the lounge in his shorts, too drunk to speak but human enough for seething rage. He could have killed me that night. The church had given her a room for three weeks after that and we had given her the bond on a new flat, with money for food, but she had gone back to him. In fact, they’re still together now, love-hating each other in a marriage of fear. It was one of our church’s proudest achievements. Jenny was listening to Donna’s words with her eyes closed and head bowed, concentrating on every syllable. I remember thinking, ‘What can she possibly be getting out of all this talk of the God that loves and smites?’ But, of course, she got it better than any of us. It was an abusive relationship and we had to suffer through it.
After Tuesday prayer group I was pretty much obliged to speak to them. That was the price I paid for the exquisite nibblies. That, and Donna’s scones. Prayer group had as much to do with the competitive baking as it did with God. More when Nancy made shortbread. Basically, we’d talk about God for a while then stick our noses in the trough. In cold graves across the Mediterranean, the bodies of ascetic monks would turn in horror. Portly women would demurely squeeze cream buns into pinched little mouths, mouths that 15 minutes earlier had been giving it to Moslems and divorcees and the other children of Satan. And there was the sex of course. Not penis-in-vagina real sex. It was pseudo-sex. Outrageous flirtation. I’d spend the after-prayer-group get-together being stroked and patted and pinched. Arms were put around me. My hand would get held and squeezed. I’d leave the meetings feeling molested. More women engaged in body contact with me on a Tuesday evening than at any other time in my life. And so cleaning up after Tuesday prayer group was like cleaning up after bad sex – sex with a charmless woman, a woman you didn’t respect. The crumpled coagulated tissues, the condom and the ooze of semen in it, cooling to the temperature of the floor boards by the bed. It was the same with the cream-smeared saucers and the plastic cups with soggy crumbs in the bottom. You had to pick them up, touch them, dispose of them.
Sister Patti and Sister Pru were helping me with the cleaning up that night, as they always did. They were the two old ladies who looked after the crèche during the week. They were former nuns, drummed out of the profession for unspecified sins, who had found a place for themselves in the Ministry of Christ where the ‘Sister’ moniker had stuck, although as a rule we didn’t go in for that nonsense in our church. Both ladies were bending under their years, thin women with stooped shoulders and narrow hips. They shared a house together and seemed unconcerned about which cardigan they pulled out of the cupboard. Sometimes Pru would wear Patti’s favourite, sometimes Patti would wear Pru’s. They seemed interchangeable. They had dark veins on the backs of their bony hands and looked like they would snap if you hugged too hard, but when a child fell from the swings at the crèche, Patti’s and Pru’s arms were always open and enfolding and their cooing kind voices would soothe the sobs away. That night they stayed back late and collected the plastic cups frugally. They would wash them and re-use them to save money. Cold water, they would tell me, because hot water splits the plastic. I think that I must have still been very tired and it must have been showing. I cleaned one side of the room while they worked the other, leaving me in peace. I loved them. Of the entire congregation only they knew when not to speak to me.
We finished the cleaning up in silence then Patti came over to me and rested a hand on my forearm. ‘You look like you need a good home-cooked dinner,’ she said with a cocked right eyebrow. I accepted her offer and arranged to come round for dinner a couple of nights later. As they left, Pru paused and said, ‘Simon, you must rest’. ‘Tell that to Mary’s bum,’ I was tempted to say, but didn’t.
* * *
I was usually late in rising on Wednesday mornings. I found that Tuesday praying could really take it out of you, but I always used to be in The Mission by 11am. The Mission was a ground-floor room in a terrace house on Darlinghurst Road in Kings Cross. From the front room I used to have a perfect view of the XXX porn store across the road and the kebab shop next door to it, run by Minh, the Vietnamese drug seller. Walk into the store for a kebab and he would greet you with a cheery ‘Salaam’.
