The Lucky Break

I'll come to the lucky break in due course. First, Missy: just 18, straight, buttery-blonde hair to her chin, and blue grey eyes, these being her self-declared only good features. Her face was somewhere between pretty and plain, more towards the latter. Smallish breasts, flattish bottom, a middling body, not thickset but no-one would call her dainty. But her passion.... She could put something into a tongue kiss I'd never known before, and as I ran my hand over those almost-flat buttocks I was lifted into a dreamlike state of desire. Somehow in her off-the-planet way she harnessed girlhood and womanhood and brought it all to bear on you as Girl Incarnate, the apotheosis of Girl-Woman. She did it, she brought it off, melted you... or at least she melted me, which is what mattered.

I was 45, childless. My wife and I had separated long since and last month our divorce had come through. But to spice things up -- from a hunch that proved accurate -- I told Missy I was married with kids and she was a homewrecker. She loved that role: I think she was driven to be a high achieving female, and since she had no money, beauty or brains the avenue to success was narrow.

Things with her were so wild and mad it's hard to say it in a way that makes sense. Like the night drive when she made me pull over in the middle of nowhere into a gravelly truck-stop. There were yellow sodium lights overhead, but the stop was empty except for an old truck body at one end: it had all the panels in place but rusted through, and no wheels, it was up on blocks -- but deep shadow underneath. Just the locale for doing something offbeat. We could have found a hotel, but she wanted me then and there. And just when we'd got ourselves into the shadowland underneath the truck, some kind of tourist bus pulled up close by, with people pouring from it and shuffling about under the lights. Crazy stuff like that happened with her all the time. Well possibly the incident doesn't sound super-hot to you, but that truck body and darkness beneath became like a symbol of the life Missy led me into.

Which leads me to the lucky break. I won $100 million in the Australian lottery, as big a prize as you can get, more or less. My ex-wife just missed out, but because I'm not a total arse, and because she had zero superannuation, I gifted her 400k to pay off the house. (It was going to be one mill, then 500k -- Missy persuaded me down; she was annoyed I gave the ex any.)

Back to me. The problem was, I had no interest in luxury houses that need security guards, or fancy cars that get nicked or keyed. Or swanning around in swank hotels. Or parading around on a yacht, bikinis and six-packs etc. etc. All the signs that you've Made It. None of that appealed. The people who lived that life made me sick. Missy did push a bit for all that, but only half-heartedly; she too was a creature of the poorer suburbs. When I discovered that I started to wonder, somewhat amazed, if Missy and I might actually last as a couple. We managed with a good but unflashy house and car.

Spare a thought for the plight of the rich. The lottery win was tax-free, sure, but on the income from that money the hit is just cruel! And when you turn it into stocks and shares the tax whammy hardly bears thinking about. How do the rich manage? Moving it to a tax haven scared me; I wasn't in that league. But there's another way: you write off tax by owning businesses that lose money.

It was Missy who suggested the solution.

I set up a chain of brothels. Totally legal, loss-making to offset my tax but a playground for me -- well-appointed places, not charging much to the punters, the barely-legal girls doing only just-ok out of it. The first establishment was for the older man, discreet, building up their sense of entitlement. I had money to hire people -- mainly older women, actually -- to find messed-up girls as soon as they come legally onstream; find them and hook them into the lifestyle -- fasten them to it, while they were still fluid and could have moved on in any direction, and to end that fluidity, so that by 19 they were bolted on to the whore life, rusted on, no way back. All legal, all above board. It was my noir playground, a fantasyland-turned-real.

Somewhat later I set up a lesbian place for older woman. But meanwhile I set up other bordellos staffed by older whores, catering to particular kinks: anything that was legal and vaguely tolerable to me even if it didn't light my fire. And others again catered to unpractised just-legal boys, giving them a start in early adulthood, affirming stuff learned from online porn, and what to expect and demand from girlfriends.

Missy was not up to managing any of this, but she did work well as my observer (spy) who kept the madams honest, flirted with the bouncers as she pleased, and betrayed confidences from the working girls. She loved the life. Today she and I are still at it, and we're closer than ever.

This is what it's like to be truly rich, I realised: why the US billionaires play around with their nutty fringe political outfits and causes, all set up to be claimed on tax. Instead of pouring tax money into general revenue, I could now play with it however I wanted. It was good to be me. Still is.