by Christopher Fowler
I never wanted to be a model.
I wanted to be the model.
He only picks one for each season. And after he picks her, nothing is ever the same again. He sees a special quality in a girl and draws it out. Then he presents it to the world. If you’re picked, everything you do is touched with magic. You don’t become a star, you become a legend. Ordinary people are awed by your presence. It’s as if you’ve been marked by the hand of God.
As far back as I could remember, I wanted to be the girl he picked.
I got off to a bad start. I wouldn’t concentrate on lessons at school. I didn’t study late into the night. I hung out with my girlfriends, discovered boys, fell for their lies, fell out with my parents just before they did the same with each other. I had a best friend, a girl called Ann-Marie who lived across the street. Ann-Marie had a weight problem and wore these disgusting dental correctors, and overwashed her hair until it frizzed up and it looked like she’d stuck her tongue in an electric socket, but she helped me out with my homework, and it made me look good to walk beside her when we were out together. She hung around with me because she was seriously screwed up about her looks, and nobody wanted to be around her. It sounds cruel but the lower her self-esteem fell, the more mine rose.
I come from nothing, just faceless ordinary people. My mother would hate me saying that, but it’s true. We lived in a rented flat on the tenth floor of a rundown apartment block in a depressing neighbourhood. I had no brothers or sisters, and my father went away years ago. My mother was never around because she worked all the time. Any humour, any life, any joy she had once been able to summon up had been scuffed away by her angry determination to maintain appearances. Nobody in my family ever had any money, or anything else. But I was aware from an early age that I had something. I had the Look. And I knew it.
Kit Marlowe says there’s a moment in everyone’s life when they have the right look. It may only last for just a single night. It may last for a season. Once in a rare while, it lasts a whole year. The trick is knowing when it’s about to happen and being ready for it. I was ready.
I was so fucking ready.
I should tell you about Kit Marlowe, as if you don’t already know. His first London collection freaked people out because he used a blind girl as his model, and everyone thought she was going to fall off the catwalk, which was really steep, but she didn’t because she’d been rehearsing for an entire year. She wore these really high stilettos, and tiny skirts like Japanese Kogals, and hundreds of silver-wire bracelets. He has more than one model, but the others always stay masked in black or white muslin so that nothing detracts from the one he has selected to bear the Look for his collection.
He had one model who performed in his show under hypnosis. The clothes she modelled were actually stitched onto her, right through the flesh. Her veil was sewn to her forehead, her blouse held tight by dozens of tiny silver piercings that ran across her breasts. Even her boots were held on by wires that passed through her calves. I read an interview with her afterwards in which she stated that she hadn’t felt a thing except total faith in Kit Marlowe. But not all of his designs were that extreme. Many of them were simple and elegant. That was the thing; you never knew the kind of look he would go for next.
Kit Marlowe got kicked out of school and has no qualifications. He’s a natural. He says he learned everything he needs to know from television. He’s larger than life. I guess I first heard about him when I was eight or nine and started collecting photographs of his models. I don’t know how old he is. He began young, but he may even be in his thirties by now. He’s a guru, a god. He changes the way we look at the world. His clothes aren’t meant to be worn by ordinary people, they’re there to serve a higher purpose, to inspire us. I used to study the pictures in amazement. I never saw anything he did that didn’t surprise me. Some of it was grotesque and outlandish, but often it had this timeless, placeless beauty.
It was Ann-Marie who first pointed out the strange quality he brought to his models. We were sitting in a McDonald’s waiting for my father to give us a lift home, studying a magazine filled with pictures from his Paris show, and she showed me how he mixed stuff from different eras and countries, so there’d be like, seventies’ Indian beadworked cotton and fifties’ American sneakers and eighties’ Japanese skirts. But he combines everything with his own style, and in the presentation he’ll throw in a wild card, like using a Viennese choir with African drummers and Latino house, the whole sound mixed together by some drum ’n’ bass Ibiza DJ, and he’ll set the whole event in something like a disused Victorian swimming pool, making all these fashion gurus trek miles out into the middle of nowhere to view his collection.
