Transsexuals suffer the oppression of the homosexual, they suffer the oppression of women…They can’t vote, most of them can’t hope to leave the country to enter another country. Most of them can’t get finance. All of them except for myself have been unable to carry on their previous profession. The only reason I could was because…I’d been fortunate, by some accident, to have fooled the Registrar of Nursing into thinking I was a Miss instead of a Mister when I registered…But I know doctors, I know psychologists, I know teachers, I know optometrists who have been struck off their registers and they have been refused entrance back into their professions just because they have had sex change surgery. So they suck cocks up in Victoria Street or take off their clothes four times a night in a strip club in King’s Cross. Or they work as waitresses in hotels which is somewhat better, or perhaps worse, than sucking cocks.
Vivian Sherman, 19751
•
Once a week, on Saturday mornings, a group of sleek young men who call each other darl and queen and lovey climb the concrete stairs to someone’s flat, fight over which record to play and who’s taken whose spot on the sofa, roll swift joints from the communal bowl on the coffee table and then begin a ritual that starts with this: an assortment of metal files, tiny scissors, glue, solvent and bottles of red lacquer amid handfuls of plastic fingernails scattered on the table like runes waiting to be read. They smoke and snort speed and drink nice cups of tea or gin and do their nails.
First, the old polish or nail is soaked away. Then the natural nail is filed and an artificial one is glued down. When this dries, it too is filed and another artificial nail is glued halfway along its length. This makes the nail long but not long enough for the desired ‘talon look’ so the process is repeated until three artificial nails are glued securely in an ascending line, filed smooth to blend into each other. Lastly the long length is coated with layer upon layer upon layer of paint. The process cannot be rushed but once it is finished—hours later, just in time to run back to their own flats to get ready for the night—you cannot tell where the real nail ends and the fake nails begin. To the girls there is no question that they look better than the real thing.
The fifties and the sixties had been a time of great and stealthy preparation, unknown even to the preparers, in the boilerplate suburbs and the bone-dry country towns and the beachside villages bleaching in the sun; in the Catholic schools and the Anglican church halls, at the milk bar and the footy and the cricket. Every place where no one ever would have believed that the meek lads, the smart-mouthed, the mother-combed, the gangly young men loathed by their fathers, would break out to become Carlotta or Terri Tinsel or Danielle Lawrence or Debra La Gae or Celestial Star the Girl with the 40-Inch Bust.2
Although unwelcome in his Footscray home, Peter had never ventured far from it. The respite he found with the McMahons, his first flat, his share houses and his homes with Linda were all within a nine-kilometre radius of the street where he grew up. St Kilda was different. Not so much because it was more than double the distance from his old neighbourhood or because you crossed at least one river to get there, but because, for a boy from West Footscray, it was like entering another dimension.
Peter knows just enough people in the scene to meet more people. He rents a room in a share house in Balaclava and has an instant circle of friends to eat with and go out with and stay in with and learn from. There is Nicole, small and gorgeous, a full-time showgirl and Peter’s best friend, whose attributes include: little hands, little feet, a deep voice, a dangerous mouth and a sister who is a fucking nut job. There is Carol, a bit of a lost soul, and also ‘a gay guy-girl’, whose particulars are now lost to history. Peter tries heroin and hates it; he tries speed and loves it. He spends hours at the dressing table built into the wall of his bedroom, reimagining himself and his surroundings. He hangs wallpaper for a feature wall. He disassembles his heavy wooden bed and lowers the mattress to the floor. His flatmates nickname him Joseph the Carpenter. He reassesses his nose. He ponders new names, practises new signatures.
At the time Peter thinks he looks fabulous but in the mirror of retrospect he stands there monstrous in his plastic wig and secondhand dress. Encouraged by some mates, he starts performing in the drag shows. He mimes the lyrics of the songs up on stage while wearing borrowed costumes and full make-up that he is gradually learning to apply by watching the queens work on their faces, like he watched his neighbour renovating a house.
It is an awkward period of adolescence that he will eventually recall cringing, and only with the help of royal remove: ‘That was in the very early stages when we were a little bit ugly.’
