Sindy in Real Life: Intimate Confessions of a No-win No-fee Paralegal who became a No-fee No-me Escort

By Sindy

Sindy in Real Life is the biography of the first five decades in the life of a woman who was raised in a home reeking of tobacco smoke by a bullying drunk often absent father who thought she was a waste of space and a mother who thought her inferior to her cousins. It was a home without books or cultural communication. She became a failing pupil at a failing school, thought of herself as ugly and unloved. Offered sex as her only way of getting attention. Left without qualifications. Gradually she gained qualifications by grafting in court-related jobs while studying at night. Misadventures with men, an attempt to flee her hometown, only to return to its claustrophobic safety, drunken nights out with her only friend and in alone with three bottles of red wine, marked her progress through the early years as a paralegal.
But then she decided to have two children and give them a positive start in life, bring them up alone with her surname, and earn the money to do it well. She entered the rough and tumble of no-win, no-fee lawyering with a desire to help deserving people to gain compensation only to find she was trapped in a money-making machine that had little to do with justice, failed to gain just rewards and encouraged dishonest claims.
But then she became pregnant again and needed more money for three children at a time when the legal work was paying less. She turned to sex, offering her services through an escort agency to make up the difference, encountered a range of men including one who controlled her life for a year of tyranny, before finally understanding that neither profession could offer her respect or the hope of self-respect, and even as she continued to work in them began to campaign for respect. This book is part of that campaign.
It is a book about the resilience of the human spirit, an honest account in the everyday language of Sindy, full of swearing and humor, frank in its descriptions of bad, enjoyable and forced sex and male performance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780993408151

Book preview

remixed.

1

A Pivotal Lunch at the Café Tivoli

This was the day when my twin selves, the no-win no-fee paralegal, or more technically legal executive, and the sex-selling escort came together and did some good. The day when I was proud to be me. Proud to be Sindy in Real Life.

This is THE lunch, I thought.

I’ll have him meet me at the Tivoli, my home territory, certainly not his, my side of the water where the real people live, not in the heart and heat of the city singles set who suck up people’s expectations and spit them out.

It certainly proved to be my coming-out lunch, if not in the way I expected.

It was 2012 and I was already forty-four, but still with a body that weakened men at the knees, a Viking Warrior Princess, a Real Life Sindy doll, bold breasts jutting out of my push-up bra, thirty-three inches of inside leg, Clarins cared-for skin, wide sparkling eyes and natural curly blonde hair, temptingly dressed in an Armani trouser suit and a scarlet blouse unbuttoned challengingly low.

Jonathan, the guy I was meeting, the enemy, was a callow hot-shot solicitor who added a naught to the end of my hourly pay, with corporate and big bureaucracy funding at his disposal. I was a trained and experienced, wait for it, PARALEGAL! No match you might think, but we were about to go head to head on some no-win no-fee ambulance chasing lawyering. Home territory again for me.

I was living the dream.

I had, an income over forty grand a year despite diminishing returns and bonuses in no-win, no-fee world, my own home, my own car, my own teeth and my own three kids, all with my single person’s surname, despite the naming and shaming of two of the three’s feckless dads on their certificates. But then I’d never been short of offers from men who loved to share a joke, and an alcoholic fug, knew how to shag and match my pace.

Sometimes I just wanted a baby in my life, a child I could bond with. Now I had three. I was giving them a better time than I ever had from my alcoholic, disinterested father and angry, bitter mother (thanks to dad) who late-parented me. Mum was long dead by then, having been tongue-lashed to death, while the bully still lived on into his eighties, selfishly pestering care home staff.

I was living the nightmare.

My policy of seeking sexual satisfaction on demand, finding a fit fucker, getting pregnant, getting rid of the donor and moving on, had stalled. My younger daughter was three, but the retard who’d fathered her, was still hanging out in the lounge like the remnants of last night’s pizza fight far too often. As I couldn’t shake him off, I bought a car for him to ferry all three of them around when I couldn’t make it. So, then I was paying for two cars, their petrol and insurance, and giving him handouts that he was supposed to spend on the kids.

