Underbelly by John Silvester

DAUGHTER
    â€˜He held a gun between my legs with the hammer cocked …’
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    BY the time the stripper starts, the men leering at her are half-pissed. Her moves to the taped music are not so much erotic as a parody of eroticism – but who cares? It does the trick for the mob of punters around her: they hoot, holler and whistle as the gear comes off. It’s a bucks’ night, a sleazy convention in their circles – a bogan brotherhood whose borderline criminal bravado is fuelled by booze.
    The girl is in her twenties, more girl-next-door than vampy bombshell, not necessarily a disadvantage in a business with enough tricked-up transsexuals to make punters wonder what’s real and what isn’t.
    But there are signs that not all her assets are natural and that at least one of the many contacts she has made since arriving in the Big Smoke is a plastic surgeon. Up close, the pert nose is a little too neat, the pert breasts a little too big,the teeth even and white. It’s not overdone – not a Michael Jackson nose above Pamela Anderson breasts but it’s obvious she has been ‘pimped’ in more ways than one. It’s the thing old school friends notice when they see pictures of her, especially other women. She’s instantly recognisable – but recognisably different.
    She has the same, dark curly hair and white skin she had at high school but is more physical than the quiet, bookish schoolgirl she was back then. Not sporty as a teenager, now she flaunts the body of someone who works on fitness for a living, with the defined muscles that come from exercise and diet – strict vegetarian in her case – and with no signs of the drug use so common in her game. She looks like a professional and she is. And her profession, at least proverbially, is the oldest of all. That’s part of the attraction for the men crowding around, waiting for what they know will happen next.
    She begins the strip wearing a version of police uniform: blue culottes, crisp white shirt and swinging baton. Off comes the uniform, piece by piece tossed among the tossers in the crowd, until she is naked, bar a tiny G-string. Then she gets down to some dirty work with the baton. The watchers are getting rowdy, making remarks ranging from suggestive to obscene but, some time in the years since leaving home and school, she’s been inoculated against that. Words are weapons but in a game where robbery, gang rape or bashing are occupational hazards, they can lose their sting.
    She finishes the strip but the show’s not over: stripping was only the entrée, a tease for ‘fans’ now lining up in anunspoken pecking order behind the unblushing bridegroom-to-be. He will have sex with her first. Then his mates will. Any or all of them: first served, first come.
    â€˜There were hands coming from everywhere,’ she would later tell a reporter. ‘They were all drunk, throwing beer cans at me and out of control. They were fond of me dressing up in police uniform and I had the complete outfit. I had such an effect on them that they were literally lining up afterwards for sex.’
    At one strip show ‘about 60 of them were lined up and there were even punch-ups out the back over who would be first,’ she remembered. There were two other girls in the show but some of the policemen would be furious if they were not ‘the first to get the girl of their choice.’
    If she were getting cash from each man the sordid deal would have at least some crude equity to it. But there is something different about this scene. It is not only – or maybe never was – strictly commercial. The stripper-turned-hooker is not dulled by narcotics – or strung out and getting cashed up for her next hit. Her bright and brittle bravado obscures the fact that tonight she’s debasing herself for next to nothing: working at a ‘discount’.
    Why would she do that? Because the