The shows are where he hears a wig called ‘a bonnet’ and a john called ‘a mug’ and Bette Davis and ‘J Crawf’ referred to like everybody’s close personal friends. The shows are where he becomes comfortable using female bathrooms, which are basically unisex anyway. The shows are where he learns to shape an eyebrow, to shade a jawline; where light should hit and shadow fall, what should shine and what should be matte, how to make lips and eyes bigger and noses and foreheads smaller, how to erase stubble and add lashes. How to transform himself from a timid, skinny dude from the western suburbs into a poised and elegant woman.
It takes longer, by far, to apply the make-up than it does to dance in the shows and although the same team dances in two or three shows each night at different venues around the neighbourhood, they have to completely change out of their hair, make-up and costumes just to cross the road. This is because if the cops catch men dressed as women on the street they will belt the shit out of them.
The cops beat Peter and his friends for looking too much like men, or too much like women, or because they are something in the middle, ‘not ridgy-didge’. The cops beat them for the same reasons that the state has made it legal to arrest them and fine them and imprison them: their very presence is, to use the legislative terminology, riotous, indecent, offensive, insulting; grossly indecent; an outrage on decency. They are told that it is illegal to dress as a woman, illegal to wear women’s underwear, illegal to loiter in a public place for homosexual purposes, whatever that means. The ones who are arrested are fined, or they are jailed in men’s prisons, like Pentridge, where they are raped.
And so they erase themselves with tissues and cold cream, fold everything neatly into bags and put on their boy clothes, their actual costumes, for the short walk just across the way. If they can afford to avoid this ‘constant off/on, off/on, off/on of gear’ by sharing a taxi to the next job, they are allowed two minutes to walk from the car into the venue; any longer and they risk being beaten and arrested.
He does the sex work between shows at night and he does it during the day. He does it because the stage is ‘pretty shitty money’, and because sex and shows are his only choices. Though it is distasteful at best and, of course, dangerous, sex work is normalised in this world where the possibility of an adequately paid straight job (assuming you managed to receive the requisite education or work experience in the necessary domestic peace most often reserved for your cisgender peers) is virtually eliminated if you choose to live full-time in the sex you were not assigned at birth. Most of his friends do sex work on the side; if not, they’re giving it away.
‘I’m a bit of a capitalist in that respect,’ he tells the girls when they go off with the punters who hang around backstage. ‘I love a dollar, nothing for nothing.’
He won’t remember any details about his first client apart from the fear and the adrenaline rush, but after that it becomes ‘like water off a duck’s back’. When Peter acknowledges that what he is doing is ‘pretty risky’, he is referring to the violence from the police and not the dangers posed by street prostitution. If the cops catch him soliciting they will arrest him or bash him senseless or both. So Peter and his friends rent a dark basement apartment in a beautiful old building on Grey Street where they can take clients. It’s always safer to work inside—and you never take them back to your own house.
In this way, although it’s a long way from his lab at the flour mill, he starts earning again. He buys furniture and clothes and costumes and make-up. As ‘the main supporter’ of the share house, he buys food and booze and drugs for everyone. He thinks nothing of spending fifty bucks at Clare’s Cakes on lemon tarts and vanilla slices, inviting people over for afternoon tea and then sweeping all the leftovers directly into the bin because he is no longer that boy who grew up scrounging for food.
‘It’s always Grand Central at my place,’ he complains proudly. He knows that he drops money like this to make himself feel better; his generosity is ‘a lonely thing’; a plea. He takes money for contact and he spends money for contact. But unlike the different service he offers to the faceless mugs who nod at him on the street, these bright things who pop over for a bite or a drink provide him with the friendship he needs to keep moving.
It is ‘action stations all the time’, there is always a party to go to. Peter lives now in an intensely social environment, a swirl of people—gay, lesbian, straight; queens and the moles that orbit them like lesser planets—all roiling together amid the audiences of hens’ nights and bucks’ nights and office workers out from the suburbs for a good time. Their shows have names like Les Girls and Play Girls and Belle Boys and Street Boys and Pokeys and Between the Sexes. His friends are guys and girls, ‘sex changers’ and not. They have the nicknames Gorilla Grip and Croc and PT, which stands for Painfully Thin.
