Beneath the Southern Cross

by Judy Nunn

  It was starting to look ugly when Bob stepped in. ‘Give him a break, Knocker, he doesn’t understand.’

  Bob explained the situation to Artie. ‘We go by rounds here, mate. It’s your shout, see? Your turn to buy.’

  Embarrassed, Artie bought a round of beers and left ten minutes later, but it had been an education. There were many lessons to be learned, particularly of Australian men and their drinking habits.

  Over time, Artie gradually discovered the places where the conversation was at its most stimulating and where he would be accepted. Indeed, where anyone could be accepted. He discovered the bohemian circle of Sydney.

  Amongst the eclectic mixture of artists, down-and-out writers, actors, journalists and general layabouts, there were two principal groups. The Push—colourfully garbed and outrageous, the Push drank heavily, played musical instruments, discussed literature and read each other’s poetry—and the Libertarians. More drab of dress and less aesthetically inclined than the Push, the Libertarians were more intense and, for the most part, politically motivated.

  Artie wasn’t sure as to the true value of either; there seemed to be a lot of talk and very little action. Their conversation, however, was stimulating and, better still, no-one cared that he was Italian. They were only too happy to listen to his views, to discuss, argue and endlessly debate with him. Artie liked that.

  There was another thing the Push and the Libertarians had in common—they were sexually promiscuous. In fact, sexual promiscuity seemed a prerequisite.

  Artie loved women, and it had been a long time. He’d visited a brothel on his arrival in Sydney, but he didn’t like brothels. In brothels, conversation was limited and, to Artie, conversation with a good-looking woman was part of the lovemaking process. Now, amongst the women of the Push and the Libertarians, Artie was offered a smorgasbord of conversation and sex, and he was only too happy to participate in both.

  He found it a little disconcerting, however, that the women appeared interested only in one-night stands. Some even preferred to remainnameless, which seemed to Artie a very clinical and detached method of engaging in a practice as intimate as love making. But it was the women’s standard approach that he found most unsettling of all.

  ‘Let’s fuck,’ a woman would say after they’d engaged in passionate discussion for an hour or so. ‘Your place or mine?’

  It always came as a shock to Artie. Not only the obscenity, but the usurping of his masculine prerogative. Couldn’t the woman have waited for him to seduce her?

  And when, after they’d made love, he’d try to arrange to meet her the following day, she’d become evasive. And when he saw her again at one of the regular hangouts, she’d be in earnest discussion with her next conquest. The pattern became somewhat predictable and Artie found itdisappointing, but he supposed he shouldn’t complain, not whilst conversation and sex were so plentiful.

  Tonight was different though, he knew it.

  ‘What is your name?’ he asked the woman seated at the bar. The Tudor Hotel in Phillip Street, a favourite watering hole for the Push, was one of the few hotels where the licensee allowed women to drink at the bar.

  ‘Red,’ the woman said, and she shrugged disinterestedly. Then he bought her a beer. ‘What’s yours?’ she asked.

  ‘Arturo. People call me Artie.’

  ‘Why? Arturo’s a beautiful name.’

  Artie was pleased, she pronounced it perfectly. ‘Arturo Farinelli,’ he said.

  ‘Arturo Farinelli.’ She stretched it out, rolling the r’s sensually, as if she was eating the words. She was terribly sexy. And beautiful. Copper-coloured hair, cropped short, framed the fine bones of her face like the border of a lovely painting.

  ‘So I suppose you’re a Scot,’ she said with a slow smile.

  They talked for a good hour after that, and when they rose to leave he noticed that she was tall. In her high-heeled ankle boots, she was as tall as he was.

  They went to the Greek’s for a cheap meal in the upstairs room where many of the Push gathered. There were people there they both knew, but she ignored them all and gave him her full attention. At first they talked about journalism; she worked for Smith’s Weekly and was as passionate as he was about the responsibility of journalists as the voice of the people. Then she asked about him, and she seemed so interested that Artie found himself telling her his whole life story.

  One o’clock in the morning saw them sitting on a bench in Hyde Park, looking at the Archibald Fountain, swigging from a bottle of wine they’d brought with them from the Greek’s.

