by Tanvir Bush
‘The Ladies’ Defective Agency?’ muses Alex. Very bloody funny.
‘You can sit and listen in while you are waiting,’ says the receptionist, proffering a headset. ‘We aren’t shy. Chairs to your right. Volume and channel change on the earpiece. You can feel it.’
‘Thanks,’ says Alex. ‘Find a seat,’ she says to Chris, and he happily pulls her over to a soft red sofa. Alex sits, dumps her handbag and pulls on the device.
Alex and Kitty
‘Filth. Extraordinary filth.’
‘Thank you.’
‘No really … I am completely shocked. I mean, I am not a prude by any means but this … ?’ Alex is in Kitty Fox’s office, her cheeks still burning.
‘Phone sex.’ Kitty is smiling from behind her desk. ‘And of course we do games and voice-overs too. Anything audio and smutty, really.’
Kitty Fox, it turns out, is indeed the Kitty Fox glamour model of the 1980s. She is not a glamour model any more. No, she gave that up after being diagnosed with a tumour on her back and having much of her spine cut away and repinned. It was harder to get those Page 3 photo shoots in a wheelchair.
‘They used me up and chucked me out like a tissue. I was sorry for myself for about, oh, an afternoon, and then I thought sod it. I may not be able to spread my legs any more but I know how this shit works. Porn-audio-ography. Made a bloody mint.’
Kitty is sitting in the most high-tech wheelchair Alex has ever seen.
‘Nice, isn’t it? I’ve got a lot of dough in research, and I get to experiment with the product. Lucky me.’ She presses a button and the chair unfolds, straightening her up to a standing position. ‘See, now it’s a robotic walker.’
She, or rather, the ex-wheelchair, hums, whirrs and takes a couple of steps. ‘It can go up stairs, apparently, but I haven’t road-tested it yet.’ Another button and the wheelchair folds itself and Kitty back to a seated position. ‘I own or have shares in almost every phone-sex line in southern Europe, though this one is a bit different. I’ve been running this gaff for the last five years – it’s my favourite. Wish I’d thought of it sooner, you know, employing disabled women. They are much more imaginative on the whole than the smack dollies we usually get.’
Alex is still trying to collect herself. ‘This is incredible!’
Kitty smiles. She is still artfully glamorous: perfect teeth, chiselled cheekbones, arched brows over turquoise eyes with barely a crow’s foot. She sports a magnificent bosom too and is wearing a low-cut black T-shirt to prove it. Again, barely a wrinkle in sight, which is impressive considering she must be pushing sixty-five.
‘Now you, Alex. You are working part time as a journalist, right? We could really do with a girl like you on board, especially right now.’
‘What do you mean? As a journalist or as a … umm … what do you call them?’
‘Voice-over artist, and yes, you would be top-notch totty voice, I can tell. But equally, I am sure we could eventually make use of your investigative skills and your contacts.’
‘I would actually like to write a piece on you, Kitty,’ says Alex, finally broaching the subject. She has read up on Kitty and knows that she very rarely gives interviews.
Kitty waves her hand, dismissively. ‘Oh yes … a “Why Work Works” special? I have read the local rag, you know.’
Alex winces, embarrassed, and drags her fingers through her hair, catching a couple of knots. She yanks. ‘It’s not my best work …’
‘Lame, Ms Lyon, totally lame. You are a good journalist. I was impressed with your documentary on the Nestling Corporation scandal. You won an award for that, didn’t you?’
Alex blinks. ‘That was a long time ago, I’m surprised you remember,’ she says. She is flattered. ‘And yes, I was awarded the Flame Keeper’s Award for Social Responsibility in Documentary.’
‘What happened to the Nestling Corporation?’
‘Well … err … they were pretty much untouchable. They promised to clean up the ground water and compensate the families but …’
‘Didn’t you chase them?’
Alex is confused about where this conversation is going. ‘I chased for a year and was then given a posting as foreign correspondent in Iraq?’
‘Ahh, you moved on?’
Alex stays quiet. She moves her chair a little closer so she can get a better view of Kitty Fox. Kitty stares back, neither smiling nor frowning, just waiting. Alex can’t figure out what the woman wants from her.
