Her heart sank even further when she saw there was no reception area with beautiful glossy photographs to reassure her, and that the changing room was just a curtained-off area with a few wooden forms like she remembered from the gymnasium at school. But even more telling was that the studio area was divided up into a series of rooms, the walls flimsy plywood, and almost all of them were decorated and furnished as bedrooms.
One of the three models who were sitting around wearing dressing gowns came over to her, and introduced herself as Katy.
‘Robbie asked me to look after you,’ she said. ‘You haven’t done this before I suppose?’
Katy was a statuesque mixed-race woman, with a strong Liverpool accent. She was at least five feet ten, her crinkly dark hair was cropped very short and she had beautiful sharply defined cheekbones.
‘I’ve been doing glamour shots,’ Laura said nervously. ‘But this is going to be porn, isn’t it?’
It was only a stab in the dark, she wasn’t sure, and she couldn’t really believe Robbie was so uncaring that he’d throw her into that.
‘Only soft porn.’ Katy shrugged. ‘Fanny shots and stuff.’
Laura’s stomach lurched.
Her alarm must have showed for Katy laughed. ‘If you don’t like the idea you’d better get going now. But don’t think Robbie will pay you for more glamour stuff, he don’t make anything out of that. This is where the money is.’
It was tempting to turn and run out, but however horrible the idea of pornographic photography was, Laura needed to know more about Robbie and these other girls.
So she sat down and had a cup of tea with Katy and the two other models. The photographer had arrived late and was still setting up the lighting. The women were friendly, and Laura soon discovered they were in much the same boat as her. All three of them had children and no husband.
Julie was a small, curvaceous blonde. ‘None of us could be fashion models,’ she said bluntly. ‘We’re too old and too fat. But we’ve all got pretty faces and the kind of bodies men want to look at. Okay, so showing off your fanny ain’t something you really want to do, but it’s a darn sight better than trying to get by on the Social or doing office cleaning.’
‘We have a laugh too,’ Katy said, her dark eyes twinkling with laughter at Laura’s horrified expression. ‘We’re all in it together, and we’re real mates. You stay and watch what goes on, and if you don’t think you can do it, go and sign on at the Social again, because you ain’t going to be offered anything else.’
Anne, the third girl, a pretty, buxom redhead, was even blunter. ‘So Robbie’s fucking you,’ she said. ‘We all went down that road, thinking we was special to him. This is the end of that road, it don’t go nowhere else.’
Laura instinctively knew the three girls were telling her the truth. But shocking as that was, it wasn’t as bad as finding out what a fool she’d been to imagine Robbie cared for her.
She ought to have read all the signs. He’d wormed his way into her life, discovering everything about her, while giving nothing of himself away. There had never been any tenderness in his lovemaking, in truth he’d treated her like a tart. The nightly phone calls, the visits to her home were both just ways to break down her defences and make her put her trust in him.
Yet however sick she felt at being conned by him, she wasn’t going to let these other women know.
The sick feeling grew ever stronger as the photo shoot began. The photographer, a middle-aged man called Don, had none of the charm and diplomacy she’d grown used to with Ed in Livingston. He was curt and crude, using the most vile language, without even a trace of humour to lighten the proceedings.
The first series of pictures he took were of Katy, wearing only a white suspender belt and stockings, and he had her lying on the bed masturbating.
‘Hold yer fanny lips open more,’ he barked at her. ‘This ain’t for a parish magazine. And look like you’re getting off on it, for fuck’s sake. Lick yer lips and act like you’re horny.’
Laura could hardly bear to look. She was blushing with embarrassment, and she didn’t know how Katy could manage to look so relaxed and even happy to do it.
Next he got Julie, who was wearing a black leather G-string and a peephole bra, on the bed with Katy to simulate lesbian acts. Laura cringed as Julie had to stick out her tongue at Katy’s vagina as she was photographed from the rear, kneeling, bottom up in the air.
