Vlad turns the aquarium until she is face to face with the fighting fish. She holds the tank between both of her hands, and touches her nose to the glass.
‘Are you alright in there?’ she asks softly.
She’s changed clothes since I saw her this afternoon, and now wears a lace teddy with a baggy sweatshirt over the top, and thigh-high patent leather boots. I feel conservative by comparison, in a loose floral dress. I had no other options really; my Marquis costume is torn and dirty, and I haven’t wanted to wear my black outfit since the experience with Leo. Tanya doesn’t like the horse mask and I don’t know I can be bothered trying to get a different body by squeezing myself into something tighter or shinier. It doesn’t work for me. I just feel even more uncomfortable.
‘I’ve told Bronwyn and Tanya that he’s not thriving, but they don’t listen.’ Vlad picks up a small plastic container and picks out a couple of freeze-dried worms, dropping them into the water, where they sink to the bottom, unnoticed.
‘He’s usually a deep red but he’s faded a lot lately, and he’s not feeding readily, which is what all the websites say he should be doing.’
‘He’s probably bored,’ I say, looking at the small square tank.
‘I actually can’t stand it.’ She looks around the room. ‘Is there anything we can give him to look at?’
‘We could put him near the window?’ I suggest.
Vlad carries him over to the windowsill and I pull the drapes aside. The fish looks nonplussed as his tank is pushed right up to the glass.
‘Look at your world,’ Vlad says, bobbing down near the tank to see his view from that angle. I do the same behind Vlad, and all three of us scrutinise the hydrangeas outside, which are lit from above by the security lights. The fish flares his gills, as if pleased with the new arrangement.
‘Imagine being a fighting fish and having nothing to fight,’ Vlad says, while shifting the enclosure an inch to the left. ‘He doesn’t even know the destruction he’s capable of. The level of aggression that he was born to feel.’ She stands looking at the tank with her hands on her hips.
I nod. ‘Truly a waste.’
We leave the fish and walk to the aftercare room, where we sit facing each other on opposing couches. She pulls a pair of tweezers from a backpack and hoists her leg over the arm of the sofa, plucking at the stray hairs along her pubic line. I watch as she pulls repeatedly at a stubborn hair, realising that this is the most comfortable I’ve felt around someone since arriving.
‘Did you grow up around here?’ I ask.
‘Canberra,’ she says. ‘But my name confuses people. I took it from Vlad the Impaler. I use the strap-on so much, it just made sense.’
‘Right,’ I say.
‘Don’t be nervous about Jay.’ She rests her tweezers on the arm of the couch so that she can pinch her false eyelashes to her real ones. ‘He’s a really special dude.’
‘Righto.’
‘Just let go, and don’t let your brain tell you it’s pain; your brain is irrelevant.’
‘I was kind of into the pain at first, when I subbed for a guy called Leo, but then—’
Vlad interrupts: ‘Leo the sadist?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s the worst; he was banned from here last year. Hand on heart, Amelia, he’s awful.’
‘It felt like I was breaking, and he didn’t wear a condom …’
‘Yeah, and I bet he used that shitty little bullwhip he takes everywhere?’
‘Yep.’ I turn around and lift my dress, showing her my welts.
She exhales slowly and shakes her head.
‘To be fair, I told him to hit me harder,’ I say.
She laughs. ‘You might be like me. I have hormones that are on a high boil. I get these surges of energy where I either have to fuck or fight, or stick my fingers in someone’s mouth just to see how warm it is in there. I lost a tooth last year because I fell off a fence I was climbing for no reason, except to see how high I could get.’ She smiles broadly and points to a particularly white tooth at the front.
‘Is that why you’re here all the time?’
‘Yeah, and I teach workshops now. But I also just like being around Tanya and Bronwyn and the regulars. They are my family and this is my home.’
‘Do you ever find yourself needing to have sex in order to stop thinking?’
‘No, never,’ she says. ‘That sounds really toxic. Tell me more.’
‘Like, my body feels as if it’s made bigger and more powerful when I have another person inside me. You know, like I have two sets of lungs, two hearts, two brains. I am a beast, and I can’t think because I’m in beast mode.’
‘Sounds like you can’t be vulnerable.’
‘But I’m constantly vulnerable.’
‘Nah, not if you’re fucking to stop feeling. That’s disassociation. There’s lots of stuff online about it; definitely worth a look.’
