Dead Sexy

‘Jaivin’s writing, like Jaivin herself, is vivacious, insightful and original.’
Sydney Morning Herald

‘She’s bitchy, wicked and intelligent. She has firm control over her material and a talent for slicing through pretension with the precision of a sushi knife.’
Australian

‘I’m converted to the Linda Jaivin school of writing which is best described as: “if a Pompous Powerful Person thinks it’s sacred, then attack it, fuck it or milk it”…her wit is painfully acute, her ability to zone in on sincerity and insincerity alike is awesome…Jaivin is one hell of a funny writer.’
Eye

‘Jaivin has to be one of “Strayer’s” most artful storytellers.’
Adelaide Advertiser

‘Jaivin never loses sight of her self-declared goal, which is to wrench the writing of erotica from its male practitioners, dress it up with style and sly humour and restore it to women.’
LA Times

‘A fine eye for the manner in which human beings cope with, act upon, and are often slaves to sexual attraction.’
Courier-Mail

‘Her writing is funny and satiric.’
Library Journal

‘A writer who’s on the “outer” looking in at something with the sort of fascination and attention that we envy in the “child”.’
Rolling Stone

‘Jaivin has made a name for herself with her hyper-erotic novels such as
Eat Me
and
Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space,
both delicious satires on Sydney society. But she has never been more funny, erudite, political, rude, savvy and downright brilliant as in
Miles Walker, You’re Dead…
You will not have found a book jam-packed with so many laugh-out-loud lines in a long time.’
Herald Sun

Linda Jaivin is a Sydney writer and translator.

OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

FICTION

Eat Me

Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space

Miles Walker, You’re Dead

NON-FICTION

New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices
(co-editor with Geremie Barmé)

Confessions of an S & M Virigin

Michael Heyward, Rose Creswell and Annette Hughes, Peter Bishop and the Varuna Writers’ Centre, assorted coroners, police, friends and firemen—thank you for your help and support. I’m dead grateful. LJ

textpublishing.com.au

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Copyright © Linda Jaivin 2000

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

This edition published 2000

Printed and bound by Griffin Press

Designed by Chong Weng-ho

Typeset in 10.8/15.5 Helvetica by Midland Typesetters

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Jaivin, Linda.

Dead sexy.

ISBN 9781876485665.

I. Title.

A823.3

Ebook ISBN 9781921799952.

For Tim

I
t was close to midnight on a sultry, late summer night in Sydney. Nicola stared out over the city, her eyes wide with terror and incomprehension.

On Bent Street, twenty-six storeys below, a lone man strode by, leaning into his mobile. His suit jacket was slung over his arm. A homeless woman rifled through a bin, observed by the bored doorman of a fashionable hotel. One taxi, and then another, sped off empty in the direction of Chinatown. At the tip of Bennelong Point, just beyond the Circular Quay East complex known
as the Toaster, the shells of the Opera House glowed. A train rattled across the Harbour Bridge. The harbour was as deep, dark and silent as a secret.

Nicola knew that the jazz clubs and Irish pubs nestled at the foot of the bridge would be pulsing with music and life. Not far in the other direction Oxford Street would be swarming with clubbers. The venues of Enmore and Newtown would be rocking, and the Cross would be pumping with its own peculiar, deviant energy. But the CBD—the CBD was dead.

And so was Johnny.

Turning from the Bent Towers windows with their expensive views, Nicola shivered. She regarded her lover’s naked body, lying on its side on carpet the colour of ash, illuminated by the flickering light of half a dozen candles. His body was lean and muscular, with a chest just hairy enough to be sexy, but not so hirsute you would need a whipper-snipper to find his nipples. All in all, it wasn’t a bad body, she thought, for a man of forty-two.

Nicola was not aware of shedding tears. But
her glasses had fogged up and when she took them off she noticed they were speckled with salt. She rubbed them clean on the sleeve of her silk blouse.

Her lover was the sort of man Nicola warned other women to stay away from, the type that, as she phrased it, ‘put up a good front but hid their “buts” from view’. As in: ‘So attractive—but doesn’t he know it!’ Nicola wrote a column for
Lip,
a women’s magazine, dispensing advice on sex and relationships. Under the header ‘Anabelle Says’ ran the credo ‘Be Sexy! But Be Sensible!’ What advice, Nicola wondered, would she give herself now? ‘Dump him!’?

It was a bit late for that.

A wave of nausea swept through her and she clamped a hand over her mouth until her stomach settled. Squinting up at the ceiling, trying to slow her breathing, she compulsively patted down imaginary wrinkles in her blouse and tight-fitting skirt, like Lady Macbeth with an ironing complex. None of this would have happened, she thought ruefully, if she’d remained an accountant.

