Sex and Death

by Sarah Hall

  There have been several email responses to our website ‘Contact’. Well, two. Both of which I responded to promptly. One was from a young lad called Joe (‘sent from iPhone’) who was clearly English but he vanished when I invited him to pop round Henri’s for our next meeting. Then the other email was from a camera shop in Valencia, offering to rent us reflectors and synchronised standing lights – labouring under the unfortunate misunderstanding that the modelling we were involved with was of the glamour variety: poolside nude photo shoots.

  *

  There is full disclosure among we Porto Baso Scale Modellers that Henri’s place is best for our Saturday meetings and occasional group construction sessions. The old Luxembourg civil service pension speaks for itself. Henri has a three-bedroom villa up in the pine range with its own pool and barbecue terrace. In each room the dusted cabinets, even tallboys (he has a cleaning lady in three days a week), are filled and topped with expertly completed and painted plastic model kits in all scales.

  Henri’s tastes run exactly similar to Norm and me – namely classic aviation – 1960s and 70s civilian airliners, seaplanes, WWII props and Cold War jets; but we start to wind down with the onset of the boring F-15 era, though we’ll never sniff at a Tornado or a Starfighter. It’s not just planes for Henri though. You will see a gallant representation of German WWII battleships, torpedo boats, landing craft, Allied and Axis tanks, Apollo 13, armoured cars, light and heavy artillery pieces with operating gun crews and even two D-Day dioramas with lettering, entitled ‘Ruined French House’ and ‘Gun Emplacement’.

  A tall glass case (locked) is in his front room, sheltered from the scourge of the summer sun which can fade a colour scheme in just two months. Here Henri has the models he is proudest of. Some are especially rare: the Kabozi Co.’s much sought-after mid-1980s kit of the Messerschmitt Me 262 – in perfectly rendered mottled camouflage. There was also the Bohums DC-8 Super 61, boldly reproduced in the mad Braniff colour scheme. Here also is his De Havilland Mosquito in 1:24, completed when Henri was just fourteen years of age in Clervaux. It is hard to discern any drop in his high level of modelling skill, even at that early age when the eyes were so sharp and daring was so great – though I would just point out that the embossing of the silver cockpit frames shows a slight and displeasing thickness which wouldn’t escape Henri’s exacting standards of today.

  That afternoon we gathered around Henri’s spacious kitchen table. Even here Henri had placed some finely completed models on top of the cupboards. With Norm’s cautious driving, our takeaways from The Brave Gurkha really required a bit of a reheat in the microwave. Norm lectured us at length on the thermal mass properties of microwaves and how you must heat the curry sauce and the rice separately. It was all a bit of a production line, getting the rice, main curry sauces and side dishes piping hot, and then, amidst this hubbub of rather anxious, peckish old chaps who love their snap, came the clanging of that hand-rung Don Quixote doorbell. Norm’s aloo gobi was going round and round on the revolving plate; Henri was stooped down to closely monitor it through the microwave view window and spoke slowly, ‘John, would you go to the door, please tell Mrs Kroll her cat is not in my rear garden, please.’

  Norm, in the tone of reading back a checklist, announced, ‘All curries are now at optimum temp.’

  I stepped along the corridor where the grandfather clock of Henri’s mother clucked with the faint aroma of its insecticide-crammed interior. I opened the front door.

  ‘Hey!’

  Fiercely, I blinked once – said, ‘Look. We’re not interested. You’ve got the whole wrong idea.’

  They had actually sent in a bloody potential participant to Henri’s. Since the bankers’ recession, things must have been pretty grim in the camera trade. She couldn’t have been north of thirty. I mean better, twenty-seven, twenty-six? And English to boot; break your heart just passing her on the street: sun-mashed hair and big cowboy boots at the end of skinny bare brown legs, denim shorts and wrist bangles, every finger decked with golden rings – apart from the matrimonial one – those coloured false fingernails like a Disney cartoon. I immediately glanced left into the villa garden of Mrs Kroll. With this one calling round, it looked like we’d not only ordered in food but also a Ukrainian private dancer from the White Love Club.

