The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl (22 page)

Dear Merry Widow,

Nothing, nothing at all. Enjoy yourself. You’ve done the time in Sexual Purgatory, and it sounds as if all your good karma is visiting you at once. Just be certain to play safe, and if you take pictures, make sure your face isn’t in any of them.

dimanche, le 1 mai

There are facts and there is the truth, and they do not necessarily converge. I was keenly reminded of this after yet another phone call with the Boy.

Usually I’m cool with that. Without interpretation, we wouldn’t have art, culture, and Newsnight. It’s a dichotomy I can live with. Especially if it keeps Jeremy Paxman in work.

But sometimes the gulf between information and knowledge is less enriching. The Boy has a little problem with the truth. But only when it involves him. So I was grumbling about fidelity again today – so what? Just last week he was taking another girl out on the town. And then today, in email, she called him sexy and made it clear that, if they aren’t sleeping together yet, it’s not far off.

He can’t admit to guilt directly, but does snipe back with, ‘Someone with your background really should watch where she pitches stones.’

Being female and Jewish, I’m down with the concept of guilt. There is no past faux pas too small for me to chew over daily. If someone points out my faults, not only will I instantly acknowledge them, but I will flagellate myself with the knowledge for at least a decade. I slept with men for money: this does not sit easily on my soul.

The Boy takes full advantage. If I lose my rag over anything he’s done, he has only to say, ‘Well, considering what you were like last year’ to send me off into a miasma of guilt and apologies. He recalls each misdeed with an effortless ease that Google would envy. I can’t say I haven’t deserved it. When I hang up, I’m angry. He still hasn’t owned up to taking Georgia to the gig, and it’s a slap in the face as hard as finding out that he called both me and Susie ‘kitty’. Damn it, I’m the one he should be going to gigs with. I’m the one who likes music. She’s just simpering arm candy.

The problem is that men lie. Worse: they lie, and think they’re not.

When the Boy and I first got together, he swore to the moon and back he’d never had a one-night stand. That by bedding him in the first week of our acquaintance, I was as close as he’d ever come. This wasn’t something I needed (or particularly wanted) to hear. It was information he offered freely.

Never let it be said that my powers of investigation – or rather, the internet’s – are below par: I track down Georgie’s number and phone her in the UK.

As soon as she answers I know it’s a mistake. How many women found my agency’s number on their phone, rang up the manager and bawled her out instead of their cheating husbands? How many rang me? How many independent call girls have I known who had to change their work numbers to get away from the harassment they received – not from men, but from other women?

She sounds haughty, the way I would have sounded if one of them had rung me. ‘You said you’re his girlfriend?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long have you known each other?’ I give her an answer which, in Hollywood circles, would be equivalent to something like three reincarnations with the same mate. ‘I’ve never heard of you.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘He and I only slept together once, ages ago,’ she said. Not that I believed her. But so much for his one-night-stand claim. Anyway, like I said, I read her email. What part of You are very sexy, and if I wasn’t so tired I’d take you up on that offer right now! isn’t two people who are having sex? I ask when the one-night stand happened. She claims not to remember.

I put the phone down: shite. I know women, I know there is no such thing as sisterhood, I know a woman who’s after a cheating man will believe anything except the truth, and I know she’s going to ring him and pass on exactly what happened.

When he rings back a few hours later, he is angry. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he yells. ‘What sort of a bunny boiler are you?’

The phrase stops me dead. Bunny boiler? Sorry, but what? He thought, and then deployed, the term ‘bunny boiler’? He actually dared invoke Fatal Attraction, a mysogynistic cliché so cheesy it makes Camembert blush?

And I’m the bunny boiler? He’s the one who was once removed from my house by the police. He’s the one who stalked N after we split up. He’s the one who went through my rubbish. He’s the one who read my diary first. Who tells me he will love me for ever, then turns round and fucks some glorified nurse on the side. We have three words for that where I come from, and they are ‘pot’, ‘kettle’ and ‘black’.

But believing your own lies is the male prerogative. If he says it, it must be true. The time I caught him in bed with the stick insect girl, I bet that’s the very phrase he used to palm her off, make her believe he wasn’t a complete shit: bunny boiler. If ever a man said it to me, I bet I would believe it, too. Well, fuck it. Fuck men and their stupid games. From now on I’m believing the women.

I confronted him about his one-night-stand lie. ‘Well, that really didn’t count,’ he said.

‘How does that not count? How is that not a one-night stand?’ I am familiar with slippery man-truth. I came of age in the Clinton era of oral sex not being ‘real’. I have no doubt my married ex-clients did not classify what they did as sleeping around.

