Some people like mornings, when the opaque light promises salient commerce for the soul. As if the new dawn will bleach the memory of past wrongs. But I like the evenings when the day is kindled in the embers of the sinking sun. I am a night guardian. I fish for dreams while men lay supine and trembling, holding themselves the way a child weeps for its mother. They lie in my bed, tell me their woes and whisper their fears which I keep as a casket of trophies hard won and unpolished.

Some say the life of men is a battleground, to trade in fear, to deny mercy and retire to weep into the arms of women who have forgotten how to love. Need it be so?

Yes I like evenings. The smell of dust settling into echoes of cries against the city walls. With the coming of the night, I pout and paint and dress myself for glory, for my own battleground.

I am that vile creature shunned by all, despised by my own sex and chided by law.

I have negotiated an honest trade in a dishonest world.

I am whore to all, slave to none.

I am Mary.

This is my account of the last days of a man they called villain.

A man I call Jay.

I

There are only three of us here, myself, Martha who cleans for us and Joanna. It is by all accounts, a small establishment. The shingle on the door does not aptly describe our business. Why should it? We trade in spent hope. How to advertise that?

Martha is by rights, the owner of the premises. Martha toils by day and frets by night. Her face is a mask etched with crows feet thieved from a flock of worry. She is some years older than I and it pains her, as do most things. She washes sheets, scrubs floors, replaces the weeds in vases every day and ministers her dour philosophy along with her potato meals on chipped white plates. Her heart is a scar.

Joanna is a breeze left late from summer. She comes and goes, her passing easy, her return welcome each time, not to Martha of course.

The house is modest. The door opens into the scrubbed kitchen Martha keeps in regimented order. For appearance sake, the house looks like the home of any merchant's wife. A rough hewn, linseed and beeswax rubbed table bullies the kitchen. Against the walls, timber cabinets hold jars of pickled fish and cucumber that slide in congealed fluid. I tell Martha they remind me of discarded babies. Along the top of the cabinet are earthenware jars like small silos. They hold our rations of milled flour and sago. One is cracked. The damage occurred when an unsatisfied client raged though Martha's kitchen, levelling a bloodied fist at Joanna. I was out at the time and returned to find the client unconscious in a storm of bread flour, the pot in pieces by his head and Martha astride the offender binding his hands and feet with laundry cord. An hour later, the flour was swept, the client absconded and though I gave Martha the money to replace her property, she refused the coins, choosing instead to mend the pot with her own recipe for glue.

From the kitchen, a door leads to the exterior laundry and to a well, its depth I have never truly fathomed. To the east wall, small furrows of weeded garden beds grow green leaf vegetables, some herbs and stalks of bitter celery. We have a duck, some chooks, a rooster is forbidden.

Martha strings laundry cord from the west wall to the chook shed. She grumbles there is not enough space for the washing. I have seen her, from time to time, hiding between corridors of sheets, feeling their smooth wet walls against her cheek and singing verse in a tiny voice the neighbours must confuse for a child.

From the other door in the kitchen, a dark passage leads to the rear of the house and to Martha's quarters. Her room is antiseptic. Once Joanna offered her the loan of a painting she had collected from an asset rich client, (his liquidity evident but dubious). I thought the painting magnificent. In oils of eggshell blue and yellow maize the faint lines of a child in prayer were etched against a plinth of mottled grey. Martha refused the gift and the manner of its giving and the painting now hangs in the sitting room adjacent to my bedroom.

We share the sitting room, Joanna and I, or should I say our clients’ share our sitting room, drinking small shots of dessert wine and thumbing the yellowed news-sheets I preserve for their patience.

I like the sitting room best. The window faces the east, toward the market square and is situated just so the pinnacle of the closest synagogue beckons almost rudely toward our home. In early evening the setting shaft of sun hits the glass orb of the synagogue spire, refracting myriad panels of white light to the four corners of our village. I tell Martha it is God's eyes beaming into the homes of those he loves. Martha's face hardens when I say this and I imagine I could chisel text into it. But it makes Joanna laugh, a sound like sunshine filling an empty room that petrifies poor Martha in its brilliance.

