The Look Read online

  “Hello,” he calls across to us. “Are you here for the shoot?”

  And the strange thing is that he says it to me, not my sister. Me, the model. The actual model. Bizarre, but wow.

  We go over and introduce ourselves.

  “I’m Seb,” he says. “I’m the, uh … photographer.”

  I’d kind of gathered that from the enormous Nikon camera, with a very large lens, sitting next to his laptop. He looks around, at the lights, the cables, the screens and reflectors, the laptop, me.

  “I’m going to be, uh … shooting you today.”

  “Great!” I say brightly. I’m thinking that if everything goes at this speed, this shoot is going to take a looong time.

  “We’re going to do it … uh … here,” he adds, wandering over toward the white brick wall.

  Does he mean this studio? Where else would we be doing it?

  He can see my confusion. “I mean, like, uh … here.” He indicates a particular spot on the wall, where the paint is slightly peeling. “Or, uh … here.” He points at another peeling place, farther down. “The light’s good. Atmospheric shadows. I might try a bit in natural daylight. See how we go. Interesting texture …”

  He was almost going at normal speed there for a minute, when he talked about the light. Now he’s come to a halt.

  I look at the wall. It’s true; the paint is more interesting where it’s patchy and flaky. And the shadows thrown by the bars in the high windows are moody, almost spooky. My art teacher, Miss Jenkins, would agree it was very atmospheric.

  “See what I mean?” he says.

  I nod, because I do, and he smiles. His teeth look weird poking through all that beard, but it’s a friendly smile. He seems pleased to have found a fellow wall-appreciator.

  “Actually,” Ava says, looking pale and woozy suddenly, “I think I might sit down. That journey was longer than I thought. Is there a chair?”

  Seb shows her into a little room carved out of one corner with a couple of sofas in it, and a kitchenette at one end. She curls up on one of the sofas.

  “Are you sure you’re OK?” I ask, going over and stroking her hair. “I mean …”

  Duh. “OK” is a relative term in my family now. I bite my lip.

  “I’m fine,” she says sleepily. “I mean it. Call me when you need me. But don’t fuss, OK?”

  With Seb hovering at the doorway, checking his watch, I don’t have much choice.

  “Is that your … uh … sister?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “Mine’s upstairs,” he says. “Doing hair and makeup. She … uh … helps me out.”

  Leaving Ava where she is, I follow Seb up a set of rickety stairs to a small changing area, built on top of the kitchenette. His sister is putting makeup on a girl with blonde, curly hair. They both turn around to say hi to me. The sister looks like Seb, but less hairy. The other girl looks like a fairytale princess. She has a perfect oval face and gray-green eyes. Her hair, wrapped around curlers, shines like coils of spun gold. Even with only foundation and eye makeup on she has, without a doubt, the most stunning face I’ve ever seen outside the pages of Marie Claire. Honestly! I have never been this close to anyone so mesmerizing. She even makes Ava look only mildly attractive by comparison. And I’m being photographed after her. What are they thinking?

  “Hello,” she says, smiling at me. “I’m Mireille. How’re you doing?”

  “Fine,” I lie. Mireille. Mum let slip once that she thought about naming me Mireille, but she thought Edwina sounded more romantic. Not sure what planet she was on at the time. “I’m Ted.”

  Seb leaves us to it. His sister, who’s named Julia, explains that she usually does freelance makeup work for theater companies.

  “Normally, I like to do something a bit creative, but today Seb wants you natural. We’re just highlighting the eyes and cheeks. I’m nearly finished with Mireille. Won’t be a mo’.”

  I sit on a spare chair and watch as she carefully applies layer after layer of lipstick to Mireille’s perfect mouth, blotting and adjusting as she goes. I remember what Ava said about work experience and try to understand what effect Julia’s going for. According to what she just said, the lips are going to be the least important bit, but this is taking ages, and Mireille’s lips are very … pink. Then Julia gets to work on the cheeks.

  “Is that, er, natural?” I ask. I mean, I’m sure Julia knows what she’s doing, but … well, actually, I’m not so sure. To me, Mireille looks as if she’s about to go on stage at a nightclub.

