by Michel Faber
‘So what should I do?’
‘Same thing prostitutes do. Look them in the eyes.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all.’
I noticed as she said this that she herself was looking straight at me the whole time, and that I was beginning to find her very attractive.
I didn’t want to just take her word for it, though, so I asked Mandy too, she being a prostitute as well as an erotic dancer.
‘Oh, it’s true,’ she said. ‘Once they’ve looked into your eyes, nine times out of ten you got ’em. There’s just something about eyes. It’s not that guys are more attracted to you once they’ve really looked at you – it can go the other way sometimes. But it’s as if, by looking into your eyes, something’s already happened between you. Like a relationship, you know? It’s harder for them to look away from you then – it would be like rejecting you in some really outrageous way, like married people making a big scene in public or something, and like the woman’s got the right to break down and cry and hit the guy with her fists and stuff. It’s weird, but it works. On the phone, I tell ya, it’s completely different. They go over you like you’re a used car. I’ve had guys trying to find out exactly how tight my fanny is – like, I thought I’d have to measure it for them. But I’m dead sure if I saw those same guys in the street and I could look them in the eyes, they’d just ask the price and then tag along like little lambs.’
Next day, I repeated what Mandy had told me to Karen over lunch. I was hoping to get to know her better by sharing some terrible café food with her, and telling her she was probably right.
‘Of course I’m right,’ she said, brushing her long hair away from her mouth as if to prevent herself eating some of it along with her meal, though that might have improved it.
‘The thing is,’ I went on, ‘how does it apply to my job? I’m male, and so are the customers.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ mumbled Karen, mouth full. ‘Once they’ve stopped and looked you in the eyes, there’s a relationship there. If they break away, they almost give you the right to follow them down the street yelling, “What’s wrong with you? I thought we were friends? How can you do this to me?” and so on.’
‘That’s pretty frightening.’
‘Are you kidding? What about people who are really friends? What about people who are really married?’
I looked at her face to read how serious she was. She was deadly serious. In fact, she was suddenly in a bad mood – with me, it seemed.
‘Do you know what I think?’ she said, leaning forwards across her plate of crap and fixing me with a narrow-eyed stare. ‘I think advertising is shit.’
‘Oh, I agree,’ I smiled, hoping this would save me, but it didn’t.
‘Advertising,’ she pressed on, ‘is a cowardly, namby-pamby, make-believe way of selling things. It’s all a lot of theory, guys in suits wanking in boardrooms. Nobody ever has to go out into the real world and grab somebody and say, “Hey, buy this.” You people have no guts. You win awards and you don’t know the first thing about persuasion.’
‘Well, I don’t know, Karen,’ I said, roused to irritation. ‘All I know is that my ad for Softsan made an extra four to five thousand women per year buy that brand of sanitary pads, and it made them do it so promptly that six weeks after the ad came out we got a letter from the Softsan comp—’
‘Bullshit!’ exclaimed Karen, her voice loud enough now to draw the attention of the other diners. ‘Why don’t you try to sell me a sanitary pad, right here and now? Go on: I’m a woman – it should be easy!’
‘Karen, keep your voice down,’ I hissed, agitating my outstretched palms over the table between us as if to magically return a dangerous genie to its bottle. ‘People can hear you!’
‘So what! Isn’t that what your dildo microphone is for?!’
Awed by her outburst, I tried to beat an inconspicuous retreat from the café but she had more surprises in store for me. Grabbing my hand in hers (I wasn’t so awed I couldn’t notice how small-boned, how delicate, how startlingly female her hand was) she pulled me out on to the street and towards a destination of her own choosing.
‘Let me show you something, Mr Ad-Man,’ she said as she strode along. ‘Mr Hidden-bloody-Persuader. Let me give you a little demonstration of persuasion.’
She led me to a second-hand bookshop which always had bins of worthless or near-worthless books outside on the footpath. Some of the bins were marked ‘$1’ or ‘$2’; the outermost was marked ‘FREE’. Karen rummaged through this bin for a few seconds, selected ten books, and walked into the store.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to the girl behind the counter, a fey-looking lass with glasses and blonde hair tucked behind her ears. ‘I need to sell some books, please. You are buying, I hope.’
‘Well,’ said the girl, ‘it depends on what they are.’
‘Oh, they’re in very good condition,’ replied Karen, and then suddenly craned her head forward to get a better look at the girl. ‘Oh hey, that’s such a lovely jumper you’ve got on. Did you knit it yourself?’
‘Thanks,’ blushed the girl, looking down at her own breast and then straight into Karen’s waiting eyes, which were bright and warm. ‘It’s just from a charity shop, you know.’
‘Oh wow – that’s what I call a find. You know it’s a real art to be able to look good without spending a lot of money. What’s your favourite charity shop?’ By now the books were on the counter and so were Karen’s folded arms, the better to narrow the distance between her and her new friend.
‘Well,’ hesitated the girl, ‘there’s one in Richmond, in among all the Vietnamese grocers. They have a lot of stuff there. Jeans as good as new for, like, five or six dollars.’
