Janine

Janine

by Ferial Mohamed

Inspired by The Piano Player, by Elizabeth Strout

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 before the shows started. The dancers came on at 11, when Janine’s shift began, and the girls would grace the stage as femme fatales swathed in sensual illusions of feminine archetypes, roles they played until the place closed at 8 the next morning, and perhaps even continuing to play the roles after that. 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 an ornate balcony that the girls joked was fashioned like “broekie lace”, or bloomer lace in English, a pleasant spot for the girls to stand and smoke cigarettes in their satin robes, overlooking the city, when they weren’t on stage. They were allowed to chat to patrons and could often be found on the balcony flirting or having a drink with someone, if he wanted to buy them a drink, which Mo encouraged because it boosted his business. 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. There was a high counter where the bar stood, rising up in the left corner, and there were ceiling fans that made a swooshing noise as it rotated endlessly, keeping the stagnant air from the fog machine on the stage circulating, and keeping the perpetual stuffiness from laboured breathing and cigarettes bearable. Sitting in the leopard print upholstered chairs was the audience – Janine of course had met people from all walks of life here - lawyers, doctors, and accountants; artists and athletes, businessmen; married men; unmarried men - often hazy-eyed individuals who came alone; or groups of raucous young boys looking for easy pleasure they did not have to hunt, that would not reject or inflict judgement ; middle-aged, balding men; stringy or pot-bellied and plump; the odd romantic couple, the final rendezvous for bachelor parties, all in some capacity voyeurs it seemed to Janine, who wanted distraction, titillation – as she observed them lean in close to watch the girls dance under the neon fluorescent lights which changed colours, from stark green to yellow to blue to pink in between the smoke, the girls dancing their routines as they stripped off their clothes, bit by bit, tossing garments into the crowd until there was nothing left but their flesh and the fantasy.

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 road 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.

By all accounts Janine was still an alluring woman, but she was not the immaculate young girl she used to be when she had first gotten into this business, not anymore, not like the newer young girls at the club. It was natural to be desirable at 18, to roll out of bed effortlessly, skin glowing and taut, her masses of brown waves not showing any signs of greying back then, to throw on a curve-hugging pants over bone-thin hips, knee-high boots, freckles across her cheeks affording her a fresh-faced innocence despite the toll the dancing took on her, a private soreness she never divulged to anyone, and which seemed to grow deeper with every uncelebrated birthday and the more she hid it. “Every man in here wants you,” Mo used to tell her, “you’re their fantasy of what a woman should be.” But these days she was finding it harder to keep her figure as slim as Mo liked it for the club. He had called her in to his office to discuss this with her, curating her dinners as if she were a girl-child – asking the other girls to watch her eating as if she was a patient, and so she had adjusted her daily 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. She was not sure what place there would be for her at Ruby’s at her age, although it was the only work she had ever known, and she had been with Mo for years already and by now she felt like this was family.

In her flat, after her shift ended, 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 much lustful ogling, so much lewd desire, yet this did not move her, she had simply learned by now how to give men what they wanted. It was matter of fact. They came to see her because they needed something and then they went home to their lives, their wives, and their responsibilities. And so Janine came to understand her work in this way, that people needed her so that they could escape, and so she came to know that despite her soreness she was not less free than most of the men she danced for, and she expected that she was not less free than their sisters, their mothers, or their wives. And so under the harsh fluorescent lights she danced, and in the small flat she would sit on top of the toilet seat after her shifts, her bare feet touching the tiles, rubbing creams into the soft lines creeping near, around her eyes, at the edges of her mouth and tugging at the new softness encroaching along her neck, knowing still that it would deepen.

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

She was living in the rooms that Mo kept above the club, an entire floor that housed all his dancers, and this had become possible after the renovations were completed three years ago, when Mo bought the building after having rented it for many years from a company based in Amsterdam. Janine had the same room the other girls had, a modest bedroom with a framed commercial print of an abstract Kandinsky above the headboard, like the kind you would find in a room at the Holiday Inn Express, and there was a bathroom, and a kitchenette with a washing machine in it. This, she thought, despite the fact that Mo had told her many times that she was his special girl and that he needed her or he would lose it. When she moved in she tried to hide her disappointment, having hoped that she would share his quarters or at the very least her flatlet would show some reflection of the role she had been playing in his life, perhaps something the other girls might envy. She had after all been his girl for over five years now. Mo did not openly discuss his private life with everyone though, and had asked her not to keep it a secret so to speak, but to keep their private affairs between them, because he did not like for people to know any more than they needed to, being especially a man in his position. Janine recalled how she felt when he had said that, they had been sitting in the back seat of his car and Arno was driving them to get a bite to eat at Carlito’s, how she had been sipping from a bottle of Valpre and how she had felt the water burn her intestines as it trailed through her, as if every minute droplet were laced with a million little knived-spurs.  

