Gigolo

by Ben Foster

  ‘The pilot? I suppose you were with your posh friends?’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘You really ought to get over yourself. You aren’t even qualified.’

  ‘I’ve been qualified enough for the last two years. Nobody has more repeat bookings than me.’

  ‘You obviously haven’t noticed that Christian is catching up. He’s become very popular.’ She took a long breath through her nose. ‘Your bookings are down . . . ’

  ‘Bookings at the hotel are down . . . ’

  ‘Every week they go down.’

  ‘They are going down for everyone. It’s the economy, stupid.’

  She went red and wobbled on her heels. ‘How dare you,’ she shot back. ‘Get your things and get out. You’re fired.’

  It was all so sudden, unexpected. I felt relieved as if a giant burden had been lifted from my shoulders. We stood staring at each other. I could have apologised. I didn’t mean what I’d said. It was just a phrase I’d heard. But I didn’t apologise. I was fed up with being in competition with Christian, the Viking, fed up with the health checks, fed up with selling myself to old women so they would give me money. It was soul destroying. I drove out of the gates at Southley that morning and felt happy for the first time in ages.

  The feeling only lasted two days. The Nigerian student who had rented the flat had finished her course and left Guildford. The property remained empty and the agent said there was little chance of finding another tenant during the summer. ‘Problem is,’ he said, ‘they’ve flung up so many new flats there’s no one to fill them.’

  My regular clients left for the Mediterranean immediately after the ball. When they got back after the summer, I planned to give them more attention and felt optimistic about building up my private practise.

  I gave Pete Taylor a foot massage and told him I’d lost my job. He shook his head.

  ‘Not the best of times to do that, mate. Unemployment’s going go through the roof.’

  ‘All the time you’ve been predicting a crash, the economy’s just gone up and up.’

  ‘That’s right, son. The higher you go, the further you fall.’

  I started jogging again in Crane Park. I had more time for the children. But the lines came back to the corners of Kelly’s eyes as our savings went into paying the mortgage on an empty flat. She couldn’t comprehend why I had given up my job a month before George was about to join Ollie at Willington. I tried to explain, but never found the right words. There was nothing to be gained by making a confession – Maggs had said once it was just a form of boasting – and, anyway, the truth wasn’t just sleazy, it was unbelievable.

  In the previous two years, I had had sex with more than two thousand women. I didn’t want to do that anymore. I told Kelly I had left Southley – I never admitted I was sacked – because I couldn’t stand being at the beck and call of spoiled hotel guests when there were a lot of ordinary working people in need of my skills.

  While I built up my private business, I intended to return to St Mary’s University, retrain as a physiotherapist, then work in the NHS. When I went to the office, I was shocked to discover that in the last three years the entire system had changed. You now needed A-levels to apply for courses, sports therapy as well as physiotherapy. I did not have A-levels and it would take two years to get them, that’s if I passed.

  That wasn’t the only blow to come in September. I already had one empty flat when Stephanie, the social worker who had been in the other flat since it first went on the market, got married to a widower with two teenaged children and moved in with him. I sold the Range Rover to keep up the payments.

  The previous year, in September 2007, my regular clients had called me when they returned after the summer. In September 2008, I had to call them. Maggs was busy. Rufus had gone to live in Los Angeles with Annabel. I had never understood their relationship and probably never would. Kate had taken Lord Aberstone to a cancer clinic in Australia. Caroline and her husband were building a hotel in Agadir. Vivienne was still in Turkey. Finally, I called her.

  ‘Ben. How are you? Did you have a lovely summer?’

  ‘Not exactly. I’m not at Southley anymore.’

  ‘So I hear. That’s wonderful. When you burn bridges it lights the way ahead.’

  ‘That’s one way to put it.’

  ‘It’s the only way, Ben.’ She paused. Her tone changed. ‘I spoke to Angela the other day, your remember her?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘By all accounts that Norwegian boy, what’s his name, Christian, has become her new pet.’

  ‘Pet?’

  ‘You know Angela. She’s always so amusing.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s doing a good job.’

  ‘But it will never be quite the same, though, will it? It’s like losing a tooth.’

