The Girls Page 15

  I do remember buying certain things: self-help books, occasional (non-sexual) massages at the nearby mall, and furniture and fabric. With little to fill my days, I begin decorating Graeme’s third bedroom, which is where I sleep when I stay over. I buy swathes of lush fabrics in pink and purple velvet, convinced I will teach myself how to sew. I don’t.

  ‘I’m going to make pillowcases and decorate my room,’ I tell Graeme when we shop for them.

  I buy cream candles, in different widths and sizes and smells, most of which I never light. I visit Vinnies and return with a small antique table on wheels. I am hungry for a home where I have my own space and, briefly, the third room in Graeme’s house seems like a good option.

  A waste, I later reprimand myself. All of that strange sex to buy those decorations, only to leave most of them at Graeme’s. Later, I want to bring them home to Mum and Dad’s but I can’t; I’m not sure how to explain how I afforded all that stuff or even why I bought it in the first place. They still think I am working as a live-in babysitter.

  Later again, after I’ve stopped working, Graeme uses it as an excuse to see me. ‘Don’t you want to come and pick up that table you bought at Vinnies? It might be worth a lot of money.’

  I do love that table. But not enough to go back.

  I don’t work often but make several hundred dollars on the days that I do. I don’t keep track of my income over the seven months or so that I am working, and while it’s not an enormous amount, it is enough to give me the freedom from mundane life that I crave. I give money away to friends and ex-lovers, am generous in my spending when out with others. A friend mentions he is short of money and I have a roll of cash that I don’t know what to do with so I give it to him. I go through a phase where I think creative outlets will help and I accumulate boxes of art supplies: printed papers and ribbons, paints and canvases, scrapbooking materials which absorb my time for a while. I make large canvas collages of mementos: one of the accident, one of Kris and me. I buy expensive dresses to make myself feel attractive. But I don’t know where most of the money goes, except for the four thousand dollars I manage to save to go to India. (Even that quickly runs out, and on that trip I will have to call home to borrow from my parents.) I am thoughtless with my money, don’t keep a budget and spend without thinking. At the time, it feels like I am living with wild abandon, not weighed down by the past or the future.

  Only once are Graeme and I ever physical.

  He says he wants to sleep with me. I am not interested in forming a relationship with him beyond the friendly and professional one we already have but I tell him that it is fine, I will see him as a client.

  Afterwards, I go back to my own bed to sleep.

  A few weeks later, I watch a woman give him head. He has met another sex worker and the two of them arrange to have a weekend at a fancy hotel. Graeme asks if I am interested in coming along.

  I am. I’ve not met another girl in the industry before.

  Despite my first-hand experience, when I think of sex workers, even now, I imagine them huddled in groups in brothels with a madame sitting at the reception desk and a security guard on the door. I picture clusters of dark rooms, and a messy shared communal space where the girls chat and eat and shit between clients. Someone once told me about the ‘line-up’ at a brothel, when a guy comes in and the girls all line up in their underwear while he chooses which one he wants to see. This sounds partly humiliating, and partly erotic.

  This is to say: I have no idea, either now or then, what other people’s experiences of the sex industry are, beyond one conversation.

  That weekend, I chat with the other girl in between jobs. She is full-bodied and large-breasted, with dark hair flowing down her back and framing the clear skin of her face. She acts indifferent to the world, but her conversation indicates otherwise. When I ask why she does what she does she says, ‘I do it anyway, so I might as well get paid for it.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ I nod. I don’t remember if she asks why I do it and can’t begin to imagine what I would have said if she did.

  (I wonder if she wanted to be seen, to feel less alone? I wonder if she recognised that in me?)

  Towards the end of the weekend, she agrees to give Graeme a head job, in lieu of some payment she owes him from the organising percentages. The three of us gather in the bathroom, she gets on her knees, pulls his pants and undies down and blows him off. I sit on the toilet, watching.

  I’ve never seen another woman give head before.

  The thing that nobody tells you about sex work is this: your mind may not remember it, but your body will.

  I have a vague outline of a few of their faces—the ones whose stories stood out: the wife dying of cancer, the turban around his head, the fantasy of being a eunuch, the graphic design agency and cocaine habit—but I cannot picture their bodies under my own.

  What my body does remember is their hands on my breasts.

  Years later, I experience problems with a partner touching them. Stop, I want to say.

  But I don’t. I am afraid he will ask why and I don’t want to tell him. What am I supposed to say? The way you touch my breasts hurts? Repulses me? Reminds me of the time I fucked all those unfamiliar men and tried to block out the feeling of their hands on my body by smoking marijuana before we went upstairs?

  Otherwise, my mind only remembers small details.

  Graeme’s dining room table, my psychology notes spread across it.

  His carpeted stairs, leading up to the bathroom and three bedrooms.

  I can picture flashes of skin.

  Small patches of hair.

  Faint outlines of men’s faces, as if I am looking at them from very far away through a weak telescope.

  I’ve met more dickheads in my personal life than in sex work. Perhaps it’s the age gap, or my naivety, but I remember the men I met as mostly sweet and lovely, albeit strangers. The men I’ve met outside it have not always been so thoughtful.

