A Compromising Position

  Tonight, however, wasn’t a bacon-roll night, it was a two-bags-of-Scampi-Fries and two-pints-of-Guinness night. Adam put the packets of chemically manufactured snacks between his teeth and carried the brimming drinks over to the table.

  Chris sat staring into space. Adam clinked his pint down in front of him, jolting Chris out of his reverie. ‘If you keep drooling like that, someone might come along and try to revoke your day pass.’

  ‘Just daydreaming, mate.’

  ‘Well, don’t do it in front of Cara or she’ll think you’ve got the hots for her and then where would we be?’ Adam said.

  Chris tried an exploratory taste of his Guinness. ‘Would you . . . ?’

  ‘What?’

  Chris shrugged. ‘You know . . . with Cara. If it was on offer.’

  ‘No. No. No. No way!’ Adam was affronted. ‘She’s a great News Editor, but she’s totally emotionally unstable. And she’s the boss. And she’s into all that “alternative” business. It would be like going to bed with the Dalai Lama. Do I need any more excuses?’

  ‘So you’ve asked and she turned you down?’

  ‘No.’ Adam sighed into his drink. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. She’s a friend, a work colleague. She’s the last person I’d want to go to bed with. Besides,’ he pointed out, ‘you know I have a deep vein of bitterness running through my body when it comes to women. These things start out all right, but they invariably turn horrid.’

  Chris tried to look smooth. ‘I wouldn’t mind giving it a go.’

  ‘Now tell me something that doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘No. Seriously,’ Chris said. ‘I could teach Cara a lot.’

  ‘Oh, I’d like to be a fly on the wall to watch that.’ Adam folded his arms across his chest and smiled.

  Chris wouldn’t be swayed. ‘We all have our perversions, mate.’

  ‘Yes,’ Adam said. ‘You just have a lot more than others.’

  ‘It’s taken years of practice,’ Chris said proudly. ‘Anyway, how are things with Laura, the woman to whom all your bitterness is owed?’

  ‘Oh fine,’ Adam nodded. ‘She’s just had my maintenance payments increased to the sort of level that any skilled extortionist would be proud of.’

  ‘She’s still giving you grief?’

  ‘She gave me grief from the moment I said “I do”.’

  Chris’s attention wandered to the two girls wiggling over to the juke box, bare-midriffed and bottoms bound into tight Capri pants. Adam followed his gaze. The girls turned round and grinned at them.

  ‘BOBFOCs,’ Chris said in a voice that it was best not to argue with.

  Body off Baywatch. Face off Crimewatch. Chris’s standard description for anyone who didn’t come up to his exacting standards, i.e. Julia Roberts.

  ‘Do me a favour, Chris. When you find your soulmate, don’t propose to her.’

  ‘Propose what?’

  ‘I was thinking of marriage.’

  Chris dragged his attention back from the two giggling women, whose taste in music appeared to be confined to Westlife, and stared at Adam wide-eyed. It was a good job he wasn’t swigging his Guinness, as he would have spat it out. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘I was once.’ Adam sighed. ‘But that’s enough. The only good thing to come out of my three years with Laura was Josh.’

  ‘He’s a great kid.’

  ‘Yeah.’ The one downside of it was that Josh’s presence tied him and his pay packet to his ex-wife for the foreseeable future. Even the thought of it dragged his heart a little bit nearer to the floor. How could you say that another person’s life was the result of a stupid accident? Particularly a freckle-faced twelve-year-old who was so irrepressibly cheeky and gave meaning to an otherwise mundane existence.

  The fact was, though, that Josh was the product of a split condom, in a time when the focus had been taken off unwanted pregnancy and put on unwanted life-threatening disease. It was months before Laura realised she was pregnant and it was shortly afterwards, when they were grinning inanely at each other in Wimbledon Register Office, that Adam realised he was marrying someone who was, in every way, wrong for him.

