By Roderick Heath
The third in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
When she was done with a client, Claudia would walk, feeling empty and hungry and lonely, enjoying the sense of money in her purse, the freedom, the knowledge she had bought her place in the world for another spell. She could march in any direction with confidence, hypnotise any man and any girl, and have herself for her self and whoever she wanted.
On this day there was a fair fresh wind waving in from the sea, shattered cloud rolling in, and the day had a dirty amber-etched tone. Claudia settled at an exterior table of the City Extra, under the Expressway’s vaults, having ordered a cup of flat white coffee and a slice of Chocolate Bavarian cake that looked fine under the glass. She sat and bantered with waiters and diners and slowly forked away chunks of cake and read the morning’s Herald. Though she had cleaned herself thoroughly before leaving Matsuo’s hotel room, she still felt a sheathe of divorcement from the world. It enclosed the heat of fine flesh and the smells and whispers that she carried into the evening cool and the grubby-toned days.
She took out Matsuo’s cheque and shook her head over it. She had friends, from university and from childhood, waiting tables, running the office photocopiers, temping, teaching, scraping by. She knew artists keeping themselves tawdrily alive, dole-cheque dilettantes, and here she was, for one night rolling with a pretentious Japanese prick, holding four thousand dollars worth of the Bank of Tokyo’s watermarked paper. The wages of sin? Merci fucking beaucoup. It could buy her the world. Tokyo, indeed? Perhaps. Matsuo’s suggestion was ripe. She studied, next, the card Matsuo had given. Joaquin Van Gelden, proprietor of the Red Curtain Club. A gentleman, not a sleazy pimp. Well, you’re a gentleman, Matsuo, but perhaps not all your friends are. I know many people that I like and would not trust so far as I might spit them.
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She could imagine feeling at home in Tokyo. Perhaps because she had lived for a time as a child on the steppes of George Street, by the edge of Haymarket, the busy stink of Chinatown and blue and green neon and gold gilt letters and dragons eyes and claws and burgundy red on the signs, and behind the doors and windows harbouring familial yellow glows, the dog-shit on the cobbles and the ripe pits of the old Paddy’s Markets. The warmth-infused scents of all the restaurants, her mother’s hand holding hers as they dashed and danced across the puddles, in front of cars, and on through the swirling night-throngs. The chrome and tile of the Dixon House and the cacophonous diners, Claudia six years old with hair in pig-tails and fleet feet, dodging through the clusters and eating from plastic trays overloaded with buffet take-away Szechuan food. She handled chopsticks with precocious skill. In every place her mother took her, elders all treated her like a precious object. The city spread webs of light and music of movement all around her head. She and her mother adventuring before heading home on the raging trains to fall asleep watching a black and white movie.
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. Now Chinatown was a gutted shell of its old self, all those elevated roads and off-ramps had exploded fully-formed from some engineer’s Escher-inspired id. By the Entertainment Centre was a good place to get mugged. Lower George Street still had that feel of a real city, with interlocked sub-cultures grinding gears, the blood-spattered sex-stained poetry of it all. How noir-perfect it felt to stamp heels upon the cement and drift like a fluttering bird and roll in the arms of greyhound-boned Chinese hipsters, droves of Italian muscle t-shirt boys who looked ready to kick queers and start kissing each-other, ersatz Harajuku girls and the baseball-capped hip-hop refuse crowding the game parlours and theatre foyers.
That was the nocturne land she stalked on the cusp of sixteen with her cum-hungry mouth and a rasped tongue. In her denim and sweaters, stamp-sole boots, her short-clipped hair concealed by a beanie tight as a skull-cap, her razored face of slashing cheekbones, jaw arcing to chin with lathe-cut refinement, and sitting like prize jewels singular in her skull, those angry eyes, watching the crowds like a cat sees a bird, as shredded feathers. The boys reeled and feared her and pronged her with counter-savagery. She was loose on the pavement and the summer slickness and the agonies of that age bled over her. She could hardly sleep or eat, nothing to do but escape into those hot filthy days and nights when they waited like vultures on the beams and rails and steps and stairs, and devoured each-other and wiped each-other’s grease across the brickwork.
Hanging with varieties of brigand, those that stole without mercy from the convenience stores, the lesser imps rolled drunks and kicked junkies; the hip-hop brats trying to articulate their manhood and successfully explaining their lack of it. The boys seemed to go mad with heat and flesh-hunger and the girls twitched and masturbated themselves silly. Claudia made them her friends, confidants, confessors, lovers, but they were incidental. She made her silent solitary way through the whirling white and shattered light of the evening, and settled at tables in the Mitchell Library and read her patient way through doorstop volumes, demanding a discipline of her mind that came with a protest of aching eyes and gyrating thoughts. She was stepping out of her intellect and back in again, for they seemed such schismatic worlds, this life of the mind and the language of the street.
