Revenge of the Tide

  My blank expression told him everything. He went up into the wheelhouse and fiddled with various controls. Nothing happened. ‘Charged the battery?’

  Of course I hadn’t.

  ‘You’ve got a decent generator, you know.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Bloody good job too. A new one would cost you a small fortune, and you need a decent generator, if you want to take her upriver. What you going to plug her into, otherwise?’ He indicated the pontoon and the electricity and water hook-up.

  ‘I hadn’t thought.’

  ‘Lots of things you probably haven’t thought. Got a cloth?’

  I found him some old rags from the storage and crouched on the deck next to him, watching as he cleaned black gunk away from joints, dials and levers.

  ‘So,’ he said cheerfully, leaning back on his heels, ‘while I’m doing this, you can tell me all about what happened in London.’

  I hesitated. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  He stopped what he was doing and gave me a pointed look.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he said. ‘Just trying to make conversation, that’s all.’

  And he went back to tinkering with the engine.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell him. Lord knew, it would be good to tell someone – it was just where to start.

  And then I had a picture of myself, dancing. How it felt to dance. How free.

  ‘Well, you know I used to be a dancer,’ I said, quietly.

  He carried on tinkering.

  ‘I started with ballet, when I was very small. I carried on with it until I was twelve. I was good at it, but not quite good enough for ballet school. When I got turned down for that I concentrated on gymnastics instead. I was alright at that, too.’

  ‘What happened?’ he asked, without turning.

  ‘Well, for a start, my body changed and suddenly I was the wrong shape for it. Then I got too busy with A-levels, then university. That was it, basically. Then, when I was working in London, I started looking for dance classes – something to do to keep fit. I thought, I’d enjoyed it before; it might be a good way to tone up. And – well – what happened was, I found a pole fitness class.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Pole dancing.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Yes. You can laugh.’

  ‘I’m not laughing. Sounds like a good idea to me. Pass me that spanner? No, the other one.’

  I watched him for a moment, wondering whether I should carry on with this.

  ‘So – you went along? To the class?’

  ‘Yes. It was good fun. Not as easy as it looks, you know. You have to be fit, and physically strong – it’s not like other dancing classes where you can get away with it if you have a good sense of rhythm. And it was a fitness class really, but I loved it straight away.’

  ‘I bet you were good at it. What with all that dancing you’d done. And gym, and that.’

  ‘Yes, I was. Have you been to a club where they’ve done it?’

  He coughed a little. ‘Well, yes. Not very good though. I bet you were better.’

  I found myself laughing. ‘Probably, yes, I was.’

  Malcolm said, ‘Right, that’s all I can do until you get the battery charged up. We’ll have another try tomorrow.’

  I felt a bit bereft all of a sudden, until I realised that he had no intention of ending our conversation there. He wiped his hands on the dirty rag, and handed me his coffee mug. ‘I think I’d like a cuppa tea this time, if it’s all the same to you. I’ll just go back to Aunty Jean and get some Swarfega. Back in a minute.’

  Ten minutes later we were sitting back in the saloon, steaming mugs in front of us. I was glad of the warmth of the mug. I’d started the fire in the woodburner but it would be a while before it started throwing out any real heat.

  ‘I was good,’ I said. ‘The instructor was a girl called Karina. She’d worked in some of the big clubs, earned loads of money doing it. She said I was better than she’d been. She said I should try it. Dancing in a club, I mean.’

  ‘And you did.’

  ‘I needed the money,’ I said. ‘I’d got this plan that I wanted to buy a boat. You know there were times I loved the sales job, times when I hated it too, but I knew I couldn’t do it forever. It’s bloody hard work, very pressured. When everything’s going well, it’s great, but if things start to slip then it’s just hideous, just like fighting uphill, all the time. And I had a sort of relationship with Ben – that one from the party – that had gone all wrong. So I wanted out. I wanted something to look forward to – an end to it all. And I decided I was going to take a year out and do up a boat.’

