Mattress Actress (18 page)

We arrived in Perth just before the Easter long weekend. For the first night, I had an apartment booked and paid for. I had $27 in cash, none in the bank. But I had already arranged to have an ad appear in
The West Australian
so that I could start taking calls straight away.

From the moment I got off the plane my phone started ringing. We reached our apartment at ten pm. I put Poppy to bed and by 10.49 I had my face made-up, a sexy dress on and a client knocking on my front door. He gave me enough to pay for two more nights’ accommodation. I had brought with me a loaf of bread, two-minute noodles, cheese slices and some apples. I didn’t eat for three days trying to conserve the food for Poppy. We had no one to call, no money to do anything but we went to parks and stayed up late cuddling in front of the TV. For some unknown reason I felt safer and more content 6000 kilometres away from my dreaded family than I did in the knowledge that they were a short drive down the road.

Within a week I had found a day care centre for Poppy so that I could work only days again. I had employed a girl to sit with me for security and to answer the phone. I had moved into my own apartment, had all the phones connected and my house set up just the way I like it. I was loving Perth. I was charging a lot more than I had on the Gold Coast and was twice as busy.

My first official step in my new town was to register with the Western Australian Police vice squad. I had been warned that if I didn’t register and was caught working I could be fined and would have a record, so I fronted up on a Tuesday morning to register. I took pride in my outfit, as I didn’t want to look like a drug-dependent hooker.

I had no idea how to go about registering so I walked into the police station and spoke to the receptionist. To my embarrassment she took one look at me and said, ‘I’ll get someone from vice to come and get you. Take a seat. By the way, what shall I call you, love?’

I wasn’t sure what to say, should I give my real name or my working name? I decided it was probably not a good idea to start lying to the police. ‘Annika Cleeve,’ I replied very quickly with a heavy accent hoping that she didn’t quite get it.

‘OK, Annika, they shouldn’t be long, take a seat, love.’

I looked around for a vacant seat. Most of the seats were occupied by awful looking women, some of whom were not even wearing shoes. There were a few available but none that I would want to sit in. I busied myself with reading the police notices on the walls. Thankfully I didn’t have to wait long until I was called by a nice-looking plain-clothes officer. She introduced herself but for the life of me I didn’t take her name in, I was far too nervous and frightened.

I knew that the police provided a commendable service to the community but in my experience they were also a power to reckon with. In the past, the police were of no help to me except to compound my shame and now those feelings were flooding back tenfold.

Good-looking Constable What’s-Her-Name directed me to a desk. She was very polite yet very official and cold. She appeared to be the only female in the room. I could feel every male pair of eyes boring holes in my skull, but I dare not look around.

‘Annika, we’re here to help you, but you have to deserve our help. I’m going to take down your personal information, your work details and also take a photograph to keep on record. If for any reason these details change we ask that you contact us. So, let’s begin. What’s your full name and date of birth? This will require you to provide ID for verification.’

I was so stunned I didn’t know what to say. For what felt like the longest time I sat in silence. Her fingers were poised impatiently over the keyboard.

‘Am I allowed to ask a few questions? I’m sorry, this is all just so new to me, and I’m just a little surprised.’

With an air of annoyance she took her hands away from the typewriter. ‘What do you want to ask?’

‘Well, for starters why is all this necessary, is this going on my police permanent record, is it going to go onto some public computer record that will come back to haunt me ten years down the track?’

She could sense my fear and seemed to genuinely soften. ‘No, not at all, Annika, we will put all this information on to a card, not a computer, and it will be locked in a filing cabinet for our eyes only. We need to know who you are so that if we get any complaints about drugs or theft we can come down and speak to you. It works both ways. If you have a client who’s bothering you, you can call us and, providing that you have stayed out of trouble, we can come to your aid.’

In theory it sounded all above board but I felt that there were things she was keeping from me and I most certainly wasn’t buying the whole ‘no computer record’ story but what was I to do?

‘Annika, it is our job to protect the community, if a Rolex watch goes missing while a client is with you then we need to know who to come after. But if you turn up missing we want to know whether it’s a sex crime that we are looking for. Anyway, without you giving us all the details we require you will not be able to work in this city. We check the papers regularly and if any phone numbers turn up that aren’t registered, or names and addresses, we will come down on them like a ton of bricks.’

She had me in a corner so I reluctantly answered all her questions honestly even down to how much I was planning on charging. When all the questions were asked and answered out came the Polaroid camera for a quick snap, which she attached to my card. She then turned the card over to me to verify all the details and sign. It was then that I noticed that she had spelt my name incorrectly, but I didn’t say a thing—I saw it as a small grace.

