Heartbreaker (19 page)

In some cases there has to be a genetic component to homosexuality, that’s obvious. But what exactly switches it on? And does it sometimes stay switched off because it’s muzzled by cultural conditions? And anyway, what about the cases where the genetics factor isn’t an issue? I’ve had clients like Richard, who insisted he was born homosexual, but I’ve also had heterosexual clients who took it up in the services and got a taste for it, and clients who are happy to be straight but fancy a man a couple of times a year for a treat. Oh, and while we’re on the subject of the hard to classify, don’t let’s forget the pervs who are bored with women and get into same-sex shenanigans for a buzz—they don’t really care what they fuck, they’re just into holes of any kind. The activists, both gay and straight, would say all these thrusters are gay, exhibiting their inborn immutable orientation. But are they?

The trouble with the activists’ claim that homosexual behaviour always springs from an inborn sexual orientation is that it doesn’t match the evidence. Mark you, I’m not saying there’s no such thing as orientation. Obviously there is. But the point I’m making is that orientation is a lot more shadowy, flexible and mysterious than people think. I mean, we’re talking about the human brain which controls the human body, and the human brain’s a plastic sort of arrangement, capable of amazing adaptation as well as enormous variety. How else can you explain the non-eunuch celibates who have deliberately chosen to live with no sex at all? If any group can testify to the power of the brain over the sex organs, these weirdos can! And if the brain has the last word here, why shouldn’t some straights opt to be gay occasionally if the fancy takes them? And vice versa? The truth is that sexually nothing’s impossible and that’s why categorising people as either STRAIGHT or GAY is too often just totally unreal.

This rigid concept of orientation, which both gay and straight activists rely upon to keep them in business, is one of the reasons why the activists can’t stand people like me. I’m the living proof that they’ve got their jockstraps in a twist, although it’s more than their political lives are worth to admit it. Not only can I testify to the extreme diversity of my clients, but my own working life proves that sexual behaviour can have nothing to do with sexual orientation.

I’ve never had any doubt that I prefer being straight. I know that if I was offered the choice of a man or a woman I’d always choose the woman—and don’t think I’d turn her down if she looked like the back-end of a bus. The back-enders are often absolute furnaces (starved of the opportunity to blaze) and touchingly grateful (never spoilt for choice). Bring on the girls in any shape or form is what I say! Yet the fanatics insist my lifestyle means that deep down I’ve got to be gay no matter how much I protest that I’m not. But I never protest. Can’t be bothered. If people want to think I’m gay, let ’em. I know which way I like my bed to bounce, and that’s why I’m relaxed enough in my head to feel mellow towards the gays I like. (Naturally I’m not going to feel mellow towards any bloke, gay or straight, that I don’t like.)

Of course some dyed-in-the-wool sexual classifiers would insist I was bisexual, but bisexual means getting equally turned on by both sexes, and that’s not where I am at all—as far as I’m concerned, male chests, waists and legs don’t even get to first base in the erotica stakes. Still, I appreciate the fact that my clients need to believe I’m turned on. That’s why when I’m with a client, whether I like him or not, I act my socks off and try to serve up an erection even if it’s not strictly necessary. Well, of course I do, I’m a professional, I take pride in my work.

Which leads me to admit this: despite my orientation, servicing gays isn’t a sexual non-event for me. How could it be? Whatever our orientation we all have erogenous zones which could be manipulated successfully by a well-programmed robot. It doesn’t really matter who’s doing the manipulating. You prefer, of course, that you’re not having it off with Godzilla, but if you are you can always close your eyes and dissociate—or at least I can. Mental control like this also helps to prevent orgasm (a serious waste of energy) and enables the body to be unfettered by physical revulsion. Why do I like opera? Because it’s noisy enough, when I play it in my head, to drown out all the grunts and groans and squeals and squawks of pushbutton sex, that contact sport which, like rugby football and sumo wrestling, is an acquired skill and nothing to do with sexual orientation at all.

