by Holly Smale
With a brush, she stipples and buffs my face with gossamer-thin layers of primer and white foundation until any sign of my natural complexion or spots or eyebrows have been totally obliterated.
She spreads the foundation down my neck and on to my chest, shoulders, back and down my arms: carefully daubing the paint down my fingers as if I’m some kind of modern-day geisha.
Deftly, Léonie pats me in a fine coat of white powder like she’s dusting icing over a particularly large almond croissant so that I look velvety, matt and doll-like.
She holds a tissue under my lower eyelashes and begins to draw enormous circles round my eyes that slowly fade out at the edges: layering matt-black eyeshadow with sparkling black eyeshadow so that – for the second time in the last twenty-four hours – I look just like my luggage.
(Except this time a panda about to go to a disco.)
Then, with absolute precision, she begins to glue hundreds of tiny black gems round my bear eyes, spiralling outwards into spikes on my forehead and running like teardrops along my cheeks.
When I look up or down, left or right, all I can see is black glitter.
It’s like living inside a terrifying kaleidoscope.
As soon as half of my face is encrusted and sparkling, Léonie gels my hair in a side parting and pins it back, and begins glueing tiny black feathers densely round my hairline and down my back.
Finally, when long black acrylic nails have been stuck on and heavy rings loaded, she applies three careful layers of jet-black lipstick.
“Nearly there,” she says, carefully dabbing my bottom lip with dark glitter. “Thanks for keeping it zipped. You wouldn’t believe how many girls get overexcited, talk through this and ruin everything. You’re so lovely and quiet.”
I stare at my make-up artist in continued silence.
For the first time in my modelling career – possibly my life – I haven’t said a single word for literally two hours. I haven’t asked a single question, or made a single comment. I haven’t loudly observed or analysed, quizzed or projected.
I haven’t even told her that Americans spend more on beauty every year than they do on education, which is a fact I only recently found out and had planned to share immediately.
Judging by the very unfamiliar silence coming from me right now, with this brand-new gothic transformation Léonie has literally blown my mind.
“OK,” she murmurs, taking me by the hand and passing me over to another lady with a blonde ponytail. “Your turn, Sylvie.”
“Thirty-three,” Sylvie nods with focus. “Thirty-three, thirty-three …” She glances up and down, then takes hold of an enormous cloth bag. “Here.”
Then she turns to look at me.
There’s a long pause while I wait with intense curiosity to see what’s going to happen next. And also while I focus on not licking my lips: it’s like playing a disappointingly low-calorie and possibly toxic version of the Sugar Doughnut Game.
Last one to ingest black glitter wins.
“Come on, sweetie,” she adds slightly impatiently, shifting under the weight of the bag. “Quickly, please. We don’t have time.”
My eyes widen. “Time for what?” Then I stare at the World’s Tiniest Piece Of Fabric, now being dragged out from behind the mirror.
OK: which one is my new outfit?
“This is your luxury changing room,” she says, somehow reading my mind. “Don’t worry, I’ll hold it up for you while you get into the dress.”
My eyes grow even rounder.
“I …” I stammer in a panic. “Is there maybe a toilet I can use or something to hide my … uh. Me?”
Léonie and Sylvie laugh. “Darling, this outfit is worth more than the flats we live in combined. From this point on you don’t leave our sight. We have bodyguards to make sure of it.”
Huh. I thought the women with walkie-talkies lined soberly around the room were guarding it from outsiders: I hadn’t realised they were guarding dresses from us.
Right. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Or a euro.
I mean, we are in France.
Taking a deep breath, I skip behind the little blanket, whip off my green leggings and puddle them on the floor, tear off my button-up T-shirt and try to ignore the fact that my knickers have a big rainbow drawn on the back.
With a small smile, Léonie helps Sylvie to unzip the cloth bag and pulls out an enormous dress.
Unsurprisingly, this is jet-black too.
A little more unexpectedly, it’s made entirely of feathers. Huge black feathers, sewn together so perfectly I have no idea where the stitches are: it just looks like resplendent plumage, getting smaller round the waist and then larger in huge, fluffy circles until the dress hits the floor.
From the centre, the feathers point upwards into an enormous feather collar and the tips of them have been dipped in black glitter.
Believe it or not, there’s actually an evolutionary reason that humans are attracted to things that sparkle: we are programmed to seek out water, and so instinctively approach things that shimmer like a river.
And it’s totally working.
Without even thinking about it, I step forward and hold out my bejewelled and glitter-encrusted hands like a tiny child.
“No,” Sylvie says in a voice that implies this obviously happens a lot. “No touching, please. It’s way too precious for fingers.”
Then she gently wraps the dress round me from the front and carefully starts stitching me into it. There isn’t a single inch of this dress that doesn’t fit snugly: it’s structured and cut so perfectly that my entire body is completely encased, like a bird.
Finally, she gets another bag and pulls out a big pair of black four-foot feather wings.
I blink at them in amazement.
“They’re not functional,” she smiles, attaching them with a clever invisible halter to my back. “Just in case you were thinking of trying to fly away.”
