Mattress Actress (21 page)

The money I was earning seemed to slip through my fingers. It didn’t matter how much I earnt, I could spend it twice as quickly. My rent was around $1200 a month, mortgage $200 per week, staff $400 per week, advertising $500 per week, the children’s nanny $300 per week and school fees $10,000 per year. Also throw in a few utilities at $300 a month, $600 a month in food, $600 a month in insurance, presents, beauty care plus half-a-dozen other miscellaneous items. Let’s not forget the tax man—$1000 a month there. Then there was always a relative with their hand out almost every month for a quick loan. My brothers were notorious; to this day they have a combined debt to me to the tune of about $7000.

Friends were another costly asset. The perception was that if my friends knew what I did for a crust they probably wouldn’t be my friends, so to have a friend who knew my occupation and still chose to confide in me was a blessing. It was such a godsend to have a person in my life that I could be one hundred per cent honest with, as they are few and far between. However, so many of these godsends came at a cost.

They were the friends who always started calling on Thursday to see what I was doing over the weekend. They always had a laundry list of suggestions that all sounded like a lot of fun, and great opportunities to let my hair down and blow off some steam. When finally a mutually agreeable agenda had been decided, we would set out all dolled up in distinctly non-prostitute attire. The taxi would generally be my shout as I was always in possession of cash, then I would quickly hear, ‘I’ll get the first round then.’ Sounds fair to me, the next round would of course be my treat.

By the third round I would always hear, ‘Let’s get the boys to buy us drinks, I’m skint!’ I refuse to be a gin and tonic whore, so I would purchase my own drinks, and usually drinks for my friend’s newly acquired friends to keep them placated, just so we didn’t owe them anything in return for their generosity towards my friend. By the wee hours of the morning I would call a cab and no doubt pay the fare back to my place, with a quick stop off at the local kebab store for good measure. These kinds of friends didn’t appreciate my generosity, rather they held the belief that I earnt so much money for doing little to no real work that I should pay the lion’s share of any or all costs. These sort of freeloading friends were very easy to offend and therefore lose completely, all I needed to do was send them a bill for what they owed me. I never saw them again.

One such friend and I decided to hire a four-wheel drive and see a bit of Western Australia’s beautiful outback, namely Karajini. We hired the car for a week, paid up front and split the cost down the centre—so far so good. At the first petrol stop, my friend asked me to pay for the petrol and I retorted with: ‘No, you get the first fill, I’ll take the second fill.’ To my surprise she had expected me to pay for all the petrol and had not brought any cash with her at all! I turned the car around and drove back to Perth in silence.

After I’d been left with quite a few outstanding debts I also learnt the adage: ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’ Once this became my mantra, I started to only get fucked at work by clients and no longer by my so-called friends in my spare time.

An average day’s earnings was between $800 and $1000, but considering I took every school holidays off and only ever worked nine to five, somehow I was only ever scraping by. Doing the calculations on these figures would imply that I was still on a good wicket but I was still trying to set up a house for my family. We needed a car and some savings behind us. I had left Queensland with hardly any furniture as it would have been too expensive to bring it all over, so for the first year prior to living with Austin, I was replacing household incidentals.

When you are earning so much money it is easy to lose track of the true value of a dollar. I recall one Saturday going bed shopping for a new mattress. I had estimated that a new mattress was going to cost around $500. I was talked into parting with $1700. I didn’t think much of spending that sort of money as it seemed I could afford it, after all, it was only two days’ work for me, and surely it was tax deductible? Another example of my extravagance was when I took Poppy overseas for Christmas. We flew business class and stayed in deluxe accommodation at the Sheraton.

It is easy to forget that beauty only lasts so long. Most girls spent like there was no tomorrow. It was sort of like dieting—I’ll do it tomorrow. Every week I told myself that I would start putting money into a super fund, but tomorrow never came.

The problem with saving is where to do it? Banking was an issue because there was always a fear that Big Brother was watching your accounts, and what you declared to the tax man and what you deposited were like chalk and cheese. Hiding cash around the house is always a scary endeavour, as it is always in arm's reach or at the mercy of burglars or phone girls with an axe to grind.

