Making Beds in Brothels Page 7

  We were supposed to rotate between the upstairs club and downstairs bar, and some of the working boys got comfortable preferring to sit at the bar and gossip and drink and you needed to prompt them to circulate, a busy bar with only a few boys circulating was hard work. And as the lads left to go to rooms upstairs you could theoretically end up with a group of working boys gossiping and a packed club with no lads available. Then the customers would start to leave, so we prompted each other all the time. The customers liked variety and they liked to be surrounded my gorgeous young things. “Are there are there any masculine dark-haired boys, around twenty?” someone would ask. “I know just the person” I would reply with a grin. Sticking my head in the dressing room Calling “Mitchell, (who had by now joined me) get your arse moving, fat bald bloke on table three, congratulations, your twenty tonight”.

  Getting hold of drugs was easy and, alongside the boozing, was taking its physical toll. I had lost weight and needed to get away for a while. After a few months I decided to try my hand at a new place that had opened in London and I had heard of on the grape vine. I now had more than enough money to afford to make this decision, but I didn’t cut my ties with the Let’s Go either. I would be back.

  Chapter 12

  La Casa operated out of one of many similar, prosperous looking four-story mid-Victorian townhouses on Levy Street, Earl’s Court, West London. The front door, beneath a classical porch, opens directly onto the York stone pavement via a short flight of stairs. The interior layout is basically the same in all the houses: a basement (formally the kitchen), three rooms on the ground floor, a staircase with ornate cast-iron balustrade leading to two floors of bedrooms above, although most are now subdivided into flats. It is a handsome, but unremarkable house.

  Unusually you don’t enter La Casa through the front door, but pass through a small wrought-iron gate, down a narrow flight of stairs and through the old servants’ entrance in the basement. In front of you is a blue door with a brass knocker cast in the shape of a Grecian youth, and an electric buzzer.

  You are now below the hustle and bustle of the street above and the noise is audibly dimmed. It also feels a few degrees warmer. The third thing you will notice is the strong floral smell of industrial air-freshener; its cloying, chemically-reproduced scents of jasmine, rose and hyacinth competing with, but not quite overpowering, another smell. I cannot quite place it, but it’s something redolent of the sour tang of a men’s locker room, fusty towels and old training shoes. Even below this smell, lurks something else, bitter-sweet and organic.

  The only window to the basement is heavily barred. As it is summer it’s wide open, although the dark blinds behind it are tightly shut. A sound of low chatter emanates: a conversation in which a man asks a question in the clipped English of the upper-class, then a giggled affirmative reply in a low, soft, Latin brogue. You cannot make out what is being said and when you press the buzzer the conversation ends abruptly. A moment later the door swing inwards.

  I am beckoned inside, “You must be the new boy who called yesterday… Did you find the place easily?”, Yes, I reply nervously. “Come, sit down here. I will be with you in a moment”, I sit on a hard, decorative hall chair and wait, anxious. I try to take in the dim surroundings, though I’m still blinded after the brightness of the street. There are two doors to my left and a staircase leading up to what must be the ground floor of the house; further back I can just make out a door with a glass panel, behind which the low rumble of conversation emanates. On the floor are expensive Turkish rugs in deep red with purple geometric patterns. Their colours swirl, my eyes unused to the dark. A monochrome print of Adonis and Ganymede, the hand of Ganymede reaching up to gently touch the face of Adonis, hangs in a heavy gilt frame on the wall.

  A second later my eyes adjust fully to the gloom, and the man who answered the door returns. He is a slim, attractive man in his mid-thirties, a fine face, beautiful eyes, who Introduces himself as the manager. “My name is Alberto”, he informs me. His accent an undefinably Latin, I would find later that he was born in Mexico, but had lived in London for most of his life, and his softly accented ‘Latin’ persona was, in fact, an affectation. His partner, who I never met, had fronted him the money to open the business.

  Asking my name, he echoes my response, “Adam… how charming!” He asks my age and if I could provide him with proof, which I do immediately. I am eighteen although I appear younger. Taking my passport and looking me over, he is suddenly business-like and asks me to remove my shirt, which I do. He then asks me to drop my trousers and turn around, appraises me closely and, seemingly pleased, he nods and smiles. “You will do very well here Adam, the customers love the English boys, and you will make lots of money.”

