Naked Angels Read online

  Naked Angels

  Judi James

  HarperCollins Publishers (1995)

  * * *

  Tags: Romance, General, Fiction

  Evangeline is at the pinnacle of her career as a famous fashion photographer when she meets Mik, a moody Hungarian war-photographer driven by ruthless ambition. Though they are drawn to one another as lovers, their professional rivalry spells doom. THEIR LOVE IS SWEET POISON... Evangeline, ugly-lovely daughter of famous American artists, is a top fashion photographer. Mik, moody, Hungarian, would like to be. When they meet on a London shoot, they are immediately drawn together as lovers, but, both driven by ruthless ambition, their clash spells doom... Each is haunted by secret tragedy. Both have sacrificed private happiness for public success. Both are victims who inflict their pain on others. 'Naked Angles' is their story, of greed and glamour, of suffering, destructive passion and, finally, of hope and unexpected happiness...

  JUDI JAMES

  Naked Angels

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  About the Author

  By the same author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  London 1995

  THE MODEL

  Even when she was dying she was still counting the calories: none in the hot water toddy at breakfast, ten in the Extra Strong mint on the way to the shoot. She licked the insides of her teeth, savouring everything.

  The model’s changing room was shared. Two males and herself. The sour but tasty stench of quick-tan and the sick-sweet perfume of hashish. She watched them push tissues down the front of their trunks while her stomach gnawed painfully. Too much padding? One less? Why not go for it? They laughed easily. Their pubic hair had been waxed. They looked gleamily good. She weighed less than seven stone but she still looked crap. Too fat – too much around the hips.

  She listened to the male models laughing and thought they were making fun of her. Paranoia. She knew she was right, though. She gave her grave face a few little smacks to raise some colour onto it. It was six a.m. She sighed and lit her fourth cigarette of the day.

  The litany continued in her head. Two dry biscuits for dinner. Three Strawberry Pop Tarts yesterday, even if she did throw them up later. Her last binge had been over a week ago: chocolate spread sandwiches on thick white bread with butter, yellow-cream rice puddings, Alpen, pink-iced cakes, and cheese triangles on warmed rolls. It had taken her an hour to be sick afterwards and she’d lain exhausted on the bathroom floor feeling the linoleum tiles cool against her cheek.

  The make-up made her skin hurt. She’d studied it like a science and knew exactly what it was doing to her flesh – every liposome, every nanosphere, every trace of phytobium. She winced and the make-up artist halted.

  ‘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.’

&n
bsp; 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 to shin a low wall but slipped and scuffed his trainers and grazed his palm into the bargain. He 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 Brown
ie 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.