Nicola had landed her job quite by accident and with no qualifications to speak of. It had happened about a year and a half earlier. She was working in the accounts department of
Lip
(‘Looks! Individuality! Panache’) when the previous author of ‘Anabelle Says’ ran off to South America with a gay Brazilian she’d met a week earlier and hoped to convert to heterosexuality.

That afternoon, Nicola popped into the editorial department to drop off some financial reports. The editor, Liz Noble, who’d pulled three all-nighters in a row to put together a special issue titled ‘I’m Going to Sweep That
Stress
Right out of My Life!’, barrelled out of her office and bailed her up.

‘What’s your name again?’ Liz panted, chopping at the air by her ears with her hands. Liz had large green eyes, a surgically perfected nose and a generous mouth into which she was forever feeding cigarettes, chocolates, coffee and anti-oxidant vitamins, sometimes at the same time. She was as naturally scrawny and pale as Nicola was voluptuous and dark. Her
wild, bleach-damaged hair looked animated by the same out-of-control energy that inspired her secret staff nickname of ‘Chernobyl’.

‘Nicola. Nicola Biondi.’

‘Bee-what?’

‘Biondi. Like Bondi but with an extra “i”.’

‘Whatever.’ Liz clawed at the lower lids of her bloodshot eyes with her chewed nails. ‘Nicola,’ she said in a voice reeking with desperation, ‘can you write?’

‘Uh, yeah, I suppose,’ Nicola replied, thinking basic skills.

‘You’ve had sex?’

Nicola tried not to blush. Like most women around thirty, she’d enjoyed her quota of unsatisfying minor relationships, passionate yet one-sided infatuations, ill-judged one-night stands, miscellaneous fumbles and gropes as well as a major relationship or two. She had no idea what Liz was on about.

‘Here. Desk. Sit. Write. Anabelle.’ Liz pushed her down into the previous Anabelle’s empty chair and pinged on the blueberry iMac. For someone so tiny, Liz was surprisingly strong.
Nicola thudded down into the seat and looked up in astonishment.

‘Sorry, boxercise,’ Liz explained, giggling and punching the air uncomfortably close to Nicola’s face. ‘Nine hundred words. Whatever. Tonight. Go for your life.’ Wrenching the stopper out of a bottle of Rescue Remedy, Liz tilted back her head and irrigated the underside of her tongue. ‘Ahh. I feel better already.’ She spun on her kitten heels, tripped, caught herself, stumbled back into her office, put her head on the desk and passed out.

Nicola had been doing ‘Anabelle Says’ ever since. No one seemed to notice her lack of formal sexpertise. Like every other woman who’d ever worked in an office, she had clocked up thousands of hours of conversations on the subject of sex and relationships, including detailed analyses of her own, her colleagues’ and all their friends’ affairs and exploits. Writing as Anabelle, she adopted the confidential, casual style of girly chat, and was an instant hit with readers. It wasn’t long before she moved into editorial fulltime, contributing, in addition to her column, features
on ‘Ten Signs That Your Relationship Is in Trouble!’ and ‘What Your Wardrobe Says about Your Personality in Bed!’ It certainly was more fun than accounts, especially since the introduction of the GST.

Besides, Nicola was an unabashed women’s magazine addict. She could recite the catechism by heart: ‘If He Won’t Commit, Find Someone Who Will!’ ‘Spice up Your Love Life and Keep Your Man!’ ‘Say Goodbye to Mr Wrong!’ She believed it, too. And why not? Unfortunately, when Nicola had spiced up her love life, she almost lost her man. As for Mr Wrong, she’d tried and tried but never could say goodbye.

Until tonight.

The real name of Nicola’s Mr Wrong was Mr Wright, which she thought of as one of life’s little ironies. Johnny B. Wright was a successful architect who penetrated and dominated the city’s skyline with thrusting towers of steel and stone. The skyline wasn’t the only thing he was famous for penetrating and dominating.

Nicola had known all along that she was, as Anabelle would say, ‘Playing with Fire!’, but in
this case the fireman was the last person she could call. Her fiancé, Fox, you see, actually was a fireman. This was one reason why no one at the magazine doubted Nicola knew what she was talking about when it came to relationships and sex. Firemen, as anyone who’s ever read a women’s magazine would know, are ‘Every Woman’s Fantasy!’ And Fox was one fantasy fireman.

