Gigolo

by Ben Foster

  Kelly grabbed my arm. ‘What did I tell you?’

  I called the boys. ‘Come on you two, lunch time,’ and George chased Ollie across the grass.

  We broke into the £50 note – we had to at some time. I felt proud letting the kids have whatever they wanted and went a bit crazy for once in my life and ordered a beer.

  7

  VIVIENNE

  The walls were hung with the strangest pictures I had ever seen: a man with his fist jammed in the rectum of another man, a naked man pointing a gun, his arm level to his penis like it was another gun; men in masks, women in chains, pierced penises, the images in matching frames beneath spotlights that ran on rails on the ceiling. I felt instantly embarrassed and unsure of myself.

  ‘Do you like them?’

  Vivienne was standing behind me dressed for ballet in a white tutu and pumps, a costume that was so unexpected it had thrown me off balance when she opened the door to her apartment, a penthouse close to Kensington Palace. I turned. Her brow was tight and she had a searching look on her long narrow face. I was about to lie but stopped myself. It was a habit I didn’t want to get into.

  ‘Not exactly,’ I answered. ‘But I don’t dislike them.’

  We moved on and stopped before a shot of a naked white woman wreathed in cigarette smoke watching a black man masturbating. I assumed it meant something but had no idea what. Vivienne spoke as if working out what she wanted to say. She grabbed at the air with her long fingers.

  ‘Photographs capture a moment in time. They’re like memories. This is different. It makes us wonder what has already happened and what is going to happen next. We become a part of the story.’ She looked into my eyes. ‘Robert Mapplethorpe was a true genius.’

  I assumed that was the photographer, but didn’t ask.

  We moved along the display.

  ‘Do you recognise anyone?’

  There were various women in various states of undress, none smiling. I shook my head. She pointed at a woman in black leather motorbike gear, then another, naked.

  ‘Marianne Faithful, Brooke Shields, Sigourney Weaver, Debbie Harry, Yoko Ono. They were all icons in their day. But it’s not their day anymore.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘It’s our day.’

  Her moods changed quickly. Her silvery blonde hair was bright as chrome in the spotlights. I could smell her perfume. It was light and airy, a scent I didn’t know, and seemed personal to her. She was so beautiful, I couldn’t bear to look at her.

  We turned from the photographs. Along the centre of the room on plinths were carvings and twisted loops of steel. She stroked a white marble nude with oversized legs and small breasts.

  ‘Henry Moore. I love him. Touch, it’s so sensuous.’

  The marble was cool beneath my fingertips.

  ‘Isn’t it luscious?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, luscious,’ I repeated.

  I watched her glide along the wall of pictures and turn off the overhead lights. The sun through the tall windows was warm, my hands were damp and I felt a desire to reach out and touch her, hold her, to feel her skin. The resolve I’d made eating pizza with my kids had vanished like a puff of smoke.

  ‘It’s such a pleasure to have you here, Ben. I never entertain.’

  ‘It’s a privilege,’ I said and meant it. ‘I’ve never been anywhere like this before.’

  ‘Do you know Amsterdam?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When I saw the Van Gogh’s, I cried. We’ll go one day.’

  She span in a pirouette, danced across the open space and out through the door at the end of the gallery. I glanced again at the photographs and it struck me that everything in the room was in shades of black and white, the images, the grey slate floor, me in my white costume like a character on stage. I set up the massage table in the space between the white Henry Moore sculpture and a black stone figure of a mother and child. The shadowy faces staring from the walls was like an audience waiting for the play to begin.

  My heart was pounding in my chest. Something had happened to me and it may have been as pathetic as driving a new car. All my life I had been weighed down by that working-class feeling of not being quite good enough. Massage had helped me to overcome that to a certain extent, but it’s like a birthmark, you never completely lose that sense of inferiority. I had felt ill at ease in the Great Hall with those fine ladies. That feeling hadn’t gone, but it had weakened. Vivienne had made me feel welcome. This was her secret world and she had invited me to be a part of it.

