By Roderick Heath
The second in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
Appointment at the Sheraton by Circular Quay. Walking the rim of the Quay studying the colour-daubed veins of the waving black waters, Claudia felt the harbour had welled out to flood the city, all the gleaming lights were the polyps and phosphorescent shoals and glowing-gutted fishes, the night wind swam upon her like the current, swooning as in inky dark, tendrils of human limbs thick and enfolding as the long wavering weed. The Rocks rose in twisted Georgian lanes and vaulted terraces of glowing sandstone and dew-bleeding granite. A white cruise ship sat with sharp thrusting bow and elephantine lines at the Passenger Terminal. In Campbell’s Cove a tethered sailing ship marked the beat of the tide with the creaking of its intricate rigging. The black arch of the bridge rode the gap of water with ribs of light, the spot-lit pedestals. The Sheraton in a half-moon of earth-coloured brick and gold-stained glass. Everything was alight and perfect and the people looked successful and seemed to be enjoying themselves. Some were setting off for voyages or had just arrived from them. They were drinking with fine-looking friends and eating within the silver and brass of the tourist restaurants.
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Claudia parted the foyer doors of the hotel, walked into the bar and ordered a glass of Cabernet. The bar was staffed by a young bloke with a ponytail and designer stubble and looked like an actor. He offered up to her a plate of hors d’oeuvres, crackers with foie gras and camembert. Claudia ate quite a few as they talked movies until a ruck of businessmen reeled in with noisy matey cussedness and demanded the barman’s attention. Claudia took her drink and a paper plate with several hors d’oeuvres to sit at a lounge facing a low-set table, next to a window with a view on the Quay. She had her black leather purse, which took all the tools of the trade. She opened it and looked at her pack of cigarettes. She wanted a smoke and wondered if she had time to go out for one by the railing where she could drink in that revivifying acrid harbour stink of salt weed and diesel scent. She decided against it and remained sipping at the Cabernet which was good and tart on the back of her tongue and with the hors d’oeuvres she was rapidly filling on this indulgence.
Matsuo Nakadai. He wore an Armani suit in dark blue with a burgundy tie with his initials stitched in gold. His English was authoritative, lacking any distinct accent other than a slight lisp. He had a smile that cracked pleasurably from his business mask, and with three or four whiskies he became jovial and put himself at ease. He settled down before her with his luminous eyes in his dark face speaking of the finer forms of torture. She had never quite ascertained what he did as a businessman, and she did not care. She only cared that he seemed to be paid obscene amounts of money for it, never stayed in any city longer than a week, and was always to be relied on for a long session followed by a large payment.
“Good evening, Claudia.”
“Hello. I’ve told the barman to bring over a scotch on the rocks when you arrived.”
“Single malt?”
“Glenfiddich. I know what you like.”
“You always drink red wine. I remember that. Rosso for Miss Rossi.”
“Good for the heart.”
“Very good. You are Italian, aren’t you?”
“A very little. My mother’s father was Italian, Pietro Giancarlo Rossi of Parma.”
“So you have your mother’s name? That’s interesting.”
“I could have had my father’s name, but my mother didn’t want me owing him an identity.”
“Complex.”
Matsuo, at this point, thankfully disengaged from the subject, sighed and his eyes rolled up in their sockets and his lips formed a tight seal. He did not say a word until the drink arrived. The young barman gave Claudia a harbouring smile as he turned with the empty tray under arm.
“How long has it been, six months?” Matsuo asked, his eyes returning.
“Eight months. Just before Christmas.”
“Oh yes.”
“Are you staying upstairs?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like meeting in the same place as where we’re going.”
“I thought it might save you some effort.”
“Sure. It’s no hanging matter. Unless a concierge catches us. Then it’s still no hanging matter but it is a pain in the ass.”
Matsuo smiled. “I’ll say you’re my fiancé. Think they will believe this?”
“Who knows.”
“You look edible tonight. Like a little black kitten.”
Claudia bared her teeth: “Thank you. You look pretty splendid yourself.”
“Your teeth are very fine. Did you have them fixed as a kid?”
“No, they’re all chipped and uneven if you looks close. I am Claudia au naturale.”
Matsuo was not pretty, his face was deeply pock-marked, tough, yet fascinating and attractive in that specifically Japanese way. There was a solidity to his face, a lordly tautness to his shoulders, matched by an athletic ease in his hips.
“You don’t have to seduce me with compliments, by the way.” Claudia suggested, tasting her wine.
“No but I like to. That’s what’s good about you Claudia. A man could think he is with a girlfriend.”
“Well you’re an easy man to love Matsuo.”
Matsuo laughed like rattling ice cubes in a glass. “Maybe for my money I am.”
“That always impresses me about you, Japanese guys I mean. You take the best and leave the rest.”
“A bit like yourself, eh?”
“Sure.”
“We have an ethos of connoisseurship. And also an inferiority complex. Japan had two great shocks in its history, both involving American war machines. We discovered to our complete surprise we weren’t the greatest thing in the world, and both times we did our best to make up the gap. So we sent ourselves out in the world to bring back the best of everything. The best clothes, the best food, the best machines, the best naval ordinance officers, the best computer technology, all that sort of thing. What is the best, how to make it, how to better it, to make it for ourselves, that’s our passion. The problem is each time it is our success that ruins us. We get too big, too fast to support it all. First the great Japanese Empire from China to New Guinea, then the great Japanese economic empire from one side of the globe to the other. Always that bubble made to be pricked. With the Americans it is the opposite. Their cowboy quality gets them in trouble all the time but it also, ah, makes them poised to pounce on a chance. Australians are balanced. You have a wealth of common sense.”
