by Fiona Neill
“Who do you think he had on the inside?”
“I heard it was his wife.”
“Let’s get a drink,” said Ali, anxiously pushing Jake toward the door of the club. She looked at his face and could tell from the tightened jaw and curl of his upper lip that he had heard. They both looked up to see where they were heading.
“Whispers,” read the huge flashing neon sign above the door.
A naked neon woman with flashing pink nipples lay on her side on top of the W.
One of the men turned to Jake.
“Go for the Catholic girls, the guilt gives them a different taste.” He leered, pressing a finger into Jake’s chest.
A bouncer asked them both for ID. He led them downstairs into a cavernous underground room and asked them if they wanted to sit at the bar or whether they wanted a booth.
“What’s the difference?” asked Ali.
“Booth is more private.” The bouncer winked.
“Booth, then,” shouted Ali above the noise. As their eyes adjusted to the dark, Ali saw the room was full of young women in varying states of undress. On a stage behind the bar, five or six girls were pole-dancing. Men, it was mostly men, although Ali counted five other women among the audience, looked up at the dancers as they performed for them. Occasionally one waved a note at a particular girl who then bent down to allow the man to tuck it in her knickers.
“I think this is a lap-dancing club,” Jake shouted in her ear.
“Great detective work, Watson,” said Ali.
It was too difficult to be heard over the music. They followed the bouncer to the other side of the room to a crescent-shaped booth flanked with a comfortable leather-look banquette. There were two small tables at each end of the crescent. Jake headed for the middle ground, leaving a space for Ali to his right. The bouncer handed them a thick leather-bound menu, and Ali was mildly surprised to hear Jake ordering lobster Thermidor and a bottle of champagne.
“Have you ever done this before?” she shouted over a song by the Black Eyed Peas.
“Absolutely not,” Jake shouted back in her ear. “I just think it would be helpful to have something to do with our hands.” He pointed across the room. There was a man at the bar, fingers magnetically hovering in front of a pair of breasts as a woman bent over to put her arms around him. Round the corner of the booth beside them, a woman straddled a middle-aged man who feverishly kneaded her buttocks, despite the signs hanging at the bar warning that men shouldn’t touch the dancers.
“I think we should go,” said Ali, her eyes glancing back and forth along the bar that dominated the center of the room. She couldn’t pick out Katya, but she was sure this was the place where she worked. It hadn’t yet occurred to her that Katya might be one of the dancers.
“You know,” said Jake, leaning back against the faux leather banquette, “in some ways, we couldn’t have chosen a better place. There’s no way those stooges are going to let a photographer in here, and it’s so dark I can hardly even see your face. No one will notice us. They’re too busy having a good time.”
He closed his eyes in mock blindness and searched for Ali’s face with his hand. He slowly ran three fingers from the top of her forehead down over her brow and nose and onto her chin. A woman, dressed in a G-string and tiny bikini top, interrupted them.
“Do you want me to dance for you both?” she asked in an Eastern European accent. “I like to do couples. I can do half a dance each.”
“No, thanks,” said Jake politely.
“I’ll give you a discount,” said the girl, leaning toward Jake so that her breasts rested perilously close to his gaze, “it would be a pleasure to dance for such an attractive couple. Say, twenty pounds each?”
“Maybe another time,” said Jake. “Try us a bit later.”
“Why did you say that?” asked Ali, as the girl curled away on precariously high heels to the booth next door.
“I didn’t want her to feel rejected,” he said.
“I think you’re injecting too much emotion into the relationship,” said Ali. “This is a purely mercantile arrangement.”
Jake was looking at the woman dancing on the pole behind the bar, her legs slowly scissoring in the air until she was doing the splits. Her breasts somehow managed to defy gravity by remaining at right angles. It was a skilled performance, although the middle-aged men watching from tables around the bar were more interested in her body than her technique. A few cheered; one asked her to take off her knickers and do the same thing again naked. When she refused, he laughed and waved a wad of twenty-pound notes in her face. Every time she said no, he added another twenty-pound note. When he reached a hundred pounds, she took the money and gave it to one of the bouncers to look after. She peeled off her knickers, catching the heel of her shoe in the elastic, and began again. Ali noticed that the girl behind the bar discreetly removed them and neatly folded them up as you might with a child.
“I could have done this instead of becoming a nanny,” mused Ali. “Plenty of students do.”
“Selling your body is the logical culmination of the capitalist dream,” said Jake. “The globalization of the East European sex industry began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism. Everything has its price. That book on your bedside table is all about how the social contract turned into the sexual contract.”
“It’s not freedom,” said Ali.
“It’s freedom for some but not for others,” argued Jake.
The bouncer who showed them to the booth came across and asked if they were looking for a particular kind of girl. Since they had rejected the petite Eastern European brunette, he wondered if they might prefer an Oriental girl. “We have some lovely exotic Thai girls,” he explained, “and a couple of spicy Latinos. They’re very good with beginners. Very warm. There’s a few English girls, too, if you want someone who speaks the vernacular.”
He was like a kindly and patient waiter, relaying news of today’s specials.
“Can you explain how it all works?” asked Jake. “We’re novices here.”