  ‘We’re a model aeroplane group, love. Toy models.’ I turned round and I swept my hand beyond the grandfather clock, along the corridor to the arched doorway where you could see into the front room above the pool. Models which Henri had constructed with their undercarriages fixed in the down position were lined up all along the sideboard, their engine nacelles angled proudly high. A Pacific Operations catwalk: Grumman Hellcat, Jap Zero, Beaufighter. ‘We don’t need flashgun reflectors or cameras, whatever. We’re just three old blokes making toy model aeroplanes. Bloody daft little hobby, you know? Just whiling our time away.’

  ‘Cameras?’ One tiny wonky tooth among a rack of dazzlers – a smile that would have crushed the entire sports team bus. She continued, ‘What you on about? I know. I’m Josephine. Emailed a month or so back and you give me this address. Didn’t you? You said Saturdays. I’m up the hill, sat by the pool, stuck your address in the satnav, just popping my head in, aren’t I?’ She swung her hair around; beyond the crenellations of Henri’s ornamental wall and the tangles of mature bougainvillea upon it, she indicated a silver SUV shape parked out on the road. She laughed very quick, two long earrings – a sequence of gold droplets – leaping excitedly beneath each lobe.

  ‘Joe! Sorry. I thought you were someone else entirely. Embarrassing. I’m John Bishop.’ I held out my hand and she took it, her fingers felt like pretzels and the bangles clattered. ‘The blokes are here right now actually. If you feel okay. About coming in to meet them?’

  ‘Just a jiff; grab something out the car.’ She lifted her gold sunglasses from where they hung on the neckline of her blouse and popped them directly onto her tanned face. She stepped out the shade and down the semicircle of stairs, all in just two long strides, wrists jingling, cowboy boots clicking, she was across that patio and out the gate in seconds, the car-key fob held straight out before her like a pistol; a little purse of skin at the elbow of her golden arm. I stood in the porch staring after.

  Norm glanced up from the table in a profound bafflement as I returned to the kitchen, accompanied by a stunning young woman, holding in her arms an object wrapped in a lightweight fleece blanket. Later, with great concentration – as if struggling to describe the manifestation of a holy apparition on some mountain-side – Norm repeatedly told me that he first thought this woman had run over a dog out on the road and had carried the poor creature in to place before us, seeking assistance.

  In her mildly croaky voice, she called, ‘Hello all. Lovely day; is this all of us? You rascals having a sneaky curry while the sun’s out, are you?’ She held her head back with the burden in her arms and inhaled sharply through her prim nostrils. ‘Mmmmm. Where can I plonk this one then?’

  We all froze, guilty at the abundance of food, paralysed by her unlikely youth and sudden beauty right there in Henri’s kitchen. Henri just opened his mouth slightly. The curry dishes were slid aside so she could place the burden down. I did quick, polite introductions of names but she hardly looked at any of us and they just stared back at her. She unfolded the blanket and glared at what was there. ‘What do you reckon then?’

  In the middle of the table, surrounded by tikka laziz, Goan king prawn curry and Brave Gurkha special chicken, was a beautiful 1:24 scale McDonnell Douglas DC-8 Super 61 – just like the one in Henri’s display cabinet – the impossible-to-obtain Bohums limited edition, but instead of Braniff colours, this one was in the perfectly rendered, long orange-red-blue cheatlines of United Airlines’ mid-seventies fleet.

  Norm nodded. ‘Gosh. Exceptionally done I must say.’

  Henri placed his fancy designer reading glasses on his nose very, very slowly. ‘The Bohum.’ He clucked his tongue and frowned, moving h
is head around the model, which was just beneath his chin. ‘Who made this then? I’d like to talk with him; your small brother? Your young son maybe?’

  ‘How do you mean, lovey? I don’t have no kids. I made it.’

  Henri blinked up over his lenses, quite appalled.

  She smiled round the three of us.

  ‘How did you obtain this particular model?’ asked Norm, with a sort of feigned English indifference.

  ‘I’m not with you. Obtain it? Like balance it, once the wings were on, or put a putty weight in its nose?’

  Henri had a caustic smile, which didn’t become him.

  I said, quietly to her, ‘It’s an out-of-date but very rare model among old collectors like us. They don’t make these any more and you just don’t see them for sale.’

