In My Skin (30 page)

There were times, as I caressed a simple man’s temple, or bent to kiss a voluptuously beautiful body, that I got tears in my eyes. It was as if I were discovering how to fall in love with anyone, for the duration of a booking. It seemed that anyone could be beautiful if I looked for it.
The whore with a heart of gold
, I thought mockingly, but my wryness did not take away the grace.

My look was still changing. In the shops after-five wear was dominated by black dresses, but at Il Fiore the right to wear black was reserved for the first lady to arrive each night, otherwise we’d look like a funeral party. So I bought a luscious crimson velvet gown. Gown was the word: it had a long skirt, to the ankles, with a high slit up the back, a bodice, a wide neckline, and a little plush velvet rose between the breasts. In it I looked like a queen.

I did have some black dresses, glossy as water, which I wore with heavy smudged eyeliner and pale pink lipgloss; half-Lolita, half-succubus, I fancied. I experimented with cosmetics and colours, created ensembles calculated to impress with a mixture of class and arse. In the full-length mirror my skin was pale against the swaying skirts and tiny shoulder-straps. My hair was shiny, my face painted carefully, my toenails were glossy silver. My breasts jutted out in the push-up bras; even I wanted to hold them, they were so appealingly voluptuous. I’d never thought I could be so exquisite.

I loved to step into my high heels at the start of each shift; and I loved taking them off at the end of the night, so I could put on my own clothes. I’d augmented my sleek shirts and pants with a blizzard of delicate fabrics: transparent skirts, ruffled chiffon tops, shimmering scarves and tiny silk flowers for my hair. I wore scarlet lipstick even when I wasn’t at work. I felt sexy and sophisticated and a long way from the scruffy streetwalker with day-old make-up and a nose ring.

When I walked in the door of my parents’ place for a visit it was in a cloud of perfume. I showed off my new clothes. ‘Like this shirt? It’s designer.’

My mother felt the fabric. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Do you want some dinner?’ offered my father. He was putting out plates for the meal.

‘It’s a bit early in the day for me, thanks Dad,’ I said. ‘I bought some cushions the other day too. Really pretty ones. And look, this coat!’

My sister was there. She gave me a look. ‘Do you know how that sounds?’ she said to me later, alone. ‘You still owe Mum and Dad money and you’re poncing around talking about all the money you’ve spent on this shit. It’s really rude.’

‘I
need
nice things, though,’ I protested. ‘It’s been so long. It makes me feel better.’

‘Well, I understand that. But, you know—’ She quirked her lips. ‘Just don’t forget that you’ve got responsibilities.’

I scowled. ‘I know.’

‘Anyway. Do you want to do yoga lessons with me?’

Peace with my family was easier to find now. And there was stability in my work. I felt varnished and fine.

When I arrived at Il Fiore every night I was greeted with scents. Our perfume mixed with the air-freshener, the scented oil that Maude sometimes burned, the powdery smell of cosmetics, and, upstairs in the rooms, the faint ammonia smells of antiseptic and sperm.

At the end of every shift when we cleaned our room and remade the bed, we changed the bin-liner. As I opened its lid each night after a day and evening of dozens of clients, the reeking air billowed out. The thin plastic bin-liner sagged with the weight of semen.

The quiet moment of fixing the room after a busy night was like a meditation. I admired myself in the mirror as I bent over to smooth a pillow-cover, tuck the towel pattern into a tighter shape. I prided myself on my towels by now, on the perfected room I created every night. In the golden mirror I was elegant and suave, and I left behind a room immaculate, as if no one had ever fucked there.

ONE NIGHT AFTER I’D been at Il Fiore several months Bernadette was talking about heroin users. I sat there, amid the other girls, saying nothing. They were all making comments, saying that women like that were sad but not good to work with, talking of times they’d had things stolen. ‘You can tell by their eyes,’ said Bernadette. ‘Their pupils are all small. If you look really closely at someone—’ To my horror she got up and came over to me, since I was closest.

