Gigolo Read online

  GIGOLO

  BEN FOSTER WITH CLIFFORD THURLOW

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © Ben Foster, Clifford Thurlow 2018

  This first edition published in 2018 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  www.thistlepublishing.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER 1: TWO JOBS

  CHAPTER 2: BETTER NEVER LATE

  CHAPTER 3: THE COMMITTEE

  CHAPTER 4: NAUGHTY MONKEY

  CHAPTER 5: IT’S ONLY SEX

  CHAPTER 6: THE £50 NOTE

  CHAPTER 7: VIVIENNE

  CHAPTER 8: DEEP BREATHING

  CHAPTER 9: YOU CAN NEVER SAY NO

  CHAPTER 10: ANGELA

  CHAPTER 11: SHOPPING

  CHAPTER 12: GROUCHO’S

  CHAPTER 13: THE GOLDEN RULE

  CHAPTER 14: POSITIVE THINKING

  CHAPTER 15: WHAT CLOTHES SAY

  CHAPTER 16: DEFYING GRAVITY

  CHAPTER 17: EXTRAS

  CHAPTER 18: SPOILED CHILDREN

  CHAPTER 19: SECRETS

  CHAPTER 20: COMEDY OF ERRORS

  CHAPTER 21: BASIC INSTINCT

  CHAPTER 22: THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER

  CHAPTER 23: IT GIRLS

  CHAPTER 24: CITY OF LOVE

  CHAPTER 25: GLOBAL WORLD

  CHAPTER 26: EVERYONE WEARS A MASK

  PREFACE

  The man was watching over half-moon glasses as I slipped my oiled hands over her narrow back, through the cheeks of her bottom and down her long slender legs.

  He was wearing a white linen suit with a striped tie from some school or club. On the table in front of him was a single line of cocaine and a pair of gold earrings like two miniature wind chimes.

  The plane banked and I almost toppled over.

  ‘Don’t stop now,’ the woman said, her voice deep, commanding.

  I grabbed the side of the table to regain balance and started again, working out the knot clusters in the area between her shoulder blades, releasing the pressure as she breathed in, applying it again as she breathed out.

  ‘Yes, there, that’s better.’

  ‘Ten minutes to landing.’ It was the pilot’s voice over the speakers.

  ‘Five more minutes,’ she said firmly.

  I continued making thumb circles over her shoulders, my legs braced during the descent. We were in an 8-seater Learjet, the interior pale cream with polished oak trim.

  The man watching the massage removed his glasses and tucked them into a circular silver case that he slipped into his jacket pocket.

  ‘Time to put some clothes on, darling,’ he said.

  She took a long breath through her nose and rolled over. She swung her legs around, sat on the edge of the table and fluttered her hand towards the closet at the rear.

  ‘Get a dress for me, the white one,’ she said, and I did so.

  As I turned back, she was leaning over the table, trim and girlish in the amber lighting. She removed one of the thin tubes attached to the earrings, snorted the line of cocaine, reattached the tube and hooked the earrings in place. She dabbed her fingertips in the white dust left on the table and ran it over her gums. I held the dress as she stepped into it and ran the zip up her back. She went up on her toes as she swivelled round to face me.

  ‘What would we do without you, Ben?’ she said, and kissed me twice on the corners of my mouth. ‘Now, what have you done with my shoes?’

  I reached for them under the seat, white toeless pumps with red soles. She slipped them on, sat beside the man and took his hand.

  ‘Two minutes to landing.’

  I buckled up. I could see the Thames below snaking its way through the warren of steel and glass buildings. We landed at London City Airport and taxied into the zone marked for private jets. The exit door opened. The woman fluffed up her hair. The man straightened his tie, then pointed at the ministerial red box on the floor next to where he had been sitting.

  ‘Bring the box for me, there’s a good chap, it weighs a ton.’

  We were waved through immigration and I followed them to the car park where a man with cropped greying hair and muscles bulging from a black tee-shirt stepped from a Range Rover with tinted windows.

