Picture Perfect (28 page)

Mobile phones have eighteen times more bacteria than the average toilet handle. I would rather lick mine than spend the day making terrible decisions and being forced to pay for them. Only crazy people would do that.

It’s called
retail therapy
for a reason.

Back home, Nat is like some kind of purse-carrying tiger. Within seconds of entering a shop, she’ll go very, very still, quietly assessing her territory.

“What are we looking for?”

“Ssssshhhh,” Nat will reply. “I’m concentrating.”

She’ll scan the room with eyes narrowed and eyebrows furrowed. Then she’ll lift her chin.

“This,” she’ll say, walking forward with great purpose and grabbing a pair of spotted trousers. “And this.” She’ll march over to a lime-green jumper. “This.” She’ll make a graceful right angle. “Obviously this.” She’ll pick up a silk jacket with studs round the collar.

“And this?” I’ll make some kind of hesitant gesture towards a rack, just to look like I’m participating.

“No.”

“But … Nat. It’s a jumper. It’s green. It’s identical.”

“It’s not. It dips instead of falling straight, the neckline isn’t wide enough, it’s six centimetres shorter, the green is slightly too blue. What you’ve got there is a
Mum
jumper.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want a
Mum
jumper?”

“Umm … No?”

“Then come on.”

And Nat will head to the till, pay for her items and emerge, glorious and triumphant, into the sunlight with her prey in shiny bags hanging from her wrists instead of her mouth.

The torture is swift, merciless and over almost immediately.

Kenderall is not a tiger.

Within minutes of entering the shiny doors of Barneys on Madison Avenue, I can tell this isn’t going to be a speedy metaphorical death.

She’s like an enormous brown bear. There’s no urgency, no direction, just contradicting opinions. She plods around the beauty section: picking things up, putting things down. Considering, pondering. Opining.

Debating over and over and over and over and …

In essence, she holds you down with her big paws, sits on your chest and slowly but carefully begins chewing on you while you’re still alive.

And the last thing you hear before certain death is: “I’m not sure, I just think this lipgloss is too
shiny
.”

But you know what?

It’s
still
better than going back to Greenway.

“Now,” Kenderall says when we’ve finally made it through the beauty section. “We need to decide what kind of apparel
brand
you are.”

“Huh?”

The bright lights, the gentle murmurs, the bow of the doorman in a neat little blue cap: it’s all a little overwhelming. For the first time in my life, words have the power to scare me. PRADA. GIVENCHY. STELLA McCARTNEY. LANVIN. ARMANI. RALPH LAUREN.

Everything
about Barneys is expensive. The smell: leather and perfume and wood floors. The lights: perfectly coordinated and glowing in the right places. The displays; the mannequins; the layout; the staff.

As for the clothes, all I’m going to say is: I’m not touching anything.

I either need to keep my hands in my pockets for the rest of the afternoon or consider cutting them off permanently.

“
Brand
,” Kenderall says patiently, prodding a pair of $3,000 velvet hotpants. “If you don’t make yourself irreplaceable, somebody will replace you. Being different is being remembered. Being the same is being forgotten.”

I nod. Sir Francis has been left with a man with a xylophone outside: Kenderall gave him twenty dollars to ‘pig-sit’.

“I don’t think I have a brand,” I admit.

“No,” she agrees. “You don’t. You walk into a room, and nobody is going to notice. Whereas
me
–” she points at herself – “I walk into the room, I
am
the room.”

That literally makes no sense. The difference between a human and a four-walled space is quite big, even to an untrained eye.

“OK,” I say doubtfully.

The shop assistants are staring at my purple flip-flops. I think they might have some kind of alarm that goes off if you’re wearing anything that’s been recently vulcanised.

“Importance is all in the mind,” Kenderall says firmly. “And you express that mind with your clothes and your mouth – understand?”

Nope.
“Uh-huh.”

“These people don’t know who we are. I could be an heiress. You could be a Russian princess. Believe it, and it’s exactly the same as it being true.”

I really hope it isn’t. I’d have been wiped out by the Russian Revolution in 1918, for starters.

“Gotcha,” I say, trying to lift my head as regally as I can.

“Live your truth,” Kenderall says. “Or whatever you want that truth to be, which is basically the same thing.”

She starts stalking through the hall, prodding at things with a disgusted look on her face.

“Gucci would approve of this layout,” she says loudly so that everybody can hear her. “I know his taste. We’re close family friends.”