They include those he will forget forever and those he will remember with forgiveness, like his boyfriend Frankie the Italian Stallion, ‘who’d root anything that moved, except the missus at home payin’ the bills’. Frankie takes Peter’s money but it’s nice to have someone to come home to, and for this, Peter forgives him everything, even when Frankie writes off his beautiful orange Monaro. When Nicole asks Peter why he lets Frankie stay, he smiles. ‘You pay for what you want,’ he says. ‘Everything in life has a price, you just have to decide whether you’re going to pay for it there and then or not.’
On the coffee table in every house is a bowl of mandies, a bowl of weed and a bowl of speed, all graciously offered like mints for visitors to help themselves. No one carries drugs, because of the police harassment they already attract by walking down the street in their own skin. For prescription drugs, there’s a doctor in St Kilda and another in North Melbourne who’ll give you pretty much anything. The girls go back and forth between the two. Peter never hears a quibble about who had how much, never hears anyone ask to be paid back. Life is communal for safety and for fun but also because, for many, this is now their only family. This also explains why, when Jullianne Deen closes the show with her number ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, slowly wiping off her make-up as she changes back into her boy clothes, ‘there isn’t a dry eye in the house’.
Peter looks at the shoes: three pairs, standing there like ghosts waiting for a train. The man who used to own them is dead, folded carefully like his work shirts and his pants and his vests into a couple of large rubbish bags that wait by the closed bedroom door.3
‘This is really it for good,’ Peter says to himself over and over, the thought like a shard of sea glass, wave-churned, smooth, but still with a sharp edge here and there. He’s already spent a week feeling like he’s been flayed alive, his cheeks bleeding, hardly able to speak. His subsequent visits three times a week for both waxing and electrolysis were far less painful and because he is so blond he never gets ‘the bluebeard regrowth look’.
He is still taking hormone pills from his doctor in Carlton but, after hearing some of the girls talk about hormone injections, he visited their doctor near the corner of Chapel Street. He has not shared with that doctor the fact that he is also taking hormones in pill form; he believes that doubling the hormones in this way will make them work better and faster. He willingly assumes the risks, and will never express regret: ‘Yes, it probably shortened my life, what it done to my liver and kidneys. But it also gave me the life I wanted.’
Now, this whole morning, he has been clearing out his small closet and few drawers, methodically but with intense emotion that encompasses both sadness and joy. This is a process he is going through alone, and though it is seismic, no one else is aware it is happening. He wonders every few minutes whether he is doing the right thing or if this is going to be an expensive and embarrassing mistake. He can’t say for sure what is driving him or where he is going or that it will be OK when he gets there; he just feels that this is the way he has to go.
Peter keeps folding and bagging, folding and bagging, and when the last item is done, she gathers up the bags and leaves the house in a long kaftan dress, locking the door behind her. As she walks out that day Stacey Anne Vaughan, sometimes known as Amanda Celeste Claire, shares many things, of course, with Peter Collins but the most important is that she will never fear what is ahead of her, only what is behind her.
Stacey has the best tits you’ve ever seen. Renee Scott, one of the Pokeys Dreamgirls, was meant to be the first to get the tit job with the incision under the arm, to keep the scarring out of sight. But Renee either got sick or chickened out, so Stacey became the first to get it done. Like most of the other girls, she went to the fancy surgeon on The Avenue in Windsor. Unlike most of the other girls, her breasts are now enormous, and with the double doses of hormones she has also put on weight. She returns to the surgeon to have her nose smoothed to a more delicate slope and then to have her eyes lifted. Her beauty, her plump softness, the ease with which she moves through the world as Stacey all mean that passing is never a problem. She is proud of the incredulity she regularly encounters. People say, ‘You’re not a drag!’
‘But I am a drag,’ she replies, smiling.
One day she is speeding to get her hair done when she is pulled over on the highway.
‘Nooo,’ the police officer says, patronising, looking down at the card she hands him through the window. ‘Not your husband’s licence. Your licence.’
‘That is my licence,’ she says.
He stands there for a long moment. He walks back to his car. Then he returns, puts one hand on the roof and bends down to peer in through her window. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he says quietly. ‘Just go. I’ll wait here for five minutes, and you can go.’
