The Naked Drinking Club (8 page)

‘I’m sorry but you’re going to have to strip,’ he said, getting into the next song, which was an old Suzy Quatro/Chris Norman duet I hadn’t heard in ages. Wilson knew all the lyrics, which he sang along to as he attempted to remove my top.

I looked over at Mac, who was engrossed in conversation with the white-haired man.

I took off my T-shirt and bra and swung them around a bit, thinking nothing of it.

‘Good tits,’ said Wilson.

‘Thanks. Good cock,’ I said, pointing at it.

Lots more people were naked by now and nobody seemed to bat an eyelid, we were all much more concerned with dancing away to the music. ‘Come Up And See Me, Make Me
Smile’
caused a surge of enthusiasm from the crowd. I took off my skirt, and danced around in my underwear for a while, before removing everything and throwing my pants at Mac. Mac just picked them up and carried on talking to the man. It felt very easy to remove my clothes, and I loved the feeling of no boundaries, of limitless debauchery.

I danced between Wilson and the moustached woman who rubbed her tits in my face every now and then. We danced however we wanted, with no emphasis on trying to look good whatsoever. It was just about moving around in whatever way we felt like. The moustached woman brought out a bottle of poppers and offered it to me, just as the music changed to Black Sabbath’s ‘Ace Of Spades’. Wilson ran over to the DJ box, grabbed a crash helmet and put it on. I hadn’t had poppers for a while and they made my head rush to what felt like the point of bursting, as Wilson ran head first, repeatedly, at the back wall. I looked into the sea of naked, drunken and vastly different bodies that surrounded me and felt fantastic.

I danced for about an hour with beer breaks every so often. I went to the toilet at one point and took some coke in a cubicle with two naked men, with whom I had bad kissing, and a goth girl. When I came out of the toilet, Mac was gone. I found the white-haired man, who was topless, and asked him if he knew where Mac was.

‘He’s gone to play in a poker game, he won’t be back now.’

‘Where’s my clothes?’ I slurred. I felt sudden, intense concern for my clothes.

‘Steve’s got them.’ He pointed to the barman who gave me the thumbs-up.

Mac must have given my clothes to Steve to look after and told Whitey to look out for me, I thought with drunken logic. That means he must care for me. I’ve only just spoken to him today yet I feel I’ve known him for a long time. What does that mean? And was the poker game just an excuse? Did he leave because I was so off my head and naked? What does my nudity mean to him? Is it wrong because he is protective of me? Does he get naked? Why does he come to this club? Why did he bring me? Maybe he can help me with what I’m looking for through his contacts in the
Sydney Morning Herald
. Maybe
that’s
why our paths have crossed. Everything happens in my life for a reason. Oh, fuck it.

I stopped questioning myself for the time being, because I was in no fit state to answer. The barman poured us both tequilas. That’s when I snogged him across the bar. And that’s how I ended up in his bed.

The thirst woke me up first. I was dreaming I was eating watermelon. I woke up scratching my hand; I thought there were eggs planted in it. I thought an insect had laid four small jelly eggs under my skin that were about to hatch. I felt sick, and my legs felt trapped. I tried to move them but they were weighed down. Then I came to and found the weight was a pitbull terrier lying across me at the foot of the bed. I twisted my body round; a large, muscular man slept on his side away from me. It wasn’t Mac. I strained to see his face, which caused the dog to growl and the man to stir. I didn’t know him at first.

On the floor was a crumpled-up Durex. I tried to make out whether it was full or not but couldn’t see. I lay back down again, defeated by the dog and nausea. I needed a drink of water so badly; the Australian heat added a tricky new element to the morning after.

I had to give in; it was too hot and dry. I thought hard about where I could be. I remembered dancing naked in a bar and later being in the room I had slept in, and a barman asking me what Branston pickle was. I thought I had fucked the man next to me in a toilet, that I had sat on top of him and someone had come in, a woman with a moustache, but I couldn’t be sure. I remembered being in a cab with Mac before that, then I could hear Blondie’s ‘Atomic’ but the gaps were really big this time, bigger than usual.

I went back to sleep for a while, and when I awoke I was less drunk, and the barman had gone. I sat up in bed, my numbed head, resting on both hands which were killing me from showing Mac my pool-table balancing. I put on my clothes and left.

