I had been trying hard not to cry, but now I couldn’t stop my eyes from welling over. “The Look,” I said stupidly. “He said anyone could . . .”
“It’s not about a look, you little idiot, it’s about being young. That’s all you need to be. Young. Gap-toothed, cross-eyed, bow-legged, brain-damaged, whatever. If you’re young you can wear anything, razor blades, pieces of jagged glass, shit-covered rags – and, believe me, you’ll have to do that while they’re all experimenting – you’ll still look good because you’re so incredibly fucking young. And if there’s really a look, something that pleases every sponsor, then you’re photographed in it and you do a few catwalks. And then it all goes away. Fast. People are like fruit: they don’t stay fresh long before everyone knows they’re damaged. That’s all the Look is. Anyone could figure it out, Christ, it’s not fucking rocket science.”
“But what happens after that? Don’t the models go to the press and describe how they’ve been—”
“Been what, exactly? Been given shit-loads of money and fame and set up for life? Nobody makes you sign, honey, it’s a choice, pure and simple. You get a contract and you honour your side of the deal, like any other job. The only thing is, if any of the surgical stuff goes wrong, I mean badly wrong, you’re fucked because they’ve got good legal people.”
“But the people who interview Kit Marlowe, they must see that he changes—”
“They see what they choose to see. Ask yourself who employs them. Who owns the magazines they write for, the networks they broadcast for. You’ve got to think bigger, kid.” She looked at her watch. “Shit, I have to get back. If you see your friend again, you’ll have to make the choice. Do you give her a friendly word of warning, or not bother? After all, she looks like she forgot about you pretty quickly.” The sour smile that crossed her face actually cracked her makeup.
“I don’t believe any of this,” I heard myself saying angrily. “You’ve lost it and you don’t want anyone younger to get their turn. You’re jealous of her, that’s all.”
Acquiveradah sighed and threw the remains of her joint on to a plate of torn-apart fruit. She stood there thinking. A fly crawled around the edge of a champagne flute. “All right.” She dug into the pocket of her green hooded jacket, brought out another card and held it up before me. “Go to Room 820, on the next floor. Take a look, but don’t touch their skin, you understand? Don’t do anything girly, like screaming. Not that I suppose you’ll wake them, because by now they’ll be so fast asleep that the place could burn down and they wouldn’t feel it. Oh, hang on.” She went into the bathroom and came back out with a pair of nail-scissors. “Use these to get a good look. Then think about your friend. And leave the entry-card in the room when you leave.”
I left the room and ran off along the corridor on wobbly legs. I knew if I got in the lift I would take it straight back down to the ground floor, so I took the stairs instead. I found Room 820 easily. The corridor was silent and deserted. I ran the swipe-card through the lock and slowly pushed the door open. I couldn’t see anything because the blinds were drawn and the lights were off. Besides, I guessed it was dark outside now. I stood in the little passage by the room’s mirrored wardrobes, unable to leave the diamond of light thrown from the corridor. I listened and heard breathing, slow, steady breathing, from more than one body. I could smell antiseptic. I tried to recall the room layout from the floor below. The lights had to be somewhere to my right. I reached out my hand and felt along the wall. Several switches were there. I flicked them all on.
The room had two beds, and someone was asleep in each of them. The pale cotton hoods they always wore in the shows were still stretched across their features. They continued to breathe at the same steady pace, and did not seem disturbed by the lights.
I walked over to the nearest one and bent closer. I could vaguely make out her features under the hood, which was held on tight with a plastic drawstring. I remembered the nail-scissors Acquiveradah had given me, and realized what she had intended me to do. I inserted the points just above the fastened collar and began to cut open the hood.
I found myself looking at the girl who had been hypnotized and pierced for the Kit Marlowe collection three seasons ago. The piercings had left terrible scars across her face, raised lumps of flesh as hard as pebbles, as red and sore as tumours. There were fresh crusts of blood around her ears, as though her skin had still not learned to cope with the demands being made upon it. Her teeth had been replaced by perfect white china pegs, neatly driven through gum and bone, but the gums had turned black and receded. I reached out my hand. I just wanted to see that she was real. I touched her cheek and felt the waxy flesh dent beneath my fingertips. When I removed my hand, the indentations remained, as though her skin was infected.
