"MORE THAN A GAME GIRL"

For six years, I was a hooker, but I retired two years ago at 32 to get married, have a baby girl and enjoy some of the money I'd earnt... But laying back without some man on top of me obviously didn't suit me and I put on weight, my conversation went flat, my brain soggy. Four months ago, I went back to the gym and enrolled in classes in French and business studies.

I'd worked at the elite end of the market and I always felt mildly irritated by the way that books, films and TV documentaries - which supposedly portrayed what I was doing - always homed in on the victim. There are some, as in any business, but I didn't see many where I worked and I wasn't one of them.

I worked for the most exclusive escort agency in London, which is actually owned by an "ex-call girl". Her words. That is what hookers were called in her day, although at fifty she looks more like a retired ballerina than an ex-prostitute. Madam has an office in Mayfair - where else? - employs two secretaries, a lawyer, an accountant and an ex-cop from Scotland Yard who pretends to be an MI6 spook. He checks out clients and discretely chases up the odd recalcitrant payer.

Her clients come by word of mouth, or recommendation from an established client, but she always looks for possible regulars: bankers, fat-cat execs, senior professionals, old money. No rich, white trash: so no rock stars, sportsmen, playboys or got-rich-quick merchants. And no Arabs, unless they were educated at English public schools.

Her clients are the 40-to-55-somethings who run the world; men who cannot step out with a twenty-year-old, glam-stick retard on their arm without looking, heaven forbid, like Peter Stringfellow. What she looked for in us was what her clients wanted: women whom their colleagues will accept as their bit on the side, women they could take to conferences, whom they could socialise with: compliant, good looking but not tarty, well-dressed, well-informed women who look older than their bodies and can act more sophisticated than they look.

I was successful because I worked hard at the escort end of the business; I became the perfect off-the-shelf, weekend girlfriend. I boned up on cultural events, read the Financial Times and empathised madly. At the luxury end of escort prostitution, as with all top of the range products, subtleties and quality count more than price.

Madam offered nothing under 750 pounds sterling a night but the market collapsed at over 1500 pounds sterling. Within a year, I was in the top bracket. Madam handled the money side of things, as haggling to get our knickers off would spoil the delusion that our clients sought. We were their Stepford girlfriends. They knew we were doing it for money, but the further removed that aspect of the transaction was from our relationship the more they could go along with the delusion that we were there for them and not the money. Madam marketed a luxury fantasy: she made our bookings, collected our dues and, after taking her 25%, paid us.

The sex? Well the happy hooker who enjoys the sex while earning the money is a myth; if you're a nympho, you can't do the job. Superhorny women get involved with clients and it is no longer a business deal. Madam got rid of them before they threw themselves under the wheels of some merchant banker's Ferrari.

I did - inadvertently - come a few times with clients, but I made sure they didn't know the real ones from my fake O's. You have to distance yourself emotionally from the job. I always remember one of the girls explaining why so many streetwalkers use heroin - it's the perfect drug for detaching yourself from your life.

Obviously, hookers are in some way or another acting, because they are having sex for money, not pleasure. The stupid ones at the bottom of the market actually show that's the reason they are doing it, which is why they earn a pittance. Their more successful sisters pretend. My approach was to treat sex as a gymnast does the apparatus. I saw giving the client a peak sexual experience as a technical exercise, like doing a perfect floor routine.

There was only one time it all unravelled. An art buyer client took me to New York for the weekend and decided to make it his business to make me come. He knew his way around a woman's body and wouldn't settle for fake orgasms. I got out of the bed and confronted him. I said, "Look, you know what the deal is and this isn't it." He laughed. In fact, we both did; but it made it impossible to rebuild the delusion and we spent the weekend as genuine mates. In acknowledgement of this, I even went Dutch in the restaurants.

The most difficult problem was coke. A lot of clients use and want the girls to join in. I kept my intake to a minimum, but the big problem was that the client's appetite for sex grew in inverse proportion to his capacity to orgasm. It made my job so much harder and disrupted my bedroom gymnastics. I dreaded the chopping sound of credit cards on powder.