The Exchange (21 page)

‘Hey,’ she said, with a sideways smile.

‘Hey.’

‘You want another drink, or shall we shoot?’

‘No, I’m done.’

She turned and I followed her up the steps and out onto the Soho Street. There she pulled her bomber jacket up around her and hunched into it to light a cigarette. Then she gestured with her head.

‘Come,’ she said, and I obeyed. She passed her cigarette to me and we shared it as we walked up Charing Cross Road, past the instrument shops and bookstores.

‘I have a room, this way,’ she said, ‘in Bloomsbury. I’m a student. What about you?’

‘I’m a stripper,’ I said, ‘in Paris.’

She turned her incandescent hazel gaze on me, and her beautiful full lips pushed out in a pout. She was amused, I could tell, and curious.

‘Well, maybe not a stripper, exactly. I keep some things on. I’m a burlesque dancer, really.’

‘What do you keep on?’

‘A thong, nipple tassels. Sometimes more. Depends on the act.’

She did her stomach-flipping sideways smile again.

‘Will you dance for me?’ she said.

I shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ I said, suddenly self-conscious. I wasn’t usually so forthcoming about my job when first meeting people. Not because I was ashamed of what I did, but because I found that it gave people certain expectations of you. I must have been trying to impress her, but it had backfired on me. She thought she’d got lucky. I felt acutely the pressure of living up to her standards.

‘I’m over there,’ she said, pointing across the leafy square we’d just entered. But she led me into the grassy square itself. It was a mild night and the sky overhead was clear.

‘Mmm,’ she said, running and throwing herself on the grass, then rolling over onto her back and flinging her arms wide on either side of her.

‘I’ve just realised, I don’t even know your name,’ I said sitting down beside her and looking into her face.

She reached up and put one hand on my cheek. ‘You’re fucking gorgeous,’ she said. ‘Names don’t matter. Wank for me.’

I knew then this girl – whoever she was – wasn’t the one. The love one. The settling-down one. The one who would lead me out of my life of chaos and into some kind of normality, even if it would be a normality that didn’t exactly conform with society’s expectations. In saying that names didn’t matter, she had quashed any hopes that this might be anything more than a one-night stand. And if I was a little disappointed deep down inside, I was also worldly enough to appreciate its liberating aspects.

I kissed her hard on the lips, then I stood up and slowly, gyrating, humming the classic stripping tune, unzipped my dress and stepped out of it. As I revealed my breasts in their half-cup bustier, my eyes flickered up and I saw that we were not alone in this garden square – across from our patch of grass sat three guys on a bench. They were staring right at us. They looked a little afraid. I guessed they were students – young students not long away from home, revelling in their freedom but not yet sure quite what to do with it. They’d been to a club or a bar, and now, slightly the worse for wear, they were having a last cigarette beneath the stars before going back to their halls. They’d failed to pick up any girls, but at the last minute they’d lucked out, stumbling upon two girls making out in front of them.

Well, let them watch
, I thought. The additional pairs of eyes only turned me on more, and I started hamming it up a bit – slowing down, caressing my limbs as I divested myself, drawing it out a bit more.

I didn’t look at them but kept my eyes trained on those of the girl lying on the grass below me. She was writhing around, hands on her breasts, little moans escaping from her lips. I knew she would find it hard not to wank herself to climax as she watched, but I wasn’t going to let her. She could watch me, and then we would fuck, right here on the grass, and I would keep bringing her to the brink and then holding back at the last moment, until she was crying, begging, promising me anything. When she did come, it would be like a million stars had exploded into being. She’d never forget this night, or me.

I peeled off my panties and touched my clit gently, almost tenderly, with two fingers, watching the girl’s eyes. It was as if she couldn’t get enough. With my free hand I squeezed my breast, brushing the nipple with my thumb. I was so aroused, I felt as if I could take off and float into the night sky. This was what it was all about, I thought to myself. It wasn’t about love and settling down, or settling at all. It was about moments like this, and making them happen.

As I’d suspected, the girl started unzipping her satinesque skinnies and tried to shove her hand down her panties, whimpering. I reached down and yanked her hand out, then lunging to the side grabbed the belt from my dress, whipped it away and, pulling the girls’ wrists together, bound them securely. She half laughed, half mewled.

