Pants on Fire

by Maggie Alderson

  Then came a big group of leathermen in all manner of outrageous ensembles. Betty was marching along, his hairy bum hanging out of a pair of leather chaps.

  “Betty! Betty!” I shouted. “You look gorgeous.” He turned and saw me and gave me a big wave.

  “Thank you, Pussy darling! Happy Mardi Gras!” Then he darted over and gave me a big hug and a kiss. Which made me feel very special, before running back to join his gang.

  The intense spectacle whipped me up into a high emotional state. One minute I was laughing hysterically as a float in the shape of a giant penis went by, with ten men in sparkly shorts and cowboy hats riding it like it was a bucking bronco. The next I was choking back tears when the Proud Parents of HIV Positive Children walked past with their heads up high, holding hands with their sick sons. One or two were pushing them in wheelchairs. I thought of friends I had lost in London and said a little prayer for Henry, Malcolm and Les. Never forgotten, I told them. Never forgotten.

  Some of the floats were works of art and some were sweet and homemade. Some represented tiny little community groups from Tasmania and rural New South Wales, and others were sponsored by enormous corporations. A troupe of about a hundred Monica Lewinskys walked past—all men, in blue dresses, holding big cigars. A clan of bear men marched by in their jeans, check shirts and Tuff boots, looking like something out of Little House on the Prairie. On acid. Drag queens were strolling along in the most amazing outfits and beautiful lesbians paraded by wearing no tops and great big boots. Everybody was grinning. I hoped they could all feel the love from the crowd.

  “Happy Mardi Gras!” I was shouting. “Happy Mardi Gras!” I said to Liinda and Zoe, hugging them both. It was great. Then, suddenly, it was all over. The Mardi Gras revellers had disappeared up to their party at the old Showground and Liinda was right, I certainly didn’t feel like going home to some cocoa and a good book. I was in the mood to parteee. Fortunately, so was Zoe. I wanted to go dancing, but where could two straight girls go on Mardi Gras night?

  “Don’t ask me,” said Liinda. “I only ever went to clubs where I knew I could score drugs. I’m going home. Bye, you two. Have fun.” And she disappeared.

  Zoe and I looked at each other. I was determined to have a good time, because I was wearing a fabulous new dress in a wild tropical print and my party high heels—Linda had kindly taken my trainers home with her.

  “What time is it?” said Zoe, who was looking very fetching in a turquoise lace shift, trimmed with red. “OK, it’s only just after nine—why don’t we go on a bit of a bar crawl and see where we end up?”

  We started in the champagne bar of a groovy boutique hotel and then moved on to a very stylish place with a great cocktail list and views over the city. There were lots of people up there and quite a few nice-looking guys, although after my recent Pollocking and the business with Billy, meeting new men was not such an attractive prospect. But Zoe knew lots of people in there, so we teamed up with a gang of them and it all seemed quite jolly. They weren’t as much fun as Antony’s friends but the music was excellent and the place was cool. I thought I was going to have a good night.

  After a while I noticed Zoe was looking round the room with a slightly puzzled expression on her face.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s been bugging me ever since we walked in here—you know, What is Wrong With this Picture? I knew something was different and I was trying to figure it out. Have they changed the lighting? Is it different carpet? I’ve just worked out what it is . . .”

  “What?”

  “There are no gay men in here.”

  I looked around. It was true.

  “This is the one night of the year you can go out in Sydney and not see a single homosexual,” said Zoe.

  “Weird, isn’t it?” I said, having another look round the room. “I wondered why everyone was so badly dressed.”

  We had a good laugh. But now she had pointed it out I felt a bit uncomfortable. This was probably the best night in the whole year to meet a man in Sydney and I couldn’t have felt less like it. The truth was I missed Dolores and Betty and Trudy. I missed their humour and their excessive behaviour. I missed the sense of security I felt with them. With these men I felt judged entirely on my attractiveness. I could see them looking at my legs.

