Unbind (54 page)

“One hundred per cent.”

“Okay,” I said softly.

He tipped it over my body, the whole mass crinkled since it had lain on the floor a little while. That one piece of fabric became a tangled mass over a world-weary body, tired of the minions intent on patronising her non-stop.

He dressed me in some huge diamond earrings, the drop kind that fell to your shoulders. He also placed a chunky diamond cuff on my wrist, the two matching perfectly.

“You’re becoming her, this character. You’re made for this.”

“I need champagne now.”

“Already one step ahead. I’ll get some initial shots of you waking to the world and it shall be your first tipple of the day.”

I didn’t dare turn to look at him. His expression might have ruined it for me. “Oh… so this is a sequence of coming alive, waking, in the morning?”

“You wake whenever you want, it doesn’t have to be in the morning.”

I giggled churlishly. “Of course. I’d like to indulge in sleeping in ’til three p.m. I imagine.”

“Good, that’s how it goes.”

“Cai?”

“Yes?”

“Where is my Chanel?”

He raided a bag, or something, and brought out a whopping, extra-large bottle that would no doubt feature in the shoot.

“Here, Miss. It’s here.”

“Good, I don’t use anything else… begin spraying the room. In fact, this sheet needs a freshening.”

He began ‘looking after me’: spritzing my air, arranging my body, combing and painting—generally fawning all over me. All those disgustingly wonderful things a woman expects when she’s playing the muse.

“Before we really get started, I just want to say… you make me feel wonderful.”

“Not as wonderful as you make me feel,” he replied.

WHILE I got dressed, he busied himself staring at the shots we’d gotten. To say I felt nervous about them was an understatement. I’d become relaxed throughout the shoot but now, afterward, I felt terrified.

“It’s a total success, Chlo. I can already see the strongest shots… they easily stand out… so we’re good here.”

That didn’t make me feel any better. Was he talking about the bits where my ass and tits looked bigger? Or what? I was beginning to imagine all sorts! I was used to getting papped all over Manhattan—the gossip mags loved to catch me in my latest outfit, or better still, with Cai on my arm. Yet having my bits and pieces on display… different ballgame!

I knew I had played the part well, from waking from a calm sleep, to stretching, to drinking my first sip of champagne, rising from a horizontal position to sitting with the sheet draped around my body. Playing someone else was always easier.

“I’m buzzed about getting these loaded up. The iPad only shows so much.”

I mirrored his excitement but I was also still worried about the shots. I heard the click-click-clicking of his finger flicking through them on the iPad screen. My anticipation was overflowing. Let’s just say, coupled with what I had in mind to write, we’d the power to create an interesting angle to work with.

“Seriously, Chlo. You have curves and lines and a presence that I’ve never shot before. You’re woman personified, bursting with love.”

“Hey, please can I get a look? I’m frightened now.”

He walked to me, his hands reaching for my shoulders. “You have to trust me—what I got today was special. Okay? No way would it be right to show you anything, not until I feel happy with the story. I need to get these onto a screen before you see the overall effect and it’s that you need to approve more than the singular shots, okay?”

I nodded reluctantly, still a bit scared. He did however seem pretty pleased, which cajoled me. He kissed me deeply, pulling me tight against his body, telling me how proud he was.

He powered down his Leica camera and tucked it into its case, safely stowing his backup storage in a separate pocket.

“I’m sure you’ll make it look wonderful, with some air brushing and whatever.”

He ignored my negativity with a loud tut and it made me laugh. “I said trust me… just wait for the results, that’s all I have to say on the subject for now.”

“I can tell you’re dying to start work already,” I whispered in his ear seductively.

He smirked, still avoiding full-on eye contact. That’d be the breaking of him. Behind his eyes I could see he was desperate to ravage me.

“Food, we need food because I’m starved,” he ordered. “Anyway you ought to write the article without seeing the pictures, focus on the words, on what you felt today rather than how you think it’ll look. Besides it’ll take me a couple days to get this right and I’m not doing this with you lurking round corners. I want this to be perfect.”

I reluctantly let him have his pictures for now and helped him tidy away the sheet, champagne flutes, bottle and used lipsticks. Getting that right for every sequence of snaps had been interesting—just me and my jewels, the champagne—my lips flirting with the flute.

MIND OVER BODY

by Anonymous

WE HAVE ALL admired actresses in the dazzling black and white movies of a certain era during which Hollywood became synonymous with ‘starlets’ and their male antagonists. Growing up, Sunday afternoon films on the small TV in my bedroom took me to other places, other worlds. I’m talking Hedren, Leigh, Kelly, Hepburn and the blonde bombshell epitomised, Marilyn Monroe. All of whom remain style icons, whose looks are still redone to this day, both in ordinary women’s wardrobes and more stylised versions perpetuated in glossy editions such as this. Why is it that we continue to look to vintage icons for guidance or inspiration? So many decades on?

