Eighty Days Amber (12 page)

As my breath returned to its natural rhythm, I noted the colourful images spread across the shop window. It was a tattoo parlour.

Had it been a sign? A further indication that my life was about to change? For good or for bad.

I walked in.

‘I want a tattoo.’

The guy, all long hippie hair in dreads, looked up at me. When he asked where I wanted the tattoo, my response was immediate.

I knew I was a creature formed by sex and that it would always be a part of me.

I slipped out of my skirt and panties.

‘Here.’ I pointed to the area of my cunt.

He was not taken aback in the slightest and handed me a sheet of possible illustrations.

‘Most popular images there are roses or dolphins. You choose the size. I’ll price accordingly.’

I declined the examples. ‘I know what I want,’ I said. And fell silent.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘A gun,’ I said.

I sat in a worn leather chair at the back of the store,
which reminded me of a dentist’s. But the rest of the room was surprisingly light, clean and sterile, almost high tech in its clean lines. I had expected something sordid.

It hurt like hell. Like nothing I had ever felt before.

A little like how it might feel to have a scalpel slowly cut across heavy sunburn. Halfway between the pain of severe heat and severe cold. But it also felt terribly erotic, and the wetness spread between my legs as the skilful but apparently indifferent tattooist went about his job, his touch as light as feather and delicate.

He stepped back and handed me a small rectangular mirror in which my naked cunt stared back at me.

And the closely adjoining new tattoo.

The minuscule gun.

It even looked like Chey’s Sieg Sauer.

I was whole, no longer empty, and Chey was forever a part of me.

The tattoo opened something up inside me. It was as if the tattooist had tapped into a vein, marked my soul as well as my skin.

It was a tiny drawing. A gun, unremarkable from a distance. To the patrons who sat at the tables metres from the stages I danced on, it could have been anything. A Chinese symbol, my star sign (I was an Aries), a flower. But any man, or woman for that matter, who got close enough would recognise the barrel of the Sieg Sauer that pointed directly at my sex.

I noticed a change both in me and in my customers from the moment that I was inked.

My movements became more athletic, riskier. I chose darker music, danced to Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ and Jimi
Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Child’. I sashayed like a femme fatale, twisted like a woman possessed and showed as much pink as I damn well pleased, and if management didn’t like it, they soon changed their tune when I became the star performer every night.

The men at the bars and downmarket clubs I now found myself dancing in loved it. I was the dangerous one, the wild girl, and the more wild they believed me to be, the wilder I became.

Inevitably, Lucian began to bore me. He fucked in one of the same three ways each and every time: missionary, doggy style, or me on top. Always in the bedroom at the same time three or four evenings per week with the same feeble expression on his face and he thrust only until he was spent, never bothering to check whether I had also orgasmed.

I didn’t fake it, like the girls in the dormitories had always insisted was the polite thing to do if you wanted to keep your man happy. I didn’t give a damn. Instead, I waited for him to roll off me and fall asleep and then I turned over and teased myself to climax, wetting my fingers with the seed he’d spilled inside me and then performing a familiar dance across my clitoris until I felt the customary fire surge through my loins and into my mind and heart.

When I wasn’t dancing, or masturbating, I felt vacant. California was too sanguine for me. Once the fun wore off, I found the city and its inhabitants vacuous. I missed the cold winters and the melancholy of New York, and even of St Petersburg. And, not being able to drive, I was forced to use cabs everywhere, which, despite Lucian’s generosity, irked and cost me.

I was empty.

Naturally I could have turned to drugs and alcohol like
the other girls at the clubs who numbed their senses before and after every shift to make the time pass and the undressing easier, but I pitied them, and then began to find them pitiful, snorting their earnings up their noses each night to get them through the next.

But very quickly, the whole bright Californian tackiness got to me badly, the flat light, the anomie, and I realised that even my dancing was suffering and I was all too often going through the motions and, possibly, stooping to the vulgar levels of the other dancers. I was on a downwards path.