Thanks to my numerous bank manager clients, I found a way to save that was out of reach to the tax man—Christmas club accounts. At the time they were tax free and could be put in the name of any person under the age of eighteen, providing you had a birth certificate. Well, young Poppy was a prodigious saver, her pocket money came in at about $2000 per month, and amazingly she was able to save every cent. The only problem was that you couldn’t touch this money until 1 December.

When I bought my first house one December for $77,000, I paid $30,000 in cash. My real estate agent was blown away and very put out having to count it all out.

The clichéd dream of most girls was that there was no need to save because a rich older man would come along in a limousine and escort them off to his palatial home overlooking the river. It was very easy to believe the fantasy. It was very easy to come to believe that you deserve no less when most of your clients were extremely wealthy business men who visited you regularly and showered you with compliments and gifts and comments like, ‘If I wasn’t married I would take you away from all this.’ I would even get proposed to at least once a month, but at least I had the common sense to know that they were proposing to Cleo and not to Annika.

Late January and February were the slowest months of the year for any working girl. We put this down to wives overspending at Christmas time and school fees for all our clients’ offspring. During these difficult months it was not uncommon to earn as little as $150 a day, which in reality meant a negative income after you paid your phone girl and for advertising. I took the lack of phone calls personally: I thought that my regulars had found someone better.

My confidence always flailed during the quiet time of the year. I desperately started to question my beauty: ‘Maybe I am not busy because I am not good-looking enough. Maybe, if I was thinner, I could make more money.’ Ads in the paper are reflective of what men want, and it seemed to me that I was in constant competition with size-six girls with double-D boobs. When clients rang up they were often asking for a porn star look, which was not me. I saw myself as attractive, but definitely not a porn star.

One of the most common questions I was asked over the phone by prospective clients was, ‘Are you busty?’ To this I always answered, ‘Ten D’. Some gentlemen would just hang up but there were the polite ones who said, ‘Oh, I was looking for a slim girl with at least a 38DD bust. Thanks for your time anyway.’ At first I would laugh at their request—didn’t they realise that a thirty-eight inch girl was bound to have hips to match? Didn’t they realise that being a thirty-eight made them a size twelve or more? Never in my history of working has any man ever asked me if I am pretty, they only ever ask, ‘What’s your body like? Are you shaven? How busty are you?’ They are looking for Barbie.

Even as a young teen I’d had a penchant for diet pills. The brand I used was eventually taken off the counter so I sought an alternative and found a medication for the morbidly obese. This required a doctor’s prescription, but that was no great hurdle. Here I was, five foot six and sixty kilos and doctors were stepping over themselves to write me prescriptions. I would take one diet pill in the morning and one sleeping pill at night to ward off the effects of the diet pill. With the help of this little pill I was able to limit myself to one meal per day and still have the energy to go to the gym or the tennis club.

I certainly had some body dysmorphia issues. No matter how many clients a day complimented me on my beauty and physique, I was convinced that I was a disaster from the waist down. When Poppy was away at camp or visiting my brothers for extended periods, I would go without eating altogether, except for miso soup. I was so proud of my self-discipline and jutting ribs. In a drastic attempt to lose weight I locked myself in an apartment located in the snow fields. It had a gym but did not have staff that serviced the dwelling, so there was no possibility of room service. I refused to pack a jumper so that I couldn’t weaken and leave the room to seek nourishment. Upon my return, friends were amazed at my transformation, which reinforced my belief in my methods. One of the girls who worked for me had a cousin who was a plastic surgeon, so I made an appointment. I was only in his office five minutes but in that time he had managed to take a few notes a few photos of my bum and book me a date to have a boob job. He instantly recognised I’d had a child and lost a certain amount of fullness to my breasts. I was nervous as hell, but I saw it as an investment in my income.

I recall after the surgery visiting my bank manager in his office.

‘Rob you are going to be so proud of me, I have finally invested my money.’

‘That’s great, Annika, what did you buy?’

I pulled up my jumper and exposed my new, fuller breasts.

‘Annika, they are very nice but that is not an investment.’

