Free Wishing and Hoping by Mia Dolan

for Michael at the Blue Genie.
    She’d thought about asking the woman – Linda, if she remembered rightly – what it was all about, but had known by the look on her face that questions would not be welcome.
    After placing the ostrich-feather outfit to one side, she looked the drag queen up and down. ‘Barry, you need new underwear.’
    Barry looked down at the salmon-pink corset he was wearing. ‘I know it’s a bit old-fashioned, but it was all I could get to fit.’
    â€˜It looks like it once belonged to a horse.’
    Barry looked hurt. ‘It was my mother’s.’
    â€˜Sorry,’ said Sally. ‘My mind’s elsewhere.’
    The office was small. It contained a wooden filing cabinet of pre-war vintage, where Marcie kept all the paperwork and records she needed to run her business, and a desk on which sat a telephone and a rubber plant streaking upwards from a red plastic pot. There was a swivel chair behind the desk and a hard chair in the little space that was left. Tan-coloured carpet tiles covered the floor. The office had just one window overlooking the street abovethe shop selling darts and snooker trophies to local pubs and sports associations.
    The face of the woman waiting there was very white. She was sitting in the hard chair, staring out of the window, though she didn’t really seem to be seeing the buses, the cabs and the few remaining costermongers pushing their barrows away from their pitches on the other side of the road. The latter didn’t linger much beyond three o’clock. Whatever they were going to sell that day had already been sold.
    It was purely premonition, that sickly butterfly feeling that makes you think that something bad is about to happen. That’s what Marcie was experiencing now, though in actual fact she had no real reason to feel that way. She didn’t know this woman. She didn’t know what she wanted.
    Marcie took a deep breath and told herself to be calm. There was nothing to fear. Nevertheless, her heart hammered in her chest.
    Marcie adopted an aura of calm and told herself not to be stupid. She greeted the woman and then asked, ‘Would you like a coffee? A cup of tea perhaps?’
    The woman shook her tawny bob. Her eyes were green. Her nose was pert and her lips glimmered with pink pearlised lipstick.
    Marcie sat down and smiled across the desk at the woman who’d introduced herself as Linda Bell.
    â€˜I used to work for your husband,’ she began, hereyes downcast, her fingers smoothing at the hem of her coat which really did not need smoothing at all.
    Lashes heavy with black mascara fluttered as furiously as the butterflies in Marcie’s stomach.
    â€˜You worked at the Blue Genie?’
    The woman nodded. At the same time she crossed one long leg over the other. Her tights were of a common colour – American Tan – probably by Pretty Polly.
    â€˜I only recently became a dancer . . .’
    Although she could feel her stomach muscles tightening with nerves, Marcie nodded. ‘I see.’ Even to her own ears she sounded calm. ‘So you were an exotic dancer,’ she prompted, though striptease artiste would have been nearer the mark.
    Linda Bell certainly had the legs for it. And the face. Everything come to that.
    â€˜I’ve been a hostess as well, but I really wanted to dance. Michael gave me my first break.’
    â€˜That was the first time you stripped?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    Linda’s glossy bob nodded with her head. ‘I was very grateful to him for giving me the break. Nobody else would. But there, that’s Michael for you – a lovely man. All the girls adore him.’
    It felt to Marcie that her stomach muscles were in danger of cleaving to her spine. This girl was going to tell her something she didn’t want to hear.
    â€˜Get to the point.’
    The lashes fluttered again. There was the downwards look, the nervous intermingling