“Twelve?” the Doll asked.
“Twelve,” the beggar replied, somewhat taken aback. “That’s right. But even a fiver’d do.”
The Doll opened her purse and handed him a hundred-dollar note.
Somewhere, the sun was setting.
20
The hot night sky hung over the wild carnival like a damp, filthy rag dripping sweat on the hundreds of thousands squashed in below. The streets were crawling with cops, but everyone appeared resigned to the need for such security after the bomb scare. For nothing, it seemed, could dampen the spirit of the biggest gay parade in the world.
The sticky stench of desire and poppers and spilt beer rose like an intoxicating incense as float after float of near-naked dancing men and women came rolling down Oxford Street. There were men waxed and honed, muscled men with guts of corro and breasts of rippling beef, delicate men in tight silver Lurex; and punctuating the floats were formations of fairies and marching boys and dancing pharaohs and open-chapped cowboys line dancing. There was the roar of the Dykes on Bikes and cheering for the Scats with Hats, and weaving the whole together was a thumping cacophony of cheap fireworks and trilling whistles and a thousand shreds of music, trance and techno and rap and the ballads of beloved gay divas.
Long before she arrived, the Doll sensed the growing vibration of the large crowds massing along the parade’s route, milling between the buildings and the barricades like netted shoals of fish, twisting and writhing but largely failing in their desire to move. Some had come to gawk at freaks, some to sneer, some to marvel and some to perv, and some, like the Doll, for a good time. Everyone strained for a view, save for a short weedy man racing through the mob selling stolen milk crates as viewing platforms for a tenner each.
As the Doll worked her way closer to the street and the spectacle of the parade, she began glimpsing between jammed bodies the sight of sashaying queens with opera house hair, glomesh bags dangling; strutting grizzlies in leathers and chains with harbour bridge moustaches; men dressed in elaborate plumage like fallen birds of paradise.
And then there was the float she had come to see: Dykes with Dicks. Framed between jostling shoulders she saw Wilder topless, waggling a huge black strap-on penis, her great breasts bouncing up and down as she danced.
The Doll thought how Wilder didn’t dance the way they did at the club, and it fascinated her how the less Wilder tried to dance the stupid way that was supposed to be about sex, the more sexy she seemed up there on the float. At the club you danced for money, and you danced because you were Krystal or Jodie or Amber. The one thing you never dared dance was yourself.
The Doll was trying to get closer to the barriers so that she could wave to Wilder, when she accidentally knocked a beer a woman was carrying over the side of a man in front of her. The woman swore. The man turned.
He was dark and good looking—too good looking, thought the Doll, to be anything other than gay.
The woman shook her head, swore again, and disappeared into the crowd. The Doll apologised to the man, then pointed to Wilder with her huge, shiny black cock, as if it were an explanation. When the man looked confused, the Doll said as brightly as she could:
“My friend—on the float—my friend.”
Rather than being angry, he laughed:
“So—you’re the dyke without a dick.”
He had the correct pronunciation of a foreigner, yet he seemed somehow familiar. Perhaps it was for that reason, or simply because she was relieved he wasn’t furious with her, that the Doll laughed back.
“No, not a dyke. Just a friend. But no dick.”
Only then did she recognise him as the man who had rescued Max.
“Compared to her,” he said, plucking his soaked shirt out from his hip, “nor have I.”
Flustered, the Doll took a handkerchief out of her handbag. When, with a futile gesture, she went to dry his shirt with it she felt her fingertips touch his.
“I’m sorry,” the Doll said. “I think we’ve—”
A float of Dusty Springfield drag queens glided by, and the music was so loud that she could neither finish her sentence nor hear his reply, but it was clear from his expression that he too now recognised her. He mimed a little boy crying and himself swimming in a comic way. She laughed again, and as some men next to them began dancing to the float’s music, he put out his hand, smiled, and the Doll, still laughing, took it, not because she really wanted to, but because she felt bad that she had ruined his night soaking him in beer.
And so they began to dance there on the street. At first, they were cramped in their movement, and did little more than an awkward shuffle. But as they continued, he manoeuvred them away from the barriers and the parade to the rear of the spectators. There it was less crowded and people gave them more space. The Doll realised he knew what he was doing as he began leading her into a merengue. They spun and turned, and he pulled her in and let her go right out before tensing his fingers in her hand just slightly, the merest hint of a resolute power, and then she flew back in to him.
As they danced, the Doll found herself looking up at the street lamps spangling the night sky, and her lips formed the easiest of smiles as they swung first this way and then that. As he spun her outwards, she pursed her lips and blew him the softest, gentlest of kisses, and he laughed, and then he pulled her in, somehow twisted her around, bounced her buttocks off his buttocks and sent her spiralling back out.
At first he held the Doll gently and politely: when their bodies touched, they merely brushed against each other as the move demanded they ought. But then she felt her hand being slightly squeezed by his, and she squeezed back. Outwardly their dance remained the same, but the next time he ran his hands down her side, it felt a caress rather than a move, and when he spun her so that she finished with him standing behind her, bodies together, she could feel pressing into her lower back for the briefest, most electric of moments, the firmness of his cock.
