by Will Wiles
Michael’s eyes were wide. He looked gleeful, which irked me. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘Oskar will not like that.’
‘Maybe he won’t notice it,’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ Michael said. He did not look at all convinced by this.
‘The cleaner saw it,’ I said, adding: ‘I think.’
‘She will tell him,’ Michael said, definitely. ‘She will want to make sure that he is not angry with her. They are like that. In communism, these caretakers were big informers. They knew things. They would go to the police if they did not like your face, and then pfft! That was the end of you. They get a flat with their job, but they are paid almost nothing and they could get money from bribes and rewards...’
He trailed off, his eyes fixed on a point beyond the brick vault, deep in the ground. ‘Sometimes I think they miss the old times.’ Then, with a barely perceptible frisson, he roused himself, and refilled our glasses.
Later – after the third bottle had been finished, I think – we were back on the street. It was not raining, but it had clearly been pouring while we had been in the bar, and the streetlights swam in filled gutters. Most windows were dark. Grand buildings slept. I did not know what time it was, but certainly past midnight. We moved at speed, on foot – it felt as if we were heading deeper into the city, and further from Oskar’s flat – and Michael was singing, but not loudly. The traffic had practically disappeared, but for the occasional hurtling car slashing, then shushing, through the wet, red tail-lights converging. There were no trams that I saw, but small soaked groups in raincoats huddled in pools of white light at each stop, untalking sentinels at strategic spots. As soon as we came out of the bar, I stepped on a loose paving stone where water had pooled underneath. It splashed explosively, a liquid landmine, and filled my right shoe with cold muddy water. Normally this kind of mishap would have crippled my mood, but instead I felt indomitably happy. I had broken through, I had second wind. Oskar was a good guy, he wouldn’t care about the floor, everything was going to be fine. There had been, however, something sickening in the tilt of the slab, the momentary loss of balance, the sudden wetness...
Michael broke off singing and turned to me, squelching along in his wake.
‘Oskar does not come dancing any more,’ he said. ‘Not since he got married. Only once or twice since he got married.’
‘Well, it doesn’t seem his sort of thing.’ Walking and talking at the same time was an act almost beyond my remaining powers of coordination. Wine swirled acidly behind my words.
‘He was not as keen as some of the others, maybe.’
‘I think it’s mostly for young people,’ I said. Younger than us, for instance, I thought.
‘Really? No, there are all ages of guys.’
We stopped at a black doorway with a neon sign above it and a heavy-set man in a black leather jacket outside it, arms crossed and feet firmly apart. STAR’S said the neon, and a loud, repetitive bassline thudded behind it. Michael nodded to the bouncer and pushed through the door. Inside, a dimly lit flight of bare concrete steps led downwards. The air smelled as damp inside as out.
‘Underground again,’ I muttered.
‘What?’ said Michael.
‘Never mind.’
Footsteps ringing, we reached a narrow corridor space, curiously empty, red-lit, vascular. A woman far into middle age, but bare-shouldered and peroxide blonde, staffed a little ticket and cloakroom counter in a doorway halfway along the space. For our cash, we handed over our jackets and received four tickets each – admission, cloakroom, free drink and free dance. I looked at the last one, vaguely aware of a missed connection somewhere at the back of my mind.
‘I don’t think I’ll dance,’ I said. ‘My foot is wet...’ The blood in my ears and pooled under my eyes throbbed with the music.
‘You don’t have to do anything,’ Michael said. The red light gave his grin a terrible aspect. His eyes were lost in shadow. ‘You just sit there and watch.’
My brain felt thick with scabs, old and new. It was full of wine, it rotated, looked close to spilling. Michael pushed through the bead curtain at the end of the hall and disappeared around a corner. I followed.
We emerged into a surprisingly large square space. Semi-circular booths lined three of the walls, and small tables filled the floor, each with one or two spindly chairs. At first it was hard to tell if the club was brightly lit or swamped in scarlet gloom. In fact, it was both, mostly murky, with a dazzling spotlit island at its centre. Under the spotlight was a stage, on the stage was a pole, and on the pole was a girl. On the girl was very little. She had the bored, focused expression of a forklift truck driver. Her body writhed and entangled itself with the pole in a way that was simultaneously animal and mechanical.
