Mattress Actress (9 page)

I met a stripper named Sonja, who seemed pretty sane. By day she worked at a bank in a shopping mall in a fairly senior position. We both admired each other for the simple reason that we didn’t shoot up. We became inseparable and she invited me to live with her in her mother’s house, which worked out well as neither of us had to pay rent.

I moved in overnight. Marc would pick me up for work then return me after work and the compulsory breakfast at Adam’s Hut. Living outside of Kings Cross and seeing normal houses with normal families, it made me question what I was doing. Men had begun offering me $600 and $700 dollars for sex, but I had become so strong, I wanted out of the sex industry for a while, so I refused every time.

I was busy working one night when one of the doormen delivered me a message: Joe wanted me at the café ASAP.

I began to sweat. He never asked for you unless there was something wrong. I walked into Adam’s Hut and noticed Joe and Frank, sitting solemnly in a booth. I was obviously meant to sit opposite them. I knew I was in trouble.

Joe started with small talk, how he was pleased my little kiosk was going well, then sprang it on me.

‘Annika, I am holding gun right between you legs under this table,’ he said in his heavy Greek accent. ‘Please give me one good reason why I shouldn’t shoot you dead.’

I sat there and the sweat was pouring out of me. ‘Give me one reason why you should have to kill me,’ I said.

‘You know the reason,’ he said. ‘You have been working illegally and I am about to lose my business over a $100,000 fine.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ I said. ‘You know me, I have always been a good girl, Joe. I have never taken drugs, I have never been late, I have never had a till that didn’t add up.’

‘A police officer saw you taking alcohol from the kebab store and selling it to the patrons,’ Joe said.

‘Yes, I do that,’ I admitted.

‘Why the fuck are you doing that?’ he screamed. He cocked his gun.

It surprised me he had brought a gun and was planning on shooting me, right in the front window of Adam’s Hut. My mind was racing, I knew I had done nothing wrong but how do I explain that to someone so irrational? Was my excuse going to suffice or was my explanation going to incur further wrath of the brainless bouncers who had taught me this practice? My choices were a bullet in the gut from Joe or a punch in the head from the bouncers. I went with the latter.

I quickly explained to Joe, as calmly as I possibly could, that two bouncers had taught me to collect money from either the doorman or the clients themselves. I would then walk across the street to the other club, go out the back door to the kebab shop’s fridge and retrieve however many drinks were ordered.

Joe’s right-hand man was becoming quite nervous by this stage of my story.

With the gun still pointed at me I closed my eyes and screamed out: ‘Ask Frank, he was there when they taught me! All I know is I do exactly what I’m told.’

Joe turned to Frank in disbelief. ‘Did you know about this?’ he asked in a soft yet chilling voice.

I could feel the atmosphere growing thicker in the room. I could hardly breathe. My life hinged on how Frank responded now, he was either going to make me or break me. The way Frank stared at that coffee, you could have sworn it was speaking to him. He finally raised his head and looked directly at me, drew one last puff of his cigarette, sipped the last of his Greek coffee and admitted he had indeed trained me and that I was not to blame. But Joe didn’t want to hear the rest of his story or any excuses. Frank being involved was enough for Joe. I was excused and permitted to live.

Joe placed the gun on the table in plain view of the street, waitresses, other diners, he didn’t seem to care.

‘Listen, koukla, you are good girl, don’t sell beer where police can see, OK, now go get back to work.’

Every night ended the same way, a compulsory three am dinner at Adam’s Hut. This was exclusively for the top tiers of the hierarchy and their dates. As Joe’s nephew’s girl, I was expected to make an appearance directly after work—this was not negotiable.

Marc was sitting with his usual group of thugs, none of whom I liked. Marc held out the chair for me to sit beside him. I ordered my meal, then sat silently while Marc and the boys finished their conversation. Finally Marc turned and looked directly at me. He seemed to be taking in every freckle, every colour in my face, then all at once he said, ‘Why do you wear that diamond in your nose? I wish you’d take it out, it cheapens you.’

I was a bit taken aback by the directness of his question and statement. Thankfully our meals arrived, which gave me a temporary reprieve from having to answer his question. I even tried changing the subject.

‘I had my busiest night ever at the kiosk tonight. I’m thinking about getting a popcorn machine, what do you think?’

He was not to be dissuaded. ‘Annika, I asked you nicely to please remove that fucking eyesore.’

‘Look, Marc, when you met me my nose was already pierced, why are you now trying to change me?’

‘Are you telling me you will not remove it, even though it pisses me off?’

‘I’ve never asked you to change. Why are you doing this to me, can we not talk about this later?’

His friends were loving the entertainment, but pretended they couldn’t hear what was being said two chairs away.