  Artie could barely see Red in the dark, just her profile as she looked up at the moon. He placed the near-empty bottle of wine on the ground and, leaning towards her, his face close to hers, he caressed her cheek as she stared up at the sky. She turned to him. Her lips parted. They kissed. It was a thrilling kiss. Tender and sensual, and Artie was lost in the smell and the taste of her.

  When, finally, he opened his eyes, he discovered that she was staring at him. Then she smiled, her lips wet and luscious. ‘I could do with a fuck,’ she said. ‘How about you?’

  The moment was shattered.

  ‘No,’ Artie said, deeply disappointed. ‘I would rather not fuck.’

  ‘Oh?’ Red asked, surprised. ‘Why on earth not?’ She reached up and placed both of her hands behind his head. Her fingers entwined in his thick black hair, she gently drew his face to hers and they kissed again.

  Once more the sensation was overwhelming and Artie couldn’t help himself, he responded passionately. ‘However,’ he said a little breathlessly as their lips parted, ‘if you would allow me to seduce you, I would be most honoured.’

  She threw back her head and laughed, and there appeared no mockery in her laughter. It was a bold, delighted laugh, and Artie found himself grinning back at her.

  ‘What is your real name?’ he asked.

  ‘Kitty,’ she said. ‘Kitty Kendall.’

  They went back to his flat and made love. Twice. And she didn’t skulk off in the dead of night as many of the other women had. He awoke to find her still sleeping blissfully beside him.

  He studied her naked body in the early morning light, admiring the curve of her back and the arch of her hip and the graceful length of her thigh. When she rolled over and opened her eyes to discover him, propped on one elbow, examining her, she didn’t cover herself.

  ‘Good morning, Arturo,’ she said, then she, in turn, examined him, tracing her finger along his shoulder, down his arm, across his chest, over the flat of his stomach and the curve of hishipbone. And they made love again.

  ‘Why do you approach men the way you do?’ he asked as he lay sated, watching her light up one of her Turkish cigarettes.

  Kitty tossed the matches onto the table and flopped back on the bed. ‘What way?’ she said, exhaling and watching the smoke furl its way towards the ceiling.

  “‘Do you want a fuck?”, why do you say that? Is it to shock?’

  ‘No.’ She turned her head on the pillow and faced him. ‘It’s because I want to fuck.’

  Her answer was so simple, so direct and honest, that Artie knew he’d already lost the argument.

  ‘Couldn’t you say “make love”,’ he suggested lamely.

  ‘Why? That’s not what I mean. I mean that I want to fuck. I want to have sex, nothing more.’ Kitty grinned knowingly. ‘You don’t like us taking the initiative, do you?’ He shrugged, but he was cornered and they both knew it. ‘Come on now, Arturo, admit it.’

  ‘No, I don’t like it.’ She was being honest with him, she deserved honesty back. ‘I like a woman to desire me of course. But I like to make the opening move,’ he said a little defensively. ‘What is wrong with that?’

  ‘Everything,’ Kitty replied. She took another puff of her cigarette. ‘This is the age of sexual liberation, Arturo; women no longer have to sit around and wait to be asked, we can take the initiative, and some of us do.’

  He looked so serious. ‘I’ll make a
bargain with you,’ she said. ‘I’ll never say “fuck” again. Not to you.’ She sat up, stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray on the bedside table and reached her hand down towards his groin. ‘You and I will always make love.’

  Artie laughed as he took her hand in his. ‘We will not make love now,’ he said, ‘not for a little while.’

  Kitty Kendall had not really changed, although her parents thought she had. She was merely rebelling, as she had always done.

  When she’d moved out of the family home to live with a dubious collection of bohemian types in a seedy terrace house in the Cross, her mother had been deeply shocked.

  ‘They’re so drab,’ she said to Tim, ‘and ill-kempt. They look positively unwashed. What in heaven’s name does she see in such people?’

  ‘Well there must be something to them, Kitty’s an intelligent young woman.’ Tim had tried to defend his daughter at first. ‘And you must remember, my dear, that clothes do not make the man.’ He knew he sounded pompous and condescending, but he always felt the need to puncture Ruth’s ego when she behaved like a snob.

