Tess's Tale (The Chanel Series Book 3) Read online

  ‘It’s enormous.’ I took a few steps into the room and put my bag on the ground. ‘Thank you Madam Liss, it’s lovely.’

  She let out a deep, throaty laugh. ‘Not as big as mine. Oh, and Tess, call me Liss.’

  I heard the door click behind me as I kicked off my shoes. I placed my bag on the bed and unpacked my few possessions into the wardrobe. Then I sat on the end of the bed and contemplated my situation.

  I was free. Free of Hillary’s barbed comments. Free of the sight of my mother’s battered body. Free of Lou’s leery smile. I couldn’t believe it. Until this morning that had been my whole life. It was a bit hard to take in.

  I shuffled further up the bed, resting my body on the soft cushions. I knew I should find Liss and thank her properly, but all of a sudden I was bone tired. I hadn’t slept a full night in years and I had been holding onto fear for so long, that now that it wasn’t needed any longer, I was spent.

  Even though I was in a strange room, owned by a strange woman, I felt safer than I ever had. I closed my eyes and drifted into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  ***

  A soft knock on my door woke me. I opened my eyes, startled to find that the dim light of twilight had crept into my room. I had been asleep for hours.

  ‘Come in.’ I sat up and ran my fingers through my hair. It was bad enough that Liss was going to think I was a lazy bones, I didn’t want her to think I was a slob as well.

  Liss poked her head around the door. Rather than the look of stern disapproval that I had expected, she wore a kind smile. She was also holding a spoon and a bowl of what looked like soup. ‘Thought you might be hungry.’

  She moved to the dressing table and placed the bowl onto it. How did she get her hips to move like that? As if her whole lower body was flowing from side-to-side.

  My stomach let out a huge gurgle at the smell of the food. ‘I am,’ I said, swinging my legs off the bed and standing up. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sleep all day.’

  She laughed and said, ‘It’ll make working tonight much easier. Besides, you looked like you needed it.’ For a second something else flashed across her face. Pity? Remorse? Anger? I wasn’t sure which one.

  I sat at the table and picked up the spoon. ‘So about tonight. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Have you ever waitressed before?’

  I pulled a face and shook my head. ‘I’m still at school.’

  ‘Huh.’ She took a seat on the edge of the bed and examined me. ‘Final year?’

  I nodded as I spooned some of the soup into my mouth. It tasted as good as it smelt.

  ‘Well until you’ve finished that, you’ll just work the weekends.’

  I stopped and stared at her. ‘I get to finish school?’

  ‘Honey, you look like a smart one. I’d prefer you to not end up in my profession. It’s only a few more months and then we’ll see about a proper job for you.’

  I put the spoon back down as tears flooded my eyes. I hadn’t wanted to give up school. It wasn’t so much that I would miss my friends – Hillary was far more popular than I with the boys and the girls, but I knew I would miss learning. My books had been my saviour over the last few years.

  ‘There, there.’ Liss stood and placed her arms around me. She pulled me up against her large, soft body and cradled me. And of course, that undid me. Silent sobs shook my body as I released all my fear, all my angst, all my sorrow. The fact that this woman, this stranger, cared about me, was the last thing I had ever expected.

  When I had control of my emotions again, Liss let go of me. ‘Did you pack any black pants?’

  I nodded my head as I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.

  ‘They’ll do for tonight. I’ll get you a uniform during the week. Put them on with a nice blouse if you have one. If not, a t-shirt will do. Nothing low cut mind you. Don’t want the patrons confusing you with my girls. When you’re ready come on down and I’ll introduce you to the bar staff.’

  It didn’t take me long to put on my black pants and a white blouse. I thought about putting my hair up in a nice style but Liss’s words stopped me.

  Madam Liss. Her girls.

  I was living in a house of ill-repute, and while that didn’t worry me – I certainly didn’t want to get mistaken for a working girl. So I pulled my hair back into a pony-tail and applied a minimal amount of make-up.

