The Photographer's Wife Read online

  “Oh those poor babbies,” Minnie says. “It’s shameful what they’re doing to us. Shameful.”

  “We’re off to my Mum’s place in Dorking,” Alice says. “Happy to get out of London, to tell the truth.”

  Minnie nods.

  “You should get out too,” Alice says. “Or at least send the kids.”

  “I can’t,” Minnie replies. “I’ve got my job, ain’t I? Someone’s got to keep coats on our boys’ backs.”

  “I found this,” Bertie says, holding up a dusty shoe.

  “That’s good,” Alice shouts, then, to Minnie, “Half the stuff’s already gone.”

  “Looters?”

  “Just people like us. People with nothing. They took me coat though, the buggers. Only one I had, as well. I chased them out of your place too.”

  Minnie nods, sighs deeply, then, unable to think what to say that could possibly help Alice, she mutters, “Bloody Hitler,” and steps back outside.

  Inside her own house, everything is blackened and sooty and she can see that some things have already been taken.

  “Can we fix it up?” Glenda asks.

  “No,” Minnie says. “No, I don’t think so.”

  "What are we going to do, Mum? We can’t live here like this, can we?”

  “No. No, we can’t live here,” Minnie agrees.

  “We could live in the dugout,” Glenda suggests, screwing up her nose.

  Minnie shakes her head and scans the room once again, noticing now how all of the wallpaper on the left side of the house is singed. She runs her left hand across the wall and feels that the bricks are still warm.

  Glenda picks up a framed photo and rubs the soot from the glass with her finger, revealing their father’s face. “Where are we going to live, Mum?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. I need to go talk to that bloke from the council,” Minnie says. “See what he says.”

  “Shall I gather stuff together?”

  “Yes,” Minnie tells Glenda. “Yes, make a pile on the doorstep. Anything we can carry. Anything we might need. Anything that’s worth something. And don’t let no one nick nothing.”

  “I can help,” Barbara says.

  “Yes, you ‘elp your sister. And if there’s a raid, go to the shelter.”

  “The dugout, or...?”

  “Yes. The dugout’s fine. We’ll go to the youth club tonight.”

  Minnie heads to the bedroom and takes her old fur coat from the wardrobe. She sniffs it, then gives it a shake and hangs it over one arm before leaving the house. She peers through the burned out window next door. “Here, Alice!” she calls out, proffering the coat. “This is for you.”

  Alice lets go of the sleeve of a jumper she’s trying to extract from the rubble. “Your lovely coat?”

  Minnie nods. “It was my Mum’s. But it’s yours now.”

  “You sure, love?” Alice asks, taking the coat and stroking it as if it were still alive.

  Minnie nods and blinks slowly.

  “I feel like I should be saying ‘no’,” Alice says, her voice wobbling with emotion. “But I’m gonna just say, ‘yes’.”

  “Good,” Minnie says. “You two look after each other in Dorking.”

  “We will.”

  “I’m off to the council, see if they can fix up somewhere for us to live.”

  “Right,” Alice says, pulling on the coat and frowning as she becomes aware of the inherent contradiction of being a woman in a fur coat standing on a mound of rubble. “Well, I hope they give you somewhere nice.”

  ***

  The accommodation allocated turns out to be a single room above a boarded-up shop in Willow Street. Each bedroom in the large house contains another dispossessed family. Because it’s only two blocks from Luke Street, they’re able to carry on foot what clothes, photos and small items of furniture remain.

  Minnie and Glenda are horrified that they’re supposed to live in a single room but Barbara – who sees in the kids playing on the stairs, not squalor and poverty, but fun and companionship – struggles to tone down her excitement. She can tell from Minnie’s grim expression that it’s not appropriate.

  Minnie alternates between muttering, “One room. It’s not right,” and spurious attempts at reassuring the girls. “We’ll be alright here, girls, won’t we?” she keeps saying, as she moves around the room lifting framed photos from the walls. She is removing the images of the happy Italian family that lived here before internment and replacing with their own family history from the biscuit tin – it’s not a pleasant process.

