Fresh from their success with the Collective Novel Experiment, and with two grants lining the coffers, Whistler’s Writers Group, the Vicious Circle, has confirmed CanLit leading lights Susan Musgrave, Caroline Adderson, and Brian Kaufman as workshop leaders for the annual festival and retreat to be held in Whistler from Sept. 8 to 13.
Registration for the entire five-day writing retreat is open to anyone, with 21 spaces available, in either fiction or non-fiction stream, at a price of $500 (discounted to $375 if participants arrange their own accommodation.) Large portions of the program are also available on a drop-on basis.
Morning lectures will be presented by Ross Laird on ethical issues related to craft and tapping into your creativity, Mary Schendlinger on the how to get work published, Patti Osborne on self publishing and Rebecca Wood Barrett on pitching stories to publishers.
A detailed program, bios of all the writing mentors and presenters, and information about the pitching session, are available online. To register, or find out more about the Retreat, lecturers and mentors, and readings visit the group’s newly launched website, www.theviciouscircle.ca
In anticipation of the Writers Festival, Pique Newsmagazine is showcasing four short stories written by local writers from Aug. 25 to Sept. 15. We hope you enjoy these stories and will come out and hear more local and national writers read and talk about their work.
Night Blooms
By Rebecca Wood Barrett
The bright girls at the club learn quick-smart which rules to follow, and which ones to ignore. Bronte Millar breaks rule number one at eight in the evening, in the kitchen of her one-room tenement flat; before she showers or dresses or even remembers why, she capsizes a bottle of vodka over a coffee mug. Two glugs clear and pure. Tops it up with orange juice from the fridge. She never drinks out of a glass when she gets up: the coffee mug makes her feel like it’s morning.
Eyes gluey with smoke-grit and mascara, she navigates with gold toes and flat feet, from Formica counter, past mattress, to shower stall. Bronte twists the taps on full bore, her face enduring a torrential summer – as long as it takes, until her eyelids come ungummed. Stuff the water shortages. She drains her mug, her sips slow and bubbling, a stutter.
She walks to work in thongs, her knapsack slung over one shoulder. Wearing a baby-blue skirt and tank top, Bronte looks like a backpacker. She slips through the narrow alleys of Woolloomooloo, navigating an indirect route to avoid the hostels, their balconies, verandahs, and the huddles of eyes. She scales the long vertiginous steps of the McElhone Stairs, and, on the fourth landing, looks over her shoulder and surveys the steep flight, feeling its pull; the descent, its potential. She scrambles up the last set, thongs slapping at heels. On the top step plants her foot in Potts Point, a more salubrious suburb than the pub suburb she’s just climbed out of.
Macleay Street unravels along a ridge: the modest rise in elevation affords the cliques of heritage buildings water-views of Rose Bay and the city’s harbour. A passing flicker of wrought iron fencing separates Bronte from the prim gardens, their precisely square or circular grass carpets, rimmed with inlaid tile walkways and flowering camellias. At the centre of each, a symmetrical planting, a tangelo tree, a Japanese maple. Bronte notices the heritage paint on the buildings is peeling.
Halfway up the street she encounters backpackers who smile and nod, mistaking her for one of their own. Waiting for the lights to change at a crosswalk, a shirtless male traveler stops next to her. She knows he’s from a northern country, his skin is tanned, the colour of brown sugar, without a freckle or sun-spot in sight. Virgin pigment. In an Irish accent, he asks her where she’s from. ‘Up north,’ she says. It’s partly true. Her flat is five blocks north of Kings Cross. The lights change and they step into the road together.
‘Off to pub with me mates. O’Malley’s. D’yeh care to join es?’
‘On a mission. Headache tablets. For my girlfriend.’
‘Aye. After that then?’
‘See you there.’ Bronte turns into the chemist’s. Inside, she corkscrews a tester lipstick on a tissue. Applies lavender gloss in three strokes. Buys a pack of gum and leaves.