  What he really means is that I will make us both lots of money, as he will take fifty percent of the ninety pounds I earn per ‘massage’, the same as at the Let’s Go and Boy Boy Club. Forty-five pounds may not seem a huge amount he tells me, but any tips, which are often substantial, I keep.

  One hand placed gently at the base of my spine, Alberto guides me towards the first door on the left, “Let me show you La Casa… We haven’t been open long. Everything is new and very expensive…” After the narrow hall, the size of the drawing room comes as a surprise. Although ambiently lit, it seems dark, you can make out the Earl’s Court traffic through the blinded window. There are a couple of leather Chesterfield sofas and deep leather wing-backed chairs are well spaced apart around the room. The carpets are expensive, thick and beige. Bronze lamps, in a lotus flower design, throw light upwards onto prints of homo-erotic neo-classical subjects. An antique marble bust of Antonius, the lover of the Emperor Hadrian, stands guard in one corner.

  Beckoning me toward the stairs, he shows me what he calls “the luxuriously appointed bedrooms”. Three are upstairs, a fourth bedroom was behind the second door downstairs that I had passed next to the drawing room. This is the original ground floor of the house. Discordantly, considering where I am and what I will be employed here as, I hear people laughing in the street outside.

  The rooms are decorated in muted colours; pale greys, tan, parchment, all very understated and tasteful. They are bare other than a fourposter double bed covered in a tightly-fitted white sheet, a chair and an elegant mirror behind each bed. There is a marble tiled en-suite bathroom for each room.

  Guiding me into the largest bedroom, I am shown the special way that the sheets are folded on the bed. Never the neatest person, this was one of the few bones of contention that I encountered with Alberto. The double bed had to be changed after each ‘massage’, as it was euphemistically called, so Alberto gives me a quick lesson in brothel bed-making.

  You take a sheet from a cupboard in the hall, removing the old one which had covered the bed, with obviously no need for duvets or other bed linen as no one was, in reality, ever sleeping here. Removing the pillows, you threw the sheet over the bed, folding the sheet back towards you about three quarters of the way up, imagining the centre of the pillow. Placing the pillow over the folded sheet you folded the sheet back over the pillow ensuring a neat crease beneath the pillow and then tucking the sides tightly under the mattress. Theoretically, I would have ended up with a smooth white sheet covering the bed and neatly folded over a pillow, ready and waiting for the next ‘massage’. And it had to be remade precisely this way every time. Rarely did my efforts work out so successfully, and I was invariably called back to remake the bed.

  The next task is my introduction to the hot towel box. It looks innocent enough; a small metal box in the corner of the room on a low table, with a small door, looking for all intents and purposes like a Baby Belling oven. ‘FOR YOUR COMFORT AND HYGIENE’ is emblazoned on a laminated sign on top. Each box contains two face towels, refreshingly moist and kept at an ambient heat. The towels are to be changed after each use, for obvious reasons, as they are the first things customers reach for to mop up spilt bodily fluids.

  Some of the boys relished knowing
that the towel provided for the ‘comfort and hygiene’ of the client, who was now daintily wiping the sweat from his brow, draping it over his face and luxuriating in its delicious warmth, was still saturated with the sweat, bodily fluids and worse of the previous customer. They purposely didn’t replace them.

  I suspect not changing the hot towels was considered by some to be subversive, or an act of resistance; a token act of vengeance, giving customers a taste of their own medicine. For those forced into that life by circumstance and poverty, those without control over their lives, knowing that their customer had left with his faced drenched in the semen of a previous client was very satisfying, these little defiances made their life bearable.

  Returning downstairs from my tour and crash course in room maintenance, I find a very well dressed little old man ensconced on a couch. “Andrew,” trilled Alberto, “please, let me introduce Adam. Adam will be starting work here in the morning. He is most beautiful don’t you think… very young and fresh? He is from Man-ches-ter”. I remember the way he separated each syllable to pronounce the word correctly.

