Faith (44 page)

The script and stage directions she wrote were laughably amateurish. Pete was to be a man interviewing young women for a job as his maid. Tansin arrives and he asks that she try on her uniform, which of course is a short black dress and a frilly apron. But the dress is too small to cover her breasts, so he calls in his current maid, Jazz, to help.

Pete was surprisingly good at acting, but then he said he was only playing out a first-class fantasy of being a rich man employing maids and having his way with them. Tansin was quite vacuous, but her breasts and her pert bottom were virtually stars in their own right, so her wooden dialogue didn’t really matter. Jazz played her role as the more experienced maid instructing the newest recruit in pleasing their master with great enthusiasm and sauciness.

It was a bitterly cold day in March when they began filming, but with the curtains tightly drawn, the fire blazing and all the extra lights Tod had brought with him, it was baking hot in the lounge. They had all snorted some coke, and loosened up so much they often had to break off because someone got a fit of the giggles at the wrong moment. Laura and Katy came up with more and more lewd ideas once they’d got into the swing of things, and at three o’clock when they had to stop because Barney would be coming home from school, no one was anxious to go home.

Filming was finished the following afternoon. It took Tod two days to edit it, and another week for him to get a friend to convert the cine film on to a video tape. Laura had to drive over to Glasgow on the Friday night to watch it with Katy, then take it down to Sid. She left Barney that night with Helen, a sixteen-year-old babysitter whose phone number she’d got from a postcard in a shop window. Helen was prepared to stay the night if Laura wasn’t home by midnight.

It was far more shocking looking at the video than it had been watching it being filmed. Laura was well used to seeing pornographic photographs, but they were just poses, this was real sex. She squirmed at the bit when Pete supposedly ejaculated on Jazz’s face, even though she was the one who mixed up a bit of wallpaper paste for the scene and knew perfectly well it wasn’t the real thing. And at the end of the film, after Pete had said goodbye to the two girls, then turned back to the settee to pick up a pair of flimsy red knickers and sniff them, her stomach churned. That was the settee she sat on with her eight-year-old son, and she felt ashamed that all that had gone on in the flat while he’d been at school.

‘It’s great, far better than I expected,’ Katy chortled. ‘Eat your heart out, Robbie, we’re going to be in the money.’

Laura didn’t stay with Sid in his office at the back of his club as he watched it, she couldn’t. She went into the bar and ordered a double vodka which she gulped down quickly. She didn’t dare think what she’d do if Sid didn’t like it.

But Sid did like it. He had thousands of copies made and sold them on to various outlets in all the major cities. After taking out all the expenses, and repaying the £1,000 loan from Jackie, Laura and Katy got just over £900 each.

While they were jubilant that it had been such a success, the money had taken a long time to come in, and they’d eaten up what little savings they had. They’d both been forced to get bar work while they waited. Now they had to get stuck into making another film and turn it around more quickly.

Maybe if Barney had been a little more clingy or difficult, Laura might have stopped just long enough to consider him. But he was the easiest, most sunny-natured eight-year-old she’d ever met. He didn’t mind coming home from school and letting himself into an empty flat. He’d happily make himself a sandwich and go out to play until she turned up. During the evenings she was on the phone all the time, and sometimes when she put it down she’d find he’d not only gone to bed all by himself, but washed up their supper things and tidied the kitchen too.

She and Katy made ten films that first year and a great deal of money, but it was never as easy again as it had been with the first one. They couldn’t keep using the same people, and finding new talent was time-consuming and difficult. The girls had to be under thirty and attractive, and only someone really down on their luck would entertain the idea of starring in a blue movie. So they had to trawl through strip clubs, bingo halls, even resorting to hanging around Social Security offices to look for someone suitable to approach. But most of the girls they found chickened out the moment they saw the camera, and often they had to offer these girls money to stop them from talking.

