by Steven Lang
Kelvin was talking about Carl when he handed her the joint, but she can no longer remember what he said. It doesn’t matter. She goes around the little table to be beside him. That is the important thing.
Except, of course, it isn’t quite that simple. She can make it next to him, into his warmth and smell – which from being disagreeable has somehow transformed itself into being him and therefore pleasant, satisfying, arousing – she can undress him, there, on the couch, she can let her hand, wide-fingered, drift across his chest and onto his belly, down towards the startling junction of his hips, his animalness undeniable, as is its effect on her. But it does not end there. The language they speak in this place is just as complex, more so perhaps, than that of words. She kisses him, he kisses her, his hands are on her body and, she thinks that it is a kind of meditation, this love-making, requiring concentration, not just a giving in to feeling, but a wilful seeking out. But perhaps it is just the dope, for her mind keeps wandering down vast historical/ philosophical paths, then back to Kelvin and his physicality, the hardness of his flesh beneath his skin, the hair on his legs, strong mountain-goat legs, the nest of his cock and balls, so admirable, his lips on her body like an insistent feeding thing, something that won’t be denied. He doesn’t seem to be prey to these ancient perspectives, unless, of course, as an aspect of his love-making itself, at which he seems so adept, so present, so original, such a strange description this last for an act which is, after all, the most banal, the most common. Old Jack’s little bit of exposed skin had told her that; that was the revelation she had on the steps of the store, not such a startling one but at the same time momentous. Her long-dormant sexuality had shown her that there is no division between animalness and humanness.This was where she, and so many others, with their strictures and scriptures, their obsession with transcendence, had made their mistake: thinking people were animals dressing up, trying to hide their true nature, failing to understand the meaning of love thy neighbour as thyself when thyself was constructed in the image of God. Human beings, she thinks, making love to Kelvin, already are their true nature, the covering and the uncovering both, all at once; there is nothing hidden, there never has been, it’s all out in the open.
The problem is that in the morning, driving him over the mountain, he is once again a chimera. She wonders, not for the first time, if he is a construct of her own imaginings. Was he ever there, did he really give rise to all those grand thoughts? She is not sure. That’s the stupid thing about dope. She can’t remember half of what the thoughts were, and what she can remember makes no sense. She places her hand on his thigh, feeling his leg through the thick denim, a solid thing.
fourteen
After that he went with Shelley whenever she worked. She no longer seemed to mind. He was her mascot, her protection from the jibes of the boys further up the street, from the things that might go wrong in cars.
The nights were hot and long. He sat in his doorway and watched the cars, watched her come and go. Eventually he grew bored.While Shelley was off doing tricks he stood at the kerb himself. A game, a dare. A car went past slowly, then came around again. On the third time the window slid down. He bent to look in. The driver was away across the other side.
‘How much?’ the man said.
‘Twenty,’ he replied, although for what he wasn’t sure. He didn’t care, it was more money than he’d ever had, it was what Shelley earned, and the man nodded and leaned over and opened the door, so he got in and when it was shut the driver made the window go up.
The man was wearing dark glasses and a kind of Elvis shirt, thick pale trousers with a perfect crease. The car seats were deep pile, there was deep pile everywhere, on the walls and the ceiling, along the dashboard, curved around the extra dials. The man was old. Lines on his face, grey hair. He was playing country and western on the radio; a funny-looking bloke, all narrow jaw and cheekbones, jutting teeth when he smiled. He drove a few blocks, stopping beside a park.
Kelvin wanted to do it right but didn’t know how. He sat, rigid, thinking about the money and how to ask for it while the man undid his pants, tilted his chair back and pumped at his cock to make it big. A strange thing this, a man’s cock, pale, thicker than he had imagined possible, with a sideways curve to it and a shiny purple head poking out from its rippled foreskin, veins on it.
‘Well, come on then,’ the man said.
Kelvin was about to reach out and touch it when the man said, his voice curiously high, ‘You like that, don’t you?’
