You can read ‘Mad Men’ in our Summer Section

Auckland author Fiona Sussman is the overall winner of the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards 2018. She says it was growing up in apartheid South Africa that inspired her to write about the underdog.

First time I stood on stage I didn’t take off my clothes. Four deep steps. Careful not to trip. Hot white lights. The hush and swallow of a packed school hall. Mr Havili’s strong handshake. The roar and slap of applause.

I climbed those stairs for days afterwards, in my head, climbing in and out of the place where nobody notices you, reliving the rush of being seen.

My mother and father were not there. Working parents can’t be expected to attend a morning prize-giving.

I still have the certificate. Its corners are curled and the print has been sucked slowly into the white. Holes pierce the card where drawing pins have stuck it to some wall. There have been many. Walls, I mean.

I gave up art the following year, but ten years on I’m still Best in Art 2007.

For a while afterwards I felt supreme. I was going to be an artist. A famous one.

Second time I stood on stage there was none of that thrill. Just terror. I can still smell it – frangipani freshener, smoke, nightclub musk, men. My fingers clumsy. Stuck fasteners. Lead limbs. I cried myself to sleep.

Leanne showed me the ropes. She has a beautiful brown body in complete sync with the air. No lines or divisions, no end or beginning. I was bewitched, not by her private bits, but by her power.

We practiced at her place. I’ve never laughed so hard. Kept bumping into the television set and tripping over her bright orange rug. But after a few tequilas my body lost its limitations and my mind escaped its jail. Something else I could do well. Maybe. It felt amazing, like the first time I took a skinny-dip at Tawharanui. A sort of freedom set on fire by giving the finger to rules. The realisation of another world. A world within a world kind of thing. Like the set of Russian dolls my aunt gave me.

Nothing quite matches the buzz of being the main act. It’s like talking to someone who is really listening. A Mr Havili handshake.

I give that back, I think. Tell a story which is all about each person in my audience. Outside the dark velvet space beautiful girls might ignore them, but inside my performance they are king.

Sometimes, when I walk down the high street in my big old sweater and baggy blue jeans, I find myself smiling, smug with my secret, my own instant high. I blend in with the hundred other heads, and no one knows that inside this regular doll hides another. The undercover rush. Other girls experience it too. One’s even a lawyer.

I can’t go posting any certificates on any walls though. Can’t talk about my work like some bank manager, bartender, or some shop assistant might. I’m ok with that. At least I thought I was.

My parents gave up asking what I do a long time ago. My sister’s there to provide them with respectable answers. I used to travel home for Christmas. It’s crazy the way a single day in the year can carry so much responsibility. A day weighed down by hope. In the end I stopped making the journey. It felt more and more like taking a trip to the moon.

The night started out as just another regular booking. Some successful sports team. A driveto event. I got lost. The wind was messing with the rain and my windscreen wipers refused to flick any faster. Finally I found the place.

Two strips of black hedge lined the driveway. You know the kind that divvy up farmlands – unnaturally tall windbreaks, dark green packed so tightly that everything beyond is blocked out. Nature shaped into something sinister.

My palms were wet on the steering wheel. It was the hedge. Reminded me of the maze at that haunted house out west. A thick confusion of gloomy green walls driving into the sky and locking down the earth. The day I went there I panicked, all sweaty and faint, and had to be led out by one of the staff.

Mostly I don’t get nerves. Saying that, I’m never completely chilled about a job. There’s always a tight thread pulling through me. I guess a concert pianist feels it too, no matter how many hours of practice. If I am more nervous than normal, it’s usually when I’m working away from the club, away from my familiar fixtures, props, and pole. And away from Isaiah (when the boss decides to skimp on security). Isaiah is built like a pyramid – colossal legs, small solid chest, a non-existent neck tapering to his pointy mohican. Isaiah doesn’t take nonsense from no-one. We called him our guardian angel.

From the moment I stepped into the bar that Sunday night I knew I had my work cut out for me. It’s quite a thing being invited to entertain a successful sports team. A pretty big honour. But I would have gladly driven home.

Yesterday a woman asked after if I ever felt ashamed of what I do. She was a journalist. There was this pretend friendship going on.

