The Girls

by Chloe Higgins

My father used to be the strict parent.

  He isn’t anymore.

  My father is there when I need him, and not there when I don’t. Once, he shook my shoulders to try to wake me up to myself. I was screaming and crying. It was just before I went into the psych ward after the accident. I don’t think he knew what else to do.

  Mum said, ‘Maurice, do something!’

  So he did.

  I still don’t think he knows what to do with me. I have to make him stop paying for everything or remind him to tell me the truth and not what he thinks I want to hear. But maybe this is also why it’s him I speak to when I need to talk about something difficult.

  My mother is now the strict one, the direct one. But she’s the one who is there for us emotionally. The one who picked Dad and me up off the ground so many times that she’s never had a chance to fall down herself. I have been her whole focus these past eleven years, and she has been watching very closely.

  What if she blurts out something I can’t bear to hear?

  12

  The first time I meet Am and Seth, I am still working with Tilda. It is early 2008. I am twenty years old. It is Saturday night. Tilda and I are sitting in the lounge room of the house she rents. I’m watching TV, waiting for her to organise a booking. The families walking around Sydney Harbour on the screen feel so distant. I cannot imagine, anymore, being carefree and content in the company of my family. I still live with my parents but avoid spending time at home.

  A woman named Amelia calls, her voice husky and intoxicated. She speaks in a slow drawl. It’s intriguing.

  I speak into the phone, holding it a little away from my face so Tilda can lean in to listen. Loudspeaker is either not yet a thing or not a thing we think to use.

  Amelia pronounces her full name, and I smile as she explains the gig: they are a couple, they have red wine, and a large back veranda overlooking a leafy garden. Their kid is staying at a friend’s place, and they are looking for a woman interested in seeing her and her husband together. I become aware of the heart in my chest. I’ve never slept with a woman before.

  ‘We’re both good-looking and fit,’ Am says, and I think it amusing that a client would point this out, as if being attracted to them is necessary.

  Later, when I am living with them, she tells me, ‘We saw your ad in the paper, and I knew you were the one. I had this feeling you were meant to be in our lives.’

  ‘They’re in the Eastern Suburbs,’ Tilda repeats, when I hang up the phone. ‘I’ll drive you there and wait out front the whole time.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. What else do I have to do on a Saturday night?

  Tilda has a soccer-mum black SUV and the collision of worlds feels incongruous: the back seat riddled with lunch boxes and school books, the space at my feet in the front concealing a handbag packed with lube and condoms. We have trouble finding the house in the dark. By the time we arrive, it is almost ten. Eventually, we pull up outside an old stone-brick terrace, a thick chimney jutting into the night.

  There are a few streetlights, but not enough to get rid of the darkness. Up ahead, the suburb’s main street crosses to form a T. It is well lit and music floats down towards us. Jazz, I think. It feels fitting. I know nothing about jazz.

  ‘Get the money first,’ Tilda says.

  I almost roll my eyes at her. I’ve watched enough hooker films by now to know this. But still, I am nervous; it is my first outcall.

  The screen door is shut and through it I can see a floorboard hallway running up to the edge of a lounge room. A slick brown leather couch and, a little further, glass doors opening onto a back veranda beyond which there is a jungle of ferns, trees and potted plants. A child’s bike leans against the fence. I’ve never seen anything like it. I am used to neat suburban homes, built within the last decade, all shiny plastic and ugly curtains. I knock and, over the French music playing inside, I hear footsteps coming up the hallway.

  A man comes to the door, gives me a hug hello, lets me in. I follow his lightly gym-honed frame up the hallway, into the lounge room. It is strange to think that within the hour, this man will be inside me.

  ‘This is my wife, Amelia,’ he says, gesturing to the woman spread out on another couch, hidden from view from the front door. He forgets to introduce himself, until I ask for his name.

  ‘Seth,’ he says, and reaches forward to shake my hand. He moves in short, sharp bursts. He seems awkward in his body, and there is something gentle in the pauses between his movements. He must be in his early thirties.

