by Freya North
For the first time in her career, Thea wasn't remotely interested in her client despite his physical improvement being a direct credit to her. ‘Look to the left,’ she told him, ‘and to the right. And to the left again, please. And to the right once more.’
‘It's no longer what I'd term pain,’ Gabriel defined, ‘it's more discomfort.’
Well, if it's only discomfort, Mr Sewell, I wish you'd cancelled your appointment and waited another week.
‘Down to your underwear and onto your stomach, please,’ Thea said with scant interest. Perhaps she'd just give him thirty minutes and charge him half the fee.
Thea commenced a pretty perfunctory massage, like a musician practising scales or a showjumper taking his top horse for a hack around the block. Something to keep it all ticking over. Her mind drifted and she found herself wondering whether any of the girls in massage parlours were actually qualified masseuses. And if so, which skill did they consider their forte? Did they look in the vacancies section of the Job Centre or local paper under ‘masseuse’ or ‘sex worker’? She wondered whether they started off with a cursory shoulder rub to somehow legitimize what came next. Saul always claimed he didn't really rate massage. Is that because he'd never had a good one? Or did he just tell the girls to forget the neck rub and go straight to his dick?
Thea looks down at Mr Sewell. He has a nice back, smooth and slightly freckled over the shoulders. It tapers becomingly to his waist and his legs are muscular and with just the right spread of hairs to be attractively masculine rather than unappetizingly hirsute. Turning deaf ears to the small voice warning her that she's mad, that this isn't going to help, that this is a very bad idea and fundamentally the wrong thing to do, Thea trails her fingertips down Gabriel's spine, just as she had on Peter. And then her hands start to caress his legs, interspersing strong strokes to the hamstrings with a feathered caress of the inner thighs. But at the point where Peter had objected and bolted away and left Thea feeling wretched, Gabriel spreads his legs slightly and Thea finds the signal a horrible but undeniable thrill.
Where else, Mr Sewell, she says silently to herself, what else can I do for you today? She is fingering the seam of his jockey pants blatantly. ‘Turn over,’ she murmurs. God, this is easy.
Mr Sewell's erection is impressive. In fact, it is so impressive that the very sight of it simultaneously excites but appals Thea. The shape of it leers up behind his pants. As bemused as Peter had been, Gabriel is now lying there, proudly tumescent. He is obviously, and quite literally, up for it. He is rock hard and eager and Thea can see his cock twitching expectantly, skewed slightly by the constraint of his underwear. She doesn't know whether to be shocked or titillated that this man, right here, would fuck her right now. He'd be quite happy to pay, there's no doubt about it.
‘But I don't even particularly like you,’ Thea thinks to herself as she looks down on his expectant body, ‘you're not my type at all. You're surly and non-communicative and cold.’
‘Miss Luckmore?’
Thea is horrified to see that while she's been deep in thought gazing at his penis, he's been staring at her intently.
‘Miss Luckmore,’ he repeats, ‘is it à la carte – or can I order off menu? What, may I ask, are the specials today?’
Thea is catapulted from her safety zone into dangerous territory. She doesn't like it. Quick. Think of something. Feign innocence. Ignorance. ‘I could do you an Indian head massage?’ she suggests.
Gabriel smirks, his hand now lolling arrogantly over the mound of his cock. ‘I assume that involves giving me head, then?’
‘Pardon?’ Thea flusters.
Gabriel snaps back to his more usual curt self. ‘Look, are you up for it or what?’
Thea wants to cry. She feels mucky. ‘I don't date clients,’ she mutters. ‘The ethics of my job discourage it. Sorry.’
‘I wasn't talking about a date,’ Gabriel says, ‘just a blow-job or something. Whatever. Never mind. I'll try the head massage. Come on.’
I'm going mad. I'm not thinking straight. I'm losing my grip. I need to think but I can't. It's like I won't let myself. I have to decide what to do but I'm incapable of making decisions because I can't think about them. I have less than two weeks before I move out. But how can I think of packing when I don't know where home is any more? I've suddenly acquired so much baggage. I can't move under the weight of it all. Maybe I'll just shove the lot into storage and run away.