  Liss gave me a nod of approval when I arrived in the bar room. ‘Tess.’ She beckoned me over to the bar where the largest man I had ever seen was wiping wine glasses with a cloth. At any second I was sure one of those glasses would shatter in his basketball-sized hands, but he delicately wiped each one and hung them in an overhead rack with their counterparts. ‘This is Thor.’

  ‘Of course it is.’ At a loss as to what else to do I scuttled forwards and offered him my hand, silently praying that he wouldn’t break any fingers.

  He reached over the bar, his touch so gentle it reminded me of a swarm of butterflies as he pressed his hand around mine. No wonder he wasn’t breaking any glasses.

  ‘Nice to meet you.’ His baritone voice echoed around the room. ‘You and I are going to work together tonight.’

  ‘So what is it exactly that I am doing?’

  While he explained the different cocktails and drinks available, Liss drifted over to the stage. A microphone on a pole stood where none had that morning. With an ease belied by her size, she scrambled onto the stage and tapped the microphone. Nothing happened the first few times, but she played around with the cord and the stem and her tapping became audible.

  ‘Testing, testing, apple rhubarb pie,’ she said into the microphone.

  Thor rolled his eyes as he continued my tutorial.

  ‘If there is a Thor in the house could he please come to the front office? I repeat, Thor, if you can hear me can you please come to the front office?’

  He shook his head while he showed me the different glasses we used.

  ‘I thor I saw a pussycat.’ Liss let out a low, throaty laugh as Thor held up the middle finger of his right hand.

  ‘Every day,’ he grumbled. ‘Same old tired jokes.’

  ‘You gotta admit the pussycat one is funny,’ she said as she jumped off the stage. She wandered out of the room and a minute later, lights started to flick on. One-by-one they transformed the room till it glowed, only needing a crowd of people to make it complete.

  ‘Tonight will be pretty quiet,’ Thor said to me. ‘But tomorrow night you’ll have your work cut out for you. Any of those guys give you grief and you give me the sign. I’ll come over and sort them out.’

  Before I could ask him what the sign was, a praying mantis of a woman strode into the room. Where Liss was all soft curves and gregarious lines, this one was hard, angular planes. Cheekbones dominated her face and muscles pulled long and hard against her limbs. And yet, with all that hardness and all that muscle she still moved with a graceful flow. Her hips swayed beneath her short skirt and her breasts pushed upwards, winning the tug-o-war competition against her low-cut shirt.

  She eyed me up and down with an expression close to a snarl on her face. ‘And you are?’

  I am sure the way she stalked towards me was meant to intimidate, but you don’t throw down with as many girls as I had over the years to be intimidated by a walk. I could bite and scratch with the best of them.

  ‘None of your business.’ I turned my back on her. I kept my body language casual but if my ears could have stood up on top of my head they would have. They were going to be my only warning if she decided to make good on the promise her eyes had made.

  ‘That’s Tess,’ Thor said. ‘She’s working with me.’

  ‘Oh. I should have guessed. Her boobs are way too small.’

  I pivoted around, ready to defend the honour of my breasts, but she wasn’t looking at me.

  ‘Who else is on tonight?’ she said to Thor.

  I looked down at my blouse. There was nothing wrong with my breasts.

  ‘You,
Eva and Clarissa.’

  The woman let out a sniff. ‘Snotty Clarissa?’

  I mean, they may have been on the small side, but they were well formed and perfectly proportioned to the rest of my body.

  Thor laughed. ‘You’re never going to let her live that down are you?’

  If I had been taller I could have carried off bigger breasts. But I wasn’t, so they were perfect, and that was the end of that argument.

  ‘She sneezed all over a client.’

  ‘She had pneumonia.’

  I turned side on to the mirror at the back of the bar and pulled my blouse a bit tighter. Perhaps they could be a bit bigger. Maybe I should buy a fancy underwire bra.

  ‘She had a cold.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Thor’s voice broke me from my contemplation of my breasts.

  ‘Nothing.’ I jumped away from the mirror and fluffed my blouse away from my body.

  The woman let out a laugh and said, ‘Don’t worry kid. They’ll grow in.’

  ‘They already have,’ I said, holding a glass up to the light. I could feel a blush developing on my cheeks.

