Sleeping Awake (3 page)

Cienna
smiled then, wide-eyed and looking mighty proud of herself. “Good. I’ll just go
up now and finish assembling my accessories for each dress. You can come up
once you’ve finished eating breakfast.”

After
she left, I cleared the table and poured my undrunk tea down the kitchen sink.
Thanks to Cienna’s foolishness, not only had I not been able to read my paper
at a leisurely pace, but my tea had gone cold. I resigned myself to half-hour’s
torture before I could get back under the covers and block out the light of the
day.

*~*

On my way to Cienna’s room, the doorbell rang. In all
likeliness, whoever was on the doorstep was there for her. However, I knew that
she wasn’t about to halt her shoe and jewellery selection for something as
bothersome as answering the front door. As for Camelea, if she was at home, she
only ever knew to leave her room in order to attend Mass or give Maman puppy
eyes for neglecting her. It was clearly up to me to find out who it was.

I squinted when I opened the door. It wasn’t because
of the sun.

“How
may I help you?” was at the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t remember how to
speak. Whoever he was, he was criminally beautiful, and the liquid gold specks
in his eyes seemed to be shooting warmth throughout my body.

“Axel
Almstedt,” he said. He stretched out his hand casually, as if used to the
temporary brain freeze of the women under his radar. “And you are?” he asked.

“Noira,”
I managed.

He
smiled; it made his eyes seem even warmer. I wanted to ask him where he was
from. His accent was barely noticeable as he spoke English. I guessed that he
was perhaps Swedish or German. His cell phone rang before I could ask.

“Excuse
me,” he said, taking out his phone. “Hej? Lucas? Hej hur
mår du?
”

So
he was Swedish.
He was dressed as impeccably as one does for the cover of
GQ and radiated a perfect blend of confidence and sex appeal. For some strange
reason, I was tempted to touch him to see if he was real.

I watched as he got off the phone. “I’m sorry about
that,” he said. “I know that it was quite rude of me, but it was rather
important.”

I gave him my best attempt at a smile. “It’s no
problem. How may I help you?”

“I’m here to see Camelea,” he said. “We’re friends.”

Camelea? What on earth did he want with my psycho-Christian-sister?
He didn’t look like the Born Again type.

“This way please,” I said in my best hostess voice.
“If you’d just follow me through to the sitting room upstairs, I will get her
for you.”

If Axel was here to see my sister, there was no way
that he’d be interested in sampling any of my treats. It was such a pity,
because Camelea sure as hell wasn’t going to be offering him a taste of
anything. That girl clung to her virginity and her Jesus as if they were oxygen
and water.

I showed him where to sit and went down the hall to
Camelea’s bedroom. Bracing myself for her foul behaviour, I knocked on the
door.

After opening the door and
realizing that it was me, she pulled her bath towel closer and straightened up.

“What is it? I thought that
Cienna was home,” she said. She suddenly looked very fatigued.

The feeling was mutual.
“There’s someone here to see you,” I said.

“What?” Her eyes narrowed into
the teeniest of slits. Had I not been the one to answer the door, I wouldn’t
have believed it either.

“Axel
Almstedt
; he says that you two are friends.”

 Camelea began to pale.
The way that she looked at me, you’d have assumed that I was the Ghost of
Horror’s Past come to snatch away her happiness. My interest in Axel piqued.

“Shall I send him away?” I asked,
raising an eyebrow.

“No!” Camelea snapped. “Tell
him that I’ll be there in five minutes.”

She reached for her crucifix.

“God’s speed!” I said, trying
not to laugh.

She scowled and slammed the
door in my face.

I walked back to the second
floor landing-turned-upstairs sitting room. “She’s coming.”

Axel nodded and smiled again.
Before I could say something that was highly suggestive and inappropriate, I
went into my bedroom. It was just to the side of the sitting room, so my
retreat was swift. I needed a cigarette.

*~*

I was sitting on my window
seat, with my head stuck out the window to prevent telltale fumes from creeping
in, when I heard Camelea yell.

 “No!”

I dropped the cigarette stub
and ran for the door. Axel was seated on the floor with Camelea’s head in his
lap.

“Did she faint?” I guessed.

He nodded.

I ran to Maman’s room and
grabbed a bottle of smelling salts, then went back into mine and grabbed a bar
of dark chocolate from my beside drawer. As soon as I returned, I bent down and
ran the bottle of smelling salts back and forth under Camelea’s nose.

“Should I call a doctor?” Axel
asked. His forehead was marred by tiny creases.

I shook my head. “No.”

Slowly, Camelea came to.

“Camelea,” I said. “Have you
had anything to eat since yesterday?”

Very slowly, she shook her
head.

My eyes narrowed.
“Tu es
stupide?

I handed her the chocolate.
Wordlessly, she took a bite.

“She’s hypoglycaemic?” Axel
asked.

“Yes. A rather careless one at
that.” I waited until Camelea had eaten half of the bar and sat up. “You need
to eat.”

She nodded. “I will.”

“Now,” I said.

 “Noira, laisses-nous,
s’il te plaît
,”
Camelea begged.
“C’est OK.”

I turned my glare to Axel.
“See to it that she eats, please.”

“Okay.”

I closed the door behind me,
but stood behind it. I wanted to make sure that Camelea was okay. I may have
despised her, but I wasn’t about to have Axel hurt her in our home. She may
have fainted from lack of food, but she had yelled “No!” before she had
fainted.