It was only her mother really that she had discussed Mo with, mostly because before moving into Ruby’s she had lived with her mother in a two-bedroomed house in Mitchells Plain, and so it was impossible to keep this information from her. Back then Janine had taken a taxi to work, walking the street at night in her short brown almost fur jacket and her skin-tight Guess jeans, to get to the rank near Westgate Mall. There was always some guy who tried to talk to her, follow her, or a group of men huddling around a corner, smoking, catcalling, gyrating in her direction even, until she was forced to look at them. Janine had mentioned this to Mo and he had started sending Arno out to fetch her for work, but when he did this, he also did the same for the other girls.

The house in Mitchell’s Plain she shared with her mother until her mother’s boyfriend, Tyrone was released from Pollsmoor, having served time for being caught with tik. When Tyrone moved in he did not get on very well with Janine and she especially did not get on with the friends he had over every night, whom she knew would enter her bedroom, which had no lock, and sit on her bed and smoke mandrax while she was working her late shifts. One morning she recalled coming home and finding her dresser drawer with her bra’s and panties half-open, strewn on the floor, and when she fought about this with Tyrone, he laughed that she was acting like she was all laa-dee-daa, and that was when Janine’s mother asked her to pack her things because she was making too much trouble for them.

The timing had been lucky, as it was the same time that Mo had opened the first floor of Ruby’s for the girls, to keep business running smoothly he had told her, but she had secretly believed that it was a little bit more than that, that it had something to do perhaps with taking care of her, and that belief had made her smile when she was alone by herself and with her own thoughts, like in the moments after a long shift and her limbs might be worn from dancing, the balls of her feet aching from the heels she strutted in, and the insides of her thighs chafed from the pole, when she clambered out of her nurses getup (one of her work outfits), and got into her pyjamas and rested her head onto her pillow, almost ready to fall asleep.

Sometimes, Janine thought, Mo made her feel like his girl. And it was in fact true, that sometimes Mo did do something that was quite nice. Like this Friday night, for example, Ruby’s was closed for business and Mo was throwing a party for the girls, so they could let their hair down and enjoy themselves he had said.

Janine had been nervous about this, not least of all because Mo had been in her room that week to bring her a gift especially for this night. He had used his key to enter, he never knocked when he came upstairs, he simply unlocked the door silently and appeared in her bedroom doorway, this time with a great white box and a green ribbon across it under his arm. Once she had complained about these unannounced appearances and her rebellion made him angry, with him questioning what she had wanted to keep from him, after everything he had done for her, and so she had learned not to do this again. Mo, she knew, wanted to keep a close eye on his affairs. She had overheard Arno talking with a man in the club she did not know, and so she knew that there were cameras in the rooms too, to make sure that none of the girls tried anything funny behind Mo’s back, especially with the club’s clientele. This was because Mo ran a clean business. “You belong to me Janine,” Mo had said when she asked him about the cameras, and he leaned in to kiss her so hard on the lips that he smeared her red lipstick across her mouth and her chin and she had to hold onto his desk to keep from falling.

Tonight Janine stood naked in her room with the box Mo had brought her on the bed, its contents unruffled amid pieces of mint green tissue paper. It was a dress that she had already tried on and had loved. He had gotten it for her to wear tonight. A long blue dress that hung to her ankles, with cut off shoulders on the top, little bits of sequins sparkling across it here and there, a shimmer that seemed to follow her as she turned in the mirror. She painted her face as Gauguin might have, or Matisse, her lips and cheeks and eyes made visceral. Before she stepped out of her room she twirled around one more time to make sure she looked lovely, and then she did what she had by now become accustomed to doing, she stepped into the kitchen and drank enough brandy to make sure that when she stepped outside she would feel light. She always did this, especially before a shift.

Downstairs the club looked somewhat different from what it normally did, as all the lights had been turned on, so it was not as dark as it used to be and a clearing had been made in the centre of the room for a dance floor. There were guests milling about with drinks in their hands, men in blazers, ladies in cocktail dresses, the girls from the club of course, elegant in dinner dresses. The tables had been transformed with white tablecloths. On the stage where Janine and the girls usually danced there was a band, and they were playing Ella Fitzgerald, wearing white tuxedo jackets. For a moment it reminded her of childhood, when she was little and she went to the Roman Catholic school in Eastridge, after bible education the girls were lined up in rows in Madame Fischer’s class to sing hymns and Madame Fischer always liked to play jazz music on the piano. She said Jesus didn’t mind and it inspired her. It was there that Janine first thought that she might sing some day. Madame Fischer had told her she had the voice of an angel and she had given her the lead in assembly on Mondays, leading the school choir after they said the Our Father. This had not lasted long because of Janine’s mother. She had never told anyone about what her mother did and yet she did not know why she did not.

