And a big warm fat and snuggly mullers and packers union of australia welcome back .
It's been a while since last we supped the hubbly bubbly together one and all.
Much has happened since last we met companeros and amigos, in our daily lives in our public lives and in the world at large.
We never stand still. Always grooving, always changing, always shakin' that thang. Always moving onwards and upwards, sideways and sometimes even backwards.
We are perpetual in our motion, yes.
Deep breathes one and all, and remember the cone of silence, that hit from the bong, that like gravity and oscillation, helps the world go 'round.
Today to get us all back in the mood, to refresh our perhaps jaded palette with the mpua's brief of creative endeavour, laced and spiced heavily with whatever our poison d'jour might be, we present for your edification and pleasure, a short work of creative fiction that knocks a fellows socks of, and demands to be read and re-read and read again.
Property
values. A short story.
I clean houses for a living. One
house each day, five days a week, Mondays through to Friday.
Twenty dollars a day plus lunch. Off the books. Cash in hand. On the sneak.
I am sixteen and living on my wits. Living out of home.
The last time mum bashed me I thought she wouldn’t stop until she’d
killed me.
Until I am dead.
So I’m on my pat malone by very mutual agreement.
An enterprising street urchin as in Dickens or The Great State of NSW. Ha ha.
I also collect the dole. It pays seventy two dollars a fortnight. I am
under eighteen,
and thus cost less to run than a grown-up.
It is Wednesday because I am cleaning for Andrea.
She’s a palliative care nurse who works the graveyard shift at St. Vincent’s in Darlinghurst.
She’s a palliative care nurse who works the graveyard shift at St. Vincent’s in Darlinghurst.
Her husband is always away on business when I enquire after him.
She has a nun like quality as she follows me about her house full of
gossip, direction and posh glasses of wine.
She seems a watery figure on account of all the grief and snot and shit
of the ever present dying and their loved ones is what I think.
She lives on the edge of Woollahra on the high end of Oxford Street. In a
three storied testimony to the privilege and pastoral grace of an older Sydney
Town.
I adore
cleaning for her.
She celebrates and she mourns as she
tends to our dead and dying-what’s not to love?
We always share a light lunch after.
She is grey
haired, narrow and fine. All weary upper crust vulgarity and snoot, delivered in
a delicious and genteel self mocking tone. I am certain that she shops for my
visits.
I am nothing
if not companionable.
And in my
situation it pays to be companionable.
I am young in
the world and I don’t really have a permanent residential address.
So it suits
me to be companionable and convivial and to take an interest in those around
me.
Steady as she
goes.
I also shop
and clean for a business man that I’ve only met the once, over in North Sydney.
A corner flat facing back towards the city with gob smacking views.
He leaves a
list, my money and a well rolled joint on the mantelpiece. Every week without
fail.
Suits me.
I work my
arse off for a woman who hoards, under the guise of being a second hand dealer.
She has two small kids. This one’s almost charity. It’s a once grand old deco
flat in the Eastern suburbs. I do what I can. I let her underpay me, knowing
that by the next visit it’ll be back to looking like a bomb has hit. She’s got
little children and I feel for the situation.
I inherit a
house through word of mouth. An ancestral pile in the upper echelons of the North
Shore. I am to iron sheets, t-towels, bolster covers and sundry linens, as well
as all the under stair chores that go with this house. I make lunch from the
fridge as I clean the remnants of the recent past away in the sprawling
somnolence and rich leafy silence of the trust funded classes.
I also clean
for a poof. A bull nosed terrace off Albion Street. He is not your average
queen. This fella likes the bondage and the discipline. He tends bar in an
underground hotel. He is the sweetest sharpest man I know, after my father. I
learn more from him, more than you could ever imagine, about valor and honour,
discretion and the sub texts of society.
His sexuality,
his very self, is against the law. His penchants and his peccadilloes, his
loves and all of his losses are illegal. He can be subject to beatings,
homicide, blackmail, vilification and gaol with no protection from the law or
judiciary. The polis and the bullies exploit where they can, and being polis
and bullies, they tend to get away scot free.
Not with
Harry though. He fights back and I am always thankful for the street smarts and
love he shows me. Together we unlock a codified world.
One afternoon
as I turn into Oxford Street after my visit with Andria, I buy a couple of
scratch lottery tickets, a newspaper and call in at the next hotel.
I invite a
man to pick me up. We play at seduction and an edited sense of self. He charms the
pants off of me from the word get go. He is older by a country mile.
Urbane and
suave and fun.
Attentive and
well tuned passes come between us.
Irresistible.
We share a late
lunch and he invites me to a motel. I say no to the motel, biting at his lower
lip in a kiss, and yes to a snog in the alley behind the kitchen.
We leave out
the back way and fall into a wall full of hungry kisses. Hands at each others’ clothes
and the ripe caress and rough graze of faces breathing hard hard pash. His cock
twitches against my belly.
I am weak
dizzy and knock kneed. I pull away a little, just enough to get some air into
this frenzy of heat pounding sex. We sit on a low wall and he lights a
cigarette.
We start
again. Fumbling our way back to the fierce spark of jolt and shock of bare
skin. His pinch of my nipple, his mouth
at my ear.
He is between
my legs, cold brick on bare bum, and o! He is in me as pulling me to him,
barely hidden inside our clothing and impropriety. Long slow fat kisses full of
tongue and teeth and moan and hiss of breath.
