Madam is poignant and darkly comedic memoir from a mother who opened an ethical escort agency in small town New Zealand – and dared to make a difference. Now a major international TV series starring Rachel Griffiths and Martin Henderson.
Read on for an extract …
ABOUT THE BOOK
What would you do if your husband suddenly left you with two kids to support? Go back to school? Go into real estate?
Or start a new career as a pimp?
Upon discovering that sex work is decriminalised in New Zealand, Antonia Murphy decides to build her own business: an ethical escort agency. It seems like a good idea, but she isn’t sure how it’s done, so she connects with the online sex worker community.
MadamAntonia: Hi! I’m new to all this, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about being a sex worker?
phryne: Well. There’s sex and there’s sex. What do you plan to offer?
These smart, sassy women teach her more than she could have dreamed of – the importance of pineapple juice, how to remove chilli oil from, ahem, sensitive places, and what ‘Greek’ means (hint: there are no togas).
Clueless but hopeful, Antonia launches The Bach: a healthy, safe place where women can earn great money and provide compassionate, shame-free pleasure for clients.
At least, that’s the idea …
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CHAPTER 1
‘Monogamy’s not that important to me,’ one of us said at the start of our courtship. I can’t remember now if it was Peter or me, but does it matter? He was from Brooklyn and I was from San Francisco. We were drinking red wine on my sailboat. When one of us said it, the other one quickly agreed.
‘My mum left my dad when he had an affair,’ we both confided, sharing our parallel lives. The divorces had been painful and damaging, sending each of us bouncing between two parents’ houses. Maybe that was why we’d soured on normal: a career track, a mortgage, a marriage with kids. We were ready to throw the whole thing in the trash and start over.
‘Why do you have to break up a family?’ Peter wondered. ‘Why can’t you sleep with who you want and stay married?’ It turned out his parents had done that for years, swinging their way through the ’60s and ’70s. ‘It was when he formed a relationship with a woman,’ Peter told me. ‘That’s where she drew the line. It was when he fell in love.’
‘But it doesn’t even have to be like that,’ I insisted. ‘My parents’ friend Claudine had a lover for years; she was married the whole time and her husband knew everything. We stayed at her lover’s cottage in Normandy on vacation, that’s how open it was!’
‘Well.’ Peter cocked his head. ‘They’re French.’
‘Yeah, and they’re so much less hung up on monogamy than Americans are,’ I told him. ‘I remember Claudine came to stay with us when the whole Clinton and Lewinsky thing was happening, and she thought it was hilarious. She laughed out loud. She couldn’t believe there was a national scandal about a blowjob.’
Then we ducked down below and went into my cabin, which is where we spent most of our time early on. One day Peter was late for his job at the boatyard, and at 20 past nine, his phone started ringing. He dismissed the call, and it just rang again.
‘Get your head out from between that girl’s thighs and get over here!’ I heard his boss shout down the line. I stuffed my face in the pillow so he wouldn’t hear me laugh.
Three months after we first met, I was pregnant. By then Peter was living on my boat, and we were already talking about marriage. ‘If it’s a boy,’ he said, his head nestled on my belly, ‘we’ll name him after my father – that is, if it’s okay with you. We’ll call him Joseph.’
‘Joe? My first kid’s going to be called Joe?’
‘It’s a good name!’ He swatted my knee. ‘Good enough for Jesus’s dad, right?’ ‘Hmf,’ I grumbled, ‘maybe. He can always go by his middle name.’
Two weeks later though, Peter changed his mind. ‘I want to go sailing!’ he said. ‘I want to have adventures. I think I want to be with you, but it’s too soon to know for sure.’
‘So, what?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘You want me to have an abortion? Abort this kid we just named after your dad?’
Peter wasn’t looking at me. He was absorbed in the collection of books on my shelf. ‘If you have it,’ he said, ‘I’ll send money. But I won’t be a part of its life.’
Get an education, my mother had said, so if some man leaves you with kids to support, you can always find a way to get by. And make sure you get married before you have kids. That way, the law’s on your side. She’d told me stories about her life before, when she was raising my brothers alone. The gold lamé miniskirt she’d had to wear at her cocktail waitressing job, slinging drinks to red-faced, ass-grabbing men, while she chipped away at her master’s degree part-time. The emotional scars my brothers still bore, since their father had left them so young. I didn’t want that life. I wanted to be married with my husband committed, to sink a foundation before building a family.
So when Peter changed his mind, I didn’t make a fuss. I took the pills and I had the abortion. He asked me to pay half the bill.
After that, we made plans to get married. Peter thought it was silly, just some words on a page, but I wanted the security the law could provide. After that, we tossed out convention like confetti, starting our union by going to sea. We cruised through Mexico and Central America, then stopped in New Zealand when I learned I was pregnant again. This time, Peter accepted fatherhood: we’d been married for just over two years. Our plan was to stay temporarily, have a couple of kids and keep going. We’d cross to Australia, then through the Torres Strait to Jakarta – we had the sailing routes all worked out.
