The Palace of Strange Girls Read Free Page B

moment. The little bastard has got a lass from over yonder in with him.”
    Jack follows the direction of Dougie’s thumb and sees a strip joint on the corner opposite with all the hatches battened down.
     “Who’s he got in there?” he asks, hard pushed to hide his incredulity.
    “One of the strippers. I didn’t stop long enough to get her name and there were no bloody point asking Doug. Pound to a penny
     he wouldn’t know.”
    “So where did you sleep?”
    “I kipped down in the Residents’ Lounge. I was OK till the cleaners turned up at six and threw me out. I’ve been hanging around
     here on the off chance one of the lads turned up. I’m chilled to the bloody bone and gasping for a drink. They won’t open
     the hotel doors before nine at the earliest.”
    Jack puts his hand in his pocket and gives Dougie half a crown. “That’ll be enough to get you a pot of tea and some breakfast.”
    Dougie brightens immediately and says, “Thanks, Jack. E-e, but you should have come with us last night. We had a grand time.
     It was a good do.”
    “Looks like it,” replies Jack.
    Dougie blinks his bloodshot eyes and rubs a calloused hand over his sickly face. “We started off at Yates’s but, God help
     us, we ended up at the King o’ Clubs.”
    “I’m surprised you went back there. I thought you’d been thrown out last time,” Jack says as they cross the tramlines.
    “We were. It was Tapper’s fault. We sat through this load o’ guff about how we were going to see amazing things. Some tart
     wi’ her own version of pingpong, half a dozen Egyptian dancers, that sort of thing. We’d gone in to see Sheba, the star of
     the show. She was billed as ‘six foot of exotic woman, naked as God intended, from the distant reaches of deepest Africa.’
     Tapper jumped up halfway through the spiel and yelled, ‘Well, bloody bring her out! I’ve summat here from Blackburn waiting
     for her!’ It took three of us, mind, but we managed to get Tapper to sit down again and button his fly. Nowt would have come
     of it if some lard-arse next to us hadn’t said summat smart. Tapper only got to throw three or four punches before we were
     out on our ears. Never a dull moment wi’ Tapper.”
    That much is true. Eddie Tapworth is the best tackler in the cotton shed. A giant of a man, he is built for the heavy job
     of lifting beams. He can keep his looms running all day. He’s not one of those tacklers who hang around making the weavers
     wait while they sort out a trapped or broken shuttle, or grumbling at Jack to chase up a shortage of spindles from the spinning
     rooms. Tapper sets to and does it himself. He could replace the used shuttles and put a fresh cop in faster than you could
     draw breath. He is one of the few tacklers who can reckon how much the shaft speed will increase when the leather drive belts
     from the looms shrink in the heat. If all the tacklers were as capable as Tapper, the foreman’s job would be a damn sight
     easier. When he’s sober, Jack has a good deal of time for Eddie Tapworth. But drunk it’s another matter. A few pints and Tapper
     would fight his own shadow if it followed him.
    “We’re off to the Winter Gardens tomorrow night,” Dougie continues. “You’d like. It’s Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen. Why don’t
     you come?”
    Jack rubs the angle of his jaw and shakes his head. “No, I’m not that bothered, Dougie.”
    “Come on! You’ve not lost your taste for jazz! I’ve known a time when I couldn’t get you to play a waltz straight without
     jazzing it up. We lost work for the band because of it. You were Blackburn’s answer to Jack Teagarden.”
    Jack’s expression is transformed by the memory. Laughter rumbles from deep in his chest while his gray eyes all but disappear
     above the curve of his cheekbones. He and Dougie got up to all sorts in the band before the war. He played trombone to Dougie’s
     trumpet. Jack had started off as bandleader—top hat, silk scarf,