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Jackie speaks: When the big ship pulled into the tropical harbour, with seven hundred Americans aboard, the whole town became an escort agency. A lot of the younger women got dressed up in their split skirts and lacy tops and hit the main street. They were the latecomers. Most were already waiting on the wharves for their chance at the Big Apple. We called them 'wharf rats' or underpaid prostitutes. One of the wharf rats in the Pub Bar said, 'I intend to have my pick out of this lot.' Roxanne had just moved up from Perth, was flat broke after a failed business venture, and looking for bar work. She met Sharlena and myself in the Pub Bar and, fed-up and a bit pissed, said that she wanted to work with us. I didn't know about that, like if she had it in her. Sharlena was standing at the bar sipping a bourbon and coke. She said that the working girls never got to work because of amateurs like them.
'The little sluts are everywhere,' she said. 'They come out when the sun sets, like fruit bats. Now let me tell you something, sweetheart. These blokes have got it too easy 'round here. At least with our girls they know it's not a dead root and she's not gonna be drunk or clingy in the morning.' 'Trouble is,' said Samantha, ''cause a these wharf rats we don't get no yang.' 'Well,' said Sharlena, 'you can have yang for nothin' anytime. Question is, are they in for yin, for one hundred and fifty dollars?' 'Hey Sharlena, have a go at that shark-fucker who's sniffing 'round Nikita. Just listen to him. Now don't you give it away, honey!' The Yank wearing a black Hard Rock Café T-shirt and tight faded denims was coked outa his brain. 'Hey, I don't know, man. I'm just a big dumb animal and God loves big dumb animals! Look! I'll consult with my fingers!' He wiggled his thumb in front of his crossed eyes and concentrated on the message of his thumb. 'Do you really want to screw this crazy guy, Nikita?' 'Well, he's interesting, different from the norm. And you know I like a challenge.'
Roxanne speaks: He was from New Mexico, part Italian, German and Mexican. Both nipples and ear lobes were pierced. A dolphin swam down the left side of his body. It was curved into his shoulder and hips, as though each time he was diving into the sea, he was transformed into the length and width of dolphin. His body was covered with deep blue ink. 'Yeah, I'll have him,' Nikita said. A white pointer and a hammerhead shark grew into an aquatic system along his calves. He was almost the cliché of a sailor. Nothing would take him away from the sea and nothing wanted to. Nikita could have stood and watched his finned movements from a salty rock shelf for long unblinking hours. It was like coming across a beautiful experience with only one chance at receiving it. More mythological than man, her time spent in his company reminded me of my adventures by rockpools as a child, the vast external time of the beach interacting with my odd, internal worlds. This is our interaction with life on earth. All the moments of our lives are small pieces of treasure dredged out of the continuum of experience. We hoped that somebody was watching, and that our treasure meant something, if only briefly whilst I imagined this sailor when he was very old, his destroyed and salty skin, all the world's oceans and claustrophobic cabins awash through his memory alongside the tight mechanics of big ships.
Or he may be like an old wharf, his broad dark brown shoulders covered with barnacles and seaweed. Where would he be living then? He would be too brittle and whiskered for the rage of the ocean. It was a rage you had to move with, not fight against. It was like being in the smash and grip of breakers as a child. They had to be understood and manoeuvred. 'Never let the deep sea take you away into its giant power. Remember that the only option you have is calculated and relaxed interaction.' I imagined him on a deserted beach somewhere, dry and half rotten like an old wharf pylon, the ocean's swell and suck rolling over his ankles on the outskirts of some coastal town, that from a distance seemed more ocean than land. But ultimately he was a human being, not a dolphin. The silence of the winter-wind-blown seaport lapping at his mind, stirring up all his old stories. How would Nikita appear inside them, if at all? Nikita hoped to appear in the dreams of someone and not left behind on the edge of the land by sailors like the other girls. She travels across lands that resemble oceans. She will not be trapped in a sea cave or tossed out by the sea swell. She will not spend her life being toppled by waves and beaten into the shoreline sand, as if she were riding the foam, as though each wave's crest were the silver mane of a big dumb animal. |
