Faith (40 page)

His only attribute was his large penis, and he would strut around naked, even when they were having a coffee break, as if waving it in front of the girls’ faces would make them fancy him.

Laura had never actually had to do a photo session with him before, but she knew from the other girls that like many of the men who had large penises, Craig sometimes couldn’t get it up. And as Don the photographer used to say, ‘A man with a flaccid cock in pornography is about as useless as a chocolate fireguard.’

Dressed in just a suspender belt and black stockings and stilettos, Laura did some shots with Pete, and then Katy was called in to join in for a three-in-the-bed scene. It was all very easy, because Pete had the unusual knack of being able to pose with a hard-on and maul them both around as if he was about to really ravage them, yet not make them feel threatened at all. Don was being his usual inventive self, once again coming up with variations on the basic theme of two girls and one man. At one point Laura got the giggles, something that often happened, and Pete smacked her bottom playfully, which was applauded by Don.

Then Craig was called in.

‘Katy, I want you doggie fashion, arse towards me,’ Don said in his usual straight-to-the-point manner. ‘Pete, you sit on the edge of the bed with Laura astride you, real close to Katy, like you’re getting turned on even more by Katy about to get it. Craig, get that dong up and hold Katy’s arse open so we can see where it’s supposed to go.’

Craig strutted towards Katy, jerking away at his penis. He got a semi lob-on, but the harder he worked at it, the weaker it became.

‘Fer fuck’s sake, Craig,’ Don yelled at him. ‘Katy’s arse would make a blind man see!’

Laura had to bury her face in Pete’s shoulder to suppress her laughter, and she heard a little snort from Katy which told her she was in the same predicament.

After a few more minutes, with Craig getting redder and redder in the face, and still no erection, Don grew impatient. ‘Katy, help the poor sod,’ he ordered. ‘Or we’ll be here all day.’

Katy did as she was asked, because like Laura she was anxious for the session to be over so they could go home. Laura slid off Pete’s lap on to the bed, and tried to avert her eyes diplomatically. But she couldn’t resist peeping, and when she saw Katy’s pained expression, and that huge flaccid penis that looked like a pork steak flapping around in her hand, she just couldn’t control her laughter.

Pete was shaking, clearly fighting against laughing out loud too, but he reached out and touched Laura’s hand as if warning her to do likewise. But all at once Craig flew at her, and punched her in the face so she fell back on the bed.

‘You evil bitch,’ he yelled at her, his Glaswegian accent so thick she could barely understand what he was saying. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’

‘You bastard,’ Katy yelled, jumping to claw Craig’s face with her nails. ‘She didn’t mean any harm.’

Pete intervened, trying to get Katy off Craig, who in turn was trying to get to Laura to hit her again. Laura glanced around for Don, expecting him to put a stop to it, but to her further shock he was clicking away, clearly thinking a fight scene with naked people might be interesting and saleable.

Craig continued to scream obscenities as Pete dragged him struggling out of the room.

‘Guess that’s it for the day,’ Don said with an air of disappointment. ‘You’d better get some cold water on your face, Laura; you’ll have a shiner tomorrow.’

They heard Don ordering Craig to leave the building as Katy bathed Laura’s face in the toilet.

‘Do you think he’ll lie in wait for me?’ Laura asked, afraid now, for her face was throbbing and fiery.

‘Don will have told him you’re too valuable to Robbie to mess with,’ Katy reassured her. ‘But we’ll get Pete to come and have a drink with us. Just in case.’

Laura fully intended to have just one drink and then go home. Her face hurt and she felt weepy. But Pete and Katy both wanted her to stay, and by the time she’d had a couple of drinks they were all laughing about Craig and discussing whether Don would ever use him again.

Before Laura knew it, the pub was closing for the afternoon and she was too drunk to drive, but still wanted more.

When she came to the next morning and found herself on Katy’s settee, she couldn’t remember anything more than that they had gone on to a drinking club in central Glasgow. She knew it was a rough place, the carpet sticky with spilled drink, but they were playing soul music from the sixties and she and Katy danced. After that it was all a blank.

