In My Skin (18 page)

The men I met that night seemed more genteel than those I knew on the street or at Cherie’s, though I couldn’t say exactly how. They were the same mix of ages, races, professions, attitudes; but there wasn’t the same brittle atmosphere. There were a lot of Greeks and Italians, office workers with briefcases, older men in jumpers and slacks, as well as a couple of tradies with canvas caps and young men in runners. I wasn’t sure what to say, marching up to them and jumping straight into business. At Cherie’s the intros had often been on the couch, acting as if we were in a bar to pick up these delightful men. In the corridor I tried to eavesdrop on the other women’s spruiks, but I couldn’t hear. Used to making chat before getting into details of my service, in this new formal context I fumbled through a few nervous conversations. I was aware of taking too much time and was startled when, cutting off my questions about his evening, the client would simply say, ‘So do you let guys go down on you?’

Bea gave me a look as I came out and later took me aside. ‘You don’t have to give them a long talk, honey. Just walk in there and tell them what you do or don’t do.’

I tried that. Phrasing an attractive list of services was hard. Carmen demonstrated hers. ‘Full service, extra fantasies available. Oral sex, twenty dollars. Vibrator on me, twenty dollars. Vibrator on you, forty. Dress-ups, fifty. No Spanish. Greek, one hundred. I do twin service but not bi. I don’t kiss. If you give me trouble there’s no refund. Any questions?’

It seemed a bit blunt. I wasn’t yet sure what my extras were but I could see that it was possible to charge for some things I’d been giving away free. This might even be my chance to stop doing some things; I could be one of those girls who said, ‘I don’t let guys give me head. That’s special for me. No, no Greek. I don’t kiss.’ On the other hand, Cherie’s had taught me all about competition. You still had to jostle for bookings, after all. I didn’t think I could risk being too precious when I needed so much money every night.

I experimented through the night with variations on a spiel. ‘Hi, I’m Lucy, how are you? How’s your night going? Are you looking for anything in particular? I offer the full service, and I do some fantasies. What’s that? Can you go down on me? Well…Are you any good?’

My tone was somewhere between comforting and coquettish; it depended on what I had to work with. Most men were dour and their questions were basic: do you do Greek, do you kiss, do you let guys go down on you? For now I said yes to all of them, and made my eyes sparkle a bit, as if I were doing it only for them. They stared dully back, and maybe chose me, or didn’t. None of them asked me for service without a condom.

I relaxed a little. A couple of house regulars came in, and booked me after Bea had a word to them and they’d checked me out: genially, they helped me tidy the room. In the girls’ lounge, the other women started to include me in the conversation, although I kept quiet and took a corner chair out of the way. I missed Esmerelda.

There weren’t many girls on that first night, only five of us, and the place seemed busy with a regular stream of clients. The rooms were nice, with gilt mirrors and showers in a corner. I learned the new rooms, each one decorated slightly differently, and their numbers (‘Half hour with Peter, Lucy, in room four’). I was shown where to dump the dirty towels in a back room, and how to take a selection of condoms from the counter basket as I went in to my booking. There seemed a bit more housekeeping procedure in the place: a routine for disinfecting the shower with antiseptic spray, tidying the moisturiser and talcum powder bottles on the bedside table, spraying room deodoriser, filling out a small form at the start of each booking, with the length of the booking and room number. There was a particular way to arrange the towels in decorative folds at the end of the bed—we spread them across the sheets during the booking—a special pattern for the many pillows on every bed. At the end of every shift we changed the bedlinen. Each room was equipped with speakers for whatever top forty music was playing, and a television, on which porn movies played.

The building was a Victorian-era single-storey cottage. At the end of the corridor was a large room, with yellow silk draped across the wall; the room across the hall had a slightly creaky bed, a cold greenish light that made for rumours of ghosts, and a spa. The next room had a double shower and a king-size bed for large bookings; then there was a smaller, cosy-feeling room, with dark green and blue decoration and a pesky shower head too high for adequate cleansing of genitals. There was a tiny room, where Nora had first interviewed me, with a narrow bed; this was mostly used as an ancillary introduction lounge where we would find clients perching awkwardly on the edge of the mattress, sitting right on top of the little towel rosette. Occasionally we busted them pinching the talcum powder from the drawers. The sixth room was comfortable, tucked away from the others, with a spa and shower and warm yellow wallpaper. This was usually appropriated by the top girl and it was months before I got a booking in there.