‘Just think of it as a giggle,’ Anne whispered to her as Don instructed Katy to sit up and Julie to kneel beside her, pull aside her G-string and masturbate against one of Katy’s nipples. ‘None of it’s real, it’s just an act. We go down the pub later and laugh about it. The good things about Don are that he’s quick and he knows what he wants. He don’t try and come on to any of us either, Katy reckons he ain’t got a cock.’
In the two hours Laura watched, she saw virtually every permutation of what a woman could do sexually, alone, with a partner, or all three together. At times she found it hideous, other times erotic, yet as Julie had said, it was amusing too. She heard the women’s whispered jokes to one another, she felt their affection for one another, and admiration at their ability to act so well compensated for her embarrassment.
Finally it was over. Don packed away his camera, stowed his rolls of film in a bag and unplugged the lighting.
‘Think you can do it?’ he called out to Laura.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, feeling that she could easily throttle Robbie.
‘If you aren’t here on Friday morning sharp on ten-thirty I’ll use someone else. If you come, you’ll be working with Katy. Get yerself a black basque and fishnet stockings, I’ve got an idea for a touch of dominatrix to break you in gently. I’ll bring the whip.’
Once dressed, with much of their heavy makeup removed, Katy, Julie and Anne all looked refreshingly ordinary, no different from any of the mothers Laura chatted to at the school gates.
They went to a pub nearby, and over a drink and sandwiches they asked Laura if she intended to come on Friday.
‘If I don’t, what will happen?’ she asked.
‘Robbie will drop you,’ Katy said with a shrug. ‘Don’t kid yourself he cares, he don’t care about no one but hisself. You ain’t in love with him, are you?’
‘No, certainly not.’ Laura laughed and told them how she met him and that she’d lost Stuart because of him.
All three women nodded in sympathy. ‘He done the same to all of us,’ Katy said. ‘I was a fashion model, but I got pregnant and that put paid to that. I was working as a stripper when I met Robbie, he did the same with me as you, got me to do the glamour stuff, then once I’d got a new flat, got used to having money, he said it was this or nothin’. Julie was a croupier at the Glasgow casino, she got sacked because she was suspected of fiddling. Robbie jumped in then. The same thing happened to her too.’
‘You mean he actually looks for women who are down on their luck?’ Laura exclaimed.
Anne smirked. ‘You got it in one! My old man left me and the three kids and the bailiffs came to repossess stuff that was on the never-never. One of the bailiffs felt sorry enough for me to give me Robbie’s number, he said he might give me a job. So I rang him, he took me out to lunch, gave me a load of old flannel, and bingo, I ended up doing this. So he don’t just find women himself, he’s got other blokes looking for them too.’
‘And you all slept with him?’ Laura asked hesitantly.
Katy’s face softened. ‘Yeah, ’fraid so. He made all of us believe he could give us a new start. It’s funny if you think about it, the King of Porn being such a dead loss in the sack. You could get more satisfaction eating a Mars Bar.’
Laura giggled.
Anne reached out and patted her hand. ‘We know how you feel, love, we’ve been there! But the good news is he does pay well. We get seventy-five pounds for every session. Where else can you earn that and be home in time to give the kids their tea?’
Laura brightened up – that
was much more than she expected. ‘But where do these pictures end up?’ she asked.
‘Not in Woman’s Own, that’s for sure,’ Julie laughed. ‘I doubt if they even stay in Britain, if they do it would only be in under-the-counter mags.’
‘Do you have to do stuff with men too?’ Laura asked.
‘Well of course.’ Katy laughed as if she thought that a silly question. ‘But that ain’t any worse, some of ’em are quite nice, they usually feel worse than we do, at least us girls don’t have to worry about getting it up!’
All three women laughed uproariously at this, but Laura blanched. ‘Does that mean we have to actually do it with them?’ she asked in a small voice.
‘Not properly,’ Julie said, glancing at her two friends and sniggering. ‘It’s kind of posed, like you saw today. There’s nothing very exciting about a picture of two people at it, is there? It’s the groping, the imagining what it feels like entering some delectable bird that turns men on.’
