Geek Girl (18 page)

y dad is having a breakdown.

He keeps looking at my head and then murmuring,
Oh God, Oh God, Oh God
, and putting his hands over his eyes. “I think Annabel is going to notice this one,” he says eventually.

I touch the hair clutched between my fingers. An hour ago it was waist-length and now it’s bobbed to just below my ears. I also have a short spiky fringe which is going to be standing vertically for the rest of my teens.

Julien is calling this look “
La Jeanne d’Arc
for the New Decade”. I think it means that I’m going to be sent to the wrong toilet in restaurants until it grows back again.

“Darling,” the stylist says, patting me on the shoulder, “I know you must be gutted: the loss of your femininity and so on. But we don’t really have time for this. We need to get you ready.”

I nod, and then pull myself together and get off the bed. I can’t complain just because my idea of a
transformation
apparently isn’t the same as anyone else’s, i.e. to make me look better
.

“OK,” I say bravely, getting into the make-up chair. I’m going to just let them do whatever it is these people want to do.

Which is, apparently, bore me to death.

Being transformed is incredibly dull. It’s like watching somebody you don’t know paint by numbers. They inexplicably paint my face with something the same colour as my face, then put pink stuff where I was blushing before they covered it up, and then give me lots of black mascara that goes into my eyes, and then bright pink lips.

Then they put shimmery stuff on my shoulders, and shimmery stuff in my hair, and then they hand me my ‘outfit’. I’ve used quotation marks, for the record, because it’s not an outfit. It’s a short fake fur coat and a pair of the highest red heels I have ever seen. And that’s it.

No, sorry. I’ve also got a pair of big black knickers you
just
can’t see under the coat and a sheer pair of tights that are totally transparent and do nothing apart from make my legs look weird and shiny, like the legs of a Barbie.

I stare at it all for a few seconds in disbelief and then take it into the bathroom to maintain my modesty, which for some unknown reason everybody seems to think is really funny. Then I sit on the seat of the toilet to put ‘the outfit’ on.

Ten minutes later, I’m still sitting there.

“Harriet?” a concerned voice eventually says, accompanied by a knocking on the door. “It’s Dad. Are you all right, sweetheart?”

“She’s probably so mesmerised by her own beauty she can’t move away from the mirror,” I hear Wilbur stage-whisper. “It’s why I’m always late.” Then he knocks on the door as well. “
Look away from the reflection, baby
,” he shouts through the wood. “
Just look away and the spell will be broken.
”

“Dad? Can you come in here? I’m on the toilet.”

There’s a pause. “Darling, I love you very much. You’re my only child and the apple of my eye and whatnot. But I’m not coming in there if you’re on the toilet.”

I sigh in frustration. “With the seat
down
, Dad. I’m sitting on the toilet. As a chair.”

“Oh. OK.” Dad pokes his head round the door. “What are you doing?”

“I can’t stand up.”

“You’re
paralysed
? How did that happen?”

“No, I literally can’t stand up. The heels are too big, Dad. I can’t walk in them.” I try to stand up and my ankles buckle and I collapse back on to the toilet.

“Oh.” Dad frowns. “Why hasn’t Annabel been teaching you how to walk in heels? I thought we had an agreement: I teach you how to be cool and she trains you how to be a girl.”

I stare at him in silence. This explains so much. “I’ve never worn heels before. So what am I going to do?”

Dad thinks about it and then starts singing ‘Lean on Me’ by Al Green. He bends down and I take one wobbly step and hang on to his shoulder like a tipsy baby koala hanging on to a eucalyptus tree. Then Dad spins me round so I’m facing away from the door.

“What are you doing?” I snap crossly. I’m currently failing to be a
girl
, let alone a model. “The exit’s that way.”

“Before we go anywhere, I want you to see this,” Dad says and he points in the mirror.

Next to a reflection that looks exactly like my dad is a girl. She’s got white skin and sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin and green eyes. She has thin long legs and a long neck and she’s sort of graceful yet clumsy-looking, like a baby deer. It’s only when I lean forward a bit and see that her nose turns up at the end just like mine does that I fully register that it’s me.

That’s
me
? Wow. The beauty industry actually works
.
I look… I look… I look kind of
OK.

“You can say what you like,” Dad says after a moment. “But I think me and your mum must have done something right.”

I make an embarrassed but pleased peeping sound.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m taking full credit for the hair. But she had all the beauty. She’d be so stoked right now.” Then Dad spins me round again so that my toes are on top of his feet and starts half-carrying, half-dancing me out of the bathroom. “Roar for me?” he demands.

“
Rooooaaaar
.”