‘If you know someone for a while first, it isn’t really a one-night stand.’

I growled. ‘So either she’s correct, and you slept together once and had a one-night stand, which means you lied to me then,’ I said, ‘or you did not have a one-night stand, in fact slept with her more than once, and you’re lying to me now.’ I licked my lips. ‘And what’s more, you’re courting while I – your actual girlfriend – am away.’

‘I’m in this situation because you put me there,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell my friends about us, because they’d think I was an idiot for having you back.’

‘So you go around telling women you’re single. And that is my fault, because you’re not man enough to stand up for me.’

‘I’ve never lied to you,’ he said, smug as you like. QED. He’s the hero for permitting me to date him. I’m the hussy who doesn’t deserve the truth. Clearly.

My father always said never trust a man who claims not to lie.

‘What’s your fucking excuse?’ I scream. ‘If you want to play around, fine, but don’t keep giving me your faithful man shit and then ring up and call me a bunny boiler. I have you bang to fucking rights and you know it.’ He threatens to hang up. I do it first.

lundi, le 2 mai

I leave the phone off. No one rings anyway. Tomás comes by in the afternoon for language study. He’s picked up a second job at a hotel, so it looks as if our meetings will become even more irregular.

He fumbles, smiling, in his bag and brings out a pineapple. ‘Ananas,’ he says, and shows me the bruise on its side. It must be a reject from the restaurant. I wonder how much of his food he comes by this way. With a pocket knife he fillets the fruit expertly and offers me a slice. We pore over vocabulary lists together, munching the pineapple. He eats the woody core; I don’t.

We quit early. Now I have enough Spanish for conversations, I ask him how his work is going, how his brother is.

‘Some days are better than others,’ Tomás says. Then, apropos of nothing, ‘You are very beautiful.’

I don’t know what he means by that, what is implied if you say something like that in Spanish. Is he … does he fancy me? Or is it just a statement? ‘I think you are nice,’ I say. ‘But I have a boyfriend,’ and for no reason I start to cry. How different would life be if relationships were as simple as that? The man thinks you are beautiful. You think he is nice. You fall in love, have babies and grow old together.

‘Estás preocupada por algo?’ Tomás asks. Are you worried about anything? His thick-fingered hand rests lightly on my shoulder.

I shake my head.

‘So why are you sad?’

‘My boyfriend … My boyfriend is …’ Mi novio es … I gesture for the dictionary to look up the word. Tomás passes it to me, finding the right word takes a few minutes. My boyfriend is a liar? My boyfriend is a cheat? My boyfriend is a pretentious shite? ‘My boyfriend is a big idiot.’

‘It happens to everyone,’ Tomás says. ‘Debes tratar de resolverlo.’ You should try to resolve it.

mardi, le 3 mai

I click through to the pictures from the Boy’s website. A Sunday walk in the country and lunch at a pub he took me to once, years ago, when he still cared about trying to impress me. Lambs, a stone cottage, a national park. Peacocks and a walled garden. And her.

So this is Georgie, eh? Nothing I couldn’t have predicted. Short legs, round face. Sunglasses holding her brownish hair back in a way that looks natural on her sort and ludicrous on everyone else. Wearing one of the Boy’s rugby shirts. It billows round her like a cape.

Did I really need to see that? See that it was just as I expected, just a parade of stereotypes?

You meet them everywhere, from the enclosures at Ascot to dining-ins at the officers’ mess. The mouse-haired posh girls, heavy bosoms sagging in bias-cut satin dresses, each one hanging on the arm of a fit, godlike man who in a true meritocracy would not be plighting his troth to good old Wellsey, the dim, horsey daughter of a merchant banker.

There’s nothing someone like me can do to compete. I was at school with several metric tonnes of them and learned the lesson well: no matter how I dress, what I do, it will always be obvious. Hunkering down into academic achievement was all I had to counter with, not that such things mattered to them. These girls wear their expensive lifestyle the way it should be worn: carelessly. I can’t do that. I put shoe trees in my pumps and am on a first-name basis with the dry cleaner. I’m a try-hard. Nothing in my life has ever been careless.

But what they don’t know – what they don’t know – is that I may look tame but I am really feral.

That’s why we become the mistresses. The call girls. Men pay for their perfectly groomed bit of fluff on an hourly basis then go home to a lady who cuts her nails with her teeth. And I would rather be bought for the cost of three hundred an hour, keeping my spare time my own, than for a token heirloom ring.

So why is he doing it this way? Keeping me in the dark and playing away with her? I’m a man’s woman. Someone who can down gin by the half-pint and shoot a decent frame of snooker. The sort of girl you have an affair with, not the sort you marry. By all rights he should be sliding a ring onto the finger of someone like her and sliding into the ring piece of someone like me. Not the other way round.