Oh, dancing, I thought.
Michael looked intensely pleased with himself. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We have a booth.’
There were other girls around the club, carrying trays or in the booths, some gyrating, some kissing men, some just sitting with men. There were not many men, most of the tables and more than half of the booths were empty. Dancers outnumbered clients. Almost all these clients were on their own, but there were a couple of groups, one noisy and suited, the other noisier and in jeans and T-shirts. This might be a British stag-do, I speculated. I hadn’t seen any compatriots since the airport. The air smelled of 40% air freshener, 40% cigarette smoke, 10% stale beer, 5% sweat and 5% genuine evil.
We slid into the curved crimson leatherette-covered banquette of our booth, behind a circular table that had a black and red yin-yang symbol laminated onto it.
‘I don’t know about this, Michael,’ I said. In my imagination, cancer cells encircled dying flesh. A clot formed. Wine drying, leaving a dark tidal mark. Sitting down made me dizzy. My muscles all felt incorrectly briefed, as if I had lifted a box that I expected to be very heavy and found it, with a lurch, to be empty. I felt powerless over events.
‘What, what?’ Michael said, emollient. ‘Relax, relax, we’ll have a good time.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said again. The kissing bothered me. A lot of things bothered me, but the kissing was at that moment top of the list. ‘Isn’t there normally some kind of no-touching rule?’
‘No, no,’ Michael said, putting his hand on my shoulder. ‘If you want to touch, you just pay for it. We’ll have some champagne.’
Another platoon of concerns and objections marched into view. Rip-offs, clip joints, £200 glasses of orange juice, knuckle dusters. But a girl, wearing nothing save a red satin bustier and hotpants, teetering on a pair of clear plastic high-heels, had arrived at our table, and Michael was placing an order. In fact, he appeared to be doing more than that. He was chatting.
‘Do they know you here?’ I asked when the girl wiggled off.
‘Yeah, sure,’ Michael said. ‘We often come here. Some of us, from the orchestra.’
‘Oskar, too?’ I said. It was nearly impossible to mentally place him here.
‘Sure,’ Michael said, ‘but not so much since he was married. As I said.’
‘OK,’ I said. My head spun.
Another girl appeared, wearing even less, just a pink two-piece swimming costume and the ubiquitous heels, and carrying a bottle of champagne and four glasses. Her breasts swung forward as she bent over to put these things on the table, exhibited themselves, full and heavy. I found myself looking, and averted my eyes. Then I looked again. I felt composed of 5% sweat, 5% genuine evil. I thought of water balloons. Then I thought they were filled with blood. I wondered if I still had any blood in me, and realised that part of me was filling with it.
‘It’s OK to look, yes,’ Michael said in a voice thick with encouragement. I had been staring, and he had caught me. He nudged me, a salacious caricature.
‘This really isn’t my thing,’ I said. The words came slowly. My brain, I felt, was losing some sort of struggle, fatally undermined by drink, betrayed by my own instincts, devoid of reliable allies. I didn’t know what the resul
ts might be if I just let it lose. I didn’t want to become some sort of leering beast, but I also feared being a PC-hobbled wet.
‘I know, you look like shit!’ Michael bawled with laughter. ‘Like a little mouse! It’s OK, it’s OK.’ He squeezed my shoulder. I wanted a no-touching rule.
The swimsuit-clad ‘waitress’ opened the bottle with a squeak and a giggle as the cork blew and the foam ran over her knuckles. It would be chilled, at least, I thought, and the bubbles would be refreshing. I took my glass. It was not very cold. I think I must have flinched or grimaced, because I found the waitress frowning at me in a pouty, comic way. She said something I didn’t understand. Her breasts were magnificent.
‘She is worried that you are not having a good time,’ Michael said.
‘She is very perceptive,’ I said. ‘Do you think I could have a glass of water?’
