Mattress Actress (27 page)

Working privately can be a daunting undertaking; each day you take the risk that some nut job will turn up and kill you. At the same time I was working as a private girl, the Claremont serial killer was wreaking havoc not two kilometres from my front door. I had a constant fear that if this homicidal lunatic ever ran out of vulnerable victims on the streets of Claremont, he only had to phone me, I’d hand over my home address and he could kill me totally undisturbed.

Caller ID was not always entirely reliable, since if a call came through on a landline it could be a central number for a big office or a hotel. In those days mobile phone companies didn’t ask you to give ID for a prepaid card, so a lot of working girls registered sim cards under bodgie names, as did dodgy clients.

One Friday in summer about four pm, we received a booking from a landline. He asked a lot of specific questions about our discretion.

‘I want to be very discreet, so it’s not an agency is it?’

We always responded with the same line: ‘No, you’re stuck with me!’ Usually this throwaway line got a giggle, but he wasn’t laughing. He didn’t seem interested in my prices, he just wanted the address and a description, which triggered alarm bells.

‘Who shall I be expecting?’

‘Oh, just call me John.’ More alarm bells.

He turned up ten minutes late, casually dressed in jeans with a button-down short sleeve floral shirt and a cap. As he turned around to close the door behind him, I could see cable ties sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans.

‘What’s that in your pocket?’ I asked.

He quickly readjusted his shirt to cover the items. ‘What? Nothing.’

‘Well, I definitely saw something, so let’s have a peek.’

He was looking and behaving quite agitated at this point. ‘Look there’s nothing in my pocket, are we going to do this or what?’

My brain was reeling, I did not trust this guy, something was definitely not kosher. Ordinarily, I show the clients into my room, close the door, and ask them how long they were wanting to stay. But on this occasion, I decided to have the conversation in the hall, where the well-hidden phone girl could hear what was being said.

‘So I’ll now take some money from you, sorry at this late hour I can only offer you half an hour. That will be $170, thank you.’ Before I could finish my sentence he had stooped and picked me up in a fireman’s lift. I was staring directly at those dreaded cable ties clearly exposed once again. My feet were on his groin and my stomach was hurting as it rested on his shoulder. He found the bedroom and threw me on the bed.

As he reached for his restraining devices, I kicked him with my seriously pointy shoe right under the jaw, and I screamed, ‘David! David! Help! I’m being attacked!’

The man jumped off the bed in record speed. Of course there was no David, but if I yelled ‘Liz!’ I’m not sure he would have been as deterred. Liz came flying in from another room, and we faced each other in a triangle. I could see what he was thinking: Liz was tiny and I wasn’t much bigger. I’m sure for a moment he considered restraining and raping us both.

Breaking the Mexican standoff, I screamed at Liz, ‘Go call the police, now!’

As she turned to follow my instructions he took his opportunity and bolted for the door.

Relief came over me, I wanted to slam the door shut and double lock it for my own safety. I have no idea why I didn’t, but I ran into the lounge room, grabbed the booking sheet and pen and followed him out to his car. As he got in and sped off I wrote his licence plate number down and ran back inside. Liz was on the phone to the police. I grabbed the phone from her mid-sentence.

The policewoman was sympathetic and very professional up until she realised she was dealing with a sex worker. At that point, her voice seemed to change an octave and her disinterest was almost palpable.

‘Oh, this is a vice issue, you will need to call them, here’s their number . . .’

I wanted to throw the phone against the wall, I wanted to give that bitch a torrent of abuse, but instead I bit my tongue and called the number she gave me.

‘Hello, you have called the Perth Vice Squad, our office hours are Monday to Friday eight thirty am to four thirty pm. If you would like one of our officers to call you back, please leave your name and number after the beep. Thank you for calling.’ Motherfucking bastards.

‘Hi this is Cleo, I have just been attacked by a nut job with cable ties, I got his licence plate number, please call me back on oh eight . . .’

Wednesday of the following week the vice squad finally called me back, only because they’d now had six other complaints by working girls, which means that he must have attacked nine or more, because few girls want to talk to vice. It appears I was his first attempt, then he modified his method for best effect. The police were calling me because I had been the only girl to have recorded his phone number and licence plate.

‘Oh, so now the police need my help? Why didn’t you call me back on Monday or even Tuesday, just to see if I was all right? Why aren’t I entitled to use triple 0 or more specifically the ordinary police that work on Fridays after four thirty pm? I pay tax too you know!’

‘Yes, yes, yes, you’re right, we’re sorry, so when can you come in and give a statement, so we can catch this perv?’ All this was said with the enthusiasm and sincerity of the voice on any bank’s call waiting message.

‘This prick isn’t a perv, he’s a fucking rapist! I’ll be there in half an hour.’

