Faith

by Lesley Pearse

  One of the most successful films they ever made was shot at Brodie Farm. Jackie was in London, and Laura had offered to go over to Fife to check how the building work was progressing. As soon as she saw the concrete mixers, scaffolding and piles of bricks she knew it would make a great backdrop for a story-line of a builder seducing the lady of the house and her friend. Jackie had furnished two rooms for herself in the farmhouse, so Laura took everyone out there when the real builders had gone home for the weekend, and by Sunday afternoon they had the film in the can. Jackie would have had fifty fits if she’d known.

  Looking back on that period right up till the spring of ’81 was like trying to remember the plots of films or television programmes she’d watched in the past. She could recall certain scenes vividly, even see the actors’ and actresses’ faces clearly, but it was just a montage of slices of action.

  A blonde girl called Monica, gagged and tied to a brass bed, was one memorable one. Laura remembered so well how she and the rest of the team stood transfixed at the realistic way she struggled and bucked as the rape scene was filmed. Yet it was more realism than they needed when she wet herself, and it transpired that she’d been trying to tell them for some time that she needed to be untied.

  There was Gary too, a real find, for he was hung like the proverbial horse and could keep it up. While mounting a voluptuous redhead called Irene on a kitchen table he had a bad accident. One of the legs of the table collapsed, and the pair of them slithered to the floor, knocking over a camera tripod, which in turn hit a jagged-edged tin bucket and flipped it up, and it landed on Gary’s back, ripping a six-inch gash.

  These were funny incidents that even the hapless victims laughed about afterwards, but there were also sordid ones, disgusting ones, and worrying ones too. It was a helter-skelter of panic, ruthlessness, fright, irritation and hysteria, with only brief moments of elation when everything went to plan. As for the actors and actresses, they were as diverse as the problems and blunders. Men like Dave who got on with it with good humour and consideration for everyone else involved were rare. Some were plain stupid, unable to follow the simplest instructions, others acted like prima donnas, constantly questioning and complaining. Some had about as much personality as a slug, others too much, wanting to be both director and star. There were the vain, the cruel, the greedy and the crude, some who had no idea about personal hygiene and others who kept everyone waiting while they primped and preened.

  Yet all the diverse emotions Laura felt, along with the memories, problems and triumphs, were numbed by the coke she relied on to get her through each day, and the brandy she drank at night in order to sleep. She didn’t want to think too hard about what she was doing, to herself or to others, and certainly not to what was happening to Barney.

  In the early days she had mostly been back home by five-thirty or six, so Barney wasn’t alone for long after school, but as it became harder to stick to office hours, she hired people to be there for him. Some were good, but others were indifferent or bad. Yet at the time she scarcely recognized the difference. The good ones were mainly students, happy to feed him, help him with his homework and tuck him into bed. But the bad ones were people she barely knew, just acquaintances only interested in the money she paid, not Barney. They ignored him, chatted on her phone while he sat waiting patiently for a meal which never came. Sometimes they never even turned up and he waited alone in the flat for hours.

  Laura wished she could comfort herself with the knowledge she made it up to Barney in other ways, but she couldn’t. She didn’t see what was going on because she was too stoned and too busy thinking about making money.

  He was such a good kid he rarely complained. He grew used to having to help himself to whatever food was in the fridge, to having to go to school in a dirty shirt because there were no clean ones. He even learned to cover up her negligence.

  But though he managed to fool his teacher, neighbours and his friends’ mothers that he was fine and happy and that his mother was always around, he didn’t manage to hoodwink Jackie. She had finely tuned antennae where he was concerned, and even over the phone she could sense when something wasn’t right. She would often make a surprise visit on her way through Edinburgh to Fife, and luckily Laura was usually there, or at least someone reasonably competent was looking after Barney. But these visits, however brief, worried Laura, for Jackie asked so many questions, made pointed remarks about the state of the flat and about Barney, and she sensed Jackie knew she was hiding something.

  It was almost inevitable that Jackie would eventually find out what Laura was doing. She was too bright and intuitive to be fobbed off for long. Unfortunately she found out in the worst possible way, arriving early one evening in November ’79 to find nine-year-old Barney alone in the flat.

  Laura had spent all day filming in a seedy flat in Glasgow that they’d rented for a week. There had been countless problems with lights, props and the actors, and they finally finished filming around seven. But she didn’t go straight home, even though she knew Barney was alone; she had to have a drink first.

  She was tipsy when she got home about half past ten, and perhaps that was why she didn’t notice Jackie’s car parked in the street. But she did notice the smell of cleaning fluid as she walked into the flat, and her first thought was that Barney must have attempted to wash the kitchen floor to please her.

  As she walked into the lounge Jackie jumped up from the settee, shocking Laura to the core.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked in a cold, angry voice. ‘How could you leave Barney alone for so long?’

  If Laura had been given some warning she might have come up with some good excuse. But her mind went blank. ‘I got caught up with a client,’ she said wildly. ‘And the traffic was bad.’

  ‘Why didn’t you phone Barney to tell him?’ Jackie asked. ‘And I can smell the drink on your breath from here, so you might as well admit you’ve been in a pub.’