All this on a
Wednesday arvo in a back alley of the city I am born to.
We hold hard
of each other into cumming. Humping, rubbing, grinding and splitting kisses about
as subtle and as growly as can be. We clench and unfold in a sweaty embrace of
shiver and tease and taunt and feint, like the desperate grapple of boxers in a
clinch.
We start
again and again.
We collapse
into each other as our breath and a sheepish countenance returns amid some mild
exclamation and guttural murmurings. For a little while we burrow into each
other on a low white washed wall in an inner city lane as the afternoon shadows
grow longer.
He offers me
money to buy something pretty as we warm and cuddle and surrender to the residue
of lust and good will. I decline politely and end up taking it all the same.
Something
pretty has a nice ring to it.
I’ll tell you
this for nothing. Me having sex isn’t about being starving for attention and
affection in the face of a busy divorced mother and a largely absent dad. It’s
not a compensatory measure for her outlandish and unpredictable assaults. There’s
nothing remedial about it.
Sex wakes you
up to possibility and chance, to seduction and the occasional poor decision. I like to feel so alive. Like a cross country
run with kisses, sex is good for me. Me and me mates are what you’d call tri-sexual…we’ll
try anything once, twice, mebbe more, if we like it.
There are
overnight encounters and zipless fucks full of good humored affection and
ribald flirtations. I’m a free trade girl. I see far too many vultures and
chicken hawks in the prostitution and traffic rackets here in Sydney, to ever
get involved with pimps and agents and agents of the state.
A maze of squats exists all over the city and there
are people who are happy enough to put me up for a night here or there. I never
really sleep too rough or spend a hard night on the streets.
It takes a fair
whack of ingenuity and bonhomie to stay well clear of dereliction and despair.
My dad has a
tiny bedsit in East Sydney, off William at the very end of Riley Street. In
that hollow as it falls away under the sweeping neon and up towards the museum,
where working girls ply trade and witty insults.
Barbed
flatteries sing out among the mugs and punters, the slow crawl and promenade of
weekend traffic and passersby.
Cue Lou Reed
and walk on this wild side.
I like it when we visit. We go for dinner at
hole in the wall joints and no name cafes. He knows everyone. Quite the bon vivant the old man. For work he guards The
States’ treasures at a nearby gallery. I love him and what he does. I visit him
on night shift sometimes and walk the different rooms as we make his rounds. He
is armed and we travel by dim lighting and torch beam.
I learn some
of the secrets of his work as the gallery gives up some of hers. I am his guest
at major exhibitions and we make our entrance grandly pantomiming, through the
secret celebrity doors. It’s a fun way to see public art.
One of my
aunties will always take me in for a few days now and then. She feeds me up,
and I bathe dirt and road grime into deep hot tubs of bubbles. She passes on
books, clothes, scarves, thick socks, sage advice, cuddles and home loving
care. It’s like a holiday in normal land at her house. I like it, it’s restful.
I’d been
staying at my Nanna’s after Mum chucked me out. She lives in my Pa’s house, a
tall narrow terrace in the skinny back streets of an old factory town that
winds along the railway tracks. My grandfather moved out years ago. Moved in
with a distant cousin in the suburbs, we know her as Auntie Anne.
He fought in
the second war. These days he goes on lots of cruise ships, gadding about the
islands of the South Pacific, and brings back lairy souvenirs all the days of
our young lives. His service medals are in our toy-box from real early on in
the peace, and he refuses ANZAC and the RSL. He stopped marching on the day he
was de-mobbed.
I love being
back here and nanna seems happy to have me. We all lived here for a couple of
years after mum first left dad.
Nanna never
sleeps much at night. For as long as I can remember she has always slept away
the better part of the day, waking mid afternoon to pots of tea, her dressing
gown and a big bowl of weeties. She’s a great reader and has a gentle slow
papery way about her.
She can do small magic tricks and encourages
us to be silly when in her company. She always has lollies, butcher paper and a
drawer full of textas and coloured pencils to hand. She rolls her own
cigarettes and smokes like a chimney. She is mad for the housie and the library
in equal measure.
Nan always
says dryly that as a fact you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and
she chivvies us to always walk softly and carry a very big stick. Like
Nietzsche, she believes that what doesn't kill you can serve to make you
stronger.
She loves me
like no other and fills my head with stories of her younger days.
Her and the
other old ladies from the street play cards and gamble match sticks late into
the evening and it feels swell to be invited into their company. Nanna and I have
a good thing going on.
But my mum
and one of the other aunties have different ideas. I am given my marching orders and dismissed out of hand. They swoop in, move me on, and brook no opposition
from me and the old girl.
So I clean
houses for a living, mapping the new world as I go. Steady as she goes.
fini
There we have it reader mine, an epic tale of fun and street smarts and a tad heroic that protagonist, I'd dare to say. Here we must leave it, my mpua lovelies, 'till next time we meet. As we always warn at the mpua; don't drink drive-it's a washing powder.
*** The mullers and packers union of australia retains any and all intellectual copyright in this and all or any subsequent posts..The mullers and packers union of australia, also respects, acknowledges, and sources, to the best of it's ability, all and any other copyrights in play, that are used in the commission of the creative goals of the author and the mullers and packers union of australia, and all who sail with her. ***
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