Julia Gets a Life

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘Hello, Richard. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’m just calling about the outside of the house. I’ve had the quote from Evans’s and I’ve told them to go ahead because it really needs doing as soon as possible. I noticed the other day that there was already a lot of peeling on the kitchen sill. I’ve said to use the walnut again. And I said next week would be okay, weather permitting. Is that going to be okay with you?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Except that I’m going to be in London on Wednesday…..’

  ‘Oh. Are you? Well. I suppose that doesn’t matter. They don’t actually need access. As long as you leave the gate open so they can get to the back…’

  ‘I’ll make sure I remember to unbolt it before I go. er..to London.’

  ‘Good. Well. Anyway. Everything all right?’

  ‘Fine. Particularly fine…..’

  ‘Good. Kids okay?’

  ‘Same as they were last time you saw them.’

  ‘Good. So. Er. Back to work then. Er. Listen, Julia, are we going to talk soon, or something?’

  Big sigh. Big sigh.

  ‘Or something, Richard.’

  ‘Sod you then. Bye.’

  ‘That you, Ju?’

  ‘Hi. I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday, Rani, but I need to take a day’s leave on Wednesday, and as you’re not in tomorrow…well, I didn’t want to leave it until the last minute.’

  ‘Oh, no probs. I’m only vegging. Yeah, that should be okay. Greg can cover. There’s nothing much doing far as I know. What are you up to on Wednesday then? Or shouldn’t I ask?’

  ‘Oh, no. I mean, yes. I’ve got to go to London. To meet with Colin. You know, my editor friend – from Depth. He’s…’

  ‘Sound’s cool. What’s the…..No, Simon! Stop that! Sorry…’

  ‘That’s okay. He’s asked me to…’

  ‘Si-mon! Ha, ha! Stop! No! St..sorry, Ju. I’d better go. Friend round. You know. I’ll see you Tuesday, okay?’

  ‘Howard? I know you’ve got a hangover, and a bug, and I’m sorry to bother you, but I just had to ring you up because I’ve had some really exciting news today. I had a call earlier from the guy who I used to work freelance for, in London – did I tell you about him? – and he’s asked me if I’d like to shoot some of the pix for a series of features they’re doing, and a hardback – coming out at Christmas, I think – which is – wait for it – a book about Kite! You know? As in the band? Me! Can you believe it? I’m so excited. They’re playing Cardiff soon apparently – in fact, come to think of it, I think Emma was after tickets for that – and I’m to meet up with this music journalist and we’re going to cover the gig itself, and do some shots before, in the dressing room etc., and then a bunch of aftershow stuff – that’s what they have, you see, an aftershow party – very showbizzy, don’t you think? And I get to snap all the stars! How about that? And, I mean, can you imagine how the book will sell? I mean, this band are just mega. Anyway, you must have run out of tape by now. Oops! Ring me as soon as you feel better, okay?’

  When Emma got back from doing whatever it is fifteen year old girls do these days on Sunday afternoons with other fifteen year old girls, I pounced upon her with the kind of desperate enthusiasm I have not felt since finding out I got an A in my Art O Level and my Mum being at the dentist having root canal work. Emma was gratifyingly impressed.

  ‘Kite? Really? Honestly? But they’re mega, Mum. (who’s picking up whose turn of phrase, here?) Wow.’

  ‘I know.’ (I really did, too) ‘And getting bigger all the time. Colin said their new album is tipped to go straight in at number one. It’s coming out at the end of November. Hence the book. For Christmas.’

  ‘And you’ll be able to get their autographs, and maybe signed copies of the album and ….and you could…Mum! You could get me tickets for the concert! And we could maybe meet them too! Oh, Mum, could I come and help? Please?’

  All in all a very satisfying maternal moment. To be someone in my daughter’s eyes.

  Actually, there was a big part of me – bigger than it should have been, given the circumstances of the last four months or so – that said ‘Richard’. Richard would really like to share this with me. Richard would understand just how exciting this thing is for me. How much of a big thing this is. Mum just doesn’t understand these things. To Mum, a rock band is no different to a piece of Battenberg – just something she doesn’t much care for but that is there, an entity on the earth. And she has no more concept of ambition than she does of quantum mechanics. And Rani – all she wants to do is go out with as many men as possible before she is forced into an unsuitable marriage to a man with a very long beard and a late night grocery shop. And Howard.

