In My Skin (16 page)

There was something called a full service, Juanita told me. Massage, oral sex, and sex. This is what the client paid for at the desk, and that’s what he was entitled to. Bookings were half-hour, three-quarters, or an hour; customers could elect to extend as you went along; some girls were in the rooms for hours at a time.

We were given half the fees at the end of the night. Beyond the duties of the full service, what was arranged between client and girl (or client and host and girl) was their own business and the money passed between them was the girl’s. The extra fees were tricky to negotiate when I didn’t know what the other girls were actually charging; as on the street, my prices sagged as the need for money rose, but at least here clients could resort to credit card if they didn’t have the cash, and often at the end of a night I’d have a fair bit extra. Occasionally even a tip. The wealthier clients were the stingiest.

‘Optional’ extras, often demanded, included sex between the breasts (Spanish), kissing, the client giving oral sex to the woman, and dirty talk. The common ‘fantasies’, which cost a fee, were Greek (anal sex), using a vibrator, twins or doubles (two girls attending to one man; two girls attending to one man and each other in simulated lesbian acts), dress-ups, if you had your own costumes, and golden showers (urinating on the man’s body). I’d encountered several of these ideas on the street, but the confines of a car had restricted what was possible. Here, in the privacy of a room, face to face and with a whole double—or triple—bed to spread over, men wanted more.

I offered kissing, but baulked at having someone go down on me; many girls felt that was too intimate, and saved it as their partners’ last prerogative. I had no vibrator or nurse costume, but I was game to try the rest. I needed the bookings and the money, but there was also a part of me that was curious to master these disciplines. I wanted not just to compete for the money but to be successful here, to be wanted, to learn. The hints I picked up from the other women’s conversation, or even from friendly clients, I tucked away as I’d once tucked money into my bra.

‘Sure, a golden shower, I love doing that,’ I murmured the first time someone asked me, panicking to myself about how to produce urine on demand.

‘Three glasses of warm water, quick; then when you get to it, just think of waterfalls,’ said a girl who called herself Lily, when I was getting ready for the booking. The client was already in the room, having his shower. Lily poured me a glass from the kettle in the kitchenette. ‘You put the guy in the shower first, right? Lay him on towels in the shower, and then just
concentrate
. Most of them don’t really know what they want, it’s just one of those porn movie things.’ She was proved right; the young guy under the bright shower lights didn’t seem aroused by my desperate stream of liquid over his masturbating hand; he said, afterwards, ‘I just wanted to try. I’m glad I tried it. Now I never have to do it again.’ I tried not to be embarrassed by having just peed all over a stranger; after all, he was paying me for it.

'You want me and Nikita together? Who’s a greedy boy?’ I said, faking delight in the lounge.

I was self-conscious at the idea of being naked in front of another woman. ‘I’m a bit–I’ve never done this with anyone,’ I whispered as Nikita and I entered the room ten minutes later.

‘God, just don’t look at me,’ she said. She was lovely, small and lithe, with long, dark red curls. ‘I’ve had two kids, I’ve got stretch marks like you wouldn’t believe.’ We giggled together over the man’s belly, acting it up as we each sucked on a hairy nipple, inciting each other’s delirious ‘moaning’. Our complicity made it bearable. I observed her, as discreetly as possible; she had some new moves I hadn’t seen. It was the first time I’d watched other people fucking in front of me. I hadn’t even seen that many naked women in my life, but somehow, with Nikita catching my eye from time to time, I wasn’t embarrassed by my own body. Instead I relished the sense of shared power we had over this helpless man. He loved it, of course. ‘I feel like I’m in a porn movie,’ he exclaimed at the end of the session. This diminutive Japanese guy with his slim penis, smothered in beautiful women: it made his night. We laughed at and with him, and I felt the beginning of the conceit that I could make someone happy.

Every night there was something new. Slowly, I worked out some tricks. I was learning to be clever, to use my wiles to protect myself. ‘Here, baby, between my tits,’ I said, squinting at the danger end of a pink penis, desperate to get it out of my chafed body for a while. And so I did Spanish.

