The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  He had one model who performed in his show under hypnosis. The clothes she modelled were actually stitched onto her, right through the flesh. Her veil was sewn to her forehead, her blouse held tight by dozens of tiny silver piercings that ran across her breasts. Even her boots were held on by wires that passed through her calves. I read an interview with her afterwards in which she stated that she hadn’t felt a thing except total faith in Kit Marlowe. But not all of his designs were that extreme. Many of them were simple and elegant. That was the thing; you never knew the kind of look he would go for next.

  Kit Marlowe got kicked out of school, and has no qualifications. He’s a natural. He says he learned everything he needs to know from television. He’s larger than life. I guess I first heard about him when I was eight or nine, and started collecting photographs of his models. I don’t know how old he is. He began young, but he may even be in his thirties by now. He’s a guru, a god. He changes the way we look at the world. His clothes aren’t meant to be worn by ordinary people, they’re there to serve a higher purpose, to inspire us. I used to study the pictures in amazement. I never saw anything he did that didn’t surprise me. Some of it was grotesque and outlandish, but often it had this timeless, placeless beauty.

  It was Ann-Marie who first pointed out the strange quality he brought to his models. We were sitting in a McDonald’s waiting for my father to give us a lift home, studying a magazine filled with pictures from his Paris show, and she showed me how he mixed stuff from different eras and countries, so there’d be, like, seventies Indian beadworked cotton and fifties American sneakers and eighties Japanese skirts. But he combines everything with his own style, and in the presentation he’ll throw in a wild card, like using a Viennese choir with African drummers and Latino house, the whole sound mixed together by some drum ’n’ bass Ibiza DJ, and he’ll set the whole event in something like a disused Victorian swimming-pool, making all these fashion gurus trek miles out into the middle of nowhere to view his collection.

  Once he showed his fashion designs on this video installation in New Jersey, setting monitors all around a morgue, where he ran footage of his clothes dressed on real corpses, teenagers who had died in car crashes. Then his model of the season came out from between the monitors with her masked team, all in blood-spattered surgical gowns, which they tore open to reveal the new season’s outfits. It was so cool, dealing with social issues through fashion like that.

  Kit Marlowe only designs for women. He says it’s all about being extraordinary. He searches out girls who have something unique, and what he searches for completely changes every season. He never uses anyone older than nineteen. He says until that age we behave with a kind of animal instinct that is lost as we grow older. His models come from all over the world. He’s used a Russian, a Hungarian, a Tunisian, a Brazilian, a Korean and an American as well as English girls, all of them complete unknowns. He just plucks them out of small towns. They give up their old lives for him, and he gives them new ones. He rechristens them. He gives them immortality.

  One model to reveal the Look was a girl he called Acquiveradah. She was from St Petersburg, seventeen, a little over six feet tall, very skinny and odd-looking, parchment white skin with pale blue veins, and she wore moth-wing purple gowns in gossamer nylon that showed her body in incredible detail. The Look was instantly copied by chain stores, who messed it up to the point of parody by adding layers of cheap material underneath. I remember her being interviewed. She said that meeting with Kit Marlowe had brought her violently alive for the first time, and yet the experience was “like being stroked on the cheek with a butterfly wing”. She looked so ethereal I thought she was going to float away from the camera lens and up into the sun.

  Kit has a special look of his own, too, but the details change constantly. Long hair, cropped hair, shades, goatee, facial tattoos, piercings, none of the above. He puts on weight and loses it according to the clothes he chooses for the season. Some likes and dislikes remain throughout his transformations. He likes unusual girls, particularly Eastern Europeans who can’t speak English but who express themselves with their bodies. He loves to court controversy because he says it gets people talking about clothes. He’s always being linked to gorgeous girls, and he openly admits that he has sex with his models. Kit says that understanding their sexuality helps him to uncover the Look. He likes strong women. He prefers fiercely textured fabrics and colours, silver, crimson, black and green. He laughs a lot and jokes around on camera, except when he’s discussing his own creations. Then he’s deadly serious. He owns houses all over the world, but lives in France. He’s physically big (although he might be short, it’s hard to tell) and from some angles he has a heavy chin, except last year when he lost a lot of weight. He hates phoneys and hype. He says his designs reflect the inner turbulence of the wearer. He explains how his clothes create chromatic harmonizations of the spirit. I filled an entire book with his sayings, and that was just from last season’s interviews.

