In My Skin (24 page)

A young man—rough, rolling drunk; straight, he said, from the bush up north—staggered in late one night.

‘I want you to teach me how to please a lay-dee,’ he proclaimed, stripping off, then reeled towards the shower and hit the glass pane with a painful bang. His manner made me smile; he was like a wide-eyed innocent, and I felt like a learned old pro. Once he’d showered, I started to massage his back, while he wriggled uncomfortably. He had looked a little shocked at the abrupt nakedness when I’d briskly whipped my dress over my head.

‘Girls are different from boys, we’re much more complicated,’ I began. ‘It’s really important not to scratch at a girl. A clitoris is very sensitive—’

He jerked up, appalled. ‘A
what
?’

‘A clitoris.’ I was amused. Sliding over, I opened my legs to show him.

‘Fuck.’ He looked aghast. ‘You’re fucking joking.’

Before I could stop him he’d yanked on his clothes, slung his boots over his shoulder and pelted out the door.

I looked at my watch. A ten-minute booking. It didn’t matter to me; I still got paid for the half hour.

‘Did you know the female clitoris can extend nine centimetres inside the body?’ I told a young stockbroker. ‘That’s bigger than some penises!’

He looked at me blankly.

‘Don’t you think that’s interesting?’

‘I guess.’ He kept sucking my breast. I sighed and held his head.

There was chemistry between some people; I was a great kisser with some men, clumsy with others. I met young men with little experience who made love like angels, lyrical sex, deft and fluid. A kind, thoughtful, humorous person was more likely to touch with sensitivity, to enter with tenderness; their mouth might be soft on my skin, their fingers sweet. They were real people, not so concerned with cutting an impressive figure, or admiring their own ‘conquest’. Very often, the less good looking a man, the better the lover. With handsome men there was often the sense that they relied on their looks to charm. Not always, and there were the happy occasions when I’d go to bed with a man who was both beautiful and exciting. But it was the gentle, fat men, the scarred men, the ones who were quiet or wry or simply ordinary who gently, quietly, handled my flesh and took their pleasure from mine, and gave it back too.

Of course, I wasn’t there for sexual pleasure. I was there to service the men; to open my legs; to be good company. It would be disingenuous to pretend, however, that having sex several times a night I didn’t notice if it was good.

‘You look happy,’ Valentina said when I came back into the lounge after an encounter with a peach-skinned, blond French boy.

‘There are times,’ I said, sinking on a chair as my legs trembled, ‘when I can’t believe I get paid for this.’

‘And there are the times when if you weren’t making this kind of money you’d run screaming,’ she said, and turned the page of her magazine.

By then I supposed I’d had sex with hundreds of men. Or thousands. I couldn’t begin to conceive of how many, or that it was a fact. Never again would I be able to enumerate my lovers, as I’d once done. There was a kind of pride in that, as well.

It wasn’t what I had expected, but I was learning new pleasures for myself. Sometimes a client would enter me and I was rinsed with the joy of it; especially when the heroin was running out of my system and my nerves were sensitised, it was as if a veil of water was running through me and the sensations inside me were full of rippling and buckling delight. Small compensation for the sweating and the fever I had to hide, but it was something new.

Many women didn’t like to orgasm with clients, even if they could. It was a private thing, they felt. I agreed with them, and for a long time I resisted any chance to pursue climax; but then, as the opportunities appeared and pleasure seemed more possible, I welcomed the rush of it, the pay-off. The release was also physically helpful, after having sex for hours. But I remained selective; it was still private.

In my bookings I learned and tried positions: back-to-front on top of a man, squatting, wheelbarrowed, scissored, standing and touching my toes…Freed from my natural sexual reticence by the mask of Lucy, pushed by my professional responsibilities, I could play the raunchy babe, the reckless sex-kitten, the sultry temptress. I could thrash around on top of a man and pump hard. I nearly fell off the bed in shock the first time my wearied gyrations on top of a tired man made me come from a vaginal orgasm. And the time a man who dedicated himself to giving oral sex tongued me intently for an hour, I came shrieking, from the tension and the surprise and the sheer relief of finally breaking through a mental barrier of embarrassment. If it was his pleasure to give me pleasure, I needn’t feel guilty or selfish; I was discovering that my body held secrets.

