Outrageous Fortune

by Lulu Taylor

  Daisy recoiled as it landed on the front of her cardigan and lay there, a bubbling mass, before it started to slide down in a slippery trail. She gasped and stared up at her father, unable to believe this was actually happening.

  ‘But, Daddy!’ she implored. Her control began to crumble. Her heart pounded as her eyes burned and stung. Despite her best efforts, tears began to pour down her face. ‘No! No …’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he mimicked back in a high squeaky tone. Then his voice turned harsh again. ‘You’ve lived off the fat of the land for long enough. None of this is yours. You’re a parasite and nothing more. I want you out of here immediately. At once. And when you’re gone, I never want to see you again, do you understand? I never want to see your face again!’

  Daisy sobbed. He couldn’t mean it. Surely this was a passing fury that would blow over and be forgotten. He adored her! She was his princess! Could he really cease loving her just like that?

  ‘Daddy,’ she whispered through her tears, ‘please …’

  He began to shake violently. ‘Say that again, and God help me, I will punch you,’ he thundered. His fist clenched as though in readiness to carry out his threat. ‘Get out! Get out, do you hear?’

  Knowing that she was on the brink of losing her self-control completely, Daisy could only obey. She turned and stumbled towards the door, her shoulders slumped, half-blinded by her tears. As she went, she saw Margaret’s expression. In the other woman’s eyes, there was a strange mixture of amusement and pity.

  Don’t pity me! Daisy felt her defiance return. Despite her weeping, she lifted her head, straightened her shoulders and stiffened her spine. I can’t show them they’ve won.

  As she reached the door, she realised that this might be the very last time she would ever see her father. She turned and looked at him, taking in his reddened face, dark, embittered eyes, the strong features submerged in a layer of fat. She looked at his over-dyed black hair, the meaty shoulders stuffed into his jacket, the paunch jutting out from under his burgundy waistcoat. He was a strange combination of strength and weakness, of manliness and childishness. Despite everything, she loved and felt sorry for him. He’d had only her to care for him. Now who would he have?

  ‘Goodbye, Daddy,’ she said softly. ‘You’ll always be my father, no matter what some test says.’

  ‘Get out!’ he roared. ‘Or I’ll have you thrown out!’

  ‘I’m going, don’t worry,’ she said. Then she opened the study door, walked out and closed it behind her. In fifteen short minutes, her life had been utterly transformed.

  Part Two

  21

  Two years later

  COCO WRAPPED HER leg high around the silver pole and leaned back, swaying from side to side so that her breasts swung invitingly while she snaked her arms in time to the music. She wore only a small silver thong, a scrap of fabric covering her pubic mound with the string cutting between her buttocks, and a pair of very high heels. That was not including the ton of make-up she’d plastered on. The girls had to wear heavy make-up so that it could be seen in the dim lighting of the club: thick blue glittering eye shadow, kohl pencil and false eyelashes, streaks of blusher and lots of sticky dark red gloss on their lips. It was what the punters liked: their idea of glamour. And when the lights caught the sheen on the girls’ lips, it looked as though they were moist and parted in arousal.

  Coco ground her hips in a rotating motion and pulled herself up the pole so that she could spin back down gracefully to the ground. It took a lot of practice and strength to do this so that it looked effortless, but Coco had been dancing at the club for a while now and she was, so Roberto said, a natural. It helped that she had a figure that seemed made for pole dancing: long legs and a slender torso, the golden expanse of her stomach pierced at the belly button with a silver bar, and full ripe breasts and graceful arms. Her hair had been dyed peroxide white and she wore it in a shaggy, shoulder-length style that gave her a vaguely seventies, punkish air. The customers seemed to like it, anyway; she was one of the girls most called upon to give private dances in the back room.

  The rule there was no touching: the man was supposed to sit watching while she gyrated only centimetres away, thrusting her pelvis at him and twisting her hips, running her hands over her breasts while she pouted, gazing at him through half-closed eyes. Sometimes, she got a strange thrill from the power she had over the male sitting there, his glassy gaze fixed upon her, first on her tits and then on her mound. He would be stock still, trying to control his breathing and unable to conceal the bulge in his pinstripe trousers – most often they were wearing suits. Usually they were City boys from along the road, slumming it in the East End for a laugh, taking in a lap-dancing club as the perfect way to finish their evening.

