by Amy Cross
“Mary?”
Hearing someone call out her name, she turned to spot a familiar blonde woman standing nearby. For a moment, she couldn't quite remember where she knew the face, but finally a shudder passed through her body as she realized the truth. Just for a fraction of a second, she actually wondered if she was seeing a ghost.
“Sarah?”
“How are you doing?” Sarah asked, stepping toward her. “It must've been six months, right?”
“I was just thinking about you the other day,” Mary told her. “I actually called by your flat a while ago, but they said you'd moved.”
“Yeah, to Hoxton. I met a guy and, well, it made sense to move in together. I suppose I should've left my new address behind in case anyone called, but... Well, I didn't think anyone would.”
“You look well,” Mary replied, her mind racing as she tried to work out how to get the conversation over as quickly as possible. “The last time I saw you... I mean, you were...”
“You know how things change,” Sarah replied. “I got some help for the drinking. I mean, I still drink, but not like that. I guess it was getting pretty out of hand, I probably would've nuked my liver by now.”
“I'm so glad you've turned a corner,” Mary continued. “I must admit, I was worried about you for a while there.”
“You were really good to me. I always felt like you took care of me back when...” She paused, and then finally a faint smile crossed her face. “God, it's so weird to think about, isn't it? All those times I used to come over to your flat and you'd take those photos! Wow!” She put her hands on the side of her face for a moment, as if she was embarrassed. “God, wow, just... Those were some pretty wild times.”
“They were indeed.
“I never carried on with that,” she added. “I didn't try to make a career out of it. Maybe I should, but... I dunno, when I met someone, I sorta felt like I should put it behind me. Silly, really. There wasn't anything wrong with it, was there?”
“It was a long time ago,” Mary said curtly.
“It started, what, about half a year ago? Crazy to think how much stuff has gone on since then.”
“Yes,” Mary replied, quickly looking over her shoulder to make sure that no-one could hear them talking, “such a long time ago. Best forgotten, probably.”
“You still got 'em?” Sarah asked.
“Got what?”
“The photos. I wouldn't mind seeing a few. Maybe give 'em to my boyfriend, I reckon he'd like that sort of thing.”
“I'm afraid we don't have any left,” Mary said, turning back to her. “After the last ones sold, we rather preferred to get out of that line of work. We don't even have the negatives.”
“You're not selling porn anymore? Pity, I could've used some extra cash now and then. I was actually wondering whether it was worth getting in touch again. Not that I really fancy it, but I've kept in shape and the money wasn't bad, was it? You and him were pretty generous.”
“You don't really want to be doing that sort of thing, do you?” Mary asked. “If you want my advice, you should get a nice job somewhere and earn some respectable money.”
“Is that what you two are doing now?”
“I -”
“Is that Don?” Sarah asked suddenly, peering into the restaurant. “Wow, he looks so different. No offence, but he's put on a little bit of weight.”
“Just some heft,” Mary replied. “It makes him look more important. It was quite deliberate, actually.”
“Pretty posh place, this. I've often walked past and wondered what it's like in there. What are you two up to nowadays, anyway? What are you out celebrating?”
“Nothing. I mean, just a few things. Don's into... suits...”
“Suits?”
“It's complicated. Anyway, I should get back inside, he'll be wondering what I'm doing out here.”
“I'll come with you,” Sarah replied, heading toward the door. “Just to -”
“No!” Mary blurted out, grabbing her by the arm. “I don't think so, not tonight. Another time.”
“Don't worry,” Sarah said with a smile, “I won't stay, I'll just say hello. I feel like, well, I don't want to lose you two as friends.”
“Friends?” Mary replied, unable to hide her shock at the word.
“Yeah, I mean... I guess we were, kinda. Weren't we?”
“We'll meet up another night,” Mary told her, trying not to panic. “Sorry, it's just that this is a private party, I'm not sure it's really open to other people.”
“Yeah, but...” Pausing for a moment, Sarah finally took a step back. “Right, yeah. Sure. Sorry, I didn't mean to start sticking my nose in or anything like that.”
“If you'd like to give me your phone number,” Mary continued, “I'll call and we can arrange a time.”
“Here,” Sarah muttered, searching through her pockets before pulling out an empty cigarette box, tearing off the back, and then scribbling a number on the back before handing it to her. “Give me a call. It'd be good to catch up.”
“Most certainly,” Mary replied, looking down at the torn piece of card.
“It'd be fun to talk about the old days,” Sarah continued, eyeing her suspiciously. “Weird to think about them, yeah? Me with my bits all out and your husband flashing his camera away. Makes you think about how things have changed, doesn't it? For you, anyway. I'm not sure I've really...”
She paused.
“So you should get back in there,” she added finally. “Don't wanna keep a bunch of toffs waiting, do you? Looks posh.”
“Not really,” Mary replied edgily. “It's just a few friends and colleagues having a meal out together.”
Once she and Sarah had said their goodbyes, Mary stood and watched her walking away. She had a sickening, tightening sensation in her chest, like a kind of stone-cold panic that threatened to crush her heart. Having long since felt that the days of nude models and dirty photos were gone, she knew that Sarah represented a sudden rush of reality and a reminder that there were still elements that were beyond her control.
