The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (9 page)

A1 and I dated for several years. It was not an easy relationship except for the sex. Once our clothes were off so were all bets. I knew I could ask him for anything and he could ask the same. For the most part, we always said yes to whatever the other wanted, but took no offence if the suggestion was rejected. He was the first man to tell me 1 was pretty whom I believed, the first person outside of a gym shower I could walk in front of unclothed. And I adored him physically: A1 is tall but not too tall, muscular, hairy. His dark, straight hair and gravelly voice were deliciously anachronistic. He was the sort of man who should have been around in the 1950s as a captain of industry.

We would have unbelievable rows. The passion I felt for him was something I didn't know how to handle. It felt too intense and slippery for me, liquid mercury pouring out of my hands. We made it up in the bedroom, of course. Or on

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his kitchen table. Or his desk at work, after his boss had gone. In an elevator. In a university post office.

And we did it every way we could imagine, from the exotic (double penetration, restraints, golden showers) to the embarrassingly prosaic (missionary while he watched a football match on telly). I've done more and dirtier with other people since then, but never felt such a sense of stretching my own boundaries.

He was the first person to take a paddle to my behind; in return, I administered a doubled leather belt to his bottom while he bent over a sofa, holding his genitals away from the strikes. His impressively varied collection of pornography was the first hardcore I'd ever seen, and we acquired new magazines and sorted them into categories with glee. The things he did like ‐ watersports, anal, women with frog-spawnish come dripping off their faces ‐ took their place; even things he didn't like such as bestiality and lesbian sex got a look in, because he was a collector. The explicit permission just to look at someone's body, as opposed to a surreptitious glance in the gym or a furtive peek before the covers came up and the lights went out, was delightful.

I started seeing A2 several years after A1 and I split. He was a sensitive lover. Not gentle as such, but strong and slow. He seemed to me to make no unnecessary movements, and I was enthralled by his long, measured steps. Sometimes, with his pale skin and fair hair, he still looked a teenager. Or even younger ‐ an overgrown boy. From the beginning of our affair to the end, no body and no touch ever felt so right every time as his did. No fingers and no tongue ever came so close to being what I imagined the perfect lover was like. His body was spare but muscular. Tall but not excessively so. Not an ounce wasted.

He had a washing machine at home, I didn't. I went round one day with laundry and found a pair of my own knickers 68

in the otherwise empty drum. 'What are these doing in here?' I asked.

'I missed you when you went home last weekend, so I wore them,'

he said.

I examined the elastic. His hips were so narrow it didn't seem to have torn the underwear. 'Maybe we should get some for you,' I kidded.

'Maybe we should,' he said, not joking.

I had his key. After waking and breakfasting (poached eggs on toast if hungry, cappuccino and a slice of challah if not) I would cycle to A2's house. He usually rose late and was showering when I arrived.

The bedroom door would be open and I would head to the bureau drawer, which contained almost two dozen pairs of knickers.

Choosing one, I would leave it in the drawer of his bedside stand and return to the front room. He would come out and dress. No comment on the knickers, which were for later.

We spent most of each day together. He worked from home; at the time I had odd hours in the bookshop nearby. While I was working he'd take a break, bringing me takeaway cups of coffee and tea. We read the literary supplements; I gave him bound proofs of upcoming books from the back room. My workmates were a mad, absinthe-drinking, middle‐aged woman and the often‐absent, never‐happy boss. Almost every week I ended up covering half of their hours but didn't mind. There were books and plenty of them. And it was exciting the few times an author of note came in the shop. I noticed, though, that most of them breezed in the door and went to check for their titles on the shelves before coming back to the front to greet me.

After work A2 would be waiting at home. No words, just through the door and straight to his sofa. He sat, arms thrown over the back, as I opened his jeans with my teeth. Always a harder trick to pull off than I remembered. Then

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the first flash of silk or lace, and his hard cock distorting the fabric. I put my face in his crotch and smelled the odour of a day's worth of sweat, piss and pre‐come through the knickers. I nibbled him, licked the underwear until it stuck to him.

