This will not be her story
Which aspects of our personal story are just there to protect us from ourselves?
In this series, I am considering the importance of story, this comes from my interest in narrative psychology and how we tell and create the story of our lives. We see this at work all around us and to have an awareness of it is a helpful tool in having greater understanding of ourselves and others.
This is a story about writing a story and interviewing someone for their story and now forms part of my story. The events are true. The novel referred to took its place in a dark drawer, making friends with several other novels I had written that have been assigned to those dark confines in my office and may, sadly, never be released.
At one point, I was writing a novel featuring a particularly unpleasant male character who decided that one of the ways that he would increase his income was through providing part of his property for sex workers. He had met some girls, through being a punter, a John, a purchaser of the service of sex workers and offered them a better premises. His home had several quite decent bedrooms that had been occupied by this children until his wife and children had left him and the country, returning to her family in Canada. As they had left with no notice to him and he had no way of contacting them, for the time being, he had the family home to himself.
The trouble was, I had watched and read stories of prostitution but I had never met anyone who worked in sex work and I wondered how women in such arrangements actually feel. I spoke to a friend about this who happened to know someone in the ‘industry’ and she managed to arrange for me to interview her on the phone.
She was a very pleasant woman to talk to - bright and chatty, we had a mutual friend, and we both had children. So, we talked about that to begin with. Then I asked her about her work. She spoke in glowing terms of how much financial freedom and independence it had afforded her; she owned her own four bedroom detached house, her children were all at private school, she had bought her Mum and Dad’s council house for them, she drove a shiny 4x4 - all the trappings of an aspirational middle class life, paid for independently by her.
We discussed the nature of her work – which she claimed to enjoy. She described how a transaction might go and convincingly made it sound like any other service industry. Relationships with her clients were good; much of their visit would be catching up and general chit chat before getting down to business. She made them feel special, wanted, needed, important and they had a really enjoyable time and paid her well. Her initial description of how a ‘job’ would normally work made it all sound as something akin to any other service industry.
She had formed long-term relationships with many of her clients - not exclusive - but regular and friendly. She was never short of work to pay all the bills and dress very well - always making sure she had fake tan, beautiful hair, glamorous nails, well-shaped brows and always smelling gorgeous. Sometimes, they would take her on holiday. They would often buy her treats and she would do very well for expensive gifts on Christmas and birthdays. Quite suitable for a material girl living in a material world.
During the conversation, at one point events took an alarming turn when she said that an ‘ex’ who had previously been a client had just turned up at her house and that he was always doing this. He was looking through her front windows as he could see her car was there but she was not answering the door - after a few minutes he went away. She was hiding from him, evidently stressed by his unwelcome call. It was the first hint of all not being quite as rosy as she had been describing. She had called it off with him as he had become controlling and abusive, often reverting to the power dynamic of punter/prostitute and treating her badly. She even had a positive spin on this apparent threat though - that she was the best and he would not be satisfied elsewhere.
All men, she told me, think about sex all the time - if they are at the hairdressers, they are thinking of ‘nailing her’, they check everyone they see out constantly and it is the issue that is highest on their minds at all times. This was her experience and at least she was able to make a really good living from it, it was so much more lucrative than any alternative work she could do. One punter seen in the morning after school drop off would mean earning a lot more than a whole day on a till in a supermarket - and then she still had until school pick up time to rake in the cash. Flexible, self-employed, easy, satisfying work.
Then, near what I thought was going to be the end of the conversation, I asked her if - on the whole - she felt she had made the right choice and that she was in the right work for her. She was adamant that it empowered her, providing financial freedom and fun and varied work. Then I asked, given her very positive attitude towards it all - would she recommend it to her daughter?
At this point, this story of a ‘happy hooker’ ended. No, absolutely no way, there was no chance on this earth that she would have her daughter doing work like this. She said she was shunned by the other parents at her children’s school (apart from a few of the dads who were clients - but they would join in the shunning in public). No one respects you. Everything thinks you’re a slag. You’re in constant danger - and then she told me of a massage parlour that she had been working in at which two of her colleagues were murdered in a hammer attack. A client of the brothel had gambling debts and came to the rob the place, brutally killing two women with multiple, sustained blows with a hammer. He later received a sentence of life imprisonment. She had not been on the rota at that time. It was this side of the story that came spilling out, angrily and forcefully when she was relating it to why her daughter could not, for one moment, consider this work.
So, she had two narratives; the happy hooker and the ‘my daughter is never doing this type of work….’ because it makes you a lonely social pariah living in constant danger. From just that one (lengthy) interview with just one woman, there were the two narratives laid out. When it was in relation to someone that she loved and wanted to protect - her daughter - it was a definite, complete no. When it came to herself, she could meet the aims that she saw as her duty in providing for her family and she did not need or deserve that same love and protection. The victims of the hammer murderer, of course, will never tell their story.
I found it really sad that she was holding on to this dual narrative in order to be able to cope with her work; if she genuinely believed all that she had spent quite some time convincing me with initially, surely she would have been able to say ‘go on, my daughter, go and make yourself a fortune having a flexible working life and lots of fun’. She had no such vision for her daughter. It was for University and a respected career with health and safety provision at work.
I had not wanted to ‘judge’ her in the conversation, I was very grateful that she agreed to talk to me and was glad - but disturbed - to hear her stories. I wondered how many of us are telling ourselves fairly unconvincing narratives in order to cope with the difficulties in our lives - especially those that would be difficult to change.