Just Breathe (6 page)

‘What the fuck is wrong with your arse now?’ Damon the Director yelled across the sand.

Dee felt like she’d woken up in her own anxiety dream. She was the centre of attention on a long, long stretch of deserted beach three hours north of Sydney and her butt just wasn’t cooperating. First it was the baggy pants. Apparently, they’d expected a gym-sculptured, bun-shaped arse to fill out the trousers but as hers was naturally pear-shaped, the director’s assistant had to do a hasty nip-and-tuck at the seams to achieve the buff look he wanted.

Then, as she executed her first forward bend in the soft sand just metres from the surf, Damon had yelled, ‘What the fuck are you wearing? Your grandma’s undies?’

As instructed by Lucy, Dee bought a flesh-coloured hipster g-string but the scrap of fabric looked more like a parachute for Base Jumper Barbie than anything she wanted to be entwined in for a yoga workout. So she’d worn a modest pair of boy-leg knickers that, according to Leon and Robert, were invisible under the baggy white pants. Damon apparently had better vision.

Luckily, she’d brought the g-string just in case but now that she was back on the beach in her mini parachute, struggling to hold her balance on the sand, trying not to crack her make-up by squinting in the sun, Damon still wasn’t happy with her butt.

‘There’s a big mark on your arse.’

Dee looked down. ‘Where?’

He walked over, poked a buttock. ‘There.’

‘Ow!’

‘What is it? Let me see.’

Dee folded down the top of her trousers, revealing the big green bruise she’d earned trying
to move Leon’s TV around the apartment so it didn’t look so empty.

‘That’s one helluva bruise,’ Damon said then yelled over his shoulder. ‘Make-up!’

In seconds, Dee’s pants were around her ankles, g-string on public display, while the make-up crew plus Damon, his assistant, a cameraman, sound recordist, photographer and half a dozen nameless others crowded around her butt like it was an endangered species.

She closed her eyes, stomach tight. Her anxiety had not behaved well this morning and now she could feel it creeping about, looking for a way to escape. She took deep breaths and tried not to flinch as the make-up girl went to work on her cheek.

Butt finally sorted, Damon told her he wanted some Salutes to the Sun to start. The idea was that the sight of a flexible young woman doing yoga in an exotic location would make people sign up for Health Life’s healthy lifestyle insurance plan – helping you even when you’re healthy, or something like that. Dee felt conscious of the audience now gathered to watch and the huge camera pointed straight at her almost naked torso – why did the costume have to be so brief? She stretched her arms above her head, bent forward, placed her hands either side of her feet, pressed one foot back into a lunge, wobbled in the sand.

‘Cut!’ Damon yelled. He checked his watch impatiently. It was now an hour since she’d stepped onto the sand, slathered in sun cream and make-up, and it was getting progressively hotter. ‘Why don’t you try that again, luv?’

She glanced awkwardly at the semi-circle of spectators, standing around with hands on hips or arms crossed, nice shady hats protecting their faces, waiting for something interesting to happen. She swallowed hard and hitched self-consciously at her trousers. Ethan Roxburgh flashed through her head.
See you later, Dee the Yoga Teacher.
She was suddenly desperately glad his dark eyes weren’t watching her making a fool of herself. Palms pressed together at her
chest, she started again – stretch up, bend forward, lunge back, Downward Dog, try not to get sand in your face as you slide forward, another lunge … Bugger, which leg was she up to? And Damon checking his watch.

He held up a hand for her to stop. He took off his cap and raked a hand through his thinning hair. ‘How ’bout you try looking, oh, I don’t know,
Zen
-like.’

Dee squinted at him. What the hell did that mean? She parted her lips a little, curled up the edges of her mouth, tried for a contented, Zen-like smile, hoping she didn’t look as stupid as she felt. Once again: stretch up, bend forward, lunge back. Her eyes flicked around the audience as she went through the moves. They looked impatient, disappointed, disillusioned even. What did they want? She was doing yoga, not turning herself into gold.

When she finished, there was a long, uncomfortable silence. Damon checked his watch then walked across the sand to her. ‘Are you nervous, hon?’

Let’s see – her mouth was dry, her back was tight, the cup of coffee she had before they started was sloshing against the rigid walls of her clenched stomach and she’d throw up if her jaw wasn’t clamped shut. ‘A little.’

‘The thing is we’re looking for something a bit more ethereal. Do you think you could do ethereal?’

Lucy never said anything about ethereal. She didn’t know how to do ethereal. ‘Well, I, ah …’

‘Okay, look, how about we take a quick break? I’ve got some calls to make and you can get a cool drink and think about being ethereal.’