  ‘Bit of a difference from working in London,’ he said.

  ‘Exactly. I’d got money saved up, from bonuses and stuff. But nowhere near enough to buy a boat, and I was getting so sick of it, so sick of the stupid job and the crazy fucked-up people I worked with.’

  ‘So you were dancing in a club? Like, a strip club?’

  This was where it started getting difficult. ‘It was a private members’ club called the Barclay, near London Bridge. Karina introduced me to the owner. Fitz, his name was. I had no idea what those places were like; I’d never been in one. But it seemed alright. The membership for it was hundreds of pounds. The drinks in the bar were – shit, I don’t know – stupid money. The whole place reeked of cash. They had separate rooms, bars. VIP area. It was good money, easy money in a lot of ways.’

  I was waiting for his reaction. I’d had lots of different ones, from the few people I’d told, or the people who’d found out for themselves. Shock was a common one. Hostility, sometimes. Occasionally I was lucky enough to get a ‘Good on you, girl’ and a pat on the back.

  ‘Well, it’s like an art form, innit,’ Malcolm said. ‘That’s what I’ve always thought, anyway. You have my complete admiration.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He raised his mug of tea in salute.

  ‘So. That was London.’ I said it with finality, thinking that might satisfy him. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you can just tell people, after all.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘I was good at it. I earned a packet, more than I was earning in the sales job, just for a few hours at the weekends. I saved it up until I had enough to leave my job and buy this boat.’

  He nodded, slowly. ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I bet some dodgy stuff went on, though.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Them places, full of drugs and shit like that.’

  ‘I guess so. Some of the girls used to take stuff to keep themselves awake. I kept away from all of that side of it, really. I had better things to do with the money I was making.’

  He sniffed and finished his tea. ‘You don’t want to be messing with all that stuff, you know. There are some nasty people run them sorts of clubs.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He looked at his watch. ‘I better shoot off. I told Josie I’d only be ten minutes.’

  I felt a huge weight of relief. ‘Oh, okay. Thanks, for, you know – the engine.’

  ‘No worries. I’ll have another look tomorrow when you’ve got the battery charged. She still wants me to take her shopping for this bloody wedding outfit, I dunno why we can’t just go as we are; got enough bloody clothes stuffed into that boat as it is.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  At the steps he paused and looked back at me, his lined face serious. ‘You’re not on your own, Gen. You know that, right? We all stick together here. You don’t need to worry.’

  I smiled at him. ‘Thanks.’

  I watched from the door of the wheelhouse until he went below decks on the Scarisbrick Jean. The boat was silent; even the rain had eased off.

  Eight

  If it hadn’t been for Karina, I would never have met Dylan, or Caddy – for it was Karina who arranged the appointment at the Barclay. An audition, I suppose it was – with F
itz, the owner of the club.

  ‘He’s alright,’ she’d said. ‘You’ll get on with him. And he’s gonna love you.’

  He didn’t show up very often; he didn’t need to. In fact I found out later that he didn’t audition all the girls; he mainly left that up to the club manager, David Norland. For some reason, Fitz had wanted to see me personally.

  Karina and I had worked out a rough routine between us. It had been good fun dancing around one of five poles in an upstairs studio in Clapham, me, Karina and several other girls of varying sizes and abilities. It had been a laugh, even with bruised legs and friction burns on the palms of my hands and the insides of my thighs until I got used to it. Like everything, the more you did it, the easier it got. I’d worked my way through all the basic moves, the intermediate and the advanced, and now I was developing new moves and combinations myself or trying ones I’d seen on the internet. It wasn’t just fitness, by that stage. It was like a challenge. And then I’d had that conversation with Karina.

  ‘You should train to be an instructor,’ she’d suggested. ‘You could help me out with classes.’

  ‘Nah,’ I said, pulling my jeans back on after class one evening. The other girls had gone; I’d stayed behind to help her dismantle the poles and put them away in the storage room.

