Fishnet Read Free Page B

if we can’t show off, eh?’
    The Slosh hugged and clapped itself off the floor as music began to warp into something darker, squelchier, doomy hip hop pending and henz in heelz took over, three of them dragging a protesting Heather to her place at the centre. Kelly led the way with a prefect’s wagging finger, assembling us in two loose rows, just like Cherry, the ‘seduction tutor’ with the tight smile, had taught us earlier. The bassline began to seep into our hips as the DJ slurred something over the intro. We all held two hands out at arm’s length, gripped invisible poles, thrust our feet apart and ground like we were born to it. Some of the girls were giggling and snorting and checking each other – Heather kept turning her head and smirking at anyone who would look at her – but on the whole we were deadly serious, Claire most of all, her mouth ticking over the beat count as it went, as the song bent and raunched away and we splayed our legs wider, stuck our bums out-out-right-out and hip, and hip. Certainly, ladies, wehad the room. The Sloshers tutted and turned their heads away across the generation gap, easy smiles gone.
    Hip hip, thrust thrust, shimmy-six-seven-eight, titty-titty pump-left, pump-right thrust thrust hip hip.
    I could feel it coming through the music, the fat electronic fart of the music, its meaty beeps. It began to make sense to my body, to bend my knees and rock my pelvis on the beat, to stick my arse out back on a count of four and shake, and thrust, and titty-titty. All of us, moving as one. Like a tribe. The girls grew cockier, a couple of the ones with hair extensions flicking them from side to side – Andrea’s hair got caught in my lip-gloss and I didn’t care, I blew her a kiss – carving movements out of the stale air, all for the two, only two acceptable boys at the bar. Hiphip thrust-thrust titty-titty. Body on autopilot.
    Then I tuned into the words the DJ was grunting along with the rapper.
    â€˜Take it, take take it, baby. You’re my ho, you’re my ho, and I’ll pimp you real good. Oh yeah, real good.’
    You’re my ho.
    I was mid-thrust when my stomach went. I made it off the dance floor in time, so none of them saw me, but most of it still ended up on the toilet corridor carpet, silky, bile-green coils that glowed faintly in the strip lighting.
    â€˜You’re my ho, you’re my ho, take it ho, take it ho. Real good. Real good.’
    I’d vomited so hard that I’d made myself cry great fat smudges of mascara, dripping down onto the cheap burnished metal trough that deputised for sinks here. The toilets were designed for female friendship in 1999; two pans to a cubicle, no lids. I suppose that made it harder to do drugs on. I heard three songs morph into different sets of beats while I was in there, carefully washing my face, scouring off every streak, squinting at myself in the crappy tin mirror, and starting again. None of my group came in to check I was okay, although I did get a motherly hug off a Slosher,gin on her breath and a smothering floral scent as she pulled my face in to her big soft bosom, rocked me, told me aw, darlin, it’ll be alright. You’ll be alright. We’ve all been there, eh?
    I don’t think we have.
    Three henz and Heather were still on the floor when I resurfaced, repeating the invisible pole dance endlessly for a room that had moved on, to a song where a robot’s voice had an orgasm: ooh-ooh-ooh-OOHYEAH . The others were clustered around the bar, around those boys in boxy shirts who seemed to have bred four more boxy friends. Samira was there, holding herself apart, stately, and of course attracting far more attention than the rest of the pack together.
    The man who’d caught my sleeve materialised out of the darkness in front of me again.
    â€˜So, you not remember your old friends, eh doll? You too good for us now, eh?’
    I made for the