She sews them on to an invisible harness under my arms, and when they’re secure and I’m trying not to wobble on heavy black velvet platform heels, I’m positioned back in front of the mirror so final touches can be made: a little pat of powder here, a tiny blob of glue there.
Amazed, I stare at my reflection shamelessly.
I am dark. I am fluffy and glittering. I am glorious.
I am by far the closest to a Disney villain I am ever likely to get. All I need now is a glowing green ball on a stick and a crow.
Quickly, I grab my mobile off the table, and manage to take a photo and send it to Nat despite my ridiculously claw-like false nails.
She has got to see this.
“But,” I say as I’m led into a line of similarly ornamented girls, turning rigidly to look at the rest of the room, “I still don’t understand. Where are we doing the show?” Last time I looked, there was nothing outside except frozen snowdrops, desultory pigeons and a stream of grey cars.
Almost everybody is ready.
Roughly fifty female models, in various styles of black gown. A tall, curvy brunette is wearing shiny, tight black rubber with large, sequined horns spiralling out of the top of her head. A beautiful, dark-skinned girl next to her is in thick, heavy black lace that stops at her shins with black wires stretching out from underneath it to the floor.
In the corner, a stunning blonde in a filmy, chiffon-layered black dress and huge black knickers is having a strand of her white-blonde hair re-curled above her jewel-encrusted face.
Thank goodness I didn’t get that outfit.
Annabel would have sued everybody in the room.
“We are showing here, in fact you’re standing right on top of your catwalk, but –” Léonie smiles as the tent door opens in a flash of fresh air and we are led outside in a long black, glittering and freaky line – “only in the most literal sense.”
*
Confused, I blink in the winter sunshine as I’m practically blinded by the dazzle of my face jewels.
There’s n
o traffic near us any more and running across the road outside are thick black carpets where no black carpets were before: lined with giant cut-glass black vases full of towering roses, sprayed black.
There are dozens of intricate black origami birds hanging from the lamp-posts, and spirals of dyed-black ivy curling down them. Lit candles in ornate black lanterns are lined along the carpet – glittering even in the sunshine – and positioned in a neat formation are men and women wearing crisp black suits, keeping at bay the passers-by now accumulating curiously at the edges.
Black swathes of chiffon drift in the wind from the trees and black carvings of demons sit amongst them, poking out like naughty little sparrows.
And in the middle, sober in the bright sunlight, is an intricately carved and Gothic-looking black gateway, above which hangs a sign:
Apparently there are a number of doorways to hell spread around the world. There’s Fengdu in China, and Hellam Township in Pennsylvania; the burning gases of Derweze in the Karakum Desert and Murgo in India.
There’s even the official Gates of Hell, cast in bronze a hundred years ago by Rodin.
But I think we can now add this one to the list.
With its curving, ancient-looking gables, it’s one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen.
And as I look down at my black-velvet-encased feet, it feels as if I’ve suddenly developed X-ray vision and can see straight through the soil to the bones resting seventy-five feet below.
I finally understand what everyone has been talking about.
he Paris of today is all beauty and sunshine.
But running directly beneath it – under the feet of 2.24 million Parisians – are two hundred kilometres of narrow, deep, dark tunnels called Les Catacombs De Paris.
A lot of tourists don’t even know they’re there.
They visit the capital of France in their millions every year without realising that in the late 1700s Paris ran out of places to put their dead people and had to come up with a new solution.
So – little by little, with eerie, overnight, candlelit processions – the Parisians of 1774 began digging up graves: exhuming corpses and carrying them to abandoned quarries underground.
And slowly but surely they lined these tunnels with the remains of six million dead people: building walls from their bones and skulls, depositing most of their passed-away Parisians and a few tourists down here for all eternity.
Which is kind of ironic, really.
Because it means that directly beneath the City of Light – wherever you are – lies a City of Darkness.
The sunny side of Paris is always up.
Trying not to scratch at the beads stuck to my face, I look down the road, to exactly where Wilbur had been pointing when he left me outside the tent. You’ll see. Or maybe you won’t, it depends what the lighting is like.
Huh.
I knew the Catacombs of Paris existed, obviously, but I missed three important clues:
A bolt of excitement rushes through me.
Ooh, apparently there’s a heart made out of human skulls lining one of the walls: if there’s time afterwards maybe I can go and look for it.
I can take a photo for Nat: she’d like that.
There are also French Revolution scratchings on the wall that India would enjoy and a constant 55-degree-Fahrenheit temperature that I could measure for Toby with an app on my phone as long as we’re down there long enough.
In fact, this was actually on my list of Things To Do In Paris anyway.
I can feel myself getting increasingly hyper again.
If there’s one thing I love, it’s multitasking.
The girls both behind and in front of me, however, are apparently not so sure.
Nervous tension is rising by the second.
“Ah non,” the beautiful brown-haired girl in black sequins murmurs nervously as the line that looks like a glamorous death march starts to disappear anxiously through the gates. “Non non non. Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
I turn round as carefully as I can, trying not to knock her off her stilettoed feet with my gargantuan wings. “It’s officially the biggest mass grave on the planet,” I explain patiently. “Although it was also used as a Nazi bunker during the war so it’s quite multipurpose. I guess all the death and ghosts and maybe poltergeists made it feel appropriate.”