  ‘Oh. Really? How about that then? I got it for nothing. Just came by it up in this old house in Hampshire back home. This is the first model I ever made, isn’t it?’

  Norm gave me a funny look, like he was going to remove a notebook and jot this information down for future use against her in a court of law.

  Henri enquired, ‘And have you been doing this long?’

  ‘Two years, seven months and eight days.’

  Henri sneered, ‘It took you that long to complete this one model?’

  ‘Nah. I did this one in a week, lovey. You’re not getting me straight here. I’ve a load of these that I’ve all done; just thought I’d cart this over for you to see how it’s come out. It’s a sudden hobby I’ve got; isn’t it? Like a sudden hobby I can see all you fellows share.’ She shook her earrings and held both her palms up in the air, which seemed to signify Henri’s collection all around us. ‘That’s about all I do now, building these fellows up, painting them, putting their cute little sticker things on.’

  ‘The decals.’

  ‘I’m addicted,’ she mumbled, apologetically.

  Henri very carefully hoisted the model and studied her work on the underside of the fuselage, his lips parting silently in French. Then he asked in English, ‘You are using airbrush then hand brush on some smaller parts?’

  ‘True enough. A hand brush on bits of that but I use more airbrushes now.’

  ‘What type of airbrush? What type of compressor?’

  ‘I don’t know the names, lovey. My husband used them in the workshop for his bloody Harley and now I use the littlest ones.’

  ‘Your husband?’ Norm said cautiously.

  Henri nodded, in an impatient way. ‘These discolourations on the wing surface are from wet landings, dirty runways, just in front of the flaps and the staining here. Very skilfully done. And what was your approach?’

  ‘To be honest. Henri is it? To be honest, Henri, I get most of my brainwaves all off my iPhone. You just type it in the net and you get all the sites and Myspaces; lots of blokes’ tips, but I try to do my own thing too. I try to put in unique touches. Do you know what I mean? Guess what I used there? To get that mucky effect round the what’s-it? The exhaust thing.’

  ‘The cowling.’

  Henri told her, ‘You used a touch of charcoal, maybe cigarette ash on your fingertip.’

  ‘Nah, that’s too obvious, lovey, and besides, I seriously quit the smokes.’ She let out a brash laugh. ‘That is using just the tiniest flake of mascara. Lancôme Doll Eyes. Good stuff too,’ she pointed a bright finger up at her own smoky eye, crowned with lagoon-blue eye-shadow, and out came that laugh again.

  Norm and Henri looked at one another.

  ‘I know fine what you bunch is all thinking and yous are too much gentlemen to say out loud, but you’re thinking that building up planes from all their little bits and pieces is just a boys’ game and what’s she doing, getting stuck in about it, but I’ll let you all in on a little secret about me, boys – if you want to know?’

  We all three leaned a little closer to her.

  ‘I’m a trained beautician. If you can use tweezers to whack a pair of false eyelashes on a hungover housewife in Colchester, then it’s a doddle gluing these plastic things all together; it’s basically IKEA flatpacks, but littler. Isn’t it? Nail technician too. So I’m fairly handy with the smaller brush.’ She shot out her ringed fingers and the bangles chipped together once, displaying for us the gaudy, woven, fantastically intricate patterns on each of her long fingernails. ‘I got pretty steady hands, fellas. These days. Hey. Go break us off some of that naan, why don’t you?’

  Norm hesitated, then he leaned across and did so. She took it from him and tugged away at the bread chunk in her fingers using the front teeth, chewing at it as if she now had a plug of tobacco behind her sunken delicate cheek.

  Henri viewed her very carefully. He stood and he went through to the side room where earlier, from the boot of Norm’s Peugeot, we had each carried in our retail park purchases. I had finally bought the Short Sunderland flying boat; not the classic Airfix Mark III, which I already owned when I was a nipper, but the Italeri Mark I in 1:72, just reviewed as ‘kit sensation of the year’. Norm had gone and got himself that MiG-15 in 1:48 by Revell. Chinese Air Force colours. Inspired by the Korean War era in Benidorm and money-no-object, Henri had bought the beautiful Hasegawa 1:48 F-86 Sabre with its distinctive yellow bandings and amazing cockpit detail, choice of speed brake positioning and decorated drop tanks. Henri placed these three boxes on the counter top at the sink side and he told Josephine, ‘Today we were at the retail park in Benidorm.’

