Fishnet (23 page)

‘May I speak to the manager?'

She doesn't hear me, frowns, mouths ‘Sorry?'

‘Gin. And. Tonic,' lips stretched, for show, because I've chickened out again. When she leans in close to take my money, I haul my torso half across the bar to get her ear.

‘The manager. I need to speak to the manager.'

She shakes her head. Not a good time.

‘Please. Please.'

She points to a corner of the bar, mouths ‘Wait. There,' flicks off, ponytail swishing with the self-righteous weariness of someone who owns her corner of the world, works it, knows it. I find my place, tucked under a large pot plant, back to the wall, hide.

Streets full of bars and their beery insides. I'm conscious again
of that other world out there, the one where people understand the language of the music and the codes of the night. That world I missed out on whilst living someone else's middle-age. I'm not sure though that the people here know it. They are all a good decade older than the bar staff, a good few years older than me, even, and there's a smell or a pulse striking through them, thronging the air. It's desperation of a sort, a grabby panic that turns them on to each other, underscores all the flirtations and forced group interactions. This idea of the fun that we are supposed to be having, that we have all been sold. We are not so different, you and I, I think in the direction of my sneering blonde, now turning a sun-lamp smile on her partner. The bar girls are high-stepping queens, thin and lovely and impervious to our stench.

A man is coming towards me, all hair gel and official assurance.

‘Hello darling,' he says, in tones that even I can tell mean he does not fancy me a jot. ‘I'm Carl, the duty manager here. As you can see, it's a bit of a busy time for us. What can I do for you?'

Deflated, I do not give good account. I mumble, repeat myself, apologise a lot. His eyes keep drifting off me to his work, his girls: I have to tug his sleeve to get him to look at the photos of Rona.

‘Yeah, she's a bit familiar. When did she work here?'

I tell him for the third time.

‘Sorry, I wasn't here then. To be honest, we've got a pretty high turnover of staff. A lot of young girls. I think the best thing to do would be to speak to Frank, he's the owner. Maybe come during the daytime. Phone first. Okay, I'm going to have to get back to work, dear. Alright?'

The ‘dear' a cursory sop to a much older woman, one who has lost her sex. Like a pat on the head. We are very probably the same age. He may even be older than me.

All this for that. All this. I still have most of my expensive drink left, and I decide not to waste it. There's a small table
over in the window, near my blonde, my Camilla-manque. A lone chair at it, the rest cannibalised to accommodate packs of cheering office-mates.

So, what would I say to this Frank, really? What would he say to me? Yes, she worked here for a while, years ago. No, we don't exchange Christmas cards. I wonder how quickly a job like this wears them out, the bar girls, when their bodies start refusing another and another late night. This is not a job you could do for years on end; it suits only young people in need of quick cash.

What did I really expect to get out of being here? Camilla's home phone number? For these people to capitulate and explain they'd been hiding Rona in the cellar the whole time? Behind the bar, Carl oils his way through the ballet, urging them on, mush, mush. One of them turns to face the till, blows air through rounded lips, counts three and slaps her smile back on for the next customer. No-one stops.

Why would they remember Rona, really. High turnover of staff. The girls' value is all in their bodies, their youth and the stores of their energy. When they finally have enough and quit it's probably pretty easy to replace them. And all I get is another name, Frank, another road of possibility to set off down. And he'll just give me another name, and that name will give me another, and none of them will ever really get me anywhere.

There's a shadow over my drink.

‘Well, you look like you're lost in thought.'

Yorkshire accent. Not from around here. He's large, this man who has placed himself in my eyeline. Not that he's fat, not exactly, although it's looming there, in his future. But for now, he's just large, in that fleshy way. Round face. Curved shapes under his shirt and a bit of a foolish smile on. I wonder if he's already regretting it: if he doesn't find me attractive up close, or if he's just playing that line back on itself in his head. I give him a smile and decide to see what can happen.

‘I was thinking I'd like to get out of here. Want to come with me?'

‘Sorry, didn't mean to bother you. Quite right.'

He's already turning off. I catch his forearm, make a gentle movement on it, bring him back round to me.

‘Did you hear what I just said?'

He replays it in his head. Ding.

‘Would this be a good time for me to say “I'll get me coat”?'

I can't tell whether he's more excited about the pull or the joke. He kisses fast and sloppily in the street and the taxi, ushering me up the stairs and past the sleepy-eyed concierge in his fairly expensive looking apartment building. His breath is sour, his hands move steadily and his cock has a nice heft in my fist. Warm bodies moving together, and what moves and stirs me on that I was able to conjure this. I wanted and I got.

There is nothing like the sweetness of my still-recent encounter with Graeme, but it's a thing in and of itself, this physical connection. He comes with his face clenched somewhere in the pillow over my shoulder and his fingers locked round mine, and freezes there for a second, making tiny noises on my skin. We disengage, and he smiles, strokes my face.

‘Mm. Nice.'

‘Nice.'

I use even, slow movements, because I don't want to trivialise anything: I bend to check the condom – yes, still intact – then smooth hands on his chest and kiss him on the cheek. My clothes are tangled round the foot of the bed, and I reach for them.

‘You're going already?'

He's still buried in the softness, and I'm in danger of snapping him out of it.

‘Yeah. I've got a train to catch. But that was great. Thank you.'

‘Wait. Are you - you're not a. Er. Is there a charge for this? Sorry. I hadn't – oh.'

‘Hey, hey. No, I'm not. It's okay. I have to go, but I mean it, that was great. It was very nice to meet you.'

He sees that I'm biting back a giggle at the formality, meets me in it, and just like that, we're easy again.

‘Would you let me see you, for a second? Just, before you get dressed? You're so lovely. Would you do that for me?'

