When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction you await the phone call. There will be a phone call. The sincere hope is that the call will be from the addict themselves, telling you they’ve had enough, that they’re ready to stop, ready to try something new. Of course though, you fear the other call, the sad nocturnal chime from a friend or relative telling you it’s too late, she’s gone. – Russell Brand
I hesitated to publish this. It seemed wrong somehow. But I can’t get the vision of her out of my head. Not the woman whose funeral I attended, but her friend, a pale woman who stood across from me as we formed an aisle for the coffin to be wheeled through.
She stood in the arms of the man I guessed was her boyfriend. A man who looked like he would have been more at home on the rugby pitch than in the funeral home; tall, square, blocky – hidden behind dark glasses. She curled herself into his protective embrace, her pretty face, with its turned up nose, and blond hair neatly tied back somewhat reminiscent of a private school girl.
I stood across from her, wrapped around Dan, my face pressed against her back, my arms around her chest – trying, hopelessly, to hold her together as she sobbed. And when I raised my eyes, the blonde woman, who seemed completely incongruous standing with us, was also heaving with sobs. Heaving and choking, her pretty faced wet, the involuntary moans issuing forth from her could only be indicative of her heart breaking.
Weeks later it’s her that I remember the most. Watching her face and the shudders and shakes of Dan’s body as she wept hard in my arms. They stood across the aisle, from such different walks of life and grieved the young dead woman who had been their friend.
And of course I revisit it because there is that other young woman who has died this week, Amy Winehouse. Her death has brought it all back. Because the woman we were grieving was so remarkably like Amy. The same age, the same face, the same prodigious artistic talent. The same damn battle with drugs that, in one way or another, led to their too soon death.
I revisit too because I don’t understand the vitriol that is being thrown in the face of Amy’s death; crackhead, druggie, junkie, and even more baffling – slut. As though her drug addiction is reason to rejoice in her passing, and many seem to performing the gleeful dance; good riddance to bad rubbish. And the thought that it is socially acceptable to write someone off, judge that they got what they deserved, just because of their addiction is so hideously ugly.
So this is what I wrote then…
I try not to intrude on other people’s grief. Try not to claim their moment of anguish as my own. I’ve seen too much sadness to go leaping in readily – I think it’s what happens when grief becomes familiar. I’ve walked next to loss so frequently I have a good sense of what is mine, and what is compassion.
So I stood at the back of the chapel today as we said goodbye. I stood next to the nearest and dearest, I stood next to the people who, to my surprise, have become my nearest and dearest and took comfort from their presence. I stood and felt a bit guilty for being there grieving someone I had only met a dozen times, who had touched my life only briefly. But as I watched the slideshow of her life play before me, a slideshow carefully curated by a person who had seen her grow from that delicious fat baby to a unique and talented young woman, my chest constricted, and hot tears pushed past my protest to run down and drip off my chin.
That sucker punch of sorrow, that I was ducking and dodging, connected as photographs of this tiny girl rolled over the screen in front of us. The tiny girl with arms wrapped around her best friend, a tiny girl standing proudly in her ballet outfit, a tiny girl dancing with her father, her small face gazing up trustingly into his, which looked down at her full of amazement and love. A look I recognised well, a look which I bestow on the small people in my life – gratitude, incredulity and overwhelming adoration all wrapped up together. A bigger girl goofing with her school friends, morphing into a young woman, trialling clothes and make up, trying to find her place.
The photographs rolled on, each a monument to a beautiful girl who had clearly grown up terribly loved. And I cried. I cried for her friends and family who had seen her disappear into a world where her habit overcame everything else. I cried because I knew how much desperation went into their attempts to rescue her. I cried as the photographs tapered off, because at some point her life disappeared from view. I cried because I may have been the last person to photograph her, because she’d ended up on the streets of St Kilda.
But while the tears were rolling I think I finally understood. I understood why all the people working here do it. I understood what I’d felt, but not been able to name, when I knew she had died. We were on the road, a Friday afternoon – all weekday worries left behind as we drew further and further away from home. From the beginning it had been one of those phone calls, those ones you can feel in your gut. The seriousness invaded the car, music turned down. We were quiet, waiting. Then Sally finished, and turned in her seat, twisted at that funny angle you need to get in to speak to the person in the back.
“Do you want to know now, or do you want to wait until Monday?”, she asked.
I paused.
“No, tell me now.”
She looked at me, weighing it up, and finally spoke.
“She’s been missing, and they’ve just found her body.”
We were driving away from the city, the sun just being sucked into the horizon, splaying its dirty orange rays onto low lying clouds. The car bumped along the road leading us closer to a country escape. I was glad to share the news, but I didn’t trust its authenticity, didn’t trust it was real. I felt numb, like it was news of someone I didn’t know. A friend of a friend, a person very far away, too far to touch me.
Later as the dark beset us, and the odd sign crept into the illumination of our headlights, my traveling companions spoke of death. They spoke of the recent departure of a dear friend, whose death they were still navigating. They spoke of funeral arrangements, of how well the one they attended had represented their dead friend’s wishes.
I gazed out the window into the blackness, half an ear on them and their grief, when I was beset by a memory of the woman whose death had been announced over that somber phone call. She was someone I knew, not very well, but a bit. She’d been there my first day at Gatehouse, and helped me germinate the seed for the book. She was the very first person who spoke to me, asking me outright about the camera on my shoulder, what sort of photographer I was. She was interested to talk about photography and art, then later suspicious of my presence – paranoid about why I sat for too long on that couch in the corner.
She was an extraordinary artist, and over the last year she’d floated in and out of my life, reviving my spirits with her enthusiasm for art, and her plans for the book, when I doubted any one would get involved in the project. So as I sat in the backseat wondering if it was true, if she had really died alone, cold, and too young, then who would organize her funeral? Who would know what song she wanted played to commemorate her short life? Even in disbelief I cried for her then. Wondering what we could do to celebrate her – thinking she had no one.
I was wrong about that of course. So terribly wrong. She was dead, the news was right, and she had so many people. And we stood together at her funeral, two incongruous halves of the sum of her short life, her pre street life, and her street life. The perfect song played and we cried together in shared loss.
But while there is no way to portion grief, to allocate a measure here, or a measure there I am sure that addiction is the hardest on the people who watch it transform their babies, their sweet faced kids, their schoolyard friends. It is hard to know how to care for someone when they pull away into the dark depths of themselves and the drug of their choosing.
There is the fear, the fear of saying the wrong thing, or doing the wrong thing and making your loved one pull even further away. And mixed up is anger. Anger that you, and the other people who form the parts of your family, are drowning under one persons weight. Being dragged under. And so the drift begins. Sometimes its a slow parting of ways, a gradual disintegration of the relationship – an estrangement. Sometimes it is vicious whirlwind of painful words and retribution.
One way or another it becomes complicated. A complicated tangle of words, and actions, and underpinning it all is that terrible, terrible drug that is draining the goodness and the life out of the relationships. Making them so hard. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve lain awake in the small hours agonizing over my loved ones whose addictions are a knot of worry, with no comprehensible solution. I’ve been stolen from, and lied to. I’ve felt powerless, and completely at a loss for what to do. Because what the bloody hell do you do? And more than that I have felt the dark brew of anger bubble in my chest. Anger that one person can destroy so much.
In that moment I finally, totally, understood why the people who work at Sacred Heart, at RhED, at Good Shepherd, at Gatehouse, do what they do. Standing there, watching her family grieve her terrible loss, I saw how hard loving her had been. What a terrible, terrible pain witnessing her destruction was. Watching her brightness diminished by the horrible shit she had put in her veins. And I understood that the people that work at support services do it because they get how hard it is.
They are brave these men and women who step in when it’s too confusing and painful for family and friends whose loved ones have drifted to the street. They step in and share the load. They love the hard to love. And it’s traumatizing for them too. But they do it because they get that its worse to do nothing. They do it because if it was their babies who needed loving, they’d want someone to reach them if they couldn’t get through.
So we all stood, and said our goodbyes to the young woman lying in the coffin. Terrible, mournful goodbyes. And we were very different people lining the path her coffin took to the hearse, but we were united by her. And she was loved. She wasn’t ‘just’ a drug addict, she was someone’s baby girl, friend, sister, someone’s lover. She was a person, and her worth wasn’t measured in how many times she put a needle in her veins.
These are excerpts from the book, following my experience as I went through the year in residency at St Kilda Gatehouse. The full book contains many more stories, including more photographs by the women involved in its production, interviews with them and photographs by me. I hope these stories give you an insight into the lives of these remarkable, brave and beautiful women. You can read more and buy the book here. In buying the book you are helping to support the valuable work St Kilda Gatehouse does to support street sex workers and people with life controlling addictions (100% of the sale profits go to them). You are also giving hope to the women involved in this project that the work they have produced has value, and that their voice will be heard.
I went and saw Dan today. She is out of ICU and at rehab. I knew she was going to be better because last week, when I was in Adelaide, Louisa called me and handed the phone to her and she kept telling me how shit it was that she had to go to rehab. And when I heard her speak all the hairs on my arm stood up and I giggled at hearing her swear away – the old Dan back. I knew it was special but she still sounded sluggish and foreign, so I wasn’t expecting much today. But when I walked in her face lit up and she threw herself out of bed and gave me a big hug. I’ll never forget that look of recognition and happiness on her face when she saw me. Not for as long as I live.
When I finally finished hugging her we sat and chatted, and it was like nothing had happened, let alone such a major trauma. I patted her knee (because I couldn’t believe she was real, and really sitting up, and really talking) and I told her I visited her when she was in a coma. I told her I crapped on and on about netball and making sandwiches for Tuesday lunch and she laughed at me (she laughed even harder when I said I thought she would punch me for the inaneness of the chatter).
I told her I was the last person to see her before she jumped on the back of the tram, but she didn’t remember. I said I was keeping her to the promise of a gluten-free birthday cake, even if she didn’t know she’d made it to me in the first place. She laughed again, and I kept on cracking jokes for the pleasure of hearing her giggle. I don’t run out of words often, but I can’t even explain how nice it was to sit and laugh. Just her, me and Louisa. Friends.
I spent a couple of hours with Dan in the hospital today. She still had her fluoro orange nails, but they were chipped and grubby, so the nurse got me some nail polish remover wipes and I took the polish off (me and her friend Hannah will go in and paint them again tomorrow). Her hands were stiff, and hard to move, but I got used to it quickly. Actually it’s funny how quickly all the machines and tubes and her lying there in silence becomes normal.
Her face reminds me of a deep sleeping child, drooling slightly, but with no flicker of eyes for dreaming. She isn’t dreaming, she’s on hold; full of drugs, sedated. I sat there for a long time and held her hand. It made me feel better to talk to her and tell her all the inane things. I asked how her temperature and the pressure on her brain were going today, and the nurse described her as temperamental. I laughed. You’re not wrong, I said. She is definitely temperamental. Even in a coma she is temperamental. Hilarious.
I payed her out for the baby-pinkness of her hospital gown. Told her it went really well with her bald head. A really good look. She’d punch me for saying something like that! After I finished taunting her I told her the one good thing about her being there was that she couldn’t retaliate. But knowing her she’ll probably wake up and tell me off for crapping on about shit, and land several whacks for all the cheeky things I’m saying. I’ll totally deserve it, and if she does, you won’t wipe the damn grin off my face. For a bloody long time.
Today is the terrible day. There have been good days here and bad ones too but today, this day, is the terrible day. The sun is shining outside and the world looks bright and fresh, like nothing could be wrong or go wrong. But something has.
Dan lies in the hospital under a weight of tubes, her legs enclosed in pressure stockings and her head swathed in bandages. The bleep of the machines is deafening, over the absoluteness of her silence. She is in a coma. She is in a coma because she decided, in the full confusion of her drug-addled mind, to catch a lift on the tram. Not in, but hanging precariously off, the back of the tram to be precise. She fell. Of course she fell. And now she has a brain injury that she may never recover from.
I stood at her bedside, scared to touch her for fear of hurting her. Louisa took my hand and put it on hers. I stroked it and asked the nurse when it had happened. She checked her notes. ‘Four on Friday,’ she said, ‘on Brighton Road.’ It was just near where I had dropped her, less than an hour before. I’d been okay until then, a bit dazed and disbelieving. But all semblance of cool evaporated at that very point. I gulped back a silent sob and leaked a river of tears down my cheeks. I had hesitated when she rolled out of the car to go to the Doctor’s appointment. I hesitated to leave her, vulnerable and stumbling, but left anyway.
I hadn’t hesitated to pick her up. Because when she rang I’d never heard her like that before. I’d never heard her so incoherent. I jumped in the car to get her, to ferry her where she needed to go, because it scared me a bit, hearing her so out of it. I just didn’t know how long it was going to take so I hesitated and then I left. I also didn’t know that the next time I saw her she’d be puffy and intubated. I didn’t know that I’d have to rifle through her blood-stained bag and her piss-soaked clothes to look for her house keys, while she lay comatose next to me.
If Only’s can kill you. They come, creeping, in the silent of the night, in every quiet moment, into every future decision. I’m an expert defender of the If Only, it’s self-indulgent and pointless to accommodate them, but this one was creeping in. As I held her hand with its fluoro orange nails and turned my face to the monitor that flashed and beeped her life signs, a tiny If Only came calling. And it said, in a small, persistent voice: If Only you had waited.
But there is no If Only. There only is. And when I tore my hand off hers and left, I reminded her unconscious form that she had promised me a cake for my birthday and that she better damn make me one, or else I was going to take her out. Stupid Moll, I said, you owe me a cake. My friend Dan would have laughed at me saying that, and rolled her eyes, secretly pleased. My friend Dan would have retorted with something cutting and I would have giggled.
Today is the terrible day because my friend Dan didn’t do any of those things. She lay there, not quite alive, not quite dead, chest rising, chest falling, breathing with the help of a machine. I wondered yesterday, whether she would still be here to cook that damn birthday cake. I didn’t expect that question to be answered so swiftly or painfully. I didn’t expect that at all.
The mattress leaned at a precarious angle against the graffiti-ed wall. It had an ejaculating penis tattooed across its surface. A flower-patterned dress lay discarded on the brown dirt, dampened by rain. I picked it up and noted its size: small. The squat looked like it was home to teenage kids and, as the rumour went, it was now being used by women for jobs. For head jobs.
The squat was balanced on the side of a bank with its ledge crumbling into the canal. The corrugated iron walls threatened to tumble away and I wondered how they managed not to fall. A pocket knife lay open in the drain, a stream of water trickling by, suggesting maybe someone had fallen. It was an archeological site ripe for misadventure; pungent with sex, drugs and homelessness.
Earlier in the morning I drove to pick up Dan. She could barely construct a sentence because she hadn’t slept for days and needed to get to the doctor. I chatted away as she mumbled into her chest, her head too heavy to hold upright. I talked about nothings; a bit of this, a bit of that, the gym, the weather, my new haircut. She dragged her hand up out of her lap only to land it clumsily on my shoulder. I wondered what she was doing as she curled her fingers roughly through the ends of my hair. ‘It’s soft’, she said, ‘so much softer now’. It felt like a really intimate gesture and compounded the sadness of her incoherence.
I’d never seen her so lost in her head. Her sentences didn’t fit together, didn’t make sense, and she kept apologising for being out of it. She muttered on about some skank who stole some shit off her. I tried to keep up with the meandering, rambling, stop-startedness.
I love this friend of mine who struggles with her addictions and her estranged family, who take care of her daughter while she can’t. This friend who struggles with who and where she is. But loving her is grim sometimes. She loves me too. She mumbled plans for making me a birthday cake amidst all the chaos of her drugged up diatribe. I wondered whether I would still be here for my birthday. I wondered if she would still be here for my birthday.
The longer I spend here, the fewer answers I have. Fewer answers and more words. My language has changed so much; skanks, mugs, fits and squats. I probably never had any reason to say them before. Now it’s how I talk too.
This is an article that was originally published by Lee Grant for the Head On Photography Festival blog.
I’m desperate for my camera. I thought I’d gotten used to not having it, but this photograph has just been handed to me. A perfectly aligned gift and I feel sick at not being able to take it with me. Sure, I can use words to describe how her prison-issue mullet complimented the blue tracksuit she wore, and the brief imprint her hand that was left when she pressed it to the thick glass that separated us. But it would speak so much more profoundly as an image. As a photograph, it would be one instantly readable, poignant picture of how her life and her thirty-year drug habit has led her to sitting, sunken but flawlessly framed in prison glass.