Thea and Sally's Six O'Clock
Thea didn't cancel her Pilates class that evening though her head throbbed and she was utterly exhausted from her un-believable day. However, she knew she was best off devoting an hour to shutting out all that tormented her; indulging in an hour tuning into her own body; centring herself, focusing on breathing, concentrating on all she really was – a skeleton swathed in muscles, joints and ligaments, assembled intricately but logically. She wouldn't be able to think about Peter or Gabriel and what had almost happened, she could forget all about Saul and what had happened. Respite, even for just an hour, was what she craved.
Alice wasn't at Pilates though she'd confirmed their session over lunch. Ultimately, Thea was slightly relieved – she actually didn't want to receive Alice's kindly glances and supportive squeezes and concerned whispers for her welfare. Thea didn't want to workshop her problems and woes over chips and wine after the class. She certainly didn't want to reveal to Alice her bizarre behaviour that afternoon. Thea just wanted to think about her body, about inhaling and exhaling, about maintaining neutral. It was nice, though, to see Sally, and Thea eagerly accepted an invitation to a light supper at the Stonehills'. It would be good to be in Sally's company, she theorized, to have no reason or recourse to talk about ‘it’. It would be constructive to simply chat, to natter on topics other than how prostitution and her future seemed inextricably bound. Sally's invite was also a good reason not to go home and have to think about packing and it provided a bona-fide excuse not to see Saul for another night at least. Ultimately, Thea rationalized that to be surrounded by the Stonehills' perfect domesticity would be comforting and affirming.
In Highgate, Sally could harp on all she liked about sleep-less nights, the sorry state of her sex life, the demise of her social life and language skills, and the destruction of her clothes by baby puke. However, for Thea, the scent pervading the Stonehill house was uplifting and restorative. Drying laundry. Baby shampoo. Flowers from husband to wife. Home pride. Everything smelt so warm and clean and cosy and complete and grown up. It was a fragrance Thea acknowledged she had always wanted in her life. Just then, she wished she could bottle it. Just in case.
Don't let Sally see me sad. Stop it, Thea, get a grip.
‘I wonder where Alice was today?’ Sally said, passing Thea tomatoes to slice while she spread oven chips on a baking tray.
Thea shrugged. ‘She said she was coming when I saw her at lunch.’
‘Have you two buried the hatchet, kissed and made up then?’ Sally probed.
‘God, yes,’ Thea said, busying herself with tearing basil into slivers.
‘You're like an old married couple, you two,’ Sally laughed, trying to shave parmesan with a potato peeler. ‘Talking of marriage, how's Saul? Richard's playing squash with him tonight. He'll be back home soon – he'll give you a lift home, if you like. Providing he managed to stick to just the one post-match pint, of course.’
The door-to-door distance from the Stonehills' house in Highgate to Thea's flat in Crouch End was less than a mile and a half. Just long enough, Richard would have thought, for a quick chat about how the purchase of the new flat was progressing.
‘Can I ask you something, Richard?’
‘Sure,’ he said, presuming his professional capacity as an architect was required.
‘Have you ever paid for it?’ Thea asked him outright.
‘Me?’ Richard asked. ‘No – we tend to use each other in our company.’
Thea's mind-set was so rigid that momentarily she didn't rea
lize Richard had not grasped her question and she fleetingly imagined a bacchanalian orgy of architects. ‘No,’ she corrected, ‘not architect stuff. Sex. Have you ever paid for sex?’
Richard stared in amazement, wondering if he'd just heard right. Fortuitously, the traffic lights between Archway Road and Shepherd's Hill turned red. Thea repeated the question. ‘No,’ he replied decisively, ‘I haven't. But I do know plenty of blokes who have.’
‘Who have?’ Thea dissected his answer. ‘Or who do?’
‘Christ, Thea!’ Richard laughed with a fleeting frown. ‘What's this all about?’
‘A client of mine,’ Thea moulded the truth credibly with cleverly employed ambiguity, ‘had the wrong idea about me.’
This seemed plausible to Richard so he continued. ‘I know blokes who have paid for it just the once, Thea, but I also know guys who use prostitutes regularly,’ he said. ‘You'd be surprised.’