She rolls into her costume fittings with Jullianne Deen the Costume Queen, who calls everyone queenie or sweetpea and whom the girls call Mother. Here she spends hours gossiping and laughing, being fitted for the looks she will be wearing in the next show. On stage she is festooned, resplendent in Mother’s creations. As Celestial Star, she has hair the colour of a Coke can and transcendentally long legs, and she gets introduced on stage as the Girl with the Big Personality on account of her forty-eight-inch bust. The girls call her Celestial Monster in mockery of this abundant bosom.
She loves the music, exults in the movement and the lights and the audience and their applause, which she feeds off as validation that she looks ‘OK’. And she feels wonderful, energised, out-of-control-alive as though she is both starring in and watching herself in a movie playing on fast forward. As everyone says, ‘mandies make you randy’, a fact of which she is acutely aware each time she wakes up naked under a sinkful of vomit in the bathroom of an empty bar, not knowing when she passed out but feeling like she had another pretty good night.
She lives in Balaclava. Strathmore. Brunswick. Kensington. East St Kilda. Northcote. Carnegie. Caulfield. North Melbourne. Cheltenham. Everywhere.
Also nowhere, for an extended period of time. There are always a couple of people living with her and off her. Though they might do an occasional drag show, none of them works or contributes towards rent or household expenses.
When Nicole points this out, Stacey waves her concern away. ‘I’m always a bit of a suck to have people around and look after people. But that is the nature of me: I always provide, for some reason, I don’t know why. I always provide,’ she sighs.
Stacey shoots up speed with a little glass syringe that glints like jewellery and drives across the city between the house she is renting in Brunswick and the shows she’s dancing in and the brothels she’s working at. She makes good money in the twenty-buck fuck shops, those dark terrace houses along Nicholson Street in Fitzroy. The trick is to get the guys in, get them excited and get them out as quickly as possible. The more she can do fast like that, the more money she makes. She returns home to cook up a storm in the middle of the night; practises dance routines in the mirror; knocks down the back wall, planning on turning it into an atrium, airy and light, but then it all just seems too hard so she simply moves. The wind blows in through the broken bricks and over the old couch where she nodded off so many times just as the sun was rising; it chases itself around the empty rooms, stirring the rain and leaves and animal droppings that collect, eventually, on the floor.
She is Celestial Star and she is Stacey Anne but she is also the person to whom the letter is addressed which appears one day at her house like a haunting. It is mystifying to her how Linda found her address. All Stacey knows is that Linda must have found out that she was ‘making some money’ and decided that she ‘wanted a piece of the action’. So she changes her name and moves to another house. Stacey Phillips. Stacey Anne Vaughan. Celestial Star. Amanda Celeste Claire. Sandra Anne Vaughan. While these name changes are a normal and integral part of the process of finding who she is as a woman, they also make it easy to disappear altogether.
Her first and continuing reaction to her ex-wife is one of indignant flight. This does not change over time. ‘Linda already had the house, had everything, all I left with was just the car and clothes that I had and that was it. Everything else was for her.’ I ask Sandra whether she had left Linda with any savings (no) and how she thinks Linda would have managed to support their children and make the repayments on the house (don’t know). When I ask these questions, Sandra genuinely seems to be considering them for the first time and uninterested in pursuing them further. We have floated across the line and here we stay, becalmed, past her outer limits. The mediaeval horizon where you simply sailed off the edge of the earth or were swallowed whole by the monstrous beasts that swam there.
Two scenes of a homecoming. First: a charity dinner dance. She does not remember where the dance was or what it was for or how she ended up there, only that she ‘didn’t dream for one minute’ that she would see her little brother Simon there. He is now in his late teens, thin and serious and darkly handsome. He too has been kicked out of home by Bill. Suddenly, despite all her pride and all her confidence, she finds her face burning and her heart racing as she smiles at him and, above the sheer volume of everything that is not said between them, tells him she is happy to see him. She is genuinely so happy to see him.
‘Well,’ Simon says in his quiet voice as he looks at her shyly. ‘You’re the only Collins boy who’s ever done what he really wants to do.’ And then he puts his arms around her and he hugs her.