Katy’s flat was squalid. It was on the third floor of a high-rise block built in the sixties. The four rooms were all small, her children were cramped up in bunk beds and they could barely get into bed for the toys and clothes strewn everywhere. The living room was larger, but with no order, and a vast three-piece suite which had seen better days meant there was no room to move. The carpet was worn and stained; Katy never cleaned the windows, and makeup, used plates and overloaded ashtrays filled every available surface. Amazingly Katy was always well groomed. How she managed it living in such conditions Laura didn’t know.

It was another hot day, as it had been since the start of June, but whereas the house in Albany Street was built of thick stone and remained cool in the summer, Katy’s flat was not well insulated, and with such large windows it was already like an inferno.

Laura’s head was throbbing and her mouth felt like the bottom of a bird cage, but Cheryl, Katy’s daughter, came in to the room with a cup of coffee and some painkillers.

‘You didn’t come in till two,’ she said, passing over the coffee. ‘Mum was really sick, but you just fell on the settee and passed out.’

Cheryl was only thirteen, a pretty girl with her mother’s sharp cheekbones and dusky skin, and when Laura realized that she’d been left alone with the two younger children for so long, it reminded her about Barney and that she’d given Fiona no warning she might not be coming home.

Pausing only to splash some water on her face in the kitchen and gulp down the coffee and painkillers, she rushed out, leaving Cheryl to say goodbye to Katy for her.

Fiona lived just two streets away from her old home in Caledonian Crescent, and Laura drove straight there without going home first to change or put some makeup over her bruised cheek.

A big burly man in a checked work shirt came to the door, and just the way he glowered at her was enough to tell her this was Roy, Fiona’s husband, and he hadn’t been pleased to come home and find another child in his house.

Laura tried the charm offensive, apologized profusely for not coming to collect Barney, but said she was on an assignment and hadn’t been able to get home.

‘What sort of mother are you?’ he snarled at her. ‘You leave your wean with a stranger all night! I had to take him to the hospital.’

Laura was horrified, asking what had happened and where Fiona was. She came forward then, fluttering her hands in anxiety. It was clear she hadn’t told her husband she’d been taking care of Barney for some time and that she got paid for it, and Laura realized she was afraid it was going to come out now and get her into bother.

‘He fell off a wall while out playing,’ she said. ‘He’s fine now, just a couple of wee stitches in his knee. But Roy had to wait a very long time at the hospital with him. I had to stay here with the others.’

‘I am so sorry,’ was all Laura could say. ‘But you aren’t on the phone, and there was no way I could get a message to you. Can I see Barney now?’

‘Ach, yer lucky I dinnae call the poliss to you,’ Roy said angrily. ‘Look at the state of youse. Fee says you’re a model, but you look and smell like a jakey!’

At that point Barney came to the door and rushed into her arms. ‘Why didn’t you come home?’ he cried. ‘I was hurt and I had stitches at the hospital.’

That incident did pull her up sharply. Laura was upset that Roy had said she looked and smelt like a wino, and by the inference that she was neglecting Barney. She promised herself she would never leave him again with anyone overnight.

His cut knee soon mended, but he didn’t forget. Clearly he’d heard things said between Roy and Fiona that had given him the idea that he was unwanted and neglected.

Laura made sure she was on time to collect him from school every day until the end of the term when the holidays started, and because she couldn’t work with him off school she planned to make a real effort to take him out somewhere every day. Then Jackie phoned and asked if Laura would like to stay at her cottage in Cellardyke and said she would join her there when she could get away from London.

The hot weather of 1976 continued. They said it was the hottest summer since records began, and Laura and Barney spent all day, every day, on the beach. But lovely as it was there, Laura felt bored a great deal of the time. A six-year-old boy was more interested in playing with other children than being with his mother. He swam, looked for crabs in rock pools, collected shells and played cricket, and there wasn’t much else for her to do but read.

Jackie arrived from London looking a million dollars in a pale green silk dress, her hair styled like Farrah Fawcett Majors in
Charlie’s Angels
. The bangles on her wrist were real gold and she was driving a new red convertible car. She laughed when Laura hugged her and said she must be making a fortune. When she took a case of champagne out of the boot, instead of the cheap wine they used to drink, that seemed confirmation.

