Let Down Your Hair (16 page)

“The next time I saw her at the gate, I ran away and hid at a friend’s house. Ravenwitch called the police. When I turned up home safe that night, Mom went
psycho
.”

We exchanged a rueful smile, Andrea’s white-ringed eyes burning holes in our memories. She didn’t specify what she meant by “went psycho“, but I remembered the whip crack of Andrea’s hand hitting Ryan, and didn’t dare to ask.

“After that I’d had enough,” said Emmeline. “Enough of the femmo preaching, enough of the freak show friends, enough of doing anything she told me. I was out to embarrass her as much as I could. I wore heels and makeup, bought beauty magazines, put boy band posters on my walls and hitched up the skirt on my school uniform until you could see my panties flash when I walked. She hated it, and I loved that she hated it.”

She smiled again, lipstick half-bitten from her lips. Her spirit shamed me. My mother waged war on Andrea’s regime at twelve; I didn’t defy her until the night I refused to let her cut my hair, aged eighteen. But then, Emmeline had grown up in the mainstream world, watching television, attending school, learning what was “normal” and how to rebel. I’d had none of those influences. Just Andrea, and the world she created.

The next spread was a collage of pictures cut from catalogues and magazines. Emmeline at the start of her modeling career, in jeans and brief, bright dresses. Long-ago versions of the outfits that made Andrea cast Freya from our house.

“It started when I was in a department store one day,’ Emmeline went on. ‘I was fifteen, and this woman came up and gave me her card, asking if I was interested in modeling. I said absolutely, because what little girl
doesn
’
t
dream of being a model?”

A little girl like me
, I answered silently.
And look what I
’
m doing tomorrow.

Looking at the modeling photos animated Emmeline in a way the earlier shots hadn’t. Her face brightened, and she lingered over each page, telling me details of the shoots and the clothing in the way I’d hoped she’d talk about herself.

Something significant occurred to me. “Don’t you need your parents’ permission to model if you’re under eighteen?”

Emmeline waved a dismissive hand. “I forged Mom’s signature and got a friend’s unemployed older sister to come to jobs with me. I needed a guardian, she loved the shoots, it was a win-win. By then Mom was so busy with her femmo stuff she didn’t suspect anything for ages. A few months later, I met Matti.”

Emmeline turned a page and I found myself staring at my father. The man who provided half my genes. The photographer. The pedophile. The sight of him sucked the air from my lungs, as if I’d been locked in a cage with a monster.

My father was sitting on a low stool, with a camera in his lap and a lit cigarette, held in the European way between thumb and forefinger. His face was lean, almost gaunt, with sideburns and pale blond hair that trailed over one eyebrow in an angled, silky sheet. His cheekbones were high, and his eyes were blue but angular, like Asian eyes. Like my eyes.

Emmeline was looking at Matti, her beautiful face as still as a waxwork. It was as though she didn’t know whether she wanted to tear the photo up or crawl inside it and live there forever. Feeling my gaze, she flashed a camera-ready smile and turned to another page of modeling shots.

“He wasn’t rude or sleazy, like some of the other photographers.” Her voice was hushed, as if telling the story of someone who’d died. “I thought he was the most beautiful man in the world. He was older, and wiser, with amazing blue eyes and this sexy Finnish accent. I knew he had a wife, but he said he’d divorce her, and I wanted to be with him more than anything in the world. When he went back to Finland I cried for weeks. I was so devastated that I missed three periods before I realized I was pregnant.”

My heart contracted. Pregnant. With
me
. Accidental product of an affair between a teenage fashion model and a married photographer. Twenty-three years ago I was
growing in the stomach
of the glamorous woman beside me.

“I was so scared.” Emmeline’s face buckled. She pulled out two tissues, scrunched them into balls, and rammed it them into her eye sockets as if staunching a wound. “I didn’t dare tell anyone, especially not Mom. When it got obvious she confronted me, and when she found out that I’d been modeling behind her back and sleeping with a married man, it was like a bomb went off. Screaming, slamming doors, smashing crockery. Trying to make me get an abortion, trying to come up something to charge Matti with. Abuse of power, sexual assault, statutory rape, anything she could think of. Which was just
stupid
.”

She ripped out two more tissues. “I was over the age of consent, for a start, and it’s not like I was a virgin or anything. And there was no way I was aborting Matti’s child. I knew men hardly ever leave their wives, but we were so in love, and I was so young and beautiful, I couldn’t believe he’d stay with her when he had a child with me.”

She rammed more tissues into her eyes, and they turned at once to mulch. I handed her two more, compassion and bitterness at silent war inside me. Had she been a vain, naïve teenage stranger, compassion would have won. But Emmeline was my mother, and I was the child she’d kept as her ticket to happily ever after.

“Then I had you. I thought I’d just pop you in a cot and go back to normal, but babies don’t work that way. I was getting up every two hours for
months
. Cleaning up vomit, changing your diapers and sheets, making bottles, begging you to sleep while you screamed in my arms. All with Mom standing by, criticizing everything, like I was the worst mother in the world.”