Dee made her way to the refreshment tent. She was too short and muscly to be ethereal. And right now, with sand creeping into crevices, sweat gathering under her arms, make-up on
her butt and an uncomfortable g-string, she felt about as ethereal as an old pro under a streetlight.

She took a bottle of water from a cooler, retreated with her phone to the shade of a tree. She had messages.

Having good day. Only puked once! A xx

She smiled, opened the next one.

Spoke 2 soon. Up to 3 now. A x

The last one was from Leon.

How goes it? R u a star yet?

Hardly.

So nervous am having heart attack,
she wrote then paused before sending. Damon was walking down the track behind her, talking into his phone.

‘Lucy said she was some kind of yoga genius … Yep … Yep … tried that … She’s all we’ve got … Yep … Yep … Well, I suppose that’s what you get when you use amateurs … Yeah, okay, keep you posted. I’ll call back in the lunch break … Yep, bye.’

He passed Dee as he talked, hung up, turned back and saw her. He paused a moment, then continued past as though she was a sign pointing to the food tent.

They hate me. About 2 b sacked. Never again. D xx

Seconds after the text was sent, Leon was on the phone. ‘What’s happ’nin’?’

Dee was so relieved to hear his voice she almost cried. ‘I’m not ethereal. It’s awful. All these people are standing around, relying on me to do something thrilling and I’ve no idea what. I don’t want to let Lucy down and my butt’s wrong and they’ve covered me in inch-thick make-up and they hate my freckles and I’ve got foundation in my belly button and my hair –’

‘Whoa, Dee, hang on a sec.’

Tears pricked at her eyes. ‘Shit. Now my make-up’s going to get all messed up.’

‘It’s okay, Dee. Tip your head back so your mascara doesn’t run.’

She rested her head against the tree. Thank God for Leon. He’d put make-up on hundreds of actors, had heaps of stories about them freaking out moments before the camera rolled – not that anyone would consider her an actor right now but she was definitely freaking out.

‘Why did I ever think I could do this? I should have borrowed some money from Amanda to pay off my debts, given the apartment to that loud friend of yours, let Val buy me a mortgage. Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe I should just tell Damon I can’t do it. But then Lucy –’

‘Dee. Dee! Just shut up for a minute and listen. You’re on a beach in the middle of nowhere to do yoga. Enjoy it. Forget about everyone else. Think of them like the traffic outside the yoga school while you’re meditating. Tune them out. Focus on the beach. Focus on your yoga. And if they hate you, so what? At least you get to do yoga in a really exotic place and get paid for it. Enjoy yourself.’

‘Enjoy myself!’ She heard her name being called. ‘Crap, I’ve gotta go. Thanks.’

She walked past the spectators, past the cameras, past the director and took her place on the sand.

Damon pointed at her. ‘Okay, luv, when you’re ready.’

Enjoy it, huh? Dee closed her eyes, took a long, deep breath. The air was salty, thick with heat, the sounds of the surf crashed and hissed around her, gulls called gurgling cries overhead and the sun felt like a raw energy source. She opened her eyes and watched the place where the sky gently pressed against the ocean. Slowly she raised her hands to her chest and started again. Breathing in, breathing out, her body moved by muscle memory, stretching, contracting, supporting, releasing. Dee relaxed in the familiar routine. Forgot about everything, forgot to stop after one Salute, forgot to wait for direction, forgot about the traffic, forgot to be nervous.

When she finished the final Salute with her palms together at her chest, she looked up and the audience and the director and the camera came back into focus. She smiled contentedly. Yoga on the beach could be very cool.

Apparently, Damon thought it was okay, too. He made her do it again and again, then at lunchtime got back on his phone. Dee couldn’t hear what he said but he was smiling instead of raking his hand through his hair.

After lunch, she showed him some other poses and he made her move in and out of them over and over, holding them for minutes at a time, while the camera watched from every angle. The sun had set and she ached all over by the time she boarded the mini bus that took them to their hotel.

Very early the next morning, Dee spent a long time stretching while the crew set up. They were hoping to capture the beauty of a summer dawn over the beach – she was hoping she’d still be able to walk after another day of endlessly holding poses.

Several hours later, she was in the Warrior Pose for the fifth time. A deep lunge, arms outstretched front and back, eyes focused on the distance beyond her fingers. A strong posture but simple considering some of the contorted positions she’d already twisted herself into. Named after an ancient Indian warrior-sage, it developed concentration, endurance and balance – and it always made her feel resilient, assertive, like she was steeling herself for whatever life was going to hurl.

