ONE
‘There’s really not that much difference between lap dancing and doing what I do,’ Pip McCabe proclaimed in a very matter-of-fact way over a robust but imaginative dinner that her uncle Django had spent the afternoon preparing in celebration of his three nieces’ weekend visit home to Derbyshire. Django spooned a large portion of something alarmingly beige on to his plate and appeared to contemplate it at length. In fact, he was considering his eldest niece’s words, wondering if he’d misheard, wondering if Pip had changed jobs; wondering, basically, what on earth he was going to do with her. Pip’s two younger sisters, Fen and Cat, sniggered into their semolina. Django had proudly called it ‘polenta’. But that was imaginative both with the truth and with the ingredients of the dish itself.
The three sisters tactfully referred to it as ‘polenta’ because they, too, were being imaginative with the truth as well as heedful of the chef’s sensitivities. Having been brought up single-handedly by their uncle Django, the McCabe girls were well accustomed to his eccentricities and loved him all the more because of them. He devoted the same imaginative attention to idiosyncratic detail in his dress sense as to his cooking. The sisters saw nothing untoward about pea soup with tuna and stilton, or rhubarb crumble with Jelly Babies instead of rhubarb. They had never gone hungry and their taste buds had developed a commendable and valuable robustness. Nor did they think it odd that a man in his late sixties should dress in the souvenirs of his colourful past. Today, as Django dolloped polenta on to his plate and enlivened it with a hearty slosh of Henderson’s Relish, he tucked his paisley cravat (he’d partied with the Kinks in the 1960s) into his cambric shirt, and loosened the enormous buckled belt he’d acquired at some free festival or other, currently holding together a pair of jeans Clint Eastwood would have coveted for a Spaghetti Western.
‘Philippa,’ he said, chewing thoughtfully, ‘I implore you to elaborate.’
‘Not much difference at all, really, between lap dancing and my line of work,’ Pip mused whilst masticating. ‘Same attention to make-up, same use and abuse of one’s body. Strutting one’s stuff for money. Having often ghastly punters to deal with. Always being gawped at. I’m pretty much a painted lady, too – quite literally.’
Her family regarded her. Everyone chewed. They all thought to themselves that they were sure polenta was meant to melt in the mouth, not glue the hinges of the jaw together. If Jamie Oliver was to be believed. It tasted good, though, and surely that was the point.
‘It’s a new take on polenta,’ Django reasoned out loud. ‘A polenta for the Millennium.’ Privately they each wondered how long he could credit (or blame) his experiments in the kitchen on the Millennium. As his jaw worked energetically, his mind turned to the vagaries of his niece’s career.
‘The main difference between my work and lap dancing,’ said Pip, holding her fork aloft for good measure, ‘is the working hours. Because, of course, I tend to work days and not nights.’
The McCabes observed with awe how the polenta on Pip’s fork defied both gravity and her expressive hand movements to adhere with such determination.
‘Surely the main difference,’ Django said, sipping sherry from a teacup because he had used the sherry glasses earlier to measure olive oil and Tabasco, ‘is that you wear substantially more clothes when you perform.’
Django, Fen and Cat were momentarily unnerved by the fact that Pip’s confirmation was not immediate.
‘Yes,’ she responded at length, ‘and no.’
‘No?’ Fen asked.
‘No?’ Cat echoed but with a raised tone.
‘No!’ Django boomed as an order, not a question.
‘I’ve modified my motley,’ Pip shrugged. ‘Somewhat skimpier – it’s spring, after all.’
‘God, I wonder whether to move back,’ Cat said, with an audible lump in her throat, as the sisters journeyed by train away from rural Derbyshire and Django, back down to their lives in London.
‘Listen, it’s still very early days for you,’ said Fen, thinking that actually Cat’s split with her odious boyfriend hadn’t come a moment too soon. ‘Why don’t you see how you feel after the summer? After all, it’s been a long-held ambition for you to follow the Tour de France as a journalist – give it your all.’
‘God,’ Cat sighed. Her dream-come-true was now more like a nightmare-in-waiting, such was the low ebb of her self-esteem.
Pip regarded her youngest sister and decided in an instant that humour was essential. ‘Think of all those bronzed thighs, all that testosterone, the lashings of Lycra!’ Cat couldn’t help but giggle. Pip felt she could now introduce a little common sense. ‘You’ve wanted to get up close and personal for years. Here’s your chance. It’ll be an excellent opportunity for someone in your position – further your career as a sports journalist plus get over Bastardwanker. And, of course, you never know whom you might meet.’
‘I’m off to Paris soon myself,’ Fen announced, ‘also to be surrounded by mouth-watering male physiques. Not in Lycra on bicycles, though,’ she all but apologized to Cat.
‘You’re a weirdo,’ Pip teased. ‘The men you salivate over are all marble and bronze sculptures.’ Fen, an art historian, found nothing remotely weird in her penchant for the work of Rodin and his followers and she screwed up her face and poked her tongue out at Pip in protest.
‘Well, I have no plans for Paris or pedallers,’ Pip said in such a tone as to suggest that she wouldn’t want to cross the Channel anyway, ‘but I, too, am due to be surrounded by men.’ She opened a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps and offered them to her sisters. ‘Holloway, actually,’ she said, with such gravitas that she might well have said Hollywood. ‘I’m doing a show for a young man called Billy. And all his mates.’
TWO
‘Billy Billy Billy,’ Pip chants under her breath whilst putting on a hair band and laying her make-up out in front of her, ‘Billy’s the birthday boy. He’s the blond one in the Gap sweatshirt.’ She stares at her reflection in the mirror she always takes with her. She’s learned from experience not to trust other people’s mirrors – distortion, however subtle or slight, could have utterly drastic consequences. So, wherever she performs, regardless of the size of her audience, the length of her performance, the shortcomings of the venue or the fee she charges, Pip always demands of her client a changing-room with good natural light and a suitable surface other than her knees on which to prop her mirror. Today, she is in Holloway. The gentrified side; where fashionable young folk with large sums of money have been buying up the gorgeous terraces from elderly owners who paid ‘two bob’ for their homes decades ago.
‘Billy’s the birthday boy,’ Pip murmurs, applying her slap, ‘blond hair, Gap sweatshirt.’ She stares at her face.
I remember, when I was fourteen and had bought my first eye-shadow – admittedly bright green – Django saying, ‘Philippa, you’re pretty enough without make-up!’
Now