Faith - Lesley Pearse [133]
‘And you all slept with him?’ Laura asked hesitantly.
Katy’s face softened. ‘Yeah, ’fraid so. He made all of us believe he could give us a new start. It’s funny if you think about it, the King of Porn being such a dead loss in the sack. You could get more satisfaction eating a Mars Bar.’
Laura giggled.
Anne reached out and patted her hand. ‘We know how you feel, love, we’ve been there! But the good news is he does pay well. We get seventy-five pounds for every session. Where else can you earn that and be home in time to give the kids their tea?’
Laura brightened up – that was much more than she expected. ‘But where do these pictures end up?’ she asked.
‘Not in Woman’s Own, that’s for sure,’ Julie laughed. ‘I doubt if they even stay in Britain, if they do it would only be in under-the-counter mags.’
‘Do you have to do stuff with men too?’ Laura asked.
‘Well of course.’ Katy laughed as if she thought that a silly question. ‘But that ain’t any worse, some of ’em are quite nice, they usually feel worse than we do, at least us girls don’t have to worry about getting it up!’
All three women laughed uproariously at this, but Laura blanched. ‘Does that mean we have to actually do it with them?’ she asked in a small voice.
‘Not properly,’ Julie said, glancing at her two friends and sniggering. ‘It’s kind of posed, like you saw today. There’s nothing very exciting about a picture of two people at it, is there? It’s the groping, the imagining what it feels like entering some delectable bird that turns men on.’
Laura’s stomach was churning with anxiety now and it must have showed in her face, for Katy put her hand over hers and squeezed it. ‘You really didn’t know until today, did you? Are you chickening out?’
‘I don’t know,’ Laura replied. ‘I need the money, but I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to do it when the time comes. Were you like this?’
‘We all were,’ Katy replied. ‘The day I started I was shaking like I had St Vitus’ Dance. Then Don made it worse still by telling me I had to put some makeup over my stretch marks! I was so self-conscious I wanted to curl up in a corner and die. But the girls gave me a pep talk, got me to snort a line of coke, and suddenly I was okay about it. We always do coke before now, it makes it a doddle. We’ll bring some for you on Friday if you like.’
On the drive back to Edinburgh, Laura tried to think only of what making £75 in two hours would do for her. If she managed to stick it out for a few months she’d have enough money to move anywhere she fancied. She could go and live in Devon or Cornwall, or find a place near Meggie and Ivy.
But attractive as the money was, it didn’t make the work any more palatable. The thought of touching another’s woman’s breasts or vagina was totally abhorrent, and letting a man she’d didn’t even fancy maul her was even worse. If she was told to give him a blow job she thought she’d be sick.
But then she didn’t really fancy Robbie, did she? Could pretending to be in the throes of an orgasm for the camera be any worse than being trapped under a heavy, hairy, sweaty man who cared for no one but himself?
She thought then about Meggie going on the game, and reminded herself how her sister had used her earnings from that to move on to better things. She could do that too. She could start her own business, maybe a promotions agency, and Barney would get to live in a nice house, she could buy him a bike, take him on lovely holidays.
The end would justify the means.
‘Close one nostril and snort up the line in the other,’ Julie said, as she held out a rolled-up bank note to Laura and two lines of cocaine on a hand mirror. ‘When you’ve done that, change nostrils and do the other one.’
Laura had only tried coke once before, but that was seven years ago and she’d been so drunk at the time she couldn’t remember what