A Life in the Shadows

I suppose a sense of belonging – to a place, an idea, or ideology, to a family or clan, to a person, a lover, a partner – is something that most people crave. Not all – I've met enough people who need their aloneness, their privacy, their separate life – to realise that we are all different, and while Maslow's Hierarchy of Need is a useful tool (you see, I'm not just a pretty face) for assessing where people stand, or lie down, it does not presume that all of our needs are universal. We know that the concept of personal space within a poor family in the cramped quarters of Mumbai, is very different from that of the herders who walk the Serengeti, or Native Australians who can feel crowded and threatened if the shimmer of a stranger appears like a williwaw on the distant horizon. And some need to feel sheltered, protected, perhaps even kept, by another, almost as if they belong to that person.

You might think think it's fun being a 'kept woman' or somebody's 'mistress' or even 'sex toy' – after all, what do women want more than to be fondled and fucked? And, oh, such an easy life, just lying around all day waiting for your man to come and 'make love' to you! They dream of life in the Seraglio, as a woman of the Sultan's Harem, lying on silk sheets, playing with a kitten, and just having to open your legs every now and then and, after all, you're getting fun too, aren't you?

That's the root of it, of course. Whether you are a concubine, or a 'bit on the side, or a whore, you're getting what all women want, and you are getting more – a home, a life, and maybe even paid for it. And all you have to do is share your body with a man. Several times a week, or fifteen times a day. What difference does it make? Who could ask for anything more? When I asked, and I truly did ask, they told me that of course it was legal, or else they wouldn't do it, would they? 'It' was me being fucked by ten strangers in one night. They did say it was perfectly legal, because I wasn't being prostituted, was I? I was doing it willingly, my own free choice, and I was the one getting all the attention, all the pleasure, all the fun, wasn't I? I didn't know much about that. Well, I was only 13 and I didn't really know a lot about anything much. They told me that 12 was the Age of Consent in Scotland so there was nothing to worry about. Consent? Did I give my Consent? Ever?

They didn't ask me if I wanted to be fucked by these ten strangers – they never asked me if I wanted to be fucked by One Stranger. In fact, no-one had ever asked if I wanted to be fucked at all. Not George Gill, Not Dr Montgomery. Not Ronnie or Jimmy or Martin or any of them. It was just taken for granted that I would do whatever they told me to do. That was certainly true. What I may or may not have wanted didn't come into it. I did what I was told and the men did what they wanted. When it came to the ten, some fucked my See You Next Tuesday, some fucked me up my Bum and some fucked my Mouth – some of them fucked me in two places and one fucked me in all three and then came all over my face.

And then he bought me!

They don't tell you That at School. Oh, you get told about William Wilberforce, the MP for Hull or somewhere, who got Slavery abolished. But they don't tell you it still goes on. All over the place. And it was only when I realised that the guy who had fucked me and cum all over my face had bought me and I was going away with him, that I realised also that I was a Slave. A Sex Slave. Someone's property.

That didn't do much for my self esteem.

Hah! Self Esteem, eh? That's for people who take decisions for themselves, have education and jobs and houses and cars and maybe kids and maybe a husband. People who've got Lives! What kind of Life did I have? I know that when you think about it – and I can think better now than when I was 13 – you can see that most people are still slaves. What's that saying about being two or three pay-packets from the streets? So they can't afford to lose their poxy jobs or else they'll lose their poxy cars and their poxy suits and houses and poxy wives and all the other poxy things that depend on having money in the banks and building societies and in their pockets. It kind of turns the idea about having Freedom and Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness on it's head, doesn't it? But so long as they've got all that, some of them will pay to fuck a 13-year-old like me. Which was why he had bought me. A sort of investment, I suppose.

I don't know how much I cost.

But I do know that the man who sold me didn't own me, not any more than Jimmy Savile, or George Gill, or Doctor Montgomery, or all their friends who'd fucked me did. They passed me from one cock to the other for fun. Not my fun, their fun. And sometimes I stayed with one of them for more than a night, maybe a few days or weeks, before he passed me back to where I'd come from, or on to the next person. They all used me. They didn't try to please me or give me anything. But they didn't own me. Until Martin Elginbrod sold me.

He drew up a Contract which they both signed and then shook on it, and money changed hands, but I didn't see it. Elginbrod didn't have to prove he owned me before he sold me, he just had to be the one selling me. He hadn't stolen me or anything, I just happened to be with him after I left Jimmy's cottage, I just happened to believe that He Loved Me the same way that I Loved Him, and if I'd known that he was going to sell me like a sack of spuds I'd have cut his balls off and played Ping-Pong with them! Well, I say that now but who the fuck knows what I'd have done? I let 10 strangers fuck me and I didn't object or say “No!” to any of them, even when they hurt me, so what's the difference anyway? Now, because it was a proper Business Transaction the money went from my new Owner's bank to Elginbrod's just by tapping a few keys. And that was it: now I belonged to this guy Shug. Hugh Finnegan. Boys named Hugh usually started off being known as Hughie, which slid into the pronunciation Shooey, a common adaptation in Scotland, particularly among the Working Class. And those who don't have any visible means of support. And then, depending on the nature and personality of the bearer, can easily become Shug. Maybe because it is so close to Slug. And Shug Finnegan was certainly that. I still don't know exactly what the link was between Elginbrod and Shug. Their taste in young girls probably. Sexual preferences can make for strange bedfellows. Very Strange.

