Claire looked in the mirror. Her figure had somehow morphed from normal to wildly voluptuous in the space of a few minutes. It made her feel horribly self-conscious and uncomfortable. Christ, was she really going to do this? Could she do this? Men would look at her in this get-up and think she was easy, wouldn’t they? And then they might try to touch her. She shuddered, hard.

‘You all right?’ asked Gina, staring at her face. ‘It’s not too tight?’

‘It’s fine,’ said Claire. ‘Um. Sylvester, the owner. He don’t seem the type for this.’

‘Well, he ain’t. Not really. His dad started the club, not him. I was there when the old man ran it and I was sure when Sylvester – the club was named after him by his dad – well I was sure that when he took over the whole thing would hit the skids. But it didn’t.’ Gina was looking at Claire’s waist. ‘You know, you could stand to lose a few pounds.’

‘Yeah. OK,’ said Claire, thinking it was impossible. The weight was going on, no matter how little she ate.

The money, she thought. Just keep thinking of the money.

This place paid so much better than any of the other waitressing jobs she’d had. ‘So . . . you’re going to teach me this Bunny dip?’

‘You’ll get it in no time,’ said Gina, and cracked a smile.

37

37

Claire found her new job to be a piece of piss. Dead easy. All her anxieties about wearing a skimpy costume had gone within about a week of starting work at Sylvester’s because the place was run on very strict lines. No touching from the punters, that wasn’t allowed. The girls were treated with respect. If they weren’t, there were bouncers on the door who would throw any chancers out on to the sidewalk and never let them back in again.

Gina, the den mother and manageress, gruff though she was, became a friend. And the other girls were friendly too. Good workers were welcomed in the club, and Claire was a very good worker indeed, shipping trays of drinks around the place, smiling, always giving her best even when she felt like shit, which she did, often. She thought she was doing fine, all things considered, until one day Sylvester called her into his office up on the first floor.

‘Claire? Yeah, come in, sit down,’ he said, standing up, eyes darting to her face and then away, hands nervously jangling the keys in his pockets, knocking over a pot of pens and then scrambling around picking them up.

Claire sat. He slapped the pot of pens back on the desk and then closed the door behind her. She felt a panicky twinge. But this was Sylvester. It was OK. ‘Tiger Feet’ by Mud was thrumming up through the floor.

‘Is something wrong?’ she asked anxiously.