Revenge of the Tide

  ‘Not many of the girls can. In fact, the last one to do it was Karina, and that was five years ago.’

  I liked the idea of the height in this room. I never felt the poles were enough of a challenge. I liked the idea of working my way to the top of the room and spinning back down. I would have to work out some new move combinations to make use of the whole length of the pole.

  He showed me round the rest of the Barclay Gentlemen’s Club. The two main bars, one of which was downstairs with a separate entrance on to the side street; the reception area, the cloakroom; the various private booths and VIP rooms around the main dance floor.

  ‘Find something nice to wear later,’ he said, when we found ourselves back in the foyer. The place looked more like a hotel than a club. ‘You’ll need an evening dress before twelve. Then you can change into something that shows more flesh for your dances. Get yourself some decent underwear.’

  ‘Alright,’ I said. The man was a slug.

  ‘Come back any time after half-ten. When you come tonight, ask for Helena. We’ll put you on probably around two, three o’clock. As long as you’re here for your dance, you’ll be alright. If you’re ever late you’ll get a fine and you might not get to go on. Sorted – yeah?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, and I was back out on the London pavement.

  Nine

  I ate toast for dinner. It was the first solid food I’d had for more than twenty-four hours, and even so it was a struggle. It felt dry and rough and tasted of nothing.

  I was sitting at the dinette, looking at the bit of paper that Carling had given me, with his phone number on it. Next to it on the table was Andy Basten’s business card.

  Detective Sergeant Andrew Basten

  MAJOR CRIME

  Why didn’t Carling have a card like the other one? And which one should I ring, if I was worried? Basten’s neat, official card, with the crest of Kent Police? Or Carling’s number hand-written on a bit of paper, scrawled but legible? Just a mobile. I wondered what he did when he was off-duty. Did he go home to his wife? Wife… and kids, maybe? And a dog. There would have to be a dog. And a wife with a noble profession, maybe a teacher. Or a nurse. Or maybe she was a police officer too. And two children at the dining table busy doing their homework when he got in from his hard day chasing criminals. He would kiss the tops of their heads – a boy and a girl – and he would ask his wife what was for dinner, while the dog chased around his feet wagging its tail with delight. He would open a bottle of wine and they would finish it – Jim Carling and his wife – when the kids were in bed.

  Or he was divorced. He had that pissed-off look about him, I decided. Maybe his wife had run off with someone else – another police officer; they all did it – and left him behind to try and look after a great big house all on his own.

  Or he was married, and yet he had affairs with people, people like me, vulnerable women he’d come across in his day job. Victims. He picked ones he fancied and got them to sleep with him.

  I wasn’t a victim, though, was I? Not yet, anyway.

  For some reason, my next thought was of Ben. He could have phoned me, at least to say thanks for the party. None of them had. None of them had any idea about the nightmare that had followed their departure. They’d all fucked off to the pub and thence God knows where, back to London in the end, without so much as a thank-you-goodbye. Shits, they were, all of them. Especially Lucy. I remembered what she’d said to Malcolm, the tone of her voice when Malcolm told her she’d be jealous of my boat one day.

  ‘I don’t think so somehow.’

  I didn’t care what she thought about it, anyway. Her opinion had ceased to be valid for me a long time ago.

  Lucy was one of the people who’d had a real problem with me dancing.

  It had been Ben who’d told her, of course; she would never have known about it otherwise. I think it was his revenge for my ending our stupid pointless disaster of a relationship. Lucy and I were in the pub one Friday after work, drinking big glasses of chilled white wine and unpicking the nightmare of selling high-end software solutions to boardrooms full of men. We took a lot of shit for it. The blokes on our team were highly competitive, driven, occasionally downright nasty. Lucy got by because she was the daughter of the managing director, but she was bitter about all the testosterone she had to deal with. I wasn’t as bothered as her about the gender thing because I got by through working hard, which usually meant I hit my bonus targets. We had an alliance, of sorts, because Lucy needed someone to moan at. But beyond that we had little in common.

