I let him out and I’ve got a booking waiting already. Scoff a slice of pizza, pat my puss dry and I’m back under the same portrait I fucked under earlier today, odalisque side-eyeing me in solidarity. Live! Nude! Girls! signs on strip clubs proclaim, but Live Nude, Girl is what she says to me in pride and bemusement. I did it too and here I lie for eternity; sold my body and it’s lived beyond me, stretched into the future well after I decomposed, just as you live on in the memory palaces that clients craft around you, as they say, ‘Let me have one last look at you before you cover up, for my spank bank later – you’ve got the perfect pussy.’
‘You’ve got the perfect pussy,’ this new client says to me, predictably, and I think of the collective subconscious and how there’s no greater proof of it than the patterns of a sex work establishment. The troughs and peaks of the industry that every working girl tries to rationalise, but really there is no explanation as to why men – like beaching whales – come in herds, turgid members filling our hands till we are overworked and then they leave us, barren and needy for money, for days at a time. Why one night every girl goes home with a green-lined wallet, and the next you are all frantic with stress as the night extends long and quiet with no doorbell ringing to shatter the slab of time, rising ominous and money-empty ahead of you. Girls become superstitious. Oh, I always make money in this set, last time I made bank I had this necklace on and now I have to wear it forever, it’s windy today and men always come when it’s windy, the feng shui is off I better wash each stone from the water fountain stone by desperate stone in the kitchen sink, if I start eating they will come, last Monday was busy I better roster on for next Monday. Tearing out your hair to make a pattern of it; sending yourself crazy trying to predict which shift will cover your rent. Uncertainty drives you wild.
And I’m driving him wild. He’s hallooing and howling as he gets closer to orgasm, flopping like a fish and giving tongue like he’s chasing something sweet inside me. Tally-ho, I want to cry, what a ride! Horse girls are the best roots, didn’t you know? Puberty Blues says so and so does my arse in reverse cowgirl.
Wipe up his cum, shower while he gets his breath back, strip the bed while he showers and I’m waiting with heels and condom bag in hand while he ties his shoelaces and off we go down the hallway; damn, I’m efficient – got him happy and out of here in under half an hour. My pussy’s a lubed-up portal that twists time. How many men have time travelled through it today, how many men will travel through it in my lifetime? In this moment I can take them all.
And I’m back in the girls’ room and without even thinking I’m back on their Instagram. Jesus fucking Christ why can’t I curb myself like I curb a 500-kilogram racehorse, with firmness and finesse? Does my mind need an even tougher hand than my own? This is stupid and this is it, the last time. No more wallowing in those waters of fantasy – you want escape, read a book; no need to be the protagonist in a love story. No more filling the space she once filled with them; be single in thoughts, not just action, and let your mind soar. No more falling back into the same complete preoccupation that you have in romantic relationships. No more no more, a crow croak of wisdom.
‘Hey, honey, how is your day?’
She’s got gloves on now, preserving her moisturised hands post booking. We’ve all got our little rhythms and routines. I’ll smear my cunt with Canesten as a thrush preventative when I go to sleep and only send voice notes to friends so my wrist can recover. Physical labour takes its toll.
‘It’s been good, busy, and none of the clients have been too bad, so I’m happy.’ I want to add, But I can’t stop thinking about this person in Europe and it’s driving me crazy – not so much the thought of them but the fact that I have so little impulse control my mind just drifts back there inevitably like tyres on the gravel corners of a country road when you’re tired and each time you come to with a start and wonder what the fuck you’re doing there and whoa that was close I almost crashed or almost sent them something stupid really, if we’re no longer talking about the figurative – but saying all that would just be giving into my desire to speak about them and chew over them in conversation like a cow with cud grinding molars and pap and also she doesn’t need to hear that mundane shit so instead I say, ‘How about yours?’
‘Good, honey. That client, he extend three hours and he very easy, just want talk-talk and kiss.’
