Revenge of the Tide (16 page)

We sat in silence for a few moments, watching as a small motorboat chugged upstream. The woman sitting in the back of it was wearing a bikini top. Surely it wasn’t warm enough for that? I was starting to calm down a bit now. The breeze was fresh, blowing in gusts under the Medway bridge. The woman on the boat waved at us. Malcolm raised his bottle of beer in salute.

‘You worked at that club a long time?’ he asked then.

‘Six or seven months, altogether.’

‘You miss it?’

‘Sometimes. It was good fun.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘I got enough money for the boat.’

He looked at me and laughed. ‘That can’t be the only reason. Why not work there and do up a boat at the same time?’

He was right, of course. There was a moment when it had all started to go horribly wrong, when things began to unravel. They’d unravelled at the Barclay at just about the same time that my night job collided with the day job, and it had all started the night I recognised my boss in the crowd of customers at the Barclay.

M
y boss was called Ian Dunkerley, a well-built man with small man syndrome. His way of working was to make you look like an idiot in front of your colleagues, so that you were left not trusting your friends, and despising him.

He’d only taken over the line management for the sales team a few months before. At the time I was one of the top performers, but not
the
top, and that made me a target. Everyone who wasn’t actually top of the performance tables was a target. The idea, I suppose, was to encourage us all to be hungry for profit, or at least to make us want to be the favoured one who didn’t get picked on or abused, but in practice it pissed everyone off.

Of all the people to see at the Barclay.

I didn’t notice Dunkerley at first as I was concentrating on the moves, but during my usual moments when I was pausing in a particularly provocative pose, getting my breath back ready for the next gymnastic flip, I scanned the room as I always did looking for my regulars, new customers, people who looked reasonably well-oiled.

And there he was.

I was so shocked I nearly fell off the pole. I had to put in an extra spin which put me one beat off.

He was sitting in one of the VIP booths with a number of other men – quite casually dressed, I noticed; I was surprised they’d been let in – laughing and joking with a couple of the girls and fortunately paying no attention whatsoever to what was going on on stage.

When I’d finished the routine and run back to the dressing room, flushed, breathless, I contemplated crying off sick for the rest of the night. I’d not missed a single dance since Fitz took me on, but the thought of going out there and dancing in front of that odious man made me feel physically ill.

‘Are you alright?’ Kay asked me.

Kay was new to the Barclay, a pole dance specialist like me. She had been sent over from one of Fitz’s other clubs because she put on a ‘challenging’ show, mainly due to her outfits, which had more than a hint of S&M about them. Her dance name was Mistress Bliss, but since that was a bit of a mouthful we were allowed to call her Kay, as long as it wasn’t in earshot of any of the customers.

‘Yes. Thanks – I just… I thought I saw someone I know.’

‘What? A punter?’

‘Yes.’

She laughed. ‘I get that all the time. I saw my old maths teacher when I was working at the Diamond.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. There he was, Mr O’Brien, in the front row, drooling. It was hilarious. Who’ve you seen out there, then?’

I grimaced. ‘My boss.’

‘From the day job?’

Not all of us had day jobs. We never mentioned them here, in any case. I had no idea what the other girls I worked with did. ‘Yes.’

‘Ooh, shit. He doesn’t know about this, then?’

‘You must be kidding. What makes it worse is that he’s not even nice. He’s a complete, total arsewipe. What am I going to do, Kay?’

She patted me on the upper arm. ‘Do you dress like this at work? What’s the chances he’s going to recognise you? Lord knows Mr O’Brien didn’t recognise me. Hope not, anyway.’

‘I feel sick.’

‘Go home, then. Don’t ask Norland – go and see Helena. You’ll be alright.’

‘I’m not a quitter.’

‘Then you’re going to have to go out there and face him.’

It crossed my mind to ask one of the other girls for help, to distract Dunkerley for me. But, other than Kay, none of the girls on tonight were particularly friendly. Caddy wasn’t here to ask. There were a bunch of Eastern European girls who stuck together; they worked the room hard and concentrated on the lap dances, putting in a half-hearted show on the pole and then doing their best to hustle in the club. If I asked them for help, they’d be less likely to oblige by providing a distraction and more likely to use it as an opportunity to get one over me by deliberately pointing me out to him.

I sat miserably putting make-up on in the hope that it would work as a disguise, borrowing someone’s tongs to put a few loose curls into my normally straight hair. Kay was probably right. The chances of him recognising me, with my hair down, wearing these clothes, in the dark, in that context in fact… it was all a bit unlikely.

And yet, he was a sharp little fucker. I wouldn’t put anything past him.