‘You’re joking! Wow, I must go there. I really need some new clothes. Nothing fits me anymore. You know, I lost a baby just recently and I got really depressed afterward. I just ate and ate and ate. You know how you eat when you’re depressed?’
‘I… sure. Now, about these books …’ The girl was sorting through them now, pink in the glow of Karen’s stare.
‘I thought I might be able to buy myself a pair of jeans that really fit me, you know. It would make such a difference. Lately I open the wardrobe and look at what I used to wear and I just want to cry.’
‘That’s awful,’ grimaced the girl. ‘But these books … Ah … We can’t really use them.’
Karen’s face dimmed, subtly, horribly.
‘Can’t really use them?’ she echoed.
‘I’m really sorry,’ squirmed the girl, ‘but they’re not … up-to-date. I mean, I think we might even have a couple of them sitting in a bin outside, for free.’
‘You mean, you won’t even buy any of them?’ Karen stepped back a little from the counter, but not too far. She had the look of someone who has just been told the cancer is too far gone.
‘Maybe you could try somewhere else,’ pleaded the girl.
‘No, no, I couldn’t,’ said Karen. ‘I almost didn’t have the courage to come in here. I – I just can’t cope with people being nasty to me right now. I mean, you’ve been nice, but … If I had to … Oh God …’ Karen took a deep breath and smiled bravely. ‘Couldn’t you give me something for some of them? You can have the rest for free.’
‘Well, what I really meant was …’ The girl caught a glimpse of rescue. ‘What I really meant was you might get more for them somewhere else. I could only offer you a dollar each – maybe three dollars for this one.’
‘Oh but that’s fine, really. That’s just fine.’
And that was that.
Walking back towards the Tunnel of Love, Karen seemed much calmer. Her bad mood had caramelised into a sort of sassy good humour, and she kept looking at me as if she were a bit concerned that I might not be feeling well.
‘So, how did you like that?’
‘Not very much,’ I confessed. ‘It was like … I don’t know … begging … or rape.’
‘Of course
it was! A rapist is only a beggar turned nasty!’
I thought that one over when I was back in the entrance of the Tunnel of Love trying to establish eye-contact with the world at large. The way she’d said it was so neatly controversial, so smartly pretentious – so cut-and-dried!
Maybe, with a mind like that, she could have been hot stuff in advertising. I tried to imagine her in that world, but realised it was all wrong. What she seemed suited for, despite all the smartness of her argument, was not so much convincing people they liked something, as convincing them they didn’t like it. That wasn’t advertising, it was literary criticism.
‘Are you a university graduate?’ I asked her when I next had the chance.
‘Sure I’m a university graduate,’ she smirked, sorting the anal from the oral as she extracted it from the box. Tuesday was the day when new shipments came in: latest-issue pornography from around the globe. Customers who would have had difficulty locating Denmark on a map knew that the most glistening vulvas came from there.
‘So what are you doing in a pornography bookshop?’
‘I’m not qualified for anything else.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘I was assistant manager of a feminist bookshop for a while – I did the ordering, stock control, layout, you name it, I did it. The manager just put up the money and gossiped with the customers. The shop went bust during the recession, nobody else was hiring, so I ended up here.’
‘Wasn’t it kind of a big change, from feminism to pornography?’
She shrugged, got out the pricing gun. ‘Not really. In both of them there’s this terrible, pathetic wishing that people would cast off their actual lives and feelings and behave according to some amazing sex fantasy. You’re not allowed to point out to the customers that in the real world, nobody’s going to let them do it. You have to let them buy their fantasy so they can sneak it home and get busy pretending.’
Was she aware how ideologically mischievous she was being? I couldn’t tell, despite the faint smile on her face, because Karen was always cheerful on Tuesdays. Sorting through the new arrivals seemed to please her as no other aspect of her job did; she was never more content than when she had magazines to sort, shrink-wrap and find niches for. Mondays were often too slow for her, as clientele was hardest to come by then. Theatrically she would describe to me the agony of keeping sentinel duty behind her desk, watching a lone pervert to make sure he didn’t slip a copy of Milk-Squirting Mamas down his trousers, and nodding off to sleep thirty times an hour.
‘Roll on Tuesday,’ she would sigh.
Thursdays and Fridays were red-letter days for the Tunnel of Love’s homosexual clientele, because these were the days when the bookshop was presided over not by Karen but by Darren. (In a world where fake names like Cindy Sheer and Brad Hardman abounded, Karen and Darren were a bona fide coincidence.) Though Karen knew the shop’s stock well, she didn’t have that certain something that enabled gay customers to ask her questions like, ‘Have you got anything with dicks with very thick veins on them, stroking against pierced nipples?’ Darren was the man to ask. Shaved from the ears down (ah, but how far down?), bleached and permed on top, he had a face whose focus was nevertheless his startlingly attractive eyes, which exerted even on heterosexual men an allure so potent that his receding chin and wine-bottle shoulders couldn’t dim it. He was a man who wore his gayness so proudly, so insouciantly, that I was convinced he must have a mum somewhere who didn’t know yet.
