The Woman He Loved Before (26 page)

She’s been dancing for a while, and is so sanguine with it. She isn’t as bitchy, and snidey and bitter like the rest. She’s got an incredible body with long, smooth bronzed muscles. She’s Amazonian in stature anyway, but in her heels and with her hair all teased and clipped back, she looks like a goddess. The men flock to her, almost as if they long to be crushed under the spikes of her heels, to be tamed by her. She seems so oblivious, immune to it. She doesn’t become someone else to go out there. She is Connie out there in front of the dribbling men, and she is Connie in here in the dressing room, and she is Connie outside of work. I am Honey in here, I am Honey in front of the men, I am Eve out of work.

‘What do you need money for, sweetie? If that’s not too personal a question,’ she asked, her head on one side, her dark, sultry eyes examining me. She kept her voice low so that no one around could hear.

I shrugged. ‘I just need it.’ Someone as immune to the effects of dancing as she was would not understand what I needed the dress for; how it would help me.

‘Not for a man, I hope?’

I shook my head. ‘Nothing like that. I’d never do this sort of thing for a man.’

‘Never say never,’ she said ruefully, wisely. ‘So you need to make more money? Well you can start doing private dances, you know, in the VIP rooms. Tell Adrian and the others that you’ll do them and they’ll start to push the men who’re into that to choose you for a dance.’

‘Do I do a normal dance in there? Just a bit longer, maybe do it naked?’ I asked.

Connie stared at me long and hard, as if asking herself if I was really that naïve. I’d never done VIP dancing before and I’d never been that curious about it. I usually made enough to pay the club fee and to cover my rent, food, bills, etc. I came, I did, I went. No need to get involved in the other stuff.

She sighed. ‘Honey, in the private rooms the rules that they pretend to stick to out front don’t really apply. You know out front we make them think that if we let them touch us it’s something we do just for them? In the back, they get to touch you. They get to wank off while watching you dance, they get to finger you, they get to touch your tits, they get to make you play with yourself, you have to wank them off if they ask for it, some girls suck them off and—’ She stopped talking, stared at me with dismay, obviously halted by the horror on my face. ‘I really don’t think private dancing is for you.’

‘But I need the money,’ I insisted.

Connie began to chew on her lower lip, smudging lipstick on her teeth – it was the first time I’d ever seen her unsure of herself. ‘OK, but you have got to toughen up. If you show any type of weakness in
there, they’ll eat you alive. I mean that literally. Some of the scum that come in here will force you to finish them off with your mouth if they think they can get away with it. One girl was raped in one of those rooms with the bouncers stood outside, because she was too scared to scream. Then the wankers who run the joint put pressure on her not to report it cos they could lose their licence. They slipped her a wad of cash then basically told her to fuck off. And the bastard who did it? He actually tried to come back a couple of times until all us girls refused to dance for him and the managers barred him.’ She shrugged. ‘Probably doing it somewhere else.’

I put my hand over my mouth. ‘Why do you still work here?’ I asked her, knowing I couldn’t work somewhere knowing a friend had been raped while I was there.

Connie’s rueful, wise smile returned to her lips and she turned again to the mirror, picked up her blusher brush and started on her cheeks. ‘I need the money.’

I spun on my chair to the mirror, too. Looked at myself. My hair backcombed to stand on end, my eyes heavily made up in black, brown and blue to stand out, artificial eyelashes, blood-red mouth, and glowing cheeks. Around my throat a gold, sparkly dog collar. I needed the money, too. I needed the money to be Eve again.

‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ Connie said, still applying her make-up. ‘I know you’re going to anyway, but I wish you wouldn’t do it. I remember the first time I saw you and I knew then you shouldn’t be here. You’re not meant for this type of place, Honey. You’re not hard enough. In years to come, you’ll look back and start to hate yourself for this.’

‘Is that what you do?’ I asked her.

‘I hated myself long before I came here. This place just gives me another reason to justify the hatred.’

