Adventures of a London Call Boy (5 page)

Chapter Twelve

In the end, it was clear that it wasn't an addiction.

I think there's a difference between, let's say, crack, and sex. You can steal enough money to get crack, or you can go on a programme, or you can get worse, cheaper drugs. I'm not sure there are drugs that are much worse than crack, but there must be, a bit like when the Costco on my street was undercut by a worse, cheaper all-night beer and crisps store across the way. Anyway, somehow or another, if you're addicted, you'll get high. Maybe that's what happens with proper sex addiction: you end up doing anything with anyone.

But it became pretty clear I didn't have an addiction. I was just trying to get the type of sex I'd been having before and I wasn't getting any. My standards, which have always been broad, I'll admit, didn't shift. I didn't start having sex with monkeys or goats.

It's funny how luck works. I'd lost my job in the bar and with it – I don't know how – my ability to pick up women. I suppose I couldn't tell you how I learnt how to pick up women in the first place. I've been doing it as long as I can remember, often without really trying too hard. I felt like a man who'd woken up one morning and forgotten how to walk. Something that had always come naturally had been turned off like a tap.

I can't help but feel that my job situation was a factor. Being out of work knocks your confidence, and women can spot a guy lacking confidence from a long way off. I'm not lucky enough to have any rich benefactors or family money to fall back on, either, so it wasn't like I could suddenly turn into a man of leisure. When your form is down, you start to try too hard, and like I said, one of the things that I'd learnt from Celeste was that a lot of women steer clear of a pushy guy.

I looked for work in a few other bars, but my ex-manageress had a vindictive streak and had decided to take her revenge by not only sacking me but also letting everyone else in the local trade know that I was a till-sifting punter-botherer. It was particularly upsetting as only half of it was even remotely true. I guess she must have thought that muddying my reputation was a means to ensure that no one would believe any gossip I happened to let slip about her. She obviously doesn't know me well enough. I've never been in the habit of kissing – or screwing, or flogging, or scalding for that matter – and telling.

In the end, as my cash ran dry and one lead after another led nowhere, I was left with no option but the jobcentre.

I'm glad that there isn't an equivalent for people who can't find sex: the North Camden jobcentre is like a cross between the queue at Heathrow airport and a school hall being used to house hurricane victims. The members of staff working in the place want to be there even less than the jobless, particularly my ‘case manager', a kid who was my age but looked like a teenager, and who urgently needed someone to tell him to blow his nose instead of constantly sniffling. On one occasion I even suggested to him that we could all solve our problems by swapping sides of the desk. I don't think he got the joke.

None of the staff there could pronounce my name, or understand why I didn't have a funny accent, or indeed what it was I'd ever done with my life. So after two weeks I found myself still on the dole and up against it.

It was also a frustrating place for a man on a bad run of luck for another reason: the women. If the staff there are the greyest, least-inspired collection of time-servers you've ever met, they contrast with the great number of extremely sexy, recently arrived Polish, Russian, Bulgarian and God knows where else from young women. All were fresh-faced, ready to impress, and desperate to improve their English by any means necessary.

When I saw the pale, lispy young man who'd failed again to get me a job being greeted by the passionate kiss of Amaja, a gypsy goddess with gravity-defying breasts who I'd seen job seeking only a week before, I realised that the world had gone wrong.

Chapter Thirteen

With no job and no sex, I tried to be creative.

Where do you go to find women and that's free? Correct: galleries and museums.

Galleries and museums are great places: the hushed, reverent silence, the slow movement of visitors. Only libraries have more sexual tension, and talking is forbidden there.

So I started spending a lot of time at the Tate, the South Bank and the Barbican. Different women frequented each one: tourists and language students at the Tate, professionals and arty types by the River and bohemians at the Barbican.

In the past, these had been great spots for quirky, impromptu liaisons, and I'd always loved arty girls. My fondest memory was one visit to the Tate. Upstairs there was some installation or similar, part of a retrospective of one artist or another, whose work consisted of a series of large rectangular mattresses, scattered apparently at random in a big white room.

