IT WAS A SMALL, SNUG world at Mood Indigo. Within the green walls, sealed off from the outside, we walked in our gowns as easily as if they were streetwear. Raised three inches in our heels, we adjusted to the elevation without noticing.

It was not strange to call someone by a made-up name. It wasn’t strange to find condom packets scattered over a table in between takeaway containers and gossip magazines, or a girl absentmindedly chewing a condom like gum. It wasn’t strange to have sex with seven or eight men in one night. It wasn’t strange to walk back into the lounge clutching your groin and wearing a man’s sweat on your face. It wasn’t strange, anymore, to walk out into the absolute quiet of 4 a.m. with a cheery ‘Bye!’ and a pocketful of money.

The women who worked at Mood Indigo were professional prostitutes, and this was a job. It was an extraordinary job; every night we transformed ourselves into princesses and wore out the soles of our shoes in an endless dance between the lounge and the bedrooms. It wasn’t, of course, only our soles that grew worn. But we glimmered in the light, proud in our gowns and our flimsy scraps of lace, tall in our heels, and took men by their damp hands to lead them down the hall. Even when we stripped off our clothes and were naked, open to the touch of unfamiliar hands and mouths, we were still princesses. Of a kind.

Then we’d go home, in the last hours of darkness or the stillness of dawn, and sleep all day, as ones enchanted.

Time went by, night after night, month after month. I barely noticed. Every day the familiar: I worked, I worried, I succeeded—or didn’t—in making enough money. My manner relaxed; I was liked, I was asked for, I was greeted with smiles from the women when I walked in the door at 7 p.m. The shift, of eight, or nine, or twelve hours, would go by in its blocks of time: an hour, or two, in a room; another hour, or two, of waiting and meeting men and flipping magazine pages. Back into the rooms. At the end of the night I’d be left with stiffened skin and a wad of money, a numb or burning vagina and the din of a night’s conversations in my head.

Asleep all day, I missed family celebrations, parties with my friends. Life out there seemed the dream, not this.

People came and went. Women arrived, stayed a few nights, a few weeks, months. Some I got to know; others I glimpsed only at the change of shift when the day girls left to go home to dinner and the night ladies arrived: a bustle at the lockers, people calling out farewells and greetings; the receptionist, harried, doing the paperwork at her desk; women yanking dresses over their heads with their faces turned to the wall.

Briony, a sober young woman I barely knew, left and Odile started, a pixie-like sophisticate with a shaved head, a collection of wigs and a gamine smile. Monique vanished and Melanie started. Asia appeared and disappeared, penalised by suspension for mysterious acts of rebellion (talking back to management). Lola sat in state on her nights. Stella kept up her tricks and insinuations. Alexia completed her security training and dropped a shift. Valentina added a shift, trying to save enough for the house she wanted. Nicole’s husband started beating her up and stealing money for his gambling habit. There was a fad of girls trying colonic irrigation after one of the receptionists came to work glowing. The magazines in the lounge changed covers; the soap opera we watched at 2 a.m. remained the same.

We called ourselves ‘girls’. The receptionists called us ‘girls’. But to the clients, the ‘gentlemen’, we were ‘ladies’.

The girls were my social life, my friends, my audience; a strange little community, brimming with intimacy, blocked with secrets. I would walk into the lounge every time to friendly faces and cheery greetings, or suddenly hushed conversations, or the shrill sound of an ongoing gossip. I would take my place, accepted, liked, never quite sure of what to trust.

‘So here we are again,’ I said cheerily to Odile at the make-up counter.

‘For our sins,’ muttered Valentina, smearing eyeshadow.

Valentina was a pal; her dry humour was a tonic. I liked her gruff common sense. I watched her apply the emerald eyeshadow to her lids and admired the exquisite length of her golden limbs. She did well, of course, but she had bad nights like everyone else.

Lola implacably rolled cigarettes for hour after hour and held forth on humanity. Nicole offered me spare slices of pizza from the enormous slabs she somehow fitted into her emaciated frame. Her pupils were always huge, and her talk was of her kids and her husband.

Other girls circulated; Sarah became a kind of mate, a tall, rather frightening red-haired girl with eloquent dark brows who also used heroin. We surreptitiously shared the drugs thing; she even came home with me a couple of times to score. She was witty, a little awkward, a little misunderstood, but we all knew that her temper was ferocious and the breadth of her shoulders made me want to charm her.

