Making Beds in Brothels: A Memoir

One man’s fight for redemption after a lifetime of sexual exploitation.

Adam Brock

Copyright © 2019 by Adam Brock All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is dedicated to the children and men of the streets and the city, those who survived and those who didn’t make it. And to the memory eternal of my irreplaceable, much missed, beloved sister. I made you a promise and kept it.

I would like to thank the many people who have supported me in the writing of this book, including my family and friends who kept me sane during what has been at times, a gruelling journey. And those who prompted sometimes dimmed memories of place or person. I would like to specifically thank my friend Kate Williams who made it clear several years ago that my story had to be told regardless of my anxieties. Without her encouragement it’s unlikely I would have had the courage to begin. Names and addresses have been changed to protect the identities of those still living.

Please look this book up on Facebook a Making Beds in Brothels or email me at: makingbedsinbrothels1@gmail.com with any queries.

Chapter 1

We had rented a country cottage on the Felbrigg estate in Norfolk; it was idyllic. The cottage was low, secluded, the walls thick and durable. We were in a clearing in the woods, where lawns ran from the cottage up to the trees, and by the gate a path led, through ancient woods, to a small lake. Further up through the pasture stood the exquisite Jacobean hall, isolated and grey against the sky, its windows glittering jewel-like in the sun. Just yesterday I had been wandering the state rooms, wondering at the beauty and craftmanship, at humanity’s master over its environment. The gardens were overflowing with beautiful plants. It was the height of flaming June and the world looked marvellous.

This holiday was something of a celebration. I had just finished my BA and in a couple of weeks I would be graduating from university with first class honours and the university award for academic excellence. It had been a tough three years. I had struggled through a foundation course and turned down an offer from York University to study History of Architecture, accepting instead a place a Lincoln’s Bishop Grosseteste University to study History and Theology. The city of Lincoln is tiny, not much bigger than the town I lived in as a child. I loved the winding streets, ancient buildings, the cathedral and churches. It was a quiet place, away from the temptations of the big city. My first year wasn’t amazing, but I applied myself and my grades rapidly improved.

That morning, as I returned from walking the dog in the grounds, I was on a high; birds were singing in the trees, and we had a full day planned ahead. I had just started cooking breakfast when my friend staggered into the kitchen, her face ashen, “Adam you need to sit down”.

I knew with crushing certainty, the moment she said those words, that Deborah was dead. She didn’t have to say another thing. I had been waiting for the first blood to be drawn and I knew instinctively it would be my sister’s.

The police told us Deborah had been found by a concerned neighbour who, seeing her kitchen door open all day, had contacted my sister’s close friend, Beth, who lived around the corner and had a key. Letting themselves in the front door, they instinctively knew something was terribly wrong. They found Deborah semi-clothed, slumped on the kitchen floor. Dialling the emergency services, Beth desperately tried to revive her. “I can’t wake her up!” she screamed down the phone to the emergency operator, “She’s so cold and I can’t wake her up!” After what felt like an eternity, the emergency services arrived, crowding into the tiny house. The paramedics and police took over.

Nothing could be done for Deborah; she had been dead for hours and everything that could be done had been. She, who had battled so hard, who was driven by her anger and her exquisite nuanced understanding of injustice, had fallen. My beautiful sister was dead, aged just forty-two.

The immediate conclusion was that she had committed suicide. They found a suicide note among her letters and saw that she had also, apparently, taken an overdose a week or two earlier. They contacted Marcus, Deborah’s ex-partner, in the middle of the night. Marcus, knowing we were staying a remote part of England, recommended that they not contact us till the morning. To this day I’m grateful we were not caught up in the trauma of her discovery. We were saved a frantic, and ultimately futile, rush to her home, then to the hospital, as well as the fear and confusion that would have generated.

It was a comfort to know that she hadn’t lain undiscovered long, and that the person who found her was a close friend. Even so, the impact was instant and devastating, but we were miles from home so I couldn’t give in to grief. On autopilot, I cleaned the cottage, packed the dishwasher, loaded the car and prepared water and food for the dog. I knew it was imperative to get this done before the shock wore off. It was a day’s drive back to Manchester, and we could not afford to lose time.

The long drive home was hell on earth, and I was glad to see the front door of the red brick terrace where I lived. We were a household in grief; the type of anguish experienced after a suicide being spectacularly more magnified than following a normal bereavement. We sat in the house, curtains drawn, rapid-cycling between anger that she could have done this, and shuddering elemental grief.

Yet things had to be done, and done quickly. This was the first death I had encountered where I was in charge of the arrangements. My mother was far too devastated, so it fell to me to organise everything. I hadn’t spoken to my father in over twenty years and tracking down a contact number wasn’t easy. He was living somewhere in a caravan in the wilds of England, forgotten.

Weeks passed without him crossing my mind, and when he did I pushed the thoughts away quickly. Yet he needed to know that Deborah was dead. I wanted him to know that he had finally killed one of us, that he had succeeded. I had it all planned in my head: his ears would burn with my anger as I poured my rage out on to him, my furious truth bringing home to him the misery he had caused. I wanted to scream, “You murdered Deborah! Murderer – you fucking monster. You killed her, you bastard – I hope you rot in hell!”

In the end, when he answered his phone, I couldn’t go through with it. “It’s Adam here… Deborah’s killed herself” was all I could say. “What?” he spluttered down the line in reply. “Deborah’s committed suicide,” I repeated. There was a long pause, before he spoke again. “Right. I’m coming over, where are you?” I paused, “That’s not a good idea… I don’t think you would be made welcome here. People are very upset”. His voice bristled, he didn’t appreciate being told what to do, “Okay. What about the funeral?” The phone was shaking in my hand as I told him it would be better if he stayed away, just went somewhere to pray for forgiveness. I hung up. I don’t know why I didn’t take that opportunity to stick the knife in. I suppose I hoped that the knowledge of how Deborah had died, and the part he had played in it, would be torment enough.

It was strange opening Deborah’s front door and entering her small two bedroomed house on Market Street, Hyde. Like me, Deborah had always guarded her privacy fiercely, but I knew she would have been unhappy with anyone else doing what had to be done.

As soon as I entered, I was filled with her presence; she was still here in a very tangible way. Her scarf lay on the table next to the door. Lifting it to my face, I found the fabric still heady with the perfume she wore. There were fresh flowers in a vase, fruit sat in a bowl on the kitchen table. It was as if she had simply stepped outside for a moment. The room swam, and as I sat down heavily, the grief came over me in waves.

In the days and weeks after her death, I would often glimpse Deborah standing very still, just beyond my peripheral vision, her arms resting down by her sides, her hair the blond, abundant curls of her youth, her face impassive, observing me silently but intently. I would see her and, startled, turn but she would be gone. I wondered in a distracted way if she was trying to communicate something to me. Once I saw her walking into a building and was so overtaken in my belief that this was really her that I went after her, only to realise, as I drew closer, it wasn’t her at all.

As I continued to clear out her home, bagging her beautiful clothing for charity, separating her evening shoes and boots, coats and scarfs, handbags, all into separate heavy black bin-bags. One of her friends told me, “Adam, those clothes are valuable, put them on eBay and put the money in trust for her son.” Considering our traumatised state, the sheer logistics of the idea horrified me, and after discussing it with my family I decided to share her belongings among the charity shops of Hyde. The money they generated for those in need would act as a legacy for my sister. After picking out items to be distributed as keepsakes among friends and family. 

Deborah was an organised hoarder; she threw away nothing. Her cupboards were filled with sealed plastic boxes, each one neatly labelled. Inside were folders with a lifetime’s correspondence: bills, letters from the local authority, cards from friends. She preserved everything. And among her letters I found neatly bound folders, each one filled with pages of my sister’s precise handwriting.

All the time I cleared, I came across more of her writing. There were hundreds of folders of her work, filled with thousands of poems; a lifetime poured onto to paper. As I looked through the bills, I came across loose poems, some half written – scribblings about her feelings and memories, unfinished and discarded letters. These were her legacy, and a task that started as simply a painful but necessary closing down of a life, became something much more important. It was the bringing together of my sister’s lifetime in words. I sensed she wanted our story to be told. She was speaking to me, telling me that words have value.

As I brought together her writing, pausing to read now and again, I realised that Deborah was a poet of great sensitivity and thought. She put everything she had, her heart, her fears, her soul, into her writing. She held nothing back about her son, our parents, the abuse she suffered at the hands of our father and her subsequent battle with mental illness. It seems [she wrote] an almost insanely normal rite of passage for every poet… and dreamer to find themselves confined between magnolia walls… Everything is recorded in her idiosyncratic prose, in neat handwriting throughout her many journals.

Although a student, I didn’t consider myself a writer, considering the writing I did to be work rather than artistic expression. Contact with my sister’s writing, and the impact of reading it, lit up something in me. It became clear that, not only did I have something to say, but it was imperative to say it. I committed myself to listening to that new voice: such damage had been done throughout our lives, terrible things had happened and been unrecorded, and now it became my duty to record them, to show other people that they could still rise through terrible adversity. I was going not only to find my voice but provide one for Deborah, and other people who remain unrecognised. What had happened to us pleaded to be spoken. Words have power.

I decided, during those first weeks after her death, that I would put the skills I had gained at university to positive use. As if to confirm my decision, Deborah’s autopsy results came back. In contravention of all the circumstantial evidence saying otherwise, my beautiful sister had not killed herself, she died of a thrombotic embolism, a blood clot to the heart, the same condition that had claimed the lives of other women in my family. Romantically, perhaps, I was left wondering if she had died of a broken heart.

The nature of our grief altered. Gone was the spinning mixture of fear, anger and sadness, the never ceasing onslaught of emotion. She had died a natural death, and nothing could have been done. We readjusted and started to grieve in a more or less normal way.

It was a relief to know that she hadn’t died the violent death, which death by your own hand always is, however people might try to tell you otherwise. It is an act of violence to the self and an act of violence towards those left behind. What death by suicide does to families is indescribably traumatic. I have never been through anything like it. I was at a meeting recently, discussing depression, when someone said flippantly, “Personally I think those who commit suicide are very brave – and it’s something families just need to deal with”. No one who experienced what I had could have said that. I was left with a clear understanding that suicide is never an option.

My sister died in the June. Well, fools rush in where hero’s dread, and I decided to take it on, What’s the worst that can happen? I thought. My life had always been a fight, I had nothing to lose and, anyway, I needed to occupy myself. I was sober now as well as clean, having quit drinking within weeks of my sister’s death. I would tell our story, mine and Deb’s, that’s what she was telling me to do: Adam, make what has happened to us worthwhile. Make the trauma into something constructive. Her writing, combined with my memories, would tell our story, it would be a collaborative effort. Perhaps something good might come from the pain we had endured? Perhaps we could provide hope for others.

Chapter 2

I have a photograph of myself and my three siblings, taken somewhere in the hills above Mobberley: four untidy, thin and anxious-looking children playing amongst flowering yellow gorse bushes, high rocks towering above us in the background. Summer sunshine, lemon sun-cream scents the air… there is no soothing breeze, just dry heat.

Deborah looks aged about ten, tall for her age and lean. She is all elbows and knees, like a foal, her white blond hair pulled loosely back in untidy bangs, unruly tendrils escaping, having had her abundant curls brushed out straight this morning with the usual screams of protest. Her expression is angry, rebellious. She has described herself as girl in a cage… Calamity Jane in jeans and pumps. My brothers are both curly haired like Deborah. William is the elder, with dark auburn hair and a mass of freckles, James is the same, white blond as Deborah, his face emotionless. I am the smallest and youngest, there is five years between me and Deborah, and the others were born one after the other in a row, with barely twelve months between Deborah and William, so there was always a twin-like connection between those two. My straight messy blond hair needs a brush, I am fascinated by something I have found in the dirt. None of us looks happy; all our faces bear tension and our bodies look clenched and drawn in with anxiety.

Deborah referred to Mobberley as that thin northern town… the valley between hills… grey stone upon grey stone. It’s a fitting description. Mobberley struggles along the bottom of a narrow valley, the town clawing unsuccessfully up the sides of the Pennines. The terrain halts the spread of development and the town remains low, dense and grey, calcified against the green hills. The area is dominated by mills and factories that churned out the yards of calico that kept the British Empire upholstered in the nineteenth century. The vast moribund weaving sheds, long silent, now provide playgrounds for local kids, somewhere for the homeless to sleep. The surviving industrial units produce chemicals, paints, adhesives and plastics. When I was a child, a dense fog of grey–yellow pollution hung over the valley like a pall, which together with busy roads from the south, that cut through the town heading towards Manchester, made the country air unwholesome. It was a tough, unattractive place, hard on the lungs. You tasted the toxins in air, which gave the atmosphere a soupy, viscous quality that caught in the nostrils.

Away from the town the air was better. One of my childhood pleasures was being alone in the woodland that ran up the hillsides. In spring, the scent of hawthorn trees filled the air and a mass of native bluebells carpeted the ground as far as the eye could see. Later, in summer, the woods were a patchwork of lady’s lace, golden rod and willow herb. I acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the flora and fauna of those ancient oak-filled woods during those long childhood days. I knew where the best trees for climbing grew, where the wild garlic could be found, where the sweetest cobnuts and fattest blackberries fruited. I would go out at dawn and return at dusk, having roamed the woods and hills for hours. I would walk up wooded lanes, past cottages and farmhouses, up Battle Hill to Stagrave Church and play on the flag gravestones in the surrounding churchyard. The forest ran down from the hills under Stagrave, high above us, ending just metres away from the front door of my home on Derby Way.

The Romans built a fort nearby, still visible beneath the bracken and gorse. Deborah wrote that she sensed the Romans marching on, beneath these rocks… a feeling that this was sacred ground… the strange feeling of being watched. I too sensed layers of the past, beneath the surface of these hills. Battle Hill was rumoured to have once been the site of a great fight between opposing forces of a warrior queen and king, where the slaughter of men was such that the hill ran red with their blood. Legend has it that, later, Battle Hill became a stronghold of the brigands; outlaws who plundered and murdered in the surrounding settlements and farmsteads.

In my mind, as I walked those woods, I fashioned a vast civilization; a place I called the Home. I peopled it with princesses, knights, and monsters. I would invent fantastic scenarios, amazing stories. The streets reflected the streets from my world; the rooms were mirror rooms, what I saw was reflected as I walked – refracted in my imagination. I moved within a world that was both real and imagined, sometimes slipping unknowingly between both.

This was my only place of escape, and I not only peopled it with complex characters, I gave each an individual persona with carefully thought out traits. And for years I was remarkably faithful to these inventions, providing them with homes, servants and spouses. Each character had a complex biography, and they were all interlinked and related in labyrinthine family trees.

They had children and grandchildren; whole dynasties that rose in my imagination. Sometimes their fortunes failed, their castles were invaded, palaces burned. Sometimes the evil people prevailed. And then, I would then choose a lowly unknown character as leader and, in my imagination, rebuild everything from scratch. This imagined world was sanctuary for years, my safe place, to which I withdrew for hours every day. I needed nowhere else. I would come home, as I called it, before I went to bed and I would sleep peacefully. For decades I could switch back into this world in a second, immediately removing myself from what was happening around me. It was an extremely good defence strategy against real events, but it was a long time before I understood the importance of that sanctuary, and of those who dwelt there.

Chapter 3

The reality of my life was drastically different to the world I imagined. The house I grew up in, on Derby Way, was on a council estate overlooking Battle Hill and Stagrave Church not far outside of Mobberley. It had been built in the nineteen-sixties to house families displaced during slum clearances of Manchester, the great industrial city twelve miles away where I had been born. It was a simple pebbled-dashed terrace, one of six, identical to hundreds of others. There were three bedrooms, two medium-sized rooms overlooking the rear garden, and a small one at the front over the kitchen. That was Deborah’s. Downstairs was a single living–dining area and a small kitchen overlooking the front garden and forest. The house was furnished sparsely, with odds and ends purchased from second-hand stores.

Appropriately, considering the violent past of the landscape, Derby Way was often the scene of violence. My father was a brutal man, sadistic in his rages. If you were unfortunate enough to catch his eye when he was in the wrong mood, God help you. He wouldn’t immediately react; he allowed his anger to simmer for hours before it boiled over into terrifying rage.

It’s 3am and the Beast has been pacing back and forth downstairs for hours. I call him ‘the Beast’ because when the mood takes him, that’s what he becomes. The Beast has a distinct personality from my father’s normal behaviour. He’s a separate entity. Something cruel possesses him, something hard and clawed, something that bristles and shakes. The Beast appears when father lets the façade slip. He clenches and unclenches his massive hands, pacing back and forth, back and forth, hands that are like leather from years of hard physical labour.

Something has upset him today. He is regurgitating, reliving and analysing whatever fault he has noted, and he is furious. The Beast rarely snaps, his furies are thought out, premeditated. He notes faults and puts them away to be dealt with, at his pleasure, and at length, later.

Upstairs, in the uncarpeted room I share with my two brothers, the light bulb that hangs unadorned from its cord, suddenly flashes on, a high wattage of white light illuminates the pitch black of the country night. I squeeze my eyes shut, pushing myself under the covers, futilely hoping that he will pass me over. He roars, “I bet you think you’re fucking clever!” A hand reaches under the covers grabbing me by a handful of hair and drags me out of the bed. I squeal instinctively. He resumes, “Fucking shut your mouth or this is going to get even worse for you – If you don’t shut your fucking mouth, I’m gonna knock your lights out!”

He pulls me towards the stairs, dragging me across the floorboards by my hair. As we reach the top he yells, “The rest of you, get up and get downstairs!” Dragging me downstairs with him, my body is thudding against the uncarpeted wooden stairs, my skin scratching, catching on the floorboards.

My father always rationalised that whatever he was doing would have some long-term positive impact on us, as if it was doing us some good, that this type of treatment was a requirement. We had done nothing to deserve it. I’m not sure we were capable of the type of wrong that warranted what was coming to us. Abuse isn’t a strong enough word for what we endured. He took pleasure in our suffering, because it satisfied some animalistic need, some dark urge to harm creatures more vulnerable than himself.

We would be kept awake as the Beast harangued us with questions, usually a combination of religious babble and riddles. Bizarrely, what he asked was often so subjective as be impossible to answer. “Tell me Adam,” he would ask reasonably, sitting legs crossed and looking at me intently, “Why is the sky blue?” We would have needed to read his mind to understand his meaning. So, he dictated what the correct response was, and if our answer was deemed wrong, that was an excuse for further beatings. We were forced to read the bible, endlessly, and he particularly identified with Job. God only knows why. If my father was tormented, it wasn’t without reason, (unlike poor blighted righteous Job, the unwitting victim of cosmic experimentation). We read the same passage again and again as he tried to make us exegete meaning from words that were way beyond our comprehension.

Interrogations went on for days, punctuated with beatings and punches. He would take us by our necks and throttle us till we were close to passing out. I still vividly recall sharp pinpricks of pressure, the light flashing blue and white behind my eyeballs as he tightened his hands around my throat.

One of his preferred torments is pushing his face hard into mine. He comes close, with a low hiss, “Take that look off your face, boy!”. He doesn’t like us looking distressed so I learn to keep my face carefully blank. Then, he grinds his strong white teeth into my face, pushing my head hard against them. Cutting, the blood first congeals under my skin; bursting, it runs down my face in streams.

Memorably, he once knocked my eldest brother unconscious with his fist. As he lay on the floor, a small unmoving bundle, that was the only briefest time, I saw a flicker of fear in the Beast’s eyes.

We were not allowed to sleep for nights or weekends during those lengthy sessions of violence, recalls Deborah. I remember those times going on for three or four nights and days with no food or drink, so that our mouths became dry and eventually the tears stopped flowing. When we inevitably nodded off, heads drooping and eyelids becoming heavy, we were slapped awake, all the time with a continual barrage of insane questions. He would keep us off school, and days would pass in a terrifying haze, in silence, hunched on the sofa; time and silence only punctuated with his incessant questions and our muted, frightened replies, and with the thuds and slaps, our whimpers, sharp sudden screams and sobs.

After interrogating us for so long, inevitably I trip up on occasion, become confused. Through the effects of hunger and lack of sleep, I become increasingly unsure of what he is asking me, I become less and less coherent, unable to provide him with anything but monosyllabic grunts. He asks the same questions again and again until my answers fail to correspond. This is the outcome he wants; he wants to feel justified that I am lying so he can move onto the next stage. He demands that I admit to being a liar and I comply immediately. There is no point in denying it, he will simply beat the desired response out of me. I just admitted anything he demanded and took the subsequent punishment.

“The truth will set you free Adam,” he says. And somewhere else, in another time, Deborah laughs bitterly, Only if it doesn’t kill you first!

The Beast reiterates, “If you tell the truth, you don’t need a good memory,” moving towards me.

That’s when he brings out the dog chain. He forces one of my siblings to dictate how many beatings I deserve. And they do it. If they don’t, he will turn on them. They have to choose a high enough number to satisfy my father. Suggesting a low number is very dangerous; it doesn’t pay to be seen showing pity, even though we don’t want to hurt each other.

It was terrifying, seeing him bring out that heavy metal chain with its worn-soft leather handle. I knew what was coming, and it makes me shudder now, remembering it. He wrapped the chain around his massive fist to give himself extra purchase, raising his arm as high as it would go. Then brought it down with full force. The pain felt hot–cold, searing, like the burning sensation of touching ice for too long. An intense sharp fire, radiating its heat through my hand, followed by aching numbness, slow throbbing like a heartbeat as the sensation briefly returned; then again… and again, eight or nine times, slashing the chain down hard on my hands. Even though I screamed out loud in agony, I didn’t move. If we pulled away, then his fury knew no bounds, so we learned to bear it. I would close my eyes to take myself somewhere else; anywhere but in this moment.

Variation of this behaviour had occurred on a regular basis since we were small children. It’s all we had ever known. Perversely, he always ended by asking us to shake his hand, and would say the same thing every time, “You’ll thank me for this one day.”

I lived in constant flux of confusion between how I should be feeling. I desperately wanted to love my father. I think it’s normal, to crave the affection of your parent, especially as there was no one else, mother having left and no family living close, but I lived in such fear of him at the same time. I could never understand the cruelty, nor the reason behind it. His behaviour overshadowed everything, to the point where our personalities became supressed, subordinated to his as a means of appeasement. Everything became focused on not triggering him. We didn’t learn the normal ways of regulating anger that children do. We didn’t throw tantrums or disobey in the normal way, everything was suppressed for fear of retribution.

And we were never happy, because we always knew that becoming relaxed, letting our guard down, even momentarily, might be registered and used against us in the most horrific manner. So, we suppressed our feelings, We learned to feel nothing. Any ‘feelings’ expressed were those that experience had taught us were permitted. The tension we were living under, day in day out for years, was terrible. Lord knows what impact this was having on our developing brains.

It was July 1986, and I was in the second year of primary school. The flame-haired Sarah Ferguson married the Duke of York, the Queen’s handsome second son. I remember entering a competition that my school had arranged as part of the celebrations, to design a wedding dress for the future duchess. I pasted bits of satin and lace, beads and glitter onto my drawing, and was very proud of the results. To my amazement, I was a runner up and won a prize. It was only a glossy programme for the event, but it was the first time I recall winning anything. Around this time, when I must have been around five, my father moved me out of the bedroom that I shared with my brothers, into his bedroom next door. I can’t remember how long I shared his bed.

I have no memory of what occurred in that room, although perhaps my ignorance is a blessing, or perhaps not recalling those nights is what prevents me going mad. Many of my later behaviours are consistent with a child who was sexually abused, and my father had a string of convictions of a sexual nature, stretching back to his childhood, which he continued to commit throughout his adult life, making him well known to police and the authorities. How he managed to win custody of us after my mother left is a mystery. I have no idea what they were thinking, allowing him to be alone with children.

Luckily for me, if you can call it luck, I could by this time retreat into my inner world, the one behind my eyes, as the real world and the Beast raged around me. I smelled summer flowers and the cut grass of the Home – it was always summer there. A girl waited for me at the gate and, taking my hand, led me to the castle keep. I was late and the Lady was expecting me. “I need to change…?” “No time,” she’d reply with a smile. “She will just have to receive you as you are.”

Chapter 4

Religion was my father’s obsession. Twice a week, Sunday and Thursday, we walked three or four miles to the service at the Kingdom Hall in town. Tuesday was held locally, in someone’s home, and a bible study session was fitted in at home during the week. The Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate Christmas, birthdays or any festivals at all. Our lives were, therefore, bleak without anything really to look forward to. There was a holiday to Dorset, and a couple of camping holidays when we were very young, otherwise our lives were unimaginably bare of anything joyful.

I hated the Kingdom Hall and sat there rigid, in the cheap plastic chairs, as one of the elders droned on and on for hours, poring over scripture that supported their eschatological beliefs that the world was soon going to end. You [too] can live on Paradise Earth! Wonderful concept. One problem: did this ‘paradise’ include you? Everyone else was ‘the World’; we were part of ‘the Truth’ and, therefore, among the saved.

What was worse was that I didn’t buy into any of it. I knew that my father, presenting his best face for the congregation, was quite a different person once he was home. Deborah wrote of my father:

It’s hard to express specific memories of the monster in human skin. He didn’t slither like a snake… he didn’t fly under moonlight, no… the monster in human skin looked good… radiating charm, warmth understanding. He blended in the right sort of crowd. He stood faceless, blameless, healthy and proud. Only God is good, [he would state], a real crowd pleaser. The monster in human skin simply fitted in. Oh, so handsome, blonde, bluest eyes… the monster in human skin was all ears, all smiles.

We had to play along with my father as the long-suffering, hardworking single parent, which was the persona he wanted people to see. We had to be careful what we said, make sure bruises were hidden, present correct answers to any questions directed at us. But it was all an act, a façade.

I grew up ambivalent towards God. I didn’t believe what I was being told. I can’t say I was atheist, that would imply more consideration than I gave it. God was simply an absence; I didn’t feel the presence of the Deity, of anything spiritual. And considering the important role of religion in our lives, that strikes me as peculiar. Thinking back, for all the religion in that house there was an absolute absence of God. I know this because I feel the presence of the divine with crystal clarity now, on occasion, the ineffable presence of God. I don’t recall much discussion of Jesus from my childhood, but my father disregarded compassion as a sign of weakness, and what is Christ if anything but compassion personified? At least, the impact of that absence of God meant that I didn’t blame what occurred on some great heavenly father who had overlooked us; not at that time anyway.

I was an early reader, and by four I could read with the skill of someone more than twice my age. My father taught me to read using his old worn King James Bible in its black leather binding, figuring, possibly correctly, that if I could manage to read and understand the complexities within that book, nothing else would seem difficult in comparison. He brandished that bible like a weapon. The book and the belt were his chief means of torment.

Father only learned to read in his twenties. Probably suffering from the dyslexia which many years later I found I had inherited. Dyslexia, with me, presented in the inability to write with a pen, my handwriting being illegible scrawl, which made school very difficult, but is something I overcome simply nowadays with a computer keyboard.

I became a voracious reader, picking up and reading anything I saw. I loved books more than anything, and spent hours happily reading. Unfortunately, for my father books were another opportunity for what he called ‘demonic influence’ and so he vetted everything I read, searching my bags and room regularly for forbidden reading material. My father’s interpretation of what constituted demonic literature was long and comprehensive. Obviously, thrillers or supernatural storylines were forbidden. Incidentally, and in severe contravention of the rules, one of my favourite authors was Alan Garner whose wonderfully imaginative supernatural fables were set in and around Manchester, in the landscape I actually inhabited. Father’s fear that Enid Blyton, whose Famous Five books I adored, was a vector of Satan seemed less logical. The only ‘safe’ books were about nature or were factual, but thankfully I enjoyed reading them too.

I suspect father’s fear of demonic influence stemmed from his childhood experiences with his paternal grandmother, Granny Brock. Granddad and Granny Brock lived in a large semi-detached Victorian house on Edge Lane, among the collieries and factories of North-East Manchester. Three generations of my family had worked down those pits and, had my father been born ten years earlier, it would have been four. The entire area was coated in black coal dust, the houses, churches, the few straggling trees and the ground itself were black.