But I can’t have my camera in the jail, a situation that has been so often the case in the past few months – a big red DENIED stamped over the shutter. The reality is that there are lots of places a camera can’t go. It can’t walk with me into the Children’s Court where I spend a day sitting with one of the women while she fights for custody of her three-week-old daughter. Nor can I take it into loiter’s court, the high dependency unit or the the police interview room.
The lack of a camera has also been about gaining trust. It’s taken me a long time to get the women comfortable in my presence, let alone in front of my gaze. They scamper, startled, if I pull it out too soon or push it too far. And I can understand. They are a group of people who are among the most victimised and vilified in our society. Their identity is one of the only powers they can wield. And before they hand their visage over to me, they need to trust I am going to honour that gift. It’s painstaking. Months in, the camera lies dormant for longer stretches than I’m comfortable with.
Because I have no idea of what else to do, I’ve started to write and write and write. It’s a totally different creative process. I’m used to shooting quickly, it’s immediate and fast-paced, but this writing business takes some brewing. I’m trying to absorb everything I see and my brain ends up too full; I can’t unravel a beginning, middle or end. I’m driven outside to walk off the hash of experiences and align them into a tangible, edible shape. I pace the St Kilda boardwalk, the cold whipping tears from my eyes. Brow furrowed and mumbling half formed sentences. I appreciate the eccentricity of the suburb in which I live – I’m not the only oddity.
These words are partially my way of adding to this project, staving off the feeling that without capturing all these images and experiences somehow, this project will be a futile exercise. Each paragraph feels like it is stemming the flow of panic that rises in my chest. But these words are also partially therapy, my way of working through the things I see and the stories I hear. I contort these often dismal visions into sentences and this goes some way towards articulating how hard it is being here, but also how rewarding.
And although the process stretches and pushes me, I grow to love the simplicity of observing, how easily my eyes can absorb, no intrusive equipment needed. I discover that sometimes you need words to tip you into the world in which I’m walking. I see how they can be used to draw painful parallels to my own life. I write how the little boy, standing, body cocked and quivering, waiting for his mum to emerge in her green prison jumpsuit, is the same size and shape as my eldest nephew. I write about their reunion, the way my breath catches when I see his small body reach a shaky crescendo of emotion as the guard leads her to him, forcing me to bite away the hot tears that rise in my eyes.
Later his mother runs from window to window to catch the very last glimpse of her son, waving and smiling until he is gone from sight. As she walks back to her cell I see her wipe her eyes, waiting until he can’t see her before she begins to cry, I see my sister in her place and again my tears rise. The resonance of the written word becomes bigger than a photograph, because after all this is my story too, my experience shaping what I choose to record and why it means something to me.
I seem to be more present somehow, more involved, when I am making an observation instead of a picture. Although framing, metering and exposing is second nature to me now, it still remains an intrusion on my peripheral vision, channelling my focus. This interaction between the mother and her child happens as I am visiting one of the sex workers I know, as we are chatting in the corner of the visiting room. If I’d had my camera focused on her, I likely would have missed it. I’m really glad I didn’t.
Despite my new found love affair with words, I know the image of the shrunken woman who sat, perfectly framed behind the glass, aged by her lifestyle, will be the haunting spectre in my stable of images – the uncaptured. It’s the image that got away, and there are no words that can recapture the aesthetic of that moment for me.
The first time I met Lee she was about seven months pregnant. I was sat, wide-eyed, on the couch, trying to be cool. Y’know, like I’d always been there in that seat, like I was part of the furniture. Then she strutted in like the, Queen of the Castle, and drew her first shot. Or a breath that was like a shot, a quick intake then a rapid-fire barrage of words poured out of her mouth.; It was some complaint that I can’t remember now. A mug, or the cops, or some screw up with a warrant.
I was shocked. She. Was. Pregnant. And working. And man could she talk. Pip-pip-pippity-pip went her words. Her partner lumbered after her, with rounded shoulders and prison tats. It might have been my first day but even I could spot prison tats. I looked at him and he seemed complicit in her working, like some silent, swarthy sidekick to her blonde movie-star looks. Like a pregnant Uma Thurman in a Tarantino film or something, she tough and he sullen.
I was smoking then, rollies, and she asked me for one. I rolled her a couple. I was trying, probably a bit too earnestly, to fit in. She was thankful and she looked me in the eye. She was proud too I guessed and she confused me. Then she ducked off to shoot up, and that confused me even more.
She stopped working after their happy baby girl was born, and they had moved into a new place. The baby got bigger, and cuter and they moved again into a more permanent home. Her son moved back in and she got access with her daughter. There were bumps for sure but in the space of a year I saw with my own eyes her move from being a heroin-addicted sex worker to a stay-at-home mum. They seemed to be living the urban myth; People Who Stop Using Drugs.
I offered to take a family portrait for her to celebrate her one-year-old’s birthday. We wandered around the park, me and her three kids. They all played together and her teen son and pre-teen daughter fawned all over the baby, smiling and laughing and showing off for me. In my head it was so hard to reconcile this scene with the one I had witnessed a year ago. She could still talk. Pip-pip-pippity-pip. But now it was about the baby and the kids and what they were doing for the school holidays.
It made me happy and I’m careful with happiness these days, a bit wary of it. I’m wary of feeling it too soon, or wanting it to stick permanently, because most of the time here you have to be content with small moments of joy, content with the tiniest of milestones or the most incremental achievements, because mostly that’s all that’s on offer.
But watching those kids scramble over the monkey bars and chase each other through the wood-chipped park, I felt as sunny as the day. It’s a monumental achievement, salvation by baby. I feel pretty confident that she won’t go backwards too. Of course there is always that chance that her life might spiral out of control and she’ll end up on the street again but I don’t think so. She is happy. Happy folding the washing, yelling at her children, recording her child’s first steps and words and being a mum again, especially when she couldn’t be for so long.
This time the black eyes were his handiwork.
We sat in the dark and she told me how he broke all her stuff, how he hit her in the head and how she hid in the laundry. She told me how she refused to be treated ‘like a dog’ and called the cops, how he’d taken what he hadn’t broken and how the cops had told her it was a domestic dispute and thus the jurisdiction of the Family Court. I listened to how she protested that it was her house and her stuff and that he didn’t live with her. I saw how frustrating it was for her not to be heard.
She was sad, she said. Sad it didn’t work out. But even though it had been nice having someone in the bed, she didn’t want that crazy cunt. And he was a crazy fuckin’ cunt.
I had to ask about the last lot of black eyes. Had he hit her before?
‘Nah,’ she said. ‘Nah. But once he did it once, he was bound to do it again, y’know? I’m better off without him, y’know?’
Looking at her, a bit broken but take-no-bullshit tough, I knew.
Most people think when you work on the street you feel quite bitter about men, but not you? No, it’s opened my eyes as far as men are concerned. As a lesbian I didn’t have a very good opinion of men basically at all, and this has opened up my eyes, working in the sex industry, to how many guys out there that are having problems and that are very lonely.
And do you have regular customers? I do. Yeah, yeah I have regulars to the point now where I only have to go down the street about once a month. I at least get one or two phone calls a week.
And that’s enough work for you? Enough to keep me off the street.
And how has it changed how you feel about yourself? Oh, it’s been grouse. I’ve been able to go out and enjoy my life a bit more. I have money to go out and have meals with friends or just go for a drink down the pub you know? I could never do that before. I was always broke. It was always, ‘No I can’t do it, I haven’t got any money’. So it’s opened up a few avenues as far as socialising is concerned. And I can pay my bills on time!
We sat on the beach wall and kicked our legs. A group of Afghani boys played soccer and families sat eating their Christmas lunches on the sand. Our conversation meandered a little bit here and a little bit there, coming to rest on men (as conversations between women sometimes do). I traded my heart for hers and when I’d finished speaking she told me about Lester.
The father of her two eldest boys, Lester was her soul mate, she said, her only regret. The only man she could see herself spending the rest of her life with (we had both already agreed that we were probably far too fond of our own company to ever be really good at tying ourselves to someone else).
As her story wandered here and there, she interspersed it with her trademark cackle.
‘Do you know that the day my Mother met Lester she pulled him aside and said I was a drug addict and I was a prostitute? And not to be trusted. The day she met him.’
‘And what did he say to that? Mind your own business?’
‘He was actually a client of mine, that’s how I met him. He spent his life’s savings on me, booking me. And then when that was all gone he say’s ‘Now I’m broke you better come out for lunch with me’.
‘It was a true romance.’
‘Yeah but we never talked or anything. And he was lousy in bed too then (laughs)… He was shorter than me, and bowlegged. Badly. Looked like he’d just got off a bloody horse. Never talked or anything during that time. So I don’t know what attracted me or vice versa.’
‘So the love of your life had bowlegs?’
‘Yeah, badly. It got worse if we stayed up all night fucking (laughs), he used to waddle more. So every time I see someone bowlegged and they waddle I think, ‘oh you’ve been up fucking all night…’
She threw her head back and laughed then, and she was beautiful. But she really did love Lester, I could see it in her eyes which were misty with nostalgia; old pain in sharp relief against the backdrop of happy families enjoying their Christmas festivities on the beach.
‘What happened with you two?’
‘He died. He committed suicide.’
Lester killed himself with no warning and turned her life upside down. He’d left her in the cruellest way and she folded with the pain of it all. She threw herself into a failed relationship with a much older man who was playing happy families with her while quietly fathering children on the side. When that relationship came crashing down she went back to working and was raped, eventually losing her children as she flailed through trauma heaped on heartbreak.
The ice-cream van pulled up and we turned to watch the kids rush to it. I saw her smile at them as they ran past, and asked her about her kids. A mother to four, a grandmother to three, but in contact with none. She relayed their names and ages, and showed me a photo of one on her phone. Now it was just her, sitting with me on Christmas Day, laughing about the bowlegged love of her life. She rubbed her eyes and complained that the wind must have irritated them.
We swung our legs up and wandered home.
Christmas sounds filtered down from the apartments. Laughter and the clinking of glasses wafted through the night air to the empty street below. I rounded the corner and reeled as hordes of drunk backpackers roamed past (I had a vision of bison on rolling grass hills, moving as one). A pair of blokes staggered so close I could smell their cheap aftershave mixed with their bleary beer breath. They held each other up and whispered to each other, ‘Keep it together mate, keep it together,’ as they attempted to cross the threshold of another pub.
The streets seemed empty of women. I looked in dark corners and under streetlights to see if I could spot anyone. I walked past a phone box on Grey Street where someone had graffiti-ed their anti Christmas sentiments in yellow marker and wondered about the loneliness they were facing and how it could make them hate the day so much. I felt less sympathetic when I looked the next box over and read the racist vitriol they had taken the care to express there.
Dani called me and said she was working Greeves, so I headed away from the man who was hiccupping as he stumbled into a corner to piss, from the girl in the Santa hat and heels, and the group of hugging drunks and walked toward the quiet of the street beat. She was sitting on the hump, her now ex-boyfriend J. in his car spotting for her. I wandered over and had a chat with them about Christmas presents and their daughter. J. told me he had been diagnosed with diabetes and some sort of bone marrow disorder. I commented wryly that it was a great Christmas present and he laughed. He didn’t seem too concerned.
Some girl I’d never seen before was sitting in the passenger seat, her face illuminated by the mobile phone she was buried in. She was some stray J. had collected. She was pregnant and alone and so had moved into his place (you couldn’t write a better soap opera). B. wandered up and I was glad to see her. It had been a while and she was chirpy. Told me to take a photo of her shoes and I did. She climbed into J.’s car to count her money and I just hung around.
I was just about to leave when some Irish guys wandered over and B. was transformed. I’d never seen her work before. This woman who is usually tough as boots was suddenly flirty and giggly. She strode into the conversation, disarming, charming, and asked if they wanted to have a bit of fun, reeling off prices without even skipping a beat.
They told her they were going to convene and think about it and as they wandered off she turned to me and told me that she thought they wanted me instead. Cheekily, she raised her eyebrows and told me I should make some quick cash for Christmas. I laughed and was about to point out that with my unwashed hair and daggy outfit (which I wear very deliberately while photographing at night) I was no prize, but I realised I was being seen through the drunken haze of a couple of horny Irishmen. I rolled my eyes instead and we made some racist jokes of our own.
They were young and very attractive guys, probably my age. I wondered if this was a regular stop at the end of a boozy night when they’d had no luck picking up their equally drunk female comrades in a bar. Like grabbing McDonald’s on the stumble home when you’re loaded, and needing a quick fix.
B. wandered off to sell her wares, joining Dani on the hump. I asked her over my departing shoulder what she was doing for Christmas Day and she said she was going to see her son in the morning. I know she doesn’t get to see him often (we had sat together once and looked at photos she had taken of him, she stroking his photographic face, and me patting her shoulder) so I was glad for her. I know that she’d probably be the first person to scrawl Christmas sux on a phone booth and that her son’s real face would be a reprieve from the dread of a day loaded with expectation.
We yelled Merry Christmas at each other and I watched them as they stood in the dark together, lit only by the dim streetlight and the headlights of horny drivers. The sounds of drunken revellers drifted from other streets and I hoped they would be safe tonight in the hands of men who’d drunk too much, and whose festive cheer was wearing into a veneer of annoyance at having to pay for sex when there was seemingly so much free sex available. I wished them happy drunks, who came as quickly as those cheap hamburgers in the yellow and red packets: the other meat of choice for Homo-Inebrious.
B. called me yesterday. It had been ages since we’d spoken and she apologised. ‘I’ve just been hanging with my boyfriend,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to work anymore. I don’t want to come down to St Kilda. I’m sorry I haven’t seen you for so long, but I haven’t been this happy in ages. I’m so happy.’
I was stoked to hear from her. She is about the sweetest thing you could imagine and I’d missed her. Her Mum died when she was really young and she was shipped around relations who didn’t really want her, finally going feral, hanging with the ‘bad kids’ and ending up with an addiction that she turned to sex work to support. If you can imagine her; tall, curvy and pretty; she’d look more at home in a country town hairdressers than on the street.
Today I went to see her and meet the guy who was the source of her happiness. She looked great, with a new haircut that framed a face that looked thinner and brighter than I’d seen before. ‘Gemma, this is D., the love of my life,’ she said as I stepped over the threshold of her home. He was a heavyset guy recently out of a four-year stint in prison. I didn’t ask what for, but I guess I’ll find out sometime.
He was pretty out of it, smoking bongs and falling asleep. They’d picked up Valium and Xannies from the chemist so I’m guessing it was a nice cocktail of drugs that kept him keeled over between his occasional slurred sentences. But welcoming enough, he showed me his DVD collection and the Playstation controller he had bought her. He cuddled the dog and you could make out writing on his hand, clearly her writing:
D. (heart)’z Bek for ever
The place was knee-deep in the chaos of new love. Clothes, food, shoes, hats, drugs and booze were all layered artfully across the flat. She apologised for the mess as I perched on the beanbag with the dog. While she talked, he loaded up cone after cone. I realised, with a thud to my chest that felt like I’d been hit, that she had two black eyes. Shit. He was beating her up. Right?
Finally, he gave in to his torpor and peeled off to collapse diagonally on their bed and snore loudly, giving us a chance to talk about boys. We talked about how she was unsure of his love, because she was so mistrustful of someone loving her. She said that they’d broken up briefly because she had taken a job with a regular client, a sort of self-sabotaging thing to do because she didn’t trust herself, or know how to be in a relationship. Though it was mangled up in her other stories, she noted her bruises and said people were giving her funny looks when they walked down the street together.
Amidst all the girly gossip, I made noises that she shouldn’t be too hard on herself and that this was new and scary. She showed me her perfume collection and gave me a Christmas card. We looked at photos and all the while I felt a bit sick. I was trying to reconcile her obvious happiness with the shiners that marred her pretty face. Finally, and with as much tact as I could muster I asked:
‘So what’s with the black eyes, Love?’
‘This chick comes up to us at the casino and is like, ‘Can I have a fucking cigarette?’ And you know me. I’m like, ‘Well you coulda had a fucking cigarette if you asked politely.’ So then it’s on. Her dude punches me in one eye, and she gouges my other eye.’
‘Oh. So hang on. D. didn’t give you the black eyes?’
‘No. I told you that.’
‘No you told me that you and D. had a fight because you cheated on him with an old client. And then the next story you told was that you had black eyes. I was freaking out, I’m like, ‘Great, D. seems awesome.’
‘Ha ha. Nah, it wasn’t him. That’s why people have been giving us funny looks.’
