The Mak Collection (14 page)

A throng of preoccupied business people rushed past Makedde as she made her way to the imposing city department store on Elizabeth Street. She scanned the industrious crowd with heavy eyes, wanting nothing more than to crawl right back into bed. A crank caller had kept her phone ringing into the night, again robbing her of precious shut-eye. She may as well have not bothered fixing the phone cord. Eventually she had taken the damn thing off the hook and had managed to drift off.

Several windows of the department store had been given over to Becky Ross publicity—larger-than-life posters of the twenty-one-year-old soap star and other information about the launch. Everything about Becky’s carefully crafted image was easily-masticated fodder for the Australian and English tabloids—what she wore, what plastic surgery she supposedly had had, and of course, who she was currently sleeping with. The media had gone temporarily mad when she dated a certain famous rugby player, but lost interest when a newer sensation
came along. The rugby player was soon after unceremoniously dumped.

Becky had a penchant for severe hair-colouring faux pas—platinum, then red, then platinum again—and cleavage revealing, see-through designer outfits that endeared her no end to the paparazzi and the glossy gossip magazines. Since Makedde had arrived, she had seen Becky countless times on covers and in television ads for fast food. Somehow she had convinced the conservative department store crowd that she was a fashion item.

Wearily, Makedde pushed open the elegant doors, lugging her heavy black model bag on her shoulder. It was her first job since Friday’s grisly discovery, and she wasn’t feeling quite up to it. A few shoppers turned and watched Makedde stride through the store. She made her way to the escalator, past make-up counters gleaming like lolly-shop shelves with polished glass and shiny gold and silver surfaces covered in rows of colourful lipsticks and eye shadows. A heady, slightly sickly floral scent permeated the entire ground floor; a mixture of hundreds of brands of expensive perfumes and cosmetics.

After seven, scenic escalator rides, which left her wondering why she hadn’t just caught the lift, she eventually located the fashion show salon. At the head of a long, thin, T-shaped catwalk was a huge banner
bearing Becky’s name and several three-foot-high images of her airbrushed, pouting face. The photograph was fashionably severe, and Makedde wasn’t sure it suited her. Around the catwalk at least two hundred empty chairs waited for the paparazzi, glitterati and general fashion folk who would soon be arriving. True to form, the gossip columnists had been feverishly speculating upon Becky’s dubious fashion credentials, but Makedde tried to keep an open mind.

The dressing-room door could be seen to the right of the stage, and as she stepped inside, Mak was startled by an instant and intense head-to-toe appraisal. She looked around at seven, beautiful, frowning and unfamiliar faces and thought,
this is going to be fun
. She smiled politely and then glanced at the clothes on the countless racks jammed into the small room.

“Excuse me?” she said to a refreshingly average looking woman bearing the name tag “Sarah”. “I’m Makedde. Do you know which is my section?”

The young girl, who was probably a volunteer dresser, escorted her to a rack bearing a piece of paper marked “Macayly”. Even with Makedde’s composite card stapled to the rack, they had still managed to get her name wrong.

She went immediately for the size tags in the back of each garment. The standard model size was generally an Australian ten, but some designers made
their samples in eights. Makedde had no illusions about her size; she couldn’t fit an Aussie size eight if her life depended on it. She bit her lip as she came across a lacy skirt labelled with the dreaded number. Surreptitiously, she attempted to tug the skirt over her hips. The material had no give, the lace didn’t look like it would hold and she couldn’t get the darn thing further than half-mast.

“This skirt is too small,” Makedde admitted self-consciously to the dresser. In a room full of waifs it felt like a confession of first-degree murder.

“We’ve had trouble with some of the sizes,” the dresser said. “We’ll switch your first outfit with someone else’s.” She eyed the other models and pointed to a particularly skinny one. “She’s swimming in that slip dress. You’ll fill it out much better. Why don’t you two swap?”

That was a relief. Normally a stylist would stare at her with disgust and say something like, “Oh dear, you
are
big. Are you having your period?”.

