by Linda Jaivin
‘Which one’s that?’ Nicola asked.
In her excited attempt to point in the direction of the building with her hand, Liz sprayed the air behind her with half the contents of her Vietnamese rice-paper roll. ‘Oops.’ She turned an even deeper shade of red under her sunburn.
Johnny didn’t miss a beat. ‘Happens to me all the time,’ he said, jettisoning the contents of his own roll over his shoulder. A small piece of tofu bounced off Fox’s chest.
Fox looked over in the direction from which the phyto-estrogenous missile had been launched. Zane, who didn’t share Fox’s highly developed sense of personal space, had already backed him up to within a few centimetres of the wharf’s edge. Where was a water cannon when you really needed one, Fox had been thinking when Johnny B. Wright catapulted into his life via a rectangular morsel of solidified soy extract.
Fox could see Johnny, Liz and Nicola doubled over in laughter at some joke. Was it at his expense? His alarm bells began to ring. When Nicola had shifted from accounting to editorial, and started getting invited to fancy dos with fancy people, Fox was both glad for her—she seemed to enjoy it so much—and apprehensive for himself. What had until now been a shapeless anxiety gelled into the very specific form of the sophisticated-looking older man who was paying what Fox considered to be an inordinate amount of flirtatious attention to his Nic. While continuing to nod at Zane, Fox kept an eye on Nicola’s little group.
‘So what are you doing here?’ Nicola asked, wiping a small tear of laughter from her eye. ‘Besides throwing food around.’
‘She started it,’ Johnny accused, pointing at Liz. They all laughed again. ‘But seriously, I’m not quite sure.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper, further arousing Fox’s suspicions. ‘They’ve invited me to be a consultant for Architextual. In fact, I was just told I may be asked to contribute the occasional piece.’
‘Great!’ Nicola enthused, though why, she wouldn’t have been able to say.
‘I take it you ladies are journalists? Any tips for a rank amateur like myself?’ He raised his eyebrows, and spread his palms as though all the better to catch whatever pearls of wisdom were to drop from their glossed lips.
‘Well,’ Liz began, ‘your first line should be your best line!’
Johnny nodded, smiling. He considered himself something of an expert on opening lines.
Nicola, her own smile setting like gelatin, despaired silently for her colleague as Liz launched into her set motivational speech for aspiring journos, the same one she gave every year at her old high school and practised in front of the staff for days beforehand. Liz could be such a dag. Nicola studied Johnny’s face for signs of boredom or worse, mockery, and was relieved, if mildly puzzled, to discover that he appeared entranced.
Johnny caught Nicola looking at him. His smile broadened and he shot her a discreet yet unmistakably conspiratorial glance. Nicola felt flattered. Johnny B. Wright, she concluded on the spot, was the most cosmopolitan man she’d ever met. She liked the graceful manner in which he was responding to Liz, and the way his smile deepened the character lines in his face. Character lines on men were what were called wrinkles on women; all the ‘Polished Silver!’ articles in the world on fabulous older women couldn’t erase the fact that only the Y-chromosome set had managed to make collapsing collagen work for them.
‘And what do you write about, Nicola?’ he asked when Liz finally wound down her lecture.
He laughed when she told him. ‘A sexpert,’ he said, winking. Although, generally speaking, winking counted as one of the ‘Ten Signs That He’s Not in Your League!’, Johnny carried it off with class. ‘Let me know if you ever need a research assistant.’ He raised an eyebrow suggestively. ‘I’m a bit of a sexpert myself.’
Nicola didn’t know where to look. The truth was, the longer she’d had her job as Anabelle, the more she realised how little she really knew about her subject, especially when it came to some of what she now thought of as the outer suburbs of sexuality. Nicola had a geographic notion of sexual experience and knowledge. She conceptualised all the basic positions, from missionary to doggie, as a kind of centre of town, the Sydney CBD to be precise. Oral variations extended the map slightly eastwards, say to Potts Point or Rushcutters Bay, and anal took it westwards, to Pyrmont and Rozelle. Spanking was Newtown, threesomes Marrickville. Lactation fantasies took the map out to Mosman, diaper play to Sans Souci, chubby chasers to Parramatta and felching was Blacktown. Nicola lived in Potts Point. She’d never been to Blacktown. Fox came from Blacktown, but he’d have decked anyone who called him a felcher, even if he couldn’t have said what it meant, exactly.
