Seven Types of Ambiguity

  I cannot convey the extent of my pain. Even if I could adequately explain to another person the things he gave me—the calm, the confidence, the joy, the knowledge—even if I could get this across to another person, it would only be the first step. Then I would have to convey what it is like to have had all this, even if only by chance, and then to have lost it. But if in all the world I had a handful of people still with me at this step, I would surely lose them at the next one. I could not expect them to imagine my pain when he says that it is all my fault, that I am responsible for his arrest, for his incarceration. When I tell him that I was only trying to protect him from himself, he tells me that I had no right to interfere in his life. But in truth, I had no right not to. He taught me that. He was forever telling me that benevolent intervention was a moral imperative. I was only putting it into practice. I called the police because I didn’t know how long he was going to keep that little boy. Simon was not completely well; he hadn’t been for a long time. He needed help. You didn’t need to be a psychiatrist to know this. What he did could not have been done by somebody who was well. I thought that sooner or later he would come to his senses and agree with me. The sooner it ended, the easier it would go for him. So I called the police because it wasn’t ending. I was thinking only of him. I have never even told him about my “inconvenience.” That’s what I called it then, my “inconvenience.”

  3. I had not been in Melbourne long when we met. I had fled Adelaide weeks, certainly less than two months, earlier, and already before then my life had taken several unexpected turns, turns my parents would not have planned for me. They knew I was in Melbourne, but I wasn’t giving them any return phone numbers. This was in part because I didn’t want them to know how often I was moving. In part it was because I just couldn’t handle their constant harping on the scandal, as they put it, that their beautiful, privileged daughter had landed them in. And in part it was because I hated my father.

  As scandals go, it pales against those of the real world, but it was not in the real world. It was only in my parents’ world, the world of the parents of the sons and daughters who went to a handful of Adelaide private schools, the world of my father’s old-boy network and of the regular customers who came into his pharmacy. My father had been a local football hero and had represented the state once. It was an honor that accompanied him every day thereafter. My mother was a trophy wife upon whom he had quite successfully engraved his pride, his values, and his worldview. And his will.

  In the distribution of their trophies, I got her fingernails, their strength and beautiful shape enhanced by the manicures I have to have to get the better-paid bookings, particularly when escorting. Men notice a woman’s fingernails when they meet her. And they notice them when they are paying. It’s all you need in a forty-second introduction. My mother took care of her fingernails, for quite different reasons. We share more than her fingernails, and this has always infuriated my father. He says I am too much like her, but I think he’s wrong about this. I have her face and her figure but everything else, really, is his. My father and I are both pretty stubborn, and maybe that’s one reason we get along so badly. It didn’t help that he hit menopause around the time I hit puberty. When I started to look like a young woman instead of a little girl, the woman I looked like was the young woman he had chosen to marry at the time his choices were the widest he’d ever had and ever would have. My mother, after four children (I had three brothers), didn’t look like that woman anymore. Only I did. He seemed to lose his balance around then.

  We argued about everything when I was a teenager. Although I was an above-average student, a member of the debating team, and something of a dancer, I hated the school I went to. But my father insisted I stay there. Everything that hurt had to be good for me. We lived right next to it. A large private school, it was Victorian in architecture and in culture. Heavy uniforms, khaki ribbons in everyone’s hair, detentions for the wrong underwear, mandatory sports after school, sanctimonious hypocrisy from the staff whose vigilance and severity never seemed to detect or curb the cruelties and humiliations the popular girls visited on the weaker ones; this was all next door to me. It was always there, even on weekends, when the out-of-town girls, the boarders, reigned supreme. I could see and hear it all. It was next to where we lived, and this was what my father thought was good for me.

  “But you have friends there, Angela. I know you have. I’ve seen them.”

  He had seen them, all right. At the end of our house were two rooms that backed onto the school grounds. One was my bedroom and the other was a sort of playroom where I kept my birds. I bred birds. I can remember coming home from dance class at about eight one night to find four girls sitting in that room smoking. One of them said they had been there since around three-thirty. I knew them, but they weren’t my friends. They were slightly older girls, boarders, from the country mostly, who used to sneak into our backyard to smoke, gossip, read magazines, anything, just to get away from the mindless puritanism of the school. Whenever I saw them there they would briefly pretend to want to know what I was up to. They’d pretend they were my friends. But they were never really my friends. Except for Suramia, the Sri Lankan girl. She was different.

  That evening I found them inside the house. My father had turned a blind eye to their smoking, even though he would have killed me for it. Why had he not rebuked them? There were too many of them? They were someone else’s and too threatening, too forward, and too voluptuous to reproach? Perhaps they were also too exciting for him? Maybe that was why he had made them tea and coffee. As far as I was aware, he had never made tea or coffee for anyone before in his life. That had always been one of my mother’s duties.

  My father’s hospitality to these girls was entirely out of character, or so I thought then. Ironically, it was his particular interest in Suramia, the Sri Lankan girl, that contributed, albeit indirectly, to my break with him and my leaving home. Suramia responded to what she perceived as the warmth of my, or more accurately my father’s, hospitality with an innocent gratitude that was disarming. Tentatively at first, at least on my part, we became friends.

