Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (14 page)

I determined to add to my already-tiring quota of jobs to find the cash, but looking for a room to rent when every trip was at the mercy of London bus timetables was proving a serious challenge. I was still in close and loving contact with my grandparents but they had no money and more importantly no car to help me go bedsit hunting.

There was only one other possibility of help: I swallowed my pride and telephoned my birth-mother.

CHAPTER 14

DREAMING SPIRES

R
enewing contact with Eileen, my birth-mother, was a huge step for me. We have stayed in contact and remained friends ever since although I will always think of my grandparents as my ‘real’ mum and dad. It also helped solve my immediate problem as I prepared to enter university.

Eileen drove me around from flat to flat until I found a place I could just about afford, relatively near to my university campus in Watford – hardly Cambridge, the City of Dreaming Spires, but at least it could earn me my much-desired degree. My birth-mother did help me with some rent payments and money for books, but it was still a constant struggle in those first few months finding enough money just to eat and house myself, let alone go out and have some fun. I was holding down several part-time jobs at once, cycling everywhere I could because I didn’t have the money for buses,
and trying to study as well. I was just so tired all the time that it was hard to concentrate on what I was supposed to be studying. At times I came close to giving up but that would have meant an even worse fate: working full-time in the sort of dead-end job that I was already doing to survive. Every time I even considered jacking the whole thing in, my granddad’s word would ring in my ears: ‘You’ve got to get an education Miranda… never give up on your education.’ It was his inspiration that kept me going when life seemed impossible.

There was never enough time to do all of the ‘normal’ things to keep life running smoothly. People think that university students have lazy lives but I was on a media course which meant that even if lectures didn’t run till five each evening, I still had to watch films or use the edit suites whenever they were available. There were lots of books or audio and video tapes to buy; so much money to pay out when I didn’t have any financial help from my family at that stage, or indeed, at any other stage! When I first moved in I had a cleaning job after studies so would cycle to college in the morning, cycle back to my room, and then between 6 pm and 9 pm every week night I did my cleaning job. On Saturdays I worked in a local River Island clothes store, which left Sunday as my only day off.

About every third weekend I would completely run out of clean clothes. Naturally I didn’t have a washing machine and I certainly couldn’t afford washing powder and launderettes. The solution was to pile all of my washing into a bag after work on Saturday evening and head for the train station. I hated that half-mile walk and the necessary trudge down the bloody station steps with a passion. The cheapest train ticket
would take me to my birth-mother’s house in Buckinghamshire where I would load up her washing machine and then often stay the night so that she could drive me back home on the Sunday. She had helped me get a phone so that we could talk once in a while. Our relationship was still strained, there was a lot of distance there and it was awkward but at least we were trying. I was finding it hard to get over my disappointment at how she had treated me the last time we’d met. I was still angry, fucking angry actually, and still felt betrayed and annoyed that she had taken her husband’s side in a silly row without thinking of how she was rejecting me.

I really do not know if my hurt feelings had anything to do with the earlier rejections in my life: her giving me up in the first place and then not asking for me back when she had another family whose lives I might have shared. People close to me have suggested that I must have harboured resentment about it, but the truth is I had never known her as a mother, and so growing up with my grandparents was, for me, a perfectly natural thing to have happened. I did have a mum – my grandmother – and so I’ve never needed another one. On top of that it is not as though my birth-mother ever vanished completely from my life. As a child I was always getting presents from her. She would telephone often and also turn up at the house with clothes or food to help my grandparents’ out. She was constantly there as a shadowy, ‘big sister’ presence in my life – just not as a mummy figure.

