Father Unknown (24 page)

At five to eleven, Josie was in Porchester Mews, looking for the studio. The mews was a horribly squalid little place, mostly panel-beating garages, printers and other small businesses, with junk piled outside most of them, and from the street the rooms above what had once been stables looked to be as nasty as the place she lived in.

But she had learned since she came to the city that this part of London, Westbourne Grove, Ladbroke Grove and Paddington, was one of the worst areas of all to live in. While Westbourne and Ladbroke Groves were virtually slum areas, populated by immigrants who were exploited by unscrupulous landlords, Paddington was home to hundreds of prostitutes. Having no real idea what prostitutes looked like, she felt nervous just walking around in case people took her for one.

‘Yoo-hoo,’ someone called out behind her, and she turned to see Tina and Candy coming into the mews.

It was sunny again today and the girls wore sleeveless mini-dresses. But the skirts were at least two inches shorter than Josie’s and she felt a stab of panic that she looked old-fashioned.

‘You look gorgeous,’ Candy said with a sincere wide smile. ‘Beetle is going to be pleased with us. Are you nervous?’

Josie nodded. She hadn’t eaten anything because she felt sick with fright, and if she’d had to hang around on her own for much longer, she might just have taken off.

‘Remember the first time is the worst,’ Tina said, and put her arm around Josie’s shoulders. ‘A few sessions later and you’ll be laughing about how you felt today. Imagine you’re an actress, that’s all it is really, acting sexy.’

Beetle was aptly named. He was short, squat, with shiny black hair cut in a similar mop-top to the Beatles. He was around forty and his hair looked suspiciously like a wig, yet he had a curious kind of charm that put Josie at her ease. After Tina and Candy had introduced her, they went off to get changed for their session, and Beetle made Josie a cup of coffee and gave her a cigarette.

‘You are beautiful, Jojo,’ he said, reaching out to touch her hair and twiddling a curl around his finger. ‘I find a girl as lovely as you only once in a blue moon. Tina told me about you on the phone last night, and I want to reassure you I won’t make you do anything you don’t like. I don’t try and get my girls to go to bed with me. I pay them for each session, and I look after them. You can trust me.’

The office they were in was tiny, a partitioned-off part of the main studio, but it was very clean and neat, holding little more than a desk, a filing cabinet and a couple of chairs. The walls were covered with photographs of girls in everything from bikinis and negligees to fur coats. Although many of them had a blouse or a coat undone to reveal they were wearing nothing beneath, there wasn’t one picture of anyone completely naked.

The studio beyond, through which Josie had entered, was large. It appeared to run right across the top of two garages beneath. The floor was shiny plain lino, the walls neutral, but it was divided into what Josie imagined film sets looked like. One had a couch covered in a fur rug, there was a beach scene with sand on the floor in another, and a bed piled high with cushions in the third.

As she and Beetle were talking, Josie saw Candy go into the set with the couch, dressed in black shiny boots and a very short black satin petticoat, but the photographer had set up a big white umbrella which prevented her from seeing how he would pose Candy. Tina came out a little later, and she was dressed in a brief bikini for the beach scene. There was a third girl too, dark-haired, and she was lying on the bed in a red negligee.

After about half an hour, Beetle said it was time for Josie to get ready, and he led her across the studio into a small changing-room. He opened a wardrobe, took a white lacy negligee down off a hanger and told her to put it on over her underwear. He then gave her some brief instructions about putting on more mascara and lipstick and defining her cheekbones with rouge. To her relief he didn’t stay and watch her.

She was terrified when she was called from the changing-room, even though the negligee wasn’t very revealing. But Bob, the man who was to photograph her, barely looked at her, just ordered her to kneel on the floor by an artificial tree. It felt very strange for the first few minutes as the man gave her instructions from behind his camera, and with bright lights shining in her face she could see nothing beyond the little set she was in. She took Candy’s advice about pretending she was an actress, and it seemed to work, for she stopped feeling self-conscious and after a little while found she could move into different poses without any prompting.