  Laura couldn’t remember much of what she said to that, some lame excuse she supposed, yet she could remember clearly how Jackie looked that night in an emerald-green mohair sweater and jeans tucked into long suede high-heeled boots that matched the sweater perfectly. With a table lamp behind her, her hair looked like a coppery halo, but her expression was anything but angelic; she looked angry enough to attack Laura.

  ‘This flat was a pigsty when I got here, with no food anywhere,’ Jackie raged. ‘Barney was sitting here eating dry cornflakes, embarrassed that I’d caught you out. How often do you leave him alone like this?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Laura insisted, but she was sobering up fast and she could see that Jackie had cleaned the room, and had probably been through the entire flat.

  ‘Don’t lie to me! Fortunately Barney doesn’t seem to take after you, he’s a hopeless liar. And before we go any further I’ve poked around in your room and I know now what kind of “agency” you are really running. Are you selling the blue movies or making them?’

  She didn’t wait for a reply, instead went into a rant about the filthy kitchen floor, the unwashed dishes, the lack of clean clothes for Barney and his sheets which clearly hadn’t been changed in weeks.

  ‘If you lived alone I wouldn’t care if you lived like a pig,’ she said. ‘It would have surprised me, seeing as you were once so fussy about cleanliness, but I wouldn’t care. But drugs and porn! When you’ve got a nine-year-old?’ She pointed out that she’d found some coke along with the videos in the bedroom. ‘And don’t try and tell me those videos are just borrowed from a friend, I know they are part of your business. What if Barney was to put one of them in the video machine? Or try the coke you left lying about so casually? Don’t you care about him?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Laura insisted, and knowing there was no point in trying to wriggle out of it all, she tried to explain that making films was all she could do to make enough money to keep herself and Barney.

  Jackie waved her hands to silence her. ‘There is absolutely nothing you can
say to justify it,’ she raged. ‘It is wrong and you know it. Obviously you’ve got so far into all this filth that you’ve forgotten your duty as a mother, which is to keep Barney from harm. You don’t deserve to have that beautiful child, leaving him all alone without a proper meal in a flat full of stuff that could corrupt his mind or actually kill him. What would you have done if you’d got back here tonight and found him dead from trying that stuff?’

  Laura began crying and tried to gain her friend’s sympathy by making out she couldn’t help herself. But Jackie would have none of that; she was furious that Laura had lied to her about what she wanted a loan for.

  ‘And you lied when you said you were working in a dress shop,’ she spat out. ‘I suspected all along that you were up to something seedy too, because you couldn’t possibly afford this flat on a shop assistant’s wages. But I never thought you could be debasing yourself in something as vile as this! Why? You knew that I would have helped you out if you’d needed money.’

  ‘Why should I have to ask you for money?’ Laura threw back at her. ‘You aren’t my keeper. I’ve got the right to start up any business I like. I don’t need your charity or your opinion. And you had no right to come here uninvited and snoop around.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you that if you are caught making these films you might go to prison and you’d certainly have Barney taken from you?’ Jackie said heatedly. ‘Can you imagine what that would do to him? For God’s sake, Laura, pull yourself together and stop this right now. It’s wrong and you know it.’

  That night after Jackie had given up ranting, when they’d both cried and Laura had seen how clean the flat was, the cupboards stocked with food that Jackie had bought, she really did intend to stop making the films.

  She looked at Barney in the morning and saw that he’d shot up in height without her noticing. He now reached her shoulder and was clearly going to be tall like his father. The stockiness of his early years was gone too, and he was skinny now. He had a look of Greg, but without the big nose, and his dark eyes had a wisdom in them beyond his nine years.

  She realized too that she hadn’t stopped to think about what subjects he was best at in school, and she’d never asked him if he had any idea what he wanted to be when he grew up. She hadn’t even been to school parent/teacher meetings to hear about his progress or problems. If she didn’t become a better mother he might go the way her older brothers had, raking the streets and getting into crime.

  But for all her good intentions, it wasn’t that easy just to stop what she was doing. Katy and Tod depended on her, and Sid wanted more films, offering her a bigger percentage of the profits. She did find a reliable woman to come in and act as a housekeeper and childminder each day after school. She took all the films, photographs and other incriminating evidence of her work out of the flat and rented a small office in Glasgow. She also made sure there was never any coke in the flat, and that she spent all weekend with Barney. But she didn’t stop making the films, and the more money she made, the more she wanted.

  Jackie was no fool, she knew Laura hadn’t given up making films, but on her next surprise visit when she found everything in order in Albany Street, and nothing dangerous or corrupting there, she seemed resigned to it. ‘I hate knowing you are involved in something like this,’ she said, shaking her head despairingly. ‘What is Barney going to think of you when he’s old enough to understand what you do?’

  ‘I won’t be doing it then,’ Laura said airily. ‘As soon as I’ve got enough money I’ll move into some legal business.’

  ‘Then at least let Barney come over to Fife with me during his school holidays,’ Jackie said. ‘He needs other kids to play with, fresh air and normality. And I want you to go to a solicitor and draw up a legal document so that if anything should happen to you, I get custody of him.’

