2000 - Thirtynothing Page 6

  It had been a mad year for Dig. He was headhunted by every A&R department in London and consequently given a payrise by a somewhat scared Toby, big enough for him to finally leave home and buy a flat at the ripe old age of twenty-seven. His reputation was made. Everyone knew who he was and what he’d achieved. So he sat back and relaxed for a while, safe in the knowledge that no one could touch him because he was the guy who discovered Fruit.

  Dig can’t ever imagine leaving Johnny-Boy Records. It’s easy. It’s cosy. It’s family. He knows everyone, from the tiny elderly cleaner who turns up every evening in a vast Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow which was left to her by her ex-employer and which she refuses to sell even though she’s paid only £6 an hour, to the guy who turns up once every three months sporting a ridiculously smart suit and over-gelled hair to service the photocopier. Dig knows where everything goes, where everything comes from and where everything belongs. Johnny-Boy Records is his second home.

  ‘You’re looking a bit pleased with yourself this morning,’ says Charlie, their pneumatically blonde but strangely droll receptionist, shoving bits of paper into internal envelopes, which always makes Dig laugh because there’s only seven of them. Charlie used to work for EMI and still does all her admin on a grand scale.

  Dig considers his expression and realizes that he does indeed have a smug smile hovering around his lips. He decides this is highly inappropriate for a Monday morning and removes it.

  ‘You recovered from Friday night yet?’ inquires Charlie, in a tone of voice laden with the suggestion that he’d been drunker than he thought.

  ‘Just about,’ he says, picking his mail out of the pile on her desk.

  ‘You know that girl was only seventeen, don’t you?’

  Dig blushes and rips open an envelope.

  ‘You shagged her, didn’t you?’

  Dig blushes even more and pretends to be very interested in the contents of a Viking Direct catalogue.

  ‘You dirty old bastard,’ she says, eyeing Dig with evident delight and tying the string on an internal envelope into a little bow, before handing it to him.

  Dig climbs the spiral staircase and ignores Charlie’s calls of ‘Lock up your daughters—paed on the loose!’

  ‘What are you looking so happy about?’ says Toby, loitering around the coffee machine.

  Dig again realizes he has that inappropriate smile on his face and quickly disassembles it.

  ‘Cradle-snatcher!’ Charlie bellows up the stairs.

  ‘Aaah,’ smiles Toby. ‘Yes. That girl. Friday night. I take it you…er…’

  Dig nods stiffly. ‘She was totally up for it, you know.’

  Toby nods, too. ‘Of course,’ he says, ‘of course she was. You’d better get used to this now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you’re thirty now. You’ve got the allure of an older man. You’ll have them throwing themselves at you. You want to get yourself one of these, too.’ He points at his wedding band and winks. ‘Fanny magnet,’ he says and then turns away, laughing hoarsely.

  Dig laughs, too, because he knows that as much as he moans about them and makes jokes about his supposed pulling power, Toby is tied completely to his wife and family and wouldn’t have the energy even if he did have the opportunities. He’s worked too hard and too long for everything he’s got and he’s far too clever to risk it all on a shag.

  Dig pulls off his leather coat and hangs it up. He reaches into the inside pocket and feels around a bit until he locates what he’s looking for. A small, manky shred of paper. He gently smooths it out, running his finger lingeringly across the creases, and places it on his desk, next to his phone. He looks at it for a while and feels that smile forming on his lips again.

  He won’t call her now. He’ll call her later. He’ll have a cup of coffee first, open his mail, check his e–mails.

  And then he’ll phone Delilah Lillie.

  Nadine always feels a little shiver of excitement going to work. First of all there’s the unadulterated thrill of driving around in her gleaming white Alfa Spider, which is beautiful beyond words and which she paid for herself. Even in the depths of winter she takes the roof down and cranks up the heating and drives around with the wind in her hair. Nadine can’t see any point in owning a convertible if you only go topless for six weeks of the year.

  And then there’s the sign outside her studio, nailed to the wall: NADINE KITE PHOTOGRAPHY. It gets her every time.

