Marie Pigalle

To see her on certain evenings at the corner of the bar, alone before the front window, is to see her at her most natural.

She is placed there strategically, behind the lights splashed against the outside of the glass and the dark of the interior, lodged between the two, sometimes turning inwards, sometimes out towards the street and sometimes just staring, with an incredible simplicity, elsewhere. It is true that when another woman has taken her place and she is back in the dimmer corners she is removed, as it were, from her private place and beneath the more tawdry lights is not unlike an angel that has fallen to earth and who, even though we'd recognised her from afar, interests us less now.

She sits before the counter or on the couches laughing with the others, smoking cigerettes that are too long for her, smacking gum sometimes, and in this mood glancing challengingly at anyone who should walk in the door. As such, she likes to be crude but the obscenities are delivered with a titallating sense of doing wrong, a kind of naive and giddy pride that she is breaking boundaries, and while she perhaps does not know it, and even thinks the opposite, all this has the effect of making her stand out as the youngest here, both in age and experience.

Despite her youth, she is not necessarily the favourite. It doesn't seem to bother her, though. At times, she appears timid and it is interesting to see that flattery still makes her preen. Her eyes light up, she dips her head and after some rumination, perhaps, or in her most immediate and " natural " way of showing gratitude, her gaze focuses tightly and with a smile that also seems to dip down beneath a certain surface, smiling, in a sense, from underwater, she remains quiet until the suggestion is made to finish the drinks in private.

This, then: and when she comes back, a certain energy depleted, a proud feminine quietude, even hardness, until last words are exchanged and, depending on her mood, she joins the others or returns to her seat, fixing her hair or bodice abstractedly. Once, she was hurt, but that seems a long time ago now. It was among the first months she worked here. The man had thrust his hand up on her so suddenly and she had snapped her legs shut with such force that her head smacked against the wall and she thudded to the floor.

The whole place stopped, the man had already fled, and she remained with her bare legs splayed and her hair before her face. In the breeze that came through the now open door, eddying in and out in the passing Spring wind ; in the noise that was borne upon it, of distant car horns and shouts and laughter ; in all the sudden dissonance, sounded by the ringing clarity of the fallen stool, it was like a crack was broken in the atmosphere of the place, a sucking in of outer elements, as if the private party had suddenly had the roof taken off it, as if the circle had extended beyond its natural circumference, and there at the centre, very still, eyes closed, the man having done more than throw her from her seat, she sat stunned, hung between where she was now and certain memories of long ago.

The effect was to make everything she wore seem suddenly tawdry. Her tears in contrast, until she later wiped them away, were like water sprung from a desert stone. She was better the next day, though, and later in the evening, before some client or other, was even dancing with the rest of them. There are undoubtedly things in her life which make what she does easier than it would for others. When asked point-blank, she says 'parce que on gagne bien ici, mieux qu'aux galeries', and glances outside.

Less and less, she sits by the window. Eventually, she will become indistinguishable from the rest. She will fade into the background, consumed by it, like some other stain on these red couches, until she is finally worn out, taken away and replaced. Dimly, she dreams of being somewhere else. In this way, and in this way only, she is not unlike a lot of other people I know.

WILLIAM PRENDIVILLE