Johnny, Nicola thought, looked like he’d been not just all over the city, but around the world a few times to boot. She felt his gaze on her body like a caressing hand.
Fox, ever vigilant, decided it was time to slide down the pole and extinguish the flames before they grew into a conflagration.
‘Dotcoms are still the future, Fox,’ Zane said.
‘Mate. I’m flat out keeping up with sitcoms. Now, if you’ll excuse me…’ Fox strode over to where Nicola was standing. He slipped his left hand possessively around her waist and lightly kissed her ear. ‘Hello, darling,’ he said. ‘Gonna introduce me to your friends?’
‘Fox,’ Nicola smiled. ‘This is my boss, Liz.’
‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Fox said politely.
‘All bad, I’m sure,’ Liz giggled, more right than she knew.
Daft, scatterbrained, and klutzy were some of the things Fox had heard about her, though Nicola was in fact very fond of Liz.
‘And this,’ Nicola continued, ‘is Johnny B. Wright.’
The two shook hands as though holding a masculinity competition. ‘You in the magazine game as well?’ Fox asked.
‘Johnny’s a famous architect!’ Nicola informed him.
Nicola’s enthusiasm worried Fox. ‘Oh, mate,’ Fox drawled, shaking his head, ‘some of those new buildings, they’re the worst.’
Johnny cocked his head. His smile looked a tad strained.
‘Fox means, you know, in case of fire, it’s hard to rescue people.’ Nicola laughed nervously. A thin line of sweat beaded her upper lip.
‘It’s the windows. They don’t open,’ Fox confirmed.
‘My buildings conform to all the standard fire safety regulations. In fact, as far as tall buildings go, they’re among the safest in the world.’
‘As far as tall buildings go,’ Fox scoffed.
‘Ooh! Guys! Look at this!’ Liz, who’d been trying to remember without success the ‘Three Easy Steps to Avoid an Argument!’ clapped her hands with relief at the approach of a food waiter. He was holding a tray on which there was a pile of crusty bread, a flat dish of olive oil with a splash of balsamic vinegar, and another plate of mixed seeds.
Fox looked like a Hollywood cowboy who’d been spinning his pistols on the main street when the director yelled, ‘Cut!’ He stared at the tray suspiciously. ‘What’s this—birdfood?’
‘Delicioso!’ Johnny enthused, taking a piece of bread, soaking it in oil and then rolling it in seeds. ‘It’s a kind of tapas. I ate it all the time when I was in Barcelona.’ He pronounced it ‘Barthalona’.
‘You’ve been to Spain!’ Liz gushed. ‘How romantic.’
‘Barthalona?’ Fox asked. ‘Ith that in Thpain?’
Nicola, embarrassed, turned her attention back to Johnny. Sometimes, she thought with a flash of annoyance, Fox seemed determined not to fit into her new and glamorous world.
‘It was quite romantic,’ Johnny was saying.
Nicola observed Liz visibly wilt. ‘I’m sure,’ Johnny added, ‘it would have been even more romantic if I’d had a beautiful travelling companion like yourself, of course.’
Liz perked up, though his eyes had darted in Nicola’s direction—a move not unnoticed by either Nicola or Fox.
The sun was going down. Like champagne that had been poured too early, the party began to lose its fizz. Their group, togeth
er with Zane and some other colleagues and acquaintances, moved on to a bar in the wharf. One by one by two, the others peeled off until it was down again to Johnny, Liz, Fox and Nicola.
‘All right, kiddies.’ Johnny fixed them each in turn with his bright gaze. ‘What d’ya say? Want to paint the town red? I’ve got a party we could all go to.’ He slung one arm around Fox’s shoulder, who stiffened, and the other around Liz, who collapsed onto his side with such enthusiasm that she nearly fell over. Johnny winked at Nicola. ‘It’s a very special party.’
‘Oh, I dunno,’ Fox said, shrugging off Johnny’s arm. ‘I think Nic and I might just call it a night. What d’you say, Nic?’
‘But it’s early!’ Nicola exclaimed.
‘It’s eleven,’ Fox pointed out. He was eager to get away from Johnny, with whom he’d forged a tenuous truce for Nicola’s sake.
‘C’mon, Nic! Fox?’ Liz pleaded tipsily. Lurching now in Fox’s direction, she grabbed at and fiddled with Fox’s shirt as though she were trying to unbutton it. ‘You gotta come.’ She let out a champagne burp, covered her mouth with her hand and giggled, ‘Pardon me!’