After the stage fright thing, Dee had been feeling pretty damn assertive anyway. No one had mentioned Zen-like or ethereal since lunchtime yesterday and all day today Damon the Director had asked her advice on postures. He’d even dropped the ‘hon’ and ‘luv’ and was calling her Dee. As she looked out beyond her fingers at the froth of waves massaging the endless stretch of sand, it occurred to her that this was probably the most assertive thing she’d done in ten years.

She hadn’t planned to become a yoga teacher. It just happened. After the crash, the back pain and anxiety and the grief over Anthony was all she could deal with. She couldn’t think about the future; getting through each day was hard enough. When she could manage on her own, she took off overseas, wandered the world for five years, got her head straight and learned how to live again before coming home to start a new life. The pain was still constant but manageable and the anxiety was being tamed. Anthony and her old life had been packed into boxes in the back of her head and left to gather dust.

What she learned in those five years was that the future took care of itself if you left it alone. So there had never been any kind of action plan. She supposed she’d eventually make use of her radiography studies, maybe one day be ready to trust someone again. But it hadn’t happened – the career or the man. The only interest she had in radiography now was to read her
own X-rays, and the trust bit – she’d never met anyone worth the bother. In the meantime, she kept doing yoga, teaching classes and five years down the track, bingo, she had a career.

Not exactly assertive, was it?

Not assertive at all, she answered herself as she stared down the length of her arm. In fact, wasn’t she still just wandering around? Taking a class if someone asked, taking a break when there were no students, finding a few more when the money was short. Not making plans for the future. Because, really, what was the point when you could be healthy one day then battered and broken the next? Happy one minute then just sad and lonely.

‘Dee?’ Damon the Director waved his hand in front of her face. ‘Are you with us?’

‘Huh?’

‘I said take a break. We’re setting up for some stills.’

‘Oh, right.’ She rubbed absently at her arms, her head buzzing. She gulped from a bottle of water while her make-up was retouched, stretched her thighs, tried to loosen up.

‘When you’re ready, Dee,’ Damon called.

She took a slow lunge back into the Warrior Pose, arms outstretched, and concentrated her focus back on the beach.

This was assertive.

The Warrior Pose on a beach for a TV ad was assertive.

Okay, she’d been forced into it by a dire financial situation – but here she was. Being assertive. Making money. Getting her shit together.

She let out a long, slow breath. Pressed deeper into the lunge. Waited for her muscles to settle into the stronger stance.

Maybe it was time to stop wandering.

After all, wasn’t it the wandering that had landed her right where she didn’t want to be – in debt, facing a future someone else was planning and desperate for a way out.

Maybe it was time to point her feet in one direction. She didn’t have to know what was at the end of the road, or even around the bend because it was the journey that counted, not the destination, right?

Which direction, though? The money trail?

No, she didn’t want a bank vault, just enough cash for a bit of security. Enough to buy some furniture. Enough to prove to Val she didn’t need a mortgage. Enough to get her shit together and keep it there. Okay, Security Road it was.

She’d have to be assertive. But she could do that now.

And she’d have to … Actually, she had no idea what else she had to do. She knew nothing about business or making money or finding opportunities. All she knew was how to teach yoga.

And that wearing a sparkly dress to a Christmas party landed her the best paying job she’d ever had.

‘Trudy, I just saw you on the TV. The ad is wonderful and I love your outfit.’

Dee stared at her phone wondering when her mother had been possessed by a supportive person. ‘Thanks, Mum.’

Three minutes earlier, her new flatmate Pam, the loud one who worked with Leon and who’d moved in after Dee’s fit of assertiveness, ran through the apartment yelling that the commercial was on the telly. Dee was stupefied by shock as she watched herself twisting and turning on the sand, the pictures alternating between spectacular wide-shots of the beach and sensual close-ups of her body.

Leon was on the mobile before the ad finished. ‘If I was straight, I’d sign up for that health
insurance in a second. You sex goddess, you.’

It was two weeks since the ad was shot and the first time Dee had seen it. When Val’s voice came down the line, she still had a hand clapped over her mouth, reeling from the overt sensuality of the pictures. It was meant to be promoting health insurance, not voyeurism.

Her mother obviously missed that angle. ‘Can you get me some copies, Trudy, so I can give them out to my friends? Maybe you could sign them. That would be nice, don’t you think?’

Had Val lost her mind? ‘I’ll ask Lucy and let you know.’

