A Tired Bride Retires

It was a lonely night on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, I was disastrously sober and my photographer was nowhere to be seen. I was trawling through Manly’s Corso, with the idea to do a photo essay on the oh-so-talked-about violence that occurs there once the bars shut; though this was going to be difficult without a photographer.

The urge to drink took hold of me, so I dragged myself and my last few bucks into the tacky tides of Charlie Bar.

It was getting late, so the crowds had already packed in and getting a drink was an impossibility. So I bumbled around the place until a group of six loud females caught my eye. I took a quick seat with these females, creating among them much confusion, amazement and outright suspicion.

They played hard-to-get at first, but the numerous empty champagne bottles told me most of the hard work was already done. The six young ladies, as it turned out, made up a hens’ night that had been well underway before I rolled onto the scene. My story shifted directions and I decided that I had arrived precisely where I should be.

At first my queries brought only stagnant answers, until something about their ‘raunchiest times’ cracked the group wide open and the confessions began to flow, along with many an upward inflection, from their champagne-soaked, high frequency, Northern Beaches mouths.

It began slowly, with boring recollections of some bare-arsed run on manly beach, before a burst of laughter and wide eyes betrayed details of Chloe’s sex romp in the disabled toilet at the Ivanhoe Hotel.

‘But come on,’ one gal jumped in, ‘Who hasn’t had sex in the Ivanhoe toilets?’

Whether such an outburst was meant to devalue Chloe’s carnal adventure, I will never really know. But I added my own two cents and declared that I once declined an offer of sex in the Ivanhoe toilets, due to dubious circumstances. This did little for my new-found reputation as the only male of the group, but it did make me all the closer to being one of the girls.

So the conversation flowed as rapidly as the cheap champagne, and the girls produced more and more stories about themselves and each other. They were perfect sculptures of a certain type of woman, a breed only found in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, Eastern Suburbs, and western train lines.

A little prompting revealed that the soon-to-be-married bride and groom actually met after sharing a drunken pash in Establishment, a story that had nothing on the fact the bride-to-be “copped a fingering” on the dance floor at their recent engagement party (held at the Ivanhoe).
“Fingering”, as it would turn out, was a brilliant memory trigger and unleashed recollections of a recent trip to Thailand where a young masseuse tried her very best to give Chloë (the loudest of the girls) the full treatment during a pamper session. While massaging the front of her legs, Chloë recalled, “She just got closer and closer then OHHH! SHE SLIPPED A FINGER IN!”

The more I heard about my new friend Chloë, the more I realised she was some kind of sexual ringleader, although another hen felt forced to explain: “Chloë’s not a slut, she just likes sex… a lot!” Hear! Hear!

By this stage, Chloe was perfectly drunk and stories of her sexual superiority continued. During an exotic Whitsunday’s holiday Chloe burst into the room one morning, stripped nude, turned to her room mate and announced in a posh voice: “Well, I just had a ménage à trois!” She went on to say explain how she “got fucked every which way but loose”.

Threesome hopes had been dashed earlier in her career, when Chloe went home with two “eligible” young men who turned out to be gay. Yet what Chloe lost in penetrated orifices she made up for in cinematography experience, by taking out her handycam and filming the no-holds-barred man sex that followed.

All the while strange, pink shots were made readily available, all seeming a little too refreshing and a little too free. As Chloë drank more and more, her eyes became a little sad. After throwing down yet another pink shot she turned to me and said, “Everyone keeps saying congratulations… but I don’t want to seem unavailable.”

Then her sad eyes became angry. She offloaded her “Bride To Be” sash onto her unreceptive friends, hiked up her skirt, and shook her junk to the dance floor.

The sash was last seen on a table, a discarded afterthought covered in pink booze. In the background, the bride-to-be let it all hang out to the repetitive beats on the top floor of the Ivanhoe Hotel.

Chloe and Justin are due to be married this Easter. Everyone at SINK would like to wish Justin many happy returns and we hope Chloe enjoys her retirement.

M. Radcliffe