Tease (10 page)

‘Get out!’ she screamed like a banshee, flying from her chair for the door with her arm over her bare face, feeling all her power gone.

‘How dare you stare at me with that look on your face like I’m some hag or something! Get out!’ She slammed the door so hard the plasterboard wall shook. It never occurred to her that Lewis was simply mesmerised.

‘Ahem, Tiger?’ he ventured through the closed door.

‘Fuck off!’ she screamed, throwing a stilletto at the door as an exclamation mark.

‘Just to let you know stage door Johnnie’s outside again. He has some flowers for you and a card.’

‘Thanks so much for tonight, Sienna. I couldn’t have got the presentation finished without you,’ said Rex, itching to get away from the office so he could surprise Tiger after her gig.

‘Oh, it was nothing. I had no plans for this evening anyway,’ said Sienna casually, thrilled at getting a compliment from Rex Hunter.

‘Well, the presentation should sock ’em between the eyes at any rate,’ said Rex proudly, making his way to Kat’s desk to pile up the documents.

‘What’s this?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Huh?’

‘On Kat’s desk? It’s addressed to me,’ he mused, puzzled.

‘Oh right. Yeah, I seem to remember a courier coming earlier. It must have gone on the wrong desk.’

Rex was already ripping the package open.

Sienna took her time packing her bag and tidying her desk ready for the morning, wanting to spend as much time alone with her boss as she could.

Rex stared at the Rolex in his hands. He felt his jaw tightening. His throat went dry as he read the words on the accompanying card. Of course. Tiger was just a one-night thing. Yes of course, he kidded himself, she meant nothing anyway. A strangled little laugh escaped his lips as he tried to calm his churning stomach. He’d never felt like this before. Was this supposed to be what love felt like? He felt as though he had been punched. He felt sick.

‘You alright, Rex?’ asked Sienna, who was now buttoning up her coat. Silence.

‘Rex? You okay?’

‘Yeah.’ A pause. ‘Er – listen, did you say you had no plans for the evening?’

‘Well, not as such. Why?’

Rex made his way over to her desk, pulling down the blinds on the way. He put his hands on Sienna’s slim waist and gently turned her back to him.

‘Er—’ started Sienna,

‘Shhh … I know this is what you want, babe.’

Silently Rex lifted up her coat and skirt, pulled her panties to one side and began to fuck her hard over her desk.

Sienna couldn’t believe her luck. She knew at that moment that Rex Hunter must have fancied her from day one.

‘And five, six, seven, eight, kick ball change, Georgia, lift that leg!’ barked Pepper, stabbing the air with her index finger in time to the music pumping through the CD player.

‘And kick two, three, four, glide, and glide! Oh for god’s sake, girls, will you watch those kicks. You’re all over the place, it has to be sharp! Look here.’ Pepper charged into the group of girls and manhandled them into position with her bony fingers. ‘And! Snap, snap, kick, turn, kick! It’s really quick, you need to be light as a feather. And look – your hands – they need to be graceful, not rigid. Grace is power, girls, grace is power! Right, take your starting positions, from the top again!’

Lewis sat tucked away in the corner of the rehearsal studio, sucking on a Murray Mint as he studied the Starr-lets’ progress proudly. It was dusty and hot in the mirrored room as the girls worked up a mean sweat, far from the glamour of the stage. But there was no doubt in Lewis’ mind this was going to be a knock-out routine. Pepper was doing a fantastic job on the choreography as usual.

Lewis secretly loved sitting in on rehearsals and watching Pepper at work. He identified with her spirit –
she was an old-school ballbreaker who got results; with the chorus girls she was a strict mother hen in charge of her wayward chicks. Just as it should be. Lewis found it soothing to have a kindred spirit on the team who wasn’t afraid to be unpopular in order to enforce high standards.

Pepper had certainly passed on to Tiger the kind of polished stagecraft that only came with years of experience. Of course, she was still the picture of elegant eccentricity even now in her eighties. Dressed in her leotard and floaty skirt, with white hair scraped back tightly into her trademark bun which gave her quite a becoming facelift, and with her signature slick of bright fuschia pink lipstick on pale powdered skin, topped off with a carefully pencilled beauty spot just above her lip, she had a vintage glamour that betrayed her roots as a 1950s burlesque star.

Actually, Pepper’s colourful character was far more than skin deep. Lewis had found over the years that she could often be persuaded to unzip her lively past at the mere whiff of a good whisky. He had enjoyed many a tale of Pepper’s days dancing with Tiger’s late grandma Coco Schnell at all manner of classic old venues like the Alhambra in London’s Leicester Square, the Gaiety on the Strand, the Friedrichstadtpalast in Berlin and countless Orpheum Theatres across the United States.

