The Midnight Hour by Neil Davies Page B

after a moment’s hesitation, Karen joined her. It was good to laugh. It seemed a long time since she’d had reason.
    Raised voices from across the street caught her attention, heard even above the constant droning of traffic and passers-by. She liked sitting at the pavement cafes in the city, liked the closeness of the noise, the people, the smells of city life. It appealed to the artist in her. She liked to cultivate that side of her nature, encourage it, especially since Steven. He had tried to stifle her creativity, crush it. What his Wall Street mind couldn’t understand, it tried to kill.
    Maybe finding him in bed with my best friend, my ex-best friend, was really the best thing that could have happened!
    “Sounds like somebody got a bad hotdog.” Jackie had stood up and was peering out across the traffic towards the argument.
    Karen grabbed her camera.
    “Back in a minute.”
    She pushed through the crowds of shoppers and weaved through the gridlocked traffic, raising her camera to her eye as she went, clicking and clicking and clicking . The angry faces. The jabbing fingers. Open mouths spraying spittle and accusation. A part-eaten hotdog thrown back at the vendor. A pair of tongs waved menacingly in the air. This was fantastic. This was drama. This was art!
     
    The pictures were disappointing.
    She watched them develop, feeling an emptiness in her stomach. It was almost a sixth sense with her, knowing when a picture was going to be bad.
    “Wish I could tell before I took the things and wasted film.”
    She clipped the latest alongside the others, hanging in her darkroom. She could feel the arguing men in the pictures looking at her, accusing her. We set up the opportunity , they seemed to say, and you blew it .
    “They were taken quickly. There were lots of other people in the way.”
    Excuses. A real professional would have got at least one good shot.
    She hung her head, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. She knew that was the truth. As a professional she should have made it happen.
     
    She almost called Steven.
    As she sat on the edge of her bed, wearing nothing but panties and a T-shirt, she felt an almost overwhelming need for someone to hold. Someone to lie in bed with. Someone who could wrap her in their arms and hold her close.
    Steven had only ever held her as a precursor to sex. Every moment of tenderness or care or concern they had ever shared had been followed by sex, or at least by an attempt to persuade her to have sex.
    It was sex that prevented her calling him. She didn’t want sex with Steven, or with anyone. When she thought of sex, she thought of Steven and her ex-best friend. It was an image she didn’t think would ever leave her.
    She called no one.
    She crawled under the duvet alone, curled up, hugged her knees to her chest and sobbed until she fell asleep.
    The morning was cold.
    Through the thin curtains of her bedroom window she could see it was bright outside, and by midday, when the sun finally came round the building and shone through the window, it would start to warm up. But for now her apartment was cold.
    She peered sleepily at the clock on the bedside cabinet. 9:03am. Not that time was important. There was nothing she needed to do today. Nowhere to go. No meetings. No pitches. No shoots. No work!
    Being your own boss was great, until the work dried up.
    She thought bitterly about the photos from yesterday. Unless she got something better than that there wouldn’t be any more work.
    Getting out of bed on days like this was hard, but she managed it. She forced her legs out from under the warm duvet into the cold air. She shivered as she stood. She dressed quickly in those things closest to hand. Tracksuit bottoms. A heavy sweatshirt with ‘I Want You’ stitched across the front, a present from Steven. She pulled on white socks found on the bedroom floor, trying to ignore that they had been thrown there to go into the washing basket, and struggled into pale blue