  Although he didn’t want to admit it, however, Tim secretly agreed with Ruth. Kitty had everything at her fingertips, why would she want to live like a pauper and mingle with a crowd like that? She refused to accept any money from him, and she steadfastly resisted any offer of help in finding employment.

  ‘Just youthful rebellion,’ he said to his wife, ‘she’ll get over it.’ But when Kitty tried to tell him about the Libertarians, their anarchistic political leanings, their belief in equality and freedom of choice, he could only accuse her of turning her back on life’s opportunities, knowing even as he did so that he was alienating her, and gradually Kitty had stopped visiting the family home.

  The truth was, Kitty loved her parents and didn’t intend to hurt them. But she needed to break away from the comfort and the restriction of her middle-class existence. She needed to be free of it in order to ask questions, to seek answers, even, possibly, to make a statement with her life. All the youthful, passionate beliefs the Libertarians appeared to espouse.

  But she was soon disenchanted with the Libertarians, particularly in their attitude towards sexual liberation. If the Libertarians were so devoted to individuality and freedom of choice, then why was promiscuity essential? They seemed to equate promiscuity with radicalism. If you slept with a different partner every night, you were a progressive thinker, you were living out a radical philosophy. Well, Kitty didn’t agree. The Libertarians were not liberated at all, she decided, they’d simply come up with a new set of rules.

  So she’d swapped her dark trousers and men’s jackets for bright scarves and an antiquated pair of ankle boots, and had begun exploring the Push instead, moving out of the seedy Kings Cross terrace into a decaying, two-storey mansion in Frenchman’s Road, Randwick, which she shared with eight others.

  She found the Push stimulating at first. They didn’t have the answers, it was true, but then she was rapidly discovering that no-one did. Those who gathered at the Stink’n Lincoln on a Saturday afternoon, however, to talk art, philosophy, occasional politics and much sex, were witty and amusing.

  The Lincoln Inn coffee shop, a converted cellar in a narrow, crowded lane near Martin Place, had become home to many of Sydney’s students, artists and actors, as well as the unemployed who pretended to be. From there they would gravitate to the Tudor Hotel and drink as heavily as they could until closing time. Then they’d move on to one of the many houses Push members shared, very often to Frenchman’s Road where up to twenty people might party until dawn before passing out on the mattresses and sleeping bags which littered each dusty room of the once fine mansion.

  As with the Libertarians, promiscuity was rife, but it was not mandatory. Many an affair was given time to blossom before it withered and died. So Kitty embraced her sexual liberation and slept with whom she liked, even falling in love now and then. Or, in any event, becoming briefly infatuated.

  One such infatuation was Lou. A tall, thin, aesthetic young man with a head of wild, long hair and an impressive beard, Lou looked like a biblical character. He wore a djellabah and carried a small silver snuff box in his top pocket from which he sniffed on the hour. He wrote passable poetry, refused to work and played the guitar in the back rooms of pubs in return for beer, cigarettes and meals which ‘tourists’, who found him colourful, bought him. The tourists, as Lou termed those who liked to gawk and to mingle on the fringe of the Push, paid as much for the intensity of his conversation as they did for his musical prowess, and Lou would happily talk for hours to those who had contributed enough to his wellbeing to be named benefactor.

  ‘My benefactor,’ he would say expansively in his rich, fruity voice when the fifth beer and a fresh packet of cigarettes arrived, ‘I thank you.’ And the tourist would glow with pride.

  Lou was the undisputed head of the Randwick Push, and when he set his eye upon her and decided that this newcomer was his, Kitty was flattered.

  ‘Red,’ he said as he ran his fingers through her thick, cropped hair, ‘I shall call you Red.’

  He read his poetry to her and taught her the lyrics to his songs. Kitty sang, her voice thin but not unpleasing, when he played in the pubs and, along with the free food and beer, they even acquired cash from time to time. Lou encouraged her to dress seductively and to flirt with the benefactors, which helped, and Kitty had the feeling he wouldn’t have minded at all if she’d slept with them, provided they paid well. Many of the Push women exchanged sex for sustenance or cash. So long as their benefactor was attractive of course, Push women were not whores.