Dee spent the next few days in a state of astonishment. First, there was the giant billboard at the junction featuring a King Kong-sized picture of her in Tree Pose – the sight of which almost made her drive up the back of a bus. Then there was the stream of yoga students who’d seen the ad aired repeatedly over breakfast TV. The couple in the café who pointed at her made her feel pretty weird but the three schoolgirls in the shopping centre who asked for an autograph stumped her completely. For someone who avoided being the centre of attention, getting noticed never felt so good.

She had a coffee with Hollywood Jesus Tom and he said she looked ethereal – go figure – but he was concerned the commercial focus on yoga would undermine the deep, spiritual origins of the practice that the Western world could truly benefit from. No sparks there yet.

‘I knew you’d be great.’ Lucy beamed from her yoga mat on the floor of her office three days after the launch of the ad. ‘The client is over the moon and the interest is unprecedented. I’ve been taking calls about the “yoga girl” since Monday morning.’

‘Who from?’

‘Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, everyone.’

Dee’s stomach did an anxious lurch. ‘What do they want?’

‘They want to know who you are, where you’ve come from, everything about you,’ Lucy enthused. ‘I’ve given out a few scraps to keep them keen but they want more. It’s fantastic.’

Dee wasn’t so sure. A scarier kind of centre of attention was coming at her at warp speed. ‘But aren’t they meant to be interested in the health insurance?’

‘Sure but while they’re talking about you, they’re talking about the ad and our client. It’s great. Sooo’ – she kneeled up on her mat, felt around on her desk, waved a card about in front of Dee – ‘there’s this advertising industry dinner tomorrow night and we’re taking Leonard and his wife along as our star clients, so I thought it’d be a great opportunity to show you off too.’

Was this it? A sparkly dress moment. A chance to be assertive. A step on the path to security and new furniture. She couldn’t afford to pass it up – the ad had paid for Leon’s car and his half of the bond, but she still had no sofa (although Pam’s hot pink bean-bags made sitting easier) and there was the car registration and the telephone bill and … God, it was endless. Although how a fancy dinner would secure her future, she had no idea.

‘What would I have to do?’

‘There’s always a bevy of media waiting to snap photos of the latest advertising stars so we can squeeze you into some of them, put your face in the social pages. We’ll get you shaking hands with a few big-wigs, then you can drink champagne, shoot the breeze with some famous names, dance a bit, that kind of thing.’

Dee winced. A swanky party. Like an annual student Christmas party without the yuletide conversation to fall back on. She was hopeless at small talk. She never knew what to say when discussions inevitably turned to high-brow topics. No one ever talked about stuff she knew. And then there were the uncomfortable comments that made her feel like teaching yoga was a sideshow act – The Amazing Bendable Woman. But it might be worth it if her ‘earthy chic’
outfit scored her another job offer. ‘So I could wear the sparkly dress from your Christmas party?’

‘Definitely not. Half of the invitation list was at my party. We want you to make an entrance and you can’t do that in last season’s dress. I know.’ She suddenly grabbed her phone, hit speed dial. ‘Gina. Lucy. I need your help.’

Gina was Lucy’s gal-pal, a yoga school student and magazine fashion editor with access to a large number of designers and their sample gowns.

Lucy hung up. ‘She’s on her way.’

By the time Dee was bringing Lucy to the end of her meditation session, Gina was walking through the door with an armload of gowns. At the swish of silk, Lucy was out of her meditative state, throwing dresses across the furniture. ‘These are fabulous.’

‘That’s Jennifer and that’s Lilly and Brian’s latest and of course Zack,’ Gina was saying, pointing to each dress, naming the designers like they were her nearest and dearest.

Dee had to admit the gowns were gorgeous – and brief. She didn’t realise ‘black tie’ meant bow tie for men and barely covered breasts for women. Lucy and Gina made her try each one on and model them around the office and yelled at her to stop hitching at the straps. Dee tried to convince them a green high-necked, backless one was best but they outvoted her with a black sequined number with a neckline that plunged to her navel.

‘My boobs’ll fall out,’ she complained.

‘Nothing a little glue can’t fix,’ Gina said. ‘Hope you’ve got some skyscraper heels or you’ll be tripping over the hem all night.’

Did Amanda’s cast-off shoes count as skyscrapers? They felt like the Eiffel Tower but after today’s fashion show, it was obvious she knew nothing.

While Dee changed back into market-stall, Gina said, ‘So has Lucy lined you up for the weekend at the Lake yet?’

‘What weekend?’