‘Why?’ Thea asked.
‘Why do they do it, or why would you be surprised?’ Richard countered. Thea, though, just stared at him, simultaneously dreading details but desiring to know more. ‘You'd be surprised how many blokes do. Professional guys like me, really,’ Richard elaborated, ‘with all the same privileges – a good wage, a gorgeous wife, a fabulous home, great kids.’
‘Why?’ Thea asked again.
‘I suppose,’ Richard considered, ‘simply because they can. It's a “bloke thing”, isn't it?’
‘Is it?’ Thea asked, forlornly.
‘It's bizarre and contradictory,’ Richard mused, ‘but a man's sex drive is infinitely complex by virtue of the fact that it's so primal and base.’
‘Virtue?’ Thea balked. ‘Vice – virtuous?’
‘I mean – and this is in strictest confidence – there's a bloke in the office, my age, my position. He has a charmed life – great marriage to a gorgeous, fun woman. Anyway, occasionally he fancies a shag in the way I might fancy a sandwich. Morality and risk don't cross his mind. It's a physical requirement. He finds himself hungry and he nips out of the office and satisfies it.’
‘Say his wife finds out?’ Thea posed, hating this colleague of Richard's intensely.
‘She never will,’ Richard shrugged, ‘unless she puts a private detective on him. But she never would because their relationship is great – you could say, guys who use prostitutes are committing the slightest and most negligible form of infidelity because emotional betrayal doesn't come into it.’
‘But say she did find out,’ Thea pressed, ‘this chap's gorgeous fun wife?’
Richard was adamant. ‘She wouldn't – you have no idea how easy and discreet it is.’
‘Then how do you know he does it,’ Thea countered, ‘if it's so easy and discreet?’
The lights turned green. Richard drove across Archway Road and pulled in along Shepherd's Hill, by the library, under the gentle orange glow of a waning street lamp.
‘This might sound shocking,’ he said, ‘but one afternoon he basically offered me a recommendation.’
‘What?’ Thea exclaimed.
‘He recommended the services of this new girl he'd just seen.’
‘For fuck's sake!’ Thea objected, gripped by a violent loathing for this colleague. ‘What – like telling you Pret a Manger have a great new sandwich you should try?’
Richard laughed. ‘Exactly like that,’ he said, ‘but in my case, it was like telling this chap thanks, but I don't eat red meat.’
‘Fucking bastard!’ Thea spat. Richard had never heard her swear, let alone imagined she could be anything other than sweet, temperate Thea.
‘This colleague of mine is a really nice bloke,’ Richard felt compelled to defend him. He drove on. ‘You'd like him. That's the irony.’
‘Promise me it's not you?’ Thea said with steel in her voice and thunder in her eyes.
Richard glanced at her before indicating right and dipping down the long sweep of Stanhope Road. ‘Christ, of course it's not me,’ he said, obviously offended, ‘it's never been me. It's simply not me – I just don't fancy it. Not during periods when I've been single. Not after nights out with the lads. Not when I've been far away from home.’
‘Promise me,’ Thea warned him. ‘Thea!’ Richard protested, regarding her quizzically. ‘What's your problem?’
‘It was unbelievably upsetting,’ she declared, leaving the car, not checking the passenger door was shut properly, for-getting to thank Richard for the ride.
Thea savours a Lewis Carroll Moment in her hallway, encircled by closed doors. She can't decide where she wants to be, so she sits down where she is, for a long while, until she's quite calmed down. She stays where she is, takes her mobile phone and thinks about calling Alice to tell her what Richard has said. It's strange, what she heard from Richard is ultimately more illuminating than it is shocking. And though the details are deplorable, fundamentally it has been helpful.
I almost feel I now have reasons to forgive Saul; the information by which I can understand him a little better. Facts that should lessen the revulsion and shock of it all. Plausible explanations that could appease my turmoil. Perhaps I should be relieved, perhaps I should try and philosophize that actually it has nothing to do with me – he's just being a bloke. Maybe I should believe that his emotional fidelity to me is sacred to him. That everything really can be quite all right.
‘But if Richard Stonehill can choose not to use hookers,’ Thea shouts, ‘why can't Saul?’