The ‘fantasies’ were interesting, too. Marcel was a lean black man who’d turn up at the very end of a Friday shift, when it was already light outside, after a night’s clubbing. He was a slave to a large woman in the bondage scene; he’d come in with his dog collar still fixed around his elegant throat and peel off his leather pants to reveal no underwear, but a shiny silver cock-ring around the base of his slender, erect penis and shaved balls. His knowing smile seduced me; he’d murmur domination talk, pushing me back on the bed with a hint of force, ask me to talk dirty; bite my throat just lightly enough to avoid marks. He’d bring in a gleaming silver dildo and press it into me while I squirmed, as if swooning; tie my hands with a silk scarf to the bed-head and take me from behind, crooning obscenities. It was a game, it was fun. And I was gratified that of all the glamorous women available on that night, he chose me. Perhaps he recognised something in me I had never seen.

But talking dirty usually confounded me. I simply didn’t have the imagination for it; all the phrases I could come up with were trite. Marcel prompted me with genuinely sexy thoughts.
You’re a lot
naughtier than you look, you’re a little fox, see how lovely you are with your pink
cunt; come on, bite me back,
was one thing. With other men, hissing
I
want you to fuck me hard, yeah I like it really hard, I’m a slut, you’re so hard
felt wrong, and I resisted.

Dress-up requests amused me, but they rarely worked well. After spending ten minutes digging out the nurse’s uniform, rummaging for stay-up stockings and pinning my hair into a severe bun, I’d enter the room to find the client looking sheepish. ‘Let me take your temperature, you poor thing,’ I’d coo, spreading his legs, but the men hardly knew how to enter into the spirit of the thing. We charged even more to ‘act the part’ as well as wear the costume, but invariably the client would ask me to just take the damn thing off and get on with the action.

A man asked me if I could do a domination act, no bondage, only talking. I admitted I’d never tried it, but I was prepared to have a go. He’d never done it before either. He booked for an hour, but after twenty minutes of
Lie down, that’s it, crawl to me. Slower. Lick my
ankle, lick my thigh, but don’t you dare touch my pussy
I was desperate for inspiration. He looked as if he felt equally foolish scrambling around on the carpet. We went on for another quarter of an hour and then admitted defeat and just fucked. I was attracted to the idea of being a dominatrix—they charged a great deal, didn’t have sex, and it was a fascinating job psychologically—but I could see there was more to it than I could provide.

Dildos were one of the easiest fantasies, and often I didn’t even charge extra for them. The little purple anal vibrator that Asia gave me was used until its battery connection failed; some men already knew the joys of prostate stimulation, but most were introduced to it by us girls, desperate to jostle the tired routine of a ‘vanilla’ booking. A knuckle against the perineum to hasten orgasm; a well-timed, condom-covered fingertip reaching around a backside to slip in. It was a delight to watch men experience the extra frisson for the first time.

I’d never seen porn movies before I started working, but I rapidly understood the idea and tired of them. I had a client called Mark who always insisted on watching one while we fucked. He’d have sex with me, but with his eyes glued to the screen. The pornos owned by the brothel were accompanied by droning synth tracks and featured a lot of headbands and bad tans and relentless grunting. There was something vaguely arousing about penetration shots and the sheer cumulative effect of watching people screwing for hour after hour, but I found them mostly misogynistic and trite and numbingly repetitive.

There was enough sex going on in the rooms.

‘Will you do a bi with me?’ asked Heidi. She knew I didn’t usually do bisexual; I was happy enough in a twin, sharing the client with another girl, but I had always held out on even faking love with another woman. My reason was romantic; I had occasionally been attracted to women, and yet I’d never been to bed with one. I wasn’t prepared to lose my ‘girl virginity’ as a vulgar spectacle. But I liked Heidi; she always looked out for me. There was a little attraction between us, delicate, furtive, unspoken.

