The Cutting Room (12 page)

remember him. This was taken a while ago, eh? But it’s him

for sure.’

AnneMarie pulled her fingers through her hair. `He had

the wrong idea.’ She took a thin strand in her mouth and

chewed on it gently.

Chris straightened in his seat. `I put him straight. AnneMarie, there’s cake left if you’re hungry.’

`It helps me think. Do you want to tell him about it or will I?’

Chris sipped his tea. `There’s nothing much to tell, is

there? It happened. It’s inevitable. You’ve been warned often enough. Anyway,’ he addressed himself to Derek and I, `this

bloke came a few times, no problem. Then he asked if he

could photograph AnneMarie in private, on his own. He

asked me because I’m the front of house. Like AnneMarie

said, she never talks to them. Well, I told him no and he went

away peaceful enough. That’s all there is to it. He tried his luck and didn’t get anywhere. The only strange thing was the amount of money he offered. It was a lot.’

`How much?’

`Let’s just say too much just to photograph someone and

enough to tempt madam here.’

AnneMarie looked defiant. `I only said that perhaps you

could be in the next room.’

`He didn’t want that. The man was quite specific. He

wanted to photograph you, alone in the house. He specifically stated alone. Aye, that’d be right. I told him to sling his

hook.’

AnneMarie looked down at her cup. `You think you know

everything, Christian, but I’m not stupid. I’ve looked after myself for a long time now.’

`I’m not denying that, but part of the reason you do okay is because you’re a bright girl.’

She rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. `I’m twenty-seven,

I’ve got a masters degree in fine art and I’m trying to complete a postgraduate in’

`Aye, like I said, you’re a clever girl. But you’re no physical match against a man.’

Well, that’s why you’re here.’

`Aye, and. the day that you start letting punters in to

photograph you on your own, that’s when I know, degree or

no degree, you’ve lost it.’

`Point taken.’ She turned to me. `Will you show me the

pictures, the pictures of the other girl?’

I looked at Chris. He shrugged.

`Don’t look at him, look at me.’

I slipped the photographs from the pile and gave them to

her. AnneMarie looked through them silently, threading a

strand of hair anxiously between her fingers. Chris held out his hand and she passed them to him reluctantly.

`Jesus Christ!’ The big man’s face distorted in distress.

`Can you understand what I’ve been going on about now??

‘You’ve made your point.’

Chris raised his voice. He was holding onto his temper,

just. `I don’t see how you can say that when we go through

this charade every week. Do you want to end up like this

lassie?

He held the photograph close to her face, so close the focus must have blurred. His hand trembled. I tensed myself for

movement, unsure of what might happen next.

`Look at her, AnneMarie, look. Jesus wept. She’s dead.’

He placed his face in his hands. `I can’t be here twenty-four hours a day. What you’re doing isn’t safe. Don’t you read the papers? Listen to the news? Even the girls turning tricks on the street don’t invite punters into their home and they’re getting picked off, one by one.’

`It’s fine, Christian. It pays well and nothing’s going to

happen. Rilke’s just told us the man’s dead. He’s no going to come after me now.’ She ran her fingers through her hair

again. `Anyway it might be make-up. She could be acting.

People have strange fancies.’

Christian raised his face from his hands.

`Strange fancies, that’s one phrase for it. Admit it, AnneMarie, you enjoy it as much as they do, you get a kick out of

it. You like the attention, posing away up there, showing

them everything you’ve got.’

Derek and I sat at the table forgotten.

`Why don’t you just get it over with and call me a whore.

You get your cut of the wages of sin. You’re not so moral

when you’re opening the door and taking the money.’

Christian sounded defeated. `If it wasn’t me it would be

someone else. At least this way I get to keep an eye on you.

Christ knows what Mum would say if she knew.’

I looked at Derek and he nodded, mouthing, `Brother and

sister.’ A faint smile played around his lips. Embarrassed or enjoying himself? I couldn’t tell.

