Or he was divorced. He had that pissed-off look about him, I decided. Maybe his wife had run off with someone else—another police officer; they all did it—and left him behind to try and look after a great big house all on his own.
Or he was married, and yet he had affairs now and then, with women like me, women he’d come across in his day job. Victims. He picked ones he liked and got them to sleep with him.
I wasn’t a victim, though, was I? Not yet, anyway.
For some reason, my next thought was of Ben. None of the London crew had contacted me since the party. None of them had any idea about the nightmare that had followed their departure. They’d all gone off to the pub, and after that God knows where, back to London in the end. I could just imagine Lucy telling them all how she’d seen it coming, how I’d been on a downward slope since I started stripping for money. I remembered what she’d said to Malcolm, the tone of her voice when Malcolm told her she’d be jealous of my boat one day.
“I don’t think so somehow.”
I didn’t care what she thought about it, anyway. Her opinion had ceased to matter to me a long time ago.
Lucy was one of the people who’d had a real problem with me dancing.
It had been Ben who’d told her, of course; she would never have known about it otherwise. He’d demanded to know where I was going one evening, and I’d told him. Even though he’d claimed to be cool with it, he wasn’t, at all. I think he felt he was sharing me, even though our relationship had been casual at best.
Lucy and I were in the pub one Friday after work, drinking big glasses of chilled white wine and dissecting the nightmare of selling high-end software solutions to boardrooms full of men. We took a lot of shit for it. The guys on our team were highly competitive, driven, occasionally downright nasty. Lucy got by because she was the daughter of the managing director, but she was bitter about all the testosterone she had to deal with. I wasn’t as put out about the gender thing because I got by through working hard, which usually meant I hit my bonus targets. We had an alliance, of sorts, because Lucy needed someone to commiserate with her. But beyond that we had little in common.
“Ben told me where you were last night.”
I drank my wine and looked at her. We’d been out with clients, and I’d disappeared early instead of staying on as we usually did and getting pathetically drunk. I’d begged off with a headache, but in fact I’d gone to the Barclay.
“You’re a stripper,” she said.
“I’m a dancer.”
“You take your clothes off for money.”
“Good money.”
There was a flicker, I saw it—a moment where I’d almost justified it to her. She knew about money and the pursuit of it. She was about to ask the question: How much money? But then the moment passed.
“It’s exploitation,” she said. “You know how hard we bloody work, twice as hard as some of them, and we still don’t get the same recognition.”
“That has nothing to do with working in the club. I’m there because I want to be there,” I said. “And if anyone’s being exploited, it certainly isn’t me. Men come in and spend all their money watching me do something I enjoy. It feels great, to be honest.”
Just at that moment three of the guys on the sales team had come over and joined us and the conversation turned to the usual topic of who had the biggest car, the biggest sales deal, the biggest set of balls. Lucy had never mentioned it again, not until last night at the party. Despite her supposedly feminist convictions, I couldn’t shake the notion that, actually, she was a little bit envious of the money, if not the attention.
Apart from Lucy and Ben, most of my friends hadn’t known what I did every Friday and Saturday night, and sometimes Thursdays and Sundays, too. I didn’t need to be at the club until eleven, so I kept up with my normal social activity and when they went off clubbing, or back home to bed, I went to the Barclay and earned myself a fortune.
It had crossed my mind to tell them, more than once. If any of them had asked me a direct question, I wouldn’t have lied. But none of them seemed interested; when I said I was going somewhere else, they just said things like, “Okay, cool,” and waved me goodbye as they disappeared off to some club or other, or back to someone’s house, or off to another party.
I was lying awake in bed. The skylight was a square of black that was lighter than the black in the rest of the room. When I closed my eyes, I could still see it. It was like an opening, the entrance to a tomb.
I was physically tired, but my mind was spinning. Malcolm was right: I was scared. During the day it was easy to pretend this wasn’t really happening, easy to believe that maybe the body hadn’t been Caddy. I’d caught only a glimpse of her face, the dirty water of the Medway washing over it, a flash of white in the beam of my flashlight. It could so easily have been someone else: a body from upstream after all, a suicide, a missing person.
At night, things were very different.
From the first day in the marina, I’d never really felt alone. Even after dark you heard noises from the other boats, the faint voices from someone’s television, shouts from Diane and Steve’s two children, traffic on the highway, the rattle of the Eurostar or the Javelin rocketing along the high-speed rail link a mile or so away. The other liveaboards were never more than a shout away; I’d proven that last night, I tried to reassure myself. I’d screamed, and in under a minute at least five people had come out of their boats to see what was going on. And yet I couldn’t relax.
A cell phone was ringing.
I sat up in bed, my whole body tensed and alert. It sounded a long way off, as though it were coming from one of the other boats.
I pushed back the duvet and opened the bedroom door. The noise of the ringing grew louder.
In the main cabin, it was louder still. It wasn’t my phone, which was charging on the dinette table—it was Dylan’s.
Finally I found it, buried down the back of the sofa, where I’d thrown it when Carling came down into the cabin. It was still ringing. The name on the display: GARLAND.