‘Now, and this is the last time I will ask, get that fucking thing out of your nose.’

I felt like saying ‘or what’ but decided against it. I said, ‘Marc, you have two choices, live with it or you can choose to stop spending time with me.’ I was petrified, I had never gone against him before.

He just looked at me unemotionally and nodded then resumed eating. But within seconds he put his knife and fork down then picked up his napkin and wiped his mouth. With his napkin still in his hand, he backhanded me.

The room was silent, but nobody dared look at me. Marc had already begun eating again.

My jaw felt unhinged. My chair had fallen backwards with the force of the blow. My legs were dangling in the air. I grabbed my bag and pride and stormed out.

I could hear Marc in the background as I was leaving: ‘Good fucking riddance.’

I didn’t run out of Adam’s Hut, I was too overwhelmed. I walked slowly to the door, taking in each and every face of my fellow diners. Their heads were stationary as they tried to look away from the scene they had just witnessed, but their eyes searched for me. A sympathetic Samaritan would only incur further penalties from any one of the seated hierarchy, so everyone remained quiet and motionless.

Outside the enormity of what had happened hit me. A cold wind made my jaw clench and chatter. I ran back to the club where my kiosk was located. Nico was still working inside on paperwork and when he saw me his eyes seemed to soften. I had only been hit five minutes ago, so surely there was no bruise yet? But there was no mistaking my blotchy tear-stained face.

‘What happened? Are you hurt? Who did this to you?’ he asked.

‘Marc hit me in Adam’s Hut. Can I use your phone please, Nico?’ It was starting to hurt even to talk. I paged Tony: ‘I’m in trouble, meet me at the Italian restaurant opposite Adam’s Hut ASAP: Annika.’

Once I had left my message, I turned to Nico. ‘Nico, I can’t believe he hit me.’

Compassion was written all over Nico’s face, but he couldn’t be seen going against the likes of Joe’s nephew. ‘Once you’re up to it, I’ll walk you out,’ was all he said. If anyone else had hit me Nico would have gathered ten of the biggest boys for a Cross-style showdown. I could see Nico was conflicted, so I decided to let him off the hook and wait for Tony. He was, however, kind enough to lend me a sweater to stop me from shaking.

On my way to the restaurant I spotted Joe walking in my direction. I thought now was as good a time as any to cross the road but it was not to be.

‘Annika, agapi mou,’ called Joe.

I couldn’t very well pretend that I hadn’t heard him. Reluctantly I made my way over to him.

‘Where you going, koukla? Come let Joe buy you a hot chocolate.’

‘Joe, there is no way I’m going back into Adam’s Hut.’

‘Who will touch you, or dare to stare when Joe will be sitting right beside you?’

I really couldn’t see the point in talking to Joe. His loyalties would always lie with his blood, the best I could hope for would be compassion. I don’t know why I agreed to go with him but I did. Joe and I passed Marc’s booth on the way to the back of the restaurant where a special table was always reserved for Joe. Marc didn’t look at me, but he knew I was there. We were only two booths back from him and I felt very uncomfortable and not at all safe. People started to leave with full meals remaining on their plate.

‘Annika, Marc is sorry he hit you, but you shouldn’t have gone against him in front of his friends. He only wants the best for you, but you shame him with that thing. Just make him happy and take it out, everyone will be happy then.’

Instead of pointing out the obvious to Joe, who was probably not even aware women voted, I opted to sit silently and sip my hot chocolate. I let him prattle on but I was not listening. I knew it was nothing that I wanted or needed to hear. Then I saw Marc rise from his table.
Please let him be leaving, God please let him be leaving.
He turned and walked in my direction, his eyes staring right into mine.

With one hand on the back of the booth and the other on the table, he leant his head right into my ear. ‘Please, agapi mou, let’s not stay angry at one another, do as I have asked then we can forget all about this night.’

I didn’t want to speak, but a single tear slipped down my face, totally from fear. He was not going to be satisfied by silence. I put my chocolate down and held my purse to my stomach. I couldn’t even bear to look at him. It took all my strength to swivel my legs around in order to leave.

When he saw that I was trying to leave without speaking to him, he lifted his body to an upright position again. Then,
bang
! I went flying across the booth, burning myself on the way through on a hot Greek coffee. My knees were on the surface of the table, while my body and head were on the vinyl seat. My hand felt my nose and it was bleeding profusely. I raised my head to see if the onslaught had finished. Was he coming towards me? Instead I saw him beside a now standing Joe and they were screaming at each other in Greek. Like a rocket I was out of there and straight into the Italian restaurant across the street.