I fucking hate him.

Except, and this is the jam in the works … I still love him. It’s not just wounded pride that makes it hurt. It’s the rich, aching desire of wishing he was here. I know I could do better, find a real man, find my equal. That isn’t the point. It’s him I want.

jeudi, le 5 mai

‘Don’t do it,’ J says, watching me dial. ‘When you come to your senses, you’ll never want that man again.’

‘The heart has its reasons, right?’ I say. I haven’t eaten in days and can think of nothing else. Tomás came around with three new horror films and I told him I had a cold. I can’t hold out any longer, I want to hear the Boy’s voice. The phone is ringing the other end, the short, staccato English ring. Brrrrrp-brrrrrp. Brrrrrp-brrrrrp.

J grabs the phone and hangs up before it connects. ‘Fucking hell! You’re my cousin, and I love you, but you’re crackers.’

I love him,’ I say.

‘That’s not love. That’s addiction. I know. I was the same way, only with drugs.’

The phone rings. It can only be the Boy, calling back. J shakes his head. ‘Then you have to do for me what your family did for you,’ I say. ‘Let me make my own mistakes.’ It’s a low blow, but it is the truth, and he knows it.

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘But if that stupid fucker comes back here, he’s not staying with me.’

samedi, le 7 mai

Twice a day. That’s how often, twice a day. We phone each other, but we’re both still angry and distant. We don’t have anything to say. Sometimes he draws enough energy to start a tirade at me, and when he does I put the phone down and quietly walk off. Sometimes I can be gone for ten minutes and when I come back he’s still going at it.

‘You ruined my life, did I ever tell you that? I’ve lost every opportunity I ever had because …’

I walk off again. Because when he’s finished, he’ll say he loves me, say he hopes I stay safe. I don’t say anything back. I remember what J told me, before I came here, those months ago: You don’t have to make a decision. Eventually the Boy will yell himself out and then we’ll see where we are.

mardi, le 10 mai

‘Darling, I’m on my way,’ a voice said down the not-particularly-clear line.

‘Pardon?’

‘I’m on my way! I’ll be staying virtually a hundred yards from your door from next week.’

‘That’s lovely. Who are you?’

‘L, you silly goose,’ she said.

‘Omigod! Sorry, the connection is terrible,’ I said, sitting up in bed. The fact that it was also half four didn’t help.

‘No worries, darling. I’ll e you the details. Get back to bed before I wake you up properly.’

jeudi, le 12 mai

Tomás knocks on the door early – there’s a staff-only party at his brother’s restaurant tonight; J can’t make it but I can.

Not knowing what to expect, I dress for anything: sleeveless, low-cut red silk top over a push-up bra, tight black skirt that flares slightly at the knee and fits like a dream, high, high heels. I thought I might have overdressed for the occasion, but the Latinos, they know how to do nights out. If anything I’ve pitched it a bit too subtle. Tomás is happy to see me, and so is his brother, and so are the half-dozen or so Serbs who have also come to the shindig.

‘I thought this was a private party?’ I whisper to Tomás, who shrugs. They obviously just turned up with fat wallets, and hey, what can you do?

Francisco hasn’t laid on much food apart from olives and nibbles, but the alcohol flows freely. He’s even brought in a DJ and after a few margaritas the place is swinging. It’s a real mix – some modern Latin stuff, some mariachi music, chart hits and oldies. I barrage the DJ with requests. He plays one of my favourites, ‘Besa me Mucho’, but doesn’t seem to know anything about Half Man Half Biscuit. Ah well. One of the Serbs is a cartoonist who sand-sketches everyone there – I’m appalled to see he’s included my laugh lines. One of the others in his group is a round-faced divorcee, and the two teenagers I initially took to be his hired companions are in fact his daughters. Oops. He keeps buying me tequila, anyway.

And I dance with anyone who asks. Tomás, his brother, the Serbian girls. One of the waiters, a rather fey snake-hipped thing, challenges me to a walk-off.

Oh no ‘she’ fucking didn’t.

‘Is he joking?’ I ask Tomás. I was running for the train in four-inch heels before this kid even knew how to put one foot in front of the other. And anyway, I thought walk-offs ended sometime circa the last century (and that I was the undisputed world champion). Still, the lithe waiter insists.

The main floor of the restaurant is already clear, the tables pushed up against the walls. Everyone stops what they’re doing to watch. The DJ humours us – at Francisco’s request – with a little Prince. The challenger is first. He’s sharp. He’s sleek. He’s good, he’s very good. But he’s just a man after all. And there are no prizes for second place.