  ‘Ben told me where you were last night.’

  I drank my wine and looked at her. We’d been out with clients last night, and I’d disappeared early instead of staying on as we usually did and getting pathetically drunk. I’d told her I had a headache, but instead I’d gone to the Barclay.

  ‘You’re a stripper,’ she said.

  ‘I’m a dancer.’

  ‘You take your clothes off for money.’

  ‘Good money.’

  There was a flicker, I saw it – a moment where I’d almost justified it to her. She knew about money and the pursuit of it. She was about to ask the question: How much money? But then the moment passed.

  ‘It’s exploitation,’ she said. ‘You know how hard we bloody work, twice as hard as some of them, and we still don’t get the same recognition.’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with working in the club. I’m there because I want to be there,’ I said. ‘And if anyone’s being exploited, it certainly isn’t me. Men come in and spend all their money watching me do something I enjoy. It feels great, to be honest.’

  Just at that moment three of the guys on the sales team had come over and joined us and the conversation turned to the normal topic of who had the biggest car, the biggest sales deal, the biggest set of balls. Lucy had never mentioned it again, not until last night at the party. Despite her supposedly feminist convictions, I couldn’t shake the notion that, actually, she was a little bit jealous.

  Apart from Lucy and Ben, most of my friends hadn’t known what I did every Friday and Saturday night and sometimes Thursdays and Sundays too. I didn’t need to be at the club until eleven, so I carried on with my normal social activity and when they went off to clubs, or back home to bed, I went to the Barclay and earned myself a fortune.

  It had crossed my mind to tell them, more than once. If any of them had asked me a direct question, I wouldn’t have lied. But none of them seemed bothered; when I said I was going somewhere else, they just said things like, ‘Okay, cool,’ and waved me goodbye as they disappeared off to some club or other, or back to someone’s house, or off to another party.

  I was lying awake, in bed. The skylight was a square of black that was somehow lighter than the black in the rest of the room. When I closed my eyes, I could still see it. It was like the opening, the entrance to a tomb.

  I was physically tired, but my mind was spinning. Malcolm was right: I was scared. During the day it was easy to pretend this wasn’t really happening, easy to believe that maybe the body hadn’t been Caddy after all. I’d only caught a glimpse of her face, the dirty water of the Medway washing over it, a flash of white in the beam of my torch. It could so easily have been someone else: a body from upstream after all, a suicide, a missing person.

  At night, things were very different.

  From the first day in the marina, I’d never really felt alone. Even after dark you heard noises from the other boats, the faint voices from someone’s television, shouts from Diane and Steve’s two children, traffic on the motorway, the rattle of the Eurostar or the Javelin rocketing along the high-speed rail link a mile or so away. The other liveaboards were never more than a shout away; I’d proved that last night, I tried to reassure myself. I’d screamed, and in under a minute at least five people had come out of their boats to see what was going on. And yet I couldn’t relax.

  A mobile phone was ringing.

  I sat up in bed, my whole body tensed and ale
rt. It sounded a long way off, as though it was coming from one of the other boats.

  I pushed back the duvet and opened the bedroom door. The noise of the ringing grew louder.

  In the saloon, it was louder still. It wasn’t my phone, which was charging on the dinette table – it was Dylan’s.

  Finally I found it, buried down the back of the sofa, where I’d thrown it when Carling came down into the cabin. It was still ringing. The name on the display: GARLAND.

  I had a surge of joy, overwhelming relief.

  ‘Hello?’

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  ‘Is that you?’ I said, my voice trembling.

  Still nothing. Someone breathing? I was certain someone was there. ‘Talk to me,’ I said, ‘please, say something. Please.’

  Nothing.

  I disconnected the call and threw the phone back on to the sofa, and cried. I waited a second to see if it would ring again, but it didn’t. There was nothing, just the silence of the boat and the sound of my own sobs.