Once he showed his fashion designs on this video installation in New Jersey, setting monitors all around a morgue, where he ran footage of his clothes dressed on real corpses, teenagers who had died in car crashes. Then his model of the season came out from between the monitors with her masked team, all in blood-spattered surgical gowns, which they tore open to reveal the new season’s outfits. It was so cool, dealing with social issues through fashion like that.
Kit Marlowe only designs for women. He says it’s all about being extraordinary. He searches out girls who have something unique, and what he searches for completely changes every season. He never uses anyone older than nineteen. He says until that age we behave with a kind of animal instinct that is lost as we grow older. His models come from all over the world. He’s used a Russian, a Hungarian, a Tunisian, a Brazilian, a Korean and an American as well as English girls, all of them complete unknowns. He just plucks them out of small towns. They give up their old lives for him, and he gives them new ones. He rechristens them. He gives them immortality.
One model to reveal the Look was a girl he called Acquiveradah. She was from St. Petersburg, seventeen, a little over six feet tall, very skinny and odd-looking, parchment-white skin with pale blue veins, and she wore mothwing purple gowns in gossamer nylon that showed her body in incredible detail. The Look was instantly copied by chain stores, who messed it up to the point of parody by adding layers of cheap material underneath. I remember her being interviewed. She said that meeting with Kit Marlowe had brought her violently alive for the first time, and yet the experience was ‘like being stroked on the cheek with a butterfly wing’. She looked so ethereal I thought she was going to float away from the camera lens and up into the sun.
Kit has a special look of his own, too, but the details change constantly. Long hair, cropped hair, shades, goatee, facial tattoos, piercings, none of the above. He puts on weight and loses it according to the clothes he chooses for the season. Some likes and dislikes remain throughout his transformations. He likes unusual girls, particularly Eastern Europeans who can’t speak English but who express themselves with their bodies. He loves to court controversy because he says it gets people talking about clothes. He’s always being linked to gorgeous girls, and he openly admits that he has sex with his models. Kit says that understanding their sexuality helps him to uncover the Look. He likes strong women. He prefers fiercely textured fabrics and colours, silver, crimson, black and green. He laughs a lot and jokes around on camera, except when he’s discussing his own creations. Then he’s deadly serious. He owns houses all over the world but lives in France. He’s physically big (although he might be short, it’s hard to tell) and from some angles he has a heavy chin, except last year when he lost a lot of weight. He hates phonies and hype. He says his designs reflect the inner turbulence of the wearer. He explains how his clothes create chromatic harmonisations of the spirit. I filled an entire book with his sayings, and that was just from last season’s interviews. It was Ann-Marie who heard about him coming to our town. He’d shown his collections outside London before, but never as far North as this. I wanted to see the show so badly. Of course it was invitation only, and I had no way of getting my hands on one. But we could at least be somewhere close by.
I was very excited about this. I knew that just to be near him would be to sense the future. Kit Marlowe is always ahead of the game. It’s like he’s standing on a chair searching the horizon while the rest of us are on the ground looking at each other like a bunch of morons. He never tells the press what the Look is going to be, but he drops hints. There were rumours going around in the style press that he was planning a range of computerised clothing; that he was going to combine microchip circuitry with the most basic fabrics and colours. But nobody really knew what that meant or what he was up to, and if they did they weren’t saying.
Sometimes we went clubbing at the weekend. I would dye my hair blond while my Dad’s girlfriend was out at work on Friday night, then dye it back before school on Monday. Ann-Marie and I figured that if we couldn’t get into the show we could maybe get into his hotel and catch sight of him in the lobby afterwards, but it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. He was staying near the station in this converted Victorian church covered with gargoyles, a cool place with headset dudes in floor-length black coats guarding the doors. Ann-Marie was smart, though. She figured we needed escorts otherwise we’d never get into the building, so we bribed these friends of Ann-Marie’s brother who were going into the centre of town for the weekend. They sold insurance and wore off-the-peg suits and looked respectable, so we dressed down to match them, only I wore another set of clothes underneath. Ann-Marie couldn’t because she was heavy enough already, and wasn’t bothered anyway, but I wanted to be noticed. I was ready for it. I had the Look. My time was now.
