Murder Most Fab Page 3

  ‘Love it!’ I echoed, already relishing our recounting of the dialogue once we got home. I stood up boldly. ‘Take me as I Assam …

  Assam laughed politely at my ‘joke’ and bowed goodnight to Catherine and Shazad. He took my elbow and steered me towards the lift where he pressed the button for the top floor: the penthouse. ‘You are nervous. Why you nervous?’ he said, once we were inside the lift. ‘I like you very much.’

  He moved closer, but although I braced myself for a kiss, he reached behind me and squeezed my left buttock, almost to the point of pain. This wasn’t romance, I reminded myself. It wasn’t showbiz either — it was prostitution. Although I was scared, seduced by the unexpected handsomeness of Assam and goggle-eyed at the opulence of such a posh hotel, the like of which I had never seen before, I knew I mustn’t let Catherine down. I must be a ‘pro’ and deliver the goods. Nothing else would do.

  As soon as the door closed behind us, Assam let out a sigh and took off his jacket. The charm and politeness he had displayed downstairs in the bar took on a curdled, cynical tone. He fixed me a drink and said, rather curtly, ‘Make yourself comfortable while I take a shower.’

  I stepped on to the balcony and looked down at the traffic sailing along Park Lane and the shadowy expanse of Hyde Park disappearing into the night. Around it, London glittered and gleamed, a luxurious playground for those who could afford it.

  I wasn’t sure what was expected of me, but I made an intelligent guess. Back in the suite, I stripped down to my boxers, slipped the condoms under the pillow and arranged myself on the bed.

  A few minutes later, Assam emerged from the shower, wrapped in a fluffy white hotel towel. He dropped it and joined me on the bed. He was warm, expensively scented and a little damp.

  He didn’t kiss me but pushed my head roughly away from him and bit the back of my neck. He was an inconsiderate but technically accomplished performer, and I displayed as much enthusiasm as I could, even though my mind was bubbling with a thousand thoughts.

  I had never been paid for sex before. In fact, I had only ever had sex with one other person and I loved him with all my heart. Sex without love was a new experience for me.

  I felt many different things. Assam’s indifference was strangely erotic. The way he turned and pulled me made me feel like a rag doll, but it was not unpleasant. Intimacy with someone new broke my heart, but ultimately hardened it, too. Face it, sister, I said to myself, your heart is already broken. It’s high time you toughened up.

  As Assam forced himself inside me, huffing and puffing, telling me how much I wanted it, I told myself it was a healing experience. If I didn’t want it, maybe I needed it, which was more important.

  I was awoken in the night for a prolonged reprise that involved hair-pulling and what I presumed was Arabic dirty talk. (It seemed unlikely that Assam would be reciting sacred poetry at such an intimate moment.) A few hours later, as dawn was breaking, he had me perform a traditional sex act on him, then announced that the car would be waiting for me downstairs in ten minutes.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said formally, once I was dressed. ‘I must sleep now. This is for you.’ He handed me a promising envelope, so I said goodbye and trotted off, without so much as a mouthwash.

  While I was waiting idly in the foyer for my car, Catherine sashayed out of the lift, all spick and span even if she was still in last night’s clothes.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ she said, linking arms and swinging me towards the rotating doors. She scrutinized me. ‘Bit of residue in the right corner of your mouth,’ she said. A manicured claw flew towards me and gouged out the offending material with a couple of layers of skin. ‘Best not to give the hotel staff any more reason to be suspicious.’ As she said this she smiled falsely at the concierge. ‘Got the dosh?’

  I handed her the envelope.

  ‘Well done.’ She peeped inside. ‘Very well done!’

  Catherine and I were delivered back to south-east London in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, whooping childishly out of the window, our pockets bulging with twenty-pound notes. Soon she was sitting on my bed, counting our booty, while I made some tea.

  ‘Ooh, Christmas has come early,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and buy some champagne!’

  I turned off the kettle.

  Catherine handed me a fat wad. ‘A very well-deserved two hundred pounds for your trouble,’ she said.

