54

The press galloped from the judiciary room to alert their photographers and cameramen downstairs for the prescribed shot of the guilty player striding abashed down the Phillip Street steps. Among those faces—to whom he was a cipher, a jaw-breaker, tomorrow’s victim of editorial comment—he was pleased to see that of Steve Mansfield emerging from the back seat of a taxi. Mansfield yelled, “Mr. Delaney! Your car, sir.” Inviting the press to bugger off and get stuffed, he dragged Delaney into the cab. It was full of people. Eric Samuels, best man from that era when the Delaneys got married, sat in the front beside the Greek driver. (The Greeks ran the cab business these days.) In the back were crammed Borissow, Gorrie, and Steve Mansfield himself.

“Told you,” said the Greek. “Can’t take four in the back.”

“Come on, mate,” said Mansfield. He leaned over and stuffed ten dollars into the pocket of the Greek’s shirt. “We’re going to a funeral.” Steve Mansfield, like the other three, was stuck uncomfortably between commiseration and bravado.

“Where we going then?” asked the Greek cab driver.

“I told you,” said Mansfield. “Francesco’s at the Cross. One of those back streets. Forget which one.”

“I know it,” the Greek begrudged them.

In their various ways they consoled Delaney. Leaving the cab in Bayswater Road, Borissow murmured to Delaney that it was all a shithouse setup. Eric Samuels held him back a second as they were being led to their table. “What can I say, mate?” he asked. Later in the evening, halfway through their third bottle of wine, Gorrie stood at the urinals with him and told him to keep training, to show the buggers.

“It was a reflex action,” said Delaney.

“Of course it was,” said Gorrie. “Stands to bloody reason. No player would risk his match payments just for the joy of breaking a bloody jawbone.” When they had their coffee in front of them, their port or cognac on the side, Mansfield announced, “I know a bordello not so many steps from here. Nice girls. No smack addicts. We’ll all pay our own way and cover Terry’s costs between us. What about it, eh? Reckon the Pope will let you?”

After the bottle of Hunter Valley white they had treated him to, the idea charmed Delaney. He made a little speech about how no man had better friends. He felt his blood begin to pool deliciously in that reach of his body beneath the table. Wine had made it remoter than Cape York.

“Dear old Gorrie’s never been before,” said Mansfield. “Don’t have ’em in Gilgandra. Blokes out there have to use the livestock!”

Borissow the center began to give Gorrie, the second-rower, straight-faced advice. “Some of these girls do so many blokes a night that their stomach muscles can just suddenly tense up, hard as a vise. I had a cousin it happened to. So tight he couldn’t get out. They have to take you to Saint Vincent’s emergency ward to separate you.”

“Don’t tell him that,” said Eric Samuels. Though he too looked alarmed.

Borissow said, “It’s the truth. What my cousin didn’t know was that all you have to do to release the muscles is just give the girl a punch in the stomach. She’ll thank you for it.”

Everyone began to laugh, except Gorrie and Borissow. Delaney began to wonder whether it wasn’t the truth.

“I’m just telling you,” said Borissow.

It was a short walk from Francesco’s. Far too short. Delaney felt a rush of panic outside the brothel, a fear he might not know the etiquette inside and so make a fool of himself. The place was shuttered and painted a trendy brown. Its nature would be a mystery to the passerby except for the red light above its door.

Delaney pulled Samuels aside. “You know how they run things in these places?”

“No,” confessed Eric. “Play it by ear, mate.”

They held on to each other on the pavement and trembled with quiet laughter about their innocence.

“Just watch Steve Mansfield,” said Samuels. “He’ll know the routine.”

And so Mansfield did. He knew, for example, that only in movies or in more hidebound cities than Sydney did you have to knock twice and mumble through an eyehole. He opened the door as if he were arriving home, and led the others straight into an orange-lit foyer where a sharp-faced woman in her thirties called them “gentlemen” and welcomed them with a false enthusiasm which made Eric Samuels continue to shudder with laughter. She motioned them past a barrier of potted palms and told them to take a seat. Three girls could be seen in soft light at the other end of the lounge. They wore party dresses and read magazines—Woman’s Day, Cosmopolitan. They raised their deep mascaraed eyes from pictures of royal children and questionnaires on the female orgasm to look at what the evening had brought them. One of them was Chinese. “Who gets the Yellow Peril?” asked Gorrie, sounding awed.

