by Glass, Lisa
‘No, I don’t. You know I’m not one of those girls. I think she’s going to win this programme and make herself famous.’
Then just like he always did when he was bored, he took off running really fast. I hoisted up my backpack and carried on walking. He reached the camp in record time and I saw him flitting from tent to tent, nosing to see what he could find, and probably wondering if there was anything worth nicking, like booze or smokes. When I reached the far edge of the camp, a male guard with long hair in a ponytail stopped me. Just my luck. Nathan got past fine.
‘What’s your business?’
‘Volunteering.’
‘You have an appointment?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Who with?’
‘Vega.’
‘The contestant?’
‘Yeah, I have her medicine,’ I lied, and added an extra one: ‘I’m her cousin. I’m going to do odd jobs around here.’
‘What medicine?’
I felt in my pocket and pulled out two bars of chocolate and some Extra Strong Mints.
‘She’s a diabetic. This stops her from going hyper.’ I wasn’t quite sure of the accuracy of this description, and he didn’t seem too convinced either. He looked me up and down, then probably thought I was too local to worry about, because he nodded me past.
I was thinking about how I could get to know Vega, when I felt something soft touch my toe. Down by the side of the path a line of black and yellow caterpillars was crawling towards the tents. They were as furry as tarantulas and they looked poisonous. There must have been nearly a hundred. I flicked it off my foot and watched it join the others and move quietly towards the camp. Yuck, I said out loud.
The assault course race was over and I couldn’t see any of the girls anywhere. I heard a noise to my left and Vega got up and stretched her legs. Covered in mud she was, but didn’t seem to care a bit. She yawned. It looked like she’d been having a nap in the sunshine not running her guts out.
‘Vile things aren’t they?’ she said in her posh voice, screwing up her face. ‘My tent was full of them. Clear ‘em out and another lot get in. Little buggers.’
‘What happened to climbing walls and swinging over puddles? Thought they’d make you do the obstacle course all day long. For the discipline.’
‘All done and finished. They get you up at like five o’clock here. Came in with the second best time, which isn’t bad. Where’s your friend? I saw you over there with a boy.’
‘Yeah, but I don’t know where he is now.’ My mouth went dry as I thought about him snooping through the girls’ tents. I stared at one of the bugs again.
‘Some kind of moth caterpillar, I think,’ she said. ‘My aunt would know the exact species. She adores butterflies. She has a wall of them with pins in their heads. It’s oddly beautiful.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, thinking it sounded anything but. Then I thought about my own mum who would hardly know the difference between a spider and a crane fly, let alone a moth and a butterfly. I also thought about what my dad had said to me the night before. About him maybe moving to Exeter to work on the dustcarts for thirty grand a year, if he couldn’t get a local job. Only coming home on the weekends. I hated myself for dwelling on that, because I knew it would just make me miserable but my mind kept going back to it, like my tongue at a mouth ulcer.
‘You know my friend Han,’ I said.
‘Do I?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Depends what you mean by know.’
I looked at her face really hard. She was being evasive, just like Han. Whatever was going on between them, it must have been dodgy for neither of them to want to talk about it.
She took my arm and walked me back to some of the other contestants who were sunbathing on patches of grass.
‘Beth, Aoife, Sarah, Nikki, Jemima, this is my friend . . .’
‘Jenny,’ I said, ending her sentence for her and thinking that “friend” was a bit on the strong side for someone I pretty much loathed. I was surprised when the girls looked up and smiled at me, and stunned when one of them patted the ground for me to sit down next to them. I shook my head and said, ‘Can’t. Sorry.’
‘When is this bootcamp finished?’ I said.
‘Two weeks. Then we’ll all be gone.’
Two weeks, I just had to get through two more weeks.
‘Where’s your boss? I’m supposed to be making tea and stuff.’
‘Around back setting up for today’s shoot. I’ll show you.’
I followed her in silence. Stooping out of a tent, we bumped right into Morgana.
