BY JAMES BEMBRIDGE

It is 1 am, and a woman is rubbing her rear cheeks against my front ones while asking if I like what I see, but they are so large that I can see very little.

This is the Soho strip club, one of the few places left where one can get a drink at this hour.

Late-night drinking has become the object of conflict between residents and revellers of the district. The fact that Soho’s nightlife brings with it a certain amount of noise seems to be a source of ever-fresh astonishment for its high-end residents.

I suspect their chief resentment is not the noise itself, but the knowledge that they are too old to make it. You can just picture them: a cohort of cat-hoarding women and sexually craven men, plotting to revenge themselves upon the young.

Whatever their motive, the result is that Soho’s nightlife deadens after midnight; its streets become ghost ones haunted only by vagrants, hookers, drug dealers or some mirthless mixture of the three.

Their noses – so accustomed to disease and filth – can detect a reveller like me from a mile away. And once sniffed, they stumble towards you with appalling speed. It is only when you see them up close – their rough-hewn faces drenched in the neon blood of sex signage – that you get the full picture of their horror.

And so here I am, in a strip club with my friend Alex, my shrinking form eclipsed by the vast buttocks of a woman. We are here in part for Alex’s pleasure and in part for my protection, or so went the idea. The reality of the matter is that I feel more uncomfortable in here than I did out there.

‘DO YOU LIKE WHAT YOU SEE?’ – she’s almost hissing it now.

I look to Alex for help, but he just laughs. Worse still, the stripper takes his laughter to be a sign of our enjoyment and begins gyrating her arse with new and violent speed.

For a lifelong homosexual, this is an ironically queer experience, without which I could easily do. But I try to steel myself. I try to picture the faces of those who put me here. The pious, the priggish, the self-righteous – whatever their adjective, I’ll be its antonym. I’ll enjoy myself only so that my enjoyment may be a gob of spit in the face of their temperance.

Finally, her eclipse gives way, and the full sordidness of the scene is revealed to me. The strip club is a strange, cave-like place, full of sweet perfume and foul sweat; only one floor below ground but 1000 fathoms away from decency.

On one table, an old man is having the ride of his life, thumping at his chest to make sure the gears don’t give way; on another, suited men are engaged in something that looks a little like business and a lot like the illicit sort.

Plumes of vape smoke eddy around the room like a vengeful spirit, from which another woman emerges.

‘Are you having a good time?’ she asks. The line is probably as well-worn as she is.

I tell her it is my friend’s birthday, and that she should direct her gifts towards him. But it’s no use. She insists that I watch the unwrapping of them.

There is a kind of authentic ugliness about her. But she knows how to work herself; she knows how to give hedonism its due.

With each item of clothing she removes, a new part of her life is revealed. 

First, the bra comes off.

‘I’m working here to pay for my tuition fees.’

‘Oh, and what are you studying?’

Then the corset.

‘Sociology,’ she answers, unblushingly.

‘Do you get much work?’

Finally, the thong.

‘Oh yes…’

Her legs spread, and I see that she isn’t lying. 

I stare into her cavernous abyss like a suicidal man over Golden Gate Bridge, and then scream the only safe word I know: ‘I’m GAY!’

And with that, Alex and I are thrown back onto the same streets from which we tried to escape.

It isn’t long before another vagrant catches our scent.

‘Look, you old soak, we don’t have any chang – ’

‘Cold night, isn’t it, brother?’ he says before vanishing back into the neon ether.

Brother? Who the hell is he calling brother? And then I see it: my reflection cast in the speckled window of a sex shop. My face is dirty, my suit dishevelled, and various body parts have imprinted themselves upon it.

Of course, he didn’t want change. Ghosts don’t carry change. I, like him, am haunting Soho after midnight.

James Bembridge is Deputy Editor of Country Squire Magazine.