Months later, when she runs into him again, this time on the street, she is struck (even though she is speeding off her face) by the fact that he looks ‘like a hobo’.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ she asks him, astounded.
He tells her that his wife left him for his friend. That she took everything from their house one day while he was at work, including his Stones records. Sandra brings him back home with her and he stays there until he gets on his feet. Later, he enlists in the army where he will spend twenty-one years working as an engineer. They will always, each in their own way, adore each other.
Second: It is 1979. Sandra finds out that her father died six months ago. She calls her mother’s sister. ‘Aunty Bessie, this is…you know…who it is…Peter,’ Sandra says.
‘Oh, hello dear! Your mother would be so pleased,’ Aunty Bessie says, sounding happy to hear from her.
‘Well, I don’t know about that, because so much has happened…’
‘Oh no, she misses you terribly,’ Bessie soothes. ‘She’d love to hear from you. You know, she’s working at Fosseys in Footscray. She finishes every Saturday at noon and she’s home by twelve-thirty. Give her a call then, darl, she’d love to see you.’
Sandra works at a brothel on Saturdays so she arranges to take a day off. She stays in on Friday night to do her nails and gets up early on Saturday to wash and set her hair. And then she waits by the phone until twelve-thirty when she can, finally, call home.
‘Hello?’ Ailsa’s voice comes clear through the line.
‘Mum?’ Sandra says. ‘It’s…me here.’
‘Huh. You,’ Ailsa says and, for a long moment, she holds her silence before her like a switchblade. ‘You fuckin’ killed your father. I never wanna fuckin’ speak to you again.’
The sound of her mother swearing shocks her more, momentarily, than the words themselves or the spitting contempt in them.
‘You can get fucked!’ Sandra screams into the phone. She hangs up and slumps into a chair like a bag of ice. And it is as though she is still sitting there thirty-six years later when she tells me what was said at 12:31 that afternoon in 1979, her voice still thinned out by the hurt of it. ‘Had my hair done in anticipation of I was gonna see my mother…And…’cause…you know, I’d look after her when she was getting bashed, I climbed in the house through the window to go look after her when he was bashing her and then she’d make up with him and then I’d get bashed for looking after her! You know, so…it was a fuckin’ rocky road…’
That was the last time Sandra spoke with her mother, Ailsa Maggie Collins, who would die fourteen years later, on 2 November 1993, three days after which a requiem mass was offered at Our Lady of Perpetual Succour for the repose of her soul.
They dance in shows at the Prince of Wales and the Night Moves Disco and Bojangles, which they call Bowie’s or Bongland. They party at Annabel’s and Mandate and Spangles, the Whiskey A Go Go and the Key Club and the Savoy and the Dover Hotel and the Union Hotel and Maisy’s Hotel and, if they’re up that way and out of options, that cheap and nasty place in North Melbourne run by the gay guy with tragic shows full of people only starting out in the scene (a biting assessment which shows not only how far Sandra’s settled into her skin now, but also how far the city has come).
Sandra missed the early days, in the late sixties, when one of the few chances to socialise in safety was at the private camp dances, organised by Jan Hillier, that migrated around Melbourne. It was all very furtive: couples would spring apart and grab the nearest person of the opposite sex if a cop showed up to check the liquor licence.
So despite the constant threat of police violence, normalised by a society in which homosexuality is officially a mental illness and a crime, the fact that Sandra and her friends now have commercial venues to visit should not be taken for granted. When Hillier and her partner, ‘drag impresario’ Doug Lucas, first approached the Prince of Wales in 1977 about establishing the regular gay night that would become Pokeys, the hotel manager doubted that a drag show could fill the pub’s entire first floor. So they were given only one room, with the consequence, so the story goes, that on opening night hundreds of customers were turned away.
By the late seventies, progress in open socialising reflected and encouraged changing attitudes; it was possible now to think in terms of an actual gay ‘community’.4 The degree to which that community reflected and promoted the rights and needs of all its members—transgender men and women in particular—is open to question. However, it was better than what had gone before.
When I ask Sandra whether she was involved with any of the activist groups in the seventies, like Gay Liberation or Society Five, her answer is both surprising and not.