My next dance was slower – Portishead’s ‘All Mine’. The lights in the club were low and I could almost hear the conversations going on around me as I danced. I loved this song, it was easy to block him out, to take myself off to a private space where I was alone and dancing for myself.

When I looked over to the table where he’d been sitting, near the end of the track, he was gone.

Malcolm went back to the
Scarisbrick Jean
after two beers. Josie had popped her head up and seen us sitting together, feet up on the gunwale, laughing about something. I waved at her but she’d already gone in.

‘Better go,’ he said, downing the last of his beer. He slid the empty bottle into the crate outside the wheelhouse and hopped down the gangplank. When he got to the deck of the
Jean
he waved. ‘Cheers, Gen,’ he said.

When I stood up, a little unsteadily, thinking that it was probably a bad idea to be drinking beer in the middle of the day, I caught sight of something down in the mud. I put both my hands on the gunwale and peered over the edge.

The mud was disturbed, churned up, around the boat. When I looked properly I realised there were footprints, deep holes with trails between them as though someone had pulled their feet from one step to another, stumbling, leaving a muddy wake with each step. To my left the trail ended in a mess of mud, debris and river weed.

The footprints led away from the boat to the grassy wasteland between the marina and the great concrete legs of the Medway bridge. I followed them with my eyes all the way to an old pontoon, half-submerged in the mud, that was made out of old pallets lashed together with bits of rope. There, more churned mud, and footprints on the wooden pallets leading up to the tussocky grass, the marshy land under the bridge.

Someone had walked from there, down to my boat. They must have struggled in the deep mud, and, judging by the mess, they had probably lost their balance once or twice and fallen over. There was no sign of anyone – nothing moved in the marina, no cars in the car park. In the bushes under the bridge, the only movement was the leaves and branches stirring in the breeze.

This morning I’d felt relief that the night had passed without incident. I’d chastised myself for being foolish, for expecting more horrors when I had no reason to expect any. But as it turned out, I’d been right – someone had been here. Someone who hadn’t wanted to be seen by anyone at the marina and so had approached my boat from the river, across the mud.

I leaned over a bit further, dizzy with the beer and with a sudden waft of stinking silt, until I could see that the footprints were right underneath the porthole. The porthole that looked in on my saloon.

I
didn’t see Dunkerley on Monday morning. He was out at meetings, and as usual it was a hectic day. By home time, I was starting to feel relief where previously I’d been feeling dread, panic. Lord knew he made my life hellish enough as it was. He didn’t need any additional weapon to fire at me.

Tuesday was our regular team meeting. Usually this was the time he picked on one of us, the one he perceived to be performing badly and needing a boost. We all dreaded it, every week.

But this Tuesday was different. He scanned the room to see if anyone was missing. I felt his eyes brush over me like an unwelcome grope on a crowded Underground train.

But there was no public humiliation, not for me or for anyone else. He was quiet, writing notes, his skin and bald head pink and shiny with perspiration. He asked for updates on workload, on profits. As soon as that was over he called the meeting to a close and scuttled off.

‘What the fuck? What’s happened to him?’ asked Alan.

We all celebrated our first gentle meeting since Dunkerley had arrived with a coffee and a prolonged discussion about what could possibly have come over him. I had a horrible feeling it might have been related to our encounter in the club, but I kept quiet.

Dunkerley avoided me at work after that, and I started to relax. Maybe he’d been embarrassed by it; maybe he was worried that I would tell everyone he’d been seen in a lap dancing club. I was almost able to enjoy work again, for the first time in ages, without that constant pressure.

Of course, it all changed the following weekend at the Barclay.

He was there early, not with his mates this time. He managed to bag himself a table right at the front of the main stage, and he was sitting there looking up with a kind of joyous anticipation, like a kid at his first pantomime.

I stared at his ugly mug, the door to the dressing rooms open just a crack.

Well, there was no doubt in my mind what he’d come to see, and I had no way of getting out of it.

He was there for all my dances. He only ever moved when I came off the stage. I did my best as I always did, but the force of his stare was off-putting. In my second dance I slipped and only just recovered in time. Even so, he laughed. The bastard laughed.

After that I got fire in me and the rest of my routine was powerful, and faultless. I would show him.

I was half-expecting him to ask for a dance with me, and it was no surprise when Helena came to see me in the dressing room when I still had at least two dances left.

‘There’s a customer for you,’ she said.

‘I thought there might be.’

‘Thing is, he said he wants a private pole dance with you for free. I told him that wasn’t an option. He said I should ask you. Someone you know, is it?’

‘Yes. The man’s a complete idiot.’

‘I take it you don’t want to dance for him, then?’

I gave her a look which said it all.

‘Is he giving you any shit?’

