by Nigel Planer
Malcolm Viner, he was a nice bloke, old, old friend of mine, was an actor once but had given it up to go on to pastures sensible. I dialled his number but felt foolish when the ringing started and hung up. What could I say to him now? ‘Hi, Malcolm, just wondering how it’s been going with you for the last decade. Oh, me? I’m fine. I’m just sitting in my office in my underpants for the hell of it and suddenly thought it would be a good idea to wake you up and have a chat about the early eighties.’
I flicked through the entertainment listings guide on the little coffee table, through art, comedy, film, even poetry events. This is how punters find their way into the stuff I sell. I never use it, of course. I go only to things with clients in them. The last thing I want to do on an evening off — although I haven’t had one of them since before the Old Testament was written — is go to be entertained. Bit of a busman’s holiday, that. I can’t even watch a video at home for pleasure. It drives Liz to distraction, but to me the most interesting thing about a film or a TV programme is the credits roll at the end.
Soul Connexions. I started to browse the phoneline lonely hearts columns, and it afforded me some momentary amusement working out the meaning of the repeated phrases and abbreviations, giving me the sort of satisfaction one gets from solving the Guardian Quick Crossword in under three minutes. ‘Profess. educ. e-g. M. 30s. WLTM sim. for f/ship poss. ser. r/ship must like mountains, The Fast Show, travel. Veg.n/s. SOH.’ ‘Profess. educ. M.3os’ meaning forty-two-year-old bloke with a couple of A levels and a job, ‘e-g’ meaning easy-going, but actually meaning frightened of commitment. ‘WLTM sim.’ meaning would like to meet someone with a similar problem. ‘Mountains and travel’ — a reference to his desire to go walkabout as soon as anything develops. ‘F/ship poss. ser. r/ship’ just a straightforward lie to make sure he gets more than one reply, and the Fast Show reference a rather pathetic attempt to demonstrate that he is one of the very few ‘veg. n/s’ — vegetarian non-smokers — who has an ‘SOH’. Sense of humour featured very often in the women’s requirements but not half as often as tall: ‘Grad. F. hedonist WLTM tall solvent M. for walks, dining and frolics. Must have SOH.’ ‘Rubenesque redhead WLTM caring M.30 + tall.’ ‘Rubenesque’ meaning obese with dimpled buttocks. ‘Slim hourglass F. 20 likes arts, eating out and more. WLTM tall M. any age.’ In fact, as I scanned the column, I could find only two entries where the woman had not written ‘tall’ as a criterion for meeting a member of the opposite sex. Depressing reading if like me you happen to be five foot six. In the men’s column, there was no ‘must have big tits’ abbreviation, MHBT. This is the nineties after all and if all we want is BTAA — big tits and arse —we can buy the Daily Sport or any tacky toilet-paper tabloid.
Some entries were simple and obviously rather cheap: ‘OK guy, Nottingham area’ or ‘Asian bi F. WLTM guy 20s.’ Others were virtually incomprehensible — ‘Mary, 40, seeks righteous Joseph to sit under lemon tree and make shining star noodles’ —or . had a poetic slant: ‘Jazz librarian WLTM his concertina.’
An entry caught my eye: ‘Gorgeous shapely babe, Newcastle, will give all for right man … No dickheads, please!’ No serial killers either, or anyone suffering from Roman Emperor Syndrome, presumably.
I dialled the Soul Connexions main number. A recorded woman s voice answered like the speaking clock: ‘Hello and welcome to Soul Connexions. Please press the star button on your telephone. To hear the message line of your choice, please press 1. To leave an advertisement, please press 2. To go to the main menu option, please press 3.’ A different woman’s voice came on, this one with all the stresses and inflections in the wrong places, like an air stewardess announcing turbulence. ‘To hear the message — line of your — choice, please press — the corresponding number on — your telephone now.’ And then, ‘You have chosen message line number…’ and the computerized numbers came out individually, each with its own placidly banal and soothing emphasis. Then a third woman’s voice came on the line. This one was a real person. This was gorgeous-shapely-from-Newcastle’s message.
‘Erm, hello, it seems really strange doing this but they say you must describe yourself, so …’ Long, embarrassed pauses. ‘… So, well, I’m twenty-nine and I’m quite petite, slim, and I see myself as having a sense of humour but I have got a serious side, and, er …’ She was talking slower and slower, it was excruciating. ‘Er . . if you can hear rustling paper, it’s because I’ve written some notes here … in case I forget who I am.’