Politely but firmly, Fox extricated himself from Liz’s clutches. He pulled Nicola aside. ‘Sweetheart,’ he whispered in her ear, ‘I don’t mind going out somewhere if you want. Liz can come too if you like. But not that tosser.’
‘Well, I don’t think he’s a tosser at all,’ Nicola asserted. ‘And I want to go. Let’s be adventurous for once in our lives.’ She had no idea how adventurous they were going to be.
Fox didn’t like to be difficult. And, as someone who regularly ran into burning buildings, he resented the implication that he was the timid one.
Johnny told the taxi driver to drop them off at Mary Street, in Surry Hills, just east of Central Station. He led the group through a narrow alley until they came to a graffiti-covered doorway. He was about to knock on the door when he remembered something. Drawing a large red handkerchief from his pocket, like a magician, he handed it to Fox. ‘Fox, my man. Take this.’
‘What for?’ Fox stared suspiciously at the cloth as though at any moment pigeons might fly out from it and shit on his head.
‘It’s a Red Party. I meant it about painting the town. Our two lovely ladies are already wearing red.’
Liz, who assumed he was referring to her frock and not her sunburn, gave ‘The Look That Tells Him You Want Him!’ her best shot. Nicola blushed and fiddled her bra straps back under her frock. ‘Don’t cover it up,’ Johnny said. ‘Red bras are very sexy.’
Fox’s hand tightened around Nicola’s. She saw out of the corner of her eye that he’d clenched his jaw. He looked extremely fuckable. She stood on tiptoes and kissed him, in a display that, she would never have openly admitted, was as much for Johnny’s benefit as Fox’s. Then she took the handkerchief and knotted it around his neck. ‘That looks great, honey,’ she said.
Fox touched the scarf dubiously. ‘I feel like a poof,’ he grumbled.
Johnny smiled and beat a sharp tattoo on the door. A freakishly tall man, with vermilion hair and a crimson waistcoat and trousers, opened the door and ushered them to the lift, which was draped in swathes of maroon velvet. It opened onto what seemed at first to be a movie set. Nicola squeezed Fox’s hand.
The room they stepped into was a fantasy of a harem. Everything from the gauzy drapes to the tasselled silk cushions and satin-covered banquettes had been dressed in various shades of red. Even the candelabras held port-red candles scented with musk. A dark, doe-eyed girl wearing rose-coloured tulle and a dreamy expression reclined on a banquette, sucking on an elaborate brass hookah. A young man in a belted red shift massaged her bare feet with perfumed oils and another rubbed her shoulders.
When a blonde woman entered through the heavy red velvet curtains that separated the harem space from the party beyond, she let in the sounds of sax-and-bass-soaked jazz. This thirty-something woman wore a magenta corset, suspender belt and red fishnet stockings. Her big feet were stuffed into stiletto pumps. She shrieked at the sight of Johnny, sashayed up and kissed him intimately.
It occurred to Nicola, who watched with a sudden and irrational jealousy, that the expression ‘planted a kiss’ could be quite appropriate: first, the ground was prepared and irrigated, then the seeds were scattered and the harvest gathered. Next thing you know, she thought sourly as she watched Johnny’s mouth widen and their tongues engage, the tart’s going to be applying for agricultural subsidies.
Liz, grinding her teeth, stamped past them and pushed through the curtain, signalling for Nicola and Fox to follow.
The scene in the entryway proved to be just a teaser for the main event. Round red Chinese lanterns with gold tassels cast a roseate glow over the room, which smelled faintly of dope and strongly of sweat, of mingled perfumes and the rose petals that had been strewn around the floor. A DJ in a cartoon devil costume, with spiky horns and a big tail, spun discs on a small platform in front of which dancers writhed and twirled. There were roses in vases everywhere there was a surface for them.
Nicola watched hypnotised as, not far from where they stood, one of the dancers, a lithe young man with pierced nipples and crimson hotpants, pulled a petal off one of the roses, placed it on his tongue and held it out for another young Adonis to lick onto his own tongue. From there, the petal was transferred to the tongue of a voluptuous older woman in a simple pink frock, and from her it went to a brown-skinned sylph, who passed it to a tall and graceful Chinese man who spotted Fox and started to move, tongue out, in his direction.