Fox looked like the man for any woman’s emergency. Blond, with smoky blue-grey eyes and lips that looked made for all manner of unspeakable acts, Fox didn’t say much, but his smouldering reserve just increased his sexual mystique. Only Nicola knew the truth, which was that Fox, to put it delicately, was a man of few words and fewer positions. When, emboldened by a column she’d written about ‘Finding His G-spot!’ Nicola had made a certain suggestion, his reply was immediate, definite and characteristic: ‘Nup. Not trying that. Fire exit. Locked from the outside.’

Judging from a chart recently published in
Lip,
the 2-3.5 times a week they had sex was
about average for a couple of their duration—five years. According to the ‘What Kind of Sex Are You Getting?’ issue, the kind she was getting with Fox fell into the ‘comfy’ category, with occasional ventures into ‘passionate’ but almost never ‘wild’, even if he did occasionally agree, in his more playful moods, to wear his yellow helmet to bed.

Only Nicola knew that, while she had a ‘Sex and the City’ kind of job, she didn’t have a ‘Sex and the City’ kind of lifestyle. So she did her research—by reading books with titles like
Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man
and logging onto such websites as nerve.com and Susie Bright’s chatroom, where she was constantly astounded by the range of human sexual practices, fetishes and fantasies. The more she learned, the more she thought about what she might be missing. Yet although Nicola increasingly sensed ‘The Itch You Need to Scratch!’, she couldn’t fault her relationship with Fox. He was loyal, protective, trustworthy, considerate and kind. He never lied, cheated or willingly created any dramas for her or anyone
else at all. And, being a fireman, he was great in a crisis.

He was, in other words, nothing like Johnny, who bolted at the first sign of trouble and for whom lying, unreliability and infidelity weren’t so much a way of life as articles of faith.

Nicola grimaced. It was irrelevant to talk about Johnny’s way of life now.

With a combination of regret, revulsion and relief she ran her eyes for the last time up Johnny’s well-proportioned legs, lean hips and torso. Dropping to her knees, she laid her brow on his naked thighs and hugged them to herself. It occurred to her that it was an agreeable change to be able to hold onto his legs without his hand pushing rhythmically on the top of her head.

She lifted her gaze to his cock. It was flaccid. She’d rarely seen it in repose, and she studied it curiously. At some distance from its tip, seeping into the fibres of the carpet, she noticed a spray of ejaculate. Johnny
would
go out with a bang, she thought, smiling faintly.

Reaching for one of the candles from the table, she summoned her courage to look at his
face. She’d always thought of him as classically handsome, like one of those clean-cut American movie stars of the 1950s, maybe Gene Kelly, with knowing eyes and a crooked grin.

But Johnny wouldn’t sing in the rain ever again.

His neck was arched back, pulled by the long scarf that was tied at the other end around the door handle. The skin of his neck and face was suffused, livid. His dark bulging eyes were shot with blood, and his mouth was frozen in a lewd rictus.

Nicola blew out the candle and dropped it next to the corpse. Scrambling to her feet, she raced for the door. The pale carpet sucked at the spiky heels of her ruby-red patent leather shoes. Johnny had given her those shoes. He adored the way her legs looked in them, the way they caused her breasts to thrust forward and forced her arse into a porn-queen wiggle. Leaning against the doorjamb to catch her breath, she wrenched them off her feet. ‘I’m not your fantasy any more,’ she declared in a choked voice. She pitched one shoe into the darkness
of the hallway. It clattered against the wall. Then she hurled the other one after it. It hit something with a dull thud.

‘Oi!’ came a gruff cry from the dim corridor. ‘Steady on there, lady.’ A thick-set man in a navy jacket and grey trousers stepped out of the gloom.

He held up the offending pump to his face while studying Nicola with narrowed eyes of harbour blue.

She stared as though seeing a ghost. ‘Y-you all right?’ she stuttered.

The apparition chuckled. ‘Lady, it takes more than being hit with a flying shoe by a breathless broad to faze me. But you oughta be careful. You coulda hurt someone with this heelage.’ His voice was deep, seductive and rough, like crushed velvet. He sniffed the shiny leather and stroked the stiletto heel of her shoe before handing it back. Then, extracting a badge from the inside pocket of his jacket, he flashed it at her and bowed with mock formality. ‘Detective Sergeant Damien Mann at your service,’ he said. ‘“Da Mann” to my friends. Not that I have many.
Hazard of the profession.’ He winked. ‘But while we’re at the introduction phase, why doncha tell me what your connection is to the smiling stiff in the next room?’

Da Mann’s words hit Nicola like a jackhammer. The colour drained out of her face and her eyes rolled back in her head. She spiralled down into his conveniently braced arms.