by Kim Westwood
She replies, just as intense, ‘What’s to explain? You’ve accepted Meg’s money offer. But the person I know wouldn’t work for that piranha under any circumstances. So who exactly are you?’
I feel the squeezing pain of having to withhold from the one I most want to confide in — and watch as a new thought dawns on her.
‘Gail put you up to it, didn’t she.’
My perspicacious girlfriend. Now she’s angry.
‘This is some double-play she’s cooked up, dangling you like bait to the wolf pack. She’s exploiting your loyalty! Have you ever thought you might be just a little too loyal?’
I don’t bother to say how I haven’t.
‘Sal, your hero is not all sweetness and light. Sure, she champions ethically made hormones and pays for the APV’s outings, but don’t forget it suits her for us to rustle the competition’s horses and put them out of business. She may have cleaner politics and better people skills, but underneath she’s as ruthless as Meg. You don’t have to go along with it. Say no to both of them before it’s too late.’
I’m reminded weirdly of the anonymous warnings. I never knew Inez thought any of these things.
It’s true Gail has my unswerving allegiance, but I owe her a debt I can never repay. She gave me a life, and I’m living it. Inez, though, feels locked out — injured that, after everything we’ve shared in our time together as co-vigilantes and lovers, I don’t trust her enough to say what’s really going on. But while this flushed and angry woman confronting me is smarter than I’ll ever be and can hold her own in all kinds of situations, she’d have no hope against Meg’s sly tactics and the heavy hands of Crusher and Snarl. I shudder inwardly. I have no hope against Crusher and Snarl.
‘I suppose you’re going to disappear, no explanation, from the APV too?’ My girlfriend fixes me with a withering eye.
I nod. I won’t risk Meg getting her hooks in there.
Inez pushes back in her chair. ‘I realise you’ve got a lot on your mind, especially now with Albee, but I gave you more credit than that. I thought you lived by a set of principles and weren’t just a gun for hire.’
I feel her every accusation go in like a blade, and can’t say a word in my defence. She gives me one last searching look in the hope I might tell her something to make it all better.
I don’t.
I watch as she gathers up her things, leaving for the APV meeting we should both be at. My last chance to plead for trust and forbearance has just slipped away, and I know in my already aching heart she won’t be seeking me out again. Gutted, I stare at my untouched drink. The exhilaration of new love, just two short weeks young, has been crushed under a heavy boot. Meg’s boot.
I glance across the dance floor to the row of cushioned alcoves. The curtains to Meg’s private space are drawn back. She’s been watching us argue from a distance all the while. I feel my jaw clench.
Before Inez’s arrival, I’d stood at Meg’s ‘office’ table and announced I was available for work. She’d looked at me through slightly narrowed eyes and asked, ‘What brings the change of heart?’ ‘Bills to pay,’ I’d muttered. Snarl had smirked — a contortion of her features I’d not thought possible. Meg’s hard gaze had stayed on me, but she’d nodded slowly.
The only thing to be gained from this sorry episode is that Meg already knows what Inez thinks of her, and seeing us at loggerheads will shore up her belief I’ve deserted Gail.
Crusher saunters up, her black tee-shirt stretched to its limits by barrel ribs and worked biceps. She claps me on the shoulder. This, I’m guessing, is a demonstration of her nicer, friendlier side. I feel the eyes of the room watching.
‘Girly trouble?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Never mind — plenty of others around with all their curves in the right places and their plump bits begging for a poke and a jiggle.’
I can’t believe I’m hearing such misogynist crap.
Crusher leans close. A terrible habit made even more excruciating by smoker’s breath. ‘Meg’s ready to give you your first job,’ she says. ‘Welcome to the club.’
I watch her shovel her bulk back between the couches, people looking up then away. She has nowhere to go but her boss’s alcove. Working for Meg has effectively separated her from any community she might have found here. Right now she doesn’t seem to care, but I wonder about later. Fate is good at flipping the tables.