The men I was beginning to accept into my bed whenever I felt in need of something more substantial than Lucian weren’t even exciting any longer. Or bad enough. They were just indifferent.

Maybe it’s something about being Russian.

You become philosophical about things, pragmatic even.

I knew something would come up.

And it did.

Following a run-of-the-mill set performed to a house full of surfers and leather-clad bikers and mechanics in a joint close to LAX, I met Madame Denoux.

She’d been in town scouting for talent in the classier places off Beverly Hills and Hollywood, after a fruitless trek through the silicone-infested stages of Orange County, where the girls were getting younger and more artificial by the day. Her flight back to New Orleans had been delayed due to bad weather conditions in the north-west and, put up in one of airport hotels, she was killing time visiting the nearest clubs in the area for want of anything better to do.

I’d already showered and dressed after my dance, the club was only half full by then with most of the surfers in search
of an early night to catch the prime dawn waves and the bikers back with their wife and kids. I was heading for the exit, clad in just an old T-shirt and a pair of cut-off shorts when I heard a woman’s voice calling out to me.

‘Hey!’

I stopped in my tracks and faced the older woman standing at the bar, nursing what looked like whiskey or bourbon.

‘Yes?’

‘You’re Luba, the Russian?’

I nodded.

‘You’re wasted in a place like this, girl.’

She had an unusual accent, American but with a slow drawl, which I would later find out was not only Southern but from New Orleans. She was fifth-generation Cajun.

Her form was voluptuous, held tight inside a green velvet dress, plump white breasts spilling from its elegant sheath.

‘Don’t I know it?’ I said. ‘So what?’

Was she hitting on me? Recently, it had been happening more and more. Was it a West Coast thing? On occasions I had been tempted to experiment, but as most of the other women who’d taken a shine to me had been baristas at the various clubs or, more rarely, other dancers, it would have made matters awkward. Never mix pleasure with business, someone had once told me.

‘I own a place. Down home in the French Quarter, in New Orleans,’ she said. She handed me a card. It was pale red with the type in black italics. All it said was ‘The Place’, and listed a telephone number. I raised it to my eyes and gave it a quizzical glance.

‘It’s very exclusive,’ she added. ‘Not open to the general public. Usually by invitation only. Classy.’

I waved at the late-night bar attendant and ordered an iced tea.

‘You have my attention,’ I told Madame Denoux, after we’d formally shaken hands and she’d told me her name.

‘Luba. It’s a great name. Real one?’

‘Yes.’

‘There were rumours floating around about you, you know. You were in New York, mostly danced at the Grand, no? Then you just vanished off the face of the earth. My good friend Blanca was distraught, I hear. Any reason?’

‘I had my reasons,’ I commented.

‘It’s usually man trouble, no?’

‘How perceptive of you.’ I grinned.

‘Anyway, none of my business. But dancers are my business. What a coincidence to find you here . . .’

I smiled. ‘We Russians believe in fate. Always have.’

She set her glass down on her counter decisively.

‘I would like you to work for me,’ she declared.

‘The Place?’

‘Yes. We’re in a quiet, discreet area in the Vieux Carré. One dance per night, only four days a week. Say a three-month contract. We’d certainly make it worth your while. After that, you might wish to stay or I have international contacts if you intend to move on. You have class, although I don’t think you were at your best tonight, were you?’

‘I wasn’t. Just dancing? No obligatory extra-curricular business?’

‘The occasional lap dance, for certain clients. There are added possibilities, but that’s something for a later
discussion. I think you have class and realise that what we provide can also be artful. So much more than just nudity.’

She looked me up and down, not like a butcher assessing a piece of meat, but like a connoisseur in search of intangible things.

One week later I was in New Orleans, my clothes and handbag full of amber pieces stored away in the rickety bamboo cupboard of a clean bedroom in a family-run bed and breakfast in Métairie.

