One last secret, p.4
One Last Secret, page 4
‘I thought you’d given them up.’
I roll my eyes and he concedes the point. It isn’t the moment to point out I might die a slow, horrible death, since we are both scared shitless that I might die a sudden, horrible one. He fishes around in his jacket pockets and pulls out a packet of Lucky Strikes. The only brand he ever smokes. He once told me that in the 1920s, Lucky Strikes were marketed as a symbol of female liberation. Young women were encouraged to light up their ‘Torches of Freedom’. Cigarettes were an emblem of women’s aspirations for equality and a better life. Ha ha, the irony. He lights one, hands it to me. As I inhale deeply, he lights another for himself.
‘He had big hands and the first punch landed on my ear and jaw.’ I make a little motion to point to the injury. Silly really. Evan knows where my ear is. ‘I screamed, as much from shock as pain, sucked at the air. My eyes sprang open instinctively, but I wished they hadn’t, because he was staring right back at me, and I could see he was enjoying my fear.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’ Evan slaps his hand down on the table, causing it to jolt. The tea judders in the mugs, the haphazardly piled magazines slip a fraction. I swallow and stare at him.
‘Please don’t.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I won’t tell you any more if you are going to act like this.’
‘No, really, I’m sorry.’
‘And you can’t pity me.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Dora. Look at you. How could I not? Everyone pities someone. It’s a good thing. It keeps us humane. It propels us towards empathy and charity.’
‘Or superciliousness and arrogance.’
‘Why do you always have to make everything so complex?’
‘Because everything is,’ I mutter. I stay silent. I’m scared. He thinks I’m sulking.
‘Look, I’ll try and muster a response that you think is appropriate,’ he says, biting back his frustration, ‘Just go on. Please.’
The please is painfully authentic. ‘I kicked and struggled, but he easily overpowered me. I mean, he was twice my size and my hands were tied. Hardly a fair fight, I think you’ll agree. He cuffed my ankles together so I could do little else than squirm away from him. But not far enough away from him.’ I take a drag on the cigarette, hold the smoke in my lungs until it hurts; one pain distracting me from another. A life philosophy?
‘Did you call out for help? Did anyone help?’
I glare at him. I don’t like the implication that I could have helped myself more, avoided this. He reads my expression correctly.
‘Sorry, sorry.’
‘Yes, I called out, but he clamped his hand over my mouth as soon as I did. I tried to bite him, but he said he’d kill me if I made any noise. I believed him.’
Evan reaches for my hand as I tap the ash into a discarded Diet Coke can. He squeezes it, carefully. ‘Of course, who wouldn’t believe him. This is not your fault.’
I pull away from him, irritated. I don’t think this is my fault, I haven’t thought so for a moment. ‘Anyway, then he gagged me. A gag and two set of cuffs makes me think that this was a thought-through attack. Even something that he’s done before, maybe several times.’
There are men out there who hate women who do what I do, or who don’t value us at all – not even enough to hate us. Quite a lot of men think that way; some think they have the right to hurt us, even kill us.
‘And then he lost control?’ Evan asks.
I shake my head. ‘It wasn’t a frenzied attack. That was what was most scary. I don’t know how long it lasted. The blows were spaced out, a minute between each. Less? More? Enough time to register the pain, and most cruelly, believe it might stop, only to feel another punch.’
The pain of each stike was excruciating. I remembered falling from a swing as a child, landing on my knees, hurt and shock invading my body, leaving me breathless. It was like that, over and over again. I became conscious of every individual cell and blood vessel bruising or bursting, each nerve ending anticipating, then taking, a blow. I could hear and feel my heart thumping thunderously in my ears.
‘I scrambled about as much as the restraints would permit, trying to avoid the blows. I tucked my head into my chest to create a protective ball, but he just punched my ribs and spine.’ Evan’s hand is quivering. I get the sense he wants to rain down punches of his own. ‘I closed my eyes and kept them squeezed shut throughout, so he was at least denied the pleasure of seeing my fear.’ I don’t tell Evan that at one point I took myself outside my body. It’s a trick I employ sometimes when I’m on the job. I imagine looking down on myself, as though whatever is happening is happening to someone else. It helped. I was able to tell her – the woman it was happening to – that it was going to be OK, that she’d get through it. But I couldn’t maintain the illusion for long. With each additional hefty punch, I violently re-entered my body. The pain was searing. Outrageous. ‘Have you ever been in a fight Evan? Ever been punched?’