The show was mid-afternoon, and we figured he’d come back and change before going to a party. We had a pretty tight lock on his movements because he gave so many interviews and loved talking to the press; all you had to do was piece everything together and you had the entire trip plan. This was probably how the guy who killed John Lennon managed it, just by gathering news of his whereabouts and drawing all the timelines together. It’s pretty easy to be a stalker if you’re single-minded. But I wasn’t a stalker. I just wanted to be touched by the hand of God. Kit Marlowe says if you’re strong about these things, you can make them happen.
It was one of those days that didn’t look as though it would get light at all and was mistily raining when we reached the hotel. There was a sooty slickness on the streets that seemed left over from the area’s coal-mining past, and the traffic was creeping forward through the gloom like a vast funeral procession. We were stuck in a steamed-up Ford with the insurance guys, getting paranoid about the time, and they were fed up with us because we hadn’t stopped talking for the last hour.
“He’s never going to make it through this,” said Ann-Marie, but the rain was good because we could wear our hoods up, and the doormen wouldn’t think we were teenage hookers or street trash. Once we had made it safely into the hotel lobby, we ditched the boring insurance guys and they went off to some bar to get drunk. We knew that Kit Marlowe was staying on the seventh floor because he had this superstitious thing about sevens (a fact disclosed in another wonderfully revealing interview) but when we went up there, we couldn’t tell which suite he’d taken. I thought there would be guards everywhere but there was no security, none at all, and I figured that maybe the hotel didn’t know who he was. We couldn’t cover both sides of the floor from a single vantage point, so we split up, each taking a cleaner’s cupboard. Then we waited in the warm soapy darkness.
Every time I heard the elevator ping, I stuck my head out. This went on for ages, until the excitement was so much that I fell asleep. The next thing I knew, Ann-Marie was shaking me and hissing in my ear. I wondered what the hell her problem was, and then what the hell she was wearing.
“I found the maid’s uniform on one of the shelves, I thought it would make me look less conspicuous,” she explained.
“Well, it really doesn’t, Ann-Marie. Pink’s not your colour, and certainly not in glazed nylon with white piping. You look like a marshmallow.”
“Take a look down the corridor.”
“Ohmigod.” A group of people was coming straight towards us. I ducked back in. “How do I look?”
“Take your coat off. Give it to me.” Ann-Marie held out her arms. I was wearing an ensemble I had invented from cuttings of every Kit Marlowe collection. Obviously I couldn’t afford the materials his designers used so I had come up with equivalents, adding a few extra details like plastic belts and sequins. It was a look that was very ahead of its time, and I knew he’d love it the moment he saw it.
I took a few quick breaths, not too many in case I started to hyperventilate, then stepped out of the cupboard. A man and a woman were talking quietly. They looked like a couple of Kit Marlowe’s PR consultants or something. They dressed so immaculately in grey suits, black tees, trainers, and identical haircuts that they looked computer-generated. Behind them was Acquiveradah, a drifting wraith in some kind of green silk-hooded arrangement. I had forgotten how long and white her arms and neck were, how strangely she moved. She looked like she’d been deep-frozen and only half thawed. Kit Marlowe was at her side (quite a lot shorter than I expected), dressed in a shiny black kaftan-thing. I could see from here that his buttons were silver crucifixes, and every time he passed under one of the corridor spotlights they shone onto the walls. It was as though he was consecrating the hotel just by walking through it.
I realised at this point that I was standing right in the middle of the passage, blocking their way. I felt Ann-Marie tugging at my sleeve, but I was utterly mesmerised. I tried to hear what they were saying. Acquiveradah sounded angry. She and Kit were speaking hard and low. Something about changing dates, deadlines, signing it, moving it, being in Berlin. Oh, God, Berlin’s so damned cold, she was complaining, like it was a big chore going there. And then they stopped.
They stopped because I was standing in their way like a fool, staring with my mouth open.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Kit Marlowe himself was speaking, actually speaking. “Who’s this? Did somebody order a singing telegram?” He was talking about me. Time slowed down. My skin prickled as he stepped forward through his PR people.
“Who are you?”
I knew I had to answer. “I’m—” But I realised I had made an incredibly stupid mistake. I had concentrated so hard on the Look that I had never invented a name for myself. “I’m—” I couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t want to tell him my real name because it’s so ordinary, but I couldn’t make one up on the spot. Behind him, Acquiveradah started hissing again. Kit held up his hand for silence and continued to stare.
