A short story about Annie, who’s taken on a different type of client.
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?’
Annie thought carefully about her outfit before their next meeting. That afternoon she had met Thomas M briefly in a coffee shop near his office as he wanted to give her a birthday present – she had on average six birthdays a year, and a spreadsheet on her phone to manage them. For their meeting, she wore a summer dress, no bra, bare legs and a strappy sandal. She thanked him for the crossbody bag in classic calfskin he’d chosen from her wishlist by letting him put his hand inside her while they said goodbye in his car. On the way to Bethan’s flat, which sat on a green square in an area inhabited by academics and filmmakers famous for radical explosions, she changed into trainers, put on a light cardigan, and pulled her hair back into a loose bun.
Bethan presented her with a drink as she entered, and asked about her day. Annie said she had come from a picnic, and offered an opinion about a novel Bethan had recommended – she saw Bethan’s face glow in the lamplight. She took a seat in the kitchen where Bethan chopped tomatoes for a salad. There were pictures propped against the wall, and a dresser heaved with plates daubed thickly with paint, and tulips drooped drunkenly from a jug. Stepping into this home reminded her of the story where the man was swallowed by a whale – the candles burned low and pink, surfaces were upholstered in a tongue-like satin. They ate chicken and Annie offered multiple opportunities for Bethan to compliment her, though she never did. After the chocolate tart, she suggested Bethan show her the bedroom, and Bethan instead showed her where to scrape her leftovers into a small green bin. Annie walked over and, perching lightly on Bethan’s knee, brushed the grey hair from her shoulder and kissed her. ‘No thank you, Annie,’ she said, turning away while patting her briskly on the arm, and Annie recoiled slightly, before standing to release her.
Annie waited almost a week for Bethan to respond to her traditional thank you text, and in that time she watched with interest as a rash spread across her stomach. At night she woke to find she’d been clawing at it with her nails – in the mornings it felt like an unglazed pot, and the scratches looked as though they were from the inside, beneath the skin. The chemist was in a shopping centre. Annie didn’t walk, she hadn’t in years, instead she marched like a 90s supermodel, eyes blank and fixed on the horizon – after paying, she applied the cream there on the shopping centre’s concourse. Now relieved, temporarily, of her horrors, the place seemed more inviting. She idled through the shops, occasionally touching a sweater or orchid’s petal, buying a bottle of perfume and sending a picture of it to Andrew, who transferred cash and a series of love hearts. Near the exit a small crowd queued beside a temporary booth, and she glided past it, her skin prickling with lotion. It was a Mother’s Day promotion – women brought their family photos to the small team standing at the counter, who would Photoshop the mothers back into the scenes. These women were absent from the shots; they had been taking the photos. The eyes of the families (which were projected upon the back wall of the booth as the team cheerfully worked) were not smiling at the lens, Annie realised itchily, but instead at a mother crouched behind the phone. Which is when Bethan replied, with taxi fare, and an invitation for tea.
She had made a cake, said Bethan as Annie took her shoes off, but it looked like shit. Those ones always taste the best, said Annie, and Bethan agreed dramatically. When they ate – in the living room this time, where a scented candle roared like a fig tree – Annie stood behind Bethan and began to massage her shoulders. She leaned in, letting her hair touch Bethan’s neck, breathing with intent. Bethan, chuckling, brushed her off, and instead of undressing or kissing on the carpet or doing anything normal the two instead sat on the sofa and talked about global warming, whether cats should live indoors, and how Annie was saving for a bike. When she entered with another pot of tea, Bethan handed Annie an envelope of cash, saying this would go some way towards a Brompton, and would she like to stay the night?
The spare room was made up, and a pair of flannel pyjamas were folded upon the pillow. Annie started to speak, but Bethan cleared her throat. ‘I have a good life,’ she said, quietly from the doorway, ‘But I never had children. And it’s only recently that this has caused me any kind of despair.’ Annie sat on the bed, and by ten they had sketched out a deal. In the morning, Bethan made eggs.
The two soon fell into a loose routine. Typically they went shopping on Saturday. In early trips Annie led them to a handful of her preferred boutiques, but two months in they spent a morning picking up a different urea creams and fetched groceries from Tesco. After helping Bethan unpack them, Annie went to meet Giles L. She returned with a hangover on Sunday afternoon, and, while watching Strictly on catch-up, she put her feet on Bethan’s lap and aired out her rash, which was now far less fierce, a sort of sunburn. She got the bus home around nine, with a Tupperware of lasagne and a big thing of yoghurt. One afternoon, she spent a long time explaining the trend for affectionately shortening serious phrases so they become accessible and adorable, before exasperatedly storming upstairs, complaining that there were truly two different internets. Another day she accompanied Bethan on something called a ‘work picnic’, where they sat on a tartan rug in the park and she was treated gently and with some curiosity by extended colleagues, who approached with Victoria sponges and thoughts about the war. Bethan, who had been nervous in the morning, by the evening was pink with prosecco and amusement, and that night helped Annie set up an ISA.