  Her very own studio. She worked long and hard for it. Five years of underpaid and overworked assisting, first of all for a temperamental interiors photographer who called her Nay-deen even after three years, no matter how many times she told him it was Nadd-een and then for a wonderful, old page-three photographer called Sandy, who’d been her inspiration.

  Nadine never expected to make a living from photographing half-naked women. She aspired, as most photography graduates do, to a much higher plane. Fashion, maybe, or portraiture. But she started doing freelance photography at around the same time that ‘lads’ magazines became big business and an ex-boyfriend who was a journalist on Him magazine at the time had recommended her for some still-life work. She’d built on that initial contact over the years and was now the magazine’s most popular photographer, doing their main features and their cover shots. She’d found a niche for herself, a place where the rewards were high and the work enjoyable, a place she loved being. She got to meet Australian soap stars and TV presenters and DJs, and even the occasional Hollywood film star. She’d photographed everyone from Jeri Ryan to Danii Minogue to Denise van Outen, and she’d yet to work with a girl she hadn’t liked.

  Her subjects were always completely disarmed to meet Nadine. ‘God,’ they’d say, ‘you don’t look like a photographer.’ And she doesn’t suppose she does.

  Nadine is in a particularly good mood for a Monday morning. She’s already been to the gym for one of her thrice-weekly work-outs and it’s left her feeling uncharacteristically energized and chirpy. The sun is shining and she’s wearing a beautiful pink sequinned cardigan she picked up from a car-boot sale yesterday for a mere pound. One quid to make her feel like a million dollars. There’s little in life as exhilarating and satisfying as a true bargain.

  The scales at the gym this morning informed her that she’d finally got down to nine and a half stone, having hovered annoyingly around the ten stone mark since a gluttonous holiday in Disneyland six months earlier.

  The bank statement that arrived in the morning’s post informed her that her business has finally started to pay out after what had been a slow start.

  And she’s single again! She loves being single, she really does. And this time she’s going to stay single for as long as it takes to find a decent bloke, not just give in at the first moment of insecurity or urge for a shag. This time she’s going to do it properly, and this time she has a rather attractive financial carrot to make sure she does.

  In the car park behind her studio Nadine clips up her soft top and attaches her Krooklok. She whistles under her breath as she approaches the front door and the big pink plastic sign with her name on it.

  Nadine flicks on the kettle in the tiny kitchen and stretches out on her pink leather sofa to read her mail. It’s going to be a quiet day today. For once. A meeting at the Him office in Shaftesbury Avenue to pick the shot for the February cover and lunch afterwards with the commissioning editor. She’ll use the rest of the day to catch up on paperwork and have a bit of a tidy-up. And maybe start phoning around her girlfriends to see if anyone has a male friend she could borrow to win this bet with Dig.

  She smiles to herself. She is going to win, there’s no doubt about that. Nadine has a fierce competitive streak, especially when it comes to Dig. Maybe it has something to do with working in a man’s world. Maybe it’s the way her parents always compared her unfavourably to her little brother. Maybe it was spending two years at an all-boys school to do her A Levels. Who knows? But it’s there, and it’s got her where she is today. I
t’s got her her flat and her car and a healthy bank balance. It’s got her respect and status and a constant stream of high-quality commissions from some of the top magazines in the country.

  And although she doesn’t know it yet, it’s just about to get her the prestigious Ruckham’s Motor Oil calendar, a commission that will send her earning potential on a quite unbelievable trajectory, straight to the stars.

  Mitchell Tuft, Ruckham’s Brand Manager, asked her to bike over her portfolio last week. It was returned the same day with a blank compliment slip, and Nadine had assumed that was that.

  But the phone has just rung and Mitchell Tuft is talking to her now, gushing forth about how much he loves her work, how fresh her style is and how he would like to offer her a month in the Polynesian Islands with some of the most beautiful women in the world and a pay-cheque big enough to mean that she could comfortably take the rest of the year off.

