The Losers

  

   The row of windows that showed the sad street extending away outside comprised of a day lit scene, swathed in the glossy yellow of a summer’s end Saturday afternoon. He spied across the empty blue stone coated car park of the boarding house, that was devoid of cars (since the husbands whose wives had chucked them out and others were away visiting or were at the pokies), and he saw that across the road on a familiar corner there was a girl who had somehow made an effort beyond that of the other street girls that he usually saw standing there as he made his way from his boarding house room down the hall.

He left the boarding house, to attain a closer proximity to the girl he had seen through the window. Acting, as he crossed the road, like he was not approaching her, and, as he came closer to her, he was amazed to see that, unlike so many of the other poor girls he had observed out on these streets, the nearer that he got to her, the better she looked.

The opposite was usually the case.

An adept, or not so adept, facial camouflage designed to hasten the head-lamp fifty dollar holding driver's dive to fulfill his lust.

    She was wearing the black fishnet stockings that were the usual garb of women  wanting to inflame men's desires, with the tops of the black fishnet stockings revealing, against her exposed patches of bare thigh tops, the black, frilly, elastic strips which clasped onto and suspended her stockings.

There were a few small and one quite large, beside the back of her right knee, just above where her black stiletto leather boots ended, both a large hole and two other small holes, in her stockings.

Her breasts were large and plump but proportioned perfectly in relation to the mass of the rest of her semi-clad frame.

   All of this was beneath a purple vinyl mini-skirt. She had long black hair which had a sheen to it that suggested a purple colour, for some intangible reason.

So strange it is, that under the brightest of summer Suns, that which, in winter, is pretty much just black, has, summoned from it by the beams of the Sun's rays, some unknown property which brings forth the release of a hue which floats, mist-like upon the surface of any natural black brought beneath that Sun.

   It was a sheen of such a colour so distinct to the individual that it might be called, upon analysing, blue, red or their child, violet. Her hair was emitting such a sheen as she stood there in the sun on street corner offering her be-stockinged thighs for rental.

The other aspect of her he noticed after this was that she was reading with fervour an overtly large, rough covered and ancient tome with frayed and curling, yellowing pages. To all else she seemed oblivious, as if she were on a couch at home completely absorbed by what she was reading, despite standing on street corner offering herself and there, by the default of the nature of this area, as it was known to be the red light district to the city’s residents.

Noting the speed that she changed pages with as he approached her, and enticed by her beauty, without much consideration he asked her, with the voice of a man who had today, spoken to no one yet,

“Hi! How much?”

She looked up from her book and replied,

“Fifty for sex.” her voice was heavily accented.

This price was unusually cheap and it sounded to him like a good deal so he signaled this with a nervously hushed,

“Okay” as he glanced at the front of the boarding house across the road with all of its windows facing them.

 She closed her book and looked at him, awaiting instructions.

“What are you reading?” he asked, thinking that she had probably found the book lying on the ground as she walked to this spot and had picked it up out of curiosity. Unusual domestic objects were often found lying about here, the debris of once 'normal' lives that had been exploded by the splash of blood in a syringe's barrel.

“It’s a book of history.” she said, pushing most of its bulk, as though it had a great value to her, into her hand bag that was resting on the low brick wall that she had been leaning against.

    As she turned her head sideways, and placed the strap of her bag upon her shoulder he noted that behind her ear that she was wearing a strikingly vibrant violet bloom that looked fresh enough to suggest that it was rooted and being nourished somewhere in the cascades of her long hair’s thick, shining, black tresses.

So, it had not been plastic as he'd first suspected.

She was so very different from the colourless and detached looking girls that he had passed so often on this street.

“What’s your name?” he asked expecting a lie but requiring a reference.

“Yasmine” she said, adding, “I am from Israel.” and she showed him her brown eyes by looking straight into his for the first time, acquiescing to him in subjection as though a signal that his time of rental of her had now been embarked upon and smiling.

