Model Misfit (13 page)

I’ve researched Japan for an entire decade. I’ve looked at photos and memorised facts and stuck maps on my wall. I’ve printed things off the internet and ripped pictures out of calendars. But for the first time in my life, studying has let me down. Not a single thing I’ve read or looked at or studied has ever come close to what it’s like actually
being
here.

I stare out of the window in total silence until the car finally pulls into a smaller street with large, grey, grubby concrete blocks and stops halfway along the kerb. The windows have bars across them and there are wooden sticks strewn on the floor with bits of dried chicken still attached to them.

“Ta-da, darling,” Bunty announces, flourishing her hands, as if she just pulled a grubby Tokyo suburb out of a black top hat. “Out you hop.”

I go to open my door, and then pause. My grandmother looks very seated and her invitation sounds nowhere near as plural as it should do. “Me?”

“No, I’m talking to the cab driver,” Bunty laughs. She playfully grabs my arm and shakes it. “Yes,
you,
silly bean.”

“Where are
you
going?”

“I thought this would be so much more fun on your own, sweetie. It’ll be a real, grown-up adventure. We won’t tell your parents. Deal? I’d only cramp your style anyway.”

The driver opens my door for me and then starts pulling my suitcase on to the pavement. I climb out with my mouth flapping in confusion. What is she
talking
about? I don’t have any style
to
cramp. Does this woman know anything about me at
all
?

“B-but—” I stammer through the gap at the top of the window as the driver gets back in and the engine starts. “What about the contract you signed with Annabel?”

“What’s my daughter going to do?” Bunty grins, raising an eyebrow. “Sue me?” And I’m suddenly not at all sure she knows anything about Annabel either.

The car starts moving away.

“W-wait,” I shout, unsuccessfully attempting to jog after it. “I don’t think that this is … this is a really big … please … I won’t … I can’t.” I swallow. “You can’t just
abandon
me on the other side of the world!”

“I’m not abandoning!” Bunty shouts through the window as the car starts driving back up the street. “I’m setting you free! Have a tremendous time, darling! Flat 6B!”

ccording to my guidebook, Tokyo is 2,187 km in area. It has 12.6 million people, twenty-three wards, sixty-two municipalities, 168 tube stations and nine train lines. There are 6,029 people for every square km, and it’s the largest metropolitan area in the world. By any stretch of the imagination, it’s a pretty big city.

In the last few seconds it just got a whole lot bigger.

I watch the taxi get smaller and smaller until my grandmother disappears completely. Then I take a deep breath, collect whatever enthusiasm I have left and start dragging my suitcase anxiously up the road.

The wheels keep getting stuck in the pavement, it keeps falling over, and by the time I’ve worked out that the sign for 6B looks like 5E I’ve walked past it six times and most of my excitement has been left in a sticky trail up and down the road, like a big sad snail.

Finally I clear my throat and press one of the buttons lined up in two neat rows, like the buttons on a dinner jacket. It crackles, and a fuzzy voice says, “Yes?”

“Umm. My name is Harriet Manners. I think I’m staying here?”

“I’ll be right down. Wait there.” The crackling abruptly stops, and a few floors above me a door slams.

This is
ridiculous.
I’ve done exactly as I’m told all my life. Fifteen
years
of not taking sweets off strangers, running with scissors, playing with matches, jumping off swings, petting stray dogs or accepting lifts from people I don’t know, and this is how it ends: knocking on the door of a stranger in a darkening alley on the other side of the world with nobody to hear me scream.

If I knew I was going to die like this, I could have relaxed and actually enjoyed my childhood.

I start rifling through my satchel for something to defend myself against my imminent attacker. I’m just tentatively wielding the Pocahontas pen I got from Disneyland in front of my face when the door swings open.

“Oh,” the axe murderer says, inhaling sharply, and I drop my weapon.

Because standing in front of me, in black jeans and a grey vest, is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.

hen Nat and I were seven we realised we would never be princesses.

I had thousands of freckles and ginger hair, and everybody knew that nobody with either of those things ever got rescued from a tower. They got left there for all eternity, and thus ended their royal bloodline.

Nat had unruly black hair, dark skin and the beginnings of what her mother would later describe as a monobrow. It was generally acknowledged that princesses had complexions like fruit and two eyebrows, clearly distinct from each other. So that excluded her as well.

The tall girl standing in front of me now is precisely what we concluded princesses should look like. Huge mesmerising blue eyes, flawless skin, a pouty mouth, pale golden hair in waves down to her waist. An aura of goodness and an ability to engage in conversation with animals. A ray of sunshine, hitting her head like a halo. (I have no idea how she’s found one, it’s almost totally dark outside.)

