I would not be like that again. I would get out there and do whatever I could to recover what I once had, inspired by that little sniff of perfume which opened up a summer bouquet of possibility in my mind. I might not succeed; I might well fail, but I wouldn’t sob into my cocoa about what I had briefly enjoyed and then lost. I might spend a lifetime trying to regain that paradise, and if I died without ever again seeing the golden light and feeling that buzz of being someone else’s other half; then, hell, at least I gave it my best shot.
I breathed that No. 5 all the way up into the centre of my brain, feeling my senses enveloped in the fragrance of possibility, of adventure, and heard the overture to the rest of my life strike up, led by the baton of Furtwängler.
Then I splashed it on my neck: right side, left side. I was strutting out, in my mind at least. And my body would soon follow, and never look back.
Chapter Nine
Cat Snatch Beaver
The 1980s rolled on, with global politics beginning to intrude ever more upon our little world. The news was rarely not filled with talk of East vs. West, old Raygun and his ever-changing rivals in the Kremlin. Every time I saw him and Nancy grinning on the television I risked hysterical convulsions as I thought of those tense moments in Johnny’s tattoo shop when I fought so hard not to wet myself as he speared my quivering body with cruel skill. Eros was supposed to shoot arrows into the heart, not needles through the nipples and try as I might, I could never quite get Tokyo completely out of my head, or my system.
So I brought Tokyo back to me, in my own personal symbolic way.
I designed my own stage set because the old theatre curtains and décor were so not me. Inspired by the Tokyo Club Electric futuristic design, I explained it in detail to the stage crew, and in a few weeks they had it ready: a great, gritty backdrop of crumbling brickwork and punk graffiti. I added some chains bought cheap from the local hardware store and adapted my wardrobe to match: more leather and mesh (all black, of course), with collars, buckles and even spikes and studs in evidence. I worked with the band to forego my usual blend of retro jazz-pop and instead ‘crunch it up’ – meaning a louder, harder, punchier soundtrack with wailing, screaming guitar breaks and bowel-loosening drums. It meant the trumpet and sax guys had to sit my sets out, but at least they took advantage of the breaks and went to the bar.
And when I hit that stage and moved in front of my new personal surroundings, I was back in the club with Johnny and Honey. And so in my new-found form, I electrocuted hearts and burned souls.
I didn’t so much tease, but torture – a bringer of pain, grief, lust and envy – I ran the gamut of sins alone. I gave birth to dreams, shattered hopes and laid waste to flesh. I gave those suckers something they’d never seen anywhere. Whether alone, or with help or so I told myself.
I had decided that a big part of growing up and learning was to become a little less emotional, less naïve; and become more cunning, colder, even more manipulative. It was time, I decided, to start doing things my way, to become the flow, rather than go with it. I’d bulked up considerably in the past year or two, with regular visits to the gym helping not just my stamina but my flexibility as well, and I could sense the slight unease among some of the others that I was now growing to rival them all, even Gloria.
With Honey gone, Bruno let the XXX entertainment license expire and our brief flirtation with hardcore performance ended. It had been an interesting experiment, and had allowed us to push the limits of our shows by blatantly pleasuring ourselves on stage with toys, fingers, and tongues on the occasions we had a twosome, but the novelty soon wore off.
“Let’s get back to traditional values,” Bruno explained to me one Saturday afternoon behind the bar. “Let things run as they were. An oasis of simpler, more tasteful delights.”
I could see it in his eyes – he was no longer interested in moving with the times, but content to let the Klub live its life and then die its eventual death, if need be. Things in the wider world were changing so much, so fast, that in a way I could see his point – he was now over fifty and was lacking the energy required to do anything more than run a business, and retire when he felt he had enough saved up and could enjoy it before it got too late. Mel had started to help out with some of the more mundane administrative tasks and the expectation was that as and when Bruno gave up the Klub as a going concern, that Mel would take it over, at least in part.
I could also see in his eyes the change that had come over him. His attitudes had hardened and there was no way now that if Honey were to walk up to him for the first time and demand an audition that he would even give her the time of day, never mind a contract.
And as I had expected, Honey did not come back, did not call, and nobody ever heard from her again. Her brief but bright flame had even begun to fade from my mind when we were unexpectedly treated to a welcome return from someone we had all thought equally lost: Petra.
Although she wasn’t the Petra we had known and loved before.
For a start, she had bleached her hair to a dirty, punky call-girl blonde, but her biggest change was far more permanent. She whipped open her shirt to show us her major boob job – increasing her bra size up to a D cup, and her nipples looked to have been surgically-enhanced as well, resembling more a couple of rubber thimbles stuck on the thumbs of a chubby paper-shuffler.
