Gabby would never have said stripping was an art, she didn’t say things like that, but she’d have insisted there was a definite knack to it. Not everybody could do it, that was for sure. Having a reasonable body, having no problems about getting your kit off in public and being prepared to go through a few lecherous dance moves was only a part of it, and not really the most important part. It definitely wasn’t something you could train for, and although it was a thing you generally got better at the more you did it, there was a whole category of girls who did it night after night, year after year, and never got the hang of it at all. If your heart and instincts weren’t in the right place you were wasting your time. But if you had a certain native talent for it and if you were willing to put in some effort, then you could keep on working, getting well paid, and winning over audiences long after glamour girls with much better bodies had been booed off the stage.
It was a funny thing though, and she’d seen it dozens of times, there was a certain sort of girl who got less sexy the more clothes she took off. They’d come on doing the dance of the seven veils or whatever, and they’d look really hot with these seven flimsy bits of costume draped around them. But by the time they were down to the last veil you’d lost interest, and by the time they were completely naked it was about as sexy as looking at a diagram in a school biology book.
Gabby wasn’t like that at all. There are some people, possibly many people, who consider the naked human female form to be a chaste, wholesome, natural, decent thing. But these people have never seen Gabby. There was something truly, darkly indecent about her nakedness. It came partly out of the inherent lines and shape of her body; a skinny rib cage, big unsiliconed breasts, dark nipples, a patch of pubic hair that waved itself at you. And there was also the matter of what she did with this body. She was not a great dancer and she knew it, yet she had the knack of moving in a sensual, sexy, rhythmical way that managed to display and flaunt every intimate surface and crevice. When Gabby danced, everybody in the place, from the keen salivators in the front row to cool determined drinkers leaning against the back wall, they all got an eyeful, and they took notice of what they saw.
There was also the face. Some strippers make a living out of looking innocent, meek, virginal, the nice, sweet girl who doesn’t look the stripper type. But Gabby did look the type – in spades – and she worked hard at looking that way. She had big, black-ringed eyes, a wide painted mouth, long, shaggy, red hair. She looked like a slut and that suited her audiences just fine, and it had always suited Mick too.
Mick had had a big influence on her look and on her performances. When she’d first met him he was a bouncer at a club where she performed. She’d thought he was just a tough guy, a bit of a thug, hard but brainless. But after they’d been out together a couple of times she realized she’d been very wrong. He was full of surprises. He occasionally read books. He knew things. He’d got some imagination and he was a bit of a thinker.
He came up with the idea of her doing a routine as Elizabeth I, complete with full Elizabethan gear including a crown and sceptre. The costume had cost a fortune and the act hadn’t gone down noticeably better than when she’d just stripped off her ordinary stage gear, but Mick was really into it by then. He fancied himself as a stage director. He came up with a Cleopatra routine and a Florence Nightingale routine, and he’d wanted her to do Boadicea but Gabby didn’t think anyone would know who Boadicea was. Mick was disappointed and they’d argued about it, but in the end he’d seen it her way. He’d had the good sense to realize you can’t do an act you don’t believe in.
Gabby was grateful to Mick. A stripper needed a gimmick and you had to be very careful these days. The schoolgirl routine had been part of the stripper’s repertoire for as long as anybody could remember, but in recent times you couldn’t walk on stage dressed as a schoolgirl without stirring up all sorts of feelings about child abuse. You couldn’t carry a whip because there’d always be some daft bastard in the audience who’d find a way of leaping up, grabbing it and using it on you. Wildlife was even worse. She’d known a few girls who’d used snakes in their acts, and one who’d had a pet monkey. But now if you appeared with an animal the audience felt cheated if you didn’t have sex with it.
Yeah, Mick had been good for her but, at the same time, she found his interest a bit strange. A lot of her previous boyfriends had wanted to stop her stripping altogether, either by trying to coax her out of it or by laying down the law and threatening her. She wasn’t having any of it. Stripping was her. It was what she did. She’d lost a few decent men because of it, but that was a price she was willing to pay. With Mick, however, the fact that she stripped seemed to be part of what he was attracted to. He liked to watch her perform. It turned him on. The knowledge that he’d be going home with the woman who was parading naked in front of a room full of men was a big thrill for him.
That was weird, but it seemed weirder still, since in lots of ways Mick was so incredibly straight. He didn’t drink much. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t even like Gabby to smoke dope, and he’d have gone mad if he’d known about all the stuff she snorted and swallowed when she wasn’t with him. She needed it. She didn’t like to be too clean when she performed. The right combination of chemicals could really help with the act, could make her more confident, wilder, could give her that necessary sharpness and edge. She’d never injected though. He’d have seen the needle marks. He still got mad when he thought about the Celtic cross she’d had tattooed on her right arm, and she’d had that done long before she met him. The way he talked you’d think that tattooing was a kind of sacrilege. He didn’t even like the fact that she had pierced ears, which was pretty funny considering that half the strippers she knew had pierced nipples.