I spent three hours there making a statement. Thanks to my information, they were able to track his initial phone call to a major car dealership, where he worked. As well, the licence gave the police his residential address. He was charged, not with attempted rape but assault—because of course you can’t rape a hooker—on six women. None of us was invited to give evidence or attend court. However, I did learn from the vice squad when I phoned them that he was given a six-month suspended sentence.

I stopped paying tax from that moment on.

‘The tax man’ was a four-letter word in the industry, the general consensus being that we received no police support, we were on the fringes of society in a semi-legal profession, so why should we pay a cent to a government that didn’t protect us? It was believed that the vice squad was nothing more than an agent for the tax department.

Many a girl had fallen foul of the tax man only to be given a bill with no explanation as to how that particular sum was reached. The tax man was like a yeti or an urban myth. To us, no one had seen him therefore he couldn’t be described with any clarity; no one knew how he worked, or what powers he possessed yet we were all petrified of him, but most thought they could outsmart him. Thus the dance began. Girls told stories about houses being staked out and anonymous-looking men counting the number of gentlemen that came and went from the address. Therefore girls believed it was better to work from an apartment where the tax man couldn’t accurately count the number of guests you received. Paranoid girls contended that this ever vigilant ogre would watch the personal section of the newspaper and monitor each time your phone number appeared. While this may sound paranoid and delusional, it was all too true. There was indeed a special tax branch set up to monitor working girls.

In order to combat the invisible tax man, girls prepared viable stories to answer questions in the event of an audit. The belief was that if your number was advertised on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday it went without saying that you were clearly working that day and thus should have an income to declare. However the question remains: Who was the phone registered to? Who was the venue leased to? Whose bodgie name appeared in the advertisement?

Ads placed in the paper changed weekly, as did names, phone numbers, suburbs and descriptions. Most girls had two or three phone numbers—one on a permanent plan and another throwaway number—names, and descriptions at any one time. The permanent number you reserved for your regular clients so they could always reach you.

This approach to advertising served a second purpose, since many clients wanted to shop around. They wanted to shag a different girl each week, so by scouring the ads and noting a new ad, the belief was that they’d get to see someone completely different. Upon arrival, they quickly realised they’d already met this girl, but they were there so what the hell. Less attractive girls tended to use that trick all the time.

Many of the girls would only work from executive apartments rented by the week, or hotel rooms booked under a false name and paid for by cash. This way there was never any way of asserting that such-and-such was working that day and was visited by fifteen clients. To me, this seemed an awful lot of trouble and running around and not at all cost effective.

Let’s be honest, if you have to rely on self-reporting for tax no one would ever declare one hundred per cent of their income—the best the government could hope for is seventy-five per cent They rarely got that out of me. But I was still declaring something, so they should be bloody grateful. I had very few deductions with the exception of condoms because the renting of a premises for the purpose of prostitution was illegal, so there was no declaring a room in your home as a deduction. My car was a deductable because I did out calls—even though I didn’t really. Clothes and lingerie were not deductable because they had to be emblazoned with a work logo to be deductable, and what was the chance that was going to happen?

Most girls didn’t fear the tax man as much as they feared the police for social security fraud. Eight out of ten working girls I knew were not subsidising any other income, but rather took the attitude that this work was part of a five-year plan to save a fortune and buy a business, get out of debt, pay off a house, pay your way through university—or some other such nonsense that never eventuated. I heard a statistic that claimed that after five years, only five per cent of working girls have anything to show for their trouble. Many of the girls I knew let social security support them and clients pay for their luxuries and travel.

I could never comprehend the mathematics of it. Girls earning at least $400 a day as rub-n-tug girls needing to take half a day off work in order to lodge their unemployment form so that they could get $200 per week. For this grand sum, they had to constantly live in fear of being caught and sent to jail. And they had to risk asking clients to sign a dodgy form saying they applied for employment.

I never knew a girl who was charged with social security fraud, but I did meet a number of girls who were given tax bills of $30,000. Interesting the government didn’t have to establish how many days a week she worked, or how many clients she saw for how much money. They didn’t have to show deposits in bank accounts or verify ownership of assets exceeding the girls’ declared incomes. They simply presented these girls with bills and no alternatives but to pay. I imagine that otherwise there would have been a public trial exposing the girls to all sorts of unwanted embarrassment, potential custody issues and threats to their future good name.

The girls I knew who’d had a rendezvous with the special branch of the tax department all paid their debts in full. All of whom did so on their back, well and truly blowing out their five-year plans.

Explaining assets or income was always a concern. Putting any money in the bank was a task to be avoided at all costs. Whenever possible, I paid cash for everything, when it wasn’t possible I put it in a company’s name that my favourite accountant had set up for me.

