Faith - Lesley Pearse [135]
How odd it was that while she could vividly recall people taking her to task for her behaviour, it never had the effect of sobering her up for long.
The shock and horror she felt that first day in the Glasgow studio fizzled out pretty quickly. The other ‘models’ as they liked to call themselves, whether male or female, were all in it for the same reason. Money.
The very first time she worked with a man had been scary and embarrassing. She’d assumed that he had to be some kind of oversexed pervert, but he disarmed her by telling her that he got an erection whenever he took his clothes off, and that it had nothing to do with seeing her or any female body. He went on to say that he never dared go into a communal changing room after sport for that reason.
Maybe he was unique, but all the men were seasoned performers: as one casually put it one day, ‘I always rise to the occasion.’ They were in the main quite sleazy, many of rather low intellect, and not one of them would she ever want to go on a date with. Yet mostly they were kind and polite, and some were very funny. As long as they could both distance themselves from what they were doing and remember it was only acting, not the real thing, then it wasn’t so bad.
With each successive session it became easier and easier, eventually getting to the point where she saw it all as a bit of a laugh. In fact she got so blasé, and so good at it, that the other girls nicknamed her ‘The Blue Queen’.
Yet it was clear to her now that whilst losing the ability to be shocked, she also lost all her values and principles. Money was the only thing that counted to her; dignity and self-respect flew out the window.
During the summer holiday of ’75 Laura had driven down to London with Barney to stay with Meggie and Ivy. It made Laura proud to see how well Meggie was doing with her houses. She didn’t have the capital to think big like Jackie. She just bought one place at a time, renovated it, sold it on quickly and then bought another. But she was making an excellent living. She was equally proud of Ivy too, for she had qualified as a bookkeeper, and ran the office in a building supplies office.
They were thrilled to have their big sister and nephew staying with them, and they took a break from their work and had days out in Brighton and Hastings and went to London Zoo, the Tower of London and on a boat trip up the Thames.
Neither of her sisters asked Laura any probing questions about how she was managing. She supposed her good clothes and general confidence spoke for themselves, and of course they’d grown up believing she was a winner.
Jackie wasn’t quite such a pushover. When Laura met her to take Barney for a day out to Southend, she grilled Laura remorselessly, not just about what she was doing for a living, but who she was staying with in London. As Barney had mentioned Meggie and Ivy several times, Laura passed them off as two friends she’d made at the casino, who had now moved to London. It felt like the very worst kind of betrayal of her generous, hard-working sisters, for in her heart Laura wanted to boast about how clever and resourceful they were.
She told Jackie the same story she’d told Meggie and Ivy, that she worked part-time in a dress shop, but she did admit that the modelling she did on the side was the glamour kind. Yet that was only because she felt that her friend might possibly see her pictures in one of the pin-up magazines as men on building sites were likely to leave them lying around.
To be fair to Jackie she was amused by this, certainly not horrified. But then she was in a very mellow mood because Barney was with them. He was five now, and a real boy, boisterous, funny and full of enthusiasm for everything from football to creepy-crawlies. But he was loving and demonstrative, still happy to be cuddled by anyone, and as he was so well and happy Jackie had no reason to be concerned about him.
Jackie hardly mentioned Stuart,