I wasn’t entirely dumped in without a clue, as at Cherie’s; still, it was weeks before I learned I was meant to wipe down and dry the glass shower walls after every booking. Each room had to be kept impersonally tidy in case another lady needed to use it and, of course, it had to look immaculate for each client. The air was dense with the scent of deodoriser.

I liked the place. It had more cheer than Cherie’s, and the clientele here appeared safer. No drug dealers came skulking through the lounge. I couldn’t tell if the other girls were using, but, overhearing a scornful reference to ‘junkie girls’, I guessed most weren’t. I pressed down my thoughts, closed my lips and bent over a crossword. Obviously this was a place where, as an addict, I’d have to be careful.

Already I found myself walking with my arms slightly crooked up, fiddling with my fingers or holding a coffee mug as an excuse. The tiny dark marks in the crook of my arms felt exposed, even under the paste of make-up I’d applied. But no one seemed to notice them. I had never looked stoned, with the wall-eyed blunder of a user who combined pills with gear to wipe themselves out. Only my tiny pupils gave me away, while my composure looked normal. I learned to look at the floor while I talked to people, to hide my eyes.

The only awkward moment was towards closing time at four, when I used the payphone in the corner of the lounge to call Plum, the dealer. Aware of the other women listening, I said, ‘I’ll have a
cup of tea
. No, make it two,’ although I knew this was ludicrous. I decided to force the pretence through; there was no other way. ‘Pick me up at work, yeah?’ I gave him the address, unsure from his sleep-thick accent whether he’d understood.

‘My boyfriend,’ I said to the girl near me. She nodded, not looking at me.

That first night, I made slightly more than I would have at Cherie’s. I collected my money at the end of the night—a newly complicated business, with the little forms and a signature to confirm that the numbers were right, and a nice handful of cash. Bea said, ‘See you tomorrow Lucy,’ and I waved a shy goodbye to the other women as I walked out. Plum was, miraculously, waiting for me in the carpark. I got into his car, cold in the dark night, pulled the wad of money out of my pocket and bought an extra deal.

WORKING EVERY NIGHT, I soon got to feel at home at Mood Indigo. Having a private lounge for ourselves made the atmosphere more familiar and relaxed—girls spent the free time plucking their eyebrows, slumping in chairs with their feet up, drinking coffee and talking together. We could stagger back from difficult or amusing bookings and relate the drama, or return from an intro to make snide comments amongst ourselves. In the long quieter hours after midnight we watched television, picked over warmed-up takeaway or fussed with make-up. It was a homely, womanly ambience. This relaxation was all new to me. I had a locker in which to store my make-up kit and my bag, without fear of my wallet being stolen; but in any case, the other women didn’t seem the type.

And they were just normal women. It was a long time since I’d met any. We shared the collusion of prostitution, but the rest of our conversation was about domestic things: kids, clothes, television. Most of them were down-to-earth, practical types. We didn’t speak much about what we did when we weren’t at work, but over time I found that Nicole had children, and tuck-shop duty at school; Carmen was studying to be an accountant; Monique ran a craft stall once a week. Alexia was a security guard. Others were saving to buy a house, or did a lot of shopping. No one really talked about why they needed this kind of money; everyone wants money. I wondered how these women happened to be here, how they’d started, what had made them decide to cross the line themselves. But I couldn’t ask. There was a delicacy around that kind of thing.

It took a while to meet all the women, and to get to know them. Some were inscrutable, or formidable. Lola presided over the group on her nights. A tidy small woman in her fifties with great legs— enhanced by a short dress, nude stockings and glittery gold heels—and a hacking cough, she had an acerbic eastern European sense of humour as she ruled the television remote and kept a stern eye on everyone. Lola was rumoured to be the management spy; and you certainly didn’t want to cross her. She liked working, for the money and the entertainment and the chance to swear loudly; at home she was a genteel divorcée with two grown children and a grandson. There were nights when she never got a booking; but she’d saunter out with her Tina Turner legs and her large bosom perked up, and for every week of nights with no bookings at all, there was a boom shift for her. She did particularly well with men of her own age and confident youths in tracksuits.

