Father Unknown (26 page)

He was already signalling the waiter for the bill. Josie sensed he was dismissing her.

‘What do I do now then?’ she asked. ‘I mean, about working for Beetle.’

Mark turned to look at her and lifted her chin with one finger. His eyes were very dark; she couldn’t even distinguish his pupils. ‘That’s entirely up to you. I’m not about to become your keeper.’

‘But is it safe for me to stay working for him?’ she asked desperately. ‘I need the money.’

‘You are safer than the other girls are,’ he said. ‘If you want the money, do it, but don’t go telling any of them about me, or what I’ve told you.’

That didn’t help her at all. ‘Shall I give you my address then?’ she asked.

He nodded, took a small notepad and pen from his pocket and handed them to her. ‘Don’t expect to hear anything for a few weeks. And remember to keep quiet about this, for your own good.’

Once outside the restaurant Mark said goodbye to Josie and walked purposefully away to his car. He knew it would have been kinder to have offered her a lift, maybe even gone to her flat to see how she lived, but he didn’t want to picture her in any other way than how he’d seen her through his lens.

Mark was older than he looked, thirty-seven, old enough to be Josie’s father, but he had no paternal instincts. When she had walked into the studio his only thought was that he could make big money with her. She was lovely, perhaps the most beautiful girl he’d ever photographed, and it was all entirely natural.

‘That hair,’ he murmured to himself. Her cascade of fiery curls would become her trademark, setting her apart from all other models. Hair product companies would beg for her, and the cosmetic companies would drool. Yet there was more to her than just her hair – her skin, face and figure were all sensational. She wasn’t very bright, though, and unbelievably naive. She was likely to be eaten alive once her pictures got around. It was a shame that Beetle had found her. He wasn’t going to let her go easily.

Mark knew that great changes were underway in England. He sensed it every day in London, from the little fashion boutiques mushrooming up overnight, the disco clubs, the music in the charts and the mood of the people. He had been aware of something like this before, in 1955 when he was twenty-eight, married with two children and working in a factory in Birmingham. Then it was Teddy Boys and the start of Rock ‘n’ Roll music with Bill Haley and the Comets that heralded dramatic changes on the way. Photography was only a hobby for Mark at that time, but as he went around taking pictures of the Teddy Boys and the wild jiving at the dance-halls, all at once he realized he wanted to be a professional photographer. If he stayed in Birmingham the most he could hope for was a few weddings and school photographs. He saw his pictures as art, and he knew the only place he was likely to be taken seriously was London.

He had been seventeen at the end of the war, and the two years of National Service which came a year later had done nothing to broaden his outlook. Like so many of his friends he had married young, and children quickly followed, giving him no choice but to stay in a secure but dead-end job. He reasoned that maybe it was callous of him to walk away from them and go to London to try his luck, but he knew that if he stayed he would only end up resenting them for trapping him.

The revolution he expected didn’t happen after all. Married women remained at home with their children. Their men worked long hours to keep them and found solace in buying a television or a car. Yet apart from improving their quality of life with material things, for most people life went on in much the same way as before the war. But Mark stayed in London, recording with his camera the subtle changes that were taking place, and he never considered going back home.

He managed to scrape a living from selling his pictures of Teddy Boys, tramps and prostitutes in Soho, and beatniks in jazz clubs, and gradually developed a reputation for pictures that were a social comment. In 1957 he won a prize for capturing the anxiety and hope on the faces of West Indian immigrants as they got off the boat in Southampton. In the following year his pictures of the Manchester United fans grieving after their idols in the football team had been killed in a plane crash in Munich, and the ones he’d taken of the race riots in Notting Hill, got him further acclaim. Soon he became known as the photographer with a social conscience, and newspapers called on him when they wanted particularly poignant pictures of a story they were covering.

