Naked Angels. Judi James

swore and scowled at the nearest of the pack, daring him to laugh. He didn’t.

      There was a sudden surge around the entrance to the hotel and the heartwarming sound of a scuffle breaking out. The paparazzi moved as one beast, pressing forward, pushing, lining up for a sniff of their prey. Someone moved from the darkness out into the street-lights and a volley of silver flashes greeted their arrival. A huge meatball of a bodyguard appeared from nowhere and a small guy in a new pair of Timberlands had his nose crushed to a crimson coulis by the lens of his own Leica.

      They all had stepladders ready in case it was Prince. In the event the ladders were superfluous because the man who finally stepped into the glare of the lights was tall enough to be seen in any crowd.

      ‘Who the …?’

      ‘Shit, give us some space for Christssake. I was here first you know …’

      The jostling became violent as the bodyguard leant his full weight to the crush. Squeezed like lemons, the paparazzi oozed a collective odour of Key West. The snapper’s foot found someone’s calf beneath it and he used it as the lever he needed to haul himself onto the wall behind.

      The man in the middle of the crowd turned full-face and he recognized him at once; the chill wind of jealousy blew throughout his vitals.

      ‘Mik-Mak!’ The whisper went round. The paparazzi virtually slobbered with glee. Mik Veronsky, supersnapper. Exclusive, elusive and charismatic enough to be worth a few bob in the next day’s papers. The pages of Vogue and Tatler had been liberally peppered with shots of his face for the past month but now he was about to be captured for the benefit of the nation’s chip-wrappings and cat litter-tray linings, too.

      The snapper swallowed hard and his camera dropped waist-high as his colleagues moved in for the kill.

      Supersnapper – what the fuck did that mean? All it meant was that Mik Veronsky charged more to do less. And got to screw all the best women. It meant he was top barker in the whole pack of snivelling hounds. It also meant he was flavour of the month with the fashion journos. Mention his name to Lavender Allcock-Hopkins and a greedy, syrupy little smile would gather across her suet-white face. He raised his camera reluctantly and faffed around with the focus instead.

      Mik had lost his rag now – he was really raging. He’d grabbed a nearby journo and was trying to tear the poor sod’s epiglottis out with his bare hands.

      What was it that women saw in him? He was taller than necessary with wide shoulders and a skinny, demi-starved frame. His skin was vampire-white and his hair as black as the long coat he always wore. His outfit was de rigueur supersnapper: boots, jeans, acres of ethnic jewellery, stupid fucking hand-woven hat that looked like it had been stolen from some passing Kurd or other. Hair extensions? Did normal men have hair that far down their backs? And hadn’t it been cropped short last season? Eyes like angry dark stones.

      Mik wasn’t handsome in the pipe-and-knitting-pattern sort of style, but he was, in a casual way, incredibly beautiful. Arty-farty, the snapper thought. All high fucking cheekbones and flared bloody nostrils. Then, of course, there was the voice. The accent: what Lavender Allcock-Hopkins described as multiply orgasmic.

      The snapper looked back through his telephoto. Mik’s eyes were so dark you could barely see the definition between pupil and iris. There was a soft dent above his top lip and a small scar near his left eyebrow.

      ‘I don’t know what they all bloody see in him,’ he announced to anyone within earshot. He looked back again. There was a locket hanging around Mik’s neck, a plain silver one, nestling just along the watermark where the chest hairs started. Lockets weren’t in that season – everybody knew that. Press-prattle had it that it held something dear to Mik – something even that cold-hearted bastard cherished as a memento.

      A body moved in front of Mik, blocking the snapper’s view, and he swore under his breath. He looked up to see who it was. Another photographer. It looked as though the prat was going to ask for a bloody autograph. The shame of the concept turned the snapper’s face scarlet.

      A car backfired. Twice. Mik’s hair seemed to explode with the shock, rising up behind his head in serene and stately slow motion. The crush of bodies parted like the Red Sea. Mik stood alone now, frozen in grey space. The thought flashed through the snapper’s mind that maybe the pack had given up at last. Maybe a sense of the injustice of it all had finally permeated their crusty skulls. Mik had no talent as a photographer. He’d screwed his way to the top. He couldn’t tell a Nikon from a Box Brownie if his life depended on it. The game was up: the pack had rejected Mik Veronsky and all his hype.

      The snapper watched with glee as Mik disintegrated with the lights of the press no longer upon him. People moved further back. Mik lurched towards them. He looked startled and amazed at their apparent lack of interest. His mouth opened and he screamed a name: ‘Andreas!’ There was an echo from other empty streets. Nonsense. Crap. The guy was all to pieces. Then the word was replaced by something else – something dark that spewed out of his mouth, splattering the bystanders. People moved back quickly in disgust, checking their clothes, wiping stains off their anoraks. All you could hear now was the shuffling and squeaking of Timberlands on wet pavement. There were a couple of screams, too.

      Mik seemed to trip over nothing and began to fall, crumpling onto the concrete without a sound. Silence after that, total and profound.

      Then suddenly the flashes began like applause after a great performance; not a quick volley of shots this time, but a barrage. No gaps between the silver light. The snapper’s mouth fell open but his hands would not move. Something seeped from beneath Mik’s fallen frame, something thicker and darker even than the rain.

      The snapper knew then that his moment had come and passed him by: that split atom of a millisecond that fate offers up to everyone at some time in their meaningless little life, the one chance we all get either to make it or not. The photographer had blown it. He could have been famous. He could have been rich.

      The moment had been his. He’d had the best view, the best angle, the best picture in his viewfinder. The irony of it was exquisite. Someone cannoned into his back and his camera rolled to the ground. He felt like jumping on it. Mik Veronsky had just been shot and all he’d done was stand there like a dickhead and watch.

      THE PHOTOGRAPHER

      It was good watching her work in the studio. Very good for an hour or two. Then maybe not so good for a while. After ten hours it was a clear descent into hell.

      The trouble was, she was a perfectionist and perfect took time. Time cost money. Clients went from mildly nervous to deeply tense to totally, frenetically, bizarrely apeshit. They knew she was slow – everyone in the business knew she was slow – she was famous for it, but very few people knew exactly how slow. That was when the torture began.

      Legend had it one client went completely bankrupt by the second day of a shoot. He could have stopped her, of course. He could have stood up there and then and told her that not only had his budget run out half-way through day one, but also that his entire year’s profits were at risk – yet he didn’t, and nobody blamed him. It would have been like stopping Michelangelo mid-brushstroke to explain your cash-flow problem as he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Sometimes it was just easier to stock up on the Prozac and sweat it out.

      She was rich, famous – she’d made it. Trading on past successes, maybe, but still a big name. Her studio complex was the size of an aircraft hangar and you got agoraphobic just walking round it. Like all true talents, though, she specialized in looking broke.

      Watching her work you noticed the round bones of her spine that showed through her faded t-shirt like strung marbles as she hunched over the loaded camera. You saw how her long, wild sun-streaked hair got pushed dismissively back into an old rubber band she got from one of the paper boxes. When she was concentrating she would often pull a strand of hair down from the band to chew.

      You heard nothing because she very rarely spoke and if she did it was in a whisper and you couldn’t hear what she said. After a while the soft puff and squeak of her sneakers as she crept almost soundlessly across