She always had the risotto and they always had the beef, and it always arrived in a puddle of its own blood, with a white pat of buttered mash like an empty speech bubble. After her second glass of wine, so cold it felt like water, Annie smiled and smoothed her dress and rose from the table. The bathroom was empty but for a ghostly shadow of perfume and beneath it, the warm dark smell of a swiftly evacuated meal. The lighting was spectacular. ‘Spec-tac-u-lar,’ Annie whispered, as she took a series of selfies in front of the full-length mirror, before pissing deeply in the largest stall. She savoured these moments alone, knowing that her absence at the table yawned, knowing she was being missed, and she took her time.
She reapplied her lipstick with a ring finger. Adam F was one of the men who liked to feel a little anxious in her company – occasionally she would let her gaze linger briefly on a figure just beyond his shoulder, and he would grasp at her hand and ask what she wanted for Christmas. ‘You’re so sweet,’ she’d reply, turning her whole weight to face him. They found her on the picture app, messaging mid-afternoon about her skirt, or eyes. Sometimes, when she asked a question in the photo caption, it felt like throwing dog food into a lake – up they would come, to feed on her youth.
Scrolling on her phone in the low light of the basement bathroom, she quickly browsed a group chat called Anya’s Dad’s Arms, and seeing they were approaching the hour of political discourse, contributed a meme which saw a small and beloved Hollywood actor saying, ‘So anyway, I started blasting’, adding a hashtag that implied strong distrust of the police. She waited for three thumbs-up reactions before swiping out of the page and browsing the picture app, violently deleting ads for egg freezing. Her finger hovered for a second before clicking on a link – here was a gallery of portraits taken in Victorian times, of babies. On second glance, it was clear each one was sitting on a woman’s knee. Except, the woman was shrouded in dark fabric, her face covered – she was female furniture, there only to keep the child still. In one photograph, a baby leaned back on a striped armchair, but an incorporeal hand emerged from the upholstery. In another, the mother’s face had been blacked out with paint. Annie chuckled briefly. The effect was both comic and uncanny, like a bad joke, and, on the long walk back to the table, it made her think briefly about care, surveillance, her parents’ old living room with the L-shaped sofa, security, ghosts.
When friends asked her about the sex, she was almost completely honest – they didn’t have sex, this wasn’t what it was about, it was about the transaction itself – the exchange of gifts and cash was what got the men off, is what she said. But of course they had sex – she just couldn’t be bothered to explain because she knew these friends would not understand the nuance. The sex she had with men like Adam F was incidental, a kind of handshake. When friends asked her about the sex they were asking a different question entirely – they were asking, did you give him some precious part of yourself, did you subjugate yourself to his rotten lusts, was he buying your innocence, etc? And that was the question she chose to answer, and the answer was always no. The sex, in fact, was just a full stop to the conversation, an ending. Though the men didn’t always know it, it was this conversation that they were paying for, this little play. The thing of value was the feeling of being attended to, the warmth of someone at their side, the image created for an audience of strangers walking by, that she was part of him, occasionally fascinated, avid, a witness. Their orgasm was like the mint at the end of a meal, a nice, but unmemorable touch. The question friends did not ask her, but which she could see anyway, shimmering behind their faces, was: why you? Why would anybody pay money to be with you? Annie knew she was not a classic beauty – she had always known her face did not bring immediate pleasure, that her features seemed to fall inwards, but she had also always known how to laugh through strangers’ apathy, and how to enjoy the wide beach of her body, and exactly when to dip her chin and look up, like a child.
When Annie returned to the table, Adam F exhaled as if he’d been holding his breath. ‘You came back!’ he said, and clasped her hands on his knee, and she caressed his dry face and the bill landed silently beside him. In the cab home at dawn she looked out at the dark wet road – the lanes gave way to streets, the greenery, blue in this light, disappeared as the city approached, and the roadkill shrunk in both size and emotional impact. Sometimes, on these journeys she reached for a little internal romance – she would gaze out at the view and attempt to be moved, or list the beauties of nature, the low pitch of the night, but no, it was always like this, it was always just rubbery houses and squat trees and suburban foxes staring.
She checked her messages. Two of her regulars were asking for dates, each question quickly followed up with a query, one about her shoe size, the other whether she spoke Spanish – he always hinted at the grandeur of his second home, but she was fairly sure it was a time-share. The third message was from someone whose profile picture was a sunset. Their page contained four photos of flowers and sea, the most recent one posted three years ago, the earlier two obscured by filters commonly used at the time to suggest it had been taken on an antique camera, to imbue its subject with nostalgia and a wistful poetry. The message was brief, and without the usual cloak of flatteries: ‘Do you accept female clients?’
Annie arrived early the following Tuesday to meet Bethan for lunch – it was a steak restaurant in the city, and all around her sat men in suits. Annie had chosen the location, and Bethan had PayPalled over the usual ‘taxi’ expenses. The men’s midday banter broke over her like waves; she loved the feeling, spotlit, as if she had drunk half a bottle of wine quickly. When Bethan entered, Annie sat up straighter with a sharp and unfamiliar sense that she had got something wrong. Annie was wearing her traditional lunch date attire – a red lip, a tight skirt, and silk blouse unbuttoned to occasionally show the faint trim of lace. The intended effect was that this was a person who had crept out of an important board meeting, possibly in the early 1980s, driven half crazy by lust – her clothes should appear to be dripping from her, throwing themselves from her shoulders. But upon seeing Bethan, who approached now with a nervous smile in jeans, FitFlops and a long cardigan, her confidence faltered. She discreetly did up her top button after reaching over to shake Bethan’s hand. At the lunch – the lunch passed quickly – they talked generously around and above the subject of their meeting, avoiding any mention of histories or men, but the fact of it, the fact that both knew Bethan was paying for Annie’s company, the fact of it sat heavy between them like a basket of uneaten bread. That was not unusual of course, for Annie, but whereas usually the unnaming of the relationship acted as a stiffly erotic secret between Annie and her date, this time there was an uncomfortable shape to the silence, and she felt questions rise regularly in her in small hiccups. Bethan was 58, she learned, divorced, worked in publishing, had travelled to Morocco purely to purchase rugs, had marched in recent political demonstrations with a colleague, quoted short lines of poetry and then apologised for it, cut up her entire steak before eating, did not believe one had to be a cat or dog person, smelled of pears. She asked Annie if that was her real name, and Annie admitted that it was not. There was a smiling pause where Bethan waited to see if Annie would offer more information, but instead, she leaned in and admired Bethan’s necklace, who explained she had bought it on a work trip during a heatwave due to fossil fuels and soon the bill came and Annie had not even had time to refresh her makeup. She excused herself.
In the bathroom she sat in a cubicle and, wincing, massaged her feet. She had walked from the station in new shoes, and one heel was bleeding. The heat seemed to spread up her leg into her body, a sort of pleasure that complemented the flatness of the date. When she opened the door, there was Bethan, washing her hands at the sink. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, looking at Annie’s foot, ‘Here.’ From a tote bag, she pulled a pack of plasters, and, kneeling down, pasted one upon the blister. Annie felt suddenly unmoored. With some difficulty then, Bethan heaved herself up, holding onto the counter, and zipped up her coat. ‘This has been good actually, thank you,’ she said. ‘Perhaps dinner at mine next week?’
