The Special Girl

They call it the Night Club in the Sky. I call it the Scam in the Sky. I watch them skim the money off the jerks night after night. They come pouring through the door, crowd the dance floor, drink watered drinks, eat shit food and think they’re having the time of their lives. They come because they’ve been told this is a wild place to be. A place where you can buy anything from pills to pleasure. Step up right here boy! Whatever you want—we have it. Even absolution.

I’m the Father Confessor. It goes with the job. Every bartender knows that come three in the morning the drunks will want to tell the story of their pathetic lives to someone. You listen because it pays well. The more sordid the secrets, the bigger the tip. But sometimes they slip a story into your ear that won’t let you sleep nights. I’m still carrying the story the girl told me. It’s a stone in my gut, pulling me down to my knees.

A large dark rum on the rocks. I remember the people by their drinks. She took a seat at the bar. It was a slow evening and I had time to wipe the glasses and lay them out neat and polish the counter. I’m like a maniac with that counter. I like it to shine like still water.

Three drops spoilt the mirror sheen of the counter. They lay there like shining jewels. I thought they were water until I wiped them and the cloth streaked red. I looked properly at her then. She was quite an eyeful because of the body art.

Tattoos ran all over her body. She had three piercings in her eyebrow and a stud in her nose. And when she leaned back the spandex of her top outlined a nipple ring. A drop of blood hung under her nose. I watched as it slid down to her lip. She took a napkin and wiped it away casually. “Nose bleed” she said, shrugging. She raised her glass to her lips, her eyes on mine.

I got it. She was one of the special girls.

That you could get anything at all in the Night Club in the Sky wasn’t just a street corner whisper to pull in the suckers. We provided discreetly for every kind of itch. Dope, drugs, and of course—women. We had a mini United Nations on supply. There were lots of long-legged Russian hookers, a couple of Italians, two fat Britishers, a whip thin Israeli, col-lege girls from Bombay out to supplement their income, a few out-of-shape locals—and then the special ones. There was a row of rooms behind the main lounge that the girls used. The one for the specials was soundproofed.

When I knew what to look for, suddenly, I could see the signs. A rash of cigarette burns ran across one shoulder. Thin white lines crusted on her arms where she had been cut. Her make up carefully masked the bruise down one side of her face. I looked back to her eyes to see that she was still watching me.

Under all the body camouflage she was beautiful. In a fragile way that I can’t describe. I’ve seen a lot of women come and go, believe me, but few as beautiful as the girl casually wiping away her nose bleed. “Go on,” she said, “Ask what you want. I have nothing to do all evening. Might as well talk.”

We were on the level from that moment. She just looked at me and we connected. So I asked all the questions that were jostling in my head. We talked for a long long time. The music was so loud she had to lean over and whisper into my ear.

“There are two kinds of people in the world,” she said. “Givers and Takers.”

She was a Taker. “I learnt early,” she said, “my father taught me.” He was in the navy. Four drinks down and the officer vanished leaving a man who reached for his belt. The happiest times for her mother and her were when he was away sailing. “My mother left him when I was five. She didn’t take me with her.” She pushed her hair away from her neck. There was a serpent swallowing its own tail tattooed on the nape.

“By the time I was seven he was using his belt on me. When I was thirteen he brought home a whip. I was a bad girl. No one wants a bad girl. He was going to beat me into the daughter he wanted.”

“What did you do that was so bad?”

“It didn’t matter. What I did. What I didn’t do. Acts of omission or commission. He beat me. When it was over he’d bathe my bruises in rum. Massage it in and hold me tenderly and tell me he loved me. He only did it for my own good.”

She raised her empty glass with a smile. “Childhood imprinting. The old man’s poison.” I filled it again.

“When I was sixteen I ran away from home to a friend’s house. He got the navy police to find me. When he took me home he tied my hands and feet before he punished me. Three days. I survived. We had to go to the navy hospital to get my wrist set. He had fractured it. When I was eighteen I ran away again. This time he didn’t find me.”

She ran her finger round and round the rim of the glass. “But you can’t leave it behind when you run away. I took it with me. Every single man I picked—he turned out to be a Giver.”

I could have told her that’s the way it normally turned out. It’s called the Pattern of Your Life and you have to cough up your guts before you can break it.

“No one can do a thing to you without your consent. If you want to stop it you’ll find a way to do that. Or you’ll leave,” I said. “Why did you stay?”

