By Roderick Heath
The first in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
Claudia Rossi had been working as a prostitute for nearly five years. She had come to enjoy, amidst the scattered pleasures of that line of work, the arts of dressing and painting herself for a rendezvous. It offered a sensation of transformation, of stepping out of her corporeal self, so badly washed by inconstant sleep, her menstrual cycle, her careening moods and psychic integrity. The bitter circles of iron oxide around her eyes spoke of burning herself in nightly arts of drinking and chasing good techno music. In her apartment, she began in the bath and scrubbed herself down until she had no smell, no dirt, just smooth and glistening skin, an embryo of possibility. Like all achieved simplicity and beauty, hers came from great effort and attention to detail. She read magazines and books on eroticism and icons of style. She found herself pulled to noir heroines, French starlets, waif singers, flappers. She was aware of her minatory charge of sexual ambiguity. Though her style was feminine, a coltish grace in the length of her body, her mouth turned a defiant pitch with an almost masculine tension. She could turn on all the girls and all the guys. Her eyes, black curves framing lucid green irises, were dreamy when still and studying, but sharp at the corners, curved and swinging with the efficiency and final intelligence of a sabre.
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Her look, always sleekly minimalist, usually involved a black dress, with narrow straps or backless and sheer. Below, black stockings, usually with elastic tops and sometimes girdle and suspenders, and she always found the reactions of clients to these very funny. She always took care with her hair, with its shade of deepest red, gathering it up in bun or fold with loose tongues. With cosmetics she liked to erase her face marked only by the sharp-angled cheekbones and eyes fielded by mascara, bordering on the mask-like. There was nothing fanciful or sluttish to her look. She could be any number of well-dressed women, and many a girl her age showed more flesh, yet there was care in her stride, intensity in her eyes, and pride in her spine, all of which made her entirely distinct.
She knew her physical faults and had learnt to conceal them. Her legs were superb, but her arms could look a touch fleshless. She had done her best to thicken them up in the gym, the type of exercise she usually disdained. Her skin was radiant with a tinge of Mediterranean colour, she had no need for the bogus sheen of a tanning salon or risking cancer on the beach. It shone with sand-coloured purity, buffed to a coppery glow on her shoulders and face. She liked to show it as much as possible without being excessive, her slim form and small bust made this easy. Her shoulders and back were architecturally sublime. Photographers and painters had paid her as a model. Her lustrous flanks in a backless red dress had been a splendid sight on a poster advertising a rave club, put together by an artist friend, festooned on many a door, lamp-post, and wall across the inner city for a couple of years.
When she dressed there was a sensual crackle that went through her as she hauled up the stockings and clipped on the stilettos she otherwise loathed. It had been her intention, in her borrowed guise, to gain the appearance of the sexual aristocrat, the most perfect edition of the nocturnal urban woman, her creation, her little triumph, and she melted away and she was no longer herself but some phantom wafting from the grates and grills. In the winter or the rain she liked to wear either her navy blue or blood red woollen coats. She liked walking on the street feeling precisely fashioned, imperious and unassailable. Equally, she never enjoyed taking the train for a job. It was bearable when she was surrounded by the lolling kissing kids and hipsters in their skin-tights and tourists of gabbling tongues in the early evening, but they reflected her solitude in such stark light she began to shrink. It became worse when the crowds were gone and she was within the metal cages, all rushing steel, white tube lighting bleeding brightness, the dark racing fear of the underground routes.
She could often not control her speeding breath until the train broke back above ground, where she could slow her rapid chest by concentrating on the cityscape. She saw high recessed windows in patches of homely orange, corners coldly painted by blue neon or burning under the sulphurous yellow, shattered cement, myriad crannies, the splendid filth of the city that always turned its ugliest, most honest face to the rail lines. She considered buying a car to avoid her dislike of the train, but that just seemed to entail an endless number of nuisances. Garages, parking fines, petrol, licences. A friend had suggested she buy a scooter, but Claudia could not overcome her belief no-one ever looked dignified on a scooter. She liked to walk. It was easy, gave exercise, and for most of her twenty-four years her life had been entirely cordoned within an area five-miles-square.
Catching trains, however, was necessary for her work. Her furthest regular client rendezvous was in North Sydney. That was with Frank Tipping, who drove an Alfa Romeo. She liked that car as he would pick her up always from the coffee shop that was their arranged meeting place, and drive her to his place near Manly Beach. Men like Frank Tipping amused her mildly, bored her often, and there had been a lot of them at the beginning. They were unfulfilled and felt themselves entirely deserving of fulfilment. So much money and so little visible character, the deposits of shapeless fat on cheeks and chin, the clothes bought and worn with style-less style, the amiable talk perfectly self-content in its lack of content. Men like Frank were manna for the entrepreneurial call-girl, but she had divested herself of them as she became more successful, except that Frank too had become more successful and less happy.
Claudia was aware how lucky she was, and also how much energy and intelligence she had expended in developing her talents. But it was still ridiculously easy for her. Most of the ghost-eyed, foul-mouthed girls from the pavements or the over-eager collegiate rent-makers or the disinterested iron-jaws never had such luxury. But there was also skill involved, and she was a snob to that degree. Early in her career she had met johns in McDonalds and pubs. Climbing high she had come to know the value of meeting in good hotel bars and lounges. It added to the atmosphere and you could also meet possible new clients, but that demanded care. She especially liked meeting in the Hilton Hotel bar – until that closed for renovations – three or four good cafés, and several locations at Circular Quay. With regular clients usually she went directly to their places.
There was another reason why she did not dress too noisily. Waiting in such places, someone with half a brain noticing you were clad in several hundred dollars’ worth of designer stuff would have you clocked immediately as a rich show-off or a pretentious whore. She alternated meeting places as much as possible, but inevitably she had become known by some people. There were concierges and bar managers easy to please with a few dollars. Others were difficult. She had never bestowed a favour on someone for the purposes of pacification. An hotel manager had once attempted to wrangle a blow-job out of her when he had announced he was onto her game. He had trouble sitting down for some days afterwards. Claudia was not afraid. There was nothing on her person that could prove a charge, nothing that gave anyone the right to arrest, assault, eject or abuse her. She had no reason to submit to bullying, coercion nor any of the thousand forms of degradation available. Everything was done with the miracles of the electronic age. The mobile phone was the most important aid to this profession since the invention of navies. Except when it came to payment. That, as ever, had to be immediate and in cash. Like everyone else in the country, she was avoiding to avoid GST charges. She did not accept cheques and credit cards, but did take traveller’s cheques.
Tomorrow: A modern woman in the oldest profession. Fifteen hours, four thousand dollars.
Posted on March 26, 2007