A Needle in the Heart

by Fiona Kidman

  The laundrette’s got big commercial-sized washing machines and a bank of coin-operated green and yellow-fronted Windsor driers. There’s a long formica table with twelve chairs arranged around it where you can sit while you wait for your stuff to go through. She’s sitting there chatting to a Samoan girl who’s doing really well at university, and reckons that’s what Tania should be doing too, when Mr Blue Satin comes in. He’s a skinny boy, may be one seventy-eight tall, not much more than sixty kilos, with a bit of a swagger, hair oiled like guys in old-fashioned movies — the Fonz or somebody, one of those fifties geeks. She half expects him to start singing or shimmying around the place in his shiny shirt. It’s got three buttons undone and, just as you’d expect, a chain hangs among the half dozen hairs that nestle in the hollow beneath his collarbone. It’s not a fitting shirt: it rides easy on him, tucked in at the waist with a wide silvery buckled belt. By the unguarded light of the laundrette the shirt has a metallic sheen, melting this way and that like mercury in a bottle, and then turning blue again.

  Mr Blue Satin carries a bundle of washing all scrunched up and rolled under one arm, nothing to hold it together, and a box of KFC in the other.

  Tania watches him loading his stuff into a machine; she can’t help it, he’s a guy who’s kind of compulsive looking. She could see him as a school boy in a classroom, pulling faces behind the teacher and looking straight-faced while everybody else laughed. An antics kind of boy.

  The student girl puts her things together. Her stuff’s already dry, but Tania’s guessed that she likes it in here, that it’s quieter than home.

  Tania sees that the guy is holding out another blue satin shirt, taken from his washing bundle, wondering what to do next. ‘You shouldn’t put that in with your other things,’ she says.

  ‘I was wondering about that. The last one I washed came out looking like coloured mince.’

  ‘You should hand-wash it, like underwear. How many blue shirts have you got?’

  ‘Three but now one’s not fit to wear. I got Suresh the tailor to do me three all at once to use up his bolt of material. I figured that way I’d always have a clean one.’

  He throws his box of fried chicken on the table in front of them. ‘Have some.’

  ‘I’m off,’ says the student. ‘You want to come over to my place?’

  ‘My clothes aren’t dry,’ says Tania.

  ‘You should still come to my house. You can keep your Kenfucky Tries, you,’ she says, addressing Mr Blue Satin. ‘You’re just trouble.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll come a bit later,’ says Tania, picking out a piece of chicken. She hasn’t had any dinner, and the hot fatty meat is firing up her tastebuds.

  The student lets the door slam shut behind her as she goes out.

  ‘Bit of a cow. Is she a mate of yours?’

  ‘I don’t even know her name. She’s doing a major in psychology.’

  ‘That explains it. Would you wash this shirt for me? I don’t know that I can do it without making a mess of it.’

  ‘You’ve gotta learn things like that. Two and a bit shirts won’t last long if you don’t know how to wash them.’

  ‘You could show me how. I’ve got some good shit at my house.’

  ‘So it’s true what she says.’ Tania indicates the spot where the student had sat. ‘You are trouble?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like some good shit. I can tell from the look of you, you’re kind of hungry.’

  ‘I could just come and show you how to wash your shirt.’

  ‘Okay, you do that.’

  The driers are spinning and humming all around them, while they eat and sit and read a magazine or two, and he presses his knee into hers and she aches at the thought of him, because just lately she’s been a bit lonely, and it’s shit getting up at the crack of dawn five days a week, and really she wants to know why the hell is she doing this, hanging out just to prove a point and live some place else except with her mother and brothers (although there’s the small matter of just a curtain hanging in the bedroom between her and her brother Jason, and the way he pulls his pudding all night long so that she doesn’t get that much sleep when she’s living at home).

