Eight Pieces on Prostitution Read Online Free PDF

predictable and bland. The problem was, she told herself, that she was too attached to routine. The extraordinary had become a habit.
    Harry left her a bonus, each time a few cents more, and for this she was grateful. She had not told him how she struggled to find the rent money each fortnight.
    Maria heard the walls cracking around her, the low sounds of timber giving way, and watched age patches on the plaster growing so as to cover the whole ceiling. She imagined Harry and herself engulfed by shadows, the only bright thing left the ancient cod-piece in its smelly bed. She thought of layers of concealment and how each one finally would be stripped away.
    When her rent was increased further, Maria knew that she would have to leave. She turned away from her landlord’s silver eyes as from a blindness that might conquer her remaining days. Time was short; her landlord, now he’d acted, wanted her out within the week. She would have liked to ask Harry what she ought to do, but had no idea where to find him in the city. She did not know his last name, or his first one, come to that, since ‘Harry’ might have been invented on the spot the first time he had rung the doorbell. Harry never missed appointments, and she was always there. She didn’t even know if he had a phone.
    Maria did not mind the contempt of other tenants, or of passers-by, as she gathered her belongings on the footpath. As she bundled the last of them into her ancient car, she thought of the goose that lay, and then finished laying, golden eggs.
    In her new place, Maria missed Harry and his costumes, and was angry with herself for doing so; she missed their hours together and told herself not to be a fool. Looking back, she could not shake the feeling that she’d been on the point of understanding something important while in Harry’s company, that understanding had been no more than a breath away. She missed the creaking of the old flat with its recalcitrant shower and shadows on the ceilings, though her new one was cleaner and her list of clients at last began to grow.
    She pictured Harry walking up to the door in his finery, knocking and then waiting, knocking and at last going away. She thought of leaving him a note with her new address, but the likelihood of her old landlord finding it deterred her. She pictured Harry pacing the footpath in his disguise of a normal human being. In the dusk, she glanced over her shoulder down the corridor, at a nostalgia she could not allow herself to indulge.
    Maria no longer kept her money in the stove, but, superstitious, banked it twice a day. There was enough left, from her rent and food and other expenses, to save a little more each week.
    Returning from the bank one afternoon, she decided that she might as well keep a diary. It would do no harm.
    Maria chose a child’s school exercise book. She thought that seventy-two pages would be more than enough.
    â€˜The first thing,’ she wrote, ‘was that we fitted. Most pricks fit most cunts – that is the heterosexual experience. You could set it out like an equation. Even ageing, battle-scarred cunts will lick their lips and smile as if for a hidden camera, since, though they know in their deepest folds that every prince turns into a frog, still, still….’
    Maria listened to the rain and thought, then she continued writing.
    â€˜The mind may know, but the cunt, in spite of its struggle with rubber, wads of cotton and daily over-use, is naively generous. It holds no memory of disappointment, or fear of being turned out in the street.’
    Maria thought again and bit the end of her pen. ‘We do not put aside our knowledge that love disintegrates and the ash is dry in the mouth and the warm places empty holes. We wrap it tenderly around and these wrappings become the body’s sought-after amnesia. That we must continually take off our costumes and replace them means no more to us than it did to Harry. It means