  It was Ann-Marie who heard about him coming to our town. He’d shown his collections outside London before, but never as far north as this. I wanted to see the show so badly. Of course it was invitation-only, and I had no way of getting my hands on one. But we could at least be somewhere close by.

  I was very excited about this. I knew that just to be near him would be to sense the future. Kit Marlowe is always ahead of the game. It’s like he’s standing on a chair searching the horizon while the rest of us are on the ground looking at each other like a bunch of morons. He never tells the press what the Look is going to be, but he drops hints. There were rumours going around in the style press that he was planning a range of computerized clothing; that he was going to combine microchip circuitry with the most basic fabrics and colours. But nobody really knew what that meant or what he was up to, and if they did they weren’t saying.

  Sometimes we went clubbing at the weekend. I would dye my hair blonde while my mum’s boyfriend was out at work on Friday night, then dye it back before school on Monday. Ann-Marie and I figured that if we couldn’t get into the show we could maybe get into his hotel and catch sight of him in the lobby afterwards, but it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. He was staying near the station in this converted Victorian church covered with gargoyles, a cool place with headset dudes in floor-length black coats guarding the doors. Ann-Marie was smart, though. She figured we needed escorts otherwise we’d never get into the building, so we bribed these friends of Ann-Marie’s brother who were going into the centre of town for the weekend. They sold insurance and wore off-the-peg suits and looked respectable, so we dressed down to match them, only I wore another set of clothes underneath. Ann-Marie couldn’t because she was heavy enough already, and wasn’t bothered anyway, but I wanted to be noticed. I was ready for it. I had the Look. My time was now.

  The show was mid-afternoon and we figured he’d come back and change before going to a party. We had a pretty tight lock on his movements because he gave so many interviews, and loved talking to the press; all you had to do was piece everything together and you had the entire trip plan. This was probably how the guy who killed John Lennon managed it, just by gathering news of his whereabouts and drawing all the timelines together. It’s pretty easy to be a stalker if you’re single-minded. But I wasn’t a stalker. I just wanted to be touched by the hand of God. Kit Marlowe says if you’re strong about these things, you can make them happen.

  It was one of those days that didn’t look as though it would get light at all, and it was mistily raining when we reached the hotel. There was a sooty slickness on the streets that seemed left over from the area’s coal-mining past, and the traffic was creeping forward through the gloom like a vast funeral procession. We were stuck in a steamed-up Ford with the insurance guys, getting paranoid about the time, and they were fed up with us because we hadn’t stopped talking for the last hour.

  “He’s never going to make it through this,” said Ann-Marie, but the rain was good because we could wear our
hoods up, and the doormen wouldn’t think we were teenage hookers or street trash. Once we had made it safely into the hotel lobby we ditched the boring insurance guys and they went off to some bar to get drunk. We knew that Kit Marlowe was staying on the seventh floor because he had this superstitious thing about sevens (a fact disclosed in another wonderfully revealing interview), but when we went up there we couldn’t tell which suite he’d taken. I thought there would be guards everywhere but there was no security, none at all, and I figured that maybe the hotel didn’t know who he was. We couldn’t cover both sides of the floor from a single vantage point, so we split up, each taking a cleaners’ cupboard. Then we waited in the warm soapy darkness.

  Every time I heard the elevator ping I stuck my head out. This went on for ages, until the excitement was so much that I fell asleep. The next thing I knew, Ann-Marie was shaking me and hissing in my ear. I wondered what the hell her problem was, and then what the hell she was wearing.