  She let out a laugh and Thor said, ‘Don’t worry about Brittney. She’s all bark and only about fifty percent bite.’

  ‘That’s comforting,’ I said.

  As the other girls wandered in, Thor introduced me. While Eva was tall and athletic, Clarissa was short and soft. ‘Something for everybody,’ Liss said when she noticed me looking at them.

  A few minutes later the patrons started to arrive. Men drifted in, in ones and twos, some of them watching Brittney, Eva and Clarissa as a dog would watch a shank of meat left out to defrost. Others were dressed in suits and carried briefcases, but the suits, ill-fitting with shiny elbows, spoke of one too many times on the wrong end of a business deal.

  My job was easy. I took drink orders, delivered those to Thor and then returned with said drinks. Avoiding being pinched on the bottom was a little trickier, what with both my hands supporting a large tray. Taking the more deserted routes helped, but by nine o’clock, when the background music petered out, I was sure I was going to be sporting some collateral-damage bruises the next day.

  A single light shining onto the stage caught my attention and, as I watched, a woman I hadn’t seen before, moved to the microphone and tapped gently on its surface. Music started up and she lifted the microphone to her lips and began to sing.

  The drink orders slowed as most of the men turned their attention to the stage. Her voice wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either. What she was, was stunning.

  ‘What do you think of Helene?’ I hadn’t noticed Liss join me at the bar.

  Helene’s huge blue eyes and pouting red lips held the eye of every man in the room. ‘She’s stunning.’

  I winced as she partly hit a note and Liss nodded. ‘She is that,’ she said. ‘But what I need is someone who can draw a crowd.’

  ‘Helene doesn’t?’ I was sure every man there would have been panting over her. With her shiny, black bob and her heaving bosom she was Betty Boop meets Marilyn Monroe.

  ‘Certain type of crowd. I need a voice so mesmerising, so intoxicating that men come just to hear it. I need a voice that will make each of them feel like the most powerful man in the universe. Then we’ll get the clientele I want.’ She reached back to the bar and picked up a drink. ‘This lot,’ she nodded at the men staring at the stage, ‘soft cocks too scared to leave their bleating wives.’

  Thor put the last of my order on the tray and I picked it up and carried it to the table. Liss was still there when I got back.

  ‘Why don’t you get that type of voice?’ I asked.

  ‘That type of voice don’t work in a joint like this.’ Her voice was low and throaty as she laughed. ‘Quite the conundrum. I can’t be the type of joint a voice like that would work in, until I get a voice like that.’

  We were silent for a while as Helene crooned her way through the rest of the song. When it had finished Liss turned to me. ‘Your mother had a voice like that. Biggest shame in the world when she was injured.’

  Injured?

  Thor leaned over the bar, looming above me. ‘Of course, what was an even bigger shame was her ending up with the bastard that did it.’

  I tried to keep my face neutral but my shock must have shown.

  ‘You didn’t know?’ Liss asked.

  She watched as I shook my head. I may have spent sixteen years living in the same house with her but I hadn’t really known anything about my Mom. A flash of guilt raced through my mind. I’d been so preoccupied with how sucky my life was, I hadn’t stopped to think that perhaps hers wasn’t the way Mom would have preferred it.

  Liss reached into a pocket in her voluminous dress. She pulled out an ornately-carved box and plucked a cigarette from it. Thor leant over the bar and proffered an already-lit lighter. She took a deep suck on the cigarette and then tipped her head back and slowly breathed out. The smoke curled out of her nostrils and floated languorously towards the ceiling.

  ‘Rose had a voice that made every man in the room feel as if she were singing just for them. Sultry and sexy, she stroked their egos and inflamed their desires.’ She took another drag of the cigarette, this time blowing out smoke rings. ‘Men came to listen to her and then took their sexual frustrations out on us working girls. Quite the combination.’ She stared off through the room, her eyes seeing nothing, her mind seeing everything. ‘But that wasn’t enough for Lou the Brain.’

  ‘What happened?’