‘We have champagne!’ Michael exclaimed, as if there was a chance I hadn’t noticed. He said something to the waitress, who departed. Almost immediately, two other girls appeared, one blonde and ample, in a red bikini top and hotpants, and the other with short dark hair, elfin looks, wearing a gold boob tube and short shorts. The blonde squeezed in next to Michael without waiting for an invitation. The elf hovered on my side of the banquette, clearly attempting to seem both appealing and sexily aloof at the same time, a titanic contradiction that she embodied like a plucked guitar string turned into a transparent blur by its rapid oscillation between two limits. The part I was expected to play was obvious. I ushered her in, trying to look friendly and genuine without looking like a sex case. I do not think I managed this balance, and I comforted myself with the awful thought that she had met far worse men than me.
The blonde had curled an arm around Michael’s shoulders and was stroking his hair. ‘If you don’t like this girl, we can get another,’ he said.
‘Would you like a blonde?’ Michael’s girl asked. ‘We can be matching? A black girl? A Japanese?’
‘What’s her name?’ I asked Michael. ‘Does she speak English?’
Michael – whose girl was now kissing his ear, wetly, in a way that I could not imagine was pleasant for either of them – said something to the elf, who said something that sounded like ‘Connie’ to me, tapping her chest between her small, apple-like breasts.
‘Connie?’ I replied. ‘Your name is Connie?’
‘Yes,’ she said. Yis. ‘English?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I speak English,’ she said, with extreme care. I felt reassured that we could at least talk, before I realised that there was nothing I could imagine talking about.
‘Perhaps Connie would like a drink,’ Michael prompted. ‘We buy champagne for the girls and watch the dancing, have some fun. Have some beers too, or Scotch. The champagne is very weak, so the girls don’t get drunk.’
I poured a glass of the sparkling liquid for Connie, conscious that it could be horribly expensive. She put her hand on my knee, and gave me a smile. We clinked our glasses together awkwardly, and drank. The bubbles scoured my throat. I felt like chewed gum. Connie caressed my chest, which I was certain had all the tone and masculinity of a clammy rubber bathmat. Then, Michael said something to her.
‘Ticket,’ she said to me. Sluggishly, I took out the four chits I had been given, which were now folded up with various other bits of ephemera – banknotes, the stub of the concert ticket, a tram timetable. Connie separated out two of these scraps, entitling me to a free drink and a free dance, and disappeared with them.
‘Relax, relax!’ Michael urged. ‘You’ll get your dance. Just have a good time. We’ll have a drink.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I felt anything but relaxed. I was trying to add up how much money had been spent and how much was left, a process like trying to fold a soggy newspaper in a high wind. My heart was running like a wind-up tin toy. I was sweating, and I was certain that I did not smell too fresh. I couldn’t stand the thought of attractive female strangers being under financial obligation to throw themselves at me if I wasn’t entirely clean. Prickly heat and fever cold pushed and shoved inside me, and wine swirled, alternated orangey blood red and Guinness black, oily rainbows on its stagnant surface. I wondered if I was going to be sick, the question one of distant relevance, an essay title in an academic journal.
‘How do we pay?’ I asked. I didn’t want to ask about the economics of the whole business. To ask was to remember that economics was all there was to this. It was nothing to do with love, or chemistry, or actual attraction, and little to do with actual sex. This was all a profit margin. We were titillating ourselves on the intersection of two earnings curves on a graph.
Connie returned with yet another girl, an amber blonde with a ferocious straight fringe over her eyes, which made her hair look like a helmet. Her eye make-up was heavy, giving her a sluttish scowl. She was wearing a pale blue top and a micro miniskirt, both in PVC or latex. Connie sat down again next to me, setting a bottle of beer in front of me, and Amber started up a sedate routine of sexual display. She was not a natural blonde.
A spike of nausea and testosterone-laced blood ran straight through me. I marvelled at the male body’s ability to feel disgust and desire in equal measure and its pulsing tempo of shame and shamelessness. A sexual guidance computer was competing with me for sovereignty over my inner controls. I thought of slabs of meat in cold basements. I thought of trafficking and sexual slavery, a mental coup de grâce that crashed the guidance computer, forced it to reboot, and detumesced its peripheral. Girls were shipped out of countries like this for lives of unimaginable servitude and horror in the West. I had redrafted local authority policy statements about it. So where did that leave these girls? Were these women lucky, or unlucky? Where did we all stand on the scale, in the cosmology of human suffering? What was their level of consent?