I look down. Placed on mine is an envelope. Inside it are my pick-up and delivery instructions for the next day, along with the money that Crusher had failed to give me the first time round. I skol my drink and pocket the envelope, my only desire now to escape the claustrophobic air of the speakeasy.
It’s pretty sad. I’m drinking alone in a dingy sports bar in St Kilda, downing vodka slammers and wishing I could turn back the last several days and do them all again. I squint at my watch. Paul will be taking over from Ellie at Albee’s bedside now.
There’s no use dwelling on my shattered love life, or the dismal lack of result at Ferguson’s — except, being in my cups, I do: I give regret full rein. If I’d just said a flat no to Meg the first time, the question of working for her might never have come up; I’d still have a girlfriend, and every day would be the shiny and exciting thing it was before. I’d been a long time in the relationship wilderness before Inez’s warm presence wrought its magic on my life. Now she believes me made of flimsy moral fibre, and I’m afraid that even when she finds out the truth, it will be too late to restore the trust between us.
Crusher and Snarl leap unpleasantly to mind. How long before I turn into a cliché too? Couriering for BioPharm, with its reputation for being not quite cruelty free, will shoot to hell any credibility I have within the APV; just as the news of my association with Mojo Meg is going to oust me from my social circle as fast as if I were strapped in an ejector seat. I remind myself the change of boss is temporary, but secretly I’m afraid that once Meg has her constrictor grip on me, she won’t let go.
I place my hand over the refilled shot glass, bang it on the counter and take a fiery swig. The other punters — all three of them — are hunched over their drinks, not interested in their neighbours or the giant TV screen above us blaring an overwrought commentary on some blood sport with a ball. What a merry lot we make for the bartender, who’s busily sending phone texts and smirking at the replies. A love interest, I’m guessing. Lucky him. I raise my glass again for the last of it to dribble down my throat and cauterise my tonsils.
I’m an easy drunk. Normally, I’d be afraid of losing the faculty to choose between flight and fight; but tonight I want it this way. Let the alcohol leak its slow fog through me, acting on the plugs and passages of my heart, numbing them against the disappointment of forfeited love.
I lay some notes on the counter and steer myself through the door. Somehow I manage to cross the street without being run over before stumbling along the darkened walkway that leads to the sea. What was a sunny day has turned black and blustery and cold. Above me the clouds are being shredded like confetti in night’s stratosphere. Once, they might eventually have made rain, but these days they just mysteriously dissolve into the empty reservoir of the sky.
Ahead, the fun park’s smiley entrance menaces. I shudder, and move on to where St Kilda pier pokes a ghostly finger from the shore. Walking its weathered boards, I have to put one hand on the railing to steady myself. Past the bleak stretch of grey shoal beach to my right, I can just make out the beacons of the Tasmanian ferry terminal. There hasn’t been a ship for a fortnight — the ferry company’s licence revoked for shoddy maintenance and leaks in hulls. People will be rowing themselves there soon.
I stop at the end of the walkway beside the permanently closed café building, and consider scaling the chain-link to get to the observation tower further along the breakwater. From there I could throw myself into the sea. It’s an inviting thought in a cold, miserable kind of way. The ocean-dwelling predators, at least, would find n
othing to distinguish transgressive from normal flesh, loyal friend from traitor. For them I’d simply be a meal. Guess that’s why all the fairy penguins have gone.
The alcohol works its acids up my gullet. I grip the rail and hang my head, then give in to the inevitable and heave onto the rocks below. Wiping my mouth with my hand, I sag onto the ground, as full of self-loathing as I’ve ever felt. And think of my family.
The last time I saw my mother was eight years ago, shortly after she and my father got dunked in the municipal swimming pool, baptised in the spirit of Jesus.
She told me she always knew I would be going to hell.
They say blood is thicker than water, but the question that followed me through childhood — girl or boy? — thinned my own family’s loyalty and washed away their love. People stopped asking the question in my adolescence; instead, it became a silent accusation in their eyes and their awkwardness. My parents realised that calling me a girl and giving me girly things wouldn’t make me be a girl. And so they sat back and watched me careen towards uncertain adulthood, knowing I would never miraculously turn into a ‘normal’ daughter — at least not without institutionalisation and electrodes.