When I saw that she wasn’t going to move, I pulled back her lower lip and saw lines of thick black stitches running around the base of her jawline. I could only imagine that after her turn in the spotlight this poor thing had agreed to stay on as one of the backing models, even though her face would never again be seen. Could fame do that, leave you so hungry for more that you would choose to stay, whatever your new situation might be?
I bent over her until our noses almost touched. The opened muslin hood lay around her face, framing it so that she looked like a discarded birthday gift. One of her eyes was closed. Hardly daring to breathe, I lifted the eyelid. There was a large glass marble in the socket, the kind boys used to play with at school.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at the other model. Who knew what fresh horrors I might find?
I was still thinking about it when the body beneath my hand moved and sat up. I think I screamed. I know I left that antiseptic-reeking room and shot out into the corridor as though I was running across hot coals. I was more confused than frightened. When I saw that Miss Three Seasons Ago wasn’t coming after me, I tried to gather my thoughts. I wanted to help Ann-Marie but I badly wanted to leave, and the indecision froze me. At last I decided to try and find the way back. I went to the stairs and ran down to the floor where I had last seen her. The corridor was so silent and empty I could have been inside an Egyptian tomb. I found the door that Kit and his team had closed on me. It was still shut. I stopped in front of it, staring stupidly at the gilded number, willing it to open, praying that it would open.
And then it did.
The PR pair came out. The woman looked at me and smiled. “I guess you’re waiting for your little friend,” she said, as if talking to a stupid child. “She can’t see you right now. She’s busy.”
“What are you doing to her?”
“Don’t worry, she’s better than fine. Now, I think you’d better go on home.”
“I can’t. She’s got my money.”
The woman sighed and pulled a wad of notes from inside her jacket. “Take this and just go away, okay?” She pushed a roll of bills into my hand. Behind her, the hotel door shifted open slightly, and I caught a glimpse of the room inside. It was very brightly lit. Ann-Marie had no clothes on. She was sitting in a chair looking very fat and white, and there was something sticking out of her, protruding from between her legs. It looked like a long steel tube with a red rubber bulb on one end. She was smiling and looking up at the ceiling, then suddenly her whole body began to shake. Somebody kicked the door shut with a bang.
I closed my fist over the money and ran, out into the night and the rain.
The rest of the evening was awful. I had to hitch home, and this creepy lorry-driver kept staring at my tits and making suggestions. I think he got the wrong idea because of the way I was dressed. Ann-Marie lived with her drunk mother and her stupid stoner brother. I called at their house, but no one was at home. They were never at home. Anyway, they weren’t expecting her back for another day.
I talked to Ann-Marie’s mother later, and she showed me the letter, about how her little girl was dropping out of school because she had a modelling contract and was moving to London to become a star. Her family, such
as it was, certainly didn’t seem too bothered. They were pleased she was going to bring in some money. I guess my own happiness for Ann-Marie had something to do with being glad that I wasn’t in her place. She was missed in class for a couple of weeks, and that’s about all. She wasn’t the kind of person you noticed, whereas I was. Maybe that was why she’d been chosen.
Anyway, when the next season’s collection was announced, I received an invitation. The thing was printed on a sheet of pressed steel that nearly slashed the tops off my fingers when I opened the envelope. By this time I was planning to leave home and start media studies at East Anglia U. I went down to London and located the venue, a disused synagogue somewhere behind Fleet Street. Once again, it was raining. I’d decided to play it safe and wear plain black jeans and a T-shirt. To tell the truth, I was growing out of dressing like a Kit Marlowe wannabe, but I was still eager to find out how Ann-Marie had fared in her new career. We were served fancy cocktails in a burnished iron antechamber, then ushered into the main salon.