  I wondered what Antony was doing at the party. I missed his eyebrows and his honking laugh, although I dreaded to think what he and Debbie were getting up to together. And then thinking about Debbie made me think about Rory Stewart. Had he watched the parade on TV up at the farm and felt totally left out of everything? Poor Rory . . .

  “This is earth calling Georgie, earth calling Georgie, come in please,” said Zoe.

  I blinked and glanced around me. The crowd we’d joined up with had split up into men and women. The men were talking about football and the women were talking about men. I stifled a yawn.

  Zoe rolled her eyes and laughed. “You really are on sparkling form.”

  “Looks like you need a little jump,” said one of the girls we were with. “We were just going to take a walk to the ‘powder’ room, if you wanted to come.”

  “Oh, no, it’s OK thanks,” I said. She gave me a funny look and she and two other women minced off in their tight dresses.

  “I think she just offered me Class A drugs,” I said to Zoe.

  “That would be right.”

  “Do you take them?”

  “Only slimming pills and laxatives. Just kidding. I used to take the lot,” she said. “Except pot, of course, because it gives you the munchies. I’ve been hanging around with this crowd since we were teenagers and we’ve always done drugs. Cocaine and ecstasy, mainly. We’re sort of part-time weekend party people, not like Debbie, who takes them all the time. But I’m not allowed to do them at all now. It’s one of the conditions of my therapy. I had to make a deal not to ‘act out’ ”—she made inverted commas with her fingers—“in any of my ‘addictions.’ Do I sound like Liinda?”

  “Only in a good way,” I said.

  “I’m not really supposed to be drinking either, to tell you the truth. Cheers!”

  We clinked glasses.

  The girls were coming back. Fresh lipstick all round. I saw the one I’d talked to pass something to one of the men, and then the four of them went off to the loo. It was like watching a Swiss clock. The girls were even more inane now, but faster. They were talking about men again, and then one of them mentioned some great shoes she’d seen in a shop in Double Bay, which somehow led to a discussion about their favourite episodes of Friends, and that brought them right back to men—the men who had just gone to the loo, in fact.

  Now I love shoes as much as the next girl and I’m pretty keen on men and even Friends can be fun on a dull night, so it wasn’t the subjects they were talking about that were getting to me, it was the way they were talking about them. There was no debate or discussion, they just went round and round in circles, making flat statements, with everything relating back to them.

  One would say, “Oh, I liked the episode when . . .” and then another would just butt in saying, “Oh no, I liked the one when . . .” and another would say, “I think Joey’s really cute, I like him best . . .” and the first one would come back saying, “Oh no, I like Ross . . .” and on and on like that. It wasn’t conversation, it was mutual monologuing. And to make it worse, the girls who had boyfriends talked only in the royal “we,” as in “WE went to Bowral at the weekend because WE are buying a horse.”

  To make matters worse, my feet were beginning to hurt. Isn’t it funny how, when you’re having a good time, you can run for miles in the highest stilettos, but the minute you’re bored, every second is agony? I was shifting from foot to foot and I saw Zoe notice, but I couldn’t very well tell her that her lifelong friends were boring me to death, could I?

  The boys had come back from the loo pumped up with inhaled masculinity and the sexes mingled a little. One of the boys started chatting me up. At leas
t I think that’s what he was doing.

  “Seen any good movies recently?” he said.

  “Yes. It was called Salo—100 Days of Sodom.”

  “Really? Never heard of it. My favourite movie is Terminator.”

  “Oh, you should try and catch Salo, you’d love it. It’s quite like Terminator. Lots of violence. Arnie has a bit part in it.” He plays an anus.

  “So,” he said, getting a frisky look in his eye. “I hear you work with Zoe.”

  Oh here we go, I thought. This old chestnut.

  “Yes, I work on Glow. I’m the orgasms editor.”

  “Is that right?” He looked thrilled. You could see him thinking: she works on Glow, she must be a pushover and know hundreds of kinky sexual positions.

  “Sorry Ben,” I said. I think his name was Ben. “Would you excuse me? I’ve just got to go and find my G-spot.”

