AMELIA SAWARD
Amelia Saward is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist, writer, and arts worker living with chronic illness. In her visual arts practice, she combines elements of illustration with contemporary painting, bridging the historical divide between art and craft. It is a way of celebrating mediums and techniques that have previously been degraded as ‘women’s art’ or as merely decorative. She has exhibited across Melbourne including at Unassigned Gallery, Brunswick Street Gallery, Linden New Art, and Trocadero Art Space.
CONTENT NOTE
Victoria Manifold’s ‘The Afterparty’ features depictions of nudity and sexual harassment, and makes mention of death.
If it’s an older man I’m going to get better tips, because men of a certain age don’t realise that huge breasts have gone out of fashion. I’m not going to tell them, ‘It’s all big arses now, that’s what the people want!’
No, I’m going to keep wearing the too-small shirt with the buttons straining across the chest. I’ll twist around in an unnatural way, so they can see—through the gaping polycotton blend—a bit of bra, a wobble of flesh. I’ll spend too long at the freezer, so that when I come over to take their order for New York-style cheesecake my nipples will be hard enough to distract them into thinking that I am a good or excellent waitress. I’ll stomp heavily to make them bounce. ‘Cream or ice cream?’ I might say.
If it’s a younger man, then forget it—nothing for me. The matronly bosom will only remind them of their own mothers—whom they all hate—and they’ll withhold any tip from a rebellious sense of spite. And if I don’t remind them of their mothers then I won’t remind them of anyone at all, that is, they won’t even see me. I hardly bother with these ones—I’ll send over Yash or Sully or Seb or Beth-Ann, someone still young enough to have a solid outline.
Yash and Sully and Seb and Beth-Ann, although much younger than me, have been here a bit longer and with that comes the humiliation of having to ask them—children—how to do certain things. Things like is it sweet chilli sauce or creamy garlic with the prawn starter? Is it a 5 or 10 per cent surcharge on card payments? It’s devastating. But how would I know unless I asked them? But also, how can I have been alive so much longer than them and know so much less?
This job was a kind of last resort for me, after some things had gone—well, not quite wrong, but not right either. The pay is low, technically below minimum wage, so the tips are important to me, a person with rent and bills and debts. Unlike Yash and Sully and Seb and Beth-Ann I don’t have a side hustle. I’m too tired to even come up with an idea, let alone make that idea fruitful.
Saying that, I’m not sure how Yash and Sully and Seb and Beth-Ann are making any profits at all. From what I can gather, outside of working here all they do is record themselves doing little choreographed dances, uploading them with a filter that casts an orange light over everything. They dance without energy, as if they’re being forced to perform them against their will. I watch them after my shifts finish, on the cracked screen of my second-hand phone. I’m careful not to press follow or like, careful not to accidentally leave a comment questioning their motivations.
But I do take screenshots and zoom in on them, the smooth faces, the plump cheeks, the shiny hair. Beth-Ann has the sort of body that makes her very visible to young people—the flat chest, the muscular thighs and derriere, the poreless, honey skin. She and Yash often appear moved by their dances, their eyes brimming with tears as they—seemingly painfully—bring their hands together, shuffle their feet. They’re filmed in a room with no objects, only their bodies. I wonder where this is, where can you find a place so empty. We live in such a small town, and, after all, everything has to go somewhere.
At work they’re always together, heads bent in thought, always reading the same book as each other, the whispers between them like the television static they’ll never experience because television static—real television static—has been lost to the ages, it’s for the archaeologists now. They look so serious in their little huddle, pointing out passages in their stupid book, making notes with the worn pencils we carry in our aprons. I’m desperate for them to know that I’ve had fun in my life.
So, I’ve picked up some phrases to use when I’m around them: I’ll drop a knife dangerously close to my foot and say, ‘pussy from a girl who doesn’t care if she lives or dies, it just hits different, ha-ha.’ This isn’t true of course—I do care a little if I live or die and I can’t say if my pussy hits different, although I’m starting to suspect it doesn’t. All Sully says is, ‘I wouldn’t really say you were a girl anymore.’
