The Fix by Nick Earls Read Free Book Online

warm one. I had come back to a summer hot enough that in City News the prostitutes had headlined their advertisements ‘busty, discreet, air conditioning’. I got the impression that a Brisbane prostitute without air conditioning watched a lot of TV in January and February while she waited for the phone to ring. I figured that made theair conditioning a legitimate business expense, and tax deductible, and there was surely blog potential lurking in there somewhere. It needed an interview, though. And if she charged me for her time, would that be a legitimate business expense for me? And if she was charging me all that money, and I was there anyway, well, it had been a while . . .
    And then I would blog about it, my mother would read it, and another family dinner would take a turn for the worse.
    So I called the ATO instead. People give the ATO money all the time, and practically none of us has sex with them in the process, so that seemed safe enough. And, yes, a work-from-home prostitute’s air conditioning is tax deductible. In fact, the unit itself can be depreciated, while running costs are tax deductible. As long as the business premises has a separate entrance. Cue Benny Hill double entendre music.
    â€˜We just treat it like any other home office,’ the ATO guy said. ‘Accountant, writer, prostitute – it’s all pretty much the same to us.’ Blog done, and I had a lot less to explain to my mother.
    I walked up the hill and turned into Hardgrave Road. The sky was clear and the stars were sharp, and that was unlike the way London had been, most of the time. There was a scent in the air. It might have been jasmine. Something was flowering, but I couldn’t see it.
    Two joggers in serious running gear ran by, and I fell in behind a group of walkers who were breaking in new Kathmandu hiking boots, clumping along as if their feet had been bricked in and trying to convince themselves that the boots would soften up soon.
    I walked past a Vietnamese medical practice and restaurants, the laundromat and a thrift shop where you could buy the fifties at close to fifties prices. Outside Café Checocho, the feral-styled kids of Labor lawyers clattered their skateboards against the kerb while men in hats hunched over chessboards.
    After three or four months of these sights on a near daily basis, they still made the neighbourhood for me. West End had poets who lived like poets, and graffiti that meant something, and eateries that proved you could take the gluten out of anything if you were so inclined. All soft targets for five hundred crass words and yet, for me, unbloggable. To mock them might be to change them, just slightly, at least in my own mind, and that was a risk I couldn’t take.
    I turned left after Mick’s Nuts, then right, and I walked past building sites and new high-end apartment blocks that were going up in places where light industry had given way. Red lights blinked on top of cranes against the night sky. The wind kicked through the huge Moreton Bay figs at the edge of Davies Park and the plants of the community garden, and it felt as if it was here that the two kinds of West End stared each other down. On one side of the street, herbs and vegetables indistinct in the dark and unfenced. On the other, screened off by the long vinyl sleeves of advertisements promising a better life, future underground car parks punched their way into bedrock.
    The ad sleeves featured rainforest and falling water and Greek columns, and they talked about tranquillity. On a huge billboard above, a woman about my age, blonde and almost inconceivably beautiful, trailed herhand through the water and looked off into the distance. She was dressed for business, a serious professional just home from the city and back in paradise.
    She could have been the other half of the Vogue lawyer photo with Ben Harkin. I wondered how many of the buyers of the apartments were twenty-eight, how many were