There was at least some grain of truth in my story about the taxi company; I may not have been working for them but one of their drivers was by now working for me. On several occasions I found myself with the same late-night cabbie dropping me at appointments, holding onto my radio and generally ensuring that I was not totally alone when I visited strange men’s houses. He earned some generous tips from me and, of course, almost immediately cottoned on to exactly what my business was. It would have been hard for him not to notice, given the unusual equipment case I took with me on my travels. By this stage of my life I had not had anything like a regular lover for years, really from when I had split up with my first love, Tom. I was virtually celibate because I was working all the hours God sends and never had time to meet guys. My life was quite lonely because of the turbulent relationship I’d had with my family for years and I was also distanced from my peers at university. I had a secret life that I couldn’t talk about with them and they were generally less mature and a lot less worldly-wise than me.
Meeting someone like my taxi-driver, who I’ll call Frank, meant that I could at least talk about my work without being paranoid that my secret would be revealed to the world. He may not have been particularly intelligent or intellectually satisfying for me but it was very convenient. That, I fear, may sound mercenary and opportunistic but it really wasn’t like that: I was just very much alone. He started flirting with me and I thought, ‘Oh, what the hell… why not?’
I can’t quite remember the moment when my driver turned into my lover but it was perhaps inevitable, given the amount of time we spent in the car together and the fact that I didn’t have time to meet any ‘normal’ men, outside of the submissives who were hiring my services. We sort of skipped out the dating stage and went straight in, from casual friendship to long-term relationship – going from driving to shagging without dating. I can’t even remember our first kiss, it was that unmemorable, but it was a relationship that was to last for the next six years.
Frank started asking me to go round to his home but I was at first almost as wary of him as I was of my routine clients. I knew that he lived with several other cab drivers and it was one of my golden rules never to find myself alone in a house with more than one man. But by now we were at the kissing and fumbling stage of our relationship and there came a point where I could no longer find excuses not to go home with him. I remember being nervous and thinking: ‘Oh God, he’s the only one who usually knows when I am alone with a client and now it’s his house that I will be going to.’ In the end I scribbled a hurried note and left it on the kitchen table of the flat that I had just moved into: ‘If anything happens to me I’ve gone to this address…’
Our night together was fine, although sex with him was unadventurous and not really to my taste. The one thing he had going for him was that he had previously worked for a whole cross-section of late-night society, working girls, drug-dealers and all sorts. So I think I started dating him more because of convenience and also because he was tolerant to what I was doing. Although our relationship was rather vanilla, it was handy to stay with him because he had no issue with what I did.
I was now in the second year of university and earning a great deal of money; studying by day and working all kinds of stupid late nights. I would whack my phones on as soon as I got back from college in the evening and answer calls through until about two or three o’clock in the morning. Other students often came into university tired and a little worse the wear from late-night drinking sessions. I didn’t drink at all but my early morning lectures were hell because I had been dominating three or four men in appointments most of the night. The upside was that I was making serious money. My rates then were around £60 for the rare half-hour appointments and about £110 for a full hour of me being cruel and sadistic to my customers. Compared with the pittance I got for my previous cleaning jobs it meant that I could earn in an hour what I used to earn in a week. The income was somewhat unreliable and sporadic: some nights I made comparative fortunes whilst on other evenings the phone didn’t ring. Even so, in what seemed like no time at all, I managed to save up more than £10,000 in cash.
Having that much money was a crossroads moment in my life. I thought, ‘What the hell am I going to do with this? I can either copy what my friends are doing and take a year out of uni to travel the world, or I can buy a house.’ Remembering how my grandparents had struggled for money all their lives, the idea of starting out on the first steps of building my own property empire was always going to be the favourite. In the end, I put the money down as a deposit on a flat in London, and carried on both working and studying just as I had done till then. My little flat was right next to a station, which I thought would increase its future rental potential, and it cost me £40,000. I think I put down about £8000 in cash as a deposit and got a mortgage for the rest. I was, to be honest, quite proud of myself. The flat I had moved into was the first home I had ever owned. I was just 21 years old, still a student – and suddenly I was a property owner.
My experience of university was nothing like that of my peers. I was never part of the usual uni social scene. When I had the time to join in, I didn’t have the money. When I had the money, I certainly didn’t have the time. When final exams came around I got a 2.1 which I was sort of pleased with. I probably could have done better but, to be honest, you know, just like anything, you could have done better.
CHAPTER 18
KINKIER AND KINKIER
I thought I was a tough cookie but there’s not much that can prepare a young woman for the kinkier side of life as a dominatrix. From the very first session onwards I was doing things that were so far from anything I had done before that I couldn’t help but be shocked. It was not as if I had not heard of all of the things that I was now being asked to do: there is after all not much that one doesn’t learn when answering the phone in a London brothel. Yet there is a big difference between hearing about the sort of things that go on and being alone in a room with a complete stranger who is expecting you to do them.