But Janine never forgot the way she felt when she was on stage during that time in her youth, when she sang - looking out across the sea of faces, the other students’ eyes fixed on her, silence in the large crowd, everyone waiting on her to use her voice – the way the sound vibrated up from her larynx and how she felt it quiver like a small animal in her throat, and then she’d set it free and it shifted the energy in the room – how it could make people feel sad, or happy, or make them remember. Truthfully, it was the only time in her life she felt people actually saw her as she would like to be and did not simply look through her or look at her as she was. For those few moments when she trusted the world enough to let people listen to her voice, she stopped being a ghost, and so the singing became the most precious part of who she was.

“You’re precious to me,” Quinton had said during that time when she was a girl, long before Tyrone ever came into the picture. “I’m the only one who really loves you, but don’t tell your mother you know how jealous she is.” That was what he said when he crept into her room in the silence of the night, covering her mouth with his hand while she clutched her teddy bear to deaden his moans. That was before he went to Pollsmoor, before her belly began to swell. When he was gone her mother took a taxi to the cells every Thursday morning with five packs of cigarettes and as much cash as she could spare to give him, she never missed a single visiting hour, and when her mother found out about her baby she said, “You asked for it didn’t you, traipsing around here in that little nightie, luring him.”

Janine saw then that Quinton was not a liar. That was what kept her awake at nights, frozen still in the dark - the affirmation that there were parts of him, no matter what he had done to her, that were the truth, and how that must have meant that perhaps he wasn’t bad like she wondered if he might be, and how that must have meant that it had to be her that was bad, that she was bad. It made her want to scrape the insides of her skin out and when she bathed at night she would take the Minora blade and make small cuts on her arms. When her mother forced her to drink the misoprostol that the neighbour, Aziza, got from the day hospital she let the tears fall quietly down her face but she did not resist. Her mother waited for Quinton for 14 months after they jailed him, but he did not come back to them when he got out, and her mother never quite forgave her for that.   

Aziza had been kind to her. She recalled that. She worked as a nurse at the local clinic and after the baby came out she came by sometimes to make sure Janine was alright. That there was no infection. “She brought it on herself,” her mother had tsked. But Aziza still brought her vegetable soup in a peach Tupperware container with a mismatched blue lid, and she patted the palm of her hand against Janine’s shoulder one afternoon, “You gonna be jus fine my girl, jus fine, jus watch,” she said as Janine sat at the linoleum table and swallowed with meagre bites, and when Janine didn’t smile, she said, “Sing something nice for me, you know I like Nat King Cole.” Aziza got up and started humming a tune, swaying her body in the small space between the chairs and the stove, her eyes faraway, and Janine looked up at her but she did not feel like singing, even though she knew she was good at singing.

On the stage at Ruby’s the saxophone player caught Janine’s eye and he winked at her as she stood transfixed for a moment, staring up at them. She became aware of herself and clutched at the blue shawl wrapped around her arms. Around her the room was filling up. Arno was tending the bar but Mo had hired a caterer and there were young girls she didn’t know in black coat tails, shorts and pantyhose, with bunny ears on their heads serving drinks. These were all new people, Janine thought as she looked around the room realising she knew only the other dancers but no one else. Behind her she felt a hand against her arm. It was Tawnee, not in her rodeo costume, but in a red ruched mini dress with a huge sateen rose propped against her waist. “Mo’s looking for you,” she said, and motioned to where he stood in a group with two other men, across the room.

Janine straightened her dress and her hair and sashayed over to him. Taking her place by his side, she smiled in a way that showed all of her teeth and she kissed Mo on the cheek. “Tawnee said you wanted me,” she breathed, staring into his eyes and grabbed onto his arm, her hands finding his.

“I want you to meet them,” he said putting his arm around her waist, and then he introduced her to the men he was talking to. “My special girl,” he said, smiling. “Take their glasses and bring them fresh drinks,” he said to Janine.

Janine complied and found the nearest waitress, when she came back and handed them the glasses Mo said he had to make an important phone call and excused himself. His last words to her as he left was, “Take care of them, they’re important business associates,” and he walked off, pulling his cell phone out of his jacket pocket.