But first, we launched ourselves into parenthood. Silas was a beautiful, plump baby boy, and he nursed and he babbled on time. He was my first child, so I didn’t think twice when he only made one kind of sound. ‘Da! da! da!’ he chortled, and I brushed it aside.
‘Maybe he speaks Russian,’ I bantered to Peter. ‘And he’s just this super positive guy.’
That our child should have a serious medical condition seemed inconceivable at the time. So far, we’d both been so lucky. Seeing no reason to pause our life of adventure, we decided we’d sail around New Zealand. If we couldn’t take off for the wild blue ocean, there was plenty to explore near the coast. I’d been penning travel articles for sailing magazines, and I thought this could be a subject for my first full-length book. We’d travel the country and I’d sample its customs. We’d have zany adventures with our one-year-old baby, and I’d write a lightweight, funny travelogue à la Bill Bryson.
Three things came out of that trip, and none of them involved a publishing contract. The first was a surprise: we learned was that I was pregnant again, this time with a baby girl. The second was a lesson which we swallowed the hard way: there’s a reason New Zealand makes world-famous sailors. We nearly killed ourselves crossing Cook Strait, and after that we finished our trip in a van.
The third was a discovery – more my thing than Peter’s, and I stumbled on it while reading the newspaper one day. ‘No way,’ I murmured out loud, and Peter glanced up from his laptop.
‘What?’
‘Prostitution is totally legal here. It’s the only country in the world where that’s true.’
Peter was only just mildly interested, but I inhaled the article, riveted. I learned that since the Prostitution Reform Act 2003, sex work wasn’t just legal in New Zealand, it was decriminalized – which is even more liberal than that. In countries where prostitution is legal, it’s often heavily regulated, and sex workers have to apply for a license. Not here. You just need to be an adult New Zealand resident, and remember to put on a condom. Legally speaking, selling sex in this country isn’t much more regulated than selling a pizza. And running a brothel – being an ‘owner operator’ as they call it – isn’t a whole lot harder.
Why, you might ask, did I bother to care? Didn’t I have diapers to change and bottles to wash, booties to launder and storybooks to read? Well, remember, I was writing a book on this trip. So I did a little research, then I called up a brothel in Auckland, and got permission to come in and talk.
At the time, I thought I was a liberated woman, someone who could say ‘anal play’ in a sentence without stumbling over my words. But when I walked into my very first brothel, I came up against a lifetime of good-girl conditioning. This wasn’t what private school and pony camp had prepared me for. Instead of playing it cool, I was self- conscious and nervous.
The bartender was unimpressed. He took one look at me and jerked his head. ‘Oi,’ he grunted, tapping the polished wood bar. ‘This here’s the lady I was tellin’ yous about. The writer.’
Two young women glanced up from their drinks, then turned away. Heart thumping, I took a step closer and introduced myself. Would they be hardened? Angry and hostile? Up until that point, I’d thought of sex workers as ‘other’, denizens of an underworld that I’d never seen.
But you know what? Those girls were just . . . girls. Rein was tall and voluptuous, with a pretty, freckled face and sharp green eyes. Her skirt was short, and her boots had high heels, so she was dressed like my friends and me in college when we went out on a Friday. Veronica looked more Māori, with dark, wavy hair and big gold hoop earrings.
Two young women glanced up from their drinks, then turned away. Heart thumping, I took a step closer and introduced myself.
Neither one was wearing much makeup.
‘Hi!’ I chirped. ‘I was wondering what you guys thought about prostitution being legal in New Zealand?’
I figured they’d open right up about sex work, and how the Prostitution Reform Act protected their rights. But they didn’t. Rein’s green eyes narrowed. Veronica didn’t look up from her Jack and Coke. ‘Reckon it’s what you think,’ she muttered.
There was a pause. I stood there, a nervous smile twitching at my lips.
‘It’s gonna happen anyway,’ Rein pointed out, giving me a sideways glance. ‘You might as well make it safe.’ She stirred her drink, then sucked on her straw.
To my right, Veronica shifted in her seat. ‘People think we don’t deserve the money. One of my mates, like, she said to me, “I work so hard at my job and you just lie around all day. At least I have a brain.” They think we’re stupid, and we’re not. At all. You have to be smart to do this.’
We chatted for an hour, and by the time I left, it seemed obvious that sex work was … well, work. Sometimes they loved it, and sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they didn’t feel like getting dressed to come into the office. You know, like a job. I added that experience to my book about New Zealand. And I filed it away in my memory banks.
Whangārei had been our first port of call in the country – and it was sunny and friendly, more affordable than Auckland or Wellington. We decided to settle there after touring around, and by then Silas’s delays were too pronounced to ignore. At nearly two years, he’d just started walking, and he still had no words – only sounds. So the doctors ordered a blood test to analyse his DNA.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Antonia Murphy is an award-winning journalist and the author of Dirty Chick and Madam, which has been adapted into a television series. She is also the founder of The Bach, a legal, feminist escort agency. A San Francisco native, she lives in Auckland, New Zealand with her partner and two children.
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