All the staff knew I was Marc’s girl. As bad as I looked to turn me away would be an insult to Marc and Joe, which they were not prepared to do. Of course I wasn’t going to tell them Marc had been the perpetrator of my injuries, for then they would surely kick me out. They gave me ice and a clean shirt and a seat in the back. I only had to wait twenty minutes before Tony arrived.

His expression was a combination of
when will you learn
and
that looks painful
. All his lips gave away was, ‘Let’s get you out of here.’ In the car, he told me that we were going to breakfast. I wasn’t hungry at all but who was I to argue?

‘Anywhere except the Cross please, Tony.’

Breakfast finished at about two thirty that afternoon. We laughed, we cried, but best of all I made some firm decisions. I was going to walk away from the Cross and the sex industry entirely.

By five that afternoon, thanks to Tony, I had a job at a bar-n-grill, taking orders and cleaning. I obviously didn’t have to sit an interview, not with a black eye and a broken nose. It was a handshake favour to Tony—for that favour I would be paid six dollars something an hour. But I didn’t care, I felt normal again, and clean.

It took me all of two weeks to realise that I couldn’t survive on $140 a week, in the absence of Gala gigs. So I supplemented my income by dancing at the major nightclubs. Some gigs expected me to take my top off but they paid $100 a night. Within weeks I had recruited about six girls and started taking bookings for choreographed sets as I had in Queensland. Once again, this was all thanks to Tony and his connections. I kept my job during the day even though it was infringing on my ability to sleep. Cleaning tables kept me grounded.

I had one last living remnant of the Cross that I had yet to rid myself of, my flatmate, Sonja. I had to get away from her. As much as I loved her she was very involved in the Cross’s culture. She had quit her job at the bank, begun dating a doorman and was now drug dependent, though thankfully she avoided the needles.

For my seventeenth birthday a group of us went out to celebrate. There was Jimmy, Wayne, Stephan, George, John, Sonja and myself. We had been friends for about six months. Every night that I had worked at the Cross we would meet in Stephan’s restaurant at eleven o’clock; we called this our dinner break. Wayne was the head chef, Jimmy was a pimp and I don’t really know what the other guys did for a living but I can guess.

Jimmy was the most interesting of them all and secretly I had a bit of a crush on him, but his choice of occupation stopped me from acting on that impulse. Mind you, he already had his own harem and why wouldn’t he, he was a dream to look at. He was a blonder version of George Michael, with a splash of James Dean attitude. All the girls who worked for him thought Jimmy was their one and only. He made us laugh because he was such a sexist pig—to him, all his ladies were whores. If one of them turned up at the restaurant wanting to speak to him he would become irate.

‘What the fuck are you doing here? Nobody here wants to pay for it. If I wanted to talk to you I would have come and found you, now fuck off.’

‘But, Jim, I want to go home, I’m cold and tired, can I borrow some money for a taxi?’

‘Do I look like a fucking ATM machine, am I your fucking father? It’s only eleven thirty, you have at least four hours left to work, it’s not as if your job’s hard, most of the time you’re on your back. Now if you want money, go and fucking earn some!’

When he returned to the table it took him about five minutes to get out of his pimp character. I never really asked anyone what it was that Jimmy provided to be given the title pimp, questions were never a wise move. But I know that the girls Jimmy worked did not work from any of the clubs that I worked from. They were definitely street girls who offered their wares up and down the strip, which usually meant that they had at one time been kicked out of Joe’s or Jim’s establishments.

Jimmy believed if the girls were stupid enough to give him half their money for no apparent reason, why should he argue? Amazingly, these girls seemed to respond positively to his rough love. They would bring him money, or coffee, on demand, they never spoke back to him and, worst of all, never seemed offended by his abuse.

We started my birthday festivities at the restaurant, then moved on to a local nightclub called the Tunnel. We were all having a great time, the club was packed with colourful people, dealers, pros, TV celebrities, and always loads of A-grade rugby players. If you’re what’s called a good girl you rarely pay for anything in the Cross. The whole time I was there I never paid for a drink or a meal or even a cigarette, and my birthday was no different.

Jimmy was flaunting his cash far too indiscreetly that night. When I asked him why he had brought so much money he told me that he hadn’t brought a lot of money with him, but his girls kept turning up with his cut. For Jimmy to say he hadn’t brought a lot of money with him meant that he had only brought a thousand dollars. The last time I saw his wad of cash that night, he definitely had over four grand on him. It was about two in the morning when Jimmy decided to take his leave. For Cross standards, that’s an early night. But he had his reasons, ever the intrepid business man: on his arm was draped a new lady. I had never met her before and I don’t think Jimmy had either but she filled the same criteria as all his others. She was good-looking, drug dependent and very slutty. We all tried to talk him into staying, we even suggested leaving together to grab something to eat, but Jimmy had a different agenda. We kissed him goodnight, even the men, which was another Cross custom, and he left. We partied and ate until the wee hours of the morning.

