by Jenny Colgan
He stood there for another second. I could hear a giggle behind the door. Obviously Cal had figured out where I was.
‘Bacon sandwich, Eck?’ he shouted. ‘Or do you want to go dancing?’
Eck’s face burned a bright red.
‘Was that someone shouting?’ I said helpfully. ‘I couldn’t really hear.’
Eck still seemed frozen to the spot.
‘Do you want me to get out while you have a pee?’ I said kindly. He nodded, looking in some pain. I smiled sympathetically and headed outside, still wearing my rubber gloves.
Cal was leaning against the kitchen doorframe, looking louche and superior. What is it about unbelievably confident men? Even ugly ones (which Cal definitely wasn’t) just exude a sense of sexiness, just by giving off the impression they know what they’re doing. I suppose there’s something quite primitive about it - the idea that when they finally got you into bed, nobody at any point would be saying, ‘Gosh, sorry - this bit goes where again?’ Anyway, it definitely works.
‘Ooh,’ he said. ‘Like the rubber gloves. Planning a special evening?’
‘Just trying not to get boy germs,’ I said. ‘Difficult round here.’
The toilet flushed, loudly.
‘So how are you getting on with our Eck then?’ said Cal, an amused look on his face. ‘Nice guy, don’t you think? Are nice guys your cup of tea, princess? Not by looking at you.’
‘You can’t tell anything by looking at me,’ I said.
‘Really? Not that you went to private school, wore a boater, can ride a pony, know your way around a yacht and like dancing in ludicrous shoes? All in Hackney, of course.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I said, but I felt a chill in my heart. If Cal found out the truth, would they chuck me out? Treble the rent? Go to the papers?
‘Those are dreadful dancing bunions you have,’ said Cal, staring at my feet. From the bathroom came the sound of some fairly frantic hand washing.
‘Listen.’ He lowered his voice. ‘We were thinking of having a bit of a party. I think Eck would quite like you to be there. Fancy it?’
‘Are you going to be there?’ I said, before I could stop myself.
‘Well, you are the naughty thing, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Everyone’s going to be there.’
Suddenly there came a yowl from the bathroom. We both turned round towards the door.
‘Argh! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.’
Cal and I looked at one another.
‘What’s up?’ shouted Cal.
‘It burns! It burns!’
There was the sound of the shower being turned on and someone jumping into it, fully clothed. Shrieking.
‘What have you been doing in there?’ said Cal to me, unfairly I thought seeing as I wasn’t the one who’d just set myself on fire.
‘Nothing!’ I said sulkily, pulling out the strange foreign cleanser I was still clutching in my rubber-gloved hands. ‘Cleaning up for you, remember?’
Cal grabbed the bottle and held it tentatively between two fingers.
‘Shit,’ he said, letting his breath out slowly. ‘Do you know what this is?’
‘Cleaning product?’ I said. ‘They come in bright packaging and smell funny.’
‘This is oven cleaner,’ said Cal. ‘The stuff you leave overnight that you can’t touch with bare flesh. Have you been swilling it down the toilet?’
I shrugged. ‘Seemed to be doing the job.’
‘Splashback,’ said Cal. ‘Oh God.’
‘It burns!’ came weakly through the door.
‘How would you know?’ I said sulkily, feeling cross for being in the wrong. ‘I can’t imagine you’ve ever cleaned anything.’
‘And you have?’ said Cal, looking amused.
‘Yes,’ I said. Well, Esperanza had showed me something. I hadn’t maybe quite matched the brand name.
He handed me back the bottle. ‘Take this away from me, I feel like a cigarette and don’t want to actually explode.’
The noise from the bathroom had degenerated into whimpering.
‘I’m going out,’ said Cal nonchalantly. ‘Only call an ambulance if you have to. Wolverine!’
Wolverine scampered out of the bedroom.
‘Bye then.’
‘Stop, don’t leave me . . .’ I said.
But it was too late.
Twenty minutes later, Eck emerged from the loo, looking rather pale and shaken.
‘Um, are you all right?’ I said tentatively. I didn’t want to rush to admit liability. Plus, I’d made tea. This time I’d left the bags in far too long. The cups were dark brown and it tasted like pure muck.
‘Well, I saved it,’ he said, looking frightened.
‘Well, that’s great news!’ I tried to be cheery. ‘Perhaps . . . I made a little mistake with the cleaner . . . but I’m going to fix that right away.’
‘You probably should,’ said Eck. ‘The toilet’s smoking.’
I waited for him to mention something about a party, but he didn’t. He didn’t drink the tea I’d made him either. Or sit down.
‘Do you want to sit down?’ I said.
‘Not yet,’ he said gingerly.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘You really are from a different planet, aren’t you?’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘I’m just like anybody else.’
I really was desperate to know if he was going to ask me out or not. My ego really needed this.