‘Well that makes so much more sense.’
We laughed. Me with relief, her with disbelief that I’d muddled the stories up together. I felt bad that I’d thought the worst. They are just young lovers doing the best with what they’ve got; him, institutionalised and angry at the world; and her, sweet and trusting but suspicious of love. Both on drugs (though they are managing to stay away from heroin) and getting into fights. It’s got all the ingredients for a disaster, but you never know, love just might prevail. He (heart)’z her after all. For ever.
The purple chair had been sitting facing the street gathering dust. More an ornament than a useful piece of furniture, its crust of dirt had developed for weeks, months, maybe years. Forlorn, forgotten. Until last night when a man’s arse disturbed it. Now the chair on our front porch has a bottom shape smoothed out of the layers of city grime. The condoms left scattered around it testified to the perpetrator of the chair’s disturbance.
Sitting on the white picket fence opposite are a toothbrush, an empty needle case and vial of sterilised water. Remnants of a life lived on the street, of having to conduct private activities in public, because for a multitude of reasons too complicated to unravel into a straight line, there is no private place to do it.
I hear the night life of St Kilda sometimes. People screaming, fighting, swearing – living loudly. Sometimes I wake up from my sleep at some dark hour and wish they’d piss off. Go to bed. Be quiet. Go somewhere else. Compassion is elusive at three am. In the morning I step over their used condoms and empty fits. The wind blows the refuse of their lives under our gate, into our yard. The broken bottles joining the pile of rubbish, belong to the backpackers, come from afar to make merry, and who far more frequently wake me with the noise of their revelry. It’s complex this neighbourhood, with uniquely flavoured layers that can sometimes be hard to reconcile.
There are committees in this neighbourhood, founded by residents who have come to the end of their tether with being parked next to prostitution, homelessness and drug use. I can see they don’t want their children to see this side of life, that they don’t want the night noise to wake them, grumpy, from the warmth of their beds, or that they don’t want their gardens to become brothels or toilets. They don’t want to be solicited as they walk down their streets or to encounter the steady stream of mugs cruising the workers.
I get it. I do. I’m a resident too. There are so many complexities caught up in the why’s and the what-to-do’s that the solutions are untenable, unrealistic, un-thought-of. I suspect that there are three main layers to the basis of the complaints: hating what the women do (the sex and the drugs), hating the men that solicit sex, and hating that it happens on their doorstep (or on the purple chair as the case may be).
I can’t put myself in the shoes of someone who has to live her private life in public. Someone who has to eat, sleep, inject, screw, dress, shower and piss in public; all in front of a collection of confused onlookers. I know women who do, sure, but I can’t imagine doing it myself, it’s too horrifying. What I can imagine is that having to service a man on the purple chair, instead of the comfort of a bed or privacy of a home, must be desperate and degrading, and far more awful than me having to pick up a few condom wrappers.
But it’s also fear. Drug addicts are unpredictable and scary. I certainly am intimidated by some of the characters I come across and I know many of their names. But do I feel unsafe? Well, yes and no. I had always felt that (once the women took to me) they would defend me if I had any issues. While there is a good dash of every-man-for-himself-ness there is also a very definite sense of being part of a group, when you take the time to get to know the women that stand for hours on end on your street corner.
A threadbare looking man came in to Gatehouse one day and took a disliking to me. As he ranted and screamed at me, I had to ask him to leave with a threat of calling the police. ‘You do nothing for the girls,’ he said and started to threaten me. L., the softest, most quietly spoken woman I know, sat bolt upright in her chair and yelled back at him in my defence. Dan came rushing out from the kitchen and physically pushed him and his foul words out the door.
It was a bit scary. But I felt like I had been accepted. I felt like I was part of this little community, where the lives are strange and the characters stranger. I don’t have a solution for the residents’ fears; it’s too intricate and circumstantial to blanket it with ‘The Answer’. But I do think that taking the time to talk to the women who work, or teaching your kids about why their behaviours are unpredictable might be a sensible step. As for the purple chair? Well, we weren’t using it anyway.
The carpet used to be red. It’s now stained to a wilted brown and speckled with the tramp of a thousand dirty footsteps. I stepped along the hall, moving around a puddle of spit that lay in my path; a freshly expectorated addition to the degraded decor. There was a stand of day lilies on the landing, a weirdly alive feature in this drab hotel that had become a rooming house, which seemed closer to death than life. In that context the flowers seemed somehow funereal.
There was some sense of faded grandeur though, some remnants of history in the murky green tiles in the bathroom and the delicate hue of the few remaining stained glass windows. Both were now covered with a deep layer of grime and the place stank of piss, alcohol and homelessness (an acrid mix of sweat and unbrushed teeth, with a discerning note of rot). I was here to visit Angel.
She had decided she wanted to be interviewed for the project and I’d come (cameras stashed in my backpack) to talk to her in a tiny room inhabited by four people, herself an eighteen year old hooker and three much older men. The two I met seemed friendly enough. All crammed in to one shared space. Rooming houses are a prescribed level of homelessness, something that had once seemed a bit illogical to me. But here in a room only slightly bigger than my bedroom I understood why. A bed shared (or a spot on a floor) does not a home equate.
Only Angel didn’t just want to be interviewed. Angel wanted to show me how to shoot up. Specifically she wanted to walk me through the process of her shooting up. I agreed (though I can’t yet work out if it was because of self interest or an unwillingness not to dictate what the participants can and can’t photograph). Addressing the camera with a wave and a chirpy ‘Hi Gem’, she proceeded to take me through each step. It was only the second time I’d ever seen anyone shoot up. The gripping fear of the first time was missing. I was so focused on photographing I didn’t even get a jab of adrenaline. I guess I’m a better voyeur now.
After she had done it, in between nodding off and shaking herself awake, she started talking me through her life; her contorted and horrifying life. As we talked something she said ticked over and over in my head, the tantalising string of a loose end. Begging. I got it! I’d met her in the street months ago. I’d come out of a wine bar into the cold Melbourne night and she asked me for change. I gave her what I had in my pocket and she asked if she could give me a hug. I laughed as she hugged me and thanked me profusely, it was a sweet gesture and I was amused by her earnestness.
I was just about to interrupt and see if she remembered too when she suddenly announced she was going to be sick and vomited, loudly, into the water closet in the corner (a cupboard comprising a sink and tap). Between retches she told me that I could record the violent spews too if I wanted. The spewing, she reckoned, was a result of not letting her body go to sleep after the hit. It looked to me like the result of a body that could not sustain the level of drug use. She came back from her stoned reverie and started to panic about her next hit.
Suddenly desperate, she hurried me outside, puking in several bins along the way, past the modest cheer of the street Christmas party. We walked to Grey Street together so she could make her rent money back (which she’d spent on the drugs). ‘I need to show them I’m reliable’, she said seriously (them meaning the men she shared her room with). I didn’t laugh at her earnestness this time. Everything seemed a bit more grim, a bit more real, after visiting that faded hotel that stank of poverty and destitution.
She started her speech from the blue chair. A bit drunk. A bit teary. A bit happy.
‘Everyone else sees us as whores and junkies, but not you,’ she said to us. ‘You guys make us feel special.’ Amidst the tinsel and tables heaving with Christmas cheer we caught each other’s eyes and welled up at her words. ‘You don’t think the girls appreciate you but they do,’ she continued. We handed out festive serviettes to use as tissues.
Sally played Christmas songs, to our general dismay (but, to her great delight, we sang along in places). The puppy played with the baby, sharing toys and slobber. Crackers were pulled, we groaned under the weight of the food in our bellies and the women swirled in new dresses, almost obscured by the piles of paper. All wrapped up together, we were content.
A young woman came in late in the day and was brought out the back where I was sneaking a quiet minute in the chaos. I’d never seen her before. ‘I’ve been raped, and bashed and held captive for four days’, she said. ‘He broke my cheekbone but the worst thing is that he took all my money for Christmas. Everything. I’ve got no money for presents. I’ve got nothing.’ She dissolved.
I gave her the bag of presents we’d given every woman, and a new dress and she threw herself at me, her whole body shaking with sobs of happiness. Her gratitude was overwhelming and I cried with her as she clung me. I cried as she marveled at the gifts I was lucky enough to hand over to her. But she gave me far more than I gave her. My gift didn’t come wrapped this year. It came in the thankful hug of a beaten woman, and I was deeply, profoundly, grateful for it. Happy Christmas to me.
Angel is back. She has been raped again. A different guy this time. She asks me to photograph the graze on her wrist from where he trussed her up to stop her escaping.
‘He tied me up with those plastic cable things.’
‘Zip ties?’
‘Yeah! A zip tie.’
She is excited that I’ve guessed right, like some perverse game of ‘I Spy’. It’s the only time her voice raises beyond monotone.
‘Where are the marks? These?’
‘No they’re my trackies. Don’t photograph them. I don’t want them in the photos.’
‘Okay, so this on your wrist?’
I’m distracted by her fake nails. Too clean, too done, too new. They don’t fit the rest of the picture.
‘Yeah.’
The mark is light and starting to heal. She doesn’t know when it happened, can’t place days in alignment; they stumble together like a drunk walking a wayward line.
‘Yeah, and can you check my back too?’
She undresses in front of me. Her body is tiny with child-sized thighs and a slightly sticking-out tummy, her belly button is adorned with a ring. She is equal parts world weary and juvenile, a grown-up not yet fully grown. I look at her and shudder at what the perverts must think about her child-like form. It’s a distasteful thought and I grimace it away.
‘And my tooth? He chipped that off, not that you can really tell because look at my teeth.’
Her mouth, like that of so many other women I have met, is rotting; a by-product of homelessness, neglect and drug addiction. She gets distracted by the mirror and starts squeezing her pimples while she talks to me.
‘It all started with the sexual abuse, me being out here. And now it just keeps happening.’
‘Well you are pretty vulnerable out there.’
She turns and stares blankly at me for a long time, eyes flat and lifeless.
‘Yeah.’
We can take a report if you want.
‘Nah. What’s the point? They’ll just say it’s my fault for working or whatever.’
‘Okay. They do take those reports pretty seriously though, but you don’t have to.’
‘Nah. What’s the point?’
‘Are you still hanging out with S.?’ (Her boyfriend and sometime spotter)
‘He’s in jail.’
‘Oh. When did that happen?’
‘Last week.’
She goes back to picking pimples.
‘I shouldn’t be doing this.’
She means picking. I want it to mean everything.
* Track marks from intravenous drug use.
Some guy yells out his car window, ‘Four, c’mon. It’s fair.’
No. No less than five. Go away…
What does he want?
He wants to pay me $400 til 6am, but I told him I wouldn’t take any less than $500 for an all-nighter.
So would you make more than that on a night like this?
Yeah. I keep track. Like last year I kept a diary of all my jobs and I worked out that I did almost 4,000.
4,000! Is that 4,000 jobs or 4,000 clients?
4,000 jobs, but I don’t really count my regulars.
That is a lot of jobs.
Yeah. I worked it out that it’s around 10 a night.
4,000.
Yeah.
On Thursday we sat in the Visitor’s Centre of the Dame Phyllis Frost Maximum Security Prison and waited for E. Decorated for Christmas, the room was slightly less roadside cafeteria-like than usual. The decorations were strange hand-knitted and painted numbers. Their festivity was in direct relationship to their lopsidedness. We sit, Louisa and I, and watch the prisoners and their visitors every second Thursday. We watch the strained relations as kids hit out, punishing their mums for absence, or cling desperately to their oh-so-brief allocated time, their every move watched over by DHS staff.
The women have to wear green coveralls, a one-size-fits-all variety, that are fastened with zip-ties and have long lycra cuffs at the ankles and wrists to prevent drugs or other contraband being smuggled in. They don’t fit all and when E. arrives, looking unexpectedly glum, she has to pull at the neck of hers to stop herself choking. She will probably be searched for that action, if the lingering guards catch her. Her face was puffy and swollen, blood in the corner of her mouth from an emergency tooth extraction.
We had been anticipating her to be exuberant. She is due for release in two days and we are here to discuss our arrangements for her collection. Instead her sad face compelled us to rise and hug her, and to sit close on the couch, bookending her with concern. We like E. She is a sweet, round-faced girl who, at twenty two years of age, has been in prison for the bulk of the last four years, something that has both aged her, but simultaneously rendered her child-like.
She once spotted five bucks floating out of the pocket of my dress. Her eyes lit up at the unusual sight of money (they don’t have actual currency in jail, but operate on a credit system). ‘Can you buy me a can of Coke?’ she asked eagerly. And then, when the Coke was finished, she imparted the very sideways teenage request of ‘I really like chocolate’. I bought her a bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk, which she savoured while she told us the ins and outs of jail life and her concerns about leaving the safety of her cell to go home.
Her past is a bit obscure but I do know that she has been in and out of care since she was twelve and that she has had the same boyfriend since she was thirteen. He is serving a sentence in the Men’s prison and they maintain their relationship via phone and letters. An inmate who happens to be a fortuneteller predicts she will be pregnant by next year and I probe into how she feels about having a baby with her boyfriend. She seems too young and the topic moves on quickly but I guess by the shine on her face that she would be secretly pleased.
She is currently incarcerated for breaking her probation but her original crime was holding up a service station. Wasted on Xanax, a drug used to treat anxiety and sleeplessness, she remembers nothing of the incident. Her recollection of the incident only starts when she woke in the police station. Short-term memory loss is a common side effect of taking too many Xannies, a drug that is over prescribed and overused on the streets. Cheap, readily available and causing inhibitions to be thrown to wind, they are a disaster waiting to happen for people living on the shadowy borders of acceptable social behaviour.
Come Saturday and I tumble out of bed before daybreak. We arrive at the jail as the sun is rising over the barbed wire buildings. While we wait I photograph. I photograph a pair of brothers who are also waiting (for their mum as it turns out), and I take a photograph of Louisa silhouetted by the sunrise, but mostly I aim the camera at the door, waiting. I want to capture the moment she bursts out, beaming with the joy of release, but my plans are intercepted by a pair of good-looking young guards who saunter out and make me put my cameras away and delete the frames I have already taken.
I give in to a moment of frustration, but as not photographing is the accepted protocol, I focus on just being there. The sight of the mum walking out of the prison with a guard twangs my resolve. She is looking for her sons who have retreated to their car. The sun stretches the shadow of her high-high-heeled boots towards us as we lean on the chain link fence. I cringe, wanting desperately to capture the moment, the photograph perfect in my mind. Instead I yell out, as they stand confused, that her kids are that-a-way. She thanks me and they have a reunion behind us, hugging and kissing. She tucks under one of their arms and they leave.
Still we wait, the sun creeping higher and higher in the sky. Then she makes her entrance, a shock in her civvies, and we rush to hug her, repeating the greeting we have just witnessed. She grins widely for the camera from back seat, smiling, happy to be free. First stop ciggies, then Maccas and coffee. She is unsure at the counter, trying to order yet feeling like she doesn’t know how. We reassure her that she’s doing great but I hesitate to photograph as much as I’d like to because I can see it’s adding to her distress at dealing with the transaction in the service station.
She feels looked at and judged, disjointed and weird. I once did a ten-day silent retreat and when it was over I went to get some things from the supermarket. So overwhelmed by the noise and the chaos and the process of choosing and paying once I got there, that I turned on my heel and decided to go hungry rather than face it. After four years of jail I can’t even imagine how strange the world must seem. Particularly if you have become used to having the decisions made for you, rather than making them for yourself.
The first challenge over E. chirps at us from the backseat while drinking eating and smoking almost all at once. She told us how her friends had covered her in eggs and flour the day before, a kind celebration of her graduation from jail. She gives herself heartburn scoffing her bacon and egg roll. Her glee is mixed with trepidation, but as we drive through the sunshine the car buzzes with excitement. She is going home. First, to her sister’s house because she wants to surprise her with a wake up. I can understand. I would choose to go to my sister’s first too.
It’s an ordinary suburban home, the number written on the letterbox with a permanent marker. She tumbles out of the car, legs giddy under the weight of having arrived, and yells through the window of the house. Another reunion in a morning jam-packed with them. This one is my favourite. They hug, a light and dark reflection of each other. But I can see her baby sister has turned into an adult while she has been in prison. E. is going to struggle with a rearranged family dynamic; another component to a difficult transition.
And it’s going to be the hardest thing she has done (and she has done it hard), to keep focused on staying out and making something of her life, placing her feet on the floor each morning and taking on another arduous day. She let down her hair on the way home, and told me as I leaned back to look at her, ‘I have beautiful hair. It’s really thick and glossy and beautiful.’ ‘It is,’ I told her. ‘It is really beautiful.’ I looked at her framed with her beautiful hair, her face adult and terribly young at the same time, and hoped she finds her place. It’s all there is to do.