‘No,’ she says, batting away the question. ‘I was never political. I never drew attention to myself.’ And her statement is not untrue because she was Celestial Star the Girl with the Big Personality twirling topless on stage night after night. It is untrue because in exercising her right to be who she was and to not make it the focus of her life any more than, say, the fact that she was adopted or from the western suburbs, she was in this, yes, quiet way of insisting on living her own life, powerfully political.
When Sandra and I visit Doug Lucas, they work out that they have not seen each other since around the year I was born. It must be quite a trip to come face to face with someone you haven’t seen for thirty-six years, but Sandra is zero awkward on first greeting Doug and during the initial small talk, and the deeper dive that follows. Although, as Doug puts it, she ‘just disappeared’ one day from the scene, leaving him to always wonder what happened to ‘Stacey’, she slots enthusiastically back in, asking after old friends, paging through his photo albums, laughing when he wistfully recalls what a good-looking man she was, hopping up to make tea because Doug has put on enough weight now that it’s taxing for him. Sitting side-saddle at his kitchen table, Doug fills Sandra in on where all the girls are now. Sandra hears the names of people and places forgotten for over three decades and when this happens her eyes squint and then open joyfully, the skin snaps back a little, it is 1978 and she is young again.
Explaining her disappearance she says, ‘I think probably the best bit of advice I got was from Rick, who I was going out with—we brought up his daughter and put her through school—and he said to me, “Whenever you’re around your gay friends, you act gay. If you want to be a woman, hang around real women.” And that’s what I did. I disassociated myself, really, from everybody.’
‘I find that a bit sad,’ Doug says, tapping his long, unpainted, almond-shaped nails on the tabletop in contemplation. ‘Because the thing is, they’re part of your life and you shouldn’t have to cut that part out. He probably looked at it like: “That’s a journey you go through.” But it’s not so much the destination sometimes, it’s the actual trip that’s more important.’
Doug is right. It is sad. Because this is the old guard who walked through fire together: warriors in silken feathers and bright war paint. They are the only ones who truly understand what it felt like to walk into ‘unexplored territory’, to be at once home and ‘in a foreign country’. They are the only ones who are stabbed in the guts, still, by the term ‘queer’; who always stumble over the word ‘transgender’ because, to them, there are only guys and girls, really, and regardless of whether you’ve had The Change or just put on a frock for the night, they will call you a girl and mean it. Sandra’s wholesale loss of these ties was the loss of a chance for true connection and support.
But Doug is also wrong about these losses. In the same way that he, who insisted at various times on running male-only bars, clearly prefers the company of men or queens, Sandra prefers the company of straight women. That’s who she feels most herself with. The fact that her drag days were a period of adolescent experimentation from which she felt the need to move on must be understood in the context of her entire life. So while Peter and Stacey and Celestial Star have not disappeared exactly, they exist now only to the extent that the sun and the motion of the earth exist in the wind. As she told me once: ‘I’m just Sandra. I’ve lived so long like this that I don’t refer to the other side. The other side is foreign to me.’
Doug rings Jullianne Deen the Costume Queen, with whom he is still close, and excitedly informs her that Stacey is here. Sandra smiles at Jullianne’s audible delight. Jullianne tells her that she is still designing and, though she experienced difficulties with her eyes, has had the loving support of ‘the man of her life’, her partner of twenty-five years. Sandra mentions that she, too, had a long-term partner, was married for fifteen years, though it went a little pear-shaped towards the end because he wanted to own her, ha, good luck.
And here it is, in Jullianne’s happy voice bouncing down the line and in the slight angularity when Sandra brandishes her second marriage and when Doug invites us into his dark bedroom, fires up the computer and shows us hundreds of photos of his past glory: the costumes and the applause and the parties could give you nothing that you weren’t willing to give yourself.
So though they sit watching the screen with the same wistful smile that makes their wet eyes wrinkle at the corners, though they have both gained weight and lost elasticity, though they remember with great fondness the same names and laugh the same delightfully wicked laugh, though they sit there, side by side, the distance between Sandra and Doug is the distance between planets.
The thing she has with Maria is different.