  “It will be different in front of the camera,” Julia laughs. “It’s shocking how the lights bleach you. Although Seb said he might work with natural light today, so I’m really underplaying it.”

  If this is underplaying it — goodness.

  Julia takes Mireille’s hair out of the curlers and brushes it. The beautiful girl checks out her gorgeous face in the mirror, gives a nod of satisfaction, and thanks Julia, before heading downstairs to be photographed. Meanwhile, I take her place. Julia herself, I notice, isn’t wearing a scrap of makeup, apart from the backs of her hands, which are covered in test swipes of foundation, blusher, and blue eye shadow, and remind me a bit of Ava’s hands at the moment, color-wise. They’re still bruised from all the needles she’s had poked into them to take endless blood samples. She doesn’t talk much about what happens at the hospital, but I know it’s tough, and I can understand that she’d rather be here, asleep, than at home, thinking about it. Frankly, right now, I’m glad she made me come, even if Julia can never make me look like Mireille.

  For what seems like several hours, but must be about thirty minutes, Julia applies various creams and powders to my face from among a vast array she’s laid out on the shelf beside us. Once I get used to a stranger touching my face, it’s actually very relaxing. I can’t see what she’s doing, because I’m facing her, not the mirror. I just have to trust that it’s OK. She also fiddles about with my hair, doing the best she can and only sighing occasionally. Her one comment is that my caterpillar unibrow is going to have to go sometime soon, but coming from the sister of a modern-day Yeti, I’m surprised she even noticed.

  “There!” she says when she’s finished. “Better.”

  I check the mirror at last. Please God, let me have turned into Linda Evangelista, whoever she is.

  Hard to tell. Does Linda Evangelista look like a moonfaced geisha? That’s my first thought, when I see my BIG eyes, pale skin, and bright lips. But as I get used to it, I realize that I’m still underneath there somewhere. I’m about one percent as pretty as Mireille, but a hundred percent more model-like than I was before Julia started. Even my hair looks like a nest made by a tidy bird who was quite proud of it. I feel like an actress, dressed up for a part, or like I did when I put on my gi in judo, ready for a grading. The makeup makes it easier, somehow — like a barrier between me and that enormous Nikon camera downstairs. I think I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

  Julia follows me down to watch Mireille pose for Seb. I was worried they might have finished by now, and I wouldn’t get a chance to see how to do it, but it seems they’ve hardly started. Taking a few photos is a lot more time-consuming than I gave it credit for.

  I quickly check on Ava, who’s still fast asleep on her sofa in the kitchen area and doesn’t stir when I call. She is technically in charge of me and I’m sure she’d love to see what’s going on, but she looks so peaceful where she is that I decide not to disturb her. I’ll tell her all about it later. Then I go back to stand near Julia and see what I can learn from Miss Perfect.

  Meanwhile, Seb has placed an old, battered wooden chair in front of the peeling paintwork and Mireille’s sitting on it backward, with her chest leaning against the back of the chair and her legs either side of it. She constantly moves her head so he can capture her face from various angles. The air is full of pumping drum ’n’ bass, coming from a speaker attached to Seb’s laptop. I’d be dancing along to it, but Mireille is ignoring it entirely, focus
ing very much on giving Seb her smile and making sure her coils of hair are hanging perfectly around her face. Every now and again, Seb says, “Uh, can you … uh …?” and wiggles his hand until Mireille shifts position and gives him the smile from a different direction.

  Oh, no. She has a smile.

  I don’t have a smile. I mean, I smile, obviously. I do it a lot. But I don’t have a smile, which you obviously need. Nor, needless to say, do I have coils of golden hair to arrange around my shoulders. My spaghetti legs will look daft on either side of that chair in Mum’s yoga leggings. And I’ll find it very hard to stop jiggling to the drum ’n’ bass. Other than that, I’m good.

  HELP.

  I still can’t quite believe that Ava talked me into this, but I’m here now, and I’ve got to go through with it. At least Seb will be taking pictures of Geisha Ted, not the real me. And they’ll have the pictures of Mireille, so the morning won’t be entirely wasted.