I went to interview Deb in a motel room a client of hers had paid for. He was out, driving to Geelong or something. She’s been living on the streets and working as a sex worker since she ran away from home at 13. She’s an icon. Everyone knows her, and somehow in a world where friendships sour quicker than milk in the sun, she keeps on everyone’s good side. She’s shrewd, rude, and hilariously funny. But she’s wise too, and motherly. Sometimes she brings me in clothes for me. I always make sure I wear them on the days I work because I know she likes seeing me in them.
How much have prices changed? When I started it was fifteen dollars for oral, twenty for sex and thirty five for both. But nowadays it’s fifty, eighty, a hundred. Yeah so that’s over a thirty five-year gap, so it really hasn’t gone up that much.
Fifty buck is like two packs of cigarettes, yeah? Yeah, it was only fifteen back then, when I first started.
How much were packs of cigarettes then? Oh I don’t know, I can’t remember.
Well, fifty bucks is not much money. Yeah I know. A hundred dollars isn’t much money.
Not for sex. A hundred bucks for sex. Yep. Thank God most males have no control, ‘cos it’ll be fucking (clicks fingers). Two minutes.
It’s a ratio then, the shorter it is, the more value for money you’re getting. It’s just not enough though is it? No.
I saw them from the car window. A stream of blonde, coiffured, pram-pushers, muddled with their carefully styled husbands. They were rolling along the footpath, a caravan of monied middleclassness. And as they pushed their children back to urban 4WDs they passed a someone lying foetal in the park. Tiny, and from my brief glance, a woman (though she looked more like a pile of rags than a woman). As I marveled at the contrast of affluence one of the carefully styled husbands broke away from the procession to investigate.
It was almost a shock, a raised eyebrow of surprise. He was their nominated representative sent to make overtones of peace on behalf of his people. I only wish I had an ending to the story. The lights turned green and I turned the corner, missing the climax (I suspect it was anti-climactic). But as the car followed the flashing orange of the indicator I was filled with a mix of feelings, each battling its way to the fore; climbing, panting, hair-pulling to be the first in line. But humbled got there first, sliding into base just before shame. I had presumed, because of the way they looked, that they would keep walking past and ignore the passed out drunk. I was wrong.
Its hard not to get cynical about the invading swarms of well-to-do’s in this suburb. I grew up in a seaside town that lost its sleepy uniqueness to a flood of mediocrity in the guise of invaders from the south, come to make their favourite holiday destination home. I see that here in St Kilda, only this time I’m in the position of newcomer, an invader from the north (I’m taking back territory). I excuse myself from death by association by proof of my income, my lack of blonde-coiffure, and no desire to frequent the cafes that line the main strip. Mostly I excuse myself because I give a shit about the unseen half of the population.
This is a suburb with multiple personality disorder. A suburb that situates the most vulnerable next to the affluent, with a dollop of arts and a heft of booze. And mostly the parts seem to move in different worlds, so much so that you could tell Doctor Who to drop in and observe a parallel universe in action. So when I saw the neat man go to the aid of the rag woman I was moved from a position of judgment to that of begrudging admiration; my cheeks coloured pink with misplaced typecasting. Because I saw his face, and he went with genuine concern.
It is a temptation when you walk with the most marginalised/poorest/people with their teeth rotted out of their mouths to sneer at the better off who share the same path. Easy to write them off as non caring, oblivious and narrow minded. Easy to get cynical too. To expect the worst from those who look the best. But the reality is that grooming and fiscal security are not synonymous with lacking compassion. The reality is that choosing to look, to talk, to walk doesn’t give you the moral high ground over someone who appears not to.
Of course it is hard to reconcile the two coexisting worlds. I go down to the Esplanade to clear my head, and on those perfect summer nights the shapes of people litter my vision as I cross toward the sunset that silhouettes them perfectly. Families eat icecreams, backpackers drink cheap goon from the cask, I walk through clouds of joint smoke. Dogs are walked, children laugh and romantics hold hands. It all seems so damn joyous.
Simultaneously only streets and yet worlds away from where M. is hanging out on the corner in the same sunshine. Literally hanging, sick with wanting for heroin, selling her rapidly shrinking self. She’s lost about 10 kilos in the last couple of months, sliding deeper and deeper into A Really Bad Place. Her bones just out of her, angular and sick looking. Hard to fathom.
Bell took the photo of Luna Park. When we talked about it she said she wished it was her in the photograph, holding hands with her lover, wearing matching outfits; carefree. I felt the weight of her longing to be a part of the straight world in that wish. To make the step of the threshold of them, moving into us.
When I frogmarched my scrapping emotions into a semblance of order the one that waited calmly at the back was want. I want that woman passed out in the park to have what the passing parade of blond women had (soberness, security, safety, nice hair, white teeth). I want Bell to have her lover with matching clothes. I want M. to be silhoutted against the setting sun, laughing along the boardwalk with an icecream in hand, fatter and happy; not wasting away in front of my eyes. I want life to be distributed fairly, evenly.
But wanting all of those things doesn’t make those that have more automatically guilty, or those who have-not automatically innocent. My favourite cry of injustice as a child was “It’s not fair” to which any one of my exasperated parents would reply, “No, life is not fair”. No, it really isn’t. But that doesn’t mean I get to blame it on some arbitrary group, because they fit the part of perpetrator. Lesson learned.
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemmingway.
I’ve got no words today. But these are some photographs I like. I like the colours melting from one photo to the next.
For some reason I’ve decided tonight is the night that I am going to start to roam the after-hours-streets. Increased panic at my non-shooting and an encroaching deadline have probably set me off. But also it’s taken me a while to formulate the ‘why’ of needing to photograph, to locate the gaps in the story.
The women are taking some magnificent photos but the night time is largely untouched. It’s shrouded in dark and mystery. They work, ergo no photographs. Even after years of this, I’m intimidated by bringing a camera out in public and shooting. I certainly can’t expect the women to feel comfortable to raise it on the corner and scare off clients. The truth is that night is where it really happens. It’s not so much a gap as a gaping hole.
I head down Greeves Street, which is quieter than I expected. No one on the big speed hump. I expect it’s a bit too dark at night, more of a daytime area. Still, there are lots of cars moving down the street so I keep moving too, not keen to meet a mug in the shadows. I hear voices and stop to photograph fluoro lights reflecting on the water of the canal, busying myself in exposure. It’s Scary Guy and Silent Friend, and they seem to have picked up another sidekick. They don’t seem to recognise me out of context and march past, briefly throwing me curious glances. It seems somehow fitting that they are the first ones to cross my path.
I’m almost at the other end of the street and I spot Dani. I hear her reeling off prices to a client and, not wanting to interrupt, I lurk behind a 4WD waiting for the transaction to be over. To be honest, I’m hoping that she won’t get the job so I can go over and say hello. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her, and I know she won’t care if I stop to talk. A guy wanders past and makes a comment about the camera. Because I presume every man who walks Greeves at night is a mug, I make a polite noise and studiously ignore him.
Dani doesn’t get the job and I cross the road and hug her hello. I ask if she minds me standing with her, stressing that I don’t want to scare off clients. She tells me she’s out until the first train back to Geelong so she doesn’t mind. We natter on. She’s a talker and it’s been a while. Her daughter has started crawling and she’s moving house. She also tells me about all the photographs she has been taking and I tell her why I am photographing the nights. She tells me I can photograph her anytime.
They are like vultures closing in on their prey. En masse they do laps around the corner. I start to recognise cars as they go around again and again and I wonder out loud why they don’t just stop and pick her up. It’s always like this, she says. Some of them drive in circles all night, round and round and round and never stop. Never? She shrugs. She doesn’t seem to care.
It’s interesting because I’m used to hiding behind a camera. It detaches you somehow. A passport to the strangest situations, it’s like a marker that you don’t belong, that you are an outsider. I expected it to mark me here too, but the mugs don’t seem to notice much. I realise very quickly they think I’m working too. They leer and they ogle even though my t-shirt is on inside-out and I’m wearing daggy jeans. I’m a woman on a corner.
It doesn’t unsettle me, perhaps because there are two of us, but I get an insight into how vulnerable it is to stand alone selling your wares. Cars pull up full of drunk guys and Dani shouts at them to piss off. ‘Huh?’ they ask stupidly and she shouts that there are too many of them and to PISS OFF. She reassures me she wouldn’t go with more than one client at a time and I’m relieved. Lots of men walk past too. Some stop and she shoos them on. I get the feeling she likes me hanging out with her.
Then the drunk guy stops. He stinks of booze and engages me in chat. I don’t know why but I chatter on to him about Russell Crowe and photography until he asks me for sex.
Oh.
I’ve always been The Girl Who Talks To Strangers and I need to shelve that personality pronto. Dani tells him to piss off. He’s a regular and he’s too drunk for her liking. After he’s shuffled round the corner she tells me it’s because he’ll take far too long to cum and she doesn’t want to waste her time. Fair enough.
Occasionally other women I know walk past and wave or say hello, but it dawns on me that I’ve been here too long. She needs to work and I move on. But now I’m walking alone down Grey Street and the men keep lapping. I realise I’m still on display. There are beeps and yells and I roll my eyes. The men who walk past let their gaze linger on me for too long. Curious, I meet their eyes, which are questioning: issheaworker? issheaworker? issheaworker?
A very quiet ‘Excuse me’ comes from a parked car. I almost miss it and take a step further before my brain catches up with my ears, turning me automatically. A neatly trimmed guy, about forty, with a bald head and blue jumper, leans towards the passenger door. I put my hand up to ward him off and say, ‘I’m not working, Mate. Sorry.’ Before I’ve even turned away I start berating myself for the sorry, starting an internal debate on whether I should be apologising.
I hear his van start up behind me and move out and wonder if he’s one of those persistent dudes. Nope. He drives past and I note, doubling over with laughter, that his number plate is VAG ***. Vag. Vagina. Mr Vagina. I giggle all the way down the rest of the street at the vision of Mr Vagina trawling for precisely that. He drives past again later, looking mournfully out of the window at me.
I’m done with testosterone and I cruise home, passing the drunk who asks me again if I’m working. No dude, I’m not.
I feel for the woman that takes him on with his boozy breath and alcoholic impotence. I spot S. when I’m almost at my door. She is one of the most beautiful women I’ve met here and it’s always a pleasure to see her. We stop for a chat and I tell her about Mr Vagina. Eager to share my experience, the words spill out and she laughs. I tell her about the men who have stopped to ask me if I’m working and we talk about if women find it intimidating.
Some girls puff up with pride, she says, and some cower under the male sex gaze. She tells me that she’ll heckle mugs if they upset non working girls and tell them to piss off. I like her even more. She’s cheery tonight and her eyes are lined with black. She really is beautiful. We make our farewells and I head inside to sleep as she heads down Greeves to work. We are living different lives right next to each other and as I drift off, I’m glad I’ve made the effort to get a glimpse of what her life feels like.
He was hot. Really hot. I glanced up from the Greeves Street sidewalk, with a million things rushing through my head, and did a double take. He made eye contact and smiled at my reaction to him. Damn, I thought, that is a good looking man. I realised a split second later that he was getting out of a worker’s car. He was cocky and smiling because he’d just had sex (at about 11:30 on a Tuesday morning). The hot man that I had just checked out was a mug. The hot man didn’t seem creepy, or gross, or yuck; all of those things I think about the men who use sex workers.
Later the same day a woman walked through the door and marched straight up to where I was sitting. Uh oh, I thought. Definitely a local resident come to complain. ‘Can I have some condoms please?’ she said. Definitely not a local resident. I always get it wrong. I’m here every day and I still turn the people into characters.
The Man Who Looks Like Santa. He came to the door one day with a kind, bearded face and grandfatherly eyes. He spoke warmly and I liked him immediately. Then it became clear that he had enjoyed his time with one of the girls and wanted me to book her again. I sent him on his way with a firm tone and laughed as I relayed the story to the girl in question the next day, leaning out the car window to tell her as she sat in the favourite spot.
Stereotypical Sex Worker. She was the first sex worker I met and with her short skirts, high heels and drug habit she was exactly what I thought a prostitute would be like. But she is one of the sharpest, most articulate women I have ever come across. She’s funny, she’s in love and she has a stable home.
Scary Guy with the creepy eye. I never know where he is looking because he has one dead eye, fixed blankly on a point in the distance. He’s homeless, drug affected and he roams the street with his sidekick Silent Friend. But Scary Guy also has great manners and says please and thank you every time he asks for a coffee.
Silent Friend is reeeeeeeeally weird. To be honest I’m a bit fearful of him. He is a lurker, lingering menacingly in my line of sight, never speaking. I project all sorts of creepy characteristics onto Silent Friend, some of them probably true. But even so, last Tuesday Silent Friend brought in our bins from the street and put them away without me asking (I would never go out of my way to ask Silent Friend anything).
I get it wrong because people in this world are supposed to be definitively bad. Or sad. Or mad. Before this becomes a Dr. Seuss story, my point: stereotypes of what a sex worker, mug or homeless person looks/sounds/tastes/touches/feels like exist because sometimes they are right. Homeless people, drug addicts, mugs and sex workers can sometimes be scary and strange. But they also bring the bins in.
The photo above is of Lee’s home (the one below is of her and her daughters at the beach – and a note that these are her images not mine). She is a complicated character. Has been off the streets/drugs for about as long as that fat, happy baby has been occupying that spot on the floor. A Miracle Story. Only the miracle story has flaws, because, unsurprisingly, she is flawed. But, by and by, she is doing okay.
And I don’t know but that living room, her living room, doesn’t conjure up sex worker to me (or sorry, ex-sex-worker). Neither does her fat baby, rolling on the floor, a vision of content. Nor her son in the corner occupying a teen slouch, nor the array of family photographs.
I’m guessing if you saw that photo, saw either of those photos, you wouldn’t even know what she used to do for a profession. She sure doesn’t look like a vision of a stereotype, stepping into the sand with her baby on hip, her big girl echoing her stance (sans the cigarette of course). She looks like an entry in any album of domestic bliss, held in place by those plastic corners that go yellow with age.
A hot wind blows down the street. I hate the wind. It makes me feel unsettled. Unruly. The local meat wholesalers have dressed up their factory in tinsel. Discount ham for Christmas; cheap meat on Greeves Street.
Buster the dog has been left in my care and I take him outside to go to the toilet. I use an old mobile phone charger in the absence of a lead. The loose brown fur of his puppyhood gathers in rolls across his neck, gleaming in the sun. The heat wafts his puppy scent towards me. He’s a good dog.
The guys across the road make furniture and are outside spraying varnish on their raw wood tables. They always glance up when activities on the street get particularly unusual but they are immune to the spectacle and go quickly back to their business.
K. tells me she hears noise in her head. She means the voices that talk to her but I tell her it’s the sander the guys are using now and we laugh.
The street is bare. I guess the heat keeps the girls inside until later and that the corners are full only in the cool ends of the day. The ones that do walk come in burnt, looking for cold drinks and iceblocks. We really have to buy some sunscreen. We had some but someone took it. Someone always takes everything.
Cop cars are drawing lazy circles of the sex streets, booking the few that emerge as the afternoon wears on. They are suss of me and my camera, stopping to talk about the weather. Hot. Yes it is. There is a blitz on. S. gets booked twice, mouthing off loudly about the slagcopbitchfromhellhowfuckingdareshe.
Some mug wanders past and checks to see if I’m selling. Eyes me appreciatively. I roll my eyes as he loiters in the shade. He seems to need to work up the courage to ask one of the girls a price. K. intervenes and tells him to piss off. Solidarity. He says he is waiting for a man. We don’t believe him.
Ugly Mug reports blow around in the wind. There is something in that, an analogy probably, but I’m blank, tired. I’ve eaten a Mars Bar. We have them in the cupboard here and sometimes I sneak one and it always makes me feel sick. I have no idea why I do it. I’m tired I guess and they lure me with the promise of a cheap sugar high.
I’m not really in the mood for this today. Don’t really want to talk to anyone. Or have anyone talk to me. I feel stretched thin by the demands of the book whose blank pages nibble at the edge of my mind, greedily coveting my attention. I want to stay at home and write, get some space to process my experiences. There is a list of topics unattended, flagging my attention.
My friend Samala gave me this Robert Frost poem and it has become my favourite.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.
