The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (10 page)

She's an equal‐opportunity party animal, juggling five or six seasonal holidays at a go. The last we checked she was trying to whip up familial enthusiasm for an Eid firework party. Having only a vague notion of what Eid is, who celebrates it or what shoes would be appropriate for standing in a back garden and craning my neck at multi‐coloured gunpowder, I decided in favour of the walking option.

75

There was a nip in the air, just enough to set the cheeks and ears tingling. We walked past a cottage with smoke from the chimney.

'Coal,' Daddy said, authoritatively. We had a wood‐burning stove when I was small. We used to cook the family meals on it. When it went and the new electric cooker and fake fire came in I was very sad.

We returned to a dark house and a worried‐looking man pushing his car off ours. He did the little foot‐to‐foot dance of trying to look innocent, which is especially tough when your front bumper is entangled in someone's estate car.

Daddy did a low whistle. 'Ooh, the woman's not going to be happy,'

he said to the strange man, as if the threat of my mother's displeasure alone could convince a perfect stranger not to do a runner. He circled the scene of the accident, which even I could see wasn't serious. But the stranger had clearly had a bit of Christmas cheer and was panicking.

'Don't know, now,' Daddy said, sucking his teeth. 'Could be a lot of damage.' The man pleaded for leniency. The usual story ‐ points on his licence, poor insurance, wife at home about to give birth to a multi‐headed hydra and only his being home on time could save her.

'Tell you what,' my father said, stroking his chin. 'Let's have two hundred off you and call it even.'

'I only have one‐twenty on me.'

'One‐twenty and that bottle of whisky in your front seat.'

A curt nod and the man handed over the goods. My father crouched low and, with a coordinated effort, they disentangled the bumpers. The man got in his saloon and drove off slowly, mumbling gratitude. We waved him round the corner.

'Well, that was potentially exciting,' Daddy said, unlocking the front door. He handed me half of the notes. 'Let's not tell your mother, shall we?'

76

lundi, le 22 decembre

The first prostitute I ever met was a friend of my father's. It was about this time of year. I was still a student.

He is not a pimp, I swear. My father is in the habit of taking on impossible projects. He'd probably qualify for sainthood if he was, you know, a dead Catholic. These altruistic efforts have ranged from resurrecting a doomed restaurant to rehabilitating a series of doomed women. It's a tendency that has led to no small amount of frostiness on my mother's part, but she has had some few decades to accustom herself to his soft‐heartedness by now.

She could tell when he was embarking on yet another failed cause before he even opened his mouth. 'There's only one reason you'd be coming in with flowers,' she barked from the kitchen. 'And it's not our anniversary.' Maybe she's the one whose name should be put forward to the Vatican.

The holiday cheer was largely lost on me that year due to a recent break‐up (as well as not being Christian). The vulgarities of the holiday are sometimes charming, or occasionally grating, but that year they were unbearable. All I could see were so many people gaining joy from an event imbued with only minimal importance by most of the world, and represented by endless yards of tatty tinsel and unwanted gifts. One afternoon, standing in a queue at the bank, I saw my reflection distorted in a cheap red tree bauble, and it occurred to me how temporary and meaningless it all was: the holiday; the bank; the world in general. I felt incapable of even anger at being alone. Defeated. So I did what any spoiled eldest child would do and went home for a few weeks to sulk properly.

As a restorative jaunt my father suggested I go with him to 77

visit one of his 'friends'. She, I was told, had just been released from prison on fraud charges related to her drug habit. Having reasserted custody of her children, she was working as a cleaner in a hotel and trying to stay off the game. Charming. I smiled tightly and we drove off to meet the woman.

We sat in the car in silence for a quarter of an hour. 'I know you know your mum doesn't approve,' he said suddenly, by way of the obvious.

I said nothing and looked out the window, where people poured out of the shops into the night.

'She's really a lovely person,' he said of the friend. 'Her children are absolutely charming.'

My father is the most ineffectual liar. In her depressing kitchen she regaled us with the story of a septic infection in her thumbnail that culminated in a week off work. Her two sons were as I imagined: the elder, about fifteen, eyed my figure under three layers of heavy clothing, while his younger sibling could not be shifted from the telly.

