Father Unknown Page 20

  ‘Well, yes.’ She couldn’t help but smile then because the whole thing struck her as funny.

  ‘That’s nice,’ he said, as she put her hand up to her mouth to stifle a giggle. ‘You look like a naughty school-girl.’

  His words broke the ice and suddenly she realized he wanted to see the real Josie, not the manufactured one the others photographers liked. So she acted just the way she used to back at home when she was playing at being a model, moving around, running her fingers through her hair, looking thoughtful and sometimes sad. His silence seemed to say she was doing the right thing, and as he kept reloading his camera with film, he was clearly satisfied.

  Later he did get her to put on a different outfit, a plain long dress that was in the studio wardrobe, and he got her to add a little more makeup. But there was no suggestion of ‘glamour’ shots, and it wasn’t until right at the end that he asked her to put on a bikini.

  In over three hours he couldn’t have said more than fifty words to her, so she was staggered when after he’d told her to get dressed again, he said he was taking her for something to eat.

  Maybe her face registered her shock, for he laughed. ‘I’ve got you on film,’ he said. ‘Now I want to know a bit about you.’

  He took her to a Chinese restaurant close to the studio and ordered for her, as if he knew she’d never eaten Chinese food and wouldn’t have had the first idea what she wanted. He had a large Scotch while they were waiting for the meal, but he ordered her a Coke.

  ‘Tell me how you met Beetle,’ he said curtly. ‘I want to know where you come from, how old you really are, and about your parents. Don’t think of telling me a pack of lies. If I’m to use you in the future I need to know the truth.’

  She told him exactly that, and it was a relief not to have to make out she was seventeen, or had family in London. She told him about Will, Westbourne Park Road, the cafe she’d worked in and how Tina and Candy had invited her to meet Beetle.

  By the time she’d finished the story, throughout which he hadn’t said a word, the food arrived. She stared at all the little dishes of things she didn’t recognize and he laughed.

  ‘Put a bit of everything on your plate and try it,’ he said. ‘You’ll find it doesn’t taste as strange as it looks. You’re too thin. I suppose you hardly eat anything?’

  This was true – since she’d left the café she hadn’t had one proper meal, only ready-made sandwiches, crisps and the occasional hamburger. So she dug into the food and found she really liked it, even if she didn’t know what it was.

  ‘If you are set on being a model you’ll have to learn to look after yourself,’ Mark said sternly. ‘You won’t keep that clear complexion on a diet of cigarettes and chocolate. You need a balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables. Exercise too and enough sleep.’

  She nodded. Sleep was one thing she did have plenty of, she had nothing much else to do when she wasn’t working.

  ‘I’ll make sure I eat more,’ she agreed. ‘Beetle’s always telling me that too. He’s very kind to me. He even bought me an eiderdown as a flat-warming present.’

  Mark gave her a very strange look, one dark eyebrow slightly raised.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, worried she’d said something wrong.

  ‘Beetle’s a rogue,’ he said abruptly, startling her. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got the first idea that most of the so-called photographers who take pictures in his studio haven’t even got film in their cameras?’

  Josie frowned. ‘But why would they do that?’ she asked. She wondered then if Mark was a little crazy.

  ‘Because they get their kicks out of seeing girls with very little on and are prepared to pay for the privilege.’

  Josie was winded and for a moment she could say nothing. Then she remembered all those films she’d seen Mark put in his camera, the sounds of winding on, and the finished films which made his jacket pockets bulge. It was very rare to see or hear that in the studio. ‘You mean they just look at us?’ she whispered, remembering all the times they’d asked her to expose a breast, or lie on the floor with her legs in the air.

  Mark nodded. ‘If you girls weren’t so greedy for money you’d have worked it out for yourselves,’ he said tersely. ‘In a real assignment the model is told what the pictures are for, there’s a makeup artist and hairdresser standing by, the company provides the clothes needed for the job. How you girls can be so thick I can’t understand. Who on earth would want photographs of a girl playing with a beach ball on a fake beach?’

  ‘Beetle said they were for holiday brochures,’ she said in a small voice, recalling with horror how one of the men had made her keep jumping so that her breasts jiggled around. It had made her feel uneasy, but she’d thought that was part of the job.

  ‘He does handle a small amount of commercial work, for calendars, the tacky end of the girlie mags, stuff like that, but he’d be living in a council flat in Ladbroke Grove and you girls would be earning less than waitresses if it wasn’t for the kinky bastards who like to play at being David Bailey’

  The secure feeling Josie had enjoyed for the past few weeks vanished. She had been duped, and now she knew the truth what on earth was she going to do? She couldn’t afford to live in Elm Park Gardens on a waitress’s wages. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she gave Mark a pleading look, hoping he’d laugh and say he was joking.

  ‘What are you crying for?’ he asked brusquely.

  ‘Because I don’t know what I’m going to do now,’ she said, dabbing at her eyes. ‘I only moved into a new flat yesterday, it’s very expensive.’

  Mark shook his head; his expression was remarkably like the one her father always had when she’d done something stupid. ‘Then you are lucky Beetle spotted that you might have real model potential, and didn’t stick you in with any of the real weirdos, and that he called me over to take a look at you.’

  It appeared by that statement that all wasn’t quite lost. ‘Have I got any potential?’ she asked timidly.

  He looked at her for a moment as if considering the question. Josie held her breath and crossed her fingers.

  ‘Yes, you have,’ he said eventually.

  Josie beamed.

  ‘Don’t look so joyful,’ he said dourly. ‘You may have a pretty face and gorgeous hair, but it takes more than that.’

  ‘I’ll do anything,’ she gasped. ‘Whatever you tell me to do.’

  Mark sighed. ‘Look, Josie, it’s not as simple as that. There’s such a thing as the look of the moment, and no one can forecast what that next look will be. Fashions are changing rapidly at the moment, what’s “in” one day is out the next. Besides, there’s your age, the estrangement from your family. You are in fact a runaway. That could backfire on me.’

  ‘But I left home almost three months ago now, they haven’t come searching for me, so they don’t care, do they?’ she said defiantly. ‘Besides, there’s no law against working away from home at fifteen.’

  ‘That would depend on how your parents viewed the work you were doing,’ he said. ‘If they believed you were in moral or physical danger, they could have you made a ward of court.’

  ‘They wouldn’t do that,’ she said with a touch of scorn. ‘As long as they get letters from me now and then and know I’m doing okay they won’t want me back.’

  He sighed deeply. ‘I’ll have to think all this over, Jojo. I’ll get the pictures I took today printed, show them around and see what interest I get. Then I’ll get back to you.’

  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, Can
dy 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.