If there was one thing she hated, it was not being in control.
Turning to look into the restaurants, she saw Donald and the others raising another toast, and she realized that nothing could be allowed to jeopardize the future for which they'd worked so hard. If a few loose ends still had to be tied, then she would simply have to find a way to tie them, and quickly.
TODAY
“Have you just been sitting here all day?” Mary asked, standing in the doorway. “Sophie, you have to move past this.”
Sitting on the sofa, with a duvet wrapped around her body, Sarah was furiously typing something on her laptop. There was a curiously focused expression on her face, as if she was working on something extremely important.
“I'm fine,” she muttered, her eyes red from having cried a little earlier.
“You're not fine,” Mary told her. “It's very clear that you're far from fine.”
“I deleted the ones of him.”
“I'm sorry?”
“All those photos,” she continued turning to her. “When I sent photos of Tom, he used to send me some back, but I deleted them all. I know I would've eventually got angry and posted them, and I don't want to be that kind of person, so I completely scrubbed them from my hard drive. I won't sink down to his level.”
“Well that's...” Mary paused. “That's very good of you. A lot of people would have given in to temptation.”
“I'm still me,” she replied. “I refuse to let him turn me into some kind of bitter asshole. I'm not going to let him define who I am.”
“No,” Mary replied, “of course not. That would be awful.”
“So I've been getting in touch with these people in America,” Sophie continued, “and they're running all these campaigns to end stuff like what happened to me. Getting websites shut down, that sort of thing. I figure I can't undo what that asshole did, but I can maybe try to help make sure that it doesn't happen t
o other people.” She looked back down at the laptop and typed a few more words. “I want to take my anger and turn it into a positive thing.”
Mary opened her mouth to reply, but at the last moment she paused. She'd expected to get home and find Sophie still in bed, still an emotional zombie after all the trauma of the previous twenty-four hours, but instead she was shocked by her daughter's resilience.
“Your father would be very proud of you,” she said finally.
“What about you?” Sophie asked. “Are you proud of me?”
“Of course. Do you even have to ask?”
“I figure it's like you said,” Sophie continued, “everyone makes mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes get blown up because of things you can't control. That doesn't mean you have to take them lying down, though. Nothing's so bad that you can't find some way to push on through, right? Thomas fucking Bell is not going to destroy me.”
“No,” Mary replied, somewhat taken aback, “I can see that.”
THIRTY YEARS AGO
“She's nothing,” Donald muttered as he drunkenly opened the kitchen cupboard and pulled out a two-thirds-empty bottle of whiskey. “She's a little tramp. Who the hell would listen to a little tramp anyway?”
“Anyone who wants to knock you down,” Mary replied, sitting tensely at the table. “The political world isn't renowned for its sense of honour.”
“I'm flavour of the month,” he said with a smile, pouring whiskey into two glasses before taking them over to her. “If it came down to a choice of who to believe, me or her, no-one in their right mind would pay any attention to a proven alcoholic with money troubles. She'd be laughed out of any room in the country, and that's if they even let her in at all.”
He slid a glass of whiskey toward her, but she slid it straight back.
“Loosen up,” he told her, pushing the glass over to her again and this time preventing her from pushing it back. “She has no proof.”
“The photos are out there,” Mary pointed out.
“A bunch of wankers aren't going to rally to her cause.” He took a swig of whiskey. “Literal wankers, I might add. Who wants to stand up and admit that he bought a load of smut?”
“We need to be sure.” Leaning back in her seat, she stared straight ahead for a moment, her mind filled with possibilities. “If we pay her to keep quiet, we have no way of knowing she won't come back for more. If we appeal to her conscience, we might find she doesn't have one and we'll only expose ourselves further. The photos are out there, thousands and thousands of them, but there's nothing in them to definitively link them to us.”
“Look on the bright side, she might step in front of a bus.”
“Donald, that's a horrible thing to say!”
“It'd solve our problems, though.” He stared at her for a moment. “That's how powerful people cling on, isn't it? They're willing to do things that other people aren't. Do you think Sarah whatshername would be the first little tart to get swept out of the way just because she pisses off someone who's got a bit of power?”
“Don't talk like that, Donald.”
“I'm just thinking out loud,” he continued, grabbing the bottle of whiskey and pouring himself another glass. “If this was a film, we'd have her bumped off and that'd be the end of it.”
“It's not a film,” she muttered, “it's real life. And she's a perfectly nice woman, or at least she was before.”
“She didn't actually say that she'd cause trouble, did she?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“There you go, then. She'll just crawl back under some rock with a bottle of wine and drink herself into oblivion. We don't even need to think about her again, Mary. She's gone, poof, vanished into thin air. People like that are a dime a dozen but they don't amount to anything.” He paused, before a grin crossed his lips. “I know what we should do. We should send her a crate of champagne as a gift. The dumb bitch'll drink herself to death, and it won't even be our fault. Death by champagne. There's a certain amount of poetic resonance in that idea. Hell, I wouldn't mind going that way.”
