‘Can you have her out here? She’s driving me mad upstairs,’ she said, dumping Sadie next to him. He gave his daughter a quick kiss and Mary smiled at the two of them, rubbing her belly. She was pregnant again, due in a month, but despite her size was dressed in the latest fashion to hit the streets, an outrageously short skirt called the mini, popularised by the designer du jour, Mary Quant. She went back upstairs and David carried on with his work, keen to get the final touches on the drawers. Sadie played happily next to him and he couldn’t resist picking up his notepad and charcoals and drawing some quick sketches of the child. As he was finishing them, Sadie toddled over and stared at the drawings.
‘Daddy, I brought it to you,’ she said, looking straight at him with an intensity that seemed from another world.
He took this as a sign – like something magical. He scooped her up and whispered in her ear. ‘Yes, my angel, you did bring it to me. You – only you brought it to me. You brought me my art, you brought me everything, because you are a gift from God sent from Heaven to save me,’ he said to her, suddenly possessed by the absolute conviction of his own talent. He picked up the chest of drawers and dragged it across the road to the bottom of the stone steps that led up to the front door of one of the posh houses. He lit the spliff and went up to the front door and rang the bell. The door was opened by an unshaven young man, good-looking, dressed in the latest fashion.
‘Yeah?’ said the man, looking him up and down.
‘Hey, man, I’m David, I live over the road.’ He stuck out his hand for his neighbour to shake. ‘I know who you are, man. You’re David Bailey, the photographer.’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘Well, I wondered if you wanted to buy this chest of drawers.’
Bailey looked past Vaughany and down at the drawer fronts, magnificently painted, but something else caught his eye. A grubby little child with a mop of black curls had appeared and was trying to climb on top of the chest. The child was wearing nothing but a pair of baggy red pants smeared with dirt and a string of beads round its neck. The little nose was covered in snot that was also smeared across her entire face and in places had become encrusted with the remnants of food.
‘Is that your little boy?’ said Bailey, smiling.
Vaughany smiled back and shook his head. ‘It’s mine, yeah, but it’s not a boy. That’s Sadie.’
‘Fuck me,’ said Bailey. ‘I seen her playin’ over there and always thought she was a boy.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Vaughany. ‘If you like the chest of drawers I’ll do you a deal if you take some photos of her.’
‘Done,’ Bailey said with a grin.
They shook hands on the deal and Dave Vaughan made his first sale – not to mention the fact that little Sadie Vaughan was about to be photographed by the man who would become one of the most famous photographers of all time. In the end, David Bailey didn’t actually take the chest of drawers from him but Dave was still bursting with pride to have agreed a sale to such a prominent man. He would soon make contact with Bailey’s circle of friends. Before long, his art and furniture were the must-have items among the cool London set, his work was being written about in trendy magazines and, to cap it all, he received a commission to paint Paul McCartney’s piano in his trademark motif, a haze of swirling psychedelia. He had money and a degree of success he could never have dreamed of. Soon he started selling his furniture in Lord John of Carnaby Street, the pinnacle of fashion, where they asked him to paint a huge mural above the shop window, an offer he gladly accepted. On the second day of the job Dave got a friend to help him and the two of them hung suspended in a painting cradle 30 feet above the street, lashing on colour and singing at the tops of their voices. Dave started to dance in time to the music coming from inside the shop, but something must have given because the cradle, dangling on ropes, dropped on one side and he slipped, and his mate Mick, a big, heavy bloke, fell on top of him as the whole cradle crashed down to the street below. People screamed and one of the sales staff ran out to help.
‘Fuck me, are you OK, man?’ said the shop assistant as he surveyed the wreckage. Dave was wedged in below Mick, who had squashed Dave’s head against the cradle, which had been the first thing to make impact with the ground.
‘Aaargh … fuck … uhh … fuck,’ said Dave, holding his head as someone pulled him upright.
‘We better get you to hospital, man,’ said the assistant and then called for an ambulance.
‘Fuck off,’ said Dave, ignoring the searing pain in his temples. He ran his hands over his head, and, apart from a couple of grazes and a pounding headache, he appeared to be intact. He had an aversion to hospitals and would rather chill out with a joint, so he sat and had a smoke as he waited for some of his mates to turn up and take him home. Unfortunately, his mates had another idea and took him to a party, where they dumped him in an armchair in the corner.
‘Drink that,’ said one of them, giving him a shot glass. After 15 minutes Dave was unable to move, his entire body splitting into millions of particles and floating out into space. His mates sat and laughed at him.
‘What’ve you fuckin’ done to me?’ Dave asked, holding on to the chair for his life.
‘LSD, man,’ said one of them. ‘We thought you needed a good trip.’
Dave would have got up and knocked them out but he couldn’t move. For two days and nights the nightmare continued and when he finally got home, Mary was hysterical with worry.
‘Where the fuck have you been? Lord John told me you’d had a fall and hurt your head,’ she shouted as he collapsed into bed, a shell of his former self. ‘I checked all the hospitals.’
‘I didn’t go to hospital.’
‘But what about your head?’
‘What about it? It’s bloody fine, woman.’
It wasn’t fine, though. After the bang to the head and the LSD, Dave fell into a slough of depression. Everywhere he went he saw the acid trip repeating itself. His happiness at his newfound success was replaced with aggression and paranoia. It was as if something had gone pop in his head. Work fell away and even the once-friendly David Bailey stopped inviting him in for a drink after he had started a fight with one of the photographer’s influential friends. Slowly, the work and the money dried up. All Dave had was his precious Sadie, and now he would just sit at home and brood.
‘Fuck you all. You’re all conspirators against me,’ he said to himself one day, grabbing a tin of red paint in one hand and scooping Sadie up with the other. He went off up Primrose Hill, to the iron bridge over the railway line that headed north. He didn’t care that it was late and that Sadie was dressed only in her pants. When he was with his little girl, everything was all right. While he painted the bridge red, with big, violent swipes of his brush, Sadie picked the pants out of her bum and toddled off to play in the dirt. He didn’t stop until the entire bridge was painted, and then lit up the spliff that was behind his ear, standing back to admire his handiwork. It was ten at night and he knew that he should have taken Sadie home to bed. He felt momentarily responsible before picking her up and taking her off again.
‘Fuck the lot of you,’ he said under his breath. ‘Fuck the world.’
He kissed Sadie’s dirty face and whispered in her ear, ‘You don’t have to do anything they want you to do. You don’t have to conform. You just gotta be what the fuck you want to be.’
A ‘black Maria’ crawled to a stop at the end of the road. The officers inside the police van appeared to be admiring his artistry and then the doors