‘No. Only accidentally on the rugby pitch.’ He looks embarrassed, but I’m glad. ‘Did he speak to you?’
‘No,’ I lie. ‘Just when I thought it was never going to stop, it did. He got dressed and then unlocked the cuffs. Left.’
‘Just like that?’ Evan is incredulous.
‘There’s no accounting.’ I trust Evan, like him better than every other being on the planet, but I can’t tell him the scariest part of all. I just can’t. If I repeat what my attacker said, the words will gather more power. I want to silence him. I want to ignore him. Deny him. Forget him. Only I can’t. His words keep going around and around my head. You disgust me. Stop what you are doing. Stop it now. Or next time will be worse. Next time will be the last time. I shudder. ‘Can we talk about something else now?’ I ask.
Evan eyes me carefully. ‘Yes, actually I do have something totally different to talk to you about. Are you up for a gentle walk?’
6
Dora
It feels surprisingly good to be out of the flat. To have fresh air brush my face. Well, as fresh as the air ever is in London. I spend a lot of time indoors. In hotel rooms, exerting myself. In my flat, preparing for that exertion or recuperating from it. In bars, restaurants, at parties. It surprises people to discover that I grew up on a farm in the north of England. I don’t miss it. I like being behind closed doors. My flat is above a dry cleaner’s, which means all the rooms are constantly infused with a particular, peculiar chemical smell. Most people don’t like the smell, but I am OK with it. I like any smells associated with cleaning: Pledge, Cif, Flash, Ariel, they lift me the way Jo Malone Lime and Basil might bring joy to another woman. Besides, because the flat is over a dry cleaner’s, it fell within my budget.
It has original features – beautiful high ceilings, wooden floorboards and elegant fireplaces – but the bathroom and kitchen are modern. Perfect. I own it. To be exact, I own about seven per cent of it and the rest is covered by an enormous mortgage, but it is mine in name and that’s important to me. Vital. I’m someone a lot of people think they own. They are all wrong. I’m my own boss, and the flat reminds me as much. I never take clients there; even Elspeth doesn’t have this address. It’s my sanctuary, and I don’t use that word lightly, especially on a day like today. I’ve painted it in dark Farrow & Ball shades and maxed out on velvet curtains, cushions, sofas, chairs in dark blue, jade and plum. My inspirational Pinterest board is basically Moulin Rouge meets Folies Bergère. I live near King’s Cross, and whilst the area has undergone extensive redevelopment in recent years, to purge it of its less salubrious connotations, sometimes it crosses my mind that I couldn’t really be more of a cliché unless I chose to live in Soho.
Evan and I head for Granary Square. Don’t think green and leafy; it’s a series of concrete steps flowing onto a concrete square, but its super-stylish and there’s a brilliant coffee shop nestled amongst the bars and restaurants that Evan swears sells the best coffee in London. I buy the coffees. We take turns, because I’m always having to remind Evan that he shouldn’t pay for other people’s stuff. It can ruin a friendship. When I say as much, he laughs and says he wouldn’t have friends if he didn’t pay for other people’s stuff. He would, though, he’d have me. ‘What can I say?’ he jokes. ‘I like being liked, it’s my modus operandi. Without external approval, I’d have to depend on self-worth; it’s exhausting always having to come up with that.’
We settle down with our coffees and watch kids duck and dive in and out of the jets of water that come up from underground. The children seem to love the element of surprise, and the fact that they often get caught out by the sequencing of the flow and end up soaked; personally, I like my fountains to work with gravity and flow downwards.
‘Shouldn’t you be at work today?’ I ask. Evan has a very loose relationship with his contractual working hours. It’s a perk of being the boss’s son.
‘They can call me if anything urgent crops up.’