At sixteen I left school and home and found my way to a squat in St Kilda. I visited my family every once in a while. They tolerated me, but I could see they wished me gone. Five years later, with their panicked conversion to evangelism through Saviour Nation, they made it clear they no longer wanted anything to do with me. It pained them, they said, but it was better this way. Better for us all. The fact that I’d never even tried to behave as a girl had increasingly strained their sense of rightness and credibility with others, and now it strained their standing in the church community. All this had taken its toll on them. Why else would my father have ulcers and my mother hypertension?
I didn’t fight it; but to be excommunicated like that, at twenty-one, is to be made skinless to the world.
I think of Helen. It must have been hard on her to have a failed role model as an older sibling, and more times than I care to remember, the accusations would come at me like javelins: Why do you have to be so different? Why can’t you act normal? All that hurt and anger had been laid like a blanket over our history, suffocating the good and leaving only the bitter taste of blame. But a shared childhood grows deep bonds, and in some indissoluble way, she’s the one who knows me best.
I finger my phone. Being late on a Friday evening, Michael might answer. He’s like a Doberman protecting her from the likes of me. How ironic I’m the one who could help them achieve their long-sought miracle by fixing them up with the right kit from Gail. In their eyes, though, that would make me not only a gender transgressor and social outcast, but a drug peddler for Beelzebub too.
I tap in the number for Helen’s mobile. It clicks into a recorded answer, then her voice cuts in.
‘Hello? Sal?’
My number must still be in her phone.
Suddenly Michael is there. I hang on, stoppered by a paralysing anxiety.
‘You don’t call my wife. Ever.’
The line goes dead.
I slump, desolate. How will the rift between us ever heal? Last time I visited, Helen said if I came to her home again, she’d get the local chapter of Neighbourly Watch to see me off. Something in me broke then — something I’d clung to, deep down, despite all experience to the contrary. It was the belief my family would ultimately cleave to its own and accept me: that they would love me, regardless.
Inez once told me her folks wouldn’t care who I was or how I fitted into her life, as long as we made each other happy. On the strength of that, I began secretly to hope I might become part of her family — a late add-on to the Moran mob — because in my reality, it’s not blood that’s thicker than water, but the potentising qualities of acceptance and respect.
‘Take me home,’ I mumble.
The taxi driver turns and looks at me through his bulletproof bubble. ‘And where would that be, mate?’ He’s a grizzled fiftyish and has seen too many of the world’s woes.
I slur out the address.
He takes one last regretful look at what he’s let in his nice clean SEC cab, then swings the vehicle into the traffic lane, saying, ‘Don’t puke on the upholstery.’
I’m too spent to reassure him. Closing my eyes, I lean back into the smell of leather and disinfectant.
Home is where the cat is: Nitro, who loves me regardless of my shortcomings, and who welcomes me plaintively at the door, pressing for my attention, even if it’s just because he knows who fills up the bunny bowl.
I’m ashamed to say it, but out on the pier it wasn’t the pricking of my conscience over Gail and the EHg crisis or even Albee’s dire situation that had drawn me back from the brink. It was the thought of Nitro waiting for his dinner.
21
I ring Max in the small hours, too self-pitying to apologise for waking him.
‘Is it Albee?’ he asks.
‘No.’
He waits for the reason I called.
‘I have to take a leave of absence from the APV,’ I tell him. ‘And I probably won’t be contacting friends for a while.’
‘You alright?’ The concern is apparent in his voice.
‘Yeah,’ I say, heavy and unconvincing. ‘Just gotta do some stuff.’
‘The sort of stuff that needs a minder for Nitro?’
‘No — but thanks for asking.’
‘We’ll keep the porch light on.’
‘I’m counting on it,’ I reply, and feel the resurgent flare of an old warmth.