Laura’s stomach was churning with anxiety now and it must have showed in her face, for Katy put her hand over hers and squeezed it. ‘You really didn’t know until today, did you? Are you chickening out?’
‘I don’t know,’ Laura replied. ‘I need the money, but I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to do it when the time comes. Were you like this?’
‘We all were,’ Katy replied. ‘The day I started I was shaking like I had St Vitus’ Dance. Then Don made it worse still by telling me I had to put some makeup over my stretch marks! I was so self-conscious I wanted to curl up in a corner and die. But the girls gave me a pep talk, got me to snort a line of coke, and suddenly I was okay about it. We always do coke before now, it makes it a doddle. We’ll bring some for you on Friday if you like.’
On the drive back to Edinburgh, Laura tried to think only of what making £75 in two hours would do for her. If she managed to stick it out for a few months she’d have enough money to move anywhere she fancied. She could go and live in Devon or Cornwall, or find a place near Meggie and Ivy.
But attractive as the money was, it didn’t make the work any more palatable. The thought of touching another’s woman’s breasts or vagina was totally abhorrent, and letting a man she’d didn’t even fancy maul her was even worse. If she was told to give him a blow job she thought she’d be sick.
But then she didn’t really fancy Robbie, did she? Could pretending to be in the throes of an orgasm for the camera be any worse than being trapped under a heavy, hairy, sweaty man who cared for no one but himself?
She thought then about Meggie going on the game, and reminded herself how her sister had used her earnings from that to move on to better things. She could do that too. She could start her own business, maybe a promotions agency, and Barney would get to live in a nice house, she could buy him a bike, take him on lovely holidays.
The end would justify the means.
‘Close one nostril and snort up the line in the other,’ Julie said, as she held out a rolled-up bank note to Laura and two lines of cocaine on a hand mirror. ‘When you’ve done that, change nostrils and do the other one.’
Laura had only tried coke once before, but that was seven years ago and she’d been so drunk at the time she couldn’t remember what sort of effect it had. But if the other girls used it and found it worked for them, then it probably would for her too.
She exhaled, then slid the banknote up her nostril and sniffed up one line. It stung her nose and made her eyes run, but she resisted the desire to sneeze and quickly did the same again in the other nostril.
‘Good girl,’ Julie said. ‘Now sniff it right back, it makes the back of your throat feel a bit weird, but that soon passes.’
It wasn’t just her throat which felt weird, everything did. She could see herself in the mirror on the wall, a person she barely recognized as Laura Brannigan, dressed in a black basque, fishnet stockings and high-heeled boots. Katy had put on her makeup for her, her eyes were dark and smoky, her lips very red, and with her dark brown ‘Afro’ hair, she was transformed into the kind of woman she’d only ever glimpsed before in her sexual fantasies.
‘Okay now?’ Julie asked.
Laura nodded, and was surprised to find she was. If she could sit here with these other girls, her breasts almost out of the basque, and nothing covering her vital parts, and not feel embarrassed, then she could do the rest.
Her debut was to be with Katy, who was wearing something which was meant to resemble a toga. It was white, and clasped on one brown shoulder with a brooch, but it was so flimsy and short that her black pubic hair was visible, as were her dark brown nipples which stood up like thimbles because she was cold.
Julie picked up an aerosol. ‘Close your eyes,’ she ordered and quickly sprayed something over Laura’s face, neck, shoulders, breasts and her belly and thighs. ‘It glistens like sweat,’ she said by way of an explanation. ‘So you look hot and sexy!’
‘You do look sexy,’ Katy said appraisingly. ‘Great tits and arse!’
Don called them then and Laura felt like a gladiator entering the ring.