When I informed Lucian I was leaving him, he didn’t appear surprised. It was almost as if he was expecting my departure. I think that, deep in his heart, he’d always known I was just passing through and that I had only stayed with him this long because of his money. He wasn’t entirely wrong, of course, but I held him in much affection nonetheless. He had been the right man at the right time, but the times had quickly changed and my demons had taken over, acknowledging the fact he was not my future. He generously gave me his blessing and wished me good luck. We agreed to stay in touch, but never did.

Once again, I was living to dance, reverting to my classical ambience and music, no longer even trying to titillate, at ease with myself and what I was doing.

It was New Year’s Eve, just a few hours into the last day of December. I could almost touch January. I was ending my set, the music slowly fading, impressionistic, like isolated dots in a landscape. I awoke from the dream of my past and my eyes fell upon the pretty redhead sitting with her man amongst the sparse audience. And I saw the way she looked at me, as if I were a mirror.

5

Dancing with Lovers

She had the demeanour of an animal straining on a leash.

She was a simmering and barely contained pool of energy, an arrangement of chemicals just waiting for an igniting spark.

I had no further time to play spy, as the final notes of Debussy drifted out of the loudspeakers and into the ether, and the spotlight plunged from bright white into black.

A hush spread through the audience as it always did in response to the erotic physicality of my set, its abrupt ending and the sudden darkness that seemed to move from the stage and across the small audience like a fog, surprise muffling speech for a few moments as I scooped up my dress and quickly ducked behind the backstage curtain, careful not to make a sound.

Madame Denoux was waiting for me in the wings with just the white beak of her mask visible and shining through the shadows like an ominous beacon. She covered my nudity with a leopard-print cape, my cue to scurry onto the stage again for a round of applause as her voice whispered through the public address system as mysteriously as any New Orleans voodoo queen’s: ‘Show your appreciation for Luba.’

It was another marker that set me apart from the other
girls, who each remained onstage after their dances, lit up by the spotlight to receive the audience’s claps and cheers.

Rather than suggest that I change my style to fit expectation, Madame preferred to highlight my points of difference. She believed that a second brief vision of my body draped in the animal skin and lit up for just a flash would emblazon my image into the patrons’ minds – wanton, wild, unique – so that they would inevitably return, primed for another dose of their favourite drug, Luba.

It was a strategy that I was happy to adhere to, not least because I basked in that brief but intense tribute, all eyes focused on me and aglow.

Tonight I used the opportunity of my final few seconds onstage to catch a last glimpse of the red-haired girl and her handsome man.

They were now entirely consumed by each other. Her expression was animated, her excitement palpable in the small circle of onlookers. She practically radiated, her pale skin gleaming and opalescent against the fire of her mane.

He watched her face with a mixture of hunger and satisfaction, as if he had been waiting for some kind of signal from her that he had now received. They were barely touching, but the strength of their desire for each other was so obvious that the vision of the two of them sitting close together, modest in dress but evidently immodest in thought, was almost pornographic.

Darkness returned just as the applause faded and I paused for a few moments longer in the shadow of the stage wing, greedy to observe the couple. Their response to my set seemed important.

From my shadowy corner I could see that they were deep in conversation, but I could not make out a thing, try as I
might to fix my eyes on their lips curving sensuously around the shape of each silent word.

Madame Denoux approached and addressed the man. They engaged in a brief exchange at the table, which caused the girl to blush a deep scarlet.

He and Madame stepped away from the table and out of my line of sight. I continued to watch the girl, as her skin shifted into a myriad shades and her stance contorted to match her response to the situation. Red with shame, pale with fear, tense with mounting excitement and straight backed with pride.

The Place dealt in only one add-on service that I was aware of: lap dances, though Madame called them ‘private dances’, which she considered a classier title.

Had the couple booked me for a private set? That would explain the girl’s demeanour and the man’s disappearance with Madame. She always processed a customer’s credit card before coughing up the goods.

Normally the private dances bored me and I completed them on occasion merely because the tips were good, it was expected and acquiescing helped to secure my employer’s favour.