  No nipples, states Nadine—that’s her only rule, no nipples, says Mitchell Tuft.

  It’s time for an injection of new blood into the glamour-calendar scene. The same old photographers, he complains, year after year. It’s a new millennium. It’s time for a change. We’ll give you a free hand, he says, we want 2001 to be as different and exciting as you can make it.

  If she was interested, of course.

  ‘Well, yes, Mitchell. Yes. I’d be honoured. Of course. Yes. I look forward to it very much. Thank you.’ Nadine puts down the phone and takes a deep breath to calm her racing heart. ‘£40,000,’ she whispers to herself, ‘£40,000. For four weeks’ work. Jesus Christ.’

  She silently congratulates herself, not for the first time, on deciding to work without an agent. And then she gets to her feet and starts screaming. ‘Oh my God! Oh my God—I’m going to be rich!’ She runs around her studio in circles. ‘Rich! Rich! Rich! Totally bloody rolling in it!’

  This is it. Her professional destiny. She’s worked for so long without any real sense of where she’s heading, just taking jobs as and when they’re offered to her, but this is different—this feels right, somehow. Editorial work pays quite well, but calendars, that’s where the real money is, and Ruckham’s isn’t any old calendar. It isn’t like the tacky ones covered in tea-stains in mechanics’ workshops. It’s artistic and innovative. Some of the models even wear clothes.

  Ruckham’s. Jesus.

  She has to tell Dig. Dig is always so impressed by Nadine’s professional achievements and Nadine loves to impress him. She picks up the phone.

  ‘Dig! Dig! Guess what?’

  ‘Urm, Jenny McCarthy’s breast implants have just exploded all over your Leica?’

  ‘No no no.’

  ‘You saw Gail Porter naked and she’s got a knob?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly. Listen. I’ve got the Ruckham’s calendar commission.’

  ‘Ruckham’s! Jesus! You’re joking!’

  ‘No. I’m serious. I’m going to be rich!’

  ‘Sod rich,’ says Dig, ‘who cares about money? You’re going to be sent off to some exotic paradise with twelve fantastic, incredible, stunning women. Oh man—can I come? I’ll be the bikini valet. I’ll be the baby-oil applicator. I’ll do anything. Please, please, please, can I come?’

  ‘Sounds like you already have.’

  ‘When are you going?’

  ‘Middle of January. Isn’t that perfect? Could there be a better time to get out of England and go to Bora-Bora?’

  ‘You’re going to Bora-Bora! That’s Polynesia, isn’t it?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Shit, Deen. You’re going to paradise. Do you realize that? And they’re bound to put you up somewhere really swank, somewhere five star. I am so jealous.’

  ‘I’ll bring you back a stick of rock.’

  ‘Thanks. A lot. Anyway. Look. We’ll celebrate at the weekend, yeah? I’m just on my way out so I can’t chat. I need your advice.’

  ‘Fire ahead.’

  ‘Restaurants. I need you to recommend me a restaurant.’

  ‘What for?’ Nadine wrinkles her nose in confusion. Dig doesn’t go to restaurants.

  Dig’s voice is almost trembling with excitement. ‘I asked her out.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Delilah, of course. I just phoned her and I asked her out.’

  ‘What do you mean, asked her out?’ Nadine’s mouth has gone dry.

  ‘I mean, I said, would you like to come out for dinner with me? And she said yes.’

  ‘You’re joking, right?’ Nadine can feel bile rising unpleasantly at the back of her throat.

  Dig appears not to have picked up on the sudden change of tone in Nadine’s voice.

  ‘…It’s all just coming together, Deen, y’know? That girl on my birthday night, Katie, she was like my wake-up call. If I hadn’t woken up in bed with her, I wouldn’t have felt so shit. If I hadn’t felt so shit, I wouldn’t have suggested going for a walk in the park with you. And if I hadn’t gone for a walk in the park with you, I’d never have bumped into Delilah and I wouldn’t have asked her out and I wouldn’t be feeling as fucking…good as I’m feeling right now. I mean, God—she’s just gorgeous. Isn’t she? Don’t you think that she’s actually more beautiful than she was when we were at school?…And nicer, too?’

