Ammanford used to bustle with independent businesses. After this, more high street brands moved in. “The Tesco’s killed off our local trade: the butchers, the greengrocers,” said Kristian. We talked about what it’s like to be young, in a town like Ammanford, and expectant of some kind of life. Photograph: Will Storr Photograph: Will Storr/Observer Prodigal son: Josh in the former mining town of Ammanford. “And then she said, ‘You’ve got something to tell your father as well.’ So I told him.”
“You had to tell an eight-year-old you were gay?” I said. Her mum said, ‘You need to tell her you’re gay.’” She was eight and was sending herself teddies and flowers and saying I sent them. “I did it to save face.” He was coerced into outing himself by a friend of his father’s who’d guessed about his orientation. As the second-best-looking boy in school he got the pick of the girls. Josh had proto-sexual experiences with male friends when he was eight or nine. “Just mostly stood under a tree thinking the helicopter couldn’t see us.” “Where would you and the anorexic girls go?” I asked. “They told me it cost £7,000 for it just to take off.” I was like, ‘Come on, fuck this thing!’” Every time he escaped, a helicopter would be scrambled. “I used to take the anorexic girls with me. Josh was sectioned in a Cardiff hospital. “Sounds cool, actually,” smiled Kristian. Gran was like, ‘What’s going on?’ and I was like, ‘This fucking thing!’” “The hand was coming out of the wall, trying to pull me in. “I remember when you saw that hand,” said Elena. “It was paranoid delusions, basically,” he said. He’d hear chattering almost-voices, see flitting shadows. “I got paranoid, always thinking someone was going to come at me with a knife,” he says. By 13 he was snorting up to seven grammes of amphetamine a day. They’d give him all the drugs to stash because, even then, he looked younger than his years and the police never searched him. By 11 he was already hanging out with the older kids in the park, smoking weed and drinking. By that time, he’d been on speed for two years. Josh used to walk out of school, just getting up in class, saying, “I’m going for a tea.” At 15, he was expelled.
“For the wrong reasons, yeah,” nodded Kristian. “He was dead popular in school,” said Kristian. “He was a funny boy, really,” said Elena. He leaned uncomfortably in the corner of the kitchen while Josh’s good friend, Elena, sat beside me. Josh’s step-brother Kristian lives in a small terrace a few minutes walk from the shops. “There’s always rumours like that going about.” “They said the actor from Men Behaving Badly was going to build a restaurant there,” said Josh. We passed a weed-choked demolition site surrounded by steel fencing. At the end of a windy car park, the triumphal Tesco sign loomed. When I photographed him in the park in which he used to take drugs, a group of youngsters jeered at us. Josh sliced through the grey pedestrian precinct in his box-fresh trainers and shiny puffer jacket like a returning pop star. There’s the Argos the Superdrug the Iceland the Shoe Express the Subway the abandoned cafés the independently owned shop (Sugar ’n’ Spice) with the Closing Down Sale posters and the To Let board fastened to its signage. And so, on a weekend of sagging cloud and sopping air, we met in Ammanford, 45 minutes north of Swansea. He parries any attempt to paint his life as dark or dangerous, insisting his moneyed life in London is preferable to life in the town in which he grew up, where the only thing to do is work in Tesco. He has monthly health checks, insists on condoms – even for oral sex – and forbids people from tying him up. Josh sees what he does as a legitimate business and compares himself variously to a doctor, a masseur and an athlete. “He looked exactly like a dog.” It was a two-hour job: £300. “His snout was looking at me the whole time,” says Josh. Josh had to watch a porn film, then say “Come here, boy!” and tickle his stomach. He asked Josh to dress in a schoolboy outfit while he attached his elasticated schnozzle and plugged his tail into place. A few weeks ago a man arrived at Josh’s flat with a dog costume in a little bag. His website notes his waist measurement, cock size and gayness to a precision of one decimal point (“97.5%”). Sometimes he sees four or five clients a day, and they’re mostly married men but there are also wealthy Arabs, an arms trader and the occasional celebrity. He’s also the most expensive hire on the UK’s most popular escort marketplace, and is, according to its founder, the most successful in Britain. With his young appearance, Josh is what’s known as a “twink”. I don’t know what Josh’s real name is, and when his age came up he said, “Let’s say 21.” He has blond choirboy hair, his body is pale and vulnerable and, on his beautiful face, innocence dances with filth across wide eyes and stung, parted lips. L et’s start with two lies: Josh Brandon is 21.