“Yeah, our common sense makes us successful,” Claudia countered. “We dig up everything our country has and send it to you guys or the Yanks or the Brits so they can think of what to do with it. And then we sell it back to ourselves. If you call the English a nation of shopkeepers we’re a country having a garage sale. We don’t like risks and drives into the unknown.”
“Is good.” Matsuo nodded. “There can be terrifying things in that unknown. I grew up in Nagasaki, you feel that shadow everywhere. You’re a rare girl you know, taking interest in all these things. I don’t mean that how it sounds, just, not many people I meet have such a large sense of things. Especially in business. You’d expect otherwise. I know people who deal in thousands of lives, the fate of countries often, but the most stupid unimaginative people are in the corporate world.”
“I’m a modern woman, Matsuo.’ her mouth curled wry “in the oldest profession.
“A contradiction.” Matsuo nodded in delight.
“Not how I see it.”
“How do you see it? I am interested, please.”
“Well, I had a lot ideas when I started, like, ah, why shouldn’t I be a female stud and do all the men I want and be paid for it. But I realised that was pretty silly after a while. The truth is, I’m a lazy bitch and I just want the money and occasional good lay. Now, are you getting an hard-on?”
“Oh yes.”
“Good then why don’t we go to it? How long are you going to want me?”
“I haven’t decided yet. I quite enjoyed the last time.”
“So did I but I can’t do all weekend. I have to be somewhere tomorrow evening.”
“You must go when you must go. But let’s enjoy ourselves until then.”
Matsuo was a commanding but slovenly fucker. He threw aside the covers and rolled in effulgence, body heat and fluids, smoking and drinking, reducing the world to a sphere of flesh and dirt like some warrior ancestor, resplendent in post-combat orgiastic rite with a geisha. He had once paid her enough money to clear the last of her university debts and her rent the next month besides, to spend a weekend with him in such a manner. He hated modesty and insisted neither of them cover themselves at any point until it was time to leave the womb of the room. Most customers were usually slightly nauseated by body-reality once that carefully applied sheen had been unsheathed, broken, punctured, exhausted. Matsuo was not happy until he was lounging in naked nothing.
He usually drank either very good scotch or sake, and kept bottles of both by the bed. Claudia had come to like sake in this way and felt damn sophisticated drinking it. Matsuo was a good man to be with and she would have considered him that without the money that he gave so ebulliently. He had a comfortably impressive cock that she appreciated, though she was never a size queen. He was unusual in many ways. He had no programme for her to follow and she had to experiment with his flesh. She was very talented in that way. This is why he liked her and always hired her when in Sydney. Matsuo reeked like an unwashed dog and so did she after a short time, especially if they had both been smoking and that acridity was mixed in with the sweat and sperm and spit. In the light soaking saffron through the drawn orange curtains and the waves of sun slipping through the cracks and painting patterns carpet and the sound of cleaning maids trundling trolleys past the Do Not Disturb sign. Close-the-world-out embryos wallowing on each-other.
“You’re a lovely girl,” he would titter, sprawled on his back and smoke whistling from his nostrils trailing for the ceiling, a hand stretched up and running fingers between the knobs of her backbone; ‘ Why aren’t you married?”
“Oh, shit.” she giggled, sitting naked on the end of the bed watching the cable television and flinching at his touch, “You ever hear of independence, Matsuo? I’m an independent girl. I’m not interested. Yet, anyway.”
“No pretty boys?”
“Now and then.”
“Girls?” he teased.
“Now and then.”
“Ah! I like that.”
“You would, wanker.”
“You don’t want to settle, huh?”
“No.”
“Smart girl like you, why you do this?”
“I like the money. Sometimes I even like the work.”
“You should go to Tokyo, you know. Become a hostess in a club. Good-looking girl, good talker, do very well.”
“Got any reliable contacts? One contact’s worth a lot of talk.”
“Certainly. One man I know, Van Gelden, he runs a club. A gentleman. Not some sleazy pimp I assure you. I’ll give you his card later.”
“I’d like to see Japan.”
“Have you been outside Australia?”
“I went to Paris last year.”
“I was in Paris in . . . Nineteen Eighty-Six.”
“Business?”
“No. Do I look that old? I don’t. I was a student.”
“What were you studying?”
“I can’t remember. Anything. Eventually I had a degree in advanced economics. I hated every minute of it.”
“You do well enough.”
“Certainly. So do you.”
“I’m a bohemian. Does Japan have those?”
“Oh of course. We just like to make sure we have a name for it.”
“Are you married, Matsuo?”
“Yes. With three children. But we have little to do with each other.”
“Why?”
“I don’t fit with them. They do not fit with me.”
“You seem pretty calm about it.”
“No. But we get over these things. Whether we want to or not.”
He resumed his placid cat smile and closed his eyes.
“Someday I think you’ll marry either a very rich man or a very poor man.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You seem that type, I don’t know.”
She started sucking his prick about this point to shut him up. Good to her word she declared the session over at noon and he asked what he owed her. He had taken out his book of traveller’s cheques.
“How much do I owe?”
“Fifteen hours – four thousand.”
Matsuo nodded minutely as her wrote the figure down.
*
Yesterday: She had come to enjoy, amidst the scattered pleasures of that line of work, the arts of dressing and painting herself for a rendezvous.
Tomorrow: Those were very good times for Claudia to remember because the world was so rich and she did not know some things that later she would know too well.
Posted on March 27, 2007