‘Do you want to ask me a question?’ Alex asks finally.
‘Not yet,’ says Kitty.
‘OK … well, will you let me write a piece about you?’
‘Not for that Work Works trash but …’ Kitty holds up a long, carefully manicured finger. ‘I might let you be the journalist who interviews me for Parade magazine and even the Chuffington Post.’
Alex nods, trying not to look too excited. She can’t believe her luck. ‘On what condition?’
‘Ah yes, conditions.’ Kitty grins, and her face is like a naughty child’s. ‘There are conditions. Look, tell you what, I’ll ask Jules to show you the setup and studio, and then perhaps we could chat again before you leave? Why don’t you do a trial recording? It’s cash in hand, up front, and forty pounds an hour. You sign nothing. You are beholden to no one.’
Alex, who has exactly 68p in her wallet and nothing for the electricity meter, takes less than a second to decide.
‘Go on then,’ she says. ‘Let’s see what this is all about.’
Jules smiles beatifically when Alex emerges to say she wants to have a go. ‘Good-oh. Let’s get you set up with the best of the best. Kitty’s second-in-command, Helen, voice coach to the stars, is going to take you through your paces. Studio three. Right this way.’
She guides Alex and Chris through the maze of individual booths where women of all shapes, sizes and abilities are muttering and groaning in feigned ecstasy. Chris’s ears flicker back and forth. The larger studios are towards the back of the first floor. Each one is blacked out and muffled with soundproofing insulation. In Studio 3, Alex is left alone briefly. She stands under a spotlight in front of a large mike that hangs down from the ceiling. A technician has handed her a script printed off in twenty-six point size. It is an utterly depraved monologue written in the voice of an uptight businesswoman who finds herself being screwed silly in the loo of a Boeing 747 by the first officer. It is graphic and crudely written and …
‘And pure fiction,’ says a liquorice-voiced person who has come quietly whirring in behind Alex in another state-of-the-art wheelchair. She has a glossy chestnut bob, a sharp little face, red lipstick and the most delicious voice.
‘I’m Helen,’ says the woman. ‘I’ve been working with Kitty for over twenty years and she believes you have “something”.’ Here she makes apostrophes in the air with one hand, the other remaining still, curled claw-like in her lap. ‘I am the person to find out if this is true. Now tell me, darling, I hear you have had some previous experience?’
Alex takes a moment to remember that Helen isn’t referring to the script. ‘I have done some TV and radio, yeah. Nothing quite like this, though.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you will be a sensation, darling. Let’s do a read-through and see how it all goes.’
Alex looks down at the script. In large print it looks like it’s shouting gratuitous smut. She swallows.
‘Come on, darling. It’s just words.’ Helen spins the chair right in front of Alex and conducts with her slender hand. ‘One, two, three, action!’
Alex jumps straight in and is doing fine until the first officer has her pinned up against the sink with her knees up to her ears.
‘I feel his tongue licking its way down the crack of my arse and I shiver. That tongue. Long and strong and wet and hot. He pulls apart my pert arse cheeks and I feel the hot flickering near my arsehole. I cannot help but groan out loud …’
Alex pauses, trying not to giggle. ‘That’s disgusting!’
‘Fo
r you, maybe,’ says Helen, deadpan. She coughs and pauses to inhale something from a tube connected to a small canister attached to her chair.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says, seeing Alex’s raised eyebrow. ‘It’s just oxygen, sadly. Got an annoying case of muscular dystrophy.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Alex is trying to think of what to say.
‘No, darling. We don’t do “sorry” here, not any more. We do work, yes?’
‘Yes,’ nods Alex, trying not to look too obviously relieved.
‘OK, so the groan?’ demands Helen.
‘Err …’
‘You have a few options. I would go for a short, low groaning pant. How about this?’ She takes another hit from the canister and then a deep breath and groans, and the groan is exceptional when it comes. Alex can immediately hear why she is top of her profession. Chris, who up to this point has been lying silently, politely, is shocked enough to leap to his feet and howl.
‘Wow!’ says Alex.
‘Yes. The trick, darling,’ Helen winks, ‘is all in the pelvic floor. At least I still have some of those muscles intact. Do your exercises every day.’