They owned their home. Home ownership was quite unusual in that area in the early twentieth century and it wasn’t Grandad Brock who paid the mortgage; he was a low-waged coalminer by trade, from a family so poor that his parents rested in the nearby cemetery in an unmarked grave. It was his wife, Granny Brock, who was the major breadwinner. She led a spiritualist church nearby and was a renowned medium and faith healer. People came from far and wide to consult her, to have her lay her hands on them. She would sit in her crowded darkened front parlour: “Focus please, the veil is thin and the presence of the dead will soon provide answers for the living…” “Praise the Lord!” muttered the assembled séance, in response.

My father, had spent months living with his grandparents, while his mother died slowly at home of the then untreatable leukaemia. He would recall with distaste his mother’s shit being carried out of the sick room “by the bucket load”. He was furious with his mother for what he considered her betrayal by dying. I don’t think he ever forgave her; he never spoke of her with love. He claimed that during the time he spent at his grandparents, he was aware of the dead that his grandmother invoked and that they tormented him in the dark. They never ceased in their torment, (they still did now) and he was vigilant against ways they could access him.

I got around father’s censorship simply by reading whatever I wanted in the library. For some reason, it never crossed his mind that I wouldn’t be following his carefully set rules when he was out of sight. I spent most of my spare time among the books of Mobberley’s large Victorian Public library. My Saturday afternoons, and many evenings after school, were spent in its old oak seats at the large reading tables. It is a love affair that has persisted. I’m still never happier than when I’m surrounded by books.

Our house, other than one small gas fire, went unheated even during the harshest Pennine winters. And anyone who knows winters in the hills of North-West England will understand just how cold it gets. I often only had the clothing I stood up in. A school photograph survives, of me aged around eleven. In it, my hair is cut badly in the much-ridiculed basin bowl hairstyle, my white shirt is grey with dirt, an old black T-shirt pokes out and over it is a frayed black sweatshirt. These were the only clothes I owned. As for toys, they simply didn’t exist. They were not bought, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses lack of organised festivals in which gifts could be shared provided a good excuse for their absence.

On one occasion, one of the wealthy families from the Kingdom Hall, sent me a bag of clothing that their own children had grown out of. T-shirts, jeans and jumpers, all four or five years out of fashion, and poorly fitting, but I was so happy that I didn’t think twice about the fact they were dated; it was thrilling simply to have a change of clothes. Oddly my father wasn’t ashamed of his wilful neglect, he would tell me that when I got a job, I could afford to buy my own clothes. That seem a very odd thing to say to a young child, but that was his reasoning.

There was often very little food in the kitchen, and Father would vanish for long periods of time for work, leaving no food in the house. All we had to eat was sugar out of the bag and black tea to drink. He encouraged my older brothers, as they matured into employment, to eat the food they bought with their wages in front of me, so I would watch them eat with hunger knots in my stomach. He told me it would encourage me to appreciate where food came from and, when I was earning my own money, I too could eat what I liked. He wasn’t unemployed, in fact he was a grafter, working as a long-distance lorry driver. There were times, like in any family, that things might have been tight, but at other times he had a decent wage coming in and I sometimes wonder exactly what he considered his parental duties to be, other than terrorizing us.

I didn’t realise until many years later that wilful neglect is just another facet of controlling abuse. His behaviour was a continuation of the beatings and control. The impact of that lifestyle was damaging so that I grew up without understanding money, how to manage it, or having any real respect for it. This made me susceptible to being impressed by those things I had been deprived of: money, clothes and food. My father didn’t understand the role that pocket money, gifts and gift-giving play in fermenting character, in setting us up for independence. But then I don’t think my father, like many abusers, liked to think of his victims as grown up.

Chapter 5

Why didn’t you do anything? It’s the age-old question. People like me mostly respond with the usual platitudes about, control, power dynamics and fear; that they simply couldn’t do anything while they were still living in that situation, and I do understand that this is often the case. Well, I did try to do something. I was ten or eleven when I tried to save myself and my older siblings. I cannot recall the internal struggles that must have filled my young mind, but I decided to speak to the police.

I’m not a naturally brave person, but I will physically make myself do things against the natural inclination in me to run away. I forced my small thin legs forward. I was underweight and poorly dressed. I had a permanent tremor; I literally shook with anxiety for years. I had facial spasms, probably brought on by stress, that people used to comment on. Anyway, I went up the steps into the reception of the police station and spoke to the policewoman behind the desk.

“Can I help you?” asked the sergeant.

“Yes,” I replied in my tiny high-pitched voice, “I would like to report that my father hits me, please”. A brief report was taken, and I was returned to my father. Just like that.

Three times I went to the austere police station in the centre of Mobberley and reported that my father was abusing me. Three times nothing was done. No social workers were called, no review or check by the police, not a single investigation. All that happened was that each time I was returned to my father, and later received the beatings of my life as a result. Those visits to the police made things much worse for me. After they left, he was incandescent with rage.

In retrospect, I suspect fighting back was empowering. It had set something off inside of me and I think he knew that I wasn’t going to sit back and take it from him for much longer. We were getting older; my siblings were all well into their teens and I wasn’t submitting mindlessly to his demands anymore. Somewhere there must have been the beginning of an understanding that this couldn’t go on for ever. That in the near future we would be adults and beyond his reach.

With the emerging realisation that he was losing control, he had started to get reckless; the beatings became much worse. Once, whilst lashing me with his heavy leather belt, the metal buckle caught me hard on the corner of my eye socket; he could easily have blinded me. He started beating me when people might see, once dragging me screaming out of the bath when there was a houseful of guests from Kingdom Hall. He only allowed us to bathe once a week, and I stank. I was often ashamed about my terrible worn and ill-fitting clothes, and this day I was so embarrassed about being around the visitors I had crept into the bathroom for a wash.

That afternoon he beat me so hard around the head that I developed blurred vision. I thought, with some justification, that he was probably going to end up murdering me. I sincerely believe that this would have been the outcome for me. In the end I did the only thing left open to me: I ran away. I returned to my maternal family in Manchester. I was immediately returned to my father and I ran away again, and again, and continued to run away, and God knows that was the beginning of a fight.

You might think he would be pleased to get rid of a child he had brutalised so often, yet he had no desire to lose control over any of us. He was furious that I dared involve anyone outside the family, furious at the thought of having to defend himself. I fought him hand and tooth, it was absolutely a battle, a battle for my survival, and during this period, he could not lay a finger on me.

I could tell, by the way he looked at me with pure hatred in his cold blue eyes, that he had sincerely never wanted to beat the shit out me more. But he couldn’t touch me because he knew he was being observed, under the spotlight. It was imperative that I win, or things would get even worse. It didn’t cross his mind for a second that he wouldn’t win, for he never lost a battle in the private fiefdom of our house, where the normal rules of parenthood didn’t apply, and his eyes told me exactly what he planned to do to me.

Eventually it went to court, even there I was so frightened of him that I didn’t tell the authorities half of what was actually going on. Regardless, the judge allowed me to decide what was in my own best interest, stating that I was old enough to choose where I wanted to live. That was the first taste of freedom I had ever enjoyed, the first fight I had ever won. Sadly, by then, I was too shattered to feel any real joy. I was physically and emotionally wrecked, the damage had already been done.

Oddly enough, my siblings chose to continue to live with him. I would find out later that loyalty to an abuser isn’t unusual, but at the time I couldn’t understand why they didn’t seize that opportunity to leave. They were of an age where they could have left of their own free will, yet they stayed and were often disarmingly loyal to him, particularly Deborah. She argued in his favour, saying I was the traitor, that I was in the wrong. This caused a rift between us for years.

My sister later told me that it wasn’t until she was about twenty, years after I had left, that she was talking naturally to a friend about life at home, when she noticed the expression on her friend’s face, which altered from one of normalcy to one of horror. My sister was so normalised to abuse that her conversation didn’t seem strange; she had forgotten herself and disclosed some recent events without any thought. Her horrified friend explained to her that she was accepting a home-life of abuse. She helped Deborah contact the correct agencies, and my sister moved into her own small one bedroomed flat in Hyde. She later wrote to the friend:

Dear Jack & Co,

It’s taken me sixteen years to get to this point. When you rescued me, in 1996, I was anorexic with a stammer… thank you so much for helping me out of that god-awful situation…

I wish I could say that ended the contact Deborah had with our father; it didn’t. Realisation is a process, and that takes time. It took her years to fully understand, and it was only when she found strength to have him charged with her sexual abuse that she severed ties with him. He received a six-year prison sentence for what he made her endure.

I want you to stay well away from me [says a scribbled note addressed to our father on a scrap of paper in my sister’s handwriting]. I can honestly say you have ruined my life, and no doubt you ruined my brothers’ lives too.

Strangely however, when I was clearing out Deborah’s home, I found all the family photographs carefully preserved, including those of my father. I don’t understand why she kept them. I was horrified and took all his photographs into her small backyard, where I burned them.

My mother was absent, I grew up not knowing her, [was she called Mother, Mum, Mam, Mummy?] Seeing her as I did only once a year, I was only aged three when she left, too young to recall what my sister called The Bill and Judith Show: the four of us taking ring-side seats as our parents screamed at each other until the punches flew, then the clatter of our mother’s heels up the garden path, and the sudden explosion of glass as she hurtled a brick through the living room window as a departing gift. Then the dark-eyed dark-haired lady had gone. She had walked out before but eventually it was for good. She tried to gain custody of us through the courts, but my poor fragile, damaged mother didn’t stand a chance against my father. To Deborah she became an unforgiven absence, the source of her deepest sense of betrayal; to me, a distant memory of warmth and love, a place of safety.

Although my family in Manchester tried their best, taking me to school and trying to provide me with a loving and stable environment, they had no experience with children, let alone children who had experienced such sustained and horrific abuse. I think there was avoidance, from my family, of facing the reality. They hoped it would sort itself out. Perhaps they felt some guilt, knowing full well what my father was like. In fact I believe there was probably awareness all along, and now the evidence was put in front of them. It’s easier to block out the unpleasant realities, rather than face them.

I was never taken to a child psychologist or given counselling, and I was probably suffering from chronic and complex post-traumatic stress, perhaps with some active dissociative condition, pathology that is a normal response in children who survive this type of trauma. I desperately needed some type of intensive cognitive therapy, or residential institutional help, but I was offered nothing.

Eventually I stopped attending school. My misbehaving was firmly placed at my door. I was considered a problem child, my family washed their hands of me and I was put into foster care. And from that moment, my life unravelled. I was on my own from fourteen years of age; a small, frightened, messed-up child, without the basics in social or survival skills. I was out among the sharks; it was almost inevitable that my life was going to turn out badly.

Later, among Deborah’s effects, I found dozens of replies in response to letters she had written to social services, to her MP, and others, as she tried in vain to find out why we had been under the radar of social services. How were we allowed to live out our childhoods in the unsupervised care of a known, violent and predatory paedophile? The fury and anguish in which she wrote them was acknowledged in their responses which offered their ‘complete sympathy over the abuse’ that we suffered. She desperately wanted to see records of social services or any department who might provide answers, and she struggled with solicitors and the local authority until she was granted her wish.

Sadly, there was nothing that could appease my sister. The harm had been done. It destroyed all our lives to some extent, but my sister could not move past it. Unable to come to terms with the trauma of her childhood, Deborah descended into chronic mental illness and spent decades in and out of institutions. She was shattered to the point she could not heal or see past her experiences. She carried her rage like a badge of honour and would unleash it on anyone she considered deserving. It destroyed her and impacted on the lives of those around her.

Yet it means a lot to know that, even in retrospect, she had fought valiantly for answers for years. She may have lost the battle, but she died fighting, and I admire her for that, for her strength and courage. I often think bitterly, how different our lives would have been if a police officer had taken my complaints seriously, contacted social services or done a cursory background check on my father. Some of my suffering could have been avoided, and the harm inflicted on my siblings been lessened. Perhaps it’s even possible that had the strain and stresses been reduced, my sister, Deborah, may have lived.

Chapter 6

Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester 13, is an inner-city area of South Manchester, bordering the city centre, Ardwick, Moss Side, Rusholme and Longsight. It’s not a large area, easily crossed on foot. At just over a single square mile the district is so small that many people not familiar with Manchester fail to distinguish Chorlton-on-Medlock from the outlying areas. The district was a victim of Manchester’s ill-conceived wholesale slum clearances of the late 1960s. Many former residents now live on sink estates that satellite the city, where I had grown up. It was a genteel, if dilapidated, area of red brick Georgian townhouses, Victorian terraces, grand civic buildings, educational institutions and churches, all of which was swept away. It’s unlikely someone travelling back fifty years from the past would have any idea of where they were.

By the 1990s it became a nondescript area dominated by the city hospitals, the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, the studios of BBC North-West and the cathedral-like bulk of the Church of the Holy Name, all built along Oxford Road. While the situation may be unlovely, Chorlton-on-Medlock is rather a special place, one of those ‘thin’ places that act like a crucible, producing talent and change. For such a relatively small area it punches well above its weight. Ideas have begun here that have, literally, changed the world.

Thomas de Quincy spent his part of his childhood at the family country house in Chorlton-on-Medlock. His most celebrated work, Confessions of an Opium Eater, records his life from boy to man, the development of his drug addiction, its impact on him, his descent into suffering, and his futile struggle to overcome that dependency. It is considered by many to be the prototype of the psychological memoir, the first of many over subsequent centuries.

Friedrich Engels, who alongside Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, lived here in the mid-19th century, and it’s likely that Marx knew the area well as he visited Engels often. Little did they know the effect that the distortion of their philosophy would have in the hand of despots, such as Stalin, whose paranoia led to the Soviet Terror, the Gulags and the death of countless people.

Lord Ernest Rutherford split the atom in the university laboratories in Chorlton-on-Medlock in 1917, igniting the nuclear age with an innovation that brought nuclear holocaust to Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII, and would bring the world the closest it had ever been to total destruction during the Cold War. Codebreaker Alan Turing came to Manchester in 1948 and did much of his ground-breaking work on computers at the University of Manchester’s Coupland House. Just up Oxford Road, outside the Palace Theatre, he met the young man who lead to his arrest for gross indecency and to his eventual suicide. We owe him the computer age, although whether the computer is a source of good or evil is yet to be seen.

And Emmeline Pankhurst’s home still stands, marooned in a car park, on what was Nelson Street, in the shadow of St Mary’s Maternity Hospital. Without the militant resistance of Pankhurst and her fellow activists, it is unlikely that women in Britain would have been enfranchised as soon as they were. Mrs Pankhurst and I were to meet later.

Coincidently, I too originated in Chorlton-on-Medlock, at St Mary’s. My mother gave birth to me here, inauspiciously, in the early hours of November 31st 1980. My father, typically, chose to stay home and watch the boxing. I was a large baby, nine pounds, and mostly head according to my mother. I was beautiful and bonny and very smiley at this time; destined to grow into a beautiful child, and to be the last my parents had together. Adam Brock – no middle name. My father apparently took one look at me lying peacefully and quietly in my Moses basket and sneered, “That baby don’t know he’s been born yet”.

Just off All Saints, a sub-district within Chorlton-on-Medlock, named for a long-demolished church. The Gay and Lesbian Community House, known simply to us as Gay House, sits hunched along the narrow remains of Melbourne Street. At one time the street boasted fine Georgian townhouses, now it only runs a few yards before abruptly ending in a carpark and flyovers. An eminent Victorian, known as ‘the prisoners’ friend’ was born here in 1789. In 1994 his home still stood, although long derelict, its windows black-eyed and boarded over and its façade leaning dangerously out onto the street. A blue plaque attached to the crumbling wall attests to his birthplace. He devoted his life and career to the betterment of those imprisoned in Britain, eventually gaining great acclaim for work he did among those considered the lowest of the low in Victorian society. He gave practical help, finding employment for many and attending many executions too. In an era not known for its compassionate treatment of the condemned, he provided those unfortunate people some comfort in their last hours.

Gay House was only a few years old when I started attending the youth group that was held twice weekly on Tuesdays and Saturdays. It was a basic, cheaply-built, yellow square brick structure containing two large rooms constructed of breezeblocks and painted white. The room you entered from the front door is a large atrium and reception area. Beyond this is another with a steep pitch so that you could clearly see the underside of the roof. The rooms were lit only from above, as the walls of windowless rectangles were plastered with young people’s projects and slogans such as OUT AND PROUD! or WE’RE HERE AND QUEER!, written on paper banners.

I started attending the youth group aged just thirteen, in 1994, twenty-five years before I now write. I was very young, even for thirteen; young looking and emotionally young. Gay House initially provided me with some stability when school wasn’t working out for me. I barely attended, preferring to sit in Manchester’s Central Library and read history and art books all day, in the long-curved art department on the third floor.

The youth group supervisors were Mavis and Julian. Mavis was aged somewhere in her early to mid-twenties. A sporty lesbian with close-cropped red hair, she habitually wore jeans and a sports top. She had a slightly hunted air, dark circles around her eyes, suggesting concealed anxieties. Julian was Indian, of a similar age to Mavis, short and stocky with long hair pulled back in a ponytail. He had the type of jovial campiness associated with presenters of children’s television.

Usually there was a group-focused activity that was supposed to promote confidence or help us develop a strong sense of worth. Manchester, in 1994, was still a place you would regularly encounter casual homophobic abuse in the streets and, though becoming more liberal, was still a ‘hard’ city, a tough, largely working-class town. I have clear recollections of being called ‘a faggot’ and worse, several times in the street. Clause 28 was very much in full swing, meaning that teachers and television could in no way be seen to be endorsing homosexual behaviour.

I had once tried to speak to Mrs Baker, a teacher at school, about my sexuality. She was an angel who always spoke to me kindly and I sensed she knew there was more going on with me, but even she sat me down and said, “I’m so sorry, Adam, I’m not allowed to speak to you about this.” She looked heartbroken. That was Clause 28 in action. There were few positive or self-affirming structures in place for young gay or lesbian people, so the youth group at Gay House was a beacon of its time.

Chapter 7

I first met Mitchell just after my fourteenth birthday. There was only year and a few months between our birthdays. He rushed into Gay House in a state one Saturday afternoon. He was anxious; something was upsetting him and there was no making him stay. His stubbornness was an absolute trait that, in the twenty years of our friendship, never altered; you could not make Mitchell move an inch if he didn’t want to. He was back next week, this time much calmer and I liked him the instant we got chatting. We were opposites in many ways: he was as dark as I was fair; he was from the grim far reaches of North Manchester, I was from the South with its museums and libraries; we had a shared love of Motown music, and both of us were fundamentally friendless. We clicked, and our fates, for good or bad, were indelibly linked.

Mitchell had endured a horrific childhood. We had that in common too. He was shunted from pillar to post by his unstable, alcoholic mother, Ellen. I never quite worked out how many children she had. I met four, but all but one had uncertain paternity. In one of the many rough bars she frequented on Oldham Street in the city centre, his mother would lean over the table, cigarette in hand, point a chipped fingernail unsteadily at some deadbeat and croak, “That’s ya father!” I witnessed this several times over the years and it was invariably a different man every time. Mitchell may or may not have shared the same father as one of his elder sisters, a career criminal who had done time for raping his own elderly mother.

Mitchell was raised in a series of grim council houses on a sink estate in the far North of Manchester. Ellen moved all the time. It was possible, in those days, to go to the local housing office and get a new place in a few weeks, and the poorest families often moved around a lot as means of dodging creditors or the rates’ man. The situation in the city is very different nowadays, with nine- or ten-year housing waiting lists being the norm. He told me that as a child it wasn’t unusual for Ellen, addled with drink, to forget him outside bars or leave him wandering around the supermarket until he was found and returned home by the police or social services.

His elderly Aunt Patricia gave Mitchell the only stability he ever knew. Years earlier Patricia had been crossing a street with her infant daughters when she was hit by a car. Her children were killed instantly, while she was dragged half a mile down the road before the inebriated driver stopped. She was so ill no one dared tell her that her children were dead, fearing the shock would kill her. They were buried for months before anyone had the courage to tell her.

I remember her as a kind, damaged woman, slightly otherworldly. She shared her home with the ghosts of her children and a dozen or so cats that coughed and wheezed, all in various stages of terminal cat flu. The fumes from the urine-soaked carpets caught in your throat. Cat faeces made resting your hand casually anywhere a potential health hazard.

Regardless of her personal loses Patricia was always considerate and hospitable. Always concerned whether you had eaten, she would offer me “a nice plate of eggs, chips and peas, dear?” which I instantly regretted accepting but received with horrified curiosity. Sometimes she forgot to fry the eggs, the yolks floating in viscous clear whites on your plate, frying the peas instead and boiling the chips. If you were lucky, she forgot that she had offered to cook you anything at all.

Mitchell’s love for his Aunt Patricia was unquestionable, one of the few people he treated with absolute sincerity. It was he alone who nursed her in her final illness. As she lay dying in her front room, it was he who administered her medicine. He wouldn’t let anyone else near her. I was a pall bearer at her funeral.

Mitchell and I grew close, becoming inseparable even. We would walk ten or fifteen miles a day to our respective homes, on either side of the city, chatting incessantly along the way, ‘putting the world to rights’. In those early days we never had money, but somehow still got smashed on Hooch, the notorious alcopop which unfortunately made its debut at the time we started drinking. In Ellen’s damp front room, we sang and danced to old Diana Ross and the Supremes records, twirling around madly, watching multi-hued fungus, that was sprouting and spreading over the walls and ceilings, seem to spin like some nefarious kind of pyrotechnic. It was a rough area, and our voices carried, drawing homophobic abuse from the neighbours. Ellen would stand on the doorstep, cigarette in hand, and tell them to “bleeding fuck off, and mind your own business!”

Once, on the small bus into town, a guy walked past muttering “shirt lifters” under his breath. Ellen, with radar hearing, swung around and spoke sweetly to the culprit

“Pick a window…”

 “What you talkin’ about, ya daft cow?” he sneered in reply.

A fury in leopard print and leggings, she turned on him roaring, “Pick a fucking window, because if you say another word to these lads, you’re gonna go through it!” Ellen had a lot of faults, but she was very protective of us, and I loved her to bits. She usually found enough money to feed us both on a pan of ‘tata-hash’ and was, in lots of ways, a surrogate mother to me when I desperately needed a parental figure.

Even then Mitchell was an inconsistent friend. He could turn on you in a second, then at other times show great loyalty. For years we had times of intense closeness, followed by spectacular falling outs. Mitchell was an alcoholic like Ellen. From his early teenage years he would drink whatever he could whenever it was available. I suppose the drink was responsible for at least some of his terrible mood swings and violent outbursts. Sometimes he could be cruel, vindictive like your absolute worst enemy, he would do terrible things, say terrible things, and encourage others to act the same way. He often didn’t think twice of robbing me or betraying me in other ways. Why did I keep going back after he had done so much? Because I was lonely. Because there was security in our familiarity. If I’m honest, I had no one else. And Mitchell was like my shadow brother, following me in everything I did. He was with me through much of what I recount here. We travelled together, lived out of each other’s homes, shared rooms, ate together. My story is really his, and his is mine.

We got ourselves into pickles over the years. When we were kids we often went on the first coach to London in the morning and got the overnight coach back that same day, you could get a day ticket very cheaply, I think for about £7.50. Anyway, on the return trip one night, we both fell deeply asleep, waking up in Blackburn, miles past Manchester. We had no money, so we hitch-hiked and were relieved when a man pulled over, “Do you boys need a lift?” Thanking our lucky stars, we replied to the affirmative and stashed our bags in the boot. Mitchell sat in the back and I sat in the front, as the balding bespectacled bloke, introducing himself as Peter, leered in our direction. We thought nothing of it, we were just happy to be homeward bound.

As we entered Greater Manchester, he asked, “Did you see Big Ben in London…?”

“Nope” I replied, innocently.

He turned to me, still leering, and with one hand whipped out his pecker. “Would you like to?”

Mitchell let out a shriek, grabbed Peter by the back the neck, and the car swerved violently from side to side. “Let us out of this fucking car you pervert, before I rip your fucking head off!”

Peter slammed on his breaks. Forgetting our bags, we escaped and walked the remaining six miles home, laughing our heads off. He could have been a serial killer or anything, but we could couldn’t have cared less – we were fearless together.

Chapter 8

After each group meeting at Gay House, a group of us, maybe as many as twenty, would all walk the short mile or so up Oxford Road and across Grosvenor Street to the Empire State Bar. The nights out after the group meeting were part of the attraction, an integral part of why we went and Mavis and Julian assured us we would be safe and sound there.

The pub that bore the name of New York’s famous skyscraper, took up an outer corner of the city’s main coach station and even though there were large picture windows, inside was dark and low. There were cosy high-backed banquettes where you could socialise without being seen, and pool tables, although I didn’t play. We were not supposed to drink alcohol, but the bar staff took a laissez-faire approach to policing this, and there was often vodka in my seemingly innocent coke or orange juice.

The wisdom of allowing a group which included under eighteens into a pub at all, when eighteen was the legal drinking age, was somewhat questionable. I do not know what agreement Mavis and Julian had with the managers of the Empire State, only that there was an agreement and we were given tacit approval.

We loved it. In our naivety we certainly didn’t question anything. It allowed us kids to play grown-up, to consider ourselves more mature and sophisticated than we actually were; really, we were just play-acting. We would sit nursing our drinks and self-consciously smoking our Lambert & Butler’s, as Aretha Franklin’s ‘A Deeper Love’ pulsated in the background. It was all very exciting, and for me, a child who had known very little positive excitement, the novelty was appealing.

There were men in the Empire State, watching us. I didn’t notice them at first. I have never been the first to catch on, but I noticed there was always a group of older men talking to each other at the bar or talking to scruffy younger men. Hunched over their drinks, their eyes followed us as we moved around the room. They watched us as we entered, watched as we went for a piss and watched as we left. I don’t think anything of it. For me the bar felt like an extension of Gay House – a safe place.

We’d had it instilled in us by Mavis and Julian that the gay community was a haven. It was populated with people we could trust; this was the scene of gay liberation and queer power. Those to be feared were outside the physical borders of Manchester’s Gay Village. It was in retrospect an unbelievably dangerous place, but unsurprisingly, as we were children and still believed what we were told by those in authority, we didn’t question anything. The men watching us had only one thing on their minds.

And it’s not surprising in retrospect. the Empire State was smack bang in the centre of the gay red-light district, where rent boys plied their trade and, more dangerously, where men came to purchase sex from young boys, from children. This was happening under the same roof. We were on an outing to the red-light district. Thinking about it after a hiatus of twenty-five years, my mind boggles.

We had been brought somewhere we were most likely to be exposed to sexual exploitation. Mavis and Julian had delivered us to the sexual predators. A bar situated in an area where men were seeking to meet young men and children for paid sex. The colloquial term for those considered young fresh meat on the gay scene is appropriately ‘chicken’, we had been turned over to the foxes by those who were supposed to protect us. What were they thinking?

The memory of the first time I was raped is so vague and unsubstantial that I cannot quite persuade myself it happened. Recalling it feels like fragments of a dream you remember on waking: illusionary, indistinct. I recollect going into the toilet at the Empire State in a slight drunken haze, and being pulled into a cubicle as the music of Take That blared away in the background. Initially I felt confusion, then briefly fear, perhaps resignation, and I cannot honestly recall more than that, it was over so quickly.

I don’t know who did it, I can’t see a face. Was it one of the hungry-looking men at the bar, or someone from outside? I’m not even certain I ever saw his face. I have probably successfully repressed it, slipping away into a world of princesses, castles, dungeons and dragons as I was violated. These violations didn’t register with me in the normal way anyway, registering more as a distraction than anything, an irritant. I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it, because who would have believed me? A lesson I learned growing up was that if you complained it was unlikely you would be believed, and it would probably make things worse.

The second time is clearer. There was a doorman called Derrek. He worked at Clubshack, one of the first all-night dance clubs in the Gay Village. At the weekend the Empire State transformed into a nightclub. There was considerable space upstairs, and both up and downstairs were used for the venue. The dancing, fuelled by copious amounts of ecstasy and amphetamine, the drugs du jour of Manchester’s gay scene, was uninhibited and went on all over the weekend, day and night.

Derrek befriended me; bought me vodka orange, or cider and blackcurrant. He was short, overweight, with a straggling goatee, a mullet, and he breathed heavily. I cannot remember how he got me back to his flat, but he raped me almost immediately I was through the front door.

He had sleep apnoea and I recall looking at his breathing equipment in the corner of the room while he sweated and breathed over me. A sharp dry stabbing pain that went on and on. His weight was crushing me, and his breathing become more laboured before stinging, hot wetness. I zoned out at sometime during this, switching back to the safe place, and when I returned it was over. What may shock you is that I went back and allowed him to do it again, several times. God only knows why, or what I was thinking.

