Anonymous - Belle do jour:Diary of an unlikely call girl

The client went to collect my coat. I gave the girl a kiss and nodded at the bottle of massage oil in her tiny hand. “Keep it-you’ll make better use of it than I will.” He came back and put a possessive arm around her, and my mind switched over again. Escort? Girlfriend? I couldn’t be sure. The tip he slipped me was equal to the fee. samedi, le 20 decembre

I am heading home to see friends and family, as is my custom. The Boy has gone on to spend a few weeks with his parents, as is his custom. I think some things should be sacrosanct from the intrusion of couplehood, and watching your family get drunk and pass out in the toilet is one of them.

Train travel is a most exciting wonder of the modern age. Having invented no shortage of faster, cheaper, and more comfortable ways to travel, we insist on perpetuating an outdated, and dare I say it, wildly inconvenient method of transport. What other modes of carriage could possibly expect you to make your own way to the start and terminating stations, wait until the company’s convenience to commence your journey, sit so long without even a free warm soda, and set up seats and tables so that you are inadvertently rubbing thighs with every pervert between King’s Cross and Yorkshire? I love it, you know I do.

Having made this trip so often, I know-seconds before the conductor’s voice breaks over the loudspeaker-when we are one minute from my stop. I know which carriage will put me closest to the exit and could conduct a tour of the station blindfolded. Even when no one is waiting for me, and I know there will be a twenty-minute queue for a taxi when I get there, the effect of stepping onto the platform at home is vivid delight. And the glow of being on my own ground lasts indefinitely, or until I pull into my parents’ drive. Whichever comes first. dimanche, le 21 decembre

Daddy and I went for a walk just after sunset. He claimed his legs were cramping from so much sitting around, but I suspect it was to get away from my mother, who has gone into celebratory overdrive. She’s an equal-opportunity party animal, juggling five or six seasonal holidays at a go. The last we checked she was trying to whip up familial enthusiasm for an Eid firework party. Having only a vague notion of what Eid is, who celebrates it, or what shoes would be appropriate to standing in a back garden and craning my neck at multicolored gunpowder, I decided in favor of the walking option.

There was a nip in the air, just enough to set the cheeks and ears tingling. We walked past a cottage with smoke from the chimney-“Coal,” Daddy said, authoritatively. We had a wood-burning stove when I was small, that we used to cook the family meals on as well. When it went and the new electric cooker and fake fire came in, I was very sad.

We returned to a dark house and a worried-looking man pushing his car back off of ours. He did the little foot-to-foot dance of trying to look innocent, which is especially tough when your front bumper is entangled in someone’s station wagon.

Daddy did a low whistle. “Ooh, the woman’s not going to be happy,” he said to the strange man, as if the threat of my mother’s displeasure alone could convince a perfect stranger not to do a runner. He circled round the scene of the accident-not much, just needed to lift the other car off the bumper, spot of scraped paint. Even I could see it wasn’t serious. But the stranger had clearly had a bit of Christmas cheer and was panicking.

“Don’t know, now,” Daddy said, sucking his teeth. “Could be a lot of damage.” The man pleaded for leniency. The usual story-points on his license, poor insurance, wife at home about to give birth to a multiheaded Hydra and only his being home on time could save her.

“Tell you what,” my father said, stroking his chin. “Let’s have about two hundred off you and call it even.”

“I only have one-twenty on me.”

“One-twenty and that bottle of whisky in your front seat.”

A curt nod and the man handed over the goods. My father crouched low and, with a coordinated effort, they disentangled the bumpers. The man got in his sedan and drove off slowly, mumbling gratitude. We waved him round the corner.

“Well, that was potentially exciting,” Daddy said, unlocking the front door. He handed me half of the notes. “Let’s not tell your mother, shall we?” lundi, le 22 decembre

The first prostitute I ever met was a friend of my father’s. It was about this time of year. I was still a student.

He is not a pimp, I swear. My father is in the habit of taking on impossible projects. He’d probably qualify for sainthood if he was, you know, a dead Catholic. These altruistic efforts have ranged from resurrecting a doomed restaurant to rehabilitating a series of doomed women. It’s a tendency that has led to no small amount of frostiness on my mother’s part, but she has had some few decades to accustom herself to his softheartedness by now.

She could tell when he was embarking on yet another failed cause before he even opened his mouth. “There’s only one reason you’d be coming in with flowers,” she barked from the kitchen. “And it’s not our anniversary.” Maybe she’s the one whose name should be put forward to the Vatican, actually.

It was winter of the year, several Yuletides ago now. The holiday cheer was largely lost on me due to a recent breakup as well as not being Christian. The vulgarities of the holiday are sometimes charming, or occasionally grating, but that year they were unbearable. All I could see were so many people gaining joy from an event imbued with only minimal importance by most of the world, as represented by endless yards of tatty tinsel and unwanted gifts. One afternoon, standing in a queue at the bank, I saw my reflection distorted in a cheap red tree bauble, and it occurred to me how temporary and meaningless all of it-the holiday, the bank, the world in general-was. I felt incapable of even anger at being alone. Defeated. So I did what any spoiled eldest child would do and went home for a few weeks to sulk properly.

As a restorative jaunt my father suggested I go with him to visit one of his “friends.” She, I was told, had just been released from prison on fraud charges related to her drug habit. Having regained custody of her children, she was working as a cleaner in a hotel and trying to stay off the game. Charming. I smiled tightly and we drove off to meet the woman.

We sat in the car in silence for a quarter of an hour. “I know you know your mum doesn’t approve,” he said suddenly, by way of the obvious.

I said nothing and looked out the window, where people poured out of the shops into the night.

“She’s really a lovely person,” he said of the friend. “Her children are absolutely charming.”

My father is the most ineffectual liar. In her depressing kitchen she regaled us with the story of a septic infection in her thumbnail that culminated in a week off work. Her two sons were as I imagined: the elder, about fifteen, eyed my figure under three layers of heavy clothing, while his younger sibling could not be shifted from the telly.

I could not stop thinking of my last boyfriend, who had left me suddenly among accusations of my snobbishness and utter lack of sympathy for other people. Well, as Philip Larkin put it, useful to get that learnt.

The other adults and the teenaged son left the room to look at his bicycle, a rusting heap retrieved from a Dumpster, which lay crumpled outside the door. My father is if nothing else rather handy and promised to look into its health. I knew the effort was more likely to result in a cash gift to the young man rather than any resurrection of the bike and was left, scowling, to watch the younger son attack the remote control.

As soon as the room was empty, he turned to me. “Would you like to see my bird?” he asked.