I wandered around, trying to work out what it was all about, before I caught sight of a pretty little Japanese girl across the way. We sort of half knew each other, as it happened that she'd been dating my friend Archie for a while. I tried not to imagine what horrible perversions he might have subjected her to during their brief liaison.

She was smiling, at the exhibit, at other visitors and at me. Eventually I made my way over to her side of the room.

‘Hi Cesc,' she said, with a broad smile.

‘Do you understand this?' I asked.

She shook her head.

‘No. It's a big bed,' she said, with a giggle.

I looked around to see how full the room was. The member of staff was not on the stool by the wall; a couple of other visitors were vaguely reading the explanatory plaques. I noticed that in one corner of the room, a few of the mattresses had been piled up, making a sort of den.

‘Come on,' I said to her. She shot a glance either side, laughed, and we dived towards the corner. Once we were half hidden, I pulled another mattress across the opening and we hid down out of view.

I looked her up and down: she was small, pretty and trendily dressed, in a puffball skirt, a top with rips across it and punky boots. Her hair had been cut into a jagged bob. We kissed, quickly, before she pulled back and looked at me.

‘Is this part of the show?' she said, laughing.

‘Oh yes. It comes with the donation.'

We kissed again, keeping low to the floor. I ran my hand up her shirt; she was braless and her nipples were hard and stuck out almost further than her tits. My other hand went to her knickers, and she gasped as I slipped my hand under the thin fabric and towards her clit. Soon I had slipped the knickers aside, unzipped my fly and manoeuvred myself between her legs.

‘Wow,' she said. I stopped, my cock paused before her pussy.

‘What?' I said.

‘I love this museum.' I slid into her, slowly, trying not to disturb our shelter. Soon, the sensation took me over. She was hot and tight, and squirmed and whimpered with pleasure beneath me. Soon, we were both coming, breathily and enthusiastically. So enthusiastically, as it happens, that I realised only after I'd rolled away that two or three other punters had been watching the whole scene.

I guess that's the great thing about galleries: people think you're an exhibit. What was it Archie said to me once? A quote from one philosopher or another: ‘Art is the ever broken promise of happiness.'

‘Of a penis,' I had said to him.

But now, though, sex in museums was just a happy and arousing memory. I was cruising round the same spots, finding only couples and school trips. The few singletons I did see wanted nothing to do with me, I guess suspecting me of being some sort of museum pervert or scammer.

Chapter Fourteen

A month passed: no sex, no job, two more unsuccessful meetings with someone so utterly unlikely to get me a job that he almost laughed at his own efforts, and a lot of frustration watching other people succeeding at what used to be easy for me.

Something had to change, and I decided that if it wasn't the work, then it would start with the sex. And I suppose, inadvertently, it was Celeste's fault that I ended up as a call guy.

This much was Celeste's idea: I started Internet dating.

I seldom take her suggestions too seriously, but this one seemed less feather-brained than usual. She'd been single for a while, once, she told me, and had tried it. Apparently all the guys she met were freaks, losers or frankly frightening. This, she told me in her rather downbeat way, was highly representative of the quality of men in London. That was why she wanted to move to Cuba, or Brazil, where, she insisted, poverty and good weather created the type of man that she wanted. I called her a sex-tourist and she shrugged. I called her a colonialist and she looked at me blankly.

But she had a point: with the gender imbalance, the unacceptability of much of the male population of the city, and with the pressure on women to look and act the part, it can be an easy ride being a guy. Especially in a field like dating.

That afternoon I joined a couple of free Internet dating sites. I noticed that on a number, membership was free for men but at a price for women. This immediately suggested something to me that I had for a long time suspected: a good man is a valuable commodity in this city. Let's be honest, even a passable man can be tricky.

I registered myself as a ‘fun member' – I liked the pun – that's to say not someone who is immediately looking for a marriage partner for a booked and arranged wedding within the next six months. Within two hours I had my first message. By the evening, I had a date.