`The only way Mum would find out is if you were to tell

her.’

`Or if you end up on a slab like this lassie.’

`You worry too much.’ She leant across the table towards

him and took his hand. `I wish I could convince you.’

`You’ll never convince me.’

`I’m the one in control. I don’t fuck anyone. No one slips

a teener down my knickers. No one touches me. I don’t do a

striptease. I pose. I make them wait while I go through a whole fashion show. I give them winter wear, day dresses, evening

gowns, the lot. It’s only after I’ve modelled the swimwear

that I take my clothes off.’ She laughed. `Then the cameras go wild.’

AnneMarie had returned the Polaroids to me at the door. `A

.

souvenir.’

She’d given Christian a kiss on the cheek, then handed him

his jacket, pushing him out gently, saying, `Aye, aye,’ to his warnings of `Put the chain on … Look through the peephole before you open the door to anyone … Remember training

tomorrow night.’

He’d stood on the landing until he heard the chain pressed

home, then followed us down the stairs.

`Christ, I worry about that lassie. Why can she no be

happy acting in your daft films? He patted Derek on the

shoulder. `No offence, like. I enjoy your movies. Listen,’ he

turned to me, `you find out anything, you let me know.’ He

slipped his hand into his pocket and handed me a fold of

notes. `Sorry about earlier. Just a bit of fun.’ I counted four tens and looked at him. `Well, you did use a roll of film.’

I folded twenty of the money Christian had returned into a

small square and palmed it to Derek along with my business

card asking, `Will you phone me if you hear anything

interesting?)

‘Sure.’ He held on to the card and gave me back the

money. `Owe me one.’

`I’ll look forward to you collecting.’

He smiled, said, `See you around,’ and walked into the

night without giving me his phone number.

I looked at Christian. He sighed, `I’m going to have bad

dreams tonight.’

I patted him on the shoulder and left him standing there, a

big man, looking up towards the stars, towards a slim

silhouette, moving against the light at a third-floor window.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call ‘d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath.

John Keats, `Ode to a Nightingale’

LATER THAT EVENING I stretched myself across Rose’s

Emperor-size bed, playing with the glass of wine she had

given me, holding it up to the light, watching the flame

through the ruby filter and beyond it Rose’s reflection, bathed in the dim glow of the trembling offertory candles.

`So good for the complexion.’

It was restful watching Rose metamorphose into herself.

She sat at her dressing table shrine, slightly flushed from her bath, her damp hair piled high on her head. I was conscious of a pride that heterosexual men must feel. I was going out on

the town with a beautiful woman. It was just a shame about

where we were going.

I watched as she felt among the jumble of cosmetics,

finding the desired potion without moving her gaze, combining lotions and powders with the skill of the apothecary. She

leant towards the cloudy glass, hung with old evening gloves and beads and pat-patted a powder puff that might once have

belonged to jean Harlow, sprinkling fine flurries of dust that seemed to hang gold and heavy in the air before diffusing over the landscape of her dressing table, settling on vials, jars, bracelets, peacock feathers, bottles of half-used perfume and petrified nail polish, stones, seashells, photographs, lacquered boxes tumbled with jewellery, all of it already coated with the dust of years. The light reflected off the bronze embroidered chrysanthemums on the shattered silk of her Chinese robe.

She caught my gaze and her reflection smiled back at mine. An artist’s model/whore from Montmartre, one hundred years

ago.

`I’m looking forward to this, Rilke. Thanks for inviting

me.’ I grunted like a ten-year-married husband and lifted a

magazine that had been making its way across the floor to that stoorie netherworld beneath Rose’s bed, where tissues, lost

wine glasses, forgotten paperbacks and other things best

forgot reigned. `It’ll be fun. It’s good for us to go out

occasionally away from work. We don’t do it often enough.’ I flicked through the glossed pages watching half-naked, skinny girls pass by, a starved parade.

