The citizens are in constant fear of gangs, or crime family stereotypes, and stay indoors. Or, more usually, to avoid missing any excitement, keeping a furtive watch, up and down the street, from the open sanctuary of those tiny, cement gardens.

Walking past the local, I catch a glimpse of someone from my days of ‘slumming it on the pavement’, and hurry invisibly by, hoping they won’t see me.

Coming up the street, in the other direction, is a girl I know, who’s been out all night at "Penny–Rollers", a cheap ultra-dive that lives off the after-hours stragglers – that somewhat bleak legion (glimpsed over your shoulder, in the corners, as you leave) intending to "ride it all the way into the shallows"

Anyway, someone asks her, "…So …exactly how much does it cost for you …and a guy …to stay there …for five minutes?…"

She knows the answer.

 Speaking of clubs, I recently heard of an exclusive establishment, somewhere in the older part of Sydney, near the old stables, that offers its patrons the most bizarre kinds of sexual entertainment.

Curiously, the building in which these premises reside – or parts of it, at any rate – do not appear on any city plans. The explanation, often put about, is that the original developers procured the site as part of a Machiavellian ‘split–document’ scam – a tangle of near identical, or mutually inconsistent lodgments – in the hope that important details might remain sufficiently ambiguous, or in contradiction, to create legal grey areas.

By the time they were finished and the ‘curtain was finally pulled back’, the place was more ‘wallpaper’ than brick.

This, of course, is all undoubtedly pure urban myth – but the mystique of such stories provide the establishment an indispensable part of its mythos.

The club itself is clandestinely unofficial, open only on irregular nights and random weeks of the year, and almost impossible to find. You will be permitted entry only at certain, ungodly hours – a quarter past three in the morning, twenty to five, in the morning – and only in the company of a member, although irony demands that you can never become a member yourself.

Either way, you may knock, and you may be admitted, although to enter is taken as your tacit consent …to whatever ordeals, surreal or painful, may befall you.

_____________________________

So, after numerous subterranean turns, and alleyways, and backtracking, my friend – who is a ‘member’ – stops, and turns to me.

Before us, set into a fearsome stone wall, is the entrance …a dark, heavily varnished door, with blackened steel hinges – in the centre, a tiny, metal window frame, its vertical, toothy-looking spines torn, by all appearances, from Hannibal Lector’s facial restraint, and then driven, viciously and permanently, into the antique timbers.

But, consideration of these aesthetics was just a foreground, of the deeper landscape going on further back.

By now, my head is swimming with images – not the obedient and submissive images of fantasy, but certain and incontestable recollections, of things …yet to be endured, future memories – of relentless and unsolicited tortures – needles inserted into the penis, or perhaps finding oneself in a drugged stupor, unable to understand what is happening, incapable of preventing it, and eventually wondering whether humiliation is actually an art, or a science.

Or, told to wait, ignored, or among surly strangers, until the realization dawns, that ‘anxious boredom’ was, in fact, exactly the ‘exquisite treat’ you were promised – so expectation conspires with reality, to …rip you off, and then laugh when your misfortunes are not even those you thought to prepare for.

And strange, supposedly thrilling, kinetic episodes, where one is first blindfolded, or bound spread-eagled, and then flung at great speed through the darkness, knowing that spaces are rarely empty – exhilaration poisoned by fear – of falling into a space, sworn to be empty, and infinite …but by someone you cannot possibly trust.

Although unquestionably novel, the mere existence of such a place – and the knowledge of that existence – seems ample titillation, and I lay a hand on my companion’s shoulder, before he can pull back on the heavy striker.

_____________________________

Thus it was that we deferred our initiation into that cultist underworld.

But, if that is true, why then am I haunted by ‘memories’, which seem to contradict that. Can I really be sure, in the end, that we did not partake of those strange, ‘inverted pleasures’..?

Perhaps, working back through these troubling recollections, (or is it ‘forwards’) to the moments before that door first opened to us… will I then begin to forget?

But, so if these are events ‘yet to occur’, what of my fears that, with the passing of time, far from growing dimmer and fading away, they should instead become more vivid?

…until such time when, that in order to be finally rid them, one day shall find that we both have returned… to finally venture inside that tortuous place?

And that, only then, will my ‘reverse-memories’ in becoming the events that are soon to take place, finally begin to fade?