“Absolute beginners,” reiterated Ali.
“A topless dance costs twenty pounds, and it’s ten quid more if the girl is naked,” he explained. “There’s a no-touching rule. You have to keep your hands on the bench. She can touch you, but you can’t touch her.”
“Do you have to pay to talk?” asked Jake.
“Time is money.” The man smiled. “Twenty minutes of hospitality costs two hundred pounds. If you want to talk, phone a friend.”
“Are there any tall, blond, long-legged Ukrainian girls with large, firm breasts?” Ali asked him.
“Ali,” Jake said, laughing, “we’re not going there.”
The bouncer pulled out a tiny flashlight from one pocket and a handwritten list from another and searched for names.
“How about Lara?” he asked, pointing to a bored-looking woman sitting at a table beside the bar.
“Bigger breasts and longer legs,” Ali requested.
“Are you doing this for me?” Jake asked. “Because big-breasted blondes aren’t really my thing.”
“Or the girl dancing at the moment?” the bouncer suggested. “She’s more expensive than some of the others.”
“Why?” asked Ali.
“Watch her dance and you’ll understand,” he said.
Ali stood up and took a couple of paces toward the bar out of Jake’s line of vision. The girl on stage wound herself around the pole like a snake. She moved languidly, almost lazily, without looking at the men gathered below. Ali turned to the bouncer and beamed.
“Great,” she said. “We’ll have her.”
“I’ll get her after she’s finished. Tonya’s on for fifteen minutes, then she’s all yours,” said the man. “If you’re interested we have even more private f
acilities upstairs.”
“Just one more thing,” Ali asked. “Are they all named after characters in Doctor Zhivago?”
• • •
“I can’t believe you’ve done that,” said Jake, shaking his head so vigorously that his dark curls bounced from side to side. He poured himself another glass of champagne. It spilled over the edge of the glass. “What are you going to do when she comes over?”
“We’ll negotiate a price, and then we’ll get her to dance for us,” said Ali. “You can’t go to a lap-dancing club and leave without a lap dance. It’s like going to Corfu without tasting the honey, or going to Cromer without eating a crab, or going to Australia without stroking a koala . . .”
“I get the picture,” interrupted Jake, “although I doubt many other people would see it that way.”
“How would they see it?” asked Ali.
“They would find it seriously dodgy that the family nanny took me to a lap-dancing club and then chose a girl to dance for me,” said Jake. “Can you imagine the headlines?”
“Don’t be so tabloid about it, Jake,” said Ali. “Fathers used to take their sons to prostitutes for their first sexual experience.”
“You’re not my dad, and this is not my first sexual experience,” Jake pointed out.
“But I do have authority over you.” Ali smiled, leaning toward him to kiss him on the lips.
“And where will you be while all this is going on?” Jake asked.
“Right here beside you,” said Ali. “In case anything goes wrong.”
“What could go wrong?” Jake asked.
“You might be tempted to touch her,” Ali suggested. “Or you might finish early. Or you might get a cricked neck from staring up at her breasts.”
“I can’t have a lap dance with you sitting beside me,” said Jake. “What will you do while I’m having it?”
“I’ll eat the lobster Thermidor,” said Ali.
“It just wouldn’t feel right doing it in front of you eating a lobster, Ali,” pleaded Jake.
“Then I’ll have the prawn and avocado instead,” said Ali.
“It’s got nothing to do with the food, it’s to do with you,” said Jake.
“These men are all doing it in front of their friends,” said Ali, pointing at three men on the adjacent table.
“It just doesn’t feel right,” said Jake, nervously eyeing the woman coming toward them. She was wearing a tiny miniskirt, gold shoes, and a red sequined top. Except, as she sashayed into the booth, Jake realized that he knew her.
“Katya?” said Jake, the expression on his face alternating between astonishment and relief. Ali nodded.
“I got you good.” Ali laughed.
“Did you know she’d be here?” Jake asked.
“Curtain open or closed?” Katya smiled.
“Closed,” said Ali.
“I took a punt,” said Ali. “I want to ask her some questions. I think she might be helpful to your mum.”
“Hello, Jake.” Katya ran a hand through Jake’s curls, saying something in Ukrainian.
“He has grown into a handsome man,” she said admiringly before sitting down between them.
Katya’s clothes were garish, and the heavy makeup drew too much attention to her eyes and lips. She had lost weight, which accentuated her long legs and broad shoulders.
“Welcome to the land that feminism forgot.” She smiled. Her breasts were precariously tethered in the well-engineered red top, somewhere between a bra and a bikini.
“I am truly sorry for everything that has happened to your family,” said Katya apologetically, turning toward Jake.
“It’s no worse than what happened to you,” said Jake.
She leaned over and took a drink from Ali’s untouched glass of champagne. The bouncer poked his head through the curtain.
“Give them a special hospitality rate,” she instructed him. She turned to Ali. “Otherwise you’ll end up spending two hundred pounds for twenty minutes of my time.”
“So what’s it like working here?” Ali asked.