  Nadine feels her stomach constrict and her heart shrivel and is glad they’re talking on the phone, otherwise Dig would be able to see the look in her eyes.

  Delilah? How can he possibly fancy Delilah? She’s stunningly beautiful, of course, but she’s just not his type. She weighs more than five pounds for a start. She has breasts. She wears a bra. She’s taller than him. She’s nine months older than him. She has creases in the corners of her eyes. And she’s married, for fuck’s sake. What in God’s name does he think he’s playing at?

  ‘Dig,’ she hisses, petulantly, ‘what are you expecting to actually happen with Delilah? She is still married, y’know.’

  ‘Yes. I do realize that,’ sniffs Dig, having finally picked up on Nadine’s attitude. ‘And I’m not expecting anything to happen. Well, not immediately. I just want to see her, that’s all. You know, just be with her.’

  ‘Well, in that case, might I suggest taking some conversation cards with you?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You know. Delilah. She’s not exactly the brightest girl in the world, is she? You might need some help.’ She can almost feel her throat blistering with the acidity of the venom that is spewing forth from it, but she just can’t help herself.

  ‘That’s a bit uncalled for, Deen.’

  ‘I’m just saying, Digby, that Delilah was all well and good when you were teenagers, but she’s not particularly your kind of girl nowadays, is she? I mean, she was fine for a first romance, you know, first love. But ultimately there’s not much more to her than a pretty face, is there?’ Oh dear God. She really hadn’t meant to be like this—men found this sort of behaviour so unbecoming—but she’s started now and she already knows there’s no way she’s going to be able to stop. ‘…And if you think that this date qualifies for our bet you’ve got another think coming. This is not what I would call an attempt at a mature relationship. This is what I would call chasing around after an unattainable, unstable married woman who will never, ever make you happy in a million years, who is pre-programmed to fuck men over, who will break your heart into a thousand pieces and hand-feed them to her sodding dog!’

  ‘Jesus, Deen. What the fuck’s the matter with you? Getting your period, or something?’

  ‘No, Digby. I’m not getting my period, I’m just…I just don’t want to see you get hurt…I know how you feel about Delilah, how you felt about her, and I think you’ve probably lost any sense of objectivity—I’m just trying to give you a little objectivity. That’s all.’

  ‘Well, thanks all the same, Nadine, but I don’t need your objectivity. OK? Delilah’s back in town. She’s just left her husband and she doesn’t know anyone…’

  ‘Oh yes! And have you actually asked her yet, what she’s
doing here, why she’s in London, why she’s abandoned her husband? Have you? Don’t you think there might be a bit more to it than just wanting to “catch up with old friends?” Has it occurred to you that she might just want some space right now, she might want some room, to sort her head out? The woman’s just left her husband, for Christ’s sake. She’s been here for five minutes and you’re already plaguing her with phone calls and asking her out on dates!’

  ‘Jesus, Nadine! I just want to spend the evening with her. That’s all. And she wants to spend the evening with me, too.’

  ‘OK. Fine. But I think you’ll find that it’s a disappointment. Being with Delilah. After all these years. You won’t have anything in common, you know. She’s been living in the sticks for ten years, living a completely different life to us.’

  ‘That might not be such a bad thing…’

  ‘…She’s not the same girl you knew at school, she’s not the same cool chick. I’ll bet she listens to Phil Collins, these days. And did you notice, the other day, she was wearing pearl earrings. I mean…that’s positively middle-aged…she’s probably got a Barbour hidden away somewhere, as well.’

  ‘My God! What’s the matter with you? You’re basing your entire opinion of her on a pair of earrings? How shallow is that, Deen? Delilah’s got class. She dresses beautifully—that classic look really suits her. And by the way—I did not ask her out just to win this bet, but I have to say that I think it counts.’

  ‘Forget it,’ snaps Nadine. ‘No way. Married women don’t count.’