She crosses her legs. ‘You should come to one of my breath-play workshops. I teach people about how to be fully present and respectful, but mainly how not to squeeze too hard on the internal and external jugular veins.’ She looks up to the ceiling and traces a finger down each side of her neck.
‘I know those veins. I do mortuary make-up, and they reach from your heart to your brain.’
‘There’s a song in that.’ She pulls a battered notebook from her bag, opens it and scrawls across the page, muttering, ‘Heart … to … your … brain.’ She closes the book and looks up at me. ‘Mortuary make-up?’
I nod.
‘You’re too young to be around dead people.’
‘I’m not. It’s beautiful; I love it. It’s my home and family, just like this is to you.’
‘So let me get this straight: you have so many thoughts that the only thing that can stop them for a moment is banging another person?’
I shrug. ‘I have a level of thought-fullness in me that medication doesn’t fix, so I use sex.’
Vlad raises her eyebrows and opens her notebook again. I wonder what else I can say that she could use as lyrics.
‘Well, if it were up to me, I would say that you’re on the side of your body, and even other people’s bodies both dead and alive, but not on the side of your mind …’ She turns to look out the window, tapping a finger to her chin. ‘But why?’
‘Because the two don’t like each other,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘The head and the body need each other, but they don’t like each other.’
There’s a pause between us.
‘Wow, you’re crying really loudly,’ Vlad says, picking up a box of tissues. She pulls a few out, and pushes them into my fist. ‘Whoa there, take it easy.’ She stands and comes over to sit next to me. She pats my back rhythmically with one hand.
My body and my head don’t like each other, maybe they never have, but they should be able to work together. If I could estimate the length of things that I’ve done that are good for my body, it would be about twelve metres long. If I measured all the things I had done wrong to my body, it would be at least a kilometre—maybe more—and I’m not even that old yet. The scales are imbalanced, and I’ve felt it for a while. I like to think in terms of measurements; quantifying things this way helps me to understand them better. Everyone should do this. Monks. Police. Everyone should measure the good and bad like this. If I wasn’t crying so goddamn hard I would invite Vlad to try it.
‘Hey, how about I do your make-up before I take you in to see Jay,’ she says. She pulls a beauty case out of her rucksack. ‘It will make you feel put together. If I’m a mess inside, it doesn’t matter as long as my make-up is perfect. It’s like a mask, you know?’
‘Yes,’ I say, wiping my face, my head already nodding and my chin jutting forward, waiting for her to begin.
Vlad shakes some foundation onto her fingers and then lightly pats it over my face in a slow and methodical way that I find entrancing.
‘My mum died,’ I say.
‘You’ve already told me.’
She pushes the foundation around the crease of my nose, and when she gets to the edge of my lips, I realise that my mouth is still open, and I snap it closed.
‘I’m sorry that happened,’ Vlad says, blending the concealer with a fluffy brush.
My head is surrounded by the sweet mint of her breath, mixed with the powder of her make-up, as well as the perfume from her wrist. I rest my head against her hand, as the awful feeling that this might end soon fills me right up to the top.
I open my eyes. ‘I feel like I might not be coping.’
‘You’re definitely not,’ she says. ‘And no one expects you to.’
She sweeps her hands over my eyes to close them again and I let her.
‘You don’t have to do anything at all, except feel. That’s your only job at the moment.’
‘I can’t,’ I say, lulled into honesty.
Vlad spritzes my face with a fine mist that smells of freshly cut cucumbers.
‘You will.’
She pulls away, and I open my eyes to check where she’s going.
‘You look really good,’ Vlad says.
‘I feel a bit better.’
‘I’m just going to finish with a light layer of this stuff.’ She holds up a compact with the lovely golden nectarine colour, and brushes it from my cheekbone to the top of my ear.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
‘My pleasure.’ She starts packing away her make-up. ‘It’s time for your session now.’
I stand, smoothing my dress down and wondering how to thank her.
‘You’ll love this,’ she says, packing away her make-up and heading for the door.
‘Will I see you afterwards?’ I ask. I know I sound clingy, but I’m trying to feel all the emotions, like she said.
‘No,’ Vlad says, ‘I’m busy till late. Just enjoy yourself and I’ll catch you around.’
I let myself feel the discomfort at the distance growing between us as I follow her out of the room.