‘I mean, I love dancing and things, just like normal people.’
‘I don’t think I’m ever going to dance again,’ said Eck, looking pained. So, I was going to have to take this as a no, then.
‘Like George Michael,’ I said wisely. ‘Until he got his sexuality sorted out, and now he dances all the time.’
I sighed to myself. Maybe they were having a party here but I wasn’t even invited to it. Maybe I’d have to sit in my room all night holding the coats. The idea of an upcoming social event, something to look forward to with a nice-looking boy - either of them, really - had really cheered me up and I’d felt almost happy. Right up to the point where I burned off Eck’s penis.
Eck looked up, a slight sagginess visible under his chocolate brown eyes.
‘Sophie . . .’ he said. ‘Do you think we should have a flat party?’
Ooh! I thought, as I swilled forty-seven litres of water down the cistern. After I’d done that the thing was pristine; it wasn’t actually that bad a way to clean a toilet, as long as you didn’t then use it for a couple of days. A party! Dancing! Booze! The only sticky moment had come when Eck had asked me, with quite a hopeful look in his eye, if I’d like to invite some of my friends. It was hard to explain that, a) I was a bit disappointed as I’d hoped the whole idea of having a party was to sneakily get a chance to ask me out, b) all my friends had inexplicably appeared to side with the woman who stole my boyfriend and didn’t like me any more, c) even if that hadn’t been the case, they wouldn’t come here, and d) if they did, they’d probably be really sneery and unpleasant about everything, as would I have been a few months before.
I moved on to the bath, more carefully this time. Good God, though, who’d been the last person to use it, Fungus the Bogeyman? Should I stick my fingers down the plughole like Esperanza had suggested . . . my eyes crept to the deadly oven poison. No, Sophie. No.
Chapter Nine
Cleaning the flat was obviously brilliant fun and everything - if by brilliant fun you mean horrible boring dirtiness that didn’t pay me any money - but it still didn’t solve my original problem. I needed my job back, and pretty damn fast. I hoped Julius would understand the principle of compassionate leave, but I wasn’t holding out much hope. There were roughly 165,000 girls in London who’d like to work for practically nothing for a famous avant-garde photographer who gave amazingly druggy parties in his super-hip loft and only slept with twins.
I dialled my old work number. ‘Hello?�
� said a smooth, sleepy-sounding voice. Weirdly, I think it sounded a bit like me.
‘Hi there, it’s Sophie Chesterton!’
There was a long pause. A loooonnngg pause. Not by any stretch of the imagination the type of pause that is just taking in a deep lungful of breath so they can scream, ‘WELCOME BACK! WE MISSED YOU SO MUCH!’ down the phone at you.
‘Sophie,’ said the voice, finally, smoothly. I recognised it as Ladushka, a terrifyingly elegant woman who did something unspecified with galleries. ‘What can I do for you?’
I aimed for cheerful perkiness, but it might have come out as strained desperation.
‘Well, I was just calling to tell Jules I’ll be back in to work tomorrow, and I’ll want to chat to him about, you know, my conditions and things . . .’ My voice trailed off. There was another, not very encouraging pause.
‘Sophie, Jules thought you’d left.’
‘I didn’t leave! My father died!’
‘Well, yes, but . . . it’s been weeks, and it was only ever an internship anyway, so . . .’
‘It was my job! You can’t fire me from my job because my father died!’
‘No, Sophie, it was an internship, with a small sum attached . . . I mean, you didn’t think that was a salary, did you?’
It was certainly more of a salary than I was getting now.
‘I was sorry to hear about your father,’ said Ladushka, her voice softening. Which meant I could tell that she knew the battle was over and that she’d made her position quite clear. ‘You must miss him terribly.’
Not so I was going to own up to her.
‘Eh, could I just speak to Jules?’
‘I’m terribly sorry, he’s in Reykjavik shooting girls swimming under the ice for Italian Vogue.’
I’d hit an impasse.
‘No mobile signal up there,’ Ladushka added quickly, just in case I hadn’t finally, irrevocably got the message.
‘I see,’ I said.
And I did see. Easy come, easy go.
I confided in Eck. I had to confide in someone and he was the only person handy.
‘I’ve lost my job,’ I said.
‘Oh no!’ he said. ‘Did they ask you to clean the loos?’
‘What do you do when you lose a job?’ I said, realising I sounded a bit pathetic.
Eck raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, you get another one. Or if you’re desperate you could sign on.’
‘Really? Do people still do that?’ I said, wondering if I put a headscarf on nobody could ever recognise me.
Eck eyed me over his paper and toast.
‘Not very many your age with four working limbs,’ he said.
‘Is that meant to make me feel guilty?’
‘No. Do you feel guilty?’
Just about everything, all the time, I didn’t say. I just sat there.
‘Do you want to look at the jobs in my paper?’