  That was the first of what were to become fairly regular visits by the girls on weekends. Remarkably, my father continued to treat them with the sort of bonhomie he usually reserved for his old football cronies. He was especially attentive to Suramia. True, she was striking to look at. But then he had often expressed views on immigration that you could be forgiven for believing were, as Simon put it when I described them to him, inspired by the Nuremberg Race Laws.

  My own friendship with Suramia developed independently of these weekend schoolgirl incursions into our back room. We went to the movies together and, when the weather allowed, for walks along the beach. I even went to her place for dinner one evening. I say “even” because she was reluctant to let me see her family’s modest home circumstances. She was ashamed, she told me later, not of their relative poverty but of the sacrifices she was allowing them to make so that they could keep her at a private school. It was not that they had to pay her fees—she had won a full scholarship including board—but even the cost of ancillary items such as uniforms and the interstate excursions and social events the school prided itself on, even that was more than they could afford. Her parents were unassuming, even self-effacing, but not enough to hide their warmth. Her brother, Romesh, a couple of years older than Suramia and doing a computer science degree at university, was rather reserved but still charming in a subtle way. I liked him. Perhaps it was because he seemed somewhat more mature than the boys I was used to. Although my father knew about my friendship with Suramia, he never commented on it. At least not while she remained at school and she and her friends used our back room as an occasional refuge.

  When I started an arts degree at university more than a year later, I ran into Romesh again. We began seeing each other quite a lot. A very good pianist, he took me to classical concerts, which I enjoyed, and I took him to plays, which he pretended to enjoy bu
t, I suspect, didn’t really.

  I’d had boy friends and boyfriends since my early teens. My father was not aware of most of them, even the ones he met. They were his pharmacy delivery boys, the sons of his friends, or, occasionally, the son of someone connected to his former football glory. And there were others. No doubt I was cruel to many of them, but I was just coming to terms with being a girl who looked like me. We had all met at the wrong time. It wasn’t our fault. It was an innocence we all had in common. Another thing at least they all had in common was that they didn’t threaten anybody’s established order, certainly not my father’s. My father reacted savagely to anything that did. He reacted savagely to my friendship with Romesh.

  It wasn’t that Romesh was Sri Lankan, he insisted. Oh no, my father wasn’t a racist. It was just that we should stick to our own kind. And these people should stick to theirs. “You see, I’m not treating them differently.” He would not let up. We argued bitterly all the time.

  Partly, I think, because of Romesh’s loneliness and partly because of my father’s bigoted hostility to him, our relationship after a time became physical. It was evident that Romesh was a virgin and although I wasn’t, my idea of contraception owed more to roulette and the Vatican than to estrogen and progesterone pills and condoms. Early in the second semester of my first year at university I found out I was pregnant.

  For a while I became an expatriate in the state of denial. Fine for a holiday, it was no place to live, and after two months I resumed residence in the real world. My father’s response, when I finally managed to tell him, was utterly predictable. How would he be able to face his friends, his customers, his associates at the club? Oh yes, and an illegitimate child wouldn’t actually be in my interest either. But he didn’t insist I have it aborted. At least not till I succumbed to his relentless questioning a week or so later and confirmed what he had suspected and feared.

  My father went completely berserk. A bastard was bad enough; a colored bastard was the ultimate violation of all his cherished prejudices. Raving and ranting, he demanded that I have an abortion. The racism that spewed from him was all the more obscene given his undisguised salivation at his nonaccidental encounters with Suramia in the back room a year or two before. His insistence on an abortion was rabid and remorseless. Eleven weeks into my pregnancy I stopped resisting.

  There were six or seven women sitting around the waiting room, waiting. Three of us waited on our own. A woman opposite me was there with her husband or boyfriend and their young son. The little boy kept running back and forth to the TV set in the corner and they, clearly embarrassed, kept telling him to be quiet.

  “He’s pretending it’s a computer screen. Crazy about computers,” the man said softly to the room.

  Romesh never even knew I was pregnant. I thought that if I didn’t tell him it would be as though it had never happened.

  My regret and my shame were immediate, and they were unassuageable. And so was my anger at my father for driving me to do it. He came into my room that night and found me crying into my pillow. Perhaps my mother had heard me and sent him in. Had she come in instead, things might have gone differently.

  “You know how much you have upset me by all this, Angela. But you would have upset me much more if you’d had his child. You did the right thing, the only thing.”

  We were in the dark. I lay on my front sobbing. I didn’t say a word, hoping he might, just once, tell me, even if he didn’t mean it, that how I felt mattered too. Had he turned me over, had he put the bedside light on, had he got me upright to tell me that, to tell me anything, he could have seen that my face was covered with vomit. But he didn’t. The reach of my father’s empathy did not extend beyond the skin that contained him and I hated him for this, his overweening concern for himself to the exclusion of everyone else, as much as I hated him for his racism and his hypocrisy.

