One Blue Moon by Catrin Collier

shared. Her silver, sequined shorts snaked over her hips like a second skin, but the back of the matching bra flapped provocatively as she held the cups loosely over her ample bosom.
    ‘All the girls’ hands full in there, are they Tess?’ Haydn enquired caustically.
    ‘You know how it is, Haydn.’ She wriggled past him in the narrow corridor, brushing the front of his trousers with her buttocks and allowing the cups of the bra to slip below her nipples. ‘Women simply don’t have the strength to pull the edges together and button the back.’ Her warm breath wafted headily over his right ear.
    ‘Is that right now?’ Dropping the South Wales Echo that he’d bought for the lead comic, he gripped the edges of her bra between his forefingers and thumbs. Heaving with all his might, he pulled the straps back.
    ‘Ow, that hurt!’ Tessie complained playfully, wiggling her hips and batting her eyelashes coyly.
    ‘Women have to suffer to be beautiful, or so my girlfriend’s always telling me. There, all done. Can I get on with what I was doing now?’ he asked wearily.
    ‘Sneaking a whisky with Ambrose?’ she said loudly, piqued by the reference to his girlfriend.
    ‘Not before the show.’
    ‘Goody Two-shoes.’
    ‘Only where man-eating vampires are concerned,’ he countered, remembering this was the revue’s last night, and that if he were fortunate he’d never see Tessie again.
    ‘Not queer, are you?’ she taunted.
    ‘My girlfriend doesn’t seem to think so,’ he replied softly as he went on his way.
    ‘No luck, Tessie?’ One of the girls’ mocking laughter followed him along the narrow corridor.
    ‘Boys, they’re all the bloody same!’ Tessie muttered savagely. ‘Don’t know what to do with it.’
    Haydn heard the remark as he banged on Ambrose’s door. It slid away like jelly from a spoon. None of it stuck, or hurt. Not any more. The manager of the Town Hall had warned him when he’d taken him on that the first six months would be the worst. They had been: crawling past in red-faced embarrassment, he’d answered cries for help from the girls’ dressing room, only to walk in on crowds of half-naked, giggling girls, who had nothing better to do than torment him by drumming the tips of their fingers on his flies. More than once he’d found himself running messages along the corridors with vital buttons undone. His boss had said nothing. He’d seen it all before.
    And there was more than just teasing. Offers of intimacy had come thick and fast, and not only from the girls. Naturally easy-going, he’d made an effort to remain pleasant and friendly while turning them down, but his refusals hadn’t always been well received. The kinder ones gave up when they realised that they could neither embarrass nor use him; others went out of their way to humiliate him.
    When he got to know variety girls better, he began to understand them. Every revue carried about four times as many girls as men. Moving to a new town every week, or at best fortnight, they spent their days bored out of their skulls, and their evenings prancing around with next to nothing on, while strange men ogled every inch of flesh that the Lord Chamberlain allowed them to bare. And no matter how they tried to live their private lives they were regarded – and treated by the locals of the towns they played – as little better than prostitutes. It wasn’t a lifestyle that allowed for sanity, or morality, but he could honestly say he’d never been tempted. Not with Jenny to go back to. Jenny who – he slammed the door shut on the painful memories of that afternoon, valiantly suppressing the urge to try to leave the theatre early so he could go knocking on her door.
    As Will would say, there were plenty of other fish in the sea. And not all of them were like Tessie.
    For once he wouldn’t rush home. He’d go to the last-night party, that’s if he was invited. Take a good look round. Watch the girls; not Tessie – perhaps one of