The street was all lively and bright and full of more couples than usual. Then I remembered it was Saturday, and we were
going
out selling early just after lunch. I stood at a bus stop, trying to focus on the route information on the sign. I put my hands in the back pockets of my denim skirt to find some soft folded paper. I took it out and examined it. It was three pages from the Sydney phone book, all of the name Duffy. I had two of them on the first page scored out, which made me worry that perhaps I’d called them the night before.

Back at William Street, things were fairly quiet. Only the Danish were up and about. I still felt slightly drunk when I walked in. I didn’t care whether Anaya saw me like this or not. In fact, I was rather hoping I would bump into her. Maybe I would ask her to come for a drink with me or something. I wouldn’t care what I said to her. I looked at the Danish eating breakfast cereal and laughed.

‘Hey, Kerry.’ Karin laughed back, not really understanding that I was laughing at them.

‘Heeeeyyy,’ I said, looking in the fridge. I bent down, putting my hands on my knees, staring in at our divided food sections. The Danish had a joint section full of fromage frais, yogurts, ham and cheese. Jim’s was mostly ham, cheese, eggs, and jam and some salad. Mine was completely empty. ‘I dunno …’ I mumbled.

‘Is that you just back, Kerry?’ asked Andrea who was tying her hair back with a band, sitting beside Karin on the sofa.

‘Yep. ‘Fraid so.’ I shut the fridge, took a glass from the draining board and filled it with water, turning round and leaning against the sink, gulping it down.

‘So, party, party, yeah?’ said Karin.

‘Party, party,’ I said in a sing-songy voice.

‘Did you go off with that guy in the bar?’ Karin asked, between enthusiastic mouthfuls of cereal eating.

I poured another glass of water. ‘Mac?’

‘Do you know him?’ asked Karin.

‘Kind of.’ I thought about telling them everything but what would be the point? They’d only say ‘cool’ or something annoying like that.

‘Yep, we went to a club in King’s Cross, and I just crashed with someone there.’ I pushed the patio doors open with my
foot,
and lit up a cigarette from a packet lying on the kitchen worktop.

‘Cool,’ she said.

‘Whose are these? Do you know?’ I asked, already lighting one up.

‘I think they’re Anaya’s,’ said Andrea.

‘Cool,’ I said, sniggering. They began speaking to each other in Danish. I sat on the step, with my back against the doorframe, half looking outside, and half looking at the Danish, sucking on the cigarette, which I regretted within seconds.

Andrea began licking stamps and putting them on postcards. That’s when it was time for me to leave. I stamped out the cigarette and retreated to my room, feeling nauseous. I was too fucked to shower, and decided to have one later. I lay down on my bed, looking at my clothes on the floor, and made plans to tidy and settle in more. I lay on my side, trying to find a position that felt better for what I had to admit was a hangover, and replayed the night before, trying to figure out what kind of sex I’d had with the barman, or what his name was. I couldn’t remember much. Instead I felt envious of the Danish, and longed to be simple like them, up bright and early, making the most of the day. We were both here in Australia for very different reasons though, mine much more complex than theirs. I felt sad and panicky for a moment, but told myself that it must be the come-down and that it would pass. I took all my clothes off and got under the covers. My body smelt of the stale sweat of the barman and me. I wondered if Anaya was still asleep in the room beneath me, and felt certain that she, of all people in this mixed troupe of players, would understand my darkness. I listened for sounds of her, and drifted off.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

WITHIN A WEEK
, I quickly learned all there was to know about selling the paintings. It was so easy to read people, the ones that were likely to let you in and the ones that weren’t. I learned little tricks of the trade through Greg, reporting back to him every night in The North Angel about the things I’d encountered during that evening’s work.

‘A good one is,’ he told me, ‘to make out you’re thirsty, say if you could just have a glass of water, that way you stand a chance of at least getting into their hall.’

One time I had asked for a beer from an approachable-looking man who answered the door with a joint in his hand. I ended up there the entire evening, just smoking and drinking a couple of beers, and shooting the breeze about this and that. By the time Jim turned up with the others, I hadn’t even opened up my folder once, and was so wasted I couldn’t explain why without laughing. In the car on the way home, things were quiet and Jim was angry with me, I could tell, but he didn’t know me well enough to chastise me. Instead he just said, ‘Well, it’s your own bloody time that you’re wasting.’

