Mattress Actress (29 page)

All of my phone girls were university students, so between phone calls, making coffee and running errands to the shops they were busy on their laptops. I spent my spare time with Jerry Springer, Judge Judy or reading a book. I believed that I was smart, I just had no proof. So I decided to test that theory and enrol in night school to complete my high school certificate.

Getting into sex work is a piece of cake, but getting out of it is akin to getting off heroin. With no qualifications, how does one go about replicating the same or similar level of income that one has grown used to living on? Most clients and coworkers would tell me that I needed to get myself a husband.

I’d respond, ‘I don’t need a husband, what I need is an ex-husband; someone to send me a cheque every other week and babysit on occasion.’ Why would I need a husband, I already had the use of everyone else’s. Plus I believed that with my history no one would ever take me seriously and most certainly would not love me. I was fuckable, not marriage material.

This was reinforced by a man whom I believed to be my knight in shining armour, coming to save me and love me warts and all. His name was Mark. He was very handsome, very rich, very intelligent and he was amazing in bed. He had been a client for about eight months before I agreed in a moment of weakness to accompany him to a party. From the moment you cross that line in the sand it is very difficult to turn back. For a while I went to functions with him and played the dutiful role of arm candy, but if he wanted more, it was going to cost him. Against my better judgement we were becoming friends—he would drop in after work and join Poppy and me for dinner or whisk us both away for a weekend down south for a concert at a winery as a total surprise. Poppy adored him, which gave me permission to let my guard down. Before I knew it, there was no more exchanging of cash, and Cleo ceased to exist in my mind when I was with him.

We spent at least one night a week at my place and at least one night a weekend at his mansion. He showered Poppy and me with gifts, dinners out, trips away, concert tickets, he even helped me with all my night-school assignments. A little trick of his was to check my mailbox at night on his way in for dinner and go through my mail, commandeering all the bills. The following day he would pay them without saying a word to me about it. He had met all of my friends and I had met all of his friends and work associates. This blissful existence lasted about six months.

One morning over breakfast at his place while Poppy slept, he turned to me and said, ‘Can you believe by this time next year I will probably be married?’

I felt like some cage fighter had just sucker punched me in the gut and winded me. I could not utter a word. I just sat there staring at him.

‘What?’ he said, straight to my face. ‘I adore you, but I could hardly marry you, Mum just wouldn’t approve, and she is really on my case to settle down. You understand? You see, there is this other girl I know from work who I see once a week and I will probably have to do the right thing by her pretty soon before she walks.’

Tears were trickling out of my eyes. No one had ever insulted me so much in my life. Thousands of thoughts were churning through my brain.

‘Hey, don’t get upset, she is nowhere near as good as you in bed, I want to keep seeing you as well.’

I silently went to fetch my child, and took her and my dignity and left.

Why was it so impossible to see me as something other than a sex worker? I volunteered at nursing homes with Poppy every month. I didn’t abuse alcohol; I was an amazingly dedicated mother and financially responsible. I didn’t touch drugs, but apparently all that means nothing if you’re a whore.

People fail to think where the community would be without sex workers. Imagine where that guy with a penchant for schoolgirls would go if he couldn’t pay a willing sex worker to dress up and roleplay his sick little fantasy? If a bored married man couldn’t pay to stray, trust me, they wouldn’t sit around masturbating themselves blind. No, they will find affection in the first pair of open legs that presents themselves. My belief is that an affair of the heart is a far worse sin than getting your rocks off anonymously with a sex worker who has regular medical checks and uses protection.

Every person deserves affection, be it free or otherwise. Are we suggesting in the absence of free affection they are undeserving? When I think of all the clients I have serviced who I know would not get sex anywhere else it makes me emotional. The stutterer, the painfully shy man, the disabled client who will take whatever form of affection they can get. I remember the worst client I ever had was a man who’d had bowel cancer and now had a colostomy bag full of shit sticking out of his stomach. His wife had left him after his surgery, because she could no longer become aroused by him and his new appendage. He had tried dating only to be knocked back dozens of times when they caught sight of his bag. I don’t blame them. I just about vomited every time I would have to go down on this guy with my nose bouncing on his plastic bag of shit. He wanted love, not sex, but until it came along he was happy with the compromise.