Kelvin wasn’t sure. It was curious, this little bubble, the inside of the car, all thick and resonant with the shag pile and the music and the man with his cock, with the night outside so effectively sealed away from them like it was only television. The man reached out and grabbed his shoulder, pulling him down towards his lap with surprising force, pulling him and then pushing Kelvin’s face into his smell, the man’s cock against his cheek, the smoothness and hardness of it hot against his skin, the coarse hair in his mouth and nose. It happened so suddenly that his arms were caught underneath him. The man was holding him amongst it, and his arms were tangled in the handbrake so he couldn’t get away. He tried not to, but despite himself he started to gag. He could feel the sick rising in his throat. He started to cough and retch.
‘What the fuck?’ the man said, lifting him back up and pushing him away with as much force as he had drawn him down; throwing Kelvin against the door, his temple hitting the glass. He fumbled for the handle but there was some sort of lock on it. He put his hand over his mouth to try to stop the sick, the bloke sitting up now and shoving at him, swearing at him, reaching over to open his door and tip him out onto the road. Then he was scrambling to get away from the wheels before the car took off.
The park was a small green square with a view out over Woolloomooloo, with a kids’ playground next to a spreading fig. Kelvin pushed the carousel around, his feet thumping in the circled dust, running round and round and then jumping on, leaning out with his head back so that the lights of the bay below, the dark silhouettes of the buildings, the broad leaves of the fig tree, all flitted past, the speed of the spin lurching inside him, getting off and running again, then back on, sitting at its centre, perched on the apex of the cold rails, shiny with the hands of many children, letting it wind down.
It had happened so quickly. He had been chuffed at getting the ride. The inside of the car was great, cool, the soft seat, the dials, the music, the smell of it. He’d even liked the man. Kelvin hadn’t even minded the business with his cock, that was what it was about, wasn’t it? He could do that, it was only when the man pushed him that it went wrong, that he messed up. He’d have done it right if the guy had just given him time, he hadn’t meant to fuck it up. Everything he did fucked up sooner or later.
The carousel had stopped. He was cold, perched there in a T-shirt. He put his arms around his knees, doubling himself, a process of making himself smaller, not larger, hunched against the cold. It was time to go but he found it difficult to move.
At the squat no one was home. He borrowed some blankets and huddled on his mattress.
When she got back Shelley was mad. She’d been looking for him everywhere. One of the trannies had told her he’d gone with a mark.
‘What the fuck were you doing? I told you not to get in cars.’
He couldn’t speak.
‘What’s the matter now?’ she said.
‘I’m cold.’
She felt him.
‘No you ain’t.You’re not sick are you?’
‘No.’
‘What then? Did someone hurt you?’
She lifted his head so she could see his face, then she put her arms around him, Shelley, in her work clothes, smelling of cheap perfume and make-up and cigarettes, smelling of what she did with strange men, and despite himself he began to cry. He didn’t know he was going to cry and once he started he didn’t know how to stop, the shame of crying making him cry more, his head against the sequins of her dr
ess, he could feel his tears wetting the cloth and he couldn’t do anything about it, there were just these tears and Shelley with her arms around him, rocking him, not taking care, giving care, this girl who got in cars, who could do what he couldn’t.
But nothing in Sydney stayed the same for long. Spic moved away, to the mythical North, promising that he would send for them when he’d made good. Without him the squat was soon uninhabitable, subject to the predations of other homeless and even, eventually, the council. The other boys drifted away. A pimp called Daz picked up Shelley in a car and took her off to a quiet place where he talked to her and while he talked he weighed a safety razor in his hands. What he said was that he thought it would be a shame to ruin looks like hers, and allowed she might continue working, if it was for him. ‘And your little poofta friend and all. Not that I like that sort of thing. But if he’s working then it has to go through me. I don’t want to hear nothing else.’
He found them a place to live, a tiny house squashed between the back of two restaurants in Little Stanley Street. Generosity wasn’t his motive. He sat with a group of men at a little metal table outside the corner shop. Shelley’s business was vetted through him and she performed her services in the front room. Kelvin worked the Wall, albeit under some sort of protection.
