Faith - Lesley Pearse [131]
‘You’ll probably like it better as you’ll have the company of other girls there. They are a nice bunch, been at it for years. It’s a different set-up there, but if you go over on Monday you can just watch and learn from the other girls before you start properly later in the week.’
‘In what way is it different?’ she asked.
‘You’ll find that out on Monday. Like I told you when you started at Livingston, if you don’t like it, you are under no obligation to stay.’
Laura immediately felt uneasy because of his take-it-or-leave-it attitude. It was very reminiscent of the way he’d asked her to lunch, then just expected her to go to bed with him. She’d often felt that if she’d refused, that would have been the end of everything.
It was raining hard on the morning she arrived at the Glasgow studio on the outskirts of town. Her heart sank when she saw it was an old warehouse, and even before she went in she sensed it would have none of the refinements she had grown used to.
Her heart sank even further when she saw there was no reception area with beautiful glossy photographs to reassure her, and that the changing room was just a curtained-off area with a few wooden forms like she remembered from the gymnasium at school. But even more telling was that the studio area was divided up into a series of rooms, the walls flimsy plywood, and almost all of them were decorated and furnished as bedrooms.
One of the three models who were sitting around wearing dressing gowns came over to her, and introduced herself as Katy.
‘Robbie asked me to look after you,’ she said. ‘You haven’t done this before I suppose?’
Katy was a statuesque mixed-race woman, with a strong Liverpool accent. She was at least five feet ten, her crinkly dark hair was cropped very short and she had beautiful sharply defined cheekbones.
‘I’ve been doing glamour shots,’ Laura said nervously. ‘But this is going to be porn, isn’t it?’
It was only a stab in the dark, she wasn’t sure, and she couldn’t really believe Robbie was so uncaring that he’d throw her into that.
‘Only soft porn.’ Katy shrugged. ‘Fanny shots and stuff.’
Laura’s stomach lurched.
Her alarm must have showed for Katy laughed. ‘If you don’t like the idea you’d better get going now. But don’t think Robbie will pay you for more glamour stuff, he don’t make anything out of that. This is where the money is.’
It was tempting to turn and run out, but however horrible the idea of pornographic photography was, Laura needed to know more about Robbie and these other girls.
So she sat down and had a cup of tea with Katy and the two other models. The photographer had arrived late and was still setting up the lighting. The women were friendly, and Laura soon discovered they were in much the same boat as her. All three of them had children and no husband.
Julie was a small, curvaceous blonde. ‘None of us could be fashion models,’ she said bluntly. ‘We’re too old and too fat. But we’ve all got pretty faces and the kind of bodies men want to look at. Okay, so showing off your fanny ain’t something you really want to do, but it’s a darn sight better than trying to get by on the Social or doing office cleaning.’
‘We have a laugh too,’ Katy said, her dark eyes twinkling with laughter at Laura’s horrified expression. ‘We’re all in it together, and we’re real mates. You stay and watch what goes on, and if you don’t think you can do it, go and sign on at the Social again, because you ain’t going to be offered anything else.’
Anne, the third girl, a pretty, buxom redhead, was even blunter. ‘So Robbie’s fucking you,’ she said. ‘We all went down that road, thinking we was special to him. This is the end of that road, it don’t go nowhere else.’
Laura instinctively knew the three girls were telling her the truth. But shocking as that was, it wasn’t as bad as finding out what a fool she’d been to imagine Robbie cared for her.
She ought to have read all the signs. He’d wormed his way into her life, discovering everything about her, while giving nothing of himself away. There had never been any