  I don’t know why I dislike men like Ben so much, but I do. He was quite good looking, he was tall, he had all the right gear on and he had nice hair. I hated him. I went to the loo and sat there a long time. I left the cubicle and reapplied my lipstick for something to do. I was just pulling some faces at myself in the mirror to pass the time when Zoe came out of another stall.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I wasn’t throwing up in there.”

  I liked Zoe. She was bright and sparky, when she wasn’t starving herself to death.

  “We’re all going to go on to the Blue Room now,” she said. “You can sort of dance there. Want to come?”

  “Sounds great.” I replied weakly. But when we were all downstairs and they turned right down Victoria Street, I caught Zoe by the arm and told her I was going to split.

  “I’m going to go home while I can still walk there. It’s been really fun, but I don’t feel like having a big night. I’ll see you on Monday. Have a good one.”

  I stood and watched them for a moment as they headed towards Oxford Street, hanging on to each other and laughing and joking. Why don’t I like nice, simple, stable blokes like that crowd? I wondered. I’m sure they all had good jobs and would want to have nice big weddings and lots of kiddies, who they would send to private schools. I could have a nice life with a man like that, but I found them insufferably dull.

  That’s why I’d ended up with Rick in London. It was a choice between him or the English equivalent of these guys. Rick certainly wasn’t dull. He was so creative that he was slightly unbalanced at times, but he was never dull. And that’s why I liked my darling Antony so much too. He wasn’t dull either. But wasn’t there another type of man anywhere? One who wasn’t unbearably boring, without being gay, or totally mad? I think that was Nick Pollock’s genius. He’d appeared to be the missing link.

  I stopped in Kings Cross and got myself in a large portion of fries and ate them as I walked home, barefoot.

  On Sunday morning I was really glad I hadn’t had a big night, because Liinda rang me at eight a.m.

  “Hello,” she said brightly. “How was your big night?”

  “Small.”

  “Really? I thought you’d be out until dawn when you would have dragged home some unsuspecting youth, to help you road-test all the sex tips in our next sealed section.”

  “You thought that and you rang me at eight?”

  She ignored that one. “So what time did you get in?”

  “Before twelve.”

  “Really? What went wrong?”

  “Oh, nothing. We went to a couple of bars, but then I just didn’t feel like it. Must be your influence.”

  “Did Zoe have a good time?”

  “Yes, I think so. We bumped into some friends of hers and she kicked on with them.”

  “Well, she probably needed to cut loose.”

  “That’s exactly what she said. But I loved the parade. Thanks for bagging that spot for us.”

  “No problem. So what are you doing today? I was wondering if you felt like meeting up later.”

  “I thought I might walk over to the Brent Whiteley studio museum thing in Surry Hills. But I’d love to catch up later.”

  “That’s a great idea—you can go via Oxford Street and check out all the tragedies staggering home from the party. It’s really fun. I sometimes come into town just to watch it. It’s like the anti-parade. And we can get together later for a Turkish pizza in Cleveland Street. Sound good?”

  “Sounds great. Where will I meet you?”

  “I’ll call you on your mobile at one-twenty and give you directions.”

  “Thirteen-twenty hours? Roger, over and out.”

  At nine a.m. Oxford Street was full of Mardi Gras casualties. Drag queens carrying their shoes, make-up running down their faces. Lithe men and women in tight Lycra shorts, chewing gum ferociously. Everyone was exhausted and very pale but they all looked happy. There were lots of couples holding hands, some of them in a great hurry—presumably to get home to bed—while others were oblivious to their surroundings, just gazing into each other’s eyes.

  It was great people-watching, as Liinda had said, so I sat at a café in Taylor Square and watched them all go by. Then I studied my map to work out how to get to the Whiteley Studio from that spot. It didn’t seem very hard.

  I crossed Flinders Street and found a lane which would take me through to Bourke Street, but there seemed to be a party going on in it, with a DJ and the works. Quit a few of the people I’d seen going by earlier were there, looking like they were about to do it all again, and I realised this must be one of the recovery parties I’d heard about. I stopped to let a gaggle of very large drag queens go by and just happened to glance to my left, where there was a smaller, really filthy lane. I stopped dead. There, sprawled on a milk crate, was Debbie.