Yes, I would do that for him.

Three hours after I arrived, I'm back at the station in time for the last train home, and I keep sniggering out loud in the empty carriage, dizzy with the ridiculous ease of this game.

Mum is sitting up at my kitchen table when I get back in, all that new glee still switched on.

‘So. Tell me everything. Where did he take you?'

‘Big bar, full of people. He was nice, but a little dull, really. Not sure we had very much in common.'

It's not a lie.

‘You had fun though?'

My mother does seem to want me to have fun.

‘Yeah. Yeah, it was good.'

Not a lie either.

‘It's just great you're getting out there again, lovey.'

She wraps unaccustomed arms round me and her thumb brushes back and forth across my temple.

The Meaning of Control

A well-meaning person once told me that she worries about me, because I habitually put myself in danger, because I do it daily. I told her I'd never been in danger, and she wouldn't believe me. You spend so much time alone with men who hate women, she said. Your daily existence is a series of situations you can't control. There is no way you haven't encountered some sort of threat to your life.

Like I said, she means well. But she's also firmly on the side of the angels; and by angels, you know I mean the righteous ones, the campaigners, the people who want to rescue me from myself. She's earnest, and hard-working. I like her. We probably could have been friends, if she hadn't suggested that I chose my job because I had been sexually abused as a child, and I suggested in return that she chose her job because she'd never got over the trauma of losing her hamster to the neighbour's cat when she was eight.

She's wrong about a number of things, my well-meaning almost-friend. Shall we bust some myths, my little perverts?

Myth number one:
All men who use the services of a sex worker hate women.

Of course, every one of my clients would say that they
love women.
In the moment, at least. Mostly, what they mean is they love women's bodies, and of course they do. Who doesn't love women's bodies (apart from the women themselves, ha ha)?

I might dress up as the big bad domme in my pictures, but the vast majority of my clients come to me for the girlfriend experience. They want a nice, affectionate fuck for fifteen minutes, then they want someone to hold them and listen to their worries until the hour's up. This might be because they're recently divorced or widowed, badly missing that companionship they've always had and not ready to try and find someone else. Or maybe because they're too shy or inexperienced to interact with potential partners. I have a number of disabled clients who just want to be treated like any other human for an hour.

When it comes down to it, we're just two people, alone in a room together. And who knows what's going on in their heads, but when actually confronted with a strange woman, the men I see are overwhelmingly courteous, a little shy at first. It's my role, in that room, to tease the sex out of them.

This isn't to say I haven't experienced misogyny. Or the odd idiot who's there to act out a porno on me. Most of the time, it comes from the ones for whom a woman's right to say no has become a personal insult. It can crystallise into hate, that sort of frustration. You learn the tricks of them, though. It's a challenge, making them see you as a person, whilst still keeping them happy, but there are ways.

This is what my almost-friend is getting at, when she says, with no practical experience of what I do, but don't they just look at you as a female body that's already been degraded?

And what I want to say to her, but don't, is that this is the condition of earning money in this world:
sometimes, you do have to put yourself out, in some way. There are people who work for construction companies, who do manual labour every working hour of the day, whose bodies are used and used up by a system that never adequately compensates them. Me, I can live well off fourteen hours' work a week, and that's including the time it takes to manage bookings and keep myself in shape. And these idiots make up maybe a twentieth of my total clients. Sometimes I can go six months without so much as a sniff of it. The reason I don't say any of this to her is because it's really her who looks at me as a female body degraded, poor thing. She can't get past it.

Myth number two:
As the client is paying, they have control of the encounter

Oh no they don't. Do you call a plumber out and then sit there telling him exactly how to fiddle with your pipes (Ithangyew)? My services, my body, my rules.

I never, ever take risks. I don't accept last minute or late night bookings. I always insist on a landline number or registered, non-webmail email address as verification. My incall flat is security equipped, and if I'm going on outcalls, someone always knows where I am.

I control every aspect of my life, from the way a situation will unfold with a client, on a booking, to the people who can or can't be trusted to know what I really do, to the hours I do, or do not, decide to work. I don't drink any more, because I don't like the feeling of being out of control, not even for a second. Before I did this, I worked for companies who seemed
to believe that they were buying a lot more than my services with their piffling salaries. As an employee, I was directionless, half my brain just shut down, marking time. I'm fully engaged now: with control comes self-respect. Funny that, isn't it? That it took working as a prostitute to get me to respect myself? And if you don't understand that, you won't. Ever.

Myth number three:
All sex workers secretly hate their clients

There is no such thing as ‘all sex workers'. The reasons people decide to do this job are as varied as the people doing this job. (Although, we're all in it for the money, right? LOL.)

Personally, I think if you can't empathise with the client, see them as just another human being, you're not doing the job right. I've seen the bitching on the boards, girls sniggering about overweight or ugly clients. Well, fine, do what you need to do. In order to have a good working experience, I've found it's important to connect with the client, match yourself to them, whether they want to confess their secrets to you or just fancy a quick impersonal blowjob. And I seem to get a lot of repeat business…

Of course, there are the aforementioned idiots. The ones who start with a smirk, a glint, the hint of a fight. There are ways.

I begin by looking them in the eye now. I take the full force of me out on them. Here are the ground rules, I say.

You wear a condom for everything.

You don't do anything without asking.

You need to take a shower first.

You must show me your fingernails before they go anywhere near my pussy.

After this, after this telling, often they're erect already, stiffening at the strength of me. Either because it's hitting some primal sweet spot, some small early fantasy of a teacher or a childhood friend's mother, or because they want to break me. And this is when I sugar it, smile and curve myself, look down and up again into them and let it come out all honey and husk, And then we'll have a lovely time, hmm?