“I felt sorry for them.” Her reply surprised me. “I think every person hates himself. He’s been told he’s stupid. He’s ugly. He’s no use. A hundred things that he’s heard that have stuck under his skin, aching. It all festers inside them until it becomes a sore, stinking with pain.”

She turned to me, “I am a knife. I lance the sore. I take their pain. They pass their pain to me and for a while they can be peaceful.”

“And you?”

“For a little while I’m peaceful too.”

I shook my head, “You buy your peace at too high a price.”

“I know no other,” she whispered.

We were silent for a while. Then she began speaking again, “I was searching. I went from man to man. And found the same thing each time. They told me they loved me. Wanted me. Needed me. Then they used me to vomit out their pain. I took it all. Took and took and took, thinking that this time I’ll come through it all and there will be serenity on the other side that will last. It never happened.”

She was on her fourth drink. I pushed it across the counter to her. “The last boyfriend I lived with beat me and ripped my clothes off. Then he shoved me out of the door naked and locked it. I had to plead for two hours before he let me in to pack my things.”

“I had enough money for a ticket on a bus to Goa. After that I had no idea what I was going to do. I had nowhere to go. No way to earn. Nothing.”

I lit her a cigarette. She smoked elegantly, blowing the smoke out in little stylized streams.

“Then I realized that there was only one thing that I had ever specialized in. Pain.” She blew the smoke out like a kiss. “So here I am.” The strobe made the smoke into a web of light that haloed her. “I provide a service. A much needed service. I take the pain of those who want to unload it. I take it at a price.”

“Is it worth the money?” I asked her.

She said, “There is nothing else I know.” Her hand went to the silver crucifix she wore on a leather choker. The choker had shifted and I could see the dark mottled line that it covered.

“Are you Catholic?” I asked.

“No” she said, caressing the crucifix. “I just get the man completely. I so get him. He swallowed the world’s pain. They beat him and nailed him and crowned him with thorns and he took it all. He was the ultimate Taker.”

“Take away the mumbo jumbo about dying for the world, and you have a man,” I pointed out, “who died as a direct result of third degree torture.”

“Don’t we all have to die to be born again? Maybe the pain washes us clean. Clean of all our sins.”

She leaned over to whisper in my ear what it was that a Taker did. The pleasure that laced the agony. The different ways to take the pain so that it enhanced their ecstasy. So that through the pain they touched bliss.

“Some of them like screamers. Others like those who fight. Some want you to cry. I know which kind they are the minute they touch me.”

“You could die.”

“I know” she whispered, and smiled at me. The blood ran down her lip. I wiped it away with a gentle finger. It was copper upon my lips.

I don’t know why—but I got her. I got her completely. She was so sad and so brave sitting there with her colourful camouflage tattooed onto her skin. I traced the tattoos with a finger. A phoenix. A jewel encrusted egg. The nine chakras. A snake swallowing its tail.

“Images of rebirth,” she said, “and eternity.” She touched the phoenix that flaunted its crest on her shoulder. “Next time around I want to come with the accounts settled. No giving. No taking. I just want to be. Easy. Peaceful.”

I touched her hand. “Stay here tonight. Talk to me,” I said.

“Of course.” She smiled at me. “I can talk to you. I know you understand. You’ve been there, haven’t you?” Her eyes held me, level and smiling.

“I quit” I said, “cold turkey.”

Eighteen months of passion and sex and drugs and a woman who had me spinning. I was addicted to her more than any-thing else. Then I got off my high at three one morning and realized that I had broken two of her ribs. I checked her into the hospital, went back and grabbed a backpack and vanished. Cold turkey. Done.

“I swore I’d never go there again.”

“We could be together,” she whispered. “I could be your special girl.”

“It’s over. I’m done with that shit. And I’ll never go there again.”

She smiled an old, old, smile at me. “I knew when I walked through the door. I came to sit with you. I can tell them at a glance. I always know.”

I shook my head. “I’m finished with it. I tell you what—be my girl. Without that.”

She leaned back and laughed. The music took away the sound and when she was done she looked sadder than ever. “I’m not finished yet. I’m not done with taking. I need to take and take and take. I can’t be with you if you don’t give.”

I shook my head. I wanted to be with her bad. Real bad. But I couldn’t give her what she was addicted to. That’s because I’d been the worst kind of junkie.

I filled her glass. I told her funny stories. I tried to engage her in every way I could. To just keep her there the night. But she stroked the scars on her arms restlessly. Her eyes flickered over the men that came to the counter.