A few wall-lights glowed dimly. Only the deep crimson outline of the catwalk could be discerned in the gloom. As we took our seats, the room was abuzz with anticipation. A single spotlight illuminated a plump young man standing motionless at the foot of the runway.
Kit Marlowe surveyed his dominion with satisfaction. He waited for everyone to settle, lightly patted the back of his waxed-back hair, and beamed. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said a voice emanating from the speakers around us as Kit moved his lips, “I’d like to thank you for coming out from the West End in such foul weather, and I hope you’ll find your efforts well rewarded. Welcome to my collection. This year my Look honours someone very special, someone we all know but never fully acknowledge. This Kit Marlowe season, ladies and gentlemen, is dedicated to the ordinary working girl. She is all around us, she is in all of us, a part of the machinery that fills our lives. She is the spark that ignites and powers the engines of society. She is Andromeda, and this is her Look.”
We realized that the figure speaking before us was an animatronic mannequin. As the overhead voice pulsed away into silence, it collapsed into the floor, and brilliant red walls of laser light rolled up to create a virtual room in space.
Along the catwalk and stepping into this lowering box of fractal colour came a figure that could not be recognized as Ann-Marie. She looked like every girl you ever saw serving behind a counter or a trolley, like all of them yet none of them. Her outfit was that of a streamlined, futuristic servant, but as the electronic soundtrack grew in pitch and volume something happened to the clothes she was wearing. They changed shape, refolding and refitting into different patterns on her body, empowering her, transforming her from slave to dominatrix. I later discovered that every item modelled in the show was manipulated by computer programs, interacting with silicon implants in the fabrics that tightened threads and changed tones. Kit Marlowe had invented digital fashion. The entire room burst into spontaneous applause.
Behind Ann-Marie moved two eighties-throwback robot girls, their heads encased in shiny foil-like fabrics. I wondered if one of them was a mutilated, ageing Acquiveradah. Lights dazzled fiercely and faded. The sonic landscape created a vision of primitive mechanization tamed and transformed by the all-powerful electron. When I looked again, Ann-Marie had changed into a different outfit. She performed all her changes onstage, dipping within the spinning vectors of hard light, aided by the microcircuitry in her clothes. Or, rather, their clothes, the creations that had resulted from the findings of so many secret focus groups, research and development teams, marketing and merchandising meetings. What “Kit Marlowe” had succeeded in doing was gaining access to the birth-point of the creative process.
As the show reached its zenith the room erupted, and stayed in a state of perpetual arousal through the hammering climactic flourishes of the performance. I’d like to think that the audience applause was spontaneous, but even that was doubtful.
I saw her after the show. My ticket admitted me to a party for special buyers. I queued for the cloakroom, queued for the VIP lounge, queued to pay my respects to the new star. Waited until she was standing with only one or two people, and moved in on her. I couldn’t bring myself to call her “Andromeda”, nor could I call her Ann-Marie because she wasn’t the Ann-Marie I knew any more. There was something different about her eyes. She had little markings carved into the actual ball of each eye, as though the pupils had been scored with a scalpel and filled with coloured ink.
“Eye tattoos,” she explained, when I asked. “They’re going to be big.”
Her eyelashes had been shaved off and her mouth artificially widened somehow, the lips collagen-implanted and reshaped. She still had heavy breasts, but now she had a waist. And great legs. I had never seen her legs before tonight. She was wearing a body-stocking constructed in the kind of coarse material you saw on African native women, but the fabric glowed in faint cadences, like the pulse of someone between dreams and wakefulness.
“How does it do that?” I asked.
“The material has microscopic mirroring on one facet of the thread. It twists slightly to the rhythm of my heartbeat,” she explained.
“Jesus, couldn’t it electrocute you?”
“The voltage is lower than that required to run the average pacemaker. Don’t worry, I’m better than fine.” She spoke as if she had learned her reply from a script, and I guess she had. I looked down at her hands. She had no fingernails. There were just puckers of ragged flesh where her nails had been.
