Contents Cover Title Page 1. Dancing with the Bad Boys 2. Dancing in the Moonlight 3. Dancing with the Ponies 4. Dancing with the Guns 5. Dancing with Lovers 6. Dancing Alone 7. Dancing with Amber 8. Dancing Across the Whole Wide World 9. Dancing on the Heath 10. Dancing with Death Epilogue: One Last Dance Acknowledgements About the Author Also by Vina Jackson Copyright 1 Dancing with the Bad Boys I’d always been attracted to bad boys. And, as I grew older, they became bad men. It was six months after I’d left Chey and I found myself in New Orleans. December was coming to an end and my mind was whirling like a dervish as I tried to imagine what resolutions I could possibly make when the clock struck twelve on New Year’s Eve. One minute I was bereft of ideas and the following moment I had a fast-moving jumble of thoughts and emotions flitting like birds through my head, yet I was unable to catch any of them in flight. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t concentrate. I was bored. Life had become a repetitive succession of dance, eat, drink, sleep, sometimes fuck, travel, dance again, eat, drink, sleep, and so on. I missed Chey. I missed the bad men and the bad boys. Even though it was winter, heat still lingered in the air, humid, fragrant. Ticking the hours off walking through the narrow but beautiful streets of the French Quarter, my bare arms were caressed by the soft breeze rising from the nearby Mississippi. It felt unreal, as though I had become a feature in someone else’s dream. Less than a week ago, I’d spent Christmas with Madame Denoux and we’d eaten on the terrace of her house on the other side of the lake, with some of her family friends. One of the men present, a far-flung cousin of hers, had driven me back to the city, his car gliding over the low bridge that spanned the immense Pontchartrain, and it felt as if we were driving on water and I could almost skim the wet surface of the lake with my fingers if I extended my arm just that little bit further through the car’s open window. Like a mirage, with the horizon of lights from the Vieux Carré in the distance, flickering on and off, and the seasonal lights draped in celebration across the houses on the shore. I ended up sleeping with him and he was a disappointing lay. A clumsy and ungenerous lover. I didn’t stay for breakfast at his apartment on Magazine. I walked back the half-mile to Canal, through the deserted Financial District with a hunger in my belly. And it wasn’t for food. New Orleans was such a strange place. So unlike Donetsk where I was born and where every building was straight lines and eminently functional, and the only horizon we had was a broken line of factory chimneys belching dark smoke through night and day. Madame Denoux’s club had been closed for five days over Christmas, but tonight reality would return and I would be dancing again. As I walked into the dressing room I attempted to remember Christmas and New Year in the Ukraine, but none of the memories stood out; it was all an unremarkable blur. There were three other women there already, in various stages of undress, adjusting their make-up in the large mirrors, fiddling with their outfits, tightening straps, spraying perfume across their bodies, dabbing powders, juggling cheap jewellery. I’d arrived from California, and prior to that New York, and they’d always resented my presence and my big city experience, the fact that Madame Denoux had preferred me to them as her star attraction. They thought I was beautiful and aloof, which was a bad combination when it came to making friends. But then I was beautiful – people had been saying so since I was barely a few years old and I’d taken it for granted. I’d always lived life by my own standards with no need for female friends. I had little in common with them. They knew it, I knew it. I turned my back on the women and undressed, feeling their eyes on me, like daggers. They were all watching, their attention focused on the cleft of my arse, the slight bump of my tailbone when I bent over to loosen the straps of my sandals. Let them. I was used to being watched. A lot. There was a buzz and through the loudspeakers in the dressing-room wall we heard the music: Duke Ellington’s ‘Minnie the Moocher’. It was Pinnie’s signal to step on stage. She was short, curvy, mixed race and beautiful. She had dark, lustrous hair falling halfway down her back, which she liked to drape around her body while she danced, titillating the customers with it as it partly concealed her brown-tipped breasts in a curtain of tease. Her other unique selling point was the fact that her pubic hair was totally unkempt, luxuriant, spreading far and wide, wild like a jungle creature’s. She also had a brown mole right at the centre of her forehead and, rather than hide it away or divert from its presence, she drew attention to this unusual feature by cutting her hair at the front in a fringe, straight and geometrical as if drawn by a knife. She was the only dancer who was polite to me, and attempted the occasional conversation between sets, while the others steadfastly ignored me. As I did them. It would be at least another hour until it was time for my own set. I came last. I pulled the book I was reading from my wicker basket and settled into my chair, temporarily blanking out my immediate surroundings. Reading novels had recently become my biggest addiction. This one was about a travelling circus. It was baroque and colourful. I had never been a great fan of realism. I’d had too much of that in the books we were assigned back at school in the Ukraine and, later, St Petersburg – worthy but endless tomes about the travails of humanity which I had never connected with. I looked up as I heard music fade to the end of a song – Van Morrison’s ‘Into the Mystic’ – and Sofia stormed back into the dressing room, swearing under her breath because of a minor costume malfunction during her set. The look she gave me as she sat at her own table and began cleaning her stage make- up away was pure evil, as if I was the one to blame for the trivial incident, because the dress I wore for my own act was so simple and didn’t bother with Velcro snaps, belts, quick-release devices, buttons or zips. I had five whole minutes before the stage was mine and I closed my eyes. Getting into the zone. There