  Sometime she tortured them a little bit further, rolling down her briefs or her thong, so that they could glimpse the prize inside, watching them as their pupils dilated and they became even more choked.

  That happened rarely, though. Mostly she couldn’t stand the punters. She disliked the ones who sat there as though they didn’t give a toss that a beautiful near-naked girl was dancing right in their face. They looked almost bored, as though they’d perfected the art of staying unaroused, and simply stared at her with something like contempt. But weirdly, those were the guys who gave her the most money: the ones who would tuck a couple of fifties into the strap of her thong or toss a wadge of tenners on to the table afterwards.

  The ones she hated most were the leery, lusty bastards who thought she was there to be touched and pawed, as though she were nothing more than a piece of meat. They thought a private dance meant they’d bought her for whatever they wanted – they reached up to tweak her nipples or tried to thrust their hot fingers inside her pants. One even reached up, grabbed her round the neck and tried to pull her face down to his crotch, where she could smell the rank mustiness of his cock and the dried piss on his underwear.

  She’d call them fucking shitheads and push them away while yelling for Sam or Roberto. Roberto was not much use, to be honest, but at least his presence would stop the groping. Sam would intimidate with his size and explain very carefully the no-touching rule, but the punters were rarely thrown out. It was understood that another girl might be a bit more amenable, perhaps with another tenner or a twenty changing hands. Coco wasn’t one of them. She didn’t sell it. At least, not until recently.

  Coco did a last spin around the pole, ending with her feet pointing up towards the ceiling and her head almost touching the floor, and then as the music faded out, her dance was over. She got down and strode off the stage, passing Kandy who was bouncing nervously in the wings as she limbered up for her turn. In the dressing room, Blanche was putting on her make-up. She was six foot tall, a statuesque black girl with skin that shimmered in the lights, especially when she rubbed baby oil into it.

  ‘How did it go?’ Blanche asked, gazing at her own reflection as she painted a thick layer of turquoise glitter on to one eyelid.

  ‘Good.’ Coco shrugged. ‘Usual, I guess. It’s not busy yet.’

  ‘It’ll fill up later, right?’ Blanche smiled at Coco in the mirror. ‘Listen, honey, I got an invitation for later. You interested?’

  Coco picked up her towel and rubbed her arms with it. She had managed to work up quite a sweat. Pole dancing was a good way to keep slim. ‘What’s the deal?’

  ‘Usual thing. It’s our man from Spitalfields, remember a few weeks back? He liked it very much. He wants the same again.’

  ‘Uh huh.’ Coco began to rub down her legs. She owed Blanche a lot. The other girl had got her this job when she’d had nothing else and nowhere to live. It was Blanche who had told Roberto to train her and suggested their on-stage double act, which always went down fantastically well with the punters. Blanche had come up with her new name too.

  ‘It’s funny, innit?’ she’d said. ‘I’m black and I’m called Blanche, which means white. And you’re white, and we can call you Coco, which is, like
, black. Dark brown, really, but you know, it works, yeah?’ Blanche had smiled with that irrepressible good humour of hers. ‘And it’s funny, ’cos it fits with your real name. Chanelle. Coco. Like Coco Chanel.’

  Coco had liked it at once. She had wanted a new start and she was certainly getting one: she’d left South London behind and come east. She’d known that she couldn’t stay in Peckham, surrounded by the memories and watching Terence, the new gang leader, taking over Jamal’s position. Despite what all those notes on the flowers had said, Jamal would be forgotten soon enough, she’d realised that.

  Michelle had not seemed unduly bothered by Chanelle’s announcement that she was leaving, telling her to take care and not to wait too long before coming back for a visit. She hadn’t asked how Chanelle intended to look after herself, perhaps she just assumed that the girl would be applying for a flat, signing on for benefits, getting pregnant, starting the kind of life she herself had led. She was living in a cloud of cheap vodka and strong lager most of the time, so perhaps she hadn’t thought about it at all.