I could not stop thinking of my last boyfriend, who had left me suddenly among accusations of my snobbishness and utter lack of sympathy for other people. Well, as Philip Larkin put it, useful to get that learned.

The other adults and the teenage son left the room to look at his bicycle, a rusting heap retrieved from a skip that lay crumpled outside the door. My father is rather handy and promised to look into its health. I knew the effort was more likely to result in a cash gift to the young man rather than any resurrection of the pushbike. 1 was left, scowling, to watch the younger son attack the remote control.

As soon as the room was empty he turned to me. 'Would you like to see my bird?'

Good gracious. Was this some sort of euphemism? I wondered.

'Okay,' I said.

78

We went to the window, and he opened it. Outside was a large holly bush. He clicked his tongue and waited. There was only the sound of motor scooters and festive drunks emerging from a pub. He clicked his tongue again and whistled. Then a small bluetit beeped back and flew out of the bush to land on his shoulder. When he opened his hand, palm up, it settled there.

Turning back in the window, he told me to put out my own hand. I did. He showed me how to snatch my hand away so the tit would fall, only to catch it again as it opened its wings. 'That's how I taught it to fly,' he said.

'You taught it to fly?'

'A cat killed its mum, so we brought the nest in,' he said. 'We got crickets and fed them with a tweezer.' There had been six in the nest, but only one survived. He showed me another trick, where, with the tit on his shoulder, he would look to the right, then left, then right again ‐ and the bird would peep in each ear as he presented it.

The others came back in, the older son flushed with the satisfaction of having parted my father from some portion of his wallet. The bird flew out and the younger boy closed the window. Their mother was chattering gamely about some other minor recent illness, owing, she was certain, to the quality of food within HM's prisons: 'You get hardly nothing, starving all the time, but you still get fat.' We stayed for another cup of tea and a chocolate bourbon, then my father and I went home in silence.

mardi, le 23 decembre

Long coat: check.

Dark sunglasses: check.

One hour's alibi to the parents: check.

79

I'm out of the door and free.

I was on time for the rendezvous. He was late. I sipped a coffee and pretended to read the paper. He slid in the door unnoticed, sat across from me. I nodded hello and pushed the package across the table.

A4 lifted the lid discreetly and looked in the box. 'You sure these are the goods?' he asked.

'None finer,' I said. 'Guaranteed results.' He exhaled, his shoulders unclenching. 'If you don't mind my asking, do you really need so much product to get through a week with your family?'

'They'd kill me otherwise.' He opened the box again and sniffed deeply. 'Soon as they start to smell blood in the water, I can throw these chocolate truffles their way. That buys me at least a few hours.'

'Secret recipe,' I fibbed. Actually I'd found it on the Internet. Butter, chocolate, cream and rum. So simple even I couldn't cock it up.

A4 and I dated for some years, we even lived together for a time.

We didn't have, as they say, a pot to piss in, but it was a comfortable domestic arrangement and we had a lot of common interests.

Namely, complaining about the rest of the world. It lasted until I moved away in the first of several unsuccessful attempts to gain useful employment. I was upset, recently, to find that he thought the post‐student house we'd shared was 'a hovel'. I always remembered it fondly.

'You're a lifesaver,' A4 said. He's the one my father still asks after, as if we're still an item. He's the one I have the most pictures of. There is one of him in the mountains in a silver frame on my bookshelves.

He's looking up at the camera, at me, a hand out to steady himself, and smiling. Sweet creature. Smiles often.

'You'll pay me back another time.'

80

mercredi, le 24 decembre

I miss living in the north. The stories are all true. People really are friendlier up here. The chips really are better. Everything really is cheaper. The women really do go out in mid‐winter wearing less.

I miss getting pissed for less than a fiver.

jeudi, le 25 decembre

I have been waiting absolutely weeks to say this: Happy Christmas, ho ho ho!