She yanked a fresh handful of tissues from the box, and tossed the drenched ones at the bin in the kitchen. One landed on the lid with a squelch, the other one slid in slow motion to the floor.

“You’d think she could’ve cut me some slack. I was
sixteen
, for Christ’s sake! But no. Everything I did was wrong, bottle-feeding, using disposable nappies, dressing you in pink, saying you were pretty. Putting you to bed too late, or not enough, or too much. Wanting time out to exercise and see my friends. Not that I had much fun when I did. It was like they were still kids and I was an adult who might give them Teenage Mother disease. As for exercise, we’re talking a couple of times a
week
. The way Mom went on you’d think I was locking you all day in a cupboard so I could get my nails done.

“Well,
fuck her
. I cared about how I looked, and I looked like shit, which made me feel like shit. I was terrified that if I didn’t get my looks back, I’d never model again and Matti might not want me any more. And I wanted him so desperately. He wrote to me sometimes, and sometimes those letters were all I had to live for.”

She hugged her knees to her heaving chest in a gesture so like mine that it pierced through my bitterness into a deep well of grief. I pushed back my chair and put my arms around her, but she kept on weeping like I wasn’t there.

I released her and sat until her sobs petered out. With a shuddering breath, she reached out and turned to the final page. And there, beneath a smooth sheet of plastic, was the picture of Emmeline I carried in my wallet. The final square that connected the real-life patchwork to the fantasy one in my head. A shiver went through my bones.

“Mom took this photo,” said Emmeline. Her face was bare and puffy, and her voice sounded flat, as if all her emotions had been wrung out. “I left a week later.” She turned away, not wanting to look her teenage self in the eye.

“Because she stopped you from taking me to Helsinki.” My words came out rusty.

“Not quite.” She picked up the second album, small and pink with “Little Angels” embossed on it in silver. “The argument that made me leave was about this.”

She opened the second album. Inside the cover was a pudgy-cheeked baby, with white-blonde hair and a winsome gummy smile. The photo was oval, and the edges misted into a soft pink background. Me, aged six months.

Something huge and messy shifted inside me. I’d never seen a photo of myself as a baby. If Andrea had any, she’d thrown them out or locked them away in her filing cabinet. Just like she’d locked me away.

A series of photos in costume followed. In one I was lying on my tummy in a denim skirt and fur-edged jacket; in another I was sitting on a throne with a tiny tiara studded with heart-shaped pink jewels. In a way, it was grotesque, as Andrea had said. Yet looking at myself in those twee little outfits, I also saw something Andrea hadn’t wanted to see: that these photos were Emmeline’s way of being proud of her daughter, and wanting to show her off.

I looked up from the last photo. Emmeline was watching with a nervous expression, as if awaiting my verdict.

“Your first portfolio,” she said, half-joking, half in earnest. “You were the cutest baby ever. I entered you in the Little Angels beauty contest and you won. Part of the prize was being signed by an agency to model kids’ clothes. I was so proud I was stupid enough to show Mom.”

I gaped. “You showed
Andrea
this album?”

She bit her lip and nodded.

We shared a pained grimace at her youthful naivete, briefly on the same side once more. “She didn’t rip it off you and burn it?”

“She tried to. But I snatched it back and barricaded myself in my room while she banged on my door and told me I was exploiting my baby. That I was shallow and disgusting and unfit to be a mother. You’d think I’d put makeup on my six year old and taught her lap dancing. OK, so it was a bit trashy, but you were
six months old!
You wouldn’t have remembered a thing! But she preached and screamed until I just couldn’t cope. I said
Fine, if I’m so crap and you’re so perfect, you fucking raise her
. And I left.” Her eyes overflowed again, and she drew her knees back to her chest. “I’m so sorry, babe. I’m so sorry.”

This time I didn’t try to hug her. I looked out the window at tatters of cloud, drifting across the sky like the fragments of a torn curtain.

A long time passed before she lifted her ravaged face. “Anyway,” she said, “I used the last of my modeling money to fly to Helsinki and stayed in a cheap hotel for three nights, ringing and ringing Matti’s number. He finally called back, and we met in a park on the edge of town. When he arrived I flung myself into his arms and he shook me off, looking around like there were spies in every tree. Then he said he wasn’t leaving his wife, gave me five thousand dollars, and told me to go home on the next plane.”

Grief of my own began stirring at last, somewhere too deep inside me to see clearly.

“So I did. I stayed for a few weeks with friends, but I could feel their parents thinking I was this fallen woman they didn’t want near their daughters. Eventually I ran into this guy I knew through modeling who had his own place, and we had this kind of live-in relationship while I got back in shape for modeling. So everything was … everything from then was OK.”

Emmeline shoved back her chair and walked out, balled fists against her eyelids, hunched over as if walking against a strong wind. I didn’t follow. When her bedroom door closed, I leafed through the Little Angels album again, empty and dry-eyed. I stared at the pictures until the reddening sky turned dark, trying to shove my mother’s story into bookshelves already jammed too tight.