The most beautiful one, Seb, has an elaborate hairstyle that must take many hours to perfect, as well as requiring expensive products that are ordinarily beyond the grasp of someone making less than minimum wage in the service industry. When I ask him about how he does it, he tries to change the subject, instead asking me if I have any friends or family—anyone who’d notice if I was missing—and I tell him I’m single and very experienced, thrusting my chest in his direction. A horrified blush crawls across his face as he averts his eyes.
When I try, just a little, to stroke his hair, he does not seem pleased at all, maybe because I’ve made my mouth wet, very wet so that my lips and chin are shining when I hold out my fingertips toward his face. I hear him asking Sully if there’s such a thing as a HR department here. Ha! I think, there are no workers’ rights here, if I want to look at the outline of your dick in your ironically skinny jeans then no one can stop me.
After that he stops wearing the jeans, in fact after that they all start dressing the same—in loose dark fabrics, some sort of robes, that cover everything except their hands and heads, so that they begin to seem even more separate from me, not just because their clothes are different to mine but because I don’t even understand their clothes or why they would want to wear them.
They talk to me less too, always hurrying off together after our shifts end and then later posting their little dances in their empty rooms, the orange filter becoming more and more intense, their faces more pained and ecstatic.
In the break room—which is what I call the bit of alleyway near the bins—I see them practice these dances but now they’ve added in a little chant too, something that sounds like ‘REJOICE’ and, weirdly, the light in the alley has somehow turned the same orange as all the filters they use. They check and double check their book—always the same book—that looks like it was written by a scientist but probably not a real one. Then they hurry back to work, seemingly not concerned about tips in the way I am but, annoyingly, making more of them than I do.
I ask them what they do after work and in unison they reply, ‘Parties.’ ‘Oh, I like parties,’ I say to them, but they tell me they’re not those sorts of parties. ‘Not what sort of parties?’ I ask, and they just lower their eyes to my fleshy cleavage bursting through the gaps in my shirt, then look at each other secretively. Their mouths form grim lines.
Back inside, I hear some shocked whispers spreading across the restaurant, and when I look over, I see that Craig is sitting at the small table in the corner. It’s not the biggest surprise in the world, after all we live in a small town and I do occasionally see him, mostly in the middle distance with a furrowed brow.
I haven’t seen him this close up for years though and I assume that him appearing at my place of work to eat a meal alone has something to do with his wife and children currently being missing. Without his whole family having disappeared there is no way Craig Chambers would be here eating the daily special (chicken schnitzel with a choice of chips and salad or mash and veg).
Because their disappearance has been all over the news there is some judgement among the other customers regarding how much he seems to be enjoying what is an unusually hearty meal. Shouldn’t he have lost his appetite? Shouldn’t he be sick with worry? Even Yash and Sully and Seb and Beth-Ann look fairly disgusted, a hint of incredulity leaking onto the usual blank slate of their faces.
Craig isn’t too bad though, by which I mean I think of him all the time, by which I mean it does not feel like twenty years since we sat in my grandmother’s house, his little finger touching mine across the arms of two overstuffed chairs pushed together. It feels like no time at all has passed since we listened to her complain about her neighbours but didn’t really listen because all I could really hear was my heart beating as he moved his finger slowly against mine.
Looking over at him, I loosen another button on my shirt. Now I’m showing more than a bit of bra, it’s sort of half the cup on the left-hand side and maybe a third of the cup on the right-hand side. The lines of Yash and Sully and Seb and Beth-Ann’s mouths become even grimmer but I have to be prepared. I’ve had hardly any tips this week, and after all Craig doesn’t have any children to spend his money on now, at least not for the time being.
I start to think what if I didn’t need the shirt at all? Or even the bra? What if I could lose my skirt and tights too? What if I could walk over to him and he saw my whole body, like I was seventeen and he was eighteen or nineteen and we were on the floor of my parents’ living room while they slept upstairs? What if I could feel the rough carpet on my back still? Hear the dog scratching at the door? Feel his fingers pushing aside my damp underwear? Feel the absolute shock of it?
