She pinned him with a withering stare. ‘Bart, please don’t be suggesting that people can only understand the horrors of assault and battery if Helena Christensen stands beside the pictures of it.’
‘I’m not saying that,’ he protested. ‘I’m suggesting the chances of people getting to know they have an opportunity to understand the horrors of violence will be markedly increased if someone like Helena can bring a spotlight to it.’
She shook her head wearily. ‘So we can’t process grit without glamour? Is war going to need celebrity endorsement too? What the hell is wrong with this society? Don’t you see what’s happening to us? If even war can be trivialized, human suffering diminished . . .’ Talent she respected, but vacuous celebrity, fame for fame’s sake, made her shake with frustration.
‘Lee, you know I admire your principles, but we’ll be suffering too if we can’t pay our bills and afford to eat. You do actually need to sell the images too, as well as exhibit them.’
She stared back at him.
‘A few famous faces would just help with word of mouth and raising the show’s profile. It’s about getting punters through the door, not cheapening your message.’
‘You just said the interest’s already there.’
‘Ugh.’ He rolled his eyes as she tripped him up with his own words.
‘The answer’s no, Bart.’ As far as she was concerned, the conversation was over. She walked over to the coffee machine and pressed the buttons with practised familiarity, closing her eyes as she waited for the tiny cup to fill, trying to ignore the fatigue that feathered her consciousness after another night of only four hours’ sleep. She could only ever sleep in short blocks of oblivion before one horror or another reached out from the past and crept into her dreams.
‘It’s a maybe. I’ll call you back,’ she heard Bart murmur into the phone.
She pretended she hadn’t heard, too tired to take him to task further. She always needed a double dose of caffeine before her day could begin. Even the strongest coffee she had been able to find here couldn’t give her the hit she was used to; she’d spent too many years drinking coffee that could have powered tanks to scale back to the mild blandness of the domestic stuff.
She downed the coffee in a single gulp, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth for a moment, as though feeling her life force gather, before turning back to the room. It was a vast space, with thick timbered beams and a concrete floor. Light poured in through the south-facing windows, creating pools of brightness when the skies were clear. Not today, though. The sky was thick with tumbling clouds, muffling the light; it was like peering through a gauze veil, everything softened and diffused.
Bart walked over to her officiously. ‘While I remember, I’ve booked the car to collect you for the opening night from your place at eight.’
‘Okay.’
‘And ditto for the Hot dinner two weeks Friday.’
‘Okay,’ she mumbled.
‘. . . Are you even listening?’
She was looking around flatly at the space, the centre of her working life now, so different from the landscapes she used to work in. A charcoal linen sofa and a rustic wooden coffee table were set by the far wall and a bolt of black canvas was draped from an overhead arm in the middle of the space, creating a mobile backdrop; a three-legged bar stool was set in the centre. Everything was light, bright, minimal – architect friends called it ‘urban’, but urban to her was rubble, a sinkhole and twisted metal.
She narrowed her eyes slightly, falling into concentration (and a numb despair) about the day ahead of her. For the past two weeks and into the next, she was shooting a select number of assorted new stars who had broken through this year to the upper ranks of stardom, for cult magazine Black Dot’s Hot List. It was considered the touchpaper to the zeitgeist, the kingmaker, and everyone who wanted to be Someone wanted to be in it. Forget running through Sniper Alley in Beirut, this was nearer her idea of hell, but it was a prestigious gig and they paid her an obscene sum to do it. She had sworn this year would be her last time at the helm – but then she’d said the same thing last year and the year before that too, and Bart had taken to teasing her that she was ‘pulling a Daniel Craig’ – feeling tainted