I'm a typical bloke.
Ask me if I've ever paid for sex and I'll deny it. Of course I will.
If I'm with a close friend I might admit to knowing that it's going to cost me a meal or some time or a few gifts, but even that's not the truth.
Not the whole truth anyway.
I'm a businessman. My ex reckons I see everything as a transaction, a deal to be done, a contract to be fulfilled. She might be right, but I think I got the better part of the deal when she left. Which is probably part of the explanation of her attitude.
Don't get me wrong. I am a deal maker. It's what I do. I had a choice in my 20s. Stay on the sites as a better than average brickie and general builder, or make some deals. My ex was a hairdresser then. By the time we split she was a mid 30s lady of leisure with malfunctioning tubes, no kids and more spare time than the credit cards could bear.
Bitter? Me? Nah...
The kind of deals I made back in the 90s were the simple ones; buy a flat, improve it to a minimum standard, let it to a member of the non-working classes and bank the housing benefit cheques. Give it three years for the value to rise and the tenants to move on and sell the property. Simple stuff.
As I got better at it I got to do bigger deals. Deals with more risk and more rewards. Deals that require knowledge and some help. I started needing to charm estate agents and property companies. Rigger boots and a lumberjack shirt didn't hack it any more. That's when the ex started thinking I was playing away.
It worked though. Six houses in South Wales at £3000 each turned into three executive homes at £150,000 each. My profit? Depends if you're the taxman or not. Nice Land Rover Discovery became my company car though.
But did I end up paying for it? That's what this interview is about isn't it?
I did. Oh, not the obvious way, although I had a few offers. If you've flats to rent working girls can suddenly become very friendly.
Not the other way either. No-one offered to sweeten a deal with a friendly pillow warmer, although there was one deal on a small site in Durham where the owner's wife seemed keen to seal the deal in a way her husband probably wouldn't have encouraged.
No, I paid when I needed help. I didn't need help with sex. But then there was a deal to be made.
It was 1999. We were all going to party like...
Well, anyway. I had acquired an option on a building at the side of the Tyne. Not exactly Quayside. More sort of Quayside and a bit. Estate agents have since redefined the area as Ouseburn Vale. The derelict stuff below Byker bridge was another way of putting it. Anyway, I got this option on an old bottle works from someone's widow. She got to live comfortably the rest of her days, and I got enough space for fifteen flats. (Well, twelve flats really, but we got fifteen in there.)
I'm a good business man, but marketing properties in the retail market? I know my limits. So I dropped a letter to various estate agents, inviting them to bid for the joy of exclusively marketing the development. And along came Maria.
I wasn't amateurish about this. Not in my view anyway. I booked a conference room at a tennis club in Jesmond, and split the day in two parts. Interested parties could come to the presentation in the morning about the deal, and come back in the afternoon and tell me how they'd do the job. Simple really.
She was the one at the back. On her own. The other five firms sent two or three people each. They had all the tools for the job, and they looked serious. Maria simply looked interested. The others conferred and made notes as we did the presentation. Maria looked as if she could take it all in at a glance.
That changed in the afternoon interviews. Maria was last, and at a disadvantage. I was bored shitless. Seriously. I'd had every kind of presentation you can imagine. The introspective ones, where people talk about their company and its organisation. Did I need to know who their receptionist was? No. But they told me anyway.
Then there were the extrovert ones. They wanted me to know that they understood Newcastle. So they talked about the city, and regeneration, and the potential of the quayside. I had to give bonus points for the bloke who got Newcastle Brown Ale into his presentation even as he described their sales targets as 'more Cabernet Sauvignon' types.
I gave up counting the number of times anyone mentioned market segments. Or consumer classification techniques. Or potential client profiles.
So Maria was talking to a very bored, very disinterested man. I had two agencies shortlisted for the hard talk about money. How much they'd charge. I hadn't even heard of the firm Maria worked for.
She got my attention with honesty. Candid, vibrant honesty. Her boss didn't know she was at the presentation. It was her day off. Her boss didn't have the get up and go to attend herself. So Maria wanted to take it on. Wanted the business, and the referrals to financial advisors. Commission was everything.
I liked the honesty. I liked the frankness, and the understanding of the vision behind the apartments. I liked the way she crossed her legs so that most of her right thigh was on show. I liked the way she didn't move her legs once she'd noticed me looking.
Don't get me wrong. I wasn't pussy struck. The deal she proposed was good on price, and good on marketing costs. The service she was offering was good, and she offered the names of two personal referees, both of whom I knew. So I took a chance, and asked her to step outside while I phoned them.
Both of them gave her glowing references. Serious, clever, assiduous and honest. I closed my eyes and thought about the deal. Her right thigh came into view. Cream blouse, dark blue skirt, black stockings and high heeled court shoes. So I opened my eyes, and looked at the figures on my scratch pad. Provided she did the deals quickly, it was a good deal for me.
So I called Maria back in. She sat down again, ran her fingers along her fringe of dark brown hair, knocking it out of her eyes, waited for my attention, and crossed her legs again. Not the full Sharon Stone, but more than you'd expect from a standard gesture.
I explained the deal to her. Simple, straightforward. They had three months from the start of the sales period to knock out two thirds of the properties. She agreed. We discussed how to deal with the contracts. Then I offered her a drink to celebrate the deal. She agreed, and followed me in her car as I drove to the Cornerhouse.
White wine for her, bottle of Becks for me, in case you're wondering. Seats in the conservatory at the front of the building, where it was quiet. No more of the Sharon Stone business with her legs. She had the deal, so why bother?
Was I disappointed? I suppose so, yeah... We shook hands after the drink, she climbed in her Golf, I got back in the Discovery, and away we both went.
It was two months before I saw her again. In the meanwhile I'd kept busy project managing the flats, and doing a complicated deal on a pub that meant a third party ended up owning it who the original owners wouldn't have sold to. Nothing dodgy, just a local competition issue.
Maria met up with me once we had the show flat done. It was in an old annexe to the factory. We'd put it there because it had a conservatory that let the light flood over the diagrams and designs on the exhibition stands.
It had a conservatory because it had been a loading bay; cheaper to build the conservatory in the opening than build it all back up again.