated, but it’s not particularly impressive if someone can only confess to a crush when they’re out of it. There’s no courage in that. Save it till you’re sober. A text comes up, where u? I text back, Panorama, meet at toilets.
Thank god it’s not as crowded as it usually is. Guess it’s only 4 p.m. and lots are G dropping at Cocktail or frolicking at Teufelssee. I was throwing them up too, but ended up here coz something about the industrial space called to me, I wanted to flounce once more across that mesh cage bridge that always makes me feel like I’m performing in the cell block tango, wanted to graze myself on concrete blocks beneath bamboo, surrounded by bears but not panda bears just the bearded and beloved bears of the gays, gaze away we’re all here to be watched, even in the darkrooms it’s part public performance, enjoy my enjoyment, etiquette of the exhibitionist, sacrosanct space, kneel at church this Sunday, lick my shoes you dirty dog I peed on them earlier when I crouched over the urinal, the only girl there, why should I have to queue just coz I have a vagina?
It’s a sacred space and I love it, love it even though it’s imperfect, even though it’s rigged against femmes (you’ve gotta be a techno lesbian short hair and sports bra for the bouncers to see you as queer), even though like everything it’s part pretence – the walls of the darkrooms are simply heavy hanging curtains, as I discovered the night lightning struck the building and the emergency lighting came on and the place was just a heaving mass of naked bodies bared to the bulbs, and I could see people’s feet beneath the curtains as they fucked and fellated. Here I am, and I’m feeling so much better than when I was here last year. When I’d fled Paris in the middle of the night to escape that man. Paris, the supposed city of romance, Versailles that famed spot of riot and beauty, and for me, now, fear, running crying down an avenue of trees with the man’s crunch on the gravel behind me, his soft ugly uncircumcised dick out and flopping. Would you be able to recognise him? the police asked. I could recognise his dick, I wanted to say. I’ve been trained to recognise them. Client
s only become familiar to me once they get naked. I know which are hard and which make me come and which have bad memories associated with them, all from the shape and the size and the pigment and the tilt. Know how they’ll twist and hit inside me, know how sore they’ll make my wrist.
The last time I was in Berlin I hardly left my friend’s apartment. And when I did I was rugged up in jeans and a huge bomber that I could zip up till even my ears and neck were hidden. Didn’t want men to look at me, to see even a slip of skin or guess the shape of me beneath baggy clothes. I was traumatised from my three days in Paris. I had gone for a booking, flown over by a rich man supposedly because he had a fetish for facial moles but in actuality because he wanted to spring another fetish on me, without consent, in a city where I knew no one, couldn’t speak the language and was vulnerable to him.
What happened? people asked, expecting a sordid tale of rape or stealthing, and that’s what I expected too, am always prepared for, ever vigilant. Well, the first day, before I met up with him, I was harassed by a man in Versailles who chased me down an avenue of trees as the crows cawed overhead and there were no other tourists within sight or sound and I was scared, so scared, but I pulled myself together to meet this client later. And he was a real conservative rich prick, but that was okay coz I’m not paid to actually like them as people, and the first day was okay but the second – well, the second I don’t even want to remember as the me you know, I want to distance and disassociate myself from it; it’s something that happened to the me of the past and maybe that’s just semantics but really that’s you, not me, I’m stepping away from it – so the first day was okay but on the second he asked if you would peg him and you don’t normally do that, like, you’re pretty vanilla, a Girl Friend Experience but he said he did it all the time, even had his strap-on ready for you, and you figured it would break the monotony of the three days with him fucking you so you said yes and of course you imagined he had prepared himself because you prepare yourself before anal, like, that’s basic consideration, but when you slowly pulled out sloppy shit went everywhere, not just on him and the towel you had carefully laid out but on your hands and legs and feet and all over the floor, and that would’ve been fine, you breathed through it – stay calm, you told yourself, it was an accident, be professional – but as you stood up to get stuff to clean it, he dropped to his knees and sucked his shit off the strap-on and said, I’m your dirty anal whore, I love being your filthy slut, and then tried to kiss you with flecks of shit around his mouth and asked if you would do a brown shower, and as you stepped away in horror you realised it was deliberate, he had wanted scat play but hadn’t asked if you offered it or negotiated what rate you would do it for, just relied on the shock in that moment to let it slide – or maybe the shock itself got him off – and you made him get in the shower as you cleaned it up but even after you cleaned it the places where it had been seemed to glow and he came out of the shower with the shit-stained towel tied around his waist, stains visible, and paraded around as if proud of his handiwork and none of this was what you signed up for and you said you were jetlagged so he would go home to his wife that night and then after he left you cried and emailed him saying he had crossed your boundaries and he had rescinded the right to GFE services such as kissing, oral on you, sex, and the booking tomorrow would have to continue just in the realm of fetish and he said you were overreacting coz you were jetlagged and it wasn’t scat play just a bit of power play and you said, Dude, you ate your own shit in front of me, and that’s when you booked flights to Berlin and left when it was still dark with a suitcase full of euros, shaking because men can spring anything on you anytime and you’ll never be prepared for it all.
