Free The Naked Drinking Club by Rhona Cameron Page A

out the cigarette and retreated to my room, feeling nauseous. I was too fucked to shower, and decided to have one later. I lay down on my bed, looking at my clothes on the floor, and made plans to tidy and settle in more. I lay on my side, trying to find a position that felt better for what I had to admit was a hangover, and replayed the night before, trying to figure out what kind of sex I’d had with the barman, or what his name was. I couldn’t remember much. Instead I felt envious of the Danish, and longed to be simple like them, up bright and early, making the most of the day. We were both here in Australia for very different reasons though, mine much more complex than theirs. I felt sad and panicky for a moment, but told myself that it must be the come-down and that it would pass. I took all my clothes off and got under the covers. My body smelt of the stale sweat of the barman and me. I wondered if Anaya was still asleep in the room beneath me, and felt certain that she, of all people in this mixed troupe of players, would understand my darkness. I listened for sounds of her, and drifted off.

CHAPTER SEVEN
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    WITHIN A WEEK , I quickly learned all there was to know about selling the paintings. It was so easy to read people, the ones that were likely to let you in and the ones that weren’t. I learned little tricks of the trade through Greg, reporting back to him every night in The North Angel about the things I’d encountered during that evening’s work.
    ‘A good one is,’ he told me, ‘to make out you’re thirsty, say if you could just have a glass of water, that way you stand a chance of at least getting into their hall.’
    One time I had asked for a beer from an approachable-looking man who answered the door with a joint in his hand. I ended up there the entire evening, just smoking and drinking a couple of beers, and shooting the breeze about this and that. By the time Jim turned up with the others, I hadn’t even opened up my folder once, and was so wasted I couldn’t explain why without laughing. In the car on the way home, things were quiet and Jim was angry with me, I could tell, but he didn’t know me well enough to chastise me. Instead he just said, ‘Well, it’s your own bloody time that you’re wasting.’
    That only made me laugh even more. A slack approach, I thought in hindsight, after my first week of work.
    Greg also told me not to waste time on the chatty partner, for it was always the silent one that held the purse strings. It all sounded bollocks at first, but when put to the test, Greg’s tips paid off every time. Even the stuff he’d said on day one that sounded ludicrous, all fell into place in various houses. I would never have believed the notion that because people are Chinese, they would buy the abstract paintings, until I encountered my first Chinese household, when they did exactly that.
    ‘Could I please show you in there?’ I had said, pointing to the clean white empty hallway behind the two men, which smelled of fresh paint and was just screaming out to be filled with my paintings. They looked at me, and then said something in their own language to one another. Neither of us could understand what the other one was saying, but within five minutes they had picked out two abstracts at one hundred bucks a piece. I was lucky, their house was new and empty and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Greg told me later that there was a certain amount of luck involved, but ninety-nine per cent of it was confidence. He felt I had more confidence than the others. I suppose in some ways I did.
    We all got given our dollars on the same night we earned them, if we made cash transactions, but most of it slipped away on endless rounds of drinks in the bar afterwards. If customers bought more than one painting, they would always pay by cheque or bank slip – most people liked to have the safety net of a cheque, to allow them to back out. It didn’t happen