The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (18 page)

'I'll listen to anything, except country and western.'

What, a life without Dolly? Without Patsy? The Flying Burrito Brothers? Admittedly the current crop of Nashville output is appallingly samey, but to write off the likes of Wilco and Lambchop altogether? To paraphrase the country and western diva, I waxed my legs for this?

jeudi, le 12 fevrier

In a taxi, sort of drowsing off in the back. I'd had the sort of day when you wake up already tired and it never quite comes together from there. My phone rang.

'Darling, I hope you're okay.' It was the manager. I'd forgotten to alert her on leaving the last client.

'Sorry, yes, I'm fine.' The taxi sped north, the streets were quiet.

'Everything was fine, he was very nice.'

'You always say they're very nice. You sound so happy.'

'Happy? I suppose so. I'm not unhappy.' I mean, the man was troll‐like, but she's not interested in knowing.

'That's because you haven't experienced any aggression in the job yet.'

I laughed. Compared to real relationships, these men are absolute pussycats, and easily pleased pussycats at that. Even sleepy and disconnected, nothing I couldn't handle –

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so far. 'I suppose it just shows how well you take care of me,' I said.

Arrived home soon after and went to bed. I had my phone under my pillow just in case as I was expecting another call. It rang around midnight.

'Darling, are you still up? Can you do another appointment?'

'Mrrrrrf arrrrrm mmmmmmmpf fhmmmmmm.'

'Okay, you get some sleep. Stay happy, darling.'

vendredi, le 13 fevrier

Usually I hold fairly positive opinions on clients ‐ being as they are the water that floats my soap, and usually pleasant enough in a ships‐passing‐in‐the‐night kind of way. If someone waxes fanatical on the charms of his school nurse circa 1978, for instance, or insists on making me read out the newspaper in a fnar‐fnar porny voice while he imagines he is having Fiona Bruce up the backside, I just steel myself and get on with it. But some things are beyond the pale. Some things chill me to the bone.

Referring to yesterday's hotel visit as 'afternoon delight', for instance. For the love of Harvey N, man, have you no taste whatsoever?

samedi, le 14 fevrier

But of course, the manager is wrong. I am not all that happy. 'Tis the blessed season of togetherness, when we honour the anniversary of the beheading of a Christian saint by exchanging overpriced tat.

The crass and obvious fakery of the Valentine h 149

powerful enough to get even me down. It's not simply the fact of being alone, though I am not technically alone ‐ in London, you really never are ‐ I have friends aplenty and work enough. No, it's more the smug mutual pampering couples get to experience.

I don't begrudge anyone their good time. I've been known to smile at couples canoodling on the tube while pregnant women and little old ladies are forced to stand. If you have an other, significant or somewhat less than, I wholeheartedly encourage you to lavish one another with lurve on that day.

What gets my goat is the shameless cashing‐in by manicurists, hair stylists and purveyors of raunchy lingerie. I make an effort to keep myself baby smooth and silkily attired at all points in the year, and what's my reward? Nothing. Book a spoil‐yourself spa weekend for two in February, though, and it's discounts ahoy.

Ahem. I think I deserve a little better here. Sure, Valentine's may be the lifestyle economy's equivalent of Christmas, but how about lending some sugar to the peeps who keep you float the rest of the year?

I brought up the subject with the woman lately charged with waxing my bush. She wasn't impressed by the logic.

dimanche, le 15 fevrier

Having very little else to do of a weekend, I went to visit N's mum.

She's an excellent woman, robust of mind and body, and lately widowed. It seemed appropriate to spend Valentine's Day with someone whose attitude toward men is 'Don't worry, dear ‐ by the time you find a good one they just up and die on you anyway.'

She has been thinking of selling the family house now that all her children are grown and she is alone.

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'It must seem quite empty now,' I said carefully. One never knows just how far and how quickly one's foot can enter one's mouth when conversing with the elderly.

'Not at all,' she said. 'I have the little ghosts, you see.'

'Of course you do,' I said. Dappy old bird. I thought nothing more of it.