  ‘You’re good enough,’ she said. ‘You could earn some extra money.’

  ‘Thanks for the offer, but I need lots of money. Lots and lots. More than this would give me.’

  ‘How come?’

  So I told her about my plan. We ended up walking out of the studio together and, without even really discussing it, into the pub next door. It was full of blokes, post-work, ties loosened. Sport on the huge flat-screen TVs.

  ‘You should think about dancing properly, then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In a club. You’d earn an absolute packet.’

  ‘You mean, like in a strip club?’

  ‘A gentlemen’s club, they’re called.’

  ‘Really? You think I could do that?’

  ‘Of course you could.’ She was looking at me, her big blue eyes wide.

  ‘How come you don’t do it any more?’

  She laughed. ‘Past my sell-by date,’ she said. ‘No – I guess I could still do it. But it’s the late nights, you know? Difficult, with the kids.’

  At the time I laughed it off a bit, finishing my drink and listening to Karina telling me about the clubs, how much fun it was at times, how hard it was at other times, but above all how much money you could get if you were any good at it.

  The week after that, I asked her about it again after class. She offered to introduce me to a guy she used to work for, the owner of a club on the South Bank. She made the call on her mobile phone and before I could change my mind she’d made me an appointment to go and see him. Fitz.

  To be honest, I hadn’t really taken the idea seriously when Karina had first suggested it. It would have been great to have had another source of income, in addition to the day job. I’d thought it might be fun to spend the night in a posh nightclub and earn money at the same time. But if he’d said no, I would have turned my back on the place and never looked back. That was why I turned up at the club with plain black underwear underneath the skirt and blouse I’d worn to work – nothing special. I can’t even remember if I was wearing make-up.

  The club wasn’t open; it was seven o’clock on a Friday evening. I rang the bell of the main front door of an imposing Georgian terrace near the river. A man in a suit opened it.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m here to see Mr Fitz,’ I said, using the same voice I used when I was trying to access a senior buyer. I wondered what he thought of me. He was tall and almost as wide, a tattoo on his neck, unreadable gothic lettering tangled in a swirl of lines. A chunk of his ear was missing.

  ‘You mean Fitz,’ he said, leading the way up a flight of stairs into a plush, quiet corridor. Artwork on the walls. Chandeliers. ‘Nobody calls him mister.’

  Fitz was in one of the club offices, talking on a mobile phone, his backside perched on the edge of a desk that was bare except for a telephone and a new-looking monitor, wireless keyboard and mouse.

  He waved me in and pointed to a chair in the corner. While he talked in south London gibberish to whoever was on the other end of the call, I took in the expensive suit, the hand-made shoes. He had dark hair neatly cut, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Indoors. I thought he looked like a twat.

  ‘…yeah, mate. Nah. No, not seen it…. Yeah, if you like. Whatever. Right. See ya later, then, fella.’ And he hung up.

  I gave him my best smile.

  ‘You must be the divine Genevieve,’ he said. His accent lost the Peckham twang with barely a hesitation.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ I said, offering my hand.

  ‘Karina tells me you’re something special.’

  ‘You should really decide that for yourself.’

  He nodded, appraisingly. ‘You’ve not done this before?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Have you been in a club like this one before?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, offering his hand to help me to my feet. ‘Let’s see what you can do, Genevieve. Afterwards I’ll ask David to give you the tour. Got any preference for music, or shall we just see what’s playing?’

  We went back downstairs and through a door at the end of the corridor, which opened up into the main nightclub. There were private booths, tables and chairs around the edge of the dance floor, heavy drapes, cushions, discreet lighting. In this bar were three stages, each with a pole. I wondered if he expected me to strip all the way. I hoped not.

  He pointed me to the largest of the three. ‘Off you go.’

