Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  We debated feminism in the close, heated changing room but futilely, as we had no one to argue against, being all of the opinion that the feminists and anti-pornographers who campaigned to have the club closed down were mistaken in believing that we were being exploited. ‘Who’s exploiting who?’ would say Jemima, who had taken me under her wing. She looked upon men contemptuously for being so ready to part with large sums of money for the unfulfilled promise of that little bit more than the odd fondle and fiddle when she knew that Pierre and Jemma weren’t looking. She and her lover, Betsy, would perform a double act for their punters who were driven to extremes of excitement and lightened wallets as they realised that the performance, the exchange of affection between the two, was not staged but real. Jemima and Betsy had it sorted, as Jemima would say, pencil eyeliner in hand. ‘Five more years and then it’s off to our cottage in Dorset. Chickens, not cocks. Pigs in muck, not pigs in suits. But if he’s a Yank, send him to me.’ The Americans were our favourite customers; they made us feel better about our work. American businessmen would admire us candidly, applaud and appreciate us, would say things like, Lady you have a great ass! or, Ma’am, you’re a ten out of ten! or, Those breasts are magnificent! True, they objectified us but they looked us in the eye when they spoke to us and had us believe that our physical qualities were not just random allocations assigned us by our genes. And they tipped handsomely. Englishmen, by contrast, if they were City bosses or of the managerial class, were sheepish and embarrassed and behaved furtively, as though they had stumbled into the club by accident, as though their and our activities were something to be ashamed of, something dirty. Believing they could salve their consciences by not ‘paying for it’, they extracted their wallets from their back pockets with gritted teeth. Worst were the English nouveauxriches, the wide boys, the barrow boys, the City traders, the boys who ‘done well’ and who considered themselves entitled to paw us, revile us and throw notes of money on the floor for us to pick up, rather than hand them to us.

  Over a period of two or three years, though, things changed for only one reason that I could see: namely, that the balance of British and foreign girls was changing. East European and Asian girls were working at the club in greater numbers and bringing with them stories of abduction, abuse and forced prostitution by international criminal gangs. Feminism, body ownership and girl power were no longer discussed so openly and comfortably or, when they were, conclusions were no longer reached with such a high degree of certainty. Our esprit de corps was not what it had been. I felt simultaneously less certain of myself and yet more determined to impose myself, to assume control of those who had controlled me, and so I started to meet punters outside the club after hours for taxi rides to their hotel or to Freddie’s and my apartment.

  Sharon

  I first visited the club on a Wednesday evening, after a rare all-family dinner.

  My mother had tickets to take Sherah to a musical on the same evening that Dad was taking Seamus to a football game, which had presented Wanda with the unusual opportunity to bring the family together. Massimo had said he’d open Lo Scoglio’s doors for us early, so that we needn’t rush; so we sat, solitary diners, around a table by the restaurant window.

  Dad: tired, as ever, but delighted to have the family together and evidently still or, perhaps, more than ever in love with his wife. Mum: quiet, indifferent, self-contained. My stranger of a brother who now towered above us all and who bored and impressed us with his knowledge of football. My butch sister whose sporting regimen on the south coast had filled her out even more and who took pleasure in letting us know that she didn’t like musicals, in the knowledge that I did. My aunt, who tried hard to conceal her anger with her sister for having bought Sherah but not me a ticket for the musical.

  I considered our mocking reflections in the restaurant window. If I stared long enough, I could convince myself that we were the caricatures of the functioning family outside, until a car pulled up onto our reflected dining table and our reflected faces blurred with those of the car’s occupants.

  ‘A strange family,’ Wanda had said, after the others had left; I didn’t know whether she included herself and me in that designation.

  Dad had asked my mother about her new work in national athletics; Mum had asked Sherah about the direction she was taking in her sports education; Seamus had asked and answered his own questions on this evening’s football match; Sherah had shown no interest in anyone or anything at all; it had taken Wanda to ask me about my work and to tell the others about my good review and my pay rise. My family had congratulated me politely.

