Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  Melanie was complaining that her boyfriend’s business was doing well and that he was pressurising her to leave the club. ‘He says that it’s not right for a businessman of his stature to have a lap dancer for a wife so if I want to marry him I’ll have to stop. Can you believe it? He’s a brickie with ideas above his station. He’s very happy to have me dance for him.’ She admired her painted face.

  ‘If you follow Gaia out of here, I’m leaving too,’ I said, looking at myself directly in the mirror to see if I could detect any insincerity.

  ‘I mean, if I’m not good enough for him as I am…’ said Melanie, and left her sentence unfinished.

  ‘But I thought that’s what you wanted,’ I said. ‘Marriage, children, the big house.’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Melanie. ‘But, you know, I’ve always been able to bring so much money to the table and then he’d be my boss and my husband and I’d lose all my, you know, independence. Anyway, there’s a limit to how much longer I can keep on doing this. If he asked to marry me, now, as I am, then I’d give it up on the spot, but if he says I’ve got to give it up for him to marry me then I won’t. But I can’t very well tell him that, can I? How long do we have left, Sharon?’ Melanie indicated the younger girls reflected in our light bulb-surrounded mirrors. ‘Five years max?’

  ‘Thank you so much for yesterday,’ said Eva, a Spanish girl, coming up to me from behind and leaning over me to kiss me on both cheeks. Her dark hair tickled my neck and her breasts kneaded my back. A drunk punter had refused to let go of her hand until I had talked to him and promised him all manner of things and had Tony bundle him into a cab. Where I had once looked forward to the admiring looks my customers would give me, I was now made happy by the need these young girls had for me. I had gone from ingénue to auntie in turn and didn’t mind.

  Attired in bikinis that were held in place by strings at the hips, at the neck and in between both bra-cups, thereby giving us several options when stripping, Melanie and I left the dressing room to greet our early customers.

  I was in between dances when I saw Sebastian. My impulse was to run and hide, to regain the sanctuary of the girls’ dressing room, but his eyes were fixed on mine. Pierre was insistent that girls not throw themselves at the men at the foot of the stairs but give them a moment to collect themselves, calm their beating hearts and overcome their trepidation, so I was unusual in making my way directly to him. I imagined myself walking down the trading room aisle as I made my way through the men seated on the pouffes and low comfy chairs, past the ice buckets on stands and the low tables, around the dancing girls. We stood facing each other, close, in order to be able to speak above the music.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Long enough to see you dance.’

  ‘Do you want to sit down?’ I turned to find a seat.

  He caught me by the arm and said, ‘Why not go upstairs? It seems quieter there.’

  I looked at his hand on my arm.

  He let go of me.

  ‘Give me a moment. If you find a table upstairs, I’ll follow you shortly.’

  I retrieved a cardigan from my locker, inspected my make-up and made my way to the office where I found Wanda getting ready to go home. ‘Aunt Wanda,’ I said, ‘will you still be here in five minutes?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Why?’

  ‘Do you remember that man I was seeing some years ago? The one from the bank?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, he’s just turned up and wants to talk.’

  ‘Interesting!’

  ‘I’m not so certain. Could you find me and liberate me if necessary?’

  ‘Of course. How will I know if you want liberating?’

  ‘You’ll know.’

  Sebastian had chosen one of the many unoccupied tables upstairs and was declining the attention of a new girl, who arched her eyebrows at me when I effectively dismissed her by sitting next to him.

  ‘How long have you been working here?’

  ‘Quite a few years. Once a week.’

  ‘Even when we were seeing each other?’

  I nodded.

  He slapped his knees and rocked back on his low-backed armchair. ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You think you know someone. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Did you ever ask me?’

  ‘Oh, God, not this again.’

  ‘What?’

  He waved his hand as though to erase my question. We looked at each other.

  ‘Is this your first time here?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In fact,’ it occurred to me to ask, ‘why did you come here?’