  ‘I’ll take that, mate,’ he said, and took the red box.

  The driver opened the door for the woman, placed the box on the passenger seat and they purred quickly and silently into the distance.

  I made my way back through the airport and got a ticket on the Docklands Light Railway. In my pack, I carried a present for Kelly, a box of Baci Italian chocolates wrapped in love notes.

  1

  TWO JOBS

  It all began in 2006.

  England was knocked out of the World Cup on penalties by Portugal. No surprise there. X-Factor winner Shayne Ward was top of the charts with That’s My Goal. The Daily Mirror reported that chocolate was good for you; now I wouldn’t have to feel guilty buying it for the kids. The temperature that summer hit 36° C (that’s 97° F), and Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, had given away $44 billion to health charities.

  If I had that kind of money, I’d probably do the same. Don’t they say what goes round comes round? I’d buy a new car first, though, mine was a piece of junk, a ten year old ex-postal van that had already done 127,000 miles when I bought it from a mate for a hundred quid. It ran more on prayer than petrol.

  The radio was all right though and I sang along with Shayne Ward as I drove the 15 miles along the A 305 from our council house in Twickenham to Egham, where I began the evening shift at six at a place we called The Lodge, a gloomy grey building remodelled as a secure unit for young adults with learning disabilities.

  I was a support worker on minimum wage. Kelly, my wife, did three afternoons a week in a laundry, and we had three little-ones aged two, four and five who broke my heart when I thought about all the things I wanted to do for them. It was hard enough trying to make a living now. What was it going to be like for them when they grew up?

  You can’t get by with only one job and I had spent the small inheritance from my Gran completing the Level 3 Diploma in Body Massage. I was a qualified masseur with a certificate, insurance and one client I had met in a gym when I was given six months’ temporary membership to provide free massages, which worked out very well for the owners of the gym.

  Massage was a strange profession for someone from my background, but when I read about the course in the brochure from St Mary’s University, the thing that jumped out at me was that the qualification was recognised in Canada. I had a sort of daydream, not a plan, just a vague idea that one day we might emigrate. I had never been to Canada, I didn’t know anyone in Canada. But I knew it had lots of space and seemed like a great country to bring up kids.

  As a teenager, I’d worked out of Lowestoft on a beam trawler catching herring, cod and plaice. It’s a good job for a youngster and I thought I’d probably be going out to sea for the rest of my life. Then the fish dried up, the laws on fishing permits changed and most of the boats went into dry dock. That was in 1996. I was twenty, and there was still plenty of work if you went out and looked for it. After forty years laying tarmacadam, my grandfather had just died at sixty-eight, of exhaustion, my mum said, and I moved to Twickenham to look after my Gran.

  After being a fisherman, I wanted to work outdoors and got a temporary post with the council planting trees. Then the council ran out of trees, or money, or both, and I started with a contractor laying paving stones. When that came to an end, I found work as a labourer, a job with good money until the developers started using gang bosses who only employed East Europeans. You hate the for
eigners when they take your job. Then you find out they’re paying inflated rents to live in old caravans so they can send home twenty quid a week to feed their families. That’s when you realise it’s the system that’s wrong and you don’t hate them anymore.

  But you still have to go and find another job.

  I had always used my muscles to earn a living. Massage is physical, you have to be strong, but also gentle, intuitive. It is a form of meditation, not only for the person receiving the massage, but also for the one giving it. The movements are rhythmic, repetitive, calming. It had certainly calmed me down. I’d always had a tendency to leap before I looked, I’d jump into anything. But when you have a family, you start to be more cautious. I’d left my twenties behind me. I was thirty now. I jogged ten miles a day, avoided the drink, and was as fit as I had ever been.

  That was probably why they had taken a chance at The Lodge and employed me without the relevant qualifications. The work was mentally gruelling. Few blokes lasted three months. I’d already done six. I had no other prospects and needed that regular wage packet. We got by. But one little thing, like the fridge giving up or the van breaking down, and I’d have to take on extra shifts until we’d paid off the bill.