And Shug was going to put me to work to earn him back he money he had paid for me and more.

I wasn't going to be a 'Call Girl' meeting wealthy punters in their hotel rooms or a fancy flat. I was just one of five girls, all slightly older than me, who were his Street Toms, and anyone interested would go with whoever he picked to Shug's van, parked just twenty yards away and fitted out with a mattress in the back. Not a very clean one. But who noticed that? Quick and easy. Climb in, Fuck, climb out again and back trying to catch the eye of passing punters. Sometimes the guy had his own car or works van and we would climb in and suck him off or whatever and then he'd give us the money and we'd climb out, go to the van and give it to Shug. It was a cheap set-up and the sex was cheap too, but Shug was going for a high turn-over. Volume. Quantity over quality. It's a wonder he hadn't cottoned on to the BOGOF idea that supermarkets do to improve their turnover and their profits. But it worked. There was nearly always someone in the van, giving a blow-job or getting fucked, while the others caught eyes, advertised themselves and found Johns. In the course of an eight or ten hour shift, on a busy night, we could usually get an average of maybe twenty or thirty or forty Johns each. Some nights one of us might get more and another less, but a total of around 150 at whatever Shug charged seemed to suit him. His running costs were low – we all lived in an old student flat in an alley off Easter Road and the food was basic but ok. And when we got home and after we'd eaten some stuff Shug's Mum, who lived upstairs, had prepared for us, or had delivered more likely, Shug would choose one of us to spend the night with him. The thought of putting his cock where maybe 20 or 30 men had already put theirs seemed to give Shug a stiff one – probably assisted by the Viagra, which he didn't hide – and he could keep going for hours; but then, he and his business was after dark really, from 6pm till 2am usually, although if there was a buzz on the streets and more punters around, say after a football match or something, we'd stay out for longer, until the numbers dwindled away, If anyone wanted a quick hand-job or blow-job and the van was already in use, we'd go into a telephone box which had it's light removed, or a shop doorway, both of which Shug could keep an eye open for. In all the time I was there, working for Shug, I don't think there was ever any trouble. I think he was a bit of an institution, everyone seemed to know him, even the Police Scotland Officers who often made use of our services, in return for turning a blind eye. Shug had been running this operation for about thirty years, succeeding his father and inheriting the van. He can't have had any ambitions, but I suppose it suited him just the way it was: a One Man and Five Girl and a Van operation. If he had been ambitious and had expanded, with more locations, more girls, he'd have had to buy more vans, hire other guys, accommodate the girls somewhere.

And anyway, it was his Mum and his Gran who were the brains behind the business. Maisie Finnegan. She'd been a cheap slag herself, when she was young, but a cheap slag with imagination and she's quickly taken herself off the streets and put others in her place. Female Pimps weren't unknown, but they weren't usual. They had to always be watchful for others trying to muscle in on their Turf. And ready to act quickly to stop it. With crippling retaliation if necessary. And Maisie Finnegan was not only a cheap slag, she was also a very hard one. Like her own Mum, Daisy. Unlike her wee Shug, who might have been expected to take over the whole operation after his father's death. Well, the father on his birth certificate; but once you knew about Maisie's early life, and the kind of motherly care and attention she herself never got from Daisy, you realised that her son could be the product of any one of a thousand men – or, I wondered if it were possible, to be a combination of several. I should have paid attention in Biology. Shug's features and body seemed to be a bit of an agglomeration of several different physiques and genes. But that wasn't something you could actually raise with your Boss. Your owner.

But expansion wasn't for him. To him it was like a lazy slob having a corner shop – you might vary the goods a bit now and then, get rid of anything past it's 'Sell By' date if it didn't even go at half or quarter price and bring in fresh stock, but other than that, if you have some good locations, with enough punters to give you a good living and the right mix of girls to keep them happy and coming back – why change? I think that was his way of thinking. Why Change Anything? If it ain't broke, don't fix it! Unless his Mammy said. Or even more so if his Granny said. He wasn't stupid, though.

He did vary the routine – it wasn't always the same place: on different days he had different places for us to work. And none of them were really Town Centre – he preferred back streets and even housing estates and industrial estates, They were where the kerb crawlers came, as if they could sniff us out.
Hah! The probably could at that, cos after you've had ten or twenty cocks inside you, up you, or cumming over you, none of us were very fragrant. Squirts of cheap perfume don't disguise the smell of men and their filthy cocks and cum. But lots of guys were like Shug, seeming to like the thought that we were rank with the smell of sex, it definitely turns lots of them on. You could see it in their eyes and their nostrils twitching and their fingers up you and sniffing them before they slid their cocks in, I know it's called 'sloppy seconds' and I don't know why, but lots of them seem to lap it up. Some quite literally. I've had guys who wanted to lick and suck my See You Next Tuesday before they put their oar in and paddle about. Nowt so queer as Men, that's for sure!