  ‘Why do you think?’

  ‘What? You knew I’d be here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How? Why, when you can talk to me any day of the week?’

  ‘Mie told me. That I’d find you here.’

  ‘Mie! Oh well, I suppose she kept it quiet long enough. Do you see Mie out of the office then?’

  He scowled. ‘No!’

  ‘But why come looking for me here when you can speak to me in the office?’

  He didn’t reply.

  I giggled as I placed a hand on his knee and asked mischievously, ‘Go on, tell me, are Mie and you seeing each other?’

  ‘No!’ Irritated, he swung his knee away from under my hand.

  We were quiet a moment and waved away the offer of a drink. ‘Actually, just bring us some still water, please,’ I said to the departing waitress in lingerie. She gave me a strange look ‘We are meant to encourage customers to buy champagne,’ I explained to Sebastian.

  He made a gesture that expressed something between indifference and a mild antipathy. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘So, you wanted to see me,’ I said sombrely.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘Why? Why do you do this?’

  I had no easy reply.

  ‘Come home with me. This evening.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, pulling my cardigan tight around me.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Is there someone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you take,’ and he waved his hand around the room, ‘your customers home afterwards then, is that it?’

  ‘Ouch! That was a bit below the belt.’

  He was unapologetic. ‘Then why not?’

  It seemed cruel to tell Sebastian that the girl who had once climbed so willingly into his bed was not the woman before him today, and that he couldn’t lay claim to her just because he thought she was. Looking away from him, my gaze took in the unoccupied pouffes that were like so many stepping stones in a sea of rippling lights. I was the same human being as the girl who had taken timid steps from stone to stone, but I wasn’t the same person.

  The waitress returned with the water that she poured into two glasses, and the bill that she placed on a saucer in front of Sebastian while presenting him with her full cleavage. He tried and failed not to stare.

  ‘Have you been seeing a lot of blokes, then?’ he asked, raising his head.

  ‘Some.’

  ‘Do you ever see the customers here? Out of here. As in a relationship,’ he added hastily.

  ‘No! I told you. We’re not allowed to.’ I passed him his glass and drank from mine.

  ‘Did you ever see any other blokes while we were seeing each other?’

  ‘You’ve got no right to ask that question!’ I touched his knee with my hand again. ‘What is this?’ I asked gently. ‘We don’t see each other for years and then you come over all jealous.’

  ‘Hmmph.’ He dropped his eyes to the floor momentarily.

  I looked at him closely. He looked tired, and I realised now that I examined him properly that he had aged, of course; and yet, paradoxically, his air was one of a disappointed boy whose toy had been placed out of reach. His fair hair was tousled, as though he’d just got out of bed, and fairer, bleached to the point of being nearly white in the cl
ub’s reflected mix of coloured lights, and his clothes seemed tighter on him, as though he persisted in shopping for clothes of the same size as he had ten years ago. His trainers and torn jeans contrasted somewhat comically with his ribbed polo neck jumper and sheepskin jacket. His eyes, still blue but, I thought, unusually bloodshot, couldn’t keep from moving over my shoulder. I turned in my seat to sit closer to him and afford him an uninterrupted view of the club’s first-floor lounge area, in which the new girls served drinks and encouraged customers to the dancing floor below. He waved one hand in their general direction and said, ‘It’s enough to turn a man to crime.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘All this,’ he said. ‘This. Downstairs. I mean, honestly. All this flesh. This meat. All this look but don’t touch. How does a heterosexual man stand it?’ A little bemused, clearly having no idea what to expect, he watched Aunt Wanda approach us.

  I introduced them to one another.

  Sebastian placed his glass on the table, stood and the two shook hands. ‘How do you do?’ he said, looking incredulous when I introduced her as Aunt Wanda, and embarrassed to have to adjust his trousers. He did his jacket up, as though out of courtesy on meeting her.