Later we went for a walk round her block. It's in a neglected village north of London that has never been fashionable, where there is still a local butcher (and not selling organic free‐range cilantro and Tamworth pork sausage to the gourmands‐come-lately, either), where the pubs are still locals and not jockeying for the attention of Miche‐lin and Egon Ronay and the residents drive normal‐sized cars and not Land Rover behemoths, or more shocking still, use public transport. In short, the sticks. And quite lovely for it.

We wittered around in the corner shop and bought a paper and sandwiches. I insisted we get two fairy cakes from the bakery with pink icing and a little plastic heart pressed in the tops. We went further, down to a cemetery. The weather wasn't great, a bit grey and blowy, but there was a touch of blue making its way through the sky. N's mum sat heavily on a stone bench next to a memorial.

'Go on, read it.'

I did. A family ‐ father, mother and four girls ‐ their names and dates of birth and death inscribed in the curly lettering of the early Victorian. 'Do you notice anything?' she said.

'They all died on the same day. Some sort of accident?'

'A fire,' she said. 'In the house where I live now.' A white‐haired lady walking a terrier paused nearby. She waved at N's mum while her doggie soiled the eternal memory of some decorated officer.

'They were asleep the whole time.'

'You're having me on,' I said. But I couldn't help 151

imagining a bed of little girls, their blankets and winceyette pyjamas catching fire. A fate we have eliminated, presumably, with central heating and flameproof furniture. The sort of thing that only happens now when a near‐bankrupt father goes off the rails and does his whole family in.

'When you wake up tomorrow, come down to the kitchen and see if it doesn't smell of smoke.'

'How do I know that's not just you burning the toast?' I smiled.

'It's not,' she said. 'It's four little ghosts, who never even woke up.' We walked home and read the paper and ate our sandwiches.

I texted N to say I was having a nice time with his mother and secretly wondered whether I'd be able to sleep the night. Every crack of a twig and whip of wind outside sounded like a growing flame, every few minutes I sat up in bed, convinced the air smelled of fire.

Woke to a smoke‐free kitchen and text: 'Enjoy the weekend.

Don't let her start telling ghost stories. Nx'

lundi, le 16 fevrier

A knock at the door this morning as I was drying my hair. It was one of the builders, holding a single pink rose. 'Er, um,' he said, charmingly.

'Is that for me?' I asked. The builders were meant to be finished by now, but there have been problems with the new dishwasher that they are either loath to describe to a delicate constitution such as mine, or are incapable of putting into words. Their morning requirement of tea and vague assurances that it will all be finished soon ate becoming permanent features of my homelife. If one decided to cement our union I'm not sure I would be able to discourage him, except by engineering a tea shortage.

'How very sweet.'

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'It's not from me,' he insisted. 'I mean, I mean . . . it's not from me, someone said to give it to you.' 'Lovely. And is there a note?'

'Didn't see one.'

'Whom did you say this was from again?'

'Dunno.' He thought a moment, scratching his chin with the tube of plastic wrapped round the rosebud. 'Some bloke?'

'And what did he look like?' 'Average size?'

It's good to know their general vagueness is not just an act to secure tea privileges. I suspected plumbing for more detail, such as whether the suitor came on foot or by car, would be met with similarly useless information. 'Well, thank you for delivering it,' I said, taking charge of the flower. The builder turned and trundled off to his van. I noticed the plastic bore a sticker from the florist and fruiterer around the corner so no clues there. Given the turnover of customers they must have this week, I can't imagine the staff would remember who purchased the rose, either.

I have queried all reasonable candidates but no one will claim responsibility for the gesture. It therefore follows that I must have a stalker, but as it is a good time of year for stalkers, I'll let it go for now. Who said romance was dead?

mardi, le 17 fevrier

By 1992 I had been studying French for six years. I was never much good at it. We never read anything interesting at school. I had a Canadian friend, Francoise, who told me Marguerite Duras was

'sexy'. So I bought a copy of the shortest of her books I could find, because my French was

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rather poor and I had stopped enjoying translating. The book was
L'Amant.

