by Sally Breen
The bar is a hovel for the nouveau riche, the perennially bored. They always think she’s a seller and when they ask about drugs Jade tells them about something else; she tells them about the cards. The Dealer and Jade buy a beautiful red felt table, round enough for eight. They buy the Dealer an expensive well-cut suit. She gives him manicures and ends up licking his fingers. They buy Jade expensive barely-there dresses, crystal-cut tumblers, an ice machine and a well-stocked bar. They host private parties at the top of their tower for people who like a high minimum. The Dealer shoots the cards and Jade shoots the juice. Slipping tablets into drinks, rubbing backs to distract. She invites a couple of girls from the bar and makes them over to help things along.
In the nightclub Jade lines them up and the Dealer sidles in on signal, presenting their card. A perfect match, a life that suits them. During the day they count the money they’ve taken and take a stab at making more. In the daylight hours Jade sleeps with the men from the card tables, in dark anonymous rooms, where they think the tryst’s a secret, and once is usually all it takes to scope out their houses, their credit lines, their wallets. They drop twenty grand on the Dealer’s table and then they want to drop their pants. The Dealer knows fucking Jade grants them some revenge but he doesn’t mind. He’d do it too if it paid but generally the women in the city are harder to sting. Any one of them rich enough to be an option, no matter how dumb she appears, will drop her pants well before she drops her guard. The men are easier. The Dealer finishes the job. Jade steals access codes, pin numbers, keys, jewellery and cars. And what can they do? Blackmail is a predictable but very useful thing. Besides, these punters have only got themselves to blame; they gave her the backstage pass.
THE DEALER
What’s this like? Jade asks me.
And she means her and me, and I tell her it’s like moving and eating and talking and thinking and fucking and drinking it all in at the same time. I tell her it’s like joy spread so big out across her and me that the world’s just bouncing off us. Like turning around in my own locked-down fantasy, loving and holding on to every minute; forgetting about the world, the rational, the staid. This is just like letting go, like no resistance or consequence. Like saying every word that comes into my head and not doing anything I don’t want to do. Ever.
And sleeping with her is like trying to catch a runaway train, like running towards something good, blood pumping with the joy spread out over my face. Kissing her is like holding something wild, like biting into a sultry and sweet fruit, one I’ve never tasted before, a fruit without a seed and I roll it over my tongue and when I swallow her the substance changes and it’s like static in my mouth, full of sharp corners and explosions and unexpected turns. It’s like eating everything I like all at once. Saturated with her and she is so beautiful I have to scream. And the feeling never ends, never drops down below ground level, always lands on high. And I think this is what God would want us to be: untameable and unstoppable.
This is what it feels like to be with her in the clean city full of hot salty breath, full of long languid lines and clipped-back surfaces, frayed on the edges with palm trees and a gold-embossed night. This is what it feels like to be with her, inhaling a pure white line, so crisp, so perfect it doesn’t sting. Like plummeting into an oblivion that feels right. This is Jade’s world, her Chinese-stone-of-heaven mind, glowing through the city like a sonic neon light. This is what it feels like to let go and lose control but to find a focus I never thought possible – honed in on sex and money and wonder, in the city that has no foci, no rules and no centre.
Jade and I are in a parallel reality. We’re not thinking about the houses, or the cars, or the furnishings or the pleasant things the money can buy us. We don’t need something to show for our time, something to make us feel better because we waste our lives in cubicles, in swivel chairs, behind tables and desks or pouring concrete to build the dreams of men.
No, Jade and I are cruising. We just came to play the game in a city where people come to unwind their minds, to let loose their bodies, and ours have completely unravelled. We know what it feels like to say no to the things we don’t want and to say yes to whatever our urges tell us. Not thinking twice, not looking over our shoulders, not considering our value or the next guy’s or thinking foolishly that anyone is innocent. Not remembering what our parents, what our forebears taught us save the things they left us by accident, our propensity for harm and displacement. We feel nothing but the sun and the fast car and this rapturous joy.
This is what it feels like to have Jade next to me, so different from Camille. This is not a love that makes me feel grand or noble or safe. This love feels like an iridescent gorgeous pain; like a crushing mix of excess and self-mutilation. Like a scratch you just can’t help but itch. This feels like the thing I’d do if I only had moments to live. Like being tickled till I cry, like laughing till I’m hoarse, like being cut till I bleed profusely and without shame.
How many times, Jade asks me, have you wanted to be free?
And this is what it feels like to do the things we shouldn’t, with no one left to answer to. Like doing something bad and looking into her eyes and seeing nothing but validation and desire.
DOUBLE ZERO
STATE OF PLAY
And what does this feel like to Jade? Jade doesn’t feel any different. This is how she feels all the time. For the Dealer, extrication is a novelty, a bolt out of the blue, an exquisite shock, and a sudden surrender. For Jade the fact he feels this is just an unexpected bonus. Now she’s got someone to fuck and run with.
Jade likes how he touches her, how he looks at her, how he moves faster now and without recourse. She likes bigger possibilities but being lovers doesn’t change anything. Jade is just the same.
