on her head. I should have traced every bump and suture with my fingertips and purged her of the horrible demon, like some schmaltzy LA faith-healer. I should have told her about those other girls on the bicycles. I should have described Allison to her just as she was that night. I should have told that poor skeleton how beautiful a woman can be with so little effort.
* * *
Days later, the anorexic girl was still playing on my mind. A world of self-absorption and of self-destruction. A world of appalling need and a world of greed. A perfect world for unequal exchange. It was Monday morning, 10am, and warm for autumn. Bright Sydney sunshine wearied the drooping gum trees behind King Street. In my little workers cottage I showered, dressed and gathered up my gear, not feeling so great about my fellow humans. As I closed my front door and hit the street en route to the bus stop, squinting my eyes against the glare, I noticed a woman walking towards me on the footpath. I was not in the mood. I could tell that she had clocked me, so I averted my eyes. She was maybe 48 years old, wearing a pair of denim jeans and a pink checked cowboy shirt. She was also wearing a white cowboy hat. I looked down. She was wearing white leather cowboy boots. They were a little over ankle length. But of course they were.
As we were about to pass each other the woman stopped, flashed me a big smile and said cheerily, ‘What say you and me go up there and have some fun, eh?’ She gestured towards the Tropical Sun Hotel, a breezy establishment on the corner known to obligingly rent its rooms out by the half-hour. I said, ‘No thank you,’ but she received my answer with ironic patience, cocking her head a little and saying, ‘Are you sure?’ in the tone that a mother uses when she asks a four-year-old if they’ve taken a wee before they get in the car. It carried with it the implied ‘you know what happened last time’. ‘Yes thanks,’ I said and started to walk away from her again but she was persistent. ‘Are … you … sure … ?’ she called out again after me with an exaggerated rising inflection and I raised my hand over my shoulder to let her know I had heard but was not interested. I guess she knew what she was doing. Perhaps there are men out there who really aren’t sure whether or not they want to have sex with a 48-year-old prostitute in a cowboy outfit and it’s only when they have been given time to reflect that they can make an informed decision. I knew I didn’t feel like it but I guess you never know. Then I heard her one last time, calling out like a child with a lolly teasing her little brother, a siren’s song above the swish of the traffic on King Street. ‘I … go … doooooowwn,’ she sang after me teasingly. I kept walking. I bet she did and I can’t deny that the frankness of the offer didn’t warrant some sort of respect.
* * *
I picked up the phone and called Mary. Donald answered. I told him that I had to rearrange my schedule and asked if we could change the time of our next session. I suggested the following day when I knew he would be in Canberra. He told me that he couldn’t make it but thought Mary should be fine with it. He said, ‘Just a moment,’ and I heard him calling for his wife. A few seconds then Mary’s voice. Very professional. Not a hint of desire. Yes, tomorrow would suit her. Yes, 4pm would be fine. What a pity Donald can’t be there. Yes, oh well.
* * *
Mary was all languor. She would laze into and out of sex. Short high gasps after red wine, caresses, seduction. The climax was like an accidental outcome of another pursuit. Languid, big-breasted Mary. A body that had nurtured and nourished a child. A few pale stretch marks gave her tummy a certain authority, the same pale lines on her hips and the top of her swaying breasts. When she bent forward they’d form cones of soft flesh and the barely visible lines would radiate from the heavy nipples. Mary’s body was full, firm, womanly. She wore it comfortably. After sex she’d often walk the room tidying up. She’d squat to reach under the chest of drawers. She’d bend to straighten the rug. I’d see her anus and vagina, her quivery wobbly boobs, the shaggy beard between her thighs. She didn’t care. It didn’t even occur to her to care because, she told me, a body that has carried a child cannot be embarrassed and because, as she also told me, it was my body by then too. She had made a gift of it. Its gurgles and aches were my gurgles and aches. So, dozing off the sex, I would see our wonderful bottom moving palely around the bed as Mary picked her clothing off the floor. Lovely. And when she pulled her clothes on, her bra and her undies, masking her hips and belly and nipples and hair, it seemed that this was the sinful gesture, the unnatural act. And you have to believe me when I tell you that at times like that it never once occurred to me that in sleeping with her I may have been doing something wrong.
* * *
The bedroom looked like a poorly designed movie set. A double bed with pink frills, pillows in the shape of love hearts, two policemen standing next to the bed chatting about last night’s footy, and the dead girl lying on the bed in her knickers, face up, eyes closed like she was sleeping. I had been asked to identify a body. It was a young prostitute, maybe twenty-two years old, with long dark hair, a freckled complexion, over-red lipstick and a tattoo of a bunny rabbit on her upper thigh. To judge from the drugs paraphernalia by the bed it was an accidental overdose.
It was all a bit embarrassing for the proprietors of The Love Shack, a brothel with a reputation for being low rent and shady. The manager, a hard woman with deep vertical smoker’s wrinkles over her top lip, said she didn’t know the girl. Never seen her before in her life. She was lying of course. The dead girl was clearly working without papers, avoiding the tax man, and it could have cost the brothel its licence so they weren’t being at all co-operative. As a result, the dead girl on the bed would be entered in the police books as a Jane Doe if I couldn’t identify her.
As I walked in, the two police officers glanced at me but continued their conversation as if it was the most normal thing in the world to chat about the football with a dead woman on the bed in the corner. The poor girl. I dare say that she had suffered a few indignities on that bed but few could compare to this. I felt an urge to cover her nakedness. She was a prostitute but she wouldn’t have wanted these people seeing her like this. She would have considered it an intrusion.
The detective who had called me walked beside me to the bed where I looked into the dead girl’s face. I remember hoping anxiously that it was not one of my girls. As it turned out, I didn’t know her although she looked vaguely familiar to me. I’d seen her around the Cross perhaps but I had no name to give them. The police seemed faintly irritated. No name made it harder to wrap the job up. It was a loose end that they’d have to work late to tie off. We stepped away from the bed and the detective excused himself while he asked some questions of the uniformed coppers. While they talked in soft murmurs I looked back to the bed. The woman lay there like a stone. Utter stillness. There was no rise and fall of the rib cage. No twitch of the eyelids. She was categorically dead. She had made the grand transition from life to death alone in the bedroom of a brothel, head resting on a pink heart-shaped cushion. There’s no romance in that death. You can’t get sentimental about it. It was just a horrible waste, the absurdity emphasised by the bunny rabbit tattoo.
The detective came back to me and thanked me for my time. He paused, ran his fingers through his hair and tilting his forehead at the bed asked if I’d like to say a few words. It took me a moment to realise what he meant. He was asking if I’d like to say a little prayer for her, for the poor dead prostitute. I looked her over one last time. What would I be praying for? A soul? ‘I think it’s too late for that,’ I said and noted for the first time in that room a look of surprise on somebody’s face.
* * *
I went home in need of the comfort of a woman. The dead prostitute had left me feeling uneasy and vulnerable. After times like that I would always think first of Mary and her comforting warm breasts and easy calm manner but Mary couldn’t make it so I gave Faith a call. An hour later and she was in my bedroom naked. Seeking comfort from Faith could be a double-edged sword. Her small body was a vessel for anger. Her pert pointy breasts appeared cross with me, her purse-lipped vagina seemed at first to
