Naked Angels. Judi James

bird flew out when the elevator went by. Its wings made a whirring sound.

      The main door was covered with locks. Nico undid each one slowly, cursing under his breath when he got the wrong key.

      ‘I like it here,’ Evangeline told him.

      ‘You’d like to live here?’ he asked, and he laughed when she said that she would.

      ‘Just you and a few moth-eaten pigeons, eh? Now how do you suppose the old lady would like that one?’

      Evangeline pulled a face. ‘If you got my money we could live just about anywhere we wanted,’ she said.

      ‘I told you, I tried.’ End of story. Non-negotiable.

      The door fell back, emitting a distinctive smell. It was an empty smell, a smell of nobody having been home for a very long time. It was unpleasant at first but after a while you didn’t notice it so much. Eventually you didn’t notice it at all. The apartment was warm and there was condensation on the windows. Nico cursed and went off to see about the heating. Evangeline snooped around each room and Nico didn’t stop her, which was nice.

      ‘It’s OK,’ she told him when she’d finished. ‘You should clean it up, though.’

      ‘I don’t live here now,’ Nico said, ‘I just come here when I need to.’

      Evangeline shrugged. ‘It would still be nicer clean,’ she told him. ‘You never know, after all.’

      ‘You never know what?’

      ‘You just never know, that’s all. You might get rats or something. Somebody might break in and see all the mess. I don’t know.’

      Nico shook his head, tapping his finger against his forehead. ‘You know you are a little crazy, don’t you?’ he laughed. He didn’t look comfortable, not even in his own home. He picked up a handful of mail from the mat and began sifting through it quickly.

      ‘There’s a room locked,’ Evangeline said.

      ‘I know. That’s where we’re working.’

      ‘Today?’

      ‘Yes, today.’

      He made coffee, which drove Evangeline mad with impatience.

      ‘We just had coffee!’

      ‘I know, but I always drink coffee when I work. It’s kind of a rule. Black, too. You’d better get used to that yourself.’ They drank black coffee that made her shudder. She washed up and dried before he could pour a second cup.

      There was another unlocking ritual and then she was inside her father’s workroom. It was small, no bigger than a bathroom, and dark, because the windows had been boarded over.

      ‘What is this?’ she asked.

      ‘Why are you whispering?’

      Because it was like being in church, she thought: weird, silent. Darkness made your voice sound funny, so it was better to whisper. Nico clicked a switch and a bare red bulb bathed the room in an eerie light.

      ‘You OK?’ Nico asked. He didn’t know if she was scared of the dark. ‘Uh-huh.’ He heard her swallow.

      There were tables and a sink and some washing lines overhead with metal pegs hanging from them. Evangeline held her hand to her face to see what it looked like in the red light. Nico tossed something into the air a couple of times and then threw it at her. She caught it, which was good. It was a film.

      ‘They’re the shots from last night,’ he said. ‘We’re going to print them up. This is my darkroom, Evangeline. This is where I work.’

      She rolled the film around in her fingers. ‘You work in the clubs,’ she said.

      ‘No,’ Nico told her. ‘I take shots in the clubs. This is where I work. This is where the magic is done. Did you take a look at the people I photograph? Eh?’

      Evangeline nodded.

      ‘Pretty? Yes or no? No. Right. You know that they’re ugly. I know that they’re ugly. But what do you think they know about it, eh? Well I’ll tell you. They think they look great. They think they look so good it’s a wonder the mirror doesn’t pay them to look into it.

      ‘What they see when they look into the mirror is not what you and I see, Evangeline. They see Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida; what we see when we look at them is a baboon’s arse, if you’ll pardon my French. Now, they pay me to take their photo. What do you think they want to see when they get those shots back? Curtis and Lollo? Or a monkey’s arse?’

      Evangeline laughed.

      ‘Right,’ Nico said, ‘so therefore the magic. Anyone can take a photograph, Evangeline. It’s making that photograph look good that counts.’ He bent his head closer towards hers, ‘The old lady wanted to teach you how to paint pictures, Evangeline. She wanted you to be like her son and your mother. Well, you’re not, so don’t bust your whole life trying. Maybe you have talent, maybe you don’t. You’re not happy with paint and paint isn’t happy with you, that much is obvious.

      ‘But there’s more than one way to create pictures, Evangeline. You see an image and you record it for others to see. Then you dress it up a little, make it look better than it already is. That is true of great artists, but it is also true of great photographers.

      ‘Photographers and artists see exactly what we all see, Evangeline, but it’s how they translate those pictures that makes them good – understand? Right, let’s see what we can do with a group of baboons’ arses, shall we?’

      She had never heard her father say so much before and she would never hear him speak so eloquently again.

      She watched enthralled as he took the lid off one of three large tanks and stuck a thermometer into the liquid inside.

      ‘Twenty degrees.’ He spoke to himself but she knew he was teaching her, too. He leant across and switched the light out and the room became the darkest darkness she had ever sat in before. There were a couple of cracking noises as he took the film out of its canister and then he described how he was loading it onto a metal spool.

      The spool went into the first tank and she heard a watery sound as he dunked it up and down. Then he put the lid back onto the tank and switched the dull red light back on again.

      ‘I have a timer, see? Like an alarm clock. It all has to be timed, like baking a loaf. Six minutes, maybe more – you get the feel of it after a while, but you still time it, right?’ The timer went off as he spoke and Evangeline nearly jumped out of her socks.

      The light went off again.

      ‘Right. Now it goes into the wash. Now I drain it and then it goes into the fix – see?’ Evangeline nodded even though she could see nothing. ‘In the fix for two minutes,’ Nico continued, ‘then I take a look at it – you learn what to look for – then I wash the film for twenty minutes or so. A bit of wetting agent and then we can hang it out to dry.’

      The film strips were hung onto the small washing line. ‘I hang them over the radiator here so that they dry more quickly – just enough time for another coffee and some cheesecake.’

      ‘Fruit,’ Evangeline said, ‘or you’ll get fat.’

      ‘Photographers don’t get fat, Evangeline,’ Nico said, ‘we’re lean, mean fighting machines. We eat what we will – it’s one of the rules of the job.’

      After more black coffee Nico showed Evangeline how to work the enlarger. She hopped with impatience while he did a test strip and then finally he came up with a proper print on paper.

      ‘See this?’ he asked. She bent over the sheet, chewing her hair. She recognized the faces in front of her. It was a man from the night before and the woman in satin who had given her the paper umbrella from her drink. ‘Baboons’ arses,’ Nico said. They looked gormless and ugly.