Snake Beach

by Glass, Lisa

  Han put his towel over my shoulders and took my hands in his to warm them up.

  When I could speak, I turned to him:

  ‘Just tell me one thing: do you want to be with me?’

  ‘Yeah. Course. Come on, Jen. It’s me and you. It’s always been me and you. Things are tricky. It’s been a whacked out summer.’ Han brought my hands up to his face and he kissed my fingers very gently. I didn’t care. Not even when he looked up at me with those piercing eyes of his.

  ‘How do you know that girl Vega?’

  ‘You said one thing.’

  ‘Han, it shouldn’t be this hard.’

  ‘I’ve known her a while, okay. She’s just . . . a friend of the family.’

  ‘But you like her?’

  ‘Not like that, no. I like you.’

  I shook my head and kept on walking.

  ‘Jenny,’ he called. ‘Aren’t you going to take your board?’

  ‘Sod it,’ I said. ‘And sod you too.’

  Chapter 14Mr Hitchcock had a doctor’s appointment about his dodgy foot, so I said I’d walk Lizzie, who still hadn’t given birth to her pups and was looking humungous.

  Right in my face in the middle of the dunes, in the sheltered green bowl where me and Mr Hitchcock used to play pitch and putt, I saw Han’s granny in a swarm of models. They were in soaking wet bubblegum pink leotards and I wondered if they’d been made to jump in the sea or something, to toughen them up. Mrs Schwab was perfectly dry in white. With her blue-grey hair tied back in a bun and the cut on her face scabbing over, she looked about three hundred.

  ‘One stands as if an invisible thread is coming out of the top of one’s head. Shoulders back, head high. You are six feet tall, you say? Then imagine you are seven feet tall.’

  She looked positively minute in the middle of those pink giraffes.

  I was just turning away when Lizzie went waddling off towards them, and jumped up with her muddy paws on Mrs Schwab’s white leotard.

  ‘CUT!’ somebody yelled. And ‘Get that dog OUT of here.’

  I raced after her.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t mean any harm; she’s just a bit hyper. She’s pregnant. It’s made her go a bit doolally.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Jenny Grand, I am losing patience with you. These people caused me to miss my WI meeting last night and they have had me here since the crack of dawn and you have just ruined a perfect scene. What do you intend to do about that?’

  ‘Getting paid, ain’t you?’

  ‘That’s a famous ballerina you’re talking to,’ said one of the models. ‘Have a bit of respect.’

  ‘My fee, every penny of it, is going to the Church Repair Fund,’ Mrs Schwab said to me, glaring.

  ‘See, some people do nice things’

  ‘Oh shut up, ginge,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not naturally ginger, you peasant. The show made me dye my hair this colour, so I look more striking. Anyway, I’m glad.’

  ‘Course you are.’

  ‘Edith still hasn’t turned up and if she was abducted by a psychopath then I’ll be fine because they always go for blondes.’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘Ted Bundy went for brunettes with their hair parted in the middle.’ I had learned this from watching Criminal Minds on the telly.

  ‘Well, yeah, but no serial killer ever targeted redheads, did he, hmmm?’

  ‘You’re weird,’ I said and turned back to Han’s granny.

  ‘So what do you intend to do to make recompense, Miss Grand?’

  ‘What do you want me to do? I haven’t got a time machine, have I?’

  A man’s voice said:

  ‘Get that mongrel out of here.’

  ‘She’s not a mongrel – she’s a border collie!’

  ‘Well, it looks like a mutt.’

  Mrs Schwab brushed herself off very daintily.

  ‘Perhaps Miss Grand can be on tea-making duty for the afternoon? To make up for her transgressions.’

  I wondered why Han’s gran was so keen to have me under her nose, since she didn’t like me. I supposed though that if I was with her then at least she knew I wasn’t with Han.

  ‘Least she can do,’ said a gigantically tall model with a sneer across her face.

