Secret Nanny Club

by Mackle, Marisa

  “I am here with my mother,” I explained light-heartedly. “She’s just in the Ladies’ touching up her make-up in case we get our photo taken. It’s a good night, isn’t it? Did you enjoy the show? The clothes were fabulous.”

  She made a face and then nudged her friend who had pink hair and was wearing a fussy pussy-bow blouse, sequined hot pants and the highest pair of wedges I’d ever seen in my life. “This is Suzie,” she said.

  Suzie nodded at me but as her eyes were quite bloodshot I wasn’t even sure that she could see me properly. I wondered how she was able to stand, never mind walk, in those

  ridiculous sky-high shoes she was wearing. “She’s my flatmate,” Emily said to Suzie. “You know, the one I was telling you about,” she added cryptically.

  Suzie said nothing. She seemed kind of out of it. Then Emily linked her arm and led her away purposefully to the bar. The encounter made me feel very uncomfortable indeed. Emily had made me feel like an annoying gate crasher. I didn’t really understand it. I mean, she had always been happy for me to carry the heavy bags of clothes back to the shops where I sometimes had to wait around for an age to get a staff member to check all the garments meticulously before signing them off. She was happy to ask me to take that brand-new designer shirt that had got make-up on the collar during a photo shoot to a specialist dry cleaner while she lay on the couch with a hangover, eating crisps and watching Jeremy Kyle, but she had never once invited me to any fashion shows, and now that I had managed to get invited to some myself, she seemed furious. I realised then that she had just been using me to do her dirty work. She wanted the name and the fame of being a stylist but she didn’t want to do the horrible part which was carrying the bags around all day until you felt like your arms were going to come out of their sockets.

  I began hiding my invitations as soon as I got them from the postman. It was ridiculous but I knew Emily was annoyed that I’d started going to glamorous events. As far as she was concerned she was supposed to be the one with the exciting job in the apartment and I was supposed to be the boring nerdy one.

  After some soul-searching I plucked up the courage to approach a well-known women’s magazine and offered to work as an assistant stylist. I didn’t hear anything back for a week or so and then I phoned the editor to see if she had got my CV. I was afraid it might have got lost or something.

  “Who is this?” The woman sounded harried on the phone. “Are you a stylist?” she asked, or rather barked at me. “I’m up to my tonsils right now. Are you free tomorrow to give a hand?”

  I was so stunned I said that yes, I was free. I didn’t have time to tell the woman that I hadn’t had much experience and that I was just starting out as a freelance. Anyway, she didn’t seem a bit interested in anything other than the fact that I was available to start as soon as possible.

  She admitted to me that the in-house stylist in the magazine had just walked out unexpectedly, leaving chaos behind. Now there was nobody to organise that month’s fashion shoot and time was of the essence. The theme was student chic. Did I think I could do that? Was I capable and confident enough to turn everything around at the speed of lightning? She said that I had to book a model, but that their in-house photographer would do the shots in his city-centre studio. My head was spinning. Talk about being thrown into the deep end without a paddle! I found myself nodding in agreement to all her demands. Basically, I should arrive with a selection of at least eight different outfits. The shoot was to be a five-spread job. Think young and fun and preppy. Nothing too old or frumpy or stuffy. Think artistic yet slightly adventurous. Oh, and could I organise a makeup artist? Think minimum make-up. No false eyelashes or false anything. Forget anything that might be considered

  trashy. No orange whatsoever on any part of the skin. And could I also organise hair? Hair! At less than twenty-four hours’ notice? Oh sure, no problem. Just leave it to me.

  As I put down the phone I was almost shaking with a mixture of fear and excitement. I wasn’t a real stylist, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I had just secured myself a booking for a high-end glossy magazine. This was a chance in a lifetime for me. It was surreal! Of course I had helped Emily out on many occasions but could I do it myself? And get paid for it? How much money should I even invoice for? Did I have the confidence to ask for the going rate even as a rookie? But then I didn’t have much time to agonize over my new assignment. I had less than a full day to get organised. I needed to hit the ground running.