  Even though he’d not said a single word, it felt like a goodbye. He knew about Caddy; he must have some idea of the spinning chaos of my life… why wasn’t he here? Why hadn’t he called to tell me what to do, to arrange to meet, even? He didn’t care about me at all, not really. Whatever it was we’d had, that one single night together that I had interpreted as magical, had been nothing to him, nothing.

  I went back to bed and buried my face in the pillow until the tears were gone.

  Hours later, still lying awake staring at the skylight, dry-eyed and too tired to move, I had worked my way all around the theory that he didn’t care about what happened to me and found myself in a different place entirely.

  He had called, after all. And he hadn’t, despite my miserable self-doubt, said goodbye. He’d said nothing at all. Why would he do that? With a rush of fear I wondered if he was in trouble. Had he tried to call, but been prevented somehow? Did he need help? And what could I do about it if he did?

  Ten

  I’d always prided myself on my ability to adapt to any changes to my working environment, but dancing at the Barclay was a steep learning curve.

  After my audition, I hunted through my wardrobe for something that I thought might be appropriately dramatic and sexy. Eventually I settled on the dark blue velvet dress I’d worn at the last conference dinner. A few tops and skirts that I wore out clubbing with my friends. And lingerie. Black lace with a pink ribbon trim.

  I had no idea if that was okay.

  I wasn’t even nervous when I went back. The club was already filling with people, the music at a level loud enough so the girls had to lean forward to chat to the guys in the bar but not so loud that they couldn’t hear someone calling them over.

  I found Helena behind the bar. She was a small woman in her forties, with an expression which said ‘don’t give me any shit’. She never looked happy in the time I worked there; even when she laughed she looked pissed off. She had dark hair piled on her head, which gave her an extra few inches, and sharp heels.

  ‘You worked before?’ she said, writing my name on a list behind the bar.

  ‘No,’ I said. I didn’t think she was referring to work in general.

  ‘Did they tell you the rules?’

  ‘I guess so. No fraternising, that sort of thing?’

  She smiled at me, or maybe it was a grimace. ‘“No fraternising.” I like that. If you’re any good and they want you back, you have to be here ready and out in the club by eleven. If you’re late you get fined.’

  The dressing room was still crowded even though a lot of the girls were already out in the club. I found a tatty bar stool and dumped my shoulder bag next to it, changing out of my jeans and into my dress while the girls around me ignored me completely. They were all talking at once, laughing, shouting, and the room was a confusing mess of fabrics and make-up and clouds of competing perfume.

  ‘Mind if I sit here?’ I asked, pulling my bar stool up to the edge of a mirror. A blonde girl was finishing off her look with lip-gloss.

  ‘Whatever,’ she said, ‘I’m done.’

  I had the mirror to myself. Within a few minutes the room had emptied of everyone except me and another girl. She was shorter than me, even wearing improbably stacked heels; she had long brown hair, big baby blue eyes.

  ‘You new?’ she said.

  I nodded. ‘Is it obvious?’

  ‘Only that you’re not out there yet. You’re wasting money.’

  ‘I’m not on until later.’

  She laughed. ‘Christ, you are new, aren’t you? Just ’cause you’re not on stage doesn’t mean you’re not working. You should be out there hustling.’

  I looked at her blankly.

  ‘You go out and chat to people, get them to buy you drinks, do a few dances, try and get them in the VIP area.’ She took pity on me. I must have looked scared, or lost, or maybe just dumb. ‘Want me to show you?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘but if any of my regulars come in you’re on your own, right?’

  ‘Thanks. What’s your name?’

  ‘My club name is Kitten,’ she said, ‘But back here you can call me Caddy.’

  ‘Caddy? Like in The Sound and the Fury?’

  She looked at me, glossed lips in a perfect O. I thought she was going to ask me what the fuck I was talking about, but it turned out we’d underestimated each other. ‘You read it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ve never met anyone else who’s ever read that book. What’s your name?’