  I wasn’t sure what she meant and didn’t ask. I remembered when I had first met the Ladies of the Committee. It had felt as if I was being interviewed to replace someone. Now I was being replaced. I heard someone calling her, a man with an American accent.

  ‘I’d better go,’ I said. ‘I hope to see you when you get back.’

  ‘Of course you will.’

  The line went dead.

  Every night, the BBC reported an unending succession of downturns and disasters. Debts were being measured in trillions of dollars and I never could work out who had loaned those trillions or how they could ever be paid back. On 15 September, the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. It was the result of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States and shockwaves reverberated across the world. The ‘global’ banks that were too big to fail had failed. Millionaires lost everything and killed themselves.

  Pete was right. More than one million people in the United Kingdom were soon to be unemployed. I was one of them.

  Vivienne called me about a week later. It was a Saturday afternoon. Kelly had taken the children to a birthday party and I heard the roar of Vivienne’s Ferrari as she spoke.

  ‘I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes. I have to see you,’ she said.

  She was walking down the path a few minutes later. I opened the door and we gazed at each other across the threshold. She was wearing an A-line white dress, her hair thrown back by the wind.

  ‘Are you going to invite me in?’

  She stepped inside. We kissed. Her lips were dry. She took my hand and led me straight upstairs to the bedroom.

  ‘My shoulders are so tense,’ she said.

  ‘Vivienne, Kelly will be back any minute.’

  She removed her dress. She was deeply tanned and wasn’t wearing underwear. She stood across the room in the light from the window, outrageous, irresistible. I was stupid. I was a bastard. Two years of sex on a daily basis had ended in a long barren summer while Kelly adjusted to our new situation. I was like a junkie with my drug of choice. I was drawn to Vivienne by some sort of madness. She pulled off my clothes. We fell across the bed. She dug her nails in my back.

  ‘Ouch . . . ’

  ‘A little pain, you know you want it.’

  We didn’t hear the door open downstairs. Kelly had forgotten something and must have seen the Ferrari outside the house when she returned to get it. She came quietly up the stairs into the bedroom. I am not sure how long we continued making love before we noticed her standing there.

  ‘It’s only sex, Kelly,’ Vivienne said.

  ‘You fucking bitch. Get out of my house.’

  ‘There’s no need to be rude.’

  Vivienne stepped from the bed and stood there for several seconds. Then she slipped into her dress. She looked from Kelly back at me.

  ‘I have something for you. It’s in the car.’

  There was confusion and hatred in Kelly’s eyes. She was trembling.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  I followed Vivienne downstairs and up the path.

  ‘I’m never going to see you again, am I?’ I said.

  ‘Probabl
y not, no,’ she replied.

  ‘You said you loved me.’

  She smiled. ‘You shouldn’t take those things literally. Words are only words.’

  She reached into the car and gave me a white box. She then folded into the driving seat, the engine roared like an aeroplane and she took off, gaining speed and vanishing around the first corner.

  I opened the box. Inside, wrapped in bubble paper, was the cast of my cock. I put it back in the box and dropped it in the bin.

  Kelly didn’t speak to me for several weeks. I apologised and kept apologising. There was no question of my moving out. I had nowhere to go. Neither did she. We had three children. I followed in the wake of Lehman Brothers and filed for bankruptcy when I fell behind with the payments on our two flats. It was a relief to lose them.

  A week or so before Christmas, I was in Twickenham reading ads in the window at the newsagents when I heard a voice out of the past.

  ‘Hello, mate, haven’t seen you since last Christmas.’

  It was Vinnie Castro. We gave each other a man hug.

  ‘Good to see you, Vinnie, what’s up?’

  ‘You know, same old, same old.’

  I laughed. ‘How’s Marley these days?’

  ‘Living the dream. His mum in Jamaica died. He moved over there. He’s got a little juice bar on the beach.’

  ‘I’m pleased for him. That’s what he always wanted.’

  ‘How about you, Ben, still coining it in?’

  ‘I wish. I’m looking for a job.’

  ‘You serious?’

  ‘True as I stand here.’

  ‘We need someone at The Lodge, if you’re up for it.’

  ‘I’m up for it.’

  He smiled. We shook hands.

  ‘I’ll see you Monday,’ he said.