She must have found that funny when she thought it up but now, talking into the disembodied digital void, she lost confidence in her own joke and it fell flaccidly like old lettuce. She went on.
…. And in case you’re wondering why I put the ad in, I reached the point where I got fed up with waiting for the right man to materialize out of thin air and I thought it was time I did something about it, so … this is it, really …’ Christ, she was about as exciting as a supermarket queue. ‘I like walking and being outdoors and sitting by the fire and talking and I like eating out in restaurants … and they say you’ve got to say the sort of thing you’re looking for… so here goes … well, he’s got to have a sense of humour and be tall and …’ I held the receiver away from my ear, as you would when an elderly relative calls to witter on. My cigar had gone out so I relit it. I took another gulp of ‘poo. I checked back with the babe from Geordieland. She was drawing to an end in her own good time…. Just someone I can have some fun with, really… and that’s it …’ Click. Back to the plastic tones of the option menu hostess. ‘To hear this message — line — again, press 1 — to return to the main menu — press 2 —’ Could be an interesting torture to hear that message line again and again. I’d crack after a couple of goes.
I was surfing the option menu now. I pressed other message line numbers, most were as sad as gorgeous-shapely but some were bizarre. ‘Well, I’m fifty-two, my work is as a detective superintendent in the police force and my husband left me two years ago and I’m looking for someone who likes Elvis Costello, Chopin and Vivaldi but not Sting or Beethoven, who could bring me out of myself a bit.’ After six or seven goes at this game, the buzzing in my head started to return; I was getting bored. These people and their stories were drab, they’d had their fifteen minutes of fame and they’d blown it. There was nothing I could do for any of them.
Suddenly, the hot night cracked with a massive roll of thunder overhead. No rain yet, but the sky was bursting. I went to the window and looked out. A lightning flash and then almost immediately another crack of thunder. This time a sudden vomiting of water from above and people in the street rushed into shop doorways to hang about for a few minutes with the homeless who were crouching there. I closed the window — the rain was flying in past the sill on to our fax machine.
I returned to the sofa. I was a player now. I flicked through to the back of the entertainment guide to where the hot chat-line numbers are listed after the rubber mini-skirt and French maid outfit ads. ‘One to one! The horniest, hottest girls!’ ‘Wet talk!’ ‘Thirty-five seconds of sexy mouth!’ ‘Oral exams!’ ‘Come in my crack!’
More air stewardess voices with option menus. I punched in a request number. Tania would be able to clock all these 0891 numbers when the itemized phone bill came, but my Captain Sensible side seemed to have gone loco. It’s lucky we weren’t yet on the internet, or I’d be entering deviant and expensive porn web-sites in Las Vegas by now. I was suddenly connected to a recorded scenario with the front dialogue lopped off, like when you get through to a cinema information number and they’re already going through the showing times, and you have to wait for the tape to go round to the beginning to find out what’s on.
An Australian male voice was plodding through a turgid script. Worse than A Country Practice, if you can credit that.
‘…. and you were a very bad girl going out in that short dress when I told you not to. I’ll have to put you over my knee and spank you now.’ He was joined, if that’s the right word, by
the voice of a woman straining to sound husky.
‘Oh, that makes me so wet when you do that.’ Then the sound of someone wearing rubber gloves slapping a block of wood. Then the woman’s voice again. ‘I’ve been very bad and I need to be punished.’
Acting, surely, is about convincing someone, anyone, that you believe what you are saying — as any of the voice artists on our books will tell you. I need not go into the wherefores of why the owner of this voice was not, nor ever could be, an actress. The Aussie bloke was back.
‘I’m going to have to pull your knickers down and spank you again.’
Well, it was entertaining. For about half a minute. I put down the phone. My friend the phone. My constant companion over these last ten years. It had let me down. No, I had let it down. I was ashamed. The phone looked back at me from its cradle like a hurt puppy in its basket. All those things Liz had told me about myself — that I was arrogant, that I had no feelings, that I didn’t know how to express my feelings, that I didn’t understand feelings, that I was only interested in sex, that I was only interested in possessions, that I didn’t know how to treat a woman properly, that I was cheap — all were real and true. I was seeing myself through her eyes. Her refracted interpretations had won the territory of my self-respect. The thunder had receded some miles away by now, but the stagnant air had begun to move. Outside in Soho a wind heaved up Shaftesbury Avenue. I got up and fetched the Yellow Pages. I couldn’t stand it in the office any longer.
