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Sport 41: 2013

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This is how the house fell apart: First Len got a really great boyfriend who worked in the skincare cosmetics section of a flash department store, they met each other’s families, decided they were in love, talked about getting married, all that bollixxx, or maybe they were scared of dying lonely like we all are once we get in our thirties and realise we’re still permanently single and don’t have any kids and aren’t likely to ever own a home. Then Hakim went back to Indonesia to see his folks for a holiday but I guess he joined a terrorist cell or married a nice girl who got down in hijab style because he never appeared in town or on Facebook ever again, and then Tyler went back to full-time Becks way, way, way after her commission and sculpture had ended and started working in the library, exactly the same job she used to do before she chucked it in to become a pro for the sake of art. She got sick of working nights, she said, but I think she got sick of trying to have a steady boyfriend whom she’d pretty soon have to dump because he’d want her to not be a hooker and she would have to get all feminist on those dudes and go down on him with the ‘You can’t change me, this is my life, you can’t own me, why do you have to possess me, why are you so jealous, you think love means you have to have me all to yourself and you don’t want to share me with anyone’ styles. Blah blah. So my hypothesis was that she figured if she stopped working as a hooker she could have a nice PhD candidate or archivist boyfriend without having to say that she’d given it up for a guy and then if she went out with a punk rocker she could probably still do burlesque dancing or pin-up girl modelling on the side with a name like Tyler Teaseme or Bubu LaBouche and he’d think that was cool and get a sketch of her tattooed on his arm, but then, that’s what the girls who want their kit off in public while guys go la-la-lum without actually doing it to them for real all do, so . . .

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The real working girls weren’t so exhibitionist. Some of them wouldn’t even look me in the eye on the street, of course I am female so maybe there was just no point, but even when talking to me, they’d seem to be staring off to the side, or there were ones who, get them drunk enough and they’d forget they weren’t working and come on to everything in sight like it was their role as a citizen and a matter of public service. Then later on down their career path, or further up the career ladder, it depends on how you look at it, they’d end up kind of sloppy with how they flung their clothes on although they’d started out classy as fluff. Go to their day job in basically underwear dresses under a raincoat, like they couldn’t remember which uniform went with which job.

Maybe she’d be too jaded by now for a life like that, the cleaner Tyler Teaseme life with the feather boas and stripping behind peacock fans and a boyfriend with colourful tattoos and ear stretchers. Maybe she was really just going to be a librarian for real, read the daily Dilbert cartoon and date someone from MSD. I got the feeling maybe she wanted a long term someone too. I suppose we all did.