The city was like an oven. Around the Doll were not only the floats, the parade, but the endless procession of men and women caught in the mirage of passion, eyeing off thighs, buttocks, waxed skin, walks, head turns, smiles, all alive with the anticipation of what pleasure the evening might yet bring them. The air was taut with desire so animal, it felt to her like some extraordinary annual natural event where hundreds of thousands gathered for one night of parade and rutting.
Someone clapped and the Doll realised it was not a float they were applauding, but them. No more was she separate from the Mardi Gras, a spectator of others, but now part of the exploding street of colour and noise and music, at one with all that was beautiful and all that was grotesque that evening, the plain and the exquisite, the desperate and the hopeful, the predatory and the innocent. No longer did she dance with care about how she might look, but rather with complete abandon, throwing her head back and laughing, suddenly speeding up moves and then slowing them down, so that the rhythm of the dance grew unexpected and wild. And then it was him following her, and he too had somehow become one with the evening and the Doll could feel the lust of the night and his lust joining, and she glowed with it.
Everything seemed to slow down and grow distant—their dancing, the noise and music, the countless thousands of other people, the floats, the carnival, even Sydney itself—as she caught his eyes, and then so casually looked into the night sky, casting him and whatever feelings she was arousing within him away as if they were nothing to her, only to return a short time later with another look, another way of letting her body rest on his, an arm, her breasts; the way, when her nose came close to his mouth, she made a point of closing her eyes and inhaling. She thought she heard him say his name was Tariq. But later, when she thought about it, she wondered if she hadn’t got that wrong too.
21
After the parade ended, the Doll found herself walking through the Cross with Tariq. Heading up Darlinghurst Road, the evening was beautiful, and the Cross seemed uncharacteristically upbeat, as they wandered past
the he-males and she-males, the offers of cheap pills, tit jobs and blow jobs and quickies down the lane, the tottering junkies and pissed Abos and passing paddy vans and parading trannies, the schizzos and touts and tourists.
One spruiker broke from his established patter and yelled out to some passing young men in rugby tops:
“Carn, boys! Look, gentlemen—” and here he extended an arm toward a dark doorway “—not a great fuck but a cheap one, and I can’t be more honest than that, can I?”
They kicked on for a while at Baron’s, a pub in the Cross composed of a series of small, oddly angled rooms whose cave-like feeling was accentuated by the dullest of lighting and walls painted a dun yellow trimmed in ochre.
It was a wild, bizarre crush. The crowd surged back and forth, spilling drinks on each other and the hapless sitting on the red leather Chesterfield lounges. There were weary drag queens, stubbled and sweaty, two fat men in rubber masks drinking blue curaçaos, and a man wearing a string vest and no trousers leaning against the wall with his cock out, smoking, looking at the melee, while another man leant in on him and stroked him in a dutiful sort of way.
Tariq said if the Doll liked she could come back to his apartment for a coffee.
“What’s the time?” asked the Doll.
Tariq lifted his arm and looked at his watch for some moments. It was hard to know whether he was looking at it for so long just to read it, or so that the Doll might see what a beautiful, expensive watch he had, a Bulgari Ipno.
The Doll looked away and upwards, to where all that seemed to be preventing the sagging ceiling from collapse was a fan staggering through the smoky babble.
“It’s Sunday,” she heard Tariq say above the din, “and it’s only just beginning.”
SUNDAY
22
NICK LOUKAKIS STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of his youngest son’s bedroom, listening to the sound of his breathing as he slept. Nick Loukakis had had an affair. Maybe he meant something by it, or maybe he didn’t. Standing there, he could smell his son’s wild dog-like smell, and it was hard to remember. Maybe he’d wanted a way out of his marriage. Or maybe he just wasn’t thinking. Maybe the affair ended the marriage. Or maybe the marriage was over when the affair began. The affair lasted several years. He believed it would fall apart each time he saw her again, fearing that she would no longer want him.
Nick Loukakis fell in love with the woman he had the affair with. Maybe he was in love with her from the beginning. Maybe he was still in love with her. His wife never found out. She always knew, but her knowing grew from a vague awareness easily put away, to a bitter knowledge she could still deny, to an enraged desolation when she one day told him she knew, that she had always known, did he think she was such a fool? And he felt his world collapse into a terrifying white hole into which he fell and in which he was still falling.
They stayed together and watched each other slowly become strangers, watched their love die as you watch a great old gum tree succumb to dieback. The affair was over for him, but it was just beginning for her. She never found out then, but it was as if each day now she lived another day of those years of lies and deceit; and his punishment was to witness her suffering. First just the leaf tips in the distant crown brown a little at the edges, then whole leaves, then a branch here and there. Still the tree lives, and everyone says it will be fine, that it is the weather, or one of those things, or anything but the death of something as natural and as seemingly permanent as a tree. But when his marriage began dying back, Nick Loukakis discovered nothing is fine.