  The lads in the unit were generally nice boys, but had psychological problems and would fly off the handle at the least provocation, often for no reason at all. You had to use gentle force so that they didn’t feel they had to take you on. I didn’t mind getting the odd punch, it came with the job, but it upset me if the boys got hurt. Their lives were difficult enough as it was.

  I would be seeing my massage client Friday, then the weekend off. I just had to get through two long days of double shifts, six till midnight, midnight till six, when at least the boys would be drugged out of their heads and I could put my feet up with a mug of tea.

  The drive from Twickenham to Egham took about thirty minutes. But I was afraid of the van overheating and limped along in the inside lane with the sun burning my arm as it rested on the open window. Trucks blasted their horns as they shot by, the whole world was in a hurry, and I was a couple of minutes late by the time I rattled over the potholes and parked below the trees surrounding The Lodge.

  Vinnie Castro, the night manager, had an office with bay windows overlooking the entrance. He tapped the face of his watch as I ran up the stairs and met me in the hall.

  ‘About bloody time,’ he said. ‘Go and help Marley, will you, he’s in the day room. They’re pissing on Little Billy again.’

  I rushed down the corridor and burst in. Marley held two lads by their collars. They looked sheepish and pleased with themselves at the same time.

  ‘Need any help?’ I said.

  ‘It’s all over ‘cept for the cleaning, man.’

  Marley had long dreads held in a beanie in the colours of the Jamaican flag and a strong accent, although he had grown up in South London. He was a Rasta, a gentle giant with a nice way with the lads.

  I gazed around the room – the ping-pong table, flat screen TV angled against the wall, shelves of books and board games, windows with bars. Troy was doing his usual thing, sitting on his hands in a blue armchair rocking back and forth. Alex had command of the TV remote and was switching channels as fast as he could. The babel of cut off words and changing colours made it feel as if you really were in a mad house. A couple of lads stood with their faces pressed against the windows and Little Billy was in the corner soaked in urine.

  Chris was the ring leader. I threw up my hands as I approached him.

  ‘Chris, why do you keep doing that?’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘You know what. Why do you keep pissing on Billy?’

  ‘He asked for it.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true.’

  ‘You calling me a liar?’

  ‘No, Chris, I am not calling you a liar. I just don’t think it’s true.’

  I glanced at Little Billy. He was grinning, nodding his head up and down, and I thought, oh no, perhaps it is true!

  ‘Come on, Billy,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and take a shower, shall we? And, Chris, help Marley clean this mess up.’

  ‘Not my job.’

  ‘I know it’s not your job. Just do it to be nice.’

  ‘Not my job.’

  ‘What is your job?’

  ‘What?’ He looked back at me as if I had spoken in a foreign language and had no idea what I was talking about.

  ‘Just help Marley and be nice.’

  ‘Not my job.’

  These kinds of conversations could go on forever. I led Billy down the corridor and upstairs to the bathroom.

  The lads at The Lodge developed fads and fetishes that would last a few weeks, then stop again. Chris and his henchmen, Del and Jordan, had peed on Billy half a dozen times in the last two weeks. I assumed it had a few more weeks to run, then something else would start.

  Several lads had obsessions with bodily waste. I’d had excrement as well as pee thrown at me. Occasionally I would have to change two or three times during the course of a shift and still drive home with my clothes reeking. I wore loose white trousers and a white polo shirt, oddly the same uniform as I wore as a masseur, and one of the big expenses on our weekly budget was buying economy-sized bottles of ‘Shout,’ the stain remover.

  What the boys lacked was personal attention. When I did have time to be alone with one of them, they quickly responded and became almost normal. Most had learning difficulties. Some, on the other hand, were extremely intelligent, they just saw the world in their own special way. If they were reading a book, they could concentrate no matter how much racket was going on and remember everything they had read. What they needed was programmes to fit their individual problems, not to be lumped together as ‘special needs.’ I had mentioned this to Vinnie and he’d promised to pass it on up the chain of command.