The sitting room, like the bedrooms, has a lofty air caressed by sea breeze, creaking gently from insufficient supporting beams. Martha warns we will be reduced to rubble for our sins. But I laugh and tell her there is more chance shoddy carpentry will do us in long before God's retributive menace.

The sitting room holds a resting lounge, the last and only piece of furniture remaining from our mother's possessions. The tapestry is worn but the cloth is a fine woven silk, once ruby red, now faded, though still rich in stripes favoured by royalty. Made from Cyprus timber, it is hand smoothed and delicately turned to cradle large cushions Joanna sewed during the quiet evenings after the drinking houses closed.

We often lie there together, Joanna and I, her head in my lap listening to tall stories I invent about my mother. Invent, because I haven't a single idea what became of her after my fifth birthday. Martha refuses to enjoy them. 'Bitter nonsense,' she calls them, though I suspect the creaking floorboards is Martha hiding outside the panelled door, weeping into a handkerchief and listening.

My room is larger than Joanna's. The deal is fair enough. Joanna could, at any hour, return to a house five times five thousand more opulent than my own. So I choose the room with the view to the sea, shining like a flat coin.

I will sail on a boat some day, sail away from this land to the country of my mother's birth. I do not expect to find her there but I will go anyway. Martha will not come with me. Martha will stay in the house of our father and rot. As he did.

If only Martha could crisp herself like the sheets she irons. She is as much to me as a dutiful wife and begrudges the manner in which she is kept. She never goes out. 'Shamed,' she says, with eyes of black pebbles I'd like to skim across water.

I pass a small reservoir each morning after the market. I have, more than once, stopped to skeet flat black rocks smoothed by age across its rippled surface. Once I made one bounce more than four times and I laughed thinking of Martha bouncing across the grey surface, sinking as stone, her green dress billowing around her large bottom, soaking her until she returns to something soft.

Some of the market traders refuse my money. So I laugh. They know their place in the world and their refusal reminds me of mine. Others serve me very well. And I laugh then also to see them close up their stalls of dried fish and preserved fruit to follow me home along the path, past the reservoir and along the small lane to the door under my shingle.

It is here in this market place where I first saw Jay. I did not know then, did not even imagine he would also walk past the reservoir along the small lane to the door under my shingle.

Martha is scrubbing floors. I heard her wake, fill the basin with water and wash herself in the silent privacy of the kitchen. She uses the same water to wash the floors. She does this naked when the heat comes, her large buttocks heaving as a hippopotamus. I stay in my room when she scrubs. She will eventually prepare breakfast and I will descend the stairwell and join her in the spartan parlour of her dominion.

Slow trade last night, less than three clients. It means no meat from the market place this week, unless the butcher's wife is away visiting her sister. If so, we shall dine on lamb in honey marinade. I cannot account for the stay in clients. There was for a time a curfew in place extending to the city walls. It did not bother us too much but perhaps circumstances have changed again and the curfew returns. Joanna is away at present, returned to her marriage that is a door revolving. The sitting room is too quiet for my satisfaction.

Early last night I argued with Martha. Like a puncture she burst during the lentil broth.

'Martha Martha thou art troubled and careful about many things.'

I said this with a smile, mimicking Jay, who had said same to her only the day earlier on his first visit to my bedroom.

'Martha Martha...but no. Martha was upset by my hair falling loose into the soup. It is because I also wear it loose in public. Occasionally I am spat upon by women who feel, not unlike my dear sister, a sense of betrayal. I suspect poor Martha was having a fit of mood. She is bleeding, or soon will and her mood was foul. I did not get angry.

Instead I put her to bed with the promise to clean the table of dinner plates myself. I sat with her by her bed and rocked her large body until weeping, she fell into fitful sleep. I dried her tired eyes and smoothed her brow with cool water from the basin and left her dreaming until dawn.

She never greets our clients. She prefers to think they do not come at all.

Then, in the quiet sitting room with night falling and few clients to pass the hours I looked to the ripple of light on the sea and thought of Jay's visit and how it upset us all.

He came alone and sat quietly though not silently, choosing the kitchen to spend his time instead of the sitting room. I did not find this exceptional but a trifle inconvenient. And when later, when he finally ascended the stairwell to my room, he removed his raiment with the tired arms of an aching wanderer and lay down to sleep, wanting only to be held until dawn.