Max is referring to a ritual established in the early days when I first got to know him and Penny. Back then, seventeen years old and unable to find my place in the world, I was drifting between jobs, having left school early with no graduating credits. Gender-wise, I was swinging between extremes — and hating myself. Nothing worked. Nothing felt right. It was a canker in my spirit, a spreading necrosis eating me up. Then along mooched Ninja, the black tortoiseshell moggie, a scratched and scruffy wanderer who crept through my open window one terrible hot summer and attached himself to me like a familiar. It turned my days around. I finally had someone — if a little worse for wear — to come home to, someone to cuddle.
Max had a practice in St Kilda near where I lived. I met him then Penny because of Ninja’s penchant for street fights and regular need for stitches. I even ended up working for a while as Max’s part-time assistant to pay for the surgery bills. He said I should think about vet school, but I could never have afforded the bridging course and upfront fees.
Gradually, with Ninja and my job as daily anchors, the swinging pendulum that was my gender identity stilled around the midway point, and I began to make peace with the gender transgressive I was and would always be. Then, in the summer before the pandemic took hold, Ninja was bitten by a brown snake. Max saved my cat that day, but not three weeks later when fate put him and his envenomed reflexes in the path of a concrete truck. We had a ceremony, Max, Penny and I, burying Ninja in their leafy back garden under the plum tree.
My battle-scarred street cat was at rest, but I was a mess again. Max and Penny rescued my sorry arse from a few bad situations on St Kilda pier, reminding me I had an important place in their lives. That reminder was a precious gift: a no-strings acceptance, and open invitation to doss down in their spare front room anytime — hence the reference to the porch light. These days it may be more a metaphor, but it’s as comforting as ever.
‘Stay safe,’ Max says, and we ring off.
I go to bed, but I don’t sleep. I watch Nitro stretched out above the covers beside me glowing like a fuzzy nightlight.
In four short hours, I will get up and go to work for Mojo Meg. I will become a courier of BioPharm’s not-so-ethical products and, to all those I know and those I love, a turncoat, having bitten the hand that’s fed me these last seven years.
Prestige Couriers Inc is in Banana Alley, a service road running along the north bank of the Yarra at
the bottom of the CBD. The building is a set of barrel vaults sitting between the water and the railway viaduct. With a sauna and solarium one end and a gym the other, it’s mighty public, but there’s plenty of eye candy to distract the curious from the unassuming roller door that was once the rear of a nightclub and is now the workers’ entrance to a busy distribution hub. Day and night a bevy of cyclists spin in and out of here like helmet-clad worker bees, the legit business hiding a much more profitable sideline. Meg is a brazen operator.
Her premises take up the middle four vaults, each one extending from Banana Alley to Pilgrim Street and connected to its neighbours by archways excavated through metre-thick walls. The entire block of tunnels used to be where fruiterers stored their goods before market — hence the name, which has stuck despite the place going through several personality changes since. It’s only a matter of time before the zealots on Melbourne City Council’s renaming committee get to it.
My Saturday deliveries made, I wheel in, exhausted and cranky. But it’s not from the exercise or the close-of-trade traffic. It’s no fun being harangued by dissatisfied customers, especially the rich and snooty kind. Not trusted with the more exclusive clients, I’ve been put on beginner’s duty, delivering goody bags of pituitary tonics and do-it-yourself collagen injections, herbal pheromone mixes and libido boosters to the beauty salons along Chapel Street, Melbourne’s high-fashion row, and along the way doing more than my fair share of kowtowing to their vanity and niggling grievances. These are the people for whom ‘tightening their belt’ means a course of liposuction. Give me the Red Quarter customers any day. BioPharm does a roaring trade south of the Yarra, and Meg, as sole distributor, has the market sewn up.
I lock my bike in the rack between a fixed-wheeler and an all-terrain hybrid and join the queue of couriers dropping off their panniers along with any undeliverables. In the next-door vault, I open one in a bank of lockers and remove my street clothes — slouch jeans, hoody and lightweight hikers — then shower in a draughty cubicle, the brick curve above me coldly lit by light-saver neons. Seems Meg has decided the only heating her workers need is the internally generated kind. Leaving, I pass several others rummaging in their lockers or silently checking their bikes, everyone intent on getting away from the place as quickly as possible.