This moment, like the hot wind wafting on across my furrowed brow, is just fleeting. Like a rolling tumbleweed. B. walks past and wishes for my cleavage. I laugh. She has an abscess in her groin from shooting up gone bad. She won’t spend her money filling her antibiotics script, choosing heroin as her pain relief. My miles pale in comparison to hers. Perspective.
She’s young, blonde and distracted in that self-centred, teen way. She’s got a daggy boyfriend and her clothes hang off her tiny hips. She lives on raspberry liquorice and red cordial. She’s got no boundaries and is prone to the odd inappropriate and thoughtless remark. Just your typical teenager really.
If I had to guess I’d put her at sixteen, though she could be younger. She says she is eighteen but it’s hard to believe her because her habit has already stunted her growth and because the standard line when the youngest ones walk in is, ‘I’ve just turned eighteen.’ It’s the underage mantra.
She has a boyfriend and works for the both of them, walking the street. They both have a heroin habit. They share it, and their homelessness. But I don’t see the romance in this addictive relationship, which is wearing them into the ground.
‘I’m off to work,’ she chirps, her tender age unmistakable in the skewed movements of her uncontrolled and angular limbs. He lingers after she has been taken by a car, stoned and playing at spotter, mostly failing to take down the number plates like he’s supposed to. He’s dopey and pretty much monosyllabic. Another typical teen: baseball cap, acres of boxer short above his waistband and a slouchy ‘tude.
She is very sweet of course, naive and faintly abrasive, but unarguably sweet. Yesterday she wrote on the whiteboard:
I (heart) you guys. thank-u for ur (heart) and support without this place I wouldnt get through (heart) Angel xxx
And then added the moniker of teen love:
Angel (heart) S. xxxxxx
I’m surprised she didn’t add a 4 EVA.
On Monday, Angel was raped. Raped by a client who beat her with his belt in the hotel room that he had booked for his lunchtime jerk-off. He pushed her on the bed and raped her from behind without a condom while she cried, all the while berating her for her tears.
The hardest part is that Angel is not the exception to the rule. The youngest ones are the easiest targets for violence at the hands of mugs. C. is another young girl who walked in today and, in a tiny voice, asked if she could drop some fits off in our yellow bins. She had two big hickies on her neck and I reckon she was no older than fifteen. She talked so quietly, eyes darting this way and that, about her habit and her baby and how guilty she felt about not being able to breastfeed. All the while I could not help but notice the scars, track marks and bruises on her skinny arms.
She told me she was on the street for the first time after ten days in hospital. She had been beaten by a mug and dumped unconscious in Richmond. I made enquiries into what sort of support she was getting, trying to conceal my dismay. She was reluctant to discuss it and left with a soft smile, back to business. All I could think about was the horrible future I could see stretched before her. She’s just a baby, but one that has a baby and a heroin habit that she works on the street to support. She should be in school having fun.
A friend and I had a discussion this week about the rhetoric that sex work is empowering. I’m not a sex worker so this is just my gut feeling, not individual experience. But this kind of sex work – street sex work – this doesn’t seem empowering. This seems like slavery. Slavery to a habit sure, but more than that it is slavery to the idea that men can let their sexual desires run rampant, can fuck without a measure of self control, and that this is sanctioned by the fact that the act is transactional. It’s almost always vulnerable women who ultimately pay for the most insidious of men’s fantasies.
Every day our society reinforces the notion that men and women are inherently different. From the time our children are young, we squeeze them into gender-assigned roles that tell them how they can and can’t behave. Muddled up in all that should and shouldn’t is the myth that somehow, biologically, sex is a male desire for which society needs to cater to. It’s so ingrained that it filters down to the street level to become an excuse that sees a middle-aged man rape a young woman. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that we have to sit back and indulgently support the uncontrolled sexual desires of men.
But we do. The onus is almost always on sex workers to stop their ‘socially destructive behaviour’. Very few countries target the men who solicit them instead. Very few cultures question a man’s right to be oversexed. Many tolerate appalling standards of sexual behaviour. You only have to look at the pack-raping antics of football teams to prove that point.
Society’s steady diet of porn, advertising, movies and music videos stream an insidious message into our consciousness. The message is that men are allowed to need sex and women are vessels for that need. The effect of that message is the dangerous and degrading sex act enacted on a teenager in a St Kilda hotel room at lunch time. And all the while we walk obliviously by.
Dan bent her head over my nails, my hands resting on her knee. As usual, slightly amused by my ineptitude, she’d offered me an out. ‘”Do want me to paint them?” she asked as I dropped the polish brush again, swearing. I assented and put my hands into hers. It was nice to to sit so close, comfortable just existing, touching, talking together. And nice to be fussed over.
I sat in her grip for 15 minutes as she did two coats of fluro pink, and another of clear varnish. I occasionally glanced at her painstaking painting, rotating my fingers on request, while we chatted about, well, just stuff. Vee sauntered up, balancing her long skinny legs on a pair of teetering heels, and told us a story about a mug trying to rip her off, widening her eyes and moving her body to emphasise the funny bits. We laughed. Bell sat quietly next to me, reading her mail, subdued after a lengthy hiatus from Gatehouse she’d slunk back in quietly to sit with us.
And in the midst of it I thought, for the first time, of the hole that would be left when I finish the project – for me. How much I’m going to miss when I leave. Since the start I’ve worried how it’s going to be for them to have yet another person walk out of their life, and have spent time planning a soft and slow escape route. But today, as Dan held my hands, I realised that I don’t yet know how I’m going to leave my new friends. What my evacuation procedure is going to be for myself.
Bee got beat up by a client the other day, some guy who didn’t like her words or her prices. I photographed her fading injuries for our records, standing outside in the sunshine, wrapped in a towel, her legs bared. She would have happily gone sans towel but, as she told me with a wink, ‘cool chicks don’t wear undies.’ Then she pulled up her pants and went back to work, sans undies. Why is she going straight back to work? Because she has a heroin habit. A massive one.
It’s four am and I’m writing this because I can’t sleep. I’m trying to measure my words, pace myself through an outline of why I hate heroin. But whether it’s the early hour, or the bubble of rage that seethes in my chest when I think on it, all I want to do is launch a scathing, vitriolic attack on this dreary, awful drug that I’ve come to see as the bad friend.
I’ve never used it and even if I wanted to narrate you a first person account of its loathsomeness, I couldn’t. I’m allergic to morphine, the medically sanctioned cousin.
The first and only time I saw someone shoot up heroin I looked away. I was sixteen and it was too scary. I’m not squeamish or afraid of needles, but heavy drugs were such an alien concept to this small town girl that my body flooded with a psychedelic swirl of emotion, heavily salted with fear. Drugs are scary. They remove you from real life, transplanting a shadowy doppelganger in your place. And the urban myth of the casual user, a functional person who uses on occasion? I’m disinclined to believe it, because drugs eat you alive. Literally eat you from the inside out. They eat you until your face is hollow and your bones jut; until you’ve given up your home, and your husband, and your children; until you’re selling your sex on the street because there is no other way to earn enough, quick enough to get your fix. Sex 4 Drugs. Like Me 4 You 4 Eva but infinitely worse.
M. comes in to Gatehouse a lot. She’s tall, beautiful and disarmingly open, almost childlike. She’s also a pretty cool character. She has an elaborate tattoo covering her back, wears some neat threads and drives one of those cool old cars your parents might’ve owned. At another time I would probably envy her effortless style, but right now she is in the midst of descent into a very uncool situation. Her long legs are becoming skeletal and her face, which I imagine was once strikingly pretty, has faded away to a pair of oversized brown eyes.
M. is staring down the barrel of jail time for unpaid fines because her habit eats up all her cash. She’s on a payment plan which, in light of her circumstances, a judge set at forty five dollars a fortnight but she still can’t do it. She must earn a significant amount of money from sex work. She is still beautiful enough that I imagine men must screech their cars to a halt, choosing her first from the corner selection. Only it all goes into her veins.
Dan is one of those girls who looks vaguely familiar. Someone you have a strange recollection of playing netball against in high school or that nice girl who might have lived on your street. Dan is amazing. Or rather, she was doing amazingly well until she slid backwards. It remains to be seen whether she can put her habit down and take her life back up.
When I first arrived, that sort-of-familiar-looking nice girl was asleep on the couch. At the time, lots of the women looked so foreign to me, with missing teeth, and the ubiquitous hooker outfits, but Dan was one of the most shocking to my newly arrived senses. She wore no makeup and her ash blonde hair was always scraped back into a ponytail. Her uniform of trackies, a hoodie and runners was so incongruent with her work.
Dan had been gradually getting straight. She quietly stopped using and stopped working. She started helping cook Tuesday lunch and eventually booted Louisa and I out of the kitchen with muttered curses against our in-the-wayness and took over cooking completely. On one of those Tuesdays, I just leant against the bench and started up a conversation. She had been pretty aggressive with me initially, testing my commitment to being there I suppose, but for whatever reason she had softened. I asked her about giving up. How and why?
‘I don’t want to work anymore,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to use drugs anymore. It’s not easy but I’m doing really good.’ I told her she was awesome. Literally inspiring awe. I watched her over the next couple of months. She finally picked up a camera and became totally engaged with the photographic process. She asked me for two sorts of cameras to see how differently they worked. She liked me more and more, throwing me the odd compliment and hug. She cooked, and took photos. She even wrote a letter to Kmart asking them to donate better kitchen equipment to Gatehouse.
Then Bee and her habit became homeless and kind, soft-hearted Dan took her in. It started again. When you are a recovering junkie, having another user move in to your home and supply you with drugs in kind, you go right on ahead and have a taste. Then a taste becomes a daily fixture and then you’re working again and coming in stoned, under some bleak haze of drugs. I watch her now through a mist of regret. Dan had become someone I like very, very much, someone of whom I am greatly proud. Someone genuinely awesome.
I hope with all my heart that this is a blip in her self-propelled road to a habit-free life. But regardless, her story fuels my hate. Heroin is a curling, spitting, hissing, vile thing that turns the corners of my mouth down even just writing about it. I loathe it; loathe everything about its measly, pitiful existence. It is the bad friend that is always waiting for an opening to strike up a chat, moving on to a cuppa, before sliding into your life and taking over completely.
My nephew has a series of books titled ‘Last night I dreamed I was… (insert Astronaut/Cowboy/Mermaid here)’. So, last night I dreamed I was a prostitute. I was, thankfully, spared the explicit detail of servicing my clients but they were men I actually knew, albeit from a long time ago; friends of old friends. The crux of the dream was that they left my house promising to bring men I know back to be serviced by me. I felt intense shame at the thought of my friends knowing what my new chosen profession was.
So I woke this morning and lay in bed for a while thinking about what it would be like to walk into this life. What it would be like to stand in front of the men, and of course the women, I know and reveal to them what I now did for work. That despite my education and professional achievements I had rerouted the course of my career to the carnal, rather than creative. The scent of that deep sleep shame lingered with me, not quite colouring my cheeks, but making me reflect on what steps would be necessary to take me there.
I’ve been interviewing some sex workers in the last while. Talking to them about how they got into working on the street. There’s a million tiny steps into sex work but the main avenues seem to be drug addictions, dodgy boyfriends and debt. Not one of them told me they wanted to be a prostituted woman when they grew up. None had stood up, a gap-toothed six-year-old, in front of their class and relayed sex as the profession of their dreams, amidst the wannabe firefighters, unicorns and nurses. Certainly none of them had taken considered steps towards their goal of street sex. It was no one’s fairytale.
And the shame of getting to a goal that you didn’t ever set for yourself? Well I think I finally understood that last night. I think I understood why you would want to crowd your life with a orchestra of drugs and drama, to drown out the noise of judgement. I think I understood the strained relations with the families left behind, and this time from the perspective of the women (I have long understood how having a loved one leaping into the abyss, wreaking a trail of carnage in their wake must feel). I particularly understood how good it must feel to have regular people accept and love you.
I can’t put myself in their shoes, I can’t see my life spiraling out of my control and ending up where they are. But that’s the thing too; It’s not because I’m more educated (I was chatting to a woman who got offered a full PHD scholarship just the other day), or because my family is more stable (some of the women come from the perfect model of a nuclear loving family), nor because I’m straighter, less experimental, or have better choice in friends. Ending up on the streets is like falling in love. Part choice, part dumb luck. And if that’s the truth of it, that it’s more roulette than tick-a-box, how come we judge them so harshly? I haven’t figured out the answer to that yet.
I was wandering around the supermarket, lugging a giant bottle of gherkins under my arm. Work wasn’t coming easily. And, frustrated with myself, I’d left my desk to stroll the shop aisles, in search of some calm. I know some people find supermarkets stressful but the shelves of food soothe me; rows of monotony, endless, bloody minded and competitive. I’d grabbed some tuna, and some insoles for my shoes. And the gherkins. The gherkins are incidental to the story really, but I’m trying to paint a picture of normalcy (which is ironic because buying 1.9 kilos of gherkins isn’t really normal). But, regardless, they were what I was holding when I saw the guy.
A guy in a red t-shirt. Sweating, profusely. Beads of sweat licked the contours of his face. He clearly wasn’t in the same meditative shopping stroll I was. I heard a voice behind me, chasing him down the aisle. A woman’s voice, slightly exasperated; “Whatever you want honey. For dinner. You choose”. Ah, domestic bliss. I giggled (it’s the people watching/listening too that I like, and the peering into trolleys to see what other people eat).
Sweaty guy chucked a response to her over his shoulder and moved on. My reprieve was interrupted by the thought that I recognised him. I did a half glance back at her, also recognising the tone of her voice, but not the suburbaness of her cardigan and yellow singlet. My fingers started tapping my brain (figuratively – they were actually otherwise employed with clutching the giant jar) – where, where, where? I don’t know that many people in Melbourne, at least not in St Kilda. Certainly not enough to run into randomly.
The thought lasted a second or two before it clicked. It was C. a sex worker, and her boyfriend. Doing the shopping. Arguing over the shopping. I didn’t recognise her out of her working dress (she wears the same one every day). I didn’t expect to see her portraying the harried wife in the dairy aisle. She probably didn’t expect to see me carrying the giant jar of pickles. Actually I’m not sure that she did see me. I was three steps too far gone by the time it clicked, halfway through the checkout. And besides I figured the last thing they wanted was to stop and chat with someone from their ‘other’ life in the supermarket.
Still, it made me smile all the way through an otherwise annoying interaction with a checkout chick who failed to listen to a single of my responses to her standard roll of questions. Sex workers have lovers tiffs in supermarket aisles too. While incognito in a cardigan and a red t-shirt. They walk amoung us, and we can’t even tell! There were no heads turning, no onlookers gawking. Of course that could be because the giant jar I was hefting drew the crowd my way, but I don’t think so. It’s because some sex workers look and act the same as us. Normal. Standard. Ordinary.
“[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” – Jack Kerouac
To say life at Gatehouse is interesting would be a flagrant disregard for the English language. In the last couple of weeks we have had to call the CAT team* to help deal with a screaming sex worker whose brain tipped over the edge into some abyss and took it to the street. We’ve had a suicide threat, not one but three women lose their shit at staff and a phone call for help from a woman who crashed a stolen vehicle into another car while involved in a police chase, and fled the scene. Add in a prison visit, a trip to the psych ward and a court appearance and you are getting closer to surmising what its like to work here. In one word? Unpredictable.
Today? Well today T. is here. She’s been here for three hours and she hasn’t stopped speaking. She is narrating her life, in a very clear, but crazed and continuous voice. She’s driving everyone nuts (although we are giggling too, because she is very, very funny). We’ve called the Ambo’s because she is a schizophrenic and she has a court ordered psych med injection that she’s on the run from. They have told us it’ll take at least an hour. She sounds like a one-woman play, her monologue is poetic and amazing, clever and entertaining but each words measures her level of crazy. She occasionally breaks into song.
When the paramedics finally get here she cracks it at them, losing her temper, and they call the cops to deal with her. They’re nice guys, tough but they manage not to lose their cool (just) and cajole her, firmly, into the waiting ambulance. She finally gives in, departing with this wisecrack – “I’m coming with you because you’ve got guns and I’m a sharp shooter.” Our combined cackle follows her cacophony into the sunny afternoon. It’s not cruel laughing, but homage to her wit.
Then some days are a reprieve of quiet. Still. Normal. Full of cups of tea, chatting and nothing much. Just being together, drinking, cooking and talking, like we all do with our girlfriends. Sure we discuss the going rate for sex, and the size of, erm, well y’know, men. But we also talk about children, shoes, pets, partners, clothes, families and beauty care. Get a bunch of women together, no matter what their profession, and those topics are pretty standard. Which is a relief, because the T. days are tiring.
