In My Skin (19 page)

These girls weren’t frightening or haughty; they were confident in their work, long familiar with their shifts and their clients. The hectic atmosphere of weekend nights was almost like a strange party, as more extravagant costumes were yanked on, the air was scented with facepowder and a dozen types of perfume, and women dashed about giggling. I watched these expert women, and studied what made them popular. It wasn’t that they were all tall and lovely—Tara, a quiet, witty blonde girl, was almost dumpy. But they had confidence, and a kind of sparkle. They were like the cool kids at school. I was somehow thrilled if I got to talk to them in the midst of the rush.

And they worked only one or two nights, and were booked solidly. Working every single night, I wondered if perhaps cutting back on my shifts, becoming less available, might give me the same 148 advantage. But I was too afraid to go a night without earning. First I had to build up a clientele.

The glamour girls showed me something to aspire to. I was nowhere near achieving that. My work was for my habit, and Robbie’s. But when I heard these women speak of buying furniture, clothes, holidays and houses, I felt a little longing start up.

Sunday nights were quiet after the frantic rush of the weekend. Friday and Saturday nights were boozy and blokey, as office men clamoured for a good time. Sundays were an evening for men to treat themselves. The clients took longer bookings, and might want a spa, or just conversation after the sex. Regulars came in. The feeling in the lounge was relaxed. Fewer girls worked, perhaps only four or five of us. There’d be a movie on television, and takeaway dinners ordered in, and time to talk, paint our nails, sit around. It was a night for the ‘girlfriend’ girls; a good shift, but not the most racy.

Right from the start I became friends with Asia, a voluptuous girl with an exceptionally pretty face. She had a kind of cruising confidence beyond her years, and something about her that told me she knew drugs. She was full of amazing stories: how at the age of twenty-three she already had four children, how she’d worked as security for a club frequented by gangsters she called by first names, how her ex-husband had smashed her about. Her teeth were all broken in her pretty mouth. She was amusing and kind and somehow different from everyone else. She didn’t get many bookings. We sometimes did sessions together, bent like black-haired twins over the man’s prone body: her luxurious flesh and my skinny flanks. We each thought the other sexy. And one night, when everything seemed too much for me, when I wasn’t getting booked and I didn’t know how I was going to afford the drugs and she found me alone in a bedroom crying, she lent me fifty bucks, knowing without being told. The next day she gave me a little box containing a silver ring, some underwear and a small vibrator. On bad nights we exchanged a lot of quiet glances. She was my new Esmerelda, a person with whom I could share things.

It wasn’t as if we didn’t need friends there. I caught the name of one girl before I met her. It seemed Stella was a popular subject of conversation—discussed in outraged, exasperated tones. She was a bitch, she was dodgy, she was up to all sorts of tricks. ‘Did you see what she did the other night?’ was the usual hissed beginning when her name came up. To my ears, she sounded like some of the women I’d known at Cherie’s, and I thought I could probably handle her.

‘You’re new,’ said a soft voice one night towards the end of my first week. I turned. ‘I’m Stella,’ said the young woman next to me at the make-up counter. She had an aristocratic face, sharply defined, and a soft, compact body in a thin dress she was pulling tight with her hands. ‘You’re so pretty. I’m sure you’ll do well here.’ She smiled. Stella was a charmer.

But it didn’t take long before I understood what the other ladies had been hissing about. She was a piece of work. Not the best-looking girl, she maintained an impressive roster of regular clients. Rumours flew about what she did to get them: she did oral without a condom; she wore no underwear and flashed the men in the privacy of the men’s lounge; she gave them a quickie handjob in the intro; she offered anal sex for free. She bullied her regulars into staying with her; she was heard shrieking at one when he tried to book someone else. Clients related stories to us about the offers she’d made them. We noticed she always sat nearest the door, so she was first to ‘accidentally’ walk out to see the receptionist and find a new man just strolling in. We overheard her whispering calumnies about the rest of us to the receptionist, to the clients.

