Eat, Prey, Lust

But you can hunt.

*

With your new name, new bank account free of restrictions and new email account, you post the advert on Craigslist, then there are two weeks of downtime before enquiries start happening.

You go on this course where they teach you to drive buses and bulldozers. You operate an axe for a week, tearing out the walls of an abandoned house. You sleep in the houses of men, apologetic, feeling like a weak and childish when their muscles and boots enter the room.

You look up an old friend, Pristina, in the corner of the city where the sections are large and there are greenhouses and factories turned into Saturday organic vegetable markets. Pristina's last name was something like Riverwater, there was aRiverin it, she changed it when she was trying to become Gender Rights Officer on campus when you thought you were going to become an engineer. God, six years goes quickly. She's Community Shopping with five other Amish-looking women who she breaks away from for your arranged meeting. You put a big hug and kiss on her. She smells like shelter and food that doesn't come wrapped up in waxy cardboard and a paper bag stuffed with napkins. Her hair is rich and shiny with human grease. It's not long before you've separated her from the pack, made her invite you into her home. It's not long before you've bonded with her twin 3 year olds who are allowed to play with untreated native wood only. They stack blocks and chew on dried figs and you watch her thighs shift under her orange canvas skirt. Everything is autumn-coloured in her house. The wallpaper is brown. The wood is unpainted.

"Listen, I've gotta tell you about this thing," you say, coming back from the bathroom where you've released some tension. "Open Craiglist. Just do it."

"I don't have a computer. What is it?"

"Don't be offended, but, listen – you obviously need a daddy around here."

She pinches your arm, brushes her lips against it. "I think so, too."

You break out of the close contact, build a farm scene with the kids' wood blocks and some pieces of wool that are supposed to be sheep. Pristina boils mugs of raspberry tea. Dinner is wild rice with some kind of Indian cheese mixed in, with a steaming bowl of water and kelp. You bathe the kids and sent a pxt to your mum.I think I might've found the one, you write. Pristina is ecstatic to finish the final paper in her psych course. She couldn't've done it without you minding the girls, thank you soooo, sooo much. You lift her like a fireman over your shoulder and she squeals and you flop her onto a padded surface then sit up against the wall, shirtless, with your hand pressed against her chest, keeping her away.

"We gotta talk business real quick."

She leans back, protects her breasts with two fists. "Can't we do it later?"

"I'm supposed to bill you. I can't work for free, I'm sorry. This is what I do, I mean – you read my advert... didn't you?"

She hugs a cushion against her breasts. "Don't youlikeme?"

"Before we dothis, we've just gotta make a contract, that's all. Nothing written, honest, we don't have to write nothing down. Just verbal. It's, like, it's for my protection..."

She starts reaching for her cardigan and you say Don't, and wrap your arms around her elbows, your nipples pressed against her shoulder blades, your chin pushing down on her clavicle, nuzzling her, and she tilts her head until her throat is exposed and you suck until she's almost saying yes, almost, but it never comes.

She twists out from under you, throws a leg across you, straddling, pushes your chest back.

"Thassit, baby. Let's rock."

"Tell me what's wrong with you," she says, pulling your huge hoodie over her cooling body. "I'm a qualified counsellor, now. Why are you doing this?"

*

You need a client who won't fuck around. Kay takes minutes to win back.

She has a story about another man who scooped her up after you'd left her smashed on the pavement, but you're certain a story is all that it is. You fuck her in the shower and on the floor and in the change rooms of Kmart. You bill her for a hundred hours of love. You scoff the leftovers from her fridge. You scoff every original plate she prepares for you. You slam her against the wall until all her resistance and disappointment is smashed away. She claws at your chest and mashes your face and demands you pause and put a condom on, but you tell her the magic words that keep you doing what you want to be doing. "I know you love this."

"Just-keep-just-keep-just-keep-fucking-meeee." You come inside her. There's a fee for that. That's your rent paid for two weeks, maybe a new cellphone too.

When the moon has painted you blue and shadows are painting black the clefts and folds above her curled hips, and the sheet's around her ankles because the room's hot and stinks of sweat and friction and rubber, you tiptoe to the kitchen, pull up a chair in front of the fridge, suck the chicken off some drumsticks, eat some of those delicious jellies and candies the girls are only allowed once a week, unwrap some slices of cheese. Since the Coke has been opened, it makes sense to drain the rest of it into your belly.

