‘Gray’ – the fifth story in Broken Rules and Other Stories (Transit Lounge, 2020) – tells the tale of an empathetic sex-worker and a new client, an elderly man whose financial circumstances preclude any further appointments. Once their session is over, instead of leaving, the worker accompanies the elderly man to the local park, where they spend time talking and enjoying coffee and ice-cream. Here’s a situation where time is money, but the younger man wants no additional payment, and simply enjoys the company of the other, despite occasional flashes of crankiness.

A while ago I heard a sex-worker being interviewed about their experiences. They were asked how they approached situations where they found the client unattractive, and the humanity of their response stayed with me: they said that they never think of anybody as unattractive, that every person has something about them that’s attractive.

In ‘Gray’, the older man anticipates a need to provide a ‘something’ that the other will find attractive and fulfilling, and when they’re in bed he produces black-and-white images of himself in his younger days. The person in these photos is simply a different version of the man that presents them – all that separates the two iterations is the passage of time. Surely the current version must retain vestiges of earlier versions, and something more substantial than memories or echoes. It’s this consideration that sparked the story – I’d been wondering about the ways in which we’re the sum of our earlier selves, how we carry our pasts or histories, and what remains or develops as we age.

We cannot know for sure if the sex-worker in ‘Gray’ needed the stimulus of the photos. I’d like to think that the photos were unnecessary, that he is an astute observer, good at his job, discerning and intuitive enough to not require so obvious a clue – the evidence in the story certainly points to this conclusion. He is after all in the business of people and their qualities and intimacies. Empathy and understanding run both ways in ‘Gray’, and this may be one of the reasons why the two characters form a comfortable and easy bond. But what will happen when their time in the park inevitably comes to an end?