  On the way back to the shelter that night, they walk along Luke Street one last time. The intention is to recover three of the blackened cushions to sit on but really Minnie just needs to see her old house one more time in order to convince herself that their life there really is over. But they are too late for cushions. The house has been stripped bare.

  Barbara and Glenda soon come to prefer life in Willow Street. The kitchen downstairs is like a social club for the war weary, and within days they have integrated Mildred’s supper club, pooling their ration books and sharing in the communal rabbit stews that Mildred somehow manages to whistle up out of thin air.

  The shared bathroom on the first floor has (a little) hot water, which makes the weekly scrub quite delicious compared with the cold outdoor tub they had in Luke Street. Even the air-raid shelter is closer now, and often Barbara runs to it with one of her new friends, little lame Benjamin, or Patty, or “half-cast” Yasmin.

  She’s aware that her mother has not taken so well to this transition. She has noticed that it is they now, not Minnie, who clean the room, and she suspects that on the frequent occasions when their mother fails to materialise at the shelter, she isn’t as she claims, stuck due to poor timing in another shelter elsewhere but at home, in the room, in her bed.

  But the harsh truth is that even as her seventh birthday goes by unmarked (except for a hand-drawn card from Glenda), Barbara doesn’t care. She feels safer and happier and is undeniably better fed since they moved to Willow Street.

  So when, one day – the day in fact before the bombing unexpectedly pauses – Glenda says quietly, “I think Mum’s given up. I think it’s up to us to look after her now,” Barbara just nods.

  “That’s OK,” she says. “I don’t mind.”

  And it’s true. She doesn’t.

  2011 - Shoreditch, London.

  Sophie straightens her back and stretches her neck from side to side, then grabs the mouse again and peers back at the screen. She selects Photoshop’s cloning tool and starts to erase a blackhead to the right of her model’s nose. Sportswear Direct uses the cheapest models it can find and it shows, Sophie reckons, by their general lack of skincare. In their raw state, these could be acne-cream ads. The “before” photos, that is, not the “after”s.

  Brett, behind her, folds the newspaper noisily, then slurps the dregs of his coffee and crosses the room to peer over her shoulder.

  “Hum. Trailer-trash-wear,” he says, dismissively, Sophie thinks, or was that “hum” meant instead to be suggestive?

  “I know,” she replies with a sigh. “I so need to up my game. I hate all this shite.”

  “Hate is probably overstating it,” Brett says.

  “You have no idea how exhausting it is to do this rubbish every day,” Sophie says.

  “It could be worse. You could be delivering people’s groceries on minimum wage,” Brett says.

  “I’d rather be delivering people’s groceries.”

  “You really wouldn’t. Has he got a boner?” Brett asks, pointing at the bulge in the man’s shiny Adidas joggers.

  “Sock,” Sophie says. “Big sock.”

  “That’s true, then?”

  She leans into the screen and zaps another blemish on the man’s right ear before saying, “Socks in the undies? To make them look like they have bigger packets? Of course it’s true.”

  “Always?”

  “Nearly always.”

&nbs
p; “Maybe I should try that,” Brett says, stepping closer so that his groin is pressing against her back.

  Sophie releases the mouse and swivels to face him. She reaches out and strokes the smooth material of his suit trousers and senses that he is already semi-erect. “I don’t think you need to, sweetheart,” she says, running her hand down the smoothness of his tie before starting to fumble with his zip.

  Brett laughingly pushes her hand away. He glances at his watch, then says, “No time for that, I’m afraid, Hon’. I have an appointment with one of your peers.”

  “Really? Who?”

  “Colley.”

  “Milly Colley?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re winding me up!”

  “Nope. She has a show coming up at Beetles. We’re doing an exclusive.”

  “Well, give her a slap for me, would you?”

  “If it sounds like jealousy and it looks like jealousy–”

  “She does the same shit that I do,” Sophie interrupts. “She’s just prettier, that’s all, so she gets better breaks.”

  “She actually isn’t,” Brett says, stroking Sophie’s cheek with the back of his hand and Sophie feels momentarily better. “But maybe she puts out. Maybe that’s it. I’ll let you know.”

  “Bastard.”