  ‘Wait a minute. I don’t have to make up for anything. Dogs belong in these dunes more than models or pensioner ballerinas do. If anyone shouldn’t be here, it’s you lot.’

  A cool young assistant with a lot of silver bars in her eyebrow strolled over and gave me a big smile.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to volunteer? Bit of work experience to go on your CV? The dog can go in the tent over there. Or have you got something better to do today?’

  I didn’t know what to say. Course I didn’t want to volunteer to do work for nothing. Who did, really?

  On the other hand I didn’t particularly want to go home and wait by the phone either.

  I made their cups of tea and listened to the hairdressers and make-up artists slagging off the contestants. This one had a facial hair problem, this one only ate tinned peas, this one had scars all across her legs from God knew what, and this other one had put on half a stone in the past week

  I listened and watched everything. I was learning too. For instance, I learnt that hairdressers used so much hairspray on the models that their heads itched like they had nits and the make-up artists put make-up not just on the faces, but on the bodies of the girls, including on the bums and legs, so you wouldn’t see any veins or blotches.

  I learned that photographers set up special lighting that made the girls look a hundred times better than they did naturally. I learned that hairpieces and false eyelashes were normal and that short of missing arms or legs, a good photographer could conceal any kind of flaw, including lazy eyes and pregnancy stretchmarks.

  And then they got to Vega.

  ‘She’s all fake, well apart from the boobs which could do with some implants. Fake hair, lip implants, coloured contact lenses. I don’t know why the judges let her get away with it.’

  ‘It’s cause she’s so good in front of the camera. She’s a natural.’

  ‘A natural liar.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘Oh yeah. She knows things she’s not supposed to know. And then denies it all if you ask her about it.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well – ‘

  At that moment, my eavesdropping was interrupted by somebody calling me.

  ‘You. Local girl. Your dog is dropping puppies all over the place.’

  ‘Serious? Christ. What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Vet might be a good idea.’

  Mr Hitchcock wasn’t answering his phone, so I got the number from directory enquiries and phoned Mr Simmons the vet, who just advised me to wait with Lizzie and monitor her progress until Mr Hitchcock arrived. So I sat with her in the tent and did my best to warm up the puppies as they came out. Seven of them, pink as new mice. The last one didn’t breathe for ages. I picked it up and held it close until it started to move. I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl but it was half the size of the rest. I kissed its shut eyes and hoped it would make it.

  By the time Mr Hitchcock turned up and got them all back to his house in some shoeboxes he swiped off the show, it was already getting dark. I was shattered and the muscles in my arms were still aching from the night before.

  As much as I wanted to go home and drop into my bed, I couldn’t. After the shoot I was asked to stay late to help prepare the set for the next day’s challenge, which did at least give me the perfect chance to snoop and see if I could dig up any dirt on Vega. The only thing I found was a blue form, on which someone had written:

  Vega transforms in front of the camera. She is whatever you need her t
o be. Whore, Madonna, Child. Her face can cover the whole spectrum. Today’s photographer loved her and said she was a true chameleon. Plus, with her boyish figure, high cheekbones and slightly crooked nose, she is totally cutting edge. She will excel at catwalk and print editorials. If she keeps her nerve up and her weight down she is a definite contender for the Final Three.

  I shook my head and watched some of the contestants pouring themselves into taxis. They had put on their tartiest glad rags, and said they were going into town to get drunk in the new cocktail bar on the corner. The loudest said they were going clubbing in Newquay. The blokes there wouldn’t know what hit them. They had a reputation for being dope-head surfers or drunken stag-nighters, but even the most obnoxious drunkard wouldn’t get the better of these mouthy girls. Beauty had given them what my dad would call An Innate Belief in their Own Superiority. Better that than being doormats, I supposed.

