The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [38]
Suddenly there was an explosion—somewhere up in the roof. Stevie scanned the gallery, looking for danger. But the faces were upturned in expectation, not fear.
A man was standing on a railing, five floors up. His arms were raised and Stevie saw there were copper wings strapped to his back. Leaning out, he allowed his body to arc through the air and plummet earthwards, a bungee cord spooling out behind him.
Before he could hit the dancers on the stage, he bounced, flying backwards through the air like Icarus rewound. He tumbled and somersaulted through the foggy air with extraordinary grace.
That’s what I need in life, thought Stevie, a bungee cord.
A shower of glitter rained down as if from some invisible silver cloud. Strobe lights kicked in like flak. The winged man flew, the dancers gyrated with even more energy, and the whole club became a snow-dome of male pleasure.
The Icarus landed gently on the stage and was unhooked from his umbilical cords. He was a small man, almost dwarfish, a hump deforming the upper part of his spine. He climbed quickly down from the podium and pushed his way roughly through the crowd. Stevie thought about how tall and graceful he had looked in the air; how small and constricted on the ground.
She scanned the galleries. The men stared down at the women below, confident in the invisibility of vertical distance. Henning and Vadim were hunting up on levels three and four.
Diego and Iacopo reappeared. ‘We couldn’t see you!’
‘You look like a tiny bambi—big eyes,’ Iacopo gestured, ‘like this!’
‘All minuscola—like un foglio di musica, a piece of sheet music,’ added Diego.
Stevie smiled. ‘That is so I can slip in and out of people’s thoughts unnoticed.’
‘We brought you a drink—’
‘Russian Standard vodka. If you drink only this—’ ‘—you get no hangover. Now you see is three am and is a new show.’
‘The three o’clock show is much more erotica.’
‘Come to dance with us!’
Stevie shook her head. The house music was getting heavier.
Stevie pushed through to the other side of the stage. Nobody took any notice of her. It was impossible to find Petra. The place was enormous.
Fresh girls were taking up their positions on the stage. The promoter was clicking his fingers at them, herding them like fowl. These ones looked very young, probably still in their teens. They wore only g-strings and leather caps, backsides swinging, lifting up to the waiting, watching crowd.
The chubby man with the enormous tongue that had so disgusted Stevie was right up front. A tender honey-blonde was waving her buttocks in his face. He was stuffing money into her garter, slowly, making her beg, owning her.
Stevie was mesmerised, not by their bodies but by their faces. They had developed an armour of expression, impenetrable. She thought of the love that must have once been invested by the parents in the future of each dancing girl. That it had come to this.
Stevie finished off the vodka with a deep swallow. It had been a large glass. She knew she was a little drunk. Sadness—or was it anger, despair?—rushed through her. Perhaps it was the stabbing of the pain the faces of the girls could not, would not show . . . did not feel?
What would Anya have felt when she saw them?
Dancing was a good job for girls in Moscow. There was so very little else—for anyone. These girls would be earning, but that their hopes for the future lay in proffering their bottoms to an indifferent crowd seemed like a symptom that the world was off-kilter. No human—no heart—should be so utterly expendable.
Out of nowhere, American dollar bills began to rain down. Stevie raised her eyes to the invisible ceiling, saw the counterfeit fortune in the air, but thought—actually felt; she was no longer thinking—only of the girls, all with mothers, all with dreams. She left her face turned skyward. She didn’t want to see any more dancing babies.
A large bearded man in a leather vest pushed his way through the crowd holding his camera over his head, over the crowd, and started firing. His