Free Universal Carnal Knowledge Pt 26

"God's gift"

"If you want a job done properly," I muttered to myself, "don't give it to Connie."

This was about half-past eleven the next morning, when I found myself in the back streets near Hanover Square, having just emerged from a meeting in a client's office. It was one of the appointments I had asked Connie to rearrange while I was on compassionate leave, and the reason for my irritation was that she had done something I had specifically warned her against, namely arranging two external meetings the same day. My second meeting was at two-thirty in a remote south-eastern suburb; the journey thither might, I guessed, take a little over an hour. Returning to the office seemed pointless; by the time I got there I should have too little time to do any worthwhile work before I had to leave again: but travelling direct to the meeting would leave me with about two hours to kill in the middle of the day. I emerged onto Regent Street still unsure what to do.

"Jim!"

I was very fond of Connie but she was not, I reflected, cut out for office work. Since I had told her to buck her ideas up no one could have faulted her time-keeping or the diligence with which she had applied herself to her duties, but her new-found zeal had merely served to expose her lack of aptitude for the job. The filing she had done, for instance, followed no known rhyme or reason and it would all have to be done again. Sooner or later management would pull the plug on her, I thought sadly, then what would she do?

"Jim! Jim!"

I made for the tube. I had decided that I might as well travel to the suburbs now; a decent lunch would be cheaper than in the West End and I might take the opportunity to look around a part of London I did not know very well. But then I became aware of running footsteps rapidly catching up behind me. Turning, I saw an attractive young black woman hurrying up, encumbered with shopping bags and looking a bit hot and bothered from the exercise, but apparently delighted to see me.

"Jim, it's me. Oh, Jim, I'm so glad to have found you!"

I was about to tell her she had the wrong man. No one calls me "Jim", which is why I had paid no attention when I first heard the name being called; the only time I had introduced myself to anyone as "Jim" was when I –

The denarius descended. "Gina!" I cried.

She threw herself into my arms and hugged me tight. "Oh, Jim honey, I thought I'd never see you again!"

I gently detached myself and pulled back from her a little. I was far from sure how I wanted to play this. I still felt embarrassed about my visit to her, which was one of the biggest mistakes I had made in my efforts to cope with FUCK. I had nothing against the girl personally, but I knew I had been lucky that our previous meeting had ended without disaster, and really I wanted nothing more than to put the whole incident behind me. Like any good Englishman unsure of himself, I fell back on small talk. "It's good to see you, too, Gina. You look fantastic."

This was not mere flattery. She was beautifully dressed in excellent and apparently expensive taste, and she had about her an air of buoyancy and

bien-être

that was almost magnetic.

She shot me a dazzling smile. "Well, I've got you to thank for that, hun." And she did a twirl so I could see her from all angles.

I was not sure what she meant. "I don't think I can claim any credit," I replied.

"You bet you can," she retorted. "Here, hun, let me buy you a drink."

I realised she had skilfully directed our steps into a side street where a pub was tucked away. Weakly, maybe, I allowed myself to be steered inside, but I insisted on getting the drinks. We nestled at a small table in the corner. She accepted her drink with another radiant smile and leant forward.

"Jim, honey," she said in a low but excited voice, "you are a life-saver. I just can't thank you enough."

"You mean last week?"

"Don't play dumb, honey, you know what I mean. What you did last time – I want it again, honey, I want it right now."

I felt I should have known where this was leading. I did not hold it against her – she had her living to earn – but I had no wish, and frankly I now had no need, to start spending my money on prostitutes. So I gave her what I hoped was a gracious smile and made my excuses.

"I'm sorry, Gina, it's a lovely idea but I'm really short at this time of month," I apologised, draining my drink.

She looked shocked.

"Jim, honey, I couldn't take money off you after what you've done for me! This is a freebie. They'll all be freebies for you from now on, Jim honey, you just let me know when you want me and I'll come running." She passed her card across the table.

"Er, Gina," I replied hesitantly, "all I did was fuck you."

"

All I did was fuck you

," she echoed, imitating my diction. "But Jim honey, it was the fuck of fucks! It was like no fuck I've ever known. Do you know it was hours before I could move off that bed?" She smiled at the recollection. "It was weird. I felt amazing, like I was floating, and I could hear everything that was going on but I couldn't move or speak. You know you frightened the bejayzus out of Gloria."

"The maid?"

