Threadworms, From the Archives: Tilly Lawless
There’s a video of me on a friend’s hard drive somewhere that’ll probably only be unearthed when I die, of me crying over a book in 2013. I don’t realise I’m being filmed and as she draws me out, asking me to explain what happened, I begin to sob.
“It’s just so sad! Judith loves him and he doesn’t want her. Oh it’s so sad.” It’s Deerslayer I’m talking about and Hawkeye is doing the rejecting. I’m particularly moved by rejection when the one being rejected is an independent person who is bending towards someone for the first time, seeing something in the other person that makes them want to be vulnerable, surrendering their boundaries – perhaps because that’s how I perceive myself, as self sufficient and self protective, until it comes to love.
I’m wearing a full face of make up, which is what you might find odd if you knew me, not that I’m crying over a book. It’s the beginning of my sex work career so most of the time I have a Macedonian glama in a Juicy Couture tracksuit trying to get me to sell her brand of femininity. I’m yet to learn that clients prefer when I let my fresh-faced youth show.
“Babe, where’s your lip liner? Babe, you need to wear all black babe. And you need your nails done, you’re meant to be a HIGH CLASS ESCORT. That’s not enough make-up babe. Okay go away I’ve had enough of you.”
“The cycle repeated, an ouroboros of coke and cash, and I went home to my books”
She thought it was strange that I was doing sex work to pay for a horse and university textbooks “you’re pretty much a librarian babe,” she would tell me when I wore my jeans with a sweater, look at the way you’re dressed!” I thought it was strange that the other girls spent their money on coke (when you could get it for free from clients), and designer bags that they would have to keep in their work apartments to avoid some-one at home getting suspicious. What was the point of buying something you couldn’t use? I didn’t understand that Chanel wasn’t just a status symbol, but an investment. It could be used as a bribe, to give to the Macedonian glama so she would send you on more jobs so you could make more money to buy more bags to stash at work. The cycle repeated, an ouroboros of coke and cash, and I went home to my books.
~
Before I started sex work, travel seemed incomprehensible to me; something that the rich city kids at my uni did. Something that there was no point even dreaming about. The job expanded my horizons.
Beneath a man, as he wheezed to a stop inside me and I felt that he might die on top of me, I knew that with each pant the globe filled with air until it was no longer the flat of a map but a real thing that I could hold in my hands and traverse over. My chest was constricted but my mind was not. Drenched in his sweat and staring at the Suncorp financial services sign over his shoulder, that yellow slice of pineapple beyond the hotel window, I sensed the beyonds that had opened to me. Beyond Sydney, beyond ‘economic disadvantage’, beyond this.
I could go to all the worlds I had read about. I went to Exmoor for Lorna Doone and got saddened and deterred from Watership Down by how built up it’s surrounds were. I walked through the Yorkshire dales for Wuthering Heights and James Herriot and tried to find out what road the One Hundred and One Dalmatians would have travelled in their flight from Suffolk to London. I went to Kinlochleven to trace where Alan Breck Stewart and David Balfour ran through the heather and ended up sharing a bottle of Moet with the man who lived in Robert Louis Stevenson’s house in Edinburgh, whom I doubt had many twenty one year old fangirls on his doorstep proclaiming their love for Kidnapped. I got to all those places with nothing but my body.
~
“...what’s eight guys though really? They certainly didn’t last as many hours as this book already has in my hands”
My body has come – tiptoed and squirmed upon strange cocks – to bathe triumphant in the sun of my own conjuring. This same body that beneath a partner’s squeeze, has made me feel love. This same body that, when walking heavy with greenbacks out of a brothel at 4am, has made me feel capable. This same body that, when touched unwanted from a crowd of hands in a club, has made me feel defenceless. The body that, when spinning atop an English moor, has made me feel transcendental. It sits here now, and I contemplate within it, all these emotions are held barely held by a film of egg white within the cracked and uncertain spin of chance. It is terrifying to me that something that can make you feel so strong and also so weak; and so I relish the strong moments, and know that it is the filaments of other emotion within them that makes it what it is. My body. The most permanent relationship of them all. Thank you for the places you have brought me and the people we have loved together, and may we smell the fresh mown grass of many more tame lawns and breakaway fields to come.
~
My body has brought me books. When I first started sex work I allowed myself two luxuries; i) that I would never again get public transport home from a kick ons and ii) that I could buy any book I wanted without guilt or hesitation. I really pushed that to the limits this year when I bought a $1500 book, which is more than I spent on my car and on my horse. That translates to about eight guys I had to suck and fuck – what’s eight guys though really? They certainly didn’t last as many hours as this book already has in my hands. And now I finally have a possession expensive enough that I can justify writing a will, which is an adventure in itself. Also all around the world it’s been found that, more important to and indicative of a child’s literacy than any kind of schooling, is growing up in a home with books.
I’m investing in my children’s future! Building a library, through the quiver and quim, the flurry and frenzy, the thrush and the thrusts. Building a library, so I never run out of something to read between jobs. So I ’m still the same girl, more than six years later, crying over a book in the girls’ room.
Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker and writer. Her debut title Nothing But My Body was published in 2021 and her sophomore novel Thora was published by Worms in 2024.
