I rested a foot on the opposite knee and picked at the caked mud on the sole of my trainer with a lolly-stick I’d found in the long grass.
‘Since my balls dropped, mate. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you?’ I flung back, to laughter from the others.
And was rewarded with the football hitting my head, knocking me sideways.
I rolled to the ground in mock collapse and stretched out, held my hands behind my neck, and watched the clouds shift high above me. The image of self-satisfaction. For a split second the fading sun and the sky were blotted out as Rob passed within inches and went and collected the ball. He looked down at me.
‘Have you seen Jenny again?’
‘Over a cup of tea.’
I didn’t feel the need to say anything more than that.
Paul looked at Rob and then at me and back again like we had some conspiracy going on.
‘Jenny? Who’s Jenny?’
‘Oh, Jenny’s an Older Woman. She answered our ad,’ smirked Rob. ‘I’ve met her,’ he crowed as if he wanted people to consider him as much the stud too. Like meeting a client for a cuppa was real hot sex-work.
Mark was far more interested in the girl and the gun.
‘Luke was called out at dawn yesterday morning. For sizzling suburban sex!’
There was a chorus of No? and Really? around me. I did a couple of sit-ups and then sat up to survey the lot of them.
‘Oh yes, my friends,’ I grinned.
‘You’ve actually had replies to the ad? I just thought it was a bit of a laugh,’ admitted Simon. He had the ball again and had stood up and was bouncing it up and down.
At least he was honest. I wasn’t quite sure how to take it. I shrugged my shoulders and looked up at him, my arm above my eyes to cut out the fading sun’s glare.
‘Well, y’know, we made a serious enough effort to get the women calling.’
‘I couldn’t do it…’ Simon stuttered. ‘Imagine if it came out that a local schoolteacher was on the game? I’d lose my job. I’d have to go back home with my tail between my legs.’
He pursed his lips as if he was thinking up some further excuse not to get involved, and resumed his bouncing. He didn’t realise that he didn’t need to. I understood.
‘No worries. That just means all the more clients for everyone else!’ I beamed, trying to make it easier for him to back out.
‘You know I can’t get involved,’ blurted out Mark. ‘Before I started going out with Natasha, yes. But not now.’
Mark had only been dating his new girlfriend for a few weeks but he was already getting serious about her. So he was into escort work by proxy, then. I let his words hang in the air. I saw no point in making an issue of it.
‘So, this suburban sex siren. What was she like?’ piped up Rob, who wanted to get back to the crux of the matter.
‘Oh, how you’d expect a suburban sex siren to be,’ I replied, with as enigmatic a smile as I could muster. ‘It was her twenty-ninth birthday the day before, but I was her own personal gift to herself. Waiting to be unwrapped.’
Rich sighed a high-pitched whistle and shook his head in disbelief. ‘Hang on,’ he countered. ‘If there are girls out there who are willing to pay for it, how come you’re having all the fun? What about passing on some of these gorgeous hordes to the rest of us?’
‘I met Jenny,’ reminded Rob. ‘Easy money,’ he crowed.
I drew my legs towards me and rested my chin on my knees. It was time to come clean.
‘That’s just it,’ I said. ‘Jenny and Clare have been the only callers.’
Rich whistled again. ‘When did we do the photos? A couple of months ago?’ He looked at me with genuine concern. ‘Fuck, Luke. How are you supposed to live? I hate to break it to you, but an average of a client a month is hardly great—there’s no way you can survive.’
For a few minutes nobody said anything. When Rich put it like that, the escort life had very little going for it.
‘Well, it’s early days yet,’ I rallied. ‘It’ll build up gradually. That’s how it works. It’s sure to. The girls’ll come flooding in. It just takes a while for things to get going. Y’know, like any business.’
I heard myself say the words and for a split second wondered if I was trying to convince myself as much as everyone else.
‘We didn’t expect it to be an overnight success, did we, Mark?’
I looked directly at him, willing him to back me up on this.
Mark replied with a sympathetic smile.
‘But don’t give up the day jobs, eh?’
‘The day jobs,’ echoed Paul. ‘I don’t know how you juggle it, Luke. How you’ll manage if—sorry, when—the work starts pouring in?’
‘I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ I murmured in response, trying to look on the bright side. I hadn’t yet worked that out myself.
‘I’ll stick with the temp work, if you don’t mind,’ continued Paul. ‘I want to have something decent to put on my CV when my work visa runs out. Something to show for my time here.’
The sun was going down and had got stuck behind a cloud. There was a definite chill in the air. I shivered. Each one of them had dropped out of our grand scheme. If they’d ever dropped in in the first place.
And then it hit me between the eyes. Out of the guys I was the only one who seemed to consider this business was in any way worth pursuing. Suppose none of them had been truly into it in the first place? Even Mark, who’d only just started dating Natasha, had been a bit too quick to change his mind.
Oh fuck. They were joking?
A cold shiver passed through me again. The mucking about for the photo shoot. It was all for the hell of it. And there was me presuming I was the reticent one hiding behind the phone so I could pass the buck on to someone else.
I swallowed back a breaker of nausea, and trusted that nobody could see through the evening gloom what I was only now working out. Even Rob, my one-time partner in crime who’d at least dipped his toes in the escort pool, would be leaving to continue his Europe walkabout in a couple of weeks.
‘I’ve got to go,’ said Simon. ‘I’ve got some marking to finish off. I’ll see whoever can make it here tomorrow?’
It was the signal for all of us to go our separate ways for the night. Simon picked up his ball. I pulled on my jacket and got up to leave with the others.
I didn’t sleep very well that night. What the guys had said in the park had been playing on my mind. I checked the time on my alarm clock: 6.05 a.m. I had just under an hour before anyone in the house got up. I sat on the side of my bed to collect my thoughts. My gaze fell on the adjacent hulk of Mark, still fast asleep. Looking as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Whereas I was facing the worry of figuring out how to make my new line of business work. Because there really were only two choices. I could throw in the towel right now with the lot of them. That would be the easy option. I’d work my way out of the crummy jobs into something that would at least have some currency when I went back to Australia. Or I could carry on the way I was heading. Alone.
Because, for all Rich’s genuine concern that I might be heading nowhere fast, I remained convinced that I could make a business out of escort work. After all, hadn’t Jenny and Clare proved to me that there was at least some