‘I need the money,’ I said again to myself as much as to her.

‘Don’t we all?’

I need the money, I need the money, I need the money.
I kept repeating that to myself after my shift when I asked Adrian to let me do some private room stuff.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked, obviously surprised. In the time I’d been there I hadn’t shown any interest in anything other than doing my shifts, collecting my cash and going home.

I nodded.
I need the money, I need the money, I need the money.

‘The punters will love it: a bit of new flesh in the back. You’ll get a bigger cut, too. Just let them know what you will and won’t do before you get down to it. You’re going to love it,’ he said patting me on the bum. ‘The way men will be gagging for you, you’re going to love it.’

I need the money, I need the money, I need the money.

8
^th
December 1988

I did a private dance for the first time today.

He wasn’t repulsive or drunk. He wore a suit and he seemed pleasant enough. He also had on a wedding ring. For some reason, that upset me. I had to avoid looking at his hands.

I had to sit astride him naked, moving to the music, while he put his hand, the one with the shiny gold wedding ring on my lower back, the other hand he used to get himself off.

I’ve had three baths since I’ve come in but I can still feel his right hand rubbing against me as he moved it up and down, and I can still feel the gold band of his lifelong commitment and fidelity to someone else against the skin of my lower back, almost burning where it made contact.

I’ve put the notes from tonight’s wages into the virtually frosted-over icebox of the fridge because I can forget about them there. I cannot bear to think about them right now. In fact, right now, I’m going to have another bath.

19
^th
February 1989

I walked into the dress shop today with a bundle of money burning a hole in my pocket. I had earned every single one of those notes. A
‘new girl’ for the VIP room is, apparently, a very popular thing for the regulars and for those who often do it elsewhere. They think that it will be easy to get me to do ‘extras’ for very little, that I can be swayed to ‘go all the way’ for the price of a dance, or that they can convince me that they can be helpful and show me the ropes in return for a discount or a freebie.

‘You have got to toughen up,’ Connie had said and so that’s what I did. While at first I was a little nervous and found myself having to dig deep to go through with it, I found the thought of being ripped off by these men – especially the ones with shiny gold wedding bands – even more terrifying. The first time I danced for them, they always tried it on. ‘Desire does that for twenty quid less,’ they’d say. And at first I didn’t know what to say so I would tell them I couldn’t do it for that amount, but would allow them to bargain me down a little. Then I got wise. I’d say, ‘Oh baby, that’s such a shame, I was looking forward to dancing for you. But if you want Desire at her prices you wait here, I’ll get her for you.’ Their egos always had them paying me what I asked.

I never did anything purely sexual – no blowjobs, no handjobs, no sex – and in a way I was able to not feel as bad about that. I did charge a few of them the price of five dances to let them touch me down there for a few seconds at the end of a song, pretending that I liked it and that I wished it could continue for free after the last bars faded out.

It was so odd that they believed it. That they genuinely thought that I would look twice at them, let alone get naked with them, if I wasn’t being paid. A part of me did feel sorry for these men, wondering what their story was that made them so
deluded
that they thought I liked it. That I could possibly even consider fancying them when they had walked into a place to pay to be turned on. Most of the time I stopped myself from feeling. I let a man run his hands over my breasts before he began fiddling with the zip on his trousers to start finishing himself off while I gyrated in front of him but the wall I had been building up since I started in this job just thickened around me. I hated being a part of it, but always I kept the words, ‘I need the money’ in my mind. My feelings were walled off, my thoughts were focused.

I had earned every single penny of the notes in my pocket, all
stored up in the freezer so that I wouldn’t have to think about them. Now, that extra cash was about to be used, to buy what I had needed it for. It would seem ludicrous to anyone who didn’t understand – that I would do all that just to buy a dress – but I
needed
it. There was very little I had in my life that I needed – there was stuff I wanted, there was stuff all of us wanted, but I needed this dress to make myself feel … real, I suppose.