“Do you
really
know Gucci?” I say in a low whisper.

I can’t help feeling a bit surprised.

According to what Nat told me a few weeks ago, Guccio Gucci died sixty years ago.

“Babe,” Kenderall says, “as far as everyone here is concerned, we know
everybody
.”

e are condescending from that point on.

We are rude in Jimmy Choo. We are supercilious in Oscar de la Renta. We are disdainful in Alexander McQueen and imperious in Michael Kors.

At least, Kenderall is. I try to look as stern and Romanov-like as is physically possible.

And it works.

Not a single person glances at my flip-flops. Nobody asks me not to touch anything, or breathe on anything, or goes to the rail two seconds after me and rearranges everything with a pointedly tired facial expression.

Not a single person treats us as if we shouldn’t be there.

And I have to be honest, it’s quite nice being treated like you’re
someone.

“As your personal stylist, it is my
job
to make you stand out,” Kenderall calls over to me as she lumbers around the clothes racks. “As difficult as that may be.”

Then she holds up a black leather pair of trousers.

“You could be The Girl in the Black Leather. Everything you wear has to be made from leather. Jacket, trousers, shoes, shirt.”

I look at the price tag. $2,500.

“Umm. Primitive leather was made by immersing raw skins into a fermented solution of pigeon poo and allowing germs and bacteria to loosen hair.”

“OK. Ew.” Kenderall puts the trousers quickly back on the rack. “Moving on.”

Then she picks up a purple dress.

“You could be The Girl Who Always Wears Purple.”

That sounds more doable.

Then I look at the label. $9,990.

Maybe not.

“Umm, it’s called purple because it is made from the mucus secreted by the
Purpura
, a spiny sea snail. Do you really want me to look like the snot glands of a gastropod mollusc?”

“Scrap that,” Kenderall agrees.

In quick succession she suggests diamante, lux-sports-wear, nightwear-for-daywear, and a dress made entirely out of paper (“although I think Molly already nabbed that one”), and I find scientifically accurate ways to reject all of them.

Finally we get to the shoe section.

“
These
,” she says triumphantly, picking up a pair.

They’re bright red with enormous heels. There’s a pair of little white eyes by the toes and orange claws wrapped around the back of the ankle that click into place.

“Lobster shoes?” I say dubiously.

“Precisely,” Kenderall affirms. “You can be The Girl with the Lobster Shoes.
Everybody
will remember that.”

I blink. I happen to like lobsters very much.

Their brains are in their throats, they breathe and listen with their legs and they taste with their feet.

I’d just never considered them as a fashion accessory before.

“One hundred and seventy-eight dollars,” Kenderall adds, thrusting them at me. “They’re in the sale. It’s a bargain. After all, you can’t put a price on yourself.”

Quick, Harriet
.

“Lobsters are actually brown or green,” I say as fast as I can. “They have a pigment called
astaxanthin
in their shells, which absorbs blue light and is the only pigment not destroyed by cooking. So red lobsters are dead ones.”

Then I look at the shoes. “These are actually
dead
lobster shoes,” I add, in case I haven’t made that clear.

“Brilliant,” Kenderall says triumphantly. “That’s even better. You can be the Dead Lobster Shoe girl.”

She pushes me towards the till.

My hands are shaking. All I have on me is my $100 birthday money, and the emergency money I stole from the kitty.

I swallow and look at Kenderall with big eyes.

“But—”

“Do you want to be remembered?” she says. “Or do you want everyone to forget about you?”

And that does it.

The box in my head rumbles, and suddenly everything bursts out in a series of explosions.

My birthday. BANG.

Greenway. BANG. My parents. BANG. The silence of my phone. BANG. Toby replacing me with my dog. BANG. Infinity Models. BANG.

Nick. BANG BANG.

Nat. College.
Jessica.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.

Then one last thing falls out with an enormous, brain-silencing thump:
You’re a nobody. A nothing.

BANG.

I clench my hands together.

Then I lift my chin, put the hideous shoes on the counter and – with calm, steady hands – hand my money over.

I am not going to be forgotten about any more. I’m not going to be pushed aside, or ignored, or replaced. I’m not going to be left behind.

And if a pair of lobster shoes is what it takes, so be it.

enderall takes us up to Fred’s to ‘replenish’.

It’s a café on the ninth floor of Barneys, it’s very expensive and glamorous, and it confuses me immensely because Fred has an apostrophe but Barney doesn’t so I’m not entirely sure what belongs to whom.