Chapter 37 - High Class Hooker
Cathy and her sister, also called Cathy, were inseparable when they were little. Actually, when she was little, everyone called her FiFi which was her real name. It was only later, after the real Cathy had gone away, well died, that she had taken Cathy’s name to keep the memory alive. She hoped, back then, that by taking her sister’s name, after she was gone, she would be able to keep some of the joy they had shared together. But, after that, her life was empty. Then the other stuff had started and it had gone from bad to worse until she just had to escape.
Cathy left home when she was sixteen, the earliest she was allowed to go and find work on her own. It was not she had any falling out with her parents; she remained close and would ring them regularly even though she would tell them almost nothing about her private life. But she had a huge sense of guilt over what had happened to her sister and did not want to inflict more pain on her parents. Even though she could not bear to talk about her own life, the things that she had done and what had been done to her, she decided that she wanted to spare her parents as much anxiety as she could over her own safety.
So she would ring them at least once a week and chat to both her Mum and Dad. She recounted things about her work she thought they wanted to hear, happy stories, nothing dark. At least once every three months, she would come home for a weekend and pretend they were all a family again and she was still their little girl.
It was like playacting and not too hard to do, though by the end of each visit she would find herself exhausted inside at the effort to sustain the pretence. But it was worth it. They went on with their lives, blissfully unaware of the real Cathy, the person she was for the rest of the time. As they were country folk at heart and almost never came to any city, she felt little concern they would find her darker secrets out.
When she left home she first went to Edinburgh and got a job as an administrative assistant to the boss of a manufacturing company. But the wages were poor and it was hard to earn enough money to live on. It was also too close to home, only an hour’s drive from the village her family lived in. While they did not come to town much she feared to find them walking down the street when she least wanted to see them.
She soon worked out that, for someone like herself, sex was the best exchange medium. So she gave in to the boss’s groping hands and pawing in his office, but on the basis that it advantaged her in both pay and other benefits. As both his public assistant and private mistress she doubled her salary and got a generous expense allowance.
After six months she moved to Glasgow where her boss arranged a job for her with a friend of his, another MD in a business that he worked closely with. She had paid for that job reference in kind with a last all night loan of her body, indulging his wild fantasies.
It had been a similar deal with her new work in Glasgow, her type of administrative assistant did as much work on the couch in his office with the door locked as she did on the phone or as a typist.
By the time she was in Glasgow she had worked out that, if this was part of the deal for many bosses, she might as well make it pay for her in other ways. She got a night time job as a higher class working girl, more discreet than those who worked the streets, no drugs and protection from catching something, baby included.
But she kept her day job going, it was easier to maintain the pretence with parents and friends back home that way. Of course there was no way she could afford such a nice flat and her nice clothes on an ordinary admin assistant’s wages.
Then she moved on to London, it was a bigger pool for the daytime jobs and also for the other work, here lots of rich Arabs fancied a milk skinned girl from the north with a touch of Scottish brogue. She had a knack of keeping her daytime bosses happy. She was good at organising other people to do work, using the boss’s authority to persuade and cajole, sometime threaten and occasionally putting her own personal charms to work as well.
Over five years she had a succession of day jobs, always a step up from the job before. By now she could easily support herself on these grandly titled Executive Manager roles. The night work was cream and, more importantly, it filled an empty hole inside her, that part which had been broken when her sister had died.
She knew deep down that all men were bastards; all were determined to get one thing no matter what it cost the woman. So she gave them that thing, but on her own terms and at her own price.
Apart from the men who paid her day job wages she had no friends. Neither the other night girls, nor the men she serviced, knew anything about her except a first name. No work colleagues or clients had her real address or private contact details. For those who needed to locate she gave a mobile phone number, one for day work, one for nights and, except for required business social functions, she never went out with her work colleagues. For her night work she met clients in private discreet places where security came as part of the package.
So she had a life at her family home where she was the dutiful and loving daughter who contacted and visited her parents regularly and said hello to the others in the village, when she came home, as if they were long lost friends.
Then she had another life in the city, different clothes, a comfortable apartment, well paid work both day and night and a healthy bank balance. Her life drifted by like that for seven years until she was twenty three.
One day she woke up faintly bored. It was OK, her life was broadly satisfactory. But there was nothing in it she cared about other than her parents and she could never let them see inside her. She did not want a boyfriend or a long term lover; she had met no one she trusted enough that way to let them see inside her. It was better to let those who wanted or desired her to pay to rent her body for a short time and then be gone. But she wanted something more important in her life than that.
