"You don't feel even a little bit guilty about acquiring for nothing a business nurtured by someone else?" Iris commented to one rather large man, with a correspondingly tiny penis, who was so full of his own glory that he didn't notice the veiled criticism.
"The bastard was an illegal," he said, while he puffed on an imported cigar and stroked the penis hidden under the folds of his stomach. "He had it coming. He didn't have to stay in the country and do work that should be done by a true blue Englishmen. He'll be fine back in Lebanon or Syria or wherever he came from. At least, that is, until the yids blast the ay-rabs to fucking kingdom come as they keep threatening."
Many of Iris' clients despised Iris with exactly the same fervour as they enjoyed fucking her. Some justified it to themselves by voicing the belief that she was an illegal immigrant and therefore deserved only to be fucked. Iris couldn't be bothered to tell them that as far as she knew, not one of her ancestors had been anything other than English. Perhaps there was some Welsh and Scottish blood in her, but she was sure that wouldn't make her any less English in the eyes of clients who still believed that Britain and England were synonymous.
"Although I'm a Scot," said one client whose name like the rest of his identity was never revealed to Iris, "I'd rather live in England than fucking Socialist Scotland. The Scottish fuckers are still in Europe. What cunts! Who wants the eurocratic buggers in Brussels or Stockholm telling you what to think or do?"
"We're better off without the jocks and the taffs and the other cunts," said another client, whose medically energised and still embarrassingly erect penis was poking against Iris' thigh. "They're nothing but trouble. They can take all our wops, spics and niggers as well if they like. We don't want them."
"Aren't the Welsh and Scots still united under the same crown?" remarked Iris to another rather less obnoxious client who'd been fulsomely apologetic about his inability to rise to the occasion.
"It's all that's left of the Commonwealth," he said. "The India-Pakistan Nuclear War scared off most of the members and the current government has deported so many people back to countries that used to be in the British Commonwealth that there are precious few members left."
"Do you support the government?" Iris wondered. Her clients' attitudes were so much at odds with what her friends believed that she sometimes doubted her own hatred for Ivan Eisenegger's administration.
"We need strong government at a time of crisis," he said.
It was a persuasive argument in a sense but, despite its posturing, Iris wasn't convinced that the Government of National Unity could truly be described as strong, resolute or tough. Every year was marked by just another humiliating climbdown by a Kingdom whose friends now were those nations that most other nations despised. Did the English really want to be associated with dictatorships and crackpots? And what was so resolute about a nation that was now surrounded by increasingly hostile neighbours? What was so good about overseeing an economy that was failing to recover? Where was the prosperity now in a London teeming with beggars and petty criminals?
"It's not just England," said another client who confessed to being less than enthralled by the government. "It's everywhere in the world. The French, the Germans, even the Japanese and the Russians: it's the same wherever you go. And I get to travel to a lot of places, I can tell you."
"You can afford to fly!" said Iris who was duly impressed.
"Well, I can't, but my company can," he said. "Everywhere it's the same. Food, fuel and raw materials are more and more expensive. Floods, droughts, heat waves and tornadoes in places that never used to know them. Lots of mouths to feed and not enough to go around."
There weren't many clients to whom Iris could speak so openly. Any hint of dissatisfaction with the government could so easily be construed as at best a lack of patriotism and at worst pure treason.
"Those cunts deserved to be fucked," remarked one client during a rambling diatribe about the recent deportation of several hundred squatters from Brixton. "Don't you agree?"
"Umm..." said Iris nervously. "I guess so."
"I'm not sure you do," said the client unsympathetically. He was still undressed, but he was so hairy and blubbery that it was difficult to positively locate his penis even though it was fully erect. "You're not a fucking pinko, are you? You look a bit like a yid or a spic. You're not an illegal, are you?"
"No, of course not," said Iris who was alarmed by this sudden turn to the conversation.
"A lot of you whores are illegals, aren't you?" he continued. "I had a spade here once. She was all neat and tidy and prim, just like you. Her tits were bigger though and so was her arse. I took her right up her back passage. I showed her. Fucking chocolate bunny. Do you take it up the arse, sweetie? I heard the wops are particularly keen to suck on a shit lollipop after a poke between the cheeks."
"Did he bugger you, then?" asked Paula, one of the girls with whom Iris shared a three-bedroom flat in Penge.
"He could have, if he wanted to," Iris admitted, "He was a big guy and he'd have had no difficulty pinning me down on the bed. But thankfully he didn't. One good thing about Empire Cleaning Services, which they make a big deal about, is that they cross people off their client list if they overstep the line. All I had to do was tell the guy that sodomy wasn't one of the services I was prepared to offer and remind him that there were other women who'd be more than pleased to satisfy him in that department. And then he backed off."
"Couldn't he just have buggered you and kicked you out?" said Peter, Paula's boyfriend, who had probably seen too many Brazilian thrillers.
"Then he'd have to find another agency," said Iris.
"He could have acted like a real bastard," continued Peter. "He could have reported your escort agency to the police and then they'd close it down. The government are real hot on vice, aren't they? They're always going on about reclaiming the streets for decent English people."
"There are too many policemen and politicians who are clients of Empire Cleaning Services for that to happen," said Iris. "For all I know this guy might have been a policeman."
"Would you know if he was?" asked Paula.
"Sometimes you can guess what the clients are," said Iris. "They have photographs of themselves on show. Some are doctors, some work in Immigration and some are ex-military. But mostly you don't know and they don't usually tell you. All you know is that they've got money."
"And these days: if you've got money you must be crooked," said Peter as if that clinched the argument.