A2 loved to pull at me, turn me over on his hands. He stripped me bare but kept the girly pants on. When he entered me ‐ almost always anally ‐ it was with the knickers pushed to one side, constricting the base of his penis, clinging to his balls.

After a few months the knickers weren't enough. I bought a summer dress, short, brightly coloured. He tried it on. I laughed and fucked him in the dress and was only slightly depressed that A2 had thinner hips and better legs than mine.

'Let's go to the sales,' he said one weekend. I didn't have to ask if the purchases were going to be for him or for me. Soon several short, pretty dresses joined the knickers in the drawer.

I knew there was another woman. He'd told me before we ever slept together. I probably fooled myself into believing it was almost over, for she lived hours away and, from what I knew, had always treated him badly. But one week he went to see friends in the city where she lived. While I tried for a few days to ignore the itching weight of his key in my pocket, in the end I could not resist. I tore his house apart looking for evidence of her: email, pictures. There was one in particular that broke my heart: her gorgeous face cracked in a smile and pink satin pyjamas open to the waist. I found her name, her number, and rang her. There was no answer. I left a message on the answerphone: 'This is a friend of A2's, I just wanted to talk to you ‐

don't worry, it's not an emergency.'

She rang back. 'Hello,' she said, sounding tired. It was hard to keep from screaming. The pulse in my neck was throbbing. 'Do you know who I am?' I asked.

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'I've heard your name,' she said. I told her about me and A2. She was very quiet. 'Thank you,' she said at the end. The day after he came back I used his key to go in but he wasn't in the shower.

He was waiting for me. I'd upset her, he said. What right did I have to do that?

There was no answer. I was shaking with anger. What right does anyone have to feel jealousy?

One of the teachers at school gave a talk to the girls in our year about his marriage. 'Love is a decision,' he declared to a room of hormonally charged teenagers. We scoffed. Love isn't a decision; the films and songs tell us otherwise. It's a force, it's a virtue. We were at the charmed age when you can suck off your brother's best friend in your bedroom and still believe in one true love.

Then I fell for someone who hurt me. Gradually I came around to the teacher's point of view. You have to open the door before someone can come in. That was no guarantee of control once they got there, of course, but it was comprehensible, if not entirely logical.

In control, that's what I thought. But first‐time jealousy tore me to pieces the same way first love had. A2 and I argued and fucked, and fucked and argued, then we argued more and fucked less.

And when we did have sex, it had changed. Once he used to put knickers on and bend over the edge of his sofa. Laughing, I would apply a riding crop to his behind. After a few minutes we'd run to his bathroom where he'd excitedly pull down the panties and look in the mirror. If I hadn't yet imprinted the pattern of the fabric on his skin, we'd go back and try again.

After, I just whipped him and whipped him until his skin was raw and spotted with blood. Until he told me to stop.

The times we shared a bed, A2 slept with his arms tangled 71

around me. I kick and struggle against sheets and blankets in the night; he held me in. I rub my legs together like a cricket; he warmed my cold feet between his. Whenever his hand rested on my belly, I would wake, wondering not only at his stillness ‐ he was only slightly less animated asleep than awake ‐ but also at his lack of self-consciousness. The body is so unarmoured: our species' success is dependent on what is inside our skin, not a thousand spikes mounted on it. I might have hurt him any time he was asleep. If he turned over, exposed his spine, I might have attacked him right then.

And once I woke before the alarm to find my curtains open on a perfectly grey morning. Hearing a sigh, thinking him awake, I turned toward A2. He still lingered in the twilight of sleep and his long arms were at strange angles under the displaced pillow.

'Why are you tucking your hands in like that?' I asked, for his elbows jutted out but his palms were jammed beneath the bedding.

'So you don't snap them off,' he murmured, and went into deeper sleep. The first starling of the morning started in a tree outside.

He broke things off with his other lover but I never quite believed it and we drifted apart, sleeping together less and less frequently until one day he was seeing someone else and so was I. We were each happy for the other.

jeudi, le 18 decembre

N and I had a minor falling out at the gym. Nothing serious, such as whose glutes are benefiting more from adding lunges to the workout, but a parting of ways on the subject of restricting access to public services and benefits. He was in

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favour, at which point I believe the words 'paranoid refugee hater'

may have traversed my mind, if not escaped my lips.

