by Pip Adam
‘So the story’s “Content Advisory Warning”’ – everyone looked at Tommy again, so quickly and with such gravity it gave him a start, but he didn’t miss a beat – ‘and we want this kind of cut-up look, but I was thinking, not this distorted.’ He waved a hand over the prints of the cut-ups, discounting the parts that were of no use to him. He was making something new and they were meant as a low noise from another room. A noise that made its way through air. The prints were like the wall: you could return to the wall if you lost your way. If you suddenly couldn’t trace the noise in the air, you could walk to the wall and touch it or place the back of your hand on it to feel the vibration, find it again then return to the centre of the room, the place where you were making something new. ‘We’d like to pick out the details of the clothes, the textures, but also destruct them – a bit like these.’ He was showing them on the tablet now, pulling parts of the images out bigger then closing his fingers to put them back in their place and move to another part of the screen.
He’d seen photos of Ava Seymour from then. He’d put a shot of her from the early 2000s in the folder. He wanted to show them. She was wearing a fur waistcoat that stood out miles from her slight body. She had large aviator glasses and tattoos. He wanted to show them, but he had a feeling it was happening again – a look from Carla, like he understood an inch of it while she understood it all. Even at the bottom of the earth where it turns to fire, she understood it. So he wouldn’t show them. It felt good to feel so sure.
It had taken the time it had taken, but he felt comfortable, like he was sitting in the seat properly. Four years now, eight collections. Everyone thought they couldn’t. Carla, probably, but who could tell with Carla. She always looked like she’d just got out of a pool – shiny skin, her eyes slightly pink behind her thick glasses.
He looked at the screen. Placed it so they could all see it. The first thing everyone would notice was the vagina but he needed to remind them who they were. The photos weren’t easy. This wasn’t an easy thing they were trying to do. They weren’t trying to calm anyone down with the first thing – the obvious one. It wasn’t the vagina that was important to him in this picture. The women’s bodies had babies’ heads. All except the one lying down – this one was all the woman’s body, the way it had been in the original photograph – who was blindfolded and cuffed at the wrists and throat. The others wore cupless bras and leather skirts or nothing at all, you could see all their vaginas except one who was wearing a strap-on, and all the others had babies’ heads. Tommy had assumed this was why the title had ‘tot’ in it, then he found out it meant ‘dead’ in German. They’d looked at straight porn for the shoot but this was better, it had more edge. It was art. ‘So yeah, we want to take some of the edge from this, the raunch, and somehow translate it to the men’s corporate line.’
Kurt and Cal nodded. Cal still had his sunglasses on. Kurt was wearing a T-shirt with a unicorn airbrushed onto it. The unicorn had been overlaid with a sugar skull.
‘No industrial walls,’ Cal said. ‘Tell her about that.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Tommy. ‘We think the conventional way to go with this would be concrete and like bolts and things, but’ – he swiped to another of Ava’s collages. It was a newer one. It was in a blue room. The walls, the bed spread, the curtains all the same blue, printed with small white flowers.
Carla had been to Ava’s 2014 show. It was made up of tiny monochromatic rectangular photographs, all different diameters, hanging from obsessively straight pencil lines ruled into white walls. It was magnificent. With all the force of a long subversive career, held at bay by the blocks of colour and the small size, the exhibition battered everyone who saw it.
Carla was writing notes in her journal. Suburban she wrote, and Cut up, Distorted.
‘Both the guys are heavily tattooed.’ Cal threw some headshots across the table towards Carla. Both the men had mousy mid-length hair. ‘And we want to, like, in the colour have the tattoos covered, tidy, like someone’s told them to hide them, and then in the black-and-white – the cut-outs over the top of the colour – the tattoos are all there, visible. It’s like “corporate clothes for the man who’s corporate-resistant”.’
‘Corporate clothes that say “fuck you”,’ Kurt said, to clarify.
Fuck you, Carla wrote.
‘Carla,’ Kurt said. Someone had talked to Kurt about how he talked to Carla, the way he sounded like he was talking to a small child he was trying to coax down from a tree. He talked to most women that way. Carla kept looking at the headshots and writing.
