Cherished [Modern Geisha Mix]

by Matthew Lowe

This girl I hang out with sometimes wears shiny red stilettos. Her hair is the colour of dried blood. Wherever she goes she draws attention.

“You should see Mama-san,” she says, “Pretty gaijin like you with your sunless skin.”

Her eye-makeup is uneven. This is not a fashion statement; it is only that she is easily distracted. She’s distracted now, staring off into the distance as she talks to me.

When I knew her at sixteen she was a tee-shirt and jeans girl. I ask her why she had changed but she just bristles, stands up and slides into a second coat.

“Don’t forget to apply,” she says as she leaves, “It’s better than teaching English to spoilt Japanese brats.”

Mama-san is a short, squat woman with a perspiration moustache and rings on each of her fingers.

“No cross legs. No stumpy nails,” she says. Her voice is dry and cool. “No sex,” she adds, as though I’m the type of woman who might be tempted.

At the door there are photos of all Mama’s girls. I see my friend’s photo.  Her hair is waist length, shiny and brown.  I point her out, but Mama just laughs and makes an unflattering comment about the size of her arse.
When she leads me into the room it smells of chemicals. The girls stand about like set traps. 

I try to blend in. My friend is dressed in steel-blue. I watch her from a distance.

Whenever she has a customer she grows small. She will not flaunt her long legs. The imbalance would be off-putting.  She stares lovingly into her client’s eyes, fills his glass, lights his cigarette.

This is what she gets paid for, I think. This disappearing act. And I watch her as she transforms into a blank canvas for a stranger’s fantasy.

She laughs only when he laughs. She plays out her own self-effacement. And yet when she glimpses her reflection in the mirror, she smiles like she has caught sight of herself again.

The Modern Geisha Remix by Matthew Lowe is licensed under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licence. It is a derivative work of Emily Maguire’s CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licensed story. The original is available at http://www.remixmylit.com/storiesremixes/emilymaguire/. For details on how you can reuse the original and this remix see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/.