That was a mean summer, but as a year rolled by and the next summer arrived Claudia had become a woman, stunned at her own prowess, with followers drawn together by her vigour and sexual viscosity. She was some latter-day Jeanne d’Arc leading the Wayside Chapel Marching Choir as they in skipped the roadway’s midst dodging the horn-protesting cars and riding the islet, mounted the statue of Shakespeare and recited their proud litany to the city’s vibrating eardrum. They danced in rich array of evening lights, the bulbs aswarm in the trees and the dresses dangled and swayed on the tiled walkways of the park and the fountains spat mercury trails as they would argue the world to a pinhead. The friends she collected with care, all slightly bruised but eternally electric. Proto-queers and spray-paint artistes and serial rhymers, the effluence of the affluent inner-city, runaways, fodder for the pimps and pushers and fancying herself the saviour. Her life was such a study in irony, she was attending a very good school raised like a sandstone bastion above the city, those schoolmates who came down to the street with her were often the highest, and those she met on the corners often the lowest. But theirs was a democracy of ridicule and worship of icons deserving one or the other, and all rejoicing in their city whether it was treating them swell or not.
All those days and so many of those people had bled away like the frost of morning, scorched by the heating sun, leaving her feeling like a lonely scarecrow standing in a very lonely, barren, cold, star-flooded field, listening for voices in the dark, as if she was keeping a home ready, but no prodigal sons or wayward daughters were returning.
The day was being sucked away by the oncoming front of cloud, the sun scrubbed to a pale oval flame, and Claudia felt fatigue gathering in her body and that mild depression that always visited when she fell into such reminiscences and idling through the map of her past. She decided to walk from the Quay to the Cross and realised as she was crossing the green of Hyde Park that the boiling cloud would soon break with rain but she decided to she could make the mile to her building, as she was enjoying the walk. The rain did however begin to fall, thick and translucent, as she was walking William Street, just at the cusp of the upward pitch towards the Cross. Instantly the heavy smoke-tasting air was flattened around her feet. Her coat temporarily rebuffed it from her body but her hair was quickly becoming sodden, trickling around her ears and cold down her neck and under the collar.
Claudia was not hurrying. She had been wet before and could not care. Her burning eyes required the cooling. She walked the incline of the grey cement wonderland splattering in shards and cars coughing out fumes hovering close to the road and diffusing amidst the droplets. There were turns through scattering pedestrians and twists through close-walled lanes in heading from the Darlinghurst Road towards her building’s back-lane entrance. The rain rattled cymbals on the rooftops and slid in sheets down the bricks walls laced by copper piping and guttering of fired clay that spread green streaks and bloody smears down the walls of white. Claudia, mascara beginning to drip black tears, approached the grey-painted door at the back entrance to her building, then there was a broad palm clutching her shoulder, spinning her about and a blind second’s rush of fear. Alec’s red-trimmed face thrusting in hers, his firm frame pushing her against the whitewashed wall. She was laughing as the rain slapped at them and he was kissing her.
“Oh god no,” her eyes clenched close as she swooned woozily against the brickwork. “No Alec, I can’t do it.”
“What’s wrong?” the man called Alec asked.
“I just can’t look at you right now.”
Alec released her and stood patient and grave as she remained propped limply against the wall, eyes shut and white face streaked with black of tendrils of hair and streams of liquid mascara.
“We weren’t supposed to meet until later.”
“We thought stuff it. What’s wrong?”
“I just felt like I came to the surface too quick. No decompression.”
Alec grasped her head then and placed his lips to her forehead. Claudia shivered. She had not expected to see him or feel him or anyone until she had shed her fetid day and his touch was raw and poisonous as a man’s fingers are to some breeds of fish. She tilted her head back and drew a breath of the cool wet air and let him kiss her again as the alley was filled with sounds of slapping feet and squeaking shoes.
“You better get ready, the rest of ’em are here,” Alec whispered in her ear.
“I can take it now.”
“Did you get as much off Matsuo as you hoped?”
“More.”
Ben and Isla, Candido and Tania, pounding around the bend in the alley, latching sight of Claudia and Alec, falling upon them, breaking them apart, lifting Claudia triumphantly on their shoulders and she was splayed out crucified as they turned with her and rode her screaming back down the alley, and they were singing the chorus all the way, hollow in that sound-shrinking space:
” . . . Happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Claudia . . . ”
*
The series:
Monday: She had come to enjoy, amidst the scattered pleasures of that line of work, the arts of dressing and painting herself for a rendezvous.
Tuesday: A modern woman in the oldest profession. Fifteen hours, four thousand dollars.
Tomorrow: A note of panic struck in her head as she realized if the photo appeared in a newspaper or any such place, her careful veneer of anonymity, vital to her job, would be endangered.
Posted on March 28, 2007