You re-trudge your steps across the dark carpet. There's at least three types of carpet stitched together, and creaky floorboards, and a leak somewhere in the hall that's gotta cost four figures to fix. You push open the door and see the woman with rolls of fat stacked on her hips curled like a caterpillar. Her short, soft body turns subconsciously toward where you're supposed to come and sleep. You think of money. You think of the sound a zipper makes as it buzzes down the back of a woman's dress. You think of your glass pipe and little crystals that take your filthy feeling away in white smoke. You think of her kids and what $896.50 could've bought them.

You were precise with the bill, exacting. $896.50's what it came to. It's just

business.

Everyone knows love shouldn't fuck with business.

You glide back into her bed, suck her lips 'til she wakes up, give her some love, off the clock. There's something about this client, she's earned a little extra. You can hear her girls waking up, whining, begging you to stay. These adult transactions, they're nothing to do with little kids, but there's something there, some strange economy. The more you read to these girls and draw them pictures and wrap your big hand around their tiny hands and guide their handwriting, and the more money you take from their mum, the more you feel you owe them –

Then again, the girls never signed any contract with you.

You gotta eat, and to eat, you gotta prey, and to prey, you gotta sneak out the bathroom window. You almost text herSorry, but she won't believe you.

There's a mother who needs you to escort her to an eight year old's birthday party. She tells the party hosts she has to drive to the store. You fuck her in her car with her fist pushed against the window and her face mashed with frustration and ecstasy. You sleep at her place a couple nights, ask her for cheap bottles of wine, 'though cigarettes are increasingly pricey and you HAVE to have those too, there's no choice about it. You won't eat cheap hamburgers. You won't see movies that aren't 3D. If you don't pay for the finest tattooists, you'll both regret it five years from now. She says you can't keep sleeping at her place. Her husband'll be back from the tournament on Sunday. You make her pay for the motel room with the spa inside it. It's too harsh on your feet, tip-toeing all the way to the spa room. Come to think of it, you need new shoes. She's got room on her AmEx, you know it.

You hate yourself for a weekend, and turn the hate into desire. You find a hip, youthy church to blend into. They grind real coffee beans instead of serving instant coffee. You grind the wall of a toilet stall with the woman who handed you the offerings dish. You brush her hand; you tell her you had to hold someone. You tell her you've just put in 90 minutes of conversation and waited till the church was empty. 1.5 hours means she owes 1.5 times your hourly rate.

"Are you for real," she gasps.

"I used to be," you pant, slurping the brains out of her ear.

You let the sons of desperate women with bright lips use your pocket knife and have sips of your beer and you show them how to hammer a nail. They give up the choicest seats in their houses. They need someone to be head of the family.

Women need you to be there as their princesses smash piñatas at birthday parties, so the mums never have to admit they're on their own. They need you to jog with their prams. They need you to hold the pads at BoxFit For New Mums. They need you to stand at the door as a babysitter comes in so the mum doesn't look like she's going out solo to the movies. You hit on every babysitter, to get back to normal, but there's a note of disgust and wariness in the voices of these unruined girls, so you stick to what you're good at.

You wedge yourself between a husband and his Malaysian noblewoman wife and fuck her so hard she can never be intimate with her husband again. You get your chin bloodied by a man in a suit frothing at the mouth who find you scrubbing your armpits with his shower gel. Some of these women use the dictionary's darkest words to blacken you in text messages they send ten at a time. They regret everything. You regret not banking the money they've paid you. You can make $1000 one Friday night and lose it by the next.

You gaze at your high school bros on Facebook. They tell tales about 18 year olds they yank out of clubs and fuck at 6am; you tell them I know, bro. I'm with you. I feel you. Happens to me all the time, bro –

But that's bullshit. You tell them nothing about whoring yourself out as a fill-in father for the women neglected by TV and movies. You know what they might say to you. You know they'll never again let you sit beside their sisters at a Christmas feast.

You have 2000 Facebook friends one week, change your name, come back and refriend them the next. You post no profile photos; you can't report the news that fills your days. You find the right administrator in the Faculty of Arts and grind her on a rug on the floor of her own office while the printery prints your diploma. She screams at you afterward. You can hear her sobbing through her closed door, trying to tug her wedding ring off. You're alone in the hallway, with two directions to choose between.

You fuck your friend, your confessor, your mother, your sister, your soulmate. You don't make love to any of them.

*

Xanthia and that old one, Mara, have a booking on the same weekend as this soccer coach and this opera singer and this greying police officer and this woman who's come out of a decade of pot and vodka dependency and needs a deep, strong keel to hold her in the water. Felicia, Christina, Christine, Lydia, Joanne, Carmen. You can only juggle half a dozen names in your head at once.