“You need to eat
,”
I
heard Axel say.

“
I can eat later. Stay here with me
,”
Camelea
said.

I leaned my ear against the
door. What was going on?

“On one condition,” Axel
replied. “I want you to explain what happened yesterday.”

My ears pricked slightly.
Could Camelea have possibly gone on a
date
with this man? If so, did he
know that she was unwell? People may have thought that I was crazy, but they
didn’t come crazier than Camelea and her version of Christianity.

I stuck my finger down my left
ear so that I was better able to hear through the ear that was stuck to the
door. I listened, a bit horrified, as Camelea explained about a game that she
and her best friend, Raecine, had spent the last three summers playing.
Apparently they would pretend to be made-up characters for a day in Manhattan.
She’d seduce some harmless fellow before running away at midnight, like
Cinderella at the ball.

“My life is stressful and
borderline depressing. Even if it’s for one afternoon, I need to be someone
else—someone who can be happy,” she said as way of explanation.

If her life was depressing, I
didn’t know what mine was.

There was a brief pause at the
end of her story. Finally, I heard Axel speak.

 “You’re mad!”

Indeed she was.

“What on earth could be going
on in your life that would drive you to pretend to be someone else and spend
all of yesterday lying to me about who you are, Camelea?” Axel asked. “I had a
really good time with you before you ran away. I thought that I was getting to
know someone whom I could see myself with, but that person was a lie. How
exactly do you think that this is okay?”

“I know, and I’m sorry,”
Camelea replied. “Raecine told me not to do it yesterday, but I went ahead
anyway. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Why did you do it?” Axel
demanded.

There was silence. I imagined
that Camelea was not keen on telling him why. I knew why she had done it; it
was the same reason why Cienna had turned into a self-obsessed fashion droid,
and probably the same reason why I had fallen into the abyss.

“You don’t want to know,”
Camelea said.

“Camelea.”

She sighed. “I’m only telling
you because I owe you an explanation, but don’t say that I did not warn you
that this might be too much for you.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

There was a brief silence
before Camelea revealed the secret of why our house of cards was barely able to
stand up. “My father left us when I was nine years old, and it was particularly
painful for me, because we were very close. We were all close to him. We had to
leave France and move to America, which was even more traumatic, especially
since my mother had taken a turn for the worst after my father had left. Then
my older sister Noira decided that she didn’t want to live and tried to kill
herself for the first time when I was eleven. My mother has since devoted all
of her energy towards nursing Noira back to happiness, but it never works…
Noira doesn’t care about anyone except herself… I’ve basically been alone and
miserable ever since my father left, and I’ve spent the last few years watching
my mother waste away and not be able to do anything about it.”

When it was all over, the
lingering silence crept in. My heartbeat pounding in my ear muffled the sound
of any other exchange that Camelea and Axel were to have. Slowly, I backed away
from the door. I needed another cigarette.

*~*

       Just when I
thought that the retched charity gala hadn’t been dragged out long enough, a
writer from
New York
had to choose the moment that Cienna and I were
leaving the to request an interview. I sat in a corner of the room and resigned
myself to sit in on another vanity-fest.

"Tell
me a little about yourself," the lady said. She looked like some sweet,
mother-like figured. No doubt her wardrobe and glasses were specifically chosen
to evoke trust. I yawned.

"Tell
me about your life. How did you become a model?"

I
listened as Cienna spun a romantic tale about growing up in Paris.

"Paris!"
The journalist said, all wide-eyed and with a mouth etched in childlike
excitement. "Paris! How exciting!"

I
almost expected her to start salivating like a rabid dog. No wonder Cienna
loved modelling; I could just imagine how high she felt at the moment from such
a reaction.

"Yes,
Paris." Cienna blushed. She lowered her head ever so gracefully, the
humble It Girl.

"I
was born in Paris, and I lived there until I was nine. It was wonderful, simply
won-der-ful
!" She looked off into the distance with a dreamy
expression on her face. The journalist sat up, beaming.

 "We
had a very Bohemian existence at home, my mother, my sisters and I. Draw up a
list of Who’s Who in the art, music or cinema world, and you’ll find that they
had passed through the doors of our house. Our front door was never locked. One
guest in particular changed my life forever…”

The
journalist seemed to be on the edge of delirium as Cienna spoke of our first
meeting with Anna Wintour. She was a client of Maman’s.

 “…It
was all very marvellous." Cienna finally finished.

"Yes,"
the woman said, all but falling out of her seat. "That does sound marvellous.
Simply
marvellous
."

Cienna
was quite the storyteller. Nevertheless, having read quite a few of the
articles about my B-list sister, I knew what would happen next.

The
journalist would go to her computer and type up an article about our enviable
childhood and how it was no wonder that Cienna was so fashionable, coming from
the fashion capital of the world and all. And girls across America would see
her looking stunning and porcelain doll-like in her oversized sunglasses and
her Louboutin heels, surrounded by glamorous people doing glamorous, carefree
things. Those girls compared themselves to her, perfectly touched up by the
latest airbrushing and PhotoShop technology and looking like a dream.

"The
beauty of this," someone once wrote, "is that here she is, a girl who
can speak English, Italian and French. A girl who can read German. A girl who
got an almost perfect score on her SATs. A girl with unlimited potential, who
can be anything that she wants to be, who chose Parson’s and runways over
Columbia."