“Do you have a room?” he asked.

“No.” she said and he paused to think, beginning to wonder with embarrassment if anyone in the boarding house had noticed him there, talking to one of these street hookers and so obviously negotiating with her.

He had noticed that she was very pretty.

“Israel?” he said then he asked her,

“Why are you doing this?” as he thought,

‘Why come half way around the world to do this? You shouldn’t be here.’

After a slight pause she explained, almost convincingly,

“I have borrowed money from a man to buy a computer and so I need to make the money so I may pay him back to do what he needs, so I do this to pay him. He is a very horrible man.”

They stood there at the impasse created by a lack of private space they might go to as other prospective Saturday morning husbands out on an errand slithered slowly passed in their family cars and leered lasciviously at her.

Then an idea occurred to him.

“I know a place where we can go to. If it’s okay with you?”

“Okay.” she replied and as she straightened her bag strap in readiness to go with him. He added cautiously,

“But, just one thing. Please follow me, and walk ten paces behind me?”

   He was embarrassed that he had given in to his urges in such a public place as the street in which he walked regularly to work each day and to quell this he needed her to walk behind and not beside him.

“Okay.” she said morosely.

    He was not an ugly man, physically, and they walked passed the lines of flats, where he had seen, in the sick grey dawn of pre work cigarette pauses from his boarding house window, the hearse-like ambulances taxiing silently away the corpses of junkies who had prematurely terminated their leases by what was colloquially known as 'dropping'. These were ambulance trips that apparently required no siren calls as they backed out slowly into the traffic and he chose not to understand their silences as he repeated the ritual of the next check of the time on his bedside alarm clock.

   As they walked further down the street he heard one of the dodgy looking guys who always stood around the driveways to these blocks of flats say to Yasmine,

“Hello there, darlin’.”

For fear she may have stopped to join in to a conversation enticed by a friendly tone and perhaps the hint of some free smack, he twisted his head to see if she was still following behind him just like a pet being tested for its loyalty and he was inflamed with lust to see that she was still there.

   Without a word they rounded the corner and passed the old disused tip site on Inkerman street and then they moved across the six lanes of highway where, for fear of sudden death car crush you always looked up, halfway across the road, to check and see that the little man was still green and check that you were safe and hopefully she would be too, underneath the sky that was now falling so quickly into a grey, scowling memorandum of the approaching dark night of rain storms that was so obviously coming. He took her across the freeway to an abandoned factory beside the one that each week day he worked in.

   It was from outside of here, which, one day during his tea break while he stood balanced upon the thousands of newly born and old and decomposing, sometimes lipstick-smeared, (always) used condoms on the concrete ground, that he saw that the door of the abandoned factory beside his had been smashed in. Probably by thieves who had aimed in the wrong direction as this factory contained nothing more than traces of the valueless rubble of a previously unsuccessful business venture.

“Are you still okay to go in here with me?” he asked Yasmine.

He was surprised that she bravely replied,

“I will go anywhere.”

   He wondered when they climbed through the so violently smashed up and open door, how she could be so reckless as to go with some freak who had just picked her up on the street and then to follow him into some dark warehouse without caring that she was not safe, hidden here and secluded from the streets with their ever watchful pimps and other working girls?

   After they had entered into the empty dirty expanse of the interior with its rain dirt streaked cataract glass windows, he stopped to look around and to sense if they were alone there until he felt positive that no other living being was in there with them.

Previously, he had toyed with the idea of ditching his overly expensive boarding house room and defiantly moving into this abandoned factory right next to where he worked, laughing, as he explained his plan and told a friend that he could get up at five to eight and still be at work by eight! As a part of this fantasy being manifested in reality he had found one day on the side of the road (where people around here often lived) a de-skun foam mattress and he had carried it into the place in excited anticipation of rejecting the expected mores of society and taking up a new and free squatter's mentality. But, because of the chocolate coated Saturday night video sessions warm in bed and the thought that he might lose ‘his stuff’ to burglars, he had never moved in. However, he had deposited there the mattress and was now going to use it for the first and only time.