What I didn’t understand then, but am much clearer around now, was the impact that my childhood abuse was having on my decision-making process. I wasn’t working on an appropriate emotional level. I hadn’t developed the normal healthy responses to trauma and self-preservation that protect young people from abuse and exploitation. The impact of childhood sexual abuse, or traumatic sexualisation, alters survivors’ psychosocial and psychosexual wellbeing. It often leaves us with distorted disassociated personalities which impact our ability to relate to others in an appropriate manner. Cognitive and emotional responses are stifled, meaning that we engage in inappropriate relationships or enter unequal power relationships. This includes a lack of normal protective behaviours and information processing that would prevent poor decision making. This is all exacerbated by the likelihood of pre-existing psychiatric pathologies, or post-traumatic disorders and personality disorders.

Essentially my childhood had primed me to be the perfect victim of sexual exploitation, or to get involved in risky sexual behaviours. For many years I didn’t recognise that this was a problem, and if I had, I would have blamed myself.

Chapter 9

I was standing at the bar of the Empire State when a youngish man with dark hair offered to buy me a drink. Of course, being broke, I acquiesced, and we chattered for a while, it wasn’t unusual for people to offer and I didn’t read anything untoward into it. When the guy suggested that I might like to come back to his hotel, which he informed me was just around the corner, I politely declined, as I was only interested in him as a source of free drink. When he then offered to pay me fifty pounds for the pleasure, which seemed like a huge amount to a fourteen-year-old child, I didn’t hesitate. I recall he offered me cocaine which I refused. That was my introduction to prostitution.

It did not occur to me at the time what the long-term ramifications would be for me, or that this man was a paedophile and I was yet again being victimised. I just took the money and ran. This wasn’t some ugly old man or violent predatory doorman, and he wasn’t sexually demanding. He was probably, and I say this with a certain bitterness, the perfect person to introduce me into the trade.

The popular imagination places child prostitution within the Far East, Thailand and Cambodia, in poverty-stricken Russia, or among the exploited street children of Brazil or African countries. I have often wondered why the prostitution of children in Manchester has drawn such little comment. I regularly worked on the streets, between the age of fourteen and seventeen, and was never once stopped and asked what I was doing by a police officer, not a single time. And I was doing it in broad daylight, in a public area for the entire world to see, often under high spec surveillance cameras. I often saw police cars driving past, but they never stopped.

Manchester is now one of the wealthiest cities in Europe, it has high employment, relatively low poverty, a well-developed and sophisticated police force, three large and well-funded universities, several papers and TV stations. Yet so little is said about the prostitution of children that has taken place on its streets. I have, as an academic, read the research of those who have studied male sex work in Manchester scientifically, recording accounts of child sexual exploitation. It has been noted and analysed by people qualified to comment. What makes Manchester different from those other places further afield? Nothing does; it’s happening right now on the well paved streets of this 21st century English city.

I suspect, in part, it has to do with its context, which is largely within the perimeters of Manchester’s Gay Village. The Gay Village is a pleasure district, dominated by the Rochdale Canal. It’s been home to the city’s gay bars since before World War II. The bars and clubs follow the line of the water, which curves slightly, and at night appears like a slick black ribbon, reflecting the lights of the bars. At the end of summer each year Manchester’s Gay Pride draws hundreds of thousands of people into the Village. It is one of the chief generators of revenue each year for the city. I suspect the great and the good don’t want a shadow drawn over their cash cow, one that might negatively impact their investment. Money is king in the city and why taint the party atmosphere by introducing something unsavoury?

For years afterwards I would see the paedophiles who paid for sex with me propping up the bars in the Gay Village, in the Old Reform, O’Malley’s Dog and other pubs, chatting to their friends. They are probably still there now, only older. I’m certain many are still actively pursuing sex with another set of children, and will continue to. And that people know who they are and look the other way.

We were child prostitutes. I say ‘we’ because I wasn’t alone, there were quite a few of us, including myself and Mitchell of course. One I remember was a young bi-racial kid called Patrick. I recall Patrick because our tracks crossed again later. He was outrageously camp, the same age as me with a strong Wythenshawe accent, Wythenshawe is a vast sink estate, one of the biggest in the country, situated in the farthest southern area of the city.

Patrick claimed he was already a veteran on the streets when I met him at fourteen; that he had been around since he was nine or ten. God only knows where his family were – he was just another feral kid like the rest of us. He trolled (his term) the public toilets looking for punters, and particularly worked around the public toilets in the Arndale shopping centre bus station. The station was on Withy Grove, close to Shudehill, built on the site of the 14th century inn, the Rovers Return, possibly a half-timbered fragment of the larger Wythengreave Hall, in what had once been the medieval heart of Manchester and was now just a seedy run-down street, home to many of the city’s second-hand book shops. Their windows proclaimed “Magazines, Books, Comics, bought, sold or exchanged!” but, in reality, they specialised in selling the then illegal hardcore pornography discreetly from under the counter. These shops eventually became obsolete with the legalisation of the pornography industry in Britain.

Patrick had an outgoing personality; camp and outrageous. He would stain his already generous lips a deep berry purple from a large bottle of lip gloss, applying it with an extravagant flourish, then smacking his lips together, he would say grandly, “I have earned a thousand pounds today... I’m going to live in Spain!!!” Taking a swig from the bottle of pop he was drinking he would add, “My bags are packed and I leave tomorrow!” When you spotted him a few days later, he acted as if the conversation had never taken place. We were all fantasists; it made the reality of what was happening to us bearable, and no one cared anyway.

There were many more children. Some came and went after a day or two, while some lasted a few weeks. Others became veterans, like me, Mitchell and Patrick, continuing to work for years, while it was still feasible anyway, spending our formative years learning the trade of selling ourselves and graduating into professional, adult prostitution. Most didn’t survive long, some devolved into drug addicts, some went mad, killed themselves, or ended up in prison; others went on to live relatively normal lives, even having families. I recall seeing one guy I had known out with his missus and kids and they looked absolutely normal. My mind boggled that anyone doing what we had done could live a normal life.

Chorlton Street, runs from Minshull Street, close to Manchester Piccadilly train station, down Bloom street and towards Princess Street. The area was laid out, in the late 18th century, in a grid plan that largely remains unaltered. A few Georgian pubs and houses remain dotted along the street. They were built for the artisan weavers of the burgeoning industrial city. In the 19th century the area became dominated by the grandiose warehouses of Cottonopolis, although even these Italianate palaces were dwarfed by Thomas Worthington’s vast Neo-Gothic Crown Court, which in 1995 had recently been extended, nearly doubling its size.

Chorlton Street bus station originated in 1950, in one of the car parks that took over areas once occupied by buildings bombed during the Second World War. In 1967 a large multi-story car park had been built, with the bottom floor taken up by the city bus and coach station. It was open on each side, but remained semi-dark even on a bright day, so you could pass through it easily on foot and, being a bus station, such perambulations passed unnoticed, in other words, it was a suitable venue for clandestine activities. To the right of the station were the ticket offices, a café and the public toilets. It was here, and at the corners of the street outside, that young men would congregate to ‘rent’ themselves.

Rent boy is the colloquial term for young men who prostitute themselves on the streets, bars and other public areas in Britain and other English-speaking countries. Rent boy suggests a certain demographic, usually working-class deprived men of the inner city. Some activists gall at such terms as a prostitute or rent boy, claiming they are reductive, and prefer to project the moniker of sex-worker, suggesting that these men are engaged in some legitimate employment and therefore their activities should be regarded as work. I don’t disagree, people have the right to self-define as they see fit. I prefer to call the boys of the street what we called ourselves, and the men and boys who worked the streets of Manchester were rent boys.

Rent boy is something of misnomer; not all rent boys are boys at all, a rent boy can be a man of forty. Reverend Flowers, a Methodist minister and non-executive chairman of the Co-operative Bank, is by one those quirks of fate a former colleague of one of my university supervisors. The tabloids were filled with tales of his ‘drug-fuelled orgies’ with a series of ‘rent boys’ who were all in their late twenties and thirties. Since the infamous Vicar of Stiffkey, notorious in the early 20th century for his friendships with what were euphemistically referred to as ‘actresses’, the press has loved nothing more than reporting that explosive combination of clergyman and prostitute, and they reported the Flowers affair with the same self-righteous glee.

After all these years I can still recall the haggard, ravaged faces, often toothless with their skin covered in sores, of the heroin addicts who worked Chorlton Street bus station, their emaciated, worn-out bodies barely holding up the shabby clothing that hung off them: torn shell suit bottoms hanging over the bony arses of their wearers. Their hands fidgeted constantly with the toggles that tightened the string around their waists, for fear their trousers might fall and expose the infected track marks of their groins and upper legs. These men were the lowest rung of a despised profession, pitied rather than despised by the other rent boys, who watched them wearily. Experience had taught us that these desperate men would rob us at the first opportunity.

Surprisingly, while these men occasionally had people willing to pay for them, mainly they made their living begging or by being an irritant to the other working boys, pleading, “Lend us a couple of quid our kid. You know I’m good for it”. The more successful lads were often generous, slipping them a tenner, “just for a bit peace”. The generosity of prostitutes on the street, slipping money to each other if the day had gone badly, buying food from the Village Chippy for those who were hungry, was part of that hard life. I still saw these lost souls tottering around the Village years later, although thinned out by overdoses, AIDS and other occupational hazards. I like to think some survived and recovered, although I’m not overly optimistic.

There were two guys (I can’t remember if they were brothers or simply looked related), who were both tall, well-built and well dressed. These older guys survived, not only by rent, but also by ‘taxing’, the colloquial term for robbing younger prostitutes of their earnings.

I remember the anxiety of seeing them appear on my peripheral vision, like sharks entering my territory. They watched out for who worked and who returned. They clocked guys leaving with the punters who paid well and would either wait for us to return or, if you were on foot, follow you at a distance. Then they’d grab hold of you, pulling you into one of the dark alleys, and demand your earnings. If you refused, a quick punch to the face followed by a punch in the kidneys ensured your compliance.

You became adept at outsmarting them, dodging down an ally, or jumping on a passing bus. We referred to these men as ‘ponces’. They ponced off you, which was the equivalent of pimping, and there still strikes me as something beyond the pale about men who choose to earn their living that way. The people we feared the most were those working alongside us, and we considered them absolute scum, worse than the worst punters.

The rest conformed either to the normal appearance of working-class men or ‘scallies’, wearing track suit, trainers and baseball cap or sometimes flamboyantly camp; we were a mixed bunch, mainly unremarkable in appearance. My defining characteristic at this time, was my extreme youth, I looked much younger than my fourteen or fifteen years. I was so slight and feminine looking, with longish blond hair parted down the centre, that I was sometimes mistaken for a girl.

I spent my days wandering in an endless cycle: up and down Chorlton Street, onto Bloom Street and towards Canal Street, down the countless back streets, sometimes walking into China Town or down the tow path of the Rochdale Canal that ran alongside Canal Street, through the gay cruising area and onto Dale Street or Aytoun Street near the labour exchange. Sometimes I would stand on the street corner, for the entire world to see, in the hope that a driver would stop and pick me up, saying, “Get in ’ere lad, out of the cold”. I was on my feet till they ached, till my shins throbbed. The scandalised stares of the public didn’t bother me, they were the least of my worries.

For rest and refreshment, we used the big old-fashioned café in the bus station. It was the type of steamy, busy café once ubiquitous across Britain: tables with Formica tops, screwed to the floor, and red plastic chairs, a set of condiments and napkins, menu above the counter. The food was simple: cheap home-cooked fare, meat and potato pie served with mashed potatoes and gravy, or a full English cooked breakfast. I fondly remember the egg and bacon sandwiches made with toasted bread.

The waitresses were diamonds, always kind, always quick with a smile. Those smiles were as nourishing as the food, they kept you going, lifted your mood. Apart from we rent boys who frequented the café, so did other denizens of the street. Bag ladies parked their overflowing shopping trollies outside and, during bad weather, settled themselves down for the day nursing a cup of strong tea, while the waitresses quietly used to top up that cup all day and surreptitiously pass them a plate of toasted tea cakes or bag of stale buns, without a word ever being said, never asking for a penny. That’s how I imagine these street women survived; small acts of kindness by normal people.

And by now I had company. Mitchell had joined me a few months earlier. He was curious about where my new-found wealth had originated. Suddenly I was flush, and came to Church Lane with pockets full of twenty-pound notes, cigs and booze for us all. I was ashamed of admitting it at first, but we were ‘bezzie mates’ by now and shared everything.

Soon, Mitchell was walking the streets alongside me. This was a turning point as it made life much more bearable. I was a young fourteen, and Mitchell had just turned sixteen so was much more streetwise than me, having been raised in the city. He was tougher and much more willing to fight back, which meant I was in a considerably safer situation in his company than I had been on my own, and in those days he seemed to be genuinely looking out for me.

Mitchell often waited if he thought someone was dicey. The punter would pull up in his car and Mitchell would pop his head round as I got in, letting the punter know, I’ve clocked you mate. “You just make sure you bring him back safely, like,” he would say, with some menace. To be clocked meant your face had been remembered and wasn’t liable to be forgotten if I turned up later, dead in a ditch.

Mitchell had been given a small council flat after his sixteenth birthday. I didn’t blame him for escaping the insanity of Ellen’s, and the flat provided us with a base to bring punters back, and somewhere to sleep. I even had a key to the door, so I could get in when he was out. These were good times. I had a friend who felt like the kind of brother I had always wanted; one who looked out for me and was protective. We would drink sickly sweet alcopops, bought illegally from one of the many off-licences willing to overlook our youth, along with twenty cigs. Buying a portion of chips and gravy for me, chip barm cake for him, and putting the world to rights in his tiny flat; it felt like a haven for a while.

Chapter 10

My memory isn’t clear about how I initially met Mick O’Rourke, it may or may not have been through an escort agency being run out of one of the huge office blocks on Whitworth Street, off Oxford Road, by a coke-addicted southern guy. As to the legality of the business, several of us working there were clearly underage.

Mick was friends with Mitchell, who was working at the agency with me. Anyway, Mitchell was staying occasionally at his flat, as his casual lover, among other things. Mick was an odd-looking person. He was in his mid-twenties, very tall, thin, emaciated even. He possessed the longest fingers I have ever seen; they were prehensile. He had some type of hypermobility, meaning he could automatically bend them into unnatural angles, which he often did while looking directly at you, I suspect as a means of intimidation. His head was small, vulpine, with a long slim nose, a triangular mouth that turned up at the edges, myopic eyes, and a scrawny neck with a large, prominent Adam’s apple. His fair hair was short and gelled forward stiffly. He had a peculiar manner and an odd inflection in his voice that made him sound cartoonish when he spoke.

Mick was a bad egg. At this age I wasn’t a very good judge of character or quick off the mark with people, but I didn’t like Mick. There are bad people and then there are bad people. He had something wrong about him that I couldn’t put my finger on.

It may seem unlikely but If you want to know about good and bad people, ask prostitutes. A prostitute who doesn’t develop a nose for people’s hidden character – for what they are not telling you, or what they actually want as opposed to what they are saying they want – isn’t going to survive very long.

Not everyone I met was like Mick. Some people were positively saintly, and I’m not exaggerating. I met genuinely good people working in brothels, paying for prostitutes. Many wonderful people work in the support services.

Serendipity often brought good people into my life. I might meet someone in the pub when I was sitting in the deepest depression wondering what the point was of going on, who I would find myself speaking openly to about my childhood or what I did for a living, and they would listen with such sincerity, compassion and perhaps reassure me, “Things will get better for you one day, Adam. Just keep going.” And that would give me the strength to go on, revitalise me, leaving me wondering if perhaps I had been the company of an angel. Never, since then, have I underestimated the value of a few kind words to a stranger; they have saved my life more than once.

There are people who are careless; normal people, who can be unthoughtful, petty and dishonest; who have good and bad attributes, driven by the normal impulses, and who are good or bad to greater or lesser degrees. We are all like this. I, even at my lowest points, wasn’t all bad, and even when I feel as if I’m presenting the best version of myself, there is room for improvement. Most people are like this.

Then there are those who take pleasure in harming others. I have met people who I would say are evil. Those who will watch you, knowing you have taken too many drugs, in the hope that some hazard befalls you. I once knew a man, a regular in the Old Reform bar in Manchester, who told me he purposefully supplied his lovers with drugs till they eventually become addicted, and then took pleasure in watching their lives fall apart. What he did was promote behaviour that might lead to these young men’s death; playing with their lives. He justified himself by saying that the men deserved it in some way: that they were using him and this was his means of revenge. To me, this a definition of evil, and people who behave in this way are the ones to watch out for, those who set you up for a fall.

Mick was one of these. His crimes were utilitarian – for money – and they were how he made his living. I believe they also satisfied a deeper need to harm those he met. Harm was part of his generating motivation; the degradation, destruction, corruption of the children and young men he used was part of why he was doing what he did, not an incidental side-effect.

He was a professional shoplifter; that was one of many pies he had his fingers in. He could clear Boots the Chemist’s shelves of toiletries, strip rails of clothing, shoes, hair dryers, CDs, even kettles, microwaves and kitchen equipment. Anything portable found its way into his specially-prepared bags. His modus operandi went like this: firstly, he took great pains over appearance. Like most clever shoplifters, he always dressed well but inconspicuously. He was a consummate actor, you would never take him for the usual drug addict or alcoholic who was shoplifting to feed their addiction; no one would look at him twice because he had studied blending into the background and had it down to a fine art.

Mick’s bags were the secret of his success. He had a selection of black bags suited to the needs of whatever product he was lifting that day. Holdalls for larger things, portfolios for CDs, VHS and DVDs, small sports bags that could be worn around the waist for jewellery and make-up; all nice quality and discreet.

These were not ordinary bags. He carefully removed the fabric inside, lining it with the metallic lining from freezer bags, tin foil, or anything that would prevent security alarms being set off, then carefully replaced the fabric, stitching it neatly back into place. He was very professional.

His small flat, rank with the smell of overflowing litter trays for the two, matted, long-haired Persian cats he shared it with, was packed full of stolen goods. It was a warehouse of his ill-gotten gains, an Aladdin’s Cave. The merchandise would either be sold on the black market or he would return to the store he had stolen it from saying he had lost his receipt, for a cash refund. This was long before the days when every purchase was recorded digitally on computer, and although it didn’t work every time, it worked enough to be worthwhile and he made a lot of money this way.

He took me out shoplifting once, to Stockport a market town to the south of Manchester, and I was caught. That was the end of my career as shoplifter for Mick, actually or for anyone. I don’t think I bothered again after that one abortive attempt. He had other uses for me.

Mitchell, however, was a natural shoplifter, although not on the same industrial scale as Mick. At sixteen, Mitchell was already a well-seasoned thief and an efficient, willing accomplice. Nothing was safe around Mitchell. He robbed everyone blind, including memorably, the entire contents of my flat that I had foolishly stored at Ellen’s. He would steal the clothing off your back. “Where’s that shirt I was wearing last night?” I asked once, waking up in hung-over daze. Looking perplexed Mitchell shrugged, “What shirt?”, then later I caught sight of him wearing it. In bars people would be rifling through their bags looking for their purses or wallets as Mitchell sat there, his face the picture of concerned innocence, knowing full well that the item was stashed away safely somewhere for him to collect later.

I’m not judging Mitchell. That would be hypocritical because I emptied enough wallets too, usually those of punters when I was working the streets. We were all scamming and didn’t give a second thought about stuff like that, it was part of the life we lived. Both of us had been handed the sticky end of the lollipop and felt the world owed us something but we owed it nothing. And you know what? Perhaps at that stage we were right.

Mick knew what use he could put those in his sphere to, particularly how to manipulate Mitchell’s natural gift for theft to his own ends. I suspect he had me worked out in precisely the same way from the moment he met me. There were more sinister reasons than shoplifting for Mick to stay interested in me, money was everything to him and he had no boundaries around how he could earn it.

I was fifteen when he took me to London to meet with André Mer. André drove a limo for a living. He was a short man with a noticeably twisted spine, large nose, fleshy lips, and hair carefully brushed in a side parting. My instinct tells me he was also probably a prolific paedophile, I’m certain that there had been many before me. Mick arranged for André to collect me, and we drove to his flat in Brentford Dock, West London. What arrangement had been made behind the scenes, I don’t know, but we drove around London. He took me to the West End and bought me a T-shirt, then later to the Hard Rock Café, where I had a cocktail and felt very grown up.

After the day’s excursion, we went back to André’s flat and I was told by Mick to go into the bedroom for a chat with André. What occurred next needs no explanation. Whatever the financial arrangements, they were sorted out away from me.

I saw André several more times until somehow my family found out, I was periodically staying with them and was going missing for days at end, then would turn up with money. After one grilling it all came flooding out. The police were called and it went to court, where André was charged. It was the only time anyone was convicted of any offence in relation to my sexual exploitation as a child.

André wasn’t the only time I was taken to other parts of Britain. I remember excursions to North Wales, although other places have faded or been suppressed. I was always left in a room with the man, but I was never the one who was materially better off; I never saw a penny. That always was Mick – whatever money was made went straight into his pocket.

And he treated me terribly. One incident sticks in my mind, on the way home from a ‘excursion’, Mick, Mitchell and I were sitting in a train when Mick took my ticket, ripped it up and threw it out of the window. When the ticket collector came, I was removed from the train. I had no money. This was years before mobile phones were ubiquitous, so I was left on a platform miles from Manchester, without any means of getting home with the sound of Mitchell’s and Mick’s laughter in my ears.

Trafficking is better understood nowadays, although there is still the perception that only women are people-trafficked, or that all those trafficked were born in Eastern Europe or Africa. That simply isn’t true. There is an internal trade that deals in males. I know I was part of it.

I don’t know how organised Mick was; if he approached supplying paedophiles with children in the same business-like way as he approached shoplifting, he was probably very well organised indeed. I don’t know if he was part of a bigger network because naturally he wasn’t going to share that information with me, although it begs the question of where he was meeting these men. If he was a paedophile himself, I’m unsure, though he certainly had sexual interest in young men (Mitchell was only sixteen). At least he never touched me and that I am eternally grateful for.

The hardest part for me to make sense of is the role Mitchell played in it. He wasn’t being sold, that was me. Mitchell watched as a bystander, at Mick’s side. He would stand blankly and watch, smiling; if I looked towards him, he would just shrug. That was quite a painful thing to accept, and it felt like betrayal. Mitchell was on the payroll; he was getting something in return. If you think that should be considered the least of my worries, take a walk in my shoes for a moment: I had nothing, I was feeding myself, I needed something to survive on – and I was being shafted.

The period I spent working on the streets was intermittent. Aged sixteen I took a break and did what I normally did during a break: found a man to support me for a while. I was occupying a type of hinterland that was inhabited by other petty criminals, dealers, thieves, and it was inevitable that I would meet someone from among them.

Phil was a well-known drug dealer on the dance scene who I had seen about in the clubs, and who had occasionally given me drugs. Aged around thirty-three when I met him, he was a slim balding guy, not unpleasant looking, and seemed likeable and friendly. He had been raised in a nice semi-detached middle-class home in Cheshire.

For years he had worked in London, in the music industry. He told me that seven years previously he had been at the party aboard the Marchioness when it collided with another ship on the River Thames, in London, killing fifty-one people. This had a massive impact on him, leading to a mental breakdown in which he quit his job and moved back up North.

He had a smart car and smart flat and he offered me somewhere to live for a while, and there were plenty of drugs, which I was just getting acquainted with. I was easily impressed by bright shiny things and ready money, and Phil flashed his cash around.

Phil had a good friend, from the music industry. This man was one half of an internationally famous ‘synth-pop’ duo, then at the zenith of their careers. He supplied this gentleman and his girlfriend with the copious amounts of coke they inhaled, and we would hang out, sometimes at Phil’s flat, sometimes visiting this guy in his house not far from Windsor Castle, or party at the guy’s girlfriend’s bar in the Gay Village, getting wasted. It was all very exciting for me.

A few years later that bar became the locally famous Dance Revue Bar. It was owned by a famous transgender pioneer, Gloria, well-known for her televised transition, one of the first in British history. The documentary followed Gloria as she went through her sex change, and it was ground-breaking at the time.

Mitchell worked behind the bar, on and off, for a few years. Gloria was notorious for not paying her staff on time, so she and Mitchell got into huge rows when his wages failed to appear in his bank. “Woman!”, he would roar at her. “You’re no fucking woman… you look like a bleeding hod carrier… you’re built like the proverbial brick shithouse… get back to Marrakesh and ask for your fucking money back!” She would yell back, “Right, you’re sacked, you dirty rent boy. Get out!” And Mitchell would stalk out, furious. The following weekend Gloria would rustle up his wages from somewhere and he would be back behind the bar, everything forgiven.

One day Phil told me to get a passport as he wanted to take me holiday. I was thrilled at the prospect. We went to some cheap resort in the Balearics for a lacklustre week, which was my first holiday abroad. After that he took me away quite frequently, never anywhere warm or anywhere I actually wanted to go. Instead we drove to odd places in rural France, pull up on a roadside where he would get out, open the boot, talking in hushed tones to people I never saw. Once, on the way back, he stopped in Paris. I still wasn’t that quick to catch on at this time but long after we had split up it dawned on me that Phil was using me as a drugs mule.

In retrospect, the whole point of me getting a passport was undoubtedly a means of using me. This wasn’t that unusual; he wasn’t the first person to look at me and see a means of lining his own pockets. Frankly, I wasn’t the brightest button at this stage, and I suppose certain people are quick to pick up on who they can easily exploit.

This turned out to be a good life lesson anyway. Don’t trust anyone with your body, with your money, or with anything else, whether that be a friend, family, lover or colleague. You either learn from your mistakes or keep making them until they kill you. That lesson stood me in good stead so that nobody like Mick or Phil ever happened to me again. I become circumspect, viewed men I met more critically, and when a man made my heckles rise, I politely declined and moved on. I had learned who not to trust, which is a good thing in our business, something else that secured my survival. From then on I managed myself, which I did with some success for years.

Chapter 11

A few years passed. I was living in Newcastle Upon Tyne trying to straighten myself out, get away from the Micks and other bad influences of Manchester. The idea was to get into a more stable environment. I was attending college and living in a shared flat.

It wasn’t going well. I was bored. I quickly found the small rent scene; the usual men with drugs and drink. One day, in a drunken rage, I wrecked the flat. The building was built over one of the artery roads of the city, after smashing all the windows, they had to close the road. I had brought the city to a standstill.

It was time to move, and I needed to get out of Britain. My eighteenth birthday was fast approaching and, with my coming of age, full autonomy, I was going professional. I had found a copy of The Spartacus Gay Guide 1997. This venerable tome, about the same size and weight as a bible, with the same thin paper and small letters but with decidedly unholy contents, and was a directory for every gay business in the world. It was very comprehensive.

I had always enjoyed reading travel books, so I would flick through it looking at all the places in the world, daydreaming of how I would love to visit this place or that place one day. Flicking through, absentmindedly, I came across a full-page spread that read:

[LET’S GO and BOY BOY CLUB]. Amsterdam’s Totally Unique House of Boys. Go-Go Boys, Semi-Nude Boys, Live on Stage, Every Day: 18:00–19:00h to 22:00–23:00h. FREE ENTRY. LIVE SEX SHOWS: 2 BOYS IN EROTIC SEX SHOWS. BOYS * BOYS * BOYS. (Good-Looking Guys Always – Unique Massage Service. Escort & Call Boy Service.)

     I knew this was the place for me. People here had already got my number. I was tarnished, my reputation was appalling, I had nothing left to lose. Not that I cared, my opinion of myself by this point was so low that I whole-heartedly agreed with them. If I was to be considered a stain on society, I might as well go the whole hog and do it professionally.

There were a few logistics to sort out first: I had absolutely no money; I could just about afford the coach and ferry fare on my meagre benefits; but I couldn’t afford to pay for accommodation.

I met an older guy called Eric and made him feel I was interested. Using men was second nature to me by now, and I suggested he come to Amsterdam where I was meeting some friends, so we could spend the night together. He was up for it. I took the coach over, met Eric and went back to his room in the Amsterdam IBIS. That evening I said I wanted to go out for a walk on my own.

