Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (13 page)

Some aspects of the sex business were less clear-cut than brothels, however, with lots of grey areas where there was a considerable lack of clarity as to exactly what was being bought and what was being sold. There were clubs with lap dancers and pole dancers where some girls would sell sex and some girls wouldn’t, depending on their personal inclinations and how badly they were in debt on that particular week.

These clubs were operating legal businesses, but anything that the girls offered on the side wasn’t strictly legit, with management largely turning a blind eye, considering that it was nobody’s business but the girls’. This meant that the rules of the game were rather opaque, and that punters could get irate because their mate might have just paid out a hundred quid for a blow job only for them to give the girl in the next booth a hefty wad of notes and get nothing but a bit of a dance in exchange. Because some of the punters were getting the girls’ sexual favours, the ones who weren’t were usually very angry to learn that they had just blown half a week’s salary on nothing. They would start huffing and puffing and threatening to blow the house down or shouting that they were going to hurt one of the girls. That was when we had to step in and sort things out. We would throw those guys out on their ears. Usually they would leave relatively quietly with just a bit of shouting and cursing. If they were violent, we would bash them up a bit to help them out the door, because there were no statutory rights to a blow job here. That was easy and I didn’t lose any sleep over wounding the pride of some loser who thought that handing over half his pay packet meant he had an automatic right to do whatever he wanted with someone else’s body.

Then there were the brothels. The way I saw it, the prostitutes were largely victims of their own backgrounds, making a living as best they could with the resources that were available to them. A lot of them had grown up in circumstances very much like my own and had fairly limited educational backgrounds and little by way of a support network, and others had come from abroad in search of a better future only to find that the only way that they could make real money in the United Kingdom was by selling their bodies to the highest bidder. Far from being pathetic and powerless, most of them were perfectly nice, well-balanced girls who any man would have been proud to take home and introduce to his mum. Many of them were mothers with all the concerns that mums usually have, and very unlike the desperate, hollow-eyed junkies of popular imagination. Of all the prostitutes I met, very few had a drug problem. For the vast majority of girls I knew, prostitution was a way of paying the rent and buying school uniforms and putting food on the table.

The girls usually started work around four o’clock in the afternoon and closed by ten, or ten-thirty at the latest, in order to avoid the drunks coming out of the pubs. This is standard procedure. Most of the brothels, then as now, were in quite ordinary flats above shops on ordinary high streets. They had intercom systems to communicate with prospective punters on the street, which gave them a limited degree of control over who they let in. If a prospective customer was obviously drunk, for example, he would be filtered out straight away. Security was always important, because there was always the possibility that someone might turn nasty.

The brothels didn’t advertise overtly – no straightforward listings in the Yellow Pages – but everyone knew where they were and there was never any shortage of customers from every walk of life. At the time I was providing security, most of the girls were from Eastern Europe and Russia with the Russian girls particularly popular with the punters because, in fatalistic Russian style, many of them did not insist on using condoms to have sex. This may have been stupid, but it was also a very lucrative line of business. Many, if not most, of the punters on the street operated a head-in-the-sand policy towards AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, and they preferred to have sex without a rubber.

When I worked the cheaper brothels, most nights were uneventful in the extreme. We would make sure that the girls didn’t get hurt or hassled, have a cup of tea and a bit of a chat with them and then go home. The brothels were small apartments, just about five rooms with a girl in each room, and those girls got to know each other very well, as there was usually plenty of time to chat between jobs. The punters would ring the doorbell downstairs and then, if they were let in, come upstairs and pick a girl.

Most of the customers were regulars who could be trusted to behave reasonably well and pay their bill before leaving, and regulars generally had their own special friends among the girls. I think that some of the friendships were even quite genuine. Even in a relationship in which money changed hands, affection and respect of a sort could flourish on both sides. We, the hired muscle, had to stay out of the way as much as possible when there were customers around so that we wouldn’t intimidate the men, but we did get to know the girls well. Most were fine, normal young women just doing their best to make a living and take care of their kids, and I had nothing but respect for them. I will say this: anyone who uses the services of prostitutes while looking down on them and what they do deserves a good hiding.

