IT'S NOT fun to f*** strangers for money. It's not fun and it's not romantic, either. There are a lot of fairy tales and myths about the world's oldest profession, but unless you've done it you can't possibly know what it's like to sell your body. Arlene Hunt is a thirty one year old from Wicklow. She worked as a prostitute in Dublin for five years, before being rescued, she

IT'S NOT fun to f*** strangers for money. It's not fun and it's not romantic, either. There are a lot of fairy tales and myths about the world's oldest profession, but unless you've done it you can't possibly know what it's like to sell your body. Arlene Hunt is a thirty one year old from Wicklow. She worked as a prostitute in Dublin for five years, before being rescued, she says, by a handsome man, who whisked her off to Barcelona where she now lives happily ever after. Extremely happily.

Her husband is, she insists, the nicest guy you could possibly meet. So nice that she laughs when people say they met a nice guy. Because if the nice guy they have met is even a shadow of the nice guy she has, she would like to meet him.

But it's good karma, she thinks, that has allowed her to be so lucky and to have this wonderful life. Because for a long time, things weren't so good. They were really, really bad. So bad that she resorted to prostitution. And however lovely Richard Gere and Julia Roberts might look in Pretty Woman, the reality of prostitution is grim and gritty and violent and humiliating. There's no two ways about that, Arlene says.

It's not something you do unless you are desperate. Really, really desperate.

I'm waiting for Arlene in the Shelbourne, on a sunny morning. She's flown in especially to promote her first novel Vicious Circle. It's the story of Amanda Harrington, a Dublin prostitute, trying to survive in the seedy world of sex and crime. It's a nasty book, a vicious book. From the very first pages, my stomach was turning. There were broken bones, splintering, blood, gore and puke. It's a visceral story.

"I love that word, visceral," Arlene says delightedly. Shaking back a mane of red hair, she fixes me with a determined blue-eyed gaze. This lady is no wimp. She writes like a man, I tell her and she accepts this as a compliment. I think of James Ellroy, I say. Of Pulp Fiction. She loves James Ellroy. She loves thrillers, about the seedy side of life. And always wanted to be a novelist, from the age of four or five, but never wanted to write girlie fiction. She doesn't readromance.

"Life is visceral," she says. "It is gritty, it is violent. It's not always nice and pretty and fluffy."

The novel is grim, it is frightening, and it is closely based on her own experiences, which included ending up in court and being charged with prostitution. She even gave her main character, the prostitute Amanda Harrington, her own initials. It wasn't necessary to invent this world. And we don't see the half of it, she assures me. But how do people end up becoming prostitutes? What kind of a situation brings them to cross that line?

"People ask me that all the 'The novel is grim, it is frightening, and it is closely based on her own experiences, which included ending up in court and being charged for with prostitution.'

time," she says. "Why did you do it? Why, why, why? Anyone can do anything, that's the truth. If your back is pushed against the wall, there is nothing you won't do."

"Contrary to the myths," she says, "there's no glamour in prostitution."

Julia Roberts in her pretty boots was miles from the truth. But Arlene found herself with no option that she could see. People get into the game for all sorts of reasons, but mainly desperation.

It was a journey that began in childhood. Arlene was not wanted by her mother, who was young, unmarried and working at three different jobs when she got pregnant. Her mother had been fostered herself, and when Arlene was three, she gave her to the daughter of her own foster parents. And later she married and had three sons.

"My foster parents spoiled me rotten," Arlene says. "So I did have a lovely time, for a while. And I knew who my mother was, but I didn't feel any connection with her, even though she lived half a mile down the road."

But, when she was 13, everything changed. Kitty, her foster mother, had a brain haemorrhage and Arlene was given back to her real mother. It didn't work out.

"She didn't want me in her space," she says. "I understand that now, but at the time I didn't. She wasn't used to having a girl around, she had three sons and her husband. And I was very rebellious."

Arlene never felt loved by her mother.

"I'm not going to lie about it," she says. "That's just how it was. Sometimes that happens." Her father had abandoned her before she was even born. He wasn't interested in having children. Never became interested.

"You learn," Arlene says, "not to take it personally." But mother and daughter fought so much that Arlene left home and rented a garage for £15 a week, working in amusement arcades to pay the rent.

"I met a guy, when I was 17, and got pregnant. Things got really bad and bleak, too bleak to go into."

But it never occurred to Arlene not to have the child.