She gave me her card and invited me to contact her if I ever had any trouble. As I stood to leave, I noticed that the men in the room were eyeing me again. I felt like they were trying to memorise my face, as if they fully expected to see me again under far more serious circumstances.

Even ten minutes after leaving the station I felt dirty and shamed. But I did feel somewhat official. I could now work without any reprisals.

I arranged a party for Poppy to introduce us to her kindy classmates. Over fifty people showed up and had a great time. From then on I was invited to dinners regularly. Poppy was inundated with sleep-over offers, and it seemed that everyone had a friend who was recently separated.

In my heart I pined for Ben. A day didn’t go by without a silent prayer for him to recover from his grief and delusion. I had had no contact from him but I still kept him up to date with letters every month.

I never liked dating. I felt that I lied enough during the day to do it all weekend as well. To avoid lying, I just didn’t date. I craved a time when I could own my own business that Poppy could come and visit me in. I longed for a time when I could hand out business cards with a real occupation embossed on it. But apart from these few inconveniences I was happy with my lot. My life was great. I could afford things that I had previously only dreamed of having. Poppy was taking tennis lessons, as well as piano. We went for holidays together. And to top it off, if I went to a bar I didn’t have to talk to anyone in return for drinks—I bought my own.

In less than a year I bought an apartment. Or I should say, the bank helped me to buy an apartment. If you were a sex worker, Perth was the city for you. Men came from all over Australia and even the world to work here in the mines, be it off-shore oil drilling or up north in the mineral sector. As a result there were just not enough women to go around. And let’s face it, who wanted to date a guy who does a roster of six weeks away and one or two weeks home? So there are a lot of single, lonely, horny men in Perth with a lot of disposable income.

This was where I came in.

One-third of my income was derived from fly-in fly-out miners, and another third from businessmen based in Perth but working in occupations that feed into the mining industry in some way.

The funny thing about life, which is epitomised in my industry, is it’s not what you know but who. If I needed an accountant, a client would always offer his services in return for an hour of my time. There was never a shortage of bank managers to help me prepare my bank loan application, not to mention approve it. Car mechanics were always at the ready if I ever needed a tune up. The fact that I charged $300 an hour and my car needed $580 worth of work seemed to escape these men. Gardeners, builders, lawyers, carpenters, painters, plumbers, painters, picture framers, computer repairs—the list goes on. I will never understand the whys but I was always grateful. I would joke about the Aussie dollar being 63 cents to the US dollar, but the pussy dollar was always four times as good as the US dollar.

In Western Australia the law is funny in relation to the sex industry. The sale of sexual favours was not illegal but not necessarily legal either. By law, if I was to work I had to work from my own home, even though I had a child residing there. For some unknown reason it was illegal to rent an apartment to work from.

Inviting a stranger to your home is an incredibly daunting experience. So for safety reasons most girls employ a receptionist or a phone girl. This is illegal because it’s illegal for another person to live off the earnings of a prostitute, but you would be insane not to. Of course, the government doesn’t mind living off my $25,000 tax instalments. Nor does the newspaper mind taking my advertising dollar, in fact they love it. Personal ads run at twice the rate of positions vacant or for sale ads.

It is for reasons of safety that every private girl with an ounce of intelligence hires a phone girl to sit with them every working hour, and so that while I was attending to a client she can be answering the phone and booking in the next client, or entertaining a client with beverages, if I was running late.

As well as being illegal the job was mundane. Over a hundred times a day the phone girl had to go through the spiel: ‘Good morning, my name is Cleo, I work from West Perth until about six pm. I offer a full service that includes French, mutual French, sex and Spanish. I am twenty-two years old, five foot seven, I have long blonde hair, green eyes, a slender build with a DD bust and am freshly waxed. Prices start from $150.’ She had to pretend to be me because we were all supposed to be working alone.

Her job was half phone girl, half bulldog. It was her job to sniff out the crazy clients, just by the tone of their voice or the questions they ask. Mind you caller ID certainly brought an element of safety to the job as well. We never took jobs from gentlemen calling from private/silent numbers, no matter what their excuse. This also limited the number of no shows that wasted your time during the day. No shows were clients who phone and make an appointment and neglect to turn up. God knows why, perhaps it’s that they had second thoughts, perhaps they just wanted your address, perhaps they were the tax man, perhaps they were psychos or perhaps they worked for the agencies who booked out the private girls with fictitious clients so that we would turn away genuine clients.

School holidays were the worst for the time-waster phone calls. In any given day we would receive up to ten calls from pesky, bored, latch-key teens thinking it was a big laugh to make prank calls to numbers from ads in the paper. Apart from the voices or the giggles in the background we could always tell by their stupid questions that they were teenagers: ‘Do you like take, um, like, really big cocks?’ We’d just hang up, only to see the same number show up again moments later, this time a different voice and a different stupid question: ‘Do you have, like, a really nice cunt?’