Bronte walks half a block up the street and then stops in front of a flower shop to study the display. The name of the shop, grandiflora , is stenciled on the glass in plain, silver lettering. Underneath, in daintier type, is the owner’s: isobel caravella . She’s never met the owner; by the time she passes by in the evening, the shop is closed. So she conjures an image of Isobel, imagines the florist as tall, taller than herself. Thin as a strap. She works at a wooden table painted flat white, a blank canvas. Isobel has delicate, musical fingers that pluck and weave the long stems and grasses of her floral designs. The skin on her hands is pierced with slivers, one is buried under the nail of her thumb. Her face is oval shaped, and her skin, pale, an overcast sky. In the morning she wears her blonde hair loose, dribbling over her shoulders, but the strands wind and catch on ficus branches and cactus spears; after an hour of absently untangling her hair, Isobel loops the lengths and secures them in a comb at the base of her neck.
Isobel Caravella’s arrangements change daily, like a horoscope, or barometer. Bronte considers the window. It is filled with swords. Slick green spikes spring from the hidden centre of a single bush, a succulent, like those she’s seen at the cactus garden in the Botanical Gardens. Bronte focuses her eyes on the edge of one of the swords but it shifts in front of her, dissolving in and out. She has the urge to reach through the window and grasp the razor-like leaves, to test if they’re as sharp as they appear. Suddenly afraid, she suspects betrayal, a mutiny by feet and knees and thighs, compressing, preparing to propel her through the window, onto the succulent. Her vision: her body, fallen, scalloped into pieces. She drifts away from the window, following the curve of Macleay Street towards Kings Cross.
Inside the dressing room of the club, Bronte sculls her second drink of the day – a Bundy and Coke – while she puts her face on. Some time ago she stabbed a plastic mirror to the wall with a thumbtack so she didn’t have to do mascara-by-Braille. A bottle of VB had shattered the original. Yumi, twenty-one, slouches beside her on a bar stool and rolls a lippie around her puckering mouth. She then puffs on a cigarette, branding the filter with her ruby lips. Yumi passes it to Clover, sitting on the bog, her skirt cinched around her waist.
‘Rule number two, don’t be late,’ says Bluey, walking in. He doesn’t knock. It’s not one of the rules.
‘Don’t start for another five,’ says Bronte.
‘Yeh better. Else youse’ll owe me. You pay for that?’ he asks, swizzling his finger round her drink.
‘Get stuffed. It’s not BYO.’
‘Is. New rule. Or you can pay at the bar. You girls’d put this place under, the rate you knock it back.’
‘Take it out of my pay,’ says Bronte sarcastically. The club doesn’t pay a wage; the girls take home only what they make in tips.
‘I’ll take it in a pound of flesh, you think it’s such a shithouse deal.’
‘Whyn’t yeh charge us dunny rental while yeh’re at it?’
Bluey glances idly at Clover on the bog. She flips him the bird. Bluey’s reflection gives Bronte a slippery stare in the plastic mirror.
‘Not a bad idea, love. Listen, if you don’t like it, refer to rule number one.’ Bluey sweeps up Bronte’s drink. Bangs the door on the way out.
‘Fuckwit,’ says Clover. Yumi laughs.
Bronte flips open her powder compact. She holds the mirror between her legs, checks for stray pieces of toilet paper. Satisfied, snaps it shut. Bronte removes her kimono and drapes it over the bar stool. She tightens the string bowtie behind her neck and pushes out the dressing room door.
When Bronte applied for the job, she thought she needed two things: a costume; and to know how to dance. She discovered a stripper needs three things: a great ass, fantastic tits and blonde hair. After the first week at the club, she dyed her hair platinum. The tips improved. The ad in the paper had said: No experience necessary. Will train. On her first day she asked Bluey who was going to train her. He pointed at a stained chalkboard. The rules. Printed in childlike handwriting.
‘Just follow the rules. Rule number four: dancers will be topless by the middle of the first song. Rule number five: dancers must be fully unclothed by the end of the second song. There, you’re trained.’
‘That’s it.’
‘Yeh. You want ter make some extra cash, I’ll set youse up on a date.’