  Most days I was mopping up pee and buckling lads into strait jackets to stop them harming themselves. My life had turned upside down. Vivienne Raynott was a society lady, a friend of the Queen. It was heady stuff. When I jogged, I usually sprinted the last two hundred metres and it made me buzz with energy. That was the feeling I had that July afternoon, like I’d run faster than I had ever run before and jumped over a vast yawning chasm.

  As I stroked the marble sculpture, Vivienne’s appearance in the doorway was like a scene from an unfolding story created by the photographer whose work lined the walls. The images portrayed the dark parts of our humanity. I couldn’t work out why Vivienne liked them so much, unless it was the attraction of opposites. She was pure and delicate in a gallery of the crude and obscene. She was wrapped in a towel, the beginnings of a smile on her lips.

  ‘Are you ready for me?’

  ‘I should wash my hands,’ I said.

  ‘Come.’

  I entered the bedroom. Everything was white, as was the bathroom with its marble sinks and shiny silver fittings. Vivienne, Maggs, Lady Catherine, they lived such different lives from me, from ordinary people. Kelly had said ‘they must have more money than sense.’ But that was untrue, a cliché. They were not lacking in common sense at all. On the contrary. They were smart, aware, chosen people. Vivienne with her art, Maggs with Bach. The comments they made and the things they talked about made me realise there was so much to know about so many things and how little I knew about anything.

  As I dried my hands, I gazed into the mirror. I was a traveller at the beginning of a journey, destination unknown, and really wasn’t sure who it was looking back at me in the reflection.

  Vivienne was waiting, naked, stretched out on the table, the towel on the floor.

  ‘I’m surprisingly strong, Ben,’ she said. ‘Don’t be afraid to press hard.’

  I didn’t want to look at her and made myself busy. My shoulder bag was under the table with some aromatherapy candles, the iPod with music, a variety of oils, jojoba, almond, apricot kernel, Kukui nut oil, arnica for sports injuries. Oils help you get the best balance between grip and slip, their perfume heightening the sense of smell, the most neglected of the senses. Some oils make patients sparkle with new life; others help them fall into a deep sleep. I would never have told anyone, but I secretly thought of myself as an alchemist choosing and blending oils in a quest to find the gold in the soul of every person.

  ‘Would you like me to light some candles and play some music?’ I asked.

  ‘No, nothing. Let’s enjoy the silence?’

  Everything Kelly said about me was true. I lacked confidence. I was unsure of myself. I was naive. But the moment I warmed some jojoba in my palms I became a different person, the me inside me, the me I was supposed to be. Massage is a performance. You play the role of the healer and become a projection of yourself when the show begins. Everyone is born with one skill. I felt blessed to have found mine.

  The room was bright with blocks of shadow as the sun moved across the windows. When I had first looked at the Henry Moore sculpture, I’d thought the proportions were wrong. Now it appeared delicate, feminine, fragile. I ran a few drops of oil over Vivienne’s spine. I saw now that her back, the cheeks of her bottom and the tops of her legs were criss-crossed with a mesh of fine shiny lines.

  ‘You have a lot of scars,’ I said and her reply was a whisper.

  ‘I think they’re beautiful.’

  I wanted to ask
more, how and why, but it would have been inappropriate. I was a stranger in the strange land of the rich and was coming to see that they do things differently there.

  ‘Take a deep breath, hold it for a count of ten and relax.’

  The nervous system is like a seesaw. You can’t be relaxed and nervous at the same time. As Vivienne held her breath, so did I and my nerves grew still. I began by running my spread fingers down either side of her spine. She sighed. Her body was like porcelain with fine cracks. But the feel of her skin was soft like dipping your hands into warm milk. She had told me to press hard, but I was afraid she would shatter under pressure.

  I carried on over her damaged bottom and up the sides of her body, repeating the initial effleurage ten times before moving on to her shoulders, where I found a ball of knots. Vivienne didn’t have the financial anxiety most of us have, but anxiety comes in many forms – perhaps she had lost her boyfriend to a rival, or her mother didn’t love her, or her father loved her too much. There had to be a reason why her back was covered in scars.

