It’s easy money, Goebbels’ friend had told him with a leer, giving him a quick elbow in the ribs to compliment it, what are you so worried about, you do like girls don’t you?

Then a fast little bob of his head nodding up and down while he thought, yes, but…and that ‘yes, but’ must have showed on his face because his friend rolled his eyes and then left him alone in the university dormitory.

Now he’s standing at the door of the woman he’s been told will pay good money just to look at a pretty youth. Well, perhaps his friend never told him she wanted ‘pretty’, he was told she had certain…tastes, and he would suit them perfectly, that’s all. Mustering up the courage to knock on the door makes him feel mildly dizzy with apprehension but it’s better than begging his father for more funds.  

A servant opens the door, takes one look at him and tells him to wait in the room to the left. Goebbels crosses his arms and tries not to vibrate his good foot on the spot. The house reminds him of a church, the smell of it at least, what he imagines is the scent of old wood. Maybe all these places just use the same furniture polish and it’s as simple as that.

The nervous sweat has spread up from his palms to the back of his neck by the time she enters the room. He glances at her face once and then down to the floor. She could be your mother, some insidious internal voice croons to him.

“Are you worried, dear?”

She’s standing right in front of him now. Her hand touches his cheek, it’s very dry, hot.

“Your friend told you didn’t he?  Just… show me,” she says. “Let me touch you. That’s all. You won’t have to do anything.”

Goebbels stares harder at the floor, yes, of course he was told, why should hearing it now make him want to flee from this place at once? And she’s just a woman, just some old, sad, lonely woman, he can come back to campus crowing about how he earned a pretty penny at her expense.

He thinks that but his mouth feels parched, incapable of his speech and a cold chill has spread from where her fingers have touched him and still he can’t bring his eyes up from the ground.

“I don’t want to hurt you.” He can hear the smile in her voice. “Just let me see your body. Touch you.”

Goebbels stands and fixes his gaze on the far wall, where there’s a clock. It almost seems as though it’s standing still. He feels hollow, adrift from himself, raw and empty inside.  His fingers struggle with the buttons on his shirt. The lady(he realises just now he doesn’t know her name) doesn’t make a comment but seems to find his fumbling all part of the exquisite enjoyment she’s wringing out of this moment.

He lays his shirt down gently. Then his trousers. He’s standing in his underthings and he knows they are expected to be discarded too and in the middle of this room where the daylight is streaming in, the high ceilings, the wooden floor tacky underneath his feet, he hooks his fingers into his drawers and-

“Wait a minute.”

The lady steps closer, kneels, reaching her fingers to his malformed leg, the tracery of damage that’s as much a part of his body as he wish it weren’t, that soft touch reminding him of how faint those memories are of when he was young and perfect and whole.

Her fingers are damp as she presses them to the twisted limb . Goebbels’ stomach begins to writhe with bile; he locks it down, resolutely.

“Take the rest off,” she says.

He does. He tries to lift his chin up, proud, cocksure, but instead his arms are shivering with the need to cover himself up.

Out of the corner of his eye he can see the woman is no longer smiling. She circles Goebbels on soft feet, touching him with clammy hands.

His jaw is clenched so tight it’s cracking. His fists furl at his sides. Her hands hover at his nipples then slip down to his hips, cradling his pelvis, feeling out its bones. He’s too thin, he knows that. He wonders if that’s what she likes and the thought fills him with equal pride and disgust. When her hands move between his thighs, he can’t keep still. His knees buckle, and he staggers as the room sucks darkly at him.

“Careful…” She breathes the word into the back of his neck, barely able to contain her excitement at the effect her touch is having on him.

He reaches for the edge of the table in front of him and steadies himself, taking shallow breaths until his pulse slows..

It’s just a body. Goebbels has already taught himself that. All those nights looking at himself with disgust and willing the fact that this was attached to him away. He can put himself higher than that, he doesn’t need to be connected to it. No amount of touching can touch him. Not now. And especially not this. A quick grope by a middle-aged dowager? It’s nothing.

He repeats it like a mantra as her hand closes over his erection and the filthiness of the whole thing worms under his skin, tears falling silently down his face as he braces himself and images himself begging her to stop but he doesn’t even have the courage for that.