Bron-44

Continued from Chapter 44: Bron-43 | ABCtales

 

Bron had just settled down with a month-old copy of Company, feet tucked underneath her legs in the round Papasan chair when she heard the key in the door of the flat in Acton. Grace was supposed to be at a comedy night at the Lesbian Club. She looked up: “Grace? You OK? Look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“Well, I’ve certainly seen something.” She was pale, trembling slightly. Bron was on her feet, immediately. “What’s happened? Something bad?”

“I’ve found out why that bastard Geoff was so happy to lend us his flat in Bayswater.”

“Oh God. Tell me!”

“I was in an adult bookshop in Eversholt Street, next to Euston station …”

“What the fuck were you doing THERE? Buying another dildo for your disgusting strip act, I expect … you’ve worn the old one out, haven’t you shoving it up…”

“Well, yes, sort of. But that’s besides the point. They had a film playing on a screen inside the shop…”

“What film?”

“This film.” Grace reached into her shoulder bag and produced a video cassette, which she let clatter onto the pinewood table. “The Temptress of Africa. What happens when Princess Abokimbo seduces innocent virgin Blodwyn Price, fresh from the valleys of Wales. 93½ minutes of uncensored lesbian action…”

“What about it? That’s not us - that’s a black lady in the picture. I mean, she’s got the same hair, but that’s not you…”

“Yes. But the film. It’s us! We’re in it! We are it!”

“WHAT? You sure?”

“Yes. I saw it in the shop. It was playing on continuous loop!”

“But how come? I mean, we never saw Geoff the whole time we were there, he couldn’t have filmed us…”

“Remember the spy shop? He’d put hidden cameras all over the flat. Filming our every move! BASTARD!”

“All those coke cans – the ones that were stuck down all over the place, that we couldn’t shift. You said you thought they might be an art installation.”

“Art installation my arse. Got the address book? I’m calling the cunt now …”

Grace fumbled with the dial, putting the apparatus on speakerphone. “Is that Geoff? It’s Grace. And Bron.”

“Oh, hi girls. I was meaning to get in touch. Everything OK with the flat, was it? Hope you enjoyed yourselves…”

“Not as much as you clearly did, Geoff Adams. And not half as much as the filthy old pervs that watch Temptress of Africa…” There was a clatter from the other end of the line; Geoff had dropped the receiver. “Fuck! How did you find out?” a strangulated whisper.

“Never you mind, Geoff. Find out I did – and you’re going to pay for this, you BASTARD!”

“Well, I can explain …”

“Oh I’m sure you can. But we already know what the explanation is. Me and Bron, we’re going to watch this disgusting piece of pervery, just the once. And then we’ll ring you back. We’ll tell you what action we’ll be taking. Get that?”

“Oh, yes,” breathed Geoff. “You’ll call … later.”

“Before you go Geoff. Who’s that on the cover? That’s not me.”

“Oh! Oh, that’s Rita. She comes round with the refreshment trolley at Gimball & Son.”

“So I’m not even good enough to front up my own porn movie, am I? You had to get the tea lady to do it instead?”

“It was just, I thought, a bit of black-on-white action might be a bit more … more marketable.”

“Fuck YOU, Geoff Adams! We’re going to have you for this!”

Grace slammed the phone down. “OK, let’s watch this piece of shit. Get the video going.”

 

The opening credits, over the Number Two dock gate at Tilbury, grey, foggy and moody: Rita Watson: Princess Abokimbo; Producer: Geoff Adams. Blodwyn Price: Suzanne Adams…

“Can’t even get a credit in my own fuckin’ porn movie,” said Bron.

The camera cut to Princess Abokimbo, marching along the Dock Road in the mist and murk, suitcase in hand, the tails of her long dark blue raincoat flapping against her long white-trousered legs, her afro just starting to glisten with raindrops. An overhead shot; Geoff must have found a handy tower-block, or maybe a floodlight mast. It couldn’t be denied, he was a superb cameraman; Princess Abokimbo went striding along the road, her tall form slowly blending with the rain and mist at the end of the arrow-straight road enclosed by tall, dark concrete walls.

There was a slight stutter in the film; this was where Rita had stubbed her toe against an uneven paving stone and nearly fallen over. By now wet through, she’d refused absolutely to retake the scene again so Geoff had simply cut the offending clip out. The target audience of Temptress of Africa weren’t likely to complain about cinematic niceties.

“Can’t be much of a princess if she's walking from Tilbury to London,” said Bron. “Must be twenty miles.”

“Perhaps she couldn’t find anywhere to change a traveller’s cheque in Tilbury.”

“Yeah. That would figure.”

“Do people even still come to London by boat?”

“Search me. Doubt it."

 

Now, Princess Abokimbo was ringing a doorbell, one of several ranged one above each other, typical of London’s bedsit-land. “I have come about the room,” she said to someone, when the door was opened, hidden deep inside the interior of the hallway.