Tracking the building down was no problem at all. It was situated on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, one of the two main streets from Central Station leading directly to Dam Square and the Royal Palace. The Let’s Go Bar, was lit up for the entire world to see, wedged between restaurants, pubs and sex cinemas, right opposite a posh hotel. I entered, ignoring the door to my left that seemed to open into a bar, and followed the red lit sign pointing towards the Boy Boy Club.

Melvin, the portly middle-aged American proprietor, stood in reception.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I was hoping I could get a job here?”

He looked me up and down, grinning broadly, “How old are you?”

“I just turned eighteen.”

His grin grew even wider. “I will need proof of age. Otherwise – when can you start?”.

I suggested tomorrow afternoon. Mel nodded and told me to be back at twelve noon sharp, and he would show me the ropes.

That night, sleep didn’t come easy. Eric was pawing me, confused about why our relations had suddenly turned chilly, and it was difficult to brush off his advances. I was in no mood for his sexual shenanigans, so I turned over and went to sleep. I had a big day tomorrow and Eric had served his purpose. The next morning, I waited till he was showering, threw my few belongings together, and bolted out the door.

There were still a few hours before my planned starting time, and I wandered the streets, feeling increasingly nervous as it neared midday. I was having terrible premonitions of returning to the Let’s Go, expecting to be told there had been a mistake, there was no work, then finding myself broke and stranded in Amsterdam. What if I couldn’t dance, what if my dance moves failed to arouse Mel and I was sent packing?

I needn’t have worried. Like the bookshops of Shudehill that advertised one thing while selling another, all promises in the advertisement were secondary to the main business. It was essentially one enormous knocking shop, a brothel. Everything else was evidently auxiliary. That’s how Mel made his money, through the sale of man flesh. This personable middle-aged man in his check shirt and beige chinos was the male equivalent of a madam.

On the ground floor was the Let’s Go Bar, which served as a venue for dancing, a local pub for Dutch gays who lived in the area, and a place where we worked and could take the men upstairs to the Boy Boy Club. You could walk in straight off the street, an odd set up in retrospect. “Hé, lekker ding jonguh!” they would ask. “You wanna drink?”

You went up a steep flight of stairs and entered the Boy Boy Club, a long darkly-lit space with red lights, the walls lined with smoked mirrors, a bar on one side and a stage in the far corner. Billy held court behind the bar, the Indonesian barman who was outgoing and attractive with thick blue-black hair cut below his chin; he was proud of his mane which he flicked with a flourish as he spoke to you. On this floor were half a dozen rooms and a pornographic cinema. Above were two more floors; the first with more rooms and the (supposedly) luxurious ‘Thai Suite’, which wasn’t – it was dark, poorly decorated, and always a suspicious smell in the air, like blocked drains. I have a photograph of myself in this room, one of my few surviving concrete relics of that time. I look pale and thin and terribly young and vulnerable, which of course I was.

It was a vast place, rough and ready, with no pretensions to luxury, very much a functional place where men came to drink, socialise and meet prostitutes. It wasn’t that different from working on the streets. You had to do the work yourselves and chat the customers up, but it was safe, and we were registered at the town hall. Everything was above board and legit at that time in liberal Amsterdam.

You sat at the bar, a client entered, you beckoned over Billy, “This gentleman would like a drink”. He might ask if you too wanted one, then a connection was made, that might or might not end in business. If it did, then you would take him into the lobby and ask reception for a key to an available room. You took the money as they left, and paid reception; the cash being split fifty-fifty each way.

I knew how to work a room. I was an expert. My speciality was encouraging people to drink while keeping my own head clear. Part of our job in Amsterdam’s Lets Go and Boy Boy Club was to encourage a festive atmosphere. Amsterdam was an international vacation destination and drew men from all over the world. Just like the red-light district drew in heterosexuals for the women who sold themselves in the windows there was a male equivalent. On a Saturday night the club was thronged with men coming to see the strippers and the live sex show upstairs in the Boy Boy.

We would mingle, scantily clad in shorts and vest, and lough and giggle and chat. If they asked me if I wanted a drink I would ask the bar man to pour me my usual ‘cocktail’ which was simply orange juice, however it was priced the same as an alcoholic drink and I kept sixty percent of the price the rest being the prerequisite of the barman, who was in cahoots. The drinks in the club where expensive but not exploitatively so, so customers would splash out and you could earn quite a lot simply from chatting. The idea was to encourage them to drink, if they were not interested in going up stairs. While we were not really interested in what was going on around us, as we still had[AB1] [AB2]  to keep our wits sharp, one eye on the men, one eye out for each other.

We were supposed to rotate between the upstairs club and downstairs bar, and some of the working boys got comfortable preferring to sit at the bar and gossip and drink and you needed to prompt them to circulate, a busy bar with only a few boys circulating was hard work. And as the lads left to go to rooms upstairs you could theoretically end up with a group of working boys gossiping and a packed club with no lads available. Then the customers would start to leave, so we prompted each other all the time. The customers liked variety and they liked to be surrounded my gorgeous young things.  “Are there are there any masculine dark-haired boys, around twenty?” someone would ask. “I know just the person” I would reply with a grin. Sticking my head in the dressing room Calling “Mitchell, (who had by now joined me) get your arse moving, fat bald bloke on table three, congratulations, your twenty tonight”.

Getting hold of drugs was easy and, alongside the boozing, was taking its physical toll. I had lost weight and needed to get away for a while. After a few months I decided to try my hand at a new place that had opened in London and I had heard of on the grape vine. I now had more than enough money to afford to make this decision, but I didn’t cut my ties with the Let’s Go either. I would be back.

Chapter 12

La Casa operated out of one of many similar, prosperous looking four-story mid-Victorian townhouses on Levy Street, Earl’s Court, West London. The front door, beneath a classical porch, opens directly onto the York stone pavement via a short flight of stairs. The interior layout is basically the same in all the houses: a basement (formally the kitchen), three rooms on the ground floor, a staircase with ornate cast-iron balustrade leading to two floors of bedrooms above, although most are now subdivided into flats. It is a handsome, but unremarkable house.

Unusually you don’t enter La Casa through the front door, but pass through a small wrought-iron gate, down a narrow flight of stairs and through the old servants’ entrance in the basement. In front of you is a blue door with a brass knocker cast in the shape of a Grecian youth, and an electric buzzer.

You are now below the hustle and bustle of the street above and the noise is audibly dimmed. It also feels a few degrees warmer. The third thing you will notice is the strong floral smell of industrial air-freshener; its cloying, chemically-reproduced scents of jasmine, rose and hyacinth competing with, but not quite overpowering, another smell. I cannot quite place it, but it’s something redolent of the sour tang of a men’s locker room, fusty towels and old training shoes. Even below this smell, lurks something else, bitter-sweet and organic.

The only window to the basement is heavily barred. As it is summer it’s wide open, although the dark blinds behind it are tightly shut. A sound of low chatter emanates: a conversation in which a man asks a question in the clipped English of the upper-class, then a giggled affirmative reply in a low, soft, Latin brogue. You cannot make out what is being said and when you press the buzzer the conversation ends abruptly. A moment later the door swing inwards.

I am beckoned inside, “You must be the new boy who called yesterday… Did you find the place easily?”, Yes, I reply nervously. “Come, sit down here. I will be with you in a moment”, I sit on a hard, decorative hall chair and wait, anxious. I try to take in the dim surroundings, though I’m still blinded after the brightness of the street. There are two doors to my left and a staircase leading up to what must be the ground floor of the house; further back I can just make out a door with a glass panel, behind which the low rumble of conversation emanates. On the floor are expensive Turkish rugs in deep red with purple geometric patterns. Their colours swirl, my eyes unused to the dark. A monochrome print of Adonis and Ganymede, the hand of Ganymede reaching up to gently touch the face of Adonis, hangs in a heavy gilt frame on the wall.

A second later my eyes adjust fully to the gloom, and the man who answered the door returns. He is a slim, attractive man in his mid-thirties, a fine face, beautiful eyes, who Introduces himself as the manager. “My name is Alberto”, he informs me. His accent an undefinably Latin, I would find later that he was born in Mexico, but had lived in London for most of his life, and his softly accented ‘Latin’ persona was, in fact, an affectation. His partner, who I never met, had fronted him the money to open the business.

Asking my name, he echoes my response, “Adam… how charming!” He asks my age and if I could provide him with proof, which I do immediately. I am eighteen although I appear younger. Taking my passport and looking me over, he is suddenly business-like and asks me to remove my shirt, which I do. He then asks me to drop my trousers and turn around, appraises me closely and, seemingly pleased, he nods and smiles. “You will do very well here Adam, the customers love the English boys, and you will make lots of money.”

What he really means is that I will make us both lots of money, as he will take fifty percent of the ninety pounds I earn per ‘massage’, the same as at the Let’s Go and Boy Boy Club. Forty-five pounds may not seem a huge amount he tells me, but any tips, which are often substantial, I keep.

One hand placed gently at the base of my spine, Alberto guides me towards the first door on the left, “Let me show you La Casa… We haven’t been open long. Everything is new and very expensive…” After the narrow hall, the size of the drawing room comes as a surprise. Although ambiently lit, it seems dark, you can make out the Earl’s Court traffic through the blinded window. There are a couple of leather Chesterfield sofas and deep leather wing-backed chairs are well spaced apart around the room. The carpets are expensive, thick and beige. Bronze lamps, in a lotus flower design, throw light upwards onto prints of homo-erotic neo-classical subjects. An antique marble bust of Antonius, the lover of the Emperor Hadrian, stands guard in one corner.

Beckoning me toward the stairs, he shows me what he calls “the luxuriously appointed bedrooms”. Three are upstairs, a fourth bedroom was behind the second door downstairs that I had passed next to the drawing room. This is the original ground floor of the house. Discordantly, considering where I am and what I will be employed here as, I hear people laughing in the street outside.

The rooms are decorated in muted colours; pale greys, tan, parchment, all very understated and tasteful. They are bare other than a fourposter double bed covered in a tightly-fitted white sheet, a chair and an elegant mirror behind each bed. There is a marble tiled en-suite bathroom for each room.

Guiding me into the largest bedroom, I am shown the special way that the sheets are folded on the bed. Never the neatest person, this was one of the few bones of contention that I encountered with Alberto. The double bed had to be changed after each ‘massage’, as it was euphemistically called, so Alberto gives me a quick lesson in brothel bed-making.

You take a sheet from a cupboard in the hall, removing the old one which had covered the bed, with obviously no need for duvets or other bed linen as no one was, in reality, ever sleeping here. Removing the pillows, you threw the sheet over the bed, folding the sheet back towards you about three quarters of the way up, imagining the centre of the pillow. Placing the pillow over the folded sheet you folded the sheet back over the pillow ensuring a neat crease beneath the pillow and then tucking the sides tightly under the mattress. Theoretically, I would have ended up with a smooth white sheet covering the bed and neatly folded over a pillow, ready and waiting for the next ‘massage’. And it had to be remade precisely this way every time. Rarely did my efforts work out so successfully, and I was invariably called back to remake the bed.

The next task is my introduction to the hot towel box. It looks innocent enough; a small metal box in the corner of the room on a low table, with a small door, looking for all intents and purposes like a Baby Belling oven. ‘FOR YOUR COMFORT AND HYGIENE’ is emblazoned on a laminated sign on top. Each box contains two face towels, refreshingly moist and kept at an ambient heat. The towels are to be changed after each use, for obvious reasons, as they are the first things customers reach for to mop up spilt bodily fluids.

Some of the boys relished knowing that the towel provided for the ‘comfort and hygiene’ of the client, who was now daintily wiping the sweat from his brow, draping it over his face and luxuriating in its delicious warmth, was still saturated with the sweat, bodily fluids and worse of the previous customer. They purposely didn’t replace them.

I suspect not changing the hot towels was considered by some to be subversive, or an act of resistance; a token act of vengeance, giving customers a taste of their own medicine. For those forced into that life by circumstance and poverty, those without control over their lives, knowing that their customer had left with his faced drenched in the semen of a previous client was very satisfying, these little defiances made their life bearable.

Returning downstairs from my tour and crash course in room maintenance, I find a very well dressed little old man ensconced on a couch. “Andrew,” trilled Alberto, “please, let me introduce Adam. Adam will be starting work here in the morning. He is most beautiful don’t you think… very young and fresh? He is from Man-ches-ter”. I remember the way he separated each syllable to pronounce the word correctly.

He looks at me closely and, gently taking hold of my chin, he turns my face towards him as I look directly into his eyes with a smile that is, at the same time, both innocent and worldly. “What beautiful green eyes you have, my dear.” I can see he’s smitten.

My most startling feature are my eyes. They are an extraordinary deep green, flecked with gold, and edged with an areola that appears the deepest vivid blue. The effect is opalescent, kaleidoscopic, quite disarming. Adding to their exoticism is their sharp Asiatic tilt and almond shape. They are, according to some, beautiful.

“You inherited those eyes,” my mother tells me now from time to time, “from my father”. Sebastiano Lincoln Talbot was born on the banks of the Demerara, in Georgetown, the capital of British Guyana, in the early 1920s. My mother recalls a snatched moment of her father’s youth, how part of the city was taken up by an open-air zoo, monkeys screaming and playing freely in the lush rainforest that ran into the streets, parrots calling in the trees.

I only remember him as a small, very dark-skinned, elderly man. His lineage followed the slave routes from Africa, and the ships and traders who dealt in spice and sugar. His mother was Amerindian, descended from the indigenous people who walked the forests long before the Europeans stole the land. I often wondered if it was their Asiatic eyes that peered back at me, I always looked more Eurasian than bi-racial or white, even with my fair colouring inherited from my father. It’s a curious coincidence that this woman, like my Great Granny Brock, made her living as healer, dealing in herbs of the jungle to those without the means of seeking conventional medicine. Another strange coincidence was that, like my sister, she too died suddenly from an embolism to the heart.

My sister was named for my mother’s long dead grandmother, Deborah Constance. My sister felt sure that both those distant grandmothers were witches; separated by an ocean and decades, she felt some kinship with them.

My grandfather was of the Windrush Generation, one of hundreds of thousands of people who immigrated from the poor British colonies in the West Indies in the 1950s, to find work in cold, austere, post-war Britain. He was an educated man, a skilled linguist, speaking several languages fluently. As a child he had been a promising student and won a prestigious scholarship. It all came to nothing. My grandfather was a drunk, a gambler. He gambled the money that should have provided food and clothing for his children, beating his English wife, my grandmother, and neglecting his children. He spent decades in various prisons around Britain for the manslaughter of a Scottish women he was involved with.

I know nothing about that woman but my heart aches for the tragedy that must have meant so much more to whoever she was beloved of; was she a beloved mother, sister or daughter? And I am sorry. We suffered our own bitter losses, yet I am still burned by the grief of this Scottish woman who is no more, stolen too soon. I understand what was taken, the value of that life, and for whatever good it is, I am sorry.

I cannot work immediately, Alberto has some indissoluble rules, one being that you cannot start on the day of your initial interview, or the day you return after an absence. Another is that if he catches you with drugs, or even a whiff of alcohol on your breath, you are immediately suspended. He makes this clear, telling me firmly that as long as I stick to these few rules we will get on fine. (He was a decent bloke, fair, kind and generous to me on more than one occasion.) Sending me home with instructions to return the next morning I am sent on my way. Ogling me as I leave, Andrew drawls, “Can’t I see him now?” “Tomorrow dear!” replies Alberto curtly, but with a twinkle in his eye. Andrew pulls a face, smiling at me as I leave. Wealthy Andrew is a favoured customer, and he allows Alberto to playfully bully him in a nanny-ish fashion.

Chapter 13

I head home to my hotel and take in my surroundings. I love Earl’s Court. I love the down-at-heel gentility of the place, the disreputable quality. Earl’s Court is situated in central London, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, it borders the fabulously wealthy district of Chelsea to the south and the museum district of South Kensington to the east, Brompton Road and West Kensington, to the west, leads into the much more socially mixed areas of Fulham, Hammersmith and Shepherds Bush. The area has been impacted by all these areas to a greater or lesser degree so that a mixture of blue-collar workers and working-class residents, tourists and the middle and upper classes all utilise the shops, bars and restaurants that follow the curve of Earl’s Court Road past Holland Park, onto Kensington High Street then Kensington proper.

The Earl’s Court of my recollection smells of dust, the stink of the cars. Dust clings heavy to the buildings, trees, streets with the tenacity of lint, like static adhered to laundry. You live with the pollution as you walk, as you drink outside the pub, it rises through the plane trees, entering the window of your room left open due to the demand of the oppressive heat, covering everything in a greasy film.

Opposite the tube station, is the maze of narrow streets that lead off Kenway Road. Here are small cheap Chinese restaurants and Pilipino supermarkets with the sweet cheesy stink of durian emanating from the baskets of fruit standing outside. In the streets around Kenway Road black guys hang about, selling crack, their chief customers being the prostitutes who also ply their trade here. They watch me shiftily as I pass. These desperate women bear comparison to the addicts of Chorlton Street. Unlike those men, they find a ready supply of customers for the cheap price they charge, just enough usually for their next fix.

You continue, walking past the Co-op Supermarket, past the golden arches of McDonalds, past the little recess with its board behind glass, where illegal sub-letters, prostitutes, and hotels looking for cleaners, leave their advertisements. You now turn left again onto Trebor Road.

The stucco of the Trebor Hotel, white from a distance, on closer inspection, is mottled and grey and streaked with black, a chemical decomposition, like an inexpertly reconstructed cadaver, painted, filled and plumped, left slightly too long unburied so that the corruption begins to show through. It draws me in, sensing my vulnerability, like a carrion-scented carnivorous flower draws in insects.

The windows are grime blinded and dark; thick net-curtains, not as dirty as the glass whose intention it was to veil, hang limp. A massive rusted bay window, painted shut, rests on a ledge wide enough for a full-grown man to sit on.

Someone, long ago, has placed a window box behind the rusted and pock-marked decorative cast-iron guard on the ledge, probably in the mistaken belief it would cheer the place up. It is filled with plastic flowers of genus and exuberance not found in nature. The countless seasons they have witnessed have bleached them to conformity: grey, yellow, puce, the colours of NHS waiting rooms and corridors, of nausea and ill health.

The building rises three floors above, six in all if you include the basement and attic, three windows to each floor, each window split equally between a sub-divided room meaning that while it looks like three rooms, there are in fact six on each floor overlooking the street, eighteen in all. The originals are crudely split in two by cheap stud partitions that cut directly through the ornate cornicing and ceiling roses. The walls are so thin you can clearly hear what is said in the rooms on either side; the snoring, and hushed conversations. The layout is repeated identically in the three conjoined town houses that make up the property. There are many more rooms at the rear and in the hotchpotch warren of attics; dozens of tiny, narrow, subdivided rooms with equally narrow hard beds.

You enter the hotel via a flight of six steps running between Doric columns that support the porch. It is Monday, and the ‘Vacancies’ sign hangs lit up in the window. Only at the weekend during high tourist season is the Trebor ever at full capacity. As you enter the front door, which is always open during the day, you must first push open twin doors that open into a hallway. Directly ahead a staircase, with ornate thickly-painted cast-iron rails and mahogany banister, disappears into the upper regions.

The first thing that hits you is the smell of disinfectant. Young female and invariably Eastern European cleaners assiduously mop the linoleum of the public areas each morning. The smell of bleach covers less savoury smells that originate in the kitchen below, from the ancient carpets, beds and from the guests themselves.

Directly to the right, where a wall has been removed, you enter what would have once been the front parlour. This is the reception. For those not accustomed to British working-class front rooms of the Seventies and Eighties the decor will come as a shock. It is the anthesis of the late Nineties’ trend for minimalism, interior chic and sophistication reliant on the maxim that ‘less is more’.

The psychedelia of red and yellow threadbare carpet competes for attention with a lurid velvet wall hanging of Richard Kiel, hung from faded and peeling red flock wallpaper. Rattan sofas, frayed and yellowing, dis-invite those inclined to sit, if you do, they creak alarmingly. A gold plastic digital clock blinks uncertainly above the long Formica reception desk, upon which florid vases of silk flowers under clear plastic domes, seemingly related to those outside, blind you with their nitrate greens, purples and reds.

Every surface is covered with thrift store tat: iridescent groups of china horses, a poorly-rendered resin model of the Houses of Parliament, and several oversized bonneted porcelain dolls in garish polyester outfits are propped up around the room.

I have a memory of being a very young child, not long before my parents split, sitting at their feet on the parlour floor of one of my formidable Brock great aunts in her redbrick East Manchester terrace. Every surface, wall, ledge is covered with masses of ornaments, knick-knacks and photographs. A budgerigar in its cage hangs from the ceiling, chattering and screeching in the thick cigarette smoke. The impact and incoherence are not dissimilar.

Behind the desk, amidst the chaos of the interior decoration and slumped low in a chair, is Veronica, receptionist and concierge. Veronica is the public face of the Trebor. Perhaps aged around forty-nine, though she could easily be ten years younger, or indeed older, Veronica bears some consideration. She is tall, overweight, and wears the faded uniform of a long-term festival goer: a dirty tie-dye smock over outsized harem pants with flipflops revealing brittle, fungal toenails.

Her face blends into her neck in loose folds of skin. Her features are indistinct, eyes small and puffy, a few stained teeth remain in her tightly pursed mouth. Usually she wears a colourful but soiled scarf, tightly wrapped around the circumference of her head in a partial toque. Her congealed mass of hair falls out of the scarf to below her waist in a single massive dreadlock. She has threaded this fetid lump with coloured ribbons, bits of metallic string and other magpie-gleaned debris.

Her perfume is her most memorable feature. It is mixture of patchouli, cannabis, stale sweat and the yeasty scent of body parts best not thought of; your nose knows of her presence long before your eyes, and her scent lingers long after her, meaning it inhabits the hotel as a second presence. You come across her odour in unexpected places; in the corridors, the ancient dangerous lift or the landings between the stairs. It was often a source of confusion as, although she presumably lived in the hotel somewhere, I have no recollection of ever seeing her, in my years of residence in the Trebor, anywhere else but behind the reception desk.

In my mind’s eye I see her decades earlier, swaying drunkenly and feeling the effect of a hallucinogenic dissolving under her tongue. Veronica is at a party at the Troubadour, the famous folk music venue on the Brompton Road. She is slim, still youngish; the disappointments haven’t taken their full toll on her yet. She still speaks with enthusiasm of the revolution that she is still sure is around the corner. If only we could mobilise the women! she absentmindedly tells no one, propping herself up against the bar, over half the world’s population is female… a great army driven by the goddess. The things we could achieve! The bartender gives her a long look, shakes his head, turns away. He’s heard it all a thousand times before. On the small stage, Sandy Denny warbles, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’; indeed, where did it go? Veronica doesn’t know. Shrugging, she stares vacantly into space, thinking “that bridge had been burned (burned out?) long before my arrival”.

Time played tricks on you in the Trebor, it shifts uneasily; fractured, trapping you unaware. Sometimes I was uncertain of the day or month, even the year.

Indistinctly, I hear Deborah whisper, “Adam…”

I glance in the mirror over the tiny cracked sink in my room. I see a young and wide-eyed man-boy staring, confused back from the mirror. Other times, an older wearier version appears, the man of now, of bitter, spiteful experience. He peers back at that younger self with absolute pity and despair. The mirror shatters. My psyche breaks into infinite shards. Each facet of myself falls, breaking apart. I am no longer a single entity, but a being made up of countless choices, myriad possible outcomes: the split personality, schizoid refractions of the man who lives a life of masks, presenting so many versions of himself every day, that the real Adam risks being consumed by the personas he creates to make life tolerable.

For a second, swept away in my reverie, I wonder if I am dead. I feel like a ghost, cursed to endlessly atone both for his own sins and the sins of others; to put right the wrongs that have been done, and air secrets long buried. Would I know if I was dead? How do we know which of us are restless spirits that seek to undo what has been done, to untangle the Gordian knot of our lives? Perhaps we living do not recognise these wandering souls for what they are. I sometimes question if I survived my childhood at all. Perhaps my bones were mouldering under some pervert’s floorboards and I am stuck in limbo, forced to relive everything, again and again.

I hear Deborah again, clearer this time, Adam, get a grip!, and immediately tug the strings of my mind tighter, drawing myself back into reality, hiding the scars and fractures of a consciousness battered, bruised, punctured and pierced. Smiling at myself, making sure the smile is reflected in my eyes, I successfully disguise the man beneath. Life continues.

If Veronica shared that discordance, she didn’t share it with me. People get stuck in places like the Trebor. One day you are young, the party is in full swing, then you blink, and everyone has left, and you are forty-nine, working reception in a doss house.

She sits like a great white Maharani, a silent Janus, only roused when I break one of the rules: “No guests after eleven Adam!” She points wearily to the white board with its list of regulations. Her accent is difficult to place, perhaps a hint of the Black Country, or perhaps the West?

I was probably an irritant to her, as the young tend to be towards the older and strange. I am both older now, and certainly strange enough, to see myself through her eyes.

I’m unsure what she would have made of me that first day. It’s probable she took one look and saw me for what I was. Lots of working boys kept a room at the Trebor. And besides us, other twilight people lived here, the female, trans and transvestite sex-workers; people who needed a place to get their heads down at a reasonable cost, no questions asked. Occasionally you would bump into them on the stairs, smeared make-up, heels in hands, coming home in the early hours.

These were the ‘women’ who offered sensual opportunities in the advertisements that cluttered London’s phone boxes. They bore little relation to the glamourous photographs that promised a Hot Latin Babe! or Sexy Transsexual Nurse. These women were, older and hard-faced. The style of their heavy make-up originated in trends of their youth, decades earlier, and they had to be tough, their life was precarious. They were clinging on, only just a step up from the girls of Kenway Road.

They would look at you blearily, pushing their meagre bosoms together, giving you a parody of a salacious come-on on the off chance that you might fancy a little ‘business’ a little ‘something extra’. “You’re barking up the wrong tree there, love,” I would laugh in reply. They’d shrug and shuffle off, back to their darkened rooms to sleep the day away.

Veronica asked no questions about your length of stay or anything else as long as the bill was paid on time each week and you abided by the rules.

Yet, recalling my time living at the Trebor among these tough people existing on the margins in the shifting unsettled and unwholesome environment of the Trebor itself, might lead you to believe I disliked it there. If the truth be told it was quite the opposite. My memory of those early days is of an intense, distilled sense of freedom.

I had never had control over where I lived. After escaping my father and moving to Manchester, aged fourteen, I was placed in local authority care with ‘Mad Anne’. Anne had a different man home every other night. Then, at sixteen, there was the city homeless shelter at Downing Street, a square red brick building with dormer roof, long demolished. I was a small, vulnerable kid living with city down and outs; the insane, the hopeless. My abiding memory of that place was simply how scary it was. Then there was a tiny flat overlooking the park, shared with the guy with the harelip who robbed me blind, stealing my food and leaving me hungry for weeks at a time.

There were angels too. Rachel of the warm heart and unlimited kindness, who cared so much for her strays, the four-legged and two-legged kind. She knew who I was, everything about me, and loved me still. Her home was a real home, albeit briefly. Rachel was and remains the finest Christian I ever met, and she claims no belief in God. There were other kindnesses extended to me, but the memories are illusionary after so long. Why is it one holds onto the bad experiences longer and with more clarity?

So, to have my own space, even in a dirty run-down hotel, in a room little larger than the average bathroom, with a shared shower and toilet and a single hard bed, was at least a place I had chosen, and that airless little room high up in the Trebor represented to me the first gasp of freedom in an otherwise unbearable life. There was a small lock on the door, which kept all predators at bay, protecting me from what was beyond. I paid for that room myself. It was my space and from one week till the next, I could leave or stay as I saw fit.

Sometimes I would just sit and watch the sun in the leaves of the plane trees below the windows. I would buy a sandwich or piece of fruit from the corner shop and watch TV in the evenings, on the ancient monitor, and do nothing but lie on my back watching a horsefly dance along the cracks in the ceiling, perfectly satisfied. In all my years in London this was my place of choice, only going to other places when I could no longer afford the rent.

The first eighteen years of my life felt as if I had been locked up, like a bad dream, and I was now free. I had never experienced such a feeling of freedom before and it was intoxicating, better than any drug. This room, these four walls, represented for me at that time, pure liberty.

