LITMIR.BIZ

       Beginnings

       Early August

      ‘We’ve been shafted, the bastards!’

      Mark spat the words out across the kitchen table. He’d just shown me his bank statement, and the evidence was there in bright red. I looked down into my mug of tea and nodded. I knew what he meant. But the truth was, we well and truly hadn’t been. That was the problem.

      ‘Meet loads of girls. You’ll be sent out on six dates a week, and make £90 an hour…’

      That was what the freesheet ad for the internet escort agency had promised us—and no doubt hundreds of other guys like Mark and me. Guys with too much male pride and not quite enough money to live on, who just assumed there would be women falling at our feet, and who were mugs enough to fork out £180 to register.

      But in the three weeks since the two of us had coughed up our money, not one girl had called for Mark’s services. Nor mine.

      I took a sip of my tea and looked across at Mark. It wasn’t even as if either of us was that bad-looking. Not that I’d ever admit I was good-looking. You got a clip for that in my family, for puffing yourself up. I’d been told that I looked a bit like the Spiderman actor, Tobey Maguire. Which was good enough for me. I was six foot tall with dark blond hair that bleached easily in the sun back home in Australia, while Mark’s hair was brown and he was slightly shorter than me. We worked out. Both of us had a reasonable Saturday-night success rate.

      Mark shook his head. ‘This is London, for God’s sake. Where are all the girls?’ He took a digestive from the packet upended on the table and bit into it. He had a right to ask. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t seen enough of them falling over each other on any of our weekends out on the piss.

      ‘Not choosing to call out for a guy, presumably. That’s what blokes do.’

      I could see the callbox windows in my mind’s eye, completely covered from floor to ceiling with brightly coloured ‘whorecards’. Blocking out the muted sunlight. That’d been my introduction to England nine weeks ago, dialling my mum to let her know I’d got here in one piece.

      ‘We can get a number for a girl from any phone box. But they can’t…’ I was working out the problem with our plan as I was saying it.

      ‘But that’s what the internet’s for!’ Mark spluttered, spraying crumbs. He swept them off the table with his forearm.

      I ran a finger along the edge of the pine tabletop until it hit a dent in the wood. I drew my nail again and again through the groove and looked Mark in the eye.

      ‘Yeah, but they’re not looking because they’re not even aware that there’s a service for them. They take their chances on a Saturday night.’

      Mark nodded: ‘Or go without.’

      ‘Exactly. And even if they knew there were guys they could pay for via their PCs, that doesn’t mean they’d do anything about it.’

      I picked up my mug and took another gulp of tea, and thought of the callbox again and all the sex phoneline ads in the freesheets that I’d seen when I was trying to find somewhere to live. That’d been a grim time, sleeping on friends of friends’ grimy floors while all the while I could sense they didn’t really want me there. Sharing a room with Mark in this house for the past month had been a damn sight better than that, even with the beer cans clustered on the floor round the bin from when we hadn’t thrown straight. He’d been looking for someone to make up the rent and I’d seen his ad on Gumtree. It’d helped that the two of us had hit it off as soon as we’d met over a drink. Same small-town Aussie background, I suppose.

      ‘I mean, have you ever phoned for a hooker?’ I raised my eyebrows at him as I said it.

      He shook his head. ‘Course not. As if I need to…’ he crowed.

      I put my mug down. ‘Well then.’

      And that’s when it hit me. What had we been thinking?

      There was not even a market for sex with straight guys. Or not one that involved money changing hands. On the girl’s part anyhow.

      ‘They’ve well and truly buggered us, haven’t they?’ I sighed.

      A grin crept up Mark’s face. ‘Thankfully not. And that’s something to be damn grateful for.’

      We both laughed, but it couldn’t disguise the fact that each of us was seriously out of pocket. We’d taken a gamble on making easy money and lost.

      ‘Well, at least we can’t be the only ones who’ve fallen for this scam,’ said Mark. ‘Think about it. There must be hordes of guys across London,’ he continued, flinging his arm out as if to embrace the whole city and not just our poxy kitchen in a crappy area of West London, ‘just like us, weeping into their tea at what might have been!’

      I sighed. Surely it was the ultimate part-time job. Screwing girls for cash. We could have waved goodbye to the crummy minimum-wage waiting and bar jobs and selling stuffed pittas while hung over from a stall at Camden Market for friends of friends who always paid shit money. God, London certainly hadn’t turned out to be all it was cracked up to be.

      I looked down at my half-full mug and felt the cogs whirring even as he was saying it.

      ‘Well then, that’s how we make our money back, isn’t it?’ I suggested.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Look, there’s clearly enough money out there to make it worthwhile setting up an agency that gets guys to pay to sign on.’

      Mark’s face momentarily fell. ‘What, and rip people off just the way we were? Come on.’

      Miserably, I nodded. ‘I agree it’s not exactly ethical.’ I thought for a moment. ‘But then it’s not exactly not. What if we were to set up an agency, y’know, advertise our services to women, and ask guys to sign on? The blokes cough up, and of course we’ll give them work if there’s enough going, but we’ll always have first call. What is wrong with that? We can’t lose.’

      Mark cocked his head to one side and shook it. But he was also smiling. ‘God, Luke. A couple of months in this country and you’ve turned into a London spiv!’

      I smirked back. He raised his mug to mine and we chinked.

      My mind was already in overdrive. We’d advertise in the London freesheets. We could do it cheaply, surely. Advertise for clients, and put something on the internet to draw in the men as well. And photos. Me, Mark and the lads, to give the girls something to choose from.

      ‘Face it, Mark. We’re broke. We might as well make a go of it. We’ve got nothing more to lose.’

      I suppose I expected it to happen overnight. But of course it didn’t. And when it didn’t, it meant it didn’t seem real. It was just mates mucking about. Even after I’d spent fifty quid I couldn’t really afford on a box ad in a London magazine; even after we’d put a whole lot of our pictures up on the net. Seven of us had spent an afternoon taking photos of each other, all of us with a big grin on our faces in front of the drawn curtains in our lounge room so it looked like we’d hired a studio or something. So we were able to still kid ourselves that we were only having a laugh.

      But we weren’t, were we?

      Or, as it turned out, I wasn’t.

      The phone rang. Mark and I were lounging on the sofa with our cans of Stella and having our last-night debrief. We looked

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