  Chanelle had felt nothing as she left the tiny house with her clothes in a backpack. She wasn’t sure if she would ever come back and see her mother again. All she knew was that life here had become so bleak and loveless that she had to get away, somewhere she could be alone and lick her wounds.

  Her journey hadn’t taken her very far: just across the river and over to the east, but it felt like a different world, full of strange faces. She’d spent a couple of nights wandering, once walking through the night and once kipping down in a park, and she’d been OK but had known her luck wouldn’t hold out. There was only so long a young girl could roam without being molested in some way. One evening, sheltering in a pub and using one of the last tenners she’d nicked from Michelle’s purse to get herself a drink and a hot meal, she’d got talking to a crowd of people, hippy types who were squatting in a deserted house, and they’d taken her back to theirs. That had been all right – she’d been given a few cushions and a sleeping bag in the corner of one of the rooms, and had spent a while in the house. But the novelty had worn thin: the other inhabitants were constantly smoking weed, rolling joints or making up bongs, and they talked without stopping, about things Chanelle didn’t understand. They were into art and politics, always off protesting about something. Besides, she had to earn some money; she couldn’t sign on without a proper address, and she had no idea what she was going to do. She couldn’t live off shared tins of beans and bowls of plain pasta.

  She’d been away from home for about four months when she’d met Blanche at a pub lock-in. They’d got talking and hit it off, and Blanche had suggested the job at the club and found Chanelle a flat to stay in. It seemed so obvious, she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. One thing she could do was dance, after all. At first it had seemed like salvation: a source of money, the shared flat in Whitechapel, the steady employment, but she knew that she’d have to get out before too long, if she ever wanted to make something better of herself. She felt dimly that she owed it to Jamal and the love he’d had for her not to spend her life writhing round a pole for other men’s amusement.

  For now, though, she had a new name, Coco, and a new look, with her white hair. And she’d learned skills in every direction.

  Blanche didn’t do hand jobs or blow jobs for the punters like some girls did.

  ‘I got class,’ she said frankly, ‘and sucking some bloke off in the back room ain’t classy.’

  Class for Blanche meant being a call girl. She would never walk the streets or let men touch her when she danced, but she would pay home visits if the price was right, and she was happy to add extras when they were asked for nicely. ‘Men, women, couples,’ she said with a shrug and a smile to Coco, when she’d explained what she sometimes did after hours. ‘A little bit of bondage, a bit of pain games – not mine, theirs. But only on my terms, you see.’

  Coco had not been particularly shocked by Blanche’s extra-curricular activities. Nothing much shocked her, especially now. Ever since she’d left Peckham, she’d felt very little – unless it was anger and hatred, usually directed at the men she performed for. Besides, there was a world of difference between what Blanche was doing, and what those poor foreign women were forced to do. Coco had seen them brought in, Eastern Europeans mostly, usually in a terrible state, obviously kept oppressed and terrified; mentally, if not physically, beaten up. Their minders would demand jobs for the girls, but it wasn’t Sam’s policy to have them in his club. He didn’t want pimps and controllers involved on his turf so he’d turn them away, but there were plenty of places that did have them. Coco knew the girls were little more than slaves, forced to work in massage parlours, or improvised brothels, or in lap-dancing clubs or even just made to walk the streets, getting into cars with strangers and handing the cash over to their guardians afterwards. It was a scandal but no one seemed to give a shit. Nothing ever happened to change it anyway.

  Life’s fucking tough, Coco thought. You got to look after yourself or someone will fuck you over, and that’s all there is to it.

  One night Blanche had told her that a visitor to the club had liked their double-act so much that he’d invited them back to his apartment to give him a private show.

  ‘What do you think?’ she had said, laughing. ‘I think he’s kosher. He’s got a nice suit on. Looks loaded. He lives in Spitalfields so he’s just up the road. He’s offering us five hundred each.’