Sometimes she thought that maybe she should get a pet, a fluffy dog or a cat that gave her company when she was on her own. But she knew that that would involve a new form of dependency, some creature whose life depended on her coming home each night and providing food, water and exercise, perhaps a walk in the park. She did not want that level of commitment. She could always pay someone else to do those parts but she did not want that either as it would involve letting someone else into her private life, sharing apartment keys or whatever.
When she did not work she read, a few novels, but mainly true stories about other places, some were books of explorers, some travel books of going to other places and of their peoples of yesterday and today. Slowly an image formed in her mind of going to live somewhere else, a place where no one knew her. She had more than a hundred thousand pounds from her night work in a Swiss bank account, and her day job had its own bank account with a several thousand pounds of spare cash.
One day she came home from another ordinary day. She worked for the boss of a big city finance firm. Today he was feeling frisky and decided he wanted to play with her more, but she had managed to avoid that.
Cathy had met his wife at the office last week. Unlike some of the other wives who were vacuous airheads, only out to build their own image, she had genuinely liked this lady. Of course her boss told Cathy how his wife did not appreciate him, how he was thinking of leaving her, how he really wanted something more than a casual romp with Cathy.
But Cathy had heard these lines too many times before. She knew they were another form of the eternal excuses these men used to justify their weak morals. Normally she did not care. Provided the pay and other benefits were right she would let these platitudes flow over her.
But somehow this man’s clear lies irritated her. Tonight he wanted to take her out for dinner. She had begged off claiming a prior engagement. She did not want to spend an evening in bed with him, days were enough.
Tonight was a rare night when she had no other engagements booked and she did not want any. She had been thinking about quitting her day job completely for a while now, she did not need the money. She had kept it going to maintain a veneer of
respectability for the sake of her parents, still the dutiful daughter, not the high class hooker. Her day job also gave her something to do. She otherwise found her days to be mostly empty and purposeless. Over the years she had come to hate weekends when she was mostly alone with her own company during the day.
But she was sick of the inevitable bartering she did with her bosses around her availability for sexual favours. She decided she would rather just get paid for what she did at night, it was much simpler, no one lied, the men did not try and con her with promises of a future she did not want, they just paid for and got sex. She could not say she really enjoyed it but at least it was a simple, straightforward transaction with no strings attached and no lies spoken.
But it meant living an ongoing lie, a lie which started when she was eleven years old and her uncle had raped her. That was bad, but when she discovered her had done it to her older sister too and, as a result, her own sister committed suicide, something broke apart inside her.
She hated her uncle; she never let him come near her again when she was alone. She would be polite to him in company, but only because she could not bear for her parents to know about his double betrayal.
After that first time she had walled the memory off, but she had let it happen with other boys at school after that, hoping to find something in the act that was better than what had happened that first time. Even though pleasurable it did not fill the emptiness inside her.
So she left school as soon as she was able. Soon after that she began to use her body to make money, to buy independence from everyone and everything. Yet now she seemed eternally trapped in living a double life and could not see any future she wanted.
She was not suicidal, she had seen and lived through the way this action had torn a hole in her and her parents’ lives. So she could not bear to be that selfish and wasteful of her life. But she could not think of any different thing she wanted to do, that is until recently.
It was not as if a new life idea had opened before her. But she knew she did not want to live here and like this anymore. So the idea of escape, travelling off to another place or places in an anonymous way and having a new unknown identity became appealing. Now she made plans for this new life where nobody knew anything about her. Perhaps it would allow some real friends or relationships, perhaps even, after a few years, a new and better relationship with her parents, an adult to adult one, not one where she was forever trapped as the younger sister of a long lost child and who tried to live for both.
So tonight she was at her apartment and restless for something new. She decided there was no better time to make the move than now. She would do it in a respectable manner, she would give her current boss a month of notice so that he could organise a replacement; she would do the same for her night time work. She would go on the internet now and look up flights and travel options to different places.
She wanted to go to the opposite side of the world, as far away from this place and this life as possible, maybe Australia or New Zealand where they spoke English. She had enough money in her regular bank account to cover her flights and her living costs for at least a few months, without having to touch the other, much larger, bank account. She would travel as a backpacker, on the cheap. It fitted better with the image she wanted for her future; not a high class hooker travelling the world and staying at posh hotels, but rather a simple girl from the back of Scotland who had worked in various jobs across the UK and had now decided to see the world and make a new life for herself somewhere else.
After a week of researching various countries she settled on Australia.
Lost Girl Diary Page 40