Sin Tropez (14 page)

****

‘Natalya, do you have a problem with nudity?’ The woman cocked her head to one side and her eyes travelled slowly up and down Natalya’s slender body. Then she
fixed her stare on Natalya’s breasts, taking in how they appeared both small and yet, in comparison to the slightness of the waist and the daintiness of the ribcage, voluptuous.

‘No.’

‘Fine. Could you take off your dress for me, leave your undies on, and I’d like you to walk slowly to the other side of the room. Stop for five seconds, turn your head and then walk
back to us. That’s right isn’t it Emilio?’

‘Exactly, if you can do that for us please …’ a bored-looking Emilio glimpsed the name at the top of the model card in front of him and added ‘Natalya’.

Natalya glanced behind her at the queue of models waiting for their turn and sighed. The queue had grown longer and the row of girls now stretched through the door and out into the hallway. Most
of them were the same height as her with blue eyes and hair falling just short of shoulder length, which was the particular look they wanted at this casting.

Natalya scrutinized her competition. Some looked bored or tired. Others were nervous, particularly the new faces, who hadn’t yet had time to build a portfolio of pictures and must rely
solely on the impression they were about to make in their two-minute window. These new faces were visibly intimidated by the regular models’ experience and confidence. Natalya knew so well
how they felt, plucked from the school gates or their local shopping mall and thrown into the world of fashion modelling. Despite dreaming of this day from the age of ten, they would have been
stunned by quite how difficult the job is to get the hang of.

The hardest thing is learning how to walk. Natalya had watched countless adolescents miss out on the chance of a lifetime because of the particular rhythm with which they placed one lanky leg in
front of another, caught out by shoes that have transcended fashion to become sculpture. And yet despite all the angst and struggle of initiation, new faces have their own weapon against the more
established. They have bodies that are not yet battling the onslaught of womanhood. They have not yet succumbed to the ruinous invasion of hips, breasts and thighs.

Natalya stared enviously at two identikit blondes chatting gaily with each other. She couldn’t understand girls like this. They thrived on the travel, the constant flow of people and the
glamour, and whether they were walking for a poxy graduate or the biggest designer in the world, they retained an affinity and camaraderie with each other that never ceased to surprise her –
didn’t they realize they were competitors? Even the make-up artists had their favourites. This was a cut-throat world and Natalya trusted nobody.

She undressed slowly, undoing each popper at the side of her tight green dress individually, although they could have been easily peeled apart in much less time.

Emilio drummed his fingers on the table and exchanged a look with the woman beside him.

‘If you could hurry please, we’ve quite a lot more to get through today,’ the woman said.

Finally, Natalya was down to her sheer thong and bra and she started to walk, as instructed, to the other side of the room. Halfway there, she heard the woman laughing. Natalya spun round to
find her poring over a series of photographs on Emilio’s digital camera. From the sound of her giggled whispers, the photos apparently showed Emilio’s young goddaughter, wearing fancy
dress and with a finger wedged up Emilio’s nostril.

The woman looked up. ‘Keep going,’ she snapped.

Seconds later and before Natalya even had a chance to stop and turn, Emilio put up a hand. ‘OK, that’s enough, thanks for coming. Who’s next?’

There were two piles of model cards on the table: a large one and a small one. He placed Natalya’s card on the large pile, raising an eyebrow at the woman, who nodded. Natalya just had
time to retrieve her dress before the next girl strutted to the centre of the room to pose for her Polaroid, looking unsmilingly into the camera lens and hunching her shoulders so that her back was
concave and her thin body appeared skeletal.

‘Mmmn, great bone structure,’ Emilio murmured to the new girl as Natalya stalked out, looking as nonchalant as she could in sheer bra and thong.

Natalya got dressed in the corridor and reached into her bag for her scrappy blue notebook, which, after its postal adventures, was by now almost falling apart. The address for her next casting
was Dean Street. At least that was still in W1. She’d been to five castings already today and had one more to go. Walking to castings was a good way to keep fit, but she often had to rush to
get to them on time so it was easy to end up spending a fortune on taxis. She clutched her portfolio – her ‘book’, as the agencies called it – and flipped through the pages:
Natalya on a beach frolicking by the shore; Natalya in a series of evening dresses and haughty hats; Natalya and a sultry boy in matching tweed outfits; Natalya entwined round a perfume bottle. She
stopped at the perfume campaign. Now that had been great money – not that she’d seen much of it. She remembered with bitterness that the agency had kept most of her wage to pay the rent
on the model flat in Paris, where she’d done the shows for a season. The grotty apartment crammed with malnourished Eastern Europeans, Brazilians and a Sudanese girl had felt more like a camp
for asylum seekers than a chic Parisian base, and she was sure the agency had held back far more than it was worth.

Suddenly she felt weary. She resolved to skip the last casting and run herself a relaxing bath at home. Oh and she could look Claude up on the net again, in case there was something she
missed.

The first entry that appeared when Natalya typed in ‘Claude Perren’ was a Wikipedia biography she already knew by heart. It read:

Jackpot! Natalya shut off the computer and glided to her en-suite bathroom to pour some essential oils into the bath. The female booker’s tinny laugh rang in her ears,
mocking her. I won’t need to pander to the likes of you for much longer, she thought, as she slid into the water and closed her eyes. Natalya was unaware that a dark, new chapter in her life
was about to begin.

****

‘Willy Eckhardt offices,’ said a deep bass voice.

‘Oh, good morning sir, could I speak to Ms Gloria Dwyer please?’

‘Speaking,’ the voice boomed.

‘Oh, er, oh I see, sorry, er Ms Dwyer. I … I’m calling about the job. It’s Sarah.’

‘Ah, Sarah. Good. Well, what do you say?’