No I don’t. I’m an actress, an illusionist, a storyteller. For as long as humans have walked on this earth, man has been fascinated by the female form. I invite my audience to look, admire, imagine. I’m not selling sex. It’s a story I sell.

Wish I’d found these words when I was talking to her. Instead I giggled.

The car park was deserted, except for a tour bus parked at a careless angle. A wide veranda was wrapped around the old wooden building and cute leadlight windows glowed against the night. Looked like a scene from some fairytale.

Nighttime in the countryside is darker than in the city, the blackness pierced only by ice-silver stars and the occasional lit window in a lonely farmhouse.

I made my way towards the light, almost tripping over a dog basket with a mongrel bitch curled up around her pups. It felt wrong to find them outside in that weather.

Four guys were drinking beer on the deck. They turned to look as I climbed five shallow steps. ‘‘Hiya.’’

They didn’t reply, or offer to help me with my gear. Just followed me in.

The place was heaving, the room thick with sweat and booze and brawn. There was a fitted carpet, a nana number with big mustard and maroon swirls. A pool table had been shoved to one side to make more space.

I’m pretty good at sussing out a scene. You have to listen to your gut in my kind of work. I can tell a lot just from a man’s eyes. There are the ones in the front row who climb straight into your story and live it from beginning to end, their gaze a movie screen on which you watch their fantasy playing out. These fellows are my favourite. Most of the time kind-hearted. A few perhaps a little weird. Then there are the awkward teens – hungry to look, but confused and embarrassed, with a shifting gaze and loud bursts of bravado.

The businessman, he’s is in a class of his own. Been many times before and his posture is all confidence bought by whisky and an expensive suit. I enjoy them all, my body catering to each category, even though it’s the same routine. There’s a lot you can say with a look.

Of course booze can change all that. There’s a fine line between loosening up and letting loose. At the club Isaiah watches out for the switch. But it’s not the boozy boys I worry about. It’s the guys who look cold, despite the heat. The ones who watch you side-on, because you don’t warrant their full attention. A clenched jaw. Snigger. Violence in the way they stub out their cigarettes.

There must have been twenty-five guys at least. Definitely more than the fifteen you need for a team. I sensed a cocky arrogance in their group gaze. It’s a big thing to be part of a successful sports team.

I started to set up my space – music system, props . . . but already there was a chorus of calls and I knew I’d lost the advantage of deciding when I would start.

The boundaries in my work are invisible. No ref to blow the whistle or flick a yellow card. When you think about what goes down on the field, even with television cameras trained, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by what followed.

I began to move my hips in a slow circle and scanned the room, trying to work out who would be my adult, my Isaiah. I remember reading Lord of

the Flies in Miss Bernard’s class and feeling Piggy’s fear. No adults.

These guys were not front-row fellows, nor goofy teens. They were the good-looking celeb sorts who can own you, use you, despise you, discard you.

I smiled. You always smile. Show you are enjoying yourself. The story I sell is all about pleasure.

They encircled me like a windbreak. No gap or sliver of light. Even the sequins on my costume lost their luster.

‘‘C’mon you tart, show us your tits.’’

I had a way to go before then. You have to build up to it. Anticipation is everything. So much of stripping is not about taking things off, but the promise of it.

I’m proud of my boobs. Must have got them from my father’s side of the family, because my mother is flat-chested. Underneath her padded bra are two thin thumbs of skin. I was seriously stoked when, at the age of fourteen, my buds burst into bloom. I’m not sure if I was happier because of the attention they drew, or because they set me apart from my mother. I guess it meant I wasn’t locked into to a life like hers.

I had at least ten minutes of routine to go before the first forbidden, but there was an impatience in the room, an almost anger. So I jumped ahead and let my boobs out early. As the kid in that movie says, ‘‘Shit just got real’’.

A hand, hot and rough, grazed my skin, tightened, squeezed. I swatted it away, told the guy to get off me.

My skin was throbbing, the imprint of five fingers already rising to the surface of my pale, freckled skin.

‘‘No touching,’’ I said firmly, then folded forward into a stilettoed V and looked back over my shoulder with a sexy smile.

The crowd let out a roar, as if a goal had been scored. But the praise was not for me. Someone pulled at my costume.