  After a while, she goes off to change and Seb turns to me.

  He gestures toward the chair. I sit on it unhappily. He checks me out through the viewfinder of his huge black camera and looks unhappy, too. First he adjusts a couple of lights, then he returns to me.

  “Could you … uh … face … to me … Uh … hands?”

  I look at him — not that I want to. That camera is so scary. Then I look down at my hands. What’s wrong with my hands? They’re just sort of hanging down beside me. I mean, sure, they look like dangling twigs, but what else can I do with them? I try placing them on the back of the chair and resting my chin on them to cover them up. Seb jolts like a startled bear.

  “Uh … no. Too low. Your … uh … back. Humpy. Try …”

  He leans back and sticks a leg out sideways to show me what he means. He looks hysterical. I grin.

  “Nice,” he says, looking slightly less depressed. “Nice grin.”

  Then Julia steps in to save me.

  “Why don’t we try turning the chair back around? Then you can try some different poses. I think Seb wants you to play with it a bit. Feel free. Relax. Have some fun with it.”

  Feel FREE? RELAX? Have FUN with it? I’m suddenly conscious of bits of my body I normally take for granted. My ankles. My elbows. What do I do with them? Where do they go? And my twig fingers — how do real models make their fingers look so normal? Never mind my face. I try every sort of smile I can think of until my mouth hurts, but Seb just looks increasingly depressed.

  Eventually he says, “Uh … not the chair … Uh … try just standing?”

  Aha! “Just standing” is something I can definitely do. I tried that at Model City and it worked. As long as “just standing” can also include “slightly jiggling,” because Seb’s speakers are playing a song I really like, and it’s categorically impossible not to move. I go over to a piece of wall that Seb and I agree has great peeling texture, and “just stand” in various poses. Hands on hips. Hands not on hips. Leaning against the wall. Half leaning against it. Even standing sideways on and looking up at the high windows. Then, when I think Seb’s finished, I do a bit of actual dancing, waving my hands above my head and wiggling my hips — or what would be my hips, if I had any.

  “Great!” Seb says. “Hold it! I mean … uh … keep doing that.”

  He clicks away and I find that as long as I stare at the floor, not him, and only think about the music, I can keep going. Finally, I look up to check if he’s still taking pictures and he clicks one final time and says, “Done. You can … uh … change now.”

  I stop moving.

  “Change?”

  “Into the dress? Did Julia show you the dresses?”

  She didn’t. Now she does. They’re hanging on a rack upstairs. It turns out that after the “casual, figure-hugging clothes” shots, they want to take more pictures of us in not-so-casual, but even more figure-hugging, minidresses. Oh.

  At this point, the door to the studio opens and Cassandra Spoke walks in, dressed impeccably in a white silk shirt, black skirt, and high-heeled sandals. Followed by her nightmare son.

  Luckily, the floor opens beneath me and swallows me whole.

  Except, of course, it doesn’t.

  Cassandra clicks across the concrete floor and gives Seb two impressively large air kisses, just skimming his beard with her golden skin.

  “Seb, darling! How gorgeous to see you!” she says. “I just had to show you — they’ve finally published your pictures in Dazed & Confused. Don’t they look wonderful? Nick wanted to say thank you.”

  Nightmare Boy sticks his hands in his jeans pockets and looks as though he doesn’t want to say anything at all. His face bristles with discomfort behind his glasses. Cassandra takes a magazine out of her handbag and lays it open on the table. Her son scowls behind her, while I sneak back down the stairs and look over Seb’s shoulder to see what the fuss is about.

  There’s a double-page black-and-white spread of a girl with big hair, doing headbanging poses in front of a wall-sized, swirly, spattery painting.

  “Ooh, it’s a bit like a Jackson Pollock,” I say without thinking. Miss Jenkins would beam with pride. Jackson Pollock is one of her Top Three Abstract Painters and all our art class can recognize his style a mile off by now.

  Nick coughs, and turns around to face me. “I was going more for Cy Twombly, actually. Although it’s influenced by Abstract Expressionism, of course.”

