Carol hugged her knees closer to her body as the studio appeared to get bigger and much colder. It was the year 2001, and her first day in the new semester at The University of Western Australia, there for her first module, Theatre Studies 205, a module she decided to study for in order to indulge her exhibitionist streak and give her inner narcissist a good workout. She didn’t know what to expect as she looked around the studio, a vast open space with cold grey walls bathed in an off-white light, a light that seemed to be holy and pure once but now tainted with the grime of sin and debauch.
This IS the Bradley Studio, right? The place the class was supposed to be meeting?
What a shitty place. It’s like God woke up one morning, scratched his armpit and this studio fell out.
There were random items scattered in the studio all up against the walls, grime encrusted, formerly white plastic chairs stacked haphazardly that reminded her of an aftermath of a very rowdy but cheap wedding. A dusty piano stood in the corner, its surface wood cracked and broken, with what looked like a weather worn maroon velvet throw draped over the top, its frayed edges hanging lazily off the piano. It looked like an over-the-hill prostitute at the street corner quietly hustling in a business that had broken, beaten and scarred her mind, body and soul.
Man, that piano looks like it could suddenly start playing on its own!
I bet it would play the theme song from Tales from the Crypt.
Or at the very least, the main song from Phantom of the Opera.
She shuddered as she noticed a lonely flight of stairs that led up to a mezzanine level into what looked like an office space or a storage room, with its windows covered with what appeared to be black cardboard paper or trash bags. It gave the studio a dark and foreboding atmosphere made worse by the creaks and squeaks that seemed to come from the walls. She felt like she was in a bad Halloween haunted house adventure at a cheap amusement park and wasn’t sure if the goosebumps she felt were from the cold winter squalls outside that bled into the studio or from the overall seemingly macabre and disturbing atmosphere in the studio.
Gosh, I can so imagine this place being a soundproof dungeon of sorts complete with instruments of torture, bodily fluids in a puddle on the floor, and all looked after by some old hunchback Eastern European guy with a name like Igorov or Nikolai.
Why is it so cold in here? It’s fucking twenty-two degrees outside.
What, is it the spirits of dead thespians and crew living here – that’s why it’s cold?
She was getting very close to walking out of the studio when the heavy double doors creaked open and in walked several familiar, friendly faces.
Carol smiled as she saw Miyuki Sasamori walking in. The pint-sized Japanese girl with the brightest, most cheerful face Carol had ever seen, rushed to give Carol a hug, genuinely excited that Carol was in the module with her. She was eighteen, a year younger than Carol, but she looked like she was twelve because of her size. Miyuki always smelled like mothballs and shampoo regardless of what day or time of day it was. It was a very unique smell that hung around like a harmless stalker and a smell that she looked forward to sometimes as it was one that was comfortable and something familiar. Miyuki had long unruly hair that she tried desperately to tame with well-placed pins and hair bands, often tying her hair back, exposing her clean sun-kissed face that had only two expressions most of the time: an intense scowl or a bright and cheery smile. They met and bonded over their love for karaoke on Thursday nights at the local bar near the uni and had done many a drunken Spice Girls and S-Club 7 duet together.
Behind her, Tracy Sharpe, Carol’s classmate in Reading Theory 201, with whom she had had many a lively discussion about postmodern cultural theory during seminars and tutorials. Tracy was a tall and lanky girl with big, smoky and intense eyes. She was Carol’s age, but she looked twenty-nine because of her height and her smouldering intensity. She struck Carol as someone who had just started making her journey out of the awkward teen phase and taking her first timorous steps into young adulthood and had an air of uncertain feminism about her. She buried that uncertainty by being stoic, but ultimately she was someone who wasn’t sure of herself as a human. Like Miyuki, she had long unruly hair that she never bothered to tame, so she had bits of fine hair sticking out of the sides of her head like a frizzy halo. Tracy had sharp facial features and an intensity painted on her face even as she smiled the unsure smile she often tried to have on.
Carol felt relief washing over her as warmth began to creep back into her, and the Bradley Studio now seemed smaller and less imposing as a smile came crawling across her face.
“I thought I was in the wrong place! This place is a hole!” Carol complained.
“Well, get used to it, you’re gonna be spending a lot of time here this semester because the rehearsals and production will all be done here,” Miyuki said, referring to the end of semester play that the students would have to stage.
Tracy adjusted her hair and took off her sweater, and time seemed to slow down to almost a standstill for Carol as she caught sight of Tracy’s flat and sinuous belly. In those few seconds, she could already memorise the number and pattern of the moles Tracy had on her belly and imagined herself tracing out those moles with her tongue. Carol could not understand the hold Tracy seemed to have over her. For all of her nineteen years, she had always been attracted to boys, the skinny, the stinky, the sweaty and the clumsy boys. She had been taught by her friends in secondary school and junior college about boys and how cute their boy flesh could be when you held it in your hands. Auntie Sam and Auntie Rachel also gave her their piece about boys and what she could do to them and most importantly, what they would do for her. Maybe it was because Tracy was built like a teenage boy, or maybe Carol was at an age of experimentation in a foreign country with all the privileges of an adult but none of the responsibilities yet.