  My mother and I are discussing my test results. I am not pregnant, although I have been worried I was.

  ‘Would you know who the father was if you were?’ she says.

  I have a feeling she knows what I’m doing, at least in part, although I’m unsure which part. I need to hide my diaries better, I think. Instead, I try to think of more legit jobs that pay cash to help cover my tracks and tell myself she wouldn’t breach my privacy like that. It’s getting exhausting.

  One day, I tell my father, ‘There’s a possibility I might have a job working for an American porn film company, writing blurbs for the back of their films.’

  I need a way to explain the money I’m making, something that my mother can’t check. It’s curious that I choose a lie that is so close to the truth.

  ‘I’ll support you in whatever you want to do but it is you who must live with the consequences,’ he says. I love him a little more.

  When my cousins from Mudgee come to visit my parents again, Jason and I sit in the back room and discuss how I’m not coping well.

  I’ve always had a soft spot for Jason. He’s eleven years my senior and I like that he listens to me and tells me what he really thinks. I explain how difficult I’m finding university, an unusual thing, given my previous penchant for study.

  ‘If you don’t want to study, leave. You’re young. You’ve got plenty of time to figure it out,’ he says. ‘Go travel if that’s what you want. You won’t regret it.’ It’s the first time an adult has mentioned a choice that isn’t all about being responsible and thinking of the future.

  Not long after, I drop out of university. I cannot bear to spend six hours a week driving alongside those median strips.

  People keep asking why I went into sex work. I don’t really know the answer to this question. It was partly for money, in the sense that I wanted to own my time. But also because my life has been—and is—a series of ex
periments. Even today, the idea of a steady job working to someone else’s schedule is my worst nightmare. I am not interested in selling the majority of my waking hours to follow someone else’s instructions. Back then, I didn’t know how I was going to feel when I woke each day, and this terrified me. Above all else, I wanted—and still want—my freedom.

  11

  My mother keeps a plant in the spare bathroom at their house. It’s in a white Ikea ceramic pot and reaches almost to my waist, with long thin stems and overhanging leaves the size of my palm.

  She doesn’t know it (or maybe she does), but when I brought it home years ago, it came from Graeme’s house. I bought it to cheer up the room a little.

  One night, I call my mother. It is June 2018. I am thirty years old.

  ‘You know when we had that fight about Christmas this year and you said you knew all that stuff?’

  ‘What stuff?’ she asks.

  I can’t bring myself to say the word. ‘You know.’

  ‘The prostitution?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Does Dad know?’

  ‘Yes, he does.’

  ‘Wow, okay. Um, I was wondering how you would feel if I started writing about it?’

  She pauses. ‘I don’t know, Chlo. That’s a big thing. Are you sure you want the world to know? Once it’s out there in public, people will judge.’

  ‘I know. But, yes, I’ve thought about that, and I need to write about it.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering if you were going to. It’s been keeping me up, actually.’

  ‘I want to.’

  ‘I just worry. People will judge. And, I guess, I would just feel ashamed. Not ashamed, that’s not the right word. Worried.’

  ‘It’s okay, Mum,’ I say, again trying to be a good daughter. ‘I understand.’ This is the first time I’ve heard her use the word ‘ashamed’ in relation to me.

  ‘Do you have to use the P word? Can’t you just say you had sex?’ Now she is the one who can’t say ‘prostitution’.

  I laugh. ‘I’m not sure that’s how it works, Mum. The best writing is the hard writing, the honest writing.’

  ‘I don’t know if that will make good writing.’

  ‘Well, think on it. There’s no rush.’ I don’t tell her I’ve applied for an online writing mentorship where, if selected, I’ll have to write an article every month. The angle I pitched was the interaction of grief and sexuality. Specifically, sex work. Writing has become the way I process my emotions. It is how I make sense of things, and there is something calming about narrativising difficult memories. But equally, it is a plea for authenticity. My life often feels so compartmentalised that I never fully sit comfortably in myself, like I am always hiding some unlikeable aspect. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t write honestly about sex work until other people started suggesting that I shouldn’t.

  ‘I’ll talk to Dad about it,’ she says.

  Dad is very down again, my mother texts.

  Send him down here, I reply.

  We have wanted to come down many, many times.

  I cringe at this. My mother always wants to visit. But that is not what I was suggesting. I think of my therapist and try to check in about what feels right. I tell Mum I meant just Dad.

  That makes me very sad, she replies.

  My heart hurts. I hate knowing I have upset her.

  But at the same time, I often feel angry that whenever I try to hang out with just Dad, Mum always comes too. This changes the dynamic, turning a gentle and quiet catch-up into something loud and draining and emotionally intense. Sometimes, I just want to see my father alone.

  Is this what good mental health is? Trying to find the balance between kindness and self-care?

  I have been looking for small ways to heal.