But now, a decade since he left Birmingham, Mark knew that what he sensed in the air wasn’t going to be a damp firework like the changes in the mid-Fifties. People were tired of being grateful for regular work, and the new innovations of the post-war period like the Health Service and improved housing were all old hat. A ‘we-want-everything-now’ attitude was emerging, people no longer saved for things they wanted but got them on the never-never. There was also admiration for conspicuous wealth and decadence, and it was this that he intended to capture on film. He would still take pictures that were a social comment on the times, but to hell with down-and-outs, slum dwellers, racial tension and men on picket lines; he wanted to move up to a more ritzy level, personally and professionally.

However, Mark knew that if he was seen to be selling out, he would be vilified by those very newspapers who had given him his fame. Until today he had been troubled by how he could move on up without revealing that he’d never cared tuppence about the plight of the people he photographed. All he’d ever been interested in was getting an outstanding picture.

Jojo could be the first rung on the ladder. Nothing succeeded better than Cinderella stories, and with her he had the makings of one. The poor farmer’s daughter who fled to London and was rescued from the dangers of the sex industry would appeal to even the most cynical. He could see it all in his mind’s eye – a few shots of a frightened, doe-eyed girl with a battered suitcase at Paddington station, which he would pretend he took quite by chance. He could say the pictures haunted him after he’d had them developed, then he’d spent several weeks looking for her. With the help of a good journalist, they could do a piece about the places runaway kids often end up in, designed purely to shock. Then lo and behold, he finds the unknown girl again, rescues her from the edge of a precipice, and takes her under his wing.

Mark smiled to himself as he drove out of Paddington, on towards Belsize Park where he lived. It had always grated on him that David Bailey got so much acclaim when he only photographed beautiful women who could be done equal justice by an amateur with a box Brownie. Let him eat his heart out when he saw Jojo. Mark intended to get her sewn up so tight in a contract that she couldn’t be photographed by anyone but himself. Jojo was going to be the face of the Sixties.

While Mark was shut in his dark-room developing his pictures of Josie later that evening, gloating over them as he hung the prints up to dry, she was lying on her bed crying. She was frightened, confused and she didn’t know what she should do about anything. She hadn’t shown Mark how horrified and dismayed she was to be told that Beetle’s studio was a front for something very nasty, but then it wasn’t until he walked away from her at the restaurant that the full implications of it hit her. Had she been told in advance that the job consisted of displaying herself to dirty old men, she would never have taken it, not if she’d been offered a hundred pounds a day.

But now she knew, how could she go back to it? Just the thought of it made her flesh crawl. She wasn’t a tart, even if the other girls were; she was still a virgin, and she’d never let a boy do anything more than touch her top half.

But if she didn’t go back to Beetle tomorrow, how would she live? All she had to her name was around three pounds, and in another month she had to pay another hundred pounds’ rent. She couldn’t earn that kind of money anywhere else.

All she had was a ray of hope that Mark was going to come back to her with a real modelling job. But what if he didn’t?

She wished she’d never got this flat, but now she came to think of it, it was Candy and Tina who had egged her on to find somewhere grand. Had they always known exactly what was going on at Beetle’s? Were they laughing at her behind her back? And Beetle too, she’d trusted him, but wasn’t it more likely that he wanted her to get in over her head with this place so she’d never walk out on him?

She clutched at the satin eiderdown he’d given her. She’d thought it was so generous and thoughtful of him to buy it for her, but now it seemed more like a bribe to do as she was told and not ask too many questions. She didn’t know who she was most angry with, Candy and Tina, Beetle, or herself. What a prize fool she’d been!

For the first time since she left home Josie wanted her mother, just to feel her arms around her and to know she was safe. Cornwall might have been dull, but at least she could trust people there.

A high wind was getting up outside and rattling the window-frames, and that was another reminder of home. The track up through the woods to the road would be deep in fallen leaves now, a carpet of brown, gold and orange. If she opened her window there tonight she would hear the sea pounding on the rocks down in the cove, and the sheep would be huddling up against the hedges to keep warm.