‘Well, Rob, I disagree, my income has doubled since having had them done.’ We both laughed. What I had said was true. The week I went back to work I changed my ads in
The West Australian
to read ‘Busty Beauty’. As a result, my phone rang twice as often as before. It was an investment, an example of my insecurity and a luxury of a girl who earns too much money.

Poppy was my biggest expenditure, and I could deny her nothing: piano lessons, gymnastics classes, Mandarin-speaking nannies, and ultimately private school, which was costing me $15,000 per year.

While I was recuperating from my investment surgery, I received a phone call that my house had been broken into. I was furious, as you can imagine, but I was semi-confident because I had purchased home contents insurance. Thus within ten days I had all my possessions replaced and back sitting in their rightful position. Sure a bit of cash had gone and objects like autographed CDs couldn’t be replaced, nor could all the data saved on my laptop, but all in all it was not a big loss.

About four weeks later I arrived at work on Monday morning to find that yet again my home had been invaded and fleeced. Now I knew it had to be an inside job, and we had a prime suspect through stories that had trickled back to me.

The insurance people were exceedingly nice to me on the phone, relaying that it was not uncommon to have electronics replaced only for them to be stolen some weeks later; apparently criminals anticipate this and bank on it. But weeks went by and I could not get the insurance representatives to return my calls.

Out of the blue, an old man arrived at my door. He was dishevelled and seemed unable to keep eye contact, rather he was taking in the surroundings much like an artist might before placing oil on canvas. His timing couldn’t have been worse. There were half-naked girls a-plenty, multiple phones ringing off the hook and clients being escorted out. I was dreaming if I thought I could down play this scene but I gave it a crack. Needless to say, he didn’t buy it.

I finally received a letter in the mail denying my insurance claim, under the terms that I was running a business from home. I was straight on the phone with my assessor arguing that I had purchased a home business policy, how could they refuse my claim because I was running a home business? To that they had no response except to say they had a morals clause.

I got straight onto the phone to all my favourite lawyers, and they rallied to my defence. My argument was that the insurance company had no objection to taking the money for policy premiums from a sex worker, but they took exception to paying out a sex worker. The insurers argued back that I was attracting trouble by welcoming into my home all sorts of society’s degenerates, that this was an open invitation for thievery and harm.

‘What, like doctors, lawyers and politicians?’ I questioned how many criminal lawyers had their firms insured by them. Surely more of ‘society’s degenerates’ would pass through those doors than my humble abode? My attitude was that until the profession was deemed illegal, they had to pay up. After much toing and froing, they did. However, they then cancelled all other policies that I held with them such as my home-owner’s insurance, my income protection policy and even my car insurance. From then on I decided to declare everything upfront. Luckily for me, I knew a few insurance salesmen, who had no issue with finding me a company prepared to take me on.

I hate drunks and I hate drugs. In my earlier naive days, I couldn’t really tell when someone was affected, but the older I got, the more I became aware of the questions to ask before you accepted any cash. Drunks were easy to detect, they reeked of alcohol, which was bad enough, but the biggest issue with alcohol is performance. Alcohol seems to disrupt the communication channels between the brain and the dick. So instead of a nice simple service where the client did his part (got hard and shagged me) and I did my part (provided head and acted compliant), I had to work my lips off, knowing all the while that this dick had the same chance of getting hard as I did of growing three inches.

As reality set in for the client that it was probably not going to happen, I inevitably heard the old: ‘Well, that was easy money for you.’ Or on worse days they might even refuse to leave until they had reached climax. It’s a fine line to know when to just try to be nice and commiserate with their situation or when to put on my best headmistress personality and give them a mouthful: ‘Mate, thanks to you and your inability to handle your booze I now have lockjaw trying to breathe life into that flaccid thing, so don’t blame me! I don’t need to own one to be an expert on dicks and alcohol. Why don’t we test this theory of my inadequacies and you come back on a sober day and we’ll see who really is to blame for today’s fiasco?’

The worst part of the session with a drunk was sitting down afterwards with them while waiting for the taxi to arrive. It was awkward indeed, so I generally left it to my receptionist to make small talk with the guy who was now embarrassed or angry. Often I had to resort to taking client’s car keys from them so they didn’t get back in the car to drive home. I’ve had to call police on angry clients or insistent drivers far too many times to count.

In addition to drunk client dilemmas were the drug-affected clients. The scenarios differ depending on the drug, but cannabis had the same general effect as alcohol: sleepy dick syndrome. But speed was the real problem drug in our industry. While there were no hard and fast rules, in general, clients still couldn’t achieve climax. Erections seemed to come and go, but the client was convinced that he was perpetually moments away from climax, so he begged for me to grant him just a few more minutes of head-board banging—after all, that’s what chicks really dig—even when it was soft, they still pumped away none the wiser.

Clients were not always so in the dark about their abilities on speed, some were completely aware of their erectile shortcomings, but still wanted to splash out on a bit of intimacy because the drug made them over-the-top horny. So it was not unusual to receive a phone call inquiring about the rate for cunnilingus (referred to on the phone as mutual French). The belief was that if it was $300 per hour for a full service, if a client could pick and choose the services he required he’d be getting less than a full service so should therefore be paying less. Wrong! Unless of course they want just French (oral on them), then the prices go up. This always seemed to shock clients: ‘But why, I don’t even want sex?’

‘Is that right, Mr Clinton? Put it this way: in an hour service I may have to give you a ten-minute head job, but you are now asking me to give you a twenty-minute head job, or longer, so why would it be the same rate?’

‘But I’m not even fucking you?’

I generally got bored at this point, and recommended the phone number of a cheaper girl.

Clients on drugs would often phone offering a barter arrangement: ‘Do you want a seventy-two-inch plasma? How about jewellery, a motorbike or a new laptop?’

I didn’t even want to give my address to these cretins, I just politely declined and hung up. More often than I care to remember, clients would want to barter drugs for service, mostly injectables. People do make the assumption that a large proportion of working girls take drugs—I wouldn’t know the truth of the statistics because you tend to attract like-minded people, so after I left Kings Cross I never met with those sort of girls. They certainly must have existed going by the numbers of calls I received. I would always write down the number the client had called from so I could hand that information on to friends in the police force.

Every now and then you got an interesting proposition from an angry, scorned husband. I clearly recall one such gentleman inviting me to visit him in his home right on the beach in one of the prestigious suburbs of Perth for an all-night visit. This request was always greeted with a firm decline, as I didn’t want to get there and find out that they have popped some speed so that two ordinary hours becomes equivalent to fourteen head-banging hours. So you simply dipped your toe in: ‘Tell you what, let’s start with two hours and see how we go?’ This generally gave them a glimmer of hope.

This particular gentleman was very distinguished, charming and affable, so I could tell that I was not in any danger of drugs or mates hiding in the closet, and I accepted my payment for two hours and made myself comfortable. He offered me a drink, which I declined, then he showed me around his mansion. He had awards and trophies everywhere, photographs taken with amazing people hung on every wall in the house. I was very impressed. But he didn’t talk for long about his accomplishments, I imagine that conversation had been done to death with all his associates.

Instead, he asked me something that initially seemed quite bizarre: ‘What size is your index finger?’

Well, that was certainly one for the books. ‘Would it shock you to hear that I have no idea?’

‘Come here and see if any of these fit.’

I followed him into his bedroom, which I can only describe as an Aladdin’s cave of gems and gold. Everywhere I looked there were earrings, necklaces, rings, brooches, watches, even bloody tiaras, spilling over the furniture. I was constantly amazed at the number of clients who leave precious items around when they invited girls like me over for a visit. Or who took their watch off for sex and then forget to put it back on before they left. To this day, I have over fifteen men’s watches waiting to be collected by persons that I no longer remember.

But in this case he was hoping that I would steal from him. ‘If you like anything, please help yourself. My fiancée has left me for some younger fuck, so I’m going to get rid of all of this anyway, cunt doesn’t deserve it.’

My brain and my conscience were immediately battling it out. This was an offer that really had no strings attached, but if she reported it stolen and he gave up my name, I’d get caught with stolen property. Surprisingly, it didn’t take that much strength to decline his generous offer. One way or another, I hadn’t earnt those items and she had. Gone were the days when I could justify shoplifting or theft of any variety. In the end we had a short tryst and I was out the door within half an hour, with only cash to show for it.