We managed to keep from strangling each other and repaired to mine for risotto. Conversation stayed on safer subjects, namely shoes, rugby and who in
Footballers' Wives
sports the best cleavage. I'm sure we'll work out this schism in the end ‐ both the cleavage debate and the ID card thing. That said, disagreements never resolve themselves as quickly once you can't fuck each other any more.

vendredi, le 19 decembre

The manager is a doll, but easily confused. Case in point: I was sitting in the back of a cab while the driver tried to find the Royal Kensington Hotel (which, incidentally, doesn't exist). I was a quarter of an hour late. We finally decided she must have meant the Royal Garden Hotel, Kensington. The driver waited outside while I checked the name and room number at reception. It was indeed correct. I gave the cabbie the thumbs up and he drove off.

The client was freshly showered and wearing a white towelling robe. We walked through to the suite's front room, where another woman sat drinking wine, already topless. She was a small blonde cutie from Israel.

I took off her skirt and shoes and undid the ribbon ties on her black silk knickers with my teeth. I had been told she was his girlfriend but something about it didn't quite jibe. He seemed to know her no better than I did. If she was a working girl, she definitely wasn't from my agency. Instincts can be wrong, though, and in threesomes with someone's girlfriend the best course of action is to lavish attention on the woman. It was no hardship ‐ she smelled of baby powder and tasted of warm honey.

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We moved on to the bedroom. He went at me from behind while she kneeled down to work at me with her tongue, fingers and a mini-vibe. I found his exceptionally smooth body fascinating ‐ someone's been spending plenty of time down the waxing salon, I thought ‐ an effect compromised by his rough, untrimmed beard. The whiskers tickled and scratched as he lapped at my girl‐parts.

'I don't know what you had in mind,' I said, as my time started drawing to a close, 'but I think it would be great if you came all over both our faces.'

The Israeli girl licked her lips and winked at me. A pro. Had to be, had to be.

Afterwards I produced a small bottle of apricot oil, and she gave both me and the client the most luscious massages. If I hadn't enjoyed it so much, I would have been jealous of her skill. I gathered my clothes from the rooms while she pummelled and kneaded his back.

The client went to collect my coat. I gave the girl a kiss and nodded at the bottle of massage oil in her tiny hand. 'Keep it ‐ you'll make better use of it than I will.' He came back and put a possessive arm around her, and my mind switched over again. Escort? Girlfriend? I couldn't be sure. The tip he slipped me was equal to the fee.

samedi, le 20 decembre

I am heading home to see friends and family, as is my custom. The Boy has gone to spend a few weeks with his parents, as is his custom.

I think some things should be sacrosanct from the intrusion of couplehood, and watching your family get drunk and pass out in the toilet is one of them.

Train travel is a most exciting wonder of the modern age. Having invented no shortage of faster, cheaper and more 74

comfortable ways to travel, we insist on perpetuating an outdated, and dare I say it, wildly inconvenient method of transport. What other modes of carriage would expect you to make your own way to the start and terminating stations, wait until the company's convenience to commence your journey, sit so long without even a free warm soda, and set up seats and tables so that you are inadvertently rubbing thighs with every pervert between King's Cross and Yorkshire?

I love it, you know I do.

Having made this journey so often, I know ‐ seconds before the conductor's voice breaks over the Tannoy ‐ when we are one minute from my stop and which carriage will put me closest to the exit. Even when no one is waiting for me, and there is a twenty‐minute queue for a taxi the effect of stepping on to the platform is vivid delight. I could conduct a tour of the station blindfolded. And the glow of being on my own ground lasts indefinitely, or until I pull into my parents'

drive. Whichever comes first.

dimanche, le 21 decembre

Daddy and I went for a walk just after sunset. He claimed his legs were cramping from so much sitting around, but I suspect it was to get away from my mother, who has gone into celebratory overdrive.