In My Skin (34 page)

‘My darling girl,’ said my mother. My sister grinned from behind her, and then flung her arms around me.

‘Look after yourself, you idiot,’ in my ear.

‘I’m so proud of you, Katie,’ said my father. I looked at them, and left them there, arms around each other, and walked through the departure gate.

I found myself settling in Rome. A friend of a friend offered me a room; my nerve failed, after all, to go adventuring alone through the continent. In the upstairs apartment I was safe, looking out on the city.

When I first arrived I cried almost every day for a month. Over nothing; over the state of the world; the news I saw on television; over the loveliness of the autumn sunshine on soft old stone. Great, wrenching sobs that came and went in moments and left me dazed.

Just occasionally I allowed my heart to stroke the sharp edge of the pity for what I’d done to myself, and to others. I’d lie in bed at night, weeping for the hurt I’d caused the ones I loved, back in the black days. And for how low I’d brought myself, this fragile girl. For the things I’d missed, while I was in the dark.

All I did, in the daytime, was walk. On the move until I was too baffled by weariness to feel anything. I wandered, almost every day, through the soft ochre streets, the narrow old spaces, learning the city, studying it. I made myself a scholar again, and sat in the cold sunshine of a city that had withstood destruction and rebirth many times, and let myself be suffused with dreaming. I walked in different weathers and times of day, learning about change and constancy. In quietness, I walked Rome. Sometimes I worked up the courage to venture further.

At times I caught the phantom whiff of withdrawal sweat on my body, long after the last chemicals had drained from my metabolism. In my mind would rise spectral cold streets, desperation, sweaty fear. I washed myself in warm showers again and again, but still the smell was in my nostrils.

I had recurring dreams about heroin. I would be walking down a night-time street littered with full syringes, all jacked up, ready to be taken in my hand and plugged in. I’d resist, walking and walking, tempted and appalled. Then I would capitulate, and put a needle through my skin, and already, in my dream, I was aghast. I would wake, suffocated by regret, relieved to have awoken.

In Naples I spent a bleak day, feeling foreign and lost, wandering the streets. I walked further and further out of the areas I knew, heading vaguely for the citadel on a hill above the teeming city. Over me the sky was white and pitiless. The streets grew more ragged, the people fewer and grimier, and then I found myself walking through an underpass, my feet crunching, as in my dream, on broken syringes. There were fit wrappers all around, and an eerie quiet. The walls of the tunnel were dank old stone. At the end, using an ancient wall for a surface, an old man dressed in rags was stirring a syringe-end in a spoon.

I walked up to him. Everything was silent up here. ‘
Scusami
,’ I said. ‘Do you know where I can buy some of that?’

He looked at me. Then resumed his stirring.

‘Do you know? Some of that—
eroina
?’

He was silent. I hesitated, and then I walked away, and got bitterly drunk in my little room instead. Scratched my skin with a blunt knife in the freezing cold. Anything to replace the bite of the needle and its luxurious savagery.

Gradually, the urge lessened. I knew that if I did drugs once, I would have no way of not doing them again. The thought of the day after stilled me. The greed for obliteration remained, but I learned to quash it. I sat, instead, in my apartment, and drank sweet lemon liqueur, and sang along with Billie Holiday, and nursed myself slowly, slowly into peace.

At the beginning when men sucked their teeth at me in the street, or gave me lascivious stares, I straightened my back. I knew my price exactly. I absorbed the desire of those men, and it gave me strength. I had been a princess, and I still walked as if draped in a velvet gown.

But those men would whistle at any woman. Here, out in the daylight, amidst the smooth-groomed European women, I began to feel awkward and ragged. Without make-up and lighting, my face was pale and thin. My clothes grew too tight as I put on weight. I stumbled on the uneven cobblestones. Loathing myself, I went to a hairdresser and had all my hair cut off short; anything, to try and feel sleek again. I thought maybe I was just a messy child, after all.

The world still startled me, even after half a year away from Melbourne. There were times when it was all too bright. And then I closed my eyes again, and stayed in the apartment, miserable and panic-stricken for days, wondering what I could possibly do with my life.