There were also the razor marks on her wrists and forearms, half a dozen per arm, not very deep, not very convincing really, just a lame, hapless attempt at hurting herself. There hadn’t even been that much blood and nobody at the hospital had been at all surprised. These scars, for some reason, he didn’t mind. Maybe they even appealed to him. They showed that she was weak and in need of him. They also meant that she always wore gloves when stripping, never took them off however naked the rest of her became.
Mick’s smattering of history was enough to pass for originality in the world of stopping, and he was the one who’d come up with the idea of the Beefeater. He’d turned up at her flat one day carrying a Beefeater’s tunic and a hat. That would only cover the top half of her body but he reckoned that was fine. Stockings and high heels on the bottom half would get the rest of the job done. She pointed out that Beefeaters were always men but Mick said that was part of the point. The next day he turned up with an eight-inch plaster model of Big Ben that he’d found in a junk shop and he suggested she could use it in the act if the occasion demanded.
By then she was performing in London quite regularly, and she’d said she thought it might be carrying coals to Newcastle, that they’d seen enough of Beefeaters down there, but in fact the act was a success and went down as well in London as anywhere else.
Gabby had the ability to work a crowd, to vary her act so that it hit them where they lived. There were strippers who went through the same tired old routines regardless of the circumstances. They’d do the same act whether they were performing for a hundred drunken squaddies or for a coach party of retired vicars. Gabby liked to be flexible. She liked to pick up on the crowd’s energy, provoking them, being egged on by them, improvising like a good jazz musician, finding herself doing things that she didn’t know she was capable of.
Of course, money came into it. A point would come in her act when she’d circulate the room holding an empty pint glass in her hand, asking for money, getting the men to dig a little deeper, prising and teasing the cash out of them, telling them that if they filled the glass then she’d go a bit further with her act. This inevitably meant audience participation. If the glass filled up the way she wanted it to then she’d sit on men’s laps, unbutton their shirts, rub their chests, or spray canned cream across her breasts and have punters lick it off. Shoving the plaster model of Big Ben into herself was another little extra, but she had to be careful with it. That point on the top looked as though it could be lethal.
But mild audience participation and a bit of self-penetration was as far as she ever went. There were some girls who’d do anything on stage. Anything. They always said they were only doing it for the money but Gabby thought it was more complicated than that. They’d go down on their knees, suck men’s cocks, they’d fuck them, they’d let themselves be whipped. They didn’t seem to be actually enjoying it, not in any straightforward sexual way, at least, but they were definitely getting something out of it, satisfying something that needed to be satisfied, and not just the need for money.
Gabby had never been tempted to go that far. You might as well be a prostitute. She’d met people who talked about ‘the sex industry’ as all one big happy family, but she didn’t feel that she had anything in common with people who fucked for money. She’d even turned down the chance to be in a blue movie, which would have meant an amazing amount of money. But that hadn’t tempted her either. Once they’d got you on film they’d got you for good. Someone might recognize you. Your father might see it. At least with a live show the audience was as implicated as the stripper, and once the show was over it was over. Nobody could replay it. Nobody took away anything that was yours.
Mick had never really wanted her to go stripping in London. He thought London was a city where anything could happen, where any sort of horror might afflict you. But the money was good and she’d done quite a few gigs down there and she’d had no trouble at all, so Mick had gradually got used to the idea. There were times when he offered to come with her, offered to drive her there and back, but she’d always refused. She liked to be alone there. It gave her a feeling of independence and sophistication. She liked to make a day of it, do some shopping for clothes and shoes, and that had always been enough to deter him. He wasn’t the sort of man you could drag around women’s clothes shops. But when she got back she always had to give him a painstakingly detailed account of how the gig had gone, what the place was like, what she’d done in her act, how the crowd had reacted.
Unlike some strippers, Gabby didn’t hate men, but she did find them comical. They were so easy to read. You knew exactly what they’d do in any given circumstances. The sight of a naked woman, the mere promise of the sight of a naked woman, was enough to make them do almost anything you wanted. And even though he was a strange one, it was pretty much the same with Mick. All the way back from London she’d rehearsed what she was going to tell him, what she was going to say about the gang-rape, so that he’d react in precisely the way she wanted. She knew that if she did it right he’d immediately head down to London, start tracking down six men, and start kicking heads. It was strange to think how much power she had over him, how much he was her creature. But then, she thought, we are all somebody’s creature. And predictably enough he’d gone, just like that, so quickly, with such determination, just as she’d wanted and planned.
Life was different without him. Their affair wasn’t big or serious or permanent, but they’d seen a lot of each other and there was something missing when he wasn’t around. Still, a woman could find ways of entertaining herself. For one thing she could carry on stripping, working on the local circuit that she knew best. It was strange not having him there to watch the show and offer some comments on her performance. She realized how good he was, how he had never put her down, only ever said how she might improve what she was already doing. In his absence she hoped she could keep up his high standards.
She tried to imagine him in London, a place that she barely knew and yet had a powerful attraction towards. She felt for him, a danger to himself but more of a danger to others. Either way she would be glad when it was over, when he’d done what he’d gone to do. She hoped he didn’t get hurt. She hoped he didn’t get caught. She wished he’d get on with it, do it quickly and efficiently, but more than anything else, she wished he’d stop telephoning her.