Chapter 4

Hayley deposited her rent within an hour. Five minutes after that I’d emailed the supplier with the feed order for the horses and paid Goodness his wages for the next fortnight, paid the electricity and paid the water bill.

After doing all that I looked at the pittance that was left in my account and I felt the same sick clench of fear in my stomach that I’d felt earlier.

And, as of next month, I had an unlettable cottage.

What if I took the advice that both my brother and his lawyer were all but ramming down my throat? What if I sold the house for whatever I could get? Made other hard decisions? Retrenched Goodness, who was like family to me, and which would mean him and his wife and children would have to move out and go … Go where? To the nearby informal settlement of Diepsloot and look for work, I supposed. For them, as outsiders, life in that ghetto would be extremely difficult, and jobs were certainly not easy to come by.

I’d have to ask my vet to humanely destroy my horses. What else could I do with them? At seventeen and twenty-two years old, they weren’t exactly in their prime. And I would probably have to re-home, or euthanise, my cats, given the standard no-animals policy in most modern flats and cluster developments these days.

And what then? What if, another six months down the line, I still had no job?

The unthinkable prospect of moving to Cape Town and throwing myself at my brother’s mercy got me up from my chair and marching out of the house.

‘There must be something else I can do,’ I said aloud, as I walked through the back garden and down towards the wire-fenced vegetable patch, causing Admiral to raise his head and regard me curiously. The vegetable patch had been badly neglected this past year, and only Goodness’s tireless work and some natural reseeding had ensured there was anything growing there at all. The sweet basil and garlic chives, spinach and land cress were doing well, and a cherry tomato bush was thriving in the far corner.

‘There must be some way of making enough money to keep this place. Even if it means selling my body.’

I gave a short, bitter laugh at that joke.

Bob the Cat, the oldest and friendliest of my four felines, sauntered over to greet me with a chirrupy meow. Bending down, I rubbed his head and listened to the comforting rumble of his purring.

‘Poor choices, Bob,’ I said aloud to him. ‘That’s what has landed me here.’

He glanced up at me with a look devoid of sympathy. In Bob’s world, the cat food was still arriving in the bowl and the pillow next to mine was his reserved night-time sleeping spot. ‘What could possibly be so bad?’ he seemed to be asking.

Now, though, I couldn’t help thinking of the idiotic things I’d done when I was younger that were partly responsible for my current all-time low point. Bad decision after bad decision, and now I was firmly stuck in the mess I’d created for myself.

I’d dreamed of becoming an actress or a radio dj when I’d finished school, but my parents had made it clear that such frivolous career choices would not be supported. Instead, I was told I should follow in Roger’s footsteps and complete a university degree in something ‘worthwhile’ – preferably business.

I had ‘compromised’ by leaving home straight after I’d done my final exams and moving into a tiny flat with three of my friends. I got a job at a local steakhouse and within the short space of just eleven months had succeeded in achieving a promotion from junior waitress to ordinary waitress. Attaining the dizzying heights of management, it seemed, was not meant for me, nor had I been offered a lateral promotion to assistant chef. But I was happy enough. I was acting in local productions and doing occasional work as an extra in movie shoots. I was half-leasing an ex-racehorse. I was dating a succession of interesting young men whom my parents considered as unsuitable as my job: musicians, arts students and university dropouts with ponytails and pierced ears, dope habits and heads full of dreams.

I even became the proud owner of an ancient Golf that belched alarming quantities of blue smoke from the exhaust but managed to ferry me between all these activities without breaking down too often.

My career as a waitron abruptly hit my own personal glass ceiling a year later when I managed to spill a full gravy boat of the restaurant’s lethal, oily, dark orange peri-peri sauce over a customer’s expensive white outfit.

I decided that the time had come to implement some life changes. I was going to leave South Africa, fly to England and make my fortune by earning British pounds.

I sold my Golf and bought a ticket to London. From there, I spent four years on the move, working at all sorts of odd jobs along the way. I was briefly employed to give sales presentations for a vegan dating club, but was fired after laughing at the owner when he invited me to dinner and made a drunken pass at me over his plate of seared duck breast. I then worked as the personal assistant to an elderly upper-class gentleman who talked non-stop about hunting, wore a toupée that looked like a dead squirrel, and drove his dented Bentley as badly if he was blind.

For a while, I became a doorgirl at a rather dodgy Soho strip club. My job was to sit at the club’s entrance wearing a low-cut black dress and stiletto shoes, and describe to potential customers, in salacious and exaggerated detail, what attractions they could enjoy inside once they had paid their entrance fee.

When I wasn’t working I was travelling, to Scotland and Ireland, Israel and Paris, New York and Los Angeles. I spent the British pounds just as fast as I earned them, and achieved the notable distinction of arriving back in the country with less money than I’d had when I had left.

