Model Misfit (17 page)

I glance down at my outfit. I look like I’m about to don a black face mask and start karate-kicking wasps and possibly grasshoppers. “I was in a hurry and it was at the top of my suitcase?”

“Then don’t pack it.”

In China there is a dish called ‘Drunken Shrimp’
,
which involves little shrimps being put into a hot broth of strong liquor and then eaten while still alive and wriggling. I’m starting to understand how they feel.

“Yuka,” I say, taking a deep breath: “I just want to take this opportunity to say how grateful I am to be given a chance to come to see Tokyo, and to be a part of—”

“Gratitude is not necessary,” she interrupts, holding up a hand. “I want your face for my new brand. That is why I am paying you.”

I flush with pleasure, even though it does sound a bit like she’s about to slice it off and attach it to some kind of elaborate necklace. “What’s the label called?”

Yuka looks at me as if she’s already regretting her decision. “
Yuka Ito
.”

“Ah.”

“However,” she says, leaning back in the seat slightly, “I would like to make three things clear.”

I quickly scrabble in my satchel for a pen and a piece of paper. “Shoot,” I squeak, and then clear my throat in embarrassment.
“I mean, please go ahead, Yuka Ito. Please. Thank you very much. Please.”

Yuka looks at me in silence and a line appears between her eyebrows. “Wilbur explained to you that the next few weeks require your complete discretion. Understood?”

I nod enthusiastically, and write
1. Discretion.

“I have not flown you to Tokyo to party. This is a job, and you will be working extremely hard. Clear?”

I nod, slightly less enthusiastically, and write
2. Not a holiday.

I guess that means I can wave goodbye to my planned trip to the Meguro Parasitological Museum, then.

Yuka narrows her eyes. “This launch campaign is a unique blend of Western and Eastern ideology. Every shoot will take stereotypical images and pull them apart: question and celebrate them. It will be powerful, fragile, feminine.”

“That sounds—”

“This is not Baylee. There is no four-hundred-year heritage and enormous profit margin to fall back on. It’s my designs, my name, my career. I do not have the luxury of tolerating maverick behaviour this time. Is that
perfectly clear
?”

I swallow, suitably chastened. I’ve never been described as a maverick before. Maybe I’m turning out more like my father than I realised.

It’s a sobering thought.

“I understand,” I say solemnly, and write
3. Just behave.

“You are being paid a
lot
of money,” Yuka says as I underline the last point three times for good measure and draw a series of stars next to it. “If you cannot meet those three simple expectations, there are many models who can.”

I redden. Annabel made it part of my initial contract that I don’t find out how much money I’m making until I’m eighteen. But – honestly – I’m a little bit intrigued now. I might be able to afford a piano, and then I can be just like Beth in
Little Women,
without the dying of typhoid part.

“OK,” I agree.

“Good,” Yuka says, turning to the window and making it clear that the conversation is over.

I watch the huge lights of Tokyo flash past in meek silence. You can say what you like about Yuka Ito – although obviously no one actually does – but she doesn’t mince her words. She’s terrifying, but at least you always know where you stand.

About four centimetres from decapitation, usually.

I clutch my new modelling list nervously in my hand until the car starts slowing down. I’m hit by a powerful salty, tangy smell that I recognise immediately. It comes from a chemical compound called
bromephenol
, which is found in algae and seawater.

I lean forward in excitement. “Ooh – are we at the seaside?”

Yuka snaps, “Tokyo is not a coastal destination.”

“But the smell,” I explain. “It smells like—”

“This is Tsukiji, the biggest fresh-fish market in the world.”

We’re pulling up outside one of the most enormous warehouses I’ve ever seen. It’s immense, and industrial, and the fishy smell is so strong, the chocolate biscuit in my stomach is threatening to make a reappearance.

“But …” I frown. “I thought we were doing our first shoot today?”

“We are,” Yuka says, opening the limousine door. “We’re doing it here.”

hoever says that modelling is glamorous is totally fibbing.

There’s blood
everywhere
. Shining at the bottom of boxes. Dripping off tables into buckets. Casually staining mounds of crushed ice, the way strawberry sauce stains a Slush Puppy. And – in the middle of all the redness – are fish. Big fish, little fish. Oysters, lobsters, squid, prawns, scallops, eels. Thousands and thousands of sea-life, piled on top of each other or laid out in rows. Whole, headless, finless or chopped into tiny pieces. Some that have already shuffled off this mortal coil, and some that are clearly in the process of desperately trying not to.