  ‘Let’s walk,’ Wanda had said purposefully, once she had paid and thanked Laura for the meal and the discount.

  ‘You know, my love,’ she said as, arm in arm, we joined London’s evening commuters on its pavements, ‘I think I need to accept that broken things sometimes need to stay broken, that if you piece them together you risk creating something worse than what was broken before.’ We stopped outside a purple-fronted shop. The dusty display contained champagne bottles, corks and glasses and top hats, gloves and walking canes in front of a mauve velvet curtain on a big brass rail. ‘Tonight is as good as any. If not better, as it’s likely to be quiet. Hello, Tony.’

  ‘Hello, Wanda,’ said Tony, a stony-faced doorman in a Crombie coat that, like its wearer, had seen better days. ‘Unusual to see you here on a Wednesday.’

  ‘Oh, I’m just popping by. This is my niece, Sharon.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Tony glumly, opening the purple entry door with one gloved hand.

  ‘Wanda!’

  ‘Jemma!’

  Wanda hugged a young woman who was tidying up a cloakroom. Again I was introduced.

  ‘Wanda!’

  ‘Pierre!’

  A tall old man drew a dark, heavy curtain back and I followed Wanda into a large, low-ceilinged, carpeted space with low tables, pouffes and comfortable chairs, and a long drinks bar down one side. Mauves and purples were the dominant colours; white roses and lilies brought relief.

  ‘Pierre. Sharon, my niece.’

  ‘Sharon. You are most welcome.’ Pierre raised my hand and bowed to kiss the back of it while keeping his eyes on mine. Furrows marked the passage of a wide-toothed comb through oily dirty-white hair. I was simultaneously flattered and repulsed by his indefinably vulgar air; he managed to be obsequious and yet threatening. With quick, darting eyes that belied his smile, he appraised me coldly, professionally. Keeping hold of my hand, he said to Wanda while looking at me, ‘Ma chère, where have you been hiding her all this time?’

  Wanda laughed and said, ‘Come on!’ and pulled me after her down a large circular staircase into yet another similarly colour-schemed space with low chairs, pouffes, divans and tables, a small bar, some open booths with mirrored partition walls, a dais and a stage with floor-to-ceiling poles. A man who was passing a vacuum cleaner waved his hand in greeting to Wanda but did not stop vacuuming.

  ‘Through here,’ said Wanda, and I found myself in a large, bright and yet immediately cosy room with comfortable chairs, ill-assorted mirrored dressing tables and stools, hanging rails filled to bursting and, at its far end out of the direct lights, old metal lockers that would have looked more in keeping in a sports club changing room. A dozen girls in varying states of undress were chatting or applying make-up to themselves or each other, or eating out of cardboard cartons.

  ‘Wanda!’

  ‘Hello, girls!’ said Wanda who, clearly pleased with the warmth of her reception, stood smiling, exuding contentment and, I thought from the way she clutched her handbag in both hands, just a small degree of apprehension. Most of the girls stood, too, and milled around her, either kissing her in greeting on both cheeks or resting their hands on a shoulder or arm for a moment in intimate acknowledgement. To those who had remained seated, she waved and received waves, air kisses and hellos in return. ‘This is Sharon, my niece.’ Wanda took a step away from me and looked at me inquiring
ly and approvingly simultaneously.

  ‘Welcome!’

  ‘Have a seat.’

  ‘Would you like a drink?’

  I was fussed over, helped out of my coat, petted and seated. Overwhelmed by the attention, the competing perfumes and the rich fragrances of skin and foundation creams, the friendliness, the extent of exposed flesh and the unabashed, natural ease with which the near-naked young girls moved around me, I shook as I held my glass of water in both hands. My eyes at crotch height, I was treated to a giddying kaleidoscope of bikini and tanning lines, young buttocks, varying flesh tones and pubic hair lines and styles that I had never imagined existed.

