To blame

Memoir, 2026

“She used to work here,” my manager says.

He’s texting on his phone as we stand around the changing room. He barely looks up as he talks.

I pull off my shorts and step into my stockings, securing them to my red garter belt. Some of us are dressed, some of us aren’t. Some dancers are still doing their makeup, tracing their lips with gloss in the mirror.

“What was she like?” someone asks. He shrugs.

Nobody says anything else. The silence drips onto my skin, like cold water falling from a gap in the ceiling.

I look at my manager and the way his fingers hover over his phone, as though none of this matters. As though it’s just another day at work.

I put on my bra and slide my g string up my legs. I want to say something, but don’t know what. I grab my shoes out of my work bag before I push it into a locker. The door closes and it beeps, the sound louder than ever.

“Everyone has to be on the floor in two minutes,” my manager says.

“Okay,” a few of us murmur. I put my feet in my heels and walk out of the change room into the empty club. The only sign of life is the bartender wiping the top of a counter. The club playlist hums quietly in the background.

Normally the beginning of the night is peaceful, a time where I can breathe before the music gets turned up and customers start coming in. Tonight, it feels as though there’s less air in the room than usual.

Over the past few days, articles started appearing online about a dancer who died at a strip club in Melbourne. Stacey Tierney, a British woman who had been working as a stripper in Australia.

The articles are vague and short. Something about drugs, something about her being left alone in a room that had no cameras. Something about men who saw that she was unconscious and didn’t help or call an ambulance.

A dancer, who walked into work one night and never walked out.

I think of her dancing on the same stages as me, talking to the same customers, being ordered by the same managers. Taking off her shoes as she spoke to other dancers in the change room, laughing about things that happened during her shift, counting her money once she got home.

The articles refer to strip clubs as seedy and sleazy. They suppose that Stacey being a stripper was more shocking to her family than the knowledge that she had passed. The fact that she died in a strip club seems to solve the case itself, as though there isn’t anyone or anything else to blame.

I have friends at my club who’ve told me about nights where they think they’ve been spiked, and how when they retrace their steps, they remember our manager giving them a drink. I’ve heard rumours about a room out the back of our club that we don’t know about, that doesn’t have any cameras in it. If anything happened to one of us, our manager wouldn’t be to blame. It would just be an accident, something that happened because of the work we do. Just because we’re strippers.

Customers come in. I talk to them, I give lap dances, I get on stage. I smile and laugh when I’m expected to.

When I get home I open up my phone and look at the pictures of Stacey on the internet. How she grins in bikinis, enjoying the life she had in Australia.

I cry for her. I cry for all of us.