I
“So” said Dickson leaning across his desk, his bulky frame half-obscuring the flyblown posters behind him “You are interested in a career in...well, let’s not beat about the bush, as it were…the adult film business. The premium brand end.” A pause. His lips parted in what he assumed would be construed as a conspiratorial smirk. He shuffled officiously through some papers on his desk as if they had to be appeased before he could continue. “You’ve certainly worked your passage young man. . . I see that you started off as… a marketing executive for Mike Gradinski.” He coughed self-approvingly at the felicity, the exquisite finesse, of his circumlocution. Gradinski had been a heavy- duty mover and shaker in the security business. My function was to impress on potential clients the benefits of our services and, where necessary, to illustrate forcibly the perils to which they might otherwise be exposed if they were to spurn this gilded opportunity. Gradinski had flourished until a hubristic complacency led him to flout the terms of the exclusivity clause in his contract with Tommy Moler. To this breach of business etiquette, Tommy Moler had taken violent exception; and in Tommy Moler’s case violent meant violent. Not only had Mike Gradinski’s business gone up in flames, but so had Mike Gradinski. When dealing with Tommy Moler, it paid to study the fine print carefully or else invest in asbestos underwear.
Dickson now proceeded to set his features into pensive mode, as if he was seriously wrestling with the merits of my application. “…And after that, I see you took up the post of credit controller with Jimmy McIntosh”. Jimmy provided finance to individuals whom the banks had declined to do business with, on the grounds of their poor or non-existent credit records. These loans carried exponential rates of interest which ensured that Jimmy’s clientele generally ending up owing the equivalent of the national debt of a mid-sized South American country. Sadly, Jimmy’s customers were habitually prone to confusing their priorities, preferring to splash their money on items such as food and clothing rather than honouring their repayments. It was my responsibility to bring home to them the consequences of such ingratitude. Not a bad number but it soon became oppressively predictable. The routine hardly varied at all: the transparent excuses tipping into spasms of frantic pleading rounded off by the rifle-cracks of snapping bone.
In any event, I was assuredly destined for bigger stuff. Dickson surveyed the ceiling and drummed his pencil stub on his desk as if it were the heartbeat of a dilemma. I maintained my stonily vacant expression; it was a subtle form of intimidation, albeit quite superfluous in the circumstances. After all, I was Tommy Moler’s nephew.
II
I escort Liana to the greasy spoon that serves as my HQ, with its peeling photos of Kylie Minogue and sulky Bulgarian waitresses. The steam from the plates forms a veil between us. Haltingly, she relives her mangled childhood: her father's poisonous kisses; the local Oi band: hopeless, horny and hallucinating; it seems unlikely that they even knew it was Liana they were screwing. I make an improbable confidant but she is not spoilt for choice.
The hoarse guffaws of the taxi- drivers, racing tipsters, writ-servers and diamond merchants who make up the unique democracy of this establishment preserve our privacy. “You realise of course”, I said matter-of-factly “ that the pictures I'm taking are of course destined for wider consumption. Just to keep us right, I will need you to sign a disclaimer. And with my reassuring grimace and avuncular squeeze of the hand, I could not have looked less Mephistolean.
But I cannot report that Liana looked greatly reassured by this display of amicability. She knew deep-down that I was a user (in every possible extension of that term).I was a very bad, but also her very best, option. And so she signed the documents, a few limp pages of standard legalese which might as easily have been a hire purchase agreement for a car rather than a body; she signed without having looked at the words and without having looked at me. Her signature was slightly smudged as if the ink had been adulterated by a teardrop.
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