  In the morning she wakes up in Mr Blue Satin’s bed — she knows now that his name is Gene — and he murmurs in her ear, ‘You taste like plums at the end of summer.’ Nobody’s ever said anything like that to her before, and she feels a wild and dizzying pleasure, as if she’s found home at last. It’s eight o’ clock and too late to go to work. She drinks a swig of red wine out of a bottle he offers her. The bed is actually a mattress on the floor. The room is like a tip, with CD’s and ashtrays and dirty socks, which he must have forgotten when he went to the laundrette, empty cigarette packs and a used needle, and wrappers from takeaways, and she thinks that when she gets up she’ll tidy up for him.

  Around eleven, when she still hasn’t started out on this course of good intentions, a woman opens the bedroom door and stands looking at the pair of them holed up there under the purple duvet. The woman, whose name, Gene says, is Dixie, is around thirty, with red and yellow streaks frosted through her black ringlets. She’s dressed all in black from head to toe, a black leather bodice trimmed with black fur round the neckline, and a long black skirt. On her hands she wears black lace mittens, the fingers cut away to reveal blood-red fingertips.

  She’s leaning on the door, looking down at Tania as if she can see her through the bed covers. Gene is on his back, smoking a cigarette not seeming as if he cares. Outside it’s started to rain, the noise on the iron roof so deafening you can hardly hear their voices.

  ‘Have one for me,’ Dixie says.

  ‘Is she your girlfriend?’ Tania asks, thinking she’s about to be killed.

  ‘Nah, she’s looking for money, aren’t you, doll?’

  ‘I’ve got some for you too,’ Dixie says.

  ‘Put it on the table. This here is Tania, my nice skinny new girlfriend. You want to give her a massage?’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Dixie says, ‘I’m dead beat as it is.’ But she’s started peeling off her gear, throwing her mittens and her skirt into a corner of the room.

  ‘It’s all right,’ says Tania, rolling over on her stomach. She’s embarrassed by Dixie seeing her with nothing on, except the cover.

  ‘No harm,’ says Dixie, dropping to her knees beside them. ‘C’mon kid, this is my job. Just keep still the way you are.’ Before Tania can do a thing about it, Dixie’s on top of her, squatting above her buttocks, her fingers digging into her spine, and it’s sheer bliss, the way she pushes into the small of her back, finding pressure points she didn’t know she had. ‘Easy, girl, easy. Now you like that, don’t you?’

  Which is true, she likes it as much as anything she and Gene have done. Dixie runs her fingers beneath Tania’s shoulder blades, then shimmies them down her spine, and it’s like a deluge engulfing her, every bit of her body folding out and out, layer upon layer of her, like a big flower showing itself to the sun, even though the rain is torrential, and a trickle of water is seeping into the room around the window frame, and running down the wall near the tip of her nose, and she can tell from the old bleak stains that run side by side with the water that this is no new thing, nothing freshly sprung. When Dixie’s got her in a state of such total relaxation that she’s drifting out into space, Gene sends her off to make coffee for them all and then he comes down on Tania from behind and it’s all right, it really is.

  It just seems like Tania and Dixie are meant to be friends. Around ten years separates them in age, but it doesn’t matter, there’s always a lot to tell each other. Dixie tells her about the two men she’d married and how they abandoned her, and now she has a little boy who was her first husband’s but he lives with his stepfather, the second one, and how she’ll sort all that out before long. She’s had some spiritual experiences in her life which have mapped out a path for her. She takes Tania down Cuba Street to have her palm read, and the woman there tells her that sh
e has a long life ahead of her after a period of indecision. There’s a man in her life but he isn’t the one for her.

  ‘She has her off days,’ Dixie says. ‘You and Gene are milk and honey together.’

  Tania tells Dixie about the good marks she’d got in school when she was a little kid and how her brothers had taken the mickey over that. And then with some of the kids in the neighbourhood she’d hung around with, it wasn’t the thing to be smart, and she didn’t believe it anyway. Her mother had got her an apprenticeship in the hairdresser’s but, as she tells Dixie, that sucked — all that smarming around old women with little wisps of hair and their grumbles if she shampooed too hard or too soft. All of these things, Dixie appears to understand absolutely. Dixie is there for her, too, when she gets into a mess with money.