When Bob suggested loosening the negligee she wasn’t frightened, in fact it was much like the way she had posed back at home in her room with a sheet. Soon she was smiling naturally, throwing back her head, running her fingers through her hair, or lying down on her side with one thigh exposed as if she had been born to it.

‘No trouble with this one, she’s a natural,’ Bob said to Beetle when he came over to the set some time later. ‘I’ll get these developed and drop them round to you this evening.’

‘Well, that’s it,’ Beetle said to Josie, his face very shiny like his hair under the lights, ‘looks like you’ve got yourself a new career now. Phone me tomorrow at midday and I’ll tell you what sessions I want you for next week.’

Josie was surprised that that was all there was to it, even a bit disappointed it was over so soon. But Bob was putting a jacket on ready to leave.

Candy was changing into some red underwear when Josie went back to put her own clothes back on. She smiled at Josie and offered her a cigarette. ‘How did it go?’

‘Fine, I think.’ Josie didn’t like to repeat what Bob had said, for fear of sounding smug. But she did say how Beetle had said she was to ring him tomorrow.

‘Well, you’re in then, love.’ Candy grinned. ‘All your troubles are over, by the end of the week you’ll have enough dosh to find yourself a better pad. We’ll probably run into you during the week, the sessions usually overlap, and you’ll meet some of the other girls too. Good luck.’

Josie was a little disappointed that it was all cut short, she’d kind of expected that she’d hang around and chat with Candy and Tina, maybe even go somewhere with them afterwards. But she tried not to show it, and thanked Candy for introducing her to Beetle.

‘You might not be so grateful after a couple of months.’ Candy laughed. ‘Now, get out in the fresh air today. The summer will be over before we know it, and you need to find your way round London if you’re going to stay here.’

Josie did what Candy had suggested and walked miles that afternoon, lost in dreams of fame and fortune. The previous day’s rain had washed the pavements and the leaves on the trees clean, and all at once she was seeing the London she’d dreamed off back home in Cornwall, Hyde Park and the Serpentine. Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square, all every bit as magnificent as she’d expected. Bubbles of excitement kept leaping up inside her. She was going to be a model, she would earn so much money she could buy all the new clothes she wanted, live in a flat like Will’s, have her hair done at the hairdresser’s, and never have to scrape other people’s left-over food off plates again.

She bought an
Evening Standard
and studied the advertisements for flats. There was a one-bedroom self-contained one in Chelsea which she’d heard was a nice area, for twenty pounds a week. It seemed laughable that only a week before she was looking at ads for bed-sitters and thinking six pounds a week was a fortune.

Her thoughts slipped back to Ellen while she was going home on the Tube later that evening. She had thought of her sister almost daily in the last two weeks, wishing she could contact her, but she hadn’t dared to. She wasn’t sure she could trust Ellen not to tell their parents where she was in London. What would she think of her modelling? Would she get all high and mighty and say it was a bad thing to do? Or would she just laugh and say good for her?

She really didn’t know, and that made her feel rather sad. A year ago she would have been able to predict how Ellen would react to anything, they’d never had secrets from one another. She remembered how Ellen had told her everything about Pierre, trusting her implicitly not to tell Mum or Dad. Why did that trust vanish? What had changed her so much that she could pretend she was pregnant just to justify leaving the sister she said she loved at home alone? Was it simply because she fell in love and that man let her down?

Yet at the back of Josie’s mind another thought had taken root. Maybe once Ellen had moved to Bristol she became a bit like Josie had while she was in Helston, thinking her family were all weird, and finding she didn’t want to be a part of it any more.

On 1 October Josie was standing inside her new flat, the key in her hand, her heart palpitating with a mixture of pleasure and anxiety.

It hadn’t been easy to find a new place. Landlords and agents were a suspicious bunch, she’d discovered. But Beetle had intervened and got her this place in Elm Park Gardens in Chelsea. It was only five minutes’ walk away from King’s Road.

The block of small flats was new and purpose-built, unlike the rest of the huge Victorian houses in the road. Her flat, on the fourth floor, had two rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. It was unfurnished, except for a cooker, fridge and fitted carpets, but after the horrors of Westbourne Park Road Josie was quite happy to sleep on the floor. She would have to for a while because she had no money left for furniture.