Pepper would recall the early days when complete nudity was so outrageous that the only way the girls could be naked on stage was to stand as still as a marble statue. The theatres billed the scenes as ‘poses plastiques’ and
‘tableaux vivants’. One of Pepper’s roles in
The Lady is a Vamp
back in 1954 was to balance in her birthday suit on a bicycle and stay still as she was shoved across the stage from one wing to the other, giving the men a quick flash as she whizzed by. In fact, Pepper claimed that Tiger’s grandmother Coco drove the men nuts with the most sensual striptease in the whole show. Legend had it that one night she actually stopped midway through to ask a punter in the front row who was clearly having a wank if he’d like the band to play a faster rhythm to go with his flute solo.

Of course times change, thought Lewis wistfully, and what was once a
risqué
art form was now deemed high theatre by today’s standards. With today’s audiences full of aristocrats, high-society women, actresses, celebrities, ordinary folk and middle-class culture vultures, he had to remind himself that the audiences of yore in the burlesque houses would include the ‘newspaper brigade’, or to put it more crudely, the ‘jack-offs’ – and that the front rows always smelt of crotches and armpits. But, Lewis knew that when Pepper and Coco danced they garnered the star audiences even then. Pepper still proudly got out the odd newscuttings from their time in America, one of them showing Ronald Reagan staring up at their buddy, the legendary Lili St Cyr, suspended from the ceiling in her magnificent gilded cage. Pepper claimed she had been there herself that very night.

It seemed a shame that Pepper was Tiger’s only means
of learning more about her own grandmother. Whilst Tiger rarely spoke of her parents, Lewis gathered that they had strongly disapproved of Coco’s legacy and of Tiger following in her footsteps. Coco had been a Catholic of Italian descent, and so Tiger’s mother Bridget, a staunch Irish Catholic, felt she was a disgrace to her faith. Nonetheless, when Coco had fallen ill Tiger’s father Frank had insisted she come back from the States to spend her last months in England near her family, and finally that she be laid to rest with a Catholic service. That was fourteen years ago. It was later that very same year that Lewis and Tiger had made their own big connection.

Tiger often spoke of her theory that Coco had always known the path her granddaughter would take. Coco gave instructions on her deathbed to Pepper, requesting that she find Tiger at the funeral service and make her acquaintance. Whilst Tiger was guarded with the quirky old lady at first, over the years she came to embrace Pepper as her fairy godmother; a gift from Coco, and a constant reminder to Tiger that her grandmother was always by her side in spirit, cheering her on from the wings.

Lewis snapped back to the present day as the music in the rehearsal room stopped abruptly.

‘Is there a problem, Georgia?’ snapped Pepper.

Georgia rolled her eyes and sighed as she delicately smoothed her blonde bob and dabbed sweat from her glistening brow with her long slender fingertips.

‘Pepper, this is really difficult without Tiger here, I’m
trying to get the girls’ spacing right and give them a good lead but without her here …’

‘It’s out of the question, darling. Tiger’s in New York overnight recording the Johnson Tyler show, you have to make do without her,’ said Pepper gently but firmly.

‘Yes, I’m all too aware of that.’ Georgia smiled sweetly, glancing behind her at Lewis for a second, before continuing, ‘It’s just, well, maybe someone can mark Tiger’s part just for today?’

‘H’mm.’ Pepper looked pensive. ‘Who would you suggest?’

‘Well … I could do it, I seem to have learned all her parts off by heart anyway,’ proposed Georgia hurriedly.

‘Well, if you think you can manage—’

‘Stop!’ roared Lewis, launching himself from his chair at the back. ‘Georgia, what the fuck are you thinking! Get back in line,’ he snarled, placing himself squarely in front of Pepper. ‘No one takes Tiger’s place, Pepper. Not ever, not even in rehearsal. Not even you, Georgia.’ He turned back to face his stunned girlfriend. ‘Or any dance captain for that matter,’ he muttered hotly, before stalking from the room with a gust of air that set the window blinds swaying in his wake. Jaws could be heard dropping. A long silence ensued.

‘Bleedin’ ’ell, babes, you alright?’ ventured Nicky out of the silence, moving to put an arm round a shocked and red-faced Georgia.

‘Oh piss off,’ Georgia half choked, half sobbed, pushing through the group of girls to chase after Lewis.