‘You fucking bitch,’ she breathed.

‘You fucking love it,’ I said.

I sat back on my heels, shot one last glance across the square to make sure the male contingent was still watching, then arching my spine I leaned back, letting my head fall and my chest thrust up, and opened my knees. I knew they were all staring at my pussy between my parted legs, longing for it, though I kept my eyes shut as I brought myself to a climax. Then I fell back onto the grass.

The girl had struggled to her knees now, hands still tied. Crawling over to where I lay, for a few moments she lapped at my puss and the juices it spilled forth. I was still too numb from my orgasm for her to be able to give me any true pleasure, so I reached down and pulled her up to me instead, tugging down her skinny trousers and panties and then bringing my face to her cunt. It was sweet and peachy. I purred like a cat who’d got the cream, lapping at it with my tongue, flickering the tip of it in and out of her hole. I pushed my hands up and inside her vest top as I did and squeezed her nipples playfully. She gasped appreciatively, so I intensified the pressure and soon I knew she was on the verge of coming.

‘Fuck me with your fingers,’ I said, and my voice sounded almost obscenely loud in the darkness. For all I knew there could be others in the park watching us, or even people who had heard us from the pavements around and stopped to find out what was going on inside the square. The thought that we were being watched by not just three but perhaps many pairs of eyes made my second orgasm, when it came – almost simultaneously with the girl’s – super-intense.

When we sat up, the boys were nowhere to be seen. The girl straightened out her clothes and I put mine back on, then we walked across the rest of the square and into her hall of residence.

Her room was spartan, decorated only by black and white postcards with photographs of women writers – Colette, Jean Rhys, Edna O’Brien. While the girl boiled a kettle and poured water over two tea-bags in separate mugs, I perused her bookshelves. The same writers featured prominently.

Seeing me look, she said, ‘You ever read Jean Rhys?’ She placed the cup on the floor in front of the rug I was sitting on.

I shook my head. ‘Is she a bit like our Françoise Sagan? You must know
Bonjour Tristesse
.’

‘Sure, but no, they’re very dissimilar, except that they’re women and write short novels. Jean Rhys is much more melancholy, while Sagan is funny, albeit in an acidic way. Rhys spent much of her time here in Bloomsbury. I’m a bit obsessed with her, to be honest. I spend a lot of time walking around revisiting her haunts.’

She walked towards the bookshelf. ‘Here,’ she said, tossing me a copy of a book. ‘I’ve got two copies of this. Keep it.’

I looked at it. It was an old orange-spined Penguin with a black and white drawing of a melancholy-looking woman on the cover. ‘
After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
,’ I read.

‘It’s much less well known than
Wide Sargasso Sea
,’ she said, ‘but I think it’s better, in many ways. It’s just so gorgeously written, and so heartbreaking. What I love about Rhys are her rootless, dispossessed women – the main character Julia is far from sympathetic and yet you feel for her so hard. She rebels against what is expected of her and – well, let’s just say she pays for that.’

I looked down at the book, hardly daring to meet the girl’s eyes. I didn’t even know her name and yet it seemed she had seen into my very soul. Was it that we had fucked, and shared our bodies? Had that given her some insight into who I was and my inner workings? Did she sense my sadness and guess where it came from? Could it be that I had finally found my soul mate?

‘Listen to this,’ she said, her finger tracing the words on the page as she read me a few moving paragraphs from the book. The sparseness of the prose and the bleakness of the subject matter hit a nerve, and I found myself wanting to cry for the first time in ages. I grabbed my tea and held it in front of my face like a mask.

‘So … Are you really a stripper?’ the girl said, and I was glad to return to the normalcy of surface conversation, of banter.

‘Kind of.’

‘What’s it like?’ She was looking at me intensely, and I realised that, once again, I represented something to this girl. She wasn’t interested in me for myself but as some kind of prize specimen, an exotic butterfly to be pinned down and studied. I made up my mind then and there that if she asked to see me again, I’d refuse.

‘There’s good stuff, and there’s bad stuff,’ I said.

‘Start with the bad.’

‘Well, I guess it’s mainly that when people have seen you naked, or nearly naked, they think they have rights over you. I don’t like feeling like an object, but I have to be one. If I show any feelings or real humanity, the barrier between us breaks down. And that’s a big no no.’