She peered into my eyes. ‘You can see that their eyes are different.’

I gazed back at her, too appalled to do anything.

‘That’s how you tell,’ Bernadette said, sitting back easily in her corner. I blinked and lowered my eyes. Bernadette went on, describing an experience she’d had with a junkie in the street. She hadn’t noticed anything different about me. I was an example of the clean girl.

I had only one small, dark scar on each arm, which I covered with make-up. I’d have to wait in the powder room, where we got ready each night, until I was alone. I always walked with my arms bent. The lighting was low.

There were only two other girls who used. Milla was sweet and young and blessed with an airy manner that made everyone adore her. She was very pretty, and Bernadette especially favoured her. It was an open secret that Milla was battling heroin; she’d lost her father only a year ago, and her drug use was evidently partly in consolation for her grief. Bernadette clucked over her, and Helen allowed her to take long breaks from work and then return. Milla and I eventually intimated to each other that we used; we were almost shy about it. Not once did we suggest scoring together. I felt it would be almost criminal to help her acquire drugs, although of course I knew she would, anyway. And I noted that Milla’s usage was not counted a character failing. I thought the time might come when I, too, could be likewise remitted.

Then Jewel appeared. She was an intelligent, funny-looking girl, with a sharp wit and a disarming candour. We became friends through a kind of sorority long before she confessed to me that she used. I hadn’t been able to tell; she used amphetamines too, to enlarge her pupils and get her through the night. A couple of times she came home with me to score. When we talked privately at work, it was with the canny realism of women who were keeping under the radar. A quick glance to see if the other was sweating and looking ill, the occasional loan of twenty dollars. Jewel and I kept our using out of the house, but I was glad, somehow, not to be alone.

In fact, the drugs were becoming a more separate part of my life; though they eased my work by numbing my body somewhat, and soothed my emotional reactions, they didn’t really seem to belong in the gilded chambers of the brothel. That place, perversely, was almost innocent.

I was using two or three times a day still, in a routine that was as much about habit as it was about dependence. The more time I spent among non-drug-users the less I thought about drugs at work, but once home, the idea was automatic. The dealer was always late; no matter how early I rang, how emphatically I reminded him that I had a job to get to by seven, he dawdled. We had a new dealer now; Plum had retired—perhaps had been retired—and had handed the business over to a sequence of his friends. Tony, Andy, Lee; they were all Vietnamese, friendly, and drove dirty white cars.

When our credit situation was exhausted with one of them, we’d resort to the nearby housing commission flats, where there was always a junkie down in the entrance foyer to ask for a contact or a nervous woman sheltering behind a half-opened door. I didn’t like going to the flats; there was a high chance of being mugged by another user, usually on the way out when you’d scored. Robbie was the one who most often went, and he got rolled a couple of times, or said he did. Nevertheless, the flats were a fairly reliable source of heroin. But even going right to the source didn’t always get me to work on time.

‘Can’t you
try,
Lucy?’ said Helen for the hundredth time. ‘We start at seven, all the other ladies get here on time, I don’t understand what’s so impossible for you.’

‘I’ll try,’ I said, but I already understood that I had a little power here, that she couldn’t push me too hard.

There were nights when I was a golden girl. Maude smiled at me as she did my books at dawn. ‘That’s a good night, Lucy,’ she said.

I felt I’d earned every cent. My body was sagging with fatigue and I’d hardly had a chance to eat anything; but I’d had the luxury of long, successive bookings, a double with two genial middle-aged mates who’d cosseted me happily, a man who’d wanted Greek, and a large tip. In my memory, the night was made up of men whose names and faces were already vanishing from my mind. I smiled.

‘Never thought an arts graduate would see money like this,’ I said.

‘Well, you’re not an arts graduate right now, are you, honey,’ said Maude, gently.

‘No,’ I said, and took the money.