"I would give the skin off my back for her!" she says, passionately. Things didn't work out with the father, and Arlene had no qualifications, so she resorted to badly-paid jobs, to support her child.

"You name it, I did it. It was exhausting. And you crack a bit after a while, having no support."

Stealing, I put it to her, could have been an option.

"I would no more steal than I'd lop my own leg off!" she exclaims. "There's is a difference doing something for yourself and doing something to deliberately hurt somebody else."

While working in a nightclub in Leeson Street, she befriended a prostitute. Who suggested she try her hand at the game.

"The way she put it to me was that it would be a step up," Arlene says. "An opportunity to put food on the table, buy clothes and sort myself out. My initial reaction was no way! Not in a million years."

But it just so happened that somebody had stolen her wallet that day, and there was literally no money for food, for the week. So she made the decision to give it a try.

"I called this number that she gave me, and after I had been fobbed off a few times, I was called for an interview at a really old-fashioned bordello with velvet drapes. And the woman was really nice and very straight. She told me it's not a job for the fainthearted, but if I worked hard I could make good money. And she was right."

What was it actually like? I ask.

"I don't want to talk about what my first job was like," she says, firmly. "Or what my worst experience, was, or my worst client, because it was all terrible, it was all the worst. It becomes the norm to you, but that doesn't make it enjoyable, maybe it dulls the edges of how much it is a trauma to you."

"There is no handbook to tell you how to do the job," she says. "You just go by instinct and do the best you can. But she will tell me that there are a few surprises. You learn a lot about men. For instance, they don't all want skinny young blondes.

"In this country, the most successful women are older women, they're not beautiful, they are just nice women, they have nice bodies, but they exude a warmth and a relaxed attitude that is instantly appealing to a nervous man or any man coming into your place. Friendliness, believe it or not, is what they want. One of our most successful women was in her sixties and not well-preserved at all!"

Most of the customers are married men. "Why do they get married," I ask, "if they are going to sleep with prostitutes?"

"Because they love their wives," she says.

"So why do they sleep with prostitutes then?" "Because they are men," she says. "And because they can. A lot of the time men and women aren't reading from the same page. You don't understand the difference between men and women."

"Maybe not," I say.

"Like David Beckham. He probably couldn't tell you why he did it. But I suspect I can. He thought he was going to get away with it, but he got caught. People covet emotion, life is dull for a lot of people, there's no disputing he loves his wife, but if nobody finds out then he's not hurting anyone."

"He's already promised he'd be faithful to her," I insist. "So it is hurting someone." "Don't think I don't see the hypocrisy," she admits. "And don't for one second think I understand it, but I do understand that it's not a black-and-white issue. You don't think women have affairs left right and centre? It's just easier for a man to go in and pay for physical satisfaction without any of the ties."

It's a sordid business, apart from the moral issue of whether or not you are hurting anyone's marriage. It's dangerous and dirty enough already. Arlene was one of the lucky ones, she says. "To be a prostitute you have to have a certain mentality. And maybe certain things happened to you, you absolutely had to provide for something, but if someone comes along and they love you and want to look after you, you leave it like that." She clicks her fingers. But supposing her husband was to go to a prostitute? How would that feel?

"I love my husband very much and he loves me very much. I would rather lop my own leg off than go off with anybody else, and he feels the same. I trust him one hundred per cent. But when you love each other, you have to get over stuff. There has to be something else there that makes you a couple, that can make you survive these things." Andrew has been very understanding about what she did for a living, she says.

"He's not the type to run away from something challenging. He's not weak, like my father was. It was hard for him, of course it was, but he's not judgmental. He's the kind of person you can be totally honest with."

They met in Dublin, at the POD nightclub.

"Everyone was facing the DJ and we were the only ones facing the other way. That's how we met, and the minute we met, I knew. No doubt about it. I never really believed in there being one special person for everyone, I was more cynical then. But from the word go we were crazy about each other."

Arlene didn't have the greatest possible start in life, but life has more than made up for it now, she says, because it couldn't get any better. And people have an enormous capacity for changing their lives, she believes, one that is largely untapped.

"Just because you've lived one life doesn't mean you have to perpetuate it in the next generation. Just because you have been brutalised doesn't mean you have to brutalise. You don't have to give in, but sometimes you have to have the balls to change things."

Her whole philosophy, she says is make the best of things - don't give in and don't give up.

"I want that on my epitaph," she laughs.

'Vicious Circle' is published by Hodder Headline at €8.99

- Victoria Mary Clarke