“I'm going to bed,” she replied, getting to her feet. “I'm exhausted.”
“I think I'll stay up,” he muttered, finishing the whiskey and pouring another. “I've got a lot to think about. Speeches to plan, that sort of thing.”
A few minutes later, having gone to bed without even bothering to brush her teeth, Mary lay in the dark and thought about her encounter with Sarah. She wanted to believe Donald when he claimed that there was nothing to worry about, but at the same time she'd seen the look in Sarah's eyes and she knew that there'd been a sliver of anger, a hint of fury at the way the situation had played out. She could easily understand that the poor girl, having slid through life without ever getting a break, might resent the system, in which case she was convinced that she and her husband might well become targets.
For a fraction of a second, she allowed herself to consider the possibility of killing Sarah. She imagined getting her alone and slipping something into her drink, or driving a knife into her chest, or taking a gun from her purse and... For a moment, she felt a wave of relief flood her body as she realized how easy it would be to end the problem, but finally she reminded herself that she could never, ever go through with such a thing. Staring up at the dark ceiling, she felt a shiver pass through her body at the realization that she was such a bad person, that she'd even contemplated such a thing.
Eventually she got out of bed and went out into the hallway, at which point she realized she could hear Donald grunting in the front room. She immediately guessed what he was doing, but as she made her way to the door and looked through the crack, she hoped she was wrong.
She wasn't wrong.
Donald was slumped on the sofa, holding up two A4 photos while masturbating with drunken enthusiasm.
Turning to head back to the bedroom, Mary stopped for a moment and realized that if she didn't make a stand, she'd be consigning herself to such a life forever. Filled with anger, she turned and stormed into the room, catching Donald completely off-guard a grabbing the photos. When she took a look at them, she realized that they both showed Sarah's naked body, and it was clear from the look in the girl's face that the images were taken on the afternoon when she turned up drunk.
“Come on,” Donald muttered, tucking his penis back into his trousers before reaching up and trying to snatch the photos back. “Let's not get all feisty about this. A man is entitled to have a little fun, especially if his wife isn't in the mood.”
“I thought we'd destroyed all the pictures,” she replied coldly.
“I might've kept a few back.”
“She was drunk that day,” she continued. “You told me you hadn't taken any photos of her when she was drunk. I asked you and you... You promised, you said you wouldn't take advantage of someone when they were in such an awful state.”
“Did I? Well, I suppose I took one or two. I never sold them, though. I just... hung onto them.”
He tried again to grab the photos, but Mary took a step back.
Hauling himself to his feet, Donald stumbled toward her.
“Give 'em back,” he slurred. “There's no harm in it!”
“Donald,” she replied, standing her ground as he approached, “I have to tell you something.”
“What, love?”
With that, she turned away and then swung back at him, slapping him in the face so hard that he fell to one side and crashed down onto the coffee table, breaking it in two and landing hard against the carpet with a loud grunt.
“If you ever do anything like this again,” she told him, with tears in her eyes, “I will leave you, do you understand? I won't expose what we've been doing, but I will leave you and I will never come back. I hope to God that you don't think this is an empty threat, because I assure you I'll go through with it if necessary. I'd rather not, but I'm afraid I can't possibly give you another chance after this. I am so close, Donald, to reconsidering what type of man I consider
you to be!”
Groaning with pain, he began to pick himself up off the floor.
“I consider this matter to be closed,” she said finally, “and we won't speak of it again. Not ever, not for as long as we live, we won't even acknowledge it. In the meantime, you will destroy any other photographs you might still have, or so help me God I'll be out that door faster than you can imagine. Do you really think you'll get very far without me around to help mop up all your mistakes?”
Still a little breathless, he leaned back against the foot of the sofa.
“Do you understand what I'm saying to you?” she asked firmly.
He nodded.
“So that's that,” she continued. “You have a meeting with Mr. Neville tomorrow morning, so I'd advise you to drink plenty of water and get to bed. I'll have breakfast on the table at seven on the dot, so don't be late. This is rock bottom, Donald. Any lower and I walk.”
“Fine,” he whispered, rubbing the back of his neck. “What about that Sarah girl, though? Do you still think she might cause us some problems?”
“I'll...” She paused for a moment. “Don't worry about Sarah Cole. I'll neutralize that particular threat.”
“But how are -”
“I said I'll deal with it,” she said firmly. “Don't think about it again, don't even say her name. If I tell you I'm going to do something, I'll do it. You don't need to know the details, just... Don't worry.”
Heading out of the room, she hurried along the corridor and finally reached the bedroom, where she sat on the end of the bed and listened as Donald lumbered past the door and went through to use the toilet. She waited as he bumped and banged about in there, stumbling and generally making a drunken mess of everything, until finally she heard a glass smashing against the floor.
“Fuck!” Donald called out.
She knew exactly what it was. It was the glass they used to hold their toothbrushes.
Without sighing, she calmly got up and headed through to help him before he cut his feet on the shards.