There were lots of men just like us standing round the stage, some not even looking at the girls, but instead at their phones which illuminated their faces and made them look dead. One or two men were cheering, reaching out to grab at passing legs and breasts, saliva dripping from their mouths. Every so often a man would step forward and motion to a girl, usually by a click of his fingers or a well-directed point and the girl would stop her dance and step unsteadily off the stage, following the man to one of the rounded booths.
‘Which do you want?’ George asked, his voice hot in my ears.
I turned to look at him and I could see his face was puce even in the dark. I almost expected his hand to clench round his dick as we stood there. The air was close and heavy and I thought the floor might be tilting. I shook my head. ‘No. I have a girlfriend.’
He laughed, exposing his perfect white teeth. ‘Don’t be a poof. I’ve got a wife and two kids.’ The floor was undulating now, as if an earthquake was shaking the building and I could feel bile rise up into my mouth.
He leant closer to me, so I could hear every word he said. ‘You don’t have to worry about them.’ He jerked his finger at the stage of women. ‘They all love it. Sex mad, they are. Not like normal women. They’re like some sort of witches or something.’
I tried to take a step back, but another man was pressed close up behind me. I could imagine George at boarding school, masturbating an older boy, drenched in fear and loathing. I looked back at the women. ‘I have to go.’
But George took my arm. ‘Don’t be an idiot.’ His voice was harsh. He clicked his fingers at two women standing next to each other. ‘Mine’s the blonde,’ he said as they teetered off the stage.
The woman assigned to me took my hand and led me to a booth, where she ducked under the curtain, pulling me with her. There was a fake leather seat which took up half the booth, and she pushed me on to it. I felt my buttocks slide on the fabric and wondered whether, if a fire broke out, anyone would get out alive.
She stood in front of me, her hand on a hip, so she jutted out at an unnatural angle. Her shoes were as high as all the others and her sparkling V was a bright pink. Her hair was jet black and fell in greasy waves around her face. Her make-up was smudged and she stank of sweat and coconut.
‘We get champagne.’ Her voice was heavily laden with an accent I took to be Eastern European.
‘OK.’
She ducked under the curtain again, but was back in a few seconds. Her breasts I noticed were small and empty and I saw the flicker of silvery stretch marks across her lower abdomen, the flesh puckered and grainy. She lit a cigarette as she stood over me, smoking it in short, angry bursts.
The curtain parted again and a man came in with a bottle that looked like the sort of sparkling wine Elaine might serve on special occasions, and two glasses on which I could see traces of finger marks. He was carrying a card machine which he thrust under my face. ‘One hundred and twenty-four pounds,’ he said.
I laughed. I could have laid waste to him with one punch but I guessed if I did it would be the woman’s fault, so I paid the absurd amount, my plastic skimming through the machine. The woman opened the bottle when he was gone, pouring out a glass which she handed to me.
‘Don’t you want one?’ I asked.
‘No, I don’t drink.’
I sipped at the liquid and it was as warm and sweet and disgusting as I’d known it would be. I put the glass back down.
‘What you want?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ I answered.
She glanced at the curtain. ‘I can dance, suck or fuck, or all three.’
‘No, really.’ I wasn’t sure I was ever going to find my way out of this place. It felt possible that life as I knew it had ended and there was no way back.
‘You have to pay whatever,’ she said.
‘That’s fine. What do you get most for?’
She looked at me like I was simple. ‘All three.’
‘How much?’
‘Five hundred pounds.’
I knew she was lying, but I didn’t care. ‘I don’t have any cash.’
She shrugged. ‘OK, three hundred.’
‘How much do you get of that?’
‘Fifty. And twenty for every bottle of champagne.’
I tried to hold her flickering gaze. ‘Get him back. Say we want another bottle of champagne and all three.’
She smiled at that and I saw her front teeth were chipped. She ducked out again but was back even more quickly. The man returned with another bottle and the machine. I swiped away ￡424 and wondered what Elaine could do with that sort of money.
‘Sit down,’ I said when he’d gone.
She shook her head. ‘I dance for you.’ I opened my mouth to tell her no, but she had already started, her body contorting and gyrating. She raised her hands above her head and I could see the shaving rash in her armpits and round her groin. She turned and the tops of her thighs were pitted and uneven, a large yellow bruise winking in the crease of her knee, another mid-way down her calf. Her hands were on her own body, kneading her non-existent breasts, her mouth pouted in an ‘O’. She came towards me and straddled me, dipping her face against mine, her mouth nipping against my ear. Her body felt slimy and I thought I would have to burn the clothes I was wearing.
And then I thought I was going to be sick; I felt the sensation rushing through my body, contorting my insides. Because I knew if V could see me now she would never forgive me.
‘Get off,’ I said. But the woman kept up her demented thrusting against me. ‘Get off me,’ I shouted, the need to stop what was happening now so imperative I wanted to scream.
I stood, perhaps more forcefully than I meant, because the woman shot backwards, her body landing against the wall of the booth, her head jerking. She whimpered and for a ghastly moment I thought her arm looked broken.
I went to help her up but she batted away my attempts, struggling to her feet on her own. We looked at each other in the flashing, smoky half-light.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t mean … I asked you to stop.’ I felt a strange desperation for her to understand that I wasn’t like the other men she had to deal with night after night.
But her lip curled as she walked past me and held the curtain to one side. ‘Your time is up,’ she said.
I felt surprisingly all right when I woke the next morning. I went on my run and my legs moved smoothly beneath me.
I thought of Stacey while I ran, a girl whom I’d been in the home with and who was brought back by the police one night for soliciting, a word she educated us in whilst the social workers discussed her with the uniformed men downstairs. She was fourteen and told us she’d already turned tricks; I fully believed her at the time, but wonder now if it was really bravado. She called it the family business and told us how her mother used to bring men back to the bedsit they shared and how she’d have to wait in the corridor. She’d ended up in care because one of the men had asked her mother how much Stacey cost and her mother had stabbed him. Stacey said she needed the money for the train fare as she wasn’t allowed to visit her mother in prison. I hadn’t thought of Stacey for years. She must be in her mid-thirties, too old probably to be a woman like I’d seen the night before, although I doubted life had turned out well for her.
When I got to work George put his head round my door. ‘Didn’t see you leave last night. Bloody good time though.’
‘Yes,’ I lied, knowing it was the only possible response.
‘Got a rollicking off the missus,’ he said. ‘How did you fare?’
‘My girlfriend’s away. Does your wife know where you went then?’ The rules of the upper classes are so foreign to me I am always lost in their world.
But he laughed. ‘God no. Just that I got in late stinking of booze and fags. She always makes way too much of a fuss about stuff like that. You know what women are like.’
‘How old are your children?’ I asked.
‘Six and four.’
‘Girls or boys?’