It was Bethan she called when her friend announced an unexpected pregnancy, and she realised she was meant to act happy. And it was Bethan she called, too, when Thomas M left her stranded in a rural carpark, after suddenly and frighteningly becoming furious when Annie laughed at his phone case. It was funny though, she told Bethan as they drove home – she tried to explain it, but the moment had passed, and as she continued to try she heard her voice reach a pitch of panic. Inside the flat, Annie soon fell asleep, and Bethan put a blanket over her in the dark. In the morning Annie made a poor omelette, and changed the water in the vases, and, leaving to meet friends in the pub, agreed to be back for dinner. By the time she and her friends were on the second bottle, the phone case story had become funny again, and not just funny, inspiring and hilarious, revealing as yet unarticulated realities about age and masculinity. They got crisps, then chips for the table, and, to stop the married ones going home, Annie surprised them with shots on the way back from the loo, and then more chips. At nine she checked her phone to find a series of missed calls from Bethan, but as she drafted a message her battery ran out. At 11, she arrived at Bethan’s house to find the big light on, and Bethan sitting on the stairs in a dressing gown. As Annie kicked off her shoes, laughing an apology, Bethan silently went to bed. In the morning there was fifty pounds and a note on the table which said there were some plums that had to be eaten, and that Bethan had gone to see friends ‘in Cambridge’.
The following Saturday, Annie’s taxi money didn’t arrive, and when she called Bethan there was no reply. A text buzzed shortly after – Bethan was busy this week, but if she needed cash, just let her know. Annie sat down and tried to identify a feeling. You were meant to be in touch with your body, she knew that. When someone prodded your heel you were meant to feel it maybe in your neck. The brain was a muscle, or was that just the heart – you could exercise it, and it would grow. You were meant to be able to understand why you were sweating, suddenly, or why your mouth was dry. Historically, Annie had not had a problem with this. The issue today, she thought, was not that she could not feel these feelings, but that she could not name them. These were feelings that had been wrapped in tissues and put through a hot wash; they were misshapen and grey, and had something to do with love. Again, the quick image of an L-shaped sofa appeared behind her eyelids, and then a broad man’s back. There had been clients who’d terminated their relationships before, of course there had. Aiden T had started an affair with his wife’s assistant. Simon C had missed out on a promotion. Simon L sent a brief text about her thighs. Michael R’s mother had called to say he’d died. Apart from one, which coincided with her landlord increasing the rent, these endings barely touched her. In the act of trying to articulate the feeling she was struggling with, she looked down on herself as if from the ceiling, sitting in the kitchen before a plate of toast, and of the scene she saw below her, felt disgust.
Adam F complimented her outfit when they met for lunch on Wednesday – he’d never seen her in a jumper before, he said, very ‘wholesome’. It was not their usual spot, and he panicked for a second when there was no beef on the menu, but when she put her hand on his hand, he settled for lamb. What had she been up to, he asked, and, distracted by the window, she told him she’d spent a lot of time in bed recently. He shifted in his seat, his voice low as he asked if she’d been thinking of him, but she was already telling him about her rash, and the book of feminist essays about rage she was struggling through, and the smell from the downstairs flat. He went to the bathroom, and she picked at her risotto.
They were sharing dessert when Annie finally saw her, leaving the office opposite to get a sandwich and nice coffee from the place with the fruit. Adam F was talking about accountability or possibly accounting, but she hushed him, and moved closer to the window. Who was Bethan with? This wasn’t any woman she recognised from the picnic. She was in her 30s, short hair, trainers, no socks, lipstick – they were both laughing, their mouths round and wet. As they turned the corner, Annie fell back in the chair, exhausted. In Adam F’s bedroom, as he grunted behind her, she composed text messages in her head and was home by five.
Annie kept invoicing Bethan for the untaken cabs, and Bethan kept paying. She liked to refresh her banking app, and see her name appear. It was while she was doing this one morning, in bed, that she rolled onto her side and felt a kind of rough agony in her breasts. ‘Lol prob pregnant’ said someone in Anya’s Dad’s Arms, and she sat up, suddenly dizzy. It was Adam F she messaged first, to cover the abortion, time off work and assorted fees (she watched the dots appear and disappear as he composed his goodbye message to her), and it was Bethan she messaged next, with a vague unplaceable delight.
In the waiting room she pulled off her black coat, and slung it over the chair opposite, along with her handbag. It looked, from there, as though there were arms caressing the bag, with its silk lining and gold buckle, and leather from a juvenile calf. She mimicked it, using her arms as arms, and her body as a bag. The procedure was more straightforward than she’d expected. She’d hoped to feel more. She took one pill in the doctor’s office, and took the second pack to insert into either her cheek or her vagina – she told the doctor, drily, she’d see how the mood took her. Bethan was waiting outside at three. They drove to her house in silence, and when they arrived Annie traipsed obediently up to bed. She woke three hours later to the sound of some atrocities unfolding on the radio downstairs, and drifted off again until morning. They drank tea in the garden, Annie in tracksuit trousers, a wide sanitary pad and two cardigans, and chattered lightly about plants in winter. After lunch Annie felt her phone buzz, the familiar massage against her thigh, of money arriving in her account. Bethan entered from the kitchen and announced she was going to see a friend at five, was Annie okay to get home by herself? My name’s Natalie, said Annie, and Bethan smiled politely, and said, great.