  Jemma put her head around the door and called, ‘Wanda? Could I nab you for a second? Pierre wants a word, as you’re here.’

  Wanda walked through the door Jemma had kept open for her.

  ‘Melanie,’ said a girl matter-of-factly. ‘What do you think?’ She held a bikini up in each hand. ‘Red or green? Red for Hands Off! Or green for Go?’ Melanie bent towards me and held the green bikini to my face. ‘Wow! Your eyes are greener than this bikini! Beautiful. It must be a bugger dressing, though. Green doesn’t go with your complexion.’

  I couldn’t help but smile. Melanie was direct, but right. Green made me look sallow, pasty. I kept my eyes on hers so as not to stare elsewhere. A nipple hovered above the rim of my glass. I didn’t dare move.

  She reached a conclusion and stood straight. ‘Red,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ said another girl, shrugging a coat off. ‘Are you new?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘I’m just visiting.’

  ‘Oh. Thinking of working here?’

  ‘Oh, no! I’ve got a job.’

  ‘Wanda’s niece,’ said Melanie.

  Melanie’s colleague flashed a smile. ‘Oh, Wanda! I saw her upstairs. This is a good place,’ she said, unzipping knee-length boots and kicking them off while looking at Melanie for confirmation. ‘It’s not full of scumbags like some other places. So I’m told. Where is it you work?’

  I told her.

  ‘Never heard of it. How does it compare to here?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not a… It’s a bank,’ I corrected her.

  ‘A bank!’ She brought her hand to her mouth to hide a grin. ‘Sorry! I thought, you know…’

  Melanie grinned too. She received her friend’s top and turned it the right way around and placed it on a hanger before draping her bra over it and hanging them both up. She then perched on the arm of my chair and stretched her arm along the back of it, so close I could feel the intoxicating musky warmth emanating from her body.

  ‘So why don’t you work here?’ The girl eyed me candidly. ‘You look like you could do it.’ Without waiting for an answer, she said, ‘Does the bank pay really well, then? I suppose it depends on what you do. We get bankers in here. They have a lot of money to throw around. Sometimes they bring their female colleagues in, too. I feel sorry for them, the women. They have to pretend they enjoy it and then when they realise they do they go absolutely wild. Or they hate it and you can see them fuming and itching to leave.’ She folded her jeans and placed them over the hanging rail. She removed her plain knickers and tucked them into one of the pockets of the jeans. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’m going to fetch my costume.’ Her brown hair hung all the way to the small of her back and swung as she took two steps in the direction of the lockers at the far end of the room before doing an about-face and standing directly before me again. ‘Oh, I’m Gaia,’ she said, extending her hand. That’s when she told me her name, naked and natural and beautiful, and I told her mine, overcome with shyness.

  Melanie gave me a pat on the shoulder and raised my hand to look at my watch. ‘Oh, is that the time?’ she said. ‘We open in ten minutes but it will be another couple of hours before we get anything like busy. Nice watch,’ she added, after I had pulled my eyes away from Gaia’s padding walk to look at my watch in turn.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘My mum gave it to me.’ My mother! I saw myself through my mother’s eyes, as though she were standing by me, and I had to admit that I no longer knew what she would say, if anything – whether she’d care and whether, really, there was anything for her to care about. I stood and said to Melanie, ‘I think I have to go and find Wanda.’

  Melanie piled her fair hair high on her head and sniffed her shaved armpits as she held her hair in place. ‘Not too bad,’ she grinned, and added, ‘See you.’