When the girls ask her what that thing is, she explains that, no, she’s really not interested in women per se. ‘It’s just probably more her soul that I like.’ Maria is good to her, ‘like a gentleman’—despite the fact that she is significantly smaller and younger than Sandra, still in her teens. Part Aboriginal, part Italian, Maria Gloria Paten is ‘quite boyish looking but in a beautiful way’. She wears a uniform consisting of a black T-shirt, a men’s business shirt with the sleeves rolled up and baggy khaki trousers. She is eighteen years old and lives at home with her mother and her sister and brother, both of whom are young enough when Sandra moves in that she refers to them as ‘the kids’. The mother welcomes her daughter’s tall, blonde girlfriend into their home. For the first time in a long time, Sandra starts thinking about the future.
The tide is out and they are posing for a photo together on the dunes. Sandra stands lower down the slope and steers Maria slightly in front to reduce their height difference. They look towards the camera, squinting in the harsh light against a grey page of sky. In red pants and a baggy old blouse, Sandra wears, for once, no make-up.
‘You know how the big op is coming up,’ she says after they break away from their friends to walk down the beach. Maria nods, walking with her hands jammed deep in both pockets and her shoulders hunched up, eyes gazing down at her sneakers kicking through the sand.
‘Yeah, so,’ Sandra continues, ‘this is the last chance I’ll have to have a child, or, like, a family, so I was thinking, maybe…’ She stops and looks down at her girlfriend, who is looking, now, out across the water, her thin eyebrows pinching together while the wind animates her short dark hair. Maria reaches for Sandra’s hand and they smile at each other and start to giggle.
They go about executing their plan with great practicality, despite the circumstances of their lives rendering it fairly unrealistic. They decide that Maria will be admitted to the hospital under Sandra’s name so that Sandra can later ‘be known as the mother’. They contemplate names, browse baby shops. When they find out that Maria is pregnant, they are delighted. ‘That was our aim,’ Sandra explains, looking back. ‘But we didn’t realise what the consequences would be, didn’t think about the complications. Could I have worked? Could I have done prostitution? Life has a funny way of working itself out, because it probably would’ve been quite tumultuous for the child.’
•
Phillip John Keen, whom the newspaper will describe as ‘an expert in certain aspects of the martial arts’, lived in West Footscray one kilometre from Sandra’s childhood home. He was on the door at the Night Moves disco the night Maria went to see Sandra perform in the show. He was in charge. And Maria comes in, all swagger, to watch her red-haired girlfriend with the amazing tits. Maybe Keen has it in for her. Maybe he has it in for dykes. Maybe he’s jealous of her. Maybe he’s jealous of the girlfriend. Maybe he’s repulsed that he’s jealous of either of them. Maybe he hates Maria’s dark skin and beautiful face. Maybe he hates that she is not afraid of him. Maybe he just wants to feel the force of bone on muscle.
The great Celestial Star has a few minutes before she goes backstage to get ready. Once made up she’ll go straight on stage; the make-up has its own momentum and it’s best not to dissipate that energy, but right after she performs they’ll go home, to Maria’s mother’s place. Maria can’t stay up as late as she used to and they don’t need to be out to have fun anymore. It is a time of becoming for both of them; Maria is three months pregnant with their child and Sandra is pregnant, in a way, with herself, about to start the process for the bottom surgery that will complete her transition. Maria leans back in her chair, looks over towards the stage and pops her sneakers up on the table as Sandra lights the cigarette poised between her long nails.
‘Feet off the fucking table,’ Keen barks as he walks by, hitching up his pants. Both women glance up with mild surprise at the bouncer. They hadn’t noticed him approaching.
‘Fuck him, he can come back and ask me nicely,’ Maria says. Sandra chuckles as she stands up, blows Maria a kiss and walks through the crowded club to the stage door. Just before she disappears backstage, she looks back. She sees that Keen has returned to their table, sees him throw Maria’s feet down. Maria stands, furious now, and glares up into Keen’s face. He pushes her roughly towards the front door of the club and out. As Sandra jostles her way back over, Maria reappears and lands one great shove into Keen’s chest. This is when he throws her on the ground and jumps on her stomach, landing on her with his knee. Then, after a long moment, Keen—panting, triumphant—grabs Maria under her armpits and drags her outside.
Though her pulse quickens, Sandra is sure it’ll be all right. Because Maria is Maria. Because it has to be.