Then I met a commonsensical, charming young man and fell in love, easily, after all. To fuck in a Naples apartment with someone I barely knew was one thing. That had had the same wicked glee as work. Faced with Raffaele’s sweetness, with passion washing through me like rain, all my tricks fell away. In his bedroom I touched him tentatively. I felt as raw and innocent as a child. He gazed into my eyes and I blinked.

‘I was a
putana
,’ I said to him finally. I didn’t know the proper word: I used the term for ‘whore’. But he understood. In the crook of each of my inner arms was a small, depressed hollow, scooped out of my flesh, where the scar tissue had collapsed. Raffaele looked at me steadily. He placed his hand against my cheek. ‘I’m not perfect,’ I said, lowering my face. He raised it.

‘No one is perfect,’ he said. He stroked my scars gently with his rough fingers, and pulled me over him.

In an out-of-the-way church in Rome, twilight staining the space and antique chandeliers hanging dark, I stood alone and lit a candle.
Serendipity
, I prayed.
Thank you for saving me.
I was very far from being religious, but someone had to be thanked.
Thank you to
all who have loved me. Thank you for saving me, for this newness.
And every time I visited a church, I lit a candle, and stood to pay respect to my fortune.

Months went past, in this odd dreaming—half lost in fantasies about the ancient past, and half dreaming up a new self with Raffaele. Then my sister came over from Australia, and we went backpacking. She made me giggle, with her joy at my wellness, and her own bravado at travelling, and we stomped through dusty countries as best friends. The first thing she said when I greeted her at the airport was, ‘Your pupils are so big. You look different.’ Her laugh was pure joy.

I sat beside her on the beach of an Adriatic island, in the ruins of a medieval harbour, under sweet pine trees, with the transparent water cooling our feet as we read and smoked and ate a picnic in the drowsy sun. Back in Rome, Raffaele was waiting for me. It was my thirtieth birthday.

My sister took a photo of us, our healthy, tanned faces and dirty hair and bottles of orange juice raised in salute.

‘I am so fucking happy,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I could ever be happier.’

She kissed me on the cheek. ‘It’s about time,’ she said. ‘My silly sis.’

Melbourne was drizzly and grim with winter when I got back after a year away. My old room at my parents’, the scent of it and the songs I’d left behind on the stereo made me sick with memories. I changed it all, and began again.

How strange I felt, and how strange the city! I walked it in my Italian leather coat, with my new haircut, to meet friends, forgetting how the streets lay, forgetting that my friends hadn’t seen me for years. ‘You look great!’ they said, and looked at me carefully. ‘You look
great
.’

Robbie rang me. I put off calling him back. There was something repellent about those memories. It was as if I had a new skin that would peel if I brushed it against old things. I let the sunlight soak and firm me.

My piano is still in the same room as when I was a child. The keys are yellowed and the notes are out of tune. It wants to play better than I allow it, with my clumsy fingers. But when I play Schubert, still the gold light falls down the hallway and still my mother comes in to put her hands on my shoulders with pride.

In the living room when I visit, we watch television, my parents and I. There is a story on the news about drug users. We watch footage of young people mixing up on a coffee table. I see the familiar orange-capped syringes, the red-printed swab packets, the powder in the spoons. I watch it, and my parents watch it. We are all suddenly very carefully quiet.

When I go to St Kilda for a coffee, the place is a palimpsest of memories. Time and space collapse; the place is full of ghosts of me. Walking exhausted in the rain down this footpath, being picked up on that corner. Here is where the police stopped me; here is where, a year before that, James and I kissed rapturously in the early days of our romance. Here is where I used to have coffee with my friends; here is where I stashed my fits under a bush. There is a working girl I used to know; we pass each other without sharing a look. The footpath under my feet is unmarked by all my footsteps, after all.