“That’s the one. Now let’s go get ’em, Tiger.”

“I think this is leopard, actually,” I point out, looking at the coat. “Tigers have stripes.”

Dad gives me his widest grin. “Then let’s go get ’em, Leopard.”

It takes another four minutes to get out of the bathroom, and by the time I’m back in the hotel room, Dad has corrected the leopard analogy to “baby giraffe learning how to ice-skate”.

Which is extremely unkind. I’d like to see
him
try and walk with eight-inch spikes attached to his feet. Plus, giraffes never lie down and there are at least three points where I’m sort of horizontal.

“Well,
this
isn’t going to work, is it?” Wilbur points out eventually. “At this rate you’ll be
way
too old to model by the time we get down to the shoot, Angel-moo. You’ll probably be in your early twenties and what good is that to anyone?”

“I could put my trainers back on?” I suggest, getting them out of my bag.

Wilbur visibly flinches. “A next season, perfectly cut, limited edition Baylee coat worn with… are they supermarket own-brand trainers?” He swallows. “I think I just sicked up in my mouth. Fashion sacrilege. I can’t allow it. Not while there’s a breath left in this beautiful body of mine.” He frowns and looks around the room. “Luckily I’m brilliant as well as stunning,” he adds happily. “And I have an idea.”

Ten minutes later, I enter Red Square with my entourage behind me. It’s not
exactly
the entrance I was hoping for. In fact, I believe I’ve got my head in my hands for all of it.

Nick takes one look at the wheelchair, accurately guesses why I’m in it and gives a very uncool shout of laughter so loud that pigeons fly off the top of a nearby statue. Yuka isn’t quite as impressed.

“Would somebody like to tell me,” she hisses as she stalks towards where I’m sitting, glaring at the seven people standing behind me, “
who broke my model?”

legant. Dignified. Graceful.

Three words that don’t describe me in the slightest. Five people have to pick me out of the wheelchair and carry me to where Nick is waiting in the snow, in front of St Basil’s Cathedral, and when they plop me down, it takes another few minutes to get me balanced enough to remain vertical on my own. Which I can just about manage. As long as I focus really hard, don’t move a muscle and scrunch my toes up into claws inside the shoes for leverage. And keep my hands out at the sides like a tightrope walker. None of which is aided by Dad’s continuous laughing.

Or – for that matter – Nick’s.

I’m briefly introduced to the photographer, Paul, who is a thin blond man without – as far as I can see – one single flamboyant tendency. He looks totally focused on the job, which is actually even more worrying. At least with Wilbur, it’s possible to forget that there’s a great deal riding on me.

It’s not a little metamorphosis experiment any more. It’s a job. It’s very expensive. It’s very important. And it matters to a lot of people.

“Look at me doing wheelies in the snow!” Wilbur screams in the background, spinning around in the wheelchair.

The photographer takes one look at him, grinds his teeth and looks back at Nick and me. “I just need to set up lighting,” he says in a tense voice, looking up at the sky. It’s starting to snow harder and the sky is a little darker than it was before. “Can somebody get my light reflector?”

A young boy races off and then runs back with a big gold circle.

“Just make yourself comfortable for a few minutes,” he says, fiddling with a little black box as the boy starts flicking the gold circle around. “I’ll take a few test shots when everything’s perfect.” He fiddles with the box again and then looks up. “Somebody might as well get Gary.”

Gary?
Gary?
Who the hell is
Gary
?

I look at Nick, who I’ve managed to avoid making eye contact with since I came back from the hotel. I feel extremely self-conscious now that my hair’s all gone. Like the Wizard of Oz after the curtain’s come down. Nick has his hands in the pockets of a large army-style coat and his hair gelled into a Mohican. He scrunches up his nose at me and my internal organs turn inside out again.

Shouldn’t I be immune to him by now? Or is he like the human version of the common cold?

“You want to watch out,” he says in his slow drawl. “Gary’s vicious.”

I look around in alarm. “Is Gary another model?” I whisper in terror. “A stylist? A hairdresser? Yuka’s assistant?”

“Nope,” Nick says and the corner of his mouth is twitching. “Worse. He’s a monster. Raises hell wherever he goes.” And then he looks past me and nods. “Here he comes. Watch yourself.” And out of the crowd comes a woman holding the teeny-tiny white kitten.

OK, first impressions are deceiving. As soon as the lady hands him over to me, Gary nips my finger and starts clawing his way up my shoulder, hissing like an angry kettle. It’s just not natural for something so cute and fluffy to be so nasty.

I look at Nick in distress. “Why is he spitting at me?”

