In the Money

We were selling crap. We were all aware of this. One of us sold macrame pot hangers, someone else sold knives with woven handles. Someone made horrid little sculptures out of shells.

There was nothing of value in any of it. Even my paintings weren't my best work. The frames were cheap. I knocked them out in an hour, each one similar to the one before, half Playboy centrefold, half forest landscape, all of them a quick sketch, nothing permanent. The frames were simple wooden things, cheap and nasty.

We sat in the sun in our sweat-damp singlets and sipped bad coffee and gathered the cash. A fistfull of it. It was the weekend before Christmas and people just wanted to buy things.

"Three aunts, five cousins, four nieces, Ill take six of those." People will buy anything the weekend before Christmas.

There are a group of us at our place. There is her (painted flowerpots with plastic bobble eyes on them), the beautiful one with the pearl skin. She looks as if the sweat were sprayed on by a stylist. Her damp hair might be gelled in place. There is her boyfriend. I am jealous of him and he is jealous of me, but we tolerate each other effectively. There is that other one, and I must admit I have wanted to make love to him for the longest time. I have suggested it at intervals and he has grinned and said 'no thanks' as if I were asking him to support some charity or other by buying a raffle ticket. There is the fellow with the chain-link bras who gave me one because he liked me. There is the other girl, my constant companion. Then there are some people I have only just met and who I will soon forget. It is a crowd.

We pop the corks on several bottles of champagne. The heat makes us drunk before we have even started sipping.

My room is all bed. The king sized thing is a wall to wall lounging area. We lie on and around each other, fully clothed until someone suggests we should take our clothes off and lie in the money.

We count it. Each one noting down our share and we lay it all on the futon and there is a lot of it. Piles of small notes, change jingling at the bottom of it all. Someone leaps into the centre of it. Money sticks to her hip. She nestles into it all as if it is some harsh kind of bubble bath. In a moment there are the papered bodies of friends and strangers.

I take my clothes off and I join them. I lie on money that has been passed from hand to hand. It is like an add for some sexually transmitted disease, who has touched the money and whose hand have they touched etc. Someone rolls a wad of notes and inserts the little fist of paper into someone elses body.

I have no objection to the possibility of an orgy, but the money scratches at me. One of the men is using his self-help jargon to make this all seem like some kind of motivational exercise.

"Money attracts money and if you put it inside you, you will draw money into you, you will be made of money."

Someone claps a five dollar bill over my breast and squeezes it. I stand, and pick my way across it all and leave them writhing in their ugly orgy of wealth.

I drink my champagne, water the plants and wander back to watch the financial transactions being conducted on my bed, more motivational seminar than actual sex. The activity comes to a resolution rather than a climax and someone starts to count the soiled money into neat piles.

He checks the figures against his spreadsheet and somehow they have managed to make twenty dollars in the deal. Someones loss is the group's gain.

"See, money grows money."

Which is a blatantly ridiculous statement.

I will have to wash the sheets. I will have to vacuum the carpet.

I leave them to wander home individually and in pairs. I run a cold bath which I will sit in alone. The beautiful girl will shut her bedroom door, snapping the cone of silence around her own raised voice and that of her jealous boyfriend. The boy I have lusted after will bring me a cup of tea and refuse to climb into the bath with me, yet again.

Tomorrow everyone will wander back to their respective family homes.

Then it will be Christmas.