In My Skin (23 page)

The good ones were my secret.

We would sit around the lounge on quiet shifts, telling stories all night. Everyone had a worse tale: the one who drunkenly pissed all over the bed; the one whose hair implants were like the bristles on a toilet brush; the one who fell asleep and farted. The one who said, when asked to have a shower, ‘But you’re joking, right, love?’ The one who spent twenty minutes in the shower and then complained when there was only five minutes left for sex.

The one who had to have crusts picked off his cock, it was so filthy under his designer underwear.

Terrible stories, about other brothels and evil managers who slept with the girls and passed around diseases; about gangsters who were rumoured to own brothels; about bitch receptionists who blew clients behind the counter. Ghost stories about cold rooms in which a girl had overdosed and which always smelt of her perfume and echoed with the sound of her heels.

Funny stories, about big men with tiny dildoes disappearing inside their arses (‘I tried to hang on, but it just slipped out of my fingers!’), about men with penises as big as the tip of a little finger (‘I poked and pried but he was just all foreskin, there was no dick!’). Haemorrhoids, bad breath, blackheads. Wheedling men droning on about fantasies they wouldn’t pay for, rich men skipping out on promised payments. The old man who took out his false teeth with a grin and promised to give oral sex like no one else. Another tiny old man who lugged in a sports bag and took out a boxer’s headgear and gloves and told tall Sarah that before she died his wife and he had liked a bit of boxing. (‘I stood there, hesitating, you know, because I didn’t want to hurt him. Then he whacked me in the jaw! And I just
swung
at him, and got him right in the side of the head—he came right there! I didn’t even touch him!’)

We shared tales of intimacy and mockery. A room full of women all competing, all sharing common experience. We could say ‘my cunt’ to each other with perfect nonchalance. The stink of sex on another woman was not offensive; to see each other naked was not shocking. To hear another woman describe her experience with one of your regulars, or the man you’d just had sex with, held little emotional tug. We were like mechanics, discussing cars. And to know you were not alone, to understand that the worst thing that happened to you was not the worst, that you were part of a giant community—however secret—of women labouring and discovering and laughing, was to recall the struggles and endurance and humour of women through all times.

The stories were a kind of folklore reeled out, told in the dark quiet hours, with our hands busy painting nails and rolling cigarettes. Some tales didn’t really belong to the teller, but had been borrowed and embroidered, spun around from brothel to brothel until even I could no longer always remember if it was I who’d seen the pot plant thrown across the lobby by a naked man, or if I’d only had it described to me so often it seemed real.

Some women genuinely hated their clients. I thought that if that were the case, they should get out of the business. Even on the street, working purely for the money, I had rarely actually hated my mugs. But rage was perhaps sweeter than bitterness.

I wanted to moderate my anger. I didn’t want to go that way. Still, we all learned to pick ‘types’. The geeks, the blokes, the kinky ones, the homeboys, the working men. For the first time in my life I heard overt racism bandied around. ‘Another currymuncher,’ someone would say, coming back from an intro. ‘God, it’s one of those stinky Indians.’

‘Actually,’ I’d say primly, ‘I think he’s a Sikh, from Sri Lanka. It’s part of his religion to wash several times a day.’

‘Huh. Whatever.’

I enjoyed the variety. An Egyptian Copt told me about his faith. A West African man talked about his time as a resistance fighter. A Singaporean youth explained that he was here only because the university in Singapore had fifty times too many applicants. A Chinese student refused to tell me anything about politics at home. It was like a crash course in foreign relations.

If there was any one group I dreaded, it was the Irish. I am from an Irish-Scottish background. It wasn’t their Irishness that I hated, but the fact that every single man with that accent came in rolling drunk. We tried to put most of the drawling Irishmen onto Shayla who we thought, with her feigned Irish accent, deserved the consequences.

‘I couldn’t understand a feckin’ word that girl was saying,’ confessed one man, fumbling at my underwear. Then he fucked me, and fell asleep within seconds. He was huge, bovine and comatose. I struggled to heave him off me, but it was no good. I lay there for twenty minutes under him, until the sound of the buzzer droning on finally made him raise his groggy head. His mate was in another room with Siobhan; it took three of us to drag him across the floor into the shower and wake him up. The Irish were nice, but trouble, and big enough to be a worry.