  “I found the maid’s uniform on one of the shelves. I thought it would make me look less conspicuous,” she explained.

  “Well, it really doesn’t, Ann-Marie. Pink’s not your colour, and certainly not in glazed nylon with white piping. You look like a marshmallow.”

  “Take a look down the corridor.”

  “Ohmigod.” A group of people was coming straight toward us. I ducked back in. “How do I look?”

  “Take your coat off. Give it to me.” Ann-Marie held out her arms. I was wearing an ensemble I had invented from cuttings of every Kit Marlowe collection. Obviously I couldn’t afford the materials his designers used, so I had come up with equivalents, adding a few extra details, like plastic belts and sequins. It was a look that was very ahead of its time, and I knew he’d love it the moment he saw it.

  I took a few quick breaths, not too many in case I started to hyperventilate, then stepped out of the cupboard. A man and a woman were talking quietly. They looked like a couple of Kit Marlowe’s PR consultants or something. They dressed so immaculately in grey suits, black Ts, trainers and identical haircuts that they looked computer-generated. Behind them was Acquiveradah, a drifting wraith in some kind of green silk-hooded arrangement. I had forgotten how long and white her arms and neck were, how strangely she moved. She looked like she’d been deep-frozen and only half thawed. Kit Marlowe was at her side (quite a lot shorter than I’d expected), dressed in a shiny black kaftan-thing. I could see from here that his buttons were silver crucifixes, and every time he passed under one of the corridor spotlights they shone on to the walls. It was as though he was consecrating the hotel just by walking through it.

  I realized at this point that I was standing right in the middle of the passage, blocking their way. I felt Ann-Marie tugging at my sleeve, but I was utterly mesmerized. I tried to hear what they were saying. Acquiveradah sounded angry. She and Kit were speaking hard and low. Something about changing dates, deadlines, signing it, moving it, being in Berlin. Oh, God, Berlin’s so damned cold, she was complaining, like it was a big chore going there. And then they stopped.

  They stopped because I was standing in their way like a fool, staring with my mouth open.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” Kit Marlowe himself was speaking, actually speaking. “Who’s this? Did somebody order a singing telegram?” He was talking about me. Time slowed down. My skin prickled as he stepped forward through his PR people.

  “Who are you?”

  I knew I had to answer. “I’m—” But I realized I had made an incredibly stupid mistake. I had concentrated so hard on the Look that I had never invented a name for myself. “I’m—” I couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t want to tell him my real name because it’s so ordinary, but I couldn’t make one up on the spot. Behind him, Acquiveradah started hissing again. Kit held up his hand for silence, and continued to stare.

  “You, I like what you’re wearing.”

  I closed my hanging mouth, not daring to move. This was the moment I had waited most of my life for.

  “Tell me something.”

  I tried to breathe.

  “Do they give you a choice?”

  What was he talking about?

  “I don’t suppose so. Hotels only care about their guests, right? Everyone else gets the universal look. Staff are treated the same anywhere in the world.” He wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and looked to one of the PRs for approval. “Right? I never thought of that, but it’s true, right?” The PRs agreed enthusiastically. “It’s a universal look.”

  I could see him. I could hear him. But I couldn’t piece together what he was saying. Not until I followed his eyeline and saw that he was talking past me. Talking to Ann-Marie. She was standing behind us near the wall, beside a trolley filled with little bottles of shampoo, conditioner and toilet rolls. She was wearing the maid’s uniform, and I saw now how much it suited her. It was perfect, like she worked here. But also, like she was modelling it.

  “It’s a look,” Kit fucking Marlowe was saying, “I don’t know if it’s the Look, but it’s certainly a look. Come here, darling.”

  “Kit, for God’s sake,” Acquiveradah was saying, but he was reaching out to Ann-Marie and drawing her into his little group. My supposed best friend walked right past me into their spotlight, mesmerized, and I felt my eyes growing hot with tears as the scene wavered. Moments later they were gone, all of them, through a door that had silently opened, swallowed them and closed.

