Eight Pieces on Prostitution by Dorothy Johnston, Port Campbell Press Page B

pink.’
    Lake Burley Griffin’s just a lake and not a river; there’s no outlet to the sea. What if her G-string just goes circling round and round?
    Melissa has fallen asleep in her stroller, but Sophie goes on talking.
    â€˜At any rate, I pissed that Simon off. I’m sorry for your sake, but what a shitty father, eh. He would’ve just sponged of us, Missy. That’s what he’d’ve done.’
    So that’s it with Simon, she thinks. It’s goodbye to that. She thinks about changing the lock on her door and decides that it’s a good idea. She doesn’t have the energy for making plans right now. She thinks that when she’s feeling stronger, when she’s over all this shit, she’ll take Melissa to visit their house again. Maybe there’ll be someone there this time, maybe they’ll strike up a conversation and she’ll find out something about the history of the place.
    â€˜All in good time,’ she tells Melissa, staring down at her sleeping daughter and thinking, what if he’d hung around long enough for Missy to fall in love with him: what then?

Names
    My name’s Sandy, my parlour name. I answer to it now. In the beginning it made me laugh when some guy calling himself John said, ‘Is that your real name?’ I’d start to giggle. ‘Come here Sandy and let me kiss those pretty tits.’ They broke me up.
    I was nervous in the beginning. I repeated the patter over to myself in order to fix it in my mind; what Gail said about acting as if I had a purseful of money, being suspicious of questions, never going through the prices at the door, never saying the word sex until the client had his clothes off, until I was sure of him under my hands and he’d broken the law himself. And if he demanded to know, if he said, ‘I don’t want to waste my money, will I get a relief or not? saying no. Better to lose a client this way than take the risk of him being a cop. And another thing to remember: if he left his underpants on, or a towel wrapped round him after he’d had his shower, he was probably a cop. Cops had blue eyes more often than brown, Gail said. Cops fancied moustaches more often than not. Gail knew a girl who’d been busted by a cop lying on the table in a towel. She knew another girl who gave this guy an oral and as soon as it was over he said, ‘You’re busted’ and flashed his ID.
    If I forgot to go over these warnings every time the doorbell rang and it was my turn, I’d get slack and get caught. I wasn’t quick like Gail. I couldn’t think on my feet like Gail did. Gail used to say after a bad night, ‘You’ve got to be a split personality.’ She said it regretfully, but I was full of admiration for her. I thought that, if I could split my personality like Gail did, then I’d be okay. Gail often repeated this advice. Sometimes she said it the way another person would say, ‘You’ve got to eat breakfast if you want to stay healthy.’
    Gail was putting herself through university. She had a Commonwealth scholarship; as I’ve told you, she was smart. You could get a living allowance if you signed up for a teacher’s studentship, but Gail didn’t want to be tied down. When she’d finished her degree, she wanted to travel and then decide what to do with her life. That was another phrase she often used. She was always telling me I should work out what to do with my life. But for me, at that time, it was enough that I continued to exist, that I went on breathing in and out.
    â€˜Listen,’ she’d lecture me, ‘it’s us who exploit the men, not the other say around.’
    But if the doorbell rang when we were just about the switch the lights off and go home, she’d say, ‘Go on, do him love. You need the money.’ It would have been pointless to argue that she needed it as much as I did, that this was an excuse; for the