Outside the chintzy-curtained window were the branches of a streetlamp—lit chestnut tree, thrashing in the wind. The heat had broken, and the air currents were angry. I sat on a small candlewick bed, waiting for the courage to take my trousers off as I had been told to do. There were clean towels everywhere and a Spanish bullfighter print on the wall.
On the TV, there was a video of a frenzied blow job to the accompaniment of soft, irritating music. On top of the TV, on a chintzy doily, stood a painted souvenir donkey from Madeira. At last she came in. She was wearing a cheap lacy all-in-one and a silk-mix dressing gown open at the front. She was bigger than me.
‘Stormy night, eh?’ she said with a grin. ‘And we’re going to be pretty stormy too.’ The wind outside was rattling the sills and driving stray soft drinks cans along the pavement. The chestnut tree outside fought with the storm in a tussle of swaying and yielding.
She sat on the bed beside me.
‘Ooooh, you are very disobedient,’ she said, referring to the fact that I had taken off my shoes and nothing else.
‘Well, I’m nervous,’ I said. ‘I’ve not done anything like this before.’
‘Aaaaaaah. They all say that. Now, give us a hug,’ she said, and pulled me to her, her painted nails on my shoulders, one hand still hanging on to the children’s Snoopy glass which contained her vodka and coke. My drink, in a Mickey Mouse tumbler, was sitting on the small bedside table under the table lamp from Tenerife. The carpet was threadbare and a lacy shawl had been draped over the main light, giving the room an amateurishly theatrical ambience. The tassels of the shawl jogged with the force of the gale outside. Her free hand rubbed between my shoulder blades, where the tension lives like a knotted pair of tights. It was soothing.
‘Do you like titties?’ She asked, and peeled down her Marks and Sparks lacy top. Well, of course I like titties, I thought. I’m just not sure about having them so large and so present right now. I felt like a child and she seemed to think that was good.
‘You have to tell me what you like,’ she said. Even if I had known what 1 like and had the words in my mind to describe it, I wouldn’t have been able to speak. I imagine that Jeremy Planter, if he ever found himself in a situation like this, would be able to be very decisive and clear about what he wanted. ‘Stand over there at an angle of forty-five degrees to the chair, flutter your eyelashes and say, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen such a big one”,’ he would say without a moment’s pause. I have no idea what I like. That never comes into it. I aim to please, 1 suppose.
‘Do most men tell you what they want?’ I asked.
‘Some do,’ she said, and started to unbutton my shirt. Inside she flicked her painted nails over my nipples for a bit and then started to unbutton my trousers.
‘Unless I’m doing the old “dommo.” Oh yes, I’m good at giving orders. ‘Cos then it’s more like a performance, you know, it’s like acting. I’ve got all the boots and whips and everything but they have to say that’s what they want beforehand, like, so I can prepare, and then it’s straight into it the moment I get into the room.’
She spoke with a straightforward Brummie accent. She was mixed race. Quite dark-skinned but not black like Joan in the office. What’s known in the biz as ‘BBC brown’.
Although they would issue a statement to deny it — introduce a packet of measures to stop it, even — the broadcasters seem not to employ black actresses, other than to play the odd one-line junkie/whore/single mother with attitude. No, when casting the larger roles, they tend to go for the more acceptable, lovable and cliché-sexier mixed-race type, hence the expression ‘BBC brown’. I don’t know why we don’t all admit it and shove it on their CVs.
This unwritten code does not apply to men, however. They’re allowed to be macho black — like my Simon N’quarbo, does very well on telly — thus making the TV industry appear both sexist and racist at the same time. It’s as well to know these things when digging around for clients. And don’t let any directive, equal-opportunity employer pamphlet, memorandum, conference bullshit convince you otherwise. The woman in front of me would have stood a chance, had she been an actress and had she so wished, of playing the token female doctor in some worthy drama series about vets.
‘Come on, off with your things, mate,’ she said.
I obliged.
‘Do you get the same guys coming back again and again?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes. I’ve got several very regular gentlemen. They’re the best. Mostly married men, you know.’
‘I’m not used to this.’ By now I was lying naked on a towel on the bed and she was tickling my thighs and balls. I was vaguely tumescent but hardly on the verge of anything. A dustbin was blown over outside in the back yard and its clatter made me start. She soothed me again with her stroking. She was working so hard, I felt sorry for her. What kind of a client was I?
‘You’ve got a very big one,’ she said. I laughed. I didn’t bother to say, ‘I bet you say that to all the guys.’