  “Wow! You did that?”

  His scowl cracks slightly. “Yes.” Then he stiffens again. “Seb kindly offered to showcase my work. Er, thanks, Seb. Great pictures.”

  He forces the words out. Something about these pictures makes him super-uncomfortable.

  “What Nick forgot to mention,” Cassandra says with a smile at Seb and a quick glare at her son, “is that he just might get a place at art school on the back of these. It’s exactly the exposure he needs. You do me the nicest favors, Seb darling.”

  She air-kisses Seb again, making sure to avoid the beard, while Nick does the “please swallow me up” look at the floor that I was just doing.

  Poor Nick. He’s trying to be cool and artistic and his mother is organizing his life for him. I’m starting to get why she drives him crazy. He looks up, catches me grinning at him, and smiles for a moment, before glancing down to fiddle with a fleck of paint on his T-shirt. It’s interesting that he doesn’t seem to possess any clothes that aren’t worn, torn, and paint-spattered, despite his mother having a magazine-worthy über-wardrobe. He’s cute when he’s embarrassed. Still out of my league, though. Actually, I don’t even have a league.

  “Oh, hello.”

  We all look around. Mireille is standing on the staircase, freshly changed. She is drop-dead gorgeous in a tight pink minidress from Julia’s rack, but a bit flushed at the sight of the über-agent in person.

  Cassandra gives her a gracious smile. “Don’t you look lovely? Actually, why don’t I see how you’ve been getting on?”

  To my surprise, Nick doesn’t seem that interested in Mireille. Maybe, after years of traveling around with his mum, models bore him. He wanders off, as Seb offers to show Cassandra the photos he’s taken so far. Mireille joins us at the computer and Cassandra quickly scrolls through shot after shot of her looking fantastic, until she gets to the ones of me. She sighs. I can’t bear to watch.

  “These ones are getting better,” Cassandra says. They’re the shots of me looking at the windows. Then, “Ah.” These are the ones of me dancing. “Shame she’s not looking into the … Oh.”

  They’ve got to the last picture: the one where I thought Seb had finished and he caught me with my arms in the air, looking straight at him. And do you know what? I can see why Cassandra said, “Oh.” It’s all right, that picture. There’s something about it — the way I’m moving, the look of surprise on my face, my gangly arms waving — that’s quite interesting. The girl in that picture looks … OK. Not like Lily Cole, or Kate Moss, and not like Mireille, but OK.

  “Well,” Cassandra says decisively, “e
ither way, I think we’ve got what we need. Good job, Seb, darling. I don’t think we need to bother with the dresses.” She doesn’t sound entirely happy, and I don’t blame her. I only produced one good shot out of about a million — well, over a hundred, anyway, and poor Seb’s been working for hours.

  But that one shot is good enough for me. I can’t wait to show Ava. I excuse myself and rush off to the kitchen area to see if she’s awake yet.

  She’s just sitting up and stretching when I get there, looking tons better after her nap.

  “Sorry!” she says, yawning. “Did I miss the whole thing?”

  “You did. But guess what? Seb actually managed to take a decent picture of me. Only one, but it’s really quite nice. It’s, like, the first one ever. It must be that camera. I think I might save up for a Nikon one day …”

  I trail off. Nikon cameras are so out of my price range. I was definitely getting a bit carried away there.

  “It’s more the lens than the camera,” says a voice behind me. I whip around. “But it’s a load of other things, too. The light. The background. The composition. Mostly the light, though. You could do it on your phone if you tried hard enough.”

  It’s Nightmare Boy again. I wondered where he’d got to. He’s been busy getting himself a Coke from a vending machine in the kitchenette.

  “Really?” I say. “I noticed that the brickwork in the background was good. Seb chose this great, peeling bit. And it’s true: He didn’t use many lights in the end. It was mostly daylight.”

  “The best shots are,” he says. He looks up at me and gives me another quick smile. “You should check out the style blogs. They mostly use natural light. I’m Nick, by the way.”

  “I’m guessing you’re a photographer,” Ava says, stretching and coming over.