BABY FOR A PRICE

by Kathryn Thomas

  For a second, as Jack talks on and on, I think of Other Daisy, living her life in a mystical world wearing a suit and making intellectual decisions. Other Daisy would never consider being a stripper. Other Daisy is too busy using her mind to make her way in the world. But even if I like to think I’m not at all stupid—even if I’ve read a few books and can hold my own in conversation—society doesn’t care if I haven’t got a piece of paper to prove it. So Other Daisy can stay in her mystical realm and I’ll stay here, where the only way of me paying my way is my tits and ass.

  “And this is it!” Jack says, gesturing at the grimy sign. I notice that the paint on the door is chipped. From behind the door, the chatter of women sounds. “These are all new girls, too, so you’ll fit right in.” He leans close to me. His breath smells like old-people candy, the kind I remember an elderly relative eating in a different life, before Mom died and before Dad went off the rails with the gambling. Sitting at an old man’s feet and wondering what that off smell was. “Mind you,” he says, and I can’t stop looking at his receding hairline, “I don’t think I can say of them what I can say of you, Daisy: that you’re a dead cert and their certainly not!” He laughs at his own joke and then leaves me at the door.

  I sigh, think briefly again of Other Daisy, think briefly of Hound (part of me wishing he was here, part of me confused about where we stand), and then open the door. All kinds of women are huddled around the ceiling-high mirrors, adjusting their bras and panties, turning here and there, dabbing their faces with makeup. Most of them don’t talk to each other, but a few girls have come together and huddle close. I walk by the girls to a free space at the mirror, dropping my bag and starting to get undressed. Once you’ve been in enough changing rooms, getting undressed isn’t a big deal, even in front of what must be twenty or so girls. I’m in my bra and panties, touching up my makeup, when Sarah drops into the seat next to me. At first I think I must be seeing things, but then I catch a glimpse of her face, her features locked in place from the plastic surgery, and I know it’s her.

  I turn away, but it’s too late.

  “Daisy Dumpster!” she cries, giggling and sidling over to me, her chair screeching on the floor. “What a coincidence this is! What are you doing here?”

  “The same thing as you, I imagine.” I carry on with my makeup, telling myself that since she’s here as well, she can’t exactly start making fun of me.

  “I’m here because if God gave it to you, you should use it, you know? Look at these.” She doesn’t seem to see the irony when she massages her fake breasts, saying, “Yeah, God did me good.”

  Even though we’re not at the Shack, I’m wary of saying anything to Sarah that might cause offence. I know she’s not above carrying tales to Steve, tales and a shaking ass and a promise of a steamy night if he does what she wants, which might well be having me fired. So I just stay silent and dab at my face, though my makeup is done now; I’m layered in the stuff, my real face hidden far beneath the shield of foundation and blusher and mascara and eye-shadow. It feels thick, a protective seal over my skin. I think that will make the dancing easier.

  I feel my heartbeat speeding up as I sit here surrounded by the girls, staring at myself in the mirror and trying to work out who I am. I was never going to be the sort of girl who went to audition at a strip club. I was never going to be the sort of girl who took off her clothes for random men to look at, all for some cash. I was going to have principals. I was going to use my mind. I remember Mom, when I was a little kid, lifting me above her head and laughing when I said I thought I was flying. “You are flying,” she told me. “And you’ll always fly. You can do anything you want to, Daisy. Anything in the whole world.” Mom worked as an insurance agent in an office, but I never knew that at the time. At the time, all I knew was she’d leave the house in the morning in sleek black tights and shiny black heels and a buttoned-up white shirt, glasses perched on her nose. All I know is, I was jealous even then.

  An older woman walks into the room holding a clipboard. “Can we get Candy Spice, please?” A round of giggles sounds at that name; even for a stripper’s fake name, it’s silly. But I don’t laugh because all I can think is that I’m an idiot for not choosing a fake name.