That scene had needed several takes. Rita’s Dagenham argot had been difficult to coax into even the merest approximation of a ‘Congo’ accent. Geoff had decided to keep Princess Abokimbo’s speech to the bare minimum for the plot, such as it was.

“OK, come in.” A shrill, singsong. Geoff’s sister, also coached, into an approximation of a Welsh accent.

 

Now Princess Abokimbo was ensconced in an armchair. “In my country, the land of the Lake Congo, I am princess. You will kneel before me.”

“Blimey! She’s made herself at home!” said Grace. “Only been in the place five minutes.”

“Not even paid her deposit yet.”

The film cut to two figures, bathed in a greeny white light. A tall woman, with an afro, standing back to the camera. A smaller woman, hair in a black bob, on her knees at her feet, half obscured by the standing woman. Bron and Grace immediately recognised the scene from several weeks ago. Petouche had puked on Geoff’s dark red Moroccan rug; Bron was frantically trying to scrub off the vomit, watched anxiously by Grace. They thought they’d done a good job, hiding the evidence, but it was all for nothing. Geoff’s hidden cameras had observed it all.

 

In its way, the film was masterly. Princess Abokimbo would be framed, making various commands – all brief and to the point, to limit the potential damage from Rita’s East End vowels – followed by a cutaway to a few of Geoff’s 93½ minutes of Lesbian Action in its eerie green glow. No viewer would suspect that Princess Abokimbo and the woman in the green scene were different people.

True, the sex scenes didn’t quite live up to the promise, but then the viewers of this kind of film were used to perpetual disappointment. Geoff could only work with the raw material at his disposal and if that included Bron sighing and turning over and reading her magazine in response to Grace’s whispered entreaties, so be it.

Bron’s standard response to Grace’s caresses and other romantic approaches was generally ‘OK, let’s fuck then,’ when it wasn’t: ‘Nar, not tonight. I’m plonkered’, neither of which had made it into the final cut, of course. A lot of the ‘lesbian action’ was fuzzy, inconclusive. A bit of fumbling under the duvet, then the creak of the bedsprings as Grace or Bron turned over and lay on their banks, panting slightly with the exertion.

At one point, viewers were treated to a close-up of Petouche’s rear end, when she’d leapt up onto the shelf and brushed against one of Geoff’s coke-can cameras. He’d decided, on reflection, to leave that in; a bit of mystery to titillate the viewers. Arguably it was the most erotic scene in the entire film.

 

“Well?” said Grace, clicking the machine off. She was calmer now. Bron, though, was trembling, quivering. “I told my Mam, I told everyone, that the film I was in wasn’t porno – but now I am in one!” she wailed. “The whole of bloody Anglesey will be talking about it!”

“I’ve been thinking. We could take Geoff to court. This is solid evidence. He’s invaded our most intimate moments, without our consent. He’d do time, for sure.”

“Yeah, they give perves like him a hard time, don’t they? Double punishment.”

“But do we really want that? You said, yourself, you don’t want the family knowing. If there’s a court case, the papers pick up on it – we’ll be all over the Sun, News of the World, you name it. This story’d be like rocket fuel for them …”

“Yeah, that’s true. Oh GOD! What are we going to DO?”

“This is my idea. We might not actually want to go to court, but Geoff doesn’t KNOW that. He’ll be bricking himself ."

"Yeah – he wasn’t counting on us finding out."

"How about, we just threaten to put the law on him, and then, in return for keeping schtum, demand a cut from the takings? Like, pretty much ALL his takings. If he thinks he’s facing the prospect of six months on the Nonce’s wing at the Scrubs, he’s not going to say ‘no’, is he?”

“How much are we going to ask for?”

“Well, been thinking about that too. The guy in the Eversholt Street shop was helpful; when he saw how upset I was, he gave me this copy for free. I quizzed him; he told me that a video like this will have cost around a couple of quid a copy to make … give or take. It’s selling for fifteen in the shop. He reckons that Geoff is making about a fiver a copy, after the shop’s taken its cut and all the overheads. And he said that a small-time producer like Geoff would probably make a batch of a thousand copies.”

“So five pounds times a thousand – five grand.”

“Yeah, about that. I suppose, we can’t ask for it all at once - cashflow and all that. But we could demand instalments. The shop guy reckons that, across all of London, he’ll be shifting around a hundred copies a week. So five hundred quid a week? For the next six months? Maybe four hundred and fifty, to be reasonable.”

“Yeah. We’re reasonable people. But what if other people see it? It’ll still get out that we’ve been in a pervy porn movie…”

“The quality of the sex scenes is pretty crappy; you can’t really see who it is. And it’s not our pic on the cover – it’s this Rita woman. And we’re neither of us named in the credits. I reckon, we’re pretty safe on that score.”

“Does mean that we’re conniving in all this pervy stuff …”

“Yeah, we are. Got a better idea?”

“No. Let’s do it.”

To be continued in Chapter 45: Bron-45 | ABCtales