  But the inevitable day came when more money was required, and Lou made a drastic choice. He was going to work for the Water Board, he announced, in order to augment the coffers of the Randwick household. The others agreed it was a noble gesture, and Lou donned a pair of trousers and went off to sign up as a Water Board labourer.

  He came home with his hair shorn short and his beard shaved off. They wouldn’t take him with all that hair, they said, those were the rules.

  Kitty fell out of love the moment she saw him. Lou had no chin. And furthermore, no crown to his head. Where was the fine, biblical figure? A pasty, characterless little face sat atop a skinny bean-pole of a body. How could she have been so deceived?

  She worried for a moment that her disenchantment made her shallow. Was she really that superficial? Well yes, she must be, she decided, and she dumped Lou immediately, shifting to a room upstairs and thinking no more about it. She was a liberated woman, superficiality was her prerogative. She was not hunting for a husband after all.

  Then one night she met Jim. Jim was a tourist and she normally avoided sex with tourists, but he was quite attractive in a beefy, rugby-playing way, and she was considering whether or not to sleep with him. The Tudor had closed and she’d taken him to Repins coffee house in King Street and he’d spiked her coffees, and the coffees of her friends, with the Scotch he’d bought at the pub. Jim was generous and affable.

  When he suggested they go for a drive, Kitty agreed. They waved goodbye to the gang and left, deciding upon Clovelly, where they could sit on the rocks and polish off the Scotch.

  But it was obvious when they got to Clovelly that a storm was brewing. There was an ominous stillness. Heavy clouds gathered overhead, and the night was unwelcoming, black and moonless.

  ‘Let’s sit in the car,’ Kitty suggested. ‘It’s going to pour down any minute.’

  Jim, however, insisted they walk out to the rocky headland which jutted into the sea. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure? We can always belt back to the car.’

  Kitty clambered over the rocks, stumbling in the dark, cursing him, but it was a long way home.

  They stood for a moment staring out at the black, still sea, the rockface behind them, and Jim put down the bottle of Scotch.

  ‘This’ll do,’ he said.

  Then he grabbed her. One strong hand behind her back, the other fumbling at
her breasts, he ground himself against her. ‘Come on, slut,’ he said, ‘come on,’ and she felt the rocks dig into her spine as he pushed her against them and started hitching up her skirt.

  ‘Cut it out, Jim,’ she said, ‘not here, we can go back to my place.’ Over her dead body, Kitty thought, any sexual inclination she might have had having instantly vanished. But the man was about to rape her, she had to lull him into a false sense of security. ‘Give us a break,’ she said as she felt his hand thrust between her thighs, ‘we’ll do it at my place.’

  ‘Oh no we won’t, slut,’ he rasped angrily, ‘we’ll do it here. I know your sort,’ she felt the crotch of her panties tear apart, ‘take a bloke’s money and then don’t come up with the goods.’ One hand at her throat, he pinned her against the rocks as he fumbled with his trousers. ‘Think you’re better than us, don’t you, you lot. Well, you’re just whores, that’s all you are. I spent a packet on you tonight, you owe me.’

  ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel, let’s at least make it enjoyable.’ Adrenalin was pumping through Kitty and her heart was pounding with a mixture of fear and anger. No bastard was going to rape her. ‘Here, let me help.’

  She put her hands on his belt and unclasped the buckle. He took his hand from her throat and undid his trousers, and that was when Kitty made her move. He was too close for her to knee him in the groin, so with both hands she shoved him in the chest as hard as she could. He staggered and, the trousers which had fallen to his knees impeding him, fell heavily onto his backside. It was all the time Kitty needed. In an instant she was across the brief stretch of rock and had hurled herself into the sea.

  He stood, horrified, pulling up his trousers. Then he walked to the edge of the rocks and looked out at the blackness. He could see nothing.

  ‘Oh shit,’ she heard him mutter as she shivered in the still, icy water. She’d swum clumsily around the outcrop, her clothes and her boots threatening to drag her under, and wedged herself into the rocks. She could see hissilhouette against the dark sky as she looked up from her niche.