My unorthodox lifestyle set me apart from every other uni student. At 19, I was just a little bit older than average but the difference was far greater than that. You hear about all these
students having fun, drinking, well that may be the case if you are middle class with wealthy parents. The people like me are the ones who never get to go to the parties because they either get part-time jobs or drop out into dead-end careers with no qualifications. Parties and drinking certainly weren’t part of my life because I was working every bloody hour God sent just to try and muddle my way through. All around me were students enjoying their first taste of freedom away from home. They were all ‘Wow… I can do anything now, blah, blah, blah…’ whilst I was like ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve been living away from anyone since I was 16. I just want to get this course over and done with.’ Everybody seemed interested in going drinking but I just couldn’t be arsed because I’d done all my clubbing and drug-taking and partying and drinking years before.

As the months went by I could feel the university workload increasing and time became even more precious. Even bank holidays such as Easter or Christmas were no holidays for me. They were a precious opportunity to get extra work done and earn extra money. I’m trying hard not to sound self-pitying but it truly was a nightmare, a bloody nightmare, to survive sometimes. I had to cycle to the supermarket and buy all these 9p tins of beans and then live on beans and bread and noodles. I had a friend in Southall who told me you could buy these really cheap packets of noodles there, so I would cycle over and pile them up high. I never really got fruit or vegetables, just the simplest things to have some kind of sustenance. By then I was an expert on living cheaply, so I would go shopping with only three or four pounds and come back with surprising amounts of bargain food.

By my second year I knew there was no way on earth that I could do this any longer; something had to give. It was then that a friend, half-jokingly, pointed out an advert in the local paper for ‘escort services’ in West London. It was a typical massage parlour advertisement of the time but buried in the body of the ad extolling the dubious charms of the ‘friendly and sexy girls’ was an intriguing footnote. It offered ‘good pay’ for a receptionist. My friend claimed she wanted to apply but didn’t have the nerve to call. I was desperate enough not to care about possible embarrassment; I picked up the phone.

A week later I started my first weekend shift as the receptionist in one of West London’s busiest ‘working girls’ flats. I was certainly not a virgin, I had a keen and continuing interest in fetish fashion and had played what I thought were some pretty kinky games with my boyfriend in the past, but answering the telephone in that flat was an eye-opener for me. Until that moment I had no idea just how many, many men were willing to pay for sex. The phone rang constantly, literally never stopping. Just 18 years old and relatively naïve, I found myself talking to a succession of men about their crudest sexual fantasies. Some of the callers were embarrassed to the point of stammering stupidity, many were clearly a little drunk and some were brazen and just wanted to engage me in sex talk on the phone. My job was to try and make the girls sound as beautiful, as sexually voracious and as alluring as possible without getting the guys so excited that they could take care of their frustration themselves, over the phone, for free. It was a fine line to tread and it also required me to lie through my teeth!

According to my patter, all of the women working there
were ‘slim and attractive’ all were ‘young’ and ‘eager for sex’. In this telephone fantasy land, the girls ‘enjoyed all positions’ and were particularly fond of ‘the more mature man’. To be fair, many of the women were nice girls just trying to earn a living but this was, in truth, merely a somewhat downmarket suburban brothel, not a high-class, international escort agency: I just had to make it sound like the latter rather than the former. Thus a tubby, 58-year-old prostitute named Irene, with greying, badly-dyed blonde hair and troublesome lower-back pain, transformed into ‘Tamsin, a young, in her early thirties, slim sexual athlete with a penchant for swinging from bedroom chandeliers’. I also rapidly became adept at the codeword conversations that indicated the precise services on offer. Many, such as ‘hand relief’ or ‘oral’ were self-explanatory, but others seemed to involve a somewhat-stereotyped, racist geographical tour of Europe that took me some while to decipher. ‘Does she do Greek?’ I would be asked, or ‘French without?’ Nowadays even well-brought up young ladies would have little trouble in translating those as requests for anal intercourse and fellatio without a condom, but I sometimes got a little lost on this continental journey. With a naturally mischievous streak, I was often tempted to make up my own nonsense terms for a giggle: ‘She will do Finnish… and maybe Latvian… but don’t you dare ask her for a Romanian kiss.’

