Read Online Eight Pieces on Prostitution by Dorothy Johnston, Port Campbell Press - Free Book Online

truth was, I was dependent on Gail. I needed her smart talk and her savvy. I would have been hopeless on my own.
    The evening the subject of law reform came up, it was very quiet; by midnight we’d only had two clients.
    Gail came back into the kitchen and dumped the dirty towels in the basket behind the door. ‘Yuk,’ she said, ‘That Alan!’
    I nodded, relieved that she’d done him this time.
    The phone rang and I said, ‘Well, we have a very nice general massage for twenty-five dollars.’
    Gail put the kettle on and asked me if I’d seen
The Truth
. ‘What did they do with our ad this week?’
    I told her I thought we should go back to a plain border. ‘Just “Discreet Massage” and the phone number.’
    Gail moved around the kitchen rattling cups. She never let herself fall into a chair like I did when she came back from a client, slumping my stomach and letting the smile drop off my face.
    I said, ‘Have you seen that stuff about legalising prostitution?’
    Gail angled herself around her coffee mug and said, ‘It won’t come to anything. Every few years it comes up. The government makes an issue of it when they want to take attention away from something else.’
    â€˜But would you
rather
it was legal?’
    â€˜Sandy,’ Gail said. ‘Think about it. If anyone from the Vice Squad turns up, you’ll know it. You’ll smell it in their brylcreem. Haven’t I told you what to look out for? If it was legal, there’d be some system of licensed brothels. You’d have to pay tax. It’d become public knowledge that that’s what you did, you fucked for a living.’
    The doorbell rang just as she finished speaking. ‘Here love,’ Gail said, ‘Give your hair a bit of a brush. And pull your shoulders back. Don’t slouch.’
    If I could get away with doing a relief, I would. Then it was a matter of having something – nice tits, a nice arse – something for them to look at while you massaged them. If you could keep them looking, maybe they wouldn’t hassle you for sex. You had to work on your saleable assets; constantly giving, constantly holding back.
    I told Gail about my visit to the VD clinic. I described lying on the table with my legs in stirrups, a piece of paper towelling across my belly, while the doctor poked away inside me and continued, in a low voice, with his special subject - how disease could be spread by hand, how I must keep my hands away from a man’s bottom and not ‘not put my hands around behind his penis’, or ‘let him rub himself against me’. I described the doctor glaring at me as he poked and talked, while the nurse, plastic-gloved hands folded across her chest, gave me advice on the best way to wipe yourself, and outside in the street a shout went up, a blare of horns as a water main burst right in front of the clinic. I watched through the window, still tied to the table by my stirrups, as a fountain of water shot up from between parked cars.
    The nurse clapped her sterilised hands and grinned at the doctor. Together they rejoiced that there was no more water in the pipes and they could close their doors on the unclean world for the rest of the day.
    Hearing that program about COYOTE was what first gave us the idea. Those women were amazing. There were things I realised would take months to talk through, if ever we got started.
    Everyone was talking at once. Weren’t West Action a bunch of shits? What were we going to do about them?
    It wasn’t only the pros, someone pointed out, ‘but homosexuals, single mothers, the old men in boarding houses.’ West Action wanted to clean up St Kilda and who would be left?
    The Council responded by saying prostitution should be legalised, so that it could be controlled. There was going to be a big public meeting in a couple of weeks’ time.
    We set about writing a leaflet, hoping to put