‘‘Stop!’’

Another hand groped me.

‘‘No touching, mate!’’

It was hard to keep smiling.

‘‘Stop! Stop!’’ mimicked the crowd in a highpitched squeal.

The first person to interview me was a woman. I guess it made the situation appear sensitive. The truth is, females are the worst, their empathy brittle, especially if you have no story of abuse or poverty to explain why you are in this line of work. They put you in the enemy camp straight off. A crimson threat to their domestic bliss.

‘‘Isn’t this something you’ve come to expect,’’ she said, sitting on my sofa, which kept spilling stuffing every time she moved. ‘‘In your line of work?’’

The circle pressed tighter. Wet pink mouths and hot beer breath. I drove my black heels into the ground to steady my shaking legs, and I thought about stopping.

‘‘In retrospect, it was perhaps inappropriate post-season entertainment for the team.’’

Leanne told me not to talk. I was surprised. She’s together, that girl. Sensible. Totally unwilling to take any crap. I thought she would have been all about me owing my space and reclaiming my power.

I took a week off work. My boss was understanding for a while, but soon got pissed off with all the drama. ‘‘Get over it. It’s not like you can’t work. No injuries preventing you.’’ Sticks and stones . . . Yeah.

There was something awful about being called those names; their sneering dirtiness just hollowed me out.

Happens I was tired of living a babushka life. Hiding in a world within a world, which everyone pretends not to see, but which pulses at the centre of every city.

After I’d made the call, I felt better. About myself.

Three producers called – TV and radio – keen to speak with me. That blew my mind.

The first interview happened right there and then, me still in my pyjamas and about to feed the cat. But it didn’t matter cause it was by telephone. Leanne said I should never have spoken to them straight off. She said preparation is everything. Like starting a show only when you’re ready. Whatever.

My story broke. And so did my set of Russian dolls.

‘‘Boys will be boys, and she was taking clothes off.’’

‘‘I’m not justifying it, but what can you expect from a roomful of virile, tanked-up young men?’’ ‘‘As sponsors, we are disappointed.’’

‘‘I suppose it’s money she’s after.’’

‘‘I’d like to retract what I said yesterday, it was not meant to sound sexist.’’

‘‘I mean, let’s call a spade a spade. She’s a stripper, for God’s sake.’’

‘‘There will be a full investigation. One does need to remember however, that . . .’’

The men and women in suits spoke slowly, seriously, sparingly. Their comments were crafted in respectable rooms with expensive desks and eyecatching logos. My bedsit couldn’t compete.

By the end of the week I felt naked. A different naked.

It was at night, lying alone in my bed, that I’d find the answers to all their questions.

‘‘If you have a daughter, will you let her strip?’’ I won’t let my son treat no stripper like that. ‘‘Is this not something you expect in your line of work?’’

If I burn my hand on a hotplate, it hurts just like yours.

‘‘You take your clothes off. That’s an invitation, isn’t it?’’

Men take off their pants to have their prostate checked.

I knew my parents would find out; the story was everywhere. How could they not? I couldn’t decide how the phone call would go, so I prepared for everything. But their call never came.

The police sent round two policewomen on Friday. I pinned up my art certificate in the lounge where I knew it would be seen. They explained what would happen if I decided to lay a charge. It felt like two of them and one of me in the room.

Idanced at a new club tonight. The pay is less, but Sven, my new boss, says I’m lucky to find work at all after that’s gone down.

At first I felt Pinocchio-wooden. Luckily the guy in the front row with a blond hairpiece and fuzzy brown sideburns didn’t seem to notice. His smile was all square teeth and wonder. And slowly my rhythm returned, till dancing was again as easy as breathing.

Just after eight, the attention in the room turned and most of my audience moved to the other side of the room to face the flat-screen. It was the start of a big game. I kept dancing, cause that’s what I’m paid to do, but the cheers in the room were not for me.

The toupee guy, he stayed put, and after my routine, bought me a drink. Told me that his dog, Cherry, had a skin condition and was losing all her hair. That his sister was a cleaner at Buckingham Palace. He hadn’t seen her in sixteen years.

He told me that a new Countdown was opening soon at the end of his road, and that his favourite television show was Mad Men.