  Another thing I had noticed was that the lads had less sense of right and wrong than Ollie, my five year old. They appeared to have no conscience and, almost without exception, were unable to understand or share another person’s feelings. When I’d asked Chris to help Marley clean up the mess he’d made, his expression remained blank and the concept of doing something ‘just to be nice’ was totally beyond his grasp.

  While Billy was in the shower, I found some clean clothes. When he was dressed again, I asked him why Chris and the others kept pissing on him. He just grinned and shrugged his thin shoulders.

  ‘Don’t let it happen again, all right?’

  ‘It’s too hot.’

  ‘You’re telling me. Hottest day of the year.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Search me, Billy, I’ve got no idea.’

  ‘Must be the weather.’

  Billy was grinning. I wasn’t sure if he’d made a joke or not, and that was another thing: the boys could always surprise you.

  We made our way back downstairs.

  ‘Now, go and watch the telly and stay away from Chris.’

  Marley had already mopped up and I walked down the corridor with him to the entrance.

  ‘Sorry I was late, mate, I owe you one.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Bro. Time is a banana.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It bends like the universe.’

  That was Marley wisdom. I was never exactly sure what he meant and would spend the rest of the night thinking about it.

  There was one other worker on the six o’clock shift, Andel Svoboda, a Czech male nurse, a quiet, serious man with a severe expression and a wife and children back in Prague. Our job for the next hour was to keep the peace until dinner time, when as much food got thrown about as eaten. I’d clean up while Andel arranged the medicines and we’d have ‘quiet time’ in the day room watching TV before they went to bed; usually the drugs had taken effect and there was no complaint.

  When one of the lads had a night trauma, we’d spend hours changing sheets and cleaning a boy up. On the worst occasions, we had to strap them into a straight-ja
cket, then lock them in a padded room where they would wail like a hurt animal until a doctor arrived and gave them an antipsychotic drug that left them like zombies for days after. It was heart-breaking and I’d drive back to Twickenham feeling depressed.

  There were times when I was screamed at, spat on, punched and scratched. I would run out of clothes to change into and arrive home with poo on my shirt and my feet yellow with urine. I’d hurry upstairs, take a bath and go straight to bed. Kelly would wake up and she knew me well enough to know I just wanted to close my eyes and not talk about anything. The job wasn’t only hard on me, it was hard on Kelly as well.

  That Thursday, one of the hottest days of the year, was a good day. The heat had exhausted the lads. I read the paper with a cup of tea and the road home was empty except for the crows that hopped indignantly out of the way as the van approached. The sun painted orange stripes across the horizon. I filled up at the service station and bought some chocolate bars.

  The children were already awake and Kelly was like a circus performer feeding Claire, dressing George, my strapping four year old, and overseeing Ollie, busy pouring cereal into a bowl. They all had blue eyes, but only Ollie had my inky dark hair. Claire and George were fair like their mum.

  The moment I opened the door, Ollie spilled half the packet of cereal over the counter and ran up to me.

  ‘Daddy, daddy,’ he cried and grabbed for the bag I was carrying.

  This may have been inspired by great love, but it was more likely that he was after the Crunchie bar he knew I’d bought. I held the bag out of reach.

  ‘Please, dad.’

  ‘Ollie, no. Not before breakfast,’ I said, and placed a Crunchie and two Milky Ways on the high shelf.

  ‘I said please.’

  ‘And I said no, not before breakfast.’

  ‘Not hungry, dad.’

  ‘If you’re not hungry, you don’t want a Crunchie.’

  ‘He got you there, Ollie,’ Kelly chipped in.

  Ollie thought about that for half a second and decided to give in gracefully.

  I helped put the cereal back in the box and emptied my pockets. I had a £5 note and a handful of change.