It's 1920 and the war is over. Many men find comfort in recreation. Alfie Solomon's extorts the opportunity as he opens a Gentleman's club in London Town - Cleopatra's. He employs high end women to dance for men in power for a steady price, with onl...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Sarah Ancel grit her teeth hard as she walked towards Cleopatra's, the Gentleman's club in London's east end. Her place of work. She kept her thin coat collar high to try and fend off the November chill that crept up around her neck as the sun began its hours of retirement and she began her evening shift. The approach was always the hardest, the act of getting through the shiny silver doors and morphing into her double life form. The girl she couldn't bear to look at head first in the dressing room mirror. The person she had become. If only her grandmother could see her now, she'd be ashamed, of that she had no doubt, maybe a little disgusted, but her grandmother wasn't here anymore, nobody was, it was just her. And she had been left alone to fend for herself in an era that discriminated her race and her gender for simply existing. In a town that falsely welcomed diversity with a crooked beckoning finger and then swallowed it up whole when they dared to show it. How dare she live and breathe as a Jewish female, how dare she exist without a father or a brother or a husband to escort her, in God's burning eyes she was a disgrace, but at least nobody here in London knew of her true origins anymore, her outcast religion or her lack of prospects.
In this City and in this club she was Sarah Smith, the one with the red hair, the one that all the gentlemen asked for. Of course, despite Cleopatra's been the most high end gentleman's club in the whole of London, run by a one-man mob called Alfie Solomons, she had never once had the pleasure of dancing for an actual gentleman. She scoffed at the notion as she tipped her hat to Fat Dan on the door, and made her way past him into the darkened staircase of the club. She had made it through the doors, but that was only half the battle. She had to dance yet. Pretty herself for foreign men and drunks twice her age. Maybe tonight would be different, she pondered as she trudged down the staircase. Maybe a gentleman would exist, appear and request her company and instead of sleazing over her physique he would whisk her away, in a car with an engine, far far away from Cleopatra's and the smog of London and all of her shame. A girl could hope after all.