`At the risk of sounding ungentlemanly, I didn’t invite you, Rose.’

She lit a cigarette. Two red tips glowed a crimson warning,

as she and the woman in the mirror inhaled. She narrowed her eyes and squinted at me through the smoke.

`You think Les and me don’t get on and it’s true, we don’t

always see eye to eye, but you know, deep down, I admire

Leslie. He’s true to himself. Even if his taste isn’t quite what I would choose.’ She selected a small cut-glass pot and

smoothed balm round her eyes. `I mean,’ she shut her left

eye, `the last time I saw him,’ and began applying a slate-grey tint, `he was way overdressed.’ She turned round to face me, checking for offence.

`You look a bit peculiar yourself right now,’ I said.

She fluttered her eyes comically and returned to her

mirror; balancing her eye-shadow, lining her lids with soft, dark kohl, curling her lashes, then coating them with thick, black mascara; concentrating on her art, but concentrating on the words she was saying to me as well.

`I’m never sure if he’s just making fun of women.’ She

sucked in her cheeks and applied her blush; for a second I

could see the skull beneath her skin. `For all that Leslie

dresses like a woman, I don’t know that he likes them.’

`If you don’t like him, don’t come.’

She retrieved a slim brush with a long tapered handle that

had fallen behind a line of perfume bottles. A dark shadow

danced across the wall.

`There’s no need to be like that. I’m just trying to

explain why I never feel comfortable with Les.’ She began

to load the brush with lipstick. `It’s nothing to do with the way he dresses, although obviously I think he could do

better,’ and began to paint on her trademark scarlet mouth.

`It’s more the way he looks at me sometimes, as if I’ve

stolen something that should be his.’ She blotted her lips

with a scrap of tissue, then scrutinised her reflection one last time. Satisfied, she stood up, dropping her robe, revealing

black lace-topped stockings, black silk cami-knickers and

black underwired brassiere, and began to flick through the

dresses in her wardrobe.

`Rose.’

`What?’

`Have you no modesty??

‘What’s it to you?

The taxi driver kept sneaking looks at Rose in his rearview

mirror. I turned and looked at her myself. Sure enough, she

had crossed her legs high on the thigh, showing a glimpse of white flesh at the top of her lacy holdups.

`You’re distracting that man from his job.’

She leaned conspiratorially against me. I smelt her perfume, Chanel No. 5 laced with cigarettes and red wine.

`Stop being such a spoilsport. It’s the only fun taxi drivers get, looking up women’s skirts - well, that and couples having it off in the back of their cabs.’ I gave her a sideways look and she winked at me. I wondered how many glasses of wine she had

drunk before I’d arrived. `They’re all voyeurs. It warps you driving a cab, boredom and depravity, nothing in between.

They end up like Travis Bickle.’ She leaned forward again and started to talk to the driver, asking him if he had seen the movie Taxi Driver. I knew where this was leading. The taxi driver game, invented by Rose, the object of which is to coax the driver into repeating lines from the film, specifically `You looking at me? You looking at me?’ `Well, I don’t see anybody else here, do you?

We slipped through a fluorescent white tunnel, then

climbed high over the city on the curving expressway; the

River Clyde oil-black and still beneath us, a backdrop to the reflected lights of the city; the white squares of late-night office work; traffic signals drifting red, amber, green, necklaces of car

headlamps halting then moving in their sway; the Renfrew

Ferry illuminated at its permanent mooring; scarlet neon sign of the Daily Record offices suspended in the dark sky to our right. The driver was repeating his lines as if they were

something clever. He had diverted his gaze towards Rose’s

bosoms, which quivered gently with the motion of the cab.

On the radio a Marilyn Monroe sound-alike whispered an

invitation to an Indian restaurant, where, her voice intimated, she would fuck and then feed you.

Why not make your way

To our buffet?

Take your feet

To the end of Argyle Street

I stretched back into the shadows and watched the driver

watching Rose, his eyes glancing between her reflection in