  I rang round a few of the well-known hairdressers to see if I could get a

  hairstylist to come out to the studio for free. The first three salons were too short-staffed to help out but the fourth hairdresser said they would send out a junior stylist for free in exchange for a credit. I nearly jumped for joy. I knew from Emily anyway that magazines rarely pay for anything and expect to get everything for free, and my budget for this job was just two hundred euro for a model so I literally would have had nothing left to pay for extras. After a few more anxious phone calls I got hold of the owner of a makeup school who was eagerly looking for business. She said she would send a member of her team along to the

  shoot, and could we make sure to publish the email address and phone number of the school in the credits?

  “No problem,” I said, totally relieved. I now began to feel guilty for having considered Emily lazy in the past. I had mistakenly thought that the tough part of the job was trudging around town with shopping bags pulling your arms out of their sockets. What I didn’t factor in was the stress involved in co-ordinating a fashion shoot. With only hours to go I had to find a suitable model. You would think in a city like Dublin I would have had no problem at all finding a suitable model. It would be easy, I thought. God, how wrong was I?

  I went onto three different model websites and there were literally thousands of photos of models of all shapes and sizes. I didn’t realise there were so many of them about. Like, hello? Did every second female in Ireland aspire to be a model or something? Looking through all the pictures I began to feel overwhelmed. Some of the photos seemed

  quite old and out of date or they were too blurred to see what the girl really looked like. It was very important that my model was under twenty-one as she was supposed to be a student.

  I didn’t want somebody too young-looking either. She had to look realistic and not a schoolgirl. I decided to hold a quick casting in town and bagged the use of a city-centre hotel for free for an hour. I then picked out a couple of girls from each website which wasn’t as easy as just going onto eBay and clicking the Buy It Now button. First of all, when I phoned my preferred agency the girl on the other end of the phone told me that the two models that

  I had in mind were unavailable because they were on holidays. I then asked about another girl on the website.

  “Oh Carla?” the girl said with a sigh, sounding rather bored. “Yeah, well, she lives in London now so she wouldn’t be available at such short notice.”

  I found myself wondering why a model who lives in London and isn’t available to work at short notice has a photo up on an Irish agency website. Then I asked for another girl that I liked the look of. She couldn’t attend the casting unfortunately because she was five months’ pregnant and was apparently only doing maternity fashion shoots at the moment.

  At this stage I was practically pulling my hair out. It was the same story at nearly all the agencies. Nearly everyone I wanted to see was unavailable. The girls were either on holidays or sick, or lived abroad or had already been booked for the following day. One girl, whose picture on the agency site was stunning, turned out to be thirty years old so she was also a non-runner.

  Another girl had a whole arm covered in tattoos that you couldn’t see in her agency shots. She wouldn’t be suitable either. Eventually I managed to get together a group of potential candidates that were available. I asked each agency to send the girls to the hotel for 4.00 p.m. so that I could make my choice. In all, twelve girls turned up for


  the one job. Now that might sound like I had a very tough time choosing one girl, but it wasn’t like I was Simon Cowell on theX Factorwith a pool of incredible talent to choose from. Okay, so I knew I wasn’t going to have my pick of supermodels, and especially at such

  short notice, but some of the girls that turned up were so unprofessional that they beggared belief. A couple of them were chewing gum and looked like they hadn’t even bothered washing, one was about the same height as me and I’m just over five foot, one was distinctly hungover and there was a whiff of booze and stale cigarette smoke about her, one had black roots halfway down her otherwise blonde head and the others simply did not have the look I had in mind. It taught me a very good lesson on not judging a model by the agency photos. I mean, obviously professional photos are going to make the subject look pretty fantastic but some of these images must have been Photoshopped beyond all recognition to the point of making crooked teeth into straight white ones and making cellulite, wrinkles, skin blemishes and spots completely vanish.