Makedde was often intimidated by the size and beauty of other models, and ill-fitting clothes only highlighted her insecurities. Logically, she knew she had no reason to feel this way, but she was acutely aware of every perfect set of lips, every wide pair of eyes, every slim waist and tiny butt around her. Being more voluptuous than every other model in the room could make her feel like a freak if she was having a bad
day. In that atmosphere, her flesh seemed sinful beside tiny bodies with skin pulled tightly over bone. It seemed indulgent to have cleavage, or rounded hips. Sure, she was a size ten, in good shape and by no means fat, especially for her height, but it was hard not to feel uneasy when a garment didn’t fit. Especially when she was getting paid for an hour’s work what most people earn in a week. She supposed that very slim girls might feel the same way when they didn’t fill out a bra. It was crazy.

Just as she was about to try the new dress, a familiar face walked in. Loulou, a make-up artist Makedde had worked with several times, exploded through the doors like a fashionable tornado. She carried an enormous make-up case covered in stickers from all over the world, along with several bright shopping bags overflowing with hot rollers, velcros and hair bands. Her dramatically pencilled eyebrows seemed to perpetually exclaim, “Wow!”, her hair was a frizzy bleached eruption and her fingernails danced with blue glitter.

“Makedde!” Loulou cried, spotting her. Loulou gave Makedde a hug that almost knocked the wind out of her. She was a wild one, but a genuine character; she never took anything too seriously, and she seemed to vibrate with enthusiasm even when she stood still. She was an eternal optimist, and was just what Makedde needed.

“Loulou, how are you?”

“Great! How ya goin’? You look divine. I heard you were in Sydney.” Her enthusiasm was catchy, and Makedde found herself instantly wanting to giggle and snort and call people “sweetie”.

“How long has it been? Two years?” Mak asked as she stepped into the new slip dress.

Loulou thought for a moment. “Has it been that long?
Sweetie
, you haven’t been here all this time, have you?”

“God, no. I was just on a direct booking when I saw you. It was only for a week.” She zipped the dress up as far as she could reach and asked, “Does this fit?”

“Divine, sweetie.
Divine
.”

“That’s good enough for me. Have you been away?”

“Paris. It was
fabulous
!”

“When are you going back?”

At this, her bubbly expression momentarily faltered. “Oh, I don’t know…”

Paris was a hard market, and Makedde guessed that Loulou was one of the large percentage who hadn’t earned enough to pay off her trip.

“Did you work anywhere else while you were over there?” Makedde asked.

“Germany. That was
marvellous
.”

Divine. Fabulous. Marvellous. “OK” just wasn’t in Loulou’s vocabulary. Mak could relate to her attitude to Germany. The catalogues were tedious, but the
Deutschmark was worth a bundle. It was a great place to work on one’s bank account.

Loulou looked around, smiling. “So what do you think of these clothes?” She pointed to a tiny red dress with spaghetti straps and a plunging neckline. “That’ll look great with your cleavage.”

Makedde laughed. “Looks like this will be a brafree zone. I can foresee having a very embarrassing accident in that one.”

“Let it all hang out, sweetie! The snappers will love you!” Loulou paused, her expression becoming more serious. “Hey, I’m sorry about your friend. I never met her, but everyone is so shocked. Just horrible.”

“Yeah.” Mak wondered if Loulou could help with the identity of Cat’s boyfriend. “Hey, do you know any guys who go by the name of JT?”

Loulou cocked her head to one side. “JT? Nah. There was J.T. Walsh, the actor.”

“That’s not who I’m thinking of.”

“Sorry. I better get started here. I’ll talk to you later, sweetie.”

“You got it.”

The show coordinator, a tall, slim, ex-model type, ushered the girls onto the stage outside the dressing-room. The white, polished runway came up around three feet off the floor; just enough to make Makedde nervous about wearing the standard model G-string in some of her shorter frocks.

“Right,” the coordinator began, “we want attitude out there today. No smiles. There are four routines, seven outfits each.” A couple of models, including Makedde, pulled out little notepads and began to scribble as the woman talked. “First routine begins with four models entering on the beat, then going single and ending with a staggered four.” Makedde took down the string of confusing choreography instructions, doodling lines and arrows on her notepad.