She got off her bed and walked over to the window. Down below, the streetlights showed up the puddles on the pavements and the sludge of fallen leaves. There were lighted windows everywhere she looked; yet she didn’t know anyone. Back home they might not be able to see a single light from their house, but they knew everyone in a ten-mile radius around them and could call on any of their neighbours in an emergency.

But it was no good thinking longingly of home; she had to go back to Beetle tomorrow. She could go home next weekend, though; she would have enough money then not to go empty-handed. Or maybe Mark would come round before then, and everything would be all right.

All that week Josie felt as if she’d suddenly been given a pair of glasses and could see her new world as it really was – a very shabby, nasty one. She remembered now how Fee had told her there were landlords in London who preyed on the weak and the poor, packing them into their houses, charging them exorbitant rents so that they would have to sub-let just to eat. She hadn’t really believed it then, but now, when she passed by slum properties in Paddington, she felt for the tenants. She knew now too why cafes and restaurants would take on staff without insurance cards. It was so they could get cut-price labour out of people who wouldn’t dare to complain.

She looked at the men who came into the studio and wondered how on earth she could ever have believed they were real photographers. The seediness of their natures showed in their lined faces and flabby bodies. They couldn’t meet her eye, they couldn’t hold a conversation, and it sickened her to think that once they were behind those big fake cameras it gave them power.

She saw too that the other girls did know. Maybe like her they’d been duped in the first place, but they knew now and it didn’t bother them. Overheard conversations took on new meanings now she knew the truth. Kate, one of the oldest of the girls, came back into the dressing-room grinning from ear to ear on Monday afternoon. ‘I cut his session short,’ she said. ‘I opened my legs and let him have a good look. He came straight away.’

Just two days before Josie would have imagined she was only talking about making the photographer move closer or something like that. Yet now she saw the situation in all its awfulness – these men didn’t just look, they relieved themselves while they were at it.

She worked out for herself that the only times she’d really been photographed was when Beetle kept her back after the other girls had gone, or got her in early. Those were the only times when he was fussy about what she wore, or checked her makeup and hair. This was probably why the other girls didn’t speak to her too, they were jealous that she was getting some real modelling work.

Yet that didn’t make up for all the times she’d been one of four girls in the studio, bathed in bright light and unable to see what was going on beyond them. It was almost laughable that she’d tried so hard to look gorgeous and alluring, she might just as well have slipped her top off or exposed her private parts and got it over with twice as fast.

But she said nothing to anyone, not even Beetle. When he asked her in private how it had gone with Mark, she made herself look as innocent as possible and said she really didn’t know, he hadn’t said much. Yet she was burning with anger inside, for the money she’d wasted on the sort of underwear she would never want to wear anywhere else, or the pair of long black boots which pinched her toes and were so high she couldn’t walk in them, but most of all for being made a fool of by Beetle and his treacherous girls.

By Friday evening she knew she couldn’t stomach any more, and she was just weighing up whether she should hang on in the flat till the end of the month, living on what she’d earned this week, or go home now before the loneliness drove her mad, when the door-bell rang.

She jumped. Apart from the man who delivered her bed, the bell had never been rung since she got here. As she ran down the stairs she hoped it might be Mark, but she was so down now that she didn’t really think that was likely. Yet it was him and he asked if he could come up.

Josie was embarrassed when he glanced around the flat and looked surprised at how bare it was, with not even a chair for him to sit on. But he made no remark, just sat down on the floor as if that was quite normal and offered her a cigarette.

‘The pictures were good,’ he said, without showing any expression. ‘I think I can work with you, but I have to tell you now it will be on my terms. Whatever I ask you to do, you do it.’

Josie thought this was another trap, that maybe he wanted to take pornographic pictures of her. She didn’t trust anyone now.

‘I’m not taking my clothes off,’ she said nervously. ‘So if that’s what you want me for, you’d better forget it.’

‘I’m a serious photographer,’ he said sternly. ‘If I wanted to take pictures of naked girls I would find one older and better endowed than you. Now, listen to me.’