  “I’m Dawn Spring,” Sarah says, pouting and applying thick red lipstick to her over-inflated lips. “Isn’t it clever? It makes you think of something, just, like, well, just sexy, right? What are you? Dumpster Dumpling?” She throws her head back and laughs raucously, ending it with a harsh coughing giggle. When she sees that I don’t laugh, she shakes her head. “You’re no fun. I’m only messing with you and you sit there like I’m some sort of monster. I mean, can’t you just take a joke, for once?”

  “What if I told you that your lips were—” I cut myself short. I can already see by watching her face that she isn’t going to take it as a joke. I can already see a plan formulating in her mind, a plan which involves snitching to Steve. “Never mind,” I say. “Don’t worry about it.”

  She nods matter-of-factly. “Well, that’s probably for the best. There are jokes, and then there’s just being mean.”

  I push my breasts up in the bra, arranging them, wondering if I’m even going to be able to dance. I request the new Taylor Swift song, which is fast-paced and sassy, hoping I can just bounce around enough so that nobody will notice that I haven’t danced properly in years, since I was a teenager, really. All these girls around me have probably spent countless wild nights at clubs, with all their girlfriends, dancing until their heels snapped or they stumbled drunkenly home or into the arms of a stranger, all while I was earning money so that Dad could go out and have the fun. I tell myself to stop being self-pitying, but by the time Alexis Crystal is called, the other girls returning to get changed, my foot is tapping against the leg of my chair frantically.

  “My mom was a stripper,” Sarah says, after a few minutes of blessed quiet (or as quiet as a chattering changing room can be). She waits for me to respond, but I don’t, so she just goes on anyway, “Yeah, she used to dance at a place called Nudes, just Nudes, and sometimes I would go and sit in the back and watch her and watch all the men staring at her. I was—maybe five, maybe four, maybe six. I’m not really sure. Isn’t that just hilarious?”

  “Hilarious,” I agree.

  “I didn’t know that people thought it was naughty until I got older. I didn’t know that people looked down on you, I mean, but I knew better. Mommy taught me right.” She pauses, and then adds, “She had C-cups, I think. Real.”

  “Okay.”

  “Miley Hot.”

  “That one isn’t very inventive,” I mutter, still annoyed at myself. When they call my name, it will be Daisy Dunham, and I know that all the girls in the room will know it’s my real name because it doesn’t sound ridiculous.

  One by one, the girls are called, ridiculous name after ridiculous name. I watch the door they return through, looking at the girls’ faced. Some of them have subtle smiles, some of them looked dazed and confused as though they only learnt onstage that they were supposed to take their clothes off. One girl, a beautiful Asian woman with dyed pink hair, sprints into the room crying, collects her things, and then runs back out again. I overhear her friend say: “She said she didn’t like the way they were looking at her ass.”

  Sarah scoffs. “That’s rich.”

  I have to agree. It’s like a lumberjack not liking the way a tree falls.

  Finally, the lady enters and shouts, “Daisy Dunham!”

  Sarah shoots me a wide-eyed look, but I ignore her and climb to my feet, walking on my heels across the room, heart in my throat. This is it, I reflect, as I walk toward the door. This is the moment when I stop being the girl who Mom held above her head, the girl for whom anything was possible. This is the moment where life has finally beaten me into shape.

  The walk to the stage is a dreamlike sequence of bright lights and narrow hallways, and then I’m standing backstage with the first few notes of “Look What You Mad
e Me Do” playing. When Taylor Swift starts singing, I feel myself become a different person. It’s like at the Shack, or at the café, but exaggerated; at least at the Shack I have my clothes on, skimpy as they are.

  I prance out onto the stage, head wagging, sassy and confident—or so I hope it seems to them—barely aware of what I’m doing. I can see Jack Michaels and a couple sitting below the stage, in a shadowed seat, his features hard to read. I can feel the air pricking my skin as I pump my ass, gyrate, shake my tits, and as I reach around for my bra strap I imagine I can see Mom’s face, staring at me, judging. Not judging me because of the stripping. If Mom was anything, it was a feminist who believed women should be able to behave how they want. No, but just staring at me waiting for me to come to my senses.

