All That Glitters (21 page)

It used to be, anyway.

Ali politely takes Annabel to the riad
hammam
for a complimentary massage while I ‘get ready’. (“Fifteen years,” she says, grinning at me. “Tell your father to drag me out by my toenails.”) Then he leads me into the atrium and introduces me to a small, blonde, spiky-looking stylist called Helena.

Over the following hour, I am transformed from a human being into something that could be attached to the side of a car and used as a wing-view mirror.

With little dobs of glue, Helena gradually covers me head to toe in sequins and tiny bits of glass, beads, silver and gold, necklaces and bangles and hair clips and fake purple lashes. My dress is sparkly: red and pink and gold and silver. Even my face and hands have been sprayed so heavily with twinkle that every time I look down my vision glints, as if I’ve got a temporary case of glaucoma.

Seriously:
National Geographic
may want to send someone over. I am definitely breaking some kind of light-reflective record.

Finally, Helena daubs me with sticky red lip gloss, blue eyeshadow and three inches of very pale foundation, and then secures an enormous, heavy gold watch round my wrist. It looks like something that could be used to locate a submarine underwater.

“Try not to lose it,” she whispers to me under her breath. “If that’s even possible. It looks like it has a tracking device inbuilt.”

“It doesn’t,” a voice says from the doorway. “Sadly, because that would be
super
useful. Oh, you’re just a veritable
phantasmagoria,
Hannah!
Exactly
as I dreamt it. Well done, lady whose name I can’t remember.”

“I just followed your directions,” Helena says, holding up a stick-figure picture she’s been glancing at the entire time. I’d assumed it was a nostalgic keepsake from her five-year-old daughter. “The credit is
all
yours, Kevin. Please. Take all of it.”

“It just
came
to me, you know? I wanted Bollywood crossed with Strictly Come Dancing and I think we’ve achieved it. Or
I’ve
achieved it, really. You just did the sticking.”

A young, thin, slightly goat-like man hops into the room and holds his hand out to me. He’s wearing little brown furry boots, a white T-shirt, brown skinny jeans, a tartan scarf and a small curly beard, and for a few seconds he reminds me so much of Mr Tumnus, I’m tempted to check him for horns and warn him about the perils of fraternising with humans.

“I’m Kevin Holland, the director. But of course, you already know that.”

I shake his hand carefully.

How would I already know that? Is he wearing a name badge I haven’t spotted?

Be
confident,
err … Hannah.

“Oh yes. Kevin Holland. Of
course.
”

“Constantly being recognised everywhere I go is
such
a nuisance,” he continues, rubbing a hand over his beard. “I wasn’t prepared for this level of fame, you know. All the awards. All the attention. Just this time last year, I had thirty Twitter followers.
Thirty.
Can you believe that?”

He looks at me with shock and indignation.

Studies have shown that we like people more when they mirror our own actions back at us, so I rub my chin too: inadvertently scratching myself with a sequin in the process.

“No, Kevin, because that is unbelievable.”

“Now I have a blue tick and thirty-five thousand followers, and who are they all? Who knows? Who cares?”

I’m tempted to say: thirty-five thousand people probably know and care, but I bite my tongue.

“Then I meet Jacques Levaire at a big Hollywood party in Hackney and he’s all, ‘
Hey, Kev, Kevin, Kevin Holland. I know you normally do profound art films that really mean something, but I would like to pay you an OBSCENE wad of money to bring that astonishing creative vision to my new line of expensive watches.
’”

I stare at Kev-Kevin-KevinHolland in surprise.

Huh. Maybe that’s just how people talk in Hackney.

“I totes see what normal people miss, you know?” he continues cheerfully. “Like a superhero with x-ray vision, except I can view straight into the
human heart,
which is even more useful
.
”

It really isn’t.

Unless you’re a surgeon, and judging by the state of his nails, this seems unlikely. But that sounds like a
very
geeky and Harriet Manners response, so instead of sharing this thought I toss my head back with a little laugh.

You can do this, Harriet. You are star-like.

“Absolutely!” I laugh loudly. “And what is your …
modus operandi
for this particular direction? I’d really like to
channel
the right
creative vision.
Are we thinking
Marlowian
?
Millerian
? A touch of
Stoppardian
with an air of
Wildean
?”

Kevin blinks a few times, as well he might.

I have literally no idea what I just said: I’m just naming playwrights I know and making long words out of them.