I offer her some pizza but she’s got her own food, and then just as I think of watching something on Stan the doorbell rings. We both intro and the guy is obviously drunk and oh god I hope he won’t pick me but he probably will coz he’s that fit middle-aged white-guy type who always does, sees himself reflected in me, Aussie on Aussie.
I’m right, and we spend the first ten minutes of the booking arguing about complimentary drinks because he thinks he should be entitled to two free beers if he’s booking me for an hour. The receptionist ends up coming to speak to him herself because he won’t take my no – that I’ve received from her through the intercom – as an answer. Keep arguing, mate; you’re just using up the time I’m being paid for.
Now he’s lecturing me on investments – as if I’ve asked for advice and have money to invest – and speaking about his extensive property portfolio, which I always find a bit tactless. Cool, you make money flipping houses, and I have to suck your dick to have a stable rental. I fill my mouth with it now so I don’t voice my frustration and disdain, and surprisingly he gets hard within the condom. I go to get on top and this guy won’t shut up.
‘The GDP, which stands for the gross –’
‘Domestic product, I know.’
Oh god, I shouldn’t have said that. He’s taken it as interest rather than a correction of his assumption of my ignorance. He repositions my body onto the side and as he enters me he continues, ‘So the four big players are China, Russia, Germany and the United States,’ and he’s punctuating every country with a slow, deep thrust. What am I meant to do in this moment? Am I meant to be learning or enjoying? Can I settle on a halfway moan that expresses both curiosity and pleasure? Is this what my life is, an audience and receptacle for dull men? It’s not so bad really; after this I’ll go to bed in one of the work rooms and then I’ll wake up and fuck on the bed I’ve just dreamt in, not just one man but a few, and I’ll do that week in and week out and sure, that’s drudgery, but think of next month when you go home for the long weekend and then think of next year when you go overseas for a month and then think of next decade when you might finally be able to afford a house, something that he sees as just a property but you’ll see as a home, and that will last forever while he’s just one link in a chain that you’re heaving yourself along, giving you callused hands that your future children can hold in love and pride and that your current friends hold in trust and adoration, because friendships are the real romances in life, the enduring till death do us part, and any crush only offers a poor shadow of what you get from your friends already, that’s why you’ll spit that European from your mind with the same force that you’re spitting on his cock now – yes, come on my tits, that’s hot. My life reaches beyond this moment and beyond this obsession and beyond this man.
tuesday
I’M LIKE, ‘GUYS, CAN I PUT HIM DOWN YET? HE’S ACTUALLY really heavy,’ and I keep crying with laughter and swallowing my hair in the wind and I’m worried about climate change but right now I’m not anxious coz I’m here with you all in my favourite place in the world, but please don’t mention the one billion native wildlife dead coz I just want to forget about it all for a few hours or half a day maybe, and yeah, we’re a world embarrassment coz we’ve voted in climate change deniers who will do nothing about our horrible rate of carbon emissions even though we are gonna be one of the first countries directly impacted by climate change and I even feel conflicted about having children when the world will probably end but also isn’t having children an act of hope and surely if all the people who care about the world stop having kids out of conscience it’s just gonna
mean the next generation is even less populated with people raised to fight for this earth and, ‘Have you got the shot yet, guys? My arms are really starting to ache!’
And the pup’s down and off to touch noses with the cows through the fence, cows that surely felt the fear just like I did in the weeks when the fires crackled around here, destroying Orara, terrorising Coffs and touching the very edges of Dorrigo rainforest. Gondwana, my soul cried, day in and day out, those forests are not meant to burn! Thousands of years they’ve been safe in their lianas and wetness, and now, because of us, they sputter and smoke. For two months it’s been black in my heart. I’ve gone to work, I’ve gone out, I’ve distracted myself. I’ve donated to anything and everything to combat my futility. But the future feels bleak and I feel powerless to change any of it.