Nostalgia for that time, as I relate this, is so powerful as to be uncomfortable. It grips my chest. Of all the emotions, nostalgia is the most painful for me. I know now what the years would have had in store for me, the illusions that would have been shattered, battles that would be won and lost. I would do it all again, in a moment, just to experience for a second the pure sense of freedom that I felt in my first weeks at the Trebor Hotel.

Chapter 14

I often walked in Brompton Cemetery, the vast necropolis just a short walk from the Trebor. You enter through a stone triumphal arch that leads into a long and stately avenue of mature lime trees. To your immediate left after you enter, buried beneath a Celtic cross carved with a female saint, is the grave of the formidable suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. She offers all those who pass a silent benediction. Pankhurst was a fellow Mancunian. I acknowledge her every time I pass, as we are fellow exiles.

Grandiose mausoleums of the great and good competed for my attention. Angels stand sentinel each side of a gothic sepulchre, one raising her eyes and shamelessly greeting the viewer with her gaze, while her partner looks demurely down at her feet.

As you walk past the memorials, you catch sight of a great neo-classical rotunda in the distance, this draws your curiosity and you walk more quickly. Suddenly you leave the avenue of limes and are caught slightly breathless, finding yourself in a great classical arcaded amphitheatre, its stone glowing gold in the sun. It feels disarmingly like an outdoor cathedral. Beneath these magnificent arcades are catacombs, coffins walled in individual loculi. You can walk down the ramps that run below ground, if you like, and peer through the great bronze doors, each guarded by a massive inverted lamp, around which great serpents’ coil.

The space is packed with marble crosses, angels and other late Victorian and Edwardian funerary monuments, and the effect is overwhelming. A statue stands above one grave, a beautiful woman in Grecian dress, her hair in a loose chignon. She wears a jewelled bracelet and sandals, a rose forever held between her delicate fingers, held protectively against her heart. Carved on the stone is her name, Blanche Roosevelt, Marchesa d’Alligri. She was the first American woman to sing on stage at Covent Garden, and the mistress of Guy de Maupassant, the great French naturalist author whose worked focused on the denouements (outcomes) of his protagonists. She died, aged forty-four, after being thrown from her carriage. Judging by the beauty and expense of her memorial, she was deeply mourned. As we part I glance back at her, and her slight smile is so welcoming, so tender, that for a moment I think she will step down from her plinth and offer me a stony embrace.

On glorious sunny afternoons it was possible to feel that I was in Italy. Among the myrtle trees and cedars, it felt like a fantasy Mediterranean landscape. A huge grey granite Egyptian pylon stands amongst a grove of Cyprus trees. A monumental stone lion rests its gargantuan head on massive paws, guarding steps that lead onto a wooded terrace. These wide terraces, pathways and colonnades were designed as delightful places to stroll. And I love to walk. I needed this, a place I could wander and allow my imagination to do its work, to remove myself from less attractive facets of my life, to heal for a while.

This is where the gays of Earl’s Court promenade; the men living in small gardenless flats or studios, who pour onto the wide boulevards of the cemetery at the first sign of sun. It is crawling with men of every type. Beautiful tall, manicured and wealthy-looking Italian men, expensively dressed, gesticulating extravagantly as they talk loudly into their mobile phones. Muscular leather daddies in check shirts stalk the pathways checking each other out, and elegant Thai house boys, who work in the local hotels and restaurants and add a touch of exoticism with their colourful sarongs.

And of course, the buffed and polished male prostitutes, tanning out the dark circles and blemishes. Absorbing the vitamins that they lack from their largely nocturnal habits. They parade themselves, topless in pairs or groups, gossiping, laughing. One calls shrilly, “Its Prada, dahling!” as he flashes his expensive black satchel to an admiring friend. It’s the only public green space in the locality, and like the animals of the Serengeti are drawn to any available water supply, coming together in communal need and unusual familiarity, the lack of any other open space draws all these divergent types here. And, naturally, there are shenanigans in the shrubberies. Brief friendships are made that end in frantic couplings among the laurels.

It’s mid-spring, and I am having my constitutional. I often walk the paths for a few hours for exercise in the mornings, before my shift began. It is beautiful, there are naturalised anemones and narcissi blooming among the tombs. The grass is coming in green and lush and the trees have the freshest green leaves, almost blue–green in the sunlight. I settle myself on a large flat sandstone tomb whose deeply-carved calligraphy informs me that this is the resting place of Edith, a member of the Gunter family. The Gunter’s were famous for developing the squares and streets Earl’s Court for the newly wealthy London middle-class during the nineteenth century. Several streets were named for the family, including an Edith Grove.

Taking my breakfast, a sandwich and fruit, from my bag, I lie back to rest, covering my eyes with my hand and seeing the sunlight and sky between my fingers. I’m about to close my eyes, when I notice the fine feathery leaves of wild asparagus coming through the green of the grass. If you didn’t know what you were looking at you wouldn’t recognise it as a relation of the delicious vegetable, its fronds looking more like dill or a type of fern. The leaves move in the slight breeze, a splash of jade against the deep green, fleetingly producing the effect of a Japanese watercolour.

As I rest, the sun warming my face, it dawns on me that what I am looking at may be a survivor from the days when this cemetery and the surrounding area were the market gardens and farms that supplied London with fruit and vegetables. Or is it the wild asparagus native to the south-west of Britain? That this plant has tenaciously clung on to this spot, in some forgotten crack, a living relic from the time when Earl’s Court was open fields and swallows flew overhead and the cuckoo called in the woods. That for all the changes in the world, for the changes in its environment, it has persevered.

For many years the cemetery was regularly mown, carefully tended, weeds excluded. A team of gardeners actively fought to keep the wilderness at bay. Now, the cemetery was allowed to return to the natural heathland that existed long before human encroachment. It seemed possible that some of the old world, something fragile, pure, started to thrive again, renewing itself each spring, getting stronger and gradually reasserting itself.

This proved a powerful metaphor of hope for me. That somehow, no matter what happened around us, however terrible things may seem, it was essential I didn’t lose myself, I couldn’t allow myself to be consumed by my demons. I had to preserve at all costs something, if just a speck, of my own personality, of my humanity, some spark of goodness, no matter how tiny, in the hope that one day things would improve and given the right conditions, I might start to grow, to flourish again. In death there is life, in death remains hope, hope to me was a tiny green shoot found among the stones of an ancient cemetery, a fragile possibility that things would one day get better.

Chapter 15

Right now, I needed to eat. Eating healthily was a preoccupation. It was wasn’t easy to eat well as, obviously, I had no kitchen, and the temptation was to live off junk food. This inevitably impacted badly on my weight and health, so I ate a lot of pre-prepared salad bowls and fruit from the supermarket, and every day tried to eat a decent meal from one of the reasonable walk-in restaurants that could be found dotted along Earl’s Court Road. They usually offered a prix fixe menu of soup or salad, then duck in orange sauce with fried potatoes, or grilled lamb chops and green beans, for under ten pounds.

Streetwise was housed in a beautiful Italianate townhouse built on the magnificent half-moon of Eardley Crescent. A blue plaque informed me Hattie Jacques, the British comedienne, had owned a house here. I had grown up watching her in the re-runs of the Carry On franchise on TV on Saturday mornings, usually playing some harassed but kind-hearted matron or long-suffering wife.

The charity had originally been established in 1985 through the instigation of Father Bill Kirkpatrick and Richie McMullan. They understood the need to provide services for male sex-workers living in the Earl’s Court area, often, like myself, living in fairly vulnerable circumstances, without a permanent address and in cheap hotels, hostels or other temporary accommodation. British bureaucracy demanded a permanent address before it was willing to provide you with support, which made it difficult to obtain even basic services such as a GP or Social Security.

Streetwise offered auxiliary support services that get overlooked when you’re in the sex-work bubble. We could access medical care, counselling. They offered housing and benefits advice, and even a laundry service.

We could also get advice and support about moving on from the profession, although they were always careful to stress that their main concern was the welfare of those actively involved in sex-work, and they never attempted to push people out of prostitution. Not pressuring male sex-workers to exit the business is vitally important. I was extremely sensitive to who I allowed around me and untrusting of the motivations of people I allowed to support me. Had I felt they were interfering in my life, it’s unlikely I’d have continued to engage with them, meaning that one lifeline of support would have been broken. Trust with our support services was vital.

Recently, I was looking at some research on the sexual health of male sex-workers in London and noticed that the work originated with Streetwise. My curiosity was piqued and I read the paper in its entirety. Twenty years earlier I had taken part in the research that I now held in my hands and I found this direct link to my past very moving. It was an amazing organisation and should have been the prototype of many more. Sadly, it was a victim of government spending cuts that lost its funding and closed within a few years, a great loss for the many men who relied on it.

My main motivation for attending Streetwise was the home-style cooked lunch served several times a week. Home cooked food was something I craved, and it was usually simple but wholesome, pies, stews and soups. The West Indian woman bustling about in the kitchen, who prepared all the food, would call out, “You want some chips with that lovely?” She was one of life’s angels, her smile from the kitchen always beautiful, warm and genuine. Those smiles kept me going, they were every bit as sustaining as the nourishing food.

Such considerations as diet and exercise, and the support of the workers at Streetwise, contributed to maintaining both my mental and physical health. This was a business where not taking care of the product, in other words ourselves, was counterproductive. If I was going to survive and thrive, I had to take self-care seriously.

This particular day I was dining at Benjy’s. Benjy’s was franchise of greasy-spoon type cafes that sold low-priced meals. It was the type of place that no one looked at you twice if you came in alone day after day. I have a clear recollection of the stickiness, tackiness of the menus and white and red Formica table-tops, the smell of bacon and hot lard mixed with the pervasive smell of cigarette smoke. You went to Benjy’s chiefly for the cooked breakfast: bacon, eggs, sausage and a slice of toast. I still remember the cost – three pounds fifty for a small cooked breakfast and coffee. A more substantial offering included chips and beans, for four pounds ninety-nine.

Your coffee was refilled limitlessly, although one cup of the strong, chicory heavy brew was enough for me, anymore made me anxious. The other customers were usually labourers working on the roads, Australian backpackers, or American tourists travelling on the cheap.

Quite often there were solitary old ladies. One regular face was a woman aged about seventy, usually wearing two or three coats; the top-coat was an expensive vintage tweed covered in brooches, some cheap, while others suggested a more refined provenance. She sported dirty white calf-leather ankle boots and, pulled low over her face, a woollen knitted hat of the tea-cosy type occasionally worn by the very elderly. Scarlet lipstick bled into the lines around her mouth as she muttered to herself. A tress of grey, yellowed-blonde hair escapes from beneath her hat and scattered around her feet was an assortment of plastic bags from Waitrose or Harrods, alongside string bags bulging with tattered newspapers and soiled clothing.

The overall effect was not of poverty, but rather of dereliction, neglect and hopelessness. She may or may not have been homeless. She could in fact have been the daughter of a baronet living the life of a recluse in few squalid rooms overlooking one of the squares, a portrait of an Edwardian society ancestor sharing the noisome space with piles of yellowing newspapers and half a dozen cats.

She was kin to the bag ladies of my native northern city, the women who sat all day slumped over a pot of tea in the Chorlton Street café, although this one probably originated from better stock. It wasn’t unusual to hear clipped upper-class English spoken by the apparently impoverished. Like the dregs of Russian high society after the revolution, they lived on in the basement flats, bedsits and garrets carved out of their former homes. In Earl’s Court, social distinctions extended beyond the norms, blurred even to the very margins of society. You took nothing on face value.

Chapter 16

I returned to La Casa as directed, the next morning. Being inveterately early, I turned up at 11 am, a full half hour early. No one answered my knock, so I waited and eventually heard someone clattering down the steps behind me.

A diminutive, slight guy appeared, wearing a translucent netted top exposing huge brown nipples, skin-tight jeans, flip flops. Over his shoulder was a huge holdall, his hair, presumably a syrup of figs – wig, was an extraordinary confection of jet-black dreadlocks, shaped like a dandelion clock with the texture of polyester carpet pile.

His skin was the colour of clay, the result of being thickly plastered in heavy foundation. When the daylight gave me a better look, I saw his skin was ashen, white under grey, with heavy stubble pushing through the make-up. He had attempted to pencil his lips in some shade of coral pink, but it hadn’t worked, just drawing more attention to his thin lips. His eyes were hidden behind a huge pair of black sunglasses.

“What are you waiting out here for?” he asked in a thick Northern Irish accent. “I’m new,” I replied. “I’m starting this morning”. He tutted, “well ya can’t wait here… come back at eleven turty.” Getting a closer look as I left, I could see that his eyes, thickly eye-lined behind his sunglasses, had the look of lightly poached eggs.

That was my first meeting with Maxwell. He was there on my first day, at eighteen, and saw me off on my last day thirteen years later. I never worked out how old he was, because his wrinkled hands looked older than Methuselah’s and suggested a more advanced age than was at first obvious. He never changed; same wig, pancake, same style of clothing.

I was later warned by the other guys to be wary of him. He was a frustrated, failed sex-worker. The great prize that no one had ever wanted. As he hadn’t been able to scrape a living on his meagre charms, he became the door whore. This was often the case, that those who couldn’t make ends meet selling themselves ended up working on the door, cleaning, and doing menial but essential tasks. There were others besides Maxwell over the years, but Maxwell always returned. He was second only to Alberto, and he was a terror. He was fine if he liked you, thankfully, and despite our inauspicious first meeting, Maxwell deemed me a friend. I was very lucky. If somehow you offended Maxwell, and the ways you could were long and varied, he would starve you out.

It was Maxwell who dealt with the customers. Alberto was front of house, but Maxwell introduced the boys. The customer would point to a guy, “He looks nice, can I book him?” Maxwell would look glum, roll his tinned-peach eyes and say, “I wouldn’t, he’s got terrible haemorrhoids,” or just whisper “Syphilis!” and shake his head.

This would go on day in day out, until the guy left. Many of the men working at La Casa desperately needed the money. It was their only income. We all knew it happened, and why, but you didn’t complain for fear he would turn those eyes in your direction next. You just shook your head. “Let that be a lesson to you all boys,” he seemed to say, grinning, as another guy left.

We always knocked on the door. The bell was for customers. That was the first piece of etiquette that differentiated civilians from the non-civilians. On arriving at La Casa, at eleven-thirty sharp, you walked straight down the long hallway, rucksack over your shoulder, and always on time. There were only twenty boys on a shift so if you arrived late and the list was full, you were told to come back for the second shift, at 6pm to 2am. You’d want to get in the shower early, as some of the guys used the shower head as an enema and just left their shit sitting one the shower floor. The next person would scream in disgust, “Which one of you fucking animals did that?”

Clean and fresh, you sort your face. You’ll be standing under bright lights and imperfections stand out a mile, so you need to take care of your complexion. I used E45 cream, then Revlon medium matt wash-off fake tan, nothing else. Dressed and polished, you sit on one of the hard benches that line the walls of the two small rooms, you wait for the others to arrive.

First after in after me today are Madonna and Maxim, together forming the ‘Lithuanian Menace’. They were a double act of arch bitches, high definition cunts. Madonna is preternaturally beautiful: tall, white teeth, white skin, white blond hair, beautiful body, very effeminate, you can’t take your eyes off her. She exudes glamour and her clothing is luxurious. Her carefully bleached hair is kept in place with Gucci sunglasses, the double G’s visible behind her ears. She is wearing expensive white designer jeans, slashed to show her smooth tan legs. What I suspect is a woman’s white linen blouse is open to her waist, revealing a smooth lightly-toned chest and abdomen, and she has diamonds at her throat and on her fingers, you can tell by how they refract the light that they are real. She has a large beige Gucci holdall thrown casually over her shoulder and matching Gucci flip flops. Maxim is as ugly as Madonna is lovely, and by far the more vicious of the two. Like her sister she is tall, blond. Dressed simply in T-shirt and jeans her teeth are black from the rollups she incessantly smokes. Madonna will clean up, make a fortune, men love to spoil her, lavish her with money and gifts. Maxim comes in early just in case this is that one day in the week when he earns something. Both will cut you to pieces with their tongue. Maxim beckoning some unfortunate new boy over, examines her victim closely like some revolting specimen of insect, lifting her imaginary lorgnette to her eyes, and turning with disdain to Madonna saying in his long accented vowels, “I knew it… she’s even uglier up close.”

Next to arrive is Danny: English, short, muscular, with an unexceptional but engaging face, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a Fred Perry T-shirt with collar pulled up around his neck, and smart expensive white trainers. We are dressed almost identically, except I’m wearing a pair of twisted Levi’s, which are all the rage at the moment. Danny is a native South Londoner, a nice lad. Gay but straight acting. He sits quietly looking contemplative and serious. He will become a pal of mine, sometimes a lover, and someone I go out partying with.

Patrick was already working at the house when I started, beating me here by a few weeks. Momentarily unseen, he is sitting hunched over, chewing gum. He stares wearily into the distance. He is quieter than when I first knew him and I sit with him, curious to know what’s been happening. He tells me he’s living in a squat in the East End. He looks scruffy and his eyes are huge, black and dilated; the dead fish eyed look that I associate with men who’ve being working in the business for years. He has already been working in it for nearly ten years and he’s only nineteen. He tells me the only way he can sleep now is with heroin. His skin is so white it’s almost blue, and he is thin, fragile-looking; his thick black hair unkempt.

There is nothing left of the once effervescent kid. All he does is work and use gear, and he’s terrified that Antonio will find out and sack him so that his only source of income will be cut off. And he’s right to be worried, the other boys are out for him – they are suspicious. Like me, working the streets in Manchester, lots of the men of La Casa have first-hand experience of drug addiction, and they don’t like having a drug addict in their midst. He makes them jittery; they think he will rob them at the first opportunity because that’s what experience has taught them junkies do. But Patrick is more terrified of ending up back on the streets. He has no intention of robbing anyone and does what he can to make sure they can’t get the ammunition they need to get him sacked. And the customers like him because he looks vulnerable and young, an intoxicating combination for some clients. Later, I will show him how to use make-up to cover the ravages, to use foundation and bronzer to make himself look healthier, and ensure he is well dressed, groomed, and eating properly. We have each other’s back. You need to know you can trust someone; that’s vital for our survival.

What we did for a living may seem abnormal. Even I recognise, in hindsight, that I wasn’t making the best life choices. Still, we were what we were, and we were not stupid. We put a lot of thought into how best to exploit ourselves. We put serious energy into thinking how we could make the most money as easily as possible. Let me explain. It’s useful to think of male sex-workers as actors working autonomously within their market. Many prostitutes consider themselves to have ‘free agency’, and they regard their work as ‘sexual labour’, as a business, as work like any other type. Even those working in less enviable situations than I did – the women of the Trebor and Kenway Road – still have control over some aspects of their lives, even if it’s just choosing what clothing to wear. Commodification of the individual makes it possible to regard ourselves as any other product that is influenced by supply, demand or quantity. I objectified myself as a means of meeting market requirements; I adjusted my appearance and persona. Some attend the Earl’s Court gym to meet the high expectations regarding appearance of the luxury end of the market, thereby enhancing their market value, their desirability. I relocated several times to more economically verdant localities; if I wasn’t going to make a living on the streets of Manchester, moving to London with its high population and great wealth, plus perhaps less competition or a higher consumer base, was the rational thing for me. I went to considerable lengths to ensure my viability as a product.

I believe that most successful men working at La Casa commodified themselves to some extent. My persona was very much an invented one. I was working-class but not the type of inner-city scally that I pretended to be. The sports gear, trainer’s baseball cap, hoodies associated with what are colloquially referred to as ‘scallies’ in Britain, might be thought of as ‘hoodlums’ by Americans. Taking on their traits was simply me marketing myself to the best of my ability to satisfy my consumer base. The British and Americans, who were the backbone of my business wanted a very definite type: good looking, masculine, young, working-class men.

Baseball cap wearing inner-city youth, are massively eroticised in gay culture. There are thousands of pornographic films with titles such as Scally Boy Gang Bang or Hung in Hoodies III available on the internet. I was tapping into that market, and it paid off. People were buying into a product that fulfilled their fantasies.

We developed back stories to support our acquired hypermasculine appearance. I could choose from a dozen imagined scenarios, usually built around some variation of being straight but desperately in need of cash, which the customers ate up. A good scenario could reduce the time of the ‘massage’ considerably, the customer often becoming overwhelmed by the excitement.

We were the equivalent of a gourmet hot dog. Street enough to make the men feel as if they were buying into the ghetto fantasy, but without the risk of developing salmonella. That was the secret; they were just as safe as we were. We took good care of them, unlike the real deal scally rent boys of Manchester who might empty their wallet while they were distracted, or who might get aggressive. That was not going to happen at La Casa, where we were high-end top quality, tame scallies, rather than the more dangerous free-range ‘kosher’ verity. The hotdog without the pathogens.

And this role-playing played a vital role in lessening some of the inevitable psychological damage. It provided us with a bulwark against the reality of our lives. Against the work and the trauma. Dissociative behaviour is most notoriously understood as the cause of multiple personality disorder, as famously parodied in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho by the knife wielding Norman Bates in the guise of his dead mother. In sex-work it is more subtle. Sometimes it presented in extravagantly fantasist behaviour, like Patrick spinning tales as a child. He wasn’t unusual, many of us lied without a second thought. Not only to the customers when telling them what they wanted to hear sexually, but we would also fabricate aspects of our lives so as to hold something back of ourselves. I didn’t want customers knowing everything about me. They had physical access to my body, but my mind was a different thing altogether. Lying, consequently, played an important role in keeping myself psychologically healthy, the problem being that these personas could take on a life of their own, running over into your real life and defining how other people considered you to be. When you were in the sex-worker bubble, you tended not to have the opportunity to switch off. You lived, slept, socialised and worked in a very small area, so it was easier sometimes just to stay in character. The risk is, that you inevitably lose yourself to a greater or lesser degree, when you live a lie over an extended period of time.

Fem’s – effeminates, girly boys – didn’t do well in La Casa, with a few exceptions: those between the ages eighteen and nineteen did okay as youth always sold. Skinny, girly, pan-Asian men had their aficionados. And Madonna, she was so beautiful that I saw straight men look at her twice in the street. I was never quite certain to who Madonna appealed; she was a boy certainly, male at a chromosomal level, but radiated soft pink gorgeous femininity, not unlike Marilyn Monroe. She was intoxicating, and I imagine men who considered themselves not at all interested in men, or the feminine type of man, found themselves drawn to her charms, her gilded creamy white and pink abundance.

Most fem’s aged out of it quickly or moved into transvestite prostitution, which was tough and dangerous, with always the inherent risk of violence when you performed as a woman or were transgender. I’m certain some of the transvestite prostitutes of the Trebor started out as male sex-workers who couldn’t cut the mustard as men. If you were camp and twenty-eight you were not going to do well, so most men toned it down and upped the butch. Once they were off shift, many of the great muscular hunks who worked beside me relaxed into quite feminine men. It was an act after all.

I groomed myself to correspond to the masculine type. I kept my hair in a short back and sides, gelled forwards in the fashionable wet look. I was always clean shaven. I spent a lot of money on the best quality shaving products, so my naturally sensitive skin didn’t suffer from the rigours of the close shave I took every morning. My complexion has been amazingly clear throughout my life, and probably answered for some of my appeal. Body hair, by which I mean hair on the chest, wasn’t an issue at that time, but had it been I would have shaved it off as the other boys did. All other body hair was neatly trimmed.

Just entering now is Louis, another English guy, who is very handsome. He came from Norfolk in the east of England, and is tall, athletic, with short jet-black hair, very tightly curled, and flawless white skin. Louis was an odd one. Something about him suggests he is cut from slightly better cloth than us. He is friendly and we speak a lot, but he never socialises like the other English lads, always taking the train back to Norfolk the same night. He tells me he is using his money to refurbish his house in Norwich. Sometimes you take such claims as this with a pinch of salt, but I believe Louis – there is an integrity about him. His clothing is always in a terrible condition; clean, but falling to bits. The jeans he is wearing now are torn, and the T-shirt paint spattered, and sporting more than one hole. Why he has chosen this lifestyle as a means of earning his money is mystery, I suppose that’s one of the great unanswered questions, why some men get involved in sex-work and some don’t.

Pedro is flamboyant, beautiful of face, oiled black hair, with a lightly muscled body, the type that comes from hard work rather than the gym. Unlike Louis he takes meticulous care of his dress. Today he wears tight white jeans, a fitted black T-shirt and black leather boots that are massively oversized, with huge chunky treads. They have been partially encased in metal, the shiny plating being riveted into place with ornate stud-work. Apparently, this being 1999, they are the pinnacle of fashion in Rio de Janeiro. For me, they are an object of fascination, transforming the wearer into a type of cyborg from the ankles downwards, and making him unnaturally tall, which is especially hilarious in the low-ceilinged basement of La Casa.

There is a stressed quality to Pedro. He is Brazilian, working in Britain illegally, and needs the money he is earning to survive. He parties a lot and has a high drug intake. He spends weekends in the nightclubs and saunas of the West End. The Brazilians use a lot of ‘special K’ or Ketamine, a horse tranquiliser that is beginning to supersede speed and ecstasy as the party drug of choice. The drug has an extremely peculiar effect, it is a downer, making the user feel completely disembodied from their surroundings. If you take too much, which is almost inevitable, you enter the ‘K-hole’, a lengthy period of introspective, internalised, hallucinating, where time doesn’t correspond with the real passing of time, so that you feel as if you have been gone for days, when in fact only an hour or so has passed. I don’t like the effect at all, and the hangover from it is horrific, making you look like the walking dead, with black hollowed-out eyes twitching left and right, and dead white skin. You can tell at a glance who has used it the night before, simply by how ghastly they look. Anyway, I think much of Pedro’s frenetic pace of life is down to uncertainty, every weekend partying like it’s his last night on earth.

They had a high turnover of Brazilian guys, who moved on as they got their papers and found legal employment, or they eventually returned home. One thing I clearly remember is how often they would report each other to immigration as a means of revenge, asking me to read out the correspondence from the Home Office. As a result, immigration officials raided La Casa more than once, and as Maxwell kept them busy for as long as possible, the Brazilians, and others working without papers, squeezed out of the small rear window and fled into the neighbouring back gardens, over the walls, and away from immediate deportation.

The nationality of most male prostitutes working at La Casa was Brazilian, sometimes nineteen of the other men on a shift of twenty. There were so many that they have blurred into one and, other than Pedro, I find it hard to recall any. They hung out together, rather than with the English boys. They had a shared language and culture and were a long way from home, so that was understandable. There was tension between us. Being the only non-Portuguese speaker in the room, day after day, took its toll, and there could be a lot of friction after a long day.

Chapter 17

The doorbell rings. Madonna yells, her accent strong, “Action girls… it’s time for our close up!”. The first client of the day has arrived.

What happens next is quite a complex ritual – almost a ballet. First all the working guys who are dotted around the drawing room watching TV, or in the kitchen, move quickly into our designated space at the rear of the house. The door whore shuts the glass panelled door cutting us off from the rest of the house. We all gather into the area in front of the door, pushing ourselves into the places we think will show our beauty to its best advantage. We all believe that some corner favours us more, therefore improving our chances of working, and are often quite superstitious about getting to our spot, which involves a certain amount of elbowing.

This is when the magic begins. Coming down the hall we can hear Maxwell moving closer, chatting pleasantries, his flipflops clippity-clopping on the floor. He firmly pushes the door shut, with an audible click. The door is carefully sound proofed for the benefit of the client, so that he and Maxwell can discuss everything discreetly.

There is a click and the room is suddenly brightly lit. The glass door in front of us, which initially looked like smoked glass, becomes an impenetrable mirror, through which we can see nothing other than our selves reflected back. In the darkness of the hallway, however, the customer can see each of us clearly under the bright spot-lights. We pull in our stomachs, pout our lips, predicating the duck face of the ubiquitous selfie by decades, as we try to make ourselves irresistible. A few moments pass. There is a sharp tap on the window, and the lights go out.

Everyone deflates and a feeling of anxiety enters the room. Who is going to be the first room of the day? Being the first is almost talismanic, for it means you can relax – anything else will be gravy. Once you have that first client out of the way, everything will be all right. The anxiety is always that you won’t work that day. Being picked gets rid of that quickly, meaning the day passes better.

Maxwell opens the door, “Adam, room one, condoms are in the cupboard.” I am new so I’ve been cleaning up. Everyone rolls their eyes, maybe hoping that another customer will come while I am safely out of the way.

