I knew a little about the working-girl life because I once dated a man who two-timed me with a Polish prostitute. (She apparently ‘wasn’t really a prostitute, she just worked in a brothel’, and had sex for money … oh, yes, and was apparently ‘just lonely’ and that’s why my boyfriend had sex with her for money because he was ‘only being nice’.)
Anyway, I also knew about the working-girl life because I used to live next door to a brothel.
Oh, and I also knew about it because, years and years and years ago, a girl at a party told my friend Nancy and me that she made $1000 a night just whipping blokes at a men’s club. ‘But if you don’t want to whip people or have sex with the punters,’ she said, ‘you can just go to dinner with them and be like their “escort” and then get paid a bit less.’
I remember Nancy and I thought this sounded like a great idea so we rang an escort agency and were soon booked for a dinner with a ‘Middle-Eastern or Asian prince person’ and his brothers and their bodyguards and an Italian girl who said she was ‘an escort’ but whom I began to understand was actually a prostitute, after a whispered conversation we had in the car as the Prince of Poopydoo and his entourage bundled us into a Rolls Royce to apparently drive us to the Prince’s hotel suite.
‘Are we meant to sleep with them?’ I whispered.
‘God, no,’ she replied. ‘You just have sex with them and then you leave.’
I recall that Nancy and I then ran away as the car stopped at the traffic lights. But we still rang the agency manager the next day and asked for our pay. To this request the agency owner told us that he’d cut our throats if we ever rang him again. Strangely this didn’t put me off now wanting to own a brothel.
I told my friend Sarah of my plans and she, ever wise, told me that I really didn’t know enough about the business to actually go ahead and buy my own.
‘You need to get some first-hand experience,’ she said.
‘You’re not suggesting I get a job as a lady of the night?’ I squeaked. ‘I can’t have sex for money. I’m too old and far too vain. I’d be so grateful that my clients had overlooked my flaws that I’d end up paying them!’
‘Do you know anyone who owns a brothel?’ Sarah asked.
‘No, but I know a guy who bumped into his father-in-law in a brothel’s waiting room.’
‘I think that you should get another opinion,’ she said.
‘And who on earth do you suggest I get that from? From my accountant, my lawyer —’
‘No, my fortune teller.’
And with that Sarah gave me the phone number of her multitasking fortune teller/cleaner.
My Underwear and the Cleaner
I was surprised that Sarah was so comfortable in her relationship with her cleaner because most people I know are scared of their domestic help. Personally, I think this may have something to do with the paranoia many of us feel that our house – our home, our castle, our monument to ourselves, our tastes, our dreams and our achievements – isn’t perfect enough to have a stranger/ cleaner enter and be judgemental of it. For this reason many people clean their house before the cleaner arrives. Yet I am the first to admit this paranoia is kind of ridiculous because I spent several years as a domestic cleaner and I can tell you right here and now that no matter how clean or how perfect someone’s place may be, I was always keen to be judgemental.
But I was always very grateful for the work as well, and I was especially grateful if the house was cleaned before I arrived because I was particularly crap at cleaning. (I once vacuumed under an ailing man’s bed and dislocated his life-support system. I didn’t realise at the time because I was wearing headphones and a Walkman, so thank heavens his invalid wife, who’d been lying in the bed beside him for the past fifteen years, was woken by the system’s blaring alarm because she re-plugged him and he survived. Unfortunately such relatively rapid movement was such an effort after fifteen years of her muscles atrophying that the old woman then had a heart attack and died.)
But, hey, maybe all that has something to do with why people are scared of their cleaners.
I should probably confess here that I was also scared of our domestic cleaner (in the days when we could afford to have one). Our last cleaner was lovely and efficient but I recently had to let him go because my newfound unemployment meant that I could no longer afford him. It’s a pity because this man was the best cleaner we’d ever had.
I should probably also point out, however, that the standard of comparison is not actually very high because, due to my shocking employment techniques, we’ve never previously had a cleaner whose professional behaviour had anything to do with their actual professional title – i.e. a cleaner who cleaned. The first cleaner we hired was a complete ‘stoner’ and we fired her after just one day because, after a three-hour shift, all she had cleaned in our entire home was the bottom of a single saucepan (and then she giggled when she showed me her reflection in it).
Our next cleaner was going through a marital breakdown and would spend her entire five-hour visit not tidying our house but sitting at our kitchen table, drinking tea and solemnly wailing while she watched me do a very bad job of cleaning the linoleum floor because I was too polite to interrupt her mourning and ask her to lift her feet while I mopped.
And I fired the third cleaner when I came home from work early and discovered him wearing my underwear and masturbating in my shower.
Despite My Misgivings I Agreed
So I’m suspicious of domestic cleaners but nevertheless I agreed to see Sarah’s cleaning lady because I was requiring her services as a fortune teller and not a cleaner. And a day later Sarah told me that she’d arranged for me to meet Inus, the cleaner, while she cleaned Sarah’s new apartment in the pre-fashionable rough end of town.