The men in cars came in all shapes and sizes but they had certain things in common. Religion, something Kelvin was only vaguely familiar with, was never far from the surface. From the moment of their decision to let their cars steer them towards the Cross they were under the protective sway of desire. But, it seemed, the instant it was over they were once again subject to a harsher counsel. Often they turned on Kelvin, blaming him, calling him names, even, on occasion, asking him to get down on his knees with them and pray. Sometimes their vilification leaked over into the earlier part, their self-disgust so strong that even during the act they needed Kelvin to be the one begging for it. He went along. It was part of the deal. What drove the men was incomprehensible to him. He didn’t bother his mind about it. Even after Daz’s cut he was earning. The only thing he knew for sure was that until they came, the men were his. It was why you took the money first.
Glen Slattery was thick-waisted, short-legged, carefully and yet prissily dressed, wearing a toupee so glaringly obvious that it took on the force of a deformity; so single-minded in his spontaneous decision to follow his desire that he had not even cleared the passenger seat. Kelvin had to wait on the kerb while he moved the piles of books into the back. Several paperbacks fell onto the front floor.
It didn’t happen in the car. Slattery drove them to Newtown, hardly speaking as they crossed the city. Kelvin picked up the fallen books, checking their titles in the passing streetlights, placed them carefully on the back seat. They entered a musty building from a laneway at the rear. There were more books in the corridor, books and periodicals were stacked on the floor, on sagging shelves in the filthy kitchen, on the stairs, in the upstairs room where there was a bed; dusty piles of them in no seeming order.
When it was over, Slattery seemed to lack any form of guilt.
‘You like books do you?’ he said.
He took him downstairs to the shop.
‘You’ve come to the right place.’
Here was the epicentre of the smell that pervaded every room in the building. Slattery didn’t turn on the lights and so, at first, Kelvin was not certain what he was seeing; a pale light slanted in from the street and illuminated an impossible conglomeration of objects. Books and more books, on shelves, yes, but rough affairs that had been added to and then added to again, getting higher each time, spawning buttresses that stood out into the room, themselves filled with books, creating, by their presence, alcoves; whole sections devoted, Kelvin would later discover, to different areas of study. Right then he was still coming to grips with what he was seeing. In the limited monochromatic light the room distorted – stretched in places and shrank in others. Slattery let him walk amongst it, running his fingers over the spines as though the business of the place was not words but rather some sort of bathhouse, a bookhouse for bathing.
Outside, beyond the glass, buses and trucks, taxis, passed in the night on King Street. In the darkness of the shop he was invisible. There had been no books in his mother’s house. She had called her women’s magazines books, but even as a small child he’d known real books were something more. The first time they’d gone to the mobile library together his mother had let him loose in the children’s section. When she went to the counter with her pile he came with his own. ‘Take those back,’ she said, but the woman behind the counter, the same woman, incidentally, who drove the big bus, who had, therefore, a certain authority, said, ‘It’s all right, he can take those.’ As if it was the most natural thing in the world.
‘Take one,’ Slattery said. ‘Take a couple, no charge. No,’ changing his mind, ‘tell you what, if you like them and want more you can bring them back and I’ll change them.’
‘What’s that?’ Shelley asked.
‘A book.’
‘Really? Is that what it is, I’d never have …’ Jumping onto him and digging her fingers into his side, grabbing the book from his hands when he was distracted and then holding onto it so tightly that to wrest it back would damage it, turning and turning away from him, opening it at random and reading aloud, slowly, painfully, like a child in class, ‘… what is this? What’s a granfalloon?’ Looking at the cover, ‘Cat’s Cradle? Is this for babies?’
Now that there was just the two of them they hung out together in the afternoons. Shelley, it turned out, was fastidious. She liked to be clean.The tiny house had a tiny bathroom out the back, a cold place whose walls and floor were painted concrete, a hole in the floor for a drain that backed up when you spent too long in the shower. This last being attached to a gas-fired device they called the dragon. It was supposed to light itself automatically but the pilot light was faulty, it needed a match, a process that resulted in an eruption of flame. Shelley insisted on a shower before going to bed, dragging Kelvin in to light it for her.