Then I lent her money and she couldn’t pay me back. What I myself had done to my friends in earlier days now enraged me. I shamed her by asking loudly for the money in front of the others. Turning her red face to the mirror she said she’d do what she could. When I came back from my booking the money was tucked under my make-up bag and Sarah had left early. We didn’t speak of it again. Shortly afterwards she was ‘purged’ from the house for allegedly letting a syringe drop out of her bag in front of Bea, the receptionist. I was sorry to see her go. But when I saw her in the street months later I did nothing to hush Robbie’s loud sniping as she strode past, her face set. The righteousness of the flawed is frightening.

There were strange characters to whom I grew accustomed. Cynthia was a volatile Italian girl who insisted on a different wig every shift in the belief that it disguised her from a legion of supposed stalkers; she was unreliable in attendance, dressed in sequinned bras, and talked incessantly about her teenage daughter’s sex life. Working with Cynthia was tiring.

Shayla was a day girl who occasionally took night shifts. She was loud and blowsy, with a hoarse voice and an appalling Irish accent she put on for the customers; the day-shift equivalent to Stella. She wasn’t above lingering for an hour or two into the evening, just long enough to poach some of the early clientele and then leave, her underwear carelessly draped over the back of a chair, the stink of her cheap perfume hanging in the air.

When someone like Carmen, who had helped me on my first night, left, I was sad. But a month later she was just an dim memory. There were always new girls.

One I liked especially, after I’d been there almost a year and poor Asia was long gone, was a black-haired, pink-cheeked girl called Siobhan. She had the same deadpan humour as one of my old friends, and I liked her immediately. We seemed to have a rapport, a similar background. She was beautiful and tough and made the slow week nights go more briskly.

It was easy to become entwined in the sticky threads of complicity. Easy to love a hissed, whispered, gleeful conversation. Alliances were made and fractured. A girl I was pally with for months might inveigle one of my regulars away—that wasn’t a crime, but the gloating was.

‘Guess Shane got tired of you.’

I shrugged. The last time I’d seen Shane, he’d proclaimed his love. Melanie turned her face to the mirror in triumph. I looked at her with loathing.

Small lies were told; small misinformations circulated. The feeling in the room was of a band of comrades, alternately beset and amused; the laughter was loud, the kindness frequent, the competition tacit and fierce. We were a group of women who found ways to be together, but the ways were not always clear.

Slowly I built up my regulars, my profile. New clients came in to ask for me, recommended by their mates. This seemed odd to me, that a man would tell his mate about a hooker he’d slept with, pass her on. But I knew that prostitutes were a regular, prosaic part of many men’s lives. In Melbourne alone there were nearly a hundred licensed brothels, never mind the illegal joints, the strip clubs, the private workers, the street girls, the phone sex lines and the escort agencies. Thousands of women working, and who-knew-how-many times that many men visiting them.

Secret to the workaday world, there was a culture that admitted paid sex as a legitimate pastime. A night out with the mates. On a quiet Monday night they’d come in, when they’d spent all their money and doing the rounds of the brothels was free entertainment. Not to stay, of course; just to meet women, be flattered and wooed, catch a glimpse of flesh, be on their way.

So long as some stayed, we endured it. To go out and offer your sex, your service, your company to a man and be refused—not just once, but again and again, night after night—was something you just had to get used to. You couldn’t afford to take it personally, even though it was so entirely personal.

Most men were pragmatic, able to recognise the limitations of our time together, and make the most of what they got. And this made for a happy ease. Sometimes I was late out of a booking because I had been enjoying myself. No matter how often the receptionist or manager chided me, still there were times when I hadn’t the heart to interrupt a conversation, or a man gasping towards climax when the buzzer went. Sometimes I saw my clients to the door with genuine laughter and a special last glance.

The men who selected me seemed to be among the better ones; I attracted jovial, sensitive men. Without always having to force a pretence of affection, I could actually find affection. For my regulars, with whom I built more and more of a relationship—keeping up with their news, sharing my own woes, learning their bodies—but also for one-offs—the shy young men, or awkward middle-aged ones. I began to love the tenderness of their skin, the anxieties they confessed, the humility of their needs. I took them to the room as a priest might take a penitent; I laid a calm hand on their shoulders and undressed them gently.

At times I was disconcerted by the aggression of sex: a friendly man’s face distorted by the ferocity of pleasure; the greedy ruthlessness of sexual momentum. It could still frighten me, beneath everything. People became strangers, and I could do nothing but cling to arms and ribs and hips as the face above me darkened with blood and I understood that I could only rush up to meet this force, or be battered by it. It was easier to mock the fervour of lust than to admit its fearful power. And I reminded myself that I was the one sought; it was I who was in control. These men, I thought, were diminished by their need.

There were men who cloaked their nervousness in disdain, and men who hid their disdain with charm. I enjoyed the game of guessing what each man would be like, and being confounded so often.