  Wanda smiled knowingly and said she was off home and would see me later.

  He sat back down and watched her depart with interest. ‘I see it’s in the family,’ he said, his eyes still on her. ‘Working in a place like this with one’s aunt. I don’t know. Does she? Did she? You know.’

  I laughed and shook my head in turn. ‘Oh no, she’s an accountant. She helps run the place.’

  ‘When I saw that slob.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The slob you were dancing for downstairs. He was salivating. I wanted to smash his face in.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘If he had touched you I would have done.’ He flared his nostrils and clenched his fists exaggeratedly.

  ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘What’s got into me? What hasn’t got into me?’

  We watched the girls and the customers at the bar making their way up- and downstairs.

  ‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Are you seeing anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you been?’

  ‘No. Not really. Not at all, in fact.’

  ‘And that’s the problem,’ I said, unable to keep the smile from my face.

  ‘You could say that.’ He frowned.

  ‘You’re not getting any.’ I said it thoughtfully, as though regretfully, and couldn’t help but tease. I lay a finger on his knee.

  He glared at me and, absurdly, I feared he might cry.

  ‘Would you like to?’ I said it slowly and very deliberately, two fingers on his thigh. An idea had come to me.

  He looked at me incredulously. ‘Sharon! Are you toying with me? I should never have come.’ He couldn’t help but turn his eyes to a beautiful Japanese girl in a thong and two star-shaped spangles for a bikini top who had sat down nearby with a man who appeared to be three times her age.

  I raised my fingers to his chin and turned his head to face me. ‘Would you like to spend the night with a kind, beautiful and very sexy friend of mine who has heard a lot about you from me and who said she’d like to get to know you?’

  ‘Sharon!’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘This is all doing my head in. Earlier today I went to a museum with a friend who took me home with her and who raised my expectations of – oh, never mind. Let’s say, a deepening friendship. And this evening I find myself in a strip club getting propositioned by an ex-girlfriend on behalf of one of her friends!’

  ‘Her name is Gaia. Gaia.’ I gave him the name of Gaia’s club and its address and had him repeat it. ‘It’s ten minutes in a cab. I’ll call her, tell her you’re coming.’

  ‘So you really won’t come home with me?’

  ‘I won’t go home with you.’

  ‘And you really expect me to go and see this – this Gaia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘No.’ I had never felt more serious. ‘You can each be my present to the other.’

  ‘And on Monday, you’ll walk to my desk with your little chits to sign in triplicate, you’ll glide through the dealing room to me and we’ll pretend none of this ever happened?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  I stood while Sebastian settled the bill for the water and then I accompanied him to the velvet ceiling-to-floor drapes that marked the exit before moving to the window. On tiptoe and gripping the brass rail, from above the purple velour curtains, I saw Tony raise an arm above the crowds on the street and hail him a taxi. The exhilarating clamour of London’s nightlife – its people and tourists, its car horns and bicycle bells – reached me through the closed window. Every night was a carnival. I watched Sebastian shoulder and sidestep his way around friends in groups and couples arm in arm. The taxi stopped at a red light. I fancied I saw Sebastian looking back, at me, but, what with the winking traffic and car lights and my and the other girls’ reflections crossed by the many faces of revellers on their way home or to pubs and clubs, it was difficult to be certain whose overlapping face was whose.

  Isabella

  You entered the club and stood with the heavy wooden door open momentarily, framing you. The late autumn cold, the wind and the leaves followed you in and in the seconds between tracks I could hear the leaves quarrelling on the bare wooden floor. You seemed to be waiting for your eyes to adjust to the poor light and they met mine, fleetingly, before moving onto the next girl and the next before tracking back to mine.