But Maria doesn’t get up. Though Sandra kneels by her side and shakes her shoulder and says, ‘Come on, love, let’s go home,’ her head just jiggles softly. Maria is still not getting up when someone shouts to call an ambulance, or when the cops suddenly materialise because they’re always around the neighbourhood anyway. Maria is still not getting up when Sandra starts wailing and is escorted, gently, out of the club by one of the cops and placed in the back of a divvy van, which is the only peaceful place the man can think of.
But then, like a prayer fulfilled, ambulance sirens confirm that Maria has finally come to; is about to be taken off to be made better again. Only now can Sandra take a shuddering gulp of air, unfold herself from the car and look around. This is when the reporter with his notebook curled in his fist comes racing across the street and hawks her hope out of mid-air as he shouts at the cop standing next to the car, ‘What’s the dead chick’s name?’
That’s how the world ends. Though she stands there, taking up space on the pavement in her red wig and tight dress, she is suddenly gone; nobody to no one.
Sandra does not need a physics lesson to understand that time dilates; life taught her early that some seconds are cruelly quick and others are torturously slow. She is floating away, unmoored from the grounding mass of the earth and suddenly, somehow, it is morning and she is scared to go back home after giving her statement. She is scared of showing other people her pain, and her grief is too large to hide, so she stays away from her friends and Maria’s family. She is scared, too, that they will blame her for not protecting Maria. She is scared that it will come out that Maria’s girlfriend is actually a drag queen in the club where she was killed and, also, that Maria was pregnant with their baby. She is scared of the way Maria’s family will look at her when they find out that their daughter’s girlfriend, who has been eating with them and laughing with them these many months, was an imposter all along. With each realisation, she falls further down a hole so black it inhales light until she is trapped in each too-slow second with no way of escaping and nowhere to run to if she could.
A tall, gaunt figure with broken nails and dirty hair, she hunches into the front door with her key one last time, when she knows Maria’s mother will be out cleaning houses and the kids will be at school. Glowing with shame, she gathers up her few things, wounded by the couch and the cracked bathroom tile, by the view from the window and the hum of the fridge—by how completely unchanged it all is and the fact that the last time she stood there, she was a different person. Someone with a home, loved by the woman in the warm body beside her with a second chance at family floating inside it.
She crashes wherever she can. The cops are cracking down again. She cannot make money by pro-ing down Acland Street or Robe Street or Fitzroy Street or any of those streets. So she goes to a brothel on the Nepean Highway. When the freeway expansion goes through years later, this house will be demolished, taking with it the small, dark rooms where she knelt or lay face down: bound, bleeding, white-pale; quivering like something slapped down on a butcher’s counter.
This is unregulated submissive BDSM work, work Maria never would have allowed her to do, work that is ‘like a mind fuck’: the bottom of the food chain. This is where, like Maria, she just lies there, internally wounded, and does not get up.
But she is not Maria and something continues to beat inside her. She supplements what she makes there with quick money from the cheap brothels in Fitzroy. Through this long Melbourne winter, she is focused on doing the work she has to do, not just to survive but to flourish. On the first anniversary of Maria’s death, she will be complete.
Eventually she will remember Maria with warmth and sadness, though when she calls her ‘Marie’ it will be unclear whether this is affectionate or forgetful. But today she is putting a small suitcase into the boot of a taxi and directing the driver from East St Kilda into the city, telling him the quickest way to get to the hospital on Lonsdale Street. The car slows to a crawl in traffic and she turns away from the cold glass, through which the finer details of cigarette butts, drink cans and chewing gum make her think that perhaps nothing ever really gets thrown away.
Then they accelerate, and her elbow bumps hard up against the pane, that line separating here from there, invisible, almost, and she looks impatiently up ahead. She is inches behind the driver. She is listening to his radio station. She is inhaling the air he exhales. She is trying not to watch his flesh spill out like flood tide from under his T-shirt and around the buckle of his seatbelt. And then they are stopping in front of the hospital and she is handing him banknotes warm from her pocket that are now warm in his hand.
She is slamming the door shut behind her and forgetting to say goodbye because she is now walking into her future, and that is a thought she pulls up and over herself like a blanket.