  He looks at me closely and, gently taking hold of my chin, he turns my face towards him as I look directly into his eyes with a smile that is, at the same time, both innocent and worldly. “What beautiful green eyes you have, my dear.” I can see he’s smitten.

  My most startling feature are my eyes. They are an extraordinary deep green, flecked with gold, and edged with an areola that appears the deepest vivid blue. The effect is opalescent, kaleidoscopic, quite disarming. Adding to their exoticism is their sharp Asiatic tilt and almond shape. They are, according to some, beautiful.

  “You inherited those eyes,” my mother tells me now from time to time, “from my father”. Sebastiano Lincoln Talbot was born on the banks of the Demerara, in Georgetown, the capital of British Guyana, in the early 1920s. My mother recalls a snatched moment of her father’s youth, how part of the city was taken up by an open-air zoo, monkeys screaming and playing freely in the lush rainforest that ran into the streets, parrots calling in the trees.

  I only remember him as a small, very dark-skinned, elderly man. His lineage followed the slave routes from Africa, and the ships and traders who dealt in spice and sugar. His mother was Amerindian, descended from the indigenous people who walked the forests long before the Europeans stole the land. I often wondered if it was their Asiatic eyes that peered back at me, I always looked more Eurasian than bi-racial or white, even with my fair colouring inherited from my father. It’s a curious coincidence that this woman, like my Great Granny Brock, made her living as healer, dealing in herbs of the jungle to those without the means of seeking conventional medicine. Another strange coincidence was that, like my sister, she too died suddenly from an embolism to the heart.

  My sister was named for my mother’s long dead grandmother, Deborah Constance. My sister felt sure that both those distant grandmothers were witches; separated by an ocean and decades, she felt some kinship with them.

  My grandfather was of the Windrush Generation, one of hundreds of thousands of people who immigrated from the poor British colonies in the West Indies in the 1950s, to find work in cold, austere, post-war Britain. He was an educated man, a skilled linguist, speaking several languages fluently. As a child he had been a promising student and won a prestigious scholarship. It all came to nothing. My grandfather was a drunk, a gambler. He gambled the money that should have provided food and clothing for his children, beating his English wife, my grandmother, and neglecting his children. He spent decades in various prisons around Britain for the manslaughter of a Scottish women he was involved with.

  I know nothing about that woman but my heart aches for the tragedy that must have meant so much more to whoever she was beloved of; was she a beloved mother, sister or daughter? And I am sorry. We suffered our own bitter losses, yet I am still burned by the grief of this Scottish woman who is no more, stolen too soon. I understand what was taken, the value of that life, and for whatever good it is, I am sorry.

  I cannot work immediately, Alberto has some indissoluble rules, one being that you cannot start on the day of your initial interview, or the day you return after an absence. Another is that if he catches you with drugs, or even a whiff of alcohol on your breath, you are immediately suspended. He makes this clear, telling me firmly that as long as I stick to these few rules we will get on fine. (He was a decent bloke, fair, kind and generous to me on more than one occasion.) Sending me home with instructions to return the next morning I am sent on my way. Ogling me as I leave, Andrew drawls, “Can’t I see him now?” “Tomorrow dear!” replies Alberto curtly, but with a twinkle in his eye. Andrew pulls a face, smiling at me as I leave. Wealthy Andrew is a favoured customer, and he allows Alberto to playfully bully him in a nanny-ish fashion.

  Chapter 13

  I head home to my hotel and take in my surroundings. I love Earl’s Court. I love the down-at-heel gentility of the place, the disreputable quality. Earl’s Court is situated in central London, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, it borders the fabulously wealthy district of Chelsea to the south and the museum district of South Kensington to the east, Brompton Road and West Kensington, to the west, leads into the much more socially mixed areas of Fulham, Hammersmith and Shepherds Bush. The area has been impacted by all these areas to a greater or lesser degree so that a mixture of blue-collar workers and working-class residents, tourists and the middle and upper classes all utilise the shops, bars and restaurants that follow the curve of Earl’s Court Road past Holland Park, onto Kensington High Street then Kensington proper.