Her dark-painted eyes widen in terror.
“Don’t worry,” I add as reassuringly as I can, “nobody has died in there for ages.” I pause. “There was a man called Philibert Aspairt who got lost in 1793 and his body was only found eleven years later, right by an exit, but I’m sure there’s proper signposting now.”
Her shallow breathing in her tight, corseted dress gets even swifter. “I know what it is,” she says in a heavy accent, “I mean why are we going in?”
OK, honestly that’s a lot less easy to answer.
“Fashion?” I guess with an uneasy shrug.
Silently, the glittering, jittering black line continues shuffling forward until I’m on the black carpet outside the portal. The darkness gapes in front of us like something from a Bram Stoker novel, and the heads of the girls in front of us are slowly melting into the gloom like nightmarish shadows.
“Zut alors,” sequin girl behind me breathes. “Je ne l’aime pas.”
Now obviously, I’m not the kind of person who believes in ghouls or afterlives or the continued adventures of the dead and decomposing.
Not only are any of the above scientifically unproven, but approximately a hundred and eight billion people have died in the history of mankind: there just wouldn’t be enough space for all of us to keep hanging around.
But still.
Something deep inside me clearly isn’t quite so sensible, because I’m starting to feel tiny chills all over. Up and down my spine, like the gentle, furtive tips of icy cold fingers.
Or – you know.
An analogy less sentimental. Like when you look down and realise an earwig has been climbing up your arm for the last six minutes and you didn’t even see it.
Casting around, I take in one final, longing gaze at the daytime sunshine: at a city literally built on light.
Then with my head lowered, I bend down as far as my feathered bodice allows.
And move into the night.
r I try to, anyway.
As everybody knows, I don’t tend to have the strongest sense of spatial awareness at the best of times, and that’s when I don’t have four-foot wings stapled to my back.
With a loud ooo-ooomph, I manage to hit the edges of the gateway on both sides.
Then – with a slightly less loud ooomph – the French model behind me slams into my spine.
“Pardon,” she murmurs.
“Ow,” the girl behind her complains angrily after another thud as somebody rams into her too. “Get your heel off the train of my dress.”
“What’s going on up there?”
“Bad Angel’s stuck in the doorway to hell.”
There’s a ripple of relieved laughter suddenly breaking the serious atmosphere and a hot flush of embarrassment washes over me.
Get it together, Harriet.
You are here to model for a world-famous designer, not provide comic relief like some kind of Shakespearean fool.
Flushing, I mumble pardonez-moi down the line and twist slightly so I can enter sideways, like a glamorous feathery crab. There’s a long, deep and curving iron staircase: perilously narrow and uneven, with a queue of totally silent girls disappearing carefully down it. The bottom is pitch-black and each step looks like it can barely hold the weight of one girl, let alone fifty.
Plus they’ve doubled my width: somebody didn’t think this through properly.
Or they did but they’ve never met me.
Squinting, I suck my breath in and try to make myself as narrow and sylph-like as possible.
I focus on hanging on to the railing with my hands as hard as I can so I don’t slip down them.
And I keep scuttling forward.
*
The darkness is overwhelming.
As soon as the sunshine disappears, the tunnel walls close in around us and the blackness spreads uncontrollably, like the ink of every lidless pen I’ve ever left in my bag, ever.
With focus, we all make our way with infinite slowness down the spiral staircase and into the narrow corridors at the bottom.
The air is thick and stale, and it’s so silent now I can hear the steady breathing of the other models, the taps of their heels and the tips of my wings making swoosh sounds against the exposed, cold, damp grey bricks.
Every ten or fifteen steps there’s a small yellow light, and as we walk in and out of dark spots the shadows of our bizarre outfits flicker and stretch around us like nightmares.
Or maybe like a particularly tall and skinny cast of Where The Wild Things Are.
But we all keep shuffling on.
Shivering and focused, through tunnel after tunnel, down and further down: twisting to the left and to the right and to the left again until I’m starting to feel a lot of sympathy for Philibert because I now have no idea where we are or – much more importantly – how to get back out again.
Past creepy little enclaves blocked by iron bars.
Over cold, crunchy ground.
Now and then, somebody will whisper “What was that?” or “Did you just touch me?” or “If I get bone dust on this dress my agent will kill me.”
But mainly we’re totally silent.
Overwhelmed by where we are, and what we’re about to do.
Finally, we reach an opening.
It’s a large cave, shaped roughly out of stone to the right of our tunnel. There’s a black velvet curtain hanging in front of it and all the models are carefully ducking round and collecting there like one half of a Gothic chess set: glittering in the strange light.
A clapping sound echoes in the chamber and we all spin towards it.
“Right, girls,” a lady in a strange, puffed-up orange dress shouts in an English accent, her voice muffled by the thick underground air. “We couldn’t brief you above ground as we had to get you down here before the audience starts arriving.”