One such moment came very early on for me when a guy asked me to stick my fingers in his rear, and I was thinking: ‘Oh, I’m not going to have to do that, am I?’ It was one thing inserting a rubber sex toy into someone’s bottom but putting my fingers in was ‘Oh my God, what am I doing here?’ To make things worse, I wasn’t 100 per cent sure exactly what I was supposed to do once my fingers were inserted, and that lack of confidence was putting me off as well. The experience felt very much like crossing another boundary and all I can say is that once you have crossed that bridge then it is nothing; you almost wonder what all the fuss was about. It is after all the sort of thing that nurses and doctors have to get used to all of the time.
It was the same ‘never done that before’ challenge with watersports. The first time that a man asked me to pee on him I realised that urinating on demand can be the hardest thing ever. It should be easy but in those early days it was not easy at all. ‘Watersports’ seemed to be a particular domination fetish for some Arab men who liked to lie on the floor and play with themselves whilst I stood over them and peed. That can be hard to do while somebody is down on the floor looking up your skirt. There were plenty of times when I felt as though I needed to ‘go’ but I couldn’t get to that point. It was awful; the poor guy would be underneath me, masturbating harder and harder and waiting for the big event but it just wouldn’t happen. Then you think: ‘I have drunk so much, why can’t I let it go?’
I saw a television documentary a while back about a famous Australian brothel. One of the women had a watersports client booked but had the same problem. She was drinking and drinking and drinking and I recognised that feeling at once because I used to try and do that to make myself pee. The answer is, however, that you don’t need to over-drink; as long as you have drunk something and you give yourself time, then nature will eventually take its course. Part of the problem in the early days when I was taking domination calls in a brothel was that there
wasn’t always time to allow that to happen. With no appointments system, men used to turn up out of the blue and expect you to be able to pee straightaway. One day I had three clients, one after the other, all of whom wanted watersports. I said ‘yes’ on the phone without thinking through the consequences. The first guy got splattered, the second one got a little damp and the last one had his belly-button filled and had to be happy with that; the well had run dry.
It didn’t take long working in a brothel for me to overcome that inhibition. The weird thing is that even after I had become a professional domme and could pee at will over the men, there were still parts of my body that I was reluctant to show. I am a lot braver in my choices of clothing these days than I would ever have been before. Back then I could stand over somebody and pee on them with no trouble at all, yet wearing a short skirt and having my thighs out on show was a complete no-no.
These days, with a couple of decades of practice behind me, I can pee on demand whenever and wherever I wish. A regular supply of coffee helps but I’ve long since beaten that psychological barrier that stops the flow flowing. The same cannot be said about the guys who come to visit me. It’s usually a complete waste of time to demand that they piss in front of me. One guy recently was insistent that he wanted to try something he’d never tried before and so I came up with what I thought was a particularly creative idea to satisfy his need for novelty. Without going into all the hydraulic detail, it involved a catheter condom, a lot of rubber tubing, an enema nozzle and tipping my medical bench slightly in order that he could piss into his own backside. The engineering arrangements worked fine but the human element let me down. I tried a number of nurses’ well-worn tricks, such as leaving a tap running and leaving the room so he could pee in private, but nothing could induce the tiniest drop from his body.
Looking back to my early days as a dominatrix I realise now how young and naïve I was at that time. I had never played any sort of watersports games with a partner and didn’t even know that people wanted to do such things. It was the same with the anal play that many men wanted. I was completely in the dark. Obviously I knew that some women enjoyed anal sex but I’d never thought about men that way. It is not something that had ever entered into my consciousness, even though I had been adventurous enough to have experimented with rope bondage and had had these kind of play urges myself in the past. I was nowhere near experienced enough to understand all the options available. More importantly still, there was no internet then which might have opened my eyes a little. In this internet age, when every sex game and perversion known to mankind is freely available to view at the click of a button, people are nowhere near as innocent as I was then. Even so, people hear the kinkier side of some of my activities and do appear to be shocked. ‘Oh my God, how can you do things like that?’ some might say to my face. Behind the closed doors of their bedroom, however, I reckon it is a very different story.
I can’t deny, however, that there was an element of guilt in those early days because I knew that my grandparents would have been ashamed of me if they had ever known what I did to fund my time at university. Whenever I went back to stay with them or just to see them for an evening I just felt, ‘Oh God, if they ever knew. It would disappoint them so much.’ I didn’t feel then – and don’t feel now – that I was ever doing anything wrong but I would have hated to disappoint them and I know my family would have had a big issue with my lifestyle.
By contrast, the woman who owned the brothel in which I was working thought that I was a very enterprising young woman. She ran five separate brothels and after a while I started doing receptionist shifts in each of them at different times. I used to answer the phone and leave my cards advertising my own domination services. She didn’t mind because she knew I would use her rooms and then give her a percentage of the fee. In theory it was illegal in those days for two girls to be working in the same ‘house’, but she never regarded the domination I offered as prostitution and so was happy for me to both answer phones and offer the occasional session as well. As the weeks went by, I gathered quite a following of clients who would call to ask for me by name and ask when I was next going to be on the premises.
