Wise enough

Madam Sadie

Oh, it was sordid, yes, but a whole lot of fun while it lasted.

I always wanted to run a high-class gin joint, but never quite made it. So a ‘low-class drinking shop with an exclusive reputation’ was the best we achieved. Saucy Sadie’s Sarsapirilla ‘n’ Spirits A-Go-Go was a big success, for a while.

We had a long, highly popular bar, with a wide range of drinks available, including cocktails, shorts, beers, wines and vermouth; we provided snacks and light meals; we had a pool table and some gaming machines, too. There was a secluded back room for card games and doing deals – and the local police used to leave us alone (apart from the detectives who used to come to play poker, of course).

We had dancing girls, who would accompany gentlemen upstairs for a small consideration (so long as I got my cut, naturally) and no questions were asked, not even by the policemen. Some of the girls were more popular than others, as you mght expect.

I do recall one young man who seemed equally keen on all my girls, because when he came into the bar of an evening, he spread his money out on the table, and the girls would practically fight each other to get his attention, knowing that he was very generous and heavily loaded. We must have made an absolute bomb out of that fellow, you know.

Then the liquor licences became more expensive and we tried to branch out into the import-export game. We even set up a still in the back yard outbuildings, but the ingredients were hard to find and then income was dropping. Eventually, of course, we went the way of everyone in the district, and there was no food to cook, no grain to distill, no booze to stock our bar, and, naturally, no customers. The famine hit us very hard, and the girls had to find legitimate jobs in offices, factories, the homes of members of the nobility, kitchens, hospitals...

I survived, because I’d been wise enough to invest the surplus from my income into a small pig farm, which did okay even during the famine. The quality of meat we could produce was low, since the only food the animals got to eat was rotting pods and husks and other people’s throwaways. But we didn’t pay huge wages to the farmhands, so that all balanced out.

Yes, sometimes I wonder what happened to those girls I used to employ. And to the barstaff. Yes, and to the really down-on-their-luck men who looked after the pigs – some of them didn’t stick around for very long, it has to be said.

But I don’t worry too much about the customers. They always seemed to me to be able to look after themselves. They knew what they were doing was illegal, unwise, immoral perhaps. It was their choice.

After all, if I hadn’t provided them with the opportunity, someone else would, then they would’ve made all the profits, and there’s no point in letting anyone else walk away with the cash, is there?