The other club

‘Do you want a dance?’ she said. She stood there smiling at me with her hand held out invitingly. I’d already decided I wasn’t going to get caught up in the dancing. But this woman — well, you should have seen her. She was about 19; as full of health, life and potential fecundity as point-of-lay pullet. And yet a vulnerability in her smile gave the impression that she’d had to pluck up the courage to ask. I said to my friend, and my friend’s friend — we’d been deep in conversation about the perilous state of a football club dear to our hearts — how could I possibly refuse and would they excuse me for a moment? They nodded curtly and returned to their football and I offered her my hand. She grasped it firmly and hauled me away.

She led me across the bar, through a swing door at the far end, down a staircase and into a small theatre with a knee-high stage and four or five rows of seats, from which about 20 or 30 young men were watching a woman with no clothes on at all and unusually pale skin lying on her back at the front of the stage and opening and closing her legs like a pair of scissors.