“You, I like what you’re wearing.”
I closed my hanging mouth, not daring to move. This was the moment I had waited all of my life for.
“Tell me something.”
I tried to breathe.
“Do they give you a choice?”
What was he talking about?
“I don’t suppose so. Hotels only care about their guests, right? Everyone else gets the universal look. Staff are treated the same anywhere in the world.” He wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and looked to one of the PRs for approval. “Right? I never thought of that, but it’s true, right?” The PRs agreed enthusiastically. “It’s a universal look.”
I could see him. I could hear him. But I couldn’t piece together what he was saying. Not until I followed his eyeline and saw that he was talking past me. Talking to Ann-Marie. She was standing behind us near the wall, beside a trolley filled with little bottles of shampoo, conditioner and toilet rolls. She was wearing the maid’s uniform, and I saw now how much it suited her. It was perfect, like she worked here. But also, like she was modelling it.
“It’s a look,’ Kit fucking Marlowe was saying, “I don’t know if it’s the Look, but it’s certainly a look. Come here, darling.”
“Kit, for God’s sake,” Acquiveradah was saying, but he was reaching out to Ann-Marie and drawing her into his little group. My supposed best friend walked right past me into their spotlight, mesmerised, and I felt my eyes growing hot with tears as the scene wavered. Moments later they were gone, all of them, through a door that had silently opened, swallowed them and closed.
I was numb. Left behind in the empty corridor. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t go anywhere. Ann-Marie had our return money in her bag.
Then the door opened again, and Acquiveradah backed out. I could hear her making excuses to Kit. (Something about “from my room”—something like “in a few minutes”.) I can’t remember what she said, but I knew she was telling him lies. She moved awkwardly toward me and placed a cold hand on my shoulder. She was stronger and more purposeful than she looked.
“I have to talk to you, little girl. In here.” She ran a swipe card through the door behind me and pushed me into the room. For a moment I was left standing in the dark while she fumbled for a light switch. In the fierceness of the mirrored neon that flicked on around the suite she looked hard and old, nothing like her photographs. There was something else about her appearance I found odd, a lopsidedness that skewed her features and gave her a permanent stare, like she’d only partially recovered from a stroke. “Sit down there.” She indicated the edge of the bed. I pushed aside a tray of barely touched food and some empty champagne bottles, and sat. “Does your friend really want to model?”
I found my voice. “I never thought she did.”
“A lot of girls act like that. It’s a secret of successful modelling, not looking like you care whether you’ll ever do it again. The moment you try too hard it shows. I can take it or leave it, they say. The world’s top models spend their entire lives telling everyone they’re giving it up next season, it’s all bullshit. What they mean is, they’re frightened they won’t cut it next time. Nobody holds the Look for long. I’ll ask you again; does she really want to model?”
I tried to think. “I guess she does. She wants to be liked.”
“Fine, then we’ll leave it. I don’t know what will happen. He’s been—well, let’s say he’s not thinking clearly after a show, and he may change his mind, but he may not, and if you see your friend again you should at least be able to tell her what she’s in for. Most of them have no idea.” She was talking in riddles, pacing about, trying to light a joint. “Look at me, I’m a good example. I had no idea what this sort of thing involved.” She pulled up the hem of her hooded top and exposed her pale stomach. “I was the wrong shape, too wide here. They took out my bottom three ribs on both sides, here see?” Her pearlised fingernails traced a faint ridge of healed stitches, the skin puckered like cloth. “I had my stomach stapled. Some of my neck removed and pinned back. My cheekbones altered. Arms tucked. Eyes lifted. The graft didn’t take at first and my left eye turned septic. It was removed and replaced with moulded plastic. You can’t tell, even close up. It photographs the same because I always wear a full contact in the other one to match the texture.” She drew on the joint, glancing anxiously at the door. “They removed fat from my ass, but I was still growing and my body started shedding it naturally, and I lost what I didn’t have, so now it’s very painful to sit down. I can feel the tops of my femurs rubbing, ball and socket scraping bone. Oh don’t give me that look, fashion always hurts. Christ, they used to tighten the foreheads of Egyptian girls to prevent their skull-plates from knitting. Chinese foot-binding, ever hear of that?” I shook my head. “And athletes, they train so hard as kids that it stunts their growth, they give up any semblance of normal life for their careers, it’s just what you have to do to get to the top and most people aren’t prepared to do it, that’s why they remain mediocre. You have to put yourself out, a long way out. It’s pretty fucking elementary.”