  I’ve almost unclipped my bra when the music comes to a screeching halt, Taylor Swift abruptly cut off mid-word. Jack Michaels is on his feet. “Sorry, sorry, Daisy,” he says. “We have a guest, a very special guest. Mac White, it’s good to see you.” Jack reaches out his hand and that’s when I see him, a man almost as towering as Hound but not quite. It’s difficult to see him in the dimness of the room, but I notice that two ginger-haired twins stand at his shoulders like guardian angels, and there seems to be something smeared on his forehead.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” Mac says, dropping into a seat and leaning back as the lady who led me to the stage brings him a whisky. “Please, go on.”

  “Mac is partial owner,” Jack explains to me, and then winces like he realizes he shouldn’t be explaining things like that to strippers. “But yes, let’s go on.”

  All this time, I’ve had my hand on the strap of my bra. When the music was playing, pumping through me the way music does, making it so that tearing off the bra was just another part of the dance, it was one thing, but this stopping and starting stuff is, somehow, grimier. So now what? I just take off my bra for this stranger, show this stranger my tits?

  I almost laugh. That’s the job, isn’t it? That’s what I’ll be facing every night if I impress in this audition. I start to hesitate as I walk back down the stage, getting ready to resume the dance, but then the ever-present voice of practicality speaks up: “But the money. What about the money?”

  They start the song from the beginning, which is good since it means I can try and get back into the rhythm again. But as I dance, I find myself wishing that Hound was here, a primal desire that comes to me in no more than a vague image of Hound’s shadow falling over me as he stands between me and these hungry-eyed men.

  But I push past it. I dance.

  Chapter Twelve

  Hound

  I’ve hated going into my apartment this past week. I’ve been damn busy with work, tooling up people for Mac, and every time I come back here, sometimes covered in blood, sometimes with the smell of gunpowder in my nostrils, I’m just reminded of the man I was trying to be. The carnage lies all around me, the pages and the laptop keys, all of it scattered everywhere. I just walk past it, go to bed, get up and leave, purposefully ignoring it all. Another man, another fucking man. What a joke.

  Today is the first time I’ve gone over all of it, collecting the torn pages of the books in a big black bag. Sometimes as I’m doing this I’ll come across a page with some highlighting on, maybe some notes, but it just seems stupid now. The only color I see is red, the red of bleeding death, the red of the pain I cause every time I go out on a job. The notes seem pathetic. All of it seems pathetic. People don’t change. Dad made me into a weapon. Mac honed me. And now I’m here, the man I’m meant to be. Might as well swallow all that shit.

  But the house…Daisy. I find I’m not prepared to swallow that, not yet. If my dreams of becoming cleverer are a joke, that doesn’t mean I can’t buy a house. Thugs can buy houses, too, can’t they? And it doesn’t mean I can’t obsess about the green-eyed moaning giggling angel.

  I’ve collected all the pages in the trash bag, tying it and leaving it at the front door, when my cell goes off. This past week, I’ve come to hate the sound of my cell going off, because it means that it’s going to be Mac, asking me to come by his bar so that he can tell me to go and hurt more people. He thinks I like it, I know. During our last conversation he said, “I’m sure this is the best week of your life.” And I just nodded, big dumb Hound. Nobody knows, except Daisy, that there might be more in here, and Daisy and I barely know each other at all. As I take my cell from my pocket, a thought hits me: a person I hardly know knows me better than anybody I’ve ever met. What does that say about my life?

  It isn’t Mac. It’s Martin Lopez, my online course tutor.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “Henry!” Martin shouts. It sounds like he’s outside. I know he lives in New York. Maybe he’s standing by the water. “I was just checking in that you’re okay. You know we had the practice paper about The Great Gatsby this week, right? Yesterday, in fact, and checking the system I see you haven’t submitted it.”