I get the tram into town and we pass along one side of the block I used to walk. I peer out into the night, past my own reflection glazed on the tram window. There are a few figures out there, standing under the lights. I watch the cars pass them, each one driven by a solitary man. I watch them all with a mixture of solidarity and pride and sorrow.

Night-time streets seem grimy to me, glossed with the residue of my weariness, my desperation. I hate walking through wet streets in the dark. The asphalt and the chilled air seem to reek of alcohol swabs and loneliness.

The tram rushes me away. My reflection, in the window, stays steady beside me.

I am buoyant, polished, secure. I’m on my way to meet Max and David; I tell them stories from my old life, as an outlandish adventure. We all laugh, and then quieten, and my smile is happier than either of theirs.

Walking in the city, a scruffy young man veers towards me. He’s saying something about ‘bigger than…’ I expect he’s leering at my breasts. Then I realise he’s offering to sell me a deal. He must have seen the scars on my bare arms. Is that all?

‘Not anymore,’ I sing as I pass him, and catch a puzzled expression on his face before I walk on.

EPILOGUE

I OPEN THE SUITCASE AND the first thing I notice is the scent. Stale perfume, musty fabric. It’s been years since I saw these dresses. And here they are, slumped in skeins of varied colours and textures, embracing each other. They’ve been lying in the dark like this, as if in a tomb, faintly holding the shape of my body. I’d forgotten I had so many. I begin to pull them out, one at a time, shaking out their crushed forms to catch the light.

I’m looking for a dress to wear to a party. I once had more beautiful gowns than I could wear; surely there is one for me still.

I hold gauzy black, slithery purple, plush, flowered velvet. Tiny beads clink around halter-necks; my nail catches a fragile lace hem. I lay the dresses out on the bed carefully. Here’s a see-through slip of chiffon, and I remember wearing this to greet clients; this piece of nothing and only a g-string and bra. I’m wonderstruck as I finger the transparent fabric. And this, my first working dress, red velvet but a dowdy cut. I wore it so often, the only one I had for a time, that it still reeks faintly. I put it aside.

Another, sunny pink with ruffles; tiny baby-doll frocks of budded lace and thin velvet shoulder-straps; shiny scarlet slacks cut tight; elasticised lace in maroon; a long black dress, slashed to the hip.

I strip, and begin to try the dresses on. I’m not sure what I’m expecting. The first is hard to get on. And the next. When I last wore these I was pared down by drugs and sex, my body lean, hard. Now the material is tight across my breasts, strains over my hips. I take each dress off hurriedly, and try the next. The sheer ones are worse: my bulges skulk under the dappled shade of fabric. I can’t imagine wearing these even for a lover. I feel blobby and celibate and rather like a child playing dress-ups. I take them off and throw them in a pile.

I find my favourites: elegant, after-five gowns. I wore these in the last house to seduce. Slick black satin, cut to drape, edged with fine lace. Chartreuse-green sheen, ruffled like a bell’s lip at my knees, worn with bright pink lingerie, designer label: a tea-party fantasy with breasts. And my magnificent crimson velvet, heavy in my hands.

The material of the satin is gorgeously chill against my skin. I strap on the shoes in the suitcase, four inches of glossy black heel; my pelvis tips forward, my bosom juts. I stand tall. The chartreuse resurrects my pallor: icy green against marble. Then the next, black silk slips against my thighs and in the mirror I see my smile become mocking, enigmatic. Last, I put on the velvet—long, slit up the back, bodiced across the belly, a tight velvet rose between my breasts. I hold myself erect, proud. I feel gorgeous.

My dresses were my costumes, my armour: my becoming. I put them on each night and stood taller. I put them on and became a woman. And at the end of the night I took them off, after one last vain glance in the mirror, and put on my own clothes with another kind of pride.

It occurs to me that none of these dresses has been washed since I stopped working. The collars are pale with make-up from where I stripped them over my face for every client; the underarms dusty with deodorant. The smell is of stale perfume and a faint tang of sweat beneath the musk of dust. There must be, still, the invisible stains where mouths nuzzled at my nipples, where hasty men pulled me, still dressed, to their naked dampness.