  From an unseen DJ booth, the opening beats to Elbow’s ‘Grounds for Divorce’ came through at deafening level. I stepped out of my shoes and started by circling the pole with bare feet, my hand on it, before lifting myself up into a curl and swinging round… and I was away. I wriggled out of the skirt quickly and did the rest of the routine in my underwear, unbuttoning my shirt and letting it swing around me as I moved. I worked my way through the routine I’d worked on with Karina, adjusting it as the music slowed, and after the first half-minute I got into my stride and actually started to enjoy myself. I even added in a few extra cartwheel kicks. The song was over sooner than I expected it to be, and, other than a slight flush to my cheeks, I hadn’t really exerted myself.

  From the seating area below the stage came a slow handclap. ‘Very good, my dear. Very good. Different, but not in a bad way. What do you think, David?’

  A second man was with him. I’d not noticed him arrive, but he was seated with Fitz. A sharp grey suit, a thin face, blond hair cut short. ‘Yeah. She’ll do.’

  ‘Come and sit with me, lovely Genevieve.’

  I slipped back into my skirt and stepped down from the stage. I crossed the carpeted floor, buttoning up my work blouse again, and went to sit at the table with the two men. My demeanour, as I sat down, was back to businesslike.

  Norland told me the rules.

  ‘Okay, here’s how it goes. You can start tonight on a trial basis. If the customers like you, we’ll call you back for a full night. That’s a minimum of five dances on the stage, more if you get requests. You can do private dances on the pole; that will be in the Blue Room. In between your stage dances you sit with the clients and drink with them – you get commission on that and you get thirty for a lap dance. You don’t do extras. You don’t take phone numbers, you don’t piss about outside the club with customers. If you take guests to the VIP area you get paid for your time, two hundred per hour, plus tips. The house fee is fifty a night. Sound fair?’

  ‘And if I don’t like it?’

  The men both laughed.

  ‘You’re not keen on earning upwards of a grand a night?’ said Norland.

  ‘I can earn that in my day job easily enough,’ I said. It wasn’t entire
ly true, but they weren’t to know. ‘I’m doing this because I enjoy dancing.’

  Fitz smiled, a smile that was surprisingly warm. ‘You’ll like it, I promise you. If you don’t, then you don’t have to come back. Alright?’

  I nodded. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Stage name,’ said Fitz. ‘What do you reckon, David?’

  ‘I think Genevieve is pretty cool anyway,’ he answered.

  ‘Don’t be a fuckwit,’ Fitz replied, looking at me steadily. ‘She can’t use her real name. How about Viva?’

  ‘Viva,’ I repeated.

  Norland nodded. ‘I’ll add her to the list for tonight.’

  When he took me on the tour of the place I was struck by two things: firstly, the place was full of money, real money; and secondly Norland was a complete cock. He was patronising and sly and sure of himself. He wore his aftershave like a weapon.

  ‘These are the dressing rooms,’ he said, leading me through a discreet ‘Staff Only’ door behind the stage. ‘You can fight with the other girls for a dressing table when you’re on.’

  ‘Don’t we get a dressing table each?’ I asked. I should have kept my mouth shut.

  ‘There’s a lot of girls working here at the weekend,’ he said. ‘We don’t have room for egos.’

  We went back out to the club and down a corridor to the side. Away from the dance floor, the carpets were thick and our footfalls were silent. The doors along the right wall of the corridor were named: Harem, Justice, Boudoir. Norland stopped outside the last door. On it, a brass plaque: ‘The Blue Room’. It was called that because of the décor, I supposed: rich blue wallpaper and gold fittings, heavy velvet curtains held back with thick gold braided rope. In the centre of the room was a round parquet floor and a gold pole rising from it. The ceiling in this room was higher and the pole went all the way up to the ornate plasterwork cornicing.

  ‘Wow,’ I said, running my hand up the pole.

  Norland smirked.

  ‘Size is everything, huh?’

  I didn’t respond.

  ‘Can you get up there?’ he asked, nodding upwards.

  ‘Of course I can,’ I said coldly.