  I felt a distinct sexual thrill. ‘Money turns me on,’ I confided. ‘I could get to like this.’

  ‘Well,’ said Catherine, ‘I could have a word with Madame for you. I don’t think she has any boys on her books. She really ought to. There’s money in them there buttocks.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I promised. So far I hadn’t been struck down by a bolt of holy lightning for my wicked behaviour and, in a strange way, I had enjoyed my night with Assam. Also, there was no denying that the money would come in useful — I was a poor student, after all.

  The next day I put a hundred pounds in an envelope and posted it to my mother with a note explaining that I’d been paid rather well for a modelling shoot. I felt extremely proud of myself.

  There was little to discourage me from renting out my body again. It seemed terribly easy and, as I was in cahoots with Catherine, rather funny. After all, I wouldn’t be a common prostitute, I reasoned: I’d just help out when they needed me and, even then, only at the top end of the market. I asked her to take me to see Madame as soon as possible.

  Catherine styled me in ripped jeans, black T-shirt and leather jacket, and escorted me to the HQ of Elegant Escorts for my afternoon appointment with Madame. She operated her small concern from a neat, minimalist mews house just off the Portobello Road and she was an inscrutable Oriental woman of indeterminate age, somewhere between thirty and fifty. Evidently Japanese in origin, she clearly had some background in rock-chick, groupie circles. She wore a top-quality leather waistcoat fitted to her child-like waist, and had the air of a rock god’s mistress.

  I quickly discovered that Madame’s catchphrase was ‘Make happy, make money!’, and that she smiled and nodded a lot.

  ‘Catherine tell me that you go to appointment with her, and Mr Assam very complimentary! Good, good. Make happy, make money!’ She hung on to the last syllable of ‘money’ a little longer each time she uttered it, until eeeeee!s echoed round the room like escaped budgies. ‘Most men like lady, but some men like boy!’ she said, giggling bashfully, geisha-style. ‘But it raining men. Do you suck and fuck to completion and how big your cock? It big, and make happy, make moneeeeeey!’

  ‘I’ve had no complaints in that department,’ I said.

  ‘Mr Assam, he said it award-winning!’ She nodded knowingly.

  ‘Oh, well done, Cowboy,’ said Catherine. ‘I didn’t like to ask but you’ve got the look of somebody with a big one. The donger of death.’

  ‘Length and girth very satisfactory,’ said Madame, consulting her notes. ‘Ejaculation distance almost two yards!’

  I lowered my head, feigning modesty.

  ‘Shame there isn’t an Olympic event for that sort of thing,’ said Catherine. ‘If they’d only bring in Synchronized Rimming and the Spunk Javelin I could imagine you with a bronze medal hanging round your neck.’

  ‘Bronze?’ I said, a little hurt.

  ‘So,’ said Madame, standing up to indicate that the meeting was over, ‘I get you work. You make happy, make—’

  ‘Moneeeeeeeeey!’ Catherine and I chimed simultaneously.

  And that was that. My career as a high-class prostitute had begun, though in those early days it was merely my sideline and, in some ways, my hobby.

  A week later Madame called me and, inevitably, my second paid sexual encounter felt much more like work. A businessman awaited me at the Savoy Hotel. No dinner was involved, I just had to present myself at room 406 at ten o’clock that evening. ‘Mr Smith’ opened the door in his sizeable boxer shorts and was as sweaty as he was salacious. But the thrill was still there, a
s he handed over the money and lost himself in lust. ‘Your body is my plaything,’ he breathed.

  I remembered Catherine’s advice: ‘If you can appear to be enjoying the sex even when it disgusts you, you’ve got it made. They’ll come quicker and probably pay you extra.’

  So I made all the appropriate noises and, sure enough, had Mr Smith spurting like a geyser within a couple of minutes. I was back on the tube within half an hour. I got my genuine thrills when he pressed a sizeable tip into my hands as I left. Money, it appeared, made everything worthwhile.

  I continued to attend college, although my heart was no longer in it. One highlight was the Shakespeare’s Sonnets workshop. I already knew the famous ones by heart and gained the momentary admiration of my peers for my faultless recitation of Sonnet 94 within minutes of the task being announced.