Some were awful at sex—it never stopped amazing me how many men were so inept, so intimidated by women’s bodies. They truly had no idea of what to do. Or they were awkward in conversation: bewildered or contemptuous at the idea of talking as well as fucking. But I came to see, more and more clearly, how every man, however unprepossessing, might bear a kind of grace; a sweet body under drab clothes; a sense of humour behind a stolid face; a readiness to admit uncertainty beyond their bravado.

‘You’re too good to be here,’ they still murmured to me. Just as they had in the cars of St Kilda.

‘So are you,’ I’d say, but I’d take their hands and kiss their mouths to make sure they’d keep coming back.

In the rooms I encountered men to laugh with and men to play sexy with; men to confess secrets to; men to giggle and roll around with. Men who made me grit my teeth, or set to dreaming the hour away while they ploughed at me. Men who flushed me full of anger and offence. Men who made me warm with the joy of real human contact, an unexpected kindness, a sincere compliment. They were all different, and yet I came to see that they were all, at base, somewhat the same. Nakedness is nakedness. We all wanted comfort.

My old fascination for the deliciousness of skin and flesh was fully indulged here. I caressed beautiful velvety youths, others plump as seals—every texture and silkiness. Clever fingers touched me more deftly than I’d ever been touched; different sized penises sparked sensations inside me.

My own previous lovers had all been beautiful to me, and with James and Robbie I enjoyed not only passion but the intoxication of love and sex meeting. Here it was just sex, and that in itself was suffused with another kind of intoxication. Sex, fierce, free and unabashed, could be good. Sex, in this world, was my power. I had left the bashful virgin far behind and surged into discovery. What I discovered was that nothing was as I expected. There were men I could barely stand to look at, whose bodies made mine blush with joy. If the connections were right, I might feel something extraordinary.

There was so much bad sex, too. Men who’d grope and pluck at me, who had no rhythm, who scraped at my clitoris with their nails and pinched my nipples, yanked me too abruptly into a new position, who thrust on and on for half an hour heedless of my fatigue and dripped sweat into my gasping mouth. Who grabbed me cruelly, who fucked me like a whore. These were the testing times, when I felt my soul clench; when it was a matter of pride that I didn’t protest or throw the man off me. To me it still seemed a professional discipline to resist pain and discomfort. The man had paid for sex; it was up to me to deliver it.

Control: I learned then how much I had. Control, not to squeal when a man grabbed my breast hard enough to make it twinge. Control to keep my legs stretched in the air even when they were trembling. Control to brace against pounding from behind, as my face mashed into the pillow and my arms shuddered and my spine jarred with every thrust. Control, not to gag at a slimy tongue in my mouth, burrowing wetly into my ear, licking at my throat.

Control not to twitch when a fingernail suddenly dug into my anus, when a cock scraped into my vagina against burning skin and I felt my face go pale with pain. Not to laugh when a man grunted, ‘You’re the best, you’re the best, I’ve never met anyone like you,’ and then screwed up his face and howled with orgasm and barely looked me in the eye a minute later. Control to stay polite, to stay charming, to go on feeding compliments, to not spit out my contempt.

Control to be the best working girl I could be.

I really tried to keep my temper. Sometimes I knew that it was just me, and the constant stress of working to pay my habit, the relentless circuit of men, the secret nugget of anger in my heart.

‘You can give me my massage now,’ said a truculent forty-something man with heavy eyebrows and a pear-shaped body, after he’d finished with a grunt and pulled out of me. ‘All over. Feet too.’

I glared at his hairy back. Straddling his buttocks I reached for the talcum powder. The powder clotted in the furze on his back as I shook it out, more and more. From the crease between his buttocks, where it dampened immediately, up his spine and over his shoulderblades. I kept going. And up the back of his neck. All over his dark hair. The powder fell lightly, undetectable. I rubbed his back, the friction of the hair making my fingertips numb, kneaded his callused feet, watched as he showered and dressed in his business suit, put his wedding ring back on. Said goodbye at the door, and smiled as he walked out, oblivious to the back of his head still blotched with white.

It was professional, of course, not to leave any traces on a client, in case they were married. Some girls wore sparkly body creams, or heavy perfumes; I didn’t want anyone coming back complaining of glitter flecks in their pubes. I used perfume, but I warned my clients to have a good shower at the end of the booking; if they ignored my advice, that was their problem. The talcum powder man was an aberration.

Some men deserved to be treated kindly, and that was a point, too. Another man came in and confessed self-consciously as he undressed that he had most of his sex in brothels. ‘I’m kind of big,’ he said.

‘How big?’ I was smiling.