Jade is driving alone, a tourist pamphlet in her lap, open on a page full of local attractions. In the right-hand corner a woman in a black and gold bikini is brandishing a gun. She has a headband on. Jade is driving to the place where you can shoot at cardboard people for a price. She is driving there alone because the Dealer thinks she isn’t.
Jade pulls up on the short, manicured drive, brand-new bitumen and low-level plants struggling against the salt air and the hot sun. Out of the car she can hear the sound of shots, of rounds blaring out, popping off in the distance, reminding her of her father and her home town. She recalls him shooting a lame horse in front of her and how she closed her eyes. She remembers calm afternoons watching the farm hands, young, slender, dusty boys cleaning guns and lounging on the long veranda. Happy and exhausted talk punctured by the sound of scraping metal. Kills left to die or brought home and strung up. She remembers a door propped shut by a long arm and she remembers fearing these things as a girl; guns changed men and they changed atmospheres.
The boys took no notice of her. She would listen to stories about killing out there in the bush where she couldn’t see them, where she wasn’t invited. In the houses the boys were quieter, more respectful, but Jade could feel something boiling underneath. Their control was just a code. An unspoken law. You never left your gun lying around in the house. You never pointed a gun at someone’s face. You never …
But here, at this shooting-range advertised in tourist brochures, the reasons and environments for violence are a little different. Here the measure of your manhood is paid for and controlled. Here you don’t own the gun.
Jade walks under a sign, ASA Australian Shooting Association, and pushes open the door. Inside, the shooting gallery is different from the ones she went to with her father. Back home the ranges had no walls and the men shot at targets under the sky. They walked in with their guns over their shoulders or wrapped up in stained wooden boxes and they walked out with them again. She would watch as they lined up, five by fifty metres, and cover her ears as the call was made. They fired together, six shots each, and then they moved up to twenty-five and fired six more. And again, at ten metres, alternating aims around wooden fire poles. At seven metres there was nothing to ai
m with and they shot ‘back alley’ style, gun held down steady and straight from the hip.
At this shooting gallery the distance is always the same. Here the roof covers them all and the surfaces are clean and unnatural. Here there is no meeting hall for members. There is a cafeteria blaring out music and large brightly coloured posters. There are boys and families and groups of tourists shooting for the fun of it down crisp, clean alleys, all identical and all running the same way. There are no guns for sale and no leaves on the floor.
HARVEY
In retrospect we figured out lots of things. Jade told me that she kept feeling dizzy, she’d get up and feel dizzy … She thought she might be pregnant, so she went to the doctor’s and came back and said she had to go for more tests, she’d got maybe a rare blood disease. She eventually said that her white blood cells were killing her red blood cells and that if the doctors couldn’t stop this, she’d die. She would make out that she was being brave and not want to talk about it, but on the odd occasion, when she did, she’d say things like: He actually said to me I’ve got a fifty–fifty chance of being alive this time next year.
She would say that she was going off to have this treatment, once a day or once every other day, and all sorts of things and this, that and the other.
She wasn’t taking any medication. Not as far as I know. The one thing I would say that did pan out sort of is that I don’t believe she was taking any birth control. I never saw, I mean, she would stay over at my place, four or five times a week, and I never saw her take the pill or use anything else. She reckoned she couldn’t have children. Which may be true, I don’t know. So we got together with some friends of somebody here about this illness because they’re naturopaths and all this, to try and talk to her, you know, they were worried about her and all this kind of thing, and she’d sit there and say all this … She’d have huge panic attacks, um, not panic attacks, I mean in illness terms. She’d slide down the wall going: It hurts, it hurts, stop it!
But then later she’d go out and get drunk and we’d then have big arguments because I’d say: Hold on, you told me the doctor said that you really must do this, this and this. Why are you doing this?
All these meaningless arguments … I was having rows with Jade ’cause I’d never met anyone, I’d never met any of her friends who she said were all here. She always had some excuse about it. But I don’t know. I thought maybe it’s because I’m old or something, she’s worried. She doesn’t want to introduce me to her friends, because it’s the age gap or whatever it is. But it started to annoy me. She had an answer for everything. All along in the relationship she’d say things like…Look, I don’t know what kind of people you’re used to going out with but I never lie…you know, and put this huge guilt trip on me if I ever doubted anything.
And then I became suspicious, not overall suspicious but thinking about it a bit, you know? I mean, she told me she’d only slept with one person. She’d been dating this one guy Weston, James Weston, for a couple of years, whose parents owned the property next door. They grew up together, very rich, a just-graduated doctor, played rugby for Australia B, all this kind of thing. On Christmas Day he sent her a diamond, a one-carat diamond from Cartier, asking her to marry him. She said no, she gave the ring back, but he wouldn’t accept it. In the end they took it back to the Cartier shop and gave the money to charity, forty-five thousand dollars. Um, I was pestered then for the next three months by the presence, the memory of this guy. Again we’d fight about him. He’d send flowers. He’d pester her, supposedly. And he was forever just, you know, there. I never met this guy, obviously.