They won’t, though. If there’s a problem, his underlings, or even his (nominal) boss, will sort it without bothering him. Evan doesn’t have a clue how much he is protected. It’s not his fault. It’s just the way it is. He was born into extreme wealth, privilege, but he had no more control over that than I had over being born to a poor family in a country that no longer exists. My family owned a newspaper kiosk and made a living selling comics and newspapers in Yugoslavia until around my first birthday, when war meant they were forced to flee. They were lucky to find asylum in England.
I don’t remember living anywhere other than here – this is my home – but my parents always had an aura of displacement about them. Not that they were made to feel unwelcome here. They were, if not welcomed, then certainly treated with a sort of apathetic tolerance; it’s simply that learning a new language and culture is exhausting and relentless. Truthfully, they never seemed to fully commit to Britain. Wouldn’t? Couldn’t? I don’t know, but they didn’t. They missed their old life, the friends and relatives they’d left behind. I grew up to a chorus of sentimental (no doubt rose-tinted) reminiscing. They talked of their old home with such wistful joy: the summers spent at the lakes or mountains, the winters in the city, pastries and grilled meats that were apparently beyond compare. I was always vaguely embarrassed when my father played the gajde (it’s a sort of bagpipe), and I wondered why, let alone how, they’d managed to bring it with them when they left their homeland in such a hurry. They tried to speak to me in their mother tongue, but I would always reply in English. I know this frustrated them, perhaps hurt them, so I made up by being an extremely studious child, grabbing every opportunity offered at the local schools that did well on the Ofsted reports. I became that cliché – the driven immigrant, determined, bright, dirt poor but with big dreams.
My father died of a heart attack when I was seventeen; my mother moved to Serbia not long after. I refused to go with her, because whilst my parents had been waxing lyrical about delicious baklava that melts in your mouth, I followed the trials of the war criminals on the news and in the broadsheets. The most recent estimates suggest that around one hundred thousand people were killed during the war we ran from. Over two million people were displaced. Horrendous. Obviously. No words. But the thing I read that disturbed me the most was that an estimated twelve to fifty thousand women were raped during the war. Brutalising women is not a new weapon of war, but what bothered me particularly was the discrepancy in the estimate, the scarcity of actual reporting. I was afraid of going to a country where women couldn’t say what was done to them. So I stayed here. See how that’s working out for me. #Peachy. I take a deep breath and a bruise on my ribs twinges.
Safe to say, Evan and I have had vastly different formative experiences. He has never been hungry, forced to eat cheap, tasteless, nutrition-free crap. He once told me that on his seventeenth birthday, his father gifted him a brand-new BMW. It cost over twenty-five thousand pounds. He wrote it off just three weeks after passing his driving test because he was driving at speed on a narrow, bendy country road. The important thing to take from the story is that Evan’s father said Evan was in no way to blame for the accident; it was all his fault as he shouldn’t have gifted a kid such a powerful car. Like any right-thinking parent, he maintained that the important thing was that Evan had walked away unhurt. The following week, he bought Evan another car. It was a more expensive model, but he did insist on putting a speed tracker on it. I bet he slept well that night, congratulating himself on his brilliant parenting. Evan is three and a half years younger than I am, so at the point when he was first running cars off the road, I was just twenty-one, had dropped out of drama school and was already turning tricks. Sorry for the dated expression; it’s hard to be woke about selling sex.
Evan went to a good school. His words. Rich, posh people refer to schools with their own ski chalets, theatres, groundsmen and chapels as ‘good’; the rest of us would call them ‘un-fucking-believable’. He got decent A levels – decent, not brilliant – and went to university, where he drank a yard of beer on a regular basis, played rugby for his hall of residence and had sex with a lot of hopeful, excitable young women who had attended schools similar to his. He didn’t feel under any urgent pressure to get a first or a 2:1, he did not have to fight and claw his way through the ferocious, endless competition to get onto a graduate scheme. He knew when he left university that he had a job at his father’s company waiting for him. More than that, one day the company would be his if he wanted it and didn’t completely fuck up. Sometimes Evan says he isn’t really that interested in property and that he’s a bit bored. He expresses a wish that his father was involved in something ‘sexy’ like film or social media. When he says this sort of thing, I have to concentrate really hard on not rolling my eyes. Instead, I suggest he tries to find work in one of those fields if they interest him more. ‘Good idea,’ he comments. ‘Maybe I’ll ask Dad if he knows anyone.’ I know, jaw-drop. He doesn’t even do that, though. It’s not his fault. Not really. It’s just his norm.