Being the new boy in a brothel was a mixed blessing. If you were young and attractive, those first few months would be the best you ever had, you could make thousands. But being a new boy was trouble for everyone else. When you led the house as top dog, someone else suddenly lost their position at the top of the pecking order. Whoever had been cleaning up before you, was going to lose a share of their custom. The most popular boy was always the newest and that naturally caused a lot of resentment. Although I had a good long spell as a top worker, eventually I myself felt that resentment as I matured and the customers chose me less. It was tough, and you couldn’t rest on your laurels for long.

The days passed, punctuated by a series of doorbells. La Casa was very busy at this time. It was the place in Britain to go to buy your boy meat. The weekends and evenings were often packed, with customers queuing for their turn. That might strike you as odd, that a brothel could be fashionable, but every consumer product in life, and prostitutes can be regarded as one such consumer product, will cater to the needs of the market. And the market at that time wanted an exclusive package for those who wanted to pay for sex. La Casa had the market cornered and raked in the cash. We all benefited but, obviously, La Casa took the lion’s share.

Men would clatter up and down the stairs all day and throughout the evening well late into the night. I often wonder what the well-heeled residents of Levy Street thought was happening. There was a cadence to it: the ring of the bell, the hushed chat, the click of the light, the call of the name. The boy would return, towel around waist. Seeing the door of the bathroom door closed and occupied, pulling a face Madonna would ask, “How long has that bitch been in the shower?”

When I’d return after my customer, the day’s shift would be filled, by a mixed group of men aged from eighteen to veterans who were well into their late thirties. There were many nationalities represented at La Casa: British, South African, Australian, Polish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, some from the US, Thailand, Korea, Malaysia; however most, sometimes all, were Brazilian.

The boys of La Casa sat around gossiping, some reading books or flicking through magazines. MTV was often on television, and they continually played Madonna’s song Frozen from her ground-breaking Ray of Light album, released the previous year. The boys, bored, changed the lyric to, “Your frozen, when your legs won’t open!” which they sang shrilly every time it came on.

I hated MTV, which made me feel as if I were trapped in a hook. The same songs regurgitated endlessly in a stream that went around and around, day after day. It always seemed to be Madonna or the girl group TLC, or Whitney Huston. I cannot to this day listen to her song It’s Not Right But It’s Okay without being taken straight back to that time.

Whitney’s vicissitudes, her drug use and lifestyle were the obsession of many of the boys. You could overhear gossip about her in three or four different languages. She was everywhere in 1999, the newspapers, television and in the hugely popular tabloid magazines. Sometimes it made me want to scream out loud. Eventually it would get too much for someone more assertive than myself, usually Danny, who would yell, “Turn that fucking telly over now or I’m warning you, I’m gonna put my foot through it!” He would get his way till he was chosen, then MTV was switched back on and the cycle started once more.

Who were the men who frequented the services offered at La Casa? Most of them were not poor. The cost was not prohibitive but still largely drew in white, middle-aged, suited types. Many worked in the city. It certainly wasn’t the same mixed bag of blue-collar workers, those with money slumming it, or the creeps and weirdo’s who had bought sex from the rough and ready rent boys of Chorlton Street. This place was way out of that league, and most of the dubiously legitimate escort agencies too. It was a high-class establishment and attracted those who wanted a quality experience.

It also drew in tourists, usually American, with fewer from European countries. American customers were very desirable. While the British might tip you handsomely, you couldn’t take it for granted that you would get anything, even from the wealthier ones. It was very hit and miss, and even the regular tippers were not consistent.

The Americans, however, with very few exceptions, always tipped generously. Sometimes as much as two or three hundred pounds. And if one took a shine to you, you raked the cash in. And they were nearly always well behaved, clean and courteous. I think Americans have a better developed culture of treating service staff well – waiters, bar staff, cleaners, who they also often tip generously – and this translated into their treatment of us. That wasn’t always the case with British customers, who could be very rude and demanding.

There were, of course, those who were outside of that type. I recall a young Austrian pianist who paid to see me overnight and took me for dinner. He was sensitive, attractive, and seemed more interested in my company than anything else.

Loneliness brought many men down the steps into La Casa, those for whom the sex would be secondary to the conversation. We might finish after ten minutes and then spend the next fifty in conversation till Alberto knocked on the door to inform us our hour was over.

Some would talk about their wives, children or boyfriends. Some discussed relationship, work or financial woes. It could take on the air of confessor and confessant, with the men believing – correctly of course – that what they told us would never ever leave those four walls. Who would we tell? It was an important part of the service, that ability to listen, to talk, to soothe them, and they would leave feeling emotionally and physically satisfied.

Others came for more practical reasons. Bill was a regular of mine. He had cerebral palsy and would come to La Casa or I would visit him in his Southampton flat. His disability meant he could not meet anyone and was very lonely as a result. I often think about this intelligent man who would ask serious questions about my life and who, unusually, I often answered honestly.

While the sex was important to him, he craved physical contact just like anyone else, but the companionship was his main motivation. I saw him for years, all through the time I was at La Casa. I got to know how to support him around the room, help him into the shower, and back up the stairs afterwards.

I was fond of Bill. I recognised his need and that he was a good person dealt a poor hand, so if I could help him feel better, why not? It made us both feel human, and Bill was an angel in some ways: he made me feel as if there was worth in all the sordidness, that my choices were, at least, benefiting someone who really needed that interaction.

There were lots of people like Bill, normal nice people, who hadn’t any means of satisfying their need for normal human contact. I dislike categorising all those who pay for sex as somehow predatory or deviant; they are drawn from as wide a pool as any other group of humanity.

That being said, there were less pleasant people who visited La Casa, those who only saw the youngest guys and would ask me, “Are you really eighteen Adam, or are you younger? You look much younger… You can tell me.”

We were all over eighteen, because Alberto was evangelical about checking people’s ages. I hated going along with their perverted requests, hated this type of sick role-play.

Then there was an elderly priest, who would enter wearing his dog collar. He’d carefully remove his religious paraphernalia from his pockets, placing rosary, bible, pen on the table next to the bed in a neat row. I have no idea why, but every time he visited he did that same thing – before requesting to be whipped with the leather ‘spider’.

The spider looked like the dolly mop that I remember older people using to clean pots and bottles when I was young except, rather than a bare wooden handle, it was leather and, instead of string or fabric, its head was a mass of strips of leather each with a tiny metal stud in the end. As I beat him senseless it crossed my mind as ironic that some people meeting us in the street and learning our respective professions, would have said I was the shameless one.

Chapter 18

The approach Mitchell and I took to our relationship with clients differed vastly. As long as men treated me with respect, and professionalism, we were fine. I didn’t dislike them. I fully understood the reasons why they visited prostitutes – loneliness, sexual desire, fantasy fulfilment – there were many reasons.

Some spoke to me about their difficulties and I listened with absolute sympathy, for I understood pain and wasn’t hard hearted, but It was still work, and once the time was up, the session ended. I had no interested in them otherwise and if they wanted to talk further they could pay for another hour, just as they would with a therapist.

I consciously kept my boundaries high, and the mixture of intimacy and apparent interest often made it hard for them to understand that our relationship was strictly professional. If I met a punter outside of La Casa, in one of the gay bars of Earl’s Court I frequented, which was not such an unusual thing, I would politely decline if they offered to buy me a drink or instigate a conversation, “No thanks, I’m not working at the moment.” Most took that with good grace and left it. If they didn’t, I repeated it with increasing firmness till, finally, they got the point.

With only a couple of exceptions, I kept business within the walls of La Casa. I didn’t want to extend the experience, and there was a cut-off point in the day for me. Most of the time I couldn’t even stand anyone being in my room. I recognise that I’m a pretty antisocial person and I rarely brought anyone back; never punters and only rarely a lover or one-night stand. The only person I could handle living with was Mitchell, and then only just, as we shared a room at the Trebor from time to time.

One of those few exceptions was Andrew, who I had met on the day of my interview. Andrew was a member of a famous banking family from the east of England. Over the years I got to know him well, and for a time we had an agreement. I would only see him, and he maintained me well enough to pay whatever bills the Trebor generated and to let me live comfortably at leisure.

This suited both of us, as it allowed me a rest and reduced his expenditure on me through La Casa. He had been booking me for days at a time and the cost was prohibitive. Andrew would inform me with a rueful smile that I was ‘more expensive than keeping a racehorse’. Naturally, without the house taking their fifty percent, I also benefited financially. I could charge him more than I had previously been receiving, while he still paid less. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Andrew was an alcoholic in sobriety. A terribly bored and lonely old man who did voluntary work at various places around Chelsea to keep himself occupied. He was still deep in grief for his lover, a famous theatrical agent lost to AIDS at the height of the epidemic, years earlier.

He lived alone in a huge Queen Anne style house, four storeys high, overlooking a beautiful private garden off Sloane Street. Mitchell had once scared me shitless, as I sat quietly reading beneath a magnolia tree, when he fell out of one of the manicured bushes after climbing the wrought-iron railings whilst steaming drunk. A blue plaque attached to one of the houses nearby stated it had once been the home of one of George III’s many profligate sons’ mistresses. It didn’t go unnoticed by myself that her status and my own bore some comparison.

We shared delicious lunches – prepared by Octavio, the Spanish houseman, who lived in a small room off Andrew’s basement kitchen – often utilizing beautiful Georgian silver inherited from an ancestor who was ambassador to the Russian Imperial Court, while sitting in the first floor drawing room on Empire furniture, reputed to have originated in the Château de Malmaison, home of the Empress Josephine, Napoleon’s long suffering first wife. I spent hours entranced by his collection of Indian Mughal art and his superb John Piper paintings.

I loved art. I would then, and still do now, seek out the local art gallery in any new town. I spent a lot of time in the small but exquisite Wallace Collection on the coincidentally named Manchester Square. One painting in particular caught my eye: Louis Féron’s The Temptation of St Hilarion. The work depicts the eponymous saint as a dour hermit who desperately attempts to resist the voluptuous charms of a curvaceous brunette who is tormenting him. Food, wine, gold and other rich earthly delights surround him.

St Jerome wrote of St Hilarion that “Satan had tickled his senses…”, which I found hilarious. Satan had certainly tickled mine. I was giving into all my earthly desires. And why not? I didn’t think it would ever end. I thought I would be young forever. I didn’t think, at that time, that one day there would be a reckoning – a bill to pay.

Swept up in Andrew’s money, and by the luxury, I denied myself nothing. He would take me shopping in Harrods, just a short walk away in Knightsbridge, let me purchase books on his account at John Sandoe’s on Blacklands Terrace. I enjoyed trashy tabloid biography, and he often recommended what he thought I should be reading instead, such as Lady Antonia Fraser or Nancy Mitford, guessing correctly that I would learn something while not being intimidated by their writing style.

We would dine at Scott’s, the lovely fish restaurant in Mayfair. I was a long way from the pie and chips and bag ladies of the steamy old café in Chorlton Street. God only knows what the good customers of that august establishment made of me, looking about twelve, and octogenarian Andrew. Andrew would often turn up in his gym clothing, which was no problem for me but mortifying for the waiters and other lackies. He was so insulated by his great wealth that no one dared bat an eyelid.

I recall once seeing, standing outside Scott’s, a famous television presenter. He was screaming at a frightened-looking woman, his face pushed right up against hers in a way that was reminiscent of my father and at odds with his seemingly easy-going TV persona. I cannot remember if seeing this triggered anything at the time, I suspect it did as it is an unusually clear memory for me.

It was a different world from what I had known, and I enjoyed it for the time it lasted. Andrew’s geriatric fumblings were enough to pay for my room at the Trebor and I didn’t work during the time of our agreement. It allowed me some rest, something I desperately needed from time to time. Unfortunately, my growing hedonism and his sobriety were at odds. We would argue about my drinking, and so we went our separate ways.

Mitchell was entirely different. He fostered friendships with punters from long before our days a La Casa. It wasn’t unusual to find a couple sitting, in his tiny flat in Manchester, either side of Ellen having a cuppa or a vodka coke.

He was ‘friends’ with one guy, Steve, for years. Steve had been in the army, then became head chef and caterer in one of the big hotels in Manchester. Now retired, he lived in a small flat in Salford. Even though it was very relaxed and informal, Mitchell’s friendship still came at a price. I suppose his formula of the long game was more successful, often paying more dividends than my shift work. I had breaks; a hiatus might last a year sometimes, until poverty drove me back down to London. Mitchell never stopped; he was committed to the game, and there was always a man somewhere on the slow rinse.

The slow rinse was how Mitchell, consciously or unconsciously – I was never certain as to the level of intention – systematically cleaned out the guys he was involved with.

Consider it like this: a one-off encounter would feed you for the day. A man on the rinse would not only feed you, he would pay your rent, provide your transport, put food in your cupboards, buy your clothing, pay for your booze and drugs and put spending money in your account.

Because it was gradual, they didn’t feel as if they were being robbed when they were told that, “My mam’s been burgled – I had to give her my wages. You couldn’t pay my rent and council tax this month?”, all said with his limpid brown eyes focused on them, promising fleshy gratitude later. I imagine few realised what was happening until it was too late. And Mitchell was nice at first. They felt they were helping him, providing him with what he needed.

Steve was drained of everything, his life savings, probably tens of thousands before he died. Eventually he lost his flat.

Mitchell was ruthless when it came to money. But guys loved him and they wanted to be around him. He was sociable, chatty, intelligent, and had grown quite disarmingly handsome. He was by far the better looking of us two and made friends much more easily than I did, and that translated in his relationships with punters.

The thing they didn’t know was that he had an almost pathological hatred of them. I knew this because I was so often with him when they left, when his demeanour altered dramatically. “Is there any fucking whiskey in that kitchen?” he’d ask, shaking with pent up rage after spending an extended period in the company of one of his blokes. I would pour him a large Jameson’s and coke, and it would take a while for him to come down. Then he would be completely morose, his face white and pinched, until the spirits started to work their magic. “Fucking bastards…” he would mutter darkly into his glass, looking at his feet, the drink shaking in his hands.

I think he was the better actor of the two of us, much more convincing, even though I could lay it on. He really despised some of them and kept it so well hidden that they didn’t have a clue till he went on the turn. All that seeming fascinated by the men’s conversation, smiling coyly and submitting to their sexual demands. And not just for an hour or two, like me; his performances were sometimes all-day everyday matinées. He was living with them, socialising with them for weeks or months at a time. It was inevitable that something was going to give eventually.

‘Going on the turn’ was a phrase you associated with Mitchell. You were never sure when it would happen, usually when he was plastered; it would all come flooding out and his rages were something to behold. Fists, furniture and anything else went flying. Having been the focus of his temper myself once or twice, it really was terrifying when he lost it. I usually scarpered sharpish at the first signs.

Surprisingly, his punters were not put off. I suspect some of the men derived some type of masochistic pleasure from it. I saw more than one of his ‘friends’ with black eyes. Whatever he was suppling in the bedroom drew them back like a moth to a flame, again and again.

For me Mitchell’s relationships were a source of friction between us. I was never happy when he would turn up to the pub with some old geezer in tow and I didn’t like the intrusion into what I considered my private life. I was usually only mollified when he’d tell me that whoever it was would be picking up the bar tab.

Chapter 19

A few weeks after I arrived in London, Mitchell joined me. He was looking tanned and well, having just left his job as a Club 18 – 30 holiday rep in Spain. There had been an altercation with his supervisor over whether they had seen him adding a tot of something alcoholic to his morning coffee. Not being swayed by Mitchell’s pleas of outraged innocence, the supervisor suggested that a sniff of Mitchell’s breath might solve the mystery. This didn’t go down well at all.

Hearing police sirens in the distance, Mitchell grabbed his belongings and took the first flight back to Britain and, feeling it was probably better to lay low for a while, he flew directly into Heathrow and jumped on the tube to Earl’s Court.

Having already settled into the room down the hall from me at the Trebor, he knocked on my door, and threw himself on the small bed. “So, what’s the malarkey with this La Casa then?” he asked. He wanted to know what to expect, how much he kept from the room fee, what the other guys were like, did he know anyone. La Casa was neither the streets of Manchester nor the Let’s Go. It was a very different set up and I wasn’t sure it would suit him. If Mitchell didn’t like a place, he didn’t hang around; only time would tell. I told him Patrick was there, and it took him a moment to remember who I was talking about. I warned him about the Lithuanian menace, in the hope he wouldn’t punch one on the first day, and I tried to drill into him the importance of not upsetting the door whore if he wanted to work. I told him, without much hope, not to drink on shift. He pulled a face, but told me he would try to behave.

Thankfully Mitchell settled into life at La Casa with no problems. The pair of us thrived. That first week all we did was work. We each worked a double shift, 11.30am till closing after 2am – we didn’t stop. We both had only a few changes of clothes and I had spent most of my savings on the room. We needed ready cash.

The clients came thick and fast, as many as we could manage. Every time the light flashed on Alberto would shout “Adam, room two!” or “Mitchell, room three”. They were literally queuing for us, one after the other. Everything went into the bank, and we were being tipped handsomely too. Now we had money we relaxed a little and rewarded ourselves with a few days off.

That night we dined at Balans, the local gay café bar. Mitchell looked handsome wearing his casual uniform of shirt and jeans, the arms of his shirt rolled up to his elbows, two buttons undone. I was starting to fill out slightly from the better diet. Having rested, my skin had taken back its sheen of health. I looked boyish and natural; my eyes shone green, my toned arms visible, the sun catching the golden down that lightly covered them. I have a sketch of me at this time that shows me sitting languidly, my head thrown arrogantly back, emphasising my jawline and muscular neck. The tight vest I wear outlines my short muscular body.

As we ate our salads and polished off a bottle of chilled white wine. Some dining with us would have taken us for simply two good-looking young men about town. Others, locals, who knew the demi-monde of Earl’s Court, saw us for exactly what we were, two expensive prostitutes. Some looked at us with close to a shudder, disgust in their eyes. Had it been a less formal environment some might have attempted small talk and perhaps tried to arrange an assignation. We didn’t care, we were shameless, absolutely without shame. I have no recollection of considering the future at this time, no sense of uncertainty that this was ever going to end, that this was fleeting.

As the months passed and our popularity grew, it wasn’t unusual for our bill to be taken care of by some admiring older gentleman, or a bottle of Champagne to be sent to our table. Cocaine was freely available. Due to our contacts at La Casa we often found ourselves on the guestlists of smart dance clubs in the West End. We were photographed by the gay press in the clubs and pubs, our image circulating throughout the capital. We lay back and let the power roll over us in waves. We were in our ascendency: we were the most popular boys at the choicest brothel, in the most fashionable city in the world. We had thousands in the bank, nothing or no one could touch us, and we revelled in it. We thought it would never end.

Those first two years were, financially, the best I would ever have. I was a money-making machine. I worked as much or as little as I wanted, I had a lover, Jacob, a tall handsome Afrikaans lad of my own age. It was a zero-commitment relationship, and we made a striking couple. At that time, I would have claimed to be deeply in love with Jacob, that ‘he was the one’ and that no other man had meant so much to me. Truth be told I didn’t know what love was. I simply didn’t have a clue, and whatever I was feeling wasn’t the hyper-anxiety, obsessive ‘need to be with, at all cost’, that I imagined love to be. Men fulfilled a need for me like most other things, but I don’t think love came into it. Something inside was broken, a vital cog in the clockwork of my psyche that allowed such normal emotions as love to generate. I could act a facsimile of love, drawn from films, books and my observations of other people, but it was the love of the automaton, a skilled actor who specialises in a single role and, no matter how well acted, eventually the other person would catch on and that would be the death knell for the relationship. Eventually I cottoned on to my own emotional deficiencies and would sabotage ‘the romance’ as the first cracks appeared, saving my ego from the inevitable battering it took every time I was found out.

Chapter 20

After the 6pm shift ended, the money was doled out, “forty-five”, “forty-five”, “forty-five”, for as many times as we had worked. It was always counted out by Alberto in that staccato fashion to make sure there was no confusion, no claims of underpayment. We would then head up Levy Street, turning right onto Warwick Road, past the Warwick pub; a group of us, usually me Mitchell, Danny, and Patrick the Lithuanian Menace, with whatever British boys had been on shift, would head over the road to the Coleherne Arms for the 7pm Happy Hour. The Coleherne was our space, somewhere we could wind down from the stresses of La Casa. Here we would let our hair down, get smashed, and spend our money.

The Coleherne had been gay for as long as anyone could remember. Some of the older patrons remembered the drag shows hosted on Sunday afternoons after lunch had been served, in the decades after WWII ended. It was a well-established gay bar and usually buzzing. Since the 1970s the bar had attracted men from the leather scene and, although much depleted in the late 1990s by the AIDS epidemic, they were still a visible presence. At weekends you got a sense of what the place had been like in its heyday, with fully leather-clad bikers, and harnessed subs, vying for attention with the check shirts and leather chaps, and booted daddies. Many of these men worked in the city during the week, as stockbrokers, or investment bankers. While their dress and demeanour looked masculine and aggressive, their gossip reflected their affluent middle-class background.

Eavesdropping on a huddled group of apparently virile masculinity, looking as if they had just spent the day toiling in a lumber yard or working the roads, one might overhear some very unlikely conversations: “We had Lawrence’s mother over the weekend at the apartment in San Gimignano,” says one hirsute man’s man, rugby shirted and wearing scruffy denim jeans, to a guy donning a builder’s protective hat, check shirt and tan boots. “She behaved appallingly as usual. I don’t know how he copes. She started on the bianco vergine before lunch, and by the time we had the digestivo she was so drunk she could barely walk… we practically had to carry her home…” The man coos in apparent sympathy, but his eyes are alive with malicious glee and mischief. He ‘simply lives’ for these vicious titbits and can’t wait to pass on the news of Roscoe and Lawrence’s disastrous Tuscan vacation.

There was also a strong presence of London’s working-class gay community in the Coleherne, many of whom were living in flats or studios around Earl’s Court, and who spoke in the accents of Ireland and Scotland, or the dialects of northern England, although there were London accents too: Cockneys and those from south of the river. They were drawn to the area by relatively cheap rents in the subdivided houses in the area in the 1960’s, and relative nearness of low-skilled service jobs, such as bar work in the West End and wealthier districts close by. AIDS had a catastrophic impact on this community, even more so than in wealthier ones where there were more practical options, and where the men could afford to return home to their families. The poor community relied on each other for support, and on whatever services were available.

The men left when I arrived were the remnants of a bigger community, still traumatised by the prevalence of death. And while the epidemic had slowed, it hadn’t ended yet and there was still a certain frenetic energy among them. They partied as if it might be their last night on earth, with a high intake of drugs and alcohol.

Many of these survivors were on high-end Disability Living Allowance, which allowed them the funds required for that lifestyle. DLA or benefits, who had got what, how to claim something else or how to appeal an unfair decision were often the main topics of conversation as they sat in the dark recesses of the pub, smoking weed in booths around the pool table. I socialised with these men a lot; although they were older, they passed no judgement. Some had unquestionably worked as rent themselves in their younger days. Others just understood that we were a fact of life in the city, and that sex-work and Earl’s Court went hand in hand. Anyway, they had bigger fish to fry than us. We came and went with the seasons. Some might remain for a few years, but most were only passing through and therefore we were of only passing interest.

I was friends with one of the managers of the Coleherne, a short stocky Australian guy. Alongside its louche reputation for prostitution and homosexuality, Earl’s Court was also synonymous with Australian backpackers, who came in droves from the 1960s onwards and often stayed. Mike was one such antipodean, having settled here a few years earlier. We became lovers, in a disorganised fashion. One afternoon he took me to one side and asked me, with some sincerity, if I wanted to quit Earl’s Court and move to Australia with him where he would pay my flight and take care of me financially. I declined, having been burned one too many times to risk trusting myself to men in this fashion. I didn’t think anything else of it until about a week later, arriving at the pub as usual and finding it closed. Curious I went over the road and upstairs to the Warwick and was told that Mike, along with, the Coleherne’s takings from that month were nowhere to be seen. It appeared he had been helping himself to the pub’s finances since day one, the full measure of his embezzlement only fully being uncovered after he had left. He had apparently returned to Australia and was now a wanted man. I had a lucky escape.

Before her ill-fated alliance with the House of Windsor, Lady Diana Spencer, had lived next door in the Coleherne Mansions. Moving into a large flat with some of her equally aristocratic ‘Sloan Ranger’ friends, it was rumoured that Diana visited the gay bars incognito with her coterie of high-profile gay friends. It seems unlikely that she would have popped next door for a pint and a bag of pork scratchings, unless as has been suggested by some, she donned her man drag first. The Coleherne was hostile towards women, it was a men’s bar, and the Warwick across the road was much more democratic anyway. Diana soon moved up the road to better digs at Kensington Palace, but remained a regular at the Earl’s Court gym, a place, incidentally, utilised by many of the body-focused boys of La Casa. Although she had died a couple of years before my arrival, the local shops still had yellowing pictures of the ‘People’s Princess’ taped inside their windows, and bars had framed photos of her. The hysteria of her tragic death, in 1997, hadn’t yet fully dissipated.

The Coleherne was a busy bar, packed most nights, and drew its custom from all over London, from all strata of society, so it’s unsurprising that the criminal world passed through its doors. Drugs were easily procured and ‘business deals’ took place among those involved in the black economies: illegal work for those claiming state benefits, the purchase and sale of merchandise of debatable origin, and the large-scale sale of under-the-counter cigarettes, thereby avoiding the high duty the British government put on them. Some guy would usually sidle up to me as I went in, “Adam you wanna buy twenty Marlboro Lights, £3.50 a pack? Or I got some Gauloises, £4?”. I had stopped smoking the lethally strong French cigarettes, as they were destroying my throat, but I’d buy four packs of Marlboro, two each for Mitchell and myself.

The lads of La Casa propped up the far-left end of the bar as you entered, at its narrowest point. The six of us would sit, looking shell-shocked. We were usually quiet for a while after finishing work. Madonna, always the first to speak at any given opportunity, would wave over the barman, “Double Vodka tonic for six… and hold the tonic!” cackling to herself at her joke as the shots were poured. We would throw back the first ‘freshener’, then order rounds for the period of the happy hour, taking advantage of the two for one deal. Within an hour or two we were well on our way to oblivion. Mitchell would be on the Jameson’s and coke, while I would drink pints of Stella with Danny, and somebody would have bought some ‘Charlie’. Usually we pitched in and bought a few grams of cocaine between us, popping into the toilets to snort the white powder through rolled-up £20 notes, with Danny, only half-jokingly, yelling, “Bring back that fucking twennie pound note Patrick, ya bleeding tea leaf!”. By ten o’clock the mood was usually festive and we’d cross the road over to the Warwick where the downstairs opened as a nightclub after eleven and we could dance until 2am. We were a wild bunch; vicious to outsiders. If someone offended us we would turn on them as a pack, our tongues being such effective weapons, honed to perfection in the cruel and competitive environment of La Casa, that there was no need to resort to physical violence.

Our conversation probably seemed shallow and vapid to outsiders. We didn’t go in for grand existential narratives but kept to very safe subjects: fashion, men, money, gossip, the nightclubs. That’s not to say there wasn’t an understanding that much was left unsaid. Occasionally you got a hint of exactly where we had come from or, more accurately, what we were running from. “Madonna,” I asked once, “why don’t you take your money (she saved her earnings religiously) and move back to Lithuania? With all that cash you could build a house and live like a queen.” Looking momentarily glum, she responded, “Are you crazy? There is nothing for me there, just a village with pigs… no work, no hope. We are like gypsies, no money, nothing. The men just drink all day.” It was hard to imagine this deluxe, flawlessly constructed, almost genderless, god-goddess, with her perfect skin and body, being the product of a squalid upbringing among the pigs in rural Lithuania. Yet here she was draped in Gucci, with a Rolex on her wrist and diamonds on her fingers, looking every inch the metropolitan courtesan she was.

We would get into long boozy all-day benders at the bar. Carrying on from the night before, we would sometimes be at the Coleherne for opening. Danny was a reflective drunk. “When I get enough fucking money, I’m getting out of the fucking job; it’s killing me. I have to sit all day with those twats in that fucking knocking shop, I hate the lot of them.” Implicit in that was that we Brits were excluded from his ire. It was the Brazilians, chatting all day in Portuguese, that really wound him up. I knew what he meant. Sitting in La Casa all day every day, being excluded from the conversation and unsure if you were actually the topic of conversation, added to the already high level of tension.