As tired as I was I had to work the following morning. When I got home from work that afternoon, Sonja was crying her eyes out. The whole crew was there looking equally forlorn. The only one missing was Jimmy.

‘What’s wrong, why is everyone so upset? Please, someone tell me?’

‘Annika, Jimmy’s dead,’ said Stephan. ‘He was found this morning in a hotel with a needle in his arm—they’re calling it a drug overdose. His wallet was empty except for my card, so the police called me to ID him. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.’

In the Cross it was customary if you were a bit on the shady side not to carry any ID on you.

‘There has to be a mistake, Jimmy didn’t take drugs, in fact he hated people who did. On top of that he had loads of cash on him, you guys all knew that,’ I said, hoping that would make it untrue.

‘Don’t you get it? Someone gave him a hot shot.’

I had no idea what Stephan was talking about. Who knew that it was such a common form of murder that it had its own nickname?

‘They drugged him, nicked his roll, then made it look like a drug overdose by injecting battery acid and leave the needle dangling. Pigs don’t investigate if he is bleeding needles,’ said George.

We besieged the police every day for weeks begging them to investigate, but they refused.

The funeral was held in Greek tradition. Women were to wear no make-up or jewellery, dress entirely in black and not do their hair except to tie it back. This information was obviously not passed on to any of Jimmy’s girls. When we arrived, there was an all-out brawl happening on the front steps of the church between Jimmy’s relatives and about six scantily clad, overly done-up women, some of whom I recognised from the Cross. Battered and bruised, the girls limped away without attending the funeral and without knowing why they had been accosted.

When the ceremony started, I had a horrible feeling that I was at the wrong funeral. The priest was talking about Dimitrius. I was embarrassed, so I grabbed the other guys’ arms and told them we should leave. They quickly briefed me about Greek names: Dimitrius is shortened to Dimmi, which in English sounds like Jimmy. Feeling a bit more relaxed I took my seat and cried hysterically throughout the whole ceremony but I was not alone, we were all crying. Apart from George and John—who were Yorgos and Yanni—no one could understand enough Greek to get what the priest was saying.

The congregation stood. I was seated on the side of the church, halfway down. People were shuffling me into the aisle, and once in the aisle I was being pushed along with everyone else to the front of the church. Being only five foot six I couldn’t see where all this was leading. Then I realised that I was expected to kiss Jimmy’s head and ring as he lay in an open coffin. I was gripped with intense fear and reservation and the closer I got I had myself convinced I could do it, it was just a body. But when my turn came I broke down; there was my friend I had loved, laughed with, depended on, dead, never to smile or talk to me ever again. I couldn’t breathe, my nose was blocked and my heart aching. I pulled away from the coffin a step, wiped my nose and eyes and as I did that the stud from my nose fell to the floor and rolled underneath Jimmy’s coffin. I went into hysterics again and George grabbed me and pulled me away.

Slightly embarrassed I told him the plight of my $200 diamond stud. A smile appeared on his face, which was contagious. He stroked my arm then went to the front of the coffin for a second time. Like the good Catholic that he wasn’t, he crossed himself in front of Jimmy, then genuflected. He made it look so genuine. Within seconds he was at my side again, and with a façade of deep concern he held my hand and led me outside. In my hand was my treasured stud.

The burial was even more heart wrenching. Jimmy’s mother was howling, as any mother would who had to bury a son. John translated her cries for our benefit: ‘Why did you have to take drugs? You were so good-looking, we gave you everything, how could you abandon us this way?’

And with that she threw herself in the grave on top of Jimmy’s casket. I could handle no more, I could feel the previous night’s food rising in my stomach. I ran to the side of the car and threw up.

During the drive back to the restaurant, Stephan, George and John were talking about having found the girl that Jimmy had gone home with that fateful evening. Apparently she lived with a real heavy and together they had a reputation as people you just didn’t mess with. George was saying, quite calmly, that he and a lot of the boys were going to set things straight later that evening. By his tone I knew he was deadly serious. I never heard what happened to the girl or her thug boyfriend, but a couple of days later, George said something that stuck in my mind. Something so astute that I instantly knew the Jimmy saga was closed. He said, ‘Jimmy can now rest in peace!’

I didn’t see the boys ever again. That little experience was too close to the bone for my liking. I realised I was capable of surviving on my own; I had come this far unscathed apart from a few emotional scars to add to the collection. I had to get together some real money and once and for all get away from Sonja and her associations.