Someone has to do sex work. And that someone was me, because I was good at it. Did this occupation encapsulate me? No fucking way. But why was I the only person who could see that? I am not insinuating that sex workers deserve an OBE for their tireless community service work, but some compassionate understanding would go a long way. Individuals are good or bad, not occupations.

The episode with Mark taught me that there was not now nor was there ever going to be a man on a white steed. If I wanted security I’d need to look within. So I put my head down and tail up and hit the books. I worked all day, three nights a week I went to night school and after Poppy went to bed I did assignments and studied. By the end of the year I had proven to myself that I was more than just a pretty face and a great set of tits, I actually had a brain. I achieved a score that allowed me to pick any subject and any university I wanted.

It’s one thing to go to night school but now I was confronted with the financial dilemma of committing myself to full-time university. How was I going to support Poppy while working part time? Or should I go to university part time and work thirty hours a week? The idea of undertaking a degree part time meant eight more years as a sex worker—no thanks! So I bit the bullet and signed up for a double degree full time. This still gave me two full days of work a week, which kept us afloat financially, providing I eliminated some of my luxuries. Gone were the personal training sessions, the three-week vacation travelling business class, the free-loading friends and relatives. Christmas had a financial cap on it. This was not just a financial culling—it quickly became obvious that it was also a friend culling. When the money dried up, people seemed to drift away.

Poppy had never wanted for anything. If anything, I had totally overcompensated for the lack of a father by showering her with time and affection. She spoke two—almost three languages—thanks to the nannies I employed. She was on the school debate team, netball team, diving team, chess team. After school she went to piano lessons, tennis lessons, academic extension classes, gymnastics and dance classes, basically anything she wanted. Every spare minute was given to her, but now I had to go to school and focus on self-improvement. My time with her had to be condensed down to quality not quantity. School holidays became one week with me and one week at camp, so that I could make some money. Summer holidays she would be sent to Queensland to visit her extended family for three weeks so that I could go to Singapore to earn next year’s school fees of $15,000 per year and then some.

Earning approximately $1000 per day, I calculated that I could maintain a decent life for the two of us providing that I could work two and a half days a week. My lectures and labs were condensed down to the remaining two and a half days. Saturdays would then be spent on quality parenting and Poppy’s sports and Sunday was a study/assignment day for both Poppy and me. Additional study could be done in the evenings.

The only thing that suffered was my savings. I was used to stashing away at least one full day’s earnings every week for rainy days—or holidays.

It was very odd going to university and being ‘the old one with the kid’, but it was more difficult coming up with a plausible cover story. If I was able to maintain such a nice lifestyle working for only two and a half days a week, why was I trying to better myself? Disclosure is a selective process. There are certain people who you can tell instinctively will accept your circumstances. Then there are others who are genuinely lovely people but put any sex on a pedestal—reserved for love and intimacy. Those individuals never understood the capability to disconnect action from emotion, so with them I kept silent.

One of my favourite clients was Samuel. He was a very tall, dark-haired lawyer with the most piercing blue eyes I’d ever seen. He had the sexiest dimples in each cheek. Sam’s only shortcoming was that he was quadriplegic. I had no idea about his disability when I agreed to go and visit him. He convinced me to visit him for a minimum of an hour and a half because he lived two streets over and told me that he was in a wheelchair so couldn’t travel. My sympathy strings were humming and he was quite the smooth talker, so I reluctantly agreed to break my no out calls unless the rate is ridiculous rule.

Upon arrival, I was greeted by a lump in a bed—Sam couldn’t move a muscle. Sam had a C2 injury as a result of a motorbike accident when he was twenty-six. He could breathe unaided and talk the pants off a nun but that was about it. No limb movement whatsoever. He had a wife, a dog and an army of volunteers who came every two hours to turn him, change him and hydrate him. So timing was of the essence.

I had to lift his head and put a cup and straw in his mouth—how the hell was he going to shag me? Turns out, he wasn’t.

Sam just wanted to feel a bit of flesh on his skin, so I nuded up and threw myself at him. Mainly he just wanted to taste me for an entire hour. At one point I sat on the end of the bed and did a bit of a show, which he apparently really enjoyed, but I had no way of knowing what he enjoyed—there was no erection or climax to gauge his approval.