Your friends have babies and buy trucks and get their wedding anniversary dates tattooed on their wrists. You'll never be like them, mowing the lawn, splitting firewood, clapping at the TV screen. You don't own a power drill. You can't fix a leaking sink or remove a u-pipe with your hands. You suck cigarettes like they're full of helium and you'll deflate without the gas. It takes seven or eight drinks at lunch and at night to keep gravity holding you down.

These women aren't members of clubs. Their girlfriends all moved away and married. These women drop their kids at school, work hard, try to eat salad for lunch, pick the kids up, make dinner, watch TV and wonder how the actresses stay skinny and get guys. They roar at the kids to quieten down so the mums can go to bed. The things they whisper at 3am are said in the delicate, crushable voices of four year olds. These counselling sessions? They're billable, too.

If you got your one hundred women together and hosted a soiree, they wouldn't mingle. They wouldn't believe they had anything in common. They'd go into separate corners. Julia, 42, last name unimportant, has curly soft brown hair. Her eyes are gentle. Freckles creep from her forehead all the way down onto her chest. She has a Ph.D. in commerce. She delivers lectures at university. A Sunday paper does a story about how she's a role model and used to be known for bringing her child into the office, refusing to place him in day care. You make her pay you $15 an hour so she never has to admit that when the lecture theatres empty, she's alone.

A 42 year old woman doesn't expect to be held against the wall and fucked while candles flicker and the vibrations shake the petals off a dozen roses. A 42 year old career woman cries while she sets up your automatic payment with her laptop on her belly while her knees cradle your ears like headphones. A 42 year old woman gasps and wriggles every time your hard tongue presses her clit. Kay stands on the doorstep of another woman's house, saying I thought you wanted to do design.

Nah, you tell her. I took a shortcut. You shouldn't've bothered, Kay. You got the girls in the car?

Yeah, I do.

That them crying I can hear?

Yup. Wanna know why they're crying?

Nah. I don't wanna know.

Kay's spent 30 hours putting together this portfolio so you can apply for honourable work. Mara's got you an Advanced Certificate In Research Accounting to put on your CV. Pristina's organised an entire job for you, if you want it – 35 hours collecting trolleys from the car park of WholeFoods.

Years melt and blur and drift like clouds as you fuck and tickle poker machines and suck cigarettes and eat burgers and watch movies, skinny, starving, brown teeth, slumped, spine curled.

When the children of these women get to about 12, even 14, you have to stay away. You're happy to destroy these kids' mothers for money, but the girls themselves? Dangerous. Kay's little girls – God, you can never remember their middle names, but you can't shake their birthdays out of your head – they get some triad of boys from their school to follow you. You run through an alleyway, can't see the end, panic, feel justice on your heels, them emerge onto High Street and breathe again and stroll into a bank instead, seconds away from having your faced smashed by kids with more testosterone than you.

Shopping vouchers from Lucinda or Lucianne or whatever her name was remain in your pockets. The youths go away, but Mara's son, he confronts you next. He has a picture of his mum on his smart phone and he's thrusting it at you. His voice is deeper than yours. He is heavy with spaghetti and NutriGrain; you're 15 years older, but weak compared to this kid. You scurry away from him in some hi-fi department in some megastore and run and crawl and crouch between furniture and emerge and think, Something has to change.

200 women is probably enough. You start snapping SIM cards, biffing them out of the window. You're throwing out photos of the children your mum wants you to have, yes, but there are other ways to make your mum happy – plus, after eight years, maybe she's not mad at you anymore.

Maybe you'll tell her you love her.

Maybe you won't charge a cent.

You park outside the house of a woman you left one night at dinner when you said you were going to use the bathroom. You saw her sticking her fork in a piece of broccoli, then you left. Why the fuck not? Your old man did the same, didn't he? You have to check three SIM cards before you find her old messages and phone number. A teenager answers the phone. He's confused when you fumble, when it's obvious you can't remember the woman's name even though you jerked this woman's car off the highway, tugged her hand into a grove of fruit trees, tugged her panties down around her ankles, pushed her into the wet leaves and dirt, licked the makeup off her cheeks. "Sounds like you want my dad," the boy says, "I'll see if he's home."

"No – don't. I want Kay."

"Kay? Who the fuck's that? Kay doesn't live here, bro."

"I know. But I want her."