  Applying figure of 8 movements over her shoulder blades, I was able to isolate the knot clusters. We all have stress and react to it in different ways; we drink, take drugs, get violent, and it depressed me that so few people turn to yoga or massage to cure their problems and pains. As I worked on the knots, they began to loosen. The body stores mental tension that remains buried until long after the causes have passed. Massage eases the tightness in the muscles that arise from that built-up tension and I could feel it prickling my fingertips as it rose to the surface and vanished from Vivienne’s long slender back.

  She turned over. Her eyes were bright like blue neon. She had wide shoulders with deep wells shaded blue beneath her collarbones. Her breasts were symmetrical and sat firmly above a frame of protruding ribs, a narrow waist and jutting hipbones. Her shaved pussy was as white as a seashell and gave her a vulnerable, child-like appearance that created in me opposing sensations. I wanted to take her in my arms, protect her, hold her tightly, while my body’s reaction ran contrary to that emotion. The blood was racing through my veins and I had an erection that was growing painful.

  I massaged her ballerina feet and wanted to kiss her toes. I ran my hands up her legs and over her ribcage, avoiding her breasts. As I began to work my thumbs into the top of the shoulders above her collarbones, she placed her palms around the back of my head.

  ‘You can kiss me now,’ she said.

  I loved her voice, it was deep and sweet like a musical instrument. We kissed, a lover’s kiss, long and sensual. I was standing at the side of the massage table. She reached down to stroke my penis.

  ‘Poor Ben. He’s been neglected.’

  She swung her legs from the table, slipped down on her knees and pulled my white jogging pants down to my feet.

  ‘There you are, poor baby,’ she said and took me into her mouth.

  My eyes closed. Stars glimmered behind my eyelids. The Hon. Vivienne Raynott, author and heiress, was sucking my cock. It was unbelievable. Me. A care worker. A nobody from nowhere. I wanted this. I had wanted it from the moment she left the Great Hall and came to tell me ‘how brave I was,’ how ‘we were going to be friends for the rest of our lives.’

  Through massage and yoga, I had learned that every person is a blend of yin and yang, of opposing traits and qualities. Good and bad. Kind and hard-hearted. Generous and mean. I was proud of myself. I was disappointed with myself, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere in the world other than where I was at that moment. Men dream of sleeping with beautiful women. I was living the dream.

  Vivienne pulled my jogging pants and boxers over my grubby trainers, stood and led me by my cock from the gallery to her bedroom with its white bed and downy pillows. I kicked off my shoes, my shirt, and lay back like a king as she continued to lick and suck and nibble my cock and balls.

  ‘Mmm, beautiful,’ she said.

  She ran her lips down the shaft as if she were playing a harmonica. She moved her tongue in circles around the head. She made sighing sounds like a cat with a bowl of cream. As my body tensed, she moved away and pressed herself against the white metal bars of the headboard, eyes glassy, her voice a whisper.

  ‘My face,’ she moaned.

  She jerked the skin up and down the length of my cock and sprayed her face, my load coating her eyes and rolling down her cheeks into her mouth. I was panting like I’d just jogged around the park. I watched as she scooped up a dollop of sperm on the end of her finger and slid it between her lips. She kissed me and I tasted my own semen.

  ‘Hit me,’ she then said and turned to take hold of the bed frame.

  She pushed out her bottom.

  My cock softened. I was unsure of myself. She turned and smiled.

  ‘Have you never spanked a girl before, Ben?’

  I shook my head. She stared into my eyes. Her voice was harder, demanding, authoritative.

  ‘It isn’t difficult. Just a little tap. It won’t hurt.’

  I gently spanked her bum cheeks with my open palm.

  ‘There, you see. And again. Harder.’

  I spanked her again. Harder. And again, harder still. And she was right. It wasn’t difficult.

  ‘Harder. Don’t stop until I tell you to.’