‘We can fake it,’ she reassured me. It was usual for women to slide a hand between their lips and the other woman’s labia, and lustily lick the back of their own fingers, hiding it all with their long hair. Heidi was gay, but I guessed licking a colleague’s vagina could be as disinterested as a client’s penis was to a heterosexual girl. I just looked at her and smiled.

The man wasn’t going to be easily fooled. He wriggled around to peer at us. ‘Go on, you love her, you love the smell of pussy,’ he was whispering hoarsely. Heidi winked over the man’s meaty shoulder and I grinned. There I was, confronted up close with a vulva for the first time in my life. Everything seemed unreal, and yet so right. I glanced up; Heidi was still smiling at me, sending me calm.

Month by month, my vanity grew. I could help people; I could give them more tenderness than anyone; I had a mission. I cosseted my men, with soft kisses to their brows and an affectionate hand in theirs as I walked them out. They told me I was beautiful, special, the sexiest thing they’d ever seen. It was a heady experience to be so adored. Rank after rank of men coming in to compliment me, worship me, to pay for my time, my presence. How glorious I felt.

Some of the other women seemed to understand the glory. The ones who didn’t talk about their clients; the ones with a sober dignity, whom I saw walking their men to the door with an arm around their waists, a quiet smiling word, a lingering kiss that wasn’t like the dramatic clinch some less-trusted customers received. There was a mien of dedication about them, and I felt myself getting closer and closer to that stature.

Then I realised I had become one of them. It was rare for me to have a night without at least a couple of regulars. My body firmed up under night after night of physical work—holding myself up on my arms for hours of sex or 69-ing, pumping hips, working off calories—and with the new sleekness came more confidence to show off. I scrimped money out of what I needed for drugs and bought some dresses, or was given cast-offs from other girls: transparent shifts, tight lycra slips, a bold pink dress of chiffon. It was a new pleasure to wear fabric so tight, to strut around marvelling at my own elegant curves and planes. New lingerie, to push up my breasts; tiny lace g-strings to tease. As my confidence grew, my clothes grew bolder. Angie wore a see-through dress with no bra, to show off her breast-job, and one night I bought a dress like it. Underneath I had only a bra and g-string; I sauntered into the intros feeling radiant with daring. The men’s gazes lingered; but after a couple of nights of poor bookings I realised that less was more. If I gave them a glimpse of everything before they’d even booked me, there was no mystery for them to pursue. Still, the night that I wore that dress I felt like I’d come a long way.

Mostly I wore black, or red; short and tight, and perhaps slightly transparent, but not so brazen. It felt wonderful, and slowly I equipped myself with finery. There was a woman named Dolores who came in occasionally with armfuls of dresses, cosmetics and trinkets to sell. I became a creature of glittery eyes, brilliant red lips and smooth velvet over which men would run their hands.

In the mirrors of the bedrooms I saw myself. Golden-skinned in the soft lighting, lithe and bucking against a faceless man. My own cleft, bent over, looking like some porn shot. My arms reaching up to twine around a man whose dark head bent to my breast.

My own wicked smile over his shoulder.

HOME WASN’T SO HAPPY. In the boarding house with Robbie, things were fraying. I was despondent at the routine of scoring, of scrimping money and chasing around for drugs, the dreariness of waking to the fading afternoon and the sound of schoolgirls walking home past my curtained window.

I’d caught myself, hitting up when Robbie was out, standing in the open door of our room. Already stoned but greedy for more, something to mark a sharp moment in the greasy slide of the day. Knowing that I’d already had enough, still faintly aware that this was a poisonous chemical that killed, that this might be the moment before I died and I’d never know. The drug would rinse through me, stronger and more blissful than I’d ever felt it; my last thought would be surprise and then terror and then the melt. I looked around the drab cream walls of the room, the peeling carpet, the harsh dense light from the lamp suspended above; I heard the people passing in the street outside the opaque window; I thought, quite soberly,
If I
have it here, then when I fall I’ll be visible from the hall. Someone passing might
see me. Someone might save me.
And I’d wrap the old tie around my arm, and find the scarred place on my arm, and plunge the metal in.