She stood there writing, and suddenly had the uneasy sensation that she was being watched. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck stood up and she turned around, scanning the large room. The double doors were swinging slightly, but no one was near them. The other girls were all busy listening or writing and the room was still empty, apart from a couple of preoccupied ladies in fashionable black discussing the stage display.

“The finale routine is a single, centre turn, circle and a peel out,” the coordinator went on.

Peel out?

When asked if everything was clear, the models nodded their heads in agreement and the rehearsal began. An impressive stereo system filled the hall with a raucous, alternative dance beat, and the first group of models began their routine. Within moments there was confusion, with girls crashing into each other and
barely regaining their balance on spindly high heels. The next group tried to execute the routine with more caution, nervously shuffling past each other. The coordinator was pulling her hair out. After an hour of futility, the routines were shortened and simplified.

All this for one twenty-minute show.

When the rehearsal finally ended, they were ushered back inside the dressing-room. Loulou was frantic. They had gone overtime, and she only had forty-five minutes left before the show to make up eight models and create eight elegantly up-swept hairdos. Loulou was flying solo and didn’t have the benefit of the store’s beauty salon and help from the staff who worked there.

Precisely forty minutes later, after a well-orchestrated operation, Makedde was checking her teeth for lipstick when Becky Ross sashayed into the dressing-room, decked out in a plunging cutaway dress. Today her hair was very long and very blonde. Mak suspected extensions. Becky did look fantastic, although perhaps a bit overmade for the cameras. No doubt she had spent hours with her personal make-up and hair artists.

She swanned around backstage, surveyed the painted, preened and up-swept group of models, and said, without blinking an eyelid, “Can we have the hair down? I’d like to see it
long
.”

The coordinator went white, and Loulou went even paler. The show was due to begin in five
minutes. Hair was hurriedly unpinned and within fifteen minutes the models had been readied for the second time and Becky was posing on stage to signal the start of the show.

Makedde was the first model out and as she strode down the runway bathed in hot lights, she was critically and intimately examined by the invisible crowd. She was nothing short of statuesque and towered over the troupe, a full six feet and three inches in her lofty shoes.

As usual, it was chaos backstage—models, waxed to within an inch of their lives, wearing nothing but flesh coloured G-strings, were running around with panic-stricken dressers trying to get them into their next outfit on time. Mak had one thirty-second change, and three dressers worked as a tag team to hoist up her black pantyhose and get her zipped, combed and adjusted. At the end of it all, Makedde and the seven other models poured onto the stage in two elegant lines and engaged in that peculiar type of applause, quite unique to fashion shows, where the palms stay glued together and only the fingers clap. The photographers were smiling, having been given a feast of photo opportunities, but the fashion elite were offering only weak praise. Despite the time, effort and expense, Makedde had a sneaking suspicion the whole exercise had been more of a publicity stunt than a fashion success.

Later on, as the crowd was dispersing, Becky Ross could be heard rabbiting on about her designs to a gaggle of television reporters. She was only twenty-one years old, but handled the press like a pro; serving up quick sound bites for the cameras and outrageous page three-style poses for the salivating photographers.

Wary of the tabloid vultures who were prowling for an inside scoop on Catherine, Makedde evaded the crowd by following a waiter through a staff-only door backstage. She passed trays of minuscule ready-to-be-served hors d’oeuvres of goats cheese, wafers and prosciutto, and within five minutes had found her way through the maze of corridors down to the street outside.

Patience.

As he waited for his girl to come through the double doors, he hid as best he could his growing excitement. Like a big cat hunting, his movements were considered, slow and unremarkable until the very moment of attack. He imagined her heavily made-up face, her sleek curves and those slender feet, wearing stilettos for his private pleasure. She would make her way home alone and he could take her when the ideal moment presented itself. And there
would
be an ideal moment. He knew that. The photo in Catherine’s wallet was fate, as was the letter he found asking him to display Catherine’s body,
his handiwork
, for her to witness at the beach. Now his prize had paraded down the runway in sexy dresses and whore’s shoes,
just for him
, and soon he would have her. The waiting would be over.