Fabian de Carlo’s studio was built in an old warehouse. The ceiling was high and barred with iron girders, and the floor was divided into areas by curtains and black scaffolding. The shoot took place among these, on a small white stage, where I posed on stools and podiums, slick with sweat from the blazing studio lights. Even though all I was wearing was Emmeline’s bikini, I somehow felt less self-conscious than I’d felt fully-clothed on campus.

“Can you lift your chin for me, bella?” called Fabian from behind the lens. “A bit more. A bit more. Ah! Now you are perfect.”
Clickclickclick
. “Now look over your left shoulder. Bring the shoulder closer. Closer.
Beautiful
.”

Clickclickclickclick
.

Beautiful
. The word rang in my ears, thrilling yet somehow unearned. Coming from Ryan,
beautiful
had been a private gift. Coming from Fabian, it felt like something valuable I’d been given by mistake. Something intended for Sadie, the chic young model Emmeline had created.

Fabian consulted the gold watch on his perma-tanned wrist. “OK, my bellas. I love you and leave you. But I tell you,” he said to Emmeline, “she has something special. I show these to Peter at La Carina, and I promise you, he will use this girl for his Birds of Paradise collection. Ciao ciao!”

Something special
. Once again the strange, detached sense of thrill, as though the compliments belonged to someone else.

A flock of assistants descended to prepare the stage for the next client, and Emmeline ushered me back to the changing area. “Oh my God, babe,” she whispered, “he’s sending your pictures to
La Carina!
”

“La Carina?” I said, shutting the curtain between us.

“Exclusive lingerie company, based in Italy. They must be shooting in town. So are you excited?” she said. “You could be the next Miranda Kerr!”

“The next who?” I said, levering my aching breasts into one of my new bras. Despite being bought only a couple of days ago, it already felt a bit tight.

“Miranda Kerr. Australian girl. Massive in lingerie modeling.”

I emerged as Emmeline was taking out her Visa card, and for the first time I saw that the name on it was Dirk Rusden. I choked on my glass of water. Emmeline was buying me clothes and waxing on
Dirk
’
s
credit card?

“Technically, you’re a bit old to start modeling now,” she said, handing the card to one of Fabian’s assistants, “but you look young. Tell them you’re eighteen. I did for years.”

My transformation had already cost several thousand dollars. I’d stopped protesting about this, figuring this was the least she owed me for growing up without her. Except that now I owed Dirk. Not just for my haircut and wardrobe, but for the food I ate, the clothes I wore, and the glamorous roof over my head. Just like she did.

“So do you … not work at all any more?”
Are you completely dependent on Dirk?

The assistant returned with a CD and a USB key. “Not really,” said Emmeline, signing the terrifying bill. “Most of the high-paid interesting stuff is for younger girls, like you. I could still look for catalogue work and ads if I wanted, but why bother?” She swept up her designer bag and led me outside to the cab rank.

Why bother?
Why work if you’ve caught a man rich enough to keep you in luxury? You
and
the daughter you’re pretending is an aspiring model you met through a friend?

Because it leaves you one break-up away from destitution. Because trophies lose their shine and get replaced. Which is why most models’ careers are over by the time they turn twenty-five. Or earlier. And I was already twenty-two.

“How much would a model make for a La Carina shoot?” I asked, climbing into the taxi.

“Oh, it depends on lots of things.” She checked her lipstick in a tiny hand mirror. “How experienced you are, how long the shoot goes for, how many of your photos they use. But a few grand, at least.”

My spirits lifted a little. If I could get semi-regular modeling work at that rate, I could rent my own place and model for a year or two while I built myself an alternative career. But in what? Everything I thought of was haunted by Ryan, telling me I had yet to find my calling.

Still no calls. Still no emails. Still no answer when I rang his cell phone. I searched for him online, but the only contact details I could find were ones I’d already tried. It was as if he’d vanished, leaving nothing but a message and that awful, humming silence that sucked in my messages and turned them into poisonous whispers.

How many messages do you plan to leave? Twenty? Fifty? You
look desperate and pathetic. He
’
s ignoring them, or deleting them, because he
’
s over you. Move on. Find someone else. The way you look now, you
’
ll be fighting off offers!
And even if the offers would be for Sadie, not me, at least I wouldn’t be sneered at.

I shoved the whispers away. “So what do I have to do to get modeling jobs?”

“There’s a couple of ways. If you register with an agency, clients contact them and pick models from their books. If you’re freelance, you find work yourself. In this case, Fabian’s going to send your photos direct to La Carina.”

When we arrived at the penthouse it was ten to five. I hurried to the guest room and opened the laptop to check my email.
Invalid username and/or password
came up. I entered my details a second time, then a third, and a fourth, but the same message came up every time. I’d got into my email just that morning—was the college server down?

Suddenly convinced my inbox was full of messages from Ryan, I clicked on
IT help
. Maybe Ryan couldn’t access his email from his mother’s place. Maybe now it was Monday he’d gone to college to check it. Academic departments locked their doors over the semester break, but the IT help desk stayed open. It was too late to ring today, but I could get them to reset my password first thing tomorrow.