Besides the job, when he turned twenty-one he was handed a literal key to the door. The door of a two-bedroom penthouse apartment in central London that his father apparently described as ‘a decent starter flat’. My guess, it cost close to two million. Evan was also given a shitload of money to help cover the bills (in case the salary he earned and the rent he charged his mate who had the other bedroom wasn’t enough). Here is something we should all keep in mind. I had a psychologist client who once told me that there’s a bit of our brains (I think it’s called the prefrontal cortex) that helps us make responsible decisions. Imagine, a specific bit of the brain devoted to that function. Here’s the thing, though, that bit does not fully develop until we are twenty-five years old. Twenty-five. WTF? Come on, evolution, catch up. Twenty-five years old is too late.
Like, for me. As if I had any choice by then.
For Evan? Well, let’s just say he had enough resources and space to really fuck up by twenty-five, so it’s to his credit that he didn’t kill himself or anyone else. He could have. He has enough money to give him licence to do anything. But then I suppose even killing someone wouldn’t be an insurmountable problem. He would always be able to bail himself out of jail, hire a cracking lawyer, and even if he did end up in prison, I guess he’d pay other cons to make his life more bearable inside. The only thing stopping men as wealthy as Evan from doing vicious, terrible things is their sense of decency and decorum, maybe a concern for reputation. His family’s, if not his own.
Evan didn’t kill anyone. He just partied. Hard. So, well done, Evan.
Evan’s father has offices all over the world, and so when we first met, Evan glided from London to New York to Hong Kong to Sydney. First-class flights all the way. There were token business meetings in boardrooms at the top of skyscrapers, and profound parties in bedrooms at the top of luxury hotels. The parties were fuelled by alcohol, drugs and women; some of whom were possibly paid to be there, whether Evan was aware of it or not. At the time, he described the parties as ‘awesome’ and considered them his birthright. He is not wrong about that exactly, which shows we live in a fucked-up world.
Sometimes he asked me to go with him on these business trips. I always refused. ‘I can’t afford the time off,’ I would point out.
‘I’ll pay for your time.’
‘You’ll hire me?’
‘Not for sex, for your company. Just so you can have a holiday but you’re not out of pocket.’
‘Busman’s holiday going to parties with creepy businessmen.’
‘We wouldn’t have to party. We could see the sights.’
‘No thanks.’
I get the feeling Evan is tiring of the parties now. The pandemic put an end to his days (and nights) of bouncing from one continent to the next. Like nearly everyone, he was tasked with working from home, which made it more apparent that little of his working day involved actual work. Quite quickly he settled into a routine that meant he spent his mornings juicing kale and celery and flicking through his phone, smirking at not-that-funny memes. In the afternoons, he’d lift weights or maybe do an online yoga class with me. At his suggestion, we were in one another’s support bubble throughout all the lockdowns. Thank God. I don’t think I could have endured a year of seeing no one other than men who paid. The pandemic has been hard on sex workers, even top-of-the-range ones like me. The better clients followed government rules and recommendations and decided that meeting hookers, which might lead to infecting their wives with a deadly disease, a step too far. That left us with the less thoughtful clients. Bear in mind, I’m dredging a very shallow pool. Evan and I played drinking games together, we worked our way through a fairly complex soupology recipe book, and we did a few thousand-piece jigsaws.
By the time he was finally able to return to the office, he’d changed. He didn’t rush back to partying; instead he began limiting drink to weekends only and not doing drugs at all. He demonstrated a keenness to be productive that had been notably lacking in the past. His colleagues don’t actively depend on him, because he is still inclined to go AWOL, either to visit me or go shopping or indulge in a very long lunch (either with or without a client), but nor do they dismiss him entirely. It’s progress.
I roll my eyes and he concedes the point. It isn’t the moment to point out I might die a slow, horrible death, since we are both scared shitless that I might die a sudden, horrible one. He fishes around in his jacket pockets and pulls out a packet of Lucky Strikes. The only brand he ever smokes. He once told me that in the 1920s, Lucky Strikes were marketed as a symbol of female liberation. Young women were encouraged to light up their ‘Torches of Freedom’. Cigarettes were an emblem of women’s aspirations for equality and a better life. Ha ha, the irony. He lights one, hands it to me. As I inhale deeply, he lights another for himself.
‘He had big hands and the first punch landed on my ear and jaw.’ I make a little motion to point to the injury. Silly really. Evan knows where my ear is. ‘I screamed, as much from shock as pain, sucked at the air. My eyes sprang open instinctively, but I wished they hadn’t, because he was staring right back at me, and I could see he was enjoying my fear.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’ Evan slaps his hand down on the table, causing it to jolt. The tea judders in the mugs, the haphazardly piled magazines slip a fraction. I swallow and stare at him.
‘Please don’t.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I won’t tell you any more if you are going to act like this.’
‘No, really, I’m sorry.’
‘And you can’t pity me.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Dora. Look at you. How could I not? Everyone pities someone. It’s a good thing. It keeps us humane. It propels us towards empathy and charity.’
‘Or superciliousness and arrogance.’
‘Why do you always have to make everything so complex?’
‘Because everything is,’ I mutter. I stay silent. I’m scared. He thinks I’m sulking.
‘Look, I’ll try and muster a response that you think is appropriate,’ he says, biting back his frustration, ‘Just go on. Please.’
The please is painfully authentic. ‘I kicked and struggled, but he easily overpowered me. I mean, he was twice my size and my hands were tied. Hardly a fair fight, I think you’ll agree. He cuffed my ankles together so I could do little else than squirm away from him. But not far enough away from him.’ I take a drag on the cigarette, hold the smoke in my lungs until it hurts; one pain distracting me from another. A life philosophy?
‘Did you call out for help? Did anyone help?’
I glare at him. I don’t like the implication that I could have helped myself more, avoided this. He reads my expression correctly.
‘Sorry, sorry.’
‘Yes, I called out, but he clamped his hand over my mouth as soon as I did. I tried to bite him, but he said he’d kill me if I made any noise. I believed him.’
Evan reaches for my hand as I tap the ash into a discarded Diet Coke can. He squeezes it, carefully. ‘Of course, who wouldn’t believe him. This is not your fault.’
I pull away from him, irritated. I don’t think this is my fault, I haven’t thought so for a moment. ‘Anyway, then he gagged me. A gag and two set of cuffs makes me think that this was a thought-through attack. Even something that he’s done before, maybe several times.’
There are men out there who hate women who do what I do, or who don’t value us at all – not even enough to hate us. Quite a lot of men think that way; some think they have the right to hurt us, even kill us.
‘And then he lost control?’ Evan asks.
I shake my head. ‘It wasn’t a frenzied attack. That was what was most scary. I don’t know how long it lasted. The blows were spaced out, a minute between each. Less? More? Enough time to register the pain, and most cruelly, believe it might stop, only to feel another punch.’
The pain of each stike was excruciating. I remembered falling from a swing as a child, landing on my knees, hurt and shock invading my body, leaving me breathless. It was like that, over and over again. I became conscious of every individual cell and blood vessel bruising or bursting, each nerve ending anticipating, then taking, a blow. I could hear and feel my heart thumping thunderously in my ears.
‘I scrambled about as much as the restraints would permit, trying to avoid the blows. I tucked my head into my chest to create a protective ball, but he just punched my ribs and spine.’ Evan’s hand is quivering. I get the sense he wants to rain down punches of his own. ‘I closed my eyes and kept them squeezed shut throughout, so he was at least denied the pleasure of seeing my fear.’ I don’t tell Evan that at one point I took myself outside my body. It’s a trick I employ sometimes when I’m on the job. I imagine looking down on myself, as though whatever is happening is happening to someone else. It helped. I was able to tell her – the woman it was happening to – that it was going to be OK, that she’d get through it. But I couldn’t maintain the illusion for long. With each additional hefty punch, I violently re-entered my body. The pain was searing. Outrageous. ‘Have you ever been in a fight Evan? Ever been punched?’