Any second now, rabbits are going to start leaping around her feet in pairs and a bluebird is going to land on her shoulder.

“Hello,” she says, sounding utterly delighted, and I realise that she’s even more English than I am. “I’m Poppy. You’re
so
not what I was expecting.”

“H-Harriet Manners,” I stutter, taking her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, umm …” and I finish the sentence by fading into silence and staring rudely over her shoulder. Part of me is still expecting to see seven miniature men wandering around the hallway.

“I’m
so
happy to finally meet you,” she says, taking my suitcase and wheeling it into the hallway. “My boyfriend’s always so busy. Anyway, it’s just not the same, is it? They just don’t want to talk about girly things.”

Oh, God. I suspect I’m about to prove an enormous disappointment.

“Umm …” I desperately start racking my brain for a subject that will make this girl like me. “Did you know that high heels for women in the West are believed to have originated with Catherine De Medici in the sixteenth century? She was about to marry King Henry of France and wanted him to think she was taller than she actually was.”

Poppy looks at me with wide eyes, and I remember why in fifteen years I have only managed to make one female friend.

“But in the Middle East,” I continue nervously, “heels were used to lift the foot from the burning sand.”

“How adorable!” Poppy giggles. “What else?”

What else?

That’s not an answer I’m usually prepared for. I’ve pretty much run out of shoe-based facts. “Did you know that Neil Armstrong took his boots off and left them on the moon to compensate for the weight of the moon rocks they took?”

“Amazing!” Poppy claps a few times, and then pulls my suitcase across the hallway towards a bright green door.

She beams at me – a genuine, open, beautiful smile. I blink and look down at my battered suitcase, crumpled dinosaur T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. I’m sticky with sweat from dragging my suitcase about, and even without lifting my arms I can tell that I smell a bit like Hugo when he’s been out in the rain. This must be how Regan and Goneril felt around Cordelia in
King Lear.

I think I’m starting to understand why they put her in prison.

“Rin?” Poppy calls, pushing the door open and manoeuvring my suitcase through the doorway with a graceful flick of her wrist. I try to hop over it and smash my ankle against the wheel. “
Harriet
is here! Come and say hello.”

There’s a clatter, and an incredibly pretty Japanese girl runs out of one of the rooms. Her hair is massive, waist-length and elaborately curled. She’s wearing a pink flowery dress with lace trim and buttons all the way down the front, and white ankle socks with pink ribbons. A large, pink toy duck is attached on a clip to a belt covered in sequins. Her face is perfectly matt with round sparkly cheeks, huge eyelashes and glittery lipstick.

She looks exactly like one of the china dolls Granny Manners used to have on her mantelpiece, except slightly bigger and without a sign in front that says DO NOT TOUCH, HARRIET.

Rin stops in the hallway, breathless. “I go for gift, but I’m not finding it. It has gone walkabouts.” She drops into a low bow. “My name is Rin. I am delight to meet you.”

“Deligh
ted
,” Poppy corrects sweetly. “It’s deligh
ted,
Rin.”

Rin looks bewildered. “Who is Ted? He’s coming later? I have no present for Ted.”

“It’s … oh, never mind.” Poppy gestures at me to take off my shoes and starts leading me through an incredibly narrow hallway. “We’re both models too. This is a model flat, but you probably know that already.”

I’ve suddenly realised why Poppy looks familiar: she was one of the girls I cut out of Nat’s magazine. I distinctly remember putting her face in the bin.

“Me also,” Rin beams, nodding happily. “Modelling sometime, then and now.” She grabs my hand with her tiny, dainty fingers and starts leading me through the minuscule flat. “This is kitchen,” she says, pointing to a bathroom with the smallest bathtub I have ever seen. “This is garden.” She points to a kitchen. “And this is alive room.” She gestures to a room with a very low table and four round cushions.

“Living room,” Poppy corrects gently.

“I am very apologising,” Rin says, blushing slightly and bowing again. “My English is so bad. I study super hard, but it is not sticky. I –
nandakke –
slurp.”

“You don’t
suck
.” Poppy laughs. “Rin’s obsessed with Australia so she’s learning English as quickly as possible so she can move there. My boyfriend says she must have been a koala in a past life.”

“One day,” Rin says in a dreamy voice, “I move to Sydney and get Rip Curls and big BBQ and burn sausages. I shall be a little ropper.”

“Ripper,” Poppy says automatically, leading us into a teeny tiny bedroom.