  The sound of my hand striking her skin echoed over the ceiling. Her bottom turned pink, each slap leaving a white hand print. My cock grew hard again. Perhaps she sensed that. It was all new to me. She didn’t tell me to stop. I didn’t stop. My hand was beginning to sting. My heart beat faster. New unknown sensations ran through me like bursts of electricity. I was sheathed in a film of sweat and my flesh felt as if it were peeling from my body like a snake shedding its skin. Whoever I was when I had arrived at that apartment had faded into the past. I was a different person now.

  Suddenly, she grew tense. She took a firmer grip on the metal bars of the headboard and her body began to shake. She turned and pulled me on top of her and we moved together like two dancers who had spent a lifetime learning a set of intricate steps. The heat expanded between us as our bodies moved closer then eased apart. She sucked air through her teeth and held her breath. We weren’t fucking. We were making love. It was a performance. Her back arched. Her body went stiff and we erupted in orgasm, our duet creating something greater than ourselves.

  We fell back into the down pillows. I felt drained yet recharged and more alive than I had ever felt in my life.

  ‘Now,’ she gasped. ‘That’s better?’ She nursed my cock in her hand, squeezing gently. ‘Your cazzo is a sculpture. It’s a Henry Moore.’

  I didn’t know what cazzo meant and didn’t ask. She looked back into my eyes and a wave of excitement crossed her features.

  ‘We are going to make a mould and cast it in bronze. Would you like that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Will it hurt?’

  She laughed. ‘A little pain can lead to a lot of pleasure.’

  ‘Is that why . . . ’ I stopped and she shook my penis.

  ‘When innocence ends, pleasure begins.’ She paused. Her expression changed. ‘Jealousy is only hurt ego. Revenge is meaningless. Life is abstract. If there is any point other than pleasure, I haven’t found it.’

  She snuggled up beside me. Her words were like poetry and I repeated them to myself as I closed my eyes. I may have dozed off and woke with Vivienne sucking my penis again. She stopped and I watched as she extracted a pubic hair from between her teeth.

  ‘Do you trust me, Ben?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’

  I smiled. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  She stepped from the bed and stretched, going up on her toes and holding her palms together above her head. She then crossed the room to a chest of drawers and removed a black silk scarf. She covered my eyes and tied the scarf at the back of my head. I heard her cross the room to the bathroom and return again.

  ‘Roll to one side for a
moment.’

  I did so and she stretched a towel beneath me.

  ‘Put your knees up and don’t move.’ She stressed the word don’t. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’

  I listened to the snip, snip, snip of a pair of scissors as she cut away tufts of my pubic hair. I heard the hiss of foam being sprayed from a container and she began to shave my lower stomach and balls. She held my penis in her long fingers. As she ran the razor down the shaft, I held my breath and thought for one unbearable second that she was going to castrate me, that she was an angel and I was the devil being punished for all the bad things I had done.

  ‘You’re shaking,’ she said and I let out my breath.

  ‘This is worse than going to the dentist.’

  ‘You are such a baby.’

  She was slow, careful, methodical. She returned to the places where the hair was stubborn, added fresh foam and ran the razor over the area again. She washed and dried the shaved parts, then popped my cock back in her mouth, her saliva like balm, and I became hard again. When she peeled away the scarf, my cock looked oddly naked and much bigger.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘It’s much better. Girls hate it when they get smelly pubes between their teeth?’

  ‘I’ve never thought about that to be honest.’

  She was smiling, joyful, totally at ease with her nudity, with mine. It was hard to believe she was older than Kelly. She looked like a teenager. It was strange and confusing. I felt as if I had fallen in love and kept having to tell myself it’s only sex. She sucked my cock again, slowly, like the last dance at the end of a long evening.

  ‘He really is rather beautiful,’ she said and skipped from the bed.

  It was time to go. We drank glasses of water. I dressed. She sat at a bureau, still naked, removed her cheque book and reached for a pen.

  ‘Ben Foster, or Benjamin.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  I stood over as she wrote the number 50 in the appropriate box. She paused, then added another 0. She wrote ‘Five Hundred Pounds Only,’ signed the cheque and gave it to me.