Sometimes, at the end of the night, they would share a joint in the little loft room they used as a bedroom. Shelley always had stories to tell, about the marks, about the other girls, what Lola had said to Denise, what Denise had said back, who was in Daz’s favour, what another pimp had done to one of his girls. It was different along the Wall. The boys didn’t speak to each other, there was just Darlinghurst Road and the fig trees overhanging, the squashed fruit underfoot and the furtive looks, the constant eye out for the police and always the fear and the excitement of where the night would take him, the men it would bring with their need to look at him, to touch him, the softness of their lips on his skin.
‘I had one from Brisbane,’ she said. ‘Wants me to go up there. Says I could be an exotic dancer. Gave me his card.’
‘What sort was he?’
‘The usual, a creep. Lots of hair. Hair all over him, dark, like. Said I wouldn’t have to fuck. I reckon it’d be good, living in Brisbane, it’s hot up there, not like here.What d’ya think?’ She stood up and pirouetted around the room like a ballet dancer, on her tiptoes, in one of her moods. ‘I did dance at school. Pleeyays and all that.’ Standing with her heels together, toes pointing out, turning her head to the side like an Egyptian and bending at the knees for him. ‘Hairy, he was, like a fucking ape.’ Laughing. After the night’s work and the dope the only thing to do was laugh.
Kelvin had become attuned to her. He had learned to recognise the days when she was up, ‘hyper’ she called it, full of plans for this and that; and the other ones, the days when everything was woeful, when you may as well slit your wrists because nothing was ever going to be any better, there would never be a way out. He had learned to ride them both out. In the early hours they’d go to sleep, lying together on a mattress on the floor, side by side, touching only hands like brother and sister, like, Kelvin thought, Hansel and Gretel, waiting to be eaten.
He took h
er to Slattery’s shop. From the street, in daylight, it was dowdy, unattractive, the window displaying sun-bleached paperbacks and old car manuals amidst dead flies. There were a couple of little baskets in the doorway, almost blocking the entrance, offering romance novels for ten or twenty cents each. Inside it was just books, old books and the smell of old books, and of Slattery himself, nearly hidden behind the counter, smoking, marking up, with nicotine-stained fingers, the sales in a tall thin journal. Several people were browsing the shelves and a tinny radio was playing something classical.
‘Who’s this?’ he said.
‘Shelley,’ Kelvin replied. ‘My friend.’
‘Very nice,’ pulling two syllables out of the one in the second word. ‘So you liked the books?’
Kelvin felt the presence of the other people in the shop.
‘And now you want some more.’ He pointed along the shelves. ‘Try over there.’Then just to Kelvin, under his breath, ‘Come back after five, without your friend, and I’ll give you something else for your trouble.’
‘Queer as a hatful of arseholes,’ Shelley said in the bus back to the city. ‘And the hair. How disgusting was that, eh? Did you see the dirt? You wonder how people live like that, don’t you?’
Kelvin read the books. He read the ones Slattery gave him and the ones he chose himself and he went back for more. Most often he went in business hours, sometimes on the bus, sometimes walking. He liked to walk in the city, passing through the different regions, as separate from each other as different nations. Often as not he had money in his pockets, and a little dope in his system. Everywhere there were people rushing from one place to another, locked into some grind. He, Kelvin, was free to move around. On one of his walks a dog attached itself to him. It didn’t so much follow him as just choose to walk awhile beside him. Together they went the full length of Cleveland Street, crossing the lights at the railway bridge where Regent Street comes in, all the way up to Victoria Park. Apart from Shelley it was the closest he ever came to another being in all that time; this easy, unspoken sharing of an hour’s walk. There was, of course, Slattery, but Slattery was a special case. Some afternoons Kelvin would curl up at the back of the shop and read there. It never occurred to him to offer money for the books. It was the characters in the novels that he knew, not the people in the city he moved amongst, not even Shelley, who couldn’t go with him into the pages, he tried to take her but she didn’t see the point. She disapproved of his friendship with Slattery. She spent her days in the city proper, perfecting what it meant to be a woman, studying it in magazines and emporia. And if he failed to notice Slattery’s passion for him, the way he fawned on him, it was because that side of things was a different world. Kelvin had the knack of separating one from the other. If, on occasion, he gave way to Slattery’s desire, he did it for a fee. It was a transaction, not the payment of a debt. And it was none of Daz’s business either. Slattery was his.