was nothing sexy about stripping. Just a job; but when I managed to ignore the environment, banish it to another dimension altogether, I could float through my whole set as if transported on invisible wings. For the past year, I’d been using Debussy’s ‘La Mer’ as my soundtrack, and I knew every wave of that imaginary sea, every sensuous curve of the melody. It had been Chey’s favourite piece of music. He had always liked the ocean. The first time I had danced to it, it had been for him. In private. The dancing, the undressing, the exposure, it became like a secret ceremony in which I was both the sacrificial lamb and the high priestess handling the fatal blade, a fantasy in which I retreated, another world I inhabited for the duration. I switched off. As I always did. I heard my cue from miles away as Madame Denoux placed my tape in the machine and the initial breath of silence filled the loudspeakers. I tiptoed silently to the almost inaudible hum and made my way to the stage in total darkness and settled into my position. I switched on. Then they gasped. Each night the response was the same and I knew that a short distance away, hidden by the backstage curtain, Madam Denoux would be smiling. First, just the most infinitesimal movements. As if I was gathering my energy, retreating to that place inside where there was nothing but stillness and an ever-humming core, an invisible power waiting to be collected, sent into every part of my body and then used. I was the puppet master, moving my own strings. For the first minute, mimicking the feel of the breeze brushing over the surface of the waves, the almost invisible droplets of water and mist that hung in the air on a day that promised a storm, the constant pull of the tide, just a soft movement of my arm here, a flick of my wrist there, a sway of my hips in time with the gentle rise of the music, the sweet, sad sound of the piccolo joining the gentle thrum of the harp and the percussion beat, like the softest rain beginning to fall, the first signs of the storm gathering. Then the second movement began, the darker notes of the clarinet and the oboe, a muted drum the first sign of thunder brewing, energy coiling in the water and in me, the waves growing and my movements becoming correspondingly fiercer, quicker, more athletic. Now I owned the almost invisible audience, and the beat. I could relax, look around, think. I knew every step; every sway to the rhythm was tattooed beneath my skin. It matched the beat of my heart and the pumping of my blood and carried me, unthinking, to the end of my set, not as though I was being tumbled through the waves, pushed here and there by the ceaseless dialogue between the wind and the sea, but as though I was the rider of the storm, the conductor of the orchestra, responsible for the rise and fall of the ocean. Sometimes it was not so romantic. Just a matter of training. Chey had said that about almost everything. It was always a matter of training, or plain old blood, sweat and tears. But it appeared to be instinctive from the outside, I knew. I could see it in the way that the silent onlookers stared at me, their faces agog, as though they were revellers come to see the strange woman or the illusionist in the book that I was reading, oblivious to all of the other cogs in the machine, each step from the entrance, through to the ticket hall, to the particular smells and tastes of each refreshment, the quality of the air, the attire of the hostess, Madame Denoux’s elaborate but always tasteful costumes, her white mask, the peculiar way that she held herself, a practised and perfected languor that made her seem like a mystic when she was just an ordinary woman like the rest of us, albeit one who made her living from selling the bodies of other women. Tonight was not as busy as I had expected. It was the night before New Year’s Eve, and New Orleans had already become a party town. The air was ripe with expectation, heavy with the promise of an ending colliding with a beginning, and all the residents of the city were out to watch one year flee and another born. It was the one time when everyone on the streets became equal, the crooks, the tourists, the whores and the shoe-shine kids, all united in the feeling that their lives were slipping away into the night, fading with the passing of the year like the firecrackers that flowered over the Vieux Carré, lighting the sky for a brief bright moment and then disappearing again, leaving little behind besides a flash of beauty, the memory of a good time and, in most cases, a hangover. I wondered what I would leave behind. Being a dancer wasn’t like being a musician. No one would record my contribution to this night and play it back. I’d be forgotten, each step hung in time for a fraction of a second, reflected in the faces of those who watched, perhaps burned into their memories if they liked it enough, but never to be repeated in quite the same way. There were two here tonight who caught my attention. One of only a handful of couples. Different from the rest. The other women with their husbands or lovers looked bored, they’d seen it all before and more, or they looked discomfited, jealous, fearful of what their man might want them to do at home after they had seen me on stage, self-conscious of the way that their bodies moved when they undressed, the way their breasts hung, affected by the inevitable weight of time and gravity, the softness of their thighs. But the redhead with the black dress had eyes like fire, full of heat. Her body was taut and her arm outstretched, gripping her man’s thigh like a vice as she followed every studied movement of my limbs. And he wasn’t watching me, he was watching her watching me, his gaze fixed, focused, like a lion that has just spotted a gazelle alone on an open plain. He had thick dark hair, broad shoulders, a compact, neat torso and a confident air about him, self-assured but not cocky. Like Chey. I pirouetted a little to face them, though still appearing to be unaware of my audience. That was always Madame Denoux’ advice, though few of the girls followed it. Dance like no one’s watching. The audience, they want to feel like voyeurs, like they’re intruding on a private moment, as though they’re taking something intimate and forbidden from the dancer. Otherwise, you’re just a girl