Read The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl Online
Authors: Belle de Jour
The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl (28 page)
Trappist brew drinker, over 50:
monk.
Cider drinker, teenager:
made an impulse decision when he couldn’t spot the alcopops.
Cider drinker, adult:
from Norfolk.
Friends, I have an admission to make. I am seeing a cider drinker who is neither underage nor East Anglian. We are, I believe, in uncharted territory.
mardi, le 19 juillet
I went round to the estate agent’s with the banker’s draft for the deposit so I could officially take over A4’s lease. The Boy picked me up afterwards, it was near his work. ‘Ugh, that was the biggest amount of money I hope to part with for a while,’ I said. ‘But at least it’s all over with.’
‘Poor you,’ he said, rubbing my hair in the exact way I hate. ‘You’re short of pennies?’
I patted his hand and removed it to my thigh. ‘Not short, as such. Just have to watch my outgoings for the rest of the year. The holiday was a little more expensive than I’d planned.’
‘Really? How much was it?’
Ooh, I should have seen that one coming. Probably going to go straight to his diary and call me an extravagant cow or something. ‘About eight thousand,’ I said, knocking a few grand off the total. I’d had plenty to spare, but there are always a few things you don’t anticipate. Such as keeping him on the phone hours at a time for the sake of trying to keep him away from Susie and Georgie.
He frowned and we drove on in silence. Of course, to one of his posh totties, eight thousand would be lipstick money. But us underclass, we’re not allowed to spend. Hm, didn’t someone write a song like that once?
‘What’s wrong now?’ I said.
‘I’m just being silly,’ he said. ‘But that’s half the cost of a wedding. You could have spent that money marrying me, and we could be living together in your new little house.’
I almost laughed. Was he kidding? He hopped into someone else’s bed literally an hour after I left Britain and spent the summer getting blowjobs from junior doctors. Was he really still entertaining the notion that a) I believed anything he said and b) I would marry someone who acted like that?
‘Well, I don’t mean to be blunt, but if you’d wanted to marry me you would have asked.’
‘But I do want to marry you, I tell you that all the time.’
‘Funnily enough, you only ever say it when we’re arguing. Now let’s drop the subject.’ To my credit, I said all this at a normal volume. To his credit he did not mention it again.
mercredi, le 20 juillet
‘Looking good,’ Giles said as I came into the building.
‘Careful, you, or people will start to think we’re up to something.’
‘A man can live in hope,’ he said. ‘Listen, we need you to meet the Japanese clients this afternoon – is it enough warning? I’m afraid you’re the only person we have capable of explaining the conversion algorithms adequately.’
Some days I don’t wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed a call girl.
jeudi, le 21 juillet
He licked my tan lines, hardly faded since returning. ‘What right do you have,’ he murmured, ‘to be firmer and sexier than any teenager?’
I wrapped a towel round myself and led him down the back steps into the garden. ‘Against the far wall,’ I whispered. ‘The neighbours are out.’
He spread the towel gently on the ground instead. ‘Quickly,’ I hissed. ‘Before the insects find you.’ But he didn’t listen, slowly running his tongue until everywhere that had been covered by a bikini last month was soaking wet.
vendredi, le 22 juillet
Met N for a meal at our favourite Italian, just the two of us. I’m aware that a certain amount of friendship maintenance needs to be undertaken, even if it is a case (I suspect) of too little, too late.
N’s looking good: leaner and more tanned than when we last saw each other. He tells me about his recent women: a German postgraduate who loves pain, the lady we had the threesome with. And he’s made friends with the man running his local sex shop, who is now passing on to N all the videos he can’t hire out legally.
‘You really do have the most amazing luck,’ I say. It’s ages since I’ve seen any quality porn, and N promises to pass some on, particularly one involving a heavy rope bondage session and a spiked glove. He swears up and down the woman looks like an older version of me.
I’ve been a bad friend and I know it: ignoring him for months, taking him for granted. I know in my heart of hearts that regardless of how the Boy feels about him, he’ll always be my friend, and no man should ever change that.
‘No worries,’ N said in his light way. ‘I’m here for you, no matter what. You know that.’
I do, but I wonder why my friends are still my friends sometimes, when I’ve been so callous to them.
samedi, le 23 juillet
One of the things we’ve always enjoyed doing together is exercise, so yesterday, in lieu of a Friday night DVD or going out for a meal, I suggest we go for a run in Richmond Park.
The Boy and I are about equal in speed: he’s bigger, I’m more efficient. Soon we fall into step with each other, the way we did years ago. But my mind is in other places. On his ex, dumpy Jo, the girl he took home the week before I came back. I can see her pursed pout on the yacht, the broad smiles of her in the family garden. I know she would give up her boyfriend to be with him. In fact, I’m having a knock-down, drag-out argument with her right now, conducted in my head: ‘Get near him again, bitch, and I’ll break his heart so hard and so fast that he can rub his sad little erection against your giant arse all you want but he’ll never feel like a man again.’
Holy moly, did I really just think that? The vitriol of it surprises even me, and I stop running. The Boy notices I’ve dropped off and turns back. ‘You okay?’ he pants.
I nod, bend over and pretend it was an old knee injury playing up. I straighten and look into his eyes. On every identity document he has, they’re down as brown, but I know the truth. His eyes are dark green with flecks of blue. They’re beautiful. He’s the loveliest man I’ve ever been with.
‘I just wanted to say, I’m really sorry for everything that happened last year.’
He’s surprised. ‘What brought that on?’
‘Nothing in particular. Come on, I’ll race you this lap!’
dimanche, le 24 juillet
My life as a call girl revolved round the phone. If I didn’t answer a call straight away, the work might have gone to someone else, which meant that for almost a year I was umbilically attached to the mobile. In the toilets, at dinner, half asleep, visiting family: apart from when I was on a call, there were few times I wouldn’t answer.