Before he could reach Fox, who was trapped betwixt his fight and flight responses, Liz stepped boldly forward, stuck out her tongue, procured the petal and disappeared into the pulsating, swirling red swarm.
Nicola looked at Fox, wide-eyed. The scene represented a form of bohemian glamour and sensuality that she’d only ever glimpsed in feature articles on extreme lifestyles: ‘You Think It—They Live It!’
Fox gave her waist a squeeze. ‘I think I need another drink if I’m gonna survive this one, honey,’ he said, and wandered off to find the bar.
Standing to the side of the dance floor, Nicola felt at once over-dressed and under-dressed in her slinky black wraparound. Trying not to be too obvious about it, she edged her frock off one shoulder to expose the strap of her red bra. She started when a pair of hands grasped her waist, then held her breath as they slid up to touch the sides of her breasts, before gliding back down to her hips, the thumbs stretched out to trace the mounds of her arse. ‘How are you enjoying it so far?’ It was Johnny’s voice. She felt the warmth of his body against hers. ‘You sexy thing.’
Goosebumps rose on her arms and spine, but she wasn’t sure if it was his words or the fact that his breath was tickling the tiny hairs on the nape of her neck. Pulling away, she turned to face him. ‘Where’s your girlfriend?’
‘Girlfriend?’ He pronounced the word as if it were the first time he’d ever come across the concept.
‘You know, the blonde woman who kissed you when we came in.’ Nicola was taken aback by the petulance in her own voice.
‘How do you know it was a woman?’ Johnny cocked one eyebrow. ‘Her real name happens to be Kevin. He’s my stockbroker.’
‘Right.’ Nicola laughed. ‘I see.’ So, Johnny was gay. Classic. That explained the looks and the charm. She felt like an idiot for suspecting that he was putting a move on her. Poor Liz. Nicola had known her boss long enough to know that she was in serious danger of making a fool of herself. She wondered if she oughtn’t find her and warn her.
‘Here you go, Nic.’ Fox approached with a red drink in each hand. ‘Strawberry daiquiris.’ Then, to Johnny, ‘Wild party, mate.’
‘It’s just beginning,’ Johnny replied merrily. ‘You two enjoy yourself. I’m going to catch up with some friends.’ Just before he shaved off into the crowd, he leaned over and whispered into Nicola’s ear, ‘X marks the spot.’
‘Sorry?’ Nicola was confused.
; ‘If you find it, you were meant to.’ With that mysterious comment, Johnny left them.
‘What was he banging on about?’ Fox asked suspiciously.
‘No idea. But guess what? He’s gay.’
‘Really? Huh.’ Nicola was relieved to see Fox lighten up. ‘Wouldn’t of guessed.’
It was hot in the warehouse, and they slurped at their frozen cocktails as they threaded their way through the dancers, looking for a place to sit down and chill. The kitchen was noisy with the whir of drink blenders and the shiny chatter of people on hug drugs. Nicola and Fox continued their exploration. A hallway off the kitchen led to a featureless corridor punctuated by a few doors.
‘Nothing much to see here,’ Fox observed.
They were about to turn back when Nicola noticed that one of the doors was marked with a discreet red ‘X’. Just then, a thickset man wearing sunnies brushed past them. He paused at the door, turned and grinned at them, and then slipped inside.
‘What was that all about?’ Nicola whispered.
‘No idea.’ Fox shook his head. ‘You know, for a second there, I thought that was Russell Crowe.’
Nicola frowned, remembering something. ‘X marks the spot,’ she mused. ‘That’s what Johnny said to me.’
A funky bass sound could be heard from inside the room.
‘Check it out?’ He opened the door. As they peered inside, goosebumps rose on Nicola’s arms.
The room was dimly lit, cavernous, and filled with dark shapes. For a nanosecond, Nicola thought they’d happened into some sort of storeroom. But the shapes were moving, and from under the beat of the music came moaning and grunting and the sound of flesh slapping on flesh, a soundtrack part porno film and part fish market.
As their eyes adjusted to the dimness, they realised that everywhere were twisting, heaving, naked bodies. A beautiful woman lay with her legs spread as another woman, who was simultaneously being fucked from behind by an older man, sucked hungrily at her cunt. An Asian fellow rubbed his swollen cock between the cupped and oiled feet of another woman, who masturbated herself with a large dildo.
