“I am not going to burn myself on the pyre of romance, on a future that exists only in my imagination.”
So ends the first chapter of NOTHING BUT MY BODY, Tilly Lawless’ tart outlaw novel of sex work, queer love and friendship. But that’s not to say romance is totally torched, even though it’s constantly tied to the stake in this incendiary story.
Set over eight nonconsecutive days in one tumultuous year, NOTHING BUT MY BODY is a lusty, lyrical and luscious plunge into the playful and the painful, a page turner of internalised emotions and externalised “going through the motions”.
The unnamed narrator is a queer sex worker who on the opening page tells her octogenarian client – Mate, don’t forget, this is a customer service job. Don’t forget, Mate, that though you see me as nude, naked of clothes and context, I am in fact crackling with emotion.
In fact, NOTHING BUT MY BODY absolutely crackles with emotion, combining conflict and counterpoint, a colloid of the professional life and the personal life.
Her professional life sees customers shipwreck on the rocks of her anatomy while her personal life sees relationships wreck on the shoreline of her psyche.
The sex work takes centre stage in NOTHING BUT MY BODY as it must. It prescribes the narrative that challenges the stigma, applying an eloquent enema to societal bullshit.
“What threatens people more -that I don’t always love it, or that I don’t always hate it” is the double edged sword of the sordid dichotomy.
Like all jobs, there are periods of highs and lows, elation and boredom, satisfaction and discontent. And office politics. The collegiate of the cat-house, the bitchiness of brothels, the boredom of the bordello are adroitly described and detailed.
“I’ve got less than five hours to go and I’ve got that adrenaline from money making, want to eat through all the men like a silverfish through a pack of cards, leave them in chewed disarray while I’m plump on the proceeds.”
As a sex worker, her body is viewed by many as a vehicle of contagion and public health risk, used and abused, devalued and discarded, an abject object of desire. For some, she is held in a higher regard, a professional service provider, a person not a receptacle. “Respect”, she writes, “has a sameness, a conformity to it, but disrespect is varied and alien in its individual manifestation.”
“Are you afraid of catching the virus?” asks a client post fuck. Threat and awareness of illness and disease are an occupational hazard of whoring so it’s a topic frankly discussed.
Pandemic – what does the pandemic mean for us? Are my clients intimate partners? Does it come under care because touch is a need? Is my work essential?
NOTHING BUT MY BODY concludes with a beautiful end rant, a free fall finale, a stream of consciousness that’s strong and direct, passionate and sensual on climate, culture, whores chores and one hungry and horny harlot’s progress
Lawless’s lyricism isn’t lofty but it is lapidary, the prose practised and polished. There’s nothing detached or polite about NOTHING BUT MY BODY but it is severely civilised in its caring about society, the environment, economic and gender equality and our individual responsibility for it all.
NOTHING BUT MY BODY by Tilly Lawless is published by Allen & Unwin
Featured photo: Author Tilly Lawless. @tilly_lawless