  Tania didn’t quite see how it happened: it was all so gradual you could hardly tell where it started. Except, of course, she lost her cleaning job. It wasn’t there for her when she went in on Monday morning and said she’d been sick as a dog, and the boss asked her why she didn’t let him know. Too sick, she said, I was too sick.

  That was tough, the boss said, because he’d had to get someone else in to take her place, and he wasn’t putting off a good worker because she mucked him around. Go to the union, he said, knowing she hadn’t joined.

  ‘Don’t worry about your job, I’ll look after you,’ Gene said, when she talked to him about it. She thought it was a bit quick the way it all happened — one night she was sitting in the laundrette, and the next one she was living with him. ‘You can stay with me for a while,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to go back to that place.’ As if the flats were only fit for dogs. But still, it was nice, just the two of them living together in a little house, and having nice things, because when you cleared away the mess, it wasn’t such a bad place, and he wasn’t shy about spending money: he bought what he wanted. There was a lounge suite covered with real pale red leather in the sitting room, and a fantastic sound system, and when she said why don’t we get a proper bed, he said well, why not. They bought a king-size at Radford’s and had it delivered the same day; it just about filled the whole bedroom up.

  ‘I’d better bring my stuff over,’ she said, and that’s when he dropped the first bombshell.

  ‘I never said anything about bringing your stuff over.’

  ‘Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do with it?’ It was the first time they’d quarrelled and she could feel it boiling up so quickly it was like a lightning rod had struck them.

  ‘I didn’t say it was permanent.’ His voice was sullen.

  ‘You did.’

  His voice hooked up a few notches. ‘I did not. When the fuck did I ever say it was permanent? Who told you that goddam lie, goddam bitch, you lying little sow. Did Dixie put you up to this?’

  ‘Gene, I’m sorry, I thought …’

  ‘Don’t think. You hear me? Don’t think, bitch.’

  ‘Okay, okay, I just don’t have the rent and it’s due now.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t have the rent. All right, then. Perhaps I can give you a bit of rent.’

  ‘You don’t need to do that. I’ll go back there tonight. I’ll get an emergency benefit.’

  ‘You’d be so lucky. Oh shit, Tania, don’t do this to me. You’re like my life to me. You’re the most fantastic girl I ever met. I’ll give you the rent money.’

  ‘So what are you saying? You want me to stay here or go back there?’

  ‘Why do you have to make everything so complicated? Eh? Eh? I said do both. Stay here and I’ll pay the rent.’

  ‘So you’ve got somewhere for me to go when you want to kick me out?’

  ‘Are you trying to provoke me or what?’

  At which point, Tania shut up.

  She stays at Gene’s and makes them dinner some nights: he likes fish fingers with chips, and Sara Lee danish for dessert. They eat up town other nights, and meet Dixie when she isn’t working. Dixie gives her some money for tampons and lipstick and a few things like that, because Tania knows somehow she can’t ask Gene for any more than he’s giving her, and Dixie seems to know this without her mentioning it. Gene has a car, a big old restored Chevrolet with fins, painted green and silver. They drive around town together, Tania as good as sitting in his lap, and one Sunday they go over to Eastbourne and have a coffee in the tearooms in the park by the duck pond. ‘This is such shit,’ Gene says, looking around at the fathers playing with their children on the green. ‘I don’t know how people can do crap like this.’

  Gene goes out some nights and she understands that this is the time when he works. She thinks he cut a few deals up town but he doesn’t talk about that, and she thinks it best not to ask. He tells her one day that he’s inherited money. When she asks him who from, he says it’s none of her business.

  Then he kicks her out, and that was when she’s in real trouble, because the rent at the flats hasn’t been paid for a month and they say she can’t go back unless she can front up with the money.

  ‘Can I stay with you for a bit?’ she asks Dixie.

  Because she has no bed, no money, no shit, and she feels like hell.

  ‘We’re a bit crowded,’ Dixie says, which is true. She’s sharing with Jane, who has a forty-two-centimetre bust, and Susie, a Goth girl who’d gone to private school. ‘Why don’t I fix you up with a bit of work?’

  ‘I don’t know that I could do that,’ says Tania, ‘I haven’t been trained in massage.’

  Dixie sighs. ‘Well, you know. It’s not a sports medicine degree we’re talking about here.’

  Which Tania knows, she isn’t that silly, but while she has Gene to look after her, she’d thought maybe she could just avoid that.

  ‘I’ll have a talk to Gene,’ Dixie says.

  So Tania, when she’s thought for a bit, asks: ‘How many girls does he have working for him?’

  ‘Never you mind,’ Dixie replies.

  Tania has been back in her old flat three nights when Gene comes knocking on the door. She sees him through the spyhole in the door, pacing up and down, his thumbs hooked under his belt, his blue satin shirt spilling out at the back of his pants, his face white.

  Opening the door, as far the chain will reach, she tells him, ‘Go away, arsehole, you’ve got what you want.’

  ‘I want you to come back to me,’ he says.

  Slamming the door shut and turning to lean her back against it. Willing herself not to say anything. Because her mind is made up, she’s been through her time of indecision, and she is going back to the Valley on the first train in the morning. She can take things a day at a time out there, the air’s fresh and there’s room to breathe.

  Gene beating the door with his fists. ‘Let me in, let me in.’ Kicking the door, running against it, so that the place shakes, and people are coming out into the stairwells, shouting to shut up the noise. What did they think they were doing? They’ll call the police. Which is a laugh, because people don’t call the police in this block of flats unless someone is already dead.

  So then she lets him in, shivering and crying and putting his arms around her for warmth, because it’s another cold night outside.

  ‘We’ll pack up your stuff,’ he says. ‘You’re coming back with me.’

  ‘But why?’ she says, as he throws open the wardrobe door and grabs the beaded top and the wind breaker she hasn’t worn since she met him.

  ‘Because you’re my girl.’

  ‘You mean I don’t have to work?’

  ‘Oh c’mon,’ he says, as they pull the door to the empty flat closed behind them, ‘everybody’s gotta work. You’re my girl, that’s the thing.’

  ‘No,’ she says, trying to drag herself free, ‘no, I’m not going to work for you. I don’t like that sort of work.’ Which she doesn’t at all. She’s been at it three nights, and she’s done fifteen or so jobs, all sorts — the working men on their way home, the men in business suits, a bunch of rugby players, and one or two of the grubby old fools peop
le like to think are the only ones who really visit people like her.

  ‘Yes, you are, yes you are, you’re going to be my girl, and we’ll be sweet.’

  ‘How can I be your girl when there’re these other jokers too?’ They’re in bed, smoking and drinking a smooth red wine, which inches its way down and soothes her, sorts her out, makes her feel unreasonably content.

  ‘That’s different,’ he says. ‘That’s work. I’m the one you come home to — nobody else, nobody, you understand. You come straight home every night and I’ll be good to you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Just one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You stay skinny. I like skinny girls. I want to count your ribs every night, okay?’

  ‘Okay, Gene.’ Which is fine and what she wanted so why is she crying now, lying here, with the wine working its way down her gullet, and the pink light filtering through the shade beside the bed, and more rain falling on the roof the way she likes to hear it?

  Someone says they’ve seen Gene up town with a blonde called Moira. It must be Dixie who’s slipped that into the conversation, she can’t think who else would have told her. It’s not what she wants to hear. No shit. Perhaps she didn’t hear it. It rolls around in her head for a week. She doesn’t ask him. He’s in a mood she doesn’t like — scary, rather cold, not answering her when she speaks to him — which tells her it might be true. One day she talks about taking the train out to the Valley to see her mother.

  ‘No, you just quit it, you just stay at home.’

  ‘Are you frightened I mightn’t come back?’ she says, which is as daring as she gets. He stubs out his cigarette on the skin beside her navel and because she’s stoned and sick in the stomach, there’s nothing she can do about it. She has to wear a plaster on it for a week and it’s so damn sore she can’t lie on it at night, because that’s the way she likes to sleep, face down, her natural position.