  Still the dirty deed was done. They struggled on gamely for three unhappy years before he left her to live in a box-sized bedsit in the bleakest part of Bermondsey and retain what was left of his sanity. Within weeks Laura had latched onto another man – Barry, the manager of the building society where she worked part-time when they had been together – and whom she had since married. She’d left her job immediately after the nuptials and now sat on her backside all day watching house makeover programmes – Changing Rooms, Rooms for Change, House Doctors, Garden Doctors, Gardening Neighbours, Neighbours’ Gardens – she knew them all. The rest of her spare time she devoted to turning into the ex-wife from hell. Adam wondered if she was taking night-school classes in it. He heaved a lengthy sigh. This was too depressing a subject to consider with only a bag of Scampi Fries for solace. Licking the orange chemical coating off one, Adam then popped it into his mouth in the hope that all the E Numbers would stave off his depression. ‘Is Toff coming tonight?’

  ‘Expect so,’ Chris replied, his interest in the girls having waned momentarily.

  Toff, otherwise known as Sebastian Atherton, had formerly occupied the position of Chief Photographer before Adam, but he had left the Hampstead Observer the previous year to form his own photographic company specialising mostly in glamour shoots. The top end of glamour – no pun intended.

  Toff was one step away from the Pirelli Calendar type of material rather than Hustler or anything featuring Readers’ Wives. This was primarily down to Daddy’s contacts. It wasn’t that Toff’s talent was in question. He was a completely competent and even talented photographer; it was just rather a mystery to everyone who met him why he bothered to work at all.

  His father owned a country pile the size of Buck House somewhere down near Brighton and several other homes organised alphabetically around the world – Antigua, Bali, Cannes, the Dordogne, Evian, and a little ten-bedroomed ski-lodge in Gstaad. His parents were Lord and Lady someone or other, or Earl and whatever an Earl’s missus is called. Toff lived in one wing of a sprawling mansion with spectacular views over the Heath, the rest of which was occupied by a pop star Adam had never heard of and a celebrity chef whom he had. Toff’s lifestyle clearly hadn’t been funded by his salary from the Hampstead Observer – and quite how he came to be chief snapper on a local rag is anyone’s guess. He was infinitely more suited to doing portraits of Iman with tyre-marks over her bottom. Toff wasn’t so much struggling to get to the top, rather the top was sitting there waiting to welcome him with open arms when he deigned to arrive.

  Still, he was a great bloke despite driving a Morgan and sounding like he’d been in Gosford Park. A valued member of the drinking brethren, he usually turned up at the local a couple of evenings a week. The other nights he spent with a harem of different women only linked by a common tendency to names like Felicity and Charlotte and Samantha and the need to start every sentence with ‘Yah’. The only other trait that ran through his choice of women was their ability to cope with his total lack of commitment to anything and their unadulterated non-accusatory delight when he saw fit to spend time with them. It was a highly commendable one in Adam’s view and he wondered why, after even a few paltry dates, he always got the feeling that women were waving their engagement fingers in his direction. It wasn’t that he was a great catch, being on the far side of thirty, permanently penniless and an embittered divorce with a nearly teenage ankle-biter in tow. Not your typical qualifications for a dreamboat.

  Toff arrived and pushed his way through the crowd of hardened late-evening drinkers to join them at their table.

  ‘Hi, Toff,’ Adam said. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Pretty damn fab, old boy.’ Toff pulled up a chair and lowered himself into it, brushing his ever-flopping fringe from his eyes. Toff had typically aristocratic hair – strawberry blond and with a mass of cur
ls on top that mothers and women with maternal tendencies just adored. He always wore linen suits with absolutely the right number of crumples. His father’s tailor probably put them in especially.

  Chris stood up. ‘It’s my round. What do you want, mate?’

  Adam jiggled his glass. ‘Same again.’

  ‘Campari and soda, sweetheart.’

  Toff could also drink girls’ drinks and get away with it. Just about. While Chris ambled over to the bar, Toff nicked one of his Scampi Fries.

  ‘You’re looking a bit glum for a Tuesday evening, old bean,’ he remarked to Adam.

  ‘Less of the “old”.’

  ‘Lacking the love of a good woman?’

  ‘I’m off women,’ Adam said sourly.

  ‘I’ve known you for five years, maybe more, and you’ve always been off women.’ Toff eyed Adam wryly. ‘Are you sure they aren’t off you?’

  ‘I was just thinking about life, Toff.’

  ‘Ooo. Scary subject.’

