Julia Gets a Life (17 page)

            ‘Sod you then. Bye.’

            ‘That you, Ju?’

            ‘Hi. I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday, Rani, but I need to take a day’s leave on Wednesday, and as you’re not in tomorrow...well, I didn’t want to leave it until the last minute.’

            ‘Oh, no probs. I’m only vegging. Yeah, that should be okay. Greg can cover. There’s nothing much doing far as I know. What are you up to on Wednesday then? Or shouldn’t I ask?’

            ‘Oh, no. I mean, yes. I’ve got to go to London. To meet with Colin. You know, my editor friend - from
Depth.
He’s...’

            ‘Sound’s cool. What’s the.....No, Simon! Stop that! Sorry...’

            ‘That’s okay. He’s asked me to...’

            ‘Si-
mon
! Ha, ha! Stop! No! St..sorry, Ju. I’d better go. Friend round. You know. I’ll see you Tuesday, okay?’

            ‘Howard? I know you’ve got a hangover, and a bug, and I’m sorry to bother you, but I just had to ring you up because I’ve had some really exciting news today. I had a call earlier from the guy who I used to work freelance for, in London - did I tell you about him? - and he’s asked me if I’d like to shoot some of the pix for a series of features they’re doing,
and
a hardback - coming out at Christmas, I think - which is - wait for it - a book about
Kite
! You know? As in the band? Me! Can you believe it? I’m so excited. They’re playing Cardiff soon apparently - in fact, come to think of it, I think Emma was after tickets for that - and I’m to meet up with this music journalist and we’re going to cover the gig itself, and do some shots before, in the dressing room etc., and then a bunch of aftershow stuff - that’s what they have, you see, an aftershow party - very showbizzy, don’t you think? And I get to snap all the stars! How about that? And, I mean, can you imagine how the book will
sell
? I mean, this band are just
mega
. Anyway, you must have run out of tape by now. Oops! Ring me as soon as you feel better, okay?’

            When Emma got back from doing whatever it is fifteen year old girls do these days on Sunday afternoons with other fifteen year old girls, I pounced upon her with the kind of desperate enthusiasm I have not felt since finding out I got an A in my Art O Level and my Mum being at the dentist having root canal work. Emma was gratifyingly impressed.

            ‘Kite?
Really
?
Honestly
? But they’re
mega
, Mum. (who’s picking up whose turn of phrase, here?) Wow.’

            ‘I know.’ (I really did, too) ‘And getting bigger all the time. Colin said their new album is tipped to go straight in at number one. It’s coming out at the end of November. Hence the book. For Christmas.’

            ‘And you’ll be able to get their autographs, and maybe signed copies of the album and ....and you could...Mum! You could get me tickets for the concert! And we could maybe meet them too! Oh, Mum, could I come and help?
Please?
’

            All in all a very satisfying maternal moment. To
be
someone in my daughter’s eyes.

            Actually, there was a big part of me - bigger than it should have been, given the circumstances of the last four months or so - that said ‘Richard’. Richard would really like to share this with me. Richard would understand just how exciting this thing is for me. How much of a big thing this is. Mum just doesn’t understand these things. To Mum, a rock band is no different to a piece of Battenberg - just something she doesn’t much care for but that is there, an entity on the earth. And she has no more concept of ambition than she does of quantum mechanics. And Rani - all she wants to do is go out with as many men as possible before she is forced into an unsuitable marriage to a man with a very long beard and a late night grocery shop. And Howard.

            And Howard. God, I so much want to have sex with that man, and yet... And yet.... And yet Howard knows me as mother, wife, person who is
so lovely
, but not as...

            But not as the person who existed in this body fifteen, no eighteen years ago, and who had such big, big dreams. Who was going to see the world, have her pictures splashed across acres of glossy newsprint, be interviewed in the quality press, be the subject of exhibitions even; be the person who was there when...well, when anything,
everything
big and important happened; the name up the side of the world’s most compelling images..
the
name. Julia Potter. Julia Potter, Photographer. Only Richard knows these things. And I can’t share this with him.

            I am
so
cross with him. Still. Because whatever I want now; whatever I achieve at, fail at, get into, get out of, it makes no difference. A whole chunk of my life has been written off and discarded. A whole bunch of memories have to be shifted out and filed under ‘bad bits’. I can’t recall years twenty to thirty eight without a tinge of regret, a trace of bitterness, maybe, or at the very least, an overlay of an unsatisfactory first chapter.

            It’s not fair. I so want to enjoy this.

Chapter
15

            Ah, London, London, London. Home of everything that’s happening and with it and dripping with wealth and the promise of stardom.

            I am David Bailey. I am
Terry O’Neill. I
am
Mitch Ikea.

            ‘Ikeda.’ Colin tells me. ‘Mitch Ikeda, his name is.’

            How does Colin know all this stuff? How can someone so sort of brownish and beige-ish and
old,
frankly,
have his finger so firmly on the throbbing pulse of pop culture and the names of painfully trendy rock photographers? I suppose it must just diffuse into him while he stalks the corridors of his Dockside monolith in search of the woman with the snack trolley and the promise of a cheese bap.

