CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I went home after seeing the law clerk and collected clothes and books and a sketchpad and pencils. I needed nothing else. I had no pets to worry about, Daniela had taken the dog with her when she’d left, and all the plants were dead already. I could just lock the house up and leave it for a few days.
I showered and shaved at Jarrod’s, put on clean clothes and sat on Jarrod’s couch with my sketchpad while Jarrod got ready for work.
I should have been blocked, after all the stress of the past couple of days and absolutely no sleep that day, but my pencil flew over the paper. I sketched Jarrod’s apartment, intrigued by the patterns cast by the afternoon sunlight that fought its way around the aluminum foil taped to the windows.
Jarrod dressed for work in low-slung jeans and a sheer T-shirt and ran mousse through his hair, and I was intrigued by that too. The changes were subtler than just a change of costume. Jarrod being Rod walked, moved his hands more, smiled. One day, I wanted to try that role, try being Rod.
Jarrod sat down on the couch beside me and looked at my sketchpad. “You feeling better?”
I nodded. “Yes. It’s a relief to know something is being done. I don’t feel as impotent as before.”
When I looked up from my sketchpad, Jarrod’s eyebrows were crawling up his forehead, and they both burst out laughing.
It was cathartic, laughing like that after the clinic and the lawyer’s office, and I closed my eyes and just let myself laugh.
When I finished, I swallowed, and Jarrod wrapped his arms around my shoulders.
“Shh,” Jarrod said, and I pressed my face against Jarrod’s neck, and sharp hot tears slid out of the corners of his eyes.
“What if I don’t get him back?” I said, hugging Jarrod.
“You will,” Jarrod said, and his voice was reassuring. “You’ve got the lawyer from hell now, she’ll disembowel your ex’s attorney, and you’ll get Billy back.”
I dropped Jarrod off at a café a few blocks from the brothel on my way to work, and Jarrod kissed me on the cheek and disappeared into the crowd.
It was early for Jarrod to go to work, he wasn’t due for another half an hour, and it got around the whole issue of concealing their relationship from the rest of the staff. I didn’t want to deal with that right then. I didn’t want to deal with anything, I was too tired. It would take a fair bit of coffee to get through a full night’s work. At least I was working reception at Club Jade, not spending the night driving.
Selene let me in and said, “Did you get an attorney? Did you get anything sorted out?”
That set the tone for the night. Everyone that came into the kitchen asked me about the order, even people like Glenn, who hadn’t been working the night before.
Clay was back at work too, still looking a little puffy and moving a little, and I gave a huge hug as soon as I saw him.
“I didn’t thank you,” Clay said. “Not. I must have been in a shock. Thank you so much.”
I gently hugged Clay since his ribs must still be sore. “You don’t have to thank me, Clay. I was just doing my job.”
Clay squeezed my shoulder. “Doesn’t mean I can’t thank you, does it?”
Autumn buzzed down on the intercom, and Selene picked up the phone. “Yep, Autumn,” she said.
“Sure… Have you called in extra staff…? OK, we’ll get ready.”
She put the phone down and walked to the door of the TV room and called out, “Hostel just booked in tonight. The first batch of clients will be here in an hour.”
She walked back into the kitchen and slapped my arm. “You haven’t been here when the hostel comes in, have you?”
“No. Tell me about it? What hostel?”
Selene poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the table. “Sit down for a moment; it’ll be the last chance you get tonight. There’s a hostel nearby, not sure where. They bring their residents in once every three months for sex.”
I must have looked surprised because Selene looked at me. “Yep, we’re in for an evening of lifting people in and out of wheelchairs. The hostel and nursing home brings their own staff along too, but there’s never enough muscle around.”
“How do we manage, with the stairs and all? Do we have to carry the clients up the stairs?” I asked, trying to imagine the logistics. “How many clients are we talking about?”
“Eight at a time and the hostel tries to restrict it to four wheelchairs at a time, just to make it easier. It’s a big place and they bring about forty people, so it makes it a long night for everyone. I gather that Eamon has a deal going with the hostel since they always come here.”
“Four wheelchairs at a time? Where do we put them?” I asked. This was looking like being a rough night, and I was already so tired, my skin felt prickly.
“We bring everyone in through your entrance, parade the staff past them for them to choose. We don’t even try to split them into gender preferences. The clients pick who they want, ambulatory clients go upstairs. Wheelchair-bound clients use the closed off lounge on your side or are wheeled through the kitchen to use the two small back rooms on my side. It leaves my half of the building undisturbed.”
“What about my regular clients? They will not stop arriving just because we’re busy.” I frowned. Eamon didn’t mind losing the regular business, but I did. He felt an obligation to the clients to get them what they wanted.
“You will get them to use my entrance. We’ll sort out who they want to have sex when we get them inside,” Selene said. “They can all consider it a chance to expand their horizons. The only thing I can never figure out is what porn to put on in the waiting room.”