I had a surge of joy, overwhelming relief.
“Hello?”
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
“Is that you?” I said, my voice trembling.
Still nothing. Someone breathing? I was certain someone was there. “Talk to me,” I said. “Please, say something. Please.”
Nothing.
I disconnected the call and threw the phone back onto the sofa, and cried. I waited a second to see if it would ring again, but it didn’t. There was nothing, just the silence of the boat and the sound of my own sobs.
Even though he hadn’t said a single word, it felt like a goodbye. He knew about Caddy; he must have some idea of the spinning chaos of my life . . . Why wasn’t he here? Why hadn’t he called to tell me what to do, to arrange to meet, even? He didn’t care about me at all, not really. Whatever it was we’d had, that single night together that I had interpreted as magical, had been nothing to him, nothing.
I went back to bed and buried my face in the pillow until the tears were gone.
Hours later, still lying awake, staring at the skylight, dry-eyed and too tired to move, I had worked my way all around the theory that he didn’t care about what happened to me, and found myself in a different place entirely.
He had called, after all. And he hadn’t, despite my self-doubt, said goodbye. He’d said nothing at all. Why would he do that? With a rush of fear I wondered if he was in trouble. Had he tried to call but been prevented somehow? Did he need help? And what could I do about it if he did?
Chapter Ten
I’d always prided myself on my ability to adapt to any changes to my working environment, but dancing at the Barclay presented a steep learning curve.
After my audition, I hunted through my closet for something that I thought might be appropriately dramatic and sexy. Eventually I settled on the dark blue velvet dress I’d worn at the last sales conference dinner. A few to
ps and skirts that I wore out clubbing with my friends. And lingerie. Black lace with a pink ribbon trim.
I had no idea if that was okay.
I was nervous when I went back. The club was already filling with people, the music at a level loud enough that the girls had to lean forward to chat with the guys in the bar but not so loud that they couldn’t hear someone calling them over.
I found Helena behind the bar. She was a small woman in her forties with an expression that said Don’t give me any shit. She never looked happy in the time I worked there; even when she laughed she looked pissed off. She had dark hair piled on her head, which gave her an extra few inches, and sharp heels.
“You worked before?” she said, writing my name on a list behind the bar.
“No,” I said. I didn’t think she was referring to work in general.
“Did they tell you the rules?”
“I guess so. No fraternizing, that sort of thing?”
She smiled at me, or maybe it was a grimace. “ ‘No fraternizing.’ I like that. If you’re any good and they want you back, you have to be here ready and out in the club by eleven. If you’re late you get fined.”
The dressing room was still crowded even though a lot of the girls were already out in the club. I found a ratty bar stool and dumped my shoulder bag next to it, changing out of my jeans and into my dress while the girls around me ignored me completely. They were all talking at once, laughing, shouting, and the room was a confusing mess of clothing and makeup and clouds of competing perfume.
“Mind if I sit here?” I asked, pulling my bar stool up to the edge of a mirror. A blond girl was finishing off her look with lip gloss.
“Whatever,” she said. “I’m done.”
I had the mirror to myself. Within a few minutes the room had emptied of everyone except me and another girl. She was shorter than me, even wearing improbably stacked heels; she had long brown hair, big baby-blue eyes.
“You new?” she said.
I nodded. “Is it obvious?”
“Only that you’re not out there yet. You’re wasting money.”
“I’m not on until later.”
She laughed. “Christ, you are new, aren’t you? Just ’cause you’re not onstage doesn’t mean you’re not working. You should be out there hustling.”
I looked at her blankly.
“You go out and chat with men, get them to buy you drinks, do a few dances, try and get them in the VIP area.” She took pity on me. I must have looked scared, or lost, or maybe just dumb. “Want me to show you?”
“Yes, please.”
“Okay,” she said, “but if any of my regulars come in you’re on your own, right?”
“Thanks. What’s your name?”
“My club name is Kitten,” she said. “But back here you can call me Caddy.”
“Caddy? Like in The Sound and the Fury?”
She looked at me, glossed lips in a perfect O. I thought she was going to ask me what I was talking about, but it turned out we’d underestimated each other. “You read it?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never met anyone else who’s ever read that book. What’s your name?”
“Genevieve. I think they’re calling me Viva.”
“Viva. Isn’t that a type of old car? My dad had one.”
We both laughed, and it was the birth of a friendship—Viva and Kitten. The other girls in the club came and went; the Russians and the Polish girls stuck together, hustled in and out of the club, bent the rules in every way they could. Other girls formed cliques and went out with one another on their nights off; but I never got close to them, not the way I did with Caddy.
On that first night she took me out into the club and we strolled around, saying hello, stopping for brief chats. I watched and learned, feeling a bit like the new girl at school.
“Mind if we sit with you for a bit? . . . Special occasion, is it, lads? . . . Ah! Congratulations! Are you going to come and have a dance with me? . . . Yes—this is Viva—she’s new. I know! . . . Don’t worry, I know you’ll look after us, won’t you? . . . Ah, I’ll have to leave you to it, then—I’ll get told off if I sit here too long . . . Well, let’s go to the VIP area, then you can have my undivided attention for as long as you like . . . You guys need to be doing shots, especially if it’s his birthday . . .”