My relationship with Robbie was getting more impossible. The more coherent I felt in the rest of my life, the more forlorn his appeared to become. He had a place to live with me, and his dreams still, but it was an increasing abrasion between us that I was the one with the money and the house. I caught myself meting out his ‘pocket money’ in small moments of discipline. I wondered if I was being mean. I didn’t really think I was.

He was lying to me so often by then that I felt my own sense of reality grow garbled; he would stare at me and lie, and I’d challenge him, and he’d lie, and his explanations (‘You must have forgotten,
you
took that money out of the box’; ‘Don’t you remember? You
told
me to score twice!’) were so vehement that, faltering, I began to wonder if I could state anymore that he was the mad one and I was not.

I was earning money, but it was still all going; paying rent was difficult every month and there were several times when I was threatened with eviction. I had cash but it seemed to go too fast. Robbie scored for me. I was grateful to be spared the toil, but I knew I was paying a high commission. I kept my temper; chose to go on forgiving and believing. The situation was difficult, but tenable. If I really changed things, if I broke up with Robbie altogether, I had no idea what would happen.

In my diary I wrote diatribes of fury that I rarely told him to his face. If there was any use in recounting my outrage to myself, I didn’t know. I would close the covers of my journal and raise my head to reassemble my patience once more.

His rages became more spiteful. He refused to move out, or to stop burning cigarette holes in my expensive bedsheets with his nodding cigarette. He would keep saying he respected me, and that was why he stayed on, and he needed me, and Kate, you’re the only one I have in the world.

Guilt bit deep; I couldn’t practise my credo of compassion at work and turn my back on the one who loved me. But I was getting desperate for a break; warm weather inflamed the differences between Robbie and me. He was uneasy about my friendship with Douglas, who came visiting sometimes to collect me for an outing, and with Max who would ring for a chat; he himself had no friends other than junkies.

‘It’s easy for you, meeting all those men every night.’

‘I’ve just been working for fourteen hours and you haven’t even done the washing up. In four days! What’s
wrong
with you?’

Secure at the brothel, I sensed a chance to progress. I could make a profession of this; the professional aspiration made my life manageable.

With summer, the world seemed to open. I was still reading, as I had done through nearly all my exile; one novel after another, and dreaming anew of the day I’d be free to travel and write and create again. It was as if my imagination, so long dulled, was bubbling up again with the warm weather, more fiercely than ever. I was reading of the French Revolution; entranced by the stories of pathos and grandeur and folly, I dreamed of going to Paris. Lying in bed every dawn, with the windows open in my bedroom and the early sunshine leaking in, I read my way back into excitement. My head resounded with the joy of wonder again.

Something was happening. Inside me there was a new fluttering of ambition. An impatience, finally, with the tithes of drug addiction. Now I yearned for a life like I’d had before, so many years ago, with all the imagination and sweetness I had always cherished in myself; but with the safety of what I now considered a fortunate career.

If I could only stop using; but the thought of giving up my precious needles, the one sure thing in every day, was too daunting. The heroin sickened me now, literally; the quality of the gear was slipping, and it was often laced with unknown substances which made our palms and the soles of our feet itch acutely for a minute after the fix, and brought up angry welts on our skin where the blood tracked it through our systems. I realised that heroin only succeeded in making me sleepy and dull, and I wanted clarity now.

But I dared not take that leap, it was always, as ever, too frightening. Every morning and evening I held the needle in my hand, and its bite still gave me satisfaction.

On New Year’s Eve I had the night off; Robbie and I spent the evening together, ceremoniously cooking, lighting candles in the little backyard, dressing in our finest clothes. We bought enough gear for a generous taste, and some alcohol too. I wore gold strappy sandles and a sexy lace top, and he held me tenderly at midnight and kissed me. ‘Here’s to a brand new year,’ I said, smiling against his face.

‘Here’s to spending my life with you,’ he replied. He was beautiful that night; we made love in the thick warm darkness, and I hoped it would all be getting better now.