“
Modus operandi?
” he says faintly. “Creative vision? Stoppardian? Millerian?”

I flush. “Umm, by which I meant …”

“Oh, I know what you
meant
,” he says, grabbing my hands and kissing both of them. “
Finally
, they send me a professional I can actually
work
with.”

He drags me over to the door of the riad, bangs it open with a flourish and spreads his arms out wide in the sunshine.

“Now, Hannah, let’s
make some art
, shall we?”

emaa el-Fnaa
is an ancient marketplace in the centre of the walled city of Marrakech. It’s an enormous open square used by both locals and tourists, and the origin of its name is unclear.

It means either ‘courtyard in front of a mosque’, ‘the mosque of death’ or ‘assembly at the end of the world’.

I’m going to vote for the latter.

It’s dusk by the time we get to the square and it feels exactly like walking into an exotic fairyland, or maybe Christina Rossetti’s enchanted goblin market.

During the day the square is filled with orange-juice stalls, ladies painting hands with intricate patterns of henna, medicine men selling cures and potions, tooth-pullers with teeth laid out in front of them and people selling little glasses with MOROCCO painted on them just in case anyone has forgotten what country they’re in.

But at night, everything changes.

The sun sets and the city shifts: music starts and spaces are filled with acrobats, dancers and musicians. Storytellers sit on the ground, fortune-tellers under umbrellas, snakes fight, monkeys dance and drums thump.

Lights are everywhere: scattered on the floor on tablecloths covered with candles and night-lights, and every now and then a whizzing blue light launches into the air: thrown by an enthusiastic child.

Marrakech during the day is wonderful, but Marrakech at night-time?

Totally magic.

“Gosh,” Annabel says as Ali leads us quietly between stalls. She’s now glowing and relaxed, and also sneaking quite a lot of little confused glances at my make-up and costume. “Harriet, you look very …”

Then she pauses for at least thirty seconds while she considers her internal thesaurus.

“Dazzling,” she finally settles for.

I pull a face, because I know exactly what she means. Held at the right angle, I could be used to create a small fire.

Ali smiles slightly and walks us past a vulture perched on the floor with a chain round its neck, beyond a group of backflipping dancers, to a corner that’s been sectioned off.

In the middle of it are enormous bright white lights and a team of people, holding cameras and looking in little screens.

And around
them
is an even larger circle of tourists.

Chatting, laughing, taking photos. Waiting patiently for the performance to begin.

I abruptly feel a bit nauseous.

There are a lot of fascinating attractions in Jemaa El-Fnaa, and it looks like I just became one of them.

“
Sooooo
sorry,” Kevin says, barging forward and dragging me through the crowd. “They must have heard I was here. There’s just no
privacy
for the famous, is there? No respect for the integrity of artists.”

“Is that Steven Spielberg?” somebody whispers. “Is this the new Indiana Jones film?”

“Is that the blonde girl from
Twilight?
She’s not as pretty in real life, is she?”

“OK,” Kevin continues as he pushes me quite aggressively into an open space and leaves me there while he runs next to the camera and picks up a blackboard. “I really want this to be
fresh
and
unstilted.
Feel
the moment
, you know? So I’m going to start rolling immediately, see how the two of you
interact
. See what the chemistry is like.”

I blink and stare in concern at the growing crowd.

The two of us?
Oh my God. Not
again.

Over the last ten months, I have modelled with a beautiful Australian boy, a white kitten called Barry, a strident New Yorker, a cockroach, a sad girl called Fleur and an octopus with very little patience for my shenanigans.

I fell in love with one, knocked the other over and made the rest of them hate me. As far as
chemistry
goes
,
it’s not a brilliant start.

“
Bring out Richard,
” Kevin shouts, clicking his blackboard together. “
ACTION
.”

I turn in astonishment – half expecting to see my father – and out of the crowd walks a little brown furry creature on all fours: round brown eyes, tail straight upwards.

They have got to be kidding me.

Because I’ve said this before, obviously, but I’ve never meant it literally.

Richard is a monkey.

ow, I
love
monkeys.

Monkeys share ninety-three per cent of their DNA with humans. They communicate with accents, play games, recognise photos of their friends and express affection by cuddling each other. They have even been known to lie to each other: yelling
tiger
so that the others retreat to the trees and they can keep a special food treat for themselves.