Svetlana was connected to good friends of mine, I cannot remember how, and when she came to Australia from somewhere outside Moscow to raise the professional standards of one of Melbourne’s inner-city strip joints, she looked my friends up. This was how months later, following her spectacular expulsion from Bar Twenty for nothing less than drunken debauchery, Svetlana moved into my one-bedroom, ninety-dollar-a-week flat in East St Kilda. It took me a while to piece together the sequence of events that had led to her sudden loss of employment. One evening, having completed her shift in the bar, my friend got drunk and then proceeded to verbally overextend herself in the presence of the bar’s management, smashing a bit of property for good measure. The boss-men were not impressed and neither Australia’s exalted democratic principles nor market forces could save Svetlana from finding herself on the streets. As to my friend’s drinking, I would soon be given every opportunity to witness her prowess, which was genuinely close to superhuman considering this woman’s diminutive frame.
 
All the Russian girls working in Bar Twenty lived in tiny, dark rabbit holes directly above their place of employment. If you pulled out the fold-out sofa bed that several of them shared, there was no space left in the room, not even for a cigarette butt. Packed as tightly as cows on a cattle train, they inhabited vertical slums in a country that had more space to play with than an orbiting space station. Most of these women had probably seen and lived in worse back home, but I took their airless dungeons as a deep personal insult, feeling ready to single-handedly overthrow the tsars of the local skin trade and liberate all Russian strippers one by one.
 
Yet despite all of my social worker buttons being pushed at once, what was there for me to say? Come on, girls, together let’s leave this sorry place of subjugation. With no English, no working visas and no skills, you may even end up working as cashiers at K-Mart, earning a fraction of what you are getting now but leading decent, quietly dignified lives on the outskirts of Melbourne. There, with the help of alcohol and some chemical reinforcements, you may even succeed in battling chronic depression. Come on, make me and mum proud. God knows how I had the decency to keep my mouth shut, but I did, owing to an instinct rather than an inherent respect for the women in front of me. I was nineteen at the time and yet to discover the great vanity of being a self-appointed fighter for someone else’s rights.
 
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