Still, he was stimulating company when we went out to lunch together. On one occasion, he pointed out all the billboards, posters, magazine covers and real live females offering aggressive heterosexual stimulus during our 200-metre walk to the sandwich bar and back. Sure enough: there seemed to be a jostling, pouting universe of vacuum-packed rumps, crotches, uplifted cleavages, kisses, promises of climax.
‘And you know what would happen if just one little shop had one little magazine in the display window showing a guy kissing another guy? Or if even one guy in the middle of this crowd was walking around with a big dong bulging through a pair of tights and a torn T-shirt on? The police would get called in!’
‘So what you’re saying is that homosexuality should have equal representation in shop windows and in the tights and T-shirts of pedestrians?’
Darren sighed, his extraordinary eyes half closing.
‘Actually, I’d be happy if the heterosexuals would just tone it down a bit. I think sex should be more private.’
‘Are you having me on?’ I was beginning to think Karen and Darren might have more in common than their jobs.
‘Of course not.’
‘But what about the pornography you sell?’
‘What could be more private than some guy coming into the Tunnel of Love, buying a magazine and taking it home in a brown paper bag?’
Through talking to Karen and Darren, I was becoming more confused every day about what I thought of pornography, the sex industry, and … Karen and Darren. I couldn’t tell if I was being corrupted or redeemed: old prejudices were melting away, yet at the same time I was letting go of permissive values I’d once claimed to hold but which had never really been tested.
My old friends were no help. I made the mistake of telling one of them what my current line of work was; I might as well have told him I was kidnapping babies for use in the pet-food industry.
‘But I’m just inviting people to buy something, same as I was before.’
‘Oh come on – don’t tell me you can’t see a difference between antiperspirant and pornography.’
‘Sure I can: people don’t actually need to stop sweating, but they need to release sexual tension.’
That’s what I said, but I don’t know if I really believed it.
I certainly didn’t seem to have any sexual tension in need of releasing, at least not since I’d started working at the Tunnel of Love. In fact, nobody who worked there seemed to have much interest left in all the pinky-orange activities in the magazines and movies and strip shows. The recurrent motif of swollen nipples on the walls exerted all the fascination of Christmas bells or polka dots. The word ‘fuck’ inspired the same excitation in us that the word ‘carpet’ might inspire in a carpet-seller. Kelly was reading a book on sports injuries, a very technical text, to figure out how she could perform her erotic dances with less muscle strain. Mandy spoke wistfully about going back to the country and finding a nice boyfriend. ‘I might even have sex with him,’ she speculated dubiously, as if that would be an untried experience she mightn’t have a taste for. Darren, who used to work in his father’s greengrocery, told me that at times in the Tunnel of Love a customer would ask him a question and he would almost call out over his shoulder, ‘Dad, do we have any Asian anal?’ Even Andrew, a red-blooded young male who might have been expected to be most vulnerable to the stimulus, was more concerned with finding exactly the right chemical to add to his bucket of water, so as to neutralise the smell while mopping out the cubicles. He didn’t know the word ‘neutralise’, though, so he used ‘antidote’ instead – not a bad choice to sum up what we all seemed to be hankering after.
To be honest, what I grew to crave most, working in the Tunnel of Love, was innocence, particularly sexual innocence, though innocence of any kind was fine. In the world of pornography, people were always pretending to be out in the woods for a picnic or to be employed to mend the stove, when really they were just hot for a fuck. In time, I came to feel the attraction of a world where people really did want to have that picnic in the woods, and where the stove-mending man mended the stove, tipped his hat to the lady and drove off in his van with maybe one friendly toot of his horn.
I discovered that Karen and I shared a love of children’s books, and this brought us closer together. I’d mastered the spruiking by this stage and knew what times of day to go out there and herd them in: George was satisfied to see the extra people shambling through the door and so he didn’t begrudge me the time I spent talking to Karen.
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br /> ‘Just don’t block her view of the shoplifters,’ he cautioned. ‘Some of these guys have got secret pouches down their fronts.’
Not wishing to spoil my chances of seeing such a marsupial being caught red-handed, I did as I was told, but even though I stood to one side of Karen, she always turned to look me straight in the eyes whenever we were talking, as if to prove she lived according to her own theories of communication. Or maybe she just liked me.
I certainly liked her. There was something very charming about this intelligent unglamorised woman enthusing about children’s books in a room filled with depravity of the most deceitful kind. She spoke affectionately of moles, mice and Marsh-wiggles to a background murmur of robotic cries filtering through from the cinema. She laughed her smoker’s laugh and was beautiful.
Looking back on one of these conversations one evening after work, I saw her as if she herself were a character in a classic children’s book: eccentric, delightful and yet dignified at the same time. I wanted more, and was suddenly inspired to take her out to dinner. I had her telephone number, though Karen had warned me she didn’t like telephones. In fact, ‘hate’ was the word she’d used. Once when Darren had needed to know something only Karen could have told him, I’d suggested ringing her, and he had smiled and shaken his head in such a way as to say, ‘Out of the question: I know better than to do that.’
I still phoned. Maybe it was the advertising man in me: I just couldn’t believe there wasn’t a way to sell someone an opportunity. Maybe I was in deeper than I thought.