‘Right, girls, I think we’ll take two minutes for a water break,’ suggested Pepper, unruffled.

‘Fackin’ hell, girls, have you ever seen Lewis that bad before? It’s not like Georgia was trying to take Tiger’s place,’ squawked Frankie with her Essex twang.

‘Yeah, possessive or what,’ said Briony, contributing her posh accent to the proceedings. ‘I reckon he’s got a thing for Tiger anyway, it’s written all over his face if you ask me.’

‘Oh come on, they’ve just been working together for, like,
centuries
,’ guffawed Blanche huskily. ‘Anyway, it’s obvious Georgia’s got an agenda, why else would she “just happen” to know Tiger’s parts?’

‘’Cos she’s our dance captain, dumbo, it’s her job to know what everyone’s doing,’ argued Frankie.

‘Crap, Georgia would throw a banana skin in front of Tiger if she thought she’d get the chance to take her place,’ retorted Blanche fiercely.

‘Girls, may I remind you I do not tolerate gossip!’ shrieked Pepper above the chatter. ‘Bad backstage manners will get you nowhere. Desist the chitchat immediately. Two minutes then we’ll move on. I’ll go and find Georgia.’

Pepper’s diminutive frame powered briskly out of the room. The moment the door clicked behind her, the Starr-lets burst into an excitable rabble of gossip and conjecture.

‘So come on then, it’s not really a career path they teach you at school is it? When exactly did you decide you wanted to be an international showgirl sensation?’

The television camera zoomed in on Tiger as she sat on the couch cool as a cucumber under the hot studio lights, looking impossibly chic with little Gravy perched on her stockinged knee.

‘Oh, Johnson, it wasn’t really one of those Eureka moments, it was quite organic, I think it must have been in my blood from day one!’

‘I can see that, but come on, tell us a bit about your background – did you go to stage school?’ probed Johnson Tyler the chat-show host.

‘Oh lord no,’ laughed Tiger softly. ‘No “jazz hands” for me.’ The audience laughed with her. ‘No, I did modern and Latin as a young girl, but I really got my passion when I ended up in Spain hanging out with the most incredible flamenco dancers. I immersed myself in the culture, the dance, the movement. In Spanish dance they call it
duende
, you know, where you become so consumed with passion when you dance that it’s like being overtaken by a spirit, and your soul is bared – it leaves the audience mesmerised.’

‘Ooh yes I’m feeling that right now as I look at you, you’re very good at this
duende
thing you know,’ quipped Johnson, winking at the audience who bellowed with laughter. ‘So after the flamenco then what? You were kidnapped by strippers on the way?’ More laughs.

‘Oh no, better than that, my grandmother was a burlesque dancer in the fifties. So when I had to leave Spain for her funeral in England, I knew I wanted to use
what I had learnt to carry on her legacy.’ Tiger stroked her pink curls nervously. She had been briefed on the questions she would be asked, but was inwardly praying Johnson didn’t go off script as he had a reputation for doing. She didn’t need any more probing into her background than the official story she always gave. She reminded herself not to fiddle, and clamped her hands safely on Gravy.

‘You’re so modest, Tiger,’ replied Johnson, ‘as your grandmother was a huge name in England and America back then wasn’t she? Coco Schnell, ladies and gentlemen, she performed in the same theatres as American burly legends Gypsy Rose Lee, Lili St Cyr and Ann Corio. Let’s get a shot of her up on screen.’ Johnson Tyler gestured behind him as a black-and-white photograph flashed onto the huge monitor behind his desk. The audience oo-ed and ah-ed at the beautiful image of raven-haired Coco in her sparkling gown slashed to the thigh with a long luxurious cape of fur and diamonds. Tiger felt an enormous twinge of pride, and grief, as she saw her grandma up there being revered all these years later. If only Coco could have enjoyed this moment of glory when she was alive instead of being ostracised as the black sheep of the family.

It made Tiger sad to think she was too young to have ever seen her own grandmother on stage, and even more so that her father forbade her to ask questions about anything to do with her career, as though he was ashamed of his own mother. Nonetheless, Tiger still managed to
steal the odd moment to listen to her grandma’s wonderful stories on the rare occasions she crossed the Atlantic to visit her family. It was true that many of the burlesque stars of Coco’s generation longed to go ‘legit’ in those days and turn to more socially acceptable careers in acting, singing or ballet; yet here was Tiger, sixty years later, doing the same as her grandma, but as legitimate as ‘legit’ could ever be.