“Yeah, when I spoke to some of the seniors from last semester’s Theatre Studies modules, they said the same thing, the Bradley Studio became their second home. Good thing there’s a toilet and a shower room there,” Tracy chimed in with her lazy, jangly accent. She always spoke like she had that little bit of beer collected in the corner of her mouth, making her accent sound like a sexy, lazy drawl that seemed to pleasure her ears.
“Yes, and if you don’t mind, you can chill and fall asleep on the old, skanky sofa in there as well, been there for years,” Miyuki said. “But you would probably get an STD just by breathing near that sofa, because you never know the kinda gunk it has accumulated and the sin that has happened on it!”
“Ewwwww,” both Tracy and Carol exclaimed, followed by a fit of giggles that reminded them of when they were in secondary school.
“What? What are you guys laughing at?” a male voice with a slightly high-pitched, nasal but soothing and heavily accented drawl interrupted their laughter from out of nowhere. They turned around and saw Zac Gilliam, an impossibly pasty Irish boy with ginger hair that seemed to be prematurely thinning. Zac was doing a double degree in law and arts, and theatre was his creative outlet for his writing. He looked like he was covered with freckles and bits and patches of ginger hair in random spots on his face and neck. He would look barbaric if it weren’t for the glasses he wore and his buzz cut. Zac must’ve had a presentation done earlier because he was dressed in his crisp white shirt, sleeves folded neatly up his arms and black pants pressed to make him look sharp. Carol enjoyed looking at Zac, who for her had the right mix of clumsy idiot boy and smooth velvet steel of a man. The right mix of pragmatism in him doing law and romantic idealism in his arts degree; one foot in making a comfortable living, the other foot in making waves in his creative pursuits, and with both his eyes on the future. Carol especially enjoyed looking at Zac in his outfit today because she had a thing for crisp white shirts with their sleeves folded, exposing good forearm action. She enjoyed visually going back and forth from Zac’s forearm to Tracy’s taut belly and found herself biting her lips as that familiar but subtle rumble in her loins began, and she found herself almost breathless.
As more of her new classmates showed up, Carol snapped out of her lazy mid-afternoon stupor and began to get into tutorial mode. She met the rest of the class, all of whom were the artsy theatre thespian types.
There was the wannabe theatre writer/director/producer.
The wannabe stand-up comic.
The here-to-earn-an-easy-credit-without-having-to-sit-for-exams type.
The just-happy-to-be-part-of-this type.
And then there was Carol, Tracy and Zac, the three who seemed inseparable from the first day of Theatre Studies, with their intellectually combative natures and their penchant for the drink. From that time onwards, the trio would be seen at every karaoke night, every birthday party and costume parties. And it was at these parties where alcohol flowed freely and inhibitions were non-existent, Tracy, dressed as Marilyn Monroe, kissed Zac, who was dressed as a G.I. Joe; Carol, in a French maid outfit, then kissed Tracy later in the night and made out with Zac at another party as a deliciously bizarre love triangle began to develop.
With the rehearsals for their annual theatre production heating up, their cast mates remarked how they hardly ever saw one without the other’s face attached to their faces. And how it was painfully obvious that it was becoming an equilateral love triangle, one where all sides were equally slutty and hot for one another. But the passion had always been ignited when there were just two of them. It was Zac and Tracy in the laundry room of the theatre, Tracy and Carol in the green room, Zac and Carol backstage, often in view of other cast members. Despite knowing about being in a somewhat bizarre sexy triangle, the trio never really spoke about it to each other and were happy to give off the impression that they were sneaking around behind each other’s backs. As much as it confounded Carol, she went along with it, as she too found it intriguing and exciting to be fooling around seemingly on the sly.
Carol felt both excited and confused by her bold experimentation.
I love how Tracy is such a soft and tender person wrapped around a ball of ravenous muscle hungry for flesh. And she always smells so nice.
I wonder if her other lips taste and smell as good as the ones on her face.
But I also love what a bumbling idiot Zac is. His unkempt boy scent and his rough, almost sandpaper-like skin turns me on, and I love how he can overwhelm me with his arms and mouth. I wonder if his dick smells like he does, musky and sweaty.
Mostly, I love how they both make me smile whenever they come around. I love how they run their fingers through my hair and how much they want me when we kiss, when we make out, when we grope each other.
I wonder what it would be like if all three of us got together at the same time?
