It was Roman who taught me about Jesus. Above his bed he had a huge picture of Jesus holding a bleeding heart. In the picture Jesus was crying. If the room was dark, the bleeding heart glowed orange, and Jesus’s eyes would shimmer. I’d fall asleep looking at His eyes. Roman taught me the Lord’s Prayer and told me how if I prayed and looked down at the ground, Jesus would listen to me.
Roman told me how back in his village one day the Germans had come to take all the boys and men, and he had looked down at the ground and prayed, and the Germans completely overlooked him. He said he heard the Virgin speak to him, tell him, ‘Shh, it will all be fine. You will go live and travel far away and you will find a beautiful wife but she will betray you and you will suffer but I will never leave you.’ Roman would sometimes cry when he told me this; he would tell me how lovely his wife had been. But there were no pictures of her in the house and the pictures of his children were all hidden from me. He wouldn’t tell me their names because what he and I did was wrong and shameful and he didn’t want someone like me to know who they were because he said people who had fallen under the sway of Satan were granted evil powers while they were on earth. He said that I could make someone die by just wishing it. But I had to have a vision of them in my mind before I could curse them. That was why I was going to burn in hell for eternity.
That’s wrong, Alex says. Jesus forgives all sins. That’s the promise. Jesus is not going to cast me into the fires of hell, even though I am a sinner and a junkie and a pervert, because he loves me, and when I am reborn in heaven I will not feel the urge to sin anymore. I will be as one with the angels.
Like Mickey. He’s an angel already and that’s why Jesus is inside him.
Mickey had to fuck the redhead. The room was so damn hot that his body was all wet with his sweat. They kept having to stop the shoot and wipe him down, his face and arse and shoulders. It was really slow and made me think being an actor would be boring. With all the stopping and starting, Mickey was taking ages to come and the redhead started whinging that he was getting sore. Dick Cheese Saunders made a sudden move and the kid shut up immediately.
I was watching the ceiling turn blue and grey, then green and pink. I was so warm in the light that I fell asleep.
Mickey woke me, and asked me if I wanted a bite to eat. He had his clothes back on. Dick Cheese Saunders gave us ten bucks and we went outside and my body expanded. I could breathe clean air again.
I walked behind Mickey, who was shivering a little from the chill.
‘Is it finished?’
‘Nah. I’ve got some more to do in the afternoon.’
‘What was it like?’
‘Okay. But it’s not like having sex with a mug. It’s different because the kid I’m fucking is being paid as well. Do you remember Show and Tell at school?’
I nodded.
‘It’s like that. I was really nervous. Until I closed my eyes. And then I didn’t think of sex. I thought of how much I like the beaches in Adelaide and I thought of being on that bus and how happy Mum will be to see me. Then it was fine. Then I just did it.’
‘I wish you weren’t going.’
He was silent. He hadn’t given me a phone number of anyone in Adelaide. I knew Mickey liked me. But I was part of what he wanted to leave behind. All the dead souls of Sydney. I wasn’t going to take it personally. He was leaving behind four million people and I happened to be one of them.
•
Last summer I saw the body of a young girl in Potts Point. She was sitting against a wall on Macleay Street with her head down. Everyone was walking past her. I stopped and looked more closely at her. The syringe was still clutched in one hand and her skin had turned the colour of ash. I checked that no one was around and then I touched her skin. I jumped back: it was freezing and felt like leather. Eventually one of the drag queens noticed her and called over a cop, who lifted her arm, dropped it, and called through for an ambulance.
‘Did you know her?’
I said I had no idea who she was.
‘A scrag,’ said the drag queen and started walking away. The ambulance came and so did the nuns. They started praying and I joined in with them.
That night I told Mickey and he must have had a hard day because he went ballistic at me, started hitting me and kicking me, called me a fucking lousy Jesus freak. ‘She’s gone to hell, you know, being a whore and a junkie and all that shit. That’s what you believe, isn’t it?’
He kept punching me, kept hitting me; I was screaming and every part of me hurt like I was burning and then I passed out.
In the morning I was in the bed between him and Angie, and he held me tight and kept saying sorry. ‘I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to.’
Angie made me toast and taught me a little maths, which she was really good at, and afterwards I crept back into bed with Mickey.
I told him that I didn’t believe in hell, there was only heaven. ‘That’s because Jesus loves us and he wouldn’t let there be a place worse than earth.’
Mickey touched the corner of my eye. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, and his voice was way sad. ‘It’s going to bruise. I’ve given you a black eye.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Go to sleep.’
But I remembered that I’d touched a dead body. I went and washed my hands, just let the hot water run and run till the skin went red.
•
When we got back to the warehouse, Saunders and Mickey had an argument. Mickey doesn’t get fucked. It don’t matter how much the mugs offer. He just doesn’t do it. He’ll suck cock, and he’ll let the mugs lick him out down there and if they pay extra he may lick them there too but no way will he get fucked. Saunders wanted to see him get it. I realised that this was what it was all about. But Mickey said no, he wasn’t going to do it and he wasn’t going to budge. Saunders reminded him that Mickey owed him.
‘That’s why I’m doing this shit, you pervo cunt. I owe you nothing.’
‘We made a deal.’
‘And I’m sticking to it.’
‘No, you’re not.’ Dick Cheese Saunders was standing over him, jabbing his finger into Mickey’s chest.
Mickey went to shove him away and Saunders clocked him a backhander. Thwack! It rang through the warehouse. Everyone went dead quiet.
‘Listen here, you maggot. You promised me that you’d do this. My exact words to you were would you make a porno for me in which you have to get fucked. Up. The. Arse. Do you remember me saying that?’
Mickey sullenly nodded.
‘And what did you say in reply?’
Mickey was silent.
Thwack! Dick Cheese Saunders backhanded him again. I wished I could make people die with my thoughts. I’d make Saunders die a million times, in burning oil, vultures tearing at his innards, a spike up his arse to his throat. I could watch him die a million times.
‘What did you reply, maggot?’
‘I said I’d do it.’
Dick Cheese Saunders turned to the director, all smiles. ‘Let’s start.’
While we’d been out they had built three cubicles, fitted out to look like they were public toilets, with sleazoid graffiti all over the walls and glory holes punched in the masonite.
A man with a thick grey moustache who had not been there before lunch was joking with the sound guy. He was wearing a checked shirt and his jeans were unzipped. He was smoking, and from time to time he would pull out his dick and tug at it. The thing was a monster, the hugest I’d ever seen. Long, thick as a beer can, with a hideous droopy foreskin.
The lights were switched back on and the moustache man went into the middle cubicle and started pissing. The camera guy was on his knees filming it all. The director ordered Mickey into the first cubicle and he too started pissing. Then it was the red-haired kid’s turn but he couldn’t get a stream going so they had to stop.