Adventures of a London Call Boy by Ben Franckx Page B

She’d been single for a while, once, she told me, and had tried it. Apparently all the guys she met were freaks, losers or frankly frightening. This, she told me in her rather downbeat way, was highly representative of the quality of men in London. That was why she wanted to move to Cuba, or Brazil, where, she insisted, poverty and good weather created the type of man that she wanted. I called her a sex-tourist and she shrugged. I called her a colonialist and she looked at me blankly.
    But she had a point: with the gender imbalance, the unacceptability of much of the male population of the city, and with the pressure on women to look and act the part, it can be an easy ride being a guy. Especially in a field like dating.
    That afternoon I joined a couple of free Internet dating sites. I noticed that on a number, membership was free for men but at a price for women. This immediately suggested something to me that I had for a long time suspected: a good man is a valuable commodity in this city. Let’s be honest, even a passable man can be tricky.
    I registered myself as a ‘fun member’ – I liked the pun – that’s to say not someone who is immediately looking for a marriage partner for a booked and arranged wedding within the next six months. Within two hours I had my first message. By the evening, I had a date.
    The girl in question claimed to be twenty-four: she’d moved to London after university, split up with her long-term boyfriend and decided that she wanted to have some, you’ve guessed, ‘fun’. After a couple of emails we chatted online and agreed to meet in a pub in Camden that we both knew. I booked a table for dinner, for later. I borrowed some cash from Celeste, who’d been seeing an older gentleman and seemed suddenly to be even more flush than usual. I dressed up and then dressed down, and headed down to meet her.
    The girl didn’t spot me at first – I’d been perfectly honest about my description – but I recognised her immediately from the photo: slim, very short brown hair, almost boyish figure, casually well dressed in a media-type way. After I waved a few times she seemed to get the hint. Later she admitted that she was shy about wearing her glasses on dates. I called her over and we exchanged a polite kiss before some amiable chat. After she’d had a couple of gin and tonics, I plucked up the courage to ask whether she was a regular Internet dater.
    â€˜Can I be honest with you?’
    â€˜I hope so.’
    â€˜I was in a relationship with one guy for seven years. He left me. He’d been sleeping around behind my back. A lot. That included a good friend of mine and a girl I used to sit next to at work.’
    â€˜Ouch,’ I said.
    â€˜He was a wanker. And I realised that life’s just too short. I wanted some variety before I settled down.’
    I contained the urge to laugh with glee before nodding understandingly.
    â€˜OK. Well, do you really want to go for dinner?’
    She laughed, slightly nervously, before responding with a smile.
    â€˜No. I live round the corner. Shall we go?’
    I didn’t bother to finish my drink. We barely spoke during the five-minute walk. She looked at me, smiling cheekily, a couple of times. A minute or so away from her door, she held my hand.
    As soon as we were inside the door, she stepped up on tiptoes to kiss me, passionately and clumsily. The height difference made us stumble across the hall towards the narrow staircase – she lived on the first floor of a Camden terrace – and we found ourselves kissing and grappling with each other’s clothes, half on the floor, half on the stairs. I half pushed her top up to reveal small breasts with bullet nipples – no bra. As I slid my hand up her skirt and between her legs, I found she had no underwear.
    â€˜My kind of girl,’ I said.
    â€˜My kind of boy,’ she replied, pulling my stiff cock from out of