She nodded. "She was going spare until I managed to tell her I was OK. Then, when it wore off a bit and I could get up, I felt really horny again. I thought of all the guys that had rung up while I was out of it; I'd heard Gloria putting them off. I wished she could ring them back so I could fuck them all. Then a guy rang up and came round. He was old and greasy but I didn't care, I wanted it so bad. And it was just mind-blowing; I came twice. I don't mean he sent me into orbit like you, Jim honey," she added, in case she had damaged my male ego, "but I'd never liked sex with clients before I saw you and now I can't get enough."

Her comment about not liking sex with clients surprised me. "You didn't like sex?"

"Not with clients, hun. Boyfriends, that's different."

"But you looked tickled to death when you first saw me at the flat."

"Pure professionalism, hun," she shrugged. "Sorry to disappoint you."

I cringed with embarrassment. "My fault for being so naïve," I assured her.

"But that's all in the past now," she resumed. "I only used to work a couple of days a week but since I saw you I've worked every day. And not working flats either. Parlours and parties all the time. I've just fucked myself stupid." In her excitement she was beginning to raise her voice and people were starting to look. I motioned her to keep it down. "I've fucked so many guys it's a wonder I can still stand," she hissed. "And I've made more lovely money than I've seen in my life. Look, hun!"

She rummaged in her bag and, with a cautious look for prying eyes, pushed a bulging purse under my nose. I undid the clasp and it burst open with the pressure from within. The purse was stuffed with an enormous roll of notes, all, so far as I could see, either fifties or twenties. "My god, Gina," I whispered, "how much have you got here?"

"Not sure; might be a couple of thou'," she replied proudly.

My eyes widened. "All earned in the last week and a bit?"

"Nah," she retorted dismissively. "This is just since Monday."

Today was Thursday. My mind boggled. Gina seemed thoroughly pleased with the effect she had generated.

"Jim honey, you are God's gift to whores and," she grinned wickedly, "I'd be letting down the whole profession if I didn't thank you properly. So you just come along with Gina, honey, no more arguments."

When she put it like that, how could I refuse? I let her grab my arm and lead me out of the pub. As soon as we hit Regent Street she hailed a cab and named a Bayswater address.

I was intrigued by what she had told me in the pub. "Gina –" I began as we drove off.

"It's Donna really, honey," she informed me.

Again I felt crushed by the realisation of my own naivety. It should have been obvious that she would not use her real name when working but the thought had never crossed my mind. All the same, I preferred "Gina", and said so.

"Right you are, hun," she replied indifferently. "Gina it is."

It suddenly struck me that she was letting go of her real name, her identity even, for the sake of my whim. I thought of telling her I liked "Donna" after all, but I was more interested in getting to the bottom of her remarks in the pub.

"Gina, when you talked about doing parlours and parties rather than flats, what did you mean?"

On that taxi ride I learnt more than I had ever expected to know about the London sex trade. Gina explained that, apart from walking the streets, which she dismissed as a dangerous and poorly paid way of working resorted to only by the desperate, the options open to a "working girl" were flats, parlours, parties, and escorting. "Of course, you don't have to stick to the same one all the time," she explained. "You can party one day and escort the next. That's something a lot of girls like about this business, the way they can decide when and how they want to work."

"But they all hate the actual sex?"

She corrected me. "I never said I hated it, hun. Sometimes it was all right, 'specially if the guy was good company and made me laugh. And sometimes I just put up with it as part of the job. But all whores aren't the same, honey. There are some girls that hate the sex and hate the clients; they get very hard and cynical and usually don't last long. I was never like that. And there are other girls that just love guys and wanna fuck them all the time. I always thought they were the lucky ones, and now I know it for sure, hun, you've made me one of them." She gave me a grateful hug.

"But I must admit whores are all the same about one thing," she added. "We all just

lurve

the money!"

Gina explained that escorting was at the top of the profession. It involved seeing possibly only two or three clients in a day, but each of them would pay some hundreds of pounds or, for an "overnight", maybe as much as a thousand (although of course the agency took its share). Although it often meant going alone to the client's home or hotel, the risk was minimal because anyone able to pay this sort of money would be a man of some substance; moreover, a satisfied client would often make generous gifts of cash or jewellery over and above the agreed fee. Gina had worked this way until the previous year, when she had fallen victim to a combination of her own advancing years and the freedom of travel resulting from the eastward expansion of the European Union.

At least, that is my interpretation of what she told me. Her exact words were, "All of a sudden last summer, London's awash with bloody perfect nineteen-year-old blondes from Lithuania, wherever the hell that is."