Ryanair's 10.10 a.m.
At Carcassonne, all Paul Brusseque knows, as he boards a Ryanair flight he's managed to find the fare for, is that there's this hot chick in England who's occupied his thoughts most of the time. Yeah, so she's married, but so what – from what he can deduce from the little information she's given him about husband and home, he reckons it must be on the rocks. Or else wide open. Something like that. Whatever. If she's up for some no-strings action, he isn't going to get his morals in a knot about it.
Tix. She had said something about sending him tix 2 uk. But she's a tease, this Alice Heggarty, a playful, tease of a flirt. Her text sex has tantalized him to distraction, to desiring the real thing enough to go for broke and board a plane for it. So he's her bit on the side, her bit of rough, her toyboy, her big boy, her fantasy incarnate. So what. It's a damn sight better than being a boring old fart of a husband who most likely can't satisfy her or probably cheats on her the whole time anyway. Is he in love with her? The husband? He'd be a crazy fucker not to be. Is Paul in love with her? Or is he just crazy about fucking her? Crazy enough to scrounge two days' leave and scrape together an air fare to surprise her. Sit back and enjoy the flight. But it's cool to go with the flow. It would be boring to always let your head rule your heart.
‘Much better to think with your dick,’ Paul laughs to himself.
Paul arrives at Stansted and wonders which way London is. And where he can change his euros. And when he should contact Alice. And how – text, telephone or just turn up? And where is he going to stay?
Alice's phone made her jump. She thought she'd put it onto silent mode. Her instinct was to hide the document she was reading on her computer. Silly, really, because the caller wouldn't know what was up on screen. In fact, even someone looking over Alice's shoulder would merely note the Guardian website and an archive article on British sex workers. Alice doing research. Inspired by her trip to Soho with Thea over lunch. Very up Adam's street, after all.
However, Alice's phone ringing through a message surprised her. Paul. She might've known. He texted her around this time most days. It was strange but in the light of Thea's situation, Alice's pleasure in her extramarital dalliance had dulled a little. Paul's texts were still an ego boost and her replies remained fruity, but it was as if it was all now so fanciful as to be virtually harmless. It was a virtual affair, after all, because she hadn't actually seen or even spoken to him for a good three weeks. Last month, in fact. For Alice, the texts provided light relief from the demands of the day, an ego boost at
opportune moments and a little light sauce into the blandness of her home life. Having a secret was still fun; quite safe fun, actually. It was all words and no action and where's the harm in that?
There is an enduring irony that actually there's a time and a place for spontaneity and if they are out of sync, the impact and attraction are severely compromised. Had Paul sprung his surprise visit the previous week, she would have fizzed with the outrageous arrogance of it. She'd have played hooky from work or she'd have smuggled him up to her office or she'd have lied to Mark and invented an industry drinks party that would take up all evening. But Paul's text arrived an hour after Alice had returned to her office from her trip to Soho with Thea. His text bleeped through just as Alice was trawling articles on the Internet, absorbing the facts and figures of the socio-economics of prostitution. Over 50 per cent of men have paid for sex; 50 per cent of those pay for it regularly. Of those, 75 per cent are ABC1 men, 30–60. Adam's circulation was ABC1 men, 30–50. Alice calculated that the majority of Adam's readers had paid for sex, and a fair proportion use prostitutes often. And then she considered her colleagues and wondered who had and who does and who wouldn't. And she couldn't decide; she just couldn't decide. But the statistics indicated that a percentage had to be punters. She wondered whether to impart this information to Thea. Would it help to know that Saul was not a deviant? That he wasn't acting alone? That he wasn't even in much of a minority? Or would it actually be of little comfort and no constructive use at all?
fancy a fuck?
Paul's message raised a short smile until Alice wondered if he'd ever paid for it.
where r u?
She'd reply later. For now, she put her phone onto silent mode. She bookmarked the webpage, logged off the Internet and turned her attention to spreadsheets and her division's budgets. Twenty minutes later she checked her phone.
Oh Paul, haven't you anything better to do today than bombard me with texts? Go and climb Mont Saint Victoire, or something.