  The Earl’s Court of my recollection smells of dust, the stink of the cars. Dust clings heavy to the buildings, trees, streets with the tenacity of lint, like static adhered to laundry. You live with the pollution as you walk, as you drink outside the pub, it rises through the plane trees, entering the window of your room left open due to the demand of the oppressive heat, covering everything in a greasy film.

  Opposite the tube station, is the maze of narrow streets that lead off Kenway Road. Here are small cheap Chinese restaurants and Pilipino supermarkets with the sweet cheesy stink of durian emanating from the baskets of fruit standing outside. In the streets around Kenway Road black guys hang about, selling crack, their chief customers being the prostitutes who also ply their trade here. They watch me shiftily as I pass. These desperate women bear comparison to the addicts of Chorlton Street. Unlike those men, they find a ready supply of customers for the cheap price they charge, just enough usually for their next fix.

  You continue, walking past the Co-op Supermarket, past the golden arches of McDonalds, past the little recess with its board behind glass, where illegal sub-letters, prostitutes, and hotels looking for cleaners, leave their advertisements. You now turn left again onto Trebor Road.

  The stucco of the Trebor Hotel, white from a distance, on closer inspection, is mottled and grey and streaked with black, a chemical decomposition, like an inexpertly reconstructed cadaver, painted, filled and plumped, left slightly too long unburied so that the corruption begins to show through. It draws me in, sensing my vulnerability, like a carrion-scented carnivorous flower draws in insects.

  The windows are grime blinded and dark; thick net-curtains, not as dirty as the glass whose intention it was to veil, hang limp. A massive rusted bay window, painted shut, rests on a ledge wide enough for a full-grown man to sit on.

  Someone, long ago, has placed a window box behind the rusted and pock-marked decorative cast-iron guard on the ledge, probably in the mistaken belief it would cheer the place up. It is filled with plastic flowers of genus and exuberance not found in nature. The countless seasons they have witnessed have bleached them to conformity: grey, yellow, puce, the colours of NHS waiting rooms and corridors, of nausea and ill health.

  The building rises three floors above, six in all if you include the basement and attic, three windows to each floor, each window split equally between a sub-divided room meaning that
while it looks like three rooms, there are in fact six on each floor overlooking the street, eighteen in all. The originals are crudely split in two by cheap stud partitions that cut directly through the ornate cornicing and ceiling roses. The walls are so thin you can clearly hear what is said in the rooms on either side; the snoring, and hushed conversations. The layout is repeated identically in the three conjoined town houses that make up the property. There are many more rooms at the rear and in the hotchpotch warren of attics; dozens of tiny, narrow, subdivided rooms with equally narrow hard beds.

  You enter the hotel via a flight of six steps running between Doric columns that support the porch. It is Monday, and the ‘Vacancies’ sign hangs lit up in the window. Only at the weekend during high tourist season is the Trebor ever at full capacity. As you enter the front door, which is always open during the day, you must first push open twin doors that open into a hallway. Directly ahead a staircase, with ornate thickly-painted cast-iron rails and mahogany banister, disappears into the upper regions.

  The first thing that hits you is the smell of disinfectant. Young female and invariably Eastern European cleaners assiduously mop the linoleum of the public areas each morning. The smell of bleach covers less savoury smells that originate in the kitchen below, from the ancient carpets, beds and from the guests themselves.

  Directly to the right, where a wall has been removed, you enter what would have once been the front parlour. This is the reception. For those not accustomed to British working-class front rooms of the Seventies and Eighties the decor will come as a shock. It is the anthesis of the late Nineties’ trend for minimalism, interior chic and sophistication reliant on the maxim that ‘less is more’.

  The psychedelia of red and yellow threadbare carpet competes for attention with a lurid velvet wall hanging of Richard Kiel, hung from faded and peeling red flock wallpaper. Rattan sofas, frayed and yellowing, dis-invite those inclined to sit, if you do, they creak alarmingly. A gold plastic digital clock blinks uncertainly above the long Formica reception desk, upon which florid vases of silk flowers under clear plastic domes, seemingly related to those outside, blind you with their nitrate greens, purples and reds.