For weeks I’ve woken up repeatedly in the night thinking the house is on fire, then I realise it’s the bushfire smoke in the air. It makes me cough, makes my throat hurt, not surprising since being outside in Sydney most days has been the equivalent of smoking four to ten cigarettes. As the fires have swept along the east coast – not just burning eucalyptus forest that is regenerated through fire but desecrating rainforest that has always been too wet to burn – I’ve been constantly anxious. For once, though, it’s a rational anxiety. It’s hard not to panic when family members are evacuated again and again, when fire draws close to your home, is put out, starts up again. You mourn and hope and hope and mourn. You sit in your backyard and a friend asks what’s falling on your face. ‘It’s ash.’ You run into someone who survived Wytaliba, and they tell you of the hundreds of skinks scorched dead on the ground after the fire went through, an entire ecosystem turned to crisps. News reports list the hectares burnt (18.6 million), the houses destroyed, the human lives lost. Besides the koalas, though, the animals go unmentioned. Internationally only UNESCO seems to acknowledge that this is a tragedy on a global scale. And the forest is simply ‘hectares’, not the loss of each individual tree. The government denies and diverts, and you feel suffocated. You are suffocated. Your house is on fire.
Now I’m back in my home area, in this untouched valley, and the wraparound mountains of the Great Dividing Range hide any fire damage from view. We’re cocooned here and could almost pretend it’s over, or that it never happened, except that we know from the news that it’s now the South Coast that is being pummelled, beaten into submission just as the places I hold dear were weeks ago. Hernani and Lowanna and Ebor aren’t only names on a map to me; they are places I love and sobbed over. And the world is waking up to it. The images coming out of Mallacoota, apocalyptic scenes of people marooned on beaches, have caught the world’s sympathy in a way that the nonstop bushfires from September to December didn’t. The apathy hurt me almost more than anything. For months my home was burning, and it felt like no one cared. The only overseas friends who checked in on me were Australians, and yet every morning I woke with tears and donned a mask inside my own home, because it wasn’t airtight and the smoke infiltrated everything. Is it because we’re in the Southern Hemisphere that we can be so easily ignored? (Is this what the people of West Papua, Sudan and Palestine feel constantly – overlooked?) Do people from other countries assume it’s the norm for Australia to have bushfires and so they don’t notice our pain?
Not like this, though. It’s not meant to be like this. It’s meant to be controlled burning, as First Nations people have practised for thousands of years, tending to the earth. Colonialism has choked that with its greedy paws, through genocide and displacement and eugenics, and our government does not heed the voices of those who have survived, those who should be listened to most intently. The land is parched, too, from drought and overuse, bled dry by cotton and mining and selfishness.
How does one wake with the strength to live another day, to fight, when everything feels utterly hopeless and you feel helpless to change any of it? I know I need more than resilience, I need fortitude, and I know if everyone who is exhausted gives up then we’re done for, and there are people so much more exhausted than me, who have devoted their entire lives to causes, yet every morning I wake heavy with doom. And unlike friends in other parts of Australia or the world who can disconnect from it, have moments of self-care where they don’t go on social media or read the news, in Sydney we’ve been unable to escape it for months because in the very air we breathe there is a constant toxic reminder that we can choke on and even see, so tangible it obscures the end of your street and even the sun. And our prime minister, who belongs to a church that believes in the end of the world and divine providence, a church that started in the bible belt of Sydney and has now been exported to LA’s elite, goes away on holidays because to him maybe the continent burning isn’t a terrible foreshadowing; it’s all part of God’s plan. I will never forgive him for this, and I hope the Australian people never forget it.
Stop thinking about it all. I’m back home now and the sky is clear. I’ll never take clear sky for granted again. I know my dad was that way after the bushfires of 1994 wrecked the Upper Hunter. It’s why he relocated us from Wollombi to Bellingen, because he never wanted to live through fires like that again. I was a baby and so didn’t understand, but now the fear and the dread has entered my psyche too. And now, less than thirty years later, the fires have followed him north, to the place he thought would never burn because it always flooded. How wrong he was! How wrong we all were. The audacity, the arrogance, the ego of humans to think we could reap what we liked from the earth with no consequences.
