Valerie says she has many girlfriends who are constantly asking her to help them out with relationship problems. ‘I think maybe because of my masculine side they feel that I can give them better advice than other women. It’s very rewarding to be needed after years and years of being a social outcast.’
Valerie says she even has ‘a special man friend’. ‘I met him professionally at first, but he asked me out for dinner one night and our relationship has turned into something quite serious. He’s so nice and gentle and understanding, and even takes me out shopping at weekends. He doesn’t seem to care when people sometimes look strangely at us. He’s been married twice and feels very reluctant to get into another relationship, but says that I make him feel really wanted for the first time in his life. It’s a very rewarding relationship for me.’
But Valerie says it is unlikely in the foreseeable future that she will ever retire from the vice game. ‘It’s an obvious career for me, but that’s exactly how I look at it – as a career. I don’t often enjoy the sex with clients. In that way I suppose I am a lot like a straight hooker; but I have to make a living to survive, and there is plenty of demand for me on the Costa del Sol.’
Valerie is extremely strict about what she will and will not do for clients. ‘I have very strict rules about cleanliness, anal sex and lots of other areas that I don’t want to talk about here. Just because I am a prostitute doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings. There are definitely times when I just grin and bear it as a man has sex with me. Often the biggest problem is having an erection. If I was a complete woman it would be so much easier to pretend that I was excited. You see, it’s not as easy or as blatant as you think!’
Nearly all Valerie’s clients like her to be as feminine as possible. ‘It’s almost as if they don’t want to even guess what my real sex is, even though I have a penis hanging down in front of their eyes. Most men adore me to wear stockings and sexy underwear and lots of make-up with high heels. Some clients even complain if I have a little stubble – I don’t blame them!’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
TWO BEST FRIENDS
All the way to Puerto Banus, Jenny and her friend Madonna. From Kent
TWO BEST FRIENDS
Bubbly blondes Jenny Fairchild and her best friend Madonna Thompson, from Kent, arrived on the Costa del Sol determined to spend at least two years in the sunshine. They worked as part-time models back in Britain, and thought they’d be able to get similar jobs in the thriving local film and TV commercials industry.
‘We went to loads of castings but never got one job,’ explains 23-year-old Jenny. ‘Then there was the language. We couldn’t speak a word of Spanish and a lot of the jobs were for Spanish TV. It was a nightmare. Our next big mistake was that we’d got ourselves a short-lease flat in Malaga, which is a busy city, not a resort. Not that many people spoke English. It turned out to be a disaster.’
Madonna, 24, adds, ‘We was getting really depressed. It was costing a lot more to live out here than we’d bargained for and we started feeling really desperate. Trouble was we didn’t want to go home either. There was nothing for us in Kent so we got drunk one night and decided we’d do anything to survive.’
The girls then met a ‘right dodgy German’ called Hermann in a bar, who suggested they might like to work in his club in the centre of Malaga. ‘He was a right creep so we turned him down,’ says Jenny. ‘But I kept his phone number and a few days later when we were down to our last twenty quid we decided to give him a call.’
Both girls knew that the ‘club’ run by Hermann was ‘probably a bit sleazy’. ‘But we just presumed it was the type of place where you get the punters to buy an expensive bottle of bubbly and then they give you a nice big tip,’ explains Madonna.
But the moment they walked into the club, located in a narrow side street near Malaga’s main port area, both girls realised they were entering a brothel. ‘We stopped for a moment and I looked at Jen. “Well, you on for this?” I asked her.
‘She just shrugged her shoulders. “In for a penny, in for a pound.” So in we went. We didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. We reckoned that, just as long as we stuck together, we’d be OK.’
The two girls had been promised free accommodation by Hermann when he asked them to come and work for him. They were literally living above the shop, and this club was a long way from the vast whitewashed haciendas and luscious golden sandy beaches of nearby resorts like Marbella and Puerto Banus. ‘We were right in the middle of a big-city port, and some of the men that came into that club were pigs off visiting ships. Many were eastern European seamen who were smelly, unshaved and mean with their money. It was bloody awful,’ remembers Madonna.