So sometimes Gatehouse is tea, some days it’s T. Which is fine by me. I’m of the ilk of Jack Kerouac; I love the mad ones the most, but you need a break from the roman candles pinwheeling into your day, to have a hot cup of something. As Bernard-Paul Heroux so wisely spoke; “There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea.” I’m inclined to agree. The problem is the women are far more keen on instant coffee with four or five sugars. If I need to make a soothing cuppa, that brew is a far safer bet. Still, even if its not tea per se, knowing how they like their coffee is a nice anchor of predictability, in a very unpredictable world.
* The Mental Health Crisis Assessment and Treatment services assist people who are in crisis with mental problems – including people who are close to suicide.
This is suburbia, the land of red brick, where a clad covered extension symbolises enviable wealth. Sedans in various states of undress rest diagonally across unmown lawns or swerved onto nature strips. A man with skin like oil, dark and shiny, slides out of the car yard shadows to ask why I’m taking photographs of the wrecks. I shrug noncommittally, admiring his handsome face. Shrugs seem to be plausible currency here and he drifts away with a sideways smile, gone by the time I turn to look back at him.
No one really walks here; the only other visible occupants of this long street are an odd-sized couple who shoulder roughly past me. Her tattooed breasts jiggle with each step of her mountainous form and she seems to snarl at the obviousness of my stare. He follows a step behind, goofy. They wear matching glasses; the ones that mirror your image back to you. I catch a glimpse of how they see me and note that in this land, I’m the anomaly.
The houses march on though, relentless; with their sprinklers, concrete kangaroos and birdbaths. A dog musters a half-hearted bark in my direction, a beat too late. Even he doesn’t remember the protocol for the step of passing strangers.
Birds sing their spring songs, which mix with the rumble of passing trucks. Industry mingles with domestic life, spilling over the border of the train tracks, stealing empty paddocks from grubby-faced kids who I imagine once played games in the grass until their mothers would open back doors to spill light over their dusky playground and summon them to dinner. Machines and smokestacks have stolen their turf, mobile phones and computer games, their attention. Streets empty except for me, wandering, wondering if they know the woman next door has sex with men in St Kilda to pay her bills. Do they know the woman next door at all?
A kid’s head pops up over the fence.
‘Hello,’ she says.
I jump, startled at the unexpected intrusion, but laugh quickly and smile. She smiles back. Her disembodied head floats for a while, watching me. I turn back to kicking my feet along the dusty path, sun on my face. It’s hot, dry and peacefully monotonous. Sex work seems incongruous here amongst the straggly hedges and occasional manicured trellises of tomatoes. I daydream my way past Dani’s house and she runs after me, calling my name.
I’ve come to interview this suburban mum, who drives down to work the streets a couple of times each week. She has her own seven-month-old daughter and several step kids. She has beautiful roses in her front yard and a cat. Her partner, a rough-hewn truck driver, knows she works and tells me he doesn’t like it. But he tolerates it, as long as she doesn’t touch any drugs. She doesn’t. I ask her how she works straight and she shrugs:
‘I don’t know, I just do’.
The job seems to be mostly motivated by the need to pay off the sixty thousand dollars worth of speeding fines she has accumulated. I’m shocked by the amount and ask her why she doesn’t slow down. Another shrug. They’re catching.
Every time I think I have this job pegged, I’m wrong. I thought everyone who worked the street had some sort of addiction. I thought I would judge every man harshly who knows his woman works and sits idly by, letting her hock her box for him. But I like her partner, with his open face and simple manner and opinions. I thought sex work would probably make you hate yourself somehow. Although Dani says sometimes she comes home and scrubs herself clean, she tells me she likes herself just fine and feels alright about what she does. And I believe her.
Before I walk back to the train station, I ask her if she is going to tell her daughter what she does for a living. ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Maybe when she’s old enough to understand…’ I’m not sure I’m old enough yet to understand all the subtle nuances of this world. I’m not sure I’m ever going to be.
M. rushes in to Gatehouse
Can you write down this number plate please?
Sure. What is it?
UX**43
What’s he doing?
He’s parked his van up the street and he’s wanking.
So he’s just trawling you girls so he can wank over you?
Yeah, it’s disgusting. But I banged on the window and said ‘There are little kids who live on this street, Mate. They don’t need to see that. And besides, that’s the smallest dick I’ve ever seen’.
I can’t speak for laughing.
The Queensland Centre for Photography has launched a new online magazine Lucida, and asked me to write an article about Red Light for it. You can find the original here, but I thought I’d put it up here as well.
—-
It’s 18 past one on a Wednesday afternoon and Bee stirs on the couch to the annoying ring tone of her phone. Surprised she has roused herself to answer (as its rung a half dozen unanswered times in the last hour) I look up from my computer and listen. She’s drugged and sleep deprived, hazy from the heaviness of her brief slumber. Her words are slurred and its not just me that takes a while to recognize the sounds she pieces together, I can hear the guy on the other end asking her to repeat herself.
“It’s $250 baby”, she slurs, “$250 with another girl… oh, anytime baby… In a couple of hours?” The transaction continues and I keep one ear half on it, but resume typing. I’m immune to these phone calls now, and the day must continue, I have many things to do. She comes to an agreement with the guy and hangs up the phone with a “Call me later baby” and rolls back to sleep (but not before she mutters something disparaging about filthy mugs and their filthy dicks).
Unperturbed I glance at her sleeping form and continue plowing through my to-do list. It’s impossible to be shocked by the transactions I see every day, the bartering for sex that occurs even on a sunny Wednesday lunch hour, when its me who hands over the condoms from the stash we keep for emergencies. Ditto for the drug use. I know how many fits the women grab from the box we keep in the second drawer, and I’ve come across about every euphemism you can imagine as they order from their dealers in front of me.
Catching the blasé shrug of my shoulders at today’s events, I turn my reaction over in my hands and look at it. I’m six months into this project and what’s de rigueur now was overwhelming not so long ago. I remember my first day in this place, a vivid Thursday that changed the whole course of my life. Usually relaxed and confident in even the most foreign situations I sat in the corner and tried not to stare at the confronting chaos unfolding in front of me. The women were drug affected, leery, with no discernable boundaries. To be perfectly honest they freaked me out.
They freaked me out so much in fact that when the germ of an idea planted itself in my mind, suggesting this was an opportunity to use my skills to give something back to a community who clearly needed, it I let it sprout but almost feared to water it. Would they, I questioned, ever accept me? I doubted. I found a grant that fitted my plans, but still I doubted. And then this came:
Hi Gemma,
I look at your work and wonder were you find the time to do everything. Your work,character, aspirations and confident mind frame serve as a strong inspiration……..Hope it all comes together just the way you want it.
We both know you’ll kick arse.
You have a lot of heart- and in combination with your work standard and ethic, i can’t see how anything could go wrong. Stay well-L.W
And that was it; I was sold. The grant application went in and the fingers got crossed.
I met LW. on that first day at Gatehouse and he’d been my saviour. A fast talking, frenetic guy with a hard history, and the most beautiful face; his eyes almond shaped, his hair a cascade of silky black to his shoulders. He spotted the camera on my shoulder and nosed up to me, curious, sussing me out. Glad for the chance to feel useful in a situation that had me flailing like being dumped into the rough sand by unruly waves, we spoke about art. And then he unrolled a canvas he had been working on and this amazing Basquiat-like image unfurled. I was impressed.
You’d think with such a generous character appraisal I’d had some profound effect on him; delivered a sermon on art that was so moving he was deeply changed, or critiqued his work with excessive generosity. But no, we just chatted. For a couple of hours we chatted while I watched the sex workers spin around the room on unsteady legs, drinking them in like a dry sponge in a puddle. And although his work was amazing I wasn’t overly effusive in my praise, I just told him it was good because it was good.
With that email came a realization for me. It’s the being there and giving a shit that matters; the small things like stopping for a chat. LW. didn’t need me to haul in like some fairy godmother and rescue him from his (sometimes) shitty life. He just wanted, like I did, to talk about art. In his words I saw that I didn’t have to divine some project that would rescue these women from their (often) shitty lives. That to make a difference I just had to offer them a voice. An offer that is par for the course for any documentary photographer; voices are our stock and trade.
And thankfully his words did come; I got the grant, and made the move to Melbourne, tempering my ambition by allowing myself to take the time to stop and have a chat. It’s been a slow brewer this year, this project, and the creeping pace has certainly taken some digesting. I’m a newspaper girl; more used to rushing and stealing the shot, BANG BANG BANG. I have to have the book to the printer in four months, and I’ve watched too much and shot too little to sleep even remotely easy. But reminiscing over his words reminded me to leave my computer and take a moment to cover Bee with a blanket.
LW. taught me a lesson, more valuable than any I, the teacher, could teach him. His gift was a realization I could take my time, to be unhurried and unworried about the outcome, enjoying instead, the journey. Of course I want this project to be successful, this is my baby, and I want it to be born whole and perfect. I want its milestones to be remarkable, to prove the worth I dreamed at its inception. But I think my measure of success is different now.
I stand over Bee watching her sleep for a moment. On that very first day last year I would never have believed I would grow to be so at ease in this world. I hate that the woman who lies curled up on the couch sells her body to fund her drug habit, but despite my best intentions I know now that a book isn’t going to make a profound difference to her life. But you never know, taking the time to get to know and love her enough to cover her with a blanket just might.
I showed some of the women’s photographs at a presentation I gave recently at the Melbourne Camera Club, and while I was collating them I couldn’t help feeling proud at how they are noticing the small details. Seeing the relevance of the sexy picture stuck on the back of a mugs door, or showing the unusual landscape of their domestic lives. I love the single shoe, record and half-deflated bag behind the cowed dog on the floor, and the tea towel, which is like the tea towels in my parents kitchen, folded neatly next to the syringes. But most of all I love the spoon full of heroin sitting on the take away menu.
DATE & TIME:
Friday 7th of May 2010 at 10:32pm
LOCATION:
Fairfield, Brisbane.
It was my thirtieth birthday and I was sitting on the couch at my sister’s house with a couple of my best girlfriends. We were celebrating my birthday with champagne as their kids slept. I was warm, wrapped up in love, as I reflected on thirty years that I reckon I’ve spent pretty well. I will learn later that whilst I basked in friendship and memories, a sex worker was being beaten and raped in St Kilda. When I read the Ugly Mug report my stomach clenched at the very personal reference point of date and time, a stark reminder of the difference between my life and theirs.
The thing about spending time in a world where women are a commodity, and a cheap commodity at that, is that it makes you a bit strange about men. And I am a woman who adores men. I’ve always reveled in their company and I love the way men can be straightforward, easygoing and familiar. My mum says when I was born, they laid me on her belly and my dad called my name. I turned my head to his voice and we fell in love. He’s the grown-up I’ve always liked more than anyone else.
But as my friendship develops with these women, I find it hard to reconcile the images I have of the men in my life – soft, sensitive guys who love women – with the horrifying stories of kidnap, brutal beatings and rape, of men who pick on the most vulnerable and treat them like vessels for their rage. Of course not all mugs are like that – the women often tell how their clients are just sexually inexperienced or desperate to be given some love and affection, but I also hear the much darker stories with startling frequency.
I notice the skew in my feelings when I return to Brisbane for a visit and my mates and I go bowling. I’m almost hysterical with happiness at being surrounded by the boys that I adore, teetering on the verge of tears. I cling to them, stealing hugs, relishing the comfort of their familiar manliness. They are like anchors for me and I need them to reassure me that men can be beautiful, safe and respectful.
I am immensely appreciative of having so many generous and loving dudes in my life, but even then it’s a struggle not to be suspicious and judgmental of men, casting them in the same mould of the blokes who cruise my street, circling and watching, who sit in the warm comfort of Gatehouse as their women work the street for them, or the men who treat the sex workers like shit, degrading them with perverse sex acts for which they pay bottom dollar. I despise the drunk on the tram who tells his mate loudly – while hanging off the straps, gyrating and thrusting his crotch – what he is going to do with the hookers on Grey Street. I glare at him with disgust and shudder at the thought of the fate that befalls one of the women at his hands.
Women come in and speak of groups of three or four men who try to force them into accepting a wildly deflated group rate – like seventy five bucks – so they can all get off cheap (and because they don’t think she is worth any more than that). Or men who demand their money back in repayment for their own impotence. Or men who coerce them into situations that are demeaning, unsafe and terrifying. This degradation and mistreatment is expected, it’s a ‘normal’ part of life working the street. A woman came into Gatehouse crying this morning and the first question she was asked by another worker was ‘did someone hurt you?’ It’s always the first question that people ask because being hurt is a daily occurrence.
These dreadful specimens of the male gender get under my skin and make me sick. I need an antidote so I pick up the phone to hear Dad’s voice, Granddad’s voice, my mate’s voices. I have video calls with my beautiful nephews, drinking them in through the computer screen. I contact my closest friends to tell them I love and miss them. They are just regular dudes, my men, but in contrast to the men in the world I’ve walked into, their genuine goodness is brilliant; shining and luminous.
This contrast makes me appreciate them even more, but mostly it makes me sad that I get the lion’s share of beautiful, safe, loving men while there is a gaping absence of them in the lives of the sex workers.
Ugly Mugs is a program coordinated by Resourcing health & Education in the Sex Industry (RhED). Those involved in street sex work can report specific details of assaults and abuse. The information is then circulated by agencies involved with the street sex work community, and details provided to police.
On Tuesdays the Sparkle girls come in to do nail painting and pampering for the ladies (I type this now with metallic purple fingernails). Yesterday Hannah brought in her four-month-old baby Mia. Mia is full of smiles and delight. She is a bundle of baby perfection whose own peculiar ray of sunshine added an even sweeter tone to the warm, laughter-filled day we were having already.
Dan grabbed her as soon as she arrived, and held her for most of the afternoon, though I snuck a brief snuggle too. Dan had been hanging around all day, helping with lunch, cracking jokes and painstakingly typing out RED LIGHT DARK ROOM with one of those old Dymo label makers we found in a drawer. But when that baby showed up she was totally absorbed.
Mia was completely unperturbed by being handed over to a stranger and no sooner had she landed in Danielle’s lap she stuck her hand in Danielle’s mouth and giggled through sleepy yawns at this grown up who was pulling faces for her amusement. Danielle has her own daughter’s name tattooed on the inside of her forearm amidst the thick scars of self harm and needle tracks. She is a drug addict. She sees her seven-year-old daughter only on once-a-week access visits. She is probably not the kind of woman you should feel comfortable handing your very small baby over to.
But Mia didn’t make any of those judgments. Her small brown eyes that barely had room amidst a face filled with chubby baby cheeks didn’t see any of the mistakes or the stigma that Dan carries with her every day. She just saw warm arms and a kind face, cooing and grinning at her. Dan got a rare moment of loving tenderness, physical contact that wasn’t about sex or power but instead warmth and care.
What was arguably even more beautiful about this interaction was that Mia’s mum Hannah was totally willing to hand her babe over to a woman who is not only a drug-affected sex worker, but someone who had lost custody of her own little baby. Hannah didn’t hand her baby over as some sort of experiment in social justice, nor did she do it in neglect of her child’s best interests.
She gave Dan a small reprieve from her life because she trusted her to hold and protect her daughter. She trusted her in full knowledge of the stigma that weighs on Dan’s back, much like Atlas was weighted down by the burden of the world. Hefting her baby over to another woman was a generous, nappy-covered gift, one she gave because she was wise enough to see the need and caring enough not to judge who ‘should’ and ’shouldn’t’ get a healthy dose of soft baby love.
It was a bittersweet moment though. Dan kept repeating wistfully that she wanted to keep Mia, take her home. When Hannah and Mia drove away I stood with her in the fading afternoon light and remarked that she was good with babies. ‘Yeah, well,’ she replied bitterly. ‘I couldn’t even look after my own baby. I’m not that good.’ The afternoon shadows crept away as the sad words lingered in the cool air, hanging there until someone made a joke and we began to laugh again.
My intern Grace and I have finally got our scanner functioning (it was sent from Canada and took its sweet time to get here). We’re having fun starting to scan the participants first photographs, though again the challenge when posting them here is anonymity. I love that I can show you they are really starting to understand we are trying to photograph how this life feels, rather than just what it looks like. Bell’s lips are undeniably sexual; pink and pursed, but with a hint of sullenness. Morgan’s plate of steaming breakfast really conjures up how good a hot free meal is when its cold and you have no home, or no money to buy food. Bek’s self portrait is dark, and shadowy and in it I see the depression and anxiety she wrestles with, her pouch of White Ox, she tells me, is what she smokes when she is really desperate. Which is often.