I had the original great deal mortgage on my house, but to create space for each new kid and a place to work from home, I had acquired a series of further charges, mortgages based on LIBOR plus infinity, just to fund the lifestyles of rip-off builders. Whenever my credit cards maxed out I arranged a new five-year personal loan, three were still running.

Don’t talk to me about how much kids cost. They can eat their own weight in food any day and still stay incredibly fit and slim. The youngest could shit for Britain, fill her own weight of expensive disposable nappies every day for months, the volume rising as she grew. The other two, a boy and a girl with no gender assignment hang-ups but four years apart refused point blank to share any wardrobe and shot up about an inch a month. They were very independent when it came to me, but very needy when it comes to gadgets and social media access. They are of a generation who don’t hang onto stuff, which accounts for me having to shell out for rechargers three times as often as a phone upgrades and replace other things when they didn’t know where they left them. Then there were the nursery and after club fees, trips and optional tuition fees for the arts and sports.

My best friend alcohol didn’t come cheap either. A decent summer red is all I ask so it wasn’t vintage that was costing. But when your responsible parenting equilibrium level is two to three bottles a night, getting rat-arsed on a Friday night of pubbing and clubbing costs. Once the virgin healthy bloom of youth had gone from my butt cheeks, there weren’t many blokes around willing to pick up the tab, especially when they had the option of students who could orgasm twice on a pint of cider. The playing field has levelled out a bit recently since the millennials got to like the taste of designer gin.

But back then, I needed to win big at that café lunch to keep my bonus up, maybe to keep my job, maybe even to prevent the firm going bust.

When I first moved from the living death of local government into the bright brave world of private client lawyering, I thought I would be playing my part in getting justice for genuinely aggrieved customers of big business and belligerent bureaucracy, a knight in shining armour, a heroine of our time. But by 2012, I knew it was all just a numbers game for making money that had nothing at all to do with justice. Plus, we had such a bad rip-off reputation that the government could keep eating into our profits with impunity. Not that I had much to do with policy or profit.

The reality of my role was to maintain contact with the referral agencies, or pimps as I thought of them. They did the stalking of potential claimants, signed them up, wrote up some case notes and sold them onto us for a flat fee, perhaps with a small percentage of the spoils if we hit pay dirt. Mainly though they lived off the intro fees unless they were insurance brokers trying for uninsured losses.

The biggest racket at that time was whiplash. And I thought I had a peach of a case before I came up against Jonathan. It wasn’t just potentially profitable, I was convinced it was genuine. I really could be that knight which made quite a change from the run-of-the-mill whiplash cases, many genuine but often with outcomes so exaggerated as to be blatantly fraudulent. I soon learned to distrust dodgy claims many of which came from unscrupulous gangs of men of Pakistani origin. A small minority of that community, but significant in my caseload. Maybe I should have spoken up and perhaps saved a lot of pimply fat white teenage girls from being groomed when the gangs refocused their energies.

The most popular ploy was to look out for some inexperienced driver in a shiny new car slowing too early when nearing a busy roundabout. The gang would be in a minibus of Pakistani women, allegedly on their way to their regular shift at a Pakistani textile factory.

The van would cut in sharply, straighten up, have its brakes slammed on and wait for the car driver to bump gently into the back of it. At which point everyone in the van would be severely whiplashed and unable to work in a factory for the remaining decades of their working age lives. Their claims would be divided up so that each of us would only hear of one or two from each crash.

A plethora of Pakistani eye witnesses would blame the car driver. The factory owner would confirm that all the women with common Pakistani surnames were the ones on his staff lists.

There was one local newspaper vendetta against me, calling me out as a racist because I identified groups of Pakistani men as being the main culprits in most of the repeated fraudulent claims I encountered. Eventually the story was dropped with a page thirty-six, eight-point italic apology which stated that I had not accused Muslims, Asians or even the majority of law abiding Pakistanis or incited hatred or prejudice.

