5.

If you think posing is a pushover then you’ve probably never tried it. Being naked is easy – what’s hard is being motionless. Even seemingly simple poses can turn into torture within minutes, and as if your aching muscles and joints weren’t bad enough, your traitorous mind creates itches that make every passing second feel like an hour in hell.

This is why some models like to meditate or mentally shut down but I’m the opposite: the more I think, the faster time goes and the less aware I am of my body’s silent groans. Plus, as I might have mentioned before, if I don’t find a way of preoccupying myself then some primal perverse part of me gets … well, let’s just say it won’t just be my muscles getting stiff as I pose.

The top floor of Carly’s art store is filled with rows of collapsible tables and plastic chairs. There’s a faded red beanbag in a corner and paper sheets taped to the wall filled with colourful scrawls of stick figures hunting pigs and dinosaurs. These are from the children’s class, which Carly refers to as preschool prison.

Slumped and scribbling in the chairs are the women who I study as much as they study me. Details that men aren’t supposed to have the time to absorb shift into focus: a constellation of pimples on an inner thigh, the flash of a g-string as a woman bends to pick up a fallen pencil, the side of a sturdy bra visible from a flimsy sleeveless top. It’s easy to fixate on the functional white elastic of this bra, the straining seam, and imagine the array of tiny hooks and clips doing their work to restrain her breasts while my bits dangle freely.

Luckily no-one here seems to know how a nude model is supposed to act, because I’m pretty sure I’m meant to keep my head still – but where’s the fun in that? So instead I stare into the eyes of each woman, from the peroxide blonde in the floral dress, the petals and buds vivid and sexual on the cloth, right through to the cougar in leopard-print who sniffs so heavily you can hear the phlegm hurtle through her passages.

This is the one part of the night where I have some control. Although these women will tear strips off me later at the after-party, even though I’ll have no idea what to do or say soon enough, for now their group bravado is shot as the silence separates them from each other, so that they can only smile nervously as I watch them watch me.

There is, however, one woman throwing me off my game tonight.

Sitting in the back row chewing gum, her pencil and paper barely touched, she defiantly returns my stare. It’s fucking up my charade of acting cocky and self-assured, which you need when you’re as exposed as I am up here. It’s unsettling.

She’s never been here before and she certainly doesn’t fit in. She isn’t wearing bright clothes or jangly jewellery and her skin is pale rather than red-tinged and damaged. With her black jeans, black tank-top (no sign of a bra strap) and jet-black hair she looks like something out of a vampire film.

My muscles are burning like acid from sucking in my gut and it’s excruciating. According to the plastic cuckoo clock on the wall, in just a few more minutes it’ll be close enough to 8pm to stop.

Ok. Focus.

Who the hell is she? Where’s she from? Why is she in this town, not to mention my class?

The only thing making me feel better about the bored look on her face is remembering the smile that flickered across it when I disrobed at the beginning of class (“for my women,” Carly had once instructed me, “that’s the money shot. We’re not guys – it comes at the beginning, not the end”).

Then again, perhaps that smile was for something bad? Perhaps …

Ok, it’s time to stop thinking.

“Time’s up,” I announce while pulling on my t-shirt as quickly as possible so the vamp doesn’t see me un-suck my gut and relax my muscles.

Fuck they’re going to hurt tomorrow.

“You normally give us more warning,” a harpie yells from the back of the class.

“Sorry. You can visualise if you need to touch anything up,” I reply with my fake confident voice.

A cougar down the back loudly whispers something about visualising me later that night.

Carly claps her hands like a primary school teacher corralling children.

“Okay, okay, let’s see what you girls have drawn,” she yells out. “It’s time for our people’s choice awards.”

Curious to see what the vamp drew, I approach her desk only for her to intercept me before I get close. This sometimes happens: women who have no problem staring at me naked suddenly turn shy when it comes to showing me the evidence of their perving.

I summon up my courage.

“Hi,” I say, trying to sound like I know what I’m doing. “I’m not sure if Carly explained this to you, but the people’s choice awards involves everyone voting for their favourite sketch, and the winner gets a prize.”

“Yeah, I figured that out,” she says drily. “What’s the prize?”

“A free art class.”

“Bargain.”

“But first, the champagne!” Carly calls out enthusiastically.

“It’s bubbly, love, not champagne,” one of the harpies corrects her. “You can’t fool us!”

“Hey, as long as it gets us wasted!” another laughs.

“So are you going to hang around for drinks?” I ask the vamp.

“Are you?” she asks.

“I have to. It’s part of the job.”

“Of course it is,” she says.

I’m not sure what she means by this.

“I might as well,” she continues. “I already paid for it and there’s nothing else to do in this shithole of a town. No offense.”

“It’s not my town – I’m just staying for a short bit,” I say, trying to sound worldly as if my usual home is an apartment on the left bank of Paris. Paris does have a left bank, doesn’t it? Or am I confusing it with the Gaza Strip?

“So where are …” I begin to say just as she cuts me off.

“I need a drink,” she says.

Carly’s wandering around with a tray of bubbly-filled plastic cups and swerves to avoid me – “Clients first, darling,” she says in a fake posh accent – and I watch as the vamp (I didn’t even get her name) grabs one and downs all of it in one go.

“Now, most of you know the rules,” Carly calls out to the room. “Pick a sketch you like the most, go to the voting booth and write the name of your new favourite artist on one of the paper slips.”

The voting booth is a pink plastic bucket squatting on the radiator. After learning about Dali by going through the art books Carly sells downstairs, all I can think about is turning the radiator on so the bucket melts. It still might not be art, but neither is the shite these women have drawn tonight.