“I can’t imagine that Kit Marlowe would allow that sort of thing to—”
“Exactly, you can’t imagine. You don’t get it, do you? There is no Kit Marlowe, he’s a corporation, a conglomerate, he’s jeans and music and vodka and cars and clothing stores, he’s not an actual person. There’s always a frontman, someone the public can focus on but he’s not real. He’s played by somebody different nearly every season. I assume most people recognise that in some fundamental way.”
“But the fashions. His vision. The Look.”
“Whoever’s in place for this collection just follows the guidelines. ‘Kit Marlowe’ is a finder. This one picked your friend, but she’s the third person he’s picked in the last two days. They all have to be submitted to a hundred fucking committees before they get any further. The fabrics people never agree with the drinks people, the car people want older role models, and everyone hates the music people.”
I had been trying hard not to cry, but now I couldn’t stop my eyes from welling over. “The Look,’ I said stupidly. ‘He said anyone could . . .”
“It’s not about a look, you little idiot, it’s about being young. That’s all you need to be. Young. Gap-toothed, cross-eyed, bow-legged, brain-damaged, whatever. If you’re young you can wear anything, razorblades, pieces of jagged glass, shit-covered rags—and believe me you’ll have to do that while they’re all experimenting—you’ll still look good because you’re so incredibly fucking young. And if there’s really a look, something that pleases every sponsor, then you’re photographed in it and you do a few catwalks. And then it all goes away. Fast. People are like fruit; they don’t stay fresh long before everyone knows they’re damaged. That’s all the Look is. Anyone should be able to figure it out.”
“But what happens after that? Don’t the models go to the press and describe how they’ve been—”
“Been what, exactly? Been given shitloads of money and fame and set up for life? Nobody makes you sign, honey, it’s a choice, pure and simple. You get a contract and you honour your side of the deal, like any other job. The only thing is if any of the surgical stuff goes wrong, I mean badly wrong, you’re fucked because they’ve got good legal people.”
“But the people who interview Kit Marlowe, they must see that he changes—”
“They see what they choose to see. Ask yourself who employs them. Who owns the magazines they write for, the networks they broadcast for. You’ve got to think bigger, kid.” She looked at her watch. “Shit, I have to get back. If you see your friend again, you’ll have to make the choice. Do you give her a friendly word of warning, or not bother? After all, she looks like she forgot about you pretty quickly.” The sour smile that crossed her face actually cracked her makeup.
“I don’t believe any of this,” I heard myself saying angrily. “You’ve lost it and you don’t want anyone younger to get their turn. You’re jealous of her, that’s all.”
Acquiveradah sighed and threw the remains of her joint onto a plate of torn-apart fruit. She stood there thinking. A fly crawled around the edge of a champagne flute. “All right.” She dug into the pocket of her green hooded jacket, brought out another card, and held it up before me. “Go to room 820, on the next floor. Take a look, but don’t touch their skin, you understand? Don’t do anything girly, like screaming. Not that I suppose you’ll wake them, because by now they’ll be so fast asleep that the place could burn down and they wouldn’t feel it. Oh, hang on.” She went into the bathroom and came back out with a pair of nail-scissors. “Use these to get a good look. Then think about your friend. And leave the entry-card in the room when you leave.”
I left the room and ran off along the corridor on wobbly legs. I knew if I got in the elevator I would take it straight back down to the ground floor, so I took the stairs instead. I found room 820 easily. The corridor was silent and deserted. I ran the swipecard through the lock and slowly pushed the door open. I couldn’t see anything because the blinds were drawn and the lights were off. Besides, I guessed it was dark outside now. I stood in the little passage by the room’s mirrored wardrobes, unable to leave the diamond of light thrown from the corridor. I listened and heard breathing, slow steady breathing, from more than one body. I could smell antiseptic. I tried to recall the room layout from the floor below. The lights had to be somewhere to my right. I reached out my hand and felt along the wall. Several switches were there. I flicked them all on.