But Shug's wasn't the only crew. His Ma and Nan had several other Leaders working teams like us, each with a different slant. We were the Young Team, there was a Mature Team, what guys call MILFS – some of them did have kids and even husbands and I think a few of them were doing it on the side for pin money – there were more in that Team than the others, cos they didn't all work at the same time, or even full-time - but we called them The Mattresses, cos they'd obviously taken quite a pounding over the years. And there was a Posh Team who did work Hotels and upmarket clubs and Conference centres and stuff. Their Team Leader was a very tight woman aged anywhere between 20 and 40. very smartly dressed – looked like a business executive, which I suppose she was. And lastly there were the foreign girls, the Black Team, though most of them weren't actually foreign or particularly black at all: some had West Indian parents, or Pakistani or Indian, or Italian – and one was Irish! The spoke with a mixture of East and West Coast accents, some sounded like teuchters, a one from Aberdeen. But a few put on completely fake accents depending on what kind of punters they were picking up. If you can say a sentence which has Urdu, Arabic, Chinese, Gaelic and Pidgin in it, they could. And nobody had the faintest idea what it meant, but obviously lots of Punters liked the idea of shagging something a bit more exotic than Muirhouse, or Westerhailes, or even Marchmont. They were actresses and didn't they know it!

But in fact, I suppose we were all acting in a way. None of the girls I got to know over the time I was with Shug enjoyed sex – at least not the kind of sex the punters and the Team Leaders liked. If they'd enjoyed sex with men before, by the time they'd worked a season this way you were pig sick of it. This was how and when I learned about the alternatives, especially Lesbianism, and discovered that this was the way my whole being was wired up: Body, Mind and Soul. Suddenly I saw through all the crap I'd allowed Men to stuff into me and knew that if I wanted to follow my own course in life it needn't be alone. There were other women with the same interests as me, the same attractions and the same desires.

In the meantime, like the others, I just had to thole it. We were all involved for different reasons. Some of the younger girls, like me, were owned by Shug and although the MILFS told us it was illegal, what it amounted to was that we owed a debt to Shug and would have to work for him until we had paid it off, with interest. It turned out that those of us tied up in this way had all been bought through Elginbrod and when the older women heard that, they said we were snookered, until we either found someone who'd buy us out, or we paid off the debt, but it seemed that a couple of the older ones were still paying theirs off after ten or more years! And even though they went home to their own places, or their families – like any working mum – they still had to turn up and work their patch. But they did get to keep part of the cash they earned. Though for the ones paying off a debt it just added to the time they had left. And interest was being added on by Maisie and Daisy every day. No wonder they call debt 'a trap'.

I think that was when I realized that I actually hated them. Men. They weren't pretending that they loved us, or even cared anything for us. They didn't know us, didn't want to know us, just wanted to use us and squirt their spunk inside us just like we were inflatable sex dolls. That was all we were to them: things to use. I suppose a lot of them grew up with Wank Mags and dirty hankies, caked and crusted with dried spunk that never got washed, just used over and over again and we were the same to them – In, Cum, Out, and walk away. Pathetic really, but I'm not talking about us. Us girls. We were human beings, or Humming Beans as Rosie used to say. And while they showed no respect for us, we hated them in return and for me that hatred grew to encompass all men, most of them certainly, and I was never too sure of the others, the ones I didn't actually hate, just disliked.

To be honest, I couldn't think of any good reason for men. They are the cause of most of the trouble and strife in the world – the wars, the carnage, the pain and death. Most of it is down to Men. And even where women have been involved, they've been just tools in the hands of men. No, apart from having something to do with making babies, I can't think of any other service they contribute to the Humming Beans that wouldn't have been better left to women. If they were all gassed, or shot or strung up by their tackle and left for the Wild World to devour, I don't think the world would be any the poorer. Probably a lot happier. I know I would be, for one. Definitely.

But in the meantime, in the cold hard reality of an Edinburgh Winter when we had to stand about on freezing nights flashing our knickers to kerb crawlers in the hope that one would give us a cosy ride in exchange for a hand-job – the least demanding and onerous of our services, but also the least required. Still, with a bit of practice we'd been taught, by 'the old hands' as it were, how to make a man think he'd fucked us inside, when his cock had been brought to climax between our thighs. It's amazing what a bit of encouragement and flattery can do to a Man, especially at night when he can't actually see what's happening. And if these bits of trickery helped us get through the harshness of an Edinburgh Winter without harming a soul, I don't think our consciences need trouble us, do you?