  ‘Genevieve. I think they’re calling me Viva.’

  ‘Viva. Isn’t that a type of old car? My dad had one.’

  We both laughed, and it was the birth of a friendship – Viva and Kitten. The other girls in the club came and went; the Russians and the Polish girls stuck together, hustled in and out of the club, bent the rules in every way they could. Other girls formed cliques and went out with each other on their nights off; but I never got close to them, not the way I did with Caddy.

  On that first night she took me out into the club and we strolled around saying hello to people, stopping for brief chats. I watched and learned, feeling a bit like the new girl at school.

  ‘Mind if we sit with you for a bit? … Special occasion, is it, lads? … Ah! Congratulations! Are you going to come and have a dance with me? … Yes – this is Viva – she’s new. I know! … Don’t worry, I know you’ll look after us, won’t you? … Ah, I’ll have to leave you to it, then – I’ll get told off if I sit here too long… well, let’s go to the VIP area, then you can have my undivided attention for as long as you like… You guys need to be doing shots, especially if it’s his birthday…’

  I felt a bit nauseous, thinking that within the next couple of hours I was going to be taking all my clothes off in front of a room full of complete strangers. It felt surreal, and watching the other girls take their turns on the pole made it somehow worse. I kept one eye on the stage as Caddy and I sat and chatted with the various groups, trying to get some idea of how it all worked. Someone announced the girl on to the stage in a barely intelligible voice that reminded me of fairgrounds. There would be a ripple of applause, maybe, just audible above the music. She would dance for two tracks, the first with clothes on, then stripping off in the second. The first girl was good, plenty of turns and spins, inverting in her second dance. She got a good cheer when she came off the stage, a little crowd forming around the pole. The second one, by contrast, was rubbish – just a lot of walking around the pole, a few dips and turns, a half-hearted spin and then she was done.

  That was something of a comfort. Even I could do better than that.

  As it turned out, I had to do my first lap dance before I even went on the pole. Thankfully I had the chance to watch Caddy doing one first, and, although mine was a clumsy effort, the young lad I was entertaining was already so drunk he was barely conscious.

  ‘It’ll get easier,?
?? Caddy said to me as we walked back to the club to look for our next targets. ‘The trick is going for the ones who are pissed but not so pissed they’ve forgotten what they’re doing here. It’s a fine line.’

  After that, it was my turn for the pole. My heart was pounding as I stood off the stage waiting for my name to be called. It’s just a job, I thought. You can do this. You can nail it.

  ‘Give her a big cheer, it’s her first night – it’s Viva!’

  For the first minute or so, nobody was particularly paying attention. I started off with some easy climbs and spins, but that wasn’t much fun. Carousel spin into back hook – that got some attention. And then a quick invert, splits at the top. Stripping off my clothes while dancing around the pole wasn’t as easy as I’d thought it was going to be – but it didn’t seem to matter. By this time the gathering around the stage had grown and I was getting some half-hearted applause. This made me braver. Spin to the floor, little peek-a-boo, knees together, bum out. End of song. I grabbed my clothes and my shoes and skittered off the stage.

  Caddy met me as I was coming out of the dressing room a few moments later. ‘Come and meet Nigel and Tom,’ she said. ‘They loved your dance, they’ve been asking after you.’

  I was breathless and perspiring a little, full of adrenaline. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. I’d done it, and it hadn’t been so bad really – actually, it had been fun. I’d caught glimpses of faces in the crowd, watching me – they liked me, and I’d only just started.

  Hours later, so tired I could barely think straight, I was next to Caddy in the dressing room as she peeled the fake lashes off her eyelids. ‘You did really well,’ she said, ‘for a first night.’

  ‘Thanks. I wouldn’t have had a clue if it hadn’t been for you, though.’

  ‘No biggie. Want some more advice?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Get yourself a decent tan,’ she said, waving a make-up-caked wipe in my direction. ‘You’re bloody dazzling them under the lights.’