☕️ The message comes in on a Tuesday morning. London. Tiki.  A selfie first, her face filling the screen, and then the line underneath it. “Remember hun? Once a warrior, always a warrior.” ⚔️

 

It was just past 10am in Sydney, the end of her night bleeding into the start of mine. I put the phone down and got on with the day.

I was already working when I met her. Not new to the trade, just new to that particular world. I’d been advertising in the back pages of the Daily Telegraph for a few months by then, seeing clients from my flat while studying, learning the work on my own terms and in my own time. I thought I knew enough. Then I did a two-week stint at a Melbourne parlour during semester break, because everyone said it was busy and lucrative, and I wanted to see what the inside of that ecosystem looked like.

I stayed the full two weeks. It was enough.

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The parlour ran along a single corridor. On one side, the clients: a reception desk at the entrance, waiting rooms partitioned by red velvet drapes, chandeliers overhead doing their best, gilded mirrors, the air thick with rose oil, the full theatre of it. On the other side, one large room that nobody decorated, big enough to hold 20 of us at any given shift. At the far end of the corridor, behind closed doors, the rooms where the work actually happened. The corridor between was where the fantasy began. We crossed it dozens of times a day.

Our side, A kitchen that smelled of instant noodles and somebody’s perfume, cigarette smoke mixed with Narciso Rodriguez for Her. A couch that had seen everything, vinyl split at the seams, small puncture holes along the cushions where stilettos had gone through over the years, girls crossing and uncrossing their legs without noticing, leaving their mark. A television that never turned off, controlled by whoever held the remote. A long makeup table running the wall, lipsticks uncapped, tissues, a hair straightener still plugged in, a can of Coke nobody claimed.

On a busy night it was frantic. The intercom cutting through every few minutes, girls cycling in and out of intro, back room to lineup and back again. Some changed outfits between rounds, some touched up their makeup, hoping this time the client’s eye would land somewhere new. On a slow afternoon it was a small country with its own weather.

The popular girls had their corners. The Thai ladyboys clustered together, fast Thai mixing under their breath, a private frequency. The Caucasian girls had their own end of the couch. It wasn’t unfriendly. We all moved through the same room, made eye contact, shared the microwave. The groupings were geography, not war. But the popular ones, whatever corner they occupied, rarely needed to look across the room. They just didn’t need to.

I sat at the other end. Quiet, out of my depth in this specific room, watching the intercom light up and call names that weren’t mine. I knew the work. I didn’t know the lineup. I was clunky in those first intros, fumbling the small talk, missing my cues, hesitating when I should have stepped forward and pitched myself. But I did learn to read the room. You learn your face in the client’s eyes in the second before he looks somewhere else…You learn what men are shopping for, and what they’re not. You learn to walk back to the couch without changing your expression. You learn to sit down like nothing happened, because something did, and acting like it didn’t is the only move available.

______________

Tiki saw me before I saw her.

Tiki was older, with more years in the trade than I could count from looking at her, and it showed in the way she moved through the parlour, unhurried, unbothered, as though the room had been built around her patience rather than the other way around. Big, Māori, built like she was carved from something harder than the room wanted to sell. Black curly hair, a chiselled face, an aura of defiance that was also, somehow, protective, the way a doorway is protective, the way a wall is. In a house that priced femininity by the gram, she took up her full size without apology and let the market do whatever the market was going to do.

She clocked me on my second or third day, the quiet one, the one that room was already starting to get to, and she came over and sat down next to me like she’d been sitting there for years.

She said it like a weather report. Calm, factual, slightly amused. She put an arm around my shoulders. Didn’t ask. Just did it. It was the right call.

______________

She taught me things I hadn’t learned working alone. How to read a client in the first three seconds from across a room rather than across a phone call. How to sit in the lineup so my shoulders didn’t curl in. How to walk out when he picked someone else with my face still intact, so the room had nothing to feed on. How to hear the intercom skip my name and register it as information, not a verdict.

“The ones who want you, want you,” she said. “The ones who don’t were never going to.”