Nor could they keep using Laura’s flat. It was expensive to rent a studio and they had to have props and backdrops to make it look professional. Occasionally they took a hotel room for a couple of days, but this was fraught with the danger the hotel manager might suspect they weren’t using it for a sales conference as they’d claimed. They made three films right out in the country in the Borders during the summer, but though isolated places seemed like a good idea while dreaming up a torrid camping story at home, in practice there were cow pats, flies, midges and the cold to contend with. Even reliable, ever-hard Pete, as they jokingly called him, sometimes couldn’t rise to the occasion in a high wind or a sudden shower.

One of the most successful films they ever made was shot at Brodie Farm. Jackie was in London, and Laura had offered to go over to Fife to check how the building work was progressing. As soon as she saw the concrete mixers, scaffolding and piles of bricks she knew it would make a great backdrop for a story-line of a builder seducing the lady of the house and her friend. Jackie had furnished two rooms for herself in the farmhouse, so Laura took everyone out there when the real builders had gone home for the weekend, and by Sunday afternoon they had the film in the can. Jackie would have had fifty fits if she’d known.

Looking back on that period right up till the spring of ’81 was like trying to remember the plots of films or television programmes she’d watched in the past. She could recall certain scenes vividly, even see the actors’ and actresses’ faces clearly, but it was just a montage of slices of action.

A blonde girl called Monica, gagged and tied to a brass bed, was one memorable one. Laura remembered so well how she and the rest of the team stood transfixed at the realistic way she struggled and bucked as the rape scene was filmed. Yet it was more realism than they needed when she wet herself, and it transpired that she’d been trying to tell them for some time that she needed to be untied.

There was Gary too, a real find, for he was hung like the proverbial horse and could keep it up. While mounting a voluptuous redhead called Irene on a kitchen table he had a bad accident. One of the legs of the table collapsed, and the pair of them slithered to the floor, knocking over a camera tripod, which in turn hit a jagged-edged tin bucket and flipped it up, and it landed on Gary’s back, ripping a six-inch gash.

These were funny incidents that even the hapless victims laughed about afterwards, but there were also sordid ones, disgusting ones, and worrying ones too. It was a helter-skelter of panic, ruthlessness, fright, irritation and hysteria, with only brief moments of elation when everything went to plan. As for the actors and actresses, they were as diverse as the problems and blunders. Men like Dave who got on with it with good humour and consideration for everyone else involved were rare. Some were plain stupid, unable to follow the simplest instructions, others acted like prima donnas, constantly questioning and complaining. Some had about as much personality as a slug, others too much, wanting to be both director and star. There were the vain, the cruel, the greedy and the crude, some who had no idea about personal hygiene and others who kept everyone waiting while they primped and preened.

Yet all the diverse emotions Laura felt, along with the memories, problems and triumphs, were numbed by the coke she relied on to get her through each day, and the brandy she drank at night in order to sleep. She didn’t want to think too hard about what she was doing, to herself or to others, and certainly not to what was happening to Barney.

In the early days she had mostly been back home by five-thirty or six, so Barney wasn’t alone for long after school, but as it became harder to stick to office hours, she hired people to be there for him. Some were good, but others were indifferent or bad. Yet at the time she scarcely recognized the difference. The good ones were mainly students, happy to feed him, help him with his homework and tuck him into bed. But the bad ones were people she barely knew, just acquaintances only interested in the money she paid, not Barney. They ignored him, chatted on her phone while he sat waiting patiently for a meal which never came. Sometimes they never even turned up and he waited alone in the flat for hours.

Laura wished she could comfort herself with the knowledge she made it up to Barney in other ways, but she couldn’t. She didn’t see what was going on because she was too stoned and too busy thinking about making money.

He was such a good kid he rarely complained. He grew used to having to help himself to whatever food was in the fridge, to having to go to school in a dirty shirt because there were no clean ones. He even learned to cover up her negligence.

But though he managed to fool his teacher, neighbours and his friends’ mothers that he was fine and happy and that his mother was always around, he didn’t manage to hoodwink Jackie. She had finely tuned antennae where he was concerned, and even over the phone she could sense when something wasn’t right. She would often make a surprise visit on her way through Edinburgh to Fife, and luckily Laura was usually there, or at least someone reasonably competent was looking after Barney. But these visits, however brief, worried Laura, for Jackie asked so many questions, made pointed remarks about the state of the flat and about Barney, and she sensed Jackie knew she was hiding something.

