Smoke and Mirrors

I don’t know where it came from; one morning I went outside to find the magazine lying in the yard, in the mud, face down. It was almost a year old. She wore no makeup and was posed in what looked like a very high-class flat. For the first time I could see her pubic hair, or I could have if the photo hadn’t been artistically fuzzed and just a fraction out of focus. She looked as if she were coming out of the mist.

Her name, it said, was Lesley. She was nineteen.

And after that I just couldn’t stay away anymore. I sold the farm for a pittance and came back to London in the last days of 1976.

I went on the dole, lived in a council flat in Victoria, got up at lunchtime, hit the pubs until they closed in the afternoons, read newspapers in the library until opening time, then pub-crawled until closing time. I lived off my dole money and drank from my savings account.

I was thirty and I felt much older. I started living with an anonymous blonde punkette from Canada I met in a drinking club in Greek Street. She was the barmaid, and one night, after closing, she told me she’d just lost her digs, so I offered her the sofa at my place. She was only sixteen, it turned out, and she never got to sleep on the sofa. She had small, pomegranate br**sts, a skull tattooed on her back, and a junior Bride of Frankenstein hairdo. She said she’d done everything and believed in nothing. She would talk for hours about the way the world was moving toward a condition of anarchy, claimed that there was no hope and no future; but she f**ked like she’d just invented f**king. And I figured that was good.

She’d come to bed wearing nothing but a spiky black leather dog collar and masses of messy black eye makeup. She spat sometimes, just gobbed on the pavement, when we were walking, which I hated, and she made me take her to the punk clubs, to watch her gob and swear and pogo. Then I really felt old. I liked some of the music, though: Peaches, stuff like that. And I saw the Sex Pistols play live. They were rotten.

Then the punkette walked out on me, claiming that I was a boring old fart, and she took up with an extremely plump Arab princeling.

“I thought you didn’t believe in anything,” I called after her as she climbed into the Roller he sent to collect her.

“I believe in hundred quid blowjobs and mink sheets,” she called back, one hand playing with a strand of her Bride of Frankenstein hairdo. “And a gold vibrator. I believe in that.”

So she went away to an oil fortune and a new wardrobe, and checked my savings and found I was dead broke—practically penniless. I was still sporadically buying Penthouse. My sixties soul was both deeply shocked and profoundly thrilled by the amount of flesh now on view. Nothing was left to the imagination, which, at the same time, attracted and repelled me.

Then, near the end of 1977, she was there again.

Her hair was multicolored, my Charlotte, and her mouth was as crimson as if she’d been eating raspberries. She lay on satin sheets with a jeweled mask on her face and a hand between her legs, ecstatic, orgasmic, all I ever wanted: Charlotte.

She was appearing under the name of Titania and was draped with peacock feathers. She worked, I was informed by the insectile black words that crept around her photographs, in an estate agent’s in the South. She liked sensitive, honest men. She was nineteen.

And goddamn it, she looked nineteen. And I was broke, on the dole with just over a million others, and going nowhere.

I sold my record collection, and my books, all but four copies of Penthouse, and most of the furniture, and I bought myself a fairly good camera. Then I phoned all the photographers I’d known when I was in advertising almost a decade before.

Most of them didn’t remember me, or they said they didn’t. And those that did, didn’t want an eager young assistant who wasn’t young anymore and had no experience. But I kept trying and eventually got hold of Harry Bleak, a silver-haired old boy with his own studios in Crouch End and a posse of expensive little boyfriends.

I told him what I wanted. He didn’t even stop to think about it. “Be here in two hours.”

“No catches?”

“Two hours. No more.”

I was there.

For the first year I cleaned the studio, painted backdrops, and went out to the local shops and streets to beg, buy, or borrow appropriate props. The next year he let me help with the lights, set up shots, waft smoke pellets and dry ice around, and make the tea. I’m exaggerating—I only made the tea once; I make terrible tea. But I learned a hell of a lot about photography.

And suddenly it was 1981, and the world was newly romantic, and I was thirty-five and feeling every minute of it. Bleak told me to look after the studio for a few weeks while he went off to Morocco for a month of well-earned debauchery.

She was in Penthouse that month. More coy and prim than before, waiting for me neatly between advertisements for stereos and Scotch. She was called Dawn, but she was still my Charlotte, with ni**les like beads of blood on her tanned br**sts, dark fuzzy thatch between forever legs, shot on location on a beach somewhere. She was only nineteen, said the text. Charlotte. Dawn.

Harry Bleak was killed traveling back from Morocco: a bus fell on him.

It’s not funny, really—he was on a car ferry coming back from Calais, and he snuck down into the car hold to get his cigars, which he’d left in the glove compartment of the Merc.

The weather was rough, and a tourist bus (belonging, I read in the papers, and was told at length by a tearful boyfriend, to a shopping co-op in Wigan) hadn’t been chained down properly. Harry was crushed against the side of his silver Mercdes.

He had always kept that car spotless.

When the will was read I discovered that the old bastard had left me his studio. I cried myself to sleep that night, got stinking drunk for a week, and then opened for business.

Things happened between then and now. I got married. It lasted three weeks, then we called it a day. I guess I’m not the marrying type. I got beaten up by a drunken Glaswegian on a train late one night, and the other passengers pretended it wasn’t happening. I bought a couple of terrapins and a tank, put them in the flat over the studio, and called them Rodney and Kevin. I became a fairly good photographer. I did calendars, advertising, fashion and glamour work, little kids and big stars: the works.

And one spring day in 1985, I met Charlotte.

I was alone in the studio on a Thursday morning, unshaven and barefoot. It was a free day, and I was going to spend it cleaning the place and reading the papers. I had left the studio doors open, letting the fresh air in to replace the stink of cigarettes and spilled wine of the shoot the night before, when a woman’s voice said, “Bleak Photographic?”