Читать книгу The Exchange - Carrie Williams - Страница 6

I didn’t realise how bad things had become, until I started chatting to Rachel. The very fact I was on Facebook at all shows how bored I was, without being aware of it. I’ve no explanation for it, other than that it was one of those ditchwater-grey afternoons when the rain seems like it will never stop falling out of the sky, and I was killing time until another shift.

I was sitting around in my dressing gown, curlers in my hair, getting ready to apply some new fake nails. As I often did before work, I started to feel a sort of unfocused, languorous horniness. You’d think you’d get over it – all that nakedness, all that naughtiness, night after night. And of course it’s not as if it’s not seedy and cheap and demeaning, at least some of the time.

It wasn’t even about the guys – I’ve never met a man in the club I actually fancy. If it’s anything, it’s about being surrounded by semi-naked girls all night. Not all of them are beautiful, although I know we all have different definitions and expectations of ‘beauty’. But there’s a camaraderie we’ve got going there. Some of us have known each other for years, and we are close – mentally, physically. That, for me, is horny. A lovely topless girl leaning over me, her hand on my shoulder, to adjust my hair just before I go on stage – that sends a thrill through me. With many of these girls, I get what the punters can never have – intimacy.

And often, as I’m getting ready for the evening, making myself as gorgeous as I can be, I think of all this feminine softness – mine and that of my colleagues – and my fingers slip down into my panties and I start rubbing at the wet little bead of my clit. As I do, I picture myself on stage, gyrating to the music, blinded by the strobes. I can’t see the faces of those looking at me, but just knowing that I am looked at – looked at but untouchable – turns me on.

This was one of those days. With one hand on my breast, tracing the soft cherry-pink outline of my nipple, I kept my thumb on my clit and slid two fingers inside myself. It felt so fucking good, I gasped out loud. I never, I thought bitterly, felt this good with Konrad, and that was so bloody frustrating. To have a boyfriend who looked so hot he brought other women out in palpitations but who couldn’t lead me to orgasm made me want to scream.

As my fingers moved in and out, I sped up, pushed deeper, arching my back to meet my own embrace. It was the ultimate irony for someone whose job was to please others – that, so far, at least, I was the one who could give myself the greatest joy.

I moaned and juddered as waves of pleasure started to break over me and a white light of pure joy went on in my head. For a moment I gave myself over to the almost unbearable pleasure that assailed me, and then I threw back my head and let my climax ebb gorgeously away like trails of smoke carried away by a soft, warm wind. Already, I felt nostalgia for my spent libido.

***

I’ve always been interested in photography, which is how come I asked Rachel about her work, after I’d got dressed and was having a last coffee and cigarette before leaving for work. That would have probably been that, only the next day I looked up the websites she mentioned to me and was sucked in by some of her images. They showed a side of London – of England – that has always fascinated me. Of course, Pigalle, where I lived, is an underbelly, a shithole, in so many respects. But much of this is on the surface. What Rachel’s images somehow managed to suggest was what lies beneath the surface of the people she photographs on the street, in the middle of their business. Outwardly respectable though many of them appear, she always manages to suggest something sinister or off-kilter beneath the skin. And to those who are sleazy, unfortunate, deprived, she gives a noble dignity, something transcendent.

As with most things in life, one thing eventually led to another, and after a few more chats with Rachel I suggested we swap lives for a while. I’m not sure that I really meant it – it was more of a challenge, one to which I never imagined she’d rise. Like I said, I was bored. I do random things when I’m bored – things that surprise even me when they come out of my mouth. But looking back, I realise that the thought of spending another night at the club, then going out drinking with Konrad and his gang of fellow models, with all the preening and posing and air-kissing and back-stabbing, made me feel queasy. Without knowing it, I’d come to the end of the line when it came to Paris and what it represented for me.

Rachel surprised me by accepting, with few questions. I think she even surprised herself. But then sometimes you meet people when they’re right on the edge and, without knowing it, ready to leap – all they need is a little push in the right direction. I did that to her, it seems, and I did it to myself. I gave myself the little push I needed so much.

I like to be controversial. Perhaps that’s why I’ve ended up doing the work I do. I was a fighter as a child – I rubbed my parents and my siblings up so badly that eventually, when I was eighteen, they packed me off to do my A-levels at a boarding school in the UK – one deep in the countryside in Hampshire, where my mother’s best friend from university headed up the French department. But the strictness of that god-awful place only hardened my resolve to be free. After a couple of months of terrible behaviour, I finally managed to get myself expelled and then headed back to France – not home, to my parents, but to a squat in a Hausmannian building on the edge of the Parc Monceau in Paris. Lack of any education at the tender age of eighteen had me doing all kinds of jobs – supermarket cashier, cinema usherette, chambermaid, nanny. I hated them all, although for a while I found the voyeuristic aspect of the chambermaid’s job rather titillating.

Gradually I ended up dancing in Pigalle – friends who had gone down that route said it was easy money, and when I gave it a go it was immediately apparent that I had a talent for it. And there were things, as I said, that I did love about it: the female camaraderie, the knowledge of one’s inherent power over other people. But it was very definitely love-hate, and the hate grew inside me without me really knowing, like a strange, secret plant, feeding off me before I really knew of its existence.

And then suddenly it was in full flower, and I needed to hack it down before it took me over.