It’s 4.40am and I’m standing in the middle of a Quentin Tarantino version of
Finding Nemo
.

“Problem?” Yuka says sharply.

I swallow. “Nope.”

“Then find something prettier to do with your face.” Yuka turns on her sharp black heels and starts clicking violently across the enormous concrete warehouse. I follow meekly behind her: smiling as hard as I can at everyone. They ignore me completely. I guess fishermen in Japan have even less interest in fashion than I do.

A corner of the warehouse has been set aside for the shoot, in the most temporary way possible. A ‘changing room’ has been propped against a wall with a mirror leaning next to it, and a fold-up table covered in make-up/hair accessories is standing right next to a bucket of eels. Fashion people are running around: talking loudly and plugging in hairdryers and curling tongs. It’s a whirlwind of activity and noise, yet as we approach it goes strangely silent.

I’m 6,000 miles away from school, but it feels like I’ve just entered the classroom with the headmistress standing behind me.

“Not there,” Yuka snaps at a woman who just put a chair by the wall. “Move them,” she says, pointing to a pair of shoes on the floor. “Stop that,” she says to a man brushing a coat with a clothes brush and wiping terrified sweat from his forehead.

Any second now she’s going to demand that everyone sits up straight before she asks for their homework.

Then Yuka reaches behind a curtain and retrieves a blue plastic suit bag. Slowly, she slides it open and pulls out the contents. It’s short and pale orange and frothy, made of layers and layers of delicate, transparent material: tight, rigid and wired at the top and puff-balling out at the waist into a stiff bell shape. There are tiny embroidered red circles scattered through each layer – stitched in an immaculate, intricate spiral – and at the hem and around the neck are thin tendrils of orange material, floating upwards and outwards.

It’s a dress. Or perhaps I should say: it’s related to a dress the way a fat ginger cat is related to a tiger, or a mural on the wall of McDonald’s is related to the Sistine Chapel.

“Oh my goodness,” I whisper, reaching out to touch it. “It’s so beautiful.”

Yuka immediately knocks my hand away. “Of course it is,” she says stiffly. “I don’t make things that aren’t.” She raises an eyebrow. “This is
haute couture
. Do you know what that means?”

I quickly scan my brain for anything I can remember from French GCSE.
Couture
= scar.
Haute
= tall.

“A huge trauma?” I guess tentatively.

“No.” Yuka’s lips are getting thinner by the second. “It means
high fashion
. It means there is only one. I made it, by hand, specifically for you. It is more valuable than the car we just came in. These, therefore, are your dressers.” Yuka gestures to a couple of young Japanese women wearing black, who’ve just appeared on either side of me like twins in a creepy old horror movie.

I blink then start feeling a little bit indignant.
Dressers
? Exactly how much of a child does Yuka think I am? “I’m very nearly sixteen years old,” I tell her in my most aggrieved-yet-still-respectful voice. “I think I can dress myself.”

Yuka lifts her eyebrows. “This time I do not want you accessorised with stickers. Gold or otherwise.”

And I think she’s made her point.

am a creature of maturity and elegance, maturity and elegance, maturity and elegance.

It doesn’t matter how many times I say it: I’m not convincing anyone. I’m certainly not convincing Yuka. She won’t let me touch anything. I’m dressed enthusiastically by strangers, with my hands stuck in the air and my feet apart like some kind of rigid, overly affectionate teddy bear.

When they’ve finally finished zipping and prodding and the make-up artist is done poking and colouring me in – thick white foundation, black eyeliner and red lipstick – I’m finally led over to the mirror.

It doesn’t matter how many times this happens: I’m totally shocked at the transformation. My hair has been smoothed into a shiny red bob, my skin is glowing and spotless and my eyes have actual, visible eyelashes so I don’t look like a rabbit. I’m totally unrecognisable. My own family couldn’t pick me out of a line-up. Every single time I model, I start off as a normal schoolgirl and end up looking like somebody else. Like
somebody
.

It’s like being Superman, except I only transform temporarily every few months with the help of a lot of very highly paid professionals and an enormous quantity of expensive cosmetics.

The team tweak the dress until they’re happy, and then finally lead me – unable to see or walk very well – round the corner into a different part of the warehouse. Where I stop, startled.

On the floor there are fish.

Thirty or forty
enormous
dead silver fish glittering under huge temporary lights, lying nose-to-tail in perfectly straight lines like a sort of camp, aquatic military school. Faint steam is rising into the freezing air and between the fish are two men, arranging fins and spraying water to keep the fish shiny.