Let me explain: if, when a lady decides to abandon a life of leisure for working the seedier side of the street, if she doesn’t already know how to walk, she will learn fast or die trying. Because sex work is all about the moves. How to make an entrance. And how – as is so often required – not to. They say Naomi Campbell moves like a thoroughbred? I’d have her at the first hedge.

I motion to the DJ to cut the music. I don’t need props. I point to my challenger and stalk off to the opposite corner. Turn, pose, walk back. A slight bounce of the cleavage and a wink. Keep it simple; no distractions. Lead from the hips. Breathe confidence, be confidence. Connect with your inner reservoir of fuck-you.

He knows I’ve nailed it. The kid gives a mock I’m-not-worthy bow. I smile, kiss his cheek, and let the Serbian divorcee buy one last round.

‘Amazing,’ he hisses wetly in my ear. ‘Kid’s play,’ I say. ‘At least this time I didn’t have to take my knickers off halfway through.’ He gives me a look but doesn’t ask.

Tomás says he’s staying over at Francisco’s; it’s walking distance. I ring a taxi and go home to bed. But I am too wound up to sleep. I writhe on the bed drunkenly, feeling my naked body, wondering what life would be like as a Serbian trophy wife.

vendredi, le 13 mai

It’s never easy to know when to let something go. Not simply relationships – though, obviously, I include relationships – but also personality quirks, ways of being. One gets so used to telling people ‘I am this’ and ‘I do that’ that not being this, or not doing that, leaves a feeling not unlike a tiny cork bobbing on a very big sea. What are you, beyond the collection of the things you’ve done, said and thought?

Happily, much comfort is to be found in the Good Book – by which I mean, of course, the inspired writings of Douglas Adams. I find J has all the volumes and start reading them again. It’s terribly uplifting in its way – you really can get by after your tiny home planet’s destruction. Knowing that we are a very small deal makes it all so much easier to let go, stick your thumb out and hope for a passing alien to take pity on us.

lundi, le 16 mai

J and I go round to Tomás’s house. Tomás has just bought a new car, and perhaps I’ve been here for too long now but it’s sweet. Low-riding ’70s model with pale leather upholstery and the Virgen de Guadalupe on the bonnet. When I return home there are three missed calls from the UK. It was four in the morning his time before he gave up ringing me. I feel like a total jerk. Then I remember about Georgie and feel like a less-than-total jerk.

mercredi, le 18 mai

Things are desperate in the love department. I’m not normally the sort of person who resents the prerogative of young marrieds to kiss and giggle in public, but, for goodness’ sake, why do they always have to be doing it on the beach next to me? I not-so-casually kick a little sand in the happy couple’s direction every time I get up but they Don’t Even Notice.

dimanche, le 22 mai

Do I know what today is? J asks. I don’t. Go ahead, have a guess. I know it’s not his birthday. Some obscure local holiday? No. Full moon? No, J says, it’s a year since. A year since what? A year since I went clean. Why didn’t you say? I’ll take you out. No, J says. I’ll take you out. A year since I realised I almost lost my family. Where to? Where else? J asks. Tomás and Francisco’s, of course.

Francisco has brought his Harley to work today. It gleams darkly outside the restaurant like a giant insect, poised to leap. ‘Hell of a motor,’ J says. ‘Ever ridden one of those?’ I say no. J says I should give it a go. Then pats his pocket. ‘Fucksticks, I forgot my wallet.’

‘I’m sure they won’t be too bothered.’

‘No, I’ll just pop home and get it. I’ll be back for you in a few.’

He gets up from the table, has a word with Francisco, then leaves in his car. When Francisco comes over to the table I realise: J has paid the bill, he’s not coming back to fetch me, he’s told Francisco to give me a lift home.

Francisco’s mouth is screwed down. ‘This is difficult,’ he says under his breath. ‘My brother is here.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, hoping he knows it was J’s idea, not mine. I could walk home, I think. It’s not far. But then the bars and restaurants will all be letting out about now, and the narrow streets will be full of drunken British thugs, and I will at the very least feel uncomfortable. ‘You don’t have to, I’ll walk,’ I offer.

Francisco waves his hand dismissively. ‘Wait outside,’ he says. ‘I’ll be ten minutes.’

The motorbike speeds away from the restaurant and my hands are tight round Francisco’s waist. We take the long route, the way along the beach. The long curve of yellow streetlamps is reflected on the calm water. My hair whips wildly around my face and his, and he urges the motorcycle faster, faster than I think must be safe.

We stop in front of my house. ‘I like you,’ Francisco says, unzipping his leather jacket.