‘Carla.’
She looked up.
‘We want the guy’s hair really short.’ He ran his hand close to the side of his head, smoothing his long hair flat.
Carla had cut Kurt’s hair a couple of weeks ago, in his house by the beach out west. She did all their hair.
‘Really short,’ Kurt said, still with his hands in his hair. ‘Almost like –’
Carla was pretty sure he was going to say ‘concentration camp’.
‘Like, you know, the Nazis, like they’ve just been sprayed down with DDT and shaved.’
She nodded.
‘But with, you know.’ He was patting the top of his head now. He didn’t want them to actually look like victims of genocide. He wanted them to have style.
‘It doesn’t have to have much length,’ Tommy said. ‘We don’t need to compromise too much.’ He was leaning over trying to see what Carla was writing in her notebook. She wrote Not too short so he could see it. Kurt was still patting his head. The unicorn was bobbing as he did it.
Carla picked he’d got the sugar-skull T-shirt in Venice Beach. She’d seen the stalls in magazines. An untrained eye would take it as ironic, but all three of them, Kurt, Cal and Tommy, represented the new sincere, the anti-irony. No, Carla thought, Kurt loves unicorns, he feels like they really say something about the pre-apocalyptic mess they were all drowning in. Sing, they said. Dance.
Carla dug deep into her bag for her phone. She had photos of a haircut she’d done last week – she’d graduated the sides and back from blade-shaved to a tight flat top. She had a feeling this would be back, but was working with the shape so it didn’t look like Vanilla Ice. She’d done the haircut at the salon where Duey worked on one of the boys who had just started. He was just out of hairdressing school and he needed a new haircut. They were all drinking. The salon was closed. Duey showed her how to get the shave blade-smooth, so it looked like there’d never been hair there. Carla had done it before but she wanted to go higher than she had previously, and closer. It was something about the occipital bone. Last time it was in fashion they’d stayed low, using the occipital as a starting point for the graduation, so it didn’t look round, so it was sharp, but this time, now, in the salon late at night, everyone slightly drunk, it had to be round, the shape of the skull needed to show through, because it was shocking. It felt frightening while she was cutting it.
‘All fashion does at the moment,’ Duey said. People were being beheaded, that was the context. ‘Show their fucking skulls,’ Duey said. ‘So it feels like you could just get a spade and cave that skull in. That’s where it’s at.’
‘Don’t fucking hold back. It’s 2016.’ Duey grabbed Carla’s hand with the straight razor still in it and pushed it with slightly more force against the new boy’s scalp. ‘The time for holding back is over.’
Duey was right. Carla knew that. And she knew that meant their time had come. Carla and Duey had been there last time. They’d used disposable Bic razors to shave skinheads, to reveal Swastika tattoos – to clear the way for more. It sat on her, and that’s what Tommy and Kurt and Cal and everyone else saw. They didn’t know it, but that’s what they saw. Carla was old now, comfortable and smart and quiet, but not weirdly. She knew what to ask them so she could give them exactly what was in their heads and they thought that was why they wanted to work with her, but it wasn’t. There were plenty of people half her age who could do that. W
hat was really reeking off her, what fell from her as she walked into these meetings, was that she had seen it and made it and broken it and been broken by it all before.
‘We were here for the last nihilistic crisis,’ Duey had said in the salon. ‘And because we didn’t die, we’re here for this one. We need to bleed it for everything it has.’ And then Duey laughed and filled their glasses again because Duey wasn’t doing a damn thing except rich old women’s hair. ‘And the working men,’ Duey said, laughing harder. ‘I have a bookful of suited gentlemen tomorrow.’ Carla smiled but didn’t look away from the new boy’s nape, the open blade, the occipital bone.
Tommy was talking again. Carla had found the photo on her phone. Duey was in the back of it, caught in the mirror somehow, almost as big as the model. Duey was looking over at something, mid-sentence. Carla passed her phone to Kurt, who looked at the image, nodded, and slid it over to Tommy. ‘Exactly,’ Tommy said. He passed the phone to the photographer.