  And Howard. God, I so much want to have sex with that man, and yet… And yet…. And yet Howard knows me as mother, wife, person who is so lovely, but not as…

  But not as the person who existed in this body fifteen, no eighteen years ago, and who had such big, big dreams. Who was going to see the world, have her pictures splashed across acres of glossy newsprint, be interviewed in the quality press, be the subject of exhibitions even; be the person who was there when…well, when anything, everything big and important happened; the name up the side of the world’s most compelling images.. the name. Julia Potter. Julia Potter, Photographer. Only Richard knows these things. And I can’t share this with him.

  I am so cross with him. Still. Because whatever I want now; whatever I achieve at, fail at, get into, get out of, it makes no difference. A whole chunk of my life has been written off and discarded. A whole bunch of memories have to be shifted out and filed under ‘bad bits’. I can’t recall years twenty to thirty eight without a tinge of regret, a trace of bitterness, maybe, or at the very least, an overlay of an unsatisfactory first chapter.

  It’s not fair. I so want to enjoy this.

  Chapter 15

  Ah, London, London, London. Home of everything that’s happening and with it and dripping with wealth and the promise of stardom.

  I am David Bailey. I am Terry O’Neill. I am Mitch Ikea.

  ‘Ikeda.’ Colin tells me. ‘Mitch Ikeda, his name is.’

  How does Colin know all this stuff? How can someone so sort of brownish and beige-ish and old, frankly, have his finger so firmly on the throbbing pulse of pop culture and the names of painfully trendy rock photographers? I suppose it must just diffuse into him while he stalks the corridors of his Dockside monolith in search of the woman with the snack trolley and the promise of a cheese bap.

  Today, we couldn’t be further from a cheese bap than a whelk is from a sturgeon’s egg sac. After scooping me up from Paddington, Colin has brought me to Builder, a recently opened themed restaurant, which is proving to be trendy amongst those in the know. It has nooks full of trowels and old bricks and emulsion cans, and the menus are cut outs of comedy bottoms. Bizarre.

  ‘So why didn’t you ask that Mitch Ikeda to do it? Why did you ask me?’

  It seems an obvious question. Whatever our personal history, Depth don’t really need to trawl the murky bywaters of family portrait photography in order to get snaps of the biggest band in Britain. Do they?

  Colin ignites a short cigarette and fixes me with one of his penetrating stares while a waitress in dungarees plops an ashtray in front of him.

  ‘You,’ he says, ‘shouldn’t knock yourself, sweetness. You are a talented, artistic and deeply creative photographer, and if you hadn’t gone off and got hooked up with that fart you married’ (there is no love lost in either camp) ‘You could have been Mitch Ikeda. Besides, there’s not much chance of getting someone like that at this sort of notice, even if there was the tiniest chance he’d be keen to go somewhere like Cardiff for more than ten minutes at a stretch. And this was an in-house thing anyway. Besides, they’ve already been done once.’

  ‘Been done?’

  ‘Been done. Up at the MEN last month.’

  ‘the MEN?’

&
nbsp; ‘The MEN Arena, in Manchester. Sweetness, where are you? No, don’t answer that. Now, babe.’ He picks up his menu. ‘What shall we have? I have to tell you, the guy who owns this place is a complete dickhead. Pops up all the time on that dreadful cooking show and swans about this place like a tit in a nursery. Don’t touch the scallops, avoid anything Russian, and don’t trust the specials – he’s just clearing the fridge.’

  I scan the contoured laminate and, beyond it, the coiffed and well tailored clientele. ‘So why do you come here?’

  ‘Come here? I never do. I only bought you here because I thought you’d like to be able to go back and say you’ve been somewhere trendy.’

  ‘Well, that’s very sweet of you.’

  Colin barks our drinks order to the waitress and asks, despite his warning, for borsch and then beef. I decide on a salad, and something involving a lamb chop, and then say,

  ‘But if the pictures have already been done, why do you need some more?’

