It was Friday night at the Boom Boom Club. It had been a good evening. The amateur cabaret extravaganzas always brought in a crowd. Sometimes, the club’s regular performers wondered whether the audience didn’t actually prefer to watch amateurs making fools of themselves to the professionals who had honed their craft over years. That night had been especially great entertainment. The elderly twin brothers dressed as sisters, who sang the old weepies before ending their set with a frighteningly high-kicking can-can routine, had put in a special appearance. The crowd bayed for an encore. The sister-brothers obliged three times.

Jerry Schluter, the club’s owner, watched from the wings with Kitty Katkin, his biggest star, as Marlene the cross-dressing mistress/master of ceremonies introduced another familiar figure: a young man dressed as Jean Harlow, who was convinced he should be in Hollywood even though he couldn’t hold a note. Marlene egged him on. The crowd were going wild, knowing that he would be simply terrible. They howled with laughter even as he took centre stage. Several were weeping with hilarity by the time he reached his second wavering verse.

Herr Schluter watched proceedings with a sad smile on his face. He shook his head. ‘It never fails to surprise me that this is what the people want,’ he said. ‘Delusion and humiliation. Just another freak show.’

Kitty nodded. Like her boss, she found the proceedings on amateur nights rather poignant at times but she knew that they kept the club going. And the club provided her livelihood. And it was where she’d found true love.

The young man dressed as Jean Harlow was persuaded to indulge in such an awful encore that a corpulent man on one of the tables in the front row laughed himself into a coughing fit.

‘You’d better get on there and calm them all down,’ Schluter told Kitty.

Kitty tipped her silver hat at him and indicated to Marlene, who was consoling the amateur crooner, that she was ready to take the stage.

‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ Marlene began her introduction. ‘That last act was a difficult one to follow, but here at the Boom Boom Club, we are always striving to go one better than before. And I think you will all have to agree that it doesn’t get much more magnificent than our next star, our very own English songbird, the beautiful, the mellifluous, the incomparable . . . Kitty Katkin!’

Marlene started the welcoming applause. The audience whooped and cheered. Backstage, Kitty gave a little shimmy of excitement, as she always did when she was about to perform. Her perfect red bobbed wig settled back into place and she stepped out. Right leg first.

Just that.

The crowd went crazy as Kitty’s long white leg appeared through the gap in the curtains. Her calf and thigh were suggestively bare. Her elegant high-arched foot was encased in a dancing shoe covered in shimmering rhinestones. Next out snaked an arm, festooned with glittering bracelets to match the shoe. Leg and arm moved up and down in unison, as though hoist by the same invisible puppet string. Kitty had the crowd enchanted with only two limbs. Then out popped her head.

‘Kitty! Kitty!’ the fat man in the front row called. ‘Marry me, Kitty. I love you.’

Kitty tweaked the corners of her glossy red mouth into a living-doll smile.

There were plenty of men in the audience who would have loved to spend an evening looking into the naughty eyes beneath that straight red fringe, but Kitty Katkin’s heart belonged to one man only. Kitty met his gaze right now. Her darling Otto was in his usual place at the piano in the orchestra pit, leading the band through the intro to her opening song. Every high-sung word of love or longing that came from Kitty’s mouth that night would be directed straight at him. When his blue eyes met her own, her smile was suddenly very real.

Kitty launched into her first song, which was ‘Burlington Bertie’ with much ruder lyrics and a very lewd dance.

‘I’m Burlington Bertie, the boys say I’m dirty . . .’

The crowd may have been delighted by the pratfalls of the cabaret wannabes but they could tell that Kitty was a cut above. They clapped along. They whooped whenever she flicked out a long leg. They hollered when she threw in a handstand that revealed the Union Flag sewn onto her knickers. Kitty’s act was part ballet, part opera, part clown. The audience laughed and swooned and shouted for more. She had them in the palm of her hand.

All the time she was thinking of Otto, performing for Otto and imagining what they would do together when they were alone.

Kitty had three numbers to sing that evening. Her glittering silver costume was carefully constructed and held together only by poppers so that her long slit skirt disappeared with the flick of a wrist. By turning her hat round, she went from city gent to cowboy. Beneath her neat little waistcoat was a daring, skintight basque.

It wasn’t quite a striptease but it was enough to send every man in the room – at least every man who wasn’t interested in other men – home with the idea that he had been royally and rudely entertained. During her last song, Kitty would always turn her back on the audience and unclip her basque so that they could kid themselves she had been topless in front of them, though in fact they hadn’t seen a thing. No one got to see Kitty’s body except Otto. It was always and only for him.

Kitty brought the house down with her comedy galloping as she sang along to ‘The Last Round-Up’, a cowboy ballad she’d pinched from the Ziegfeld Follies and given her own special twist with a filthy new libretto. It was all building up to a wonderful finale, but that Friday night, Kitty would not be ending her act with ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’, the song with which she always closed the show. As Kitty was finding her mark on the centre of the stage and thanking her fellow performers and the audience for their support, Otto began to play a different tune. It was Irving Berlin’s ‘The Song is Ended’. It was
their
song.

For a moment Kitty was confused. She looked at Otto enquiringly. He looked back at her and gave the slightest nod, a nod so small and so subtle that only she could see it. Kitty briefly checked out the rest of the band. They had taken the change of music in their stride and were following Otto as a good orchestra always follows a great conductor. He had their absolute trust.

Kitty glanced to the side of the stage. Marlene and Schluter looked back at her. Marlene’s eyes were steely. Her jaw was set. Schluter looked weary and resigned. He nodded just as Otto had done, then he disappeared into the darkness. Behind the scenes, Kitty knew, the entire backstage crew would be swinging into action.

Taking a deep breath, Kitty centred herself. ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ was the song she had planned to sing, indeed,
wanted
to sing but ‘The Song is Ended’ was always going to be the real finale. She felt the backs of her eyes start to sting and tried to fight the tears with a smile. No one must notice that anything was different, even though Otto had always reassured her that if she
did
cry the crowd would just assume it was part of the act. ‘The Song is Ended’ was one of those tunes that got you right in the heart. It was so full of love and longing.

Kitty began to sing.

Oh so many moments of bliss, she thought as she wobbled through the first line. Must it really all come to an end? Right now? Like this? She wasn’t ready for it. Otto had been telling her for weeks that she must always be ready because the moment
would
come and it would not wait for anyone to say their last goodbyes.

‘I never want to say a last goodbye to you,’ Kitty had told him. She’d pummelled him with her fists whenever he suggested it. But now it was happening. Though the lights made the audience indistinct to her, Kitty thought she could see dark shapes moving at the very back of the room, drawing closer, paying no respect to the fact that the show wasn’t finished yet. Not quite. She sang on.

Kitty’s heart was breaking. Every word was important to her now. Every single note must reach Otto’s ears and caress him as though those notes were kisses. She was so glad they’d been so happy before the show. They’d made love in her little room on the top floor of the Hotel Frankfort. When she pushed a stray strand of hair away from her face, Kitty could still smell the scent of Otto’s sweet skin on her hand.

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