At this point my thoughts turn back to the Reverend Gilbert Tucker, who no doubt thinks sexual orientation is always inborn, immutable and inextricably wedded to sexual behaviour. If he
is
a clerical gay activist— and I hardly think he’d be bumming around with those two in-yer-face types if he wasn’t—I salute him for his guts in coming out yet I groan at the thought of him committing professional suicide in the name of some starry-eyed concept of gayness which doesn’t match the reality I know. In fact as I visualise Gil playing Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, awash with idealism, I’m groaning so hard that I can only hope the Christians don’t crucify him. He’s too nice a bloke for such a grisly fate, that’s for sure—but now it’s time to face the fact that even the nicest bloke should be kept right out of my life if he has St. Benet’s connections.

I punch out the number of his vicarage.

The bell rings four times. I’m just trying to work out a message for the answerphone when the receiver’s picked up and Mr. Valiant-for-Truth says: “Gilbert Tucker.”

“Gil, it’s Gavin Blake. Listen, mate, what the hell are you playing at, calling my office?”

He takes a deep breath. “I decided I did want to see you again after all, and I knew that this time I’d have to go through the proper channels.”

“Yes, yes, yes, but—” Running my fingers through my hair I try to keep cool. “Okay, let’s get a couple of things straight. One: don’t tell anyone at the office that I gave you a freebie. And two: for God’s sake don’t say we met at Carta’s house. The story has to be that we met at Richard Slaney’s funeral.”

“Who’s he?”

“Oh God . . . Right, let’s get our heads together on this. Richard Slaney, that’s S-L-A-N-E-Y, was a lawyer who worked for Carta’s old firm Curtis, Towers. He died of a coronary and his funeral was at Compton Beeches near Andover a few weeks ago.”

“Got it . . . Gavin, it’s so good to hear you! I suppose you got my phone number from the book, but what made you so sure I was the Gilbert Tucker living at St. Eadred’s vicarage?”

“There weren’t any other Gilbert Tuckers queueing for my attention, but don’t worry, I’m not grassing you up to the Bishop of London. Look, I thought you said you couldn’t afford me?”

“I’ve just inherited a legacy from an aunt.”

“Don’t make me laugh! Gil, I don’t understand why you want to go down this route, I really don’t—you’re a nice-looking bloke, you’re out, you could get it for free anywhere, so why buy a sliver of my time at a rate you can’t afford?”

“You’re worth it.”

“I know I am, but—”

“I want to get to know you better.”

“I’m flattered, but as I said after we did the freebie,
I can’t have a relationshipwith you.
If you’re booking a slot in the hope that it’ll—”

“At least if I book a slot I get to see you again!”

My forehead’s damp. I’m pushing a hand against it as I suppress my impatience. “Okay,” I say flatly, “let me help you get real here. The truth is that my manager’s unlikely to take you on as a client because you don’t earn enough.”

“Thanks to my late aunt I’ll have a private income.”

“Gil, just
listen,
would you, and stop feeding me these pathetic lies! You can’t be a client and I can’t be a chum you chat to at weekends!”

“But surely at weekends you can see who you like?”

“Right. That’s when I shag women.” I never usually rub a gay’s nose in this fact but I can think of no other way to get him to back off.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” says Gil laughing. “Who’s telling pathetic lies now?”

This was worse than teaching a mermaid to walk. “Gil,” I say, making one last effort to reach him, “you’ve got to wise up or you’ll get hurt, and believe me, that’s the last thing I want—I want to think of you tucked up snugly in your vicarage with a nice-natured, church-going soulmate who thinks paying for sex is something that happens on another planet. So why don’t you just forget about me and—”

“I’m going to bust a gut to book that slot!” declares the Christian martyr, begging to be thrown to the lions, and hangs up, leaving me feeling not just exasperated but queasy at the thought of him talking to Elizabeth.

I sit brooding on the conversation for a moment before deciding that there’s no need for me to go on feeling queasy. Gil will serve up the right story, Elizabeth will turn him off and that’ll be that. Gil will mope for a while, but I can’t get involved. One of the reasons why I’m so successful at what I do is that I stay detached from my clients’ emotional demands. Most of them just want a physical release, but there are always some who almost beg to have their hearts broken. I try to be kind, but I can’t afford to get churned up in my line of work, and detachment is the big advantage of screwing across your orientation. Emotions are kept safe in a fireproof compartment and the clients become just objects which require skilled handling.

