LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

and curling into the foetal position. I suggested he take her to the lock-up but Jamie shook his head in the negative. ‘We have a new bloke down there who wouldn’t see it our way. He’d insist on charging her.’ I looked at her bloodied face. ‘What with, for Christ’s sake?’ I asked angrily. Jamie raised his eyebrows and gestured towards the dresser beside the bed. A couple of little plastic bags sat on the top, a residue of clear crystal meth still visible inside. A little laugh. ‘Take your pick,’ he said. ‘Drugs, prostitution, you name it. Look, mate. I can’t stick around here all night and I’m worried she’ll overdo the drugs if we leave her alone.’ He didn’t finish the sentence. I knew what he was asking. I told him I’d stay with her till she started coming out of it and he thanked me. ‘I don’t want a stiff on my watch,’ he half-joked. Jamie was a good guy. He could have just left her and plenty of blokes would have.

      Jamie and the other copper walked out and I was left with a cup of hot sweet tea and a half-conscious prostitute. She was sleeping on her side on the bed, her back to me. I tried to rouse her, offer her a cuppa. Her instinctual response was anger. She roared at me to get fucked so I just left it alone. She rolled her back to me again and drifted off to sleep, snoring gently. I looked around the room. Bare. Hardly a piece of furniture in it save the old bed and a faded chest of drawers and dresser. No photographs. No art. I stepped into her bathroom. It was filthy. I checked the cabinet. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Panadol. A small bottle of prescription drugs. A condom packet. I walked down the hall to the tiny kitchen and found myself a chair. I took it back into the bedroom and made myself comfortable beside the window. I took my wallet and mobile phone out of my pockets and put them on the window sill and after a time I drifted off to sleep.

      I woke an hour or so later to hear the woman sobbing. The room reeked. She had defecated herself. Gagging, I tried to take her jeans off but she was still half asleep and half drug-fucked, her arms and legs flopping, head lolling, as I dragged first her trousers down her wasted thighs, then her underpants. I left her sprawled on the bed, naked except for her t-shirt, about as sexless as nudity can get, and threw the jeans and knickers into the bathtub, closing the door on the smell. I couldn’t bring myself to clean her any more so I drew the sheet up over her naked arse and returned to my seat. Dawn soon. The sky was turning to pale grey. What a life. Hers and mine.

      I waited until about 8am and then shook the woman awake. The drugs were wearing off but her face was still a mess. The blood had dried. Her eye was bruised. She looked at me bleary-eyed but, accustomed to finding strange men in her bedroom, she exhibited every emotion except scared. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ she demanded angrily. I told her. She seemed unimpressed. ‘Get me a wet towel,’ she ordered so I went to the stinking bathroom and found a towel, ran it under the tap and returned to the bedroom. She was standing by the bed still naked from the waist down. ‘What the fuck?’ she said, palms up. ‘You shat yourself,’ I told her. She took the wet towel and wiped her bloodied face, glancing at me as she did so, then she cleaned between her legs as if I were not in the room. She looked alright in spite of the beating so I took up my wallet and phone and told her she should see a doctor. I told her she should take better care of herself, trying not to sound patronising but maybe getting the intonation wrong. ‘Get fucked,’ she said. There was no point sticking around now so I said a simple good-bye and made my way back down the hallway leaving the woman to her soiled pants, her drugs, and her cheap painted toenails. As I closed the front door behind me I paused to roll the aches out of my shoulders then made my way through a dim morning to the taxi rank. It looked like rain. It was only when the taxi pulled up outside my home and I tried to pay that I found that the hooker had stolen every note in my wallet. It had been one of those nights I guess. Just one of those nights.