Most men put aside any religious convictions they had the moment they walked in the door of a brothel, but some retained a doctrine. I heard one girl relate that a Muslim client had made her perform a brief and mysterious ‘marriage’ ceremony at the start of an hour booking, then ritually ‘divorced’ her at the end of it. Another reported that an Orthodox Jew had booked her, only to spend the booking railing against her for being a prostitute—‘I just
looked
at him, you know?’—and leave in a rage. Christian clients occasionally fingered the cross around their necks and muttered about redemption as they lay sprawled on a plush bed with a naked woman tidying the dirty tissues. I didn’t know enough about most of these religions to guess if they permitted the visiting of prostitutes, but I suspected not. In any case, it was none of my business to gauge the severity of the sin. I was not, I felt, the one committing it.

The other least favoured group of customers—and it seemed strange to me, when there were genuinely loathsome gangs of sullen youths, or drunken businessmen, or dirty-nailed tradesmen—were those with disabilities. Occasionally someone would wheel in through the door in a chair. The receptionist would come and ask us specially if we were prepared to intro. I always did, because I needed the money and I wasn’t fussed if someone had wonky legs. It could be more demanding, because usually the man needed help dressing and undressing and showering, and it took extra time. And a man with a disability is not guaranteed to be any more pleasant than one without; I was sworn at for putting socks on backwards, for accidentally pinching someone’s leg. A young man with cerebral palsy drooled on my face. I had a client with terrible burns which were coarse under my fingers when I massaged him, but the sensation was no weirder than someone else’s hairy shoulders. It was an arrogant vanity on my part, to conceive of myself as a carer or some tender angel, but I did like feeling that I’d given some human warmth to people whose chances of sexual affection were slim. What they thought, I didn’t know.

It was getting easier, altogether, to indulge in the conceit that I was a merciful bestower of human kindness on the wretched. It was partly vanity. But the more I worked and saw kind souls bereft of affection, miserable men who’d mumble ‘I’m just no good with girls’, and saw their appreciation, their gratitude for being treated sweetly by someone who stroked their face and remembered their woes, the more I saw all of us prostitutes as a kind of social service. Nurse, therapist, counsellor, big sister, temporary friend. It felt good to make people happy.

I HAD BEEN AT MOOD Indigo for eight months. The more I saw of the meek, the bored, the frustrated, the more I glimpsed how our society worked. Shut inside the brothel all night and asleep all day, I forgot that the world was full of ordinary, happy couples too. I only saw the men, alone.

There was a client called Antonio. Black hair, green eyes, a sweet boyish face slightly pockmarked; he booked me every few weeks and we built up a friendly banter. He would make love to me with his eyes open, gazing at me adoringly. One night he pulled a slender ring off his finger and said, ‘I want you to have this.’

‘I can’t take it,’ I said, surprised, pleased. It was a little gold ring with some tiny emeralds, a girl’s ring.

‘It was my ex-fiancée’s,’ he said. ‘Please. Take it.’

I wore it, amongst my others; too big for me, it slid around my knuckle and there was a time when I thought I might pawn it, but I didn’t. Then I came in earlier in the afternoon one day, and Antonio was there, waiting for another girl. Stricken and red-faced, he told me to keep the ring, but he never booked me again.

At the back of my mind was the emerging thought that I was following in the tradition of the great courtesans of history: the sacred prostitutes of Corinth, the intellectual hetaeras of Athens; the
grande-dame
mistresses of the Belle Epoque. Women who were prized for conversation, talent, style and substance as well as sexual gifts. However little I resembled an established woman of fame and fortune, the ideal comforted me. I could talk, I could be a companion; I wasn’t just a whore. I studied my sexual arts, practising different techniques and personae. I wanted to be praised for my character as well as my body.