‘No. Only accidentally on the rugby pitch.’ He looks embarrassed, but I’m glad. ‘Did he speak to you?’
‘No,’ I lie. ‘Just when I thought it was never going to stop, it did. He got dressed and then unlocked the cuffs. Left.’
‘Just like that?’ Evan is incredulous.
‘There’s no accounting.’ I trust Evan, like him better than every other being on the planet, but I can’t tell him the scariest part of all. I just can’t. If I repeat what my attacker said, the words will gather more power. I want to silence him. I want to ignore him. Deny him. Forget him. Only I can’t. His words keep going around and around my head. You disgust me. Stop what you are doing. Stop it now. Or next time will be worse. Next time will be the last time. I shudder. ‘Can we talk about something else now?’ I ask.
Evan eyes me carefully. ‘Yes, actually I do have something totally different to talk to you about. Are you up for a gentle walk?’
6
Dora
It feels surprisingly good to be out of the flat. To have fresh air brush my face. Well, as fresh as the air ever is in London. I spend a lot of time indoors. In hotel rooms, exerting myself. In my flat, preparing for that exertion or recuperating from it. In bars, restaurants, at parties. It surprises people to discover that I grew up on a farm in the north of England. I don’t miss it. I like being behind closed doors. My flat is above a dry cleaner’s, which means all the rooms are constantly infused with a particular, peculiar chemical smell. Most people don’t like the smell, but I am OK with it. I like any smells associated with cleaning: Pledge, Cif, Flash, Ariel, they lift me the way Jo Malone Lime and Basil might bring joy to another woman. Besides, because the flat is over a dry cleaner’s, it fell within my budget.
It has original features – beautiful high ceilings, wooden floorboards and elegant fireplaces – but the bathroom and kitchen are modern. Perfect. I own it. To be exact, I own about seven per cent of it and the rest is covered by an enormous mortgage, but it is mine in name and that’s important to me. Vital. I’m someone a lot of people think they own. They are all wrong. I’m my own boss, and the flat reminds me as much. I never take clients there; even Elspeth doesn’t have this address. It’s my sanctuary, and I don’t use that word lightly, especially on a day like today. I’ve painted it in dark Farrow & Ball shades and maxed out on velvet curtains, cushions, sofas, chairs in dark blue, jade and plum. My inspirational Pinterest board is basically Moulin Rouge meets Folies Bergère. I live near King’s Cross, and whilst the area has undergone extensive redevelopment in recent years, to purge it of its less salubrious connotations, sometimes it crosses my mind that I couldn’t really be more of a cliché unless I chose to live in Soho.
Evan and I head for Granary Square. Don’t think green and leafy; it’s a series of concrete steps flowing onto a concrete square, but its super-stylish and there’s a brilliant coffee shop nestled amongst the bars and restaurants that Evan swears sells the best coffee in London. I buy the coffees. We take turns, because I’m always having to remind Evan that he shouldn’t pay for other people’s stuff. It can ruin a friendship. When I say as much, he laughs and says he wouldn’t have friends if he didn’t pay for other people’s stuff. He would, though, he’d have me. ‘What can I say?’ he jokes. ‘I like being liked, it’s my modus operandi. Without external approval, I’d have to depend on self-worth; it’s exhausting always having to come up with that.’
We settle down with our coffees and watch kids duck and dive in and out of the jets of water that come up from underground. The children seem to love the element of surprise, and the fact that they often get caught out by the sequencing of the flow and end up soaked; personally, I like my fountains to work with gravity and flow downwards.
‘Shouldn’t you be at work today?’ I ask. Evan has a very loose relationship with his contractual working hours. It’s a perk of being the boss’s son.
‘They can call me if anything urgent crops up.’