There was another older woman, Sandra, a bloated, purple-faced blonde who said little in a finicky, mannered voice and heaved herself around the room to systematically steal everyone’s seat. She had a way of staring at me, rather spookily, for hours. Sandra didn’t get many bookings. I would have pitied her but for her truculence.

It was easier to warm to Heidi, a woman in her forties. She had a straight-up, strong personality and the precious ability to laugh at herself. Late to work every shift, she’d yank on a long dress and set about making up her wise, ordinary face, joking that she needed at least three hours to become as beautiful as the rest of us. She was a lesbian who’d only recently started working; she said not being attracted to men made her a good worker, free to enjoy the men’s company without being emotionally engaged. ‘Besides, I like dildos so a live cock’s almost as good,’ she remarked. She looked out for me, gave me advice about life and had a way of loosening the lounge’s atmosphere with her jokes and her common sense.

Most of us were younger, ranging from one cheeky redhead of twenty-one to a couple of women in their mid-thirties. There were some brothels specialising in young girls, but this wasn’t one of them; to her chagrin, young Renee wasn’t as popular as she expected. The patrons here wanted normal, substantial women, not fantasy Lolitas; a few of them told me that young girls weren’t experienced enough. I was beginning to appreciate that professionalism was about more than just washing your hair and opening your legs; many of these men valued a woman who was a person, who had experience and knew what she was doing in bed, whose personality might make up for slack flesh, who might talk as well as moan. The younger girls seemed contrived by comparison, with their saucy talk and pouts.

I came to believe that there were three main types of working girls. How we had fitted ourselves into each type I wasn’t sure, but you could almost pick a type from the kind of working name a girl used. Women with names like Gypsy, Scarlette, or Crystal were ‘sluts’, wearing skimpy dresses, heavy make-up, and tending to offer a raunchy, no-holds-barred service. Their appeal lay in the tawdry Route 66 fantasy of a motel room, a naughty girl, a wanton minx. Cherie’s had been that kind of place.

The glamour girls had names like Chanel and Lana, and they were a man’s fantasy of a model companion, a princess, a dream that they might purchase for an hour. These women were better looking, more svelte, and possessed an aura of chic exclusivity.

Then there was the mid-range. The ‘girlfriend’. Women who were pretty enough, and glamorous enough, but not ideally perfect. Women who dressed better than the men’s own wives and girlfriends, who wouldn’t say no to a bit of naughty play, but weren’t terrifying.Women with names like Nicole and Briony and Heidi. Or Lucy. In Cherie’s raunchy atmosphere I’d tried to compete with the other girls, but now I was happy to fit into this milder stratum. My clients, too, spanned the mid-range. They weren’t as likely to be arrogant or intimidated by me, though I met with both reactions.

On Friday and Saturday nights the mood changed. The glamour girls came in for their exclusive shifts and their scheduled regulars. They all seemed taller and bolder and rushed in and out of bookings to fix their make-up and get instructions from the receptionist. Valentina was one of them—tall, impossibly beautiful in her long body, with gleaming blonde hair, an outer-suburbs drawl and a scoffing kind of wit. And Monique, whose impish face, hairpiece and spectacular catsuit-encased body gave her a Barbarella cuteness. She’d get a break only rarely and sit with us, giggling hoarsely and telling jokes against herself. ‘So I was there just now, with my arm halfway up this guy’s bum, and I accidentally turned and saw myself in the mirror on the wall. And I’m like,
how did I
get here?
’

Angie was the most startling. She was slim, with a boob job and transparent dresses, great legs, and the loudest, filthiest mouth I’d ever heard. You could hear her braying from the men’s lounge. She’d start the shift by swaggering in and saying happily, ‘Cunt! Cunt!
Cunt cunt cunt!
’ and then tottering over to the mirror to mash make-up onto her face. She never stopped talking, aided by the diet pills she took for stamina, and the men loved her. ‘Get a mouthful of that, dickhead,’ she’d say to an intro, shoving her bum at him. ‘What’s that? You’re scared? I’m scared too, sweetheart, that’s why I talk such shit.’ Everyone adored Angie, although we force-fed her Minties from reception in order to glue her jaws shut occasionally. She was a mother from the suburbs who was a genius at crosswords; in real life she wore twinsets and never said anything worse than ‘damn’. Work seemed like an excursion for her, until the end of the shift when, exhausted, she’d sag in her chair, finally silent.