Rubbing my forehead, I tried to think of a compromise but couldn’t. “I still can’t see how we will cope.”
Autumn patted his arm. “We’ve managed before. Eamon will come down and deal with the regulars, and you and I will handle the hostile customers. Now, let’s go drag furniture around.”
***
By the time the bus arrived, we were ready, and I wedged the door to Club Jade open and went to help the hostel worker maneuver the first wheelchair through the door. The guy in the chair was shouting and waving his arms around and the hostel worker patted his shoulder and said, “Calm down, Ross. Few more minutes.”
When they’d dragged Ross’s wheelchair up the two steps, the hostel worker wiped his brow and said to me, “Want to put Ross in front of porn, then come and help me with the next person?”
Ross shouted again, and the worker wiped drool off his chin, then I pushed him into the waiting room where he could see the TV, showing Glenn and a man and a woman going for it.
Ross’s eyes were glued to the screen, so I put the brakes on his chair and went to get the next client.
When the eight clients from the bus were all in the waiting room, the worker who seemed in charge said, “Andre’s got a suprapubic IDC. He sees Lanie. Is she here tonight?”
I nodded. “Yeah, Lanie’s out the back. I’ll let her know she’s got, Andre.”
“Thanks,” said the worker. “Lanie used to be a nurse, so we always ask her to take the high-dependency clients.”
I hadn’t known, but he could see that Lanie, with her gruff manner and candle wax, would have been a competent nurse. And if Ross wasn’t high-dependency, I wasn’t sure he wanted to think about what Lanie was dealing with. “I’ll get the staff.”
Eamon was in the TV room when I walked in, and I listened to him say, “… half an hour. Got it? I mean a full half an hour. No cutting a session short.”
I waited for Eamon to finish then said, “Let’s go.”
I felt like a strange mother duck, walking into the waiting room with a long line of hookers behind him.
He’d never watched the women hustle a client before, and it was an education, making Clay, Shane and Rod look well-mannered and restrained. They showed their breasts, bent over and showed off their asses, letting the clients have a good long look before they made their choices.
And the clients…
Lanie knelt down beside her client, Andre, and took his hand and pressed it against one of her breasts, and his face lit up with delight, and I understood what it was all about.
These clients were just like the sad men who came in wearing rumpled suits, or the young guys who had to drink themselves silly just to get the courage up to walk in the door; they wanted the same thing, human contact.
I was getting good at distancing myself from what it was Jarrod did. I was Jude, and Jarrod was Rod, and what happened in this building had absolutely nothing to do with our private lives. Which meant we could watch with detachment as Rod took the hand of a beaming young woman and led her up the stairs.
It would occurred to me later, while I was lifting Andre back into his wheelchair from the bed, that I did not understand Rod serviced women.
The hostel worker slapped me on the back as they loaded the last of the batch of clients into the bus. “I’ll see you in twenty minutes, with the next busload.”
It would be a long night.
The hostel brought 36 clients in one night, with 17 of them in wheelchairs. I was absolutely exhausted by two in the morning, so far beyond tired, I couldn’t think. I hadn’t been this tired since Billy was tiny and prone to digestive disturbances which kept the whole household, and street and suburb, up for nights at a time.
I was so tired that when I sat down at the kitchen table and they completely covered it in used coffee cups, I couldn’t make myself stand up again and fill the dishwasher.
There wasn’t a clean towel in the house because Eamon professed to be incapable of operating the washing machine and had done nothing about the laundry mountain on the utility room floor.
I knew this was a lie since I caught Eamon doing his own washing one day when I came into work early, but I didn’t have the strength to be pissed off at Eamon.
Selene chose two coffee mugs at random off the table and filled them from the jug and handed one to me and sat down.
“Fuck,” she said, and I nodded in agreement.
The staff was just as tired, all sprawled out on the TV room couches or floor, sleeping or resting. Any customer who wandered in that night looking for a late-night round of sex was going have to watch porn and wait while Selene or I woke up the staff and fed them coffee.
Casey brought Jen and Ira back from wherever they had been and sat down at the kitchen table too. “Busy night, huh?” he said, and Selene glared at him.
“You wouldn’t know because you’ve been on the road all night, you lazy ass. It’s a Tuesday night. It doesn’t take three hours to do the airport-downtown loop. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.” Selene’s voice was rising and I pushed my chair back from the table and stood up. If Selene would get angry, I could find the energy to load the washer.
I closed the utility door on Selene’s continuing tirade, loaded the washer and dryer, and leaned against the washer with my eyes closed.
Jarrod was asleep on the couch when all the rest of the staff went to leave at about five, and Chloe patted my arm and said, “Should I wake him? Or will you take him home?”
There was a knowing twinkle in Chloe’s eyes and I couldn’t help be amused at the idea that she was trying to matchmake Jarrod and I. “I’ll take him home,” I said, and she kissed me cheek and disappeared, leaving behind a cloud of Chanel No. 5, Listerine and patchouli.