It was my first visit to Sarah’s new place and I confess I was a little anxious after I climbed the ramshackle stairs in the dark, because someone had shot both the stairwell lights and the escalator mechanisms, but I rang the doorbell precisely at the appointed time and after almost ten minutes of frantic scuttling sounds a woman opened the door.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ she said.
(Polite greetings and random and inappropriate use of the ‘f-word’ aside, isn’t knowing who’s knocking at your door kind of rudimentary when it comes to being an – excuse me – fucking psychic!)
Things got a little better after I convinced her that I wasn’t a plain-clothes policeperson and then got a little worse when I had to explain that I’d come to have my fortune read and she asked for my watch, wallet and phone. I thought she wanted to feel my energy through my possessions so I gave them all to her and she ran off with them down the street. I then rang Sarah reverse-charge from a public phone to ask for the cleaner’s name and home address so I could report her to the police.
‘Where are you?’ asked Sarah.
‘I’m at your place.’
‘No you’re not. Inus rang and said that she’s still waiting for you to turn up.’
I told Sarah my location. ‘You’ve gone to the wrong address,’ she said. ‘But you know, when I rang Inus the other day to tell her you were coming, she said that something like this might happen.’
‘Can I call her and make another appointment?’ I asked.
‘No,’ replied Sarah. ‘She’s quitting her work as both a cleaner and a fortune teller.’
‘But why?’ I gasped in desperation.
‘She said she wanted to get a job in a call centre … because she was sick of trying to help people.’
And with that, the ache in my heart began to ever so slightly throb,
just for a fleeting moment,
it hurt a little bit more,
and then it returned to its more usual dull ache.
And I walked home to the accompaniment of the rhythmic beat of my bum bouncing off the back of my legs.
2
‘Mum, why do you think our bums drop?’
‘Well, in older women it’s the result of gra
vity. But in someone your age it’s simply because God doesn’t want you to attract men any more.’
‘But why wouldn’t God want me to attract men?’ I ask, clearly distraught.
‘I’m sorry, dear,’ my mother replies. ‘I really shouldn’t have said that. It’s not because God doesn’t want you to attract men. It’s because he wants you to repel them.’
‘But that’s ridiculous!’ I scoff.
‘Is it, dear?’ my mother replies softly. ‘Because it really seems to be working.’
‘But why would God want me to repel men?’
‘Because he doesn’t want you to keep breeding.’
‘Why not? Is it because I’m unattractive? Is it because I’m not bright enough? Is it because I’m a crushing disappointment?’
‘Yes, dear, it’s possibly all of those reasons, but it’s also because God has noticed you have a major flaw that he doesn’t want to risk passing on to your children.’
‘But what major flaw could he have noticed?’
‘Well, apart from the obvious – your feet size, that odd thing with your nose, and of course your bum – there’s also the aching empty space in your heart.’
‘But maybe the attention of a man will make the ache in my heart go away.’
‘Well, then, you’ll have to hide the fact that your bum has fallen by making it kind of shrink.’
‘But how the hell do you make your bum shrink?’
‘Well,’ replied my mother solemnly, ‘if you really want to make your bum look smaller, you just extend the crack with an eyebrow pencil.’*
Stagnating Moats Under the Eyes
And so the ache in my heart continued. I asked my next-door neighbour and friend, Emily, for her advice on how to heal it and she told me that I should meditate. Emily is calm, with clear skin and no dark circles hovering under her eyes like stagnating moats, so whatever she’s doing seems to be working for her. But the problem is that I’ve tried meditating for calmness in the past and I found it very stressful.
I tried more than fifteen years ago, while struggling through the endless cobweb of divorce, and I remember heading off to the recommended guru who practised by a name that sounded like Banana Head but more than likely wasn’t. I attended the required three private sessions at dawn, each day with the prescribed different offering of fruit. This varying menu was allegedly intended as an offering to the gods but I now suspect it was simply determined by what Banana Head thought he might like for breakfast. Had the course continued for a fourth day, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the request came in for an offering of scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns and pancakes.
In truth, however, I can tell you that the problems actually didn’t start with the breakfast offerings but when I arrived at the meditating instructor’s suburban home, which was decorated in a subtle combination of ‘guru meets Freedom furniture’ (i.e. quite nice furniture draped in hideous pieces of assorted woven brown fabrics). I wasn’t expecting luxury because I knew that the instructor’s standard fee was simply ten per cent of whatever the student had received as income from their work that week, but I was greeted at the door of the living room by the aforementioned ‘great one’ only to discover a couple of other unexpected issues:
ISSUE 1
The guru was good-looking. (And I think we all know that it is not possible for a good-looking person to have a genuinely spiritual personality. In fact, it’s probably not possible for a good-looking person to be either genuine or spiritual or to even have a personality.) and
ISSUE 2
I went to primary school with this guy! And he was, at that time when we were both five, famous for sitting on the school bus and ‘doing diarrhoea’ in his drink bottle.
