She ignored the Israeli salesmen aggressively pitching their wares to any tourist lingering long enough outside and walked through the side entrance into the building.
“My friend Lisa sent me,” Katherine says.
The little guy smoking an evil-smelling cigar lounges back in his chair and looks her over. At the front of his cluttered desk is a board with his name:
“Your top,” he indicates.
Katherine pulls the white tee-shirt over her head, her breasts fall free, she hasn’t been wearing a bra. She’s never really needed to wear one.
The response is predictable.
“Not much up there, hey?” the older man says.
“I know I’m not very voluptuous, but…” she begins to say.
“I like your accent, though. Limey, hmm?” He smiles. A mask of kindness almost invades his lined features. “Tell you what, you look a bit Irish to me. Pull your hair back, all those curls, there’s too many of them.”
She follows his instructions and bunches her myriad curls together and pulls the thick clump back to reveal her forehead. She doesn’t like herself like this, her forehead is too large.
“Interesting,” says Bloom. “You’re not really that beautiful, but you’ve got something, you know. You’re different; I think the guys might well like you. Pity about the tits, though. Turn round and give me a looksie.”
She does.
“No need to take it all off, just pull the skirt up. Let me see your butt. Yeah, thought so, great legs, honey, ass is a bit big, very white, not seen much tanning. Definitely, they’ll like you.”
He explains the terms of employment.
“How much money you make is up to you. The better you are, the more they like you, the more tips you’ll get. It’s all tips. We don’t pay any insurance, so you look after yourself. You supply your costume, or lack of costume should I say…” he sniggers.
“No funny business inside the theatre. What you arrange outside is your own business, and I don’t want to know anything about it. Understood?”
“Yes, I understand,” Katherine says. “When can I start? I really need some money. Bills to pay, you know.”
“First shift starts tomorrow at two, honey. I might actually come and have a look myself, you’re different, should be interesting. Sometimes I regret I’m no longer a young man. Maybe your bump and grind routine will be more intelligent than the other gals. Show some imagination.”
Of course, Katherine thinks, I have a degree in English from Cambridge, what do you expect?
And thinks one brief moment of her erstwhile lover, who made such a song and melodramatic fuss after she had rejected him of the fact he had never seen her dance. Well now, honey, you’d have to pay, she says under her breath.
The other girls explain how to string the whole thing together. Katherine has bought herself a spectacular bikini, spandex or something like it, shiny, leather-like, and another dancer, a girl with a pronounced Tennessee drawl lends her a feather boa and some silk scarves and shows her how best to drape them around her body. In the cramped dressing-room, she slaps on her best scarlet lipstick and loses one of her soft contact lenses, the last one from the old British prescription. The floor is filthy and she can’t find it again. She takes the other out. Things are blurry now. At least, she won’t see all the bloody men in the audience too close. A saving grace.
“Have you chosen your tunes?” another dancer asks Katherine.
“What tunes?”
“You know, kiddo, the music you want to dance to.”
Kiddo. The girl under all her flaky make-up is barely out of her teens. Worn before her years. Katherine will soon turn thirty. She reckons she might well be the oldest here. Never mind.
“I hadn’t thought of it, really. I’ll dance to anything they play.”
“Here, use this,” the girl says, handing her a CD. “It’s great, but the rhythm is not really me. You have it, you use it.”
Katherine peers at the label.
She waits in the wings, watches the first three girls do their numbers. She can’t believe it. They are lewd, provocative, dirty, wonderfully indecent. She can’t do any of this. Really, she can’t. What am I doing here? In Times Square, cesspool of the western world, where a few doors away a derelict cinema is still screening
“Go, blondie, go,” shout the other dancers as she reaches the centre of the proscenium. They sense it’s her first time and show solidarity.
But the music doesn’t start, and she stands there, paralysed, crucified under the dual assault of two glaring, hot spotlights, her medusa curls held aloft by the conditioning mousse, her shiny underwear glittering, her legs long and white, all the bruises from back in London now faded away. She wets her lips. Tries to see the audience and can only distinguish a few trouser legs emerging from the outlying darkness. Not even a dirty mac in sight.
A guitar chord and the song begins.
She swings her hips to the beat, pulls the green silk scarf draped over her shoulder across to her throat, caresses the material as it lingers there, a fragile noose of fabric, her knees bend to the rhythm, her bare feet drag slowly across the stage floor, she closes her eyes one moment, pulls with her free hand on the other scarf circling her wrist and waves it in the air where it floats slowly, suspended like a slow-motion kite during the festival at Blackheath, the scarf swims down and lands on the gentle rise of her breasts. She dances in one spot, her body circling the area in a steady motion, every breath in her soul singing parallel to the melodic waves of the rock and roll tune. Her fingers linger over the silk square now protecting her pale chest, she slides them down the narrow slope, from the brown mole at the onset of her cleavage to the tip of her left breast, where she rubs the still concealed aureola through the recalcitrant plastic-like thickness of the bikini bra. Katherine remembers the bump and grind tradition and, when the beat accelerates, with an artificial smile piercing her scarlet lips she pushes her bum out, and then her crotch. Dance, girl, dance. She takes hold of the silk scarf still draped over her chest, slips it between the thin strap and pulls it across the valley separating her two slight promontories, and out again, throws the piece of fabric in the air and allows it to drift down to the stage floor where she kicks it away just a few inches with her toe, as her hips keep gyrating mechanically to the music which seems to be growing louder and louder. She unclips the bra and loosens her breasts, soon to cover them chastely with the other silk piece until now adorning her throat like a thin choker. She feels her nipples growing erect under the thin gauze. Her body undulates steadily as she lowers both her hands and begins to gently massage her nipples through the fabric, like she saw the other women do before and when the chorus of the song jumps in, she pulls the silk piece away to reveal her front unencumbered. A few claps in the sparse crowd. She dances on, Salome of only two veils. She can feel sweat rising through the pores of her unveiled skin. A clammy feeling under her armpits where she had shaved only yesterday afternoon. Her upper lip, which she’d bleached at the same time, itches. The beat goes on. Come on, baby, give us more skin. She dances on, trying somehow to lose herself inside the relentless music. Bump and grind. Push your bum out; shove that crotch forward, show them how the mound of your cunt stretches the fabric of the bikini bottom. Bump. Grind. Push. Shove. The song ends. Another begins without a pause for breath or reflection. Every stage number is divided into three ritual parts, three songs or pieces of music. The new tune is an old big band blast. Brassy. She quickens the movement of her wavering shoulders and the geometrical patterns her arms are tracing in the glare of the harsh spotlights. She moves two steps forward, closer to the edge of the stage where small coloured bulbs imprint rectangular patterns of gaudy colours over the white skin of her legs. As her hands keep on caressing her breasts, she feels a tremor in the pit of her stomach. She recognizes