Mo was barely out of earshot when one of the men put his arm around Janine’s waist, in the same spot where Mo had put his arm earlier, and he led her, walking towards one of the club’s private rooms, the rooms the girls used for private dancing. Janine’s blue wrap fell from her shoulder and she hesitated, moving only as stolid as a tree trunk, her steps fumbling and dispassionate.

She knew this room, Mo had named it Venus, and Janine felt she did not want to go inside and so she pulled back. Her shawl fell to the ground and she felt ill. She looked behind her to find Mo, understanding now the arrangement he had made for her, Janine flinched, that inner soreness pelting her from out of nowhere.

“I paid him extra for this,” the man said, “he said you were one of his best girls.”

All of Mo’s You’re specials and all his You belong to me’s and all the You’re my girl’s flushed her and she felt lightheaded and realised she had had nothing to eat all day except that damned litchi juice and she needed to sit down. There was an empty seat at a table just behind her and she said, “I’m going to be sick,” and then Janine felt the room spinning around her and people’s faces blurred and then a mixture of brandy and fruit flavoured water poured forth from the pit of her stomach through her throat. She doubled over, throwing up on the white tablecloth and on her blue dress, and on the man’s tuxedo jacket. His face soured and he withdrew from her as Tawnee stepped forward to hold Janine steady. “You okay there girl? I’ll tell Mo you’re not feeling well,” Tawnee said, leading Janine to the bathroom to clean her up, her dress stained, ruined - her lipstick smudged across her face.  

After she wiped her mouth she went to find Mo in his office at the back of the club. She had asked Arno for another glass of brandy to settle her stomach before she went in and she felt ready to speak to him.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said looking up from behind his desk as she entered the room.

She closed the door.

“I just spoke to Van Jaarsveld he said you got sick all over him, he’s fucking pissed. Jesus Janine, I’m trying to buy a property from that guy, I told you he’s an associate are you trying to ruin my fucking business. All you had to do was keep him happy. You just cost me you alkie.”

A lot of words went through her mind, but all she said was, “I’m leaving.” She had told Tawnee in the bathroom earlier that she was going to leave and Tawnee had said that she would never leave Ruby’s herself because the girls were treated well here and she enjoyed her work, that she was doing what she loved.

“Leaving?” Mo said. “I told you, you belong to me.”

“I don’t belong to anyone,” Janine said, and it was only when she said it out loud that she knew that it was true.

“And what do you think’s out there for a dried up old whore. Go ahead and leave then, but don’t you ever come back. I won’t want you again.”

Like all those years ago with Quentin she was afraid that he was telling the truth, but she was more sure than ever before that she was tired - tired of lying awake in her room at 2am waiting and hoping to hear Mo’s key turn in the door just to hold her in the dark when he could make it, tired of her mother’s condemnation, tired of the desires of strangers, tired of giving everyone else what they wanted, afraid of the freedom it took.

And she understood then that she got fainted because she was hungry, that her body wanted more than cardboard cartons of litchi juice washed down with brandy to trick her into feeling full.

“Goodbye,” Janine whispered.

She went upstairs to pack her bag. One bag. Her toothbrush, her hairbrush, a few items of clothes. She had not accumulated too much while she lived there. She called an Uber and carried her suitcase out to the passage, locking the door and as she left she walked past the stage where the band was still playing jazz music, the party still going on, but this time she did not stop to stare, she walked straight past. Tawnee was sitting on a man’s lap giggling and stroking his cheek, Arno was behind the bar and she went over to him and pushed her key across the counter. She did not explain where she was going. On the street outside it was already dark but the moon was bright in the sky. A drunken man crouched on the pavement steadied himself on a streetlamp and called out to her as she passed, “Hey sexy, you got loose change for me?” but Janine did not turn around or answer him, then he called out after her, “I love you,” and then he dropped to the ground. As she clambered into the Uber and closed the door she saw him urinate against a wall.

“You going to Mitchell’s Plain?” the Uber driver said, checking her address on his app.

“No. I changed my mind.” Janine dug in her purse and pulled out a few notes. “How far will this take me?” She handed it to him.

“Depends. What direction you want to go?”

“Just drive,” she said.

“Listen, lady, I don’t want no funny business,” the man said, and turned the car ignition off to stare at her. “I need to know where you going.”  

She thought for a moment. “To the seaside,” she said, “take me to the nearest seaside motel. Where there's sunlight and ocean air.”

“If that’s what you want.” He turned around and turned the car on again and the radio up. There was a song playing that Janine did not remember the words to but she knew the tune from long ago, and as they drove off she hummed along, hitting every high note like she had done in the school assembly for Madame Fischer.

 

The end.

Thank you for reading.