“Maybe he thinks he’s a llama.”

I grab the kitten, who has changed his mind and is now scrabbling back down and trying to use my arm as a springboard. I don’t think that’s a good idea. He’s small and white: if he lands in the snow, there’s a really good chance we’ll never find him again.

“OK, guys,”Paul finally says. “We’re ready to do some test shots.” He pauses and looks at me. “Harriet. What are you doing to that animal?”

I look down to where I’m sort of hanging on to Gary by his back legs while he scrabbles away with his front ones. “Bonding?” I offer weakly.

“Could you bond in a way that looks a bit less like animal cruelty?”Paul clears his throat. “Right, I’m going to take a dozen or so frames. It’s not
too
important what you do now, but this might be a good time to practise.”

I nod nervously, grimly hold on to the cat and try to pretend that there isn’t a large group of people in a semicircle, all watching every single thing we do.

Right, this is it. I’d expected a little more training – perhaps a little step-by-step instruction sheet on modelling – but… this is fine. I’ll just go with it. Let the inner model out. Wilbur and Yuka obviously saw something deep within me, which has just been waiting to burst forth and impress everyone. Like a… dragon. Or a really big dog.

I stare at the camera with my most modelly face. There’s a pause and then Paul looks up. “What are you doing, Harriet? What’s that face?”

I gulp. “It’s my modelling face.”

“Your…” Paul says in confusion and then he rolls his eyes. “You
have
a modelling face, Harriet. You don’t need to strain it as if you’ve got a bad case of constipation.
Relax.
” There’s another silence. “
Now
what are you doing?”

“Smiling?”

Paul sighs. “Have you ever seen a fashion magazine in your life? Take a look at Nick, Harriet. What is he doing?”

I look at Nick. “He’s, erm… Just standing there.”

“Precisely. He’s being natural, in the best-looking way possible. Just pretend the camera’s not here, sweetheart, and focus on being as beautiful as you can be.”

The cat’s clearly not convinced that I’m capable of this either; he makes a mewling sound and scratches in terror at my other shoulder. Which makes me wobble dangerously on the heels, so I have to reach out and grab Nick’s shoulder.

“Sorry,” I mumble in embarrassment and stare hard at the snow.

Why didn’t anyone explain that there was actually some kind of
skill
involved in being a model? Why didn’t somebody tell me I’d have to actually
do
something? Why didn’t they know I’d be rubbish?

I can feel my eyes starting to well up, and somewhere in the background I hear the make-up artist starting to panic loudly about my mascara. I look at Nick in open desperation and he gives me a crooked smile.

“Right,” he says under his breath. “Give me the cat,” and he takes it off me. Gary immediately makes a small meowing sound, curls up happily in Nick’s arm and goes to sleep. Even
Gary
is in love with him.

“Now blow a raspberry.”

I look at him for a few seconds in silence. “You want me to blow a raspberry?”

“Yup. Loud as you can. Make it a nice wet one.”

I can feel my cheeks getting pink under the foundation. “I’m not blowing a raspberry,” I tell him in a dignified voice. “I’m nearly an adult.”

“Blow a raspberry.”

“No.”

“Blow it.”

“No.”

“
Blow.”

“
Fine
,” I snap in exasperation and I blow a half-hearted raspberry.

Nick frowns at me. “That wasn’t even a strawberry.”

“Oh, for the love of…” I sigh and then I blow a much louder raspberry. I’m not even going to look at Yuka. I don’t think this is why she employed me. “Happy now?”

“Much better. Now wiggle your shoulders. And your neck.”

I wiggle my shoulders and my neck.

“Knock your knees together.”

I knock my knees.

“And do the funky chicken.”

I giggle and obediently do the funky chicken.

“Can you handle cold feet? Because if you can, I reckon you should take those stupid shoes off and hold them.”

I glance at Paul, who is concentrating on adjusting one of the lamps to his right. And then I glance to the left where Yuka Ito is sitting in a black chair, glaring at us both with the face Annabel pulls when she eats oysters.

“OK,” I say, shrugging, and take my shoes off. I’m so nervous I can’t feel my feet anyway. Plus, I’m not sure I can get much worse at this. The only way is up.

Apparently Nick’s thinking the same thing. Literally. “Now,” he says, grinning. “I’m going to hold your hand. And when I say jump,
jump
, as high as you can. Look straight at the camera, keep your face calm and
jump
. OK?”

I nod, with my head now numb.

“Relax?”

I nod.

“Funky chicken?”

I nod and waggle my arms a bit.

“
OK, jump
,” Nick whispers.

And I jump.