Although this work was largely quite uneventful, a few incidents stand out as worthy of note. During one period, a gang of African lowlifes (lowlifes came in every nationality; these ones just happened to be Africans) had taken to barging into East End brothels at the end of the night, raping the women, beating them up and taking their money. This had happened on several occasions in a number of different establishments, so everyone was understandably nervous and girls were refusing to go to work without twenty-four-hour protection.

As luck had it, the gang of marauders called by the night I was protecting the girls. Myself and this black guy I knew were waiting at the top of the stairwell when they came thundering upstairs, unaware that we were lying in wait and more than ready to give them what they had coming to them. We had seen them approaching on CCTV, so we were very well prepared. We had to be, as we were seriously outnumbered. When the first guy reached the top of the stairs, I hit him hard in the mouth with a baseball bat and his heavy body fell back down the stairs as he screamed like a pig with a slit throat. Blood and broken teeth poured out of his mouth and down the front of his shirt. He fell on top of his friends who were coming up behind him in the narrow stairwell and they all went down like dominoes, so it was easy for me and my mate to go downstairs and make sure that none of them would want to return in a hurry. We had locked the door remotely so we took the time to do our job well and hurt them as much as they had hurt the women they had beaten. I did not feel sorry for them in the slightest. In my book, rapists deserve whatever they get, and rape is rape, regardless of who the victim happens to be.

Having beaten the intruders soundly, my mate and I had a problem. It was two fold. First of all, because they had all fallen on top of each other in a very narrow stairwell, they were blocking the front door in a big, moaning heap. Secondly, while we had been defending the girls from being robbed and badly hurt, we had also been very enthusiastic in our violence, which meant that when the police arrived we, as well as they, might be in trouble. To avoid difficulties of any kind, we had to go back upstairs, climb out a back window on to a flat roof and shimmy down the drainpipe to make a swift exit.

Most of the time, the work was far less dramatic, but it was certainly interesting, sitting there in the brothel and watching the customers come and go. It was a real lesson in the sociology of the sex industry. The punters came in all ages, shapes and ethnic varieties and did a good job of representing the diversity of London. In the East End, most of them were respectable enough small-business owners, Pakistanis, Indians and Englishmen. The typical punter is the type of guy who sells you your newspaper on your way to work in the morning, and your six-pack of beer when you are on your way home. He is the man who will chat to you about the weather or comment on the football last night or the latest newspaper headlines. He is your neighbour, your teacher, your local shopkeeper. He is just a regular, ordinary man. He might even be you. These fellows came in all tidy in their flannel trousers with their shirts tucked in and then they went upstairs and gave those girls all they had before going back home to have their tea with their wives and children, who presumably remained blissfully ignorant of what Dad got up to on his way home from work.

Most of the ordinary punters just wanted regular, boring missionary-style sex that was over in minutes, but some of the girls had gruesome stories to tell about the less orthodox tastes of some of their clients. I remember one girl having us in stitches as she described a particular client, an Indian shopkeeper who was generally a model of propriety. This dignified and well-dressed gentleman kept the nail on his little finger long, filed and polished and he took his pleasure by coming to the brothel and paying top dollar to insert his precious nail up the girl’s bum. Once he got it in, he would wiggle it around so that he could go home with a little collection of, well, poo, under his fingernail. One can only wonder what he did with it when he went home, but that was what he wanted to do, and, if he was prepared to pay for it, that was nobody’s business but his own. Excrement is a very popular fetish, I learned. Another punter’s only pleasure in life was being shit on, and I almost fell off my chair with laughter when the girl told me, in all earnestness, that she made sure he went home satisfied, by asking him to give her a day’s notice so that she could have a big curry the night before he was due to come, because she knew that she would be expected to come up with the goods and she wanted to be prepared. ‘I don’t want him to go home disappointed, Paul. He’s one of my best customers!’