  I wanted to get away from him, from the abortion, from the guilt, from Adelaide, from everything.

  4. By the time the house had begun to stir in the weak light of the following morning, before my mother had cut up the fruit she put on top of my father’s cereal and boiled the water for his coffee, before she had collected his newspaper from the porch, I had already left. I had thrown all that I thought I would need into a suitcase, caught a taxi to Keswick Station, and was on a train to Melbourne, a place where no one knew me, no one, except one of the girls of the group of boarders who had made the outskirts of my home their second home.

  I had been told she was living in Melbourne. I got her phone number from the directory, and to my surprise she agreed to let me stay with her for a while. She was working in promotions for her boyfriend, who was part owner of a nightclub. Through the two of them I met a lot of the so-called glamorous people, dropped a lot of “e,” snorted a lot of cocaine, and slept with as many men as I thought I needed to sleep with to help me forget Adelaide.

  I couldn’t get older fast enough. I never paid for my drinks and seldom for my drugs. I moved around a lot, staying with the people I met, men and women, for a few days or even a couple of months. They all had great places, in Prahran and South Yarra. Some lived in the center of the city. Everything was new. Anyone I was still sleeping with ten days after the first time became my boyfriend, and I made my boyfriends pay for everything. I caught up on my sleep during the day and did everything else at night.

  I was sleeping with a man called Steve when the last of my savings and my Visa credit ran out. Steve asked me what I planned to do for money. It could have been an innocent question but despite the fact that I had not been his guest for very long, I feared it contained an impatience I didn’t want to exacerbate. I told him I thought I would go back to dancing or maybe get a job as an aerobics instructor. He said that he had a friend who was always looking for dancers and that he could set up an appointment for me. When I found, as I should have guessed, that it was tabletop dancing he was talking about, I said no.

  “Give it a try.”

  “No, I’m not doing that. What do you take me for?” But I knew what it was he took me for. I was out of money and out of contacts. The doors of my newly old haunts were closing to me, and their denizens were already forgetting we had met. Where once they could all recognize me across a crowded dance floor, now they didn’t see me. When I called out to them, they couldn’t hear me.

  I took the job at Steve’s friend’s club. I lasted two nights. I couldn’t do it. I was too embarrassed. Even now I couldn’t do it. I do more than wriggle around on a table now, but it’s in private and the onlooker is naked too. There’s a certain equality about it, even an upper hand. There’s nothing empowering in having to gyrate high on a table, naked but for stilettos, in front of a bunch of lecherous drunks. On my second evening there I kicked a drink all over a paralytic slob who was trying to lasso my leg with his tie. He complained, and I was immediately dismissed by Steve’s friend’s manager. By the time I was dressed and my cab had reached Steve’s place, Steve already knew that I had lost the great job he had gotten for me.

  “That’s what you’re there for. That’s what the men do.”

  He was furious and told me that I had another think coming if I thought I could keep sponging off him. I had no work ethic. I disgusted him. He wanted me to move out, the next day. I made him sick. He was going to bed. I could sleep on the couch. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I lay in the dark on his couch for more than two hours wondering how I had gotten into this situation. I thought that if I could revive his interest in me it would at least buy me some time. So I crept into the room. It was dark except for the light of the clock radio.

  “Steve,” I whispered. “Steve.”

  I tripped over some shoes that were scattered on the floor and fell forward toward the bed with my arms out to protect my face. He sat up on the other side of the bed with a start and I realized that my hand was resting on someone else’s ankle. The other person didn’t move, but Steve got up and dragged me all the way back to the couch in the
living room. He slapped me a few times in the dark as we banged into the furniture. He told me I was a walking disaster, an irresponsible slut who had let him down to his friend. And then he raped me.

  Steve kept snorting like an animal, cursing and hurting me. He was obviously high on something. The woman in his bedroom ignored my screaming but came in when she heard me sobbing after he had finished and gone into the bathroom. The lamp on the sideboard went on. I looked up and saw the spaced-out, heavy-lidded, bewildered face of the girl from school who had put me up when I first arrived in Melbourne.

  The next day I checked into a motel at the end of Carlisle Street in St. Kilda. It was the cheapest motel I could find. I was completely out of money. When the sun went down that day I found myself on the street offering men in slow-moving vehicles a hand job for forty dollars. When exactly did I become a prostitute? I don’t know. Sometime between the back of my parents’ house the time my father first played host to the girls from my school and the street corner in St. Kilda that evening it just happened. After I was raped I figured that since they were going to get it anyway, I might as well get paid for it.

  5. I’ve talked to many businessmen since I started working as a prostitute. Many of my clients are in business. They differ physically and psychologically and in what they want from us, but there’s one thing they all say: Find out what people want and you’ll never be hungry. I was hungry for a moment there, hungry in their sense of the word, but it hasn’t happened since. I know what half the population want. I knew it then. But I still do not really know why. I’ve talked to Dr. Klima—Alex—about it. He’s a psychiatrist. He ought to know.