‘I’ll take it. Thank you so much. I’m delighted. I’ll take the job.’

****

The first letter arrived the next day. An elated Natalya, assuming it was from Claude, felt a sudden chill shoot through her body when she saw how her name had been scrawled on
the envelope in a handwriting that was both childish and menacing. The writer had pressed the blue ball-point pen with such force upon the envelope that the imprint of her name could be clearly
read on the paper it encased. The letter itself was brief. It had been typed on a computer, and the two lines of small black font seemed absurd on the A4 sheet of plain white paper.

Shaking, Natalya collapsed back on to the red leather sofa, one of the only flashes of colour in the luxurious but bland cream-themed apartment that Gregory had rented for her.
She knew that many people were jealous of her, some even despised her. But nobody – absolutely nobody – knew about her father. She always lied about him if people asked. She would tell
them her real father had been dear Janis, who had died so suddenly and so needlessly, from a curable illness for which he hadn’t been able to afford treatment. She had never written about
Stan, never said anything; she hardly knew a thing about him herself. Other than that she loathed him.

She closed her eyes and thought back to the moment her mother had told her what had really happened on the night of her conception. Natalya had been eight years old. Until then, she had thought
her father was a charming man called Stan who had gone to live in England where he could work hard and earn lots of money – enough to buy Natalya a big pony. That he wanted Janis to keep
mummy company, but that he loved his daughter and would come back to find her. But at just eight years old, Natalya, hardened by poverty and the weight of supporting her mother emotionally since
Janis’s death a year earlier, had begun to question this story. ‘Mummy, is my real daddy really going to come back? I don’t believe that he really loves me,’ she had asked
one day while she helped weave a basket she would sell in the market at the weekend. She had stared at the big basket in her small hands, which, if she was lucky, would fetch enough to buy a few
days’ worth of vegetables. She could not bring herself to look at her mother because she had known, just known, that she was about to learn something terrible.

‘Your father got me to do something I did not want to do. That I should not have done,’ Daina began.

She took Natalya’s hands in hers and her voice was choked with tears, although Natalya didn’t look up to see them. She didn’t understand, but she sensed that something was
deeply wrong. She felt a sadness and something more. Something that was to feature greatly in her life and which she was later to identify as disgust. She had felt dirty. And now, thirteen years
later, Natalya was frustrated that she couldn’t actually remember the rest of what had been said in that conversation, a conversation which had shattered a delusion that had comforted and
sustained her for years. Her traumatized eight-year-old mind had immediately blotted out the details, the horror, the odd tone of her mother’s voice that had frightened her, leaving only a
sense of intense revulsion.

For a short time after that conversation she had hated her mother, though she hadn’t known quite why. She’d felt revolted every time her mother touched her, or called her name. Was
it because of what had been done to her? Or because she had shattered a dream? Or something entirely different? She hadn’t really known, but life wasn’t the same after that. Then, four
years later, her attitude towards her mother changed again.

Natalya was twelve years old. It was sunny outside and she was doing as she always did on a Saturday morning, helping her mother sell the woven baskets at the market. She was wearing a battered
old dress of her mother’s, cinched in with an old leather belt, and didn’t care in the least that it looked silly. She just wanted to sell as many baskets as possible.

She had just set up her stall as nicely as she could when she noticed a tall, thin man of about forty staring intensely in her direction. Pleased, she adjusted the baskets; he didn’t look
like the sort who usually bought them, but he had been standing there a while so she supposed he must be interested. Slightly nervous under the ferocity of the man’s continuing stare, she
fiddled with the baskets again, piling them on top of each other until one fell off the rickety old table. Natalya bent down to pick up the basket, and inspected it crossly. Glancing up at the man,
anxious that he would still want to buy something, she saw that his gaze had now moved from her face to her chest. She looked down and was embarrassed to see that the oversize dress was hanging
well away from her body and her small budding breasts were completely exposed. Clutching the thin material to her, she quickly rose and repositioned the basket.

But she noticed something in the way that man had looked at her chest. He had been
enraptured
. It had been a look stranded somewhere between intense pleasure and intense pain. Suddenly
Natalya understood what lust was. She sensed it was a powerful force; certainly more powerful than her poor, lovely mother, who had been only three years older than herself when she had first given
birth.

But Natalya also sensed that such lust gave a woman power. At that moment in the market when she saw the man’s eyes mist over, somewhere beneath her disgust and fear she had enjoyed it.
She
had caused such a reaction. Instinctively, she smiled at the man, who flushed slightly and moved on. He never did buy a basket.

It seemed that after that incident boys and men watched her everywhere she went. They watched the sway of her skinny hips as she rushed to and fro. They watched her long, long legs, which were
always on show for she was taller than most and could only afford second-hand clothes. These men were irrevocably drawn to her nipples when she wore dresses made out of thin fabric. They were
mesmerized by her soft skin, which was lightly tanned and flawlessly smooth. And most of all they looked at her face: at her red lips, which had developed a fullness to match her growing breasts,
and at her eyes, which were big and innocent and the brightest blue. It was a face as vulnerable and as beautiful as an angel’s, and though she was young, she knew her height made her appear
older than she was.

‘See you later, hon, we’re off.’

Abena waved a final goodbye to Tara as she raced down the front steps to Sebastian’s black Range Rover. She could see Tara through the kitchen window, pouring herself a glass of wine.
Taking in the plush car and Abena’s sexy version of country dress – skinny denim, tight cashmere, and slouchy flat boots – Tara raised an eyebrow and winked. Sebastian was about
to drive off, when Tara emerged, barefoot, on the road. She’d pulled a pale blue chiffon skirt over her chest to become a sheer dress, and a Prada turban was perched on her head. She leaned
into the car through Abena’s open window.