  I was dismayed by what had turned up, but just as I was about to give up hope, one last girl arrived in through the studio door. She was a vision: tall, slim and fresh-looking with a megawatt natural smile. She was dressed simply in skinny jeans, a white T-shirt and a

  black blazer, and she was clean and healthy-looking with long wavy auburn hair cascading down her back. She was exactly what I wanted and I thanked heaven for sending her to me and saving the day. Reena, as her name turned out to be, was professional, polite and utterly delightful to work with. She was patient and easy-going but also gave her all to the camera. Myself and the photographer, a seasoned snapper in his sixties called Luke, were completely bowled over by the lovely Reena. She even impressed us when halfway through the shoot she offered to go out and buy us sandwiches and coffee!

  All the clothes looked lovely on her. She was so slim that everything we put on her fitted perfectly. She didn’t even have to hold in her tummy! We took eight shots in total and then viewed them on Luke’s laptop. It was pretty difficult to narrow the selection to just five. Reena really looked the part in all of the photos. But then she was a student herself so why wouldn’t she have? She was perfect!

  At the end of the day I was completely exhausted, I hadn’t eaten and I was struggling to keep my eyes open. It had been fun but a very tiring day. The hairdresser, make-up artist, the model and myself had all been in the large unheated studio since 7.30 a.m. It wasn’t at all as glamorous as you might think a fashion shoot would be. But it was still exciting to have been part of it all and I now felt like a real stylist rather than a mere pretender. I literally couldn’t wait to see the end result in a real magazine on the shop shelves.

  The best thing of all was that the editor phoned me later to say how pleased she was with the results of my photo shoot and immediately commissioned me to do another one for the following month’s edition. The relief was enormous. I had been so terrified she’d think I was crap! I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face for the whole day. It would be all systems go from now on. Yes, I was in business!

  I remember so well the day the magazine was supposed to be out and I went to my local newsagent’s first thing in the morning. I was almost shaking with excitement and anticipation as I scanned the magazine rack. But, alas, I couldn’t see the magazine at all. The guy behind the till said it hadn’t been delivered yet but they were expecting it in later that day. I must have made at least five trips to the shop on the same day but no luck. The magazine hadn’t been seen at all. I was engulfed by disappointment. This was as bad as waiting for exam results. Actually it was worse, because when I was in school I hadn’t particularly cared about exam results.

  Reluctantly, I accepted that I wouldn’t see the magazine until the following day. And then, when I eventually saw it the following morning, I stood in the shop with trembling hands, flicking over the pages frantically until I saw the shoot with Reena. If the magazine had beenVogueand the model had been Kate Moss herself I couldn’t have been happier. She looked beautiful and the clothes looked amazing on her. I bought five copies, then headed off to the off-licence to buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate and hailed a taxi to my mother’s house. My mum was really proud when I showed her my name in the credits. She said she was going to buy five copies of the magazine myself, including one for my grandmother. We cracked open the champagne, toasted my first ever solo shoot and then I treated my mum to a late lunch in a popular little Indian restaurant around the corner from her house.

  “Well done, you! I’m so proud of you, my love,” my mother said as we toasted each other again in the restaurant, this time with sparkling wine. “This is all just so exciting. How much are you getting paid for the shoot by the way?”

  I cleared my throat awkwardly. “Eh . . . I’m not sure. I didn’t like to ask, you know.”

  “What? Now, that’s a mistake, Kaylah. You need to get over your shyness. If you want to work for yourself, and compete in the big bad world you’ve got to grow a pair.”

  “I know, and you’re right,” I said, looking down at the menu and flicking the pages absently. “It’s just that I didn’t want to start asking about money before I’d got the job done. I felt like I needed to prove myself. It’s tough out there.”

  “It was always tough. Life is tough, and you have to fight for everything that’s worth having.”

  “I’m well aware of that.” For God’s sake, as if I didn’t know! “Anyway, the good thing is that I’ve been asked to do another photo shoot for the next month’s edition of the magazine so I can’t complain. I’m happy.”

  And I was happy. Walking on air. Until I arrived back at my flat later that evening to find Emily waiting for me in the hall. She was holding a copy of the magazine in her right hand and her face was like thunder. “What the hell is the meaning of this?” She held the magazine up in the air. “I want answers and I want themnow.”