He handed it over. There was quite a lot of jobs on offer for someone with my qualifications, i.e. not much. But they all seemed to involve something called hostessing or exotic dancing.
‘You need to buy a better quality paper,’ I said.
‘It pleases me to think I read the same paper as exotic dancers,’ said Eck. ‘Don’t worry, Sophie. You’ll get a job. You could waitress, or you’re getting quite good at cleaning . . .’
I’d taken to the surfaces of everything with a tin of polish. I’d gone a bit overboard - OK, you could get slightly high walking in the house. And I’d used one of my old pairs of Agent Provocateur pants as a duster. They didn’t fit me any more for some reason.
‘Nope,’ I said, standing up. ‘No more cleaning. I’m a photographer. That’s what I am. That’s what I’ve always wanted to be. I’m dedicated, and I’m going to do it.’
‘Yay! Good for you!’ said Eck, saluting me with his toast. I grinned back at him, then stopped suddenly and hoped I had enough money left for camera film.
The dedicated photographer trudged around every studio in London in the end. That’s OK, flat hunting had made me quite good at trudging, and it gave me something to do during the day, apart from watch out for dropped pound coins on the street. I couldn’t rely on the boys sharing their fish and chips forever.
I wished my portfolio were bigger. God, after Daddy put in my own dark room and everything. That made me feel all squirmy and guilty. I took a lot of shots en route though; of a sudden piece of beauty amongst the graffiti, and rubbish on the bypass; a wildly optimistic daffodil pushing up through concrete, or a grubby child, eyes wide, pointing at a fire engine.
The West End had nothing for me. They had photography assistants up to their eyeballs, which coincidentally was where the legs of those photography assistants came up to too. East London wasn’t much help either. So finally I ended up even further south from where I started out; down the bottom of the endless Old Kent Road, in New Cross. I’d just taken the address from Yellow Pages.
In the end it was less a studio, more a big garage that someone had knocked a large north-facing window into. Inside, one corner had big, red velvet drapes pinned up. The rest was the usual photographer’s mess of empty coffee cups and cabling, as well as a large selection of slightly dubious-looking clothing. Suddenly I wasn’t sure about this at all. It looked definitely a bit on the seedy side.
‘Hello!’ yelled a voice from behind the curtain.
‘Hello,’ I said, trotting out my spiel. ‘I’m looking for a job? I’ve been working with Julius Mandinski, and I’m looking for a bigger challenge.’
A burly figure stepped out from behind the curtain.
‘Oh yeah?’
It was Julius.
‘Julius!’ I said. He looked at me, and I could tell he was trying to remember my name.
‘It’s Sophie, remember? Your assistant? I thought you were in Reykjavik.’
‘Uh, yeah,’ said Julius. He looked a hundred per cent not very happy to see me. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Well, what are you doing here?’
Suddenly I heard a squawk from the door behind me.
‘Well, I’m not going to be big sister, right, so you might as well just get over yourself, Kelly.’
‘I would do,’ came a voice that sounded like it possessed extremely long fingernails, ‘if you weren’t looking like such a hideous old bag. Maybe we could be, like mother and daughter, yeah?’
‘Oh Christ,’ said Julius, looking worried and glancing at his watch. Two little minxes pushed open the door. Neither of them could have been taller than five foot two. Both had really cheap blonde synthetic hair extensions down their backs, obvious fake logoed bags (I recognised them but would never have bought them) and very pale lipgloss. They could easily have been sisters.
‘Hello, Grace. Hello, Kelly,’ said Julius. I glanced at them in disbelief. He knew these girls? The only girls he ever worked with were over six foot and under six stone.
‘JULIUS!’ they both started up at once. ‘I’m not going to be the big sister.’
‘She’s an old trout,’ said Grace, whose eyebrows were possibly more arched than Kelly’s, though it was a close run thing. ‘One, she’s twenty-one anyway, two, she’s had too much sunbed, and three, all the kids have dragged her tits down to the ground anyway.’
‘They have not!’ said Kelly, affronted, ‘And I’m smaller! I should be little sister!’
I looked at Julius and he shot a look at me.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
Julius rolled his eyes. ‘You trust-fund honeys never do. There’s no money in fashion photography, darling. The fees are so low it hardly covers the models’ waxing bills. This is what pays for the flash pad.’ He waved his hand at the lowly studio. ‘Bit o’ glamour, bit o’ catalogue.’
He turned away from me. My mouth dropped open.
‘Now, can we just get the tops off, girls, and get started?’ he said.
‘No,’ said Grace. ‘Not till she confesses that she looks older than me.’
‘No way,’ said Kelly. ‘Bitch.’
‘Now, come on, girls. This is for the Sport; you’ve got to look like you love each other.’
‘Neh,’ said Kelly.
‘I’ve got another two girls in an hour,’ said Julius to me desperately. ‘I’ve really got to get this done.’