  I declaimed with much feeling:

  ‘But if that flower with base infection meet,

  The basest weed outbraves his dignity.’

  For an instant, I was in the sunshine but soon I was relegated to the shadows. I committed the cardinal sin of not showing up for rehearsals and, as a result, I was regarded as the devil’s accomplice. I didn’t care. My life outside was much more entertaining than anything drama school could offer me, and I regarded the other students as tedious neurotics lacking any real sense of humour.

  Over the following months, after I’d turned a handful more tricks and was what Catherine called ‘broken in’, I felt relaxed about it. I seemed to have a bit of a flair for this career — perhaps I’d found my true calling. As an added bonus, it seemed to ease the pain of my aching heart — anything that did that was worth taking notice of. I’d been miserable for long enough, I told myself.

  The money was wonderful, of course, but what I loved most was the gratitude I invoked. Like an acupuncturist or a hairdresser, I put a spring in men’s steps and sent them smiling and happy on their way.

  I explained this to Catherine late one night when we got in from our respective jobs. Catherine’s Gucci handbag was bulging with the contents of her punter’s mini-bar, and over a few neat Bacardis we reviewed our performances.

  I had been to a private house in Chalfont St Giles, where I had been booked for a ‘Mix and Mingle’. This turned out to be a geriatric gay orgy in which I was the central attraction.

  Catherine had been wined, dined and taken roughly from behind by a visiting Italian diplomat. ‘Unfortunately he was no stranger to a bowl of pasta. If I look a bit like a pug, it’s because I’ve been face down on the shag pile for over an hour with nineteen stone of Italian porker on top of me.’

  I was drunk and very pleased with myself. ‘Do you know what, Catherine? I think I’ve truly developed as a human being from this line of work. Whatever sexual role I’m cast in, I feel completely confident I can play my part well. I’ve already learnt to watch for the defining moment when need is transformed into nature. The breathing, the biorhythms — even the colour of their eyes changes as something in their souls opens up and they lose themselves in the moment. You know, I’m proud of my work.’

  ‘Steady, Cowboy,’ she cautioned. ‘If you start talking poncy bollocks I shall go to bed. Success in sex is measured by the grunts and the tip. Nothing else. Your development as a human being is of no interest to me — let’s not pretend otherwise because you’ve got a few too many miniatures down you.’

  ‘But don’t you ever feel that way? As though you’re truly helping another human being?’

  ‘Of course not. And this isn’t a support group for sex workers. At least, I bloody hope not. What shall we drink next? Whisky or Baileys?’ She was only ever interested in facts and figures and what the next drink would be.

  ‘Well, I do,’ I said, a trifle sulkily.

  ‘We’ve all been there, sweetheart. But never mind — in years to come you can say you were scarred by your reckless youth. Or that I lured you into it. I don’t care what you say — just shut the fuck up about your vocation and your desire to heal the world before I kill you.’

  I had learnt that Catherine couldn’t tolerate serious conversation and always brought me back to earth if I started to bare my soul, but I was determined that, for once, we would have a proper conversation about the reality of our lives. Maybe now I would tell her about Kent and the things that had happened to me there. The time felt right.

  ‘What would your mother say if she knew you were on the game?’ I asked.

  “‘Snap”, I expect,’ said Catherine. ‘Oh, God, here it comes. You’re quite the public speaker tonight, aren’t you? Remind me never to pour Bacardi down you again. You’re going to force me to listen to the story of your life, and it’s all going to be rather dreary. I can feel it in my water.’

  “‘So many worlds, so much to do, so little done, such things to be”,’ I quoted. ‘That’s Tennyson. And yes, I am about to tell you my life story. I insist. So listen carefully.’

  My mother looked like Julie Christie and I was her adoring only son. Her name was Alice and we lived alone in an isolated cottage on the outskirts of a tiny windswept village on Romney Marsh in Kent. My mother enjoyed a carefree life, smiled all the time and was always humming. In fact, she was so relentlessly happy that, as a child, I doubted any tragedy that might befall me would cause more than a hiccup in her joyful disposition. After all, this was the woman who had gone along to my grandfather’s funeral in a floral dress and a straw hat with a broad smile. ‘How lovely to see you!’ she’d greeted friends and relatives. ‘Beautiful day, isn’t it?’