  My words snapped her out of her reverie. She swirled and stubbed the butt of her smoke out on a drink coaster. ‘He stalked her. Then one night he strangled her. Her voice was never the same again.’ Her dress swirled as she strode away from the bar.

  I felt like I’d been slapped in the face with a cold case of reality. My Mom had once been something more than what she was. Lou had taken that away from her and had broken her spirit. If I hadn’t already hated him, the seed was now well and truly sown. My hatred grew, blooming into something bigger. I would make him pay for what he did to my Mom if it were the last thing I did.

  ***

  The sun was high in the sky when I crawled out of bed the next morning. The evening before had continued in much the same way. Men drank and listened to Helene sing and then skulked upstairs with one of the girls. The only thing that hadn’t continued was Liss talking about my Mom.

  I wasn’t sure if I was sad about that or not. I wasn’t entirely comfortable having my vision of my childhood disturbed. I was more comfortable being the only victim, and I wasn’t yet ready to share the title. And yet a part of me yearned to know this other side of my mother.

  I grabbed some clothes and made my way down the hall to the bathroom. A noise from Liss’s room made me pause. Had she called out to me?

  I was reaching out to the door handle again when I heard Liss say, ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Shall I go fix us something?’

  I backed away from the door as I heard Thor.

  ‘Silly boy.’ Liss was practically purring. ‘I’m not that kind of hungry.’

  ‘Lissity-Jane,’ Thor’s voice held mock outrage, ‘didn’t your mother ever tell you that that sort of behaviour was rude?’

  ‘Oh she did, but I was never a good listener.’

  ‘Lucky me.’ Thor’s answer was accompanied by the sound of a bed’s springs squeaking.

  I scuttled towards the bathroom door, trying not to think about what was going on in the room next door while I showered. It made sense of something I had observed last night though. Liss had watched her girls like a hawk, keeping an eye on the men propositioning them, but not once had I seen Liss leading a man up to those little rooms. She may have been the Madam of the house, but she only had eyes for Thor.

  After I had dressed and waited what I thought would be an appropriate length of time, I made my way to the small kitchen. Thor was already there, dressed in a short, pink bathrobe as he cooked an omelette. The ruffle finis
hed mid-thigh, looking particularly ludicrous against the coarse, black hair covering his legs.

  ‘Hungry?’ He pointed to a small table covered in a loud floral tablecloth. Three places were already set and a pot of coffee sat brewing in the middle.

  ‘Starving,’ I said, trying not to think about the part of their conversation I had overheard. I was only partly successful and I felt a blush erupt on my cheeks.

  ‘Thor makes the best omelette in Las Vegas,’ Liss said as she came into the room behind me. She was wearing a longer version of Thor’s dressing robe and had a satisfied smile on her face. She crossed to the cooktop and, standing on tiptoes, brushed a kiss across his cheek.

  I didn’t mean to stare, but the sight of the two of them, loving each other, was like a river to a parched man. I wished with all my might that Mom could have had even a day of what these two obviously shared.

  Liss took the seat opposite me and buttered a piece of toast. ‘Coffee?’ She picked up the pot and, when I nodded, poured us both a cup of the thick, strong brew.

  I added milk and sugar, holding the cup between my hands while I watched Thor cook our breakfast.

  ‘So,’ Liss said when we had finished eating, ‘what time did you want to show us what you’ve got.’ She burst out laughing and pointed at me. ‘Oh, you should see the look on your face.’

  ‘Don’t tease her Lissity,’ Thor said, but he had a big grin on his face.

  ‘I’m talking about your voice, not your boobs,’ Liss said.

  That only made me feel marginally better. I had a feeling my breasts were more impressive than my voice, and that wasn’t saying much.

  A sick feeling started up in my gut. ‘About my voice,’ I said, ‘I don’t know if it’s any good.’ What if I couldn’t sing? Would they kick me out? Then where would I go?

  ‘Hey.’ Liss reached over and took my hand. ‘We don’t care if you can sing or not. And even if you’ve got a set of pipes on you that would make Tina Turner green, but you don’t want to use them, that’s fine too. You live here now for as long as you want.’