Would that be considered an orgy?
Is there a way back from there? Like once you try an orgy, do you always want to have one because it’s that good?
Will we then be the kind of people that only have orgies?
All her orgiastic contemplations were answered when they found themselves on a protracted night out that involved several house parties. As members of the theatre community, they were often invited to house parties, usually from the extras hired or the stagehands who wanted to be part of the cool thespian crowd. So it was one particular night when Tracy invited Carol out to a house party in what seemed to be a seedy part of town.
It was an unusually wet night, with the skies unleashing a deluge of almost biblical proportions on the city. Carol was wrapped in her heavy leather, ankle-length coat braving the rain with Tracy and walking briskly to the address written down on a black and white photocopied invite. It was a regular house that neither stood out nor was unique in its features, but it did have a foreboding, almost haunting aura about it. It was like it was ensconced in a force shield of negativity, the kind that would make babies cry and beasts stay away.
This looks like that Amityville house.
Wonder which demon will be taking over whose body tonight.
They walked into the front yard confidently, as neither of them knew anyone in the house, and they just walked in, took a beer from a tub that was filled with beer bottles and ice. They stood around, chugging their beer, and looked for a familiar face, straining their ears over the thumping house music for the sound of a chummy voice, anything that wouldn’t make them look like total strangers in a house that was starting to look like an abandoned den of sin and debauchery.
How the hell did we get here?
I’m sure I don’t know anyone here.
There was no furniture in the house save for a white plastic chair that was used to put empty beer bottles. The floors were wet and covered with a thin film of blackened dirt and dust as it seemed that the smokers flicked their ashes and cigarette butts on it without a care. If you had an open wound that came into contact with the floor, you were bound to get gangrene and within days would need to amputate that limb.
My gosh, who lives here?
The rent better be dirt cheap!
The walls were white, bare and with paint peeling in some parts, scratch marks on others. Carol looked up and saw that the ceiling had its layer of cement falling off, exposing the floorboards, and she could even see faint shadows of footsteps from the people upstairs.
Are those rats in the ceiling or people walking about?
I am so close to regretting this.
All around Carol and Tracy were unfamiliar but friendly faces milling about. They were all dressed in black for some reason, like the harlots of hell, making the more normally coloured duo feel even more out of place than they already were.
If I hold my breath, it will minimise the chances of infection.
Carol tried very hard to hide her disgust at the squalor that was the house and was certain that some insect was crawling up her leg or flying about into her ear. She tried to make a beeline for the back door to get some fresh air when a skinny, pasty, long-haired and thick-bearded goth appeared as if out of thin air. He stood in front of her, blocking her exit, swaying to an invisible beat. He had a large three-piece luggage hanging under his eyes and was shirtless, and Carol could see that he was so emaciated that his ribs poked out from underneath his pale skin. His hands were moving as if independent of his body in an almost comical way, and Carol was more amused than threatened. Carol put her hands on his waist to gently push him aside, when he suddenly fell, almost soundlessly onto the floor. Carol watched in sheer delight as this skinny, goth stranger writhed and rolled uncontrollably on the wet and slippery floor. Streaks of black dirt began to form all over his pale skeletal body, yet his face was a mask of serenity.
Well, that was interesting.
Creepy as fuck, but definitely not something you see every day.
Carol stepped over that piece of squirming goth man and finally stepped out of that filthy den. Outside, she took a long, deep breath of fresh air and savoured the fresh smell of grass and rain. Relieved, she shuddered and felt like she had broken out of prison. She unknowingly, and very visibly, wiped herself clean of the sin of being in that house.
“Aw, come on, it can’t be that bad in there, can it?” a familiar voice boomed amidst the maniacal laughter and booming bass beats. Carol snapped her head around and saw that Zac was sitting on a lawn chair in the corner, nursing a now-lukewarm bottle of beer, smiling a smile that lit her heart and brought her joy to no end.
“Zac!” she screamed. “So fucking happy to see you here! What the fuck house is this? Who the fuck are these people even?” she asked as her voice raised in decibel and pitch, both signs of despair and excitement.
Zac was about to launch into an explanation when Tracy came out and flew into his arms in relief and begged the two of them to take her away from what was turning out to be the fourth level of Hell. Always wanting to ride things out, Carol was undecided, but the sound of breaking glass, inhuman screams and the sheer sonic chaos that emanated from inside the house made her decision for her.
“Quick, to my car, I drove here!” Zac shouted as he pointed to his banged up – or as he called it, near-vintage – Daihatsu Charade. The trio ran through the backyard toward the bucket of bolts and steel without looking back. And as the echoes of Hell faded in the distance, they felt that they had shaken off the demonic chains that had them spellbound by the den of sin and felt an almighty relief washing over them.