“I’m glad you could come. It means a lot. I wondered if you’d ever forgive me.”
“I’m not sure I have. Your mum says you never write any more.”
“I don’t know what I’d say to her. I send money, of course. She wouldn’t approve if I told her half of what happens around here. I mean, it’s great and everything, but—”
“But what? Can we have a drink together?”
Ann-Marie looked around guiltily. “I’d love to have a drink, but I’m not allowed. The first few weeks were rough, but I feel a lot more centred now. You wouldn’t believe the eating and exercise regime.”
The Ann-Marie I knew would never have used a word like “centred”. I was hungry for answers. I wanted to know what went on behind the hotel doors. I went to touch her and she flinched. “All models have to work out,” I told her, “but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”
She gave me her patented blank look. Her eyes went so unfocused she could have been watching a plane land.
“Come on, Ann-Marie, I know.”
“Well, I admit,” she said softly, “there’s a downside, a real downside. I wish we could talk more. I miss you.”
“I just want to know if you’re happy,” I asked. “Tell me you made the right choice.”
“I don’t know. They took out a length of my gut. Stripped my veins and tried to re-colour them. They tried out some piercings at the top of my legs and attached them to the flesh on the backs of my arms, but it wasn’t a good look. If I eat the wrong things I start bleeding inside. They tried little mirrors instead of my fingernails but my system rejected them. They were going to run fine neon wires under my skin to light me up, but their doctor said it would be too dangerous for me to move around with so much electric cable in me. I won’t tell you what they wanted to do to me down below. There are other things going on that you wouldn’t—”
Suddenly a tiny LED on her collar blinked, just once, so briefly that I later wondered if I imagined it. Ann-Marie’s face paled. The huge wire collar around her neck automatically tightened, cutting into her skin, closing off her throat and the carotid artery in her neck. A vein throbbed angrily at her temple. Liquid began to pool in the bay of her mouth. The bodysuit closed more tightly around her as its circuitry came alive. She could barely find the air to speak. A second later the spasm ended, and the collar released itself to its pre-set diameter.
“I have to go now,” she whispered hoarsely, her eyes searching my face
as if trying to memorize my features for some future recollection. She turned away, stiffly walking back to her keepers. I figured she was miked up, and wondered if that was the first time they had been called upon to jerk her lead. But for now, Ann-Marie was gone. Andromeda returned to her celestial enclosure of light, away from the mundane world, into the mists of mythology.
I understood then what she had surrendered to keep the Look.
The terrible truth is, I would still have changed places with her for a taste of that life, just for a chance to be someone, to look down upon dreary mortals from the height of godhood. I would have done anything – I would still do anything – to get a second chance. To have Kit Marlowe look at me and smile knowingly. To let his people experiment with my body until they were happy, no matter how much it hurt, and I would smile back at them through the stitches and the blood and the endless tearing pain. I would surrender everything.
Because nothing can ever take away the power of the Look. To be adored is to become divine. All your life is worth its finest moment. And when at last you fall from grace, you still have eternity to remind you of that time.
Residue
Alice Henderson
Galen Roundtree sucked in a breath as the shard cut through the meat of his palm. Damn the artefact preparers. They were supposed to take care of things like this. He peered inside the ancient pot, seeing the sharp piece inside. A corner of the lip had broken off, and recently, too. Nice of them to deliver these invaluable pieces intact.
But something else was wrong with the artefact. It smelt terrible, like rotting scraps stuck in a garbage disposal. Galen had been about to go home and spend an evening catching up on his reading when the ancient piece had arrived at the lab.
He read the tag. Possible Anasazi pottery, needing a date ASAP. It was found locally, near an ancestral Puebloan site that had been abandoned mysteriously in 1300 CE. He sighed, rubbing the muscles in the back of his neck. Another piece to date. He was already backed up with work, too many samples coming in to possibly finish on time.
The Mammoth Book of Body Horror Page 39