Each day some small thing—a joke, a shared intimacy, a sweet memory—he found to have withered and died. Caresses fell like dead leaves. Conversations cracked and then broke. And in the end there was nothing to quicken the trunk with the rising sap that fed and was fed in return by the branches, by the twigs, by the leaves. And in the end what remained, Nick Loukakis discovered, was nothing; nothing to keep it going, just a large thing still standing erect and proud, only everything about it had withered and died.
Nick Loukakis realised that for a long time there had been something about his life that he now saw as innocence. He would wait up at night until his family was asleep, then walk up and down the corridor of his small home looking into each of their rooms, glad simply to watch them sleeping, knowing they were warm and safe, knowing they were at peace. Sometimes he would pull their covers up, graze their foreheads with the lightest of kisses, and be grateful. Then he would sleep, and in the morning he would rise before anyone, so that he might be awake, sipping his coffee, when they came one by one into the kitchen, sleepy, dishevelled, and he could simply marvel that this joy had been allowed him.
But then this thing happened—something broke and he came to realise he had broken it and that it could not be put back together, not his family nor his life. He realised he could never again be that man, standing in doorways or sipping coffee in the kitchen, that he had been allowed a kind of paradise on earth in his little fibro cottage in Panania, but it was all over, and he could never again be that man waiting to marvel at his life.
Now whenever he tried to hold or hug his wife, she would say,
“Not like that, I don’t like it like that. You know that.”
Or she would say nothing, and he would fold and unfold her limbs as if she were an inflatable woman. When he tried to make love she made no response. It felt like rape, and he guessed it amounted to much the same thing. He felt the sadness overwhelming him. It clutched at him like death. It dragged him down into the earth. There seemed no good thing left in this life. He drove to an abandoned road with a garden hose, then drove back home. He felt for his children, and he could not escape the sense that it would have been a crime to do such a thing to children, an act for which there would be no forgiveness.
And yet he knew his wife loved him, and he loved her. But something had happened, something had broken and he knew neither how to fix it nor end it. They had continued living together, losing themselves in the dream that is life, because they didn’t know what else they could do. The world was large, their troubles insoluble, and they waited together as strangers might huddle together in a shelter biding their time until a storm has passed. He hoped for a sign, a gesture, a moment.
He discovered things he had not known about himself: that after twenty-five years he now preferred to sleep alone; that after half a lifetime of his wife with a sound of frustration pushing away his foot, thigh, hand, he no longer wanted to be rejected every night. The sex was absurd, pointless; an affirmation only of what they didn’t have—the affection, tenderness, hope and dreams that had once been theirs. It was a dismal affair of penetration and her body moving only where it was shoved by his thrusts. But the absence of sex he could adjust to as a price, a penance, perhaps. It was the absence of touch, of warmth, of animal connection. She had not let him kiss her for over ten years. When he held her, embraced her, cuddled her, she pushed him away. And yet he knew she loved him and would always love him.
How was it possible to live with another human being so closely, to eat with them, sleep with them, smell their breath, and yet be so unspeakably alone? She rarely talked. She would say:
“That’s just me. Take me or leave me.”
And if he drove her to talk, she would grow enraged and anguished. She would tell him to go and live with Wilder, because, she would yell,
“That’s what you want!”
Never knowing what he wanted, what he craved, what he had not known for so many years was company, the warmth and stimulation of sharing the everyday, a sight one recalled, an idea, a story, a joke—the comfort of intimacy. He came to realise little, perhaps nothing, about him now gave her pleasure and much about him drove her to a silent contempt.
Her passions were her work as an accounts manager at a medical centre, and their two sons, whom she showed all the warmth that she withheld from him. He envied them and he admired her; they were a picture, a beautiful picture in which he did not exist. Outside he k
new there was horror, corpses floating in the harbour, bones mortared into dank flats’ walls, flesh raked with gunfire; outside there was violence and evil, people waiting to hurt each other, hurting each other at that very moment. As a policeman he had learnt that. It was inescapable. It was unstoppable. In his working life as a detective sergeant with the Kings Cross drug squad he embraced the evil, the horror. He believed it would make him feel better to meet and deal with people whose problems were worse than his own. It didn’t. For the same reason, he read books about Hitler and Stalin, about genocides and totalitarian states. That didn’t help either.
Policemen, he came to believe, were just the journalists of evil; they described it with reports, photos, videos, forensic reports; they were to their horror what the historians and biographers were to the Holocaust and Hitler. They could not change anything. He could only keep his family safe, while outside, wolves roamed.
He wandered the small house late of an evening when everyone was sleeping, standing in the doorway of each of the bedrooms, listening to the sound of his wife breathing, of his sons breathing, gently, in and out, praying, hoping; waiting for a sign, a gesture, a moment, listening to the human sound of breathing. He was trying not to think that he was falling, that everything was turning to white; trying not to think that the wolf might already be inside, waiting, hoping, listening.
23
Only after she saw him dead did the Doll realise that she had never asked Tariq who he worked for, or where he worked. He had seemed in some way fundamentally bored by what he said he did: talking about it the way students do a subject the night before an exam. Sitting in his apartment early that morning, it hadn’t seemed right to ask the questions that later everyone would presume she had the answers to.