  Amelia is dressed in a purple lace nightie, her nipples protruding through the top. She rolls onto her stomach to look at me, and I see her G-string underneath.

  She’s wearing stilettos. The kind I could never pull off. I am already enamoured with her.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ she says, as if meeting a friend of a friend brought to a dinner party. ‘Sit down. Some wine? Or would you like a cigarette?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ I take a seat on the couch. I’d watched a show once about a high-class call girl not drinking on the job, to keep things professional, so I follow this lead.

  Here, my memory holds snippets:

  Amelia smoking a cigarette on the back veranda.

  A high heel in one corner of the lounge room, her purple lacy bra, his lanky penis.

  Amelia making sighing sounds in the bedroom.

  Red wine in fishbowl glasses, left on the retro coffee table. Bookshelves covering two walls of their house.

  A white leather bed, clothing strewn across the floor—theirs, not ours from that evening.

  Later, when we became lovers, they will tell me: ‘You stayed longer than you had to.’

  A few months after our first meeting, Am and Seth have become regular clients, and I’m no longer working with Tilda.

  One night we are doing what, by now, has become our usual boozy-talking, staying-way-over-paid-hours thing when Am and I go out for a cigarette. Seth stays inside, relishing the solitude. He is not a fan of Am’s smoking. They’ve been together twelve years, and she’s been smoking longer than that. He tells me he used to try to convince her to quit but now he is resigned to the fact that she will do whatever she will do, regardless of how he feels about it.

  Am and I are sitting on the back veranda, half-naked; she’s telling me her theories of social welfare and justice and the perils of housing commissions. I sit there, listening and inhaling my cigarette until I say, ‘I’d take a housing commission flat if it meant I could get out of home.’

  ‘You can stay here for a bit,’ she says. ‘Do some babysitting.’

  I take her statement literally. I’ve met their only child—eight-year-old Harry—a couple of times, when I arrived early and his babysitter hadn’t yet picked him up.

  That night, I drive home feeling excited. It does not occur to me how much this will break my mother’s heart. I’m so excited I can barely sleep and instead spend the night packing. First, a milk crate of books. Second, a milk crate of clothes. Then a milk crate of toiletries and odds and ends.

  My mother is vaguely familiar with Am and Seth. She’s never met them, and does not know the full extent of what is happening, but I tell her I have a regular gig babysitting their son. The next morning, I tell her I am leaving, and she begins crying. ‘Where are you going?’ she sobs, standing at the front door as I pack my three milk crates and hairless dog into the Peugeot my father bought me for my eighteenth birthday.

  My mother chases after me if I step away from her. My father is noticeably absent from these memories. He waits for me to come to him.

  I try to play down the situation to calm her. ‘Mum, it’s not a big deal. They just need some extra help with the babysitting so I’m going to stay there for a bit.’

  ‘When will you come home?’ Still, the tears.

  ‘I don’t know. Soon. It’s not for long.’ I give h
er a hug, tell her I love her. Get in my car and drive away.

  When I arrive at Am’s house, she answers the door. Her eyebrows shoot upwards. I am standing with my three milk crates and a cage with my dog in it.

  ‘Thanks for having me,’ I say, as she lets me into the house.

  We are sitting on the front veranda one night, chatting, smoking, drinking red wine. By now I carry my own packet on me at all times. I am telling her about how confused I feel, about life, about my parents, about my work. She is a haven, to me.

  She says, ‘All these feelings you’re going through—not everyone does. Very few people have such realisations and that’s what makes us special.’

  A man approaches the front yard and leans across the letterbox. I have seen him asleep on the main street, stretched out on a piece of cardboard.

  ‘It scares people,’ Am continues. ‘It’s not that normal people don’t like us, they just have no idea where we come from.’

  The man’s clothes are frayed and unwashed, a thick beard covering half of his face.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ Am calls out.

  ‘Do you have a spare cigarette, ma’am?’

