NEVER HAVE I WORKED IN A PLACE where a nipple so casually slips out and the countenance of all remains as unperturbed as a rock. The nipple was maroon brown like one of those milk chocolate Thornton’s sprinkled in chocolate powder. The woman, a dark Asian, from Thailand or the rectum of mars or the Bazaar of Opium twitching. She bent over the bar asking good old Imran to buy her a “Fine Chicken Chorizo sandwich”. “Did you hear me? “Fine”, it must be “Fine”, if they don’t have it, don’t buy it” she says, but more so dictates Imran. “Okay, I got it” Imran says, acceptingly. “Here take this” Nipple slipper hands him an unopened pack of peach Halls “thank you darling” and she finishes with a controlled sophisticated baritone, a blend of maternal and femme fatale timbers.
It was a trail shift of only four hours but time had done that ruthless thing where it stretches into an infinitum-ado-fata-morgana. But with bare flesh of legs, thighs, wrists, necks, shoulders, elbows, arms, breasts, nipples, brown nipple, arses, crack of the arses, secrets whispering from the cracks, pubes, bare flesh – how could I be mad towards time? In front of me sitting arse were three English girls – or birds, as they say here. What were they doing but killing time waiting to kill rich mans’ sinewy black card. They were playing a guessing game, the one where the victim puts the phone on the forehead and has to guess what thing, hero, place, is on the screen. They sat in a triangle howling all tumult “Italy!” “Bonjournor” “Ca’mon, Ya know it, It’s from da T.V” – et cetera. The leading lady, after guffawing with her snout to Olympus – sorry, the ceiling, struts towards the bar. She strutted carrying the entire voluptuousness of ass and character in her diaphanous dress, slithering around her two – because she would have two – sculpted Athenian legs. If ever her and the Algerian woman were cued in subway then, definitely, there would be a dispute of the ass, polemikos!
“Ya’ight darlin?” she blasts from her gob, money gob, temporary-cock-holder gob. Her breath, odious smell of dry sperm, smell, powerful, much too, for I.
“Just fine, what’s your name?” says I, congenially of course.
“Laura sweetheart”
“Well, nice to meet you Laura, I’m Keanu”
“D’ya like ma breasts?” she asks bullishly, yanking down her bra.
“You caught me” – she did catch me.
“Let me’ave a white wine and two rose’s for the girls please, and a dash of lemonade in one of em.”
I accidently splashed a dash of soda water in one of the rose’s. Give a shit, I did not. The girls accompanying her at the table looked like those plastic flowers trapped in the windows of steel coffins that men in blue, black, grey polyester uniforms drag themselves into, to sow numbers into screens, watch arrows, green and red shoot up-down superfluous charts, to eye orange coloured numbers race up-down in the millions, to save time going to the barbers because all hair is lost to the edge of the steel walls, to have the skin of face sag and droop beyond the base of Tartarus, to have flesh warp into pink mass-mush around the bones, to allow mind to rot into obsession for the vogue shoelace, the trendy button, the chic screen-watch, to suckle companions for steely motifs, but in the end it is all okay, because the Tom, Dick and Harry of the modern efficient sepulchres can buy themselves a plastic flower, one with a profound chipboard inside, a plastic flower that can talk and give advice, water itself and even clean up the guillotine disguised as an office. And even if Tom, Dick and Harry didn’t fancy the idea of having a flower by the window because the veneer of masculinity was at stake, then, there was always the plastic flowers sitting arse by the leading lady.
“How long have you been working here?” I ask Imran.
“Only one month, yeah” his voice squeezes out of his nose.
“Do you like it?”
“Yeah, it’s alright”
“How much do you get paid?”
“Seven-fifty, yeah, it’s alright” the nasal drone of his voice felt like the beginning-middle-end to a banal life.
“Have you ever had a dance from one of the girls?”
“No, not while working here, I actually used to come here regularly and when I started working here one of the girls left.”
“-Was it because of your ugly smile?” I asked, checking the temperature.
“Gah-gah-gah, I hope not” he guffawed a strange noise.
Five minutes later…the club was still empty. In front of Imran and me were two girls sat, they had been sat the whole night as if waiting for a divine intervention. I couldn’t help but imagining the two sleeping.
“How’s your eyesight Imran?” I asked, becoming restless.
“Quite bad, I need to go the opticians, these glasses are no good for me anymore” he droned or moaned or just said.
“Okay, can you see those girls sitting down?” I tilted my head towards the club floor, gently leading him with my hand cupping his elbow.
“Yeah,” he replied, monotonously.
“Are they sleeping?”
“Oh, I don’t know” he says deciding.
“Do you think I should wake them up?” I asked, trying to conjure up some play.
“You would be helping them so, yeah, maybe”
“What about a glass of water over the face?”
“Or what about a bucket of water?”
“Oh, that would definitely wake them, and afterwards I can scribble back their make up on their faces.”
“Hey, that’s not bad idea.”
“I just don’t want them to miss out on any business you know?” I said sincerely.
“Yeah, that would be bad.”
“Can you imagine, they sleep the whole night, miss all the men, wake up, have no money for rent, then they have to sell those fancy shoes and dresses, next thing you know, they’re homeless.”
“And this ice…” I pointed to the millions of ice cubes in front of us in the dilapidated metal container, “I could… lob it over to them, no?” I gestured my arm going over my head. We both guffawed hysterically because there was nothing else to do, but to watch the girls drag themselves, scratch themselves, sit themselves, drink themselves, squabble to themselves. A lengthy woman whose belly enveloped outwards hovered past the bar, her countenance appeared as if she was constipated. “Can I borrow a cigarette?” she asked Imran with the bluntness of a stripper. Imran gave her a cigarette and she jounced off scratching her cunt, digging her nails into her curly bush, zealous her itch was, I could feel every inch of nail uncurling each individual pube pressed by her navy blue dress, the repetitive action of her nails folding and unfolding onto that patch of pubes, what was it? Crabs? Papillomavirus? Gonorrhoea? Chlamydia? Genital herpes? Genital dispute? Genital revolution? Genital overthrowing the head? Had the cunt finally had enough of being exploited? Maybe the cunt had read a certain red book, decided that it would no longer be farm for the head, had the cunt got the lower body organised to revolt? Cha-cha-cha. Who knows? Whether she returned Imran’s cigarette or not, who knows? And who cares. This is the working world after all.
A tall bronze woman strode onto the stage, her legs running with no end and her skin glimmering like bronze European treasure. She danced first in her body-con burgundy dress. Her dress was so tightly stretched over her licentious curves, curves that could form an undriveable race track, her ankles in full composure of weight and heel, her hair, long, jet black, silky waves of hair. She slid her dress off and what I saw next was an archaic body, a body that had escaped the ruins of Greek antiquity, that had effortlessly departed the female bodies of the 21st century, that had absorbed light and darkness and projected what Rodin his whole life tried to capture, grace. She danced around the silver pole making the flock of girls around her warp into blurring images of visual filler. First she held the pole with one hand, began pussyfooting her way in circles, her breast sitting large, firm, bulbously confident and the light trying to expose the breast but instead it was the breasts keeping the light.
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