  Five hundred. For maybe an hour of her time. Coco had never done anything like that before but maybe it was worth trying it out. God only knew she needed money.

  ‘You know … you know that a private show is a bit different to what we do here,’ Blanche had said lightly. ‘There’ll be other stuff, yeah? And if a guy wants two girls, well …’ She’d come up close to Coco and touched her arm lightly. ‘You don’t have to be scared if you haven’t done it before,’ she murmured. Her eyes were dark and chocolatey, and her lips seemed tender. ‘I have. I know what I’m doing. You might even like it.’

  Coco stared back at her, and for a moment felt as though she was staring into Jamal’s eyes. She felt a stab of desperate pain at the same time as an awful yearning possessed her. She longed for Jamal so badly, she thought she might collapse right there. She swallowed, somehow managing it despite her dry throat.

  ‘Well?’ pressed Blanche.

  ‘OK,’ Coco had replied. ‘OK. I’ll do it.’

  The night had taken on a dream-like quality after that. It was two in the morning before their shift was over and they took a taxi up to Spitalfields, each wrapped up in a coat but with only underwear beneath. The man had been waiting for them in his apartment, a converted loft-style warehouse, with exposed brick and industrial pipework. He was middle-aged but fit and stylish, with a stubbly grey beard and grey hair in a fashionable cut. He’d called them ‘ladies’ and offered them real champagne. Then he’d cut lines of coke. Blanche and the man had snorted them, Coco had turned it down. They’d mellowed out for a while over the booze. Coco had liked it, despite the prickling bubbles that made her want to sneeze, and she’d necked hers quickly, hoping it would both anaesthetise her and give her courage.

  ‘Hey, that’s vintage Bollinger,’ the man had laughed. ‘Don’t drink it too quickly.’ But he’d topped up her glass anyway.

  After a while Blanche had asked for music and started to dance lightly about the room. Then she slid her fur coat from her shoulders and began to dance more sensuously, writhing and twisting so that she showed off her magnificent body to the man sitting on the sofa. He watched, a half smile on his lips, his glass of champagne close to his face so that he could take a sip every few moments.

  Blanche danced over to Coco and held out her hand, helping her to her feet. Coco started to move, finding her rhythm after a few moments and slipping easily into some of the routines the girls danced on stage, but bringing it down a notch or two. The high theatricality and exaggerated movements of the club did not seem
suited to the intimate atmosphere of this man’s sitting room. She began to enjoy moving to the music, the warmth and luxury of the apartment, the sensation of being lightly, pleasantly drunk and getting drunker.

  Blanche moved close to her, swaying and twisting to the beat. When she was so close that her breasts were almost touching Coco, she smiled and leaned forward, stooping a little so that she could reach the other girl’s mouth, and kissed her. There was a murmur of appreciation from the man on the sofa, and Blanche increased the pressure of her kiss, running her hands over Coco’s arms and back.

  It was a pleasant sensation, Coco found, the touch of soft full lips on hers, and when Blanche prodded open her mouth with the tip of her tongue, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to open to her. This was different from the cold, mechanical dancing she did for the men at the club, where it was all about them and not about her in the slightest. She felt that Blanche wanted to make her feel good, that the man watching them wanted to see them enjoy themselves. In that moment, she relaxed and decided to go with it and let it happen.

  Now she remembered that night, she recalled being naked on the floor with Blanche, letting the other girl do whatever she wanted. She remembered the man leading them both through to his bedroom where he joined them in his huge satin-sheeted bed. She remembered the shudders of pleasure that had rocked her body when, finally, she’d been pushed over the brink by the man’s cock thrusting deep inside her, as Blanche’s fingers and tongue were busy on her.

  It had been her first sexual experience since Jamal, and she’d felt simultaneously treacherous and relieved. The orgasm had been a great release but it was nice simply to feel loved, to forget her pain for a moment, and to have the ceaseless longing for Jamal lifted for just a brief while.

  ‘So?’ asked Blanche now, as she began to coat her eyelashes in layer after layer of mascara. ‘What’s your answer?’