  I phoned my mum and told her I’d be late. The darkness came in as the blaze of a stunning sunset faded over the sea. The radio was on in the camp and someone was discussing the gatherings of basking sharks that were being spotted up and down our coasts. Tell me about it, I thought. People was being told to stay out of the water. Not for their own sakes, but for the sakes of the sharks. Other runners and assistants moseyed around packing up from the day’s filming and they had worried looks on their faces. Maybe they’d also sensed that something big was going down in our town that summer. Perhaps they had instincts that told them they should make a run for it, hop on the nearest train and not look back. Course nobody did because instincts don’t pay the credit card bill.

  I was just about to walk the long route home along the floodlit paths when a black stretch limousine pulled up and out of it emerged a woman who put all the contestants in the shade.

  I knew her from the newspapers and from the clips of the show I had watched on YouTube. On this day of all days she had finally chosen to make her entrance at the bootcamp. I stayed in the shadows and watched her from a distance. Brown and gold wavy hair to the waist, turquoise eyes, broad shoulders and no hips whatsoever. Nathan would have said she looked like a mermaid straight out of a storybook, barring the fishtail. I was just glad Han wasn’t there to see her.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I breathed to myself. ‘Morgana.’

  Morgana Spence was the Host of Britain’s Next Catwalk Queen. If you’d believe that powerful beings roam the earth in human bodies, you’d have believed it of her. Seemed to me that she wore her power like a cape that fanned out all around her. When she gestured for an assistant to remove her baggage from the boot of the car, she had the most slender pretty hand, and yet I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it crush a man’s throat.

  Her voice, when she spoke to her driver to tell him off for a slow journey, was shrill and irritating. I watched her walk along the path to the barracks and disappear inside. Behind me I heard the grind of shoes on sand and saw the figure of a boy melt behind a dune. It was eerie to think that while I was watching Morgana someone had been watching me. Nathan.

  I walked home as quickly as I could. When I rounded the corner and got a view of Sunny Daze I saw that someone had returned my dad’s surfboard and left it leaning against my bedroom window. I wondered if Han was feeling guilty and I really hoped he was.

  My thoughts before I fell asleep were of those models in their sea-soaked leotards. Remembering how cold and wet those girls had been made my own bed feel even warmer. That night, I dreamed again of dead blackbirds falling from a cherry tree.

  Chapter 15First thing in the morning, I set out again for the Model Bootcamp. I was still going to volunteer to help them, but I’d set my sights higher. Since things were so tough for everybody, I was going to ask them to pay me. I’d done bits of cleaning and a paper round before, but this would be my first proper job. I packed up my rucksack and called to my mum:

  ‘I’m off out.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Earning a living,’ I shouted and added under my breath ‘somebody’s got to.’ She was outside pegging up the washing and she came in carrying the still-full basket of wet clothes.

  ‘What’s that, Jenny Bean?’

  ‘I said I’m going out. I’m getting myself a part-time job to pay my way. The money will come in handy.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I already told you twice.’

  ‘I couldn’t hear, could I? It’s no good shouting things I can’t hear and then saying that you’ve told me something. Now tell me properly.’

  She set the washing basket on the coffee table and sat down on the settee. It was bizarre to see her taking such an interest in my business. She normally didn’t much notice of my comings and goings.

  ‘You know the models,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you know they’re out there in the dunes doing the model bootcamp?’

  ‘Well, durr, we watched them come in on the coach before the plane crash, didn’t we? Terribly thin they was all looking too. The sea wind will blow ‘em away if they ain’t careful.’

  She shook her head and some of the pink went out of her face, which made me think that she was genuinely worried about those girls, rather than just spouting her normal rubbish.

  ‘Well, anyway, I’m going to volunteer at the camp. It’s all over town that they need assistants. I did a bit yesterday. Runners. Tea girls. People to fetch and carry and do all the stuff that none of their own people can be bothered with. So I’m going to be one of them. If they’ll have me, that is.’

  ‘They might not want to pay you, Jen. They’ll probably have you on work experience. They don’t need to pay you for that, do they?’