And on the first day of the new year I met Douglas, and sensed an immediate rapport. He was a big, warm, silver-haired fellow, with a cherubic smile and a witty turn of phrase; we discovered that we both loved history and literature, and our booking was spent talking, spinning from one topic to another. He was companionably married, but he liked to spend time with prostitutes. It was his stress relief.

‘And then there’s the whole thing with Paris in the twenties.’ We were engrossed in a discussion of literary heroes. It seemed not at all odd to be talking in the middle of a brothel, in the spa, with the dimmed sound of people passing in the corridor outside. The stereo was playing Eminem. ‘Henry Miller,’ he went on, ‘traipsing around Paris, getting all his friends to cook dinner for him.’

‘Anaïs, riding her bicycle to fuck her psychiatrist in the morning. And then to make Henry lunch! Writing her diary next to her husband in bed.’ I grinned. ‘She was a naughty girl.’ I remembered dressing like Anaïs years earlier. At least now I had the lingerie to match the fantasy.

‘You look a bit like her.’

Douglas held me against his large pale belly and we snuggled in. I made an effort to fulfil my professional obligations, but he didn’t seem to notice my caresses, and I happily ceased. He extended the booking for another hour of chat and I knew I’d gained a fan.

The second time I saw him I asked if we could turn off the porn movie playing on the television so I could watch a documentary about Alexander the Great; and Douglas let me, while he paid a lot of money to watch it with me. This was a test, and an impudent one; but he merely watched, amused, as I enjoyed a moment reminiscent of my old life. And he came back, every week or so. We would hug, and have perfunctory sex, and I’d lie against him and we’d talk. He had worked all over the world in humanitarian aid; he was forgiving of human weakness; when he appeared I always felt glad. His embrace was huge and warm.

Some men lay down obediently, predictably, for the routine of massage-oral-sex, as prosaically as if they were at the physiotherapist.
On top to kiss. Suck him. Here he comes to fuck me. Change position.
There, and we’re done.
Others preferred to model the experience as if it were a real seduction; as I entered the room to start the booking after their shower, they’d slide up behind me, wrap me in an embrace, kiss me slowly. ‘Can I undress you?’ they’d murmur, and I’d be coquettish, languid in their arms. It was sometimes ludicrous, sometimes erotic, this step out of reality into passion, however contrived it was. It could make the experience feel all new, or it was a tiresome burden, to pretend ‘genuine’ pleasure, having to act one layer beyond actual ostentatious faking, as if they were really,
really
making me happy. A booking when a man would say,
Now tell me
what you really like
was a tiring one. But sometimes we both ended the booking happy.

It was always a tricky question whether, or how much, to enact pleasure. There was a twinge of conscientiousness in me; if I let bad lovers believe they were good, then how would they ever learn? They’d just go off and tweak and pinch and scrape other women. I didn’t believe that most men wanted to be bad lovers. There was also the matter of perfecting the fake orgasm. I heard the yowling of other girls in their rooms, caterwauling that would convince only a truly ignorant man. I imagined trying it on with a client and having him gaze at me aghast or incredulous. My nerve failed; I simply didn’t think I could do that. And I liked the idea of being honest with my men. There was, however, male vanity to be assuaged and the fantasy of amazing sex to be maintained.

The last point to weigh was that a little judicious writhing could be effective in hastening a climax. Grace notes. I learned to simulate exactly the tinier signs of arousal: a mouth carelessly open, a pelvis twitching up as if unconsciously; fingers curling, eyelids tightening, brow flickering, a head twisted rapturously to one side. Nothing too ostentatious; let them believe I was a quiet one, that I was the more sincere. I learned to do this so well that I wasn’t even aware of it. It seemed that the less respect I had for a man, the more comfortably I’d resign myself to faking.

There was a site on the internet where people could post news and reviews of brothels and working ladies. I didn’t have access to a computer. But one day Nora told me she’d seen my name, and handed me a printout.
Lucy gave me an excellent service,
the anonymous reviewer said.
She didn’t have an orgasm, but she very kindly explained to me
that she’d had a lovely time and she’d rather be honest with me, and I appreciated
that. I recommend her highly.
That made my night.