Victoria

Victoria has been asked the same thing in a hundred different arrangements of words, and none of them lands as a shock any more. What a guest gets back is a plain reply, delivered as though the subject were the weather, which is what most people were hoping for and did not expect. She is twenty-eight, blonde, and lives in Oud-Zuid a short way from the Museumplein. Ukrainian, Russian and English are all hers, and she will settle on one early rather than drift between them. The evening is shaped by her judgement on the night, and she says that before the door closes rather than after.

Victoria decides which bookings she takes and may decline any of them; she sets the limits for what a session includes, says what they are, and may end a visit at any point, as the terms set out.