I was a quick learner.

I’d always shied away from the idea of a brothel. Giving up half the money; being cooped inside, waiting passively for the men. It had seemed a claustrophobic trap. I’d been apprehensive of the other women I’d have to work with, in the same way as I’d been nervous of other girls in school. Street work had been confronting, but I’d felt a kind of self-possessed agency in it.

Now I wondered why it had taken so long to get here.

It all seemed so much more professional and stabilised than on the street, and it was legal. With a regular stream of clients coming through the door instead of having to be landed like fish, I had more energy. Rather than three or four small jobs a night I could manage five or six, if I was lucky enough to get the bookings. My body was sore, from the shock of repeated penetrations and the longer friction of half-hour sessions, but I wasn’t exhausted from trudging the block and watching for the cops, and we sipped coffee between each booking.

But it wasn’t comfortable in every way. Juanita was not motherly, she was not kind; she sat, thin and sly behind her big desk, an enormous Fragonard print gilt-framed behind her, and watched us with cool eyes while her scarlet mouth smiled at the clients. Sometimes Bruno, the other ‘host’, would come and sit with us at the dawn end of the shift, and make smutty jokes in his eastern European accent, and his face seemed like the face of a nice man, except for what he urged us to do. Sean remained enigmatic; he was rumoured to be Juanita’s lover. He and I rarely spoke; one night, tottering down the steep stairs on my borrowed high heels to where he was chatting with a client, I stumbled and lurched forwards into space, grabbing at the railing; as I collapsed abruptly at his feet I saw him break into a laugh.

A few of us noticed that every girl (and every one of us was a heroin addict) made only just enough money to last the twenty-four hours until the next shift. There was no contract: we weren’t bound to return by anything but our need. We didn’t know how Juanita had gauged our habits so well, but she seemed capable of such calculation. A couple of tall Vietnamese men would pay a visit during the evening and be followed out of the room by sweating, anxious girls who returned from the back rooms eased and languid. I didn’t try their wares; I was too shy to approach them. The local vice squad guys came in and sat with Juanita at the desk, chatting and smoking. The parlour was licensed, and regulated as part of the Victorian legal prostitution system; it had a registration number and the permitted six rooms, and so ostensibly it was covered by the law. What went on there, however, with the unprotected practices and the drugs, was obviously not always strictly legal.

Not that any of us was in a position to complain. Using an illegal drug is disenfranchising in many ways: not only have you become a second-class citizen in society, but you forfeit your dignity under other laws. None of us could afford to lose our job there unless we were on our way to another house; with a daily habit to feed, the risk of ending up with no money was too great to indulge our disgruntlement.

Little by little we were tempted into various indiscretions. It wasn’t long before a man simply pushed my legs apart and went down on me, despite my protests, and I was too apprehensive to argue about it. Then there was the rest of it. First you lowered a price for a fantasy; then you promised to kiss in order to secure a booking; Bruno would instruct you to let just one man get oral without a condom for a price; then no extra fee. And all the time you were aware that other girls already offered more than you, that the drugs had to be paid for, that it was all too easy to end up sitting on the couch all night. It was humiliating, but no more so than on the street. Or so I told myself. I was more disturbed by the way these decisions were taken out of my hands. Here, I was told when to risk my health.

The most tragic person I met was Sammy, a young blonde with a tired, mocking face below tizzy blow-dried hair. She said she was going to jail after a completely fucked-up life, abused by her father, beaten by her husband, her children taken away, and she didn’t care anymore. Whether any of this was true or not, she gave anal sex without a condom for fifty, or free, to get a booking. She was only about twenty-five, and there was bleakness on her face in repose. The rest of us simply suffered the whispered chats with the hosts. It seemed all the more vulgar that Juanita had herself been a working girl once and knew what we were facing. No one ever said that to her, though. And she said nothing at all.