Sneaking into the kitchen, I pour some booze for the vamp as well as myself – something tells me she’s not the moderate drinking type. Back into the fray, I spy the vamp being cornered by two old bats.

“He was absolutely horrific to look at!” says one bat with blue rinse hair, and my stomach sinks – are they talking about me?

“I heard it was a gangland killing,” says the other bat, whose ample thighs stretch her horse-riding pants to capacity.

“Don’t be silly – there’s no gang in this town!” Blue Rinse retorts.

“Don’t be so sure about that. What about all those bikies at the Iron Castle? Or those shifty teens lounging around town scratching themselves all day? Something’s going on …”

The vamp looks distinctly unimpressed.

“Here’s a fresh one,” I say to her, cleaving the conversation while handing her a glass.

“Thanks,” she says, surprised. “I’m used to serving drinks, not receiving them.”

“You’re a barmaid?” I ask. “Where from?”

She steps away from the old bats without saying a word, toward someone’s drawing of me that’s horrifically out of proportion.

“We like to be called bartenders, not barmaids,” she corrects. “And I move around a lot, but I’m here to help out my brother. He runs The Iron Castle – you know it? It’s the pub those witches were bitching about.”

“I’m familiar with it,” I say, thinking of her brother saying I wasn’t tough enough to work there.

“How long you been here?” I ask.

“A few days.”

The drawing is disturbing – is my nose really that big? I move on to the neighbouring table, whose sketchpad shows me having a much more muscular body than I do, when a woman in pink pants hones in on me and my embarrassment.

“What do you think? Do you like it?” she asks. “I drew it, you know!”

“Ah … it’s … very flattering,” I say. “Because I don’t have stomach muscles anywhere near that defined.”

“Oh, nonsense, you’re much too modest. Look, I can feel them!”

She reaches for my shirt and lifts it up a bit before I immediately back off.

“Ah … no,” I say. “Show’s over.”

“Oh, go on, let me feel. I’ve been looking at them for so long I’ve earned the right to feel them.”

Earned the right?

“Hey, you can’t touch the merchandise,” I say, making a bad embarrassed joke, but Pink Pants is already reaching out again.

All of a sudden the vamp steps between us.

“Fuck off,” she says viciously. “He’s mine.”

Pint Pants recoils as if slapped, walking away stunned.

Fuck.

I mean, I was getting pissed off at her too, but …

“I’m yours?” I ask.

“Oh I’m sorry, did you want to hang out with her?” the vamp says sarcastically.

“Ah … no.”

There’s an awkward pause, at least for me. Is the vamp gutsy or just frickin’ insane?

“My name’s Ben,” I say.

“I know. It says so in the ad.”

“What ad?”

The vamp fishes inside one of her jean’s pockets, pulling out a clipping from a newspaper’s classifieds.

Under the heading Adult Services the ad says “Young stud Ben strips nude and models in erotic art class,” followed by Carly’s phone number.

It takes a moment to sink in.

I can’t believe even Carly would do this.

The paper’s circulated around the area – not just this town. How many people have seen this?

I’m going to kill her.

I scan the room and find Carly fielding a complaint from Pink Pants. I begin to approach, I’m going to tear her a new one … but the vamp walks away.

Shit.

Is she going?

I pause, decide to quickly turn back, and catch up to the vamp as she reaches her table.

“I didn’t put that ad in,” I explain. “I’m not some erotic model and I’m going to kill …”

Then I notice her sketchpad.

Instead of the usual nude drawing, she just drew a stick figure with loops on top of his head for curls and an obscenely long penis hanging down, as well as a speech bubble coming out of his – my – mouth that says, “I’m a prostitute!” in a kindergarten-like scrawl.

It’s like a punch in the gut.

Is this how people see me? A prostitute?

My mind fills with white noise – and I snap.

I can’t believe I chased after her like a devoted puppy dog.

“Go fuck yourself, you …”

No decent insult comes to mind.

“… piece of white trash,” I say.

I then march up to Carly, seething, thrusting the ad in her face.

“What’s this?” I demand.

Carly’s surprised but tries to look calm.

“Let’s talk about it in the kitchen.”

“No need to talk about it. Give me my cash now, because I’m going.”

“Ben,” Carly says patronisingly, “I said let’s talk about this in the kitchen. You’re making a scene over a little advertisement.”

“I’m not making a scene – yet,” I say in a low voice. “Give me my money now – and a massive fucking tip – or I will make a scene, one so fucking big you’ll wish you’d never met me.”

I’m going to explode.

Carly opens her mouth, shuts it, she’s never seen me like this before. For the first time since I met her she doesn’t say anything. She goes over to the till and hands me my cash.

I don’t look at the women in the class, who are probably all staring, I don’t look at anything. I march straight into the kitchen, grab an unopened bottle of bubbly and walk out the door and down the stairs.

I’m fractionally calmer when I hit the street, calm enough to count the cash to make sure Carly didn’t screw me. As I take out the wad, a shadow forms beside me: it belongs to the vamp.

She looks at the wad in my hand. Feeling like a prostitute, I quickly shove it back into my jeans pocket.

How did my life become so fucked up?

“Mate, I hadn’t even spoken to you when I drew that picture,” she says, her voice softer now.

Anger seeps out of me; humiliation taking its place. At least I was in control when I was angry.

“I didn’t know you,” she continues. “I still don’t know you, but … what I drew was just a bored stupid doodle. I’m not an artist, I just came here for something to do.”

I can’t bring myself to look her in the face. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know how I feel.

“Why don’t we forget it, take that bottle of yours, find a park, and ignore the arseholes in this town?” she suggests.

She places a hand on my arm.

It feels nice.

“Well?” she prods. “I could use a drink.”

My anger’s completely deserted me.

“My name’s Marty,” she says. “Let’s go.”