‘Yeah, he is a bit. He’s sitting at the front and he’s putting me off, to be honest with you.’

‘Right,’ she said, and marched out again.

When I went back out into the club, he had gone.

I asked Helena when I got a chance to talk to her. They’d taken him out. He wasn’t welcome, she said.

I could have kissed her.

I spent the afternoon keeping busy, anything to take my mind away from the churned-up mud under the porthole, but even so the thought of it kept returning. Whoever it was had been there at low tide, which meant first thing this morning. I’d been asleep in bed.

The cabin was still full of dust from the sanding I’d done earlier, so I spent a long time wiping everything down with a damp cloth. I kept glancing across to the porthole as I did it, as though I was expecting to see a face appearing there. In the end it got dark and then all I could see when I looked up was a blank, black circle.

When I’d finished wiping down the cabin, I rinsed out the cloth and left it out to dry. It was early, but I was exhausted. I got ready for bed and, as I drifted off into an uneasy sleep, the tide ebbed away once more and left behind it a clean, smooth surface to the mud outside the porthole, as if the footprints had never been there at all.

The week after he’d been chucked out of the Barclay, Ian Dunkerley avoided me. I thought that I’d escaped somehow, that maybe the heavies at the club ejecting him had put an end to it.

Of course, I was wrong.

It was one of the regular Friday night after-work drinking sessions that I’d participated in with rather less frequency since I’d been dancing; most of my team went, got smashed every Friday on expenses and then either staggered home to nurse their heads, or went off into town and got drunker and drunker at their own expense.

Dunkerley didn’t come along often; he’d told one of the supervisors that he felt it was important to allow the team to relax without him, it helped foster an atmosphere of independence. Bollocks to that. It was because he knew we all hated him and if any of us saw him away from company property there was a strong chance one of us would punch him, especially when lubricated by several bottles of wine.

This time, he was in the Highwayman with a large glass of red wine when I made it in there at nearly eight. I’d been working hard to set up appointments for the following week, something I liked to do on a Friday because then I could draw a line under the day job and concentrate on getting ready for the Barclay.

He was already a bit pissed, I noticed, his bald fat head shiny in the lights from the bar. Of course, what I should have done was to turn on my heels and leave again immediately, but I was tired and I’d been looking forward to my two glasses of wine for most of the afternoon.

‘Genevieve,’ he said, holding out his arm in an arc as though he expected me to snuggle into his sweaty armpit and embrace him.

‘Ian,’ I said in reply. ‘Special occasion?’

He tried to laugh but snorted instead, which made him look like a drunken idiot.

‘I was just thinking I’d have a few drinks with my team,’ he said in general, and then, in a hushed comedy whisper which was directed at me, ‘I might go on somewhere else, later. Anywhere you recommend?’

‘I recommend you go home,’ I said.

Dunkerley gave me a foul look; clearly, I’d made a mistake.

‘Sorry,’ I said, with a tight smile. ‘It’s been a hectic day.’

I got myself a glass of burgundy and took a big sip. One glass, I thought. One glass and I’d be on my way. I tried talking to some of the other guys on the team, but they kept looking over my shoulder at Dunkerley as though he might erupt at any moment.

‘He’s been acting really weird,’ Gavin said. ‘It’s like he’s disturbed, or something.’

I laughed at that, recognising that that was probably exactly what had happened to him. I still hadn’t told anyone about the Barclay. I wasn’t sure any of them would believe me if I did.

A few minutes later I finished my glass of wine. ‘I’m off,’ I said to Gavin.

‘What? You can’t go yet!’

I winked at him. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got a hot date,’ I said. Only something of that magnitude would satisfy him.

‘Really? Who is it?’

‘I’ll tell you all about it on Monday,’ I said, recognising that by the time Monday rolled around Gavin was likely to have consumed enough alcohol to have killed off all the brain cells that were currently engaged in our conversation.

I kissed him on the cheek and made for the door.

Dunkerley followed. I didn’t realise until I’d reached the Underground, and there he was, pressed against me from behind in the crush to get on the District Line. It was still the tail end of rush hour, I’d left the bar so early.

‘Where are you off to?’ he asked into my ear, breathing wine fumes and cheese-flavoured corn-based snack all over me.

‘Home,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you go back to the bar, Ian? They’ll be wondering where you’ve gone.’

I recognised that this was a dangerous situation, despite the crowds of people. I had to be pleasant to him, when all I wanted to do was throw him on the tracks.

‘Are you dancing tonight?’ he asked, as though to put to bed any lingering doubts I might have had over his recognising me.

‘Not tonight,’ I lied.

‘Shame,’ he said. ‘I was going to try again for another private dance.’