‘Well. My last girlfriend cried when I fucked her.’ He dropped his underpants to his ankles.

His penis was as thick as my forearm, and he wasn’t even hard yet. I lay there stroking his thigh and listening to his woes. His girlfriends kept leaving him. He was reduced to going to prostitutes, and then he’d found that courteously warning the girls in the intro meant that he was usually declined. I’d heard of other men like this—Valentina returning to the lounge with watering eyes, pointing at a coffee mug: ‘It was that thick!’—but it wasn’t common.

‘I can only try,’ I said.

‘I know. I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said, and kissed me slowly and drew me up onto him.

It hurt. It was big. I imagined it was like having a baby in reverse. I breathed, and concentrated; I sent breath billowing down through me to my vaginal muscles, trying not to think of pelvic dislocation. Under me, the guy’s face was red with arousal and the effort not to thrust. I beamed at him as sweat broke out on my face. ‘Slowly does it,’ I said. I gingerly moved up and down; only a few slow, tight pumps, and he came.

‘Will you treat me special?’ a young man in the intro lounge asked for the fifth time.

‘You know I will. I’ll treat you like a prince,’ I said for the third.

He was fastidious in his pride, smirking. ‘I don’t want to be just another client, you know,’ he said. In fact he was my sixth job of the night.

In the room he jabbed his penis into me as hard as he could, but I barely felt it. He was writhing on top of me, groaning and sweating; I gasped and clenched against him, simulating some kind of crisis. I didn’t have the energy to fake a full orgasm, but I wanted him to come. ‘Oh yeah, baby, baby,’ he hissed into my ear, wet breath on my skin. When he’d finished he took his time showering and dressing. I waited by the door, already dressed, the room fixed, my arms full of towels, ready to go. The buzzer went a second time. I could hear the thunk of footsteps passing out in the hall. It was a busy night.

‘Mate, I love this song!’ he said, still naked, grinding to the Ricky Martin track on the stereo. ‘All the girls tell me I’m like Ricky!’ He wiggled at me. ‘Hey—’

‘Yes?’I hefted the towels ostentatiously, put my hand on the door handle.

‘My cock. Tell me honestly. I want the honest truth. Is it—you know, is it—would you say it’s big? Is it big? —Or—?’ He held it in his hand and grinned at me.

‘Honestly?’ I said. ‘It’s kind of small.’ He stopped dancing and pulled his clothes on.

Amazingly, he came back to see me again. I wondered if he’d even remembered me. But the next time he made a point of screwing me for a good forty minutes straight.

‘This one is so unbelievably ugly,’ said Chloe, coming back into the girls’ lounge from an intro. There were raised eyebrows. ‘I don’t mind ugly, but he looks like a fucking toad.’

‘That’s too bad, Chloe,’ said Nora, walking in. ‘He’s booked you for an hour.’

We were allowed to refuse a booking, but only with good reason. If a girl knew a client in real life, or had heard reports of him being trouble, or if he refused to be checked for diseases, she could decline. Appearance wasn’t a good enough reason; and, in any case, it was a question of money. When I had a truly appalling specimen, I tried to think past the exterior, and he had to be pretty astoundingly ugly for me to notice. Hairy backs could be furry and comforting. A plain face could hide a kind heart and clever tongue. A pimply face might need affection. I kissed bald spots, acne-flecked cheeks, ignored dirty fingernails and blotchy patches of moles. It was all flesh.

I had to remember that irritating men weren’t, for the most part, malicious. They were just fools, or anxious about having sex with a woman so experienced. Insecure about their bodies, trapped by an idea of what a brothel-going man should be like. I knew all too well what stupid and fearful behaviour felt like from the inside; I knew what frailty might make a person do. I wanted to gentle these men, as I might have like to be gentled myself.

Nevertheless, my little nugget of rage slowly accreted new layers. I felt it harden, shiny in its varnish, a lode of energy for me to rub when I needed it. I was almost always cheerful, polite, agreeable; even when I was sick, sweating, exhausted with hanging out for drugs or simply worn out.

‘You’re always so happy,’ a man said to me.

I looked at him. It was six o’clock on a Sunday morning and I hadn’t had a taste for fifteen hours. The shift had started at seven and I’d done nine bookings. My body was feeble, my skin clammy, my eyes burning dry. Allowing someone to touch me was a test of nerves already shrieking. I’d be going home to heroin soon, home to my dank boarding-house cell, to my difficult boyfriend, to a day of sleeping and then rising again to return here. ‘Am I?’

‘That’s why I come to you,’ he said, shyly. ‘You make everything seem all right.’

I did smile at that, though it almost hurt.