‘I was just doing an intro,’ said Valentina, ‘and I saw the guy looking at something over my shoulder, and I turn around and there’s fucking Stella, standing by reception, writhing and rubbing her fucking tits! I can’t take it, I’m going to stab her.’

‘Last Christmas,’ said Chloe, ‘we had tinsel all over the place and she did that to me. I looked around and there she is, with a piece of tinsel, fucking
skipping.
And no undies. Of
course
, he went with her.’

‘She doesn’t shower after bookings. So she can run out and get another one straight away.’

‘That’s why she’s always putting on more perfume.’

We all glared at each other. ‘That slut.’

Stella was awful. But she could be so charming, and soft and disarmingly generous at times. Bringing in a magazine someone had mentioned wanting, offering food around. Giving kind advice which may or may not have served her own purposes. Her demeanour seemed calculated; there was something opaque in her calm, disdainful gaze. But I noticed, over the months, how much pleasure the rest of us took from hating her; how alight with outrage we became in our endless complaining sessions; how, when Stella finally left, another girl was fixed upon as the pariah. To me Stella seemed very alone; she told implausible stories about her life, her parents and their careers, her child and her husband. She must have felt our loathing, and yet she fronted up every shift with all the self-possession in the world. She damaged me, trying to set me against my friends, stealing my regulars, sabotaging my confidence with casual remarks, but even so I had an almost-admiring fascination for Stella.

At Mood Indigo I kept the drugs and the boarding house quiet, though no doubt people guessed. After a couple of months Asia told me, ‘We all thought you were a junkie when you started. Lola said, “She’s got black bruises under her eyes.” Then we saw you come in one night without your make-up on and put black eyeliner under your eyes!’

‘I
am
a heroin addict,’ I said, but she already knew that by then. So we laughed.

I had to be careful what I revealed about myself, because it was clear that junkies were despised and mistrusted, and so I listened to the vitriol against them, and gave noncommittal smiles, and invented vague stories about the ‘hotel’ I lived in and the ‘debt’ I was working to pay off.

Everyone told lies to the outside world about what they did. Receptionist, croupier at the casino, night-cleaner, data-entry. I didn’t care what the outside world thought; I was happy, even, to brag. It was part of defiance. But inside the house, that’s where I had to deceive.

Humour was the currency of the lounge. I heard myself making hearty jokes, inventing nicknames for the other women I liked, catching the strands of deprecating wit and scorn and flinging them back with a twist.

‘If you pull your g-string straps higher, it makes your legs look longer,’ suggested Monique.

‘Shows off the stretch-marks nicely,’ said Heidi.

‘As if I have stretch-marks! I’ve got
texture
. My men
lick
them.’ I pouted. ‘I should charge extra.
And
I can talk for bloody hours about medieval art. The perfect woman.’

‘Lucy, you bloody wish.’

‘I know. But I do get my men to sleep through the bookings once I get talking.’

It wasn’t so much constructing a personality, for me, as extrapolating one. It was as if we all enlarged ourselves; not quite different from who we were in real life, but exaggerated. A halo of personality to shield our too-accessible flesh. All my humour, all my impudence, my candour, and especially the sexuality I’d muffled in my younger days, I now wore proudly—self-consciously at first, as I developed Lucy’s character, and then more comfortably. Lucy was me, but more so. It was a surprise to find myself confident, once I had territory to be confident in; raunchy, once I felt that raunchiness wasn’t embarrassing; witty, once there was an arena for wit. I marvelled at how I could adjust my character; from gauche to coy, from ingenuous to dominating. Never ceasing to be myself, but shifting aspects as the face of the person across the room changed from hour to hour.

I realised my figure, too, was changing. I’d always hated my body and shrouded it in over-sized clothes. Now I drew gazes towards my breasts, my curved waist, my legs. For the first time in my life I began to consider my body something to glory in. I stood taller. And when I bought a new dress, it was tight.