The first night in the seedy club, both girls were so scared that they couldn’t bring themselves even to talk to the customers. Jenny described the scene to me. ‘It was very dimly lit in the club and it just made all these men look even more scary. Madonna and I just huddled together in a corner, afraid to talk to anyone.’ Within a couple of hours, Hermann pulled the girls into his side office and yelled at them for not mixing with the customers. ‘He was furious and kept shouting at us. Then he said that unless we both slept with him in an upstairs room that night he’d chuck us out on the street. It was a nightmare. We begged him for another chance because we had nowhere else to turn.’
Jenny and Madonna say that they both then reluctantly agreed to the German’s sexual demands because at least he was clean and used a condom. ‘It wasn’t pleasant,’ Madonna admits, ‘but it was better than having to sleep with his customers.’
For the following month, they lived in a tiny bedroom and ‘serviced’ Hermann. ‘He said we didn’t have to sleep with the customers,’ Jenny told me, ‘just so long as we went with him. We dreaded every knock on the door of that little bedroom because it was always him. He wouldn’t even let us leave the room between eight in the evening and eight in the morning because he liked to come upstairs and visit us whenever he felt the urge.’ He called the girls his concubines. They didn’t even know what the word meant until Jen looked it up in a dictionary.
After a month of virtually round-the-clock sexual degradation, Jenny and Madonna felt completely trapped. ‘He paid us nothing, but gave us free accommodation, drink and food. We had nowhere to turn,’ says Madonna.
Then Hermann tried to persuade the two girls to sleep with another man who worked in the bar of the club. It was the last straw for Jenny and Madonna. ‘It was only then we realised that he was trying to become our pimp. He told us this man was going to come up to our room and we would have to sleep with him otherwise he’d chuck us out. That was it. We both agreed enough was enough and packed our bags and made a run for it.’
Jenny and Madonna caught a late-night bus up the coast to the Marbella resort of Puerto Banus. ‘We didn’t know what else to do. I’d earlier met one guy in a bar who’d said that many English-speaking girls made a good living picking up men in bars in Puerto Banus where there were lots of rich people.’
The two British girls headed for the Burger King, changed into their tightest Lycra dresses and highest heels in the toilets, and then tottered out towards the numerous bars and clubs alongside the marina area, which was filled with dozens of multi-million-pound yachts. ‘Before we’d even got to any of the bars,’ Jenny told me, ‘these two good-looking British guys approached us and asked if we wanted to have a drink with them. They were nice, polite, middle-aged men – not like the animals inside that Malaga club.’
Within an hour Jenny and Madonna had struck a deal to go back to the men’s hotel and stay the night. ‘They agreed €750 each,’ reveals Jenny. ‘It was a fortune to us. It was like a dream come true after all we’d been through.’
‘This was a completely different ball game,’ continues Madonna. ‘The hotel was beautifully decorated and the men we went with were real gentleman. Turned out they were in Puerto Banus for some work conference. Both of them seemed to be loaded.’
Th
at first experience convinced Jenny and Madonna that they should specialise in picking up rich clients in Puerto Banus nightclubs and bars. ‘We always stuck together as a pair because it made us feel safer,’ explains Madonna.
In their first two weeks, both girls say they earned €5,000 each. It was the height of the season and the place was heaving with wealthy men. But the honeymoon period didn’t last long. Jenny takes up the story. ‘One night, a man we met in a bar who was a well-known local British drug dealer persuaded us to go with him to a party in a villa up in the hills behind Marbella. Turned out to be twenty British men in that house and they all wanted to have sex with us. We refused and they got really heavy with us. Three of them then tried to rape Madonna. She managed to break free and we ran out of the villa. The drug dealer phoned us the next day, screaming and shouting and threatening to kill us for not having sex with his friends. We were so scared we moved out of our new apartment in case they came round and got us.’