ISSUE 3 didn’t raise its head until the afternoon of my second-last session when I arrived home to open the mail and discovered that my new employer at the time had sent me my six-month income in advance as an act of goodwill.
And ISSUE 3 blossomed fully the following morning, my final morning with Banana Head, when I was asked to pay him my offering of a simple ten per cent of my week’s income and I, for fear I’d burn like incense in bad-karma hell, get hit by a bus or grow a beard out my bum if I dared to deceive, paid him ten per cent of the cheque I’d received the day before! That is, twenty-six times more than I actually would have were I simply on a weekly wage!!!!
I know why I did it, because I thought that I should. But as soon as I’d done it I thought that I shouldn’t have. In fact, as soon as I’d paid him, I lost every skerrick of any calming good that had been achieved through me sitting in his Sentient Space (formerly known as ‘attic storage’). So the upshot of all this is quite simply that nowadays the mere thought of meditation makes me want to bite my nails and take up smoking and hit someone who’s wearing a sheet.
N.B. Sometimes I wonder whether fifteen years after the event is too late to cancel the cheque that I paid to Banana Head. I’ve actually only ever cancelled a cheque once before and that was the time I was having second thoughts about investing in real estate through a man who’d spent three months winning me over with his architectural and business plans. He found out about the cheque cancellation, of course, and got so angry with me for not trusting him that I wrote out another cheque immediately. And then, as soon as it cleared, he took the proceeds to Beirut, where he had work done on his man-boobs.
Running Out of Friends
So meditation wasn’t the answer and I continued to suffer from le grand vide qui me déchire le coeur (the big black aching hole in my heart).
Clearly I still needed life advice, but I was running out of friends to ask.
I should probably point out here that when I use the term ‘friend’ I am actually referring to the old-fashioned definition of ‘friend’ – that is, someone you know and like and have shared life’s journey with. I establish this definition of friend as opposed to the modern Facebook definition of friend, which is anyone in the universe you have never met, nor will ever meet but who is joined to you by a chain extending to thousands, if not millions, of other people whom you also have never met nor will ever meet. Admittedly, were one to do an anthropological study of this chain, it is possible that I’m exaggerating and at the origin of the ‘chain of friends’ you may discover someone whom you have actually met, at a nightclub or in a bus queue. And it is also possible that, although it’s more than likely you won’t remember your ‘friend’s’ face, you’ll be pretty sure that you do have their number in your mobile phone, and you definitely won’t delete it because you think you might ring them to meet again some time, if you could only remember your ‘friend’s’ name.
So yes, the modern definition of a friend is what we formerly called a stranger, but my friends are not such people. My friends are fellow travellers in life and I’ve met them and know them … perhaps a little too well. To be honest, some of them are possibly not the best that no money can buy – they’re not rich or good-looking, and some of them aren’t particularly interesting or even nice. It’s true that I have hand-picked my friends from life’s all-you-can-eat buffet, but admittedly it has been more of a Sizzler variety than the Ritz, and due to my religious/low self-esteem/undeserving upbringing, I let everyone serve themselves before me. So I’ve essentially had to make do with what was left on the buffet, the friend equivalent of limp lettuce and half a cold boiled egg that’s lost its yellow centre.
But when push comes to shove they’re the best friends that life has made available and I’d stick by them to the end (unless that end meant a choice between their life or mine, in which case I would delete this paragraph!).
(So, if this is so, why do I call them my friends? Because single women can’t be choosy. And besides, I kind of love them – albeit perhaps in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way.)
Anyway, the point is that I was running out of the traditional definition of friends from whom to ask advice. This was not due immediately to the fact that I was running out of friends, because they were
still with me, albeit either too mentally absent to have even noted my trauma, or still standing by my side but just from a slightly greater distance than usual for fear that my dilemma might be contagious. No, when I say that I was ‘running out of friends’ I mean that I was running out of friends who were actually capable of giving advice. Actually, that’s not true. Everyone is ‘capable of giving advice’, but when a friend tells you that you might be better if you spend the day wearing three pairs of underpants because ‘they make you feel cosy, and cosy means loved’, then you have to wonder if the advice is worth listening to.
After only a couple of days I’d already asked the advice of every wise friend I had and the wisest of them all said, ‘The worst thing you could do at a time like this is ask the advice of any of your other friends.’ He said this not out of envy but in order to protect me because he felt that ‘the others’ would give irresponsible advice and you can’t insure against stupidity.
He was right, of course, but his advice on advice came at a point when I was losing faith in anyone’s advice because even my wise friends were starting to reveal they had all the worldly wisdom of a sock.
The Night my Bum Dropped Page 4