Free Personal Protection by Tracey Shellito Page A

wasn’t tempted. Much. The noise level rose. More clients arrived. Then I broke up my first fight.
    I was about to descend to the mezzanine when two guys went for one another. The woman milking both of them leapt clear with a cry of “Help here!” I was closest.
    I didn’t see who’d started the affray, but the glitter of what might have been a knife and a broken bottle made me wade in impartially. I grabbed each combatant by the back of the
neck and smacked their heads into the table. Both went limp and stopped struggling. I continued to press their heads to the melamine.
    “Are we finished, gentlemen, or do I have to ask you to leave?”
    Affirmative grunts came from the faces being ground into their spilled drinks.
    “Good.” I relieved them of the weapons they’d been about to make use of, then let them up. Bouncers converged from all sides. The cavalry. Too late.
    “Fuck! Wasn’t that a bit much?” the first man on the scene grumbled.
    “Yeah, you could have broken their noses and then…
    I interrupted the second to hand over the flick knife and smashed bottle the bravos had been about to fight with, and said sweetly, “I don’t know, gentlemen. Why don’t you
decide?”
    Halfway down the stairs a third man caught up with me.
    “You went up against them barehanded, knowing they had weapons?”
    “It was that or a bloodbath on the balcony. Which would your boss have preferred?”
    “Didn’t you..? I mean, weren’t you worried that you might have been..?”
    He really was very young. I stepped aside to allow a couple to pass me. He joined me against the banister.
    “This is what we do. You’d be a fool if acting to stop a situation like that doesn’t scare you shitless. But you practise and you work until you know what to do. Then you do
it. If the thought of being cut makes you freeze you should get out of the job. Now.”
    “How do you learn? Will you teach me?”
    I hadn’t a clue who he was, but he seemed in earnest. I let him follow me the rest of the way down the stairs, snagged a napkin from a table and requested a pen from one of the bar staff.
I wrote out the address of my gym and gave it to him.
    “If you’re serious, go in the morning and tell them I sent you. Tell them what you do for a living and why you want their help. Somebody will take care of you and show you what you
need to know to get started. Other than that all you can do is watch and learn.”
    “Thanks!” He was like a dog with two tails. “I really appreciate this!”
    I let him bound around enthusiastically for a while then shooed him away so I could get back to work. I wondered if I was ever like that.
    I’d arrived in time for Tori’s first number. If you’ve never seen what goes on in a lap dancing club, nothing can prepare you. Most people have watched Showgirls (good)
or Striptease (not so good), or seen one of the handful of documentaries Channel 4 or Channel 5 have been brave enough to show. (Divas comes to mind.) So it won’t shock you when
I tell you that Tori strutted out on to the horseshoe-shaped stage and very artistically took her clothes off to something slutty by The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, and slithered suggestively
up and down the fireman’s pole.
    Since this place used to be a strip club, (and yes, there is a difference) there were no seats next to the stage. The girls have been pulled off by over-enthusiastic clients in the past, so the
whole tucking the money into their g-strings bit doesn’t happen on stage any more. Instead, girls not currently dancing wander around with tip buckets. If the clients like what they see, they
tip well; if they don’t, they tip badly or not at all.
    It helps that someone had the bright idea of making the tip buckets those artificial vaginas they sell in sex toy catalogues. It’s not in good taste, I grant you, but it is safer than the
way things used to be. Now they can’t get their grubby little mitts on the real thing, punters