I often have a recurring dream of wild animals trying to attack me. Just as the onslaught is about to take place, I manage to wake up in a disturbed haze, disorientated but somehow relieved. It is always predatory zoo animals, the type you find on safari or behind Plexiglass. They change form every night, each in a wildly different environment. A crocodile floating down the Nile, a trapped lion at a circus, a bull in a crack den – they’re always ready to pounce.
I know these nightly visitations represent my clients. Apex predators at the top of their game – I’m a toy to be played with. In my nightmares there is no sexual connection, which makes the dreams slightly alarming. Sex and violence work well together – violence on its own is just boring.
As a working-class escort from the north of England who works in central London, I’ve come to view my wealthy clients like attractions in a zoo: precious exotic creatures to be admired, fed and cautiously petted. Fifty-something men who haunt The Ned’s Vault on weekday nights, take business lunches at The Connaught and sport £60,000 Rolexes (despite the slew of recent muggings).
They make a booking with me by text or WhatsApp, and glide into my apartment as if on golden ether. Peacock feathers burst from within their suits, standing in my hallway with an ease that has been instilled in them since forever.
They see me as an exotic creature too. I’ve got a thick regional accent that both embarrasses and delights them, and an overly friendly demeanour. Travelling north of Birmingham would give most of my clients a nosebleed, so my intrusion into their sphere is seen as a novelty. I fit the stereotype without being a caricature. Buxom but not fat, witty but not cruel, gentle without the condescension. I enjoy this roleplay – and they enjoy it too. The emotional labour doesn’t feel transactional, so the sex that follows comes with ease. Sex has no class (or so you would believe).
I started out at £150 per hour on a well-known escort directory competing against hundreds of other women. I didn’t have any professional photos as they were too expensive (£1,000 for ten edited pictures). It’s incredibly expensive working as a high-class escort – £1,000 a week for zone 1 rent, £300 for a single lingerie set, £400 a month for online adverts, £1,000 for Botox and fillers, £100 a month on nails – the list goes on.
When I first came to London, I had never been on a dinner date, or even to a fancy restaurant. Dinner dates are always four hours long, and, depending on the company, can fly by or feel like a prison sentence – two hours at dinner, two hours back at his or my hotel. Before I started this line of work, the most expensive meal I had ever eaten was at Nando’s. Suddenly, I found myself struggling not to fall over in fake designer heels in Berkeley Square on my way to meet a Magic Circle solicitor in Mayfair. I picked at Michelin-starred taster menus and averted eye contact with the sommeliers. Conversation was interrupted by awkward silence and my fidgeting hands, and I often didn’t understand what they were talking about. I felt like I was drowning, and would face these dates with dread – terrified of saying the wrong thing or being exposed as a fraud. The men would take pity on me and feign niceties, only to never book me again. Some would openly mock my accent. I was failing their tests, and I didn’t even know what the questions were.
So I had to change. I didn’t know what to change into, but my current form of plebeian had to be erased. I Googled ‘where do rich people go in London?’. I began reading Tatler and researched the FTSE 1oo. I studied French restaurant menus while gorging on a KFC in my tiny Paddington studio. Gone were my long acrylics and in their place were short nude nails á la Kate Middleton. No more mini skirts, wedge heels or lip filler. What did women wear to Annabel’s? What was a riesling? Why am I not supposed to like it south of the river and how did Lady Victoria Hervey end up so right-wing? These trivial questions became my obsession.