The woman standing next to us on the platform looked at me, and him, and then focused on the advertisement for coffee on the far wall.

‘I don’t think they’ll let you in, Ian.’

His voice rose, just slightly. ‘And who do I have to thank for that, eh? You sarcastic bitch.’

That did it. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said you’re a sarcastic bitch!’ His voice got louder and louder and by the last two words they were a full-on shout.

The other platform occupants were torn between staring or looking pointedly in the opposite direction. Of course, no one intervened. He could have put his hand up my skirt and not a single person would have said or done anything.

I felt a gust of wind heading towards us through the tunnel. I turned and started to walk away. As I thought he would, he followed. I had to push my way through the crowds who were surging forward to try and get on the train.

‘Where the fuck are you going?’ he shouted, over people’s heads.

I didn’t answer. I was going to get a cab home. He couldn’t follow me there, after all. I had a sudden vision of being crammed against him in the train, feeling his skinny little erection pressing into my backside.
I’d rather die,
I thought,
I really would.

Outside the station, though, there were no cabs anywhere. It had started raining, and everywhere I looked were people patently ignoring this wanker who was standing within my personal space, bleating something about my being a stuck-up bitch who needed to get a grip.

‘Leave me alone,’ I said. ‘Seriously, Ian, fuck off back to the pub. This is getting embarrassing.’

That didn’t work either; in fact it seemed to make him even more mad. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’re moonlighting. You could lose your job. I could sack you.’

‘Yeah, course you could. And how would you explain how you found out what I do in my spare time, huh?’

It threw him for a second, but he rallied. ‘I don’t need to explain myself. If anyone asks, I’ll say I got a tip-off.’

‘You can’t sack someone on hearsay. And in any case, you know what – I don’t give a fuck. You tell anyone about my job, and I’ll make your life hell, do you understand? Does your wife know where you were? Do you think she’d like to hear about it?’ I was getting angry and raising my voice, and of course now people were starting to take an interest. Fortunately for me, at that moment a cab came into view with its light still on, and I waved at it and stepped into the road to force it to stop. I got in and told the driver to go, fast, please just go… just as Dunkerley reached for the door handle and had it snatched away from him as we sped off.

I cried in the cab. I had been afraid of him, the wanker; if I’d been in a different place, with fewer people around, what would he have done? Would he have tried to be more physical with me? Would he have hurt me?

Would I have been able to fight him off, even if I was angry?

‘You alright, love?’ the cab driver asked me.

‘I’m okay,’ I sniffed. ‘Thanks.’

He drove me home and the cost of it, thirty quid, came out of my savings. Even though I had plenty of money by this stage, it was the principle of it, that that man had taken money out of my boat fund, that made me mad.

I sensed that wasn’t the final confrontation between us. Things would not get better, they would get worse from now on. He’d make every day at work a misery for me, until I left. I needed more money. I needed enough money to get out, and soon.

I woke up, with a start – my heart pounding – without really knowing why.

I sat up in bed and shrank back into the corner, away from the skylight, even though it was still dark overhead – grey clouds. Too early to be awake.

Something must have woken me up – what? I strained to listen, but there was nothing, except the gentle rise and fall of the boat, the noise of the water. I could distantly hear something else – a car maybe?

And then, a sound, directly overhead. On the roof of the cabin. I froze, listening hard, my heart thumping with panic. I thought of my mobile phone – both of them, mine and Dylan’s – on the table of the dinette. Fat lot of good they were there – what if I needed them? I would bring them both to bed with me tomorrow…

In the perfect rectangle of the skylight, framed against the grey sky, I saw the figure of a man.

I took in a sudden gasp of breath and pushed myself back even further into the corner. From here I could just see the dark shape outlined against the sky. I could see him moving as he tried to peer in. And then I heard something else, a voice – but not clear enough to make it out, and a footstep on the deck.

Seconds later and there was a figure in the doorway to the bedroom.

I tried to scream but it was too late. He saw me in the corner and lunged for me, grabbing my pillow and ramming it against my face. My head hit the wall behind the bed and for a second I saw stars. Then I started struggling and kicking, fighting as hard as I could.

‘Stop it,’ he hissed, ‘stop it, you stupid bitch.’

I kicked harder, and he put one hand across my throat until I couldn’t get any air. I really panicked then.

‘You going to stop struggling?’

I tried to speak but couldn’t get a word out with his hand over my throat, so I nodded, hoping he could see me in the darkness. Someone else came into the room.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘She was fucking right kicking off,’ said the first man in a low whisper. He took his hand away from my throat and I gasped and choked, pulling air into my lungs.

He pushed me over on to my front and between them they grabbed my wrists and fastened them with something, pulled it tight, the plastic biting into my skin.