And while she was filled with excited talk about how happy she was to be back, how much she’d missed us all (and made no mention at all of the conspicuous absence of her old nemesis, Honey), her face betrayed inner anguish. Petra had never been prone to any kind of excess weight but she looked as though she had gained a bit around the middle and then lost it again very quickly. Her facial bone structure had become more angular, more obvious – the skin shrunken somewhat over the frame of her skull, it seemed, as though her eyes and mouth had stretched and tightened from too much grinning, grimacing or screaming. There was also something in her eyes I didn’t like – a certain distance, a disconnectedness from things and people around her, as if she saw things that were not there to be seen, and did not see things that were. We did wonder exactly what she’d been up to during her years away, but I was too polite, or scared, to ask.
It was Gloria, always her closest friend and confidant, who hinted to me that things hadn’t been good for her of late.
“Don’t know for sure what she’s been doing. She wouldn’t tell me, but I’ve seen that faraway look before.”
“Nothing too serious, I hope,” I wondered – hoped – aloud.
“Yeah, actually pretty serious,” she muttered. “Addiction is a bitch to shake off.”
I chewed my lip in fear. Not what I had wanted to hear, but not entirely unexpected, either.
“Well, I’ve asked her if she needs any help or support, and she’s assured me that she’s fine. So I’ll leave her alone just now and see how she settles back in.”
Our worst fears weren’t confirmed. Bruno threw a private little ‘welcome back’ party for her and we all got scarily drunk, while she regaled us with tales of her travels through Central Europe and the colorful characters she’d run into, in between having her surgery which, according to her, was part of some vague and ill-defined quest for personal improvement. But as it turned out, the further East she went, the more she realized how much she missed the West, and her old home, and she kicked it all in the head to return to the place that she knew and loved, before she found herself disappearing forever behind the Iron Curtain.
And as attitudes in our little world shifted and evolved with the times, we could hardly ever forget the cruel and great divide which split our own city in half, separating us from our Soviet-controlled fellows who lived in unknowable conditions – so close, and yet so far away.
It also didn’t escape the notice of a certain member of our happy-go-lucky gang who had managed to keep herself to herself all this time.
“I think Sweaty Lana wants a word,” Petra confided in me quietly as I turned up for my wag
e packet one Saturday.
“Which word’s that?” I asked, “Smirnoff?”
“She didn’t say. You never know, maybe she’s looking to share some glasnost now that Mr. Gorbachev seems to be tearing up the red flag in her country.”
“Well it would be about time,” I said. “Don’t think I’ve exchanged more than a few dozen words with that awkward madam since I first came here.”
I found her backstage, where she was working out with dumbbells, topless, and admiring her triceps in the mirror as she did so.
“Afternoon,” I said. “I believe you wanted a word with me?”
She finished her set, silently mouthing the reps before even bothering to look at me. I was just about to turn on my heel and leave when she bashed the iron weights to the floor and said, “A word? No, a challenge, more like.”
“Challenge?” I repeated. “A challenge for what?”
“Why, for superiority, of course.”
I laughed, having failed to expect anything so heavy or dramatic. She didn’t get the joke, and her narrow eyes got even narrower.
“What?” I gasped, realizing that she was serious.
“Yes, don’t look so surprised. I know what you want. To be the top. The big star of this place. You think you have Bruno in your pocket? Heh. Well, I can show you who’s boss.”
“You can try,” I said, still wondering why it had taken this long for her to decide that she didn’t like me. Although perhaps my recent changes to my set and attitude were beginning to cramp her style.
“It’s more than just pride at stake. It’s East vs. West now, you Berlin bitch.”
I wanted to shrug her off with a laugh and a wave of her hand, but the chill hostility which seeped out of her very pores was something I knew I would have to deal with, stamp on, and put out of my life completely. The only way to handle this strange new antagonism was to face it head-on, and hope that I was strong enough to defeat it.
“Try acting the Bolshevik with me, you balloon-breasted heifer, and I’ll tear your bloody Red wall right down,” I snarled back. “I never saw my Father again thanks to that atrocity, so back off. I don’t have any fight with you, and never did.”
She passed behind me and caught me by the hair as she went, yanking me off balance.
“You see? That’s fighting talk. You act peaceful but your mouth spits war.”
“Unhand my hair. You’re hurting me.”
She yanked me hard. “If I do this again, will you cry?” she sneered.
“No, but I might get angry enough to kick you in the tits. And I never get angry.”
She leaned in close to me, blowing hot breath all over my neck. “Oh, so I’ve found your weak spot then, have I? Sounds like you’ve just taken up the challenge, girlie. So let’s make it public. Our Cold War, out there, will be won on stage. What about that? You and me, in a battle for total domination. If only politics could be so easy, eh.”
“The audience will never take to you,” I warned her, “You’ll be a villain for ever.”
“Maybe, but I’ll also be victorious. Who says good guys always have to win? That’s your dumb Western allies who sell you that propaganda. And don’t forget: without the massive Soviet sacrifices in World War Two, you’d all be wearing armbands and jackboots.” She dipped her fingertip in my black eye-shadow tray and smudged it over my top lip, giving me a comedy moustache.