“As a journalist, you’re always looking to capture things in words. Up here, it’s everything between the words that seems to count most. The laughter, gestures, and the sounds of instruments weaving together, a little face watching behind the frangipani tree.” – Liza Power from an artwork by Tobias Titz.
I read that quote in The Age on the weekend and I thought it summed up the day-to-day here so beautifully. There’s no music or round-eyed kids peeking from the leaves of the Frangipani, but she’s right; it’s everything between the words that seems to count most.
The days here can be tense and stressful, immeasurably sad sometimes. But there are moments of uproarious laughter and joy too. It’s hard to count how many times I have thrown my head back and hooted at one of the sex worker’s imitations of a mug, and marvelled at the candour at of the some of their stories.
T. sauntered into a conversation about weird clients and made a passing comment that demonstrated how capable these women are of holding on to their dignity despite it being chipped away with every job. ‘This guy, Mate, he picks me up and we go to a car park. I’m giving him a head job and he keeps patting my hair, saying, “Good girl. Good girl”. I look up and I’m like “Mate, I’m not a fucking dog!” I hate it when they mess up my hair,’ she recounted before strolling off, ciggie clamped in mouth. We all heaved with hilarity in her wake.
Last Monday I was standing, having a chat with Bell as she sat waiting for a job. The sun was shining, and as a car pulled away from the curb further down the road, gathering speed as it went past us, the sex worker who had just been picked up rolled down the window and yelled to us, ‘I’ll just be half an hour! Less if I’m lucky!’ Her hair whipped in the wind, glowing red under the unusually warm sky as Bell and I clutched our sides giggling. Joking about the sexual prowess of men, it seems, is universal.
And to the outsider I guess it sounds like insensitivity. It’s like the time I went to see the Australian movie, The Castle in a UK cinema. There were two people laughing in an otherwise silent theatre, me and another expat. All those jokes about the cars, and the suburban proclivities of your average meat-and-three-veg Aussie, were totally lost in translation. These jokes are easy to lose in translation.
Although I can tell you how funny some of the moments there are, words cannot describe the relief they provide. It’s immeasurable. These moments are like sustaining little rays of sunshine breaking through the gloomy clouds, a respite from the howling winds and relentless cold.
Of course it’s not just laughter, and it’s not just sex. That little house, full of women who are mothers, aunties and grandmothers, is a refuge in the fullest sense of the word. We all take our turn to beam with pride relating the stories of the kids in our lives. When I am desperate with longing for my small nephews I pull out photographs and show them around. The women gush and coo, and tell me how beautiful they are. It’s comforting because they understand the pain of separation. When we share our stories over cups of tea we are all just mothers, aunties and grandmothers. And all those other labels fall away.
I see people walk through the door, visitors and volunteers, looking awkward and uncomfortable and I’m reminded of myself eight months ago, unsure of where to sit or what to say. Now here I am, snorting uncontrollably when Bee pronounces she’d ‘rather be a whore than a bore’, having a chat about how much the sex workers charge someone for fantasies, or trying on shoes with Deb. It’s become so normal.
It’s a trap though, like long term lovers you develop some kind of shorthand, and those little details are lost in a familiarity that breeds blindness. I want to bundle up every moment here and share it, I want to keep all the little details that might otherwise fall in the cracks. Or the wisecracks. But I can’t, because it is everything between the words that counts the most.
I feel a bit constricted with the images I can put on here sometimes – conscientiously tiptoeing around identification. While, like everything in life, this ‘negative’ is also a positive. A constriction on my creativity conversely presents a unique opportunity to really push my ability to articulate myself with the written word. I have worked on my visual storytelling for a long time, learning to use photography to express how something feels, as opposed to what it looks like, and words present a different challenge.
This week, for me, has been pink. Pink-hued sunset setting over the tram stop where I stand with Vee, having helped her carry her food parcel bags, laden with goods for her son’s access visit. We talk about novels, she consumes books faster than me, and there is a realm of unchartered territory between us as we discuss our favourite authors, not finding many in common, yet a delight finding a fellow reader in an unexpected situation.
Pink slabs of meat, perfectly and uniformly carved by Bee, a woman whose quick wit makes me cackle daily, a woman who is tough, loyal, and a little bit terrifying (who, quite frankly, I am quite glad likes me). Before she exchanged sex for drugs she was a chef, owned her own restaurant. She fried up the meat for Thursday’s lunch, and perhaps the careful onlooker could detect a blush of pink pride under her heavily troweled makeup at the praise that was heaped on her cooking. I don’t have the skill to draw a parallel between the meat, raw and ready, and the sex workers, but I see something poetic, or maybe just cliche, in the imagery.
Finally it has been pink hospital blankets. A mother, herself a prostitute, has a heart attack. Her daughter, also a prostitute, the girl she gave birth to a week before her 16th birthday, sits worriedly at her side. They talk words of love to each other. I’m not sure the love is a healthy shade of pink, like the blooming rose of a tar-free lung, but rather one that is graying and frayed, a product of a hard life, and shitty circumstances. The relationship between these two women is complicated; not breathing easily, but not gasping its last breaths yet.
I walk past this graffiti every day as I go down Greeves Street. It has always seemed sad to me. Like a perfectly placed reminder that sometimes when you screw something up, you have screwed it up not just in the moment you make the decision, but for the whole of your future.
R. came bursting through the door in haste, apologetically stinking of booze. ‘Gemma, you are my saviour,’ she yelled drunkenly from behind the toilet door as I brought her a roll of loo paper. She swayed by the urn, making a coffee while she told me the story. She had been to a job interview that morning and told me she was sure it was hers. But later the phone call came that told her that it wasn’t, that they’d gone for someone else. ‘Can they check to see if you have told the truth on your CV?’ she asked. I hesitated knowing the answer wasn’t going to brighten her day. I said I was sure they wouldn’t investigate too deeply, a sentiment she rejected. ‘I’m fucked. Fucked. What was I going to say? That I haven’t worked for ten years because I’m a drug addict?’
You can’t help but agree. Being a drug-addicted prostitute is not exactly an appealing attribute in a potential employee. I suppose it’s a position from which both sides get my understanding. I can understand an employer not wanting to take a chance on someone who has an unpredictable life. I can understand not wanting to be the person that gets screwed by someone who can’t quite meet the promises they have made, someone who bails inconveniently because their habit is stronger than they are.
She swayed off, on the phone to a friend, crying. ‘I’m trying so hard’, she said, ‘I’ve been to so many interviews. Am I supposed to pack shelves at Coles?’ The person on the other end was clearly dispensing some tough love. ‘No there’s nothing wrong with that. I just want you to understand how I feel…Fuck why can’t I do something that I’m good at, or that I enjoy?’ she sobbed into her phone. Minutes later, she apologised for her tears, grabbed a couple of tissues and lurched out the door.
R. doesn’t want to be a lawyer or an architect. She wants to answer phones, do some typing, sit at a desk and live an ordinary life. The women who come in talk often about their dreams, much the same as my other friends do, verbalising their imaginary futures, sharing their ambitions. Most won’t ever get to hold down a desk job, because most won’t be offered one in the first place. Who will take that chance?
Much later W. wanders in as I sit pondering the day’s turn of events. I can tell I’m growing on her by the way she randomly starts up in the middle of a story, vaguely speaking in my general direction. Today she takes up a thread about wanting to have a baby. She sees it as a way to go clean. She would never touch drugs if she had a baby she says, sneering at the women who do. She doesn’t care who the father is, she’s running out of time, and she just wants one. Later on, she says, she might find someone to fall in love with. While you’d think my heart would have toughened up by now, it cracks at this point. W. is staggering under the effect of the drugs she has just taken, her blonde hair has an inch of dark regrowth and her face has streaks of garish makeup. She trades her mouth for money, but she wants love. She sees herself being loved.
She’s thirty six, and like my other girlfriends of the same age, her biological clock is ticking. In a twist, one of my friends had called me earlier in the day to have the same conversation. But the conversation I have with W. raises far more questions than the one I have with my friend. I wonder how her skinny, abused body would cope with carrying a baby, wonder about her fertility and her ability to take care of the child she longs for.
These two women’s dreams are fading because of a similar decision they made, long before they knew where it was going to take them, to indulge in the tiniest little bit of escape in a needle.
I don’t doubt the basic human ability to enact change, of character or of lifestyle. I’ve even seen it happen and heard of the ones who have moved on. But still I wonder, when there is so little support from the outside community, just how many will achieve their modest dreams of desk jobs and love. It would take a tremendous amount of compassion and bravery, from people willing to step outside their comfortable lives and take a risk.
Is it going to happen for either R. or W. or any of the other women who have the very same dreams and ambitions that you and I do? I don’t know. I really don’t.
It’s hard to describe how warm Gatehouse is sometimes, the way that on some days it just glows.
I loved reading when I was a kid and my Mum bought me and my sister these great Brothers Grimm books that we would spend hours immersed in, drinking in the quaint 1950’s pictures, absorbing the tales and their underlying morals. My favourite was Rose Red and Snow White, a tale about two sisters who live deep in the woods with their poor, widowed mother. The sisters love each other very much. Rose Red is very outspoken and cheerful, and loves to play outside. Her sister Snow-White is quieter and shy, and prefers doing housework and reading. You can see where I was going with this in my seven-year-old mind, casting my sister and I in the roles of the girls.
One night there was a knock at their door. It was a bear wanting to warm himself by the fire in their modest but clean home. They are terrified but kindly let him in. They brush the snow from his matted fur and bring him what food they can spare. Every night of the long, cold winter the bear would come to sleep by their fire and the sisters grew to love him, despite his menacing appearance. The illustration in the book portrayed light spilling out of their tiny cottage, a beacon of warmth in the deep, dark woods.
Eventually, strengthened by the loving kindness of the sisters, the bear kills an evil dwarf who had previously deceived him and turned him from a handsome prince into a wild animal. With the death of the dwarf, the bear turns back into a prince and marries Snow White. Rose Red marries the Prince’s brother (as the brother never makes an appearance it was perfectly plausible for me to take the literary liberty of marrying my sister off and riding away on my own fairy-tale adventure).
It’s easy to draw parallels with fairytales. That’s the point. They give you a nicely packaged morality tale to apply to your own life. But on those days when an icy wind whips around Saint Kilda, hurtling leaves around exposed ankles and creeping into bones, I see Gatehouse as like that little cottage in the deep, dark woods. It too is modest but clean and most of all, it’s a home. Sometimes the people who ask to come in have a menacing appearance, but there, in that little sanctuary they come to be loved. Sometimes, the loving kindness helps women to overcome their own evil dwarf, that which has held them captive in a strange and terrible shape. Some women emerge free. The moral of the tale is best summarised by Lennon and McCartney: all you need is love.
Often what happens at the Gatehouse – what we see and the stories we hear – is dreary, depressing and disillusioning; certainly no fairytale. The majority of women who walk through the door have been beaten, raped, sexually abused and have life-altering drug addictions. They are a marginalised group who are at the mercy of the men who pay them for sex, the dealers who sell them drugs, and the arseholes who throw eggs and abuse at them as they stand on the street. In the space of five hours yesterday I heard the story of a horrific rape and abduction, of a woman whose client paid her $20 to shit in her mouth, and of a woman whose brother sexually abused her. And yesterday was a quiet day. Those stories are the ever-present undercurrents to the ebb and flow of the Gatehouse daily routine.
Later that afternoon a woman was brought in by one of the regulars. She had the kind of black eye that only comes from being purposefully, viciously, beaten. She had come straight from court where she had been trying to get a domestic violence order. She was afraid to go home to another attack from her boyfriend. Disoriented, bruised and fragile; she hadn’t slept for two days. Her friend had brought her in because she trusts Gatehouse and the people that work there. I made her a coffee while Louisa, the mother hen of the support workers, clucked over her. I tidied as I watched the other sex workers offer their support, give her a hug and help her make plans for where she was going to sleep. It seemed like the ultimate act of generosity from women who have so little, to care so much.
I helped her find some clothes from our rack of donations and gave them to her as she walked out the door. She looked at me, her poor bruised eyes engaging with my face. ‘You’re so pretty,’ she said. ‘You’re really pretty.’ She took me by surprise and I thanked her as she made her way back out into the cold night.
I’ve never felt more beautiful. And when I speak of the Gatehouse glowing, being a beacon of light and hope in the dark and cold, that’s what I mean. I mean that it’s a place that lets people shine, lets people be kind and give words where they have no possessions. It’s a place of refuge and comfort, where extraordinary things happen in the smallest, most insignificant moments. I gave that woman some second-hand jeans and a jumper in an old plastic bag, yet she left me glowing, feeling like somehow my face might be reflecting the warmth that I saw around me.
The moral of the story is not just that all you need is love; it is that kindness, given without expectation of reward, is often rewarded in the most exceptional ways.
I’ve been sitting on this for a while. A state noted (increasingly vocally) by the people who regularly read this. Its been floating in my head waiting to be written, just seven words resonating, and I’m trying to pad around it, but its a definite writers stumbling block. How do you work with the words “There’s no point, I have no future”? Where do you possibly go from there? Its so finite; an ending, not a beginning. Because here’s the thing; what if those words are true? And if they’re true, if it is an ending, can you possibly make it a beginning?
I went to see Mercedes in the psychiatry ward at The Alfred. She had been in there for weeks and a social worker from Sacred Heart Mission called to tell me that she wanted me to visit. She was worried I’d forget that she had signed up for the project and she would miss out on telling her story.
Mental health, along with drug addiction, is a reoccurring theme amongst sex workers, though certainly not for all of the women. Mostly it’s a chicken/egg scenario. What came first? There is no way to tell.
I rode my bike through the freezing winter night to see her. As I waited for her to finish her shower I watched the other patients as they shuffled awkwardly around the ward under strangely placed pools of dim light. It is difficult to find words to describe the alien nature of a psych ward, because the scary part lies in the almost normality. It’s there that the fine line of mental stability is trod and, more often, crossed.
The image we are given is that psych wards are the place for the dispossessed, strange and drooling, an image that deliberately removes us, making the mentally ill ‘the other’; not us, not even close to us. And some of the people are definitely strange. The guy grimly clenching a Pepsi can while shaking his finger at me and muttering about my being a woman was a little challenging, but the reality is that a lot of the people are the same as us.
The scars on Mercedes arms tell a tale far more succinctly than I can manage in words. She had caused herself great, great harm. When I first saw her routinely ravaged arms I guessed she would have to hate herself more than I’m capable of imagining.
She was desperate for me to take her portrait with a cheap set of black rosary beads that she ripped open from a plastic packet. As I photographed her we talked, she asked me if I believed whores could actually pray.
I said I didn’t think her profession affected her ability to believe in God. What I was actually thinking was that if I still believed in God after going through the hell evident in every deep score on her soft arms, being a whore wouldn’t even come into the equation.
I signed her out for leave so we could walk in the park outside the hospital and take photographs. The sun was warm and her excitement about the project was infectious. She told every woman from the psych ward that she came across, most of them on smoke breaks, that they should join up and do it. ‘You get a free camera,’ she said. I didn’t want to rein her in so I let it slide, being politely discouraging in the wake of her enthusiasm, like mopping up after an exuberant kid in the bath.
Until we came to the woman in the tracksuit. She looked like a suburban housewife; pink trackies, bitten nails, and eyebrows that had been tweezed too thin, uneven lines in a blank face. She sucked on a ciggie. Mercedes called out to her, holding her camera aloft, ‘You should join in this photography project.’
The woman looked at her and shook her head almost imperceptibly. Mercedes persisted, ‘It’s really good,’ she said. The woman exhaled, ‘There’s no point.’ Mercedes raised her own tweezed brown in question. The woman turned her face and dragged on her cigarette. ‘There’s no point, I have no future.’ The conversation was ended. We walked on, the daylight suddenly too harsh and illuminating.
It was satisfying being the person Mercedes wanted to visit her, just as its a honour to be bestowed with the stories of all the women I am working with. The dead-voiced woman with the cigarette made me worry though. Worry how deeply I am entwining myself in their lives with this project, giving them hope in the chance to tell their stories. I’m not a hopeless idealist, but I do want it to be a release, a chance, maybe even a beginning for some of the women who have chosen to be a part of it. But at the end of the day I get to walk away and they, who have shown their scars to the world and bravely told their stories, stay and continue to live them. All I have to hold on to is that they believe there is a point, that they do have a future.