  I was numb. Left behind in the empty corridor. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t go anywhere. Ann-Marie had our return money in her bag.

  Then the door opened again, and Acquiveradah backed out. I could hear her making excuses to Kit. (Something about “from my room” – something like “in a few minutes”.) I can’t remember what she said, but I knew she was telling him lies. She moved awkwardly toward me and placed a cold hand on my shoulder. She was stronger and more purposeful than she looked.

  “I have to talk to you, little girl. In here.” She ran a swipe card through the door behind me and pushed me into the room. For a moment I was left standing in the dark while she fumbled for a light switch. In the fierceness of the mirrored neon that flicked on around the suite she looked hard and old, nothing like her photographs. There was something else about her appearance I found odd: a lopsidedness that skewed her features and gave her a permanent stare, like she’d only partially recovered from a stroke. “Sit down there.” She indicated the edge of the bed. I pushed aside a tray of barely touched food and some empty champagne bottles, and sat. “Does your friend really want to model?”

  I found my voice. “I never thought she did.”

  “A lot of girls act like that. It’s a secret of successful modelling, not looking like you care whether you’ll ever do it again. The moment you try too hard it shows. I can take it or leave it, they say. The world’s top models spend their entire lives telling everyone they’re giving it up next season, it’s all bullshit. What they mean is, they’re frightened they won’t cut it next time. Nobody holds the Look for long. I’ll ask you again: does she really want to model?”

  I tried to think. “I guess she does. She wants to be liked.”

  “Fine, then we’ll leave it. I don’t know what will happen. He’s been – well, let’s say he’s not thinking clearly after a show, and he may change his mind, but he may not, and if you see your friend again you should at least be able to tell her what she’s in for. Most of them have no idea.” She was talking in riddles, pacing about, trying to light a joint. “Look at me, I’m a good example. I had no idea what this sort of thing involved.” She pulled up the hem of her hooded top and exposed her pale stomach. “I was the wrong shape, too wide here. They took out my bottom three ribs on both sides, here see?” Her pearlized fingernails traced a faint ridge of healed stitches, the skin puckered like cloth. “I had my stomach stapled. Some of my neck removed and pinned back. My cheekbones altered. Arms tucked. Eyes lifted. The graft didn’t take at first and my left eye turned septic. I
t was removed and replaced with moulded plastic. You can’t tell, even close up. It photographs the same because I always wear a full contact in the other one to match the texture.” She drew on the joint, glancing anxiously at the door. “They removed fat from my ass, but I was still growing and my body started shedding it naturally, and I lost what I didn’t have, so now it’s very painful to sit down. I can feel the tops of my femurs rubbing, ball and socket scraping bone. Oh, don’t give me that look, fashion always hurts. Christ, they used to tighten the foreheads of Egyptian girls to prevent their skull-plates from knitting. Chinese foot-binding, ever hear of that?” I shook my head. “And athletes, they give up any semblance of normal life for their careers, it’s just what you have to do to get to the top and most people aren’t prepared to do it, that’s why they remain mediocre. You have to put yourself out, a long way out. It’s pretty fucking elementary.”

  “I can’t imagine that Kit Marlowe would allow that sort of thing to—”

  “Exactly, you can’t imagine. You don’t get it, do you? There is no Kit Marlowe, he’s a corporation, a conglomerate, he’s jeans and music and vodka and cars and clothing stores, he’s not an actual person. There’s always a front-man, someone the public can focus on, but he’s not real. He’s played by somebody different nearly every season. I assume most people recognize that in some fundamental way.”

  “But the fashions. His vision. The Look.”

  “Whoever’s in place for this collection just follows the guidelines. ‘Kit Marlowe’ is a finder. This one picked your friend, but she’s the third person he’s picked in the last two days. They all have to be submitted to a hundred fucking committees before they get any further. The fabrics people never agree with the drinks people, the car people want older role models and everyone hates the music people.”