  ‘Because, my darling, the first lot have been scuppered. Victims of the Feng Shui Seven, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Donna got done by them last week.’

  ‘But what..’

  ‘You know Donna..’

  I know of Donna. Donna Talbot is Depth’s major contributing photographer. The person I could have been if I hadn’t got hitched up with that fart etc. etc. She is very much of-her-ilk. She carries a bottle of designer mineral water rehydrating spray around in her handbag. Which has always told me everything I need to know. Except, perhaps, quite what it is one does with bottles of designer mineral water sprays. They would make your make up drip, wouldn’t they?

  Colin blows a plume of smoke into the step ladder and scaffold-strewn ceiling space. ‘Well she had the negs round at her place – God knows why, when they should have been with me – and her place got stripped. And do I mean stripped. Right down to her colourwashed floorboards. Ha!’

  I recall that Donna moved into one of those converted riverside warehouses on the Isle of Dogs, or somewhere. The sort that turn up in lifestyle magazines with the owner prattling about white space and minimalism and the integrity of willow as a representational artefact. And who can’t hear the name Phillipe Starck without swooning.

  I accept some wine and sip it. It tastes expensive. ‘But who are the Feng Shui Seven?’ I ask.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ He stabs out his cigarette and the ashtray is immediately seized. ‘Oh, it’s such a hoot. It’s this bunch of villains from New Cross – as yet still operating, as far as I know – who go into people’s homes and offer to Feng Shui them – for vast tracts of cash, naturally. You know, all this bed moving and goldfish and thrusting yuccas and putting bits of flint on your window sill. All crap, but exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to Donna’s philosophy of being stuck as far up her own bottom as it is possible to be.’

  ‘But how did they get in?’

  ‘Oh, as easily as you like. They told her, apparently, that it was important that certain manoeuvres be carried out at a particular point in some sort of celestial – or was it oriental? – cycle, which just happened to coincide with a shoot she was doing in Caithness. So she gave them the key.’

  ‘Gave them the key – is she mad?’

  ‘Quite mad. But, as she says, they were all in Ozwald Boateng suits, and one of them was Chinese. And Donna’s from Torquay, remember. So. There you have it. No pix. No feature.’

  He sits and beams while my starter is deposited in front of me. There are flowers in it. Garnish or food? Oh, the shame.

  ‘So you rang me,’ I say.

  ‘So I rang you. I thought; Kite are playing Cardiff in three weeks time. Donna Talbot would no more visit Cardiff than Kamchatka. And who the hell else do I know that will schlepp down to Cardiff? Thank you, dear -’ he takes charge of a large bowl with a hod carrier motif. ‘But, ah! I thought. Julia Potter lives in Cardiff. And Julia Potter’s husband has recently poked some trollop and been ousted. So Julia Potter could do with a fat cheque and some kudos right now. And besides,’ Colin plucks my free hand from the table cloth, ‘I have been in love with Julia Potter for nineteen years, and now she’s available, and looking, if it’s possible, even more gorgeous than ever she did.’

  I pick up my fork. ‘Don’t start.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Because you’re married. Because you’re not in love with me at all. You’d just like to have sex with me.’

  ‘Oh, very strident. But it is true about the sex, yes. But sex in a strictly serial sense. Until my dick packs up, certainly – possibly longer, now that Viagra is a viable alternative to a stout rubber band. And Julia, I am in love with you. Just because I rub along with Mrs Colin does not mean I don’t have the most intense feelings for you.’

  ‘Oh shut up. If I said okay, leave your wife, come away with me and I’ll shag you senseless till your teeth drop out, you would run a mile.’

  ‘Ah, but come away where? I couldn’t possibly go to Cardiff. I can’t even read the bloody road signs, for one thing. Lets do Clapham. Clapham works for me. We could get a flat in one of those houses on the common and you could waft around in petticoats while I gaze dolefully out of the window agonising over whether my stanzas scan. Lets do it.’

