Free Refuge by Andrew Brown Page B

he walked up the stone path.

 
     
     
FOUR
     
     
    T HE FLASHING STROBE light made the dancer’s movements jerky and disjointed, like a mannequin strung up on a shooting range. The victim of a cruel hoax, her slender arms moved too suddenly from one position to the next and her head snapped from side to side. She strode across the floor towards the audience. The interrupted sequences made her approach menacing and unpredictable as she loomed out of the alternating dark and light. Suddenly, she was at the edge of the mock-catwalk, towering above her audience. The carefully applied eyeliner gave her big eyes a stylised and androgynous appearance, and her lips were smeared with iridescent lipstick. The front row of men gazed up with fixed grins, caressing her legs with fidgety eyes. She looked over the tops of their heads, staring into the fog of cigarette smoke and soft lighting. Her nipples pressed out beneath her white schoolgirl shirt and a fluffy pompom wiggled in front of her snatch, held in place by a transparent plastic thong. On cue, the strobe faded and a red-and-yellow wash lit up the stage. The frenetic introductory music changed to a slower, anticipatory beat. Some men started clapping in time, watching her expectantly.
    Richard sat away from the stage, slouched in a black paddedleather booth. He observed the display on stage absently, sipping his frothed beer and grunting in occasional agreement as David Keefer prattled next to him. Richard had not been in such a club for years, not since he was a student, drunk and confident. When he had arrived with David, he had felt the thrill, alighting from a taxi outside the imposing city block and nodding to the stocky bouncers standing outside. But the initial exhilaration had quickly faded and was replaced with smutty boredom. There was undoubtedly something risqué and unnervingly lustful about the mix of men, alcohol and naked dancers. But the tease, the unattainable fiction of erotic dance, was depressing, and ultimately as demeaning to the audience as it was to the dancers. Richard could not shake the sense that he did not belong. When he looked around, he saw powerful and wealthy men; this was not a gathering of boilermakers and diesel mechanics, but one of the respectable middle and upper classes, wearing suits and fashionable labels. Yet he was still nagged by the thought that his presence imparted a special credence that the evening would otherwise lack, as if he came from a caste of especially honourable men – a caste to whom such a scene would be unfamiliar and distasteful. He turned away, bothered that they might see the condescension reflected in his eyes, and brand him with their scorn.
    A waitress walked past with a tray of empty glasses and bottles. Her pointed breasts perched just above the wet plastic rim. The combination of her unashamed nakedness and the spilt remains of beer was disquieting, and Richard could not help but stare. She met his gaze briefly, but did not acknowledge him; he supposed she was used to being watched. At another circle of couches, a tall, willowy dancer was giving a group of boisterous suit-clad men a private show, draping herself across one man’s lap and pressing her damp skin against his face. The others were hooting and cheering her on, smacking each other boyishly on the shoulders. She noticed Richard watching and licked her top lip with a pink tongue. He quickly looked away, mortified. The two fleeting encounters – the unsmiling waitress and the lap-dancer – focused the rift for Richard: it was not that he judged these men; it was that he was unable to suspend disbelief and enter the fiction. Instead he paced the perimeter like a chained predator, hungry and unfulfilled. He envied the others’ ability to find satisfaction in their constructed affairs and imagined interactions, and he berated himself for his self-righteousness.
    Richard became aware of the continued drone of David’s conversation next to him: