All the nice girls - a short story

All the nice girls

Written for Steemit: Copyright © 2017 Nina Plapp - "All the nice girls" All Rights Reserved.

The woman had whiskers and she whistled out rotten air though the gaps in her teeth. She stood at the machine, a small, humpbacked figure, almost entirely still except for her index finger which pressed the 'spin' button every five seconds or so.
The arcade machines were in higgledy piggledy rows, turning the hall into a labyrinth which only emphasized its dinginess. Most of them were switched off but enough were on to create an atonal symphony of electronic sounds; blurp, blurp, ka-ching, ka- ching, diddley diddley diddley doo.
He stood a safe distance, hoping to observe while not being seen.
He had forgotten her name so he fumbled in his pockets for the order form. He had scribbled the name down so quickly he couldn't read his own writing. “Ms”...he could just about make out the first name, “Agnes?”
She glanced up at him, “Who's looking?”
He came forward. “I'm Jason Thomson; you commissioned me for the painting”
“I didn't.”
She offered no further explanation. Her bottom lip, set to pouting, was so low it could have been the sole inspiration for Dali's clocks.
“melting mouth”, “melts in your mouth”, “mouth melting on your face” - he was thinking of titles for a grotesque caricature he could do later, in oils.
She turned her attention back to the slot machine as its lights started flashing furiously and the fruits on the screen jerked round by themselves, adhering to an inaudible jive. She was bolt upright now, in the stance of a predator: waiting, listening, concentrating and then... blam! Her hand went down on the button and money started pouring out of the machine.
She scooped the money out into the lap of her dress. He glanced down at her fleshy legs suddenly on display, estuaries of varicose veins, purple, blue and pink. She glared at him and he glanced away quickly. “You want Agnes?”
He nodded, too embarrassed to speak.
She led him to the other side of the hall, and outside. “Wait here.” She waved in the direction of a wooden bench and he sat down while she disappeared into another building. He looked out at the sea and gasped in a cold rush of salt air.

A long time ago, he had romantic notions about this place. From the shore he had watched the mist hanging over the pier in wisps as the salt waves kissed the sides of the metal pylons, made them blush with rust, while unknown figures moved with lights up and down the flanks. During his childhood, he had never been allowed on the pier to play on the ferris wheel or on the arcade games, and they had moved away long before his chance at adolescent defiance would have lured him on regardless. But he had held it in his mind as the archetype of excitement; the height of perfect revelry and joy that, as a boy sitting on the shore wall, looking out to sea, he vowed he would one day join. 

And now, a good thirty years on, he had missed the party. The carousel's horses had been graffitied; their beautifully hand-painted name tags now read “cock” and “fuck u”, their eyes  sprayed over in black. The ferris wheel squeaked awkwardly, bemoaning its own dilapidation, and the headlights on the dodgems had been kicked in.

As he waited, the sun fell further and the sky took on the later colours of a sunset. Pink, purple, blue; he remembered the obscenity of the old lady's legs. He idly wondered about the money  from the slot machine. The place was derelict, from what he could tell, except for the woman. He sighed and wondered how long this would all take. He needed to get back to the city sometime this evening or Sally would have a fit. 

The old woman finally appeared again.

“Follow me, please,” she said, turning into the white-faced building behind her.

She was so fast up its winding staircase, he was having trouble keeping up, but he managed to follow the skirt tails disappearing around each turn of the stairs. 
Out of breath and annoyed, he finally reached an open door at the top of the house.
He walked into a dilapidated living room where two other elderly women sat. 
The oldest-looking of them came to greet him. “Jason! Wonderful to meet you.” He assumed this must be Agnes, as no one bothered to give up their name.

“Let me get you a tea!” Her voice was breathy and otherworldly. It had the quality of someone blowing over the side of a bottle.  
“No, thats fine.”
“No, please, I insist. You've come all this way.”
She took his shoulders with a great strength and directed him to a seat in a little, dance-like movement so that it couldn't be construed as forceful.  He could feel the cold sweat on the back of his shirt where her fingers gripped as he sank into the sofa. 
She went over to a little gas stove on a side table and put the kettle on. Wallpaper hung from the ceiling. The room was pungent with urine and oil gas.
“This is Lucia!”
Agnes pointed to the lady sitting opposite him.
“Lucia was in the ballet, you know.”
“Is that right?” Jason feigned a look of belief. 
Lucia sat with her long body folded over her crossed legs, chain smoking cigarettes.  Her boney arm looked elongated and distorted when she extended it to tap ash onto the carpet. She had tissue paper skin. 
“Yes. The Royal Ballet," she confirmed. 
“I played Coppelia when I was sixteen - Coppelia at that age! Can you imagine? The youngest dancer to play her in a professional production!"
Her face was hollowed out and sculpted with lines heroin might have carved. 
"Of course there were other roles, I was in the chorus in Swan Lake when I was eighteen, we had a ten month run of that show. Touring the country! I was the belle of the ball back then!"
He tried to imagine this skeleton junkie as the dancer she described.  As if she had read his  thought, she pulled herself up and, still holding her cigarette, formed an arabesque with her arms,  extending her left leg into the air with a strange incongruent grace.
A faraway look crossed her face;  she was back on her stage, her feathered swan dress shining with sequins twinkling in the show lights, her audience in silent awe. For a second, he glimpsed it too. 

