Luke Bradbury - Undercover - The Adventures of a Real Life Gigolo

‘Not choosing to call out for a guy, presumably. That’s what blokes do.’

I could see the callbox windows in my mind’s eye, completely covered from floor to ceiling with brightly coloured ‘whorecards’. Blocking out the muted sunlight. That’d been my introduction to England nine weeks ago, dialling my mum to let her know I’d got here in one piece.

‘We can get a number for a girl from any phone box. But they can’t…’ I was working out the problem with our plan as I was saying it.

‘But that’s what the internet’s for!’ Mark spluttered, spraying crumbs. He swept them off the table with his forearm.

I ran a finger along the edge of the pine tabletop until it hit a dent in the wood. I drew my nail again and again through the groove and looked Mark in the eye.

‘Yeah, but they’re not looking because they’re not even aware that there’s a service for them. They take their chances on a Saturday night.’

Mark nodded: ‘Or go without.’

‘Exactly. And even if they knew there were guys they could pay for via their PCs, that doesn’t mean they’d do anything about it.’

I picked up my mug and took another gulp of tea, and thought of the callbox again and all the sex phoneline ads in the freesheets that I’d seen when I was trying to find somewhere to live. That’d been a grim time, sleeping on friends of friends’ grimy floors while all the while I could sense they didn’t really want me there. Sharing a room with Mark in this house for the past month had been a damn sight better than that , even with the beer cans clustered on the floor round the bin from when we hadn’t thrown straight. He’d been looking for someone to make up the rent and I’d seen his ad on Gumtree. It’d helped that the two of us had hit it off as soon as we’d met over a drink. Same small-town Aussie background, I suppose.

‘I mean, have you ever phoned for a hooker?’ I raised my eyebrows at him as I said it.

He shook his head. ‘Course not. As if I need to…’ he crowed.

I put my mug down. ‘Well then.’

And that’s when it hit me. What had we been thinking?

There was not even a market for sex with straight guys. Or not one that involved money changing hands. On the girl’s part anyhow.

‘They’ve well and truly buggered us, haven’t they?’ I sighed.

A grin crept up Mark’s face. ‘Thankfully not. And that’s something to be damn grateful for.’

We both laughed, but it couldn’t disguise the fact that each of us was seriously out of pocket. We’d taken a gamble on making easy money and lost.

‘Well, at least we can’t be the only ones who’ve fallen for this scam,’ said Mark. ‘Think about it. There must be hordes of guys across London,’ he continued, flinging his arm out as if to embrace the whole city and not just our poxy kitchen in a crappy area of West London, ‘just like us, weeping into their tea at what might have been!’

I sighed. Surely it was the ultimate part-time job. Screwing girls for cash. We could have waved goodbye to the crummy minimum-wage waiting and bar jobs and selling stuffed pittas while hung over from a stall at Camden Market for friends of friends who always paid shit money. God, London certainly hadn’t turned out to be all it was cracked up to be.

I looked down at my half-full mug and felt the cogs whirring even as he was saying it.

‘Well then, that’s how we make our money back, isn’t it?’ I suggested.

‘What?’

‘Look, there’s clearly enough money out there to make it worthwhile setting up an agency that gets guys to pay to sign on.’

Mark’s face momentarily fell. ‘What, and rip people off just the way we were? Come on.’

Miserably, I nodded. ‘I agree it’s not exactly ethical.’ I thought for a moment. ‘But then it’s not exactly not . What if we were to set up an agency, y’know, advertise our services to women, and ask guys to sign on? The blokes cough up, and of course we’ll give them work if there’s enough going, but we’ll always have first call. What is wrong with that? We can’t lose.’

Mark cocked his head to one side and shook it. But he was also smiling. ‘God, Luke. A couple of months in this country and you’ve turned into a London spiv!’

I smirked back. He raised his mug to mine and we chinked.

My mind was already in overdrive. We’d advertise in the London freesheets. We could do it cheaply, surely. Advertise for clients, and put something on the internet to draw in the men as well. And photos. Me, Mark and the lads, to give the girls something to choose from.

‘Face it, Mark. We’re broke. We might as well make a go of it. We’ve got nothing more to lose.’

I suppose I expected it to happen overnight. But of course it didn’t. And when it didn’t, it meant it didn’t seem real. It was just mates mucking about. Even after I’d spent fifty quid I couldn’t really afford on a box ad in a London magazine; even after we’d put a whole lot of our pictures up on the net. Seven of us had spent an afternoon taking photos of each other, all of us with a big grin on our faces in front of the drawn curtains in our lounge room so it looked like we’d hired a studio or something. So we were able to still kid ourselves that we were only having a laugh.

But we weren’t, were we?

Or, as it turned out, I wasn’t.

The phone rang. Mark and I were lounging on the sofa with our cans of Stella and having our last-night debrief. We looked at each other for a beat, and since he didn’t get up, I did and sauntered across the room.

‘Hi?’

‘Male Escorts Esquire? I saw your advert.’

Shit!

I pulled up a chair and sat down, half out of shock. The name we’d come up with wasn’t the greatest, but it had clearly done its job. I struggled to get my head into gear. She was the first to call—though I wasn’t about to let her know that, of course.

‘Hello, how might we help you?’

What have we got ourselves into?

‘Uh, I’ve never done this before,’ she mumbled. ‘I was wondering if you might be able to send me someone tomorrow evening?’

What was I thinking? I can’t do this. This isn’t for me . That was why I’d volunteered my phone number in the first place, so I could act the receptionist and palm off anyone who rang onto one of the others.

It was one thing to fantasise about girls phoning you for sex, it was quite another to be faced with the sheer reality of going with whoever happened to ask. Suppose she sounded better than she turned out to look? What did you do then?

This one wasn’t too young—I could tell by the tone of her voice—and she was clearly nervous.

Join the club .

I sat up straight on the dining chair and went into professional mode.

‘Is there anyone on the website you liked the look of? Sorry, your name is—?’

Mark’s ears pricked up. He stared across the room at me with excited saucer eyes and a smirk. I shook my head as a sign to him to ease up, and tried to focus on what was being said to me.

‘Jenny,’ she replied. ‘I don’t have a computer.’

Ah, definitely an older woman. Okaay.

‘Nice to talk to you, Jenny, I’m Luke. That’s not a problem. What would you like him to look like? We have a range of young men on our books.’

Mark stifled a guffaw and I shot a glare at him.

‘I’m not—I’m not sure,’ she stuttered.

So, she was indecisive. That wasn’t a problem either. All I had to do was make sure she was satisfied with the service. She didn’t sound as if she could cope with someone too bullish, like Simon, our resident rugby player. She needed a gentleman who wouldn’t frighten her off.