  ‘I want to do something with it.’ Adam rubbed his toe over some long-dried chewing gum on the floor. ‘I don’t want to spend the rest of my days photographing school harvest festivals, church fêtes and bouncing baby competitions.’

  ‘Come and join me,’ Toff offered. He grinned a louche aristocratic grin. ‘Different sort of bouncing babies.’

  Chris came back with the drinks and plonked them on the table. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘You’re not a photographer.’

  ‘So. How hard can it be?’ he said, voicing the typical antipathy that existed between reporters and photographers when it came to appreciating each other’s respective talents.

  Adam and Toff exchanged a glance.

  ‘Chris is in love with a cyberbabe.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with that?’ Chris looked affronted. ‘I’ve forwarded that celestial image to several of my deserving friends and not one of them came back with the riposte “not bad”.’ He turned Bambi eyes on his friend. ‘Gissa job, Toff.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please,’ Chris begged.

  ‘We’re talking about Adam,’ Toff reminded him. ‘He’s tired of life.’

  ‘He’s always tired of life,’ Chris whined. ‘Even when Manchester United win, he can barely raise a titter.’

  ‘That is because he has a burdened soul.’

  ‘That’s because his ex-missus is emptying his wallet. Again.’

  ‘I want to make a difference,’ Adam said thoughtfully, savouring a sip of his pint. ‘I want to get out into the big, wide world. Do you know, until the paper sent me to Bosnia, I’d never been further than Ibiza? I want to go back there. Or to Kosovo.’

  ‘I would treat someone who wanted to ship me out to a war zone with the utmost suspicion,’ Chris concluded.

  It had been a turning point in Adam’s life when he’d been sent out to Bosnia by the Hampstead Observer at the beginning of December. His brief was to do a feature spread of photographs showing how local boys who were in the Armed Forces spent their Christmas. Adam had seen it as a jolly. He’d entered into the festive spirit totally and taken two Santa hats, a foot-high, battery-operated, fibre-optic Christmas tree and some garish scarlet tinsel with him.

  After seven hours’ bouncing around in a basic Army issue plane, with no in-flight entertainment other than how to keep warm, he and the reporter, a crusty, seen-it-all-before hack called Andrew, had been dumped in a pile of rubble that used to be a town, given flak-jackets and hard tin hats, a crash course in how to avoid land mines and had been sent on their way with two heavily armed guards to take cheery pictures and report cheery thoughts.

  When they’d reached their eventual destination, the village was so bombed out that there was nothing left worth exploding. Adam had taken ridiculous posed pictures of the boys who called themselves soldiers sporting Santa hats, blood-red tinsel draped poignantly round the barrels of their guns, the tiny Christmas tree twinkling in the background for all its worth. They’d left them huddled against the cold behind damp sandbags valiantly defending a few ragged houses and a few ragged people.

  Two little girls, barely Josh’s age, dressed in threadbare clothing and paper-thin shoes, had laughed as only carefree children can do as they bombarded Adam and the reporter with snowballs. It was the single uplifting moment of the entire trip. He and Andrew had left their thick, fleecy man-sized gloves behind to warm the children’s tiny, red-raw hands, and sometimes, in the wee small hours, he wondered whether they were still alive.

  When they returned home Adam had sat in the fugged-up warmth of the Starbucks coffee bar in Hampstead High Street and marvelled at the British ability to moan about every single aspect of their cosy little Christmas and their self-inflicted, obsessive commercialism. He could hardly bear to listen to the indulgent mothers laden with bursting carrier bags reeling off all the needless toys they were bestowing on their spoiled brats, complaining about all the retail excesses they still had to endure. Life is tough. I don’t think so.

  After twenty long years as a journalist, Andrew had resigned from the Hampstead Observer, waved his comfortable company pension goodbye and gone off to work for the Voluntary Services Overseas building mud huts in Namibia. Adam had lacked the same courage and commitment to walk away from it all, but an unidentified restlessness had stayed in his heart ever since.

  ‘Bosnia. Bollocks,’ Chris said succinctly, breaking Adam’s train of thought. ‘Why would you want to spend your days getting your arse shot at?’