  As he speaks, I study my knuckles; there isn’t one which is unmarked, uncut, unbruised. “No, I haven’t,” I say.

  “May I ask why?”

  Because last night I busted into a warehouse where four men were playing a poker game on my employer’s territory and I blew out one of their knees with a sawn-off shotgun and smashed the other one’s face in with my fist, probably shattered his nose, and left the other two passed out on the concrete bleeding into the gutter.

  “I haven’t had the time.” I think about telling him I’m quitting the course, but I can’t. Maybe part of me still wants it. Even if it is a pathetic joke. I pause, and then say, “I don’t know if I’ll be submitting it for a while.”

  “Submitting test papers is the best way to track your progress,” Martin explains.

  If you could see me, I say silently, you wouldn’t want to talk to me, Martin. If you could see the man on the other end of the line you would slam the phone down as quickly as you could.

  “I know. But it doesn’t mean I fail the course, does it?”

  I’m just shooting the shit, buying time for the sake of it. I’ve already failed. The books are shredded and I’m not going to replace them. All those fancy quotes and fancy literary theories will soon just be half-remembered phantoms, and then nothing at all.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Martin says. “Of course not. But it might impact your performance in the real test.”

  “Alright. Thanks for letting me know.”

  Martin makes an awkward half-word sound, and then sighs. “Is everything okay, Henry? Is this a personal issue? You know, we have a number you can call if—”

  I can’t help it. I burst out laughing. A number you can call! I imagine myself calling this number, where they usually deal with normal-student shit, like stress about the deadlines or feeling overwhelmed by the work or whatever, and telling them about my particular problems. I laugh loudly down the phone, and then because I feel guilty laughing at this guy who’s helped me out over the months, I hang up and laugh myself out. Wiping a tear of laughter from my eye, I mutter, “A number you can call.”

  When the apartment is halfway clean—can’t be bothered to deal with the beer bottles or the takeout containers, or to put away the free weights—I climb into my jeep and drive to an apartment about half an hour away, where one of my men lives. His name is Denton Curtis, a man I’ve used for jobs in the past. When I press his buzzer, he barks down, “What sort of self-righteous motherfucker thinks he can hold down a man’s buzzer for two motherfucking seconds and get away with it?”

  “Me,” I say.

  “Damn Hound, you should’a said. I was two seconds away from sending down a bullet on your vending-machine ass, you fuckin’ giant.”

  “Alright, alright. Open up.”

  Denton wears a baggy Austin Spurs jersey with baggy white shorts, high-top sports sneakers, and a perpetual white-toothed smile. Three or four silver chains clink at his chest as he walks, and he has the habit of shaking his head and laughing at anything anybody sa
ys. But he’s a damn good finder-of-people, in my experience.

  “Take a seat, man.”

  We sit in Denton’s living room, opposite his huge TV, sipping beers.

  The TV is playing a Spurs game. I’ve never been a big basketball fan, but I can guess it’s not going well.

  “Now would’ya look at this, Hound? These little fuckin’ fuckers spend the whole damn game polishing their sneakers and then decide at the last second to get their asses in gear, when it’s too damn late. That’s what I call lazy, fuckin’ lazy.”

  “I’m here about Dean,” I tell him.

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, lemme take a look.” He reaches down the side of the couch and picks up a manila folder. “No location on him—yet—don’t know if there will be one, either. I heard some rumblings in Silicon Valley about him. Weird, right? But these are old rumblings, years old, and all I can say is two techy guys have his name saved on their computers. Oh, motherfuckers!” He waves the folder at the screen, and then settles back down. “I don’t know where he is right now. Might be he’s got some ninja hiding skills you don’t know about, might be he’s lying at the bottom of a river somewhere. Might be he went up in flames. I dunno, man, not for sure. Gimme some more time.”