  You were exactly as Sharon had described you, your hair tousled, as though you’d just got out of bed, and achromatised to the point of appearing nearly white in the club’s strip lights above the door and your clothes tight on you, as though they’d shrunk in the wash. You wore trainers that were old and jeans that were torn slightly at one knee and yet were clean and had not been inexpensive. A ribbed purple polo neck jumper and a sheepskin jacket betrayed your age. Your eyes were a striking blue beneath bushy pale eyebrows and long fair eyelashes.

  I had come to notice these things, the material things. I had come to know the difference between a pair of jeans and a pair of chinos and the difference between off the shelf and made to measure, not so much in terms of how much they cost but of how much their wearer would pay or tip me. I noticed the cufflinks, too, and the heavy watches and the ties and the absence or presence of a wedding ring and would know what a girl’s takings would be for a night. A suit, a shirt, a tie, a watch and cufflinks: a contemporary Venetian mask held before its owner like a Plato’s form. But this was different, this set-up was different. You were new to this, you had different expectations. You were new to me; and the game, I had come to realise, was old to me and I was tired of it.

  Godehard materialised next to you, welcomed you, took you by the elbow, indicating the stage, the bar, the lounge area, the private rooms beyond and told you, I know, of the entry fee, of the obligatory purchase of a bottle of champagne, of the cost of a dance and of your and a girl’s liberty to negotiate whatever you and she wanted. He stayed your hand as it reached for your inside pocket; there would be time enough later to settle bills.

  I observed you in the long mirror behind the bar as you wandered the bare floorboards, wondering what your move should be and when and how to make it. As you walked past me, I removed my handbag from the bar stool next to me and placed it on the bar. I knew you would sit there and you did. It’s as if the removal of the handbag creates a vacuum that a man can’t help but fill. That’s the great thing about the handbag-on-the-bar-stool routine. If a girl doesn’t like the look of the punter she keeps her handbag there, and more often than not he’ll move on. If she does, she removes it and it’s like reeling him in like a fish.

  ‘Hello,’ you said. ‘Sebastian.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Gaia,’ you said.

  ‘Yes.’

>   You asked Dieter, the barman, for the wine list that you perused with arched eyebrows before handing it to me open at the first page and saying, ‘Please pick a champagne you like.’

  I chose a relatively inexpensive one.

  You nodded gratefully.

  ‘Gaia,’ you repeated. ‘Is that a real name?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied truthfully, though I knew that what you had said was not exactly what you had meant. ‘So. Sharon. She’s very fond of you.’

  ‘Not fond enough, clearly.’ You spoke more with resignation than with rancour.

  Dieter produced the bottle and an ice bucket on a tray.

  ‘Would you like to sit down with me in the lounge area?’ I indicated it with an upward inclination of my head and eyebrows. ‘I think we’ll be more comfortable there.’

  You said you would love to and stood, courteously moving your bar stool out of my way.

  I looked at you in the mirrors as we glided silently by and saw you observing my back and my hips that I swayed to the music that was now Country and Western. I was wearing a black see-through strapless dress that was split up the sides all the way to my waist. In my glass six-inch high-heeled shoes I came up to your shoulder.

  Dieter pursued us with the champagne flutes and the champagne in the ice bucket until we reached the last of a dozen brown leather sofas and smoked glass tables. ‘I think you’ll be comfortable here, sir,’ he said obsequiously.

  ‘I’m sure we will,’ you replied. I liked that, that you were thinking of my comfort, too, and not just of your own.

  You indicated a sofa and you only sat down once I had, tucking your leg up under you a bit so that you were naturally inclined towards me with your arm extended along the sofa back behind me. We were as close to each other as we could be without actually touching and, after I had filled the flutes and we had said ‘Cheers!’, I brought my flute to my parted lips and just held it there, my tongue’s tip exposed to the wine’s soft petillance.

  I hoped the low light hid my imperfections: my poor complexion and skin quality. I had powdered my face but knew that the light source, positioned behind you and shining directly on to my right cheek, would probably not help me conceal it completely. That was the problem with my job: too little exposure to natural light. Over the years, this had taken its toll.