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

goes Hamlet,’ Bonny said.
    Somebody else said, ‘You wish.’
    When the mayor got up to speak about legalising prostitution, ‘because you can’t abolish it and hope that it will go away’, there were angry jeers from around the hall. I realised that he’d misjudged the mood of the meeting, as we had. No one from West Action or their supporters wanted to hear about legalisation. They wanted to kick us out of the suburb and never let us back.
    I looked over my shoulder. The hall was packed and I knew it held close to a thousand people.
    A voice shouted from a few rows behind us ‘If you don’t like St.Kilda the way it is, you leave! We love St.Kilda!’
    There were a few cheers from our side, overcome by hoots and jeers. No, I thought, it’s all wrong. Gail was right. I shouldn’t have come. I made a face at Bonny, two seats down. No one could hear what anybody else was saying.
    We’d agreed that Bonny would be the one to speak. I thought we should have chosen someone who was six foot three. When the program was being put together, we were told she’d be allowed two minutes.
    Bonny stood up. ‘Slut!’ West Action supporters shouted. ‘Get back to the gutter!’
    Bonny bent over the mike as if it could be persuaded to calm down. She looked so tiny I could not believe that she was twenty-three.
    â€˜There are lots of prostitutes living in St.Kilda.’
    I strained to hear her, catching perhaps one word in five. But I knew what she was saying. We’d been over it ten times.
    â€˜Shouldn’t we have the same rights as other residents? We’re people too.’
    For perhaps three seconds, the crowd was quiet, then the hooting began again. ‘Get back to the gutter! Whore!’
    We hugged Bonny when she came back to her seat. ‘You were great, fantastic,’ we told her.
    A couple of nights later, when I went along to do my first radio interview, feeling nervous and a sham, I remembered what Therese had said. True to her word, she’d sat with us in the hall, and had coached me for the interview and helped me work out what to say. I remembered Bonny’s face, clenched over the microphone. I told myself I didn’t have to prove anything. I told the man who met me at the door of the station that my name was Sandy. On air, I tried to make the appeal that Bonny had - Bonny’s appeal that had been squashed under the stamping feet of protest – to any sympathetic listeners who might be out there. Leave the damned whores in the history books: make a leap of the heart over thousands of years of false names.

Where The Ladders Start
    â€˜I must lie down where all the ladders start
    In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.’
    From ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ by WB Yeats.
    The room was white and all the lights were on. Money had changed hands, and a naked man sat propped up on a bed. Dim lighting would have given a kinder shape to overhangs of flesh, or flesh that stubbornly refused to rise, but this was a comely man.
    White light shone on Laura’s bowed head, on her bent knees and supple back, while the night’s heat gave the man a shiny second skin. Had Laura not been holding tightly onto him, he would have fallen over.
    Though she’d cried out only seconds before, Laura did not look up at the sound of the door opening. There was an urgency in her coiled spine, her clenched hands and concentrated arms, that made the person standing at the door, Laura’s friend and colleague, freeze.
    The man’s shoulders were shapely, wide and reassuring. His body parts were whole and beautiful and not misused. Later, cold limbs might have to be broken in order to be moved, but for now all of him was warm.
    Laura loosened her grip, then turned and raised her head, and Sue moved swiftly to her side.
    â€˜
What happened
?’
    â€˜He’s dead,’ Laura whispered.
    â€˜
How?
’
    â€˜I