  I was shocked by the look of anger in her face. I mean, I had just had a fashion shoot published and I was elated. It wasn’t as though I had committed a crime or anything. But the way she looked at me accusingly was actually making me feel guilty. Maybe I should have told her I was doing it. But then again, she didn’t tell me every single job she was booked for. Were we supposed to tell each other everything now? Were we now like a couple joined at the hip?

  “There is no law against me doing this, as far as I am aware,” I said, trying to speak calmly. I had no idea why I was being forced to justify myself. “I can’t believe your reaction.”

  “This is my territory,” she snapped, almost spitting in my face. “You are completely stepping on my toes here, Kaylah. It just isn’t on.”

  “Sorry, Emily, but you are being unreasonable. It’s not like there is a law stating that there can only be one stylist in the whole of the country. Lots of people are stylists just like there are lots of nurses and taxi-drivers out there. We’re all free to do what we want. I’d have

  thought that you would have been happy for me.”

  Emily’s eyes narrowed. “You obviously did not think I’d be happy,” she seethed. “Or else you would have told me about this photo shoot! You went behind my back. What do you know about styling? I thought you were going to be a lab technician. You’re trying to steal my

  life. You’re like that character from the filmSingle White Female. This is outrageous!”

  “But you don’t even work for this magazine,” I said, feeling the earlier effects of the day’s happiness ebb away from me. “If you worked for them, maybe, just maybe, I would understand your reaction, but you don’t!”

  “I am a freelance, as you very well know,” she said. “So I work with everyone and anyone that’s willing to work with me. It’s tough in this business to keep your head above water. I had been hoping to work for this magazine too before you came along and swiped the opportunity.”

  “What? That’s utter nonsense,” I said, defending myself. “It’s not like they’re only go
ing to work with just me. Phone them up tomorrow and pitch an idea, I don’t care. There’s room in this town for us both.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said, “there may be room in this town but there’s certainly not enough room in this apartment for the both of us. I’m moving out. I can’t deal with this anymore.”

  I shook my head. “I honestly cannot believe you’re being so dramatic.”

  “Can you not? Really? Well, to you this is drama, maybe. But to me, it’s my entire livelihood. You learned everything about styling from me and from me alone. I trained you and you turned around and stabbed me in the back. I will never help anyone again because you get no thanks for it.”

  Close to tears at this stage, I nevertheless pointed out that Emily had been quite happy for me to be her practical slave for months, dragging bags around town and getting no thanks for it whatsoever. But she didn’t want to hear that bit. When I was in the middle of talking to her, she started walking away from me. She disappeared into her room and slammed the door shut behind her. And the next day, true to her word, she packed up her belongings and left the place we shared together. And ever since, even though we both work in the same industry, see each other at various functions and a lot of time has passed since our infamous bust-up, we have never exchanged a single word.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Years ago, an auntie of mine called Kitty told me about a cruise liner she had once been on. She had taken a round-the-world trip with some of the money she had got from her husband’s life insurance after he had sadly passed away.

  “It was the most beautiful ship imaginable,” Kitty told me, “and the service was second to none. Every cabin was assigned its own personal butler. It was actually embarrassing how much they looked after you. Nothing was too much for them. If you so much as sipped from your glass of water, the staff would top it up for you the moment you put it down.”

  Kitty had spent a lot of money on that cruise. No wonder the staff had been at her beck and call! She obviously tipped well too. I loved hearing the stories from the cruise and all about the characters that she had met on board. One lady on the ship was from California and had been on it for six months, probably because her family thought it was better than bundling her into a dreary nursing home. The Californian lady had been married four times but was a widow when she met Kitty. Kitty told me that the lady would arrive at dinner every night dripping in jewellery and would entertain fellow guests with wonderful tales about meetings with Hollywood stars. I was fascinated about it all, but especially about the private butlers whose sole job was to look after a single guest each. If the guest wanted the laundry done, he organised it; he made sure the cabin was full of fresh flowers; he would even come with you to the self-service buffet to make sure you didn’t even have to serve yourself if you didn’t want to. And he would dance with you in the evening if nobody else asked.