The room had two beds, and someone was asleep in each of them. The pale cotton hoods they always wore in the shows were still stretched across their features. They continued to breathe at the same steady pace, and did not seem disturbed by the lights.
I walked over to the nearest one and bent closer. I could vaguely make out her features under the hood, which was held on tight with a plastic drawstring. I remembered the nail-scissors Acquiveradah had given me, and realised what she had intended me to do. I inserted the points just above the fastened collar and began to cut open the hood.
I found myself looking at the girl who had been hypnotised and pierced for the Kit Marlowe collection three seasons ago. The piercings had left terrible scars across her face, raised lumps of flesh as hard as pebbles, as red and sore as tumours. There were fresh crusts of blood around her ears, as though her skin had still not learned to cope with the demands being made upon it. Her teeth had been replaced by perfect white china pegs, neatly driven through gum and bone, but the gums had turned black and receded. I reached out my hand. I just wanted to see that she was real. I touched her cheek and felt the waxy flesh dent beneath my fingertips. When I removed my hand, the indentations remained, as though her skin was infected.
When I saw that she wasn’t going to move, I pulled back her lower lip and saw lines of thick black stitches running around the base of her jawline. I could only imagine that after her turn in the spotlight this poor thing had agreed to stay on as one of the backing models, even though her face would never again be seen. Could fame do that, leave you so hungry for more that you would choose to stay, whatever your new situation might be?
I bent over her until our noses almost touched. The opened muslin hood lay around her face, framing it so that she looked like a discarded birthday gift. One of her eyes was closed. Hardly daring to breathe, I lifted the eyelid. There was a large glass marble in the socket, the kind boys used to play with at school.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at the other model. Who knew what fresh horrors I might find? I was still thinking about it when the body beneath my hand moved and sat up. I think I screamed. I know I left that antiseptic-reeking room and shot out into the corridor as though I was running across hot coals. I was more confused than frightened. When I saw that Miss Three-Seasons-Ago wasn’t coming after me, I tried to gather my thoughts. I wanted to help Ann-Marie but I badly wanted to leave, and the indecision froze me. At last I decided to try and find the way back. I went to the stairs and ran down to the floor where I had last seen her. The corridor was so silent and empty I could have been inside an Egyptian tomb. I found the door that Kit and his team had closed on me. It was still shut. I stopped in front of it, staring stupidly at the gilded number, willing it to open, praying that it would open.
And then it did.
The PR pair came out. The woman looked at me and smiled. “I guess you’re waiting for your little friend,” she said, as if talking to a stupid child. “She can’t see you right now. She’s busy.”
“What are you doing to her?”
“Don’t worry, she’s enjoying herself. Now, I think you’d better go on home.”
“I can’t. She’s got my money.”
The woman sighed and pulled a wad of notes from inside her jacket. “Take this and just go away, okay?” She pushed a roll of bills into my hand. Behind her, the hotel door shifted open slightly, and I caught a glimpse of the room inside. It was very brightly lit. Ann-Marie had no clothes on. She was sitting in a chair looking very fat and white, and there was something sticking out of her, protruding from between her legs. It looked like a long steel tube with a red rubber bulb on one end. She was smiling and looking up at the ceiling, then suddenly her whole body began to shake. Somebody kicked the door shut with a bang.
I closed my fist over the money and ran, out into the night and the rain.
The rest of the evening was awful. I had to hitch home, and this creepy lorry-driver kept staring at my tits and making suggestions. I think he got the wrong idea because of the way I was dressed. Ann-Marie lived with her drunk mother and her stupid stoner brother. I called at their house, but no-one was at home. They were never at home. Anyway, they weren’t expecting her back for another day.
I talked to Ann-Marie’s mother later, and she showed me the letter, about how her little girl was dropping out of school because she had a modelling contract and was moving to London to become a star. Her family, such as it was, certainly didn’t seem too bothered. They were pleased she was going to bring in some money. I guess my own happiness for Ann-Marie had something to do with being glad that I wasn’t in her place. She was missed in class for a couple of weeks, and that’s about all. She wasn’t the kind of person you noticed, whereas I was. Maybe that was why she’d been chosen.