  “She’s pretty damned good, Sophie. Have a look at her fine art shots. Even her Top Shop stuff looks like fine art these days. She’s where it’s at. You should seriously check her out.”

  “Enough!” Sophie shrieks, raising one hand. “Be gone!” She turns back to her Sportswear Direct bodybuilder and Brett, behind her, sighs and begins to move around the room, now unplugging his iPhone from her charger, now pulling his jacket on and jingling his keys.

  “I hate my life,” Sophie says, zooming in on the nasal passages of the on-screen model.

  “Thanks,” Brett laughs.

  “Not you. You know I don’t mean you. I mean this.”

  “Then do something different,” Brett says, and Sophie braces herself for one of his American Dream speeches.

  When the expected rant fails to materialise, Sophie asks, “If I did, would you help me up my profile?” Her hand freezes over the mouse. The question has been on the tip of her tongue for weeks but now it’s out in the open. She holds her breath.

  “Up your profile, how?” Brett asks.

  “You know, get me some publicity. As a kosher arts photographer.”

  Brett laughs.

  “Don’t laugh,” Sophie says. “You’re doing it for Colley.”

  “Take some kosher art shots, babe,” he says, “and we’ll see. Do the work and I’ll try to find an angle.”

  Do the work, Sophie repeats in her head. Take some decent shots. Bastard!

  “Are we meeting here ce soir?” Brett asks.

  Sophie glances over her shoulder and looks at him blankly, her mind still on Milly Colley. “Sorry?”

  “Here? Tonight?” Brett repeats.

  “Oh, no. I’ll come to yours,” Sophie says. “I’m removing nasal hair at home all day, so I’ll need a change of scenery by then.”

  “OK. Have a good one. And make sure you zap all those pimples,” Brett says.

  Sophie turns back to the screen and listens as the flat door opens and then closes and as Brett’s hard shoes echo away down the corridor. She bites her lip and thinks about Brett.

  Because somehow, without any decision having been taken, they have ended up dating. For a month now, they have seen each other almost every night and she wonders again how this could have happened.

  Brett is so far from the image she fostered of her ideal man. She always imagined herself with some dreadlocked artist in paint-spattered clothes, which, let’s face it, is about as far from Brett’s Republican suityness as anyone could manage. Then again, the paint-splattered artists she has dated have all proved to be far from ideal. She had also hoped for someone younger. Someone funnier. Someone fitter.

  But the strange truth is that she fancies Brett. Despite herself, she thinks he looks sexy in his suit, almost more than sexy. Seductive. Somehow naughty. Pervy perhaps. And there’s something about the way he pulls his cock – his unfeasibly large cock – from his suit trousers without even getting undressed, something about the way he expects her to – no, assumes that she will – worship it, that despite everything she has ever believed about men, about women, about gender identity, about roles and feminism, she really rather enjoys.

  Intellectually, she would rather she didn’t but that’s just the way it is. She wrinkles her nose and refocuses on the screen where she has switched to Safari and is googling, “Milly Colley.”

  Colley’s fashion shots aren’t that much better than her own, she decides. Yes, Colley has access to better models wearing better gear, because, well, she’s hip at the moment, but the photographs themselves are nothing Sophie couldn’t manage. Technically, she’s just as good.

  But then Sophie clicks on “Fine Art” and her heart sinks. Because Milly Colley has that magical, elusive thing she has been hunting for ever since she went into photography, has the same kind of “eye” that propelled her father to stardom.

  She clicks through a few photos, then, imagining a speech bubble above her own head containing the word, “Grrrrr!” she quits Safari and the screen is filled, anew, by the man in the shiny sportswear.

  “So, track-suit man,” she says out loud. She looks at his bulge now, then zooms in on it and nods. “Yeah, OK, that is a bit O.T.T,” she mumbles.

  She wishes she had spotted this during the shoot and removed the sock, or used a smaller sock, because now she will have to spend fifteen minutes massaging his package into a smaller state. She grins at the thought of this and, as she starts to do just that, thinks about doing the same thing to Brett, tonight, only for real.

  When Sophie gets to Brett’s place, it is his flat-mate who opens the door – a permanently stoned satellite-dish installer called Raoul.