I remember when the when the Queen Mother passed away, in 2001, and the news flashed on the television. Some of the Brazilian guys, unaware of the veneration in which this elderly lady was held, were less than respectful. Quizzing us about what the fuss was over the death of a woman over a hundred years of age. When some of lads started sniggering and suggested the television should be turned back onto MTV, Danny blew a gasket. With tears in his eyes he drew himself up to his full, albeit not very tall, height and roared, “Have some fucking respect!”. Picking up one squealing culprit by his neck, he started shaking him. It took a lot of soothing to calm him down. Danny held the royal family in great reverence and woe betide those who forgot it.

Danny, like me, was poor inner-city English, from South London, and he was tough, sensitive and intelligent. “What you been up to, Princess?”, he often gently interrogated me about where I wandered on my long days off in London. It passed the time. “I walked over to Highgate Cemetery from Camden yesterday, and visited the grave of Marx… It was a long walk, but the views over London were stunning.” He was always curious and quizzed me or added snippets he knew. He’d get morose as he drank. Not angry like Mitchell, but it ate him up to think about what he was. Most of us cultivated an ability to kid ourselves about the reality of being a prostitute. Spencer dwelt on it, brooding, “How am I gonna get out of the fucking mess…? What’s going to happen to me?” Danny’s parents were drug addicts and he was raised in foster homes around the capital. I would listen with sympathy and try to soothe his nerves, although not often with success. Reading between the lines, I got a sense that he had been badly neglected and therefore his anxiety and insecurity weren’t unfounded. He had had periods of employment, “kosher jobs” he called them, in construction or working as a parcel delivery man in the city.

The physical nature of his employment had given him a muscular build, and someone he knew from the clubs – Danny was clearly gay for all his muscles and working-class demeanour – told him how he could make fast money, no questions asked. He wasn’t interested initially but, on losing his job, he called his friend and that was his introduction into prostitution. That was two years previously. We were lovers for a while, nothing intense. Neither of us was really capable of anything physical, usually just falling asleep. The wanted human contact acted as a salve to our bruised psyches. Like all things in our lives, it was complicated by the job, and Danny had an older ‘patron’ he lived with in one of the mansion flats nearby, so nothing was ever going to develop further. Years later I heard he had got out of the business, eventually marrying his ‘patron’ and becoming the manager of a restaurant. Then, tragically, his demons overtook him, he became seriously mentally ill, and killed himself.

I loved it at the Coleherne. There was great familiarity between us all there and rarely any of the usual tensions you get in city pubs. Me and Mitchell treated it like a second home for a long time. Birthdays, deaths, relationships – both ending and beginning – were all celebrated in that venerable old pub. About ten years after I first started drinking there, the Coleherne came under new management who swept everything away, turning it into just another expensive gastropub, and removing what was a valuable community hub for so many who had suffered so much in the area. To my great sadness on returning one year, and in one final act of whitewashing of what had been, I found they had changed its name.

Chapter 21

I was now travelling back and forth between London and Amsterdam. I worked in the brothels of Germany for a time. Those were dreadful places where you were locked in, twenty-four hours a day, full of boys who were robbing each other. Those grim places were worse than the streets, at least the streets had escape routes. You were forced to sit at the bar clipping, which meant selling ‘cocktails’ and what purported to be Champagne at massively inflated prices for a small commission. I left Germany quickly, returning to safer and more familiar stomping grounds in London and Amsterdam.

The years flew, and I would spend more and more time in Manchester. I was winding down. There is an old saying about prostitutes, two great years, two okay years and two shit years. That really sums up my experience of professional sex-work. However, I stretched it out much longer than the norm.

Aged around twenty-five, I made my first real attempt to settle down. I had a flat in Manchester, work had slowed down and my heart wasn’t in it anymore. The money wasn’t enough to justify what I was feeling. I was beginning to feel disgusted with myself, with my world and life. I would do a couple of customers a day then refuse to stand up when the light went on. This was probably the last time I could still have reasonably extricated myself from that lifestyle and remade a life for myself. It wasn’t to be.

The flat was a disaster. I couldn’t cope. I didn’t know how to pay bills or clean and decorate. I struggled with the simplest household management. Half of the charm of living in a hotel room was that everything was provided, I just paid the bill, and even the cleaning was done by magic.

Years later, on returning to education, I was diagnosed as being dyslexic and dyspraxic. These conditions both have a massive impact on your organisational skills so in retrospect, alongside my psychological state, it was unsurprising that I couldn’t manage. Although I tried valiantly for years to keep on top of it, my arrears grew so bad and the place got into such a squalid state that I abandoned it in the end. Just walked out and left it. If I’m honest it had never felt as much like home as the Trebor had anyway.

I continued to work intermittently for the next five years, but it was now largely out of need. I tried settling into civilian life, even having a job for a few years, but I struggled with the people, with the routine. I am ashamed to admit I stole from my employers. I didn’t know any better. Anyway, it was a disaster and I walked out of that too.

I ended up returning to London for short periods to get extra cash when life on the dole became too monotonous, that is when I couldn’t scam cash out of people any other way. I could still earn enough to make it worthwhile. I looked much younger than my thirty years, had kept myself trim and was still presentable although I hated it by now, hated everything about it. I despised the people and hated myself.

As the years passed, I lost one friend after another, people I knew from the early days and who I regarded as family. One year I came back and Patrick had vanished, the next year Danny had left. Mitchell eventually got sacked for turning up plastered and aggressive one too many times. Madonna moved into private escorting. In the end it was only me and Maxim; the sole survivors of those early days. And Maxim was mainly working on the door, his tall gaunt figure and long drawn-out vowels echoing through the house. I really missed them. They had made life bearable, even when it hadn’t been going well. Things were slowly going downhill, and I was entering the end game.

I had been up on a visit for a few months because the work hadn’t been brilliant. I was aged thirty-one, a veteran of seventeen years, and had been doing a client a day, just enough to survive on. Out of that I paid for a bed in the hostel, and got food and a few cans of beer.

I could no longer afford the weekly rates at the Trebor. I moved around the cheap hostels, where you could buy sleep in a shared room with three or four other men for less than fifteen pounds a night. There were some on Courtfield Square, opposite the tube station, but the cheapest were at the top of the Warwick Road, near the supermarket and based in tall dusty houses that faced straight onto the busy road. They were squalid places, swelteringly hot in summer, freezing in winter, filled with Australian backpackers, ten to fifteen per room in bunkbeds. But the less money I paid, the better, and they were cheap. I didn’t complain; it was a step up from the street, and I could get some rest and take a shower.

Suddenly, the custom stopped altogether. It didn’t trail off, it stopped dead. I had some savings, not much but enough to cover a week or so. A few days earlier I had seen Bill who had tipped me generously, more so than usual. I used that to pay a week in advance at the hostel I was living in. I had a very small amount of money left and was eking it out on the cheapest, most filling food I could afford. Eventually it ran out.

I ended up walking the streets at night without any place to sleep. I sometimes got a few fitful hours on a bench or in Victoria Coach station. I had no money and nowhere to go. In the morning I washed in the Earl’s Court library toilets, and sit there till La Casa opened. This was the worst time in my life. I was freezing cold, hungry and rapidly losing the will to live, thinking it might be easier to just end it all. I often sat on London Embankment weighing up whether to throw myself into the deep fast-flowing river and be done with it. I can still feel the wind that rolled in off the Thames in the early hours, so cold it burned your face, and how no matter how much you walked your feet never warmed up. I struggled to find water to drink, something we take for granted. I’m not ashamed to admit I stole food, and rifled bins.

One morning Maxwell met me at the door. He looked me up and down, pulling his face into a caricature of sympathy, “Awww, ain’t tings being going very well for you Adam?” It hits me straight away, I don’t know why it hadn’t dawned on me before, Maxwell was starving me out. Exactly as I had seen him do to others many times before. I don’t know what I’d done to upset him. Possibly nothing. He may have just been waiting for the right time to stick the knife in, waiting to see me in a vulnerable condition.

It would be pointless ever trying to work at La Casa again. He knew I knew, but I walked past him, showered and tried to muster up as much dignity as possible. What a difference from my first time here thirteen years ago. It wasn’t only me who had gone downhill, La Casa had. Its days of luxury were over. It was now just another rough West London knocking shop. A few years back Alberto had sold the upstairs and sliced the downstairs area into separate rooms, cutting the sizeable drawing room in half, and the furnishings now looked threadbare. The place was worn out, and so was I.

That was it. I knew my life in prostitution was over. This was not how I had imagined my final day, but here it was. In the fantasy world I had inhabited for so long, I had pictured retirement at the behest of some wealthy client, Andrew perhaps, and being given an allowance and a small apartment to live my final days in retired luxury. The truth was I was knackered, in a mess and unlikely to be going anywhere but downhill. I waited for Alberto to come in with the wages and asked if he would lend me my coach fare home. He didn’t hesitate, taking two twenty-pound notes, twice as much as I had asked. He smiled at me sadly, “Go home, carino, go home.”

I walked past Alberto waving goodbye. I saw Maxwell, his goldfish eyes rolling gleefully in the distance, and looking delighted. “How the mighty have fallen,” he seemed to mouth at me. I walked up the narrow staircase, up Levy Street and towards Earl’s Court station for the final time. I knew, as I walked away, that I wouldn’t be back; that I was walking out of that life for good.

In retrospect I realise how foolish I had been. That life was never going to be sustainable. The good years were short and I couldn’t have realistically worked for much longer. It was far too psychologically taxing. Sooner or later I would have had to quit. It was a massively damaging way to earn my living, and its cost was high. While other people were learning skills to help maintain them throughout their lives, I had been living in a fool’s paradise.

I now realised how none of it had provided me with any real-life skills other than a highly-developed survival mode. And that was half the problem: for seventeen years I had been tuned in to a type of behaviour predicated on heightened risk. My needs were always immediate. The immediate need for accommodation, for money or food. I needed drink and drugs to suppress the inevitable anxiety. To preserve myself right now, in a manner I could cope, was paramount, my only concern. I had made no plans at all for the future, there had been no escape route.

Chapter 22

As I sat on the coach to Manchester, pulling out of Victoria Station, I was terrified. I didn’t have a clue what to do, I was thirty-one, homeless, with little work experience outside of prostitution and a non-existent resumé. I didn’t know how to find work. I wasn’t sure even how to start looking. Ten years earlier I could have relied on support from Streetwise, to help me with the practicalities of leaving sex-work, but now there was nothing. I was on my own.

My immediate problem this time was finding somewhere to live. There was only one place I could think of to go. Mitchell, now living in his late Aunt Patricia’s three-bedroomed house would put me up for a while. I turned up at his door with nothing but the clothes on my back, and he welcomed me inside.

Long gone was the cat faeces and stench. Mitchell had made a comfortable home for himself. He put me in one of the small bedrooms and I was grateful for the roof over my head. For the first few weeks it was fine. I signed on at the unemployment office, got some money coming in and rested for a while.

But living with Mitchell was a nightmare. He had developed a serious drinking problem by now and his day revolved around staggering back and forth to the corner shops to buy cheap four-litre bottles of wickedly strong white cider, which he drank from a Champagne flute. He started drinking first thing in the morning and finished late at night. Surprisingly, considering his alcoholism, he had a man on the slow rinse, just like in the old days.

Phil allegedly did something in financial services, although I wasn’t convinced and I don’t think Mitchell believed him either. Mitchell wasn’t in a good way and probably didn’t have his full senses about him, because he was usually more circumspect. Phil lived with his mother, Yvonne, in a large bungalow not far from Mitchell’s home. I’m not sure where the money was coming from, but Phil kept Mitchell in the money that allowed him to drink all day.

He was living between his home and Phil’s house, meaning I occasionally got some space. I would go over to Phil’s with Mitchell, but not often as there was something ‘off’ about Phil’s mother. I’m not saying I didn’t like her, although an alcoholic she was nice enough. Rather, she seemed drugged; her manner was ‘off’. She would sit, eyes dilated, muttering to herself. And she looked sick. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something wrong about that whole set-up, something was setting off my survival sirens, and I didn’t want to be around any of them.

After I moved out, Mitchell called me late one night to say they had come home to find Yvonne dead. I went over to see him, concerned about his welfare. This would be traumatic for even a strong person and it was the second time a similar thing had happened. I was worried about the impact it would have on him.

He was blind drunk when he answered the door and although it was late he was wide awake so I stayed with him, talking all night. As dawn broke, he muttered something about “…not being able to stand seeing her looking like that”.

I attended her cremation, one of only half a dozen or so mourners. Mitchell wept all the way through the service, which was the first time I ever saw him cry, he hadn’t even cried at the burial of his beloved Aunt Patricia.

They massively over-catered for the wake. A sideboard was weighted down under a huge quantity of food, enough to feed dozens. Hams, quiches, piles of chicken legs and vats of salads that no one was touching. It was very peculiar.

Phil was overly jovial, giggling and cracking jokes, as Mitchell sat there looking distraught. The whole atmosphere freaked me out, and I fled. I didn’t spend much time with Mitchell after that. Something had changed between us.

Chapter 23

The next few years passed in a blur. My drinking and drug use, once recreational, was spiralling wildly out of control. I lived with a series of ‘sugar daddies’ who, in return for sex, gave me somewhere to live, and kept me drunk and high. It wasn’t quite prostitution, but not far from it. I was at the lowest ebb of my life. I could see no escape route.

I took any drugs I could get my hands on, anything to bring about the oblivion I needed from the misery I was in. I would walk into Manchester in the morning to get the packets of white powder I snorted. There were places in the trendy Northern Quarter for my morning fix and a place in the Gay Village for my evening supply. I needed to polish off entire bottles of neat whiskey to bring myself down from the drugs long enough for a few hours’ sleep. That was my life. I was an absolute mess

It came to a head in the first few days of 2013. I was seeing a guy called Spencer. Spencer worked in management at a call centre, earning a decent wage. He was overweight, bearded and, importantly, generous with the drink and drugs. Dressing up in rugby shirts and football shorts for the sex sessions he enjoyed seemed a small price, if he kept me topped up. I was so gone by this stage that any shred of dignity had evaporated. We had been partying since New Year’s Eve and I had been awake continually for four whole days. We had a huge row, Spencer called me some terrible things, screaming into my face and triggering terrible memories.

In a drugged haze and terrible mood, I retreated to my digs with a quantity of drugs I had purloined from Spencer, and continued snorting them. That morning, suffering from drug-induced psychosis and under the impression I was under attack from demons waiting outside my door, that something that I could hear laughing and cajoling me with murderous intent in their voices was about to enter the room and consume me, I defenestrated myself, in spectacular fashion, hurtling myself out of the third story window, and falling in a shower of broken glass. I felt no fear as I flew through the air, toppling towards the concrete below. I recall no flashing of my life before my eyes, just relief that I was away from whatever waited behind that door. The fall should have killed me, I should have died that morning. It’s a miracle I’m here today to tell my story.

I recall the agony of the journey to the hospital, the blinding lights making me think I was being abducted by aliens. I recall how every jolt, every slight movement made me scream out loud in agony. The hospital felt like the depths of hell. It sat gaunt and dark on a hill in North Manchester overlooking a cemetery. A century earlier this very same building had been the city workhouse. A wretched place that was notorious for the maltreatment of its residents. In the more recent past it was home to a centre for aversion therapy. Electric shocks, and other appalling ‘treatments’ had been prescribed as a means of ‘curing’ the homosexual impulse of men sent here by the courts. The inhumanity of this place, the misery and suffering of those lost souls was palpable. And on some cosmic level I believe I tuned into it.

I was surrounded by voices of the dead who screamed into my ears, arguing whether I should live or die. I swear that, at that point, I felt as if I was overhearing a conversation taking place around me. That these spirits and others would decide my fate. In such trauma, and believing myself close to death, it seemed as if the borders were brought down that protect us from another plane.

Thankfully, I was given morphine for the pain and a sedative. This was immediately calming. I stayed awake long enough to be told I had broken my back in three places and shattered the bones in my face.

Over the next six weeks in hospital I had frequent visits. People from my childhood turned up, my few friends, brothers, my mother and her partner. Deborah came and she recorded in her journals that I was still hallucinating.

My old friend Rachel, was a most welcome visitor. As the morphine was suppressing my appetite, I couldn’t eat anything and the weight was dropping off me, so Rachel brought in food to tempt me: fresh fruit, soups and other treats that I normally loved. Rachel’s support really helped me through those weeks.

Mitchell sat by my bed chatting and sipping neat whiskey from a fruit juice bottle, and the smell of it knocked me sick. Still, I was moved that he pulled himself together enough each day to come see me.

One of the most surprising visitors was Spencer. I thought he would want to get as far away as possible, forget he had ever met me. Not so, he turned up every day, driving through the snow and blizzards that crippled Manchester that January. Spencer was guilt-ridden, and he spent the next two years trying to make up for what he believed he was responsible for. If he had any blame, it was only partial; the responsibility was largely my own. It was Spencer who pushed me towards education, who found me a place on a foundation course to lead me back into education and ultimately turn my life around. I have a lot to thank him for. I often wonder where I would be now if we hadn’t met.

I was in bed under strict orders of no movement whatsoever. After six weeks it was time to assess the damage I had done to my back. I was wheeled off for scans every day and I recall laying still as the huge MRI machine clunked and thudded, with me inside. It wasn’t clear if I would walk again after such chronic injuries, and regular scans checked my progress.

The nurses were careful to tell me not to build my hopes up, and I worried incessantly that I would spend the rest of my days in a wheelchair. After six weeks of being motionless, I set my mind to the task of walking. Those first moments on my feet were sheer agony. Even with the generous amount of morphine I had been prescribed, my bones and muscles screamed. Those first few months of my recovery were tough, and I got around on my crutches only with the aid of strong painkillers. I lifted myself onto my crutches and put one foot in front of the other. There was no stopping me. I gripped tightly, and walked.

One day Mitchell called, asking if I fancied a change of scenery. I was living with Spencer full time now; he had taken on the full responsibility of my rehabilitation. Spencer’s flat was high up in a tower block and I was quite isolated. It wasn’t easy for me to get out, so I accepted Mitchell’s offer with gratitude.

After an enjoyable evening putting the world to rights, and with the aid of painkillers and a few glasses of wine, I passed out cold. Dead to the world. I woke up in the morning in desperate need of a piss.

Reaching round for my crutches I was confused not to be able to find them. I pulled myself up, looking around the room, but they were nowhere to be seen. I called out to Mitchell, thinking he must have moved them, but there was no rely.

I pulled myself up and, using the furniture as support, searched the house. Thinking he might have passed out cold upstairs, I dragged myself up on my arse, one step at a time, my backside chaffing on the bare floorboards. The house was empty, and my crutches were gone. Unbelievably the bastard had stolen my crutches as I slept.

Somehow, I got back home. Ringing him up later, he answered the phone blearily, as if I had woken him. “What crutches - what are you talking about…?” he said at first, but soon realising the implausibility of that line of denial, he changed tactic and decided on the truth. “Sorry Adam… Ellen had her doctor’s review for her incapacity benefit… we needed some crutches… Tell you what, I’ll drop ’em off later.” It dawned on me that he had probably invited me over with the sole intention of taking them, that this had been his intention from the start.

That was typical of him, to always have his eye on the bigger game. But what kind of person steals the crutches from a man with a broken back? I was incandescent with rage and I hung up on him. After all the years of shit, that really was the proverbial final straw. I put down the phone, and that was the last time I ever spoke to him.

Chapter 24

I was so sick of everything. Sick to the stomach with myself. I was sick of Mitchell, of everyone. I no longer wanted a part of any of it. I’d had enough, and I wanted out of that life for good.

I prayed to God, earnestly, to tell me where I had gone wrong. That was the first time in my life that I prayed and meant every single word of it. I had nothing left: no self-respect, no belongings, no home, no friends. I was physically and mentally traumatised. There was no one left who I could speak to. Then I’m not certain there had ever been anyone in the first place. The only thing left was God, and I didn’t even see God as something I could trust. Still, I had no one else, everyone had had enough of me. God was the one thing I had left in the end.

       Years later I attended the Alpha Course, an evangelical pathways meeting founded in 1977 by the charismatic Charles Marnham as an introduction to the Christian faith. For years I had seen Alpha advertised around Britain, usually on boards outside of churches. And I had been curious about attending but rather fearful of its apparent evangelical credentials. It looked rather cultish to me with its promise of questions answered, a ‘new way’ of seeing life and the multitude of smiling happy followers. Frankly I didn’t trust anyone who approached me smiling. I didn’t trust anyone full stop. I have a quality of red and black, like the colour certain moths develop that says, ‘I will leave a nasty taste, so leave me be’. Like I didn’t desire to be the subject of attention I didn’t seek it either and certainly not with religion thrown in the matrix, I was still very sceptical about any organised expression of faith after my experiences with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

        Walking to my office one morning I saw a banner on the building opposite advertising the course and my inquisitiveness got the better of me, it being so close and according to the sign it would be taking place at lunch time so I couldn’t feasibly talk myself out of it. I can remember walking in feeling nervous, however the enthusiasm of the young people running the course was infectious and oddly enough, they were blasting out Motown and soul music, which I love and took to be a good omen. I was invited to join them for a delicious vegetarian lunch, I hadn’t realised that the sessions revolved around a shared meal and I was charmed by their simple hospitality. Obviously, there was a religious element, prayers and singing, however the focus was a recorded homily given by Marnham himself, usually on some topic such as sin or forgiveness, followed by testimonials.

        It was these recollections that caught my attention. They were often very serious criminals, men who had spent decades in and out of prison for horrendous crimes, terrible acts of violence. Others had overcome terrible odds, shown amazing forgiveness in spite of everything. I felt a kinship with these marginalised individuals. I’m certain many would view me in the same light. They too had often come from a place of no faith, of little hope, until one day something shifted, something woke in them and they turned their lives around. Retrospectively I recognised that movement away from my former life as being like theirs, although their change often seemed to come with ease in the film clips, I suspect that if was probably a rockier road than it appeared to be. And I started to think back to the process I had gone through in my own spiritual recovery.

I would take myself to the Church of the Holy Name in Chorlton-on-Medlock, kneel stiffly at the altar and beg for understanding, beg him to show me the way back. I pleaded for forgiveness, for anything that would bring peace from my inner turmoil, I felt as if I was being torn into pieces. I wanted things to improve straightaway, and when they didn’t, when the expected miracles failed to improve my life overnight, I would rant at God venting my internalised angst, “Is this your fucking ‘will’ being done? Is this what you require of us, our fucking father?”. I was furious. It poured out of me in a primal scream, a projectile purge of decades of pent-up anger. I would rock on my heels, feeling my back scream as I wrestled with my demons and with God, right there on the church floor, sometimes with the pain of my internal struggles so great that they blocked out the creaking agony of my back.

I didn’t give up. I carried on praying and pleading, begging on my knees. I wanted answers and I became stubbornly focused on persuading God to listen to me. Again and again, I internally pleaded, Listen to me, help me. I’m begging you. Again and again, Listen to me, help me, I’m begging you please. This became my mantra. After what felt like months, God heard me. Without a question it became crystal clear that God had heard me and, not only that, he was going to grant me fully the understanding I had requested.

Be careful what you ask for. Had I known what was coming, its likely I would never have prayed in the first place. As C.S Lewis wrote ‘no man knows how bad he is until he’s tried very hard to be good’. Slowly at first, then with increasing power, God’s grace rolled over me with the force of an avalanche. It smashed me wide open, crushing me existentially in the process. I was beaten black and blue and I thought the strength of it would destroy me. In the midst of this I heard a voice clearly say, Don’t give up Adam, I will not test you more than you are able to endure, and things will get better. It formed in my mind with such clarity that I didn’t doubt for a second that it was God speaking to me.

Everything I had experienced over the last thirty years started to bombard me. Every day I was faced with memories of what had been. Clear recollections of every penny I had stolen. Every single unkind word spoken in anger. Every deception and lie. It was flooding in on me in a tsunami of memories, crashing down on me. I had wanted to know what had brought me to this state, and I was being given the answer in one painful blow after another. It became very clear that the responsibility was mine. The explanation for why I had fallen so far, for every terrible thing that had been done to me, was about the choices I had made. It wasn’t the answer I wanted. I had been looking for someone else to blame.

Such was the deluge that I sincerely thought it was going to drive me out of my mind. Every day came another revelation: a boyfriend beaten in a drunken rage; someone’s treasured possession smashed out of jealousy and anger; the lies that I had spun for money; items I had stolen; petty, vindictive insults thrown at people for no reason. Suddenly my mind was clear. I was given the clarification I had asked for, and it was mind blowing. The most painful lesson you will ever learn is to understand that it is you yourself who is often the chief architect of your own misery.

Anyone who goes through such self-revelation, who has lived the life I had, made my choices, ended in the condition I was in now, and does not see themselves clearly for the first time is probably beyond help. To endure that, then look back at yourself and think I’m fine, yet still believe the world owes you something, then perhaps nothing can be done to help you.

I understood that only massive change was going to save me. Yet again I was in a fight for my life, but this was worse by far than anything I had battled through before, and the person I was battling was myself.

And God, I got so tired. Tired to my bones. So tired I could not imagine going on, my mind was in such a bad way. Everything I saw or thought took on dark and portentous meaning. During my time in hospital three people died. None were more than passing acquaintances, peripheral to my life, but still, they were three young men around the same age as me; three loved ones, sons, brothers, uncles and friends. One died from a heart attack, another hanged himself and the final one accidently overdosed on GBH, the fashionable party drug. They all lived complex and problematic lives, and ungenerous souls might say none were a great loss to society. But I sometimes wonder if there shouldn’t have been four; I certainly wouldn’t have been mourned by many. Perhaps death has a quota that needs to be met, and my chance survival has put me on death’s list of escapees. Sooner or later, in some other guise, death comes creeping back to claim his due. This fear is pervasive; it colours my waking moments and taints my sleep. No, that’s not wholly accurate. My fear is indecisive; I don’t fear the reality of death, I’m resigned to it. The fear of death does not keep me awake at night, but the unknown does, what comes next. Not for me because I don’t focus on an afterlife. I have a similar outlook to the Jews, not sure if there is a heaven or hell. There seems no need for a fiery hell elsewhere anyway, because many of us already dwell in it; many are born into hell, and we only have to look around to know it. And as for heaven, well, it’s hard to remember a time without suffering, let alone imagine a place of eternal joy and peace.

It’s what I might leave behind here that powers me on, that I would miss something. Curiosity is my great drive that keeps me going when nothing else will. When I most feel like throwing in the towel, I remember the words Things will get better. Even though I feared I might already be too far down the rabbit hole to escape, I clung on to that promise and stood firm in my resolve to bear the brunt of my anguish.

I started to question sin, my own wrongdoing. I had unquestionably sinned grievously in my life, there was no denying it. At times I revelled in it, shamelessly. I took great pleasure in excesses: of money, promiscuity, food, drugs and drink. I had indulged my every whim for years, and denied myself nothing, which was clearly part of what brought me to this state. That and my thoughtless, sometimes cruel treatment of others. I was vain, selfish and self-absorbed as if the world owed me something, which I made clear to everyone. I was angry and made the world feel my anger. Simply put, I was not a nice person to be around. I understood that clearly enough.

Slowly, however, arrived more depth to my self-reflection. I started to understand that, while I had sinned greatly and that some responsibility lay with me, I had been badly impacted upon by the sins of others: my father’s terrible treatment of his children; his abuse, his sin inflicted upon us. I had been given a faulty foundation from the very beginning. Secondly, there was the support workers  Mavis and Julian’s sin: they were given responsibility of children but failed to protect us, indeed they had led us straight into the lion’s den, fed us whole to the predators. Next there was the state: the police, social services, those at the Kingdom Hall, who turned a blind eye to my complaints, to their own suspicions. None of this was my responsibility, and yet these sins had the huge impact of fermenting sin in me. Had that chain of neglect been broken at any point along the way, I may have been saved. It was not. So sin was fermented in me from a young age and went unchecked, and that sin resulted from parental neglect and abuse, was implanted from structural and social indifference, originated in those who turn away for whatever reason and choose not to see.