The world I lived in, the things I did, made me feel unreal. I was so often disgusted with myself and when I stopped being Honey, when I stopped pretending that I didn’t see anything wrong in what I did, I was confronted by the fear that I would disappear. Honey would take over, little by little, and soon I would walk out of the club and would not return to being Eve. I would walk away as Honey, Honey would return to my flat, Honey would take off her clothes, Honey would get in the bath, Honey would scrub herself clean, Honey would sit in a dressing gown with wet hair and smoke cigarettes while staring into space. Honey would eventually climb into bed and go to sleep. Then Honey would wake up in the morning and go about the day as Eve would.

Every day it got harder and harder to come back to who I was. It would take longer to stop being her and start being me. I needed this dress, this thing that Eve loved to look at. With the dress, with Aunt Mavis’s rosary, Uncle Henry’s kit bag, and the photo of my parents and me when I was two, I was collecting more and more things that meant something to me, to
Eve. Things
that meant I was real. I had things to ground me here, so I was less likely to disappear.

The discreet shop bell intoned as I pushed the door open. The bitchy woman who had made me cry looked up from the jumper she was folding on the counter, a smile ready for the valued customer who had stepped into her exclusive haven. She recognised me, it showed on the frowns of her face, but for some reason her lip did not curl into a sneer and her eyes did not narrow. Maybe she wanted to wait until I was right in front of her before she tried to take me apart. But she couldn’t now, could she? I had money, I was as good as her. No matter how much she did not want to, no matter how much
better than me she thought she was, she was going to have to sell me that dress.

I was trembling slightly, but the money in my pocket gave me courage to keep walking.

‘Yes?’ she asked when I stopped in front of her, the counter separating us.

‘I’d like to try on the dress in the window,’ I said. I sounded polite and confident.

‘Of course,’ she said.

I couldn’t help but draw back a little in surprise. I had expected to have to get the money out of my pocket, to show her that I wasn’t wasting her time and that she had no reason not to sell me the dress.

She finished her folding, then moved from around the counter and walked calmly towards the window. She stepped up onto the window display and unzipped the dress, pulling it carefully over the top of the headless mannequin. A burst of a song from the movie
Mannequin
exploded in my head, ‘Looking in your eyes, I see a paradise …’ I went to see that with Peter on one of our dates. I think it was before we did it for the first time. We sat holding hands in the front row, my heart almost bursting with what I thought was love. I think what love is changes over time, as you grow older, learn more, do more. I remember my love for him changed so much after we had sex. I felt like I was his, he could do no wrong and I could feel no pain. For the time we were together it felt like there was nothing that could hurt us or tear us apart. And then he was gone from my life.

With the quality of the material, the dress was quite heavy as I lifted it off the small wooden hook in the dressing room at the back of the boutique. I took my time to step into it, and then zipped it up under my arm almost reverentially. It was so soft against my skin, as if it was stroking me, hushing me wherever the material made contact, and once I was secured in, the waves of comfort that it brought were incredible. Tears came rushing to my eyes, and stung my throat. I felt like I was being hugged, being loved and swayed in someone’s gentle arms.

I braced myself for the saleswoman’s scorn and pulled aside the
curtain to step out to see the mirror. She had the phone receiver pressed to her ear and was looking towards the front of the shop as the saleswoman listened to what the person on the other end of the phone had to say. I crept out, my feet bare as I didn’t have the perfect shoes for this dress, and moved to the mirror.

My hand flew to my mouth and I had to physically hold back a cry as I saw myself properly for the first time. I did not look like the person I thought I was. I did not look like Honey. I did not look like anybody I had been since I had walked out of my mother’s house all those years ago. I looked like a grown up woman, someone who had learned the hard way to stand on her own two feet. But I also looked fragile and delicate and peaceful. The dress made me glow. This was probably how women felt when they got dressed on their wedding day. They felt like the prettiest woman in the world.