Broke, jobless and desperate to earn some quick cash, I saw the advertisement in the paper a week later.

‘Broadminded ladies with good speaking voices needed for telephone work.’

It sounded intriguing. I enquired, got the position, and a week later found myself sitting in a small, soundproofed cubicle and listening, wide-eyed, while my first-ever caller described his cock to me.

‘It’s long and very hard at the moment … throbbing slightly … and the tip of it … is purple in colour,’ he’d offered rather breathlessly, while I gawped in astonishment at what I was hearing. I’d had some experience of cocks, of course, but hadn’t known that they were available in purple-when-hard and had never imagined their owners were wont to describe them in such proud and boastful detail. Still less had I thought about the fact that the men who phoned in to sex lines were doing so for one purpose only – to masturbate to a climax while I, in my breathiest voice, described my fictional lacy underwear and imaginary ddd-sized breasts while talking dirty to them to enhance their pleasure.

The first week of my new job was eye-opening. By the second, I started to find it entertaining. What made it fun was knowing that while my callers were aroused, I held a certain power over them, even while I was pandering to their most explicit desires.

I soon realised that there were some men who required the concept of power to go even further. These callers wanted a more extreme service, and not every woman talking on the phone lines could satisfy their needs. They wanted to be dominated, punished, controlled. Not for them the whispered confessions of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, lingerie-wearing nymphomaniac. No, they wanted the voice, image and stern commands of an invisible strict mistress, leather-clad, standing tall in stiletto-heeled boots and wielding a whip.

Telephonic domination soon became my specialty. Over four years I worked at various phone companies, sometimes taking sex calls, but more usually speaking to the men with fetishes, the adult babies, the naughty schoolboys, the slaves who called in craving humiliation and harsh control.

I’d interspersed my phone work with overseas travel, and it was after returning from two months in Thailand that I had finally come to the conclusion that my family had despaired of me ever reaching – that I needed to do something more constructive with my life.

Talking thousands of men into explosive orgasm was no small accomplishment, and yet it was not something that was going to make prospective employers sit up and say ‘Wow!’ So, after proving my ability as a creative type by fudging my cv to conceal the fact that I’d spent the last few years speaking filth on the phone, I had managed to get a job with an advertising agency as a junior copywriter. Times were good back then, and people were hiring.

Soon after that, myself and Gaby, a girlfriend I’d done some travelling with, had been invited to a party held by an acquaintance she hadn’t seen for ages.

‘It’s fancy-dress, Emma,’ she’d told me on the phone. ‘The theme is priests and prostitutes.’

‘Oh, what fun! We simply have to go as a pair of whores,’ I’d said.

We’d spent hours ransacking our cupboards for outrageously short skirts, strapless tops, fishnet stockings in which we ripped some extra holes to create a seedy effect, and the highest heels we could find. Then we’d applied garish make-up, teased our hair, and set off for the party only to find, to our horror, that Gaby’s acquaintance had scrapped the fancy-dress theme without notifying her. Everybody else there was traditionally clad in blue jeans and jerseys.

There was only one thing to do, costumed as we were. Trying our best to avoid the disapproving looks from the women and the fascinated stares from the men, we sidled up to the bar for some Dutch courage.

An hour later I found myself perched on a bar stool conversing with a tall, well-built, clean-cut man who introduced himself as Mark Caine. Over several drinks, I learned that Mark was single, played league tennis and cricket, had a well-paying job with a shipping company and aspired to owning a business one day and making piles of money, just like his brothers.

‘It’s lucky you’re dressed the way you are,’ he’d told me, laughing. ‘At least it’s been a conversation starter. You’re so pretty I don’t think I’d have dared to chat to you otherwise.’

‘That’s just as well, then,’ I’d said. ‘And I don’t always dress like this.’

He’d smiled; his fingers moving tentatively over my stockinged thigh and exploring the bare skin exposed by one of the rips I’d made.

‘That’s just as well,’ he’d said.

After dating for a while, Mark and I had married, and year by year, I slowly became the person I realised I always should have been. With Mark tending towards the conservative, I found myself becoming entrenched in respectability. Emma Caine, writer, wife, horse-owner, good cook … quite the domestic goddess.

I had successfully turned my back on the idiotic choices I’d made in my past, and I’d gradually lost touch with the friends I’d made during that time. Even I had started to believe that what I’d done in my early twenties was a shameful illusion.

Now, staring at Bob as he jumped into the vegetable patch and pounced on something small and helpless hiding behind a spinach plant, I realised that there was still one opportunity open to me.

There was one way in which I had a hope of salvaging my life. Doing it, though, would mean revisiting the foolish things I had done in my youth. I could no longer deny their reality and pretend that period of my life had never existed.

Instead, I would have to turn back to the person I had been in my twenties … and I would have to become her again.