  ‘They’ll pay.’

  The truth was that I didn’t know they would, but I wasn’t going to let on about that to my mum. I’d just have to find a way.

  ‘I’ll turn on the charm. Or find something really horrible to do that everyone else dreads doing, and they’ll be only too happy to pay me to do it. Emptying out chemical toilets or something. Don’t worry. I’m not going to waste my time with voluntary work. I’m not a mug, am I? I’m going to ask for twenty pound cash-in-the-hand a day. I reckon that’s fair.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky. Oh well, we’ll see. Careful as you go, this town has had bad luck raining down on it like pollen lately. And watch where you step in them dunes. Overrun they are. Never mind Luke Gilbert and his worries. Seem to be more bloody snakes than ever. Only takes a bit of sunshine and they all come out.’

  ‘I stamp so they can hear me coming. I’ll be fine. Like I always am.’

  ‘Make sure you are. Love you, Jenny,’ and she kissed me on the head, which felt surprisingly nice, as she wasn’t all covered in gloopy lipstick like she normally was. I put a tiny lucky clamshell in my pocket and set off. I hadn’t walked two minutes when I caught up with Nathan on the path to the site shop.

  ‘How’s Sammy?’ I said.

  ‘He’ll live.’

  ‘I didn’t know what we’d find over at the church. I wouldn’t have took him if I did.’

  Nathan fiddled with his glasses, which had fallen down to the end of his nose.

  ‘I saw you watching that Morgana person last night,’ I said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I said I’d go over there again today. I’m volunteering. Wanna come with me?’

  ‘Not bothered.’

  ‘Well, what else have you got planned for today?’

  ‘Alright then.’

  We walked past a tow truck pulling the models’ gaudy pink coach away down the road and into town. Must have broken down or something, I thought, wondering who on earth in the town would want to be seen fixing something so hideous. We cut across the dunes, scattering rabbits and setting the crows off. It was empty. Like the mountains of the moon. We scrabbled up the side of the highest sand dune, me sliding backwards in my old flip-fl
ops, Nathan leading the way. His long stride left me behind and he was sitting cross-legged with his eyes glued to his binoculars when I reached the top.

  ‘Took you long enough,’ he said.

  ‘You try getting up in these. Stupid things.’

  ‘You missed them doing star jumps.’

  ‘You perving?’ I said. Nathan was normally only gross like that when he was out with his male friends.

  He shrugged as if to say ‘Yeah. So what?’

  ‘Well, keep on dreaming. They are way out of your league. Way, way out of your league.’

  ‘Maybe now but not in a couple years.’

  ‘In two years you’ll be sixteen.’

  ‘Which is a grown man in most of the world.’

  ‘Maybe in Lilliput.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Don’t you read anything except grot mags?’

  ‘Who says I read grot mags?’

  ‘They’re all over your room.’

  ‘They’re Sammy’s.’

  I let it go but I knew he was lying. The boys I knew always lied and expected you not to call them on it.

  We walked through the heat haze towards the shanty town of tents. Nathan let me borrow his binoculars and I put them to my eyes as we walked. I focused in on the tall, skinny figures trying to get through the long assault course. Back along, me and Nathan had sometimes gone there but it was full of cobwebs and spiders, and there’s nothing worse than accidentally getting a face full of cobweb with a big spider sat in the middle of it. Takes the fun right out of things.

  I looked over all the girls and I thought I could make out Vega. Her hair was tied in a bun on the top of her head and she was wearing green fatigues. She was behind but she ran like the wind and I could see her gaining on the other girls.

  ‘What do you think of her with the black hair?’ I asked Nathan.

  ‘She’s alright.’

  ‘In what way? Do you like her?’

  ‘She’s alright.’

  ‘So you don’t fancy her or anything then?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘No boobs. Pretty though. Why, what do you think of her? Hate her for being so good-looking probably.’