taking her clothes off for money, nothing special. There was something about her, the girl that watched with her handsome man. She reminded me of me. The way she appreciated my body. The way she devoured the theatricality of it all. She was seeing herself on the stage, wondering what it would be like to have all of these people watching her instead of me. And Madame Denoux hadn’t missed it. I’d seen her circling, could imagine her thoughts adding together, ever calculating, never missing an opportunity to wring a man’s pockets or find a new girl for her collection, like she’d found me. Was it the redhead’s facial expression, or the man who reminded me of Chey, or the way a note led the melody into a subtle variation, even though I knew the music inside out? There was no telling. Sometimes, memories rushed back, unbidden, unwelcome. Shards of my past unfolding against a backlit screen, images racing by like a drug trip. Vivid. Painful. The faces of my parents the last time I saw them alive. Waving to me as their car faded into the distance down the dirt road that led away from the agricultural institute where they lived and worked. I was five years old. My father ran the institute and my mother worked in the laboratories and experimental gardens as a researcher. That was how they had initially met and fallen in love. Or at least that was what I was told later by relatives. He had been an engineer from St Petersburg, she was a local girl from the Donbass region. He had been posted to Donetsk on a temporary secondment, which became permanent once he married and they had their first child. Their only child. Me. I know I was wanted and loved, and now it hurts like hell that my memories of my early years and of my parents are fading to oblivion as the past recedes. I think I remember a vegetable garden, some of the toys I played with, but what escapes me is the sound of their voices, the soothing lullabies my mother would sing to help me fall asleep. Lubachka, I think she called me. But now those memories, those songs, are buried far and deep and I can no longer retrieve them, nor can I picture the smile on her face or the severe, professorial demeanour of my father. I don’t even know the colours of my parents’ eyes. And the false memories created by the few photographs I retain of them are all in black and white. I was told that the driver of the lorry who hit their car on the Moscow Highway was drunk. The articulated lorry he lost control of was carrying a cargo of building materials. It was no consolation to hear he also died in the collision, crushed in his cockpit by massive blocks of concrete that had cut loose from the back of his vehicle. All three died instantly. It was the middle of the night. I was taken in by my aunt, my mother’s sister. She was divorced and childless, and also lived close to Donetsk. Once she had wanted to be a ballet dancer and she made it her life’s work to see that I followed in that path, encouraging my dancing and sacrificing much in the way of money and leisure time so that I might realise her ambition and be successful where she hadn’t been. I was enrolled in the local dance academy, and attended classes after school three times a week and then again at the weekend. In order to pay for my lessons, my aunt was obliged to give piano lessons every Saturday in our apartment, which meant on those days I had to make my own way on foot to the academy buildings over three miles from where we lived, through heavy snow, sunshine or under the rain, whatever the weather. I had to make this journey increasingly regularly, after school, as her old used car was beginning to fall apart and she was unable to pick me up. It afforded me much time for daydreaming. Of course, like most little girls in the USSR, let alone the Ukraine, I dreamed of making it as a prima ballerina and I was repeatedly told that I had the necessary natural talent. But did I have the discipline, the ambition? The answer to that was less evident. I was lazy and unwilling to learn the classical steps, hated their rigour, preferred to lose myself in the music and improvise movements that just came naturally and were not part of any of the choreography our stern teachers were trying to drum into our small skulls. ‘Lubov Shevshenko,’ they would shout at me time and time again, ‘you are incorrigible. What are we going to make of you?’ I think I was eleven by then, and I managed to pass the final set of exams and was invited to move to St Petersburg, my father’s place of birth, to attend the prestigious School of Art and Dance. I had no known relatives living there any longer and, as an orphan, was granted a menial bursary to cover my living expenses, although I had no choice in the matter and would have to live in a dormitory for other provincials similarly adrift in the city – an old secret police building that had been converted into a school for the disadvantaged. The prospect of living on my own wasn’t daunting, as life with my aunt had over the years become a series of silences and misunderstandings. She had, since the day she took me in, treated me as an adult, when I still wanted to be a child. Being thrown in at the deep end and having to share in close proximity an eight-bed dormitory with other kids, most of whom were a few years older than me, was something of a traumatic experience. They hailed from Siberia, Tajikistan, a couple were also from the Ukraine and others from the Baltic States, with their perfect complexions, high cheekbones and rotten teeth. I quickly realised I had little in common with most of them. Only two of us attended the same school, while the others were scattered across a variety of different institutes, none of which had artistic aspirations, so we stood out like a pair of sore thumbs, Zosia and I. I couldn’t even pretend we became close friends. At best, from the advantage of her sixteen months seniority and the fact her breasts were already growing, she tolerated me, found my presence convenient as a messenger, factotum and facilitator. Luba, junior assistant when it came to anything illegal or forbidden, like smuggling cigarettes into the dormitory or concealing other’s banned make-up under her mattress – that was me. My early training in criminality . . . A few years into my time in St Petersburg, Zosia fell pregnant. She was