  She was naked apart from gigantic platforms and a sparkly fuschia G-string. Her make-up was all over her face. She was leaning against the filthy wall with her head back and her eyes closed. Her left arm was hanging down by her side and there was a man crouching next to her. Did he take something off her arm and throw it on the ground? He moved so quickly, it was hard to tell. I was so surprised I took an involuntary step forward. At that moment the man looked up and saw me and mouthed “fuck off” at me with such venom that I jumped and turned back up the main lane. I didn’t know what to do. Then I saw Antony. I couldn’t believe my luck.

  “Dolly!” I called out to him. He was staggering a bit and didn’t look up.

  “Antony! It’s me,” I said, standing right in front of him. I tapped his shoulder. He looked up at me with completely blank eyes. “Fuck off,” he said.

  I thought he must have mistaken me for someone else.

  “Antony, it’s me, Georgia . . . Pussy.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about pussy,” he said and pushed me away, stumbling down the lane.

  I felt like I’d been punched. First Debbie, naked in an alley. Then Antony—my dear Antony, who I thought was my best friend in Sydney—had told me to fuck off. The party in the alley seemed like a nightmare, full of ghouls and strange wasted creatures. I pushed my way through and walked down Bourke Street as fast as I could. It was a steamy humid day but I was shivering.

  I came to a café and sat down. I needed a glass of water; I was still in shock. What was Debbie doing with that horrid man? Had he been injecting her with something? Now I felt really ill. Was I going to have to ring Jenny Brent and tell her Debbie was a junkie? But how could I be sure? I didn’t actually see a syringe. What if I rang and told Jenny that and I was wrong?

  And as for Antony, I couldn’t bear to think about what had just happened with him.

  Then my mobile rang. It was Liinda.

  “Georgia? Hi. Look, I’m going to have to cancel lunch. One of the women I’m sponsoring at my NA group is in crisis and I can’t leave her. I’m really sorry.”

  I was relieved. I didn’t really want to tell anyone what I’d just seen until I’d had time to digest it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “It’s a shame you didn’t come to the Blu
e Room with us,” said Zoe on Monday. She was back at work and looking very happy to be there. She sat on the chair across from my desk and swung her legs like a schoolgirl.

  “Yeah? Did you have a late night?”

  Zoe smiled. “Very late . . . I didn’t go home at all—or rather, I went home with Ben.”

  “Really?” I wondered if he had a Terminator duvet cover. “How was that?”

  Zoe looked just as I had the morning after a good Pollocking.

  “It was divine. He’s fantastic in bed. Gorgeous bod. He plays soccer.”

  Well, waddyaknow? Maybe he could have helped me find my G-spot after all.

  “It meant a lot to me,” continued Zoe, in full post-coital glow. “I haven’t been with a guy for nearly a year. It was a big breakthrough.” She looked serious for a moment. “I thought I was too fat to let anyone see me with my clothes off.”

  “Therapy must be working then,” I said. “That’s great. Was there a good crowd at the Blue Room?”

  “Great, it was pumping and there was a guy looking for you . . .”

  “Really, who?” I said. Pollock Repentant? Billy Unbound?

  “Jasper O’Connor. The photographer. I didn’t know you knew him. Anyway, he asked me where you were and seemed very disappointed I told him you’d gone home.”

  Jasper, I thought. Hmmm.

  At midday Antony called.

  “Hello,” he said in us usual chirpy voice.

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  “Well, that’s nice isn’t it? I ring up to tell you all about the party and that’s the reception I get.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Pussy—is something wrong?”

  “I don’t give a fuck about Pussy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you, because those were the last things you said to me.”

  “What? Fuck off?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I distinctly remember telling you I loved you the first time we spoke. My first eccie was just kicking in, but I did mean it. What’s wrong with you? This is quite boring, I want to have lunch and tell you what Betty did at the party.”