Faith - Lesley Pearse [152]
‘But we haven’t got any money to pay anyone.’ Katy’s face fell. ‘We’ll never get it off the ground.’
‘I’ll borrow some,’ Laura said, thinking of Jackie. ‘Look, I spent most of my early life in promotional work, this isn’t that different. We can do it.’
They did do it too. Laura borrowed £1,000 from Jackie, telling her she wanted it to start up an agency for promotional work, running it from her home. She did of course get the inevitable lecture about keeping proper books and getting receipts for everything, but Jackie appeared really happy that Laura was doing what she called ‘pulling her life together’.
Pete came in on it, bringing with him a petite redhead called Tansin, who had the biggest breasts any of them had ever seen, and Katy found Jazz, a pretty black prostitute who didn’t want to work at nights because she had a child.
Tod joined them, bringing with him a wealth of knowledge about filming, and his charm. Laura had always secretly fancied him; he had an elfin look, with tiny sharp features, spiky hair and rather large ears, but the best thing about him was that he was very articulate and quick-witted, as well as being fun to be around.
He sent Laura to charm Sid Lyons, a night-club owner who was always interested in diversifying. Sid was in his late fifties, a great bull of a man with a hooked nose and a reputation for being as hard as nails. But he must have taken to her, for he promised that if the first video they made was up to scratch, he knew people who would distribute it. He wanted a half share of the profits, but he seemed sure that they would both make a fortune. Laura didn’t believe he would have entertained her plan for a moment if he hadn’t thought it would succeed.
The script and stage directions she wrote were laughably amateurish. Pete was to be a man interviewing young women for a job as his maid. Tansin arrives and he asks that she try on her uniform, which of course is a short black dress and a frilly apron. But the dress is too small to cover her breasts, so he calls in his current maid, Jazz, to help.
Pete was surprisingly good at acting, but then he said he was only playing out a first-class fantasy of being a rich man employing maids and having his way with them. Tansin was quite vacuous, but her breasts and her pert bottom were virtually stars in their own right, so her wooden dialogue didn’t really matter. Jazz played her role as the more experienced maid instructing the newest recruit in pleasing their master with great enthusiasm and sauciness.
It was a bitterly cold day in March when they began filming, but with the curtains tightly drawn, the fire blazing and all the extra lights Tod had brought with him, it was baking hot in the lounge. They had all snorted some coke, and loosened up so much they often had to break off because someone got a fit of the giggles at the wrong moment. Laura and Katy came up with more and more lewd ideas once they’d got into the swing of things, and at three o’clock when they had to stop because Barney would be coming home from school, no one was anxious to go home.
Filming was finished the following afternoon. It took Tod two days to edit it, and another week for him to get a friend to convert the cine film on to a video tape. Laura had to drive over to Glasgow on the Friday night to watch it with Katy, then take it down to Sid. She left Barney that night with Helen, a sixteen-year-old babysitter whose phone number she’d got from a postcard in a shop window. Helen was prepared to stay the night if Laura wasn’t home by midnight.
It was far more shocking looking at the video than it had been watching it being filmed. Laura was well used to seeing pornographic photographs, but they were just poses, this was real sex. She squirmed at the bit when Pete supposedly ejaculated on Jazz’s face, even though she was the one who mixed up a bit of wallpaper paste for the scene and knew perfectly well it wasn’t the real thing. And at the end of the film, after Pete had said goodbye to the two girls, then turned back to the settee to pick up a pair of