Tequila with a squeeze of lime. He looked perfectly ordinary to me. Nothing differentiated him from the dozens of men that sat at the counter, turned over through the night. Just one of the jerks who come to Goa to get sloshed and stake out women, hoping to get lucky. He wore a designer shirt and had a diamond stud in his ear. The correct ear. Not gay or anything. Looked like a Bombay guy to me. Banker maybe. But she picked him out and walked over. I watched them.

It was a busy night. A large group of women on a girls’ night out kept me stretched. They were drinking with a vengeance, hoping to prove that girls have more fun. When I turned back to her after five gimlets, three bloody marys and twelve tequila shots—they were gone.

I found myself listening. Listening for sounds to carry over the thumping music. It was stupid. I knew the room out at the back was soundproof. But in my head I could hear her scream-ing and screaming. I broke a glass. I dropped a bottle of vodka. I had to take a break and smoke a cigarette. I took my break out the back and all the time I smoked I was listening.

At two in the morning I couldn’t bear it any longer. I went to the bathroom and flung water on my face. I stared at myself in the neon lit mirror and I thought of her in that room. I thought of her trying to wash away her sins in pain. I saw myself standing before her, my knuckles bloody. My legs trembled and I began to retch.

I was still in the loo when the cops raided the place. There was chaos as the girls ran, and the Bombay jerks tried to save their asses, and the bouncers showed people where to get out quick from.

Of course the cops know about the rooms at the back. They’re paid to stay out of them. This time they didn’t. A cop opened the door to the soundproof room and threw up all over his shoes.

She’d been chained to the bed. The blood had spattered the walls and soaked the mattress and the sheets so thickly that we had to burn them. She had taken a lot. What killed her was the nosebleed. He had gagged her and she couldn’t breathe through her nose. She just suffocated to death.

The two brothers who owned the lounge bar told me not to tell the cops anything but I told them they could shove the job. A woman had died. “I knew her” I said, “she was my friend.” When they asked me, I didn’t know her name.

I described him to the cops. I was called to the police station again and again. I went back several times myself. It didn’t make any difference. They never arrested anyone.

The police asked many questions, it was in the papers and for a while all the girls vanished. Business was slow. We even stopped watering the drinks just to get them to come back.

Then, when business become normal, I began to see them. Nothing marked them out from the other men who came to the counter, but I’d look up as they ordered a whiskey, a gin, a tequila—and I’d know. The Givers.

I had to hear them. I coaxed the confessions out of them. I’d spent years hearing the darkest secrets of people’s lives. I’d learnt how to lead them on, ease them, squeeze them. First I pour them the drinks. Lots of them. Then I listen. Let them knife their guts and spill them on the counter. Then, at about four in the morning I whisper in their ears. Drop the right words into the mix of alcohol and guilt and despair.

The confessor knows where the guilt lies. Knows where the edge of the knife is hidden. Knows how to sharpen it with words. Knows how to draw out the thin edge of reason that can garrotte.

One of them ran to the edge of the view across the valley and jumped. Another didn’t wait to go that far. He swallowed way too many ecstasy tabs in the loo and died with his head in the toilet bowl.

Then everyone started to get spooked. Too many deaths. Too much weirdness. The place emptied out. I had long nights just waiting. I don’t know when the uneasiness began to point at me.

The younger brother came over to me earlier this evening and put a wad of notes on the counter. “Your back pay. In cash. When we finish tonight, you leave.”

“Why?” I asked him. He looked at me and he was scared. “Leave, man. You’re just bad juju.”

I could have given him something to be really scared about but I said nothing.

The night before we’d had just three people at the bar. I’d served them and turned away. My mobile caught the strobe of the lasers on the dance floor as it lay on the counter. A drop lay on its surface. A single dark drop. Like a pomegranate seed. Like a jewel on the mirrored surface. I touched it. It was copper on my lips.

There was another drop on the counter. I stepped around the counter. Two drops on the wooden floor. Another drop. Then another. They led out of the Lounge. At the door I saw them gleaming on the pavement. A trail that led into the dark-ness beyond. Like the trail of breadcrumbs that led Hansel and Gretel to the house of the witch.

Tonight I’ve wiped the counter a dozen times. Each time I turn back and the drops lie dark on it again. They spatter the floor, leading inevitably out into the night. When the music stops late tonight, I’m going to wash up the glasses, put everything away neatly and give the counter one last wipe.

Then I’m going to step out the door and follow that trail into the darkness. I don’t know what waits for me. I’m sure she has something special planned.