my clients? No, I just bash them, I explain, making a chopping motion with my hands. — Obviously, some will proposition you, but it’s outside the agency’s official terms and conditions, I lie, spouting the party line. — I did . . . I pause for a second. They both look so open-mouthed in anticipation, I feel like a granny reading a bedtime story to a couple of innocent waifs, and I’m nearly at the bit where the big bad wolf is about to make an appearance. . . . — I did give one sweet old guy a handjob one time, after he started going on about missing his dead wife. I didn’t want to take two hundred quid from him, but he insisted. Then he said that he saw I was a nice girl and apologised profusely for putting me in this position. He was so sweet.
— How could you, Nikki? Lauren bleats.
— It’s okay for you, love, you’re Scottish, you get your fees paid, I tell her. Lauren knows that there’s little she can say about that, which suits me fine. The brutal truth is that I give loads of handjobs, but it’s not something you’d do for anything other than money.
5
Scam # 18,734
I was prepared for Colville, thanks to Tanya’s notice of the cunt’s behaviour. He had been wanting to get rid of me for a long time and now the wanker had the chance. Of course, I wasn’t going down without a fight, and for the past year I’d been well acquainted with the insides of Chez Colville at Holloway.
He’d wait until the end of my shift, of course. It had been a quiet night. Then Henry and Ghengis had come in with a few boys and they were all pretty pished. There had been some row with another mob and they were all chuffed in victory, swapping stories and the like. There was talk that Aberdeen and Tottenham had teamed up. — Wouldnae like to be in that company, who the fuck would pay for the drinks? The fuckin barman probably, I laugh, and some of the boys join in. I’m holding court, pouring quite a few nips on the house, because I feel my reign here is coming to an end.
In a way it’s sad, it’s been a second home, a way in, a place to meet the kind of people I always seem to meet, but it is limited. It’s time to move on. You never win by working in places like this, you’ve got to own one. From the corner of my vision, Lynsey appears and winks at me, as she prepares to take the stage.
Aye, it’s all plastic, chrome and pristine fittings but you can still smell the stale fags and spunk in the gadges’ flannels, the lassies’ cheap perfume and the watered-down beer and the sick desperation amid the bonhomie.
Lynsey’s got the right idea though, far too sussed ever to be a victim hanging around in a place like this after her fuck-by date. She’s careful never to show the punters the contempt that a smart, educated young woman like her must feel for them, and, I suppose, for me, although we all love to entertain the notion that we’re different, that we have our own unique take on all this tack, our own special redeeming irony. She is different though, and she’s got the right idea. She’s done a few stag vids, got her own website, to get her name known, and now she just packs them in, at this lap-dancing lark. Not a pimp boyfriend in sight and her engaged smile turns into detached ice whenever you overstep the mark. She’s playing nobody else’s game but her own and therefore she’s no good to me.
Pity. Watching her up there, doing that athletic pelvic thrust which would send a crack-shag hoor like Tanya into intensive care, I trace those sunbed thighs up to that silver mini as studiously as any paying punter and I’m thinking that a search for one of Lynsey’s vids has to be on the cards.
Sure enough, at the end of the shift Dewry comes up to me with that school-sneak idiot grin on his face. — Colville wants to see you in his office, the repugnant bastard nearly fucking sings.
I know what this is all about, and entering the office, I sit in the chair opposite him without being