            Today, we couldn’t be further from a cheese bap than a whelk is from a sturgeon’s egg sac. After scooping me up from Paddington, Colin has brought me to
Builder
, a recently opened themed
restaurant, which is proving to be trendy amongst those in the know. It has nooks full of trowels and old bricks and emulsion cans, and the menus are cut outs of comedy bottoms. Bizarre.

            ‘So why didn’t you ask that Mitch Ikeda to do it? Why did you ask me?’

            It seems an obvious question. Whatever our personal history,
Depth
don’t really need to trawl the murky bywaters of family portrait photography in order to get snaps of the biggest band in Britain. Do they?

            Colin ignites a short cigarette and fixes me with one of his penetrating stares while a waitress in dungarees plops an ashtray in front of him.

            ‘
You,
’ he says, ‘shouldn’t knock yourself, sweetness. You are a talented, artistic and deeply creative photographer, and if you hadn’t gone off and got hooked up with that fart you married’ (there is no love lost in either camp) ‘You could have
been
Mitch Ikeda. Besides, there’s not much chance of getting someone like that at this sort of notice, even if there was the tiniest chance he’d be keen to go somewhere like Cardiff for more than ten minutes at a stretch. And this was an in-house thing anyway. Besides, they’ve already been done once.’

            ‘Been done?’

            ‘Been done. Up at the MEN last month.’

            ‘the MEN?’

            ‘The MEN Arena, in
Man
chester. Sweetness, where
are
you? No, don’t answer that. Now, babe.’ He picks up his menu. ‘What shall we have? I have to tell you, the guy who owns this place is a complete dickhead. Pops up all the time on that dreadful cooking show and swans about this place like a tit in a nursery. Don’t touch the scallops, avoid anything Russian, and don’t trust the specials - he’s just clearing the fridge.’

            I scan the contoured laminate and, beyond it, the coiffed and well tailored clientele. ‘So why do you come here?’

            ‘Come here? I never do. I only bought you here because I thought you’d like to be able to go back and say you’ve been somewhere trendy.’

            ‘Well, that’s very sweet of you.’

            Colin barks our drinks order to the waitress and asks, despite his warning, for borsch and then beef. I decide on a salad, and something involving a lamb chop, and then say,

            ‘But if the pictures have already been done, why do you need some more?’

            ‘Because, my darling, the first lot have been scuppered. Victims of the Feng Shui Seven, I’m afraid.’

            ‘I’m sorry?’

            ‘Donna got done by them last week.’

            ‘But what..’

            ‘You know Donna..’

            I know
of
Donna. Donna Talbot is
Depth’s
major contributing photographer. The person I could have been if I hadn’t got hitched up with that fart etc. etc. She is very much of-her-ilk. She carries a bottle of designer mineral water rehydrating spray around in her handbag. Which has always told me everything I need to know. Except, perhaps, quite what it is one does with bottles of designer mineral water sprays. They would make your make up drip, wouldn’t they?

            Colin blows a plume of smoke into the step ladder and scaffold-strewn ceiling space. ‘Well she had the negs round at her place - God knows why, when they should have been with me - and her place got stripped. And do I mean stripped. Right down to her colourwashed floorboards. Ha!’

            I recall that Donna moved into one of those converted riverside warehouses on the Isle of Dogs, or somewhere. The sort that turn up in lifestyle magazines with the owner prattling about white space and minimalism and the integrity of willow as a representational artefact. And who can’t hear the name Phillipe Starck without swooning.

            I accept some wine and sip it. It tastes expensive. ‘But who are the Feng Shui Seven?’ I ask.

            ‘Don’t you know?’ He stabs out his cigarette and the ashtray is immediately seized. ‘Oh, it’s such a hoot. It’s this bunch of villains from New Cross - as yet still operating, as far as I know - who go into people’s homes and offer to Feng Shui them - for vast tracts of cash, naturally. You know, all this bed moving and goldfish and thrusting yuccas and putting bits of flint on your window sill. All crap, but exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to Donna’s philosophy of being stuck as far up her own bottom as it is possible to be.’

            ‘But how did they get in?’

            ‘Oh, as easily as you like. They told her, apparently, that it was important that certain manoeuvres be carried out at a particular point in some sort of celestial - or was it oriental? - cycle, which just happened to coincide with a shoot she was doing in Caithness. So she gave them the key.’

            ‘Gave them the key - is she mad?’

            ‘Quite mad. But, as she says, they were all in Ozwald Boateng suits, and one of them
was
Chinese. And Donna’s from Torquay, remember. So. There you have it. No pix. No feature.’

            He sits and beams while my starter is deposited in front of me. There are flowers in it. Garnish or food? Oh, the shame.

            ‘So you rang me,’ I say.

            ‘So I rang you. I thought;
Kite
are playing Cardiff in three weeks time. Donna Talbot would no more visit Cardiff than Kamchatka. And who the hell else do I know that will schlepp down to Cardiff? Thank you, dear -’ he takes charge of a large bowl with a hod carrier motif. ‘But, ah! I thought. Julia Potter lives in Cardiff. And Julia Potter’s husband has recently poked some trollop and been ousted. So Julia Potter could do with a fat cheque and some kudos right now. And besides,’ Colin plucks my free hand from the table cloth, ‘I have been in love with Julia Potter for nineteen years, and now she’s available, and looking, if it’s possible, even more gorgeous than ever she did.’