Yeah … so she was sending the flowers to herself maybe, um, and all sorts of things. In an attempt to make me jealous? I don’t know. Maybe she might have been trying to live the life she might have had if she had married this guy. It’s hard to say. She said she had only ever slept with him because they had been going out for three years, and she was such a good girl and all this.
Eventually I got her to crack and admit to this one personal thing. We had an argument because like everything else I really struggled to believe that all this was true. I said: I bet you have …
And she said: No, I haven’t.
I said, I bet you have, I’ve just got a hunch. Tell me the truth or …
I had this hold over her at that time; she knew I was getting close, you know, and I was just trying to get her to tell me the truth about everything. I said: Look, you just tell me the truth, then maybe … But if you carry on lying to me…
And then she admitted: Okay, I did sleep with someone else.
It was some guy she said she met when she arrived. Nothing weird about that. She said it was just the once, just ’cause she was lonely and that she didn’t like it and that it didn’t happen again. I don’t know if she did sleep with anyone; maybe she just said it to shut me up. Um, then again, what’s the likelihood of her not, you know? Also, I would have thought it fitted in with the pattern. I got the feeling she desperately wanted to be liked by everyone. Which is why she would send thankyou cards and that sort of thing, just because she wanted people to like her. And normally consistent with that is that she would have slept around a lot. Again wanting people to like her and not wanting to say no and all that kind of thing. Then again, being as young as she was, if she’d been at home all that time out on a property somewhere, maybe she hadn’t.
STATE OF PLAY
Jade and the Dealer are watching TV. Jade flicks through the channels, obsessed with her aversion to settling for what’s on offer, on the selection, on the world, on him. A slogan, a cue-in for some movie, flashes across the screen. Life is hard, choose wisely. Jade’s in the mood to take everything she witnesses as a sign. The Dealer berates her indecision playfully, not really interested in anything else but her proximity, however cold she might be.
See what’s on free-to-air, he says to her.
Jade reaches for the other remote, leaning forward over his legs spread across her and the glass-topped coffee table which, the Dealer jokes, is nearly the same size as his whole apartment. His cheerfulness, his readiness to understand her black moods, to even enjoy them, makes the restlessness inside her worse.
The Dealer doesn’t have the faintest idea of what Jade’s really thinking or what she really wants.
Jade mistrusts the closeness of their bodies, their blood and flesh. She thinks lying down with people is an opposition to love. To her, the heart is merely a territory that bypasses the brain. To the Dealer, resting on her now is a comfort and something mildly exciting. A comfort that will build slowly, languidly, possibly to sex. To Jade, his legs just get heavier. She finds the gesture imposing, presumptuous, too familiar. Pinning her to the couch uncomfortably. His legs thrown over her. She doesn’t move. She puts up with the weight of him for the sake of maintaining her control. It is her thoughts that turn away.
Her attention is caught now by a familiar face on the screen.
At first the Dealer isn’t watching, he’s playing with the fine tendrils of hair that catch around her face, but his head turns at the sound of the voice. For a moment they are both silent. On the screen, in talk-show format, a question is put.
But you do admit your role in the affair?
Of course. But admission of guilt and feeling shame are two different things.
How so?
Well, most people, don’t they, fear exposure for something they’ve done because of the shame it might bring? The media, the media today, plays such a big part in the trial, the public circus. But they’re not acknowledging guilt, they’re declaring public shame. There’s no choice in that. Given the choice, the admission probably wouldn’t come.
So you’re saying you’re guilty but you’re exonerated in a way because you’re upfront?
Exactly.
Jade sits up quickly. Alert. The Dealer pulls his legs off her, frustrated, in mock revulsion. Not really angry yet, but wanting her back, wanting her to turn back to him. He says: I can’t stand
this, Jade, to hear him going on. Turn it off.
Sssh!
He looks at her. The little spark in her eye. He looks at the screen. The little spark in PJ’s too. The way he’s leaning back into his chair, comfortable, affable. Only a dealer or maybe a cop could pick the slight aversion of PJ’s eye, how it shifts under the lid as if checking sideways for who or what is coming. The Dealer can see it and also that familiar hardness, the blankness in his rigid face. He has to admit PJ looks sharp. Like someone died for the starch in his collar. The interviewer, frustrated but obviously charmed, pushes on.
Some people would say, though, that you’ve hurt a lot of people, that you’ve ripped a lot of people off. Both here and overseas. That you’ve made a career out of lying, and a lot of enemies.
PJ smirks.
Any fool can tell the truth but it requires a person of some sense to know how to tell a lie well.
The interviewer is quick.
I would never have picked you as someone who read Oscar Wilde.
Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it, mate? You should never presume anything. And it’s not Oscar Wilde; it’s Quentin Crisp.
Jade laughs, the interviewer laughs, the studio audience laughs on cue. Everyone laughs but the Dealer. He looks at Jade. She puts her hand on his leg in a vague gesture of complicity, acting like she’s completely unaware of how he’s feeling. He knows she’s buying PJ’s act. Knows she wants to suck the guts right out of him. The screen goes on.