Jenny and Madonna then started work at a well-known brothel in San Pedro, just off the main N340 coastal road towards Estepona. ‘It was like a cattle market in there, but at least they gave us a room to stay in when we were off duty. The hours are tough. It’s 6pm until 6am, but we both feel safer in this environment. Many of the customers who walk into the club looking for sex are British holidaymakers. A lot of these men even sneak out of their hotels leaving their wives and kids asleep and unaware that they’ve gone off to a brothel. It takes all sorts, I guess.’
Jenny and Madonna both insist they will quit the brothel once they have earned enough cash to set themselves up as dominatrixes in a decent apartment in Marbella. Says Madonna, ‘We reckon that running a dungeon would be much better because then we don’t have to have actual sex with the clients. This club is a real strain because some nights we have to go with more than half a dozen men. We charge them an average of 150–200 each, so the money’s good even though we have to give thirty per cent of that to the manager of the hotel attached to the bar. But at least none of the clients can beat us up or anything like that, because everything happens on the premises.’
Both girls claim they gained good A-level grades at school back in Britain and had both originally applied to work as flight attendants based at Gatwick Airport. ‘But we got turned down,’ explains Jenny, ‘because we’d both been nicked as kids for shoplifting. If it hadn’t been for that, none of this would have happened to us. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?’ They insist they ‘aim to go straight eventually and get ourselves jobs as reps or something like that.’ Yet they are both adamant that they prefer working in a brothel to being back in England. ‘Most people we know are stuck in boring jobs in banks and stuff like that. Others are out of work. I’m not proud of being a hooker, but we’ve both managed to get through it by detaching ourselves from the reality of what we’re doing. It’s not that hard.’
Madonna has the final word. ‘I think it’s true to say that both our attitudes towards sex have changed since we got here. We know there are bad people out there who could hurt us but we’ve grown up very quickly and we both reckon we can now handle ourselves. You see, there are good and bad people everywhere in the world. We just need to make sure we know how to spot the bad ’uns.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
COSTA DEL SILICONE
Floating to a better body the Spanish way
COSTA DEL SILICONE
There is another controversial business thriving on the Costa del Sol. It attracts a wide range of customers, but they all have two specific aims: to look beautiful in old age and to improve their sex lives. The south of Spain has become a plastic-surgery paradise for the over-50s. Each year thousands of people book into clinics in Marbella and other similar establishments, returning home with wrinkles smoothed and sagging faces reshaped.
Back in the early-1990s, most of the patients would fly over from the UK for their nips and tucks; but now that UK residency in the Costa del Sol has increased tenfold over the past five years, the number of locally based patients has shot up. As one clinic director explains, ‘A lot of women come here telling their husbands they’re going on a shopping trip with a female friend and then go home and say they’ve had a new hairdo. Some men would be furious if they knew – how dare they spend money like that! – but most, after thirty years of marriage, don’t even notice. Why tell him, if he would only go mad and think she was doing it for another man?’
A number of Costa del Sol clinics hold initial cosmetic consultations for tourists back in London at which measurements and photographs are taken. If they decide to go ahead, they’re collected from Marbella Airport and taken straight to the clinic for a full medical before the operation.
The clinic director I spoke to usually tends to recommend what he calls the lower facelift, which involves tidying the neck and chin. It is the most popular operation and the easiest to pass off once the patient gets home. ‘It doesn’t alter the face like a full facelift. Ladies who don’t want their husbands to know can easily get away with it.’
These secretive jobs are getting ever more popular. Privacy at the clinic is all important. After an overnight stay at the Hospital Europa in Marbella, clients are transferred to rooms at a modest local three-star hotel near the centre of the old town. Cosmetic-surgery patients have taken over the entire top floor of the building. As the swelling subsides and the bruises fade, clients emerge with eyes hidden behind dark glasses. In the evenings they cluster at dimly lit local tapas bars, confident that no one they know will spot the tell-tale stitches or the scars behind their ears.