For months after I was scared to do private work with new clients, because who knew what could happen? They could do anything, something you were completely mentally unprepared for, at any moment. I tried to anticipate but there were too many possibilities, everyone is so unique in their depravity, how could I counter a sudden exposé? And really he had no respect for me at all and that was what scared me most: that clients with no respect for me could treat me in ways I couldn’t predict. Respect has a sameness, a conformity to it, but disrespect is varied and alien in its individual manifestation.
No matter; men don’t scare me now. Their eyes are on each other here, anyway, or even if they are on me they won’t touch me, I move with such a determined tread through the crowd. They’ll ask if I wanna fuck and I can say no and then they’ll walk off and leave me be, just like I asked that guy last weekend if he wanted to and walked off to dance before he even had time to think about it. ‘I don’t normally fuck guys but you’re really hot so if you’re interested let me know coz I’m down.’ After being that forward you’ve gotta give people their space so they don’t feel pressured in any way. Besides, the ball is in their court, they can take you up on it if they wish.
And he did wish. I went around to his the next evening and he was a nerd like me, used to RPG online and we could finish each other’s sentences about obscure movie facts. ‘I don’t usually meet up with girls,’ he said, ‘I’m a bit weird. Often when I’m meant to I stop replying to their messages on the day.’
‘So you ghost them? That’s not weird – that’s the most normal guy behaviour in the world.’
We fucked and I laughed throughout it because it was just so good to be fucking someone out of pure attraction, just because I wanted to, not motivated by money at all. And it was fun, unlike the sex with her by the end, which was heavy with too much emotional emphasis because it so rarely happened and I ended up unable to relax and was tight inside in a way I never had been with her before, coz really it had been so long and I had cried over it so much that when the intimacy finally came it only hurt because it cascaded through my life with light and threw all the shadows, the lack, into relief.
‘You’re the first guy I’ve fucked for free in five years,’ I said, and he repeated, ‘For free?!’ and laughed. He had no idea of the significance of it, how it brought me back into my body with joy when for so long I had felt at odds with my body, either ashamed of its wants in my relationship, or only able to access it through the desires of clients. I had written off casual sex as not worth doing for free, because emotional sex was so superior, and truly good sex with someone you’re emotionally connected with is the pinnacle of sex, but that didn’t mean the pleasures of connecting with a stranger in a moment of genuine physical intimacy should be denied me as a single person.
‘Let me know if you come back to Berlin,’ he said.
‘I will, but I won’t be offended if you don’t reply,’ I said, and he looked surprised and relieved, as if I got something about him, or he wasn’t used to someone not holding him to something. I felt like saying, Babe, you gotta fuck a dyke more often. I don’t need you for validation and couldn’t care less if this happens again beyond the fact that it was fun and I’m always down for more fun. I only hit on you coz I lost the girl I wanted to get with that day somewhere in the club and then met you and thought, Why not get with this guy with the beautiful face who isn’t staring at me creepily and is talking to me as if I’m a person not a girl with her nipples and pubic hair visible to everyone?
I just ran down the stairs of the darkened apartment building and yelled back at him to hit the stairwell lights so I didn’t have to slow my pace because I had a flight to London to catch, otherwise I might’ve stayed for round two.
Damn, now I’m horny thinking about that, squashed like a sardine into this bathroom stall. ‘Guys, I’m so horny I can hardly dance!’
‘Here, babe, do this line of K and then I’ll do up a line of speed for you, too – that’ll fix you, or it’ll fix your cunt.’
Yeah, I need to fix my cunt all right. It’s an annoyance between my legs right now, heavy with need. Gloating and proud, aware of its power, a searchlight streaming from it, on the prowl. Should’ve masturbated earlier to ease this, fed my fingers into its greed and let it spit them bac
k out again, satiated slop.
Wow, those lines wipe me. Let the others lead the way back to the floor. Reach out an arm to clasp a mesh waist so I don’t lose them in the churning crowd. My feet are square nuisances. Not knives getting sharper and sharper with each step but bundles of lead that I have to drag. I try getting up on the podium but it’s too much for me. I need to pee. ‘I’ll be back soon, guys, or I’ll find you to the left of the speakers … Yeah, fag hag corner.’
Hold on to the railing on the way down the stairs or I might topple like a broken doll on the heel of my boot. Darkness and smoke clothe me more than anything else, my open-crotch panties baring my labia to the world. Wait, who’s this guy coming up the stairs looking at me? Do we know each other? He looks familiar but also not … He’s looking at me so intently, though, it’s going to be so embarrassing if it’s a friend I don’t recognise. I’ve slowed to steady myself and oh my god what if it’s the guy I fucked last week? He was so nice that it would be rude if I didn’t say hi, especially as we fucked sober, in the light. It’s not his fault I fuck so many guys – and besides, he wasn’t a client, so I would hate to cold-shoulder him. I know there’s a way I can find out if it’s him or not.
Nothing But My Body Page 3