Yes, excrement featured quite frequently in some of the girls’ more lurid tales. Well, it takes all sorts.

So much for the East End brothels. I thought that I had seen everything after a stint working in them. But then I got put on security detail in the West End, and realised that I hadn’t had a clue about what real perversion entails! If you want to learn about perversion, you have got to spend some time with the upper classes because – take it from me – they are the experts.

In the West End, the brothel clients were mainly Members of Parliament, minor members of the royal family, aristocrats, senior civil servants and business men. They were all very well-heeled and they came with thick wallets, credit cards and serious psycho logical issues that expressed themselves in the form of unorthodox sexual preferences. You see, the fees in this much more upper-crust establishment were very high, and the business only catered to the top end of the market. The girls, however, were not notably different from their East End colleagues – they just had fewer tattoos, more confidence and middle-class accents. A greater number of them had Oxbridge degrees, and very few of them had drug or other substance problems.

The punters, however, were a great deal more interesting than in the East End and the need for security was even more stringent. Various factors were at play. On the one hand, because these girls were so expensive – we are talking about between five hundred and a thousand pounds a go, quite a few years ago – there was the risk that some punters would try to leave without paying for their hour or two of fun. On the other hand, some of the punters were so well known and so easily recognised that security had to be discreet as they certainly did not want to have their extra-marital exploits splashed all over the tabloids. Also, the level of perversion and extreme sex play that was requested was extraordinary and it seemed that the more blue the blood that ran in the customer’s veins, the weirder the tastes that needed to be catered to. When you saw a guy going in with a bowler hat and a copy of the
Financial Times
, you just knew that he was going to ask to be dressed in a nappy, or something equally undignified.

Because I was an outsider in this well-connected world, I was not privy to the unspoken rules of the community, and the situation made me feel a bit uneasy, because, when you don’t know the rules, it is easy to put a foot wrong by mistake. It was much simpler in the East End where, if someone started to cause a problem, I just beat them up, got the money they owed from them and threw them out to lick their wounds and slink away. I was familiar with life on the streets of the East End because that was the environment in which I had grown up, come of age and acquired all my work experience. There I could read the body language, interpret the nuances and know when and how to go in for the blow. There, I not only knew the unspoken rules, but I was an expert on them. Here I couldn’t do that, because the offender in question might well be minor royalty, or an important magistrate, or a visiting dignitary from overseas. While we had had to be reasonably discreet in the East End, here we had to hide from the customers completely and keep up the pretence that there was no security at all, even though security was at least as important here as in the grottier end of the market.

The security detail had a special room with cameras observing who went in and out of the lavishly appointed quarters – although not what happened in the bedrooms, of course – and a full sound system so that we could hear what was happening everywhere and make sure that only the people who got hurt actually
wanted
to be hurt and that the prostitutes didn’t have to do anything that they hadn’t agreed to. There were the guys who liked to tie girls up and play bondage games with them, pretending to dominate the prostitute or take her by force. There was always one who would go a bit too far with his game, and when the girl started to say, ‘No, no, no, I don’t want this any more,’ we would have to go in and put a stop to it before she got hurt.

All the girls’ rooms were fitted with panic buttons: on the bed, on the mattress where they could be activated by hitting the bed three times, and on all the furniture around the room so that, whatever the customer asked the girl to do, she was always able to reach a panic button whenever she felt that the situation was getting out of hand. There were also recognised code words that, when the girls uttered them, would have us out of our room and into the girl’s in a matter of moments. There were often times when someone was causing a problem but we couldn’t beat him up and throw him out because he was too important and it would be more than our job was worth. We would have to call him ‘sir’ as we gently but firmly escorted him to the door and helped him to pull up his trousers before sending him on his way. While the temptation was always to get a bit rough with them if they caused difficulties, we had to handle these idiots with kid gloves and treat them with respect regardless of how stupidly they had been behaving inside.