Janine

 

Janine

Ferial Mohamed

Inspired by The Piano Player, Elizabeth Strout

Draft.

Janine van Breda worked the late night shift as a modern dancer at Ruby’s, an establishment near Long Street, in the heart of town. The place had been there for the better part of seven years and opened at 10pm, when people would stream in intermittently to drink cocktails at the bar. The dancers came on at 11, when Janine’s shift started, and they would grace the stage until the place closed at 8 the next morning. It was not unusual during the night to see the bouncers throw someone who misbehaved out onto the pavement, his jacket or his keys following on behind him, after he had had too much to drink perhaps and tried more often than not, something not allowed with one of the girls. Ruby’s was run by Mo Shaikh and Mo had a reputation for running a clean place, and also being someone you did not want to cross, and could not cross without consequences. Janine herself believed that she would not do this.

Like most buildings in the vicinity, the architecture of the place was old Victorian, with a balcony that the girls joked was fashioned like “broekie lace”. Around the building, which was set on the corner of Adderley and Wale Streets, there were large square windows which were tinted black so that nobody from the outside could see in. Inside the doorway, a narrow entrance led to a low ceilinged room dotted with round tables and chairs around each table, closely set, so that if one chair were pulled out too far it would knock into another, a high counter where the bar stood rose up in the left corner, and ceiling fans that made a swooshing noise as it rotated endlessly to keep the stagnant air from laboured breathing and cigarettes, and smoke from the fog machine on stage circulating. Sitting in the leopard print upholstered chairs was an audience, hazy-eyed lonely individuals; old, plump men; the odd romantic couple, groups of raucous young friends, voyeurs it seemed to Janine, who came to be entertained, to be distracted, titillated, leaning in close to watch the girls dance.

From inside Ruby’s, you could see passers-by making their way across the street or hurrying along the pavement to the restaurant next door, or to the string of fast fashion outlets further down the way selling Chinese container imports, but the occupants of Ruby’s hardly cared for this. Janine herself, while she was working, never stopped to look out.

Janine by all accounts was still a young woman, but she was not the immaculate young girl she used to be, especially not when she had first gotten into this business. It was easy to be desirable then, at 18, to roll out of bed effortlessly and part her masses of brown waves in the middle, throw on her curve-hugging tights over bone-thin hips with her knee length boots and a vest, her freckles across her cheeks affording her a fresh-faced innocence despite the toll the dancing took on her, something she never divulged to anyone. These days she was finding it harder to keep her figure as slim as Mo liked it for his clientele. He had called her in to discuss it with her, limiting her dinner as if she was a girl-child, or a patient, and so she had adjusted her consumption to a simple piece of chicken or fish with a bowl of greens and a 500ml carton of litchi juice, something she bought a few of and drank throughout the day.

At night after her shift when she washed her face clean in the bathroom she would lean in close to the mirror and inspect the tender skin that had been the object of so many stares of admiration and ogling that did not touch her. Under the harsh fluorescent light in the small flat she would sit on top of the toilet seat, her bare feet touching the tiles, and rub creams into the soft lines creeping near, around her eyes, at the edges of her mouth and the new softness encroaching along her neck, knowing still that it would deepen.

Then she would step into the bedroom and from her closet retrieve and hang out her costume for her next shift.

 

to be continued