‘Who is this person?’ Morgana said to the Producer scuttling behind her, looking me over like I was road kill.
Producer said, ‘Hell if I know.’
‘Then what in God’s name is it doing on our set?’ What with her thick Northern accent I wasn’t sure I could believe my ears. But it sounded like she called me an “it.”
I looked up at her face and said:
‘I’m volunteering as a runner. Mrs Schwab set it up. I was here all day yesterday?’
‘Mrs who?’ This was the Producer, who should have known better.
Vega said, ‘The old lady. German. Ballerina.’
Gutless wonder that she was, the Producer said, ‘She had no business to engage any volunteers. If I had known you were here yesterday I’d have sent you packing then. Kindly remove yourself from this set.’
Morgana tossed her hair and stomped off with her clompy, horsey walk.
I blushed. Vega mouthed ‘sorry’ at me, and I almost believed she meant it. Could I have been wrong about her?
When the Producer was called away by one of her minions, Vega turned to me.
‘Sorry they spoke to you like that. Bunch of idiots running the place around here and Morgana for all her pretty face is the worst of them.’
‘I really needed the money,’ I said. ‘Things are tough at home.’
I wasn’t lying. We’d had tinned tomatoes on toast, beans on toast, or eggs on toast for tea practically every day since my dad was fired. Mum said it was a good job that tomato ketchup had Vitamin C in it or we’d all have got scurvy.
‘Okay. Look. I won yesterday’s challenge and my reward is a full body massage. It’s red hot today so how about I pay you to fan me for a bit so I don’t boil to death while I’m having this massage.’
‘How much?’
‘I’d prefer it if you name the figure,’ she said.
‘I don’t know. How much do slaves normally charge for fanning?’
She laughed.
‘Just name your price.’
‘Fifty quid. . . ’
‘Perfect.’
‘Really?’ I couldn’t believe anyone would pay that much just to have someone fan them.
‘Yes, it’s fine. I have plenty of my own money.’
‘Deal,’ I said, and then added, ‘No cheques,’ and we shook hands.
Vega went and got one of the woven grass fans from the props tent and handed it to me. I followed her into a big tent that had a separate area for cooking and sleeping. A tall, nice-looking man wearing a white tunic and trousers ducked his head under the door and started taking the lids off glass bottles of oils. Vega introduced me and he replied in an Italian accent something that I couldn’t understand. A camera crew came in to record it all but they didn’t seem too bothered that I was there. Vega stripped off to her pants and lay down on a cushion-covered table. I watched as the man worked his hands across Vega’s thin body, up her back, then down to her legs and the tips of her toes, then her arms, and finally he rolled her over and did her stomach and scalp. He touched her, I thought, like she was a very important artefact. Respectful of her every bit of skin and muscle it seemed like. You’d have thought he was a priest the way he went about it.
A
t the end of the hour my own arms burned from the strain of fanning her. To think I’d reckoned it would be easy money. When the camera crew left, I pocketed the bank notes that Vega fished out of her dressing gown pocket. She yawned massively and then thanked me.
‘You can come again tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’ll find work for you, even if it’s only helping me to file the dead skin from my feet. Just be careful that none of the production staff see you around and it’ll be okay.’
‘See you tomorrow then,’ I said, hoping that she wouldn’t want help with waxing any bits of her. It was nice of her to help me out though; I had to admit that.
I couldn’t see any sign of Nathan and didn’t want to look too hard, since I had been technically banned from the camp by Morgana the Terrible and didn’t fancy another run-in with her, so I walked home alone and tried not to squish any caterpillars. They were ugly as hell but I reminded myself that one day they would be beautiful, they just had to turn into butterflies. For a second I wondered if a transformation like that might happen to me. And then I ruled it out.