  I shunt the flowers to the plate rim. (They are not nasturtiums.) ‘Can’t. I’m moving into a new phase of my life in which I am going to eschew traditional male/female couplings and live as a free and sensual being, taking sexual gratification from whatever attractive males hove into view.’ (Howard.)

  He plunges his spoon into the mauve well in front of him. ‘Well consider me hoved,’ he says brightly. And loudly. ‘We must do it on the table, now! But listen, Julia Potter, I detect a certain cutting edge in your usual array of soft and winsome charms. Life’s cruel blows?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I tell him, as heads drop again around us. ‘All healed. Consider it more a delightful and unexpected bonus. I must have buried it way back in a ‘non-marriageable attributes’ nook.’

  ‘Well, if it’s as robust a state of mind as you say, that is excellent news. You should never have married that dreary man in the first place. And it’s fortuitous also. Donna tells me that Kite have a fearful reputation, and a collective libido that could service Wyoming.’

  It is so nice to see Colin.

  The great thing about Colin is that apart from my family he is the only person I currently know that knew me before I knew Richard. Which gives him a special importance in my life. Not because he doesn’t like him much (though it helps), but because it means he sees me differently than most people do. He sees me as Julia the talented and would-be famous photographer as opposed to Julia as in wife of Richard as in mother to Emma and Max as in person for whom the domestic star shines most brightly in the firmament of life. Which matters. Of course it does. How many women are there in the world who have evolved into people who look after families and whose work has become just the thing that they do to fill in the time before the children get home? Too many.

  And then there’s the lust. Colin is not embarrassed about lusting after me because he didn’t meet me at a dinner party as someone’s wife. Every woman should have a Colin around.

  A lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely day.

  Almost.

  When I left to go to London I had;

  Locked house

  Left back gate open (access for painters, as per instructions)

  Put coloured wash on timer to coincide with return

  Hauled large plastic vat of bolognaise sauce from snowy depths of freezer for convenient (yet nutritious) supper for self and children

  Made arrangements for Max (at friend’s house – to return following confirmatory phone call from self)

  Made arrangements for Emma (Do not have anyone in while I am out – especially boys. Do not use phone except in extremis. Do not microwave tights.)

  When I returned
, I had

  A police car outside my house

  A broken window

  Richard in my garden.

  All rather worrisome.

  Of course, drinking at lunchtime is the very best way to ensure that by seven pm you are anxious, nauseated, irritable and tired and that the front of your head will feel just like the bit in the roasting tin where the chicken has stuck. The bit you attack rigorously with a knife.

  It was with some sluggishness therefore that I closed the taxi door behind me, and walked back into the maelstrom that was, these days, my life.

  Richard had obviously heard the taxi because his head bobbed about above the garden gate like a skittish glove puppet.

  ‘Hmmph,’ he said, emerging. ‘There you are at last.’

  ‘Yes, here I am at last, ‘ I agreed, with an entirely unforced edge of exasperation in my voice. ‘And here are you. Where is Emma?’

  ‘How should I know?’ he snapped. ‘You make all those arrangements these days.’

  ‘But Emma should be home…’

  ‘Yes, indeed she should. Which is another thing. But in the meantime, would you please go in and deal with the alarm.’

  ‘The alarm?’

  ‘Yes, the alarm, if you wouldn’t mind, before it goes off again.’

  At which point, it did.

  I followed Richard into the house and switched it off.

  ‘But why is the alarm going off, and what exactly are you doing here?’

  ‘Because…’ He rubbed his face with the palms of his hands. He looked very tense. ‘Because Mr Evans accidentally broke a window and then set the alarm off.’

  ‘But breaking a window wouldn’t set the alarm off. It only…’

  ‘Yes I know that. God, you are becoming aggressive these days. He broke the window when he was moving his ladder, and when he ducked to avoid being speared by a shard of flying glass he then jolted the ladder and the top of it hit the alarm box, causing it to go off. Okay?’

  He turned and walked back into the kitchen, snubbing me. I let it go, in the interests of my chicken bit, and followed him, and then instantly regretted the slide into low-life that meant none of the breakfast had yet been cleared away. I could feel Richard noting it. Bastard.