That first time, with Moukie, was the worst, but after that it got easier. Actually he was a nice guy. I mean not at a deep level – at a deep level he’d break both your legs. But to meet and chat to. Big smile, friendly face. He called us ‘beautiful’ and ‘darling’, complimented us if we bought a new dress. Sometimes he seemed a bit camp. ‘The red really brings out your colouring.’
Moukie looked after us, sorted stuff out for us, made sure we were OK. He made sure we knew not to mess with him, too. One girl was chaotic, missing appointments with clients, maybe she was drinking or taking drugs. Moukie kept warning her. Then he took her son away, God knows what he did with him – rumour was he handed the boy to social services. Well, that was one of the better rumours; you don’t want to hear the other ones. Then Moukie sent her to one of the Arab clients – the ones we used to dread, the ones they normally reserve for the two-star girls. Those guys lock you in a room and do crazy shit to you.
Here’s what Titans is like, right? The website is all sexy photos, black silk and grand pianos boasting about what a classy service it is, foreign languages spoken and business degrees, but it operates out of a room above a taxi office called Speedy Cars in Seven Sisters. The guys who run Titans, they’re gangsters. Bit of drugs, bit of trafficking, dodgy as.
To begin with, Moukie gave me three diamonds. So I decided to up my game – I had to be perfect, perfectly manicured, healthy, beautifully dressed. I was sent to Paris – which sounds glamorous, but trust me, it wasn’t – to learn everything there was to know about positions; reverse cowgirl, the longest blow job, how to keep going and going, how to stay clean, how to look like you’re enjoying yourself. Because that’s what you’re there for: to do the things their wives won’t do.
Titans girls are told to take no liquids for twelve hours before a booking – you can lose a lot of weight that way, by drying out. I ate no solid foods for nine weeks to get into perfect shape, worked out twice a day. It’s incredibly hard to maintain. But the money these men are paying, they won’t put up with any wobbly bits. You have to have the body of a Victoria’s Secret model.
If you get a good rating – and in my prime I was up to five diamonds – you make more money. Ten thousand pounds for one night, forty thousand for a weekend. That was then. Prices have come down since the global downturn, and since more girls are choosing it as a career. If you’re smart, you invest in a pension and property; get them to buy you jewellery, like something from Tiffany – that’s an investment too. Best of all, you marry one of them. At the very least, you get out as soon as you’ve made enough to retire on. Titans clients are on the Forbes List: powerful, powerful men, and often they’re very fucked up. The girls are fucked up too, but they’re generally from very poor backgrounds, except for the university kids who are fucked up in a different way and trying to shock their fathers. But generally it’s the very rich screwing the very poor. Isn’t that how the world’s going? It’s separating, like oil from vinegar.
If you’re a Titans girl you have to read The Economist, know about world events, look like a girlfriend on his arm. These guys, these sad old rich men want to look like they’re going out with a model. That’s why Jon-Oliver was such a catch – good-looking, nice to fuck, generous with his money. If I married him, I could get out.
Titans provides ‘women of exceptional beauty, intelligence and sophistication’. You can’t be, like, ‘My name Svetlana. My fada work in factory.’ No, none of that, though that is what lots of their backgrounds are like. The girls are numb: they don’t care about their clients. They’ve got hardened by life. Let’s just say there’s a reason they’re doing what they’re doing. Like Jade.
To get to the root of all this, I have to go back to Jade. Jade changed me.
Jade was new, never done a Titans gig before. Moukie brought her to my flat, asked me to look after her, which is code for ‘tell her everything, about keeping clean, keeping going, all the tricks’. Jade was 15, but seemed younger. She was so beautiful – she had freckles across her nose, a gap between her front teeth, huge dark brown eyes. She was like a young Kate Moss. She was into loom bands, d’you know those? Little elastic bands they make bracelets out of. She kept making me glow-in-the-dark bracelets. She had a teddy. She danced around to that song, ‘Call Me Maybe’. We went shopping together for clothes for her, had manicures, pedicures. I did her hair, her fake tan. I looked at her and it broke my heart, knowing what they were going to do to her, so I kept trying to put her off. I thought, if I could just get her out of her first gig, she’d be all right. If she never went there, she might stand a chance.
We were getting ready at my flat. I told her I’d cover for her, say she was sick. I told her to stop before she got really damaged.
She said she had no choice. She’d been in care, some really rough council-run children’s home. This was her way out.
‘I never had nice things,’ she said. ‘I never been in the Carlton before.’
‘Doesn’t look so good when you’re on your back,’ I said. ‘Go and get some GCSEs.’
She said she couldn’t go back to the care home, didn’t say why but I could sense it was serious. She wanted to buy herself a home, she said. I could see what she really wanted to buy herself was a safe place in the world.
‘Isn’t that why you do it?’ she asked me.
‘I didn’t do it when I was 15,’ I said. ‘These guys – they don’t play nice. They can do what they like to you, even if you’re crying.’
‘I won’t cry,’ she said. ‘I’ll be smiling up at the ceiling, thinking about the money.’
She smiled at me. Fake bravado. That pretty face, so much in need of protection. She was bright and there was no one to protect her, not even me. I felt so much rage at that moment, I can’t even begin to tell you.
It wasn’t just Jade that caused a change in me. Two weeks earlier, I’d done a pregnancy test and it was positive. I was pretty sure it was Jon-Oliver’s, and I started having all these thoughts about marrying him, having a family, thinking about that baby and who it might be. Anyway, five days before the Carlton party, I bled. The baby was gone.