Translations are a lot like pasta. At first, because you don't know anything, you'll buy whatever's on offer. Audio‐book of Keith Harris reading Gunther Grass? Sure. Comic book version of
The Iliad}
Hit me. But the more of a taste you get for the originals, the more demanding you become. You try your hand at a simple translation, armed with only the basic kitchen essentials, and the result is not bad. Your friends are impressed. To be honest, so are you. You invest a little more time and effort, and the returns are positive. Finally you go all out on the pasta‐maker / Oxford Classical Grammar and turn into a one‐woman spaghetti / translation machine. You buy the supplementary books, join the appreciation societies and watch the right programmes. Then you realise how time‐consuming your interest is, and worse, how much of a bore your friends think you are, going on about oo graded semolina / Hesse in the original German like it mattered.

You let it slide. Those who don't, end up doing it professionally or soon find themselves the social equivalent of a hand grenade at any party.

But even when you give up on making your own pasta /

translating from the original, you have just enough knowledge to ruin the thing you enjoyed in the first place. You'll never enjoy

'just' a bowl of pasta, 'just' a nice book to read. Neither tastes very good when it's bland, cardboardy, off‐the‐shelf, sanitised for Western Europe rubbish. So I bought
L'Amant
in French to see if I could read it. Also, it was the only version that did not advertise the film on the book cover. Nothing turns me off a paperback quite as quickly as the dreaded words 'Now a Major Motion Picture'.

So I started reading it. I didn't like the book, didn't find it sexy.

For a dozen or more pages, she writes about the heat in Asia, a silk dress, a hat. She describes a girl like me – small 154

for her age, burdened with a heavy mass of hair, delicate and odd.

Francoise must have been lying. No one who is like me can be sexy, I thought. Perhaps in some passages I could see what was meant, though having constantly to refer to a French grammar to puzzle out the author's finely crafted lines broke up the meaning.

Then I was surprised. By the end of the book ‐ which I will not give away, because to relate what happens (though the ending itself is not a surprise) will diminish it ‐ I was in tears. Something that did not happen to me broke my heart. That was how I knew I was capable of the feeling.

From time to time I read it again. Often when I am feeling alone. The end always comes in such a rush, with always the same effect.

mercredi, le 18 fevrier

It used to be simple to buy faintly embarrassing items and hide them in the rest of my purchases. Of course, this is not so much a clever ruse as a socially accepted fiction. No shop assistant is fooled by an extra‐strength deodorant hiding amongst the oranges ‐ it's just not nice commenting on a single sore thumb in an otherwise unremarkable cascade of groceries. And we all have biological functions.

On the other hand, put too many of these in at once, and you're cruising for jokes. A witness to my usual haul of cosmetic goods might suspect I'm buying for a minimum of six post‐operative transsexuals. So there is one chemist I go to for normal things and another for everything else.

Typical shop at Chemist One:

shampoo

toothpaste

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bath salts

cucumber gel masque

loofah scrubber

At worst, this might stimulate a solicitous, 'Ooh, a facial masque?

Treating yourself?' As opposed to today's shop at Chemist Two: tampons

vaginal pessary (for irritation)

condoms

sugarless breath mints

lubricant

individual post-waxing wipes

self tanning liquid

razor blades

potassium citrate granules (for cystitis)

This was met with the vaguely disinterested, 'There are halitosis remedies on the far end of aisle two, if you're interested.'

Bitch.

jeudi, le 19 fevrier

The builders have moved on to the vexing problem of my freezer.

This is a surprise, not simply because I would not have ascribed to them an expertise in complex internal condensers, but because I had no idea there was anything wrong with the freezer.

'What's that noise?' one of them asked yesterday afternoon, distracted from his detailed study of a cracked floor tile (which I hasten to add he was the cause of ‐ an unfortu-156

nate accident involving the installation of the new dishwasher while one of my more voluptuous neighbours elected to begin her daily jog).

'I don't know,' I said, looking up from the paper. 'The freezer, most likely.' Its occasional whirry cricket sound is something I have grown used to and find rather comforting.

He opened the freezer door. 'For the love of ‐ when was the last time you defrosted this?'