I insisted he bathe. I trickled water warmed by the stove down his back, sponging the grit that had settled in his pores. Sand riddled his hair and I resisted the urge to comb it clean. He was exhausted. His feet were cut from walking and bandages clung hopelessly to his toes, congealed by blood. He refused when I offered to change the dressing.

'Not tonight.'

There is an aching in him. His weight seemed heavy and though he breathed evenly he was not present. Not really. He leant into me while I washed him and there was something redoubtable about the feeling of it.

He is not so foreign in appearance than many others who wander our streets. The city has been filling with strangers for months. They come for work but there is none. They don't leave. Most have spent all their worth making the journey here, so they move to the city outskirts and erect shacks from palms that never last a storm. Others ingratiate themselves into trades illegal or otherwise. The north wall is a highway at night. The selling is cheap and the transactions brief. But Jay is not a drifter. Nor has he come alone.

His eyes have the look of a man who has seen more than his desire. His hands are naked of jewellery. They are long soft hands though scarred from some trade. His fingernails, though caked with grime are even and neat. I surprised myself, wondering how they might feel on my back. When I asked him his profession, he said only, 'I am in the service of my master.'

'And I do the work of God,' I replied smugly and he smiled in a way I would come to learn was for me alone though sometimes, sometimes for Martha.

Naked and suddenly shy he draped one of Martha's ironed sheets around his waist. I wanted to caress his cheek but I did not. I have rules of my own and they protect me. Martha has other rules and they imprison her.

He lay down on the bed, the weight of the world is in his body and was asleep before I finished drying him. I turned down the lamps. I removed a small vial of oil I keep in a dresser. It is expensive and Martha is unaware I still posses some. I rubbed the oil through his chest and along his legs. He stirred while I touched him but not so much to arouse him. He lay shining in the glimmer of lamps which I then extinguished, preferring the rays of the moon to highlight his beauty. I lay with him, holding his head for a time in my lap.

It is perhaps only compassion I felt but the tenderness came easily as his modest request on my person was gentle respite for other nights of hard gain.

He is not so unlike some others I have encountered in my work. More often, I see hopelessness welling in the eyes of men who visit me. Some, like the soldiers, have stifled their pain. But they are more obvious by their introspection. Jay carries a different desperation. He aches, and not for what life has denied him but for something that is yet to come. I have known many men. I have come to understand their internal mechanisms. I understand their needs even if I do not always regard them with the respect they feel owed.

Joanna laughs when I talk of need or want. She does not bother to question either.

'Men are simple,' she says, 'it is women who are complex. Men just want. Their desire is simple, they are urgent by nature and avenged by control. Sex is simple to them which is why they crave so much.' 

Joanna is capable of bold statements but only, it seems, when she is out of ear shot of a husband who knows nothing of her ventures beyond his house in the city. Such duplicity must create chaos inside her, not that you would notice, of course.

Martha doesn't know what sex is, other than perfidy.  'Women are the lesser of the sexes and their pleasure is unnecessary.'

The irony rings in my teeth. Such pleasure is my work and necessary absolutely or we will all starve. God help me if I didn’t take pleasure in my work. What a waste without it! I take pleasure and pride in my work. Like many who work a trade, god is in the detail.

When he had slept a while Jay stirred in my arms and I removed his head from my lap and placed it gently on the pillow. To sleep is simple. The thieving of it from worry is like a tax on the poor. He is poor, but not so poor he cannot afford a night with Mary. He is not yet down among the urchins by the north wall selling his soul.

Men are simple, though no lesser for it, nor greater. They find simple satisfaction in the arms of a woman. They do not discriminate in this desire. I find this cause for celebration. If a woman could be so equal in her honesty, in her desire, perhaps we could experience the keeping of love as easy as we do the finding. Few among females can bear such burden of simple-mindedness.

Joanna has choice, Martha has none and I have too much. And none of us are happy for it. Who is more honest? Who is living the deceit?

Jay lay in my arms until dawn then slipped away quietly before Martha woke. He has so far, asked for nothing but a place to sleep.