I felt a bit nauseated, thinking that within the next couple of hours I was going to be taking all my clothes off in front of a room full of complete strangers. It felt surreal, and watching the other girls take their turns on the pole made it somehow worse. I kept one eye on the stage as Caddy and I sat and chatted with the various groups, trying to get some idea of how it all worked. Someone announced the girl onto the stage in a barely intelligible voice that reminded me of the fairgrounds. There would be a ripple of applause, maybe, just audible above the music. She would dance for two tracks, the first with clothes on, then stripping off in the second. The first girl was good, plenty of turns and spins, inverting in her second dance. She got a good cheer when she came off the stage, a little crowd forming around the pole. The second one, by contrast, was no good—just a lot of walking around the pole, a few dips and turns, a halfhearted spin, and then she was done.
That was something of a comfort. Even I could do better than that.
As it turned out, I had to do my first lap dance before I even went on the pole. Thankfully I had the chance to watch Caddy doing one first, and, although mine was a clumsy effort, the young lad I was entertaining was already so drunk he was barely conscious.
“It’ll get easier,” Caddy said to me as we walked back to the main part of the club to look for our next targets. “The trick is going for the ones who are wasted but not so wasted they’ve forgotten what they’re doing here. It’s a fine line.”
After that, it was my turn for the pole. My heart was pounding as I stood offstage waiting for my name to be called. At that moment I thought of my dad, wondered what he would say about the fact that I was about to strip my clothes off for a room full of men I didn’t know. I tried to picture him, not in the audience but waiting for me outside, a free taxi service home as he’d been on so many nights out with my friends. I need the money, Dad, I said to him. It’s a job like any other. I waited for his response, waited for him to yell at me, to tell me that I should be ashamed. But in life he’d never yelled at me, and he’d always said he was proud of me, not ashamed. All I could picture was his smile, all I could feel was his warmth. And he understood why I was doing it. It was for the boat. It was all about the boat.
“Give her a big cheer, it’s her first night—it’s Viva!”
For the first minute or so, nobody was particularly paying attention. I started off with some easy climbs and spins, but that wasn’t much fun. Carousel spin into back hook—that got some attention. And then a quick invert, splits at the top. Stripping off my clothes while dancing around the pole wasn’t as easy as I’d thought it was going to be—but it didn’t seem to matter. By this time the gathering around the stage had grown and I was getting some halfhearted applause. This made me braver. Spin to the floor, little peek-a-boo, knees together, bum out. End of song. I grabbed my clothes and my shoes and skittered off the stage.
Caddy met me as I was coming out of the dressing room a few moments later. “Come and meet Nigel and Tom,” she said. “They loved your dance, they want me to introduce you.”
I was out of breath and perspiring a little, full of adrenaline. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. I’d done it, and it hadn’t been so bad, really—actually, it had been fun. I’d caught glimpses of faces in the crowd, watching me—they liked me, and I’d only just started.
Hours later, so tired I could barely think straight, I was next to Caddy in the dressing room as she peeled the fake lashes off her eyelids. “You did really well,” she said, “for a first night.”
“Thanks. I wouldn’t have had a clue if it hadn’t been for you, though.”
“No biggie. Want some
more advice?”
“Sure.”
“Get yourself a decent tan,” she said, waving a makeup-caked wipe in my direction. “You’re bloody dazzling them under the lights.”
I had a lot to thank Caddy for. Most girls tended to look out for themselves—since we were all, in effect, competing for the same limited pot of money in the wallets of the men in the club on any given night, it was horribly similar to my day job. Dancing on the stage was the pitch. You started off showing your skills as a dancer, before moving on to add value to your pitch by showing them that you had a good body to back it up. At the same time, you were scanning the room for potential customers to target later. Once you came off the stage it was all about establishing a rapport with your customers by chatting them up, before closing the deal by getting them into the VIP area, which was the most financially rewarding part of the job, or, failing that, by getting them to pay you for a private dance.
At least I understood how the sales environment worked. Once I applied that to the Barclay, I could start to earn some serious money. As for taking my clothes off, after the first couple of times it didn’t bother me. It was acting, just as selling was acting. You spotted the guys who were paying particular attention to you, the ones who made eye contact, prioritizing the ones who were already drinking champagne and shots, and therefore had plenty of money and were already half-drunk. The rest was easy.
“Half the guys in here are expecting you to make them come,” Caddy said, “and the other half are expecting you to fall off the pole. That’s what we’re here for. Entertainment, whichever way you look at it.”
Every so often she would come out with corkers like that: classic Caddy quotes that summed up the experience of working in the club in a way I would never have been able to do.
The first night in the Barclay I made two hundred quid, after taking off the house fee. I’d had fun, got a fairly decent workout, and enjoyed chatting with the customers. And I’d made a new friend. This will be easy, I remember thinking. This is going to be a piece of cake.