IT WAS A NEW AND enthralling experience to keep myself looking lovely all the time. I would rush in every evening from the street, bare-faced and barely woken, and for ten minutes sit there constructing Lucy. Enhanced, composed and reconstituted, I was ready to go out and conquer a man. It was new to shave my legs every single night—dashing into an unused bedroom for a shower, since the bathroom at the boardinghouse was filthy and cold—to pamper my skin with moisturisers. Having seven or eight showers a night with the antiseptic soap in the rooms made my skin very soft but dry; the girls’ room was always full of women smoothing creams onto their legs. I watched the others: how they applied their makeup, how they styled their hair. My eyebrows were plucked thinner. I began to grow my hair long. I bought more cosmetics, I experimented with glittery shades. My locker filled with sprays and bottles; at the start of the shift each one of us would stake out her own place on the counter beneath the fluorescent mirror, like a surgeon’s tray. We’d come out smeared and rumpled from each booking, but be presentable to the next intro, perhaps only a minute later. There was a ritualistic pleasure in sleeking ourselves back to elegance, in applying our lacquered masks. And at the end of the night, we scraped our masks off, removed our costumes and walked out.

Nicole said, ‘My little girl is amazing. Six years old, and she said the other night, “Mummy, do you keep lipstick in your purse?” I don’t. But then she said, “So why is it so fresh when you get home in the morning?” Isn’t that creepy? So observant. You’ve all got to remind me: take my bloody lipstick off when I leave!’

We showered at the end of every booking, but with make-up on our faces, it was more difficult to wash them. By the end of shift our faces were stiff with soaked-in cosmetics and the accumulated kisses and sweat of every client. At first I would scrub my face at the end of the shift. Then I just got used to the muck.

The make-up, the dresses, were our tools. They made us feel beautiful, powerful, glorious. But they were a means; in the end the men would strip the clothes off, smear our make-up, mess our hair. It was what was underneath they wanted.

Most men were after a good shag and a taste of glamour, but there were heartening surprises in their choice of lady. Young men adored Lola’s maturity; older men valued women who made good, intelligent conversation. Strutting bucks took shy girls and were tender to them. One of the sexiest women I ever saw was Velvet: short, curvaceous and not pretty, she had such a vibrancy, as she floated around with feather boas and sleek stockings, such confidence in herself, that she was irresistible. Blondes, more conventionally beautiful, might be left on the shelf in favour of a scrawny, timid brunette. I loved that—the signs that men were more sophisticated in their attitudes than conventional wisdom suggested.

Part of me considered myself one of the less likely contenders. I was good looking enough, but not ideal. I was only just getting the hang of grooming. I didn’t have the most wonderful arse. I cut my legs shaving. My hair was never quite right. And I talked too much.

Everyone noted that I was educated; most of these women, however savvy and sharp, had no tertiary education. It made me self-conscious, but I was proud, too. And so I started to make something of this attribute, rather than camouflaging it. Why not gain attention with something different? It turned out that what was merely ‘different’ to me was outright weird to some. But not unpopular. And so I became known as much for my eccentric conversation as my sexual attractiveness.

I talked about anything that interested me. I’d learned to rattle on in the cars back in St Kilda: now I could make good sexy chat, or sympathise with a man’s job stress, or commiserate on how difficult girlfriends were to find. I could discuss quantum theory and the decline of the Roman empire. I talked about physiology and neurochemistry, about weightlifting, and the perfect packed lunch. I talked, and giggled, and found that I could charm these men with more than just my breasts.

It didn’t take long to attract some regulars. Every house has its ‘house regs’, even if they’re loyal to more than one establishment. Some attach themselves to one girl, sometimes for years; others are frequent visitors who will take a different girl each time, but become friends, of a sort, with all. They’d loiter at the front desk, chatting up the receptionist and watching other clients come and go. They were idle men, for whom this place was a kind of club. The atmosphere could be convivial, or intimidating; at first there was something odd about walking a new client to a booking past a man with whom I’d had sex an hour before, and who snickered knowingly as I collected my condoms from the basket on the desk. But I quickly forgot how peculiar this was.