I was trying so hard to look as if I found this a deplorable state of affairs that I almost failed to notice that the words "It's on the Baltic" were rising to my lips. Just in time I realised that she was not in the market for a geography lesson and I substituted a comment about having seen newspaper stories about human trafficking.

"Don't believe everything you read, hun. I'm sure that goes on with dodgy agencies and the rough end of the business but the girls I met knew exactly what they were doing. And they'd do

anything

, the little tarts." She paused a moment, perhaps aware of a certain inconsistency in her remarks. "All right," she continued; "I admit it. I'm a whore. I fuck men for money. But I was always a bit picky about kissing guys full-on and I never took it up the ass. But these new girls! Wave a bit of red money [she meant fifty-pound notes] in front of those pretty faces and those big blue eyes would pop out on stalks and they'd tickle the guy's tonsils with their tongues and take his cock up their behind and do it all for half of what I'd been used to getting just for a fuck."

I tried to tut disapprovingly.

"I suppose I can't blame them, really," Gina went on more charitably. "I was talking to one girl, she hadn't been in London a week, she said she was eighteen but I'd have put her nearer sixteen. She told me she'd made more money from one night with a Japanese businessman than her father earned in a year as a schoolteacher back in Slovakia or someplace. The poor kid looked bewildered, overwhelmed. I hope she's OK."

She fell silent for a moment. It shames me to have to confess that I happily drifted off into thoughts of beautiful eastern European girls with perfect teenaged bodies and no sexual morals.

"Well, anyway," she resumed, "all the agencies, or at least the ones I'd be willing to work for, were telling me they had nothing for me, so since then I've been working flats." She explained that this meant she would see a few men each day and give them a degree of personal attention for which they would pay reasonably well. There was an element of risk, since the men were unknown quantities and she was alone apart from the maid, and it could get boring hanging around the flat all day, plus of course she had to pay the maid and the flat owner, but for her these drawbacks were outweighed by getting a reasonable financial return from not too many clients.

In the past she had worked in massage parlours. (Even I had been faintly aware that this was a quaint euphemism for "brothel" but I had never visited such an establishment.) In a parlour three or four girls would typically be on duty and the turnover of clients would be much faster. A man would come in off the street, choose his girl, and be taken to a private room where she would, to put it bluntly, empty his balls as quickly as possible. The whole process was much faster and more clinical than working a flat, as well as cheaper for the client, of course. The girl would earn far less from each encounter than in a flat but would see far more men in the day so overall the reward was about the same. It was also safer because other people were around if a client gave any trouble, but having to service so many men had put Gina off this way of working.

That is, she explained, until I had entered her life. That day, after getting over her encounter with me, she had enjoyed blinding sex and massive orgasms with three more callers at the flat but she had still felt horny, so she had rung round some parlours she knew and booked herself in for the following day. And what a day it had been, apparently. "Jim, honey, it was fucking fantastic," she enthused. "I knew the place was busy, that's why I hadn't liked it before, but there was some kind of big business exhibition on somewhere near and the guys just kept coming." She laughed as she realised the unintended double meaning. "I kept coming too. I fucked twenty-eight guys in the day and I just exploded every time. And the twenty-eighth guy," she proclaimed with professional pride, "was just as satisfied as the first."

By the time we arrived at her flat, which was in the basement of a posh Bayswater terrace, Gina was telling me about parties, in which you get three or four girls in a flat with about twelve or fifteen fee-paying punters and, so far as I could understand it, basically have an orgy. It was an idea she had always found thoroughly off-putting until just over a week ago, when it had somehow become irresistibly alluring. With so many people around this was also, of course, a very safe environment in which to work.

All in all, Gina had given me a fascinating insight into an aspect of London life I had known almost nothing about. To tell the truth I was getting thoroughly excited and aroused by the thought that all this sex was going on, all day, every day, all over London, while millions of people got on with their conventional lives all around it, yet oblivious of it.

I gathered that since our encounter Gina had spent all her time, the weekend included, in parties and parlours, always choosing the ones she thought would have most men. She had never had so much sex or made so much money, she reckoned an average of seven hundred pounds a day. "After eight days of wall-to-wall fucking," she said as we entered the flat, "I thought it was time I spent some of the money so I took today off and came up the West End to splash out. Nice, eh?" She stood before me showing off the obviously new outfit she was wearing and proudly held up the bulging bags sporting the logos of prestigious and expensive West End stores.

"Very nice," I acknowledged, "but you'd look even better without any clothes at all."