  Adam scowled. ‘I want to experience the difficulties of living in conflict.’

  ‘I thought you’d have had enough of that with Laura.’

  ‘We have it so cushy, mate.’ Adam tried to explain. ‘You’ve no idea. I want to do something to help these people. I want to know what they feel like. I want to make a contribution to improving their lives.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of entering Miss World?’ Chris put on a girly voice. ‘“My ambitions are to meet people and help animals, cure cancer, reverse global warming and create world peace.”’

  ‘Don’t you want to be remembered for something, Chris?’

  ‘Being a great shag.’ He grinned widely.

  ‘Be serious.’

  Chris looked hurt. ‘I am.’

  ‘Has it ever occurred to you that you might be considered very shallow?’

  Chris put his beer down as a barricade. ‘Compared to what?’

  Adam huffed wearily. ‘Don’t you want to make a difference?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It sounds too much like hard work.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’d be great. Challenging. I’m talking about life-changing stuff.’

  ‘So why haven’t you done it?’

  Adam sagged. ‘It sounds too much like hard work.’

  Chris grinned smugly. ‘I rest my case.’

  ‘You have also one other small matter to consider.’ Toff looked at Adam sagely. ‘What about Josh?’

  ‘You don’t need to remind me.’ Adam shook his head. It was something that always brought his lofty ideals down to earth. He had fought long and hard to stay involved in Josh’s life – and not just financially. If it meant sacrificing his own ideals he would have to do it. Josh was growing up fast and his father wanted to be around while he did so, and if that required him to spend his days snapping prize-winning vegetables, toddler groups and the tennis club trophy dinner then he would do so. There was no point going halfway across the world to help deserving causes while neglecting your own offspring. He was just going to have to knuckle down and make the most of it.

  ‘So are you going to give me a job, Toff?’ Chris interjected.

  ‘No.’ Toff swirled his Campari. ‘But if you’re very good, you can come and watch sometimes.’

  Appeased, Chris rubbed his hands together in glee. ‘Great!’

  Chapter Six

  Declan could charm the birds out of the trees. He had looked at investors in the
same way and found he could also charm individuals out of large sums of money with nothing more to offer than a wing and a prayer – and, of course, the possibility of becoming ridiculously wealthy at some time in the future. At the moment, that time was looking further and further away. And there was another thing about investors – they were rather more demanding than birds once you had got them out of the trees.

  It was a skill he had cultivated over many a year. Charm. Or perhaps it was part of his Irish inheritance. That and a good sprinkling of the old blarney. At the moment, though, words seemed to be failing him. Declan was sitting in front of a whirring computer, hands over his eyes. It was late and everyone else had gone from the offices except him and Alan, the nerdy computer programmer who’d helped him to launch his business in its fledgling stage.

  He’d been in the right place at the right time. Everyone had wanted to invest in dot.coms. Was it his fault that the floaty, fragile bubble had quite spectacularly burst? No it wasn’t. Every day, the newspapers were full of doom and gloom stories of yet another trendy young website gone to the wall. There was no way his failure was going to grace the business pages. But if that wasn’t to be the case, he’d have to do something pretty nifty and pretty fast.

  He risked a look at the screen again. Emily smiled back at him, cheeks full and rounded – not the ones on her face. He could hardly bring himself to do this, but unless he wanted to retain his manhood, which Emily had threatened to part him with, he had to ditch the Saucy Santa images pronto. It was a desperate situation and one that he hadn’t really foreseen. Emily was the least computer literate person he knew, and she’d probably never have found out – as was the plan – until he’d foolishly printed a copy out.

  Declan chewed his lip. This had been a very sound business decision, if not the best choice for improving domestic harmony. But then domestic harmony wasn’t really his top priority at the moment. Hanging on by the tips of his fingers, still hoping to cash in on the Internet explosion was. There was bound to be a turnaround soon and he wanted to be there at the front of the race when it happened. And in order to do so, he’d set up three surefire, money-spinning winners – except that they were turning out to be backfiring, money-munching losers. In the face of mounting bills and rising pressure from investors, he had been forced to take drastic action. And he could think of nothing more drastic than starting up a soft porn site starring his unwitting girlfriend in private bedroom shenanigans.