Chapter 16When I went back the next day, I had just crossed into the camp and was shading my eyes from the sun when I tripped over a girl on the ground. She was wearing an embarrassing outfit. Some kind of a fluorescent pencil skirt and a yellow-spotted silk scarf that she was wearing as a top. She was laid out in the sunshine holding strands of her dark hair in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. I mumbled an apology and she looked up at me and said, like it was an explanation for her weird behaviour: ‘My hair’s so endy lately.’
Half of the models were in the middle of a photo shoot so I hung around by the tents and tried to keep out of sight of the producer and the host who both seemed to have it in for me.
From behind a group of water carafes in the canteen tent I had a pretty good view of most of what was going on, and I reckoned I couldn’t really be seen either. When the shoot finished, I listened to a class that Morgana gave to the contestants.
She made a big show of laying out plain black leotards for them, saying ‘Uniformity breeds competitiveness. Now we’ll see who’s best’ – I watched while they slipped into them, all knock-knees and skinny arms.
‘Do you know what a model’s best secret is?’ she said to them in her shrill voice. They stared at her wide-eyed and shook their glamorous heads. ‘Pain,’ she said. ‘Learning to sex up the pain. You’ve got to claim the pain. Sometimes on shoots you’re going to be wearing boots three sizes too small, or metal headdresses that weigh a stone and feel like they’re digging into your brain. Corsets. Corsets laced up tight enough to chip a rib. Glittery eye-shadow that with every blink drops grit into your eyes. Raw wool girdles, slat dresses, wire sweaters, electric cable trousers. Enough pain to drive you insane, but it’s your job to make all these crazy outfits look good. Nobody wants to see a sad face on a beautiful girl. Sad-sack faces don’t sell anything, I’m afraid. And it’s your job to sell. Let’s be clear about that. You are here to Sell Product. Endorse. Promote. Make people want. Make people aspire to something better. A lifestyle that costs more and more money to maintain. This is commerce. This is capitalism. Understand? Nod your heads if you understand.’ They all nodded. I’d never seen them so subdued.
‘Now, you never know when pain is going to come for you, so you have to get good, very good, at accepting it, taking that pain and working it so that it’s beautiful. You wear your pain like a ruby necklace and you figure out how to do that in three seconds.’
To illustrate this point, she fell into a perfect cartwheel and on the return acted as if she had badly jarred her back. She moved her body from side to side, still in positions that indicated crippling backache, but interesting, artistic angles, whilst keeping her face pretty.
‘You,’ she said to one of the girls, ‘You with the wild green eyes. You have excruciating period pain and nobody has any Ibuprofen. Pose.’ The girl doubled over and placed her hands on her stomach, peeping up provocatively from under her fringe.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘But don’t forget that hand. It’s looking a little bit like an alien claw there. There’s nothing sexy about an alien claw. You’re up next blondie. You’ve sprained your ankle. Go.’ The girl sank to the floor with her legs apart and her neck twisted to one side.
‘Yes,’ Morgana said, ‘Like a broken-up china doll. A good look. Very high fashion. That’s it. I’d buy anything from you, broken ankle or not. Heck, maybe I’d want a broken ankle too after seeing you work that one. Very hot. Now you, Duracell – yes I’m talking to you, Ginge – you’ve been out in the sun too long and your face is burnt to a crisp. Your eyelids are so tight and painful that you can hardly blink without wanting to scream. Go.’ The girl with strawberry blonde hair brought her shoulders up to her ears and held her hands protectively over her cheeks. Her mouth was open a crack and she put on a tarty look.
‘Not bad. Don’t lose that neck though. Stretch it up to one side so the camera can see it. Looking a little like a no-neck monster there.’ They went on like that, through burnt-out quad muscles, toothache, frostbitten fingers and a slashed throat. When I’d had enough of watching and was feeling quite tired myself, I slipped away. The last thing I heard was Morgana say that for the next photo shoot she was going to duck-tape their mouths to see what emotions they could convey using just their eyes. At least they wouldn’t have to wax their moustaches after that, I thought.