The woman who first greeted them had followed them into the lounge. “Now, gentlemen,” she said. “We do not mind greeting guests who have dined well. But I’m sure you understand that we welcome only orderly clients, and that if you wish to be disorderly or loud, then we would be regretfully forced to ask you to go elsewhere.”

The little speech sobered everyone. She had demanded decencies of them, the way they did at school or in the Leagues Club. She introduced them to the three girls at the other end of the room. Karen, Lynette, Suzie. “All the Yellow Perils call themselves Suzie,” murmured Steve Mansfield. “You know, after that old movie. Suzie Wong.”

Delaney looked at the one called Karen. Her eyes were bruised with shadow. For the first time in some weeks he felt honest lust. Three of the other girls would be along soon, the sharp-faced woman told them. Then they could make their choice.

A middle-aged waitress appeared and asked them if they would care for a drink. They all ordered, Gorrie mumbling his desire for a Pilsener. “Geez,” he said when the woman had gone again to fetch their drinks. “She looks like she could be someone’s old mum.”

“Putting her boy through Sydney,” said Steve Mansfield.

Borissow gestured them all to lean toward him so he could tell them something that might be to their interest. “If nobody minds, I don’t want the Yellow Peril. They’ve got bloody fierce muscles in their abdomens.”

“That’s jake,” said Mansfield. “I figure poor little Gorrie’s already sporting a hard-on for her.”

How will I do it? Delaney was demanding of himself. How, when they all march up, will I be able to say I’ll take Karen? What if someone else wants her too? Someone like Eric Samuels. Best man.

Three new girls arrived through a dimly lit door beyond a life-sized glossy statue of a panther. They all carried their handbags with them, as if they could not safely put them down. “Here we go, boys,” said Mansfield. “Hang on to your credit cards!” The girls came over and stood in front of the five clients. They said their names were Sally, Jenny, Brook. “If you’d like to make a choice of companion,” said an angular spokeswoman in a blue dress. Brook.

“Guest of honor first,” said Mansfield, indicating Delaney.

But Delaney said in a panic, “No, no. You first.”

“Suzie, then,” said Mansfield, slapping his knees and rising. He moved like an habitué behind the swaying Suzie. So much at ease that in the doorway he turned back and said, “I’ll pick up Terry’s bill on my Bankcard, and you gentlemen can pay me back later.” And for the information of the girls he pointed at Delaney, who suddenly felt a liquor headache, a seepage of color from his face, a lack of focus in his eyes. “It’s not that he can’t afford it,” Eric Samuels hurried to tell Lynette. “It’s just that it’s his, ah, his … birthday. You’ll read about it in tomorrow’s paper.”

Lynette, who may have been twenty, was used to the in-jokes of male clients and did not want any explanations. She did not laugh or speak, yet it was somehow obvious that she—pretty chin, dark eyes, and cool agelessness—was the girl Eric wanted. So it’s no contest after all, Delaney realized. It’s all done by little signals that everyone else catches on to—your mates, the women. No wonder they call them professional women. Gorrie was already talking to the bony, lean girl named Brook. Discreetly freckled, she was hard-core Australian, a girl from the bush, from some hard-times town like the one Gorrie himself came from. Borissow spoke to a plump blonde, the most expressive of the lot. “I’ll take Karen,” said Delaney, his voice sounding ridiculous to himself, sounding in fact like a mimicry of some marriage ceremony.

Karen, her handbag under her arm, led him at once into a cerise hallway where a refrigerator stood. From it she supplied him with another frosted glass and can of beer. She said she had to arrange the payment with him up front, so that they would not be distracted later.

“I’m the one my mates are paying for,” he said.

“That’s right. Then come with me.”

At the bottom of the stairs she turned and smiled. “And how are you tonight?”

“I’m fine,” he said. He had been banished from his game. He did not know where his love was. But you could not tell a strange girl these things. “Never been better.”