“Belle of the ball,” she repeated, sitting down and taking a long toke.  
“Belle of the ball! Well, we all were!” sung Agnes. “We were sirens in our day Jason! Belles of the ball, fully blown sirens!”   
She began to laugh, and so did the fat, little hunchback he'd first met, and then they were all laughing.
He had noticed there was some kind of pipe on the table and was beginning to think that this was not the commission he had be relying on to pay off his credit card bill. A realization was forming in his mind that he was probably in a squatters' drug den. 
A pensioners' squatters den, that is.
“It's not by random chance I hired you.” Agnes poured out the tea, until it nearly ran over the side of the cup. 
“I've been following you.”
Horrified, Jason got up from his seat.
“On Facebook,” she added, “and on your website...you paint beautifully.”
He sat down again. “Thank you.”
“And you paint women, beautiful women.”
“Well, I do figure painting. I paint figures.”
“Yes but mostly beautiful women. I don't think I've seen any of your other works,” Agnes chimed. 
“Yes, mostly, I suppose, but I can paint anything you like.” 
Working on the premise that it couldn't hurt to try, Jason added: “On the online order form you said something about a payment upfront.” He pointed at the numbers on the scrap of paper that looked insignificant and bawdy on the page now. 
“Of course,” Agnes said, suddenly businesslike. “Go down with Thelma. She'll get it for you at once.” 
Thelma turned out to be the gate keeper – that miserable little old hunchback he had met first. She fled down the steps again with the agility of a cat, and he found himself once more in the arcade hall. She looked around, specks of dust floating in the air above the dingy glow of the machine lights. She stood listening to the slots purr with electric and, with expert precision, decided on a machine. 

Thelma asked Jason for a coin, and he reluctantly fiddled around in his suit pocket. Once again, money soon began pouring out of the machine and she scooped it up as before. Pound and two-pound coins clunked down: kachunk, kachunk. As she looked down at his receipt, muttering calculations, he realized she meant to pay the whole amount like this. 
Jason stood watching in amazement as she went from one machine to another until the entire prepayment was collected. She pulled out an old Tesco's plastic bag, gathered it all into that, and thrust it into Jason's hands with a glare and spittle-covered lips that almost turned into a smile.
When they got back to the living room, Lucia and Agnes had cleared off the little table and set it up with a rose patterned table cloth and tea set. It was the only clean thing in the room. 
“...All the nice girls love a sailor,” Agnes was crooning as she poured fresh tea into their cups.
Jason was agitated. He had his prepayment, he would take some photos, get the proper instructions for the commission and then he would leave immediately.
“All the nice girls love a tar! Oh there's something about a sailor....”
“So shall we get to work? I can take some shots. Is it a seascape you are after? Do you have any old photos you want me to work with?”
“All in good time Jason, all in good time...let me tell you, yes i've been following you for a while now – funny, none of your siblings are artists, are they? Neither are your parents.”
“My father was in the navy and I'm an only child”
“Ah yes, you are now...have some tea, let me explain. We want you to paint us.”
Jason shuddered but was relieved he was getting somewhere at last. He began getting his camera out, fixing the lens. 
“Did you want a seascape background...maybe we can shoot from the bridge?”
Agnes put her hands on the camera, pushing it away. She had immaculate red painted nails on her clawing hands.
“Oh no, if you want the full payment, we want to sit for the whole thing.”
“Its the only proper way to paint us,” Lucia chipped in. 
“So you'll only pay the full amount if I paint you live? All three of you? It didn't say that in the commission brief.” 
Jason had lost his patience and his manners. Even the heavy bag of coins irritated him now. 

“It was assumed.” The businesslike tone in Agnes's voice returned, with full force.
The money promised was enough to pay off all his debts , and what was left would even pay for a much needed little holiday for him and Sally. He had dust in his lungs, sweat on his clothes, and the strong smell of the room was making him nauseous. He wanted to leave right away; drop the heavy bag of coins, shoot down the stairs and run past the arcade, down the pier and onto dry land. His imagination took him all the way back to his car parked on the next road. He saw himself getting in and driving, driving far away from this place that made him feel trapped and frightened. He felt frightened! That was it! He didn't know why exactly but he felt death clinging to him like nicotine. He tried to laugh the thought off. He needed the money, It was as simple as that.
He needed It to pay off the debts. He turned away to calm himself down.
When he looked around he gasped in horror.
The old women were collectively getting undressed. Lucia was down to her suspenders and bra, Agnes was stripping down, taking off her socks and struggling out of a silk shirt. Thelma stood short and pot-bellied in off-white, lacy underwear, trying to unclasp her bra. Letting down their hair from lank pony tails and shaking their heads to release their manes from tight buns, they were giggling like nymphs all the while.
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” Jason demanded staggering back to the other side of the room.
“We're getting ready to pose, Jason.”
“What?!”
“We want the three of us painted together. Have you seen paintings of the muses?”
“What?”
The three of them joined their hands in the air and began twirling around.
“We never had anything like that, you see – the paintings of us are all stormy seascapes, we look very chaotic, monstrous almost.”
“And we are always doing such dreadful things, all that whirling and howling and sinking sailors' ships, we want something a bit more...”
“...dignified,” Thelma offered.
“Have you got your equipment?” Lucia asked, grabbing at Jason's trousers playfully.
“Lucia! Don't! You'll scare the poor boy!” Agnes turned to Jason. “She means, have you got all your paint and canvas ready?”
Jason got up and tried to exit the room.
“Where are you going, Jason?” Agnes asked sweetly.
“I'm leaving, sorry this is too much...I can't do this.”
“Oh, you can't go now,” she said, grabbing him roughly by the waist. She looked at the others mischievously, “besides...that tea is about to kick in.”

This story is copyright of Nina Plapp