‘Just the dancing.’
‘Suit cherself.’
‘So… when do I start?’
‘Clover comes off in five.’
Bronte didn’t have a signature move like lighting her nipples on fire. But it didn’t matter, she was the new girl, fresh meat. She made more money in the first month than in three as a waitress. She admired herself in the mirrors, seeing what the men saw: legs stretched long and tight by strappy stilettos; two half moons gyrating in a provocative orbit; and the curves paired in heart shapes – her calves, lips and breasts – inviting them in, like a flower that blooms at night and releases an irresistible nocturnal perfume. They were helpless, insects attracted, dipping deep into their pockets for their wallets, rolling bills and slipping them into her g-string. Before they could touch her, she shimmied sideways in a wavelike dance, evading their darting hands.
The first two notes of Bronte’s opening song. Blasting. She totters on stage, her feet balancing on points. A scattering of men. She shows her teeth to them. Sees the empty leather chair at the back of the club and closes her eyes. She floats and divides from herself, eases into the chair’s embrace of arms, where she watches over the girl on stage, swinging around a pole. She observes the blokes too, separates one from the other: the piss-tanks, the generous types, the cheap gits, the likely lads.
Now the girl is sliding towards a bald man, the flick of a folded fiver. Behind her, a man wearing a green singlet raises his hand and swings. Seemingly prescient, the girl lunges forward. Catches only the tail end of the blow, a four-fingertip swipe. His nails leave a rosy signature scraped on her hide. The clients are not allowed to touch the dancers. Besides the slap, the girl has been kicked, pinched and punched. A bloke once spat on her – a fat little spud with dirtblack hair. Backstage, she let loose a stinging stream of rum and coke.
The second refrain of the song begins: Please, please tell me now, ’cause it’s something that can’t wait . The girl removes her bikini top. She doesn’t hear the yeah-yeahs, instead, she remembers an evening last spring. The grandiflora window: a terracotta pot, foundering on its side, half-sunk in the soil. Its rim blistered with rust-coloured flakes. The pot was the unlikely home to a riot of thick green leaves shaped like gecko heads. Sprouting Sedum, read a tent card propped on the sill. It was just a houseplant really, commonplace. In a new pot, on a kitchen windowsill, it would be no more noticeable than wallpaper. Paired with the decrepit pot, the houseplant was transformed into something extraordinary, a rare and lovely thing, a discovery. The girl hears light applause, several whistles, she knows her song is over. She scans the front row. Now the men are looking away, making a show of ordering more pints of cheap draft beer. The bald bloke, still watching, stands out. The girl accepts another bill from him. In other circumstances, she thinks, he’s a hero. Maybe they all are, they just don’t know it.
The dressing room is blue with smoke. Clover rubs a red smear from her teeth with her index finger. She eyes Bronte, slumping down on a barstool.
‘Any tippers?’
‘Eh. Nuthink too crash hot,’ says Bronte. Clover knows she wouldn’t tell her, even if there were, and she hustles out the door. Yumi sits in the corner, slowly getting stoned. She extends the twisted spliff to Bronte.
‘Stuff puts me into a coma,’ says Bronte, waving it away.
‘You like a pill?’ Yumi points to her makeup case. Along the top row, blue and white and yellow pills are neatly separated in plastic trays.
‘Got the whole medicine cabinet sorted haven’t you? D’jou know what they are?’
‘No. But white one iss bery good.’
‘I think I need a drink.’
‘I get you one, you feel better.’ Yumi holds out her tiny brown palm. Bronte pulls a fiver out of the triangle pocket of her g-string.
‘They give us fifty percent discount,’ says Yumi, ‘it fifty percent too much.’