  Aunt Wanda and I returned home both a little breathless, she a little sheepish and me a little cowed, overawed by the sudden plunge into an underground, adult world and by the girls’ brazenness. Rather than talk in the crowded tube train, we stole glances at each other. I wondered if Wanda feared that she had changed the nature of our relationship for the worse, thought that she may have failed in her implicit duty as my unofficial guardian. Once home, over mugs of tea that we treasured in both hands, she attempted to explain herself by talking of the girls as family, of their histories and of the affection she had for them. ‘But, you know, going in there with you this evening, I suddenly saw it through your eyes, a new person’s eyes, and I remembered the first time I had been referred to Pierre and been shocked and nearly hadn’t stayed and yet…’ She shrugged and continued, ‘What you don’t see the first time is how damaged some of the girls are, and how they find this camaraderie, this togetherness.’

  I extended an arm to silence her and said, ‘Aunt Wanda, you don’t have to be so defensive. There’s no need. I’m so glad you took me. Really. The girls are lovely. I think I know exactly what you mean. And the way they love you, look to you, that was so nice to see. And the respect everyone has for you there and they were friendly to me because I’m your niece, it made me proud of you.’

  Relief filled Wanda’s features, and it occurred to me for the first time that someone else might care what I thought of them; that my opinion of them mattered, and I tingled with this discovery and almost wept with the pleasure of it. A power I wouldn’t know how to use let alone abuse, it was a source of warm pleasure, all the same.

  I went back to the club. A month later. Then a couple of times a month. Then once a week, either with Wanda or to meet her there. I helped where I could, behind the bar or in the cloakroom or bringing the food out that was served only on the ground floor where our customers would dine, either before or between visits downstairs. When it was time for me to leave, Pierre would extract a wodge of banknotes from his inside jacket pocket, lick his fingers and peel some off for me and see me out with a kiss on the cheek and pat on the bottom. After I learnt that Jemma was his fiancée, I felt both more at ease around him and less comfortable around her; after all, he was over twice her age.

  Mie

  I spent three years immersed in the English language and in English literature. I travelled through Sir Walter Scott’s Scotland and Jane Austen’s Hampshire, Charles Dickens’s London, George Eliot’s provincial England and Elizabeth Bowen’s Ireland. These authors took me to places I would never visit, not least because they no longer existed but because they were set in a different past, as if in a foreign country where things are done differently. While the physical scenes of place and time – the hanging drapes of English meadows and Scottish heaths and of English and Irish country homes – pleased me, the emotional tableaux of unrequited and reciprocated loves intrigued and excited me. How and why Elizabeth Bennet and Maggie Tulliver throw themselves upon others – throw their selves away to others – fascinated me. I would reread novels’ endings in the fantasy that they might change, that our strong heroines would stand resolute and learn from past mistakes.

  University had been different from school in two principal respects. The first was that I no longer had to contend with the furtive, uncertain advances of insecure boys, but with the propositions of self-assured, cocky young men. The second was that I grew to love the English language that I had found so charming at school and began to plan exactly how I would use it as a springboard out of my count
ry. Additionally, university had opened my eyes to wider Japanese society and, by bringing me into contact with students from outside my prefecture, helped me realise just how sheltered my upbringing had been and how unconventional and open-minded my parents were. However, that only really hit home after university, once I’d started my first full-time job, at Yumimoto.

  The evening before my first day at Yumimoto, after I had pressed my regulation white shirt and black skirt and polished my old black school shoes, I stood at my bedroom window. To my left lay a decaying sunset, as though a last call for those heading west. Soon, I thought to myself. Ahead, Keiko’s and Michi’s lightless bedroom windows almost shouted their absence. Keiko had gone south immediately after graduation to be assistant to the manager of her parents’ shop in Hamamatsu; she would board above it for the length of her secondment, returning to Sangenjaya only occasionally. Michi had been accepted for a master’s degree in clinical psychology and school education at Fukushima University. West-, north- and eastwards spread a quietening town, settling down for the night like a dog in its basket, and telephone wires that still whispered to me and sought to lead me astray and away. I was still me, the young girl with the ambition to travel as long as she could remember, but the closer I came to achieving my goal the less impatient I became.