It was all very amateurish but it sort of snowballed: what started as a simple daily sum of pennies in my hand started to grow into serious money. I would think, ‘Wow! I’ve got my maid’s fee and an extra £30. This is fantastic.’ I vividly remember the first day I left the place with £150 in my pocket, I felt like the richest person ever because I was only a student, I had no money, and now I had a maid’s fee and I was earning more on top of that. Needless to say, I went shopping. There were all these things I needed, like trainers, and I bought this and I bought that and actually got a taxi back from the shopping centre because I had all these bags. It was my first taste of money – £150. I remember it well.
I discovered that with the receptionist work and the growing number of clients who wanted me to dominate them, making money was easier than I had imagined. But I always knew that working in the brothels was no more than a stepping stone, just a way to pay for life until I could graduate and find a decent nine-to-five career. The truth was that life can be unpleasant and dangerous for any girl in a brothel and the muddled-up status of our laws on prostitution offers little protection to the women who work there. Very early on I had an incident when a guy came in and agreed to pay for a session but then started demanding far more than I was prepared to give to any man. I would never have sex, and that was always made clear from the start, so when this guy started demanding more I told him to leave. He walked out quietly enough but then smashed a house brick through the window; I wasn’t hurt but it was a terrifying experience.
Soon after that I had another bad day when a client came in and stole the very first piece of equipment that I had bought with the idea of building up my own domination business. It was a V-string, an artificial rubber vagina that could be strapped around a man to hide his own genitalia and make it look as though he was a woman. A lot of the men who came to see me wanted to cross-dress and be made into a woman and so this bit of kit was a logical extension to the normal wigs and women’s dresses that helped me create the illusion they desired. It was a big investment for my fledgling business, several hundred pounds as I recall, and it came with variable-coloured pubic hair to match different men and it allowed them to fantasise that they had a fully-penetrable vagina.
The guy who stole it had come into the room before I realised that he was seriously drunk and that there was no way I was going to session with him. I refused to take his money and told him to leave but he grabbed the V-string and ran before I could stop him. Dealing with guys who had been drinking all day and then decided they wanted a five-minute fling was an occupational hazard in those places. I had a lot of horrible, smelly, rude, drunk, arrogant men come to see me because the brothels advertised in newspapers and were at the bottom end of scale. They offered the lowest common denominator price-wise and so it is no surprise that they attracted the lowest common denominator people-wise.
As well as the sort of drunken, scummy bums who I had to kick out, there were other, more serious, dangers. Being ill one day saved me from a horrendous incident. I had been due to answer calls at one particular brothel but had to call in and tell them I was just too ill to work. That same day two guys forced their way into the building, raped one of the girls, and robbed the maid at knifepoint. It could so easily have been me. At around that same time there was a complete nutter, known as ‘domination man’ who visited several brothels where girls offered domination services. I can still remember his face to this day because he was on an ‘ugly mugs’ list that the working girls circulated to try and keep themselves safe. His modus operandi was to book a domination session and then beat the women black and blue when they were alone in the room. He put at least one girl in intensive care before he was finally caught and sentenced to more than 10 years in jail.
So there were a lot of guys that were really not very ni
ce at all, which is a consequence of working in an environment where the doors are open to all. Men call the number in an advert, you give them the address and they turn up at the door. Even though I found that those who sought fetish services tended to be more educated, intelligent and articulate people, it didn’t alter the fact that you are not selecting your clients, they are selecting you. It creates a very different clientele to the one I have now.
Back then, and in all the many contacts I’ve had over the years with ‘working girls’ – the euphemistic name for prostitutes – I’ve never come across any woman in the sort of forced-labour situation which seems to have obsessed the police and the popular press in recent years. I don’t doubt that there are the very occasional cases where girls are exploited by evil trafficking gangs, but the image that is peddled that this is all part of widespread organised crime is far from the truth. Do I feel there are woman exploited? I can’t say that I have ever seen it in any of the brothels I ever knew of, and ever worked in and answered the phones. Those girls were certainly not exploited. Some of course will be taking drugs but that is a very different problem and, again, most of them are not forced into it at all. Many of them are quite happy; like me they quite enjoy what they are doing, not all of it is doom and gloom. Depending on where they work, prostitutes can come into contact with decent, interesting people.
I certainly found most of my clients interesting in the days when I was building up my outcalls domination service throughout the London suburbs. Clothing was an important consideration once my workload increased. I needed clothes that could cover whatever kinky outfit I was wearing underneath and could be versatile enough not to look out of place going into a private home or a London hotel. You wanted to go looking sexy and smart but not so sexy that the neighbours would stare at you, and not so smart that it just looked wrong. I used to wrestle with myself wondering should I wear a business suit, or should I wear normal clothes just to blend in as though I were a friend calling round to the house? It was a constant dilemma and I went through phases of trying out different things. At one stage I thought of putting a uniform on and just brazening it out on the streets but then I thought, ‘What if I get stopped by the Old Bill, having a uniform on? It could be disastrous’.
Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story Page 14