The Last

6

A vampire has written: "The great asymmetry between immortals and werewolves (apart from the obvious aesthetic asymmetry) is that whereas the vampire is elevated by his transformation the werewolf is diminished by his. To be a vampire is to be increased in subtlety of mind and refinement of taste; the self opens the door of its dismal bed-sit to discover the house of many mansions. Personality expands, indefinitely. The vampire gets immortality, immense physical strength, hypnotic ability, the power of flight, psychic grandeur and emotional depth. The werewolf gets dyslexia and a permanent erection. It's hardly worth making the comparison ..." For all of which you can read: Werewolves get to have sex and we don't. But so do Succubus and Incubus of course.

Though I'm not a misogynist I only have sex with women I dislike. Emotionally there's no alternative, but it's tough. Not because dislike impedes desire (on the contrary, as we modernly know, as we're modernly cool with) but because my dislike rarely lasts, especially with prostitutes, most of whom go out of their way to be likeable. Very many contemporary metropolitan escorts are ruinously likeable. Last year I hired a twenty-nine-year-old Argentinean girl, Victoria, whose soul spoke to mine in its own occult tongue within the first minute of our encounter. I had oral, vaginal and anal sex with her (in that order; I repeat, I'm not a misogynist) over a period of six hours (£3,600) then we went shopping at Borough Market and had breakfast overlooking the Thames. Crossing the Hungerford bridge we held hands and the wind lifted her dark hair and she turned her face up to mine for the inevitable kiss with already languorous knowledge of what was possible between us and I liked her enormously and she said, This is going to be trouble, isn't it? So I called the agency after putting her in a cab on the Embankment and told them never to send her to me again. She wasn't a bad person nor was it all her fault. Maybe it was my incubus side screaming deep down inside me or the shallow idea that she may have been too young to understand.

Why then, if they're so likeable, rely on prostitutes? Why not trawl the ranks of lady neo-Nazis or the register of paedophile mums? There's a deep reason and a shallow one. The deep reason I'll get to, by and by. The shallow one you can have now: In short, because nonprostitutes require reciprocal desire. I'm not an ugly man (or werewolf either, judging by some of the pug-faced lollopers I've seen in Maikoa's sneaked WOCOP files) but I'm a long way from taking any woman's attraction for granted. I can't hang around waiting for someone who fancies me. It's time-consuming. It's labour intensive. Therefore professional escorts, for whom, like therapists and mercenaries (and in happy contradiction of Lennon and McCartney), all you need is cash.

Rao, white-skinned, red-eyed, with straightened black hair, a short upper body and alert, pop-kittenish breasts, is self-congratulatory, vain, materialistic, brimming with tabloid axioms and fluent in cliché. She's been there done that, bought the T-shirt. She goes ballistic. She gets paralytic. She wants the organ-grinder not his monkey. She wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. Amis's mouldering novelties are her lingua franca. Her telephone farewell is... This more than her spiritual deficits has kept my dislike going, but it can't last forever.

She was waiting for me in the Zetter's deluxe rooftop studio suite, albeit with a look of having just freshened-up from a quickie-moonlighted on my dollar since I'd booked her for the whole night. "Hiya," she said, raising her glass, muting the TV, summoning the feline glitter. Extreme Cosmetic Surgery was on. A woman was having fat from her abdomen removed and stuffed into her buttocks.

"Feel that," I said, extending my frozen hand. "Shall I put that on you somewhere?" Rao's hand, French-manicured, was warm, lotioned and in even its moist fingerprints promissory of transactional sex.

"Only if you like hospital food, babes," she said. "D'you want champagne? Or something from the minibar?"

"Not yet. I'm going to wash the world off. You watch the rest of this. Order whatever you want."