Strippers

It was one of those recent rainy nights. It had been raining all day, and not the normal English rain that halfheartedly spits at you but that great big spring rain. With thick pregnant raindrops and a warm haze in the air that seems to have bounced up from each shattered drop. I was soaking, almost to the skin; I could feel the trickles running down the warm clammy bit of my back as I parked my bike in the hallway of the strip club.

Ed was on the door, “is he here today?” I asked.

“Ask the girl behind the bar,” he said.

I had a big smile on. I love cycling in the rain. I was coming from my life class up in deepest darkest hackney. I have been in this club a number of times, courting permission; each time asking and each time being told to come back and ask a different person.

I stick out like a sore thumb. With my tousled wet hair pinned up haphazardly and my spring coat that I got from Reiss, two toned form the storm.

“Is Tom here?” I asked the girl.

“The one in the suit” she pointed to the end of the bar.

There weren’t many people in the strip club on a Wednesday night. I walked up to the bar between two guys in suits; one guy had a girl in green draped around his neck like an overgrown medallion. She was taller than me. I could see the downy blond hairs in the small of her back.

The friend was unsure what to do with himself, looking as if at a game of tennis between three players, between the girl in green, the now completely nude dancer on the pole; all slithery and creamy white; and me. He was smiling.

The first time I had been here was in the bright sun of the afternoon, it had seemed then both safer and seedier. I asked an older lady with a great broad east-end accent. She had told me to come back in the evening. It gets busier in the evenings, but it is still not too full.

The first time I ever went into a strip club was for my 23^rd birthday party. I had it at Cheaters on Hollywood Boulevard. All you could see of the club on the outside was the blue lights flooding out onto the dusty pavement. It was a great party. And my boss at the time, a very well behaved graphic designer from the firm I was working at bought me a lap dance. She was a pretty brunette with big hard boobs and she smelt like very sweet soap. It was all a bit wired for me but my male friends still say it was the best party.

Tom the elusive owner looked like a very nice guy, smart in a well fitting suit. He had two guys flanking him. They were cute, the kind who used to skate in the concrete parks in the south bank a few years ago before getting a job in a design firm. They smiled too.

“Can I draw in here?”

he looked perplexed, not sure if he had heard me,

“I have a studio round the corner and I really want to do a set of drawings in here” I smiled, he smiled “of the girls”.

“Is that the place with the big black doors?” he paused, “It’s got graffiti on it. What dose that say?”

“Showreal?” I asked, “Yea, that’s it”

“I never knew what that was” he mused, but it was more to the design skaters than to me, or maybe to himself. “it’s an artists studio is it?” this idea of a building full of artists confounded him in the same way this converted pub full of beautiful girls enticed me. He was well spoken, and considered me for a moment. I could feel him looking at my wet clothes and my shiny face, “When?”

“In the daytime if I could, I find it a bit daunting in here for me at night” I do. The men stand differently and the women are intimidating in the way that the big girls were at primary school. They are all taller than me in their massive see-through plastic stilettos.

“Sure thing.”

And that was how I made these