I thought I had the answers until I did this shoot. It was the genius of the photographer who made me see a few simple truths that the rest of us often overlook. The story in the accompanying pictures here is familiar: I am asked to imagine that I have such elevated star status, I don’t act like other mere mortals, nor should I be treated as such. Placing myself in the mind of any one of those aforementioned style icons, or even a classic designer such as Coco Chanel, I became somebody not of myself. I realised that
frame of mind
is responsible for so much. It is important to elaborate here…

Champagne for breakfast is something not all of us do and indeed, it isn’t a habit our doctors prescribe if they want us to outlive our fifties and sixties. The actress is immortal, infallible and otherworldly—captured forever on screen. She doesn’t have the same hang-ups as the rest of us, not in this medium anyway. She perpetuates the myth that only women with broken souls or tragic pasts know pain and misery, drawing enough from that to fuel their creativity and/or drive. In reality, plenty of success stories originate with the humble girl/boy from a nice family who just so happened to have a talent they pursued, stuck with, and it paid off (in financial terms, at least).

The starlet obviously lingers in the heart with her sad story, beauty, mystery unsolved—her potential wasted or lost, for some reason. The
femme fatale
on the other hand we admire, but pity. Sometimes, we even applaud her. During this shoot, I felt uninhibited. Not only because I know and trust the photographer, but for other reasons too. I knew the audience wouldn’t know me, my name, my face. In the shots, you only see my body, portions of which are draped in silk sheets. In the images, do you see an ordinary woman draped in diamonds? Or do you see the hair, the lips, the facial expressions caught only in aspect? The glacial movement of
her
figure in repose—then does your mind immediately register a woman or an image? An icon? A face? Or a pose you might have seen a thousand times before and wouldn’t think out of place in this high-brow glossy?

You do. Admit it. You see my figure and immediately see sensuality. You think of other dreamlike creatures you’ve watched in movies and it draws to mind stories you’ve imagined before you even read my words. You see diamonds and see wealth and you see confidence and imagine breeding and… the mind conjures. I don’t want to sully the magic of fashion, art, image and wealth. Each to their own. The purpose, or rather the wonder of the photographer’s gift in this shoot, was that he caught me in all the most wonderful ways—carefree, relaxed, sultry, indifferent, unidentified yet alluring. Pore over facets of the glamorous lifestyle that are wonderful—jewels, money, style, elegance, opportunity, freedom, expression, exploration—endless possibilities. We seek escape in stories unlike our own, seek intrigue and wonder and eventual resolution, though it not always be happy.

If you look closer, you may see more. Not interpretations or metaphors or stories loosely based on life. Look closer and you shall see, I have a disfigurement hiding amongst my tresses. The sequence of the starlet’s awakening in this article finishes with one, last close-up the photographer submitted to the editor with my repeated pre-approval. Please, take a look. The disfigurement is there in plain sight, only you probably didn’t look hard enough. You saw what the eye immediately caught, and nought else. You saw my beauty and my curves and the allure of the poses and the suggestive nature of the shots, but not the three-inch scar sitting jagged at the back of my scalp, right in front of your eyes.

True, the photographer took some liberties here. He carefully dressed my hair so that most of the scar remained hidden, all except that dark-pink, hairline contusion sitting in the middle of still-uncomfortable, rubbery white scar tissue. Now you see it, don’t you? Glaring now as you stare. My hair moved apart reveals follicles that simply will never sprout again. Those storytellers and story-readers of you with me might conclude any number of theories on this scar and its origin. Perhaps brain surgery, a fall on the ski slope, I don’t know… a mishap down a dark alley. One little idea planted in the mind and the nodules spark with images and trains of thought. Would it surprise you to know the greatest secrets are often the ones hidden in plain sight? Glaring, without words, or an explanation made plain?

Do we no longer have the ability to ask questions and find out what the cause is? Do we not want to see the grisly truth some days, so we find empty comfort in an old film, a rom-com or a bucket of chicken? Add multiple escape methods here […] and discover, all of us are guilty of them. Do we want all things spelled out? All horrors eradicated?

Whatever happened to give me this scar? Was it some malevolent force? Well yes, yes it was. There. I have sated your appetite for the wicked and controversial. We all feed that appetite now and again, no matter who we are. Again, the real issue isn’t the manner in which I gained this scar, it is the way in which I lived for ten years afterwards. I didn’t realise it had affected me so greatly, not until recently. Reason being I had been able to hide it for so many years and like those starlets with their personas and their images hiding painful pasts, I hid mine behind my hair. I didn’t grow up especially poor, nor did I luck out on opportunities. I just got very unlucky being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the worst circumstances. Yet it changed my life forever and I couldn’t go back.

Scars run deeper with some, harsher and less treatable for others, but we all suffer in similar ways. To show you my scar isn’t painful but to remember who did this to me, and why it happened, hurts more than any other physical reminder of the day I met the rough end of a broken beer bottle. The way in which we all treat disfigurement is similarly subjective, from person to person. Avoid the evidence or acknowledge it? Who will be more offended then? Stare at the woman who had acid thrown in her face? Or ignore it totally and downgrade the importance of what she survived? Congratulate the war veteran on keeping his life or apologise for his missing limbs? Give the burns victim a medal for bravery or encourage them to tell their story, like me? You’d never feel adequate in their presence because you can’t measure up to the superiority of their aggrandised station as
Survivor
. These are my own experiences of how people have reacted to my scar in the past—and the number of people to have seen it is few.