‘I should know,’ she said. ‘You could be a black man. It’s true what they say, you know.’
‘Is it really?’ I said, trying to be polite.
‘And I’ll tell you another thing for free. The Chinese? Very small.’
‘But it’s what they do with it, isn’t it? Well, so I’ve been told,’ I said.
‘Naaaaa,’ she said, and then, ‘You could come on my titties if you like.’ Over her shoulder, the video came to an abrupt end and the screen hissed with snow and crackle. She got up to turn it off and came back with a condom packet which she tore open with her mouth.
Luckily I was hard enough for the rubber to fit on and she unfolded it expertly to the bottom, kneading me all the time like a cow’s udder. I needed to keep talking and she didn’t seem to mind my questions, so I asked her how many clients she saw in a week.
As she wiped the condom with a tissue, she told me she had ten regulars, any number of others and that she worked for several different agencies. I enquired how much commission an agency would take, and was surprised to hear that sometimes it was as much’ as fifty per cent. I’m obviously in the wrong business.
‘But some girls I know, the really pretty ones, like, they can get a thousand pounds a night.’
She said she would give me her number before I left so that I could get in touch again if I wanted to and she could avoid paying commission. I thanked her. For a few seconds, she put her mouth around my cock, condom and all, but then returned to kneading it.
‘Do you
feel like coming yet?’ she asked sweetly. I wanted to, if only to participate fully and help her to feel that she was doing her job properly. I couldn’t find an answer, though.
‘No hurry,’ she said, and sitting back for a few moments, she offered me more vodka and coke.
‘We’ve got lots of time, you can relax with me.’ We both looked at our watches at the same moment. We caught each other’s eye and laughed.
‘So you’ve got a lot of pressure at work, have you?’
‘You could say that,’ I replied.
The chestnut tree outside was still struggling with the wind; bending and swaying, its flexibility being tested to the limit. I’ve always liked trees, they cheer me up. The absence of them from the Shaftesbury Avenue area is one of the main drawbacks to working round there. There’s Soho Square, of course, that’s got some ash, and the Soho church graveyard with its little trimmed hedges and plane trees. I was brought up in the suburbs, you see, so although I’m pleased that I got out of there and made it in the big city, as ‘twere, I do miss them. It’s OK down in Fulham tree-wise, in fact, London is one of the most tree-ish cities in the world. One of my earliest memories is of the noise of poplar trees swishing in the wind around Adam’s Pond in Kingston. The myriad dark leaves tinkling together as they flipped over in graceful waves to reveal their pale undersides, as if they were being blow-dried by a massive hairdryer in some giant-sized shampoo advertisement for lustrous hair. Very sensual. Because trees are sexy, they just take a very long time getting round to it.
The first so-called London plane tree, for example, was imported and planted in Barnes in 1680, just one tree, and look at them now, the commonest tree all over London. They’ve been at it for three hundred years. And they’re not so hung up on gender roles as us humans either. Sometimes there’s male and female trees, sure — like the two big ailanthus trees of heaven on either side of the Fulham Road, the male growing achingly towards the female, ever closer each year, only to be cut back to make room for double-decker buses — but sometimes, like elm trees, females can go on replicating themselves for a few generations until a seed of male elm arrives on the wind or in a piece of squirrel or bat shit to stir up their genetic mix. Essential if they’re to adapt, evolve and perpetuate themselves and avoid being overrun by other, more virulent strains with quicker, randier ways of spreading themselves. I’ve often wondered how — after being blown halfway across the country — the seeds and fruit and flowers and pussy willow catkins of trees know when they’ve found the right opposite number with whom to procreate and have lots of little saplings. There are no shocking divorce rate figures to worry about with trees. Recently, it seemed as if — despite our initial attraction — Liz was in fact deciduous, whilst I’d turned out to be coniferous and our little Grace offshoot was to be one of those mutations which gets eaten by a wandering deer before it gets to be one foot high. I wonder, if men were like trees and every spring they all had a massive communal wank into the sky — letting the wind blow their millions of chances at immortality hither and thither —whether my Grace seed would have found its way to Liz’s Grace bud or whether all the Grace-type buds would have been reserved for pips from the genus Henderson, tall and mighty broadleafs with big conkers in the autumn. Was me being with Liz just a mistake? A genetic flirtation? Were we destined never to be broadcast? Never to enter the Pocket Users’ Guide to the Sex Lives of Trees and Shrubs of the British Isles?