As I write this Dee is curled up asleep on the corner couch, tiny under her black coat, camouflaged in crocheted blankets and a licorice allsort of cushions, cigarettes scattered all over the floor. And when I look at her sleeping form she seems so peaceful. I’m reminded, with an unexpected pang, of the sleeping form of my eldest nephew. He is a child whose limbs barely contain his enthusiasm for life, who rushes headlong into the day, and who, with great passion, has the odd occasion to resist sleep. Many times I’ve watched his face after it has finally relaxed into that wildly battled nap, limbs tucked into a foetal ball, tucked under the arm of my sister.
I’ve tiptoed into their room to watch them sleep from the time he was first born when they were wrapped up in each other, falling in love and oblivious to my steps, and still do now he is almost three. There is something so intimate about being allowed to see someone sleep, about being allowed to witness the moments of vulnerability. Many times my girlfriends and I have talked about the first night you share a bed with a lover, and how hard it is to relax into a proper sleep. Because when we sleep we can’t maintain any facade. We drool, snore, talk and yes, fart. Ditto sleeping on airplanes, trains and in public places. Yet despite the drooly lack of social graces there is something in the vulnerability of a sleeping face that can make you fall wildly in love with the sleeper (hence the continued bedtime stalkery of said nephew – he is so moreishly delectable asleep).
So when Dee came in today and asked me if I minded her curling up on the couch and having a sleep I said I didn’t. Of course not. And now she lies there sleeping, and my heart is panging because I miss watching my nephew snooze. But also because in the curl of her form, I can see that she was once a little baby who tucked up to sleep under her mother’s arm, safe and close to a milky bosom. She was, is, someones baby girl. Someones sweet-smelling, tiny-toed, nuzzling baby girl. And today, watching her face that is ravaged with sores from her drug use, relaxed under glasses with one cracked lens, it makes you wonder what her story is. How on earth that baby ended up asleep on the Gatehouse couch?
Dee sleeps on the couch quite often but it touches me that she trusts me to sleep when its just me here with my camera. I’m becoming part of the fabric of Gatehouse. A regular. That trust means I am starting to get to a point where I can get her to tell me her story, which is, after all, the whole point of me being here; sharing these women’s stories. And maybe understanding how that baby girl became ruined by drugs, selling her sex on the street will give us, who walk past her and judge (and we all do) more compassion.
She has been taking photos of her own too she tells me. Photos of walls and trees. The walls and trees she walks into when she is “off her face”. She is a hilarious character but I confess when I first arrived here I found her behavior challenging. She is belligerent, clever, difficult and obnoxious. But to my great surprise I have warmed to her gradually over the weeks. In the beginning I actually hoped she wouldn’t want to be involved in the project because she rubbed me the wrong way, making me scratchy and irritated. All I saw was a challenge I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on. But she has worked her peculiar brand of magic on me. I now find her dear little heart and funny ways endearing, even through all her prickles. In return I think she quite likes me too. She lingered at closing today, showing me her shoes, and helping me hang some photos on the walls. And later, when I was walking home she called out her goodbye from her spot on the street corner. It took all my self control not to run across the road and tuck her little battered self under my arm.
We have a Gatehouse Netball team and we are terrible. Unless there is some miracle and we win our last (and only) game, we will most certainly finish at the bottom of the competition. And given this is no Disney movie, I’m not hanging out for that miracle moment. We are injury prone, motley and completely oblivious to the rules. To be honest I would pay good money (that, incidentally, I don’t have) to be a fly on the wall when the other teams are trying to figure out what exactly is wrong with us. We certainly don’t make a lot of sense – particularly the part where we come with a photographer with two big cameras to capture the total terribleness.
But our skills, or marked lack thereof, is mostly irrelevant. Maybe not to the other teams who are looking for more of a challenge than we provide, but who are (generally) kind enough to help us when we have no idea what we are doing. What is relevant is that when we get our bibs on there is no more division between sex worker and straight – we are a team. It’s one of the few occasions the sex workers get to feel like a part of the ‘normal’ world, and equally its an opportunity for us straights to get a sense of what it is like to be a bit different.
No one in the league knows half the team are sex workers, that half of those again are playing under the influence. What they do know is that we are pretty crap, and I would suspect they know we are a little bit different. Drug use leaves its mark, and its not just tracks in the crooks of elbows. It’s bad skin, paranoia and scant attention. It would be easy for us straights to explain away the funny looks and occasional snide comment by contextualising the players – but while it would be a convenient excuse, its not actually an accurate one.
We don’t get to scapegoat because sex work is not the reason we are the worst team in the league. We are the worst team because I’ve only played five games in my life, because Sally panics when she gets the ball and throws it in haste, because Dee overestimates her ability, because we don’t train, and the list goes on. Sex worker and straight alike we are equally bad (in all truth our two star players are sex workers), and we wear that together.
Last night we lost 30-0. But I tell you, as we drove home in the minivan, we were buzzing – our sport endorphins heightened by beating the odds against us getting onto the court at all. We analyzed the game, and gave ourselves credit for keeping the other team moving. The rain dotted the windows, framing us in refracted traffic lights, and we made our way back to St Kilda chatting and laughing. We might be terrible but we sure feel like a team. A normal, completely unco, team.
And while normal in this context is the ultimate achievement, I have to confess it is a word that is making me nervous at the moment. This morning as I walked down to Gatehouse I saw Bell working and stopped to have a chat with her by the side of the road. I gave her a kiss hello, and we continued last night’s game analysis. I kept it brief because I didn’t want to scare any mugs off. As I walked away it occurred to me how quickly its become normal to stop and have a chat with a sex worker while she’s working. How quickly I have submerged myself into being a part of Gatehouse, rather than just an observer. And while the point of my argument that we are all just people regardless of profession is proved by how quickly I have acclimatised, my realization made me nervous about how clearly I can see what I am photographing.
I once moved into a house that had horrible ugly curtains. Really, really, bloody horrible curtains. For the first week I lived there I noticed every day how ugly those curtains were. Ugly. The second week I noticed less frequently, but still most days. The third week I was moved to vague annoyance a couple of times. And after that I forgot about the curtains. In this instance my anxiety, however unnecessary, is that I am going to get so involved in Gatehouse that I am going to stop seeing what is right in front of me. That my role as a photographer is usurped by my desire to be a part of something.
To summarize something my Dad said to me to appease another anxiety – its not the end result so much as the journey that matters – and its true, the book doesn’t matter as much as the opportunity this project is providing to the women involved. But I still want the book to be as powerful a tool for change as the project. I want the images I take to change how people see sex workers. How people treat sex workers. And I worry if I stop seeing the curtains, I won’t be able to articulate the core message that sex workers are more than just one dimensional sexbots.
This project is in motion, and I know each anxiety will pass as it gathers momentum, but its important to me that I chronicle where I am while its going. That when I look back I remember each step. Each moment that contributes to the whole. Because this is no Disney movie, the miracle moment is not in the finale, when, to a emotive soundtrack, we make our way from underdog to victory. The miracle moments are going to occur along the way (though probably not on the netball court), and I need to trust I am going to keep seeing the ugly curtains.
I write this to keep you updated, but also to keep me updated. I need to remember all the moments, minutes and days that make this project what it is going to become. I need to remember M who gave me three hugs yesterday just because I gave her a camera. Who also told me that doing this project is a chance for her to feel like she exists. And that’s the crux of it isn’t it; these women don’t get a chance to feel like they exist. Or like Dee said to me this morning they are just seen like robots. Sex robots.
I write because at some points I am going to need to remember that I love being here getting hugs from M. I love it because it means that she trusts me a bit. And I love it because having moved away from my home to be here for this, I miss my family, I miss the comfort of my sweet nephews wrapping their little arms around my neck, I miss the hello and goodbye hugs from old friends, and to whatever extent it is possible these women, this disarray of women (I can think of no other verb to describe the collection I have assembled in front of me other than a disarray – because they are indeed a motley crew) is going to become that familial comfort to me. And in the true nature of friendship they will also be my anxiety, my headache and sometimes my heartache. And of course my joy and pride. But that’s friendship isn’t it? Complex and inconsistent, a multitude of emotions all bundled into one invisible connection between two souls.
Yesterday I went with Bee to her access visit with her son. He is two years old and has been in the care of a foster family for most of his life. Not because Bee doesn’t love him, nor because she isn’t capable of being a mother, but because events in her life converged at time when she struggled to look after and love herself, let alone a small bundle of need and nappies.
And once a baby disappears into the hands of the Department of Human Services (DHS) it’s a hell of a fight to get it back. Especially because sometimes back is not the best place for the child. As we drove closer she talked faster, nerves mounting in anticipation of seeing her child.
As we walked into the DHS building, she lugged a huge, black, slightly worse for wear suitcase behind her. It was full of belated birthday and Easter presents. She spotted her son in the waiting area, and in a blur of activity the DHS supervisor arrived and escorted us down the grim corridor to the ‘meeting’ room. The room distinguished itself from any old meeting room in any old building by the child-sized table and chair in the corner. Elsewhere another table hosted a collection of battered and worn children’s books.
The air of desperation in the building was palpable as parents, foster parents, DHS supervisors and children shuffled through the motions of their too-short or too-long access visits. Meeting rooms were full of dads kneeling awkwardly on the floor with their kids and disconcertingly young mothers holding their tiny babies, all being watched by the social workers who have the unenviable job of determining the fate of these kids, born in difficult circumstances.
I sat in the corner of the room and watched my friend kneel on the floor and coax her son off his foster father’s lap. I sat in that room and watched as she was shown pictures of her son in the arms of another woman, her son at the beach with his other ‘parents’, her son on a holiday that she couldn’t ever afford to take him on. I felt a knot of desperation and longing clench deep in my stomach. It was heartbreaking. I wondered how the social workers didn’t sink under the tide of all those sad moments.
I watched her win her son’s attention and then his smiles with the presents that overflowed from the suitcase. While they were playing I watched his foster father and my heart broke for him too. This kind man was spending the latter part of his life as a full time dad, when he should have been a once-a-week granddad. This man would also take my friend’s baby home after this too-short hour and have to mop up the fallout from a kid with a confused and hurting heart. I can think of no better example of being between a rock and hard place. No one wins here. No one.
When we left, Bee and her son clung to each other, neither wanting to let go. I imagined what it would be like for one of my sisters to send their young kids home with a stranger, however kind that stranger was. That thought touched on places in my heart that hurt even more than watching this sad scene unfold in front of me. We stood and waved the car into the distance and then we went back to St Kilda. Back to Greeves Street.
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I’ve been writing this entry in that same day-to-day chaos of Gatehouse, and between words I’ve collected clothes, distributed phonecards, had a chat about babies, cuddled the resident baby, checked out a ‘new’ car and given someone a camera. It really is chaotic, this disarray of women, but I love it. Highs, lows, rocks and hard places.
There’s a reason you won’t see any faces on this blog. Because its intended to be an update of how the project is coming along rather than a catalogue for trawling punters – lets be honest I’ve got better things to use my photographic skills for than provide a image bank for mugs. The whole purpose of the project is to humanize sex workers by putting faces and stories to the job title but for now they’ll stay faceless at least. Though I reckon if you follow their stories in these updates you will get to know them pretty well (and maybe even love them like I’m starting to) before the book comes out.
Yesterday I rushed home from the city on my bike so I could squeeze an hour in at Gatehouse, and I was glad I did because it was one of those days where everyone was being hilarious – cracking jokes and laughing. It’s really nice when its like that. Vee and Ess came in and complained about the young girl nabbing punters on the street. She was really pretty they said, and looked about 17. And her boyfriend had been hanging around while she worked. As they struggled into tighter jeans so they could compete for jobs with the ‘pretty girl’ Louisa and I talked about how sad it is that a young girl can get talked into street work by her boyfriend, who hangs in the car waiting for her to earn money so he can feed his habit.
I said my goodbyes and turned to walk home when this baby faced girl, who looked just like a younger version of my sister Melody walked up the path. I smiled at her and stopped in my tracks so I wouldn’t run into her. She gave me this sweet smile back, and ducked her head shyly as she made her way past. I was so busy thinking how much she looked like a teenage Melody, with her tall, lanky frame and curled brown hair it took me a moment to realise this was the girl the older workers had been complaining about. This kid who was dressed in high boots and a short skirt, this kid who was the same age as my intern Grace, this kid who looked just like my little sister, was walking the street selling sex.
I cried walking home yesterday. I cried for all of those reasons and I cried because no matter where this girls life goes, at some point her heart has been so caught up with some bloke she has walked the street to make him money.
Today was a quiet day at Gatehouse – which I expect until Wednesday becomes more of an institution. D. came in and asked about the project but nodded off while I was telling her. I talked to her when she was awake, and looked through the first batch of photos when she was asleep. I’m adapting to whatever happens in there. Just trying to absorb, learn and be unfazed by my lack of knowledge. I’m on such a steep learning curve, and its daunting at times, learning a new language and culture.
And all the while figuring out how to balance my voice with their voices; not overwhelming or directing too much, but allowing this project to develop naturally. I’m going to start interviewing people soon, so I get a better understanding of the culture and circumstances that lead people, women, to this place, this point. In the meantime I’m watching and listening. Watching D.’s poor scraped knuckles, and the way she sleeps in the armchair. Listening to her tell me “Anyone who does this job without a drug addiction is crazy”. Watching the bruised apples in the fruit bowl go brown (and thinking there is some cliche metaphor waiting for me in that observation). Listening to the cars stop outside and pick up workers. Watching, listening, learning.
Yesterday was my first day of teaching. I was preparing my lesson at home when Lee dashed up to the doorstep with apologies that her, her partner, and their baby had to do family stuff, and wouldn’t be able to make it (Lee is an ex worker with a sweet four-month-old baby girl). Its funny because I didn’t know anything when I got here. I didn’t know if the women would want to be involved, or be interested in what I was trying to do and its only been five weeks and I’ve got L going out of her way to make sure I know she will be there next week. It was a really thoughtful, comforting gesture. I’ve changed my whole life to do this project and everything really hinges on the workers getting involved, so its a relief they are.
Bell and K. turned up for the first lesson, and Bell surprised me with how much thought she had put into the theme of her project. She said while she had been considering looking at the fact that not all women who are street sex workers get into the job because of drugs, she had decided that she was going to direct her photographic series to look at the sometimes conflicting roles of mothering and prostitution. And I shouldn’t have been surprised because the point of what I’m doing is to show that just because women sell their bodies on the street doesn’t mean they are not articulate, intelligent, and reflective women, but I was. And very, very happy.
We spent time talking about the role of viewpoint and light in making an image while other women, lured by the open door, tried their luck with grabbing a cordial. Technically Gatehouse is not open on Wednesday, except for me and my photographers, particularly because I don’t know where anything is, but I’ve figured out where the perennial favourites (cordial and chocolate) are pretty quickly. K. jumped all over the furniture, and got down on the floor, really getting into experimenting with viewpoint. Bell decided to photograph the canal running beside Gatehouse which she told me the workers use for sex when the mugs have no car, and don’t want to pay for a hotel room. She told me, cigarette in one hand, camera in the other, that she thought she had got some good images, and that she was really excited to be doing the project.
So its been one day, and this might be overly optimistic but I can’t help but think I’m going to look back on this year of my life and feel like I spent it wisely. It’s already amazing.
Yesterday I went with A. to photograph her weekly swimming lesson with Louisa’s* kids. A. limps when she walks because of an accident that I haven’t talked to her about yet, but in the water she is graceful, at ease and at home. And endlessly patient with the rambunctious Jay and Tilly. She gently coaxed them up and down the lanes, encouraging them when they lost confidence and flailed, gulping mouthfuls of the heavily chlorinated water. She even joined Tilly when she scrambled on tired legs for a celebratory ride on the water slide. Afterwards she gave them beautiful certificates she had made, covered with stickers and flowery writing, which they carried them home proudly. Jay asked me to take a photograph of him with his.
I loved watching her with the kids. And to be honest I forgot why I was photographing her most of the time. Yes, because there were slippery seal-pup bodies all around me, goggle eyed and gleefully dive-bombing, shouting, leaping and splashing, but mostly because it was such an unremarkable event. A woman teaching her friends children how to swim amidst the chaos of an afternoon at the pool. Which is remarkable in itself.
* Louisa is a support worker at St Kilda Gatehouse.