I was beginning to understand that simply viewing my sin as a concrete binary, as something between me and society, me and God, simply good or bad, without ambiguities wasn’t a fulsome enough explanation for the position I was in; it didn’t providing me with the root causes. I believe that sin isn’t black and white, it isn’t simply about good or bad. Because your personal sin isn’t the only one impacting on you. A sinful and careless society is just as damaging. Structural sin also has a real and devastating impact on our life. Structural sin is not an abstract idea without consequences, concerning unfair government or unequal societies. Structural sin is present in poor policing policy or bad workplace practice. In communities that turn away blindly from abuse. Fighting personal sin is merely one step toward recovery. Identifying and understanding other forms of sin at work in our society, at work in ourselves, is vitally important. That’s the only way that another generation of children will avoid being dragged into the world I inhabited for so long.

And there is a causality between God and sinfulness. Not that God inspires sin, but rather that we are of God and the world is of God, and sin happens through the sinner’s own freewill. However, God through unlimited compassion, gave himself to humanity in the corporal body of Jesus Christ, who was both human and of God, thus allowing the notion of a joint responsibility and forgiveness within Christ.

This provided me with a rational model for forgiveness, one that transcends a one-dimensional approach of good versus evil. By believing there is ‘divine solidarity’ with the Deity, a being that has shared human suffering and thus can acknowledge its reality through Jesus Christ. Jesus commands forgiveness as in Matthew 6:12, “If you forgive other people, your sins will be forgiven”; divine forgiveness is, however, dependent on the action of the individual who must recover from his state of paralysation and walk (Matthew 9:6). And it isn’t easy. The levity with which Christ commands the damaged individual to pick up and continue their life, belies the difficulty of those of us shattered by abuse and circumstance to simply pick ourselves up, whatever the psychological benefits.

This is especially true within the complex ambiguities of survival-based male sex-work, in which a person might need both accountability and culpability in equal measure. Forgiveness of sin within the self and in others is explained beautifully by JJ Hamman in his 2012 paper Revisiting Forgiveness as a Theological Problem. Forgiveness is “best understood as a complex, spiritual, emotional, relational, and cognitive process of mutual encounter, self-discovery, and the reintegration of the self around new values and practices.” I couldn’t agree more.

Mine was a fraught battle, a lengthy and complex internal struggle, although I understood its necessity. Renewal, without some pain and without these complex questions, might seem too easily given otherwise. This has been a continual, ongoing process in which I have clung to the hope that something good survived inside me, enough to encourage back some form of decent humanity. I hoped that an ember was left inside me that might smoulder back into life, if I changed my ways.

Chapter 25

I took my medicine; I didn’t drown out the thoughts with booze and drugs this time. Taking to heart the messages that came to me through prayer, I worked through my struggles, dragged myself to classes, to church, to drug and drink programmes. In the end, I sought help for the sexual abuse I’d suffered. It wasn’t easy because the men I met at rehabilitation spoke in a manner that pushed all the wrong buttons. One man, not knowing my history, told me wistfully, “If only I could have one more day on the crack pipe, with a couple of whores”.

I finished my foundation course, just getting the grades I needed for university, and found a place on a degree course studying two subjects I thought I would enjoy, history and theology. I was still struggling with myself and concerned that I would fall back heavily into old habits if I wasn’t careful, so it was a difficult time. But it was the start of an ongoing process of healing. I prayed through it, meditated through it. I can’t say I became used to the onslaught, but with time it became tolerable though it still punches me hard in the guts occasionally, even now.

Without drugs and drink suppressing everything, I now started to recall aspects of my life that I had long forgotten. I started to think of my childhood for the first time in decades. This was a gentler process of gradual re-familiarisation with what had been.

I had successfully blocked out large chunks of my life, which came back piecemeal. For a long period I hadn’t really seen my father in the correct light; he was just someone I chose not to see and didn’t like very much. As memories of what happened in the house overlooking Battle Hill returned, so did a sense of wrong that went beyond self-pity. I began to understand his role in what had happened to me, what I had become. His atrocious treatment of us meant I had never been given a proper start in life.

This was the seed of my acknowledgement that even when you take responsibility for your mistakes, it is vitally important to understand how behaviours are learned, how our minds and the chemicals that control them are altered by trauma. Knowing that so much was outside my control was reassuring, and a means of instigating change in myself.

The thoughts kept coming, and I started to think about my time as a sex-worker. One of the toughest realisations was that I had been a child prostitute. I had never thought about it in that language before, and that was a very tough one to deal with, coming to terms with the fact that I had been abused by so many in my home city, that hundreds of men had sexually abused me as a child. I still find it hard to grasp that I was being sold on the streets of Manchester, the city I was born in and that, in many ways, I love.

For a very long time I didn’t see myself as the victim of systematic abuse. Largely because in the environment it happened and continues to happen to this day. I believe sex with children still isn’t regarded as abnormal by some on the gay scene in parts of the city of Manchester. And it isn’t just the paedophiles. It is those who refuse to acknowledge that such things are happening, who are not willing to engage in such a distasteful conversation. They too are complicit. It has similarities with the environment that allowed girls in Rochdale and Bradford to be sexually exploited by gangs of men for so long. A tacit normalisation of abhorrent behaviour by people within a community that refuses to face the facts. ‘Normal’ men and women frequenting Manchester look askance at the young men of the street, if they see them at all. Not until the LGBTQ+ community of the Village realise that it’s not the rent boys, or the ‘difficult’ men they mature into, who are to blame, but the men who exploited them, will the cycle end.

With that came the realisation that for years I had socialised with those who contributed to my exploitation. I saw these men walking down the street and rather than rushing over to them and screaming in their faces, striking them with my fists, I did nothing. I would sit next to them in a bar, and even nod acknowledgement to them. This normalisation now strikes me as perverse and it’s that normalisation that allows it to continue.

Those people who should have protected me had failed to do so: the police, social services, Mavis and Julian. In fact, they had often made my life worse. Seeing the wrong others have inflicted on you is not the same as self-pity or diverting blame. It’s an essential part of the healing process.

It’s a generalisation to say that if you’re born into a decent family with honest hardworking parents who love their children, and actively seek to nurture them towards healthy and happy adult independence, that things will go well for you. I understand that, even with the finest upbringing possible, adults lose their way, become addicts or criminals, and that, likewise, children dragged up in the most appalling circumstances, can somehow develop into healthy, happy adults. But the odds are against abused and neglected kids, and the vast majority of the people who I stood beside during my years in sex-work, the boys and men of the streets of Manchester, and of La Casa, no matter what face they were showing the world, were like myself the product of unstable and unhappy childhoods, often marred by poverty or abuse. If society acts against the root cause of these issues it will have some impact on the psychological damage that develops in children who cannot protect themselves properly, who engage in such risky behaviours. And we need to listen to children. I wasn’t listened to, and that caused immeasurable damage to myself and my family. If you care about children and the adults they will develop into, then listen to those children. Listen to what they say when they come to you in need.

Everything else recorded in this book came back slowly, allowing me to mentally accommodate it within a less traumatic, but still painful, reawakening. And with this reawakening, more positive memories came back. I recalled my sense of freedom high up above Earl’s Court, in my small room in the Trebor. The wonderment of finding wild asparagus growing in a city cemetery, and those angels throughout my life whose wings I believe secured my survival.

Chapter 26

This period of intensive introspection saved my life. I couldn’t kid myself anymore, I stopped trying. I just put my nose to the grindstone and worked. I took every opportunity I could to be helpful, and I made myself a useful person. I tried to be kind and see the goodness in people rather than jumping straight into survival mode, with its inherent paranoia and distrust. I still met bastards, life is full of them, but self-insight taught me that there is probably something else going on with them and being displayed in their ill treatment of others. I realised that perhaps these people were brought to me for a reason, as a God-given way of improving myself. I looked at people I came head to head with and could often see myself in them. That was a lesson in empathy: how perhaps these troublesome souls, as difficult as I could be myself, had their own crosses to bear. Perhaps they deserved the compassion I thought I was owed.

I realised that I had to renounce what I had been – those years of troublesome behaviour, hopelessness and suffering – in more than simply words or thoughts; my actions had to evidence them. I needed concrete proof that my character was improving, that my mind was thinking in healthier terms. It’s an ongoing task. You cannot change overnight, and I wouldn’t trust anyone who claimed that you can. It’s a continuing battle, an unending process.

After Deborah’s funeral I continued with my studies. I couldn’t allow myself to use her death as an excuse to regress to my former self.

Initially, I planned to finish my MA and look for work. I had been studying for nearly five years, and academia does not fully suit me. I am not a sociable person and struggle with the interaction that it demands. I made a few friends during my time in Lincoln, but it’s not something that comes easily to me.

I wanted a job. I was sick of being broke. I desperately wanted my own home, a few rooms overlooking a garden, so I could have privacy. I craved a garden with earth rather than tubs and pots on concrete. I needed time to sit back and take stock, perhaps give myself up to grief for a while.

However, I felt a shift within; the need to speak about my experiences.

With my mind now set to continue my academic activities, at PhD level, I decided to do it as a former sex-worker. I would make the field of male sex work the focus of my academic endeavour, as a means of drawing attention back to the community of men and children that I have come from and, hopefully in the long term, facilitate a greater understanding of the reality their lives. I wanted to provide hope for the hopeless; to do something useful and constructive with my ability.

But there was a huge amount to accomplish first. I was doing coursework, planning and researching my master’s dissertation, and now added to that was working out a tenable thesis and looking for universities to apply to. I had no idea about funding. Researching, I found the government would pay my fees and there would be some left, but nowhere near enough to live on. I was taking a big gamble again although as usual, I told myself, if it all went ‘tits up’ what had I lost? I took a chance, put myself in God’s hands, and moved on.

Approaching my tutor for advice, I was told, “Adam, we recommend at least a year for a PhD proposal to be written… and you have a heavy load to be getting on with anyway”. The look from my tutor was a mixture of concern and pity. I could see her thinking, Who does this guy think he is, and what will we do when he inevitably screws up? They were not convinced I was going to finish my MA, let alone start a PhD. I can’t blame them either as, on the face of it, I’m probably not very promising-looking material. Anyway, I pursed my lips, making the ‘hummph’ sound I make to myself when I’m thinking, and absentmindedly said, “Okay. Thanks.” I was already reassessing what I needed to do. I wasn’t going to get support from my superiors, so a new course of action was needed.

I didn’t have a year, that was the first thing, I had a few months. If I was going to get a place, I had to start applying now. Thinking, How the hell am I going to do this? I got down on my knees and prayed every single day for a week. Someone once said I should have been named for Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, the saint who intercedes for those who seemingly survive against the odds, so I appealed to him now. Somehow, I managed to write the required fifteen-hundred-word thesis proposal in a few weeks. And it was not, I thought, a bad effort.

I only applied to two universities. The first was a theological college in Birmingham which seemed ideal, being a champion of liberal theology.

The interview went brilliantly, and I was immediately offered a place. Unfortunately, there was a problem with funding and I could not accept their offer. While I was initially very disappointed, I tried to see this as a positive step. It was helpful to speak openly about my experiences and I told myself it was good practical experience for my next interview. It was a good lesson.

My second interview was at the University of Manchester. The great gothic bulk of the university dominates Oxford Road, I was back in Chorlton-on-Medlock where I had been born and so much of what is recounted here began. The area is hardly recognisable as what it was twenty-five years ago. The hospital and universities had swelled, gobbling up more land and becoming the biggest institutions of their sort in the country. The BBC is there no more, and everywhere skyscrapers are rising in the distance. The city is in flux, great change is on the horizon.

Oxford Road was, literally, the road to my ruin. I wasn’t sure whether returning to the place where all this started is further evidence of some cosmic game, that this peculiar circularity perhaps meant that what was such an inauspicious place for me in so many ways was possibly taking a turn for the better. So, once again, I put my trust in God.

Disappointingly for me, the interview didn’t take place in some ancient vaulted and wood-panelled chamber. Instead it was held in a modern annex, down a long, cheerful corridor of identical offices in the department of religion and theology.

It couldn’t have gone better. I was again open about myself and was delighted to learn, after what seemed like a very long couple of weeks, that I had been offered a place. Funding was still an issue and although my fees would be paid via a loan, I would have to find the bulk of living expenses.

In late July I took a three-day vacation. I needed time away from Manchester. My dissertation for my master’s was due back in August, but I wanted a break from everything, before my submission. Refreshed, I would be able look over my work with fresh eyes.

Edinburgh is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Its magnificent situation, walkability and historic associations make it very attractive to me. As is my habit, I packed lightly, taking only a book, a daily change of clothing, toiletries and walking boots. I had booked a room in a backpacker’s hostel, overlooking Edinburgh’s splendid Castle Rock.

I spent a couple of days walking the kirk yards, exploring Holyrood Palace, the museums and galleries, and I was sitting in the Cannon Gate Kirk, a beautiful and simply-furnished church, taking a rest from the summer heat, when my phone made the idiosyncratic tinkle of a message being received. With all the drama of the last few months I was concerned that something had gone wrong back home, and I checked it with some anxiety. The thought crossed my mind that I was about to be told to come home immediately.

Instead, I was delighted to be informed that I had been awarded a full scholarship and studentship by the University of Manchester which included enough money for me to live on for the period of my study. I felt elated and honoured by this. It was the best news I’d had in a very long time. I got down on my knees and heartily thanked God. This was something I had earned myself, honestly, through my own ability. I felt none of the ambiguity towards being rewarded that I had felt as a sex-worker. Feeling that I should mark the occasion, I celebrated with a slice of cake and pot of Earl Grey tea in a smart patisserie on the Royal Mile. I felt a long way indeed from the life I lived before. And for once, amid the light and laughter, I felt connected to the people enjoying themselves around me.

Chapter 27

God help you if you’re unfortunate enough to become a prostitute. The prognosis for most is dire. God help you, because it’s possible that only God can help you. If you survive the vagaries of the industry, on whatever level you are employed, you’re unlikely to be left unscarred, your life may end in tatters, the stain on your soul might seem indelible.

Prostitutes are stigmatised as a matter of course, and for male sex-workers that stigma can seem magnified many, many times over. Prostitutes have relatively short working lives, maybe five years maximum, then often years of drug abuse, alcohol problems, deteriorating mental health, or homelessness plagues them. Ultimately, the outcome is often an early death. I know this isn’t the case for all sex workers, some would valiantly defend their rights to work as they see fit and live normal productive lives while doing it, and I don’t discount that there are other perspectives than my own. However, there are many like me who have been through the mill and back, and cannot see any way out. Some choose the oblivion of drink or drugs. Others like the inquisitive and sensitive Danny, who simply could not live with himself, choose suicide.

This doesn’t have to be the case, because there is more to us than a negative prognosis. We sometimes need to be able to see there is more to life, that it need not end as it began. God, faith or belief offers this, and I admit it is easier said than done.

Sometimes my relationship with God seems to mirror my relationship with my father. Why does the omnipresent Deity, who ultimately oversees everything, allow me to suffer so much? If I deserve it and I’m being punished, are the words we are fed about a compassionate God who is radically forgiving, meaningless, empty promises meant simply to placate us? Presumably you can’t be both loving and drive someone into an early grave. I found it hard to quantify a loving God with one who oversees such misery and then expects praise.

The ultimate sting of death may seem preferable to death by a thousand stings, one venomous disappointment at a time; not fatal individually, but slowly weakening you over time till, eventually, death becomes preferable to living. And God expects thanks for this? Not unlike my own father who demanded thanks after beating us senseless. God says, I oversaw your abuse, you inevitably strayed due to the damage and de-normalisation of childhood trauma, now I’m going to punish you, perhaps till the strain becomes too much. But this is okay, this is the way to your redemption. I have already been to hell and back. If hell is redemptive, as someone once told me, then it’s a bitter cup for all of us who have already suffered it.

It might be counterintuitive, therefore, that so many sex-workers seek solace in religion. Even if it is regarded as a comedic trope: the fallen women, or in my case man, who finds redemption in the church. There have been enough kneeling, endlessly-praying, reformed Magdalens throughout the centuries to fill all the churches of Rome, countless times over. I know many might find my faith in God implausible, and some might question my sincerity. All I can say is that when you are hopeless you cling to any possibility that life will improve. And hope is powerful thing, a potent force. God offers hope, a means of envisioning a better life in the future. To be without hope is the most vulnerable condition I think a person can be in, the closest to physical and spiritual death, therefore maintaining an ember of hope within us is central to our survival.

For years I craved the security of a normally-lived life, a home, a place of sanctuary. I am yet to find that place externally. Hope is all I have and, even though I don’t cease to question why, I still cling to hope. I have drawn towards my inner self; that place inside me with impenetrable gates. The same place that kept my psyche safe from brutality, squalor and sin. For a long time that place was closed to me, so that I couldn’t return there. I didn’t realise that the key to my peace of mind was in the meditative practice of prayer. Prayer was how I eventually returned to that place called The Home. I find succour there. In that place resides the Lord, Jesus the Spirit. It is a safe place in a life of fear, of anxiety. The Deity resides in me, in the Home and I take every opportunity to draw myself close to the generating force. That same force repels the evil spirits of doubt, hopelessness, guilt, that plague survivors of abuse and sexual exploitation, ones that mock me, and try to convince me I am beyond redemption.

God reveals himself in the answer that leads me away from the darkness. Sometimes the explanations come with the force of electricity, a cosmic blow to the solar plexus that leaves me with absolute clarity what my intention should be, how I have slipped, what direction I must take to a position of favour. I do not question the presence of God. The reality of God moves with crystal clarity within me. Sometimes the presence of God makes himself known in a single white feather, in the glancing touch of a stranger, or in the wing of a moth that catches the light in an otherwise black night, and reminding me how I am a small but essential part of the divine plan, that I have purpose, even if the part I am to play is not obvious to me or anyone else.

In that place within myself is a room, and within the room is an open French window, near which Deborah rests in a chair, waiting. She wears a simple floral gown, her long blond hair falling in loose curls to her waist, and she smiles at me warmly. From outside comes the smell of cut grass, children laughing somewhere in the distance, and I hear water running. Deborah takes me by the hand and we pass through the window, leaving the room. The blue sky dazzles and bees buzz in roses that surround the lawn. The warmth of an early summer sun beats down, and on the grass sits a man. He smiles at me with complete peace and sincerity, knowing all, seeing everything. I come to him in full knowledge that from him nothing is hidden. In the presence of Christ, I am washed clean. There is full recognition of everything that has been before, everything that has brought me here, to him. He bids me sit with him, while saying nothing. I look into that face that I have seen many times before behind my eyes, and sadness in Christ’s eyes, and curiosity, but love also, love and hope, hope which feels infinite. Your journey brought you to me, he seems to say. Feel no shame in what cannot be undone. With the realisation of what I am being told, the tears stream down my face.

Chapter 28

I understand now that the rigours of the furnace are what test the metal. And it is from these potentially destructive flames, that Truth is wrought. Do not disregard the path that brings you to the Truth no matter how rocky or unpalatable the path may have been. Christ himself dealt with the full force of public humiliation when he was stripped, mocked, and forced to bear his humiliation publicly in front of his community.

When people say Jesus was killed by the Jews, I believe there is an attempt to distance the reality of what occurred. Jesus was killed not by the Jews; he was a Jew himself in the fullest meaning of the word. He was born to Jewish parents, circumcised, raised in a Jewish home with all its customs, attended synagogue, lived like any other Jew. The Jews were not a separate identity from his own, they were who he was.

Rather than being tormented by some ‘other’, he was harrowed, tortured and murdered by people within his own community. His own people humiliated him, stigmatised him. His hell was envisioned within the place he called home, somewhere that should have been familiar and safe. And he was betrayed and denied by the people he called friends, people he loved, lived with, worked and ate with. This to me, and to many survivors of abuse and exploitation, is completely relatable, there is a kinship between our own experiences and Christ.

And that man who sits peacefully in that garden, welcoming with such equanimity those who seek him, is still the man torn open on the cross, the man abused within his community. He understands our suffering because he has tasted it himself, and his compassion comes not from an abstract idea of the worst that man can inflict on each other, rather it comes from tasting real suffering, real degradation. He is the sum of his parts and more. He is also a survivor.

This is my story, my confession, my attempt at an act of atonement. To understand how we arrive you must understand the journey we take to get there, for where I am now is not the place I was before. I am the same man, but also different. I am also at once the sum of my experiences and, at the same time, entirely different.

I want you to understand what I was before so that, no matter how embedded in sin and sinfulness you may feel, or how that is mirrored in your external situation, you understand that this path you have chosen is simply that, a path. That its outcome is yet undecided. That this path may be the one that leads us through his window, a positive defenestration this time, into a place of sanctuary, refuge, light and security. If you choose to alter direction, your path can take you to the Lord Jesus Christ, and no matter how low you may think you have fallen, there is always hope for you, for hope in Christ is eternal. I am only at the beginning of a new path. I still have many miles to walk before I am free from the shackles that weigh so heavily on me, but I live in hope that one day they will be cast off.

Take the example from Christ. Jesus turned to those beyond the pale as positive examples, and you can be an example, be that example. Come to him when you hear his voice; it is there if you listen. He loves you. Love is everything, it is eternal and ever abiding, and his love is without question or codicil, he loves you flaws and all. He loves you at your lowest and his love swells for you when you draw closer to him after being far away, when you return to his loving arms and return that unconditional love.

Epilogue

I hadn’t intended for this work to be about God when I began writing, although I realise now that God played a central role in my writing it.

It wasn’t until I returned home from Rome recently that it dawned on me fully what I was engaged in while writing this book. I had been to Rome before many years earlier as a tourist, this time would be different. I would visit during Lent as part of my fast and as an informal pilgrimage. I wanted to walk the seven great pilgrimage churches of that ancient city, the Vatican and other holy sites, to pray and think about what direction my life should take.

Rome that April was unseasonably cold and at other times swelteringly hot. My room in the hostel, situated on the site of Diocletian’s Library within part of his vast complex of Baths, was unheated and I was on antibiotics fighting an infection and felt dreadful as a result. Rather than spoiling my pilgrimage as it might have, it focused my attention on my main motivation for visiting Rome, which was prayer, leading, I hoped to full conversion to Christianity. I was still uncertain about how this conversion would manifest itself. Normally my attention might have been pulled this way and that by the distracting beauty of Rome, however my illness suppressed the desire to lose focus, my attention was purely driven by the task in hand. And as I travelled to one church after the next, I would kneel and pray.

It was while walking toward the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, a church of great antiquity and considered one of the most sacred of the seven pilgrimage churches of Rome due to its being built on soil imported from the Holy Land and the presence of three pieces of the True Cross, that I felt something sweep over me with such gentle force and warmth, with love and extraordinary sense of inner peace and innocence. Immediately I felt fully recovered from my illness and renewed and refreshed. I believe I was being told that I was on the right path, that my request would be granted. While I was uncertain about how this would take place, I was certain it would, and with that I left Rome satisfied that I was making the right decision.

One morning months later, I woke with the strangest sense of clarity. I had just received this book back from my proof-reader, it still needed some work on its editing, and I was reading and re-reading the text to try and locate problems in text when it dawned on me what I was doing. Whilst still achieving my initial goal of my promise to my sister, recording my experiences and raising a platform for male sex-workers, without knowing it my prayers had been answered long before I had visited Rome. Long before the desire for conversion had become concrete in my mind, I was already recording my pathway to full conversion. This project was part of my movement towards Christ, and what had been a difficult and sometimes traumatic reengagement with the past became something profoundly more important. 

I haven’t seen Mitchell since that final time years ago, but I have long forgiven him. And in retrospect, with the wisdom of distance and maturity, I can think of him more warmly now than I did before I started writing this book. He was no worse than me, and I no better than him; we were both victims of the lottery of life and I hope he too finds peace in himself. I will always be there for him, I love him; and he knows where I am and he only need ask.

Perhaps of all the people I have struggled to come to terms with while writing this book the most difficult have been Mavis and Julian; and they didn’t harm me in any direct way themselves. However when you are in a position of responsibility with vulnerable children, then you should go above and beyond the norms, beyond what is required, to ensure their safety. I don’t know what the safeguarding policy was a Gay House at that time but it failed devastatingly in my case. I can only speak for myself, I don’t know of any others who might have fallen prey to the predators of the Empire State bar as a result of attending the youth group, perhaps there were more, perhaps this book will draw out other victims, even if it does not, one victim is too many. And my attending the group triggered in me a series of events that would have shattering consequences that have impacted my life and my wellbeing to this day. Had I never stepped foot in that place over twenty five years ago, it’s possible my life would have turned out quite differently.

That being said I recognise that their altruism was genuine. I don’t believe for a second they intended any harm to befall any of us. Perhaps it was their relative youth, the lack of structural organisation at Gay House itself, poor management, and simply naiveté as to the reality of life in a big dangerous city. My anger towards them both, as I pray for understanding and forgiveness, lessens. I don’t seek vengeance, just understanding and a firm promise that lessons have been learnt.      

Chorlton Street bus station, in its old form, is no more; it closed years ago and was replaced by a smaller enclosed version to the rear. The café, a safe refuge for the homeless and a warm place of rest gone with it. The corners where we worked are fenced off now. Even the Empire State Bar is gone, renamed, perhaps as a means of hiding unwanted associations. Rumour has it that the entire place, car park, pub and everything else will soon be demolished, taking with it many bad memories.

The Lets Go and Boy Boy Club has long closed for business but La Casa still operates on Levy Street, although much reduced in size and splendour. I called La Casa to see if it was still in operation and Maxwell answered the phone. He didn’t recognise my voice, but I recognised his immediately. He sounded cracked, strained. But then working in that environment for over twenty years would tell on anyone. And time and distance have allowed my feelings to soften slightly for Maxwell also. His life can’t be easy, and God knows what his story is, it possibly reflects my own. I never got close enough to find out. Perhaps, in hindsight, I should thank Maxwell for getting me out when he did. Perhaps he’s proof that angels come in all shapes and sizes.

Earl’s Court has lost its down at heel charm from the years gone by. Thoroughly gentrified, gone are the bag ladies, Aussies, dealers and hippies, as have the hostels and dosshouses, replaced by gastro pubs and Marks & Spencer.

All the gay bars are gone too, including the Coleherne, and that is a real shame. I never felt like an outsider among the leather queens and sex-workers, the transgender women, the freaks, the addicts and everyone drawn in by the bars and clubs that made up that close-knit community. I would have liked to spend some time among them now I’m in a better place and thank them for providing me with a sense of family, some worth.

Recently, I was staying in London on a break and, simply out of curiosity, I walked over to Earl’s Court one morning from my hotel. It was so early the sun was only just rising and the morning was just warming up, promising to be a glorious day later. I wanted to see what had changed and what little remained. I walked down Kenway Road, thinking of the past, when the door of one the few remaining cheap hotels flew open and a vision in torn tights and tatty sequinned dress, with long badly-dyed blond hair, fell out into the road. Some poor bedraggled transwoman prostitute finishing the night shift, just like I used to see in the old days at the Trebor. Not everything has changed then.

I was walking away when I heard “Adaaaam…” an unmistakable eldritch screech that took me back years, straight to La Casa. Stopping dead, I turned to look back and realised it was Maxim, one half of the Lithuanian Menace. We stopped and spoke for a few moments; she was now called Maria and was living as a woman. Asking after Madonna, Maria shrugged, she had vanished years ago, friendships ‘on the game’ are often ephemeral. I hoped she was alive and well somewhere.

Still I found seeing Maria very moving, and sad, and I was pleased to see her – really pleased. Sad because she hadn’t escaped, that here she still was, out of all of us, still barely surviving, eking out a living against the odds as she always had, long after all the rest of us had gone. Where had that time gone? It had flown. One day you blink, and twenty years have passed. As I left, hurrying back towards my hotel faster than I planned. I thanked God I was out of it, thinking There but for the grace of God go I.

Even the Trebor has been given a lick of paint and is now a smart city hotel. It offers clean bright rooms at competitive prices, according to its website: its “elegant double rooms offer a delightful retreat after exploring all the capital has to offer”. I have no reason to disbelieved them.

Veronica no longer works the reception; she wouldn’t fit in with the modern ambience anyway. Although I imagine if you stand in the right area, at the right time, you will still catch a wisp of her unique fragrance. In my mind Veronica will always remain at the Trebor. She was its Janus after all, the guardian of that place.

Only the cemetery remains unchanged. A vast green oasis, a place of rest for both the living and the dead. And somewhere in that place, the wild asparagus still grows.

The End