  “Come in, come in!” Raoul says, grinning sheepishly as if perhaps he doesn’t often see women, before hurling himself rather spectacularly over the back of the sofa to continue watching The Simpsons.

  Sophie checks the kitchen and, finding it empty, heads on to Brett’s room where she finds him wearing boxer shorts, lying face-down, typing on his laptop.

  “I’m here,” she says.

  “Yeah, I got that,” Brett replies without looking up. “Just let me send this copy and...” he mutters.

  “You’re looking very summery,” Sophie says.

  “It’s the heating in this place,” Brett says distractedly. “It’s ridiculous.”

  Sophie pulls off her coat, then sits in the armchair and stares at Brett’s back as she listens to the clicking of the keys. She runs her tongue across her lips and tries to decide whether or not to be offended by his lack of welcome. Are we already at this point? she wonders. Are we already at the point where one’s arrival doesn’t even merit a glance? Wasn’t that supposed to take just a bit longer than a month?

  She stretches and groans as Brett, with flourish, hits the send button and rolls onto his side so that he can look back at her. “Hard day in Photoshop hell, honey?” he asks.

  “It just makes my back hurt,” Sophie says, twisting and rubbing her neck. “My desk is too low or something. I think I need one of those weird, Swedish chairs. Can you give my back a rub?”

  Brett smiles lopsidedly and as usual the result is both creepy and sexy at the same time. “Sure,” he says, scooting to the side of the bed.

  As he bends to pull open a drawer, Sophie tries not to look at the pale folds of skin around his belly.

  First he pulls a little bag of white powder from the drawer and wiggles it at Sophie. “Do you want a hit?” he asks.

  Sophie shakes her head. “Maybe later,” she replies. She is aware that since meeting Brett she has been taking a lot of coke and she’s not entirely happy about it. She had decided not to partake tonight but can already sense her resolve
weakening.

  Brett shrugs, drops the bag and pulls a bottle of Body Shop massage oil from the drawer. “Fully prepared for all eventualities,” he says, waving it at her instead. “Impressed?”

  But something else has caught Sophie’s eye. “What are those?” she asks, rounding the bed and pulling the drawer fully open. Inside, stuffed at the back behind the underwear, are a pair of chrome handcuffs, a dog collar and a large, pink dildo.

  “Those,” Brett says, pushing the drawer shut again, “are for later, when we get bored.”

  “When we get bored?” Sophie repeats, hesitating between being offended that he assumes that they will get bored and feeling flattered that he thinks there will be a later.

  “Look, do you want this back-rub or not?” Brett asks.

  And Sophie really does, so she nods and crawls onto the bed, then because her back hurts, she rolls to her side momentarily so that she can wedge a pillow beneath her belly, effectively lifting up her haunches just enough that the pain stops.

  “Hum, nice,” Brett says, running a hand up her inner thigh.

  “You promised me a massage,” Sophie comments, speaking through the pillow.

  “Yes, right. Sorry Mistress. Massage,” Brett says with spoof seriousness as he slathers his hands in massage lotion and starts to work Sophie’s shoulder blades.

  “Ooh, that’s cold,” Sophie tells him. “But don’t stop. It’s good too.”

  As soon as Brett’s bulge presses through his boxer shorts against her bottom, Sophie knows that neither of them is going to be satisfied with a back rub for long. Well, at least we’re not bored yet, she thinks.

  1944 - Shoreditch, London.

  It is only ten o’clock but Barbara is walking home. Her teacher, Mrs Pritchard, has failed to turn up and the rumour amongst the children is that she is dead.

  Above her, in the blue spring sky, Barbara is vaguely aware of the buzzing of a doodlebug, another of the hundreds of daily flying bombs that have been raining destruction on them for months now. The air-raid warning sounded just as Barbara was passing back out of the school gates but she doesn’t care. The sirens are almost constant these days and unlike the bombers, which needed the cover of nightfall to do their dirty deeds, the doodlebugs fall day and night. No one seems to care about the air-raid warnings anymore because caring about them simply isn’t compatible with any other activity. It’s impossible to go to the shelter every time and once that pattern has been broken, there doesn’t seem to be any point in going there at all.