    He dragged it to the middle of the warehouse floor. She stripped her plump body, unsheathing a milky coloured skin, pouting orb breasts, and, as she unbuckled and let fall her clothes to the grimy floor, she left her knee length black leather boots on. He simultaneously joined in the ritual to become completely naked at her side and as they stood there in the frosty fading light of that great empty expanse he pulled her completely human form by the hip to him and they kissed each other on the mouth as though the original innocent lovers in the Garden of Eden.

The fold of her right arm was full of bloodied, pepper-corn sized holes.

There was no computer.

   There in the very center of the empty warehouse they did it and she held him above her with far too great an embrace, as if he would escape and he felt her roughly shaven thighs scraping against his buttocks and the leather boots smooth above them, and when he went to kiss her she latched her mouth on to his upper lip and sucked upon it like some strange creature extracting its juice, sucking with a strength that bordered on violence, for the entire entanglement she did this without relenting, until he was done.

"Strong." she whispered to herself, mascaraed eyes closed.

  The windows now were filled with shadow. He wanted to keep going, without realising it, for the rest of his life, and so did she, but she stopped him by looking at the windows and urging him with a terrified,

“Oh no! I must be getting back! He will be looking for me.” With this she rose and quickly dressed again into the costumed anonymity of the stranger on the street.         

What ever it was that he said next as he slowly dressed was enough to inspire her to write upon a found scrap of paper in her handbag both her name and mobile phone number before she emphatically asked him to call her?

With a rising suspicion he wondered why she would want him to do this? He was afraid of the drug that lived inside her, but not of her.

   They left that place and walked back up to Gray street through the flaring masses of sex maniac searching car headlights passing by, but now, he followed her ten paces behind, and more slowly, until she had disappeared, before he could notice that she was gone.

   Back in his room he turned on the TV and during the commercial breaks he looked at the phone number and then later put the scrap of paper under his socks and undies in the dresser drawer where he knew he might forget it.

    Years later, on the show, ‘Call the Cops TV’ he saw a report that a prostitute who went by the name of 'Yasmine' had been picked up from a similar red light district street in a city in another part of the country, and had been the victim of an unsolved murder.

He wondered if it was her, but did not really think it aloud, until he wondered one day if someone had killed her because she always wore a violet flower behind her ear and seemed much more interested in finishing reading her old and vastly luxurious history books than in having the next ‘score-a-hit-for-a-screw-john’ pull up in the family car and pick her up?

    He had meant to ring her he convinced himself and sometimes he looked at the number and wondered if he was just another one that she had dropped this paper bait upon?

The history book and the way she wore the violet behind her ear told him that this was not so and that she was ‘honest’ despite the smack addicts required moral abandon, but he never rang the number for fear that should a romance develop that he too would succumb to the, ‘low-flying-bullet-graze-on-the-fold-of-the-arm-habit’ syndrome.

Heroin was this neighborhood's very own First World War machine gun sniper's nest and the barrel was flaming red hot.

   A few times, on other sad and lonely Saturday afternoons, lying on the floor in his room and looking through the window at the street, he had spotted her on the corner, but by the time he had jumped to his feet and gotten as far as the window in the hall outside his room, she had already been picked up.

News around these parts traveled fast when a girl like her was only charging $50.00 for sex and he missed her every time.

    As they had walked up to the busted up, crumpled, steel door of the abandoned warehouse and she had come up beside him for the first time since they had begun their walk, so he could, gentlemanly, allow her to go through the doorway first, he gushed excitedly to her, with a dull and dumb smile that she did not see,

“Normally, you know, every weekend I lose all of my money gambling on the pokies!”

“Oh.” she said, with an emphasis on the silence surrounding the word.

“I’m a loser.”

“I’m a loser, too.” she said.