      * * *

      The night after my session with Donald and Mary and we were talking about giving it up to God. This time it was prayer group. Tuesdays. 7.30pm kick-off, usually over by 10. We always started with twenty minutes of song – up-tempo religious numbers with a funky rhythm, all played out in my lounge room to the accompaniment of a tambourine (Caroline with the bucked teeth) and an acoustic guitar (Caroline with the armpit hair). I was an understated preacher by all reports. I ran the Tuesday prayer group but I used to try to take a backseat. During the singing, I’d sing along. In spite of everything, I must admit that I quite liked the songs, but when the singing stopped and the time came for me to speak, I found myself doing so less and less enthusiastically. Actually, I did it totally without enthusiasm. They used to misinterpret my reticence as a sober shyness. They were all plain gullible come to think of it but they were nice people I suppose, for the most part. I suppose.

      That night, I hadn’t prepared. That had been going to happen the previous night but Mary’s bottom had put paid to that, so I just sat in front of the room of assembled faithful, groin throbbing gently with the memory of Mary, and spoke to them of generic God-things. He’s kind. He’s all-seeing. He’s just and forgiving. My words were punctuated with ardent muttered amens from the congregation. Not African-American gospel amens. We were all white-bread Australians of the essentially Protestant ilk, with a smattering of recovering abused Catholics in our midst, so we didn’t go in for the really big amens. Not on a Tuesday. That was for the youngsters in the Sunday services.

      For a preacher I didn’t really like talking about God that much but that was all part of the role that I played, and for a few hours every week it wasn’t so hard. It was much easier when we were in New Testament territory. I could talk about that stuff all night. I enjoyed encouraging people to do unto others as they would have others do unto them, but they always wanted to steer it back to the Old Testament eventually. They loved it. Gods that smite. They especially liked Gods that smite single mothers and gays. A lot of stones used to get cast in Bible Group, and when I’d say ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ they’d seem non-plussed. I loved the New Testament but they’d look at me as if I was a spoilsport, as if to say, there has to be some judging, surely!

      That night Donna was keen to speak. Donna was one of the women who never missed prayer group. She was middle-aged and plain. She baked scones that were middle-aged and plain. She’d bring the scones to prayer group every week wrapped in grubby tea towels. They were hard little things, like her heart. I ignored her for a few minutes until I knew it was almost killing her, and then I asked her if she had any thoughts she’d like to share. That was what prayer group was really all about for her: a captive audience forced before God to endure her gobshite. She told me that she had the perfect psalm for that night’s theme, one that was all about God’s immeasurable beauty and strength. She opened her Bible and nominated some psalm. She could have referred us to any of them really. They’re all about God’s power and how he can really fuck you over if you don’t watch out. I suggested that Donna read it aloud for us which she acceded to graciously, a slight nod of her head, looking me in the eye as if to say ‘what a good man you are’. She should have seen me going down on Mary the night before. ‘Good’ was barely scratching the surface.

      At about that time I was starting to get introspective about it all. As Donna read the scripture I allowed my mind to wander. ‘How the hell did I get here?’ I thought to myself. ‘I’m thirty-seven years old. I’m neither tall nor short, fat nor thin. Non-descript, I suppose you’d say. A university degree. No car. I’m unmarried. And I live my life surrounded by the delusional!’ That was my cross to bear: a congregation of numpties.

      Donna read on. The psalm was all about how we must love God or suffer the consequences. ‘Praise God,’ said a woman’s voice from the left. It was Jenny. I knew Jenny well. The year before, her husband had fractured her cheek bone after a night on the turps by hitting her with the bread board. Another 4am telephone call and me driving to her place to break up the fight. What a scene. Her dreadful abused face swollen from the beating and Jenny weeping, her husband slumped on the lounge in his shorts, too drunk to speak but human enough for seething rage. He could have killed me that night. The church had given her a room for three weeks after that and we had given her the bond on a new flat, with money for food, but she had gone back to him. In fact, they’re still together now, love-hating each other in a marriage of fear. It was one of our church’s proudest achievements. Jenny was listening to Donna’s words with her eyes closed and head bowed, concentrating on every syllable. I remember thinking, ‘What can she possibly be getting out

Скачать книгу