Anonymous

Belle do jour: Diary of an unlikely call girl

Prologue

The first thing you should know is that I’m a whore.

I don’t mean that in a glib way. I’m not using the word as an analogy for working a desk job or toiling away in new media. Many of my friends will tell you how temping for a year or ending up in sales is equivalent to prostitution. It’s not. I know this because I’ve been a temp, and I’ve fucked for money, and they are in no way similar. Not even the same planet. Different solar systems altogether.

The second thing is that I live in London. These two facts may or may not be related. It’s not a cheap city. Like almost all of my friends, I moved here after university with the hope of getting a job. If not a well-paying one, at least something interesting, or populated exclusively by handsome, eligible men. But such positions are thin on the ground. Almost everyone is studying to be an accountant now, including my friends A2 and A3, who are respected in their academic circles. Good God-a fate worse than death. Accountancy trumps even academia in the unsexiness stakes.

Prostitution is steady work but not demanding. I meet a lot of people. Granted, they’re almost all men, most of whom I’ll never see again, and I’m required to fuck them regardless of whether they’re covered in hairy moles or have a grand total of three teeth or want me to re-create a fantasy involving their sixth-form history teacher. But it’s better than watching the clock until the next scheduled tea break in a dismal staff room. So when my friends pull out the tired analogy of corporate-employment-as-whoring yet again, I nod knowingly, and commiserate with them, and we down cocktails and wonder where all our youthful promise went. Theirs is probably taking a commuter train to the suburbs. Mine is spreading its legs for cash on a regular basis.

Having said that, the leap to full-on prostitution did not happen overnight.

I ended up in London like thousands of other recent graduates. With only a small student debt and a bit of cash saved, I thought I was set for a few months, but that was quickly drained by rent and a thousand trivial expenses. My daily routine consisted of poring over the job pages, writing enthusiastic and sycophantic cover letters for positions I knew I’d never be interviewed for, and masturbating furiously before bed every night.

The masturbation was, by far, the highlight of those days. I imagined myself employed as a testing engineer for an office supplies manufacturer, in which the job involved covering my inner thighs with bulldog clips as someone screwed me vigorously. Or being the personal assistant to a powerful dominatrix, chained to her desk and eaten out by one of the other slaves, who in her turn was impaled on a dildo. Or floating in a sensory deprivation tank as unseen hands pinched and pulled at my skin, gestures at first gentle, then painful.

London wasn’t the first city I’d lived in, but it was certainly the largest. Anywhere else there is always the chance of seeing someone you know or, at the very least, a smiling face. Not here. Commuters crowd the trains, eager to outdo their fellow travelers in an escalating privacy war of paperbacks, headphones, and newspapers. A woman next to me on the Northern Line one day held the Metro just inches from her face; it was only three stops later that I noticed she was not reading but crying. It was hard not to offer sympathy and harder still to not start crying myself.

When work did come, it was always temporary, and usually paid badly. I did all the usual office drudgery, from answering phones (I never did figure out how to transfer a call without losing it) to filing (my alphabetization skills are probably surpassed by the average five-year-old; I always claim dyslexia, but am just lazy) to transcribing dictation (100,000 monkeys at 100,000 typewriters would do a better job). The day I came home with blistered fingertips from sealing envelopes was probably the worst. And even all this was better than the long, frequent periods in which I had no work at all.

So I watched my mean savings dwindle away as buying a Metrocard became the highlight of each week. And while I have a crippling lingerie-buying habit, even cutting down the intake of lacy things was not going to solve the problem.