That only made me laugh even more. A slack approach, I thought in hindsight, after my first week of work.

Greg also told me not to waste time on the chatty partner, for it was always the silent one that held the purse strings. It all sounded bollocks at first, but when put to the test, Greg’s tips paid off every time. Even the stuff he’d said on day one that sounded ludicrous, all fell into place in various houses. I would never have believed the notion that because people are Chinese, they would buy the abstract paintings, until I encountered my first Chinese household, when they did exactly that.

‘Could I please show you in there?’ I had said, pointing to the clean white empty hallway behind the two men, which smelled of fresh paint and was just screaming out to be filled with my paintings. They looked at me, and then said something in their own language to one another. Neither of us could understand what the other one was saying, but within five minutes they had picked out two abstracts at one hundred bucks a piece. I was lucky, their house was new and empty and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Greg told me later that there was a certain amount of luck involved, but ninety-nine per cent of it was confidence. He felt I had more confidence than the others. I suppose in some ways I did.

We all got given our dollars on the same night we earned them, if we made cash transactions, but most of it slipped away on endless rounds of drinks in the bar afterwards. If customers bought more than one painting, they would always pay by cheque or bank slip – most people liked to have the safety net of a cheque, to allow them to back out. It didn’t happen often, but once in the first week Andrea had a sale fall through. It was frustrating and worrying to wait for these transactions to clear, but I guess I saw them as savings to put towards my journey. I kept a notebook of money owing to me, and the paintings I’d sold. So far, I was in the lead with ten paintings in my first week. I had earned myself four hundred dollars, around two hundred pounds. With rent money knocked off, that left me with a total of three hundred and twenty dollars, or one hundred and sixty pounds.

Karin was in second place with eight sales, and then Andrea with six. Scotty made the odd sale to keep things ticking over for him, but mostly he drove and sorted out the painting stock. Jim supervised everything, and liaised with Greg over areas and routes. When it got busier Scotty would take another team out, but for now he stayed with us.

I’d made more of an effort to settle in at the flat. I bought some groceries, although most days I ate breakfast out at a café on the corner. I’d also done some laundry and tidied up my tiny room, putting up a Bruce Springsteen poster that came with Sydney’s
City Limits
magazine, and a photo of my granddad in an effort to make it more homely. I bought a pack of airmail
letters,
and had already written two and sent them off. One to my grandfather and the other to Maggie, a friend of mine back home who was looking after my records while I was away.

The mornings and afternoons were quiet. We often ate burgers together in a greasy type café a few blocks away, before we left for work just ahead of the rush hour, heading out to the suburbs. Sometimes I would lie sunbathing in the yard out the back from lunchtime onwards, reading a paper, scribbling thoughts in my notebook, or making little sketches of the others as we lay around. The rest of the time I would lie in my room, looking up and wondering when I would do something concrete about my search, and not understanding why I didn’t. The late mornings were spent watching terrible yet addictive American soaps on TV. There was a whole new world out there, but I just didn’t seem to care.

Apart from the non-selling-night blip, I was being good, and had drunk very little more than the others each night. But by the following weekend I was growing restless again, as usual, and the all-too-familiar empty feeling was beginning to set in. On the Friday night, I started to drink a bit more, and made efforts to look for Mac whom I’d seen very little of since our night out together, as he’d been in Perth working. I was disappointed with his absence, as I had hoped we could hit King’s Cross together again, or something similar.

Plus Anaya had been on holiday down the coast visiting people since the weekend before, and I found the company of the others limited, especially while trying to adhere to moderate drinking.

On the Friday night I was looking forward to Anaya being back, and getting paid what was owing to me. I showered after we got back from selling and put on some make-up, and a top I thought I looked good in. But neither Anaya nor Greg showed their faces in the bar, preferring instead to have dinner together somewhere in town, according to Scotty, and then have an early night. I wondered how much Greg loved Anaya, and how Anaya could possibly love Greg, before sinking too many Jack Daniel’s to care.