Anyway, when the next season’s collection was announced, I received an invitation. The thing was printed on a sheet of pressed steel that nearly slashed the tops off my fingers when I opened the envelope. By this time I was planning to leave home and start media studies at the local college. I went down to London and located the venue, a disused synagogue somewhere behind Fleet Street. Once again, it was raining. I’d decided to play it safe and wear plain black jeans and a tee shirt. To tell the truth, I was growing out of dressing like a Kit Marlowe wannabe, but I was still eager to find out how Ann-Marie had fared in her new career. We were served fancy cocktails in a burnished iron antechamber, then ushered into the main salon.
A few wall-lights glowed dimly. Only the deep crimson outline of the catwalk could be discerned in the gloom. As we took our seats, the room was abuzz with anticipation. A single spotlight illuminated a plump young man standing motionless at the foot of the runway.
Kit Marlowe surveyed his dominion with satisfaction. He waited for everyone to settle, lightly patted the back of his waxed hair, and beamed. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said a voice emanating from the speakers around us as Kit moved his lips, “I’d like to thank you for coming out from the West End in such foul weather, and I hope you’ll find your efforts well rewarded. Welcome to my collection. This year the Look honours someone very special, someone we all know but never fully acknowledge. This Kit Marlowe season, ladies and gentlemen, is dedicated to the ordinary working girl. She is all around us, she is in all of us, a part of the machinery that fills our lives. She is the spark that ignites and powers the engines of society. She is Andromeda, and this is her Look.”
We realised that the figure speaking before us was an animatronic mannequin. As the overhead voice pulsed away into silence, it collapsed into the floor, and brilliant red walls of laser light rolled up to create a virtual room in space.
Along the catwalk and stepping into this lowering box of fractal colour came a figure that could not be recognised as Ann-Marie. She looked like every girl you ever saw serving behind a counter or a trolley, like all of them yet none of them. Her outfit was that of a streamlined, futuristic servant, but as the electronic soundtrack grew in pitch and volume something happened to the clothes she was wearing. They changed shape, refolding and refitting into different patterns on her body, empowering her, transforming her from slave to dominatrix. I later discovered that every item modelled in the show was manipulated by computer programs, interacting with silicon implants in the fabrics that tightened threads and changed tones. Kit Marlowe had invented digital fashion. The entire room burst into spontaneous applause.
Behind Ann-Marie moved two eighties-throwback robot girls, their heads encased in shiny foil-like fabrics. I wondered if one of them was a mutilated, ageing Acquiveradah. Lights dazzled fiercely and faded. The sonic landscape created a vision of primitive mechanisation tamed and transformed by the all-powerful electron. When I looked again, Ann-Marie had changed into a different outfit. She performed all her changes onstage, dipping within the spinning vectors of hard light, aided by the micro-circuitry in her clothes. Or rather, their clothes, the creations that had resulted from the findings of so many secret focus groups, research and development teams, marketing and merchandising meetings. What ‘Kit Marlowe’ had succeeded in doing was gaining access to the birth-point of the creative process.
As the show reached its zenith the room erupted, and stayed in a state of perpetual arousal through the hammering climactic flourishes of the performance. I’d like to think that the audience applause was spontaneous, but even that was doubtful.
I saw her after the show. My ticket admitted me to a party for special buyers. I queued for the cloakroom, queued for the VIP lounge, queued to pay my respects to the new star. Waited until she was standing with only one or two people, and moved in on her. I couldn’t bring myself to call her ‘Andromeda’, nor could I call her Ann-Marie because she wasn’t the Ann-Marie I knew any more. There was something different about her eyes. She had little markings carved into the actual ball of each eye, as though the pupils had been scored with a scalpel and filled with coloured ink.
“Eye tattoos,” she explained when I asked. “They’re going to be big.”