It made me laugh anyway. It's Chanukah, and I am eating white chocolate gelt at the moment, which is cooler than cool. And no sign of a gift from the Boy, which is less than cool.

vendredi, le 26 decembre

My first diary was a seventh birthday gift. Fortunately, most of the intervening volumes have been lost. This morning, bored to death, I set about cleaning out a desk and found some old ones from a few years back. They were written in softcover exercise books with flowers drawn on the covers. They date from the time N and I met a few years ago. We hit if off immediately (a coy way of saying 'grabbed a room in the first hotel we could find'). A couple of days later, when we came up for air, he mentioned his female friend J and the possibility of a threesome. He'd had threesomes with her several times before and vouched for her beauty and overwhelming sexuality.

We were sitting in his car, looking at the river near 81

Hammersmith. 'Sure,' I said. I hadn't been with many women, but considering all the ground he and I had covered in a weekend it seemed impossible to refuse. He rang her to arrange a meeting, and this is how the diary entry continued:

We met J at her place and went for brunch. Food was nice, talked about sex and underwater archaeology. Back at hers I made hot cocoa for N and me. When he went out of the room she kissed me and asked how many women I'd been with.

Lied and said eight or nine. We drank the cocoa in the front room and N said he might have a nap. J took me to her bedroom, which held a big white bed and pillowcases that spelled 'La Nuit' in a serif font. We kissed and touched. J

seemed tiny until I took off my shoes ‐ in fact, we are the same height. Her bum looked so good in the cream striped trousers, but even better naked. The night before N had said I had the best arse he'd ever seen but J's, I think, is better. Her neck, skin and hair all smelled so nice I was suddenly aware of my own sweat. 'Did N do that?' she asked of the deep scratches on my shoulder. I showed her the dark bruises on my thighs and the faint marks from his cock on my face. She told me to lie down and blindfolded me and tied my hands.

She dragged a soft, multi‐stranded whip across me. 'Do you know what this is?' 'Yes.' 'Do you want it?' She saved the hardest lashes for my breasts and fucked me with a double-headed dildo. When I pressed my face in her crotch, she untied me and took the mask off. I licked her through the knickers and then took them off ‐ J was shaven down below.

It was easy to get her off with my fingers. After which I noticed N watching from the open door. Asked how long he'd been there. 'Since the mask went on,' he said. 'I could smell the two of you before I even got to the door.'

82

At this point J's boyfriend turned up and the diary gets a little vague. To make a long story short, he had a problem with N ‐

namely, he didn't want N to touch J. Out of frustration N blurted that if that was so, J's man couldn't touch me either. Instead, N

tried unsuccessfully to fist me. I was so distracted I couldn't come.

J sucked her partner off, we all showered separately, exchanged numbers, and N and I left. He dropped me at King's Cross and asked if I needed anything before the journey. Something meaningful to live for, I quipped. Food and sex, he said immediately, and I laughed. I've reminded him of this flash of philosophy several times since, but he never remembers saying it.

Walking through the station, I felt lighter than air, dazed. Happy.

'Well,' he shrugged just before the train doors closed, 'I guess four in a bed is too many.'

I remember masturbating on the ride north. It wasn't easy, the carriage was crowded and people kept sitting next to me. I didn't want to do it in the toilet. But I had hours to do it in and unbuttoned my trousers as slowly as needed for perfect silence. It happened with an Asian girl sitting next to me, turned talking to her friend a few rows back. I had a coat thrown over my lap and pretended to be asleep. Afterwards I rang N to let him know. It was somewhere around Grantham, I believe.

samedi, le 27 decembre

I have never been the sort of girl to make New Year's resolutions.

Such things are bound to lead to teetotaller parties, ill‐advised marriages or worse. Once I resolved to use floss and mouthwash before brushing every day for an entire year. This was before I realised (some 1 .4 milliseconds later) that maintaining such a level of dental hygiene was not

83

only unlikely to last an entire week, but also unattractive. Would you want to wake up to a full‐on Broadway musical starring your beloved's tonsils every morning?

Another year I planned to keep a handwritten diary without giving up out of boredom or forgetfulness. Miraculously I made it to the six‐month mark, spurred on by simultaneous reading of the diaries of Kenneth Tynan and Pepys. By comparison my own suffered from a lack of tales of having my wig deloused or all-night drinking sessions with Tennessee Williams.