“You must have thought Mum would never come,” the Doll said, squatting in the dust of the Baby Lawn. She spoke quietly, as if he were still in her arms and able to hear her very breathing. “Let’s fix this up, then,” she said as if talking about a child’s untidy bedroom, squatting down and setting to work cleaning up the grave. The very dust was so hot she thought it might scorch her skin. Liam had not been good looking when he was born, yet within his prune-like face she had seen another, the face of a young, handsome man.
“My ugly Liam,” she whispered as she cleaned the weeds out from around her son’s small piece of crumbling concrete beam. “My ugly, beautiful boy.”
With the new kitchen knife she had bought at the hardware store she cut away the tufts of dead grass encroaching on that half-metre of concrete beam that in her mind belonged to her Liam. She pulled out a lantana seedling that had risen almost level with the plaque.
She had photos of herself pregnant with Liam and kept them in a special album. No doubt the police had the photographs now. What would they see? What does anyone see? What did the suits in the Chairman’s Lounge see when they peered so intently up between her legs? Eyes without eyelids that also couldn’t stop looking?
After Liam’s stillbirth, the Doll went to Melbourne. She told those around her that she was “going to find a better city”. She found the same city, the same streets, the same dead stares, the same filth, the same indifference, the same grand decay, the same hive-like energy, bursting and building, killing and destroying, robbing flowers and fertilising flowers for no point other than to continue. She found all this and only the weather was different, and she knew every city henceforth would be the same for her, be it Berlin or Manhattan or Shanghai.
She returned to Sydney after a year, determined to change not towns anymore, but herself. ‘I will begin again,’ she thought, ‘that’s what life is, all it is, having to start over and over.’ She remembered finding a job at a Qantas call centre, hating it, having every toilet break timed, and then seeing the ad asking for dancers at the Chairman’s Lounge. She worked there for a weekend and never went back to the call centre.
Lap dancing didn’t seem to involve either humiliation or pride. It offered money, and that was enough. And for a time—looking back she realised it had been a very short time—it made her feel somebody, feel proud, seem wanted. Instead of just taking it day after day from people over the phone, copping crap from the supervisors, she was up there looking down on others, and they admired her, they thought she was beautiful, they told her about their lives, all these men in their suits, all these older men who had for so long lorded it over her. She only had to put her hand between her thighs, push her arse into their faces, and they were lost; she could taunt them, have them hard and wanting her and only her and if they so much as touched her anywhere security would throw them out on their ears.
Really, thought the Doll, she didn’t fool men, she just let men fool themselves. She was a goddess, unobtainable, better than them, beyond them, and they were nothing, not the Lebanese gangsters, not the television and music celebs, not the corporate executives, not the rich north shore boys out on a buck’s night. It had been something, it so had, it had been like a party every night at which she was the centre of attention. Everyone came to the clubs, the dollars flowed, and without trying she was pulling over three grand a week, all of it black.
And the Doll felt she was finally going somewhere. She wasn’t exactly sure where, but for a time it felt good. Even the shock of her friends felt good. She was making real money, and she was proud, so proud. She looked better. With the exercise every night toning her right up and the clothes, the beautiful clothes and shoes and bags she could now buy, she looked like a movie star. Only sometime later did it become clear. She wasn’t a movie star. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was a lap dancer and she was falling.
Then the authorities banned lap dancing, and it was only tips from pole dancing or fifty bucks for a fifteen-minute private show, and somehow the clubs were no longer the thing, the place to go, but an embarrassment, and all the girls were sad, and all the men were mean, and you had to work twice as hard to make half as much. She was a lap dancer, no matter what she held on to nothing held, everything was collapsing and she was falling.
For a time the Doll worked elsewhere: a club in Perth where anything seemed to go; she lasted there three weeks until she was asked to do a full body soap slide. Apart from not wanting to do it anyway, it just seemed too ridiculous. For a few months she had flown to the Gold Coast to work weekends at a club there. Then she came back; tried to be proud once more. She was a dancer, an erotic dancer. It was an industry, not a game. She went back to the Chairman’s Lounge: it was near where she lived, and that was enough of a reason.
‘I am beautiful,’ the Doll said to herself over and over, and men paid to admire her beauty and the way she displayed it. But in her heart the Doll felt otherwise. In her heart the Doll felt that they were paying for something else, and the more they paid, the more distant became that thing they sought. The Doll could now see that she had been no different from the men, that all the time the dollar notes had been rising over her body she had been falling further and further from what she really wanted—friendship, trust, serenity, love—that she had been falling and no one had said anything and everyone had known.
And as the Doll danced above the suits, their shirt tongues hanging out, she knew the men had to imagine she was thinking about fucking them, fucking anything, imagine that she existed in a state of sexual desire so absolute even they could enter it, a sexual desire that did not need another human being with a name, a past, a life, but just an assembly of flesh.
The Doll had to imagine other things. She imagined a life in which she had an apartment and an education and a job that people admired, a life in which she amounted to something, and her imagining became the plan, and the plan became the dream of dollar notes papering her body.
And once more, the Doll persuaded herself she was going somewhere, when all the time she was falling. She had always been falling but now she knew nothing ever changed. People lived, people died. There would always be women stripping for rich men, there would always be men paying to look at women, she would continue falling until death, and a month or two after her death only a few people very close to her, like Wilder, would remember her, and after a few years more even Wilder would have trouble recalling her face or her laugh, and out of her only lantana would grow.
The day of Liam’s funeral had been a beautiful winter’s day of the type that makes Sydneysiders smile and say:
“It’s the best place on earth.”
The air seemed full of joyful noise to the Doll. Everywhere were the sounds of children playing, of people laughing, pleasant music rising—and it was clear to the Doll that death was of no concern to such a world, where life was good and cheerful, and the appearance of suffering was an embarrassment, where she was falling and out of the dead only lantana grew.