LITMIR.BIZ

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on that and even after he had left home he had somehow been unable to cure himself of the habit. There was a row of his old paperbacks on a shelf, a couple of posters and some club flyers pasted to the wall. Noah clenched his fist and thumped the wall beside his bed, just once, but hard enough to make him wince. The silence of the house was undisturbed.

      Noah lay down in the remainder of his clothes and locked his hands behind his head. The geography of the ceiling, laid out like an enigmatic map, reminded him of being a child. He screwed his eyes shut and then opened them wide, stretching the orbits, but the reality was still there. At length, bringing faint relief, tears rolled out of the corners of his eyes and ran down his temples to soak into his hair.

      

      Roxana was on the stage. She had been nervous when she first started at The Cosmos, but she learned quickly. The two Brazilian girls were the best dancers, which meant that they earned the most money from giving private dances, so she had watched very carefully to see what they did. And then she had copied their best tricks into her own routine.

      She slid her body up the pole, slowly winding one leg around it, then tipped her head back and arched her spine until only her heel kept her anchored. Then she whipped herself upright again, raised her chin and slid her hands up the pole to stretch further upwards, up on tiptoe, to her full height. This, she knew from having checked it in the mirrors, made her look hard-bodied and imperious. So next she softened all her muscles and sank onto her heels, bending her neck so that her head nodded like a flower on its stalk. From this vulnerable pose she raised her eyes, as if coming out of a dream, and stared straight into the wall of men who lined the bar. Her gaze would connect with one of them, and stay fixed while she rotated around her pole.

      She would play a game with herself, to see if she could compel the customer to walk down to the front of the club and take a private dance.

      Roxana caught her bottom lip between her teeth and smiled at the man she had chosen. When she looked away from him, unhooking the front of her black bodice with deliberate twists of her fingers, and then flicked her glance back again, he was still grinning at her.

      This one was almost too easy.

      She rotated on her pole again, then detached herself for long enough to peel off the bodice. She stood with her naked back to the audience, braced on her high heels, swaying gently to the music. Then she crossed her arms across her front before turning back again, her face lit up with a teasing smile. This dance was almost over.

      The girls stripped to their pants on the pole and no further, that was the routine. Nakedness was reserved for the private customers. The spot would blink off and come up on one of the other dancers while Roxana slipped off the stage.

      It wasn’t difficult work. The nights were long and the other girls were bitchy, especially the two Brazilians, but Roxana had done worse jobs. It was quite safe, for one thing. Mr Shane’s rule was absolute, customers were never allowed to touch the girls. The law for himself was different, but in the week that she had worked at The Cosmos he had hardly tried anything with her. His preference was for the dark-haired voluptuous girls, not ‘skinny-arsed Russian tarts’, as one of the English dancers had called her backstage, well within her hearing.

      ‘I am from Uzbekistan,’ Roxana told her flatly, but the girl had only stared though a pall of cigarette smoke and then turned away to laugh.

      With her clothes on again, a short black top over a lace bra, she worked her way through the crowd to the bar. Her customer was one of a group of men in suits with ties pulled open at the neck. They had flushed faces, hair that was either shaved to the skull or fixed in little spikes, and they drank beer from bottles that they slapped down on the bar.

      She went straight up to him and said, ‘Hello. I am Roxana.’

      The other men jostled, grinning and showing their teeth. Heat seemed to rise off the mass of them.

      One said, ‘Oi Dave, yer in, mate.’

      ‘Hello darlin’. Give us a special dance, then.’

      She took Dave’s hand and wound past the tables to the chairs at the front in their partially screened alcoves. Only Mr Shane, up in his room behind the one-way mirrors, could see everything that went on in the booths.

      ‘That will be twenty-five, please,’ she murmured in Dave’s ear before the dance. Her lips almost touched his skin. He took a note out of his wallet and waved it in the air before tucking it inside her garter. It was fifty pounds. Quite often, the men liked to demonstrate to each other how much money they could spend. Roxana thought that was funny, but it worked to her advantage.

      She gave him his dance, a really good one. It brought small beads of sweat out on his crimson forehead. The folded note crackled minutely against her skin.

      And after Dave, two of his friends wanted private dances too. It was a successful night. When it finally ended, Roxana had earned over three hundred pounds.

      Most of the girls took taxis home, but Roxana preferred to save her money. A small wad of notes had already accumulated, wrapped in an old T-shirt that she kept under her mattress. She walked towards the night-bus stop with the hood of her outdoor coat pulled over her head.

      Once she was outside the club, the elation brought on by dancing and making men appear to do what she wanted quickly faded.

      Tonight she felt hungry and thirsty, and at the same time faintly sick. She hadn’t eaten anything since before work, and then only a banana and some slices of white bread. With a customer she had drunk some of the sweet fizzy wine that passed for champagne, but that had only made her more thirsty. Close to the bus stop there was a twenty-four-hour supermarket so she turned towards it. Through the murky glass the lights showed drained blue or dull orange that made the goods on sale look as if they were coated with a sticky film.

      A boy and a girl came out of the shop. They were her age, perhaps younger. The boy was carrying a bag of groceries under one arm and the girl had a round sweet on a stick that she licked and then offered to the boy. They balanced against each other for a second while he closed his mouth on the sweet, making a pop-eyed look at her, and then they danced apart again. They brushed past Roxana and hurried away.

      There were few other people in sight, but they all seemed to be couples hurrying home to burrow together in a warm bed.

      Loneliness descended like a black bag dropping over her head. Through the shop window she could see shelves stacked with packets and tins but she couldn’t imagine what she was going to buy. Not even the thought of the night’s money zipped against her ribs offered any comfort. She hesitated, then turned away from the shop and walked heavily towards the bus stop.

      The house was silent when she let herself in. It was very late; the running feet and slamming doors, even the music, had all subsided. Roxana pressed the timed switch next to the front door and walked quickly up the stairs because the light only stayed on for a few seconds.

      Dylan’s door was closed. Then she looked at her own and her breath caught.

      The wood was splintered round the lock. There were splits in the panels where someone had kicked them.

      She put out her hand and reluctantly pushed, and the door swung open.

      Her bed had been tipped over, the mattress now lay beneath the frame and the pillow had been slashed. Her clothes lay scattered and little shards of blue plastic and metal from her transistor radio glinted among them. Her packets of rice and biscuits had been upended and the debris lay on the floor in a swamp of soured milk.

      Roxana knelt beside the mattress and felt for the folded T-shirt. She recovered that, but the envelope of money was gone.

      She backed out onto the landing. It was hard to work out which felt less safe now: her ripped-apart room, the shadowed stairwell with its stained walls and scrawled graffiti, or the streets outside. Then the light blinked off and left her in darkness.

      Roxana shuddered but she made herself keep steady. She felt her way across the landing to Dylan’s door and knocked. Softly at first, and then when there was no response she banged with her clenched

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