Judi James - Naked Angels

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 the varnished floor, moving from pools of light into total darkness, would get on your nerves.

What you saw when you booked her for a shoot was a tall, youngish woman – not ugly, not plain, but not quite beautiful either – in the throes of an intense, all-consuming relationship with a handful of strobe lights and a beaten-up Rolleiflex. What you got was an illicit love affair with light that made you feel like a snoop even to be watching.

At thirty-five she had been at the top of her profession for several years, having hung there precariously owing to a mixture of driven ambition, technical perfection, and perpetual motion. Her name was legendary in the business and even photographers who trashed her work were in awe of her skill and her knowledge. She was not an instinctive worker – her pictures excited by their composition rather than their content.

She would frown all the time when she worked; it was only when she was finished that she would flash the famous grin, but by then you were too emotionally and financially drained to catch it.

The client that day was Japanese. He’d been warned about her working methods but his company was one of the largest in Japan and well up to the financial challenge. Besides, they wanted the best. The guy had foresight. He had a small roll-up bed with him, a portable TV for the Teletext and the number of an excellent local Japanese restaurant that delivered.

An hour after he’d settled behind the set the news of Mik’s shooting had flashed onto CNN and less than an hour after that he was informed his own shoot was in the can. No take-away sushi and no flies on the Futon.

His initial astonishment soon turned to anger, but when he went to speak to the photographer he found her staring into space and completely oblivious to anything around her. She looked so unwell he feared she might have had a stroke, but then the studio manager came to spirit him away and assure him that all was well and the job fairly completed. When he looked back the photographer still hadn’t moved. Maybe it was merely a display of the type of artistic behaviour the Americans were prone to. If the shots were no good he could always sue. But he still wasn’t sure she hadn’t had a stroke or a breakdown.

He bid her farewell and good luck just in case, and was extraordinarily relieved when she finally looked up and smiled and politely wished him the same in almost perfect Japanese.

The child was intrigued by a small speck of light that danced away somewhere deep in the heart of the darkness. He had been scared many times before but never so much that it hurt.

He wore a small plastic submarine pinned to the inside of his vest which was a medal for valour given to him by Father Janovsky for beating the shit out of Istvan Gosser, even though the boy had been armed with a knife. The trophy meant nothing today, though. Today his mouth felt like it was full of pitch and his heart was trying to punch its way out of his chest. If he had encountered Istvan Gosser down there in the dark he would have greeted him like a long-lost friend, and meant it, too.

The light squirmed some more. Perhaps it was a ghost – the soul of one of the newly dead. It might even be Andreas. The thought turned the boy’s knees to sponge. The place smelt funny. He wished he were somewhere else, somewhere with proper light. Anywhere. If he could have remembered his prayers he would have said them. Then a door opened from nowhere and he thought he would die from the shock.

The sudden glare startled him. The darkness felt almost better now. Dark was bad but that bright glare was a million times worse. Someone – not a ghost, because ghosts don’t wear rubber aprons and smell of tobacco – pushed past him and the door fell back almost shut again. The boy was quick, though, pushing his fingers between the crack and preventing the door from closing properly, even though it hurt. When the corridor was quiet he prised the door open. Then, with a quick glance around first to check he was unseen, he stepped inside.

The local mortuary was one vast, watery-smelling place that was tiled and lit like a public convenience. The bare bulbs strung in a line overhead made everyone look like a corpse whether they were dead or not. If the boy could have seen his own reflection in a mirror right then he would have made himself jump.

His face was whey-white with guilt and his hair, in contrast, looked black. The lights bleached the grime and dirt on his body so that he looked almost clean and his mouth had shrunk into a slit. It was hard for him to imagine he was above ground in that room. It was harder still for him to imagine he would ever get out of there alive.

There was a noise. There were other people in that long room. The boy fled to hide, scuttling across the floor like a rat.