  ‘Were you now? I go to the toy shops there sometimes, but I write down the names of the planes and then order off the internet. The shop markup is quite stiff now and I’m always careful since I’m divorced.’

  ‘Divorced?’

  ‘Oh. Divorced?’

  ‘You’re divorced?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she looked left and right and back again between us, smiling. ‘You know what they say, Spain: divorce capital of Essex. We had a good five years. My husband, he was in securing of oil rights, India, Venezuela, ends of the earth. When we split he left Spain taking bloody Marie Carmen with him. Didn’t he? Our fff-ing accountant. Shoulda known he couldn’t be spending that much time. Two-timing and double accounting. Got to admit I was seen all right – moneywise, wasn’t I? But I’ve always watched the pennies since I was a little girl, apart from a wild period.’ She looked at the kit box and wiped her palm across the picture so the bangles jinkled once more.

  Impatiently, Henri said, ‘This one is mine,’ and he lifted the F-86 box. ‘I wish very much for you to have it?’

  ‘Me? I couldn’t do that, lovey. That’s a nice mark that, pricey, I’ve seen them.’

  ‘Why not that you begin it and then next week we too see how much you are getting along?’

  ‘Really? Then I can be in your modelling club too?’

  She seemed charmingly happy but Henri laughed indulgently. ‘Well, we’ll see, my dear.’

  I had to speak out. ‘Steady on now, we’re not a Surrey golf club. I mean surely, the more the merrier?’

  ‘Tell you fellas,’ she said, nodding, ‘the more the merrier. That’s what I’ve often said in life. I can tell you. Look, Henri. I’ll work on it and I can just text you a photo to your phone on how I’m getting along.’

  ‘Ah no no no. I think. No text please. I have no mobile phone. I think next Saturday you come along here to us and bring how much of the model you’ve made so I can examine?’

  ‘Oh. How much,’ she smiled, gently. ‘All right then, lovey.’

  There followed a bit of blether about summer being here at last and the water company digging up the road at the top of the hill. Then Josephine grabbed a last bit of naan and, chewing, she departed, with Henri’s new €180 scale model kit in her arms. I helped her out to the car with the old Dick 8-61 in its blanket and we placed it carefully into the hatchback: a silver Range Rover, the one with all the fancy stuff stuck on. Fifty grand’s worth at least. She beeped as she drove off up the hill, the automatic gears dropping and upgrading easy in the ascent towards the larger v
illas on the summit, where I’d never been.

  The three of us sat for some time over the cooled food and we had little interest in reheating it. Subconsciously we had all begun diets. We stared at each other. Henri said, ‘I refuse to believe she made it. A woman. This terrible ex-husband perhaps. Did you see? Hey. Guys. Come on! It was one of the best made models I ever seen.’

  ‘It is. It is just remarkable,’ I nodded. ‘Sickening really.’

  Norm shook his head. ‘But a young woman. A girl even! A girl in our group. I mean it’ll change everything. Henry.’

  Henri nodded.

  Norm flustered over the gender issue. ‘And not just a woman, I mean, but a . . .’ He blushed but spat it out. ‘A divorcee. And a damned attractive divorcee. Damned, damned attractive. Well I find her damned attractive.’

  ‘I think we’re with you on that one, Norm.’

  ‘She’s. Very saucy.’ Norm spoke this in a complex tone which seemed to hint that the poor young woman would now be exposed to his own attractiveness and that this would be a sudden and unfair burden upon her.

  I turned to Henri. ‘You gave her the Sabre to see if it’s really her making them, eh?’

  ‘Oui. I just cannot believe, the look of her. I mean, trop belle pour toi but all of this and just a beautiful child. What age is that child?’

  ‘Twenty-five? Six?’

  ‘Good God,’ Norm blinked, ‘my niece Pippa is twenty-four.’

  ‘Thirty at a push.’

  ‘At our age it gets harder to tell.’

  ‘But it’s just, socially . . .’ Norm frowned, despondent. ‘Socially we need to face up to the fact there will be differences. I mean she’s a bit. She’s damned attractive but a bit.’