  I get invited to do a reading at the State Library in Sydney. Normally, I would try to make it useful. Invite several people so the event organisers could fill the seats. Gather four or five friends together for lunch afterwards, so they could connect and maybe collaborate in the future. Try to squeeze one more conversation out into the world so I don’t feel guilty for not spending enough time with people.

  Instead, I decide to go alone. Lately I have been reading books whose characters are trying to recover from grief and go out and do things alone. They go camping for a week without their partner or get a new haircut and leave the kids with Grandma. Yesterday, I rose to write at four in the morning and was done by eleven so took myself out to lunch and sat there alone with my book for two hours.

  ‘You must be an artist?’ the waiter asked.

  ‘A writer. How did you know?’

  ‘Only the writers and painters go to lunch on their own.’

  I laughed and nodded.

  ‘Won’t you be lonely?’ my mother asks when I tell her about the reading the next day. She will be working and would otherwise insist on coming. ‘Dad can go. Or I can tell Nan and Pa?’

  ‘No, I don’t want to do that, Mum.’

  To my surprise, she agrees.

  On the train to the reading, I call my father. He’s going to see his osteopath, who our psychologist recommended. I ask if he thinks it’s helpful and he says, ‘Not really. It’s so physical.’

  I send him an article I’ve read recently on how trauma plays out physically and psychologically and how the two interact.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, when I tell him to read it.

  Well before I leave for New York, I start picturing my days there.

  Some days, I think, I’ll sit in libraries and read, or walk through Central Park and chat to strangers. But I don’t know how to fit my mother into this equation. I don’t know how to explain to her that anyone’s presence, not just hers, in the apartment each morning while I am trying to work would suffocate me. How to say: Please, Mum, don’t be home in the mornings. I don’t know how to explain that, no, I don’t want to text her my whereabouts, and what time I’ll be home if I occasionally venture out for a solo evening. I don’t know how to explain that I’m happy to give her a full week where I don’t write, but the thought of anyone’s constant presence buzzing, humming, filling my ears and nose and mouth until I can’t breathe for sixteen days in a shared studio apartment terrifies me.

  I can last two weeks without writing, but not without my reading.

  My mother calls. She has a list of things to discuss. A neighbour’s eighteenth birthday party. Toe tinea. Have I eaten the salami she bought me yet? Second last on her list, she says, ‘I spoke to Dad about your book . . . and, that word I can’t say, you know, the P word—’

  ‘Uh huh, I know what you’re talking about,’ I reply, as if there’s a chance I don’t.

  ‘He, he doesn’t think you should.’ My mother never stutters. ‘And this is only my opinion, but I don’t think you should either. Everyone is waiting to read it. I saw on Facebook the other day Mr Addicoat saying he couldn’t wait to read it. And what about Nan and Pa?’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ I say. Mr Addicoat was the principal of our high school. He let us hold the funeral in the school yard so we could fit all the people.

  ‘And what do you think?’ she asks.

  ‘I think I have to write about it.’

  She starts crying into the phone. ‘It’s just, we lived through it once already. And now I’m going to have to live it all over again. I haven’t been able to sleep, worrying about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum. There’s time to think, there’s no rush. I just feel like I have to write about it eventually.’

  Our shifting dynamic comes through in her response. Instead of hanging up while still crying, or guilt-tripping me, or refusing to talk, she stops her sniffles and changes the subject: ‘So did you go running today?’

  I think of that appointment with my psychologist, a couple
of months back, when I said I wanted to write about this stuff but felt selfish and worried about hurting my parents.

  ‘You’re not responsible for other people’s feelings, Chloe,’ she said.

  I don’t know my opinion on this yet.

  Cory Taylor, in Dying: A Memoir, writes:

  I don’t know where I would be if I couldn’t do this strange work. It has saved my life many times over the years, and it continues to do so now. For while my body is careering towards catastrophe, my mind is elsewhere, concentrated on this other, vital task, which is to tell you something meaningful before I go. Because I’m never happier than when I’m writing, or thinking about writing, or watching the world as a writer, and it has been this way from the start.

  Before I depart for New York, I spend days researching ways to make friends there. I want to establish some boundaries, so I message my mother to say no, we don’t need to share a bed when there are two of them in the apartment. I tell her she should start researching some group tours for social oldies and maybe look up some New York–based groups of interest on Facebook so she has a way to make friends and get out and do things, as I will need to work quietly in the mornings until midday.

  ‘I also did this,’ I explain. I searched for things like ‘best New York bookstores’ and ‘literary events in NYC’ and signed up to their newsletters. Just today, I began looking for book clubs to attend. I found a literary pub crawl around Brooklyn and I hope to make friends there. I am pleased to see it is an afternoon tour so I can get my fix of literature and people and red wine and still be in bed early enough to be up with the sun the next morning. I subscribed to the mailing lists of a few places that run writing classes and am excited to see Gotham Writers hold a free class every second Sunday. I think about posting to ask if anyone has any friends there they could introduce me to, but decide against it; I don’t want to overwhelm myself. Balancing people and peace is difficult. Dad later tells me my message made Mum cry, but she doesn’t say anything about it to me.

  I’m learning how to hold a healthy adult life together.