She never went back to the waitressing job, and she had been doing seven sessions a week for Beetle since she started with him nine weeks ago. Yet even though she’d earned over nine hundred pounds in that time, two hundred of it had gone on key money for this place, plus another hundred for a month’s advance rent, and then a huge deposit. The rest had gone on clothes, food and living expenses.

Josie had confided in Tina about this, as she thought that handing over more than half of what she’d earned just for a roof over her head seemed ludicrous. But Tina laughingly said she was earning ludicrous amounts of money too, and to remember she’d get the key money and deposit back if she ever left there.

Josie took off her coat, then carried her suitcase and the pillowcase she’d filled with clothes into the bedroom. There was at least a fitted wardrobe, and as she began to hang up her clothes in it, she put aside her anxiety and thought instead of the future. Beetle kept telling her she was a hot property and that once she was sixteen he’d be able to get her into the prestigious glossy magazines, and she could easily become a celebrity.

Once she’d put her clothes away she went back into the lounge to unpack the box which contained a new iron, a hair-dryer and a radio and kitchen equipment. As she took out each item she reminded herself she had bought them all, and that was concrete evidence that she had achieved a great deal since she arrived in London.

Yet the one thing she really wanted above all was a friend. She hadn’t expected to miss Rosemary and her other schoolfriends, but there was hardly a day she didn’t think of them and wonder what they were doing now. Did Rosemary get the job in Truro? Who filled the vacancy in the shipping office?

She thought too about her parents, wondering if they’d made any attempt to find her. She thought it was more likely that once they got her postcard they’d just dismissed her, and even if that was what she wanted in one way, it hurt that they could cast her off so easily.

Then there was Ellen. Josie had finally written her a letter, but she put no address on it, making the excuse that this was because she was about to move to a nicer place and she’d let Ellen know the address then. She said she’d got some modelling work (though she didn’t specify what kind) and had made lots of new friends. She just wished that last bit was true. London wasn’t a very friendly place, she’d found. She couldn’t just strike up conversations with people the way she had in Cornwall. If she had a girlfriend maybe they could go to pubs, coffee bars and dance-halls, but she couldn’t do any of those things alone, especially not in London.

The girls she met at the studio were mostly much older than her. They were slick and sophisticated and they ignored her. Even Tina and Candy were a bit distant now. They would stop to chat for a few minutes, ask how she was doing, but it was obvious to Josie they didn’t want to get involved with her. They hadn’t once invited her to go out with them, not even for a cup of coffee. Now she had this flat, and she would give anything to have someone she could invite round.

Beetle had fixed her up with a photographic session this afternoon and again tomorrow even though normally none of the girls worked on Saturday afternoons or Sundays. He seemed to know she was lonely and that her money was all gone, and she supposed he thought work was the answer to both problems.

Once her few things were stashed away in the cupboards, Josie sat on the floor of the lounge, leaned back against the wall and lit up a cigarette. She really didn’t know why she kept lighting cigarettes; she didn’t like the taste or the smell. Back home she had only ever had the odd one with Rosemary. But everyone seemed to smoke in London, especially the other models, and she didn’t want to be different.

As she sat there looking around the empty room, she suddenly began to cry. She couldn’t understand why, she’d worked flat out to get this place, had thought of nothing else for the past three weeks, but now she was here she just felt desolate.

After about half an hour she picked herself up off the floor and went into the bathroom to wash her face. It was tiny, but clean and bright, and she gained a little comfort from seeing her face flannel, toothbrush and her own towel, knowing they could stay in there permanently without fear of anyone taking them.

‘put your makeup on,’ she said aloud to her reflection in the mirror. ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’

When Josie walked into the studio two hours later, Beetle grinned at her. ‘I bought you a flat-warming present,’ he said, and lifted up a huge carrier bag from Selfridges.

All Josie’s sadness vanished at his kindness. ‘Oh, Beetle,’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s so nice of you. What on earth is it?’