The other part of my job was to evaluate which cases could make money for us, gather the evidence, provide and brief a witness list and lay out the bones of a script for a barrister to strut his stuff with in court if it ever came to that, then send a letter offering to settle for whatever I thought we could get away with, then negotiate the sum if they resisted. Few accident whiplash cases got to court, unlike the other kind when politicians, celebrities or vicars had enjoyed a spanking good time.

It was interesting when the few Pakistani minibus cases I worked on came to court. Invariably the devout and dutiful Muslim women confessed the truth, while the men lied through their teeth.  

It had been a long time since legal aid had been available to anyone but criminals and civil cases were brought to court by us no win, no fee lawyers or funded by insurers via their pet solicitors under the title of legal expenses insurance policy which offered protection to the punter in the event of an accident.  It protected them from paying anything to us for fees but this in reality was the same as no-win no-fee lawyering except you couldn’t take any money from the client and so had to make do with the fixed costs from the Defendant even though these were being reduced seemingly without end.

At first, we could write up the most trivial of cases, especially the difficult to disprove ones like whiplash and claim thousands for doing so. It was a license to print money. The costs began to get out of hand as far as the profit-hungry insurers were concerned. England topped the whiplash league of the world according to them. They promised anyone who would listen that if the number of cases were cut back and the costs were slashed the saving to the punter buying insurance would be massive and all would benefit. In reality they were just transferring profit from us to them.

Gradually the fee allowed to bring a case was driven down. Scales for valuing injuries were introduced dependent on the period of incapacity and injury documented in the medical report filed at court. The time and effort in bringing a case to court as well as disbursements you had to pay out to run a case such as engineers fee, medical report costs, police report fees and court fees, continued to increase while costs recovered grew less and less.

Higher awards were possible for identifiable treatment costs and the big one, loss of earnings and earning potential. The referral agencies who just needed to write up a plausible case and sell it to us for a fixed fee did well enough to keep on recruiting and dressing up hopeless or contrived cases to fool us. It became harder to make a profit, easier to make a loss with every case. A lot of firms went to the wall. We staggered on, just.  But we needed cases with a share of the award for loss of earning potential. Doctor Sharma was perfect, or so she seemed.

Jonathan, I soon discovered, had been well funded by a variety of interested parties to contest that view.

I almost missed the significance of the case at first. It arrived in a batch of potential claims from a source not known for its diligence, in a batch with a few dodgy textile workers’ claims. Doctor Sharma was however not just a doctor, but a pioneering surgeon in her native Bombay as she insisted on calling it. Mumbai was its Hindu name, she stated and she was Christian of Anglo-Indian descent four generations back who had believed in the message of the missionaries. She was more than a doctor, she was a world class innovative surgeon of international reputation, in Britain to address a conference. She was a passenger in a taxi that had been involved in the accident with a white- van courier who seemed the guiltier of the drivers. When I met Doctor Sharma for a formal interview, she expressed her absolute faith in the integrity and the fair-mindedness of the British justice system which would decide the fate of her case. I told her she might be in for a shock.

She began to describe her injuries clearly in general terms and it was obvious to me that somewhere in the back of her mind she was aware of the precise details of operations and exercises that might help her and that she knew her limits and the timescale of her recovery. Yet she failed to identify the detailed steps in medical terms.

The pain involved in the smallest movement and the lack of control over her arms, hands and fingers were obvious. Dr Sharma’s international career, her research days, her ability to operate, were all at an end. I felt compassion for her, of course I did, just as I felt love for men who had pleased my body. I just couldn’t bring it to the surface, that was all, I told myself. But really, I was only seeing pound signs and zeros, lots of zeros.

‘You want three friggin specialist reports at a grand a pop for a Paki whiplash? The boss yelled. Now he is a racist, somewhere to the right of a rogue UKIP branch twinned with the KKK. ‘You gone friggin crazy?’

I painted a saintly portrait of our client for him. It wasn’t difficult.