Now all that has changed. Especially after having been away so long without a mobile, or even reliable landlines. I can go days without checking voice mail, and it’s an incredible luxury. The phone goes dead and it’s not a life-or-death problem. It’s sitting on my desk more often than about my person, and sometimes I’ll even be near it and can’t be bothered to answer.
Fate has a funny way of making you see yourself as others see you, because there’s hardly a minute when my boyfriend isn’t on his phone. Worse still, he has one of these sexy little camera/email/does-everything-but-your-washing-up models. We’ve been sailing in a gale and he’s on the phone. He’s forever texting at the dinner table. Now I see how unbearably annoying it must have been for my friends.
I’m obsessed with schemes for getting rid of the thing. It wouldn’t do to chuck it away, since I suspect it has a greater place in his heart than I have (this particular one having been a gift to him from the fat ex, Jo). When it’s raining, I keep hoping it will turn up waterlogged. If he’s washing up and takes a call, I fantasise about giving him a bump from behind and plop! it drops straight into the sink.
Of course, it may be the romantic associations of his phone that make me despise it so. That, and the fact that he’d rather be doing household chores and talking to other people than spending time with me.
But what better way to guarantee I will never have to do the laundry again than by not-so-accidentally leaving his phone in a trouser pocket? The idea has possibilities. I’ll have to think on it.
lundi, le 25 juillet
< belle_online>
ace
mardi, le 26 juillet
Maybe it’s a reaction to not being slathered daily in sun-screen, but my skin is going horribly dry. Luckily I have laid in a pantry-full of supplies from abroad. In particular one product from the US, which comes in a dispenser not unlike a stick deodorant, and smells of lemons. It’s gratifyingly smoothing and as close to a miracle in a jar as I can find. Probably made with the blood of young virgins or something.
After a shower I was rubbing it on. The Boy came through and looked a bit puzzled until he realised I was not, in fact, applying Mum to the backs of my hands. I asked if he would mind rubbing it in.
Once upon a time in our relationship, he took every request for a massage of any sort as an invitation to sex. A sort of tit-for-tat thing: I’ll rub your back if I get to slip into you from behind right afterwards. And while I appreciate that all sexual relationships have an element of give and take, that was a little too commodified for me. A little too much like being a call girl, only with rubs instead of money.
So I explained how I felt, and now I can ask him to rub me down without expecting sex immediately after. Though I think he still tots up the number of massages and extracts payment for them in sexual favours later. I’d actually rather give oral sex than have to lavish a reciprocal backrub on him – my hands are half the size of his and his back is twice as broad as mine so proportionally speaking I end up having to do four times as much work. He’s not good with maths but he sort of understands. What he doesn’t seem to realise, though, is that I’m winning all round: sex and massage. He’s just having sex.
‘I love this cream, it’s so thick and clingy,’ I said.
‘Hey! That’s my job,’ he said, putting on an exaggerated pout.
‘What, being thick and clingy?’ I asked. ‘Do you really want me to describe you that way?’
‘Well, no, but you probably would.’
‘It smells very strong, doesn’t it,’ I said of the cream. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Thick, clingy and strong-smelling.’
‘Just like me?’ We laughed, me because it was true, and he because he knew that’s what I was thinking.
mercredi, le 27 juillet
We went to one of the Boy’s work dos, as a couple, together. I played it down but was secretly thrilled. He kept looking over at me uneasily whenever we were parted – I wasn’t saying something I shouldn’t, was I? But he had nothing to worry about. For one thing, I was caught in conversation with one of the most boring women in the world.
M was a tall girl and heavy, dressed in flat London black with flat London hair, and was telling me she despised the concept of the one-night stand.
This, I realised, was the flip side to fifteen-year-old tramps giving blowjobs at bus shelters and twenty-somethings with their booty-call fucks. The thirty-something single city woman who has convinced herself that only true love is worth waiting for.
I don’t understand. M and thousands of women like her deciding that not only do they prefer time alone to a bad relationship – fine decision, yes – but that if there’s no relationship at all, there’s no sex. So the teenagers are banging mindlessly, surely unable to glean much benefit from the act apart from having something to do between CBeebies and X Factor, while the very women who are not only cresting their sexual peaks but also have the discretional income and storage space for a host of boytoys and their accessories choose instead to spend their time in the company of BBC Three and a vibrator.
I mean, what gives? Sex does not equal relationship. If the man is sexy, but not the one, no one said you have to give him your keys (or, come to think of it, your number). I was stunned that a woman would so happily suppress her needs. I’d love to dine at a Michelin three-star establishment every night, sure, but in the meantime I still have to eat. And if the restaurant isn’t so hot, honey, I don’t go back. Simple as.
And London is a lonely place. Sometimes human contact for its own sake is nice. One day during my first six months in London, I decided to not talk to anyone for twenty-four hours, to see if it could be done. It could. And it was depress-ingly easy, as well.
I gritted my teeth. The Boy smiled at me uneasily from across the room, I gave him the raised eyebrow of Every-thing’s Fine. ‘And if Mr Right just happened to walk through the door tonight … ?’
‘That’s different,’ she said. ‘Not that I’d take him home on the first night, either.’ Obviously. Because you’d rather the love of your life thought you frigid than you thought yourself a slut. Because your approach to the sexual double-standard is to accept that men can have stringless fun but you must martyr yourself on every loser attractive enough to dampen your knickers.
We’re our own worst enemies.
jeudi, le 28 juillet
Crossword clues are an enigma of the order of football results, lonely-hearts listings and the shipping forecast: either you understand them or you don’t. I don’t, and it worries me.