One woman I spoke to in Marbella admitted to having returned three times for similar operations; now in her early 60s, she says this may be her last attempt at an overhaul. The elegant former air hostess told me, ‘Age can be very cruel to somebody who has been beautiful. I look at photos of myself forty years ago and gasp. Did I really look like that? Having an operation is my way of at least making myself feel half as confident as I did back then.’
Among the Brits of the Costa del Sol who have recently gone under the scalpel are two well-known TV actresses and one renowned Scottish comedian. But these patients are extra bashful, afraid that if their fans knew their cosmetic secrets, their careers will be over.
One elegant peroxide blonde, on holiday in Marbella with a girlfriend, says she was delighted by the neck and jawline lift that had just cost her £5,000. She even insists she had told her husband back in Sussex. ‘But I try not to tell many friends because people in general seem to have this appalling attitude towards cosmetic surgery, which I think is entirely unfair.’ However, this very savvy lady does admit that she pretended to her husband that the operation had cost half of what it actually did. ‘I sent the clinic one early cheque stating “in full and final settlement” and only showed that to him,’ she says proudly. ‘He was none the wiser.’
But does all this surgery, combined with a wonderfully bronzed body, improve the sex life? One lady who has had a nose job at another clinic near Estepona is adamant. ‘Yes! My husband still only manages to perform once a month, but I’ve found myself a wonderful Spanish toy boy who likes to make love three times whenever I see him, and that’s usually for a couple of hours in the evening, twice a week.’
Almost half of the clinics’ patients are men who seem to be equally capable of subterfuge. Terry, from the Marbella resort of Nuevo Andalucia, still sports a ponytail and plenty of bling bling, even though he has just celebrated his 60th birthday. ‘I still love pulling birds, so splashing out six grand on a facelift was definitely a good investment for me. I feel ten years younger and the type of women I’ve met recently has definitely improved. I’m in good shape.’
Terry opted for a quick nip and tuck after his third marriage to a much younger woman hit the rocks. ‘The singles game out here is tough. More and more younger blokes are trying to pull the richer, older women. By having a facelift, I’ve upped the ante and it’s working well.’
Meanwhile, the clinic direct
or has no doubt that the number of patients will continue to increase. He even claims to have pioneered the so-called lunchtime mini-facelift. He is an unashamed salesman for cosmetic surgery and he considers himself to be the ultimate professional. Operations at his clinic are carried out by a highly respected Spanish professor.
He insists it’s the men who have more sob stories than the women. ‘Men tell me they’re on the scrap heap at sixty. They would do anything to find work and survive. Then they have a facelift and take ten years off their CV. You can’t stop the clock, but you can slow it down. People age through stress, or because they’re treated abominably by their partners. Some patients’ stories break your heart.’
Lisa and Georgina, who live on the same urbanisation in Estepona, both had operations recently. Both women are in their 50s. Lisa’s husband died two years ago. ‘I lost all confidence and didn’t leave the house for eighteen months after he died. Then I decided to have surgery to rejuvenate myself both physically and mentally. I realised I couldn’t let my life just end because of his death. It’s turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever had done. I feel confident for the first time in years. My husband would turn in his grave if he knew I’d been under the knife!’
Her friend Georgina had cheek implants to contour a round, flat face. ‘I didn’t do this just to try and pull younger men,’ she says bluntly. ‘It’s about self-esteem. I’m not that interested in a new relationship. I’m divorced and my last husband showed me that men in general are pigs. But I do admit I enjoy teasing them more now when they try and pick me up in bars.’
A facelift is far from simple. This is what is involved in a full facial ‘overhaul’:
Complete forehead lift, repositioning and lowering of hairline.
Costa Del Crime Page 15