Alex goes back to having her arsehole licked in a toilet, and after a couple of hours’ work it is recorded and in the bag. Helen is pleased with her.
‘It’s just that final orgasm that needs to extend out over a few more seconds.’ She places her hand on the flies of Alex’s jeans. ‘There … show me again.’
Alex takes a deep breath and manages to keep the orgasm going over the twenty-second mark.
‘Excellent, darling. You have nice vibration. Keep practising and there will be a lot more work for you.’ She pats Alex’s lower belly. ‘A natural. Let your vulva do the talking!’
It isn’t Jules who comes to guide her back to reception but another woman, a smiling black woman with glasses whom Alex is shocked to find she recognises.
‘Mrs Honey? Mrs Honey, is that you?’
‘Yes, dear. It’s Alexandra, isn’t it? How nice to see you again after all this time.’
It had been Mrs Honey who Alex had interviewed when Joanna Honey had been passed ‘fit for work’ by TOSA. Alex had tried her level best to push the story, but in the end Gerald had axed it and run with the paedophile headline instead. Alex had been mortified, but Mrs Honey had patted her arm, told her, told her, not to worry.
Back then, Mrs Honey had been in her work overalls, exhausted, shoulders slumping, her hair unkempt and spotted with grey, and she had stunk of pine floor disinfectant. Today she is in jeans and a long, bright white T-shirt with a flower across the front. The clenched, stressed brow is gone, and her hair is knotted back into an elegant braid.
‘You look great,’ says Alex, and really means it. ‘How are you?’ What are YOU doing here? she desperately wants to ask. Surely not voice-over work too? She can’t help but imagine what Mrs Honey can do with her pelvic floor.
‘I am well, thank you, Alexandra,’ says Mrs Honey. ‘Making enough money now, doing two jobs, to keep the wolf from the door at last.’
‘That’s great.’ Alex presumes Mrs Honey is still doing the occasional cleaning job as well as working here. ‘And Joanna?’
‘Home and with a full-time carer.’
‘That’s wonderful.’ Alex is amazed.
‘That’s Kitty Fox for you,’ says Mrs Honey. ‘I couldn’t have done it without her and the LDA. I’ve been working here for the last few weeks and it’s been life-changing. Come on, you’ll need to sign for your money.’
Chris is already getting to grips with the territory and is following his nose back to reception. Laverne smiles when she hears his collar tinkle. ‘You might want to meet Albert,’ she says to Alex. ‘He’s back here sleeping.’
Squeezing behind the reception desk, Alex unharnesses Chris so he can meet Laverne’s dog, an ancient black Labrador with seen-it-all eyes and white whiskers. The dogs do a short, stiff-legged, smell-arse dance around each other and then Albert lies down again.
‘He’s nearly eleven,’ says Laverne. ‘He retires next April.’
Alex’s heart goes out to Laverne. ‘Jesus,’ she whispers.
‘Yeah,’ says Laverne. ‘It is actually physically impossible to even think about it. I am lucky, though. I can keep him, even with a new dog. My husband and kids will walk him when I’m at work. He won’t have to go away from us.’
‘That is the best way,’ says Alex. In her own heart she knows that when it is Chris’s time to leave the earth she will die too. She can’t imagine the separation being bearable, even with a new dog. Or rather, she refuses to imagine it. And she doesn’t mind, really. She has had a good life on the whole. What’s the song? ‘Why stagger on when the one you love has gone?’
She is paid £100 for two-and-a-half hours’ work, cash in hand. Laverne says that Kitty has asked to see Alex again soon.
‘Sounds good,’ says Alex, eyeing the cash in her wallet.
‘There is plenty more work,’ says Laverne, smiling. ‘Helen says you have a wonderful talent.’
‘Pelvic floor,’ says Alex. ‘Apparently, it’s all about the vulva.’
‘Hell yeah,’ says Laverne.