“I’m not feeling so well,” Karen said, mounting the stairs before him. It was like the sort of excuse he’d heard sometimes from Gina during their courtship. The intimacy of the confession almost shocked him. “I went to a curry house,” she continued. “I’ve already been sick once this evening.”

“You don’t want to do it?” asked Delaney, a sort of hope taking over from desire.

“It’s my job. Besides, I like a handsome man of your age. You wouldn’t believe how old some of the people are we get in here. Not that I have anything against beer guts.”

Delaney raised the can and the frosted glass. “I’m working on it,” he said.

“But you’re in good condition,” said Karen. “I like a man in good condition.”

It was not said languorously. It was a statement. “I’ll give you your money’s worth,” she said with that same simplicity. “Even if I’ve got to stop once or twice. After all, we’ve got half an hour.”

She led him into a bedroom—mirrors, turquoise paint, a low bed, spread with towels. A black-tiled shower cubicle gave off the bedroom with a black toilet bowl and washbasin. First, she said, she would have to inspect him. Would he put on a bathrobe and she would do it now?

He turned his back, undressing as he did in primary school in public baths, crookedly hanging his sports coat and slacks in a cupboard, neatly balling his socks so that she would know that he wasn’t slovenly. The way those little nylon and cotton bundles stuck in his brown shoes, like small marsupials emerging from their holes, infected him for some reason with a withering sorrow. He kept his back to Karen, who liked tight stomachs, and began to shudder, a yelp emerging from his throat, a small supply of tears astringent on his lids.

“Anything the matter?” he heard her call from the bathroom, where, still fully dressed, she was cleaning her teeth. He wondered if the sperm of the last stranger was what she was rinsing away.

“Ready?” she asked through the foam of toothpaste. He came forward dressed in his bathrobe. She took his penis functionally in her hands. She moved the foreskin back and forth across the glans.

Gratefully he felt desire revive. When he asked if she was looking for bugs, she laughed and said, “No. Lesions, breaks in the skin, rashes, pustules. You’re fine,” she told him, dropping him and going to the washbasin again to rinse her hands.

It was all a little like a visit to the doctor, he thought.

She sent him to the low bed, where he waited for her. She came from the basin and undressed. He saw the strong young stomach and the elegant legs almost luminous, in the bordello dimness, with shift worker’s pallor. She came across and caressed him—he was willing to let her lead. As she did, straddling him, lowering her body onto his, she felt extraordinarily cool. As Delaney began to arch against her thighs, she turned her head and seemed to retch. “Pardon me,” she called, vaulting onto the floor and rushing for the black-tiled bathroom.

Of course they have these tricks, Delaney thought. Then they don’t have to sit too long on one man after another. He followed her, consumed with a genuine interest in the authenticity or otherwise of her nausea. She heaved into the black bowl. He saw the sweat bursting out on the back of her neck. “You really are sick,” he said. “You poor little bugger!”

Gasping when the spasms ceased, she apologized. “No, no,” he said. “There’s no need for you to do anything. What if I go down to the front desk and see if they have an aspirin.”

He embraced happily the idea that she was an honest woman and now would have been very pleased to play elder brother to her.

“No, no,” she said. “You’ve paid.”

She led him back to the low bed and applied her mouth so energetically to him, moistening him with saliva, that he managed to release himself within minutes as a matter of good manners to a girl who was putting herself out. “Now lie beside me,” he instructed her, “and have a good rest.” He wished there were tea-making facilities in here.

She was very quickly close to sleep and he forgot her, or she became a token for Danielle. To lie like this at a safe distance, somewhere in Queensland!

The girl was awakened, and he aroused from that dream, by a noise from down the corridor. Karen shook herself, found a bathrobe. So too did Delaney. They stepped out into the narrow hallway. Even its windows were shuttered, Delaney noticed. Three doors closer to the front of the house, Gorrie was struggling with a large muscular man. Gorrie himself was large and muscular, but this other one was ornately body-built in the manner of a weight lifter, a professional wrestler, of someone who enjoyed throwing weight. From other doors along the corridor strangers and friends appeared. Eric and Mansfield and Borissow, all in the establishment’s shaggy bathrobes. Simultaneously, from the stairs, rose the woman who had first greeted them to the place. She seemed pigeon-chested with anger. “I warned you,” she said. “We expect manners here. You Rugby League crowd never know where to stop!”

Mansfield had begun wrestling loyally with the bouncer, trying to get him to release his hold on Gorrie. “What happened?” Eric Samuels was asking.

The girl whom Gorrie had chosen, the angular one with the freckles, emerged panting from the door of the room which she had been sharing with Gorrie. “The bastard started to beat me up,” she said in the voice of someone who has been winded.

“Gorrie?” asked Delaney, not believing it.

“I felt her belly clench up,” said Gorrie, out of a throat constricted by the bouncer’s forearm.

“I want you all to go,” said the madam. “Unless you’d like a little help from the boys in blue from Darlinghurst.”

“We paid our money,” Steve Mansfield protested.

“I would have thought he-men such as you would have had full value by now,” said the woman from downstairs. The muscular one said nothing but maintained his hold on Gorrie.

“Collect your things, ladies,” the woman instructed the girls. It was like a scene from one of those films, when the headmistress catches the hockey team in the football team’s dormitories at schools in England and America, as remote as Szechuan from Delaney’s comprehension.

“Well,” yelled Mansfield after the madam. “We’ll tell all our mates never to darken your poxy door.”

“I hope you will,” said the madam witheringly from halfway down the stairs.

“Sorry, love,” said food-poisoned Karen as she grabbed her handbag and party dress and brushed past Delaney, who for a second thought he would split with desire. The inarticulate bouncer let the girls pass him, a true eunuch, indifferent to how well they looked with their glad rags hooked in their elbows and their good legs beneath their bathrobes. When they had all gone by, he released Gorrie and blocked the head of the stairs with his body. Yelling abuse at him, Mansfield and Borissow got dressed in the corridor. Delaney preferred to dress in the dim room where for a short time he had nursed Karen. Her fragrance and that of her colleagues were blended there, not altogether pleasantly, with the tang of a hundred men.

“Come on, Terry,” he heard Eric calling. “We’re off.”

“If King bloody Kong will let us,” Mansfield could be heard screaming.

He led his party downstairs to the street door, speculating aloud about whether Frankenstein’s mother was watching them go on some closed-circuit television set. Before closing the door behind himself and the others, he gestured vastly with his thumb, the old-fashioned profane gesture of their childhood, before Italians and other immigrants had made the middle finger popular in the antipodes.

As they stood in the street, unfulfilled lust and tenderness both souring in Delaney’s stomach, he remembered that the first editions of The Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald, detailing his shame, were already printed up. I have no game. I have no love. Employees of the Parramatta lawyer, approached by Margin, had informed their boss, who threatened to have him arrested. In a hearty, corrupt state like New South Wales, it took an idiot like Margin to botch a bribery attempt.

Mansfield had an idea. Why didn’t they go up and look at the gay bars in Oxford Street.

“No poofter bashing,” Erie Samuels stipulated.

“No,” said Mansfield, leading them off. “Just a visit.”

Everyone told Gorrie what a silly prick he was, except Delaney, who was demonstrably the silliest prick of the lot. Only loyalty, based on their turning up in Phillip Street earlier in the night, kept him with them at this crack-brained end of the evening.

“These queers are dynamite,” said Mansfield as they began to walk. “Some of them have five roots a night.”

“That’s why they’re riddled with disease,” said Gorrie with a sort of bush rectitude.

In Delaney’s disordered perception they walked for perpetually dark days. Past car salesrooms on William Street where girls in miniskirts with pinpoint addicted eyes barely saw them pass. Past little terraces, their doors smack on the street. Delaney would have liked to go to sleep, or at least to die for a month or two, on one of those threshholds. After an age they came to Oxford Street and on a corner a gay bar called “Cheeks.” The very name rocked them with hilarity on the pavement.

The interior of the place was hung with black fabric. A polite and well-built boy in his mid-twenties gave them the sort of lecture the brothel madam had earlier given. They were welcome to have a drink, but would be ejected if they caused trouble. He should also warn them that drinks cost somewhat more than they did in hotels.

“Christ,” said Mansfield. “You’d think that we were the outcasts of bloody society.”

Cheeks was very crowded, even though it was one in the morning. The barman gave a small toss of the head when Mansfield ordered beers. Delaney could see that at remote dim candlelit tables Perrier bottles and tall watery drinks were much in evidence. Nearly everyone here wore the loose, voluminous pants which had become fashionable that year, and white shoes with stick-down tabs you didn’t have to do up. It’s the same everywhere, Delaney recognized, even in the pubs out in Penrith. Everyone has a night-prowling set of gear. Except me, in the sports coat I wore to the judiciary.

They sat at the bar drinking their beers. Steve Mansfield turned around once or twice trying to catch an eye, looking for trouble.

“Stop looking for trouble, Steve,” Delaney warned him.

“How did all this happen?” Mansfield asked the smoky air. “How did it happen? In the land of the bloody Anzacs?”

None of the others were comfortable. They were bored, they were uneasy. They pecked their beer down into digestions already overloaded. They had come to the wrong place, and there was no time left tonight to find the right one. All of them—except Delaney—had training tomorrow.

“Might be good,” Eric Samuels confided to Delaney, repeating Gorrie’s earlier advice, “if you turned up for training runs. And help on the sideline during games. And when one of us is knocked arse-over-head, run out in a track suit with a bucket and a sponge. Might be good to show Golder the bastards haven’t got you down.”

They began to discuss what a good and loyal bloke Golder was. “Turning on a lawyer and all. He didn’t bloody have to.”

Eric Samuels laughed a little. “Rough as bloody bags though. His wife’s not a bad sort. But a root with him must be like being run down by the Western bloody Pacific.”

Mansfield now grew particularly outraged by the passage to the back of the bar of a boy in a scarlet shirt with spiked carroty hair. “The things you see when you haven’t got a gun!”

But Delaney did not try to follow the boy with his eyes. He was distracted by a familiar voice behind him. It was ordering a Riesling and soda, a Campari and soda, a Perrier. As if being suspended for six months were not enough shame, he was about to be discovered in a gay bar by an acquaintance! Then he understood in a sluggish way, all the beer and wine of the evening haying spilled to the front of his brain, that the acquaintance was equally vulnerable. He turned. Standing a few paces behind him in the uniform of Cheeks, the ballooning trousers and the kinky shoes, was Father Doig. What was worse was that Mansfield witnessed the pulse of recognition between Delaney and Doig and began to ask some bumpkin question, “Hey, aren’t you the …?”

Doig did not wait to be accused of being anything. He held Delaney’s gaze a second, but his face was pale. “Would you take those over to my table?” he asked the barman. Then he turned and walked out into the street. Delaney left his chair and stumbled after him. Doig was waiting outside.

“Well, Terry,” he said. “What can I say?”

“Nothing,” Delaney admitted.

“Well, I said it, didn’t I? You know—that sexuality could be rationally arranged, that it doesn’t have to eat you alive. This is part of my rational arrangement.”

“Are you going to tell your flock about this?” asked Delaney. “Are you going to explain it away for my old man the way you explain every other bloody thing?”

“I would tell them, Terry, if it was within their means to take it in. I should tell you I’m monogamous. A one-man man. I’ve got a lover who lives out this way, in the Eastern Suburbs. Without him I would have shot myself.”

Delaney could not sustain the anger as he wanted to. He had hoped for a while that in Doig he had found the pariah of the evening, but he remained the pariah himself, and in an hour or two people going to work would discover the fact on the back page, Delaney in his best sports jacket and his mute face descending the Phillip Street steps.

“Oh Jesus, Andrew, you bastard!” said Delaney. The life went from his legs. He sat like a child on the pavement, and for the first time Doig showed old-fashioned embarrassment, or perhaps fear of patrolling police, and tried to drag him upright. Delaney had, however, in a strange self-aware way, lost two-thirds of his consciousness and the control of his limbs.