Jackie had always been great with Barney, she was patient and loving and as interested in his development as if she were a blood aunt. But after a couple of days, Laura found herself becoming irritated that Jackie seemed far more enthusiastic about being with Barney than with her. The moment she got up in the morning she began planning the day around him. Even though he was more than happy to play with his friends, she joined in games of cricket or crab-hunting with them, leaving Laura sitting alone on the beach. She didn’t want to go into the pub and leave him to play with the other kids, and when she took him up to bed in the evenings she would stay reading to him for well over an hour.

That was what started a row, a week after she arrived.

Laura had been drinking steadily since about six in the evening. They’d had a bottle of wine with dinner, and then Jackie disappeared off upstairs with Barney to bathe him and put him to bed, so Laura opened another bottle of wine and had finished it all by the time Jackie came downstairs again.

‘You are so lucky, Laura,’ she said breathlessly as she sat down on the settee. ‘He’s so bright, so handsome and so loving. I wish he was mine.’

‘Then take him,’ Laura retorted. ‘I’ll swap him for your car.’

It was a flippant remark, but her voice probably had a hard edge to it because she was drunk and fed up.

‘Don’t you realize what a treasure he is?’ Jackie asked sharply.

‘I realize I can’t go anywhere, do anything because of him. It’s easy for you to moon over him when you’ve only got him around you for a week or so, you only see the good part,’ Laura snapped back.

‘So where do you want to go, what do you want to do?’ Jackie asked tartly.

‘To be wined and dined, to stay in luxury hotels and wear fabulous clothes. I want fun and men adoring me. I want to be as rich as you are.’

‘That is so shallow, Laura,’ Jackie exclaimed. ‘Stuart said that was how you’d become, but I didn’t believe him. Yet it’s true, all you’ve talked about since I got here is money, clothes and your hair and nails. What’s happened to you?’

‘You can talk,’ Laura threw back. ‘Sitting there with half a pound of gold on your wrists, an Ozzie Clark dress and that sports car outside! You’ve got everything – a wealthy husband, a business worth a fortune, even this place too for when you feel like slumming it.’

‘But I haven’t got a child,’ Jackie said, revealing that was what she really wanted. ‘And if I had to choose between all the material things and a baby, I’d choose a baby any day, even if I had to live in a council flat.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Laura mocked. ‘Like you know anything about life in a council flat. You were born with the proverbial silver spoon. It’s the easiest thing in the world to get a baby, and the hardest thing of all to bring them up, especially when you’ve got no money.’

‘What happened between you and that man from the casino to make you change so much?’ Jackie asked, her eyes glittering with unshed tears. ‘Okay, so we both used to dream of being stinking rich, we used men and did things that perhaps we shouldn’t have. But you loved Stuart, you were good together; what made you throw all that away?’

Laura had known that sooner or later Jackie would question her about that. She tried to think of a good excuse, but there wasn’t one.

‘I didn’t want to throw it all away. I never intended to do anything with Robbie but he took me to lunch and one thing led to another. It was a big mistake.’ Laura’s voice began to rise in agitation. ‘I thought he was going to help me get a really good job, but it was all hot air.’

‘Was it him who got you to do the pin-up pictures?’

Laura was very drunk, but at Jackie’s question she suddenly felt sober and afraid. ‘Yes, it was if you must know. And what’s wrong with it?’

‘Nothing if they are all like the one Stuart showed me. But are they, Laura? That was an old magazine he showed me. Have you progressed to something more hardcore now?’

‘Of course I haven’t,’ Laura said indignantly, but she was scared that Jackie might know that wasn’t true. Robbie had always said the pornographic pictures were sold abroad, but he might have been lying. ‘Why would you think that?’

‘Well, it was a bit of a shock to both of us. You looked very sexy and lovely, but pin-ups are a bit old-hat now, and let’s face it, Laura, page three girls are usually about eighteen, not over thirty.’

The last thing Laura wanted was to be reminded she was too old for real modelling. She also hated the idea that Jackie and Stuart had been looking at the picture together and discussing what it might lead to. ‘Pardon me if I used the only assets I had to make some money,’ she said with heavy sarcasm. ‘You could go running home to Mummy and Daddy if you were left in the lurch with a four-year-old. I wasn’t that lucky.’