I don’t know how to reply. I don’t know what weight the words carry in Spanish, what my response may or may not imply. ‘I like you, too,’ I say.

And then suddenly he pushes me against the wall, making my elbows raw, and he is kissing me. He grinds his hips into mine and pushes me off the ground with the force. His tongue is quick and certain, and mine replies in kind. Then, just as quickly, it’s over. We stand a few feet apart.

‘Tiene una esposa,’ I say. It’s not a question, it’s a statement: you have a wife.

He looks at me, holds his hands out at his sides and shrugs. It’s a classically male gesture, a so what? Implying that it doesn’t matter to him and it shouldn’t matter to me. I am being disingenuous, I know this, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t know about my past, the number of husbands I’ve had, the number of fathers.

And I know that, for all the outward show, the Catholic piety of people here goes about as deep as my Jewishness does. An identification, a way of life – not a system of belief. I wouldn’t be the first girl he’s had on the side. My refusal would give him no more than a moment’s pause. Anglo girls are ten a penny.

I say goodnight and enter the house. The lights are off, but I know J is there, know he heard everything.

lundi, le 23 mai

‘Cardinal rule,’ L says, turning over to tan her front. Her skin is fair and freckly, but she’s managing well thus far. ‘Don’t bring up the wife and child unless he does first.’

‘You sound like you’ve been involved with married men before,’ I say.

L harrumphs but doesn’t answer. She’s staying at a rented cabaña – alas, she notes, devoid of cabaña boy. ‘The long and short of it is this: if a man wants to be single, he’ll be single. If he wants to cheat, he’ll cheat. No sense throwing his lies back in his face.’

‘Noted,’ I say, rubbing more suncream into my shoulders. I don’t see the point, as the light wind blows sand into the sticky cream, meaning that every time I rub more on I take some skin off with it. Surely this negates any positive, skin-protecting effect the cream must have? On the other hand, perhaps it’s exfoliating. ‘So how are you enjoying your time out?’

L laughs. ‘My entire life’s a time out,’ she says. ‘The actress who never acted, the lawyer who has yet to practise law.’

‘It’s a hell of a way to live.’

‘It’s a tough life, but someone has to do it,’ she says.

mardi, le 24 mai

J was out with a different girl. I saw her briefly before they left: short, dyed blond hair, the slightly hassled look of a single mother. I cycled down the beach, oblivious of the crowds and noise around me. Before I knew it I was at Francisco’s restaurant, so I went in.

Tomás didn’t seem to be around. I chose a small corner table and started writing in a notebook. Francisco came over and offered a menu, but having had everything on it three times over, I told him to bring me whatever he thought I would like and a carafe of wine. He smiled: this pleased him. I saw the restaurant was very busy for midweek but he waited on my table himself.

After the first glass of wine I went to the toilet. When I was washing my hands the door rattled. ‘Es ocupado,’ I said back.

‘No, es Francisco,’ he hissed from the other side. I let him in.

Without even locking the door he pushed me against the sink and started kissing me. One hand pulled me up onto the edge of the sink and the other fiddled with my left nipple through my shirt. He was definitely someone who had moves and knew what to do with them, I decided.

‘Saturday night,’ he said. It was a command, not a question, but to be honest I like a man who says – not asks – what to do. ‘I’ll see you after work.’

He left the toilet and I waited a minute before emerging. It was all I could do not to fall over on the way back to the table. He brought out my courses as if nothing had happened, I settled the bill and walked home. What to do with this? I wondered. A married man. But I’ll bet he’s great in bed. And no good reason to deny myself …

The Boy rang shortly after I returned. Idly I wondered what – or who – was keeping him up so late.

‘You seem to have a far more active social life by yourself than you ever do with me,’ he said.

If that’s what he thinks, good. ‘That’s because you never took me anywhere and never introduced me to your friends,’ I said.

He went quiet. It was, after all, the truth: introducing me to more people than strictly necessary would have put a serious damper on his extracurricular activities.

‘I’d better be off to bed, then,’ he said.

‘Enjoy it.’

‘’Bye.’

mercredi, le 25 mai

‘Let me see if I understand,’ J says. He’s taken me out for ice cream and a tan. No, really – it turns out his favourite place to go is a combination tanning salon and ice cream parlour. Genius. Whatever will they think of next? ‘He says he wants to marry you, but has he ever actually asked you to marry him?’

‘Not as such, no.’

‘And he let you leave the country and come here,’ J says, swirling his spoon around in the remains of a knickerbocker glory. ‘But if he’d given up the other girls and asked you to stay in England, you would have done?’

‘That’s about the size of it, yes.’