Bronte examines herself in the plastic mirror. She adds another lick of eyeliner to the darkness around her eyes. One day, she promises, I’ll get up at noon – the middle of my night – and meet Isobel. She pictures the florist stepping between buckets of blooms, deciding on her night display. Her long fingers reach down, drawing a stem from water. She chooses a white lily, no, not a lily. Bronte knows full well she’s no lily. What then? An Icelandic poppy, its transparent petals like moths’ wings, dusty, fragile. But whatever flower Isobel grasps in her hand is forgotten, because Bronte feels the woman’s gaze upon her for the first time. In the plastic mirror Bronte sees herself as others see her; a woman with cigarette stains in the crevices between her teeth; a woman with dyed, fried blonde hair lacking a hairstyle; a woman with split and bleeding fingernails, cracked from years of applying the corrosive glue of press-on nails.
Yumi returns with a vodka and tonic. Bronte sucks it up and heads backstage for round two. She watches Clover without really seeing her, she’s seen all her moves before. It’s like watching a rerun of show you didn’t care for in first place. Her stomach flip-flops at the smell of cheap, dollar store cologne. Beery breath, onions, and sweat she can tolerate. They’re real. Those smells happen without making an effort. Cologne, on the other hand, is the whiff of a bloke who wants her to notice him. He’s looking to impress her, but she knows it’s impossible, because nice guys don’t want to date strippers.
Clover struts offstage. Bronte’s on. In the second song there’s less time to remove herself, to find that empty chair at the back of the bar. The night’s rolled on, the joint has filled up. She spots an empty lounge and almost gets there, but the smell of cologne is crawling up her nose, distracting her. When Bronte hears the end of the first chorus, she’s startled; she’ll break rule number five if she doesn’t catch up. With a tug and a jerk she unsnaps her yellow bikini top, waves the mess of string above her head like a lariat before flinging it offstage. Bronte drops to her knees and crawls across the stage in an unsexy way, trying to reel back her place in the song. Her hips hear the music, and without knowing how she got there, she is on time again. She relaxes, and thinks of Isobel and her manicured hands, sliding a single cineraria into a vase so slender it has room enough for only one stem. The cineraria looks like a robust daisy, painted campfire red. A perfect finger and thumb grasp a petal and pull, detaching the petal with a light snap. Isobel plucks the petals one after another, scattering them at the base of the vase until there is only one left. She turns off the lights of the shop, leaves by the front door and locks it from the outside. The last remaining red petal thrusts skyward in defiance, a raised fist in an unfinished game of love-me, love-me-not.
Now Bronte prepares herself for the end of the song, by reaching down to her waist to satisfy rule number five and remove her last stitch of clothing, her g-string. She doesn’t see the muscley arm snake around her waist. It yards her off stage and she falls, face down, landing on laps, knees and open palms. Flailing, Bronte struggles to right herself, to push away from the hands that slap and nip at her flesh and the savage fingers that comb her hair. Hooting voices squash her escape. An open palm slides between her legs and then separates into smaller grouting things, working their way into her. She can’t breathe; their workhard smells consume too much air. Someone screams and she is falling again, landing on dusty boots with an ungainly whump. One of the bouncers collars a couple blokes and shunts them aside. Bronte’s already on her feet, tearing up the beer-stained carpet in her stilettos.
In the dressing room, Bronte is alone. Yumi is already onstage, sent on immediately to prevent any fights from breaking out. Clover is nowhere to be seen. Bronte throws on her baby-blue tank top and skirt, slips her feet into her thongs. Bluey is leaning in the doorway.
‘Youse owe me a fine for that little stunt.’
‘I’m leaving now Bluey.’
‘Hang on hang on don’t get yourself in a twist. Lemme get youse a drink. On the house,’ says Bluey in a gentle voice, not one she’s heard often, and only with clients.
‘Orright. Gimme a sec.’
‘There’s a good gel, I’ll meet youse in my office.’
Bronte waits for the door to swing shut before she gathers up her makeup, stilettos and bikinis and folds them into her knapsack. She untacks her plastic mirror from the dressing room wall and wiggles it in with the rest of her things and then leaves by the club’s back door.
The end.
Rebecca Wood Barrett's once promising career as a cowgirl is now in tatters. She is currently writing a collection of short stories and is a student in the UBC Creative Writing MFA optional residency program.