Once I got over my initial awkwardness, and better learned the language of brothel-speak, the job suited me down to the ground. Within days I was happily discussing a client’s need for ‘water-sports’ which many of the girls didn’t mind, or ‘kaviar’ (always, for some reason, with that spelling) which none of the girls wanted to touch with a bargepole. I
soon became adept at picking out the real weirdoes who just might be dangerous and the timewasters, who just wasted my time talking. The girls were on the whole decent and kind to very young me and it was interesting to hear snippets of the convoluted stories of their lives in between appointments. Most important of all, I suddenly found that I no longer had to worry where my next meal was coming from; for the first time in my life I had good money in my pocket from my receptionist/maid duties. The real oddity was that my own sex life was just about non-existent at the time. I was living like a nun at home but discussing every sexual perversion under the sun each weekend in one of London’s busiest brothels.

Throughout my young life I had always striven to gain as much experience and knowledge as I could from every situation in which I had found myself. I started my ‘maiding’ with the attitude that this was going to be no more than a short-term financial fix to help me survive through to my graduation. Soon, however, I realised the scale of a hidden demand that was not being met; there was real financial potential right here. The mis-match in supply and demand that I had identified was for girls who could dominate men in the way they clearly desired. Answering the phones every day, I would get constant requests for ‘domination services’ but most of the girls would never entertain that sort of client. The brothel worked on encouraging a rapid turnover of straight sex appointments; the best clients were, to put it bluntly, in the door for a quick suck and a fuck and back out again on the street, minus £60 from their wallets. The girls
would charge extra for more fancy games, such as putting on some of the cheap and frankly tatty uniforms hanging up in each room, or for inserting their favourite dildo or vibrator into their pussy, waggling it around for a few minutes and then gasping their way to a patently fake conclusion. For the few extra pounds it was hardly worth their while to bother. They certainly didn’t want to get involved in lengthy scenarios with submissive men who wanted to be humiliated or beaten, not least because none of them had the faintest idea of how to do that.

For me, however, the prospect was intriguing. I had been fascinated by fetish clothing ever since first encountering Madonna in my early teens. Thigh-high boots, tight-fitting and shiny outfits in rubber or leather had always caught my eye. I knew I would never have the money to buy such clothes for myself; why not indulge that particular passion for my own fun and make money as well. It just seemed a natural progression to willingly stroll down the road to where my own sexual enjoyment could be found. The opportunity to do that came a short while later when a new customer appeared on the doorstep and was ushered into one of the girl’s bedroom. There was a brief interlude with the door shut and then the girl re-appeared and told me she didn’t want to see this particular client. As far as I could establish, he had asked her for domination services that she didn’t feel experienced enough to provide. Seizing the opportunity, I asked if she’d mind if I gave him a go. Moments later it was me walking back into the bedroom while the working girl took a well-earned break. It was a watershed moment for me: I had started the day as a receptionist and maid but was going to end it as a
professional dominatrix. All I had to do was fulfil my first-ever client’s request:

‘Tell me my cock is too small…’

CHAPTER 15

A MISTRESS’S FIRST STEPS

T
he middle-aged man patiently awaiting my attention in the whorehouse bedroom was an unlikely candidate to be into kinky sex. He just appeared to be so ‘normal’: smartly dressed in a neat grey suit and looking every inch a dull civil servant. He immediately put me in mind of Penfold, the bespectacled, little hamster companion of the cartoon character
Danger Mouse,
a firm television favourite of my youth.

True to character, Penfold was clutching a briefcase from which he proceeded to pull out a stunning collection of items which would never have made it onto kids’ TV. He carefully laid out a range of different-sized plastic and rubber dildoes in rows upon the bed. It was, to say the least, surprising, but I was determined not to giggle or react in any way which might shatter my first customer’s illusions. The fake cocks ranged in size from a realistic half-a-dozen inches up to a monstrous
pink penis so long and fat that he must have bent it double to get into his case. Outwardly I just tried to look stern and commanding. Inside I was thinking: ‘Oh My God… what on earth is this lot? What on earth does he want me to do?’