BY JAMES BEMBRIDGE

On my third listen to the recording, I accepted there was nothing to hear. Words, words, torrents of words and none worthwhile. How did it happen? How could the most boring interview of my life have been with a prostitute?

For months, I had skirted the borders of iniquity in search of a story so ugly as to be unprintable. A revolt against the humdrum of modern periodicals: ‘The Nature of Conservativism’, ‘Predictions for the Next Budget’, ‘In Defence of X’ – Christ, who reads these dribbles of piddling piss?

No, the low life is where the poetry lies. Why write a portrait of a politician when you can write one of a prostitute? I wanted to document them in print as Toulouse-Lautrec had in paint. Romanticise their revolting splendour and sonnetise their sin. All these ideas were bouncing around my mind like a drunken squirrel when I met him. Gabriel, he said his name was Gabriel.

We had arranged to meet in the Friendly Society, Soho. A place of dark rooms and tortuous passages too perfumed to be clean. When I finally found my way to the bar, I was surprised to see it empty, save for the barman and a couple whom I took to be media types. A man and woman snapping selfies with grins so contrived as to look like grimaces. ‘Omg! You look gorgeousss. Possst it on Insssta!’ the man simpered. He was a small, whey-faced creature who conformed to every stereotype one might hold of a person in ‘the arts’: a black turtleneck sweater, thick-framed ‘quirky’ glasses and a horrible lisp of a voice. A composite of homosexuality to which the piercing of his right ear seemed a superfluous addition.

‘I couldn’t possssibly drink another thing!’ Don’t, then. Mince off into the night and leave me to my work. The hard work of hard liquor. I studied him with bemused contempt. He was one of those gays constantly in search of women’s approval, like a mangy rescue mutt. ‘Yaas queen!’. The phrase entered my head for no reason whatsoever.

The woman was no less ghastly than he. She seemed to be bubbling over with excitement at the prospect of being seen in a gay bar, fighting bigotry one overpriced cocktail at a time.

When I went to the bar, I found the barman busy making himself look it, fiddling with instruments that didn’t need to be fiddled. So, I decided to give him some work –  four glasses full. ‘Johnnie Walker Black, please. Oh, they aren’t all for me. I’m meeting someone here.’

‘Very good, sir. You’re at home here,’ his face seemed to say. But the surroundings said otherwise. Disco balls, vinyl sofas (vinyl because it is easier to clean, I imagine) and a bevy of undressed Barbie dolls made up the horror of the scene.

‘Someone nice I hope. The person you’re meeting, I mean.’

‘Oh, no. It’s nothing like th…’ I then saw the bill and wished it had been like that, for the price couldn’t have been much less than Gabriel’s fee. Just as I was downing one of the glasses to salve my shock at the price, I saw him, and was shocked enough again to down another. Strange how disarming beauty can be. It is, as Plato said, the ‘natural superiority’.

‘Gabriel, nice to meet you. Please sit down. It will be no hatchet job, you have my word on that.’ My word. The smile that played on his face looked stupid enough to suggest he took it.

The red light of the recorder signified ‘go’, but I was still paralysed by his features; features that belonged to those of a Pre-Raphaelite painting: porcelain skin with faintly blushed cheeks and lips far too full for a man’s, from which words escaped in an exotic accent my ignorance couldn’t place. A face completely unmarked by life’s miseries. But there were miseries hidden beneath it, great terrible ones, I was sure. Like a wedding cake infested with maggots. 

‘You’re not trying the whisky?’

‘Oh, no, thank you. I don’t drink.’

Christ, it has come to something when even the male trollops are teetotal. My plan had been to souse him in alcohol, gain his trust and then betray it without remorse. The story is what mattered; the subjects were mere casualties.

‘So, how did you get into escorting?

‘I set up a profile on the – ’

‘No, I mean, were you trying to escape something? Did you have a troubled childhood? Some monstrous father who beat you like an Arab mule perhaps?’ – I’m not quite sure where that image came from nor why it came out with such lecherous excitement, but it didn’t bother him. He had heard far worse, I’m sure. Or at least I was sure I wanted to hear he had.

‘No, I love my family.’

‘OK, but what about drugs? Tell me about drugs. All escorts take them, don’t they?

‘I… don’t take drugs. You?’

‘No, I take a very dim view of them. Occasionally, people try to tempt me with the white powder – an offer which is always to be sniffed at.’ Gabriel refused to be impressed by this clumsy attempt at a witticism.

I then noticed a silver cross on his chest, gifted to him by some foul-breathed vicar, no doubt. If its purpose was to ward off predatory hacks, then it had served it. All my appeals to scandal went refuted, and all the ‘so what you’re saying is?’ questions I crammed down his throat went unswallowed – trust me to find the only callboy in town with a functioning gag reflex.

‘So, you have faith?’

‘Yes, I go to church every Sunday. Do you believe in God?’

‘On good days, yes, on bad days, I believe in the other chap. I’ll leave you to guess as to what kind of day I’m having now.’

His face then took on a worried cast.

‘I’m sorry, have I done something wrong?’

‘No, Gabriel,’ I sighed while another glass of Johnnie Walker fired my throat. ‘You’re just the wrong person.’

I returned home to a word document that looked like a blank sheet of snow with no material to make tracks on it. The following days were spent with friends ruminating on the whole futility of the affair. Examining it in all its readings. I couldn’t accept that the interview had been for no purpose whatsoever. ‘Move on, find another subject’, they said. Only, I couldn’t move on, not least from the subject.

What did I want? Sin, whole sinuous streams of the stuff: blood, semen, lubricants – a divine cascade of wickedness; the lowlife in all its unprintable poetry. What did I get? A callboy who behaved like a choir one.

Gabriel, he said his name was Gabriel.

Perhaps it wasn’t a pseudonym after all.

James Bembridge is Deputy Editor of Country Squire Magazine.