‘And the good?’

‘The other girls, at the club.’

‘You fuck any of them?’

I gazed back at her. She was trying to be hard, but there was a background flicker of jealousy in her eyes, like a storm approaching. I was disappointed. Why did it always have to be about ownership?

‘Not so far,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘Just none that I really fancy.’ I eyed her squarely. ‘And the other thing,’ I said, ‘that I like about it, is that it turns me on. I love dancing, I love my body.’

‘You see those guys in the park?’ she said.

I nodded. ‘You too, huh?’

‘It feels good, doesn’t it?’

I nodded.

She put her mug down, brought her face close to mine. ‘Then how about we invite some people round?’ she said. ‘Some guys? I know a couple of hot ones down the hall who would go crazy to see you and me in action.’

She was doing her lopsided half-smile. I smiled back.

‘How can I resist?’ I said, and she jumped on me and stuck her tongue down my throat, then got up and rushed from the room.

We hung out together a lot, Camille and I. It was great to find someone with the same interests and obsessions as me and to feel that my voyeurism was, if not normal, then something that was part of many people’s make-up. Like me, Camille was fascinated with the underbelly of things – with the seedy and the marginal. Together we haunted the dressing rooms of the club, chatting to the girls, photographing them. Camille wrote about them –
aperçus
, life histories, vignettes. Where I thought of myself as a modern-day Brassaï, she fetishised the works of Zola and Colette. We’d meet in cafés and I’d find her nose-deep in
Nana
, Zola’s novel about a prostitute who becomes a cabaret star who destroys every man who pursues her. It was, raved Camille, a literary soap opera with heaps of sex and death. Or else she was reading
La Vagabonde
, Colette’s semi-autobiographical novel about a divorcée who becomes a music-hall dancer.

We decided we’d collaborate on a book documenting life behind the scenes of an anonymous club. Camille had resigned from the chorus line the very day we’d talked at the Crillon – she knew it didn’t make sense when it was making her miserable, and I pointed out to her that just being there wasn’t getting her anywhere with research for her novel. It would be much better, now that she knew me, to just hang out backstage and glean her insights that way.

‘We can’t get in, really in,’ I’d explained to her, and she’d frowned but nodded.

‘It’s the artist’s curse,’ she said. ‘We’re observers, outsiders. We can never really be involved, if we want to faithfully record.’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘Sometimes, yes. There’s a part of me that loves being an artist, but there’s another part of me that would just love to let go – stop watching and start doing. Don’t you agree?’

‘For sure.’

I was going to carry on but I fell silent. It was unusual for me to open up, and I wasn’t sure I was ready, although it felt so good to have a like-minded friend who experienced life the same way I did. I wondered if she too had problems getting close to other people. She’d mentioned that she wasn’t currently having sex, which meant she didn’t have a partner. Did she, like me, step away from intimacy? Did she hold back when people offered you their hearts, as Kyle had me? Did she too have an annoying habit of picking feelings apart and analysing them just as you do photographs or paintings or books, and in doing so, kill them?

She was looking at me curiously, and I realised I had tears in my eyes. Sensing that I didn’t want to open up, she began to talk again.

‘I think there
are
people who can do both,’ she said. ‘Look at Victorine Meurent, Manet’s model in
Olympia
and several other of his paintings. She was a singer in café-concerts, but also a painter in her own right.’

I nodded. The danger of crying had now passed. ‘There are exceptions,’ I agreed. ‘But I do think they often burn out from the pressure of being both inside and outside. It’s not something you can take for long. Or you can only take it with the help of drugs and booze – and you end up dying young.’

‘You may well have a point,’ she said thoughtfully, picking up her book from the café-table. ‘OK, I’m off to the Pompidou Centre library for a bit. See you at the club later?’

‘Great. See you later.’

Remaining alone at the table, I ordered another
café crème
, thinking about people who are fully inside life. Konrad was one of those. Konrad wasn’t unintelligent, but he seemed to actively avoid deep thought. And perhaps he was right – why not just enjoy life, especially when one has youth and beauty, and money to burn? Why angst or analyse when you could be out having fun? But then, could that go on forever, and if not, what came afterwards? Or did Konrad and his ilk avoid thinking about the future too? Did they assume it would never come?