When my time was running out, I had to clean him up so as to remove any scent of foreign female, even though my perfume was all over the sheets. I suppose he had that many nurses in his room he could easily explain that little detail away without any problem. Sam’s bigger problem was getting cash, it’s not as if he could just bolt down to the ATM five minutes before I got there. If he ever did go down the shops he was usually accompanied by his wife. So we quickly established a regular bank transfer system that he could easily manage when he was sat in his chair in front of his desk. His computer was amazing, totally wi-fi and voice activated.

I would visit Sam the moment I saw $500 drop into my little account every three weeks. To my surprise, one day I noticed $600 in my account from Sam, and when I turned up at my allotted time I questioned his error. Apparently there was no error, he wanted a little more than the usual.

There was a knock at the door, and I jumped. In walked a friend of Sam’s, who looked at me very quizzically. Without missing a beat, Sam told his friend that I was a sex worker he’d been seeing, and how that because he was incapable of fucking me, he was hoping his friend could do it for him while he watched.

Whoa! I know that I have some awesome friends but I think that’s just a bridge too far for my mates.

This poor guy didn’t know where to look. Finally he said, ‘Sam, I thought I was coming over for lunch not sex. Fuck mate, I’m married. You’re married, for that matter. I know you can’t fuck and, mate, if I could change that I would, but I’m not going to fuck on your behalf.’

The next few uncomfortable minutes felt like hours, I could almost smell the guy’s body odour fill the room from sheer embarrassment. I decided to take my leave, and Sam knew that I would keep him in credit.

Sam eventually did get to live out his fantasy.

Clients in wheelchairs, or wheelies as I called them, were regular callers, but I didn’t really like them. Not personally of course, but because they took up so much time; just getting from the car or taxi to the front door was a half-hour affair. But hey, everyone deserves a good time, so allowances had to be made. They would always call in advance to inquire as to whether I had an upstairs bedroom, so straight away I knew they were wheelies. The poor buggers were limited to who they could see not by finances but by logistics. Most of the time they could perform sexually but it was never about the sex, they just loved the intimacy of a woman.

Often I’d get calls from clients who sounded like they had just been kicked out of a pub. Their voices were slurred and their speech almost incomprehensible, but I quickly learnt to hold off on a terse hang-up because I was now familiar with the strained speech patterns of cerebral palsy or motor neurone disease affected clients. It was a challenge to see these gentlemen because they had such little control of their movements, but it was amazing to see the difference in them as they left my room. Clients would arrive visibly nervous, limbs flailing all over the show, but leave like they were walking a catwalk. From the moment they reached climax, they would just liquefy—except for the big grin on their dials—and for the briefest time they were motionless.

There was a discrimination against seeing physically disabled clients with most girls. Clients told me horrible stories about taxi drivers refusing to take them to brothels out of principle. If they did manage to finally make it to an establishment they would often be refused service.

My motto was if you can pay you can play. This was a business after all. I did draw the line at drunks though, the smell of them and let’s not forget brewer’s droop—it just makes for too much work.

ANZAC Day was always the busiest day of the year for phone calls. From eleven am you would start to get calls from sweet old drunk veterans.

‘Hey love, you working today? I’m looking for a busty young thing about a size twelve. Do you think you can help?’

‘Sure let me give you the prices.’

‘What, darling, I can’t hear you, what did you say?’

‘I WILL GIVE YOU THE PRICES.’

‘Hello, is anyone there? I think the phone is broken, I can’t hear her.’ God bless them, ears didn’t work but their old fellas never skipped a beat. I rarely saw the old diggers, they generally wanted to spend $50 because that’s what they were used to spending in the good old days, so I was out of their league. But it didn’t stop them from calling and trying to negotiate a ‘veteran’s/pensioner rate’.

The older clients were truly adorable. They always arrived with gifts in hand, usually of the traditional chocolate or flower variety, the naughtier clients with cheeky lingerie. More often than not they would leave with the question: ‘Do you fancy going to dinner with me one night? No funny business.’

‘Why, have you got a single grandson you want to introduce me to?’