‘Who’s this guy?’ the photographer said, turning the phone round to everyone and pointing at Duey. ‘He’s the best-looking man I’ve ever seen.’
‘She,’ said Carla.
‘Sorry,’ the photographer again, his eyes still on the phone.
‘She’s the best-looking man you’ve ever seen.’
‘Don’t care,’ he said.
‘Even better,’ the stylist said.
‘This is the face for the campaign,’ the photographer said. ‘These are the tattoos.’ The photographer zoomed in on Duey’s hands, then her neck. ‘This is the body. They’re skinny as fuck.’
The air was awkward in the room.
‘Do those tattoos go up their arm?’ the stylist was asking the photographer now.
‘It’d be nice,’ Tommy said, without anything in his voice, but loud enough so everyone turned back to him. ‘And believe me we’ve tried. But they’re just not into it.’
‘She’s not into it at all,’ Carla said.
Carla was sure they’d given up asking Duey, because whenever they did, it made Duey furious and she’d yell at Carla about it. The first time Tommy mentioned it to her, Duey asked Carla if she thought it might be a badly thought-out pick-up line – that maybe she’d read him wrong. But Carla explained about Elodie. Duey shuddered. The whole thing made her uncomfortable because she knew how they talked about models, about models’ bodies. Duey’s body was her own business. She’d shouted it at Carla after Cal had visited the salon out of the blue. ‘They need to stop talking about me,’ she said. Carla should have been more careful with the photo.
‘Oh well,’ the photographer said, handing the phone back to Carla. ‘It’s a shame.’
Everyone was quiet.
Carla picked up the final model’s headshot. ‘What about her?’ The woman had long blond hair falling around her bare tanned shoulders in beach waves. ‘She’s got no tattoos.’
‘Or penis.’ The photographer laughed.
‘Oh. No,’ said Kurt, ‘no. With her it’ll be like, we’re going to put one of the men’s shirts on her, but that’s all and her legs are apart so the black and white will show bare legs and underwear.’
Carla nodded, holding the headshot a bit longer, mulling it over. Then she said, ‘We could do a white headband so it kind of echoes the way underwear looks from that angle. You know, clean, white, contained.’
‘Carla.’ Tommy turned to her. ‘This is why we can’t do without you.’
No one else had seen it, Tommy was sure. He looked around quickly to check if anyone else had seen it, but no one indicated anything. Everyone was looking at their phones, at the screens of the tablets they were passing round. But Tommy had been looking up and he’d seen it flash across Carla’s face. It was so quick, but so was he. Contempt. Worse, she was laughing at them. She wore very thick glasses. She always had. Thick black rims and thick lenses as well. Her eyes boomed in them, like she was in a fish bowl. But he’d seen it, in the split second after, possibly even while he was saying it, while he was showing his appreciation. She’d pushed the glasses up the bridge of her nose and then there it was, all her energy. He could see the force she needed not to shake her head and roll her eyes. He could see it. She thought she’d got away with it. But he’d seen it.
All this he only realised in hindsight, later that night, as he was being driven to his parents’ house thinking, ‘What the fuck?’ Talking himself into how it would all be all right. In between the positive talk he replayed what it was that he’d said and why exactly he’d said it. And he saw it clearly, then. The effort it had taken not to show them exactly what she thought of them, the contempt. Something had moved in him, and that’s why he’d said it.
‘I think we should shoot this really soon. What do you think, Carla? Are you ready to shoot this?’
There could have been a reprieve. There could have been. If she hadn’t answered, so sure, ‘Yeah, I’m ready.’ Even if she’d let her eyes drop from his for a second, not looked him so sure in the eye, demonstrated just for a second that she realised the capacity he had and that he could do what he did next.
‘I feel good about this. Let’s shoot tomorrow.’
Everyone looked at him. At that moment, as he looked down at the table, he wondered if someone else had suggested it, but when he looked up again everyone was still looking at him. He had said it. ‘Are the samples here?’ Kurt asked. Carefully.
‘I’m sure they can be.’ Tommy started rolling his phone over and over in his hand, feeling the smoothness of it, the smallness and how it held so much.