Compared with the streets, however, this was comfort itself. A warm room to sit and watch television, free coffee, company, and beds to fuck in—even showers afterwards. We would order in takeaway meals and talk, and I grew fond of several girls. Emma, a tiny, pretty Vietnamese girl, worked to look after her two younger brothers, both addicts too. Poppy wore only lingerie to show off her gymnast’s body, and heavy make-up to disguise her sulky face. Charlene, a lugubrious blonde, told me she had suffered a complete personality severance from job stress and become, so she said, two distinct personalities, although I only saw the one. Come down from the north in search of work, she lived in the house, sleeping in one of the rooms in the hours between the end of the night shift and the beginning of the day shift at ten.

We would talk easily, but I found myself growing cautious with information. The sense of competition was strong. And there was always the smoky tang of lies in the air.

Just after I started at the brothel, I had a message, through my parents, from Jason. We were being evicted from our house in the country. I’d slipped too far behind with the rent. Jason wasn’t as angry as I expected; for me, the news was a relief. It had been a couple of months since I’d been up there. Now I had to get my stuff out. I was too busy working to do such a huge job. Finally my parents and Robbie spent a day recovering all my belongings before the bailiffs cleaned the place out. My old room at home, I heard, was stacked with boxes.

The week after, Robbie and I had to leave the Gatwick. We owed a month’s rent, and had no money to pay it. The landlady was understanding. ‘You can come back when you can pay the debt,’ she said. We weren’t the first tenants to default. We lurched out of the wood-panelled gloom of that strange old relic, waving goodbye to the mumbling spectres on the landing, and hobbled with our bags to the tram stop. The day before, we’d been to the government housing agency, and they’d given us a voucher and recommended a place on the edge of the city, on Spencer Street. It, too, was old and rackety but with none of the Gatwick’s charm. The place stank, and we lugged our stuff up four flights of stairs and down several dark passages to a room that opened onto a concrete light-well. The bedspread was stained and charred with cigarette burns.

‘So, here we are,’ I said, and Robbie looked at me. We already didn’t want to be.

At midnight a few days later I said to my client, an affable man with soft breasts and a black moustache, ‘It’s my birthday!’

‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘Let me give you a massage to celebrate,’ and rubbed his hands over me, well-meaning, but too rough. I lay there, pondering.

In the afternoon later the same day I woke to the sound of rats under the bed. The room was cold, Robbie had gone out, and the bleak light came in through the furred turquoise curtains along with the sounds of Spencer Street and the city churning obliviously through its day. I knew I should get to a phonebox and call home. It had been weeks. But there was no way I could take a night off and see my family; there was no way my twenty-seventh birthday was going to be any different from any other day. Suddenly a horrific vertigo came over me. This was not what I imagined twenty-seven to be like. This was not what I’d imagined any of my life to be like. There were rats under my bed, and the most I had to look forward to was the white powder on its way, and the chocolate bar next to the bed. I took the book I was reading from the table; I turned on the lamp. I shoved my face up to the pages and started reading as tears ran down my face.

WE LASTED A WEEK IN that place. Then we couldn’t stand it—the degradation, the shabbiness, even after what each of us had already lived through—and we found another boarding house, this time in Fitzroy.

Fitzroy was the across-the-river equivalent of St Kilda. Another ragged, working-class suburb that had become bohemian and then been discovered and slicked up. There was plenty of scunge left, however; in the back streets the smell of dope wafted from the houses. I had sometimes come to Brunswick Street, the main strip, to shop as a teenager. Now the first places Robbie and I got to know were the café near the new place, the needle exchange down on Smith Street and the pawn shops.

Our new palace was an old thirties maze of dank carpet and half-finished renovations; but it had a large room, with a saggy double bed, a dressing table, and the rumour of a fridge available to buy from another tenant. Through the frosted window I could see sunshine and shade. There was a shared bathroom down an outside alley and, allegedly, a communal kitchen. The rent was a hundred and twenty a week and there was no sound or stink of rodents; we took it. One more awkwardly laden tram ride, me blinking in the daylight, and we were settled in.