In Singapore they had a system where you could open a bank account with a birth certificate providing you could deposit $15,000 minimum. Then in Australia you could pay for things using this foreign VISA. The ATO couldn’t tax income derived from overseas, but I had no work visa for Singapore or any of the countries that I visited and worked in.

A day didn’t go by without at least five calls asking if I saw couples. In the early years I thought it was a great perk; instead of $250 per hour I was getting $550: $250 each and a $50 fantasy charge. I didn’t particularly like sex with women, but then again I didn’t particularly like sex with really old, overweight men, so what difference did it make? At least I was getting paid twice the dollars for the same sixty minutes of detachment. The truth was an entirely different reality.

With any job I needed to be on the ball from the moment the client walked through the door: Why was he there? Was he seeking sex or affection or ego stroking? I needed to establish how I should play the appointment. Strong and sexy or demure and let him run the show? Was this guy a potential regular I should be really nice to or was he a brothel rat—a name we used for guys who never saw the same girl twice? Was he on drugs or drunk? So until I’d answered all these questions I couldn’t afford to be detached. Even as I ripped open that condom and put it on with my mouth, my brain was alert and active: How much was he enjoying this? What were the chances I could get him off like this and he wouldn’t be able to muster another erection? I always did this positioned between his legs, with my puss well out of hands’ reach. And I got to watch his face to see how hard he was trying to hold back.

Even during sex I couldn’t afford to detach, I was always on alert. Was the condom still on? Where did he like to be touched? Was he enjoying this or should I try another position? When the occasional client did outlast the standard two minutes, my brain remained switched on: What did I fancy for dinner, I had a cauliflower in the fridge that really should be eaten soon, how about a risotto, did I have bacon in the fridge?

‘Ooh, Cleo, I’m going to come.’

This was where it was my job to say: ‘No, hold on for one more minute,’ or ‘Quick, what’s eight times sixty-four?’ Or, my personal favourite: ‘Quick, think of Shane Warne naked.’ That way when they did ignore all my pleadings and come anyway I could quip: ‘So you’re a bit of a Warnie fan?’

Inevitably they apologised for a poor performance. ‘Sorry, Cleo, I never usually come that quickly, I’ll make it up to you next time.’

To which I always responded, ‘You owe me one.’

Of course every client was different, every hour had its variations, but in general it all started the same and it all ended the same. Differences were only apparent somewhere in the middle ground, namely if they want to go down on me. That only occurred about fifty per cent of the time and really came down to the nationality or culture of the client. There are no hard and fast rules where cunnilingus and country of origin are concerned but I will say that when I first started working it was a rarity. In later years of my career, men seem to have adopted a new definition of satisfaction, which included providing good sex. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been bounced around a bed for about fifty minutes, only to have the client amazed that in all that time I hadn’t reached climax.

Female clients were nowhere near as easy to please as their male counterparts. They defined satisfaction completely differently to male clients. Men wanted to rip off their gear and get down to it, while women would arrive with a bottle of bubbly and ask where I kept the champagne flutes. In my dollars and cents brain, I was thinking, Do you really want to spend fifteen minutes getting to know one another over drinks at $9.20 per minute? My bet is hubby doesn’t. Then they wanted to take a five-minute shower only to come out of the bathroom redressed, so that I could undress them seductively. That would be fun in the real world while you’re passionately kissing but in Cleo’s world there was no kissing allowed.

So now I had twenty-five minutes left to sexually gratify both clients, see them both showered, dressed and out my door. I knew all the while that was never going to happen, but I’d give it a whirl. Just like men, women will try to suspend orgasm, it’s just women are better at accomplishing that feat. Women would beg me not to make them come yet, because they wanted to prolong the experience, totally oblivious to the reality that I was looking at the clock on the wall.

If I told a man he had eight minutes remaining he would climax within two minutes. However, if I told a woman she had eight minutes remaining she would vent: ‘What, am I on the clock?’ In reply, I’d direct my question to hubby: ‘Does it take your wife an hour and a half to watch
60 minutes
on Sunday?’

Arguing was futile, and that thirty-five minutes of buttering up was now gone. The moment the fantasy ceased to exist in her mind, attempting to reignite her was a lost cause. As clients, women defined a good hour-long threesome experience as ninety minutes of mutual sexual satisfaction.

I didn’t mind being a mattress actress but don’t try to head fuck me. Men would talk to me about the weather and the football, maybe comment on my home. I really didn’t need the get-to-know-you-better-style conversations. Not women, they wanted to know every detail. They just didn’t get that, once you walked through my doors, it was a liar’s paradise. Every client was John the accountant, except of course for John the actual accountant—he was a pilot with Qantas, or an officer with ASIO. The guy that owned a Jim’s Mowing, he apparently started the franchise. Liars were welcome any time in my home, because I was selling fantasy, so keep the fuck out of my reality!