The room they were to use was rigged out like a torture chamber, only all the chains and handcuffs hanging up were black plastic. Even before Don began instructing them about what he wanted, Laura could see it for herself. Katy was the victim, and she the abuser. The first few shots were easy enough to do – Katy was to cower away from her, while Laura looked menacing with the whip in her hand. The coke was working and she felt excited and uninhibited. At one point, unasked, she even put one foot up on the bench where Katy was sprawled, a display of dominance and giving the camera a first-class view of her pubic area.
‘Well done, Laura,’ Don muttered in the darkness beyond the lights. ‘You’ve got it!’
She guessed as they moved on to other poses that Don had settled on this setting for her first time because it didn’t involve her having to touch Katy intimately. Katy was her slave, there to pleasure her. This idea aroused Laura a little, just as her costume had, and she found she was acting it out almost unconsciously, to the point when Don directed Katy to kneel before her open legs and simulate licking at her vagina, she looked down at her very red, pointed tongue and for a second or two wished it was for real.
‘That’s it, girls,’ Don called out, breaking the mood. ‘Very good, both of you. Laura, you are a natural.’
Julie and Anne blew her kisses as they went out for their shoot. Julie was dressed as a nurse, in a ridiculously short striped uniform and black stockings. Anne was presumably the patient in a skimpy dress and very high heels.
‘Wasn’t so bad, was it?’ Katy said as they got dressed in their own clothes. ‘Don was right, you are a natural. I got the idea you even enjoyed it.’
∗
Laura got up from the bed and paced up and down her cell like a caged animal. Remembering that first shoot was bad enough, but she certainly didn’t want to recall all the far worse ones that came afterwards. Where did all her modesty and dignity go? Why was money so important to her?
11
As Laura looked back at the second half of 1975, and ’76 and ’77, she found much of it was blank to her. That, she supposed, was because she spent so much of it out of her head on coke, speed or alcohol. There weren’t that many entirely straight days, and those there were she almost wished she couldn’t remember because they were invariably days of reckoning.
How odd it was that while she could vividly recall people taking her to task for her behaviour, it never had the effect of sobering her up for long.
The shock and horror she felt that first day in the Glasgow studio fizzled out pretty quickly. The other ‘models’ as they liked to call themselves, whether male or female, were all in it for the same reason. Money.
The very first time she worked with a man had been scary and embarrassing. She’d assumed that he had to be some kind of oversexed pervert, but he disarmed her by telling her that he got an erection whenever he took his clothes off, and that it had nothing
to do with seeing her or any female body. He went on to say that he never dared go into a communal changing room after sport for that reason.
Maybe he was unique, but all the men were seasoned performers: as one casually put it one day, ‘I always rise to the occasion.’ They were in the main quite sleazy, many of rather low intellect, and not one of them would she ever want to go on a date with. Yet mostly they were kind and polite, and some were very funny. As long as they could both distance themselves from what they were doing and remember it was only acting, not the real thing, then it wasn’t so bad.
With each successive session it became easier and easier, eventually getting to the point where she saw it all as a bit of a laugh. In fact she got so blasé, and so good at it, that the other girls nicknamed her ‘The Blue Queen’.
Yet it was clear to her now that whilst losing the ability to be shocked, she also lost all her values and principles. Money was the only thing that counted to her; dignity and self-respect flew out the window.
During the summer holiday of ’75 Laura had driven down to London with Barney to stay with Meggie and Ivy. It made Laura proud to see how well Meggie was doing with her houses. She didn’t have the capital to think big like Jackie. She just bought one place at a time, renovated it, sold it on quickly and then bought another. But she was making an excellent living. She was equally proud of Ivy too, for she had qualified as a bookkeeper, and ran the office in a building supplies office.
They were thrilled to have their big sister and nephew staying with them, and they took a break from their work and had days out in Brighton and Hastings and went to London Zoo, the Tower of London and on a boat trip up the Thames.
Neither of her sisters asked Laura any probing questions about how she was managing. She supposed her good clothes and general confidence spoke for themselves, and of course they’d grown up believing she was a winner.
Faith Page 30