Alex Goes Back for More
Over the next few weeks Alex makes a good deal of filthy lucre by talking dirty into a microphone. She works a couple of days a week at the Cambright Sun still, but her focus has shifted, and in the late afternoon, when she and Chris trot off to the canal and the Ladies’ Defective Agency, she feels something she hasn’t felt for a very long time. Anticipation. And not in a bad way, but in a I can’t wait to get there kind of a way. It is absolutely not about the work itself, although she is damn good at it. Reading truly gratuitous porn for hours at a time gradually inures her to embarrassment. She is no longer coy about weeing on the head of a complete stranger in the sauna at the gym or being part of a gang bang at a rock star’s house in California. She no longer winces when describing nipple clamps or shudders when being fisted by a lesbian dominatrix. The stuff is not atrociously written, and there is never any specifically female debasement, no rape, not a lot of non-consensual sadism. No, the scripts she can take or leave, but it is the company itself, the ladies of the LDA, she finds endearing. It is Laverne and Jules, Helen and Kitty, and the myriad other odd bods that Alex has found a connection with. Just yesterday she had been in the clubroom – and, yes, of course the LDA would have a staff clubroom beautifully laid out, fully accessible with subsidised drinks and snacks and a lowered bar for wheelchair users. The deaf bartender had shown her how to sign for gin and tonic, how to say thank you and, most importantly, ‘It’s your round.’ Although one is not permitted to booze before work, afterwards most people spend a while unwinding before heading home to the challenges of everyday life.
And often they are difficult challenges to face: unpleasant or complicated or both. Like Alex, many of the staff at the LDA work two jobs or care for disabled or vulnerable relatives when not on shift. Between the Believe in Better campaigners and the various shop-a-scrounger media campaigns, being a high-visibility crip, especially in a wheelchair or on a mobility scooter, is asking for trouble. Most of the ladies have to wear rain hats and keep cling film wrapped around their shoulders to protect them from spittle. It could come from anyone, neighbours to schoolchildren, but it comes. And most buses no longer stop, and trains no longer bother with special seating for crips. How does the advert go? ‘If you can’t fit, you can’t sit.’
At the LDA the women can use computers, a bank of which line the back of the clubroom. They can do their online shopping and have it delivered to the door, but they all still have to negotiate the other stuff: the GP, pharmacy, hospital, dentists, schools, and so forth.
Helen and Kitty do what they can to help. Every staff member is given several pocket-sized canisters of pepper spray and expected to carry them at all times. Additionally, staff are expected to text when en route to work. If people don’t check in at around their usual arrival time, Jules and one or tw
o of the other security team will head out to see if there are any problems.
This rule has been doubly enforced since a gang of teenagers set on Dawn about six months ago. They had collected a pile of rocks, waited at the entrance to the warehouse and jumped her before she had a chance to get into the building. Dawn, who, before her encounter with a drunk driver, had been a professional tennis coach, had enough rage and focus to catch a couple of the rocks and throw them back. But with only one working arm and minimal swing from her wheelchair, she had rather got the worst of it, ending up in hospital having her scalp stitched up.
The H5 police said they had given the kids a warning, but, really, a woman with such a conspicuous disability shouldn’t be out by herself in the evening. In their opinion, Dawn had brought it on herself. Dawn had said, ‘Fuck you very much,’ and asked Kitty for a double shift to make up her loss of earnings. Dawn was what Jules called ‘hardcore’.
Even so, the security team are on the alert. Six months on and Jules and a couple of others are pretty sure they have seen the same kids lurking around again.
And one night it happens, just as Alex is coming off her shift. She and Chris are mooching, yawning, down the dimly lit corridor towards the reception desk when Alex hears Jules shouting from the lift. Alex has never heard Jules raise her voice before and it makes her afraid. Then there is an almighty dinging as the fire alarm goes off.
Alex, clutching her ears, waits with Laverne, Albert and Chris, conscious of her limited sight and the darkness outside, while others rush forward. Katrina, another of the security staff, runs halfway back down the corridor shouting for Laverne to call an ambulance.
‘Get an ambulance. Tell them it’s burns, really bad burns!’
Alex can hear that Katrina is trying to keep calm but her voice breaks and she has to stifle a gag. Chris and Albert sit, ears pricked, eyes glowing. They look different, not gentle, somehow more wolf-like in the darkness of the hallway. Alex wonders if they can smell the seared skin in the lift already. In another couple of minutes so can she.