  ‘Of course,’ she says, and pulls three Camels out of her pack. Her body is eager for movement, her hand gestures large. As she stands and takes the few steps to the front fence and the man’s waiting face, it appears as if she is bounding, pushing up into the air, floating down with each step.

  ‘Do you have a light, ma’am?’ he asks.

  She lights his cigarette, he disappears and we continue our conversation. She bounds back towards me. As I watch this unfold, her presence is so large, so surreal to me, that her body is a vacuum for my attention.

  ‘How do you know other people don’t feel this way?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m a genius, you know,’ she laughs.

  I come home to see my parents once a week.

  The first time I visit, I bring Princess with me. I let her onto the floor, and she runs to my mother, who leans down and says, ‘Princess, why are you so scared? What have they been doing to you?’

  Theirs is a life unlike anything I’ve seen before. Am and Seth sleep in until eight and I take Harry to school, or I sleep in and they take him to school. Seth walks up the main street and returns with three flat whites. They each chew the edge of a piece of toast, Am watching the news on TV, Seth spread across the dining room table with his newspapers.

  Out west, I don’t know anyone who reads the papers besides my grandparents. I certainly don’t know anyone who leaves the house to get coffee.

  Afterwards, they climb into a cab, head off to their separate workplaces in the city. Seth is high up in a Commonwealth agency, and seems to work all sorts of hours. I don’t really understand what he does but Am tells me he spends his days deciding the future of our country. Amelia is a consultant in the corporate world, and talks about using her position to fight for social justice issues. On the side, she writes. She’s had pieces published all over the place: online, in print, on a photograph a friend of hers took (who then scratched Amelia’s words into the corner of several prints). This blows my mind: she is the first writer I’ve ever met.

  Sometimes, one of them is away for a few days, off at some secret meeting (Seth) or attending a conference at some exotic location (Am). Then I have the house to myself for a few hours. And what a house it is. Stashes of marijuana and Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, tubs of fancy cheese—sometimes mouldy cheese—in the fridge, a big leafy backyard in which to read and fill my diaries and listen to Nina Simone and stare at the blue, blue sky.

  Around two thirty in the afternoon I have a last smoke and walk down the road to pick up Harry from school. We walk back the long way, stopping to eat cupcakes at a cafe, or go the more direct way but stop by the park for an hour to kick a ball around or jump off the top of the slide onto a discarded mattress on the grass.

  His favourite place to visit is a cafe that serves more than fifty varieties of tea to customers sitting on cushions and listening to soft, lyric-less music. I think about opening my own tea shop–bookstore and for a while daydream about renting a vacant shop. It does not occur to me what a huge—and difficult—commitment this would be.

  Harry tells me about his day, and about his future: he’ll be a famous actor or a space explorer. Sometimes we visit his other babysitter, Clara, who looks after Harry when I am working at Graeme’s. Harry plays with Clara’s son while we drink tea and I start to feel like an adult.

  When we get home, I cook dinner. Sometimes, if it is a weekend or we are out of food, Seth drives up the street and picks up plastic containers of butter chicken, dhal and paneer naan.

  Out west, we only ever eat Italian or Chinese.

  Harry reads and then sleeps by eight thirty, and then Am, Seth and I watch TV, or Am and I sit on the back balcony smoking cigarettes and joints while she tells me who she saw and where she’s been that day.

  We fall into bed by midnight—them in their bedroom, me on a mattress in the study—and sleep until we wake to repeat it all the next morning.

  On weekends they give Clara some money to babysit and we head into the city. We watch k.d. lang perform ‘Hallelujah’ barefoot at the State Theatre. It is the first time I’ve seen anything live that isn’t Top 100 pop.

  We book a hotel in the city and smoke cigarettes into the bathroom vents before going out again to gay bars, where Am and I dance on each other—our legs intertwined as we gyrate up and down each other’s bodies, our hands in each other’s hair, on each other’s arses and thighs and hips as one of us turns to push our backside into the other. Later that night, Seth tells us how much it turned him on.