“I’m going to tell you the only three facts about lap dancing that you need to know,” said Katya, taking another sip of Ali’s champagne. Jake offered to pour her a glass, but she said she didn’t drink on the job. “One, it’s ideal for English men, because they can’t dance. Two, it makes it difficult to like men. And three, you double your tips when you’re ovulating.”
“How do you know that?” asked Jake.
“Some American scientists did a study,” said Katya.
“Couldn’t you do something else?” asked Ali.
“I earn good money.” Katya shrugged. “I’m the best dancer, so they look after me well. The other girls are great. Most of them are students, but there are a couple of nurses and a prison warden, and a couple of nannies. It’s a good club. But I miss Thomas, and some of the men are awful.”
“Have you seen him since you left?” Ali asked.
“Ned has brought him to see me a couple of times,” Katya said.
“Have you seen Ned since this scandal broke?” Jake asked. Katya eyed Ali.
“We won’t say anything,” she promised. Katya nodded.
Ali explained to Katya that Bryony had been arrested and accused of passing on information about her clients to Nick. Katya shook her head.
“She didn’t do it,” she said. She paused for a moment. “But Ned and Nick did. Nick spied on Bryony to get the information for Ned.”
“Would you tell the FSA what you know?” asked Jake.
“Sure,” agreed Katya.
• • •
It was the early hours of Monday morning when Jake and Ali arrived back at Holland Park Crescent. They found the twins asleep, lying in exactly the same position on their sides, facing each other, thumbs in mouths. Perfectly symmetrical. They were wearing pajama bottoms but had removed their tops, and Ali could see their torsos glistened with sweat. She opened the window. The long, hot summer had sucked the energy out of the night air, and the breeze barely stirred the curtains. The duvet was lying on the floor, and both guinea pigs were asleep on top of it. All the lights were on. Ali kissed them both on the cheek, gently closed the door, and headed up to Jake’s room.
Ali smiled as she came in and saw the signed Arsenal shirt and the White Stripes poster. She went over to the photos of Jake hanging on the wall and touched them tenderly. Her hand drifted to the chest of drawers. There was such an array of objects scattered over its surface that the wood beneath was barely visible. An out-of-charge iPod, hair ties belonging to Ali, an empty box of condoms, loose cigarettes, a couple of tampons, a silver bangle of Ali’s that Jake liked wearing, an eyeliner. Ali’s hand hovered above them. She was about to remove her stuff from the pile, then changed her mind. She liked this casual entanglement of their lives. It suggested a permanence that was comforting.
The room was like an old and familiar friend. She loved the way it smelled of them. She loved the deep red walls. She loved the way that no one else came in here, not even Leicester, who had taken to roaming the length and breadth of the house with his blanket in his mouth in search of a secure berth. Mostly Ali loved the way it belonged to them. It was the only place they could be completely uninhibited together.
Her ears were still ringing from the noise of the music at the lap-dancing club. Whispers had been an assault on the senses. It was too loud, too dark, and too airless.
This must be intentional, so that no one could think clearly about what they were doing there, decided Ali. Otherwise they might notice that the dancer who collected the £20 notes had an ugly bruise on her right buttock, that her bikini top was old and frayed, and that her smile stopped as soon as the money was paid.
“What are you doing?” asked Jake, who was already lying on the b
ed, hands behind his head, legs splayed, with an erection so big that it made Ali smile at the comedy of the human body. “I’ve got a lot of pent-up frustration that needs releasing.”
Ali laughed. She began slowly undressing in front of him, tantalizingly removing her clothes, rolling them into a ball, and throwing them at his head. Jake pleaded for mercy. She felt pleasantly drunk. Tomorrow they would tell Bryony what they had learned from Katya. Perhaps, later, they could even tell her about their relationship.
“There wasn’t a dancer in that club more gorgeous than you.” Jake sighed as Ali sauntered naked toward the bed.
“Do you want a lap dance?” she teased.
“As long as it lasts longer than two minutes,” he said, and groaned.
“I think those clubs encourage premature ejaculation,” said Ali as she slid along his body.
• • •
On the other side of the Atlantic, a lonely figure was also making his way home, after a long weekend at the office. Dick Fuld, guest of honor at the Skinners’ Christmas party two years earlier, was being driven to his New York apartment from Lehman’s office at 745 Seventh Avenue. He looked impassively ahead, as if paralyzed, as the car sped through the empty streets. The usual arrogance and bluster had disappeared as he absorbed the news that the last-minute deal with Barclays had fallen apart and his bank was to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, in what would be the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Downstairs in the kitchen at Holland Park Crescent, Bryony was watching these scenes on television.
“The ships have all sunk at once,” she muttered to herself. The screen was now showing the front page of The Wall Street Journal: “Crisis on Wall Street As Lehman Totters, Merrill Is Sold and AIG Seeks to Raise Cash.”
A panel of experts began discussing the repercussions of this new catastrophe. One of them described it as a “financial tsunami.” Felix Naylor pointed out that Lehman’s employees were unusual in that they owned a third of the company through share options that were now worthless. Someone mentioned greedy bankers and cited the example of the insider-trading charges against Nick Skinner and Ned Wilbraham, “two of the highest-paid bankers in the City.”