  Because I was an only child and we lived in the middle of nowhere, my mother and I depended on each other for company. She played with me like an older sister and was never preoccupied with housework or any matters to do with the real world. We didn’t have a television and she never listened to the news on the radio. Instead we played ‘chase’ round the house and garden, had dressing-up parties and midnight feasts. I remember we whispered, too, as if anyone might hear us. When the weather was good, she took me tramping across crusty fields, her long sandy hair blowing across her face.

  My mother cooked wonderful food: big hearty casseroles in the winter and fresh fruit cocktail with real cream, served in the garden, during summer. After dinner she liked to lie on the sofa, or in the garden hammock if it was fine, and listen while I read poetry or novels to her by candlelight. We would lose ourselves in long, lovely books by Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and Charles Dickens. Sometimes we couldn’t wait until the evening for the next instalment and would get up half an hour early to have a chapter after our porridge before I went to school. I think we’d read all of D. H. Lawrence by the time I was ten. Parts of Sons and Lovers made me blush.

  My mother thought it was important to memorize poems. ‘That way,’ she explained, ‘they’re always in your head, and you can get to them at any time. What beautiful thoughts you can have as you lie in bed, waiting for sleep to come! Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde …‘

  So, with her encouragement, I committed as many poems as I could to memory, and then it became our habit to recite couplets or sonnets throughout the day. She made it fun. The more our repertoire grew, the better able we were to pluck a poem from our heads appropriate to every mood or occasion. For example, if my mother was hanging out the washing and I hurtled down the path on my bicycle, she’d stop me by declaring:

  ‘Tread lightly, she is near

  Under the snow,

  Speak gently, she can hear

  The daisies grow.’

  I had to guess that she was quoting from ‘Requiescat’ by Oscar Wilde, and reply with the next verse.

  ‘All her bright golden hair

  Tarnished with rust,

  She that was young and fair

  Fallen to dust.’

  Or, if I couldn’t remember the next verse or wanted to express a different point of view, I would quote from another poem that seemed apt, perhaps some of my favourite nonsense by Lewis Carroll:

  “‘Will
you walk a little faster?”

  Said the whiting to a snail,

  “There’s a porpoise close behind us

  And he’s treading on my tail.”’

  My mother’s rustic image was hard to square with the few facts I knew about her own childhood. They seemed to imply a certain poshness. I knew that she had originally come from London, because that was where my grandmother Rita lived, and that she had been privately educated and brought up as what they used to call a lady. I also knew that she had turned her back on all that, running away from school and embracing a life that rejected material trappings and social status, which meant nothing to her. A pastoral existence had been trapped inside her, waiting to get out. Now she was a real country girl and happiest in our garden or pottering about our tumbledown Kentish cottage, which was always cheerful and clean.

  One spring we took on an orphaned black-faced lamb, which we called Saucy, and she followed Mother around, nuzzling her and making her laugh even more than usual. Saucy nibbled at the lawn while chickens pecked their way round the yard; potatoes, beans, radishes and garlic grew in our half-acre of garden, protected from Saucy by a white picket fence. My mother wore gingham or white lace blouses, with the sleeves rolled up, pinafore dresses or flouncy skirts, the perfect picture of a country lass. She even spoke with a non-specific rural burr, which may have been Suffolk but certainly wasn’t London or Kent; as she had never lived anywhere else, its origin must remain a mystery. She loved to be outdoors, tending the flowers or watering the vegetable garden, or trying to cajole Saucy into chasing her and being lamblike and carefree once more. But Saucy, by the age of two, was a dour and boring sheep, refusing to play, just widening her eyes a little and glaring at my mother disdainfully. We loved her nevertheless, lavishing her with affection and attention that she blankly endured.

  Mother gave the wild birds in the garden names. She greeted and recited Keats to every robin or blue-tit: