The grappling hooks of lust sunk deep in to Natasha at the De Kooning retrospective when she saw Katrina, whose long blonde hair fell over a black mohair top and down to the zip of her retro Biba mini skirt. Natasha knocked back her fourth lemon margarita and made her way over to her in tipsy catwalk style.

It was 20 years ago during the Intercollegiate football final, as the oranges were handed out, that Natasha’s well kept secret stirred beneath a pair of grass-stained white footy shorts. She was Brian then. A prefect and Vice Captain of the Saints College First 18 football team. It was a part he played to perfection. He slapped the boys on their tight arses and revved them up. Come on you blues, you mongrels, you hard-ons, he’d yell as his older sister’s white bikini panties chaffed against his penis. He played the part so convincingly four years later, he graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art and began a career as a TV soap actor. After the operation she was Natasha.

On their first night together, Natasha saw a penis between Katrina’s foal-like legs. While Natasha no longer identified as male and pursued women with a vampire’s blood lust, the idea of having sex with a ladyboy, hit all the bases. In the post coital glow, before the melancholia, as Katrina lit a cigarette, she said she wasn’t a lady boy. She couldn’t afford the surgery on a recruiter’s wage. The economy was deep diving. The ragged trousered unemployed rang her everyday and begged for work. It was heart breaking. Like Natasha, she hung around the art crowd for food and drink. She didn’t even like painters. They were up themselves.

They moved in to a sunny, spacious two bedroom apartment in Carlton, near the university. They danced in the clubs in to the early hours, fuelled by ecstasy and alcohol. Management gave them free drinks because having a few pretty trannies around helped with branding.

Katrina’s Instagram site went stratospheric. She landed a column writing on identity politics in a progressive daily newspaper. Her articles on gender fluidity, Gay bashing and sexual self-determination, gained a strong inner suburban readership. The greatest issue facing Australia, she wrote, wasn’t unemployment. It was the fight for diversity.

While she was welcomed by the MeToo# sisterhood, older feminists seethed in the Letters to the Editor.

“I was born as a woman,” wrote Patricia, 68 from Kew. “I get 20 per cent less pay because I’m a woman and I’m sexually objectified because I’m a woman. I’ve fought this shit my whole life. You might think you’re a woman but this prejudice is something I was born in to. Prancing around a nightclub air kissing people doesn’t make you an ambassador for feminism.”

Katrina’s next opinion piece slammed older feminists for failing to understand that if she identified as a woman, she was a woman. The old guard were tired, middle class and comfortable. Then she copped a vicious attack from the socialists. The only socialist she knew was that Argentinian guy’s face on a t-shirt.

“It’s all me, me, me, with the identity politics crowd,” Daniel Spooner, leader of Socialist Action, wrote in a right to reply.

“I’ve got no problem with feminism and gay liberation but for the last 30 years, the fixation on one’s sexuality – and by this I mean fucking – has destroyed any notion of a collective opposition. Unemployment and under-employment is rising. Rents and the price of food have skyrocketed and the causalisation of work has created insecure employment for millions of people. You’re part of the problem. Not part of the solution.”

The right wing haters picked it up and it went viral. Katrina cancelled her Twitter and Facebook accounts. Her editor was delighted. She said Katrina’s columns were making an important contribution to public debate. She’d consider paying her for the next article.

Natasha had problems. The TV work dried up and she couldn’t make the rent. Katrina dipped in to her savings and covered her share. Natasha got a TV commercial flogging bananas. She wore a Carmen Miranda fruit hat and a tight fitting yellow body stocking, which left nothing to the imagination. She had one line which she pouted to camera above the “I go to Rio” sound track. “Is that a banana in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

The economy went in to free fall. There was a run on the banks in Europe and the share market plummeted. Young people stayed home and got hammered in their lounge rooms. The dance floors emptied. Natasha and Katrina lowered a bottle of vodka at the kitchen table on Saturday nights and played Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit. They held hands while shopping in the high street but people weren’t so happy to see them. Was their popularity waning or were the sullen faces a sign that money was too tight to mention?

Other contributors took Katrina’s column. Economists, clairvoyants and celebrity chefs, who provided readers with recipes they could make on the cheap.

It was Friday afternoon, two weeks before Christmas, when Katrina’s boss called her in to his office. They’d have to let her go. There was nothing wrong with her work – and having a ‘celebrity’ in the office had been wonderful – but as there were no jobs, there were no clients to pay the wages. Karina could see her gender reassignment surgery fly out of the windows of the 17^th floor of his office. She cried in the elevator and sat in Stalactites Greek restaurant and sunk two Crown lagers and two double bourbons and coke while staring at a cold yiros.

xxxxxxx

On Monday morning, Katrina got up early and caught a bus to the city dole office. She stood hands on hips at end of the line, which stretched 100 metres up the street. Her purple slacks suit and sensible shoes with a low cork heel, stood in contrast to the grey, black and dark blue clothes of the manufacturing workers, tyre fitters, car salesmen, dry cleaners, council workers and waiters. None of the men were handsome. None of the women smiled. They stood, like cows pointing in to the wind.

The morning sun beat on her head. She was going to borrow Natasha’s black, broad rimmed felt hat but they hadn’t been getting on well lately. Snippy one word replies. Three hours passed and she felt faint. She needed water. The man behind her, who looked like Mr Magoo on steroids, was a crane driver from Bendigo.

“Can you hold my spot, love?” she said. “I’m dying of thirst”

“Depends” he said.

“Depends on what?”

“On what you did for a job”

“I was a recruiter”

“Then you can fucking stand out here in the sun like the rest of us”

An hour later, with a pounding headache, she made it inside the dole office. A young man with dreadlocks was selling small bottles of water for $10.00 each. Cash only.

Katrina searched her purse. Only maxed out credit cards.

“Be a love and I’ll pay you back later”

“Cash only. I’m running a business”

“But I’m about to faint”

“You’re a female impersonator, right? Give us a tune, maybe ‘Danny Boy’ and you can have one for free”

Katrina bit down on her anger as she walked to the counter.

“Hullo, my name’s Katrina Blackpool and I want to sign on to the dole”

A man in his late 30s with acne scars stared at her.

“Have you got Form 101? You’ve got to have Form 101 signed by your employer”

“I don’t have Form 101. Is there anyway around this? I’d be ever so grateful”

“Yeah, you can get Form 101. How much do you have in savings?”

“About $12,000”

“Come back when you’ve spent that. Next!”

xxxxxxx

Natasha was shortlisted for a job as a bar hostess. She sat next to the other women, who were 15 years younger than her. She’d put on a corset and spent a painful half hour waxing her legs. She noticed she’d missed a bit. The days of going to Pamela, her beauty therapist on the high street, were long gone. Two hours passed as one-by-one the women were called in, until only Natasha was left in the waiting room. She walked over to the secretary sitting beneath a print of Brett Whiteley’s, Lavender Bay, and cleared her throat. The woman looked up with an apologetic smile.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry darling, all the interviews are done. They’ve found the right girl”

“But they haven’t seen me. I’ve had three birthdays sitting over there”

“I think the selection committee were looking for someone in their 20s. I know that sucks. If you want, I can put put your name down if any other jobs come up. What’s your name?”

“Carlotta”

“Last name?”

“I’ll spell it for you: S-u-k-s-c-o-c-k-s”

“Thanks Carlotta, we’ll be in touch. Have a nice day”

xxxxxxx

They lived off Katrina’s savings for a year and Natasha picked up casual bar work. They moved from Carlton to a small unit in Broadmeadows. The husband and wife next door screamed at each other half the night and boys in their hotted-up cars, did burn outs at 2.00am. Natasha joked they had not only transitioned sexually but transitioned demographically – downwards. Without money for the hormone medications, Katrina became more masculine. She had to shave her legs, arms and face everyday. The hairdresser down the road was a butch dyke who told Natasha that if she wanted her wig restyled, she could shove it where the sun didn’t shine.

Katrina’s appetite grew bird-like. She picked at her food. A pain flared in her side and then disappeared as quickly as it came. They struggled to pay rent on the unit, which smelt of cats’s piss. They caught a tram to Chapel Street to go op shopping and the power poles were plastered with flyers about a large People’s Protest outside Parliament House on Saturday. It clashed with the LGBTIQA rally at the Catani Gardens in St Kilda.

xxxxxxx

The Village People’s ‘YMCA’ like a cliché, boomed out over the gyrating bodies, who were ramming food and drink past their painted lips. The summer sun was high and there was no shade. In the distance, a woman dressed in a tutu and yellow hard hat, was speaking on a platform. In these tough economic times, she said, the politics of identity, so hard fought for, was more important than ever.

“We have to stick together,” she said.

A man walked past selling vodka shots and glow-in-the-dark necklaces. Natasha and Katrina lay on the grass next to the rotunda. Katrina remembered as a boy, playing with toy soldiers that glowed in the dark. An phosphorescent army of the night. She leaned on Natasha and the colour drained from her face.

“Are you okay, darling?” Natasha said.

“I’ll be right in a minute”

Katrina had kept the medical results results to herself. Her appendix had to come out. She had $320 in the bank. The operation would have to wait. The pain stopped as she ran her fingers over the cool grass, then it returned like a knife driven deep in to her side, knocking the wind out of her.

“Jesus, Nat,” she whispered and curled in to a ball.

“Wait here darling,” Natasha said. “I’ll get a first aid person.” She took off her high heels and belted towards Fitzroy Street.

The pain came in waves. Her appendix had burst, just like the doctor said it would. She watched a ladybird with red and yellow dots on its back, climb a blade of grass. “Pretty ladybird,” she muttered. A transexual couple, one wearing a maids uniform and the other a tuxedo, stopped and looked at her, as they would a mummy in a museum.

“She looks familiar,” the maid said.

“Too many drugs,” the tuxedo said.

“Been there, done that,” and they walked on.

Natasha in a panic, asked an old man where the medic station was.

“All gone pretty petal,” he said. “All gone away”

“Where?”

“No more money, honey”

Katrina fainted, then woke up. The lady bird was still there. “Hullo ladybird, hullo,” and a shadow fell over her eyes and the music got softer and softer until it stopped.