Elizabeth explained all that when she converted me to the idea of servicing gays. That was after Norah kicked me out of the escort agency. I didn’t do gays when I worked for Norah. My job was to go out with women who were twenty or thirty or even forty years older than I was, and I couldn’t stand it. I felt so sorry for them, so humiliated on their behalf, so angry that they should be so desperate. In other words I got emotionally involved, and once I was upset I couldn’t shag properly— well, I was a low-grade shagger anyway before Elizabeth trained me.

When I wound up a failure as a hetero-escort, Norah stopped employing males because (she said) she was fed up with temperamental masculine equipment. (Typical lesbian cattiness! Strictly speaking our equipment was none of her business anyway—what makes an escort agency legal is that in theory it’s just peddling companionship, and whatever sex takes place is supposedly a private matter between the client and the escort, but that’s the kind of legal set-up which can be bent as easily as a stick of chewing gum, particularly when the stick’s being chewed by someone like Norah.)

However, she was probably right to get rid of the younger of my two male stablemates. He was straight but a psychopath, all charm and no heart—Norah was lucky he didn’t start cutting up the clients. The other bloke was much nicer—a good-hearted bi with not much upstairs—so his sacking made less sense. He was only doing escort work to finance his mother’s hip operation, poor sod . . . I must say, one thing the leisure industry’s taught me is how diverse human beings are and what a huge, sprawling, exotic, fantastical canvas we’re given as a background to our pathetic little efforts to get through life as best we can. If there
is
a God— which of course there isn’t—what a vast painting the old man’s working on as he lolls in front of the canvas with a brush in one hand and a can of Australian lager in the other! Forget the pearly gates and the Elysian fields. Heaven’s a jumbo art studio with gallons of paint stacked all over everywhere and maybe a music system which plays non-stop opera by Mozart to keep God sane.

I sigh, marvelling that a random thought about my failure as a hetero-escort should have led to this nutso vision of an artist-God sloshing away at a mega-canvas while getting himself trolleyed. Then I stop daydreaming and focus on the job.

The final shift of the week’s looming and with it comes the big challenge: for some time now I’ve been psyching myself up to pitch my fundraising spiel to Mr. Moneybags, Sir Colin Broune, in the hope of landing a vast donation to my snow-white Christian cause.

If there really is a God out there who’s splashing away drunkenly at that messy painting of his, he should bloody well give me a can from his current crate of Australian lager.

Okay, it’s a risk tapping Colin for money when Asherton wants to recruit him for GOLD, but it’s only a slight risk, like that statistic airlines trot out when they want to convince nervous flyers how unlikely it is they’ll get killed. The low risk is because Asherton’s going for Colin’s private wealth but I’m going for a corporate donation, and Colin can certainly afford to shell out to both of us. And he’ll keep quiet about my fundraising, no problem, I’ve built up a good relationship with him over the last few weeks.

I still haven’t managed to find out anything about his metaphysical interests, but Elizabeth understands that some clients take longer than others to reveal their private beliefs, and although Asherton’s simmering with impatience he knows that too. When I first started recruiting for GOLD I said to Elizabeth: “Supposing the client doesn’t have any beliefs?” But she said everyone believes in something, everyone has a world-view, and even a determination to believe in nothing is itself a belief which can be just as dogmatic as the beliefs of any religious fundamentalist. And as time passed I found that my clients did all believe in something, even if it was just the mystique of the Dow Jones or the magic of the Footsie or, as in Richard’s case, the power of sailing to soothe the soul. Nobody was wandering around the City of London with their minds as belief-less as a blank slate, and although not all people had beliefs which made them suitable candidates for GOLD, none of them could be instantly disqualified as a metaphysical write-off.

So I know Colin has to believe in something, and today’s the day I hope to find out what it is. We can hardly discuss a Christian cause without getting kind of metaphysical.

Picking the right moment with exquisite care I mention casually, after a natter about winter holidays, that if he’s worrying about where to dump his corporate donation this Christmas I know an unusually worthy City cause.