…and then, she says, she worked on an apple farm in Holland for three years. We’re sitting in a small cafe, one I’ve missed. At the next table six French students have been playing cards for three hours. Every half an hour they file outside and stare into the grey sky, colourful bohemian chic. People eating pasties from blue paper bags stop and gawp. A small child wielding, unwieldily, an ice-cream, frowns up at the sky and squawks. On my way home I think in snapshots about working on an apple farm in Holland. A wicker basket, the bark of a gnarled old trunk in the dappled light of dusk, a close up of an equally gnarled old woman, her face a landscape of elephant skin wrinkles and cracked tectonic plates. I have read too many books, perhaps, or am no longer living in the real world.

 

I meet Sammy for a drink, and look for the sharp angles in her face. She wears very red lipstick smudged around the borders of her lips, which she leaves on the rim of my glass. As always, kohl-rimmed eyes. I ask about the club. Oh, she says, they told me that since I cut my hair and stopped working out, I’ve been giving clients the wrong image. They take away Othello and tell her, this is not a library. I can see that, she says, pointedly. In unlit corners of the room half-naked wisps of women gyrate for half-closed eyes and three-day stubble, for tattoed forearms and leering jaw-dropped mouths breathing alcohol and fags, and for the tips. They say, Marie Claire and Cosmo under the desk. Then next week they say, we replaced you with a full-time receptionist. As you don’t dance, anymore… 

 

She shrugs. Outside three Chinese women, stone-cold sober and wrapped up in duffel coats and scarves, sell neon flashing sticks and plastic roses to girls with goosebumps in high high heels, and a slinky blonde in a small black dress sidles up to two policemen. On their flourescent yellow jackets it says guardian of the streets. They look mildly impressed. ‘Night, says Sammy, and I walk home, the streets swaying slightly.