‘I’m fine.’ The photographer had his diary up and was already tapping in the event.
‘I have everything I need,’ said the stylist. ‘I like this idea.’
Carla didn’t look so smug now. She had the most to do. ‘We don’t have a makeup artist,’ she said.
‘I like Elodie,’ Tommy said. ‘Can you contact Elodie?’ He didn’t even look at Kurt and Cal.
‘Yeah, I can try. She could be booked up.’
‘She’s lost her phone,’ Cal said.
‘She’s got a new one,’ Tommy and Kurt said at the same time.
Carla nodded.
‘You sort that out, Carla.’ Tommy had his phone out, calling the workroom. He walked over to the kitchen so they would only hear his side of the conversation.
‘Sharona,’ he said. ‘We’re going to shoot tomorrow.’
‘Okay,’ she said.
‘Yeah, I think it’s best. Fresh. Hot. We’re going to do it now.’
‘Okay.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Tommy, the samples aren’t here.’
‘Yeah, exactly. So yeah.’
‘Tommy, they’re coming from Indonesia.’
He laughed. Carla wouldn’t look at him, she was on her phone. ‘Exactly. We’re really excited.’
‘Shall I call them?’ Sharona asked.
‘Yeah. So tomorrow. Morning.’
He looked over to the photographer, who said, ‘Ten. I reckon ten. We’re shooting inside.’
‘Ten,’ Tommy said to the phone, to Sharona. ‘We’re shooting inside.’
‘There are no clothes to shoot.’
‘Okay. Great. Thanks Sharona.’ Tommy hung up and came back to the table.
‘Are the clothes here?’ Cal said.
‘Under control,’ Tommy said. It was pointless really, Carla and Sharona would talk immediately after the meeting – could be texting each other now. But Carla wasn’t the only person in the room who could hear him talking on the phone.
Carla nodded and started to pack up her notebook. Her phone vibrated. She looked at the message. ‘CUNTS.’ It was from Sharona. With only one hand, while the others were finishing up, Carla messaged Duey, ‘Need to cut 2 boys. Can I have a chair? Any chance?’
‘Where do I find these boys?’ she said, pointing to the models’ headshots.
Tommy looked at the headshots too. ‘Guy’s in High Street. At World. He can probably pop out for an hour or
so. Dominic doesn’t work.’
Carla picked up the photographs and turned them over. ‘And they’re all right with shooting tomorrow?’
Tommy nodded. Carla looked up from copying down Guy’s phone number. ‘There’s no number for Dominic.’ She was turning the print over and over in her hand like it would appear. There was no agency contact either.
Tommy nodded and looked at his phone. He wrote down a cell number on the corner of the photo.
‘Right, well I better make a move.’ She picked her stuff off the table. ‘Thanks everyone. See you tomorrow.’
There was a huddle in the workroom. As Carla walked past Sharona looked out, eyes wide, mouthing, ‘What the fuck?’
Carla shook her head and looked at her phone at the same time. She had to get home to Doug and call Elodie. She messaged Duey again. ‘Sorry to be a dick. But. Chairs? Possibility of such?’
It would be easier to call. Duey looked at her phone, at the message from Carla. It was busy but not out of control – she could duck out and it would be fine.
The salon smelt of women. It was a huge room really, the floors were wooden and slat timber screens held the retail space away from the shampoo basins, from the cutting bay. The people inside could look out to the street from the privacy of more timber screens. Clients sat next to one another and opposite one another. Everything was slim lines. A long, complete mirror stretched the extent of the cutting bay. Black sculptures of humans and animals shone from the walls and floor, the only roundness and body. The salon vibrated with the hum of hairdryers and smelt like women. Carla said it was the sort of place where a man who wanted to be a hairdresser but still wanted pussy should work, which upset Duey and also wasn’t true. Carla said it to wind her up. They’d been friends for 30 years. Carla had gone away for 10. So really, they’d been friends for 20 years. Duey didn’t want to fuck Carla, and Carla didn’t want to fuck Duey. They were friends. So Carla could wind her up with jokes about sex and the people Duey had sex with, just to bring Duey down to size. Maybe.