  We take ecstasy and sneak into the botanic gardens and have sex on the grass in the dead of night. Afterwards, the gates are locked and we have to balance on garbage bins to climb over and hope the spikes on the fence don’t pierce us.

  Through all of this, Am tells me stories of her life. Her father was often absent and couldn’t remain faithful to her mother. From when she was very young, Amelia was hungry to escape. She wanted to be a writer and in those days, she tells me, all the writers seemed to live in big cities so she moved to Sydney. She did degrees in international relations and communications, and eventually the company she was interning for began paying her, which then became the consultant role she now holds. Throughout all of this, she continued to write on the side. I am in awe of the life she’s built for herself.

  She gives me pieces of advice:

  ‘Don’t mistake yourself for the person sitting next to you.’

  ‘You can tell a woman’s entire history by her shoes.’

  ‘The real crime in the prosecution of prostitution is that the women are persecuted and not the men.’

  Sometimes, I read small pieces of my diaries out to her and say, ‘One day, I’m going to write books.’

  ‘I know you will,’ she replies.

  (I wonder if she realised my first book would be, in part, about her?)

  ‘Why, Chloe?’ my mother asks when I tell her I’m heading back to Am’s after a visit to my parents’ house.

  Am has just had another piece published, and I want to celebrate with her. I don’t know how to tell my mother Am is the first person who makes me realise the possibilities in life.

  When Am gets home, she goes out to the back veranda and smokes two thirds of a joint while I watch Harry inside. She leaves the remaining third on the chair for me, then comes in and spends an hour reading to him in bed.

  In his bedroom, Harry is part laughing and part telling his mother to grow up as she tickles him into bed. He is on the threshold of adolescence, still moody and demanding, but also maturing and refusing some of the games he used to play.

  That afternoon, as we were walking home from school, with Princess on a leash beside us, we stopped to let her poo on the grass by the footpath. When
I realised I didn’t have a plastic bag with me, I left it there. A lady from behind sped up, overtook us, and turned around to shout at us: ‘It’s because of people like you that we all have to step in dog poo!’

  Her voice was loud and full of anger, and in my shock, I froze and did not respond.

  As she walked away Harry turned to me, touched my arm and said, ‘Don’t worry, Chloe. She’s obviously got other things going on in her life that are making her angry.’

  I adore this kid.

  I leave the warmth of the lounge room and walk out to the balcony. Pull up a chair, put the joint to my lips, light the end, and inhale. It is winter now in Sydney. There is steam rising off my mug of hot chocolate. The rain is drizzling down. It is cold, but I am rugged up and in my socks and coat and scarf, the hot drink in my hands and cool air against my face. Everything feels just right.

  I read for a while and when Am joins me, I tell her, ‘I love this garden.’

  Am sourced the plants and stone from a place out west that sells recycled trees, stone, timber and garden furniture. When they first moved in, the backyard was an empty pit. Little but dirt and dead grass.

  ‘We transformed it,’ she told me when I first arrived. She and Seth had slabs of rock hauled in, bamboo and eucalyptus trees. They built a mini-waterfall. Hired a landscaper to help design the pebbled path and lighting.

  Am lights another joint, inhales and offers it to me.

  I take it, and say, ‘Do you ever feel bad, smoking around your family?’

  ‘It allows me to relax and focus on the most important thing—my son,’ she says.

  That June, my parents move house.

  Seven months before the accident my parents had bought a 2.5-acre block of land fifteen minutes away from our quarter-acre-block childhood home. ‘You girls are getting older and we thought you might like your own bathroom,’ my father said when I asked why we were moving.

  In the end, I really do have my own bathroom. The house isn’t finished in time for me to share it with the girls.

  Dad wants to move the entire contents of both girls’ bedrooms into the new house. He is responsible for the heavy lifting, the transportation. Mum is responsible for the packing. When Dad is not looking, Mum and Aunty Lol put half of the girls’ stuff in the throw-away pile. They hide it before Dad notices. When Mum unpacks the boxes assigned to the girls’ new rooms, my father doesn’t seem to notice the extra space in their closets.