The tide of alcohol was coming back in, dissolving these arguments, mushing them into short-circuiting feedback loops, eating away at ethics, at second thoughts, at broader contexts, at tomorrows and consequences. Amber bumped and ground, and the drink revealed a simple formula on the smeared palimpsest of my mind: seek pleasure. Connie slipped a hand between my legs and I suddenly felt self-conscious, embarrassed even, of my recent reverse down there, as if I had failed to leave a tip. And with that, its presence returned. I swigged my beer.
‘Not bad!’ Michael said loudly as Amber’s devotions drew to an end. It could have been either a statement or a question.
‘Great,’ I said, not very enthusiastically, tipping five euros. Connie leaned into me, and was now rubbing between my legs. She licked her lips. She smelled of a recent shower. She clutched the hair at the back of my neck with her free hand. I was caught in a dilemma, not wanting to appear either interested or uninterested. With some difficulty, considering my entanglement, I took another deep draught of the not very cold beer. As soon as the neck of the bottle was out of my mouth, however, Connie moved in. Her lips clamped around mine, her hot tongue pushed in. I tasted beer, champagne, wine, smoke, metal, blood. My hand went to her waist, thin and fragile, and up to her breast. I was repatriated to a tyranny of desire. Stale fireworks blew in my head, and yeast stirred in my belly.
I disengaged. Connie was beautiful, and her lips sparkled with moisture in the complicated red light. She was so beautiful, and if this whole process was disgusting her, she was doing an excellent job of concealing it. I wanted to feel free. I wanted to feel an open spectrum of possibility. But instead, I felt bound by many threads, each tied to an action in the past and a result in the future. The beer was not helping me as I thought it had been – it had been lying to me. I thought of fermentation, of yeast, of gases, of microbial processes. The wine churned, and came close to spilling. Many of the threads pulled at once.
‘Oh, God,’ I said softly. ‘Michael, I think I have to go...’
Tiredness and the urge to vomit crashed through me. My bowels liquesced. ‘Love me, love me, say that you love me,’ the music implored cloyi
ngly.
‘Oh, God,’ I said again. I stood up, and pushed out of the booth, past Connie. ‘I’m so sorry. I have to go. I’ve had a really good time. I’m very drunk. Tired, and I’m very tired.’ I didn’t want to talk. Talking, bringing forth things from within, felt risky. I fumbled through the scraps of paper I had dropped on the table and left some money there, more than enough. Then I turned and left at speed.
The entrance corridor smelled of bleach and water. It smelled of Oskar’s bathroom. I wanted to be in that bathroom right away. I collected my jacket in a frenzy of impatience, and turned to see where the teasing sound of running water was coming from.
A stream was cascading down the concrete steps and into the club, where it flowed into a grate. The steps were a running gutter. The corridor was a sort of storm drain. And it was a storm up above – a biblical downpour, one that threatened to float away flagstones and snuff out streetlights. I was instantly drenched to the skin, and I did not care. I needed to get back to Oskar’s flat, urgently, a priority that cancelled all other considerations. The threads tugged and pulled; many of them appeared to be anchored to my stomach.
I jogged and stumbled through the streets, guided by instinct, soaked thoroughly, skidding and tripping over the sliding paving slabs. Then, my legs felt washed away from under me, and I staggered against a rough wall. A terrible battle was lost inside, and I belched awfully, then doubled over and retched. A red liquid stream splashed out and spread into the puddles. Then it happened again, hot and acid. And again. I was propping myself against an abrasive surface, surrounded by water, feet almost submerged to the ankles. I felt the sandy roughness of the wall with the same hand that had, a short time previously, been warm and dry on Connie’s waist and breast. Water was in my shoes and ears. Was it a short time previously, or hours? Another retch, I hoped the last. I was lashed to a rack of exhaustion, but the struggle was over, the threads now pulling me to bed, not pulling open my innards.