‘What’s that? Yeah, let’s have a joint – I’m tripping too hard to roll it myself, though.’
My fingers are mottled and stumpy and my foot pulses from that bull ant’s bite as we trudge back through the grass, stepping over logs and dodging thistles. I’m looking down because the view is too overwhelming. So much green and blue that it comes screaming in at us, 360 degrees of eucalyptus and us, just one irrelevant pinpoint squished by those technicolour surrounds. As I light up on the verandah, I’m reminded that the world is best viewed from between a horse’s ears or down the length of a joint. The land rolls off in one continuation from my hand, down to the mandarin trees along the creek where the cows hoover the dropped fruit up whole, shloooop, across that one unsightly blotch of state forest that reminds you of so many awful things better not thought of now so don’t think of them, up to the smudge of the ocean twenty kilometres away. And off to either side, into the great beyond and beauty that I am a part of.
‘I’m having a moment, guys,’ I say over my drag.
Looking around, we are all lost in our own moments. What feelings of grief and horror in their bodies, I wonder, are temporarily soothed by the tranquillity of nature? I know none of us has forgotten what’s going on. On the drive up we stopped to pee among the charred remains of eucalyptus forests that had been home to koalas; kilometres and kilometres of burnt trees alongside the highway, empty of birds and the sounds of life, black and brown and grey where there used to be green and green and green. We pulled over in silence, gazed at the ravaged planet in silence, drove on in silence. What could be said that we didn’t already feel and know? That we have destroyed this earth, the only earth we know, which we should have treasured above all things.
We – the general we, the human race, but more specifically the non-Indigenous Australian we – are culpable for what has happened to this continent. And then I, the white Australian me, who loves this country like no other, whose biggest heartbreak was losing the property she grew up on, whose nightmares are of the red cedars being chopped down and lantana overrunning the riverbanks, yet who is able to be in and love this country only because of the dispossession of the Gumbaynggirr. How do I reconcile myself to that? Maybe it’s not something that can be reconciled.
‘What’s that hanging off the trellis?’ she asks as she reaches for the joint I’m holding out to her, breaking my contemplation.
‘It’s a snakeskin.’
‘Did you put it there fo
r decoration?’
‘Nah, the diamond python just conveniently rubbed its shedding skin off there.’
‘The diamond python?’
‘Yeah, the one that lives in the roof. It lives off all the rats there. They’re harmless, don’t worry – non-venomous.’
‘Is that the main snake you get around here?’
‘Yeah, that and red-bellied black snakes. We don’t get many brown snakes, which is good coz they’re quite aggressive. Red-bellies are venomous but they’re pretty shy; they won’t hurt you if you don’t bother them.’
‘What does a red-bellied black snake look like?’
‘Black … with a red belly.’
Everyone laughs and because of the acid none of us can stop; it goes on in waves as one person stops for breath and the others start up again, witches’ cackles that leave our cheeks aching and gums dry, to the point we’re laughing at our own laughter, the absurdity of ourselves and of being together. My belly starts to cramp because I’m laughing so hard, and it’s so much better than the empty sickness of anxiety that I’ve felt for months, that has had me hysterical in the girls’ room at work on days when the wind blew towards my home and the Fires Near Me app sent me constant notifications and clients asked me how I was and I would say, I’m okay, I just can’t stop thinking about the fires, can you? It’s just so terrifying and awful and there’s nothing I can do, and then they’d shut me up by putting their dick in my mouth and then I’d fuck them with such force in reverse cowgirl that I could continue to read the updates between their legs without them noticing, one hand teasing their balls while the other flicked the screen. Panic that became panic attack and then numbness and then back to panic and all that’s coming out now in this purge of a laugh that I’ve needed more than anything.
Nothing But My Body Page 7