Yash and Sully and Seb and Beth-Ann don’t see me as I undress, they seem to be performing some kind of emergency meditation that involves passing a small orange ball to each other, while they do their little chant and move their feet in time. Their eyes are closed and their faces bear a beatific look, so it’s easy to get past them to Craig’s table.
He’s finishing off the last of his hot chips as he sees me. ‘Leigh,’ he says, ‘what are you doing here?’
‘This is where I work.’
No reply.
‘I just wanted to check everything was OK with your meal today?’
‘Yeah, fine, but…’
‘But what?’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yep, I’m fine. I’m actually doing really well for myself.’
I’m starting to feel a little cold but I stand there a while longer looking at him.
‘Look, Leigh, I can’t really put up with this shit. I’ve got a lot going on right now.’
‘Would you like to see the dessert menu?’
‘Leigh, what the fuck?’
‘We’ve got a chocolate roulade on special today.’
‘I don’t know if you heard but Shannon is missing.’
‘And that comes with a choice of cream or ice cream.’
‘And the kids too, no one knows where they’ve gone.’
‘But I would recommend the New York–style cheesecake.’
‘Can you fucking hear me?’
And of course, tears are coming now, dripping right down my face and landing on the little bit of limp salad that he hasn’t finished. I sense the other customers are looking at us, judging him for being a poor husband and father and me for trying to perform ordinary waitressing duties without clothes.
‘I don’t want any fucking dessert, Leigh.’
It is then that Yash and Sully and Seb and Beth-Ann see what is happening. They hurry over to me with some of their spare robes, sweeping me up in the soft, black fabric and making me feel so safe. Their arms are rigid, they won’t let me look back at Craig as they take me to the alleyway break room and give me some juice in a little box and some leftover New York cheesecake that a recalcitrant child couldn’t finish.
They let me sit there for the rest of the shift, they do all the cleaning, all the cashing up and dividing the tips. They give me more than my fair share and then they say to me, ‘Maybe you can come to the party tonight.’ And I nod my head yes. Yes, there is nothing that I want more than to go to their party.
And then, somehow, I am finally walking through all the empty rooms they dance in, finally bathed in that strange orange light that I’ve watched on my phone so many times. There are others there too, just like them, so young and smooth and dressed in their dark robes. They’re wearing little knitted hats and saying things like, ‘Bonnet hive rise up,’ whereas I’m pulling down the robe they’ve given me and saying things like, ‘I’ve had my gag reflex surgically removed,’ to which they all shake their heads, sadly. ‘You don’t have to say things like that anymore,’ they tell me.
They don’t have any alcohol here, but I still feel drunk as I walk around trying to talk to them all. They just look at me blankly, smiling at each other but not at me. These are not like the parties I went to when I was young, where someone might’ve had some cocaine I could rub on my gums or half a pill I could knock back, or a dick I could suck in a dirty bathroom or a, or a a a…
No, not like that at all.
Something different.
My watch is gone, maybe I left it on Craig’s table, maybe I don’t even own a watch. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Just wandering in and out of these empty, orange rooms and smiling at all these smooth faces that don’t smile back. I wish they would teach me their dance routines or their chants, which at first seemed to me to be fairly simple but now appear incredibly intricate and confusing.
I feel some hands touching me, pulling at the hood of the robe until it is right over my face and then it’s the panic! Just like that, inhaling the fabric so it shoots right to the back of the throat, choking on it now, more panic as the dry material touches the wet tongue.
‘Relax,’ they say, and then ‘rejoice.’
I manage to make out some figures around me through the weave of the robe’s fabric, they’re retreating from me into the darkness. The light becomes a shape, something solid now. The light is all over me now, I feel like I’m actually breathing the light in, like I’m swallowing some of it without meaning to. I can’t seem to find Seb and Sully and Yash and Beth-Ann, not even an outline of them now, just the light, the light and the colour.
Softly, I hear a door close. I can feel my heart beating in my chest, but, after all, where else would my heart be?