Her eyelashes had been shaved off and her mouth artificially widened somehow, the lips collagen-implanted and reshaped. She still had heavy breasts, but now she had a waist. And great legs. I had never seen her legs before tonight. She was wearing a body-stocking constructed in the kind of coarse material you saw on African native women, but the fabric glowed in faint cadences, like the pulse of someone between dreams and wakefulness.
“How does it do that?” I asked.
“The material has microscopic mirroring on one facet of the thread. It twists slightly to the rhythm of my heartbeat,” she explained.
“Jesus, couldn’t it electrocute you?”
“The voltage is lower than that required to run the average pacemaker. Don’t worry, I’m better than fine.” She spoke as if she had learned her reply from a script, and I guess she had. I looked down at her hands. She had no fingernails. There were just puckers of ragged flesh where her nails had been.
“I’m glad you could come. It means a lot. I wondered if you’d ever forgive me.”
“I’m not sure I have. Your mum says you never write any more.”
“I don’t know what I’d say to her. I send money, of course. She wouldn’t approve if I told her half of what happens around here. I mean, it’s great and everything, but—”
“But what? Can we have a drink together?”
Ann-Marie looked around guiltily. “I’d love to have a drink, but I’m not allowed. The first few weeks were rough, but I feel a lot more centred now. You wouldn’t believe the eating and exercise regime.”
The Ann-Marie I knew would never have used a word like ‘centred’. I was hungry for answers. I wanted to know what went on behind the hotel doors. I went to touch her and she flinched. “All models have to work out,” I told her, “but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”
She gave me her patented blank look. Her eyes went so unfocused she could have been watching a plane land.
“Come on, Ann-Marie, I know.”
“Well, I admit,” she said softly, “there’s a downside, a real downside. I wish we could talk more. I miss you.”
“I just want to know if you’re happy,” I asked. “Tell me you made the right choice.”
“I don’t know. They took out a length of my gut. Stripped my veins and tried to recolour them. They tried out some piercings at the top of my legs and attached them to the flesh on the backs of my arms, but it wasn’t a good look. If I eat the wrong things I start bleeding inside. They tried little mirrors instead of my fingernails but my system rejected them. They were going to run fine neon wires under my skin to light me up, but their doctor said it would be too dangerous for me to move around with so much electric cable in me. I won’t tell you what they wanted to do to me down below. There are other things going on that you wouldn’t—”
Suddenly a tiny LED on her collar blinked, just once, so briefly that I later wondered if I imagined it. Ann-Marie’s face paled. The fine wire collar around her neck automatically tightened, cutting into her skin, closing off her throat and the carotid artery in her neck. A vein throbbed angrily at her temple. Liquid began to pool in the bay of her mouth. The bodysuit closed more tightly around her as its circuitry came alive. She could barely find the air to speak. A second later the spasm ended, and the collar released itself to its preset diameter.
“I have to go now,” she whispered hoarsely, her eyes searching my face as if trying to memorise my features for some future recollection. She turned away, stiffly walking back to her keepers. I figured she was miked up, and wondered if that was the first time they had been called upon to jerk her lead. But for now, Ann-Marie was gone. Andromeda returned to her celestial enclosure of light, away from the mundane world, into the mists of mythology.
I understood then what she had surrendered to keep the Look.
The terrible truth is, I would still have changed places with her for a taste of that life, just for a chance to be someone, to look down upon dreary mortals from the height of godhood. I would have done anything—I would still do anything—to get a second chance. To have Kit Marlowe look at me and smile knowingly. To let his people experiment with my body until they were happy no matter how much it hurt, and I would smile back at them through the stitches and the blood and the endless tearing pain. I would surrender everything.
Because nothing can ever take away the power of the Look. To be adored is to become divine. All your life is worth its finest moment. And when at last you fall from grace, you still have eternity to remind you of that time.
Christopher Fowler is the multi award-winning author of nearly fifty novels and short story collections, including the acclaimed Bryant & May mysteries. His novels include Roofworld, Spanky, The Sand Men, and Hell Train, plus two volumes of memoirs, Paperboy (winner of the Green Carnation Prize), Film Freak, and The Book of Forgotten Authors. In 2015 he won the CWA Dagger In The Library for his body of work. His latest novel is The Lonely Hour. He lives in London and Barcelona, and blogs every day at www.christopherfowler.co.uk.