‘If you’re wrong, the three grand or whatever comes out of your bonus, right.’

‘Yeah right.’ I dismissed the threat as bluster.

‘I’m serious.’

‘So am I, yes if you insist. But if this comes off I get five percent of the award.’

‘Done,’

‘Split a bottle of red?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ he replied so off we went to order a pint of Spittlebeck or whatever the real ale of the month was for him, the first of three, and a bottle of house red for me.

The medics did us proud. They should. We gave them enough business to cut their NHS shifts down to three days a week. I was ready to write my letter on behalf of Dr Sharma. Then I hit the first snag. Who could we threaten?

I started off with the courier company, an international name, owner of the national parcels service of a European nation. Except that the bit that dealt with the UK was a separate entity, owned by offshore trusts, with a head office on a minor Caribbean island. All its British couriers were, according to tax records, sole traders.   

When I saw the driver’s terms of engagement as a sole trader, I knew I had them. They wouldn’t allow him to carry parcels for any other organization and he had to be available at one hour’s notice six days a week. I could threaten to make a big fuss and set some crusading journalist onto them if they hung him out to dry.

I phrased the opening letter delicately referring to the driver who was contracted by them and detailing the extent of loss of career earnings by Dr Sharma. Then I hit them with a massive settlement figure, knowing they would scurry to their lawyers. They provided the usual bullshit response about time to investigate the validity of the claim and I was quite prepared to wait given the solidity of the medical opinions in my file.

Then I received a terse reply from Jonathan.

‘We acknowledge that our client, the van driver was delivering on behalf of the UK company which we own, but would point out that he is a sole trader. Even so we are instructed by our clients to offer the standard three-year tariff as an ex-gratia payment with the proviso that the matter remains private. Our client denies that your client is in fact Dr Sharma. The flight and hotel details that you provided are for Mrs. Sharma. Dr Sharma arrived on a flight, two days earlier at Birmingham International Airport and stayed with family. In addition, Dr Sharma was in good health when she addressed a medical conference, three days after the accident.’

I ordered my Dr Sharma to come to the office immediately.

She was not used to being ordered and protested, but I have developed a sound technique to have my orders obeyed and employed it.

She limped in to the office with difficulty and crouched awkwardly on the chair, her right arm in a loose sling, her fingers tense but lifeless, her wrist weak and slack. Any judge would feel empathy. I didn’t even have any sympathy when I slammed Jonathan’s missive down on the table between us.

She read it, seemed taken aback at first,

‘Yes, all this is true, but it is not the way it seems. I assure you that I am Dr Sharma of international reputation.’

‘So, explain,’ I demanded.

‘In India there are always many cousins. Sharma is what in Scotland you might think of as a clan. There are many of us. One of my cousins, removed many times, was booked on a flight to Birmingham when her passport was mislaid. A wedding had been planned and she had a crucial role to play. I allowed her to use my passport. But then I was asked to speak at a conference here at short notice, by which time my cousin’s passport had been found, so I used hers for my flight. After the accident, the conference organizers asked if my speech could be read by another Indian specialist who was familiar with my work and I agreed. There was nothing new in my presentation.  So, all of this we can explain.’

‘If this goes to court you’ll be admitting that you entered the UK illegally on a false passport. You could be deported and denied any future visa. The gutter press will have a field day and will make a big fuss about you fielding a substitute at the conference. Your professional reputation will plummet.’

She began to look worried then.

‘So, I should not be compensated?’

‘I’ll go and see this Jonathan, work my charm on him, get him to accept that you are the Dr Sharma, and get a settlement agreed.’

That’s why they are so ambivalent about me in the office. I promise the Earth will move, and sometimes it doesn’t. Dr Sharma arranged for statements from all involved in both deceptions and I rehearsed approaches to Jonathan in the mirror, none of which seemed likely to have the desired effect.

The Tivoli has stood at the water’s edge for over two hundred years, once it was the bathing and fishing lodge of the manor house, with only manicured gardens between the two buildings. But the manor house has long been redeveloped and the land sold off. It is still served by an ancient right of way that runs along the river bank to the bridge into the business district.