But it was a comedy that only she found amusing. Svetlana’s manner was such that I couldn’t tell when she was playing around, and when she was being serious, although I was having difficulty finding anything very playful in her latest tirade. She had never really opened herself up to the rest of us, and it had been hard at times to get to know her on any kind of level. She drank Smirnoff and cola as though it were water (and constantly reminded us that vodka meant ‘water’ in Russian). Her ‘whip tease’ routines seemed to be more cathartic than erotic at times, usually involving stripping down to a sheer body stocking and then shredding into strips with her bullwhip, and I did wonder if she had a lot of socio-political anger to work out of her system. Perhaps she really was a red-hot Red Star Soviet, forever stuck on the wrong side of the border and estranged from her beloved Motherland.
But that wasn’t my problem, and I wasn’t going to allow her to make it so, either. My family had suffered directly due to Soviet occupation of the city, whether justified or not, and that made it personal. I’d been denied a normal, stable environment in which to grow up, and undue hardships inflicted upon my mother due to my father having to flee to the East to help his own family when I was barely a year old.
And we had never seen, nor heard from him, since that day he crossed the border and the Wall was put up behind him.
“Next time,” she hissed at me, “I’ll be dressed with pride. Challenge me if you’re made of the right stuff. And if you don’t, then I know exactly what you are made of.”
“I’m not your enemy, Svetlana,” I shouted after her as she strode off towards the wings. “What did I ever do to you? We’re all in this together. We’re supposed to be friends.”
She stopped as she reached the doorway and turned to me. “That’s what your Allied friends told my country in 1945,” she spat. “My people don’t appreciate being stabbed in the back. And we don’t forget.”
I floundered in helpless silence as she stomped off out of sight. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to history at school, and then I might have been able to come up with some kind of sensible counter-argument. Something told me that, in a way, she was right, and was probably justified in feeling angry. Her parents, after all, would have had some experience of the last horrible war. But Berlin had also suffered not once but twice under the Soviets, and it seemed as though those memories wouldn’t be allowed to fade.
But it still wasn’t my problem.
I chewed my lip in silence as I sat down at the mirror and tried to concentrate on getting myself ready for my performance. I angrily wiped away the black blot she had put underneath my nose. I couldn’t allow her to unsettle me, if that was her game. Top billing at the Klub was never that big a deal – it was just Bruno and Mel’s way of swapping us around and making sure that those of us who were up to it, got given the chance to raise our game a little. It was a matter of pride really, providing gentle rivalry – or at least it had been merely that until now.
It occurred to me that Svetlana had barely spoken to me before the previous week, when I was granted a headline slot for the first time. Perhaps that was it – she saw me as an easier target than the long-established Olivia, the mouthy Petra, the genuinely world-class Gloria or the full-on Honey. Well, I told myself as I brushed my hair out; I wasn’t going to be anyone’s pushover.
“Hey, Phoenyx. Still up for tonight’s face-off then?”
Svetlana leant herself against the doorframe and looked down the dressing-table. Everyone, including me, turned to look at her in almost perfect unison.
She grinned back at us from beneath a black beret bearing a big red enamel star. A riding crop in one hand, the rest of her outfit was all leather – knee boots, a halter neck top, and laced-up hot pants. Even her long opera gloves were the real thing, and from over ten meters away she still smelled like a tanning factory.
The crop slapped against the top of her boot. Mrs. Groenenberg did that with a lot more panache, I observed. Now that would be a battle to contemplate, I mused: grim Mrs. G and not-so svelte Svetlana. I would have paid to see that show.
“I’m not afraid,” I said, “But I still don’t understand what you’re playing at.”
“Oh, you will.”
Olivia bent close to me. “Stepped on someone’s toes, darling?” she asked me with her usual gentle concern.
I shook my head. “No idea. You’ll have to ask the Comrade Colonel.”
Just then, Bruno appeared in the doorway and tapped Svetlana on the shoulder.
“Hey,” he said. She turned to face him and he took a step back to get a good look at
her costume. He pointed to the beret. “Could you take that off, please?”
“I won’t.”
“Svetlana, it might have escaped your notice – but this is Berlin. Not Leningrad. Now please take the hat off, because I don’t want any complaints. It doesn’t bother me but some people are touchy about these things.”
Svetlana looked ready to argue back when I stepped in.
“Bruno? Let her wear it. It’s okay. This club has a long and noble history,” I reminded him. “It flourished during the early Nazi years, with satire and comedy aimed against the Third Reich. It made people laugh during a dark and frightening time, and brought a little light to lives which were much in need of it.”
Behind me, Petra applauded enthusiastically. “Pretty speech, Phoenyx,” she gushed. “As pretty as the nose on your face, in fact.”
I smiled inwardly. That had been an unusual burst of subterfuge on my part. I seemed to be picking up cunning bad habits from the others.
Svetlana didn’t flinch. Bruno pushed his shoulders back and shoved his hands in his pockets. “What are you two up to? Eh? You’re planning something. I can sense it.”
“Stick around and find out, darling,” Svetlana said as she marched past him and disappeared into the corridor, swinging her crop as she went.
Phoenyx: Flesh & Fire Page 23