They won’t, though. If there’s a problem, his underlings, or even his (nominal) boss, will sort it without bothering him. Evan doesn’t have a clue how much he is protected. It’s not his fault. It’s just the way it is. He was born into extreme wealth, privilege, but he had no more control over that than I had over being born to a poor family in a country that no longer exists. My family owned a newspaper kiosk and made a living selling comics and newspapers in Yugoslavia until around my first birthday, when war meant they were forced to flee. They were lucky to find asylum in England.
I don’t remember living anywhere other than here – this is my home – but my parents always had an aura of displacement about them. Not that they were made to feel unwelcome here. They were, if not welcomed, then certainly treated with a sort of apathetic tolerance; it’s simply that learning a new language and culture is exhausting and relentless. Truthfully, they never seemed to fully commit to Britain. Wouldn’t? Couldn’t? I don’t know, but they didn’t. They missed their old life, the friends and relatives they’d left behind. I grew up to a chorus of sentimental (no doubt rose-tinted) reminiscing. They talked of their old home with such wistful joy: the summers spent at the lakes or mountains, the winters in the city, pastries and grilled meats that were apparently beyond compare. I was always vaguely embarrassed when my father played the gajde (it’s a sort of bagpipe), and I wondered why, let alone how, they’d managed to bring it with them when they left their homeland in such a hurry. They tried to speak to me in their mother tongue, but I would always reply in English. I know this frustrated them, perhaps hurt them, so I made up by being an extremely studious child, grabbing every opportunity offered at the local schools that did well on the Ofsted reports. I became that cliché – the driven immigrant, determined, bright, dirt poor but with big dreams.
My father died of a heart attack when I was seventeen; my mother moved to Serbia not long after. I refused to go with her, because whilst my parents had been waxing lyrical about delicious baklava that melts in your mouth, I followed the trials of the war criminals on the news and in the broadsheets. The most recent estimates suggest that around one hundred thousand people were killed during the war we ran from. Over two million people were displaced. Horrendous. Obviously. No words. But the thing I read that disturbed me the most was that an estimated twelve to fifty thousand women were raped during the war. Brutalising women is not a new weapon of war, but what bothered me particularly was the discrepancy in the estimate, the scarcity of actual reporting. I was afraid of going to a country where women couldn’t say what was done to them. So I stayed here. See how that’s working out for me. #Peachy. I take a deep breath and a bruise on my ribs twinges.
Safe to say, Evan and I have had vastly different formative experiences. He has never been hungry, forced to eat cheap, tasteless, nutrition-free crap. He once told me that on his seventeenth birthday, his father gifted him a brand-new BMW. It cost over twenty-five thousand pounds. He wrote it off just three weeks after passing his driving test because he was driving at speed on a narrow, bendy country road. The important thing to take from the story is that Evan’s father said Evan was in no way to blame for the accident; it was all his fault as he shouldn’t have gifted a kid such a powerful car. Like any right-thinking parent, he maintained that the important thing was that Evan had walked away unhurt. The following week, he bought Evan another car. It was a more expensive model, but he did insist on putting a speed tracker on it. I bet he slept well that night, congratulating himself on his brilliant parenting. Evan is three and a half years younger than I am, so at the point when he was first running cars off the road, I was just twenty-one, had dropped out of drama school and was already turning tricks. Sorry for the dated expression; it’s hard to be woke about selling sex.
Evan went to a good school. His words. Rich, posh people refer to schools with their own ski chalets, theatres, groundsmen and chapels as ‘good’; the rest of us would call them ‘un-fucking-believable’. He got decent A levels – decent, not brilliant – and went to university, where he drank a yard of beer on a regular basis, played rugby for his hall of residence and had sex with a lot of hopeful, excitable young women who had attended schools similar to his. He didn’t feel under any urgent pressure to get a first or a 2:1, he did not have to fight and claw his way through the ferocious, endless competition to get onto a graduate scheme. He knew when he left university that he had a job at his father’s company waiting for him. More than that, one day the company would be his if he wanted it and didn’t completely fuck up. Sometimes Evan says he isn’t really that interested in property and that he’s a bit bored. He expresses a wish that his father was involved in something ‘sexy’ like film or social media. When he says this sort of thing, I have to concentrate really hard on not rolling my eyes. Instead, I suggest he tries to find work in one of those fields if they interest him more. ‘Good idea,’ he comments. ‘Maybe I’ll ask Dad if he knows anyone.’ I know, jaw-drop. He doesn’t even do that, though. It’s not his fault. Not really. It’s just his norm.