I arrived early, ordered a bottle of Argentinian Malbec and two glasses, and took up a position on the balcony from where I could see Jonathan approach. I had told him of the path, but not of its usual mud-covered condition. I suspected he was the type to be embarrassed by arriving with soggy bottoms to his pants in squelching shoes. From his fastidious progress I guessed I wasn’t wrong. He was a fashionable twenty minutes late which demonstrates the amount of role reversal that was already happening by then.

The sun was quite low in the sky, quirkily appearing from behind small clouds and hiding behind them again. My dark glasses were not just an affectation, but when the shafts of light were dimmed by cloud I could hardly see any detail. Jonathan seemed much more concerned about his own appearance and the odor rising from his feet and ankles. to study me carefully.

‘There is an explanation about the identity, my client is definitely the Dr Sharma,’ I began.

‘We’ll see about that,’ he sneered as he sniffed the Malbec and called over a waiter and said, ‘I’ll have a Chablis if you have a decent vintage.’ Then he took some interest in my legs and added, ‘Bring a bottle.’ In my book Chablis is a wimp’s drink.

He pushed the un-sipped Malbec across the table and stretched out languidly, obviously feeling in charge again, as his birthright demanded.

I pushed documents across the table substantiating Dr Sharma’s unlikely story as I explained it. But he relaxed as he seemed to appreciate, as I had done, that I could not take the case to court.

But as our eyes met with each exchange of documents, it became clearer to us that this was not our first meeting. Then I remembered how and where we had met.

‘So, there will be no nonsense about my client’s true identity will there,’ I said raising my voice menacingly.

The commanding tone of my voice brought his memory into sharp focus.

He had been Whining Fag and I had been the fantasy female Whipping Sheila as I caned his bum with the same loving swish that he had enjoyed so much in his boarding school years, if he imagined a girl holding the cane. In fact, he’d been Sindy’s first role-play client and I had transferred the security film coverage to my mobile, played the clip to him as I gathered up my documentation.

I especially liked the bit in which he lay across the bed with his striped buttocks in the air and turned his head full on to the camera and said, ‘Lash me again Sheila, please, lash me again.’

However well this case turns out, I thought, I won’t see much of the money. But in my alter ego as Sindy in Real Life, I can make enough to pay off some loans and make sure my kids have a secure and reasonably affluent life and a good education.

It was one of the few times my parallel existences met.

‘I’m sure the other hotshots in your firm would love to see this. I have a mate who’s a freelancer for the mags who could sell fifty articles based on it. Could be a career killer for you in court when the opposition started to offer you six of the best.’

‘I’ll look at the figures bitch. But I want all copies of that clip.’

You haven’t got a hope in hell of that, I thought, but stopped myself from saying it.

‘If the figure is high enough I might even give you an hour of Sheila,’ I offered. It’s much nicer to be able to offer a little carrot with the stick.

Or in his case, a swish of the stick for his little carrot. Whatever else his experience as a fag had done for him, socially and character wise, it had certainly stunted his growth.  

‘I don’t know how the frig you got that much girl, but you done good,’ my bardic boss acknowledged when the huge cheque arrived. I decided not to detail my method.

It was a good day.

There hadn’t been that many of them, except the three when I put my new-born baby to my nipple and knew that the child was entirely mine.

I was determined to ensure that my kids weren’t mired in the shitty start that I had to endure.

2

It’s All the Doll’s Fault

The last thing any young teenager wants is to stand out, unless she’s living out her mum’s dream or her daddy’s fantasy and yearns to perform. I hated my appearance enough to want to stay anonymous.

There was no chance of that.

At twelve, I was already five feet four inches tall with tits that were more solid than a mere roll of baby fat. For the next six years I grew an inch a year in height and around my chest.

I guess the comparison between me and the ideal all began years before, in infants’ school just before Christmas. Annie brought in the Sindy doll as her favorite toy. I took one look and