  Laura had mixed feelings about Jackie’s request. While she was happy to agree to Barney staying with her in the school holidays, and she could see the sense in having some contingency plan in the unlikely event of anything bad happening to her, she resented being policed. It seemed to her that Jackie had stopped being her friend and become her social worker. She didn’t confide in Laura any more, not about the trouble she was having conceiving a child of her own, or about her marriage. It was obvious from the amount of time she was spending in Fife that she had left Roger for good, but she didn’t admit it. And if she wouldn’t talk about her problems, Laura felt unable to talk about hers.

  Robbie had moved into making blue movies too; it turned out that was why he’d closed down the old studio. He was not amused when Laura beat him at his own game. He’d telephoned her several rimes threatening to mark her for life because she’d poached people he wanted to work for him, and he’d called on Katy at home for the same end. Laura also suspected he was having her followed, and there was the distinct possibility he would grass her up to the police so they would raid her flat.

  She knew Jackie wouldn’t be sympathetic about any of that, but she would have liked to confide in her about her torrid affair with Tod the photographer.

  It had started out as a bit of fun, hot, steamy sex with no strings. But however much Laura had thought that was all she wanted, it turned out it wasn’t. Tod was married, so their affair had to be conducted mainly during the day, and six months down the line Laura was feeling bruised and used.

  She scrutinized herself in the mirror and saw an extremely attractive woman who looked ten years younger than her real age of thirty-four, despite drinking too much, doing drugs and not eating well. Her figure was perfect, her hair shone, and everyone she met remarked how stylish and elegant she was.

  She had everything she ever wanted – money, beautiful clothes, a nice home and a new car – yet she felt desperately alone. She didn’t understand how that could be, not when she was surrounded by people all day. It was that Stinky Wilmslow scenario all over again. She felt that no one really liked her for herself, only for what she could do for them.

  More and more often she found herself thinking back to what she’d had with Stuart, the closeness, that all-enveloping love that made the world beautiful. Sex with Tod was very much like in the films they made, erotic perhaps, but never the magic carpet ride she’d known with Stuart. Afterwards, as Tod hastily put on his clothes and rushed off home, she felt so cheap. They never had time for a cup of tea together, a walk in the park or just a loving cuddle. Sometimes when she felt really low she thought he only made love to her to make sure she kept him on as cameraman. Even Katy, whom she had always thought of as a real friend, seemed only interested in the money they made together.

  Laura and Barney spent Christmas of ’79 alone in Albany Street, but they saw the New Year in at Brodie Farm with Jackie. Roger was there too, and Frank and Lena had come up from London with Belle and Charles. The stables were still in the process of being converted into guest rooms, and with only two completely finished, it was a little crowded in the farmhouse, but that made it seem even cosier for everyone pitched in with cooking and tidying up. It was so good to see Lena, Frank and Belle again, like the old days at Muswell Hill. They played board games for Barney’s benefit, took long walks and ate huge meals, and at Jackie’s insistence Laura stayed on in Fife until after her thirty-fifth birthday in early January.

  It was the first time in a very long while that Laura felt at peace. She was touched that Jackie never once said anything that might alert the others that she wasn’t running a promotions agency. Even Roger, who she knew had never liked her, had been pleasant. She was able to be herself, to enjoy seeing Barney so happy, and to laugh and chatter with the family as if she were a real member of it too.

  Her memories of Barney during that period were some of the sharpest she had, so clear and vivid still they could have been just yesterday. Lena and Frank had bought him one of those leather flying hats with flaps that came down over his ears, and he wore it all the time. But he pretended to be Deputy Dog, the gormless character from the Disney cartoon, and mim
icked his voice. At one point when all the adults were drinking he picked up a bottle of whisky and pretended to take a swig of it. ‘Darn fine moonshine,’ he said, staggering around as if he was drunk and making everyone laugh.

  She remembered thinking that he would be ten in the spring, and how fleeting childhood was. Jackie and Belle were always saying what a little charmer he was, that he took such an interest in people, and cared about them. She realized then that he was the only thing in her life she could be really proud of.

  Jackie came into her bedroom the night before she was due to leave to get Barney ready for school the following day. He was asleep in the other twin bed, and Jackie sat on Laura’s the way they used to do when they shared a flat.

  ‘It’s New Year and a time for new beginnings,’ she said, reaching out and smoothing Laura’s hair back from her face. ‘Roger and I are going to have one last attempt at saving our marriage, so I won’t be coming up here so much this year. Will you promise me you’ll behave yourself?’

  There was so much affection and anxiety in her voice that a lump came up in Laura’s throat. ‘Of course I will,’ she replied. ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m a big girl now.’

  ‘You could come back to London,’ Jackie suggested. ‘I could let you have one of my flats. You’d soon get a good job there and we could all help out with Barney. Mum and Belle both adore him.’

  ‘I belong here now,’ Laura said, though she wasn’t sure that was strictly true. She did love Scotland, especially away from the cities, and she often daydreamed of living by a loch in the Highlands, or on a river miles from anywhere. But it was only a daydream, there was no work in such places and maybe she was too much of a city girl to live anywhere else.