She knew her numbers. Some men loved her. Some chose her in the first second. Most didn’t. She knew the ratio and had made peace with it. Not resignation. Accounting.

She never softened herself. Never dropped her voice to sound smaller. Never crossed her ankles in the lineup the way the popular girls did. She sat the way she sat, walked the way she walked, and if you didn’t want her, fine, the next one might. Her refusal wasn’t a statement. It was a posture she’d worn so long it had become her body.

We were the two at the low end of the intercom. Her by hierarchy, me by the particular foreignness of being inside a parlour for the first time after months of working alone. The couch was our country.

_______________

We invented a language. Not to hurt anyone, not to punch up at the popular girls or down at the clientele, just to fill the hours when the intercom had nothing for either of us. Private words, stupid jokes, a small dictionary that only made sense if you were us.

My favourite was enches.

“I will look after every enches of you, darling,” she’d say, stretching the Kiwi vowel into full Māori opera, “not inches. Enches!!!…”

It was a joke about her accent and a joke about the job and a joke about how she talked me through the slow afternoons when the intercom had nothing for either of us. Twenty-odd years later I can still hear her voice inside the word.

_____________

The television was always on. Whoever held the remote wrote the afternoon. The popular couch ran loud American reality shows, the kind where someone was always being eliminated from something. If Tiki got the remote, which was rare, she’d find rugby, or a cooking show, or something with singing. We half-watched, talked over it, ate instant noodles from the same pot.

Some of the girls created dramas. Boyfriends, wigs, stolen regulars. Small bitter things that recycled on a weekly schedule. Tiki and I stayed out of it, not from virtue but from economy. The low end of the intercom teaches you to conserve.

“Drama is a luxury of the chosen, darling,” she said, pointing her chin at the girl across the room who had just slammed her compact shut.

I giggled and choked on my tea.

____________

She didn’t explain things. She handled them.

A hand on my knee after a bad lineup. “Breathe…eat before your shift, not after. An empty stomach makes you fold faster.” . When I came out of a room shaken, she was already on the couch waiting, and she knew from my face what had happened without me saying it. “That one isn’t worth the story. Don’t give him the story.”  She handed me a cigarette and changed the subject, and that was that.

She laughed at everything, the clients, the popular girls, the parlour, the receptionist who mangled the more complicated stage names on the intercom, the whole theatre of it. She laughed every day and she taught me to laugh too. That’s what saved me, more than any technique she passed on.

______________

I left at the end of those two weeks. Back to the classrooms, back to the flat, back to the Telegraph ad. Within a few years I stopped working from classifieds altogether and built something of my own. Tiki went independent too, at some point, in her own way, on her own timeline.

We stayed in touch the way people do when they’ve met in a pressure chamber. Not constantly. A message every few months. A photo from Taupo, then later from London. A wink emoji on my birthday. The friendship didn’t need maintenance. The bond had been made in a specific room, in a specific season, and that kind of bond doesn’t decay. It just sits there, intact, ready.

She’s in London now. Working, in whatever configuration suits her. She’s there, she’s fine, she’s still herself. That’s enough.

____________

She dropped that line into the parlour kitchen the first time on an afternoon the intercom had skipped her four times in a row. I’d asked her how long she thought she’d do this for. She looked at me over the rim of her mug and winked.

I didn’t understand it then. I thought she was being theatrical, which she often was. It took me twenty-odd years to understand she wasn’t. She was telling me who she was. Not the role she played at work. The thing underneath the role. The thing that kept her standing in a room that priced her low, in a city that hadn’t asked her to come, in a body the market never quite knew what to do with. Warrior wasn’t a metaphor. It was her name for herself.

She’s still in the trade. Still standing. London in spring, Sydney in autumn, and the line arrives the same as it always did.

Some people leave. Some reshape themselves until the market recognises them. And some were never the shape of anyone else’s market in the first place.

They were the shape of themselves.

Once a warrior, always a warrior.

Enches, darling. Every one of them.