Besides the job, when he turned twenty-one he was handed a literal key to the door. The door of a two-bedroom penthouse apartment in central London that his father apparently described as ‘a decent starter flat’. My guess, it cost close to two million. Evan was also given a shitload of money to help cover the bills (in case the salary he earned and the rent he charged his mate who had the other bedroom wasn’t enough). Here is something we should all keep in mind. I had a psychologist client who once told me that there’s a bit of our brains (I think it’s called the prefrontal cortex) that helps us make responsible decisions. Imagine, a specific bit of the brain devoted to that function. Here’s the thing, though, that bit does not fully develop until we are twenty-five years old. Twenty-five. WTF? Come on, evolution, catch up. Twenty-five years old is too late.
Like, for me. As if I had any choice by then.
For Evan? Well, let’s just say he had enough resources and space to really fuck up by twenty-five, so it’s to his credit that he didn’t kill himself or anyone else. He could have. He has enough money to give him licence to do anything. But then I suppose even killing someone wouldn’t be an insurmountable problem. He would always be able to bail himself out of jail, hire a cracking lawyer, and even if he did end up in prison, I guess he’d pay other cons to make his life more bearable inside. The only thing stopping men as wealthy as Evan from doing vicious, terrible things is their sense of decency and decorum, maybe a concern for reputation. His family’s, if not his own.
Evan didn’t kill anyone. He just partied. Hard. So, well done, Evan.
Evan’s father has offices all over the world, and so when we first met, Evan glided from London to New York to Hong Kong to Sydney. First-class flights all the way. There were token business meetings in boardrooms at the top of skyscrapers, and profound parties in bedrooms at the top of luxury hotels. The parties were fuelled by alcohol, drugs and women; some of whom were possibly paid to be there, whether Evan was aware of it or not. At the time, he described the parties as ‘awesome’ and considered them his birthright. He is not wrong about that exactly, which shows we live in a fucked-up world.
Sometimes he asked me to go with him on these business trips. I always refused. ‘I can’t afford the time off,’ I would point out.
‘I’ll pay for your time.’
‘You’ll hire me?’
‘Not for sex, for your company. Just so you can have a holiday but you’re not out of pocket.’
‘Busman’s holiday going to parties with creepy businessmen.’
‘We wouldn’t have to party. We could see the sights.’
‘No thanks.’
I get the feeling Evan is tiring of the parties now. The pandemic put an end to his days (and nights) of bouncing from one continent to the next. Like nearly everyone, he was tasked with working from home, which made it more apparent that little of his working day involved actual work. Quite quickly he settled into a routine that meant he spent his mornings juicing kale and celery and flicking through his phone, smirking at not-that-funny memes. In the afternoons, he’d lift weights or maybe do an online yoga class with me. At his suggestion, we were in one another’s support bubble throughout all the lockdowns. Thank God. I don’t think I could have endured a year of seeing no one other than men who paid. The pandemic has been hard on sex workers, even top-of-the-range ones like me. The better clients followed government rules and recommendations and decided that meeting hookers, which might lead to infecting their wives with a deadly disease, a step too far. That left us with the less thoughtful clients. Bear in mind, I’m dredging a very shallow pool. Evan and I played drinking games together, we worked our way through a fairly complex soupology recipe book, and we did a few thousand-piece jigsaws.
By the time he was finally able to return to the office, he’d changed. He didn’t rush back to partying; instead he began limiting drink to weekends only and not doing drugs at all. He demonstrated a keenness to be productive that had been notably lacking in the past. His colleagues don’t actively depend on him, because he is still inclined to go AWOL, either to visit me or go shopping or indulge in a very long lunch (either with or without a client), but nor do they dismiss him entirely. It’s progress.
