Whoring Around. John Bryson

could answer her only with difficulty and his voice was dead. No, I need some rest,, he said, and he knew his cheeks were grey and his eyes sagged. Your eyes dribble with fatigue like an exhausted spaniel, Mimi told him, no stamina at all. He slid off the stool and looked again at the girl’s face. The head was unnaturally round and had the vacant malevolence of a halloween mask. He stared at her breasts, they were mean and without promise of motherhood, and he felt disgust bubble in his throat like an acid.

      His lump of crushed notes lay on the bar. He counted some of it out: ten, twenty, thirty, forty, forty-two. There, he said as she drew away from it, that’s for your coat.

      He stumbled from the doorway into the pedestrian stream. The light was harsh. The current sucked him past the shopfronts. Some were still open. Cab-horns sounded from a roadway he couldn’t see; grey water ran the gutter and splashed the pavement although it had not been raining. His eyes closed out the strobed glare from display windows beaded with lightbulbs. The force of movement around him stopped at an intersection. He stood in a wide queue as police directed traffic on both sides of nine workers excavating a floodlit trench in the centre of the road. Most of the pick-workers were women. They wore the black work-singlets of men and chipped at the bitumen crust without glancing up at the traffic.

      Humphrey joined the group waiting to cross. It bulged over the kerbline. He was pushed forward and across the road, closely behind three women in wide-bottomed trousers and short canvas jackets hurrying to early shift-work. They turned toward the wharf. The shortest of the women carried a baby in a sling across her back. The child was swaddled to the chin and fast asleep. A brown bottle swung from its mouth and the teat jerked flat with each short stride. All the way to the ferry Humphrey walked to one side in case the bottle dropped and splintered. He lost them in the crowd outside the terminal.

      And from his hotel room Humphrey booked for the breakfast flight to Tokyo.