If my phone girl was on the toilet or running an errand for me, I was forced to answer calls, so when these kids were wasting my time, I decided to have a little fun with them. ‘Listen, you are wasting my time and being very rude, I can see you are calling from Subiaco from your area code that comes up on my caller ID.’ That shut them up pretty quick-smart. ‘I am going to give you five minutes to call me back and apologise for wasting my time and money and for the way you spoke to me, or I shall be calling you back at six thirty tonight when Mummy and Daddy are home, and see how they feel about you racking up phone bills to prostitutes in the paper.’ I’d hang up and wait. A few times I phoned their number at six thirty and told whichever parent answered what their son had been up to.

Finding a girl to employ was easy. Finding a girl who was trustworthy was not always so easy. I found a nice lady, Marie, who also happened to be a single mother. She worked for me for about eight months without a hitch. Then just before Christmas, she found herself in financial need. I had just bought my apartment and was doing my best to pay off more than just the interest on it. I was also trying to pay for a holiday for Poppy and myself for Christmas, as I felt that it was going to be a very isolated time of the year with all my family on the other side of the country.

Marie skipped around the subject of how hard the Christmas was going to be for her and her child for the entire month of November. I knew what she was getting at but played dumb. She saw daily how much I was making so knew all too well my financial position. So the more I commiserated with her about her lack of funds instead of offering to loan her money, the greener her eyes became. Two weeks before Christmas she came right out and asked for a $1000 loan. I told her that I couldn’t afford it and that I was sorry.

In truth I wasn’t sorry at all. Marie lived the high life at her child’s expense. For a woman on the pension she seemed to spend a lot on partying and nice clothes and then wondered why there was no money for Christmas.

Marie was pissed off, to say the least. She berated me for a good half an hour about why I should help her and that if I didn’t, ‘God help you’. She was so angry I truly feared that she was going to hit me. I tried to remain as calm as possible, not wanting to infuriate her further. Bits of spittle were flying into my face while her pointer finger was drilling into my forehead.

The only thing that saved me was a client knocking on the door. The poor bugger didn’t know what hit him: he asked for half an hour and got two hours. I was too afraid to leave the bedroom. When it got to five thirty—Poppy’s daycare shut at six—I left the bedroom, paid Marie her daily rate and we both left the apartment.

That evening I called her to ask for an apology for her behaviour and aggressive outburst. When one was not forthcoming I told her that she should not bother coming to work the following day. I felt she had overstepped her boundaries and was out of line speaking to me that way. I also told her that her lack of funds was not my responsibility. This last remark seemed to throw her right over the edge.

‘You fucking whore, you will regret this, I know too much about you for you to treat me this way so close to Christmas. Watch your back, bitch, you’re finished in this town.’

At that point I hung up, not in the least concerned by her empty threats.

Within a week I had a knock on the door from my friendly apartment caretaker. He had received an anonymous complaint about me running a brothel from my apartment. I laughed in his face and to my amusement he laughed as well. We remained in stitches for a couple of minutes.

‘I never really believed it, Annika, but it’s just my job to let you know. I’m sorry if I upset you.’

I told him that I’d had a fight with one of the other tenants in the building down by the pool. I intentionally named a girl who was leaving soon anyway, a girl the caretaker had asked to leave for loud parties.

‘She accused me of flirting with her boyfriend when I was topless sunbaking.’ This incident had indeed happened but I knew the complaint had been made by Marie.

It was time to move on before they had real proof, because even though he wasn’t buying it now, it was the caretaker’s job to watch me a little more closely on behalf of the owners and body corporate. I decided to rent a secure house, that way I could never be at the mercy of nosy neighbours and caretakers. As luck would have it I found the perfect little house in an even better location—right opposite parliament house. I felt like I owed Marie a thank you phone call. Her maliciousness was a blessing in disguise.

I never again employed a permanent phone girl, I only ever employed casual university students who shared a five-day week, that way no one girl ever knew how much I was making. One of the other threats I had received from Marie was that she would write a letter to the tax department telling them that she had witnessed me earn twice what I declared the previous year. As a safeguard, I also made sure that I rented a house that was a private lease where rent was paid into a bank account rather than through a real estate agency. I felt better knowing that no girl would ever know who to dob me into if this problem ever arose again. I also gave the girls I employed the impression that I owned the property myself so that when they deposited the rent into an account they assumed it was my mortgage account. With all my bases covered I felt protected and wiser.