It was almost inevitable that Jackie would eventually find out what Laura was doing. She was too bright and intuitive to be fobbed off for long. Unfortunately she found out in the worst possible way, arriving early one evening in November ’79 to find nine-year-old Barney alone in the flat.

Laura had spent all day filming in a seedy flat in Glasgow that they’d rented for a week. There had been countless problems with lights, props and the actors, and they finally finished filming around seven. But she didn’t go straight home, even though she knew Barney was alone; she had to have a drink first.

She was tipsy when she got home about half past ten, and perhaps that was why she didn’t notice Jackie’s car parked in the street. But she did notice the smell of cleaning fluid as she walked into the flat, and her first thought was that Barney must have attempted to wash the kitchen floor to please her.

As she walked into the lounge Jackie jumped up from the settee, shocking Laura to the core.

‘Where have you been?’ she asked in a cold, angry voice. ‘How could you leave Barney alone for so long?’

If Laura had been given some warning she might have come up with some good excuse. But her mind went blank. ‘I got caught up with a client,’ she said wildly. ‘And the traffic was bad.’

‘Why didn’t you phone Barney to tell him?’ Jackie asked. ‘And I can smell the drink on your breath from here, so you might as well admit you’ve been in a pub.’

Laura couldn’t remember much of what she said to that, some lame excuse she supposed, yet she could remember clearly how Jackie looked that night in an emerald-green mohair sweater and jeans tucked into long suede high-heeled boots that matched the sweater perfectly. With a table lamp behind her, her hair looked like a coppery halo, but her expression was anything but angelic; she looked angry enough to attack Laura.

‘This flat was a pigsty when I got here, with no food anywhere,’ Jackie raged. ‘Barney was sitting here eating dry cornflakes, embarrassed that I’d caught you out. How often do you leave him alone like this?’

‘I don’t,’ Laura insisted, but she was sobering up fast and she could see that Jackie had cleaned the room, and had probably been through the entire flat.

‘Don’t lie to me! Fortunately Barney doesn’t seem to take after you, he’s a hopeless liar. And before we go any further I’ve poked around in your room and I know now what kind of “agency” you are really running. Are you selling the blue movies or making them?’

She didn’t wait for a reply, instead went into a rant about the filthy kitchen floor, the unwashed dishes, the lack of clean clothes for Barney and his sheets which clearly hadn’t been changed in weeks.

‘If you lived alone I wouldn’t care if you lived like a pig,’ she said. ‘It would have surprised me, seeing as you were once so fussy about cleanliness, but I wouldn’t care. But drugs and porn! When you’ve got a nine-year-old?’ She pointed out that she’d found some coke along with the videos in the bedroom. ‘And don’t try and tell me those videos are just borrowed from a friend, I know they are part of your business. What if Barney was to put one of them in the video machine? Or try the coke you left lying about so casually? Don’t you care about him?’

‘Of course I do,’ Laura insisted, and knowing there was no point in trying to wriggle out of it all, she tried to explain that making films was all she could do to make enough money to keep herself and Barney.

Jackie waved her hands to silence her. ‘There is absolutely nothing you can say to justify it,’ she raged. ‘It is wrong and you know it. Obviously you’ve got so far into all this filth that you’ve forgotten your duty as a mother, which is to keep Barney from harm. You don’t deserve to have that beautiful child, leaving him all alone without a proper meal in a flat full of stuff that could corrupt his mind or actually kill him. What would you have done if you’d got back here tonight and found him dead from trying that stuff?’

Laura began crying and tried to gain her friend’s sympathy by making out she couldn’t help herself. But Jackie would have none of that; she was furious that Laura had lied to her about what she wanted a loan for.

‘And you lied when you said you were working in a dress shop,’ she spat out. ‘I suspected all along that you were up to something seedy too, because you couldn’t possibly afford this flat on a shop assistant’s wages. But I never thought you could be debasing yourself in something as vile as this! Why? You knew that I would have helped you out if you’d needed money.’