I slipped into Vega’s tent and flicked through one of her fashion magazines, which unbelievably had a coat in it that cost six thousand pounds. I couldn’t even get my head around that amount of money. It was insane. Suddenly I heard a beep. Underneath some dirty clothes and bras on a deckchair was Vega’s mobile phone.
My excuse is that I’m naturally curious and I couldn’t help it. I picked up the phone and pressed to read the text message. It said, ‘All done. She’ll be out next. H.’ The number was listed in Vega’s phone only as ‘Joshua Bell,’ which meant nothing to me. And why would someone called Josh sign himself off as “H”?
I looked at the number and it looked familiar. Was it Han’s? I put my hand in my pocket to compare the numbers but when I looked for my own phone, I found that I had forgotten to bring it.
‘Damn,’ I said, and when I couldn’t find a pen, I tried to memorise the numbers.
I was going to run home before I forgot the number but at that moment Vega appeared in the tent covered in dirt and practically naked.
‘Is that allowed?’ I said. ‘Being in the nip like that?’
‘It’s simulated nude,’ she said. ‘We wear flesh-coloured thongs and a band around our breasts. And duct tape on our gobs.’
‘Whatever flicks your switch,’ I said.
‘My switch? Nothing to do with me. It’s the Artistic Director you want to talk to. It’s his concept. All about bringing in the best viewing figures, isn’t it? What could be better than muddy naked girls? Oh, I know it’s pathetic. All the girls do, barring one or two of the most stupid, but we do it because that’s what we have to do to get through to the next round.’
I offered her one of my mints, but she shook her head and made a grimace with her mouth. I wondered if she ever ate anything. I hadn’t seen her eat so much as a slice of cucumber.
She turned to a rack of dresses which contained all of her outfits for the next few days. ‘There’s not one thing here that I would actually wear if I was given the choice. I’d rather dress like you, Jenny, with your surfy flip-flops and your grungy old t-shirts, I really would.’
I was just about to answer with something that sounded mildly offended, when someone ducked his head through the tent opening and came in. I almost spat out the Polo mint that I was crunching. The person coming in to Vega’s tent, whilst she was half-dressed, was Han.
He paled at the sight of me. Vega disappeared into the bedroom part of the tent. To dress, I hoped.
‘Alright?’ I said
to Han. ‘Lost, are you?’
‘Um, yes, I mean, no.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Well, I was, you know, looking for you.’
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘My gran told me you was volunteering.’
His gran did know that I’d been on the camp, but there was no way Han could have known I was in that particular tent.
Suddenly I felt sick to my stomach. I sank down on Vega’s deckchair and put my hand to my mouth. A warm whoosh of vomit came up my throat and I only just managed to swallow it down again.
Han was crouching down in front of me looking into my face, his nice eyes all concerned.
‘Something’s wrong with you, Jenny. You look really bad.’
‘Thanks very much,’ I managed to say, popping another mint into my mouth to cover my sick breath. My throat was burning with what felt like acid from my stomach.
‘Let me help you up,’ he said.
‘I’m fine. I don’t need your help. And I know why you’re here and it’s got nothing to do with me, has it? You’re here for her. That bloody stick insect in there. Well, I hope you’re good enough for her, I really do, because she’s got her eye on world domination that one and she won’t want you then, will she?’
I had tears in my eyes as I said this, and I couldn’t control them. Streaming down my face they were, like some little girl who’d had her ice cream nicked by a sea gull.
‘I don’t even know if you’re my boyfriend,’ I carried on, ‘but if you are, you’re dumped,’ I said, running out of the tent.
I couldn’t believe myself. It was not like me to be that aggro to Han at all.
Suddenly, I heard a rustle behind me. Vega had followed me across the camp and she was there wearing her stupid Model Soldiers overalls. ‘Jenny,’ she said. ‘It’s not as bad as you think.’
‘What do I think?’ I said.
‘That Han and I are. . . involved.’
‘You saying you ain’t?’