The Mission was furnished with a simple second-hand desk and a variety of cheap plastic chairs, none of them matching. There was a bar fridge in one corner containing non-alcoholic drinks and, in an ice-cream container in the vegetable cooler, about fifty clean hypodermic needles. At the front of the room, by the window, there was a rack containing a variety of brochures. They were all about God and Jesus. Gregory, the head of our church, used to make me put them there. Lots of American-produced cartoonish pictures of Jesus. There was Jesus looking very smug, having just turned the water into wine, his self-satisfied expression saying ‘get a load of this!’ And Jesus going for a stroll on the Sea of Galilee, hitching his skirt a little to avoid getting the hem wet. My favourite was Jesus bricking it in the Garden of Gethsemane in the hours before his arrest. Who paints these pictures? They were, I’m afraid, wasted on my clientele whose first instinct would more likely have been to offer poor Jesus a head job than pray to him. My clientele, you see, were generally working girls who viewed the world with clinical cynicism. They had seen it all. They had done it all. They had abused their bodies with alcohol and drugs. They had given their bodies to men who had abused them still more. They had little regard for men with kind eyes. They could be very hard ladies, which is not to say bad.
That Wednesday passed quietly. A couple of girls dropped by, asking for clean needles. A couple of coppers doing their rounds dropped in for a chat. They seemed so young. As we chatted, they rearranged the accoutrements of their profession on their giant black belts: handcuffs, revolver, night stick, mace holsters. A reminder that when it all goes horribly wrong they are the ones that clean it up. We compared news, rumours and gossip and they strolled back into the street, waving to a couple of girls working the opposite corner as they went. The girls smiled, waved back, grinned at each other, and returned to toeing the footpath agitatedly as they waited for a punter. Mostly, the world passed them by, ignoring, not caring.
Late in the day Evie dropped by, tossing me a chocolate bar as she walked through the door. Evie had a great smile and a sassy attitude. She’d swing her hips when she walked, not as an affectation but because she was just plain sexy, prostitute or not. She was only in her early twenties and not yet hard. One day I figured she would tell me why she was there doing those things but I didn’t need to push it. ‘Hey preacher,’ she called cheekily. ‘Hi Evie,’ I replied. ‘What brings you down here?’ ‘Thought I might get a kiss,’ she said and we both smiled. I opened the chocolate bar and took a bite, offering Evie a bit, but she turned her nose up at it and watched me chew while we chatted. ‘So what’s up?’ I asked. Evie half thought about it and said, ‘Nothing,’ as if that disappointed her. ‘I’m just off to work and thought I’d stop by and chat to a man who doesn’t want to do me for once.’ She looked about the room absently then settled a sneaky grin on me like she suddenly remembered it was a challenge. ‘You can say that again!’ ‘Naughty preacher,’ Evie said with a wave of her finger. ‘If that’s the best you can do, I’m off.’ She stood up to leave, taking mock offence, but paused to look at me, hands on hips. ‘Oh come on,’ she complained. ‘Just one widdle kiss.’ She puckered for me in mock readiness but I waved her away. ‘Fine, I had things to do anyway.’ She turned haughtily and walked out laughing, swinging her hips extravagantly for my benefit. ‘Stop looking, ya perv,’ she called over her shoulder as she disappeared out the door, leaving me suddenly very much alone. Just me and a grubby world outside the window. I’d had six years of it by then and after six years I could claim to be something of an expert on the subject of street prostitution. Let me tell you, it’s no picnic.
At the end of the day I closed the front door on The Mission, pulled down the metal security screen and locked it tight. I headed home to my empty house, buying some Thai takeaway on the way. Inside my house it was silent and cold. Mainly, it was empty. It would have saddened some people, I suppose. I slopped the noodles into a bowl and flicked on the telly, then slumped on the lounge in front of it. It was late evening. Crickets were chirping away any lingering memories of summer in the little courtyard out the back door. After a day of XXX and policemen and needles and prostitutes I found myself watching one of those
