Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions - By Neil Gaiman Page 0,60

over a million others, and going nowhere.

I sold my record collection, and my books, all but four copies of Penthouse, and most of the furniture, and I bought myself a fairly good camera. Then I phoned all the photographers I’d known when I was in advertising almost a decade before.

Most of them didn’t remember me, or they said they didn’t. And those that did, didn’t want an eager young assistant who wasn’t young anymore and had no experience. But I kept trying and eventually got hold of Harry Bleak, a silver-haired old boy with his own studios in Crouch End and a posse of expensive little boyfriends.

I told him what I wanted. He didn’t even stop to think about it. “Be here in two hours.”

“No catches?”

“Two hours. No more.”

I was there.

For the first year I cleaned the studio, painted backdrops, and went out to the local shops and streets to beg, buy, or borrow appropriate props. The next year he let me help with the lights, set up shots, waft smoke pellets and dry ice around, and make the tea. I’m exaggerating—I only made the tea once; I make terrible tea. But I learned a hell of a lot about photography.

And suddenly it was 1981, and the world was newly romantic, and I was thirty-five and feeling every minute of it. Bleak told me to look after the studio for a few weeks while he went off to Morocco for a month of well-earned debauchery.

She was in Penthouse that month. More coy and prim than before, waiting for me neatly between advertisements for stereos and Scotch. She was called Dawn, but she was still my Charlotte, with nipples like beads of blood on her tanned breasts, dark fuzzy thatch between forever legs, shot on location on a beach somewhere. She was only nineteen, said the text. Charlotte. Dawn.

Harry Bleak was killed traveling back from Morocco: a bus fell on him.

It’s not funny, really—he was on a car ferry coming back from Calais, and he snuck down into the car hold to get his cigars, which he’d left in the glove compartment of the Merc.

The weather was rough, and a tourist bus (belonging, I read in the papers, and was told at length by a tearful boyfriend, to a shopping co-op in Wigan) hadn’t been chained down properly. Harry was crushed against the side of his silver Mercdes.

He had always kept that car spotless.

When the will was read I discovered that the old bastard had left me his studio. I cried myself to sleep that night, got stinking drunk for a week, and then opened for business.

Things happened between then and now. I got married. It lasted three weeks, then we called it a day. I guess I’m not the marrying type. I got beaten up by a drunken Glaswegian on a train late one night, and the other passengers pretended it wasn’t happening. I bought a couple of terrapins and a tank, put them in the flat over the studio, and called them Rodney and Kevin. I became a fairly good photographer. I did calendars, advertising, fashion and glamour work, little kids and big stars: the works.

And one spring day in 1985, I met Charlotte.

I was alone in the studio on a Thursday morning, unshaven and barefoot. It was a free day, and I was going to spend it cleaning the place and reading the papers. I had left the studio doors open, letting the fresh air in to replace the stink of cigarettes and spilled wine of the shoot the night before, when a woman’s voice said, “Bleak Photographic?”

“That’s right,” I said, not turning around, “but Bleak’s dead. I run the place now.”

“I want to model for you,” she said.

I turned around. She was about five foot six, with honey-colored hair, olive green eyes, a smile like cold water in the desert.

“Charlotte?”

She tilted her head to one side. “If you like. Do you want to take my picture?”

I nodded dumbly. Plugged in the umbrellas, stood her up against a bare brick wall, and shot off a couple of test Polaroids. No special makeup, no set, just a few lights, a Hasselblad, and the most beautiful girl in my world.

After a while, she began to take off her clothes. I did not ask her to. I don’t remember saying anything to her. She undressed and I carried on taking photographs.

She knew it all. How to pose, to preen, to stare. Silently she flirted with the camera, and with me standing