Naked Angels. Judi James

      ‘The sponge – it’s a bit scratchy. Have you got a softer one?’

      He smiled but his teeth formed a set line as he went to fetch a new one. She closed her eyes and relaxed a little.

      The set was bare – just the model and the guys. The photographer was firing instructions at her. She had so much oil on her body she slid off the male models like an eel. They touched one another breezily between shots, swapping muscle tone.

      She’d do it that evening, definitely. She didn’t want any more of this.

      Back in the changing room she stared at herself in the mirror. Six feet tall. A freak, dressed in two-hundred quid fishnets and denim cut-offs with the bum sagging. And the shoes – velvet stiletto tart shoes with diamante toe-caps – she liked the shoes, they were pretty.

      She was fifteen years old, yet she felt three hundred and nine. Fifteen seemed a long time to have lived. She wanted to be young again. She wanted an end to it all.

      THE ILLUSIONIST

      The photographer sat before his computer screen, the model’s image flickering and dancing in front of his face. The room was dark. His face was half lit and eerie. The model was perfectly reflected as a pair of tiny twins, trapped in the round orbs of his Calvin Klein wire-rimmed glasses.

      ‘It’s a conceptual shot,’ he told his assistant. ‘You mean it’s shit.’

      ‘It’s OK,’ the photographer said, ‘it doesn’t matter. It’s the concept – the concept is sound.’

      ‘She looks bad,’ the assistant said, studying the model’s image.

      ‘Bad as in good?’ the photographer asked.

      ‘No, bad as in bad. Really bad. I thought she was supposed to be a name. What’s the matter with her, her face looks like Emmenthal. Is she on something? I thought she was special.’

      ‘The client wanted her,’ the photographer told him, ‘it’s OK, I told you.’ He lit a cigarette and pushed it into the side of his mouth. Smoke billowed from his nostrils and arched around his head.

      ‘I’m so disappointed,’ the boy said.

      ‘You won’t be,’ he was told. ‘A little computer enhancement and we will have created your true goddess for you again.’

      He pressed a few keys and pulled the model’s face into close-up. He felt as though he was a true artist, creating a perfect image with a few finger-flicks: less darkness under the eyes. Bleached pupils. A small mark removed from the cheek. He added warmth and tone to her pallid cheeks and widened her distressed-looking smile.

      ‘What d’you think?’ he asked. The boy leant forward. Both faces were lit gleaming and frog-like by the flickering colours on screen.

      ‘It’s cheating,’ the assistant said. He laughed, though. The model looked the way he knew her now. She looked like the face everyone saw in the magazines. Healthy. Glowing. Fuckable.

      The photographer shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s art. Total empowerment via VDU. We’ve become the creative force we always yearned to be. Look at that fucking face – I created that face, just like Leonardo created the Mona Lisa.’

      He sat back in his chair, scratching himself, swinging gently. ‘It’s all illusion, son, playing tricks with images. Digital imaging – fucking brilliant. Photographers have been cheating for years, only now we can do it all with a finger-twitch.

      ‘Did you know one of the first patentees of the photographic process was a prize illusionist?’ he asked. ‘There’s some history here, it’s a tradition – only now we’ve got it down to an art form. Don’t you like what you see?’ He turned to his assistant, the light in his glasses obscuring his eyes. ‘Don’t you like it?’ he repeated.

      The boy smiled.

      ‘Does it matter that what you see doesn’t exist?’ the photographer whispered. ‘Do you think many of the punters have a hope in hell of meeting her in the flesh anyway? It’s trickery, son, hocus-pocus, jiggery-pokery. It’s alchemy – turning basest metals into gold. And she is gold, isn’t she? Look at her – shit, man, look at her. We got rid of all her faults. We made her perfect.’

      He looked back to the screen, stroking his stubble. ‘Maybe a little more leg,’ he said. His assistant nodded his approval.

      THE PAPARAZZI

      Flaccid had to be the saddest word in the English language. The snapper shifted sagging weight from ossified femur to atrophied tibia. Never fuck a fashion hack – why had no one ever told him that? Or maybe they had. Maybe he just forgot.

      The incense made his nose itch. When he moved again he could just glimpse the faux-snakeskin linoleum behind the post-modernist Conran headboard. She should take the Hoover round there more often, he thought – there were dustballs the size of large rats down by the marble-effect skirting. Or were they rats? Jesus!

      That season the fashion hack was into Tantric Sex. She slid deftly into the Lotus position, opening her mouth and sticking her tongue out like a Maori rugby player prior to a match. He’d bought her dinner at Quaglino’s but she’d barfed it all up in the john half an hour later to balance her inner toxins.

      He was so bored it hurt but she was Lavender Allcock-Hopkins, just about The Biggest Name in the Fashion Business, so he gritted his buttocks and pressed on with the Chi Gung. When the portable phone chirruped from beneath the herb-stuffed continental pillow he could have fucked that instead, he was so relieved for the interruption.

      ‘Where are you, you bugger?’ It was the editor of the Sunday Slimes, sizzling and shouting as though Edison Bell were just a figment of some ad-man’s imagination. The snapper held the phone near the open window so the traffic sounds fizzed down the wires.

      ‘Kensington Palace,’ he yelled, ‘down at the gates. There’s a bit of serious to-ing and fro-ing down here and word is out the prince …’

      ‘Sod the prince!’ his editor screamed. ‘Get down to Piccadilly. There’s some sort of awards night going on and Spike says they’ve just smuggled some celebs in by the tradesman’s. Are you on your bike?’

      The snapper grunted. In his haste he’d shoved two feet into one leg of his Gaultiers. He scowled across at Lavender but she was into her forty-fifth inner-vaginal orgasm and so barely aware he was AWOL from the Futon.

      There were hideous whale sounds playing on the CD. The flask of amyl nitrate he’d brought lay untouched atop the Jeff Koons Retrospective catalogue. That little gift had been received with all the enthusiasm of a box of Quality Streets on a first date.

      “Bye, lover,’ the snapper mouthed, quickly syphoning Givenchy beneath each armpit before picking up the keys to his Harley and tossing them twice into the air. Lavender was silent but the whales hooted their eerie farewell.

      THE KILL

      It was raining – but then the rain always drizzled on a true paparazzo. They stank of the rain – it steamed from their anoraks and snaked through their hair gel, bubbling like mucus. Without the rain they would have lost the kudos that came with the cupped cigarettes and the serious body-hunch.

      As the snapper strolled across to join the straggle they quickly banded together, staring like meerkats spoiling for a fight.

      ‘Who is it in there tonight?’

      ‘Fuck-knows.’

      ‘Again? We did him last night.’ ‘Very funny.’ ‘You think so?’ ‘No, actually.’

      ‘It’s Paul Daniels, I saw him go in.’

      ‘Buggeroff.’

      ‘Buggeroffyerself.’

      Some even claimed it was the patter and camaraderie that kept them loyal to the job.

      The snapper tried