The girl in question claimed to be twenty-four: she'd moved to London after university, split up with her long-term boyfriend and decided that she wanted to have some, you've guessed, ‘fun'. After a couple of emails we chatted online and agreed to meet in a pub in Camden that we both knew. I booked a table for dinner, for later. I borrowed some cash from Celeste, who'd been seeing an older gentleman and seemed suddenly to be even more flush than usual. I dressed up and then dressed down, and headed down to meet her.

The girl didn't spot me at first – I'd been perfectly honest about my description – but I recognised her immediately from the photo: slim, very short brown hair, almost boyish figure, casually well dressed in a media-type way. After I waved a few times she seemed to get the hint. Later she admitted that she was shy about wearing her glasses on dates. I called her over and we exchanged a polite kiss before some amiable chat. After she'd had a couple of gin and tonics, I plucked up the courage to ask whether she was a regular Internet dater.

‘Can I be honest with you?'

‘I hope so.'

‘I was in a relationship with one guy for seven years. He left me. He'd been sleeping around behind my back. A lot. That included a good friend of mine and a girl I used to sit next to at work.'

‘Ouch,' I said.

‘He was a wanker. And I realised that life's just too short. I wanted some variety before I settled down.'

I contained the urge to laugh with glee before nodding understandingly.

‘OK. Well, do you really want to go for dinner?'

She laughed, slightly nervously, before responding with a smile.

‘No. I live round the corner. Shall we go?'

I didn't bother to finish my drink. We barely spoke during the five-minute walk. She looked at me, smiling cheekily, a couple of times. A minute or so away from her door, she held my hand.

As soon as we were inside the door, she stepped up on tiptoes to kiss me, passionately and clumsily. The height difference made us stumble across the hall towards the narrow staircase – she lived on the first floor of a Camden terrace – and we found ourselves kissing and grappling with each other's clothes, half on the floor, half on the stairs. I half pushed her top up to reveal small breasts with bullet nipples – no bra. As I slid my hand up her skirt and between her legs, I found she had no underwear.

‘My kind of girl,' I said.

‘My kind of boy,' she replied, pulling my stiff cock from out of my jeans.

‘The neighbours?' I asked.

‘They're out.'

I fumbled a condom out of my wallet and slipped it on before hitching her skirt up. The time out of the saddle had made me greedy and keen, but I controlled myself and entered her slowly, an inch at a time, before giving her the lot in a final stroke. She moaned and rubbed herself against me, grinding against the stairs and my groin. She came before I did, and I decided to be a gentleman.

‘Why don't we finish this off somewhere more comfortable?' I suggested.

She nodded, eyes half closed, and we collected ourselves and headed up to her flat. There I was rewarded for my efforts: under the polite, nervous exterior was a girl who'd clearly spent a lot of her time as a recent singleton reading sex manuals or learning from experts. She had an amazing appetite for all things male. She found three or four ways in which to come that I'd only read about. For one orgasm, she had me lie back with my legs up, before she sat on my cock. The pressure made it taught against her inside, and she wriggled down so it was deep against her, stroking her G-spot against its head until she was screaming with pleasure.

After that, her small hands could not stay away from me. She bent over and let me fuck her from behind, but stopped me from coming with a swift tweak of the balls. She moved off me, then sucked me until I came in her mouth. For the next time, she rode me until she came, leaning back on my thighs while she pulled her own nipples hard. Then she sucked me off again and made me come on her tits, lick it up, and kiss it into her mouth.

Once we'd exhausted each other, she skipped away from the bed and put on a dressing gown.

‘I don't want you to stay, I hope that's OK?'

Surprised, I looked at her.

‘No?'

‘No. I've had fun. I may call you.'

‘You may call me?'

‘Yeah. You know. If I want another fuck. Yeah?'

For the first time in my life, I felt dirty, and I felt used.

It was a wonderful feeling.