Snake Beach

by Glass, Lisa

  ‘Your father’s had a terrible red dream, most likely brought on by seeing all that death spread over the place. He needs distracting.’

  ‘Where you goin?’

  ‘Just to the car park.’

  ‘You’ve washed your hair.’

  ‘Ain’t I allowed to wash my hair occasionally?’

  ‘What’s that smell? Apples or something. Oh my God, you’ve only gone and used my conditioner. What happened to hot rinses and scalp massage being better than hair products sold by millionaire capitalists?’

  ‘I never said that. I said billionaire.’

  I poured myself a bowl of cornflakes and made up some powdered milk to go with it, since the milk bottle was put back in the fridge empty again.

  ‘Can you give my cream shoes a wipe off? Once you’ve eaten your brekkie, I mean,’ she said. ‘I’m in a bit of a rush.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  She sighed. ‘Nothing really. Just those dolly birds are coming to the town today. Me and your father are going to see them. Lots of the neighbours are going along too. It’s not just us.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know, that programme from the telly where they take pretty girls and turn them into beauty queens. Britain’s Next Catwalk Queen. They’re filming some episodes here in Hayle.’

  ‘How sad is that,’ I said, my heart racing. So that’s what Rick Sylvester meant.

  ‘I’m sure they won’t have anything on you, Jen.’

  ‘Like I care.’

  ‘Everyone’s going. Should pass a nice hour or two.’

  I wondered if Han would be there. It didn’t seem like his scene, but you never knew.

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘You’ve got school, haven’t you.’

  ‘There’s only two weeks of it left, so there’s hardly anything going on. Just revision. I could do that at home.’

  ‘I don’t want you to get behind.’

  ‘I get straight As. One day off isn’t going to ruin my life, is it? Come on, Mum. How often does Hayle get TV crews? And I want to see the models, like you do.’

  If they were going to be my competition, I thought I might as well see what I was up against.

  ‘Well, only if you promise to introduce us to your boyfriend.’

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend.’

  ‘You didn’t get in until almost midnight last night.’

  ‘We’re just friends.’

  ‘Your dad wants to meet him. So do I. Ask him around for tea.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Make sure you take an apple for your break today.’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘You’re not having the day off unless we get to meet Yann.’

  ‘You know his name isn’t Yann, Mum. It’s Han.’

  ‘Like off Star Wars?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What a thing to call a child.’

  ‘He doesn’t mind. He likes it.’

  ‘I suppose he likes that green hair too.’

  ‘Better to be an individual than a sheep. That’s what you say, isn’t it?’

  At least that’s what she said when it came to buying me three pound trainers from Lidl rather than eighty pound ones from JJB Sports.

  ‘Hmmm, I suppose I do say that.’

  I picked up her shoes for her and started to wipe away the grime.

  ‘And actually he does like the green hair. He wouldn’t dye it that colour if he didn’t. It’s not naturally green, you know. He’s not a warlock. He’s making a statement.’

  ‘Good. He can come and make some statements to me and your father. Six o’clock tonight.’

  ‘I said no.’

  She waved at me. ‘Off you go to school then.’

  I put her shoes on the table.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Are you going to ask him around or not?’

  ‘He’s not a stranger. He used to live in Hayle.’

  ‘Boys change a lot in a few years.’

  ‘Well Han’s just the same.’

  ‘He’s at least two foot taller.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask him around, but only for a cup of tea and not a meal. And he’s not my boyfriend. We’re just mates.’

  So that’s how I found myself watching a pink coach pull up into the big car park on the edge of the dunes.

  A woman with black hair got off the coach first. She definitely wasn’t one of the models. She was old and chubby and really bossy. The cameramen had already arrived earlier in 4x4s. ‘Who’s that old woman?’ I said to one of them.

  ‘Producer. She takes a bit of getting used to.’

  Another one of the men made a witchy cackling noise.

  The Producer had a really loud voice for someone so short. When she had finished ordering all her people around, the first model finally stepped off the coach. She had red hair and a cigarette tucked behind her ear. She was followed by a massively tall blonde girl who had a Welsh accent but looked like she came from Sweden. The third girl to come out had a Cleopatra hairdo and no bust whatsoever; she turned to look at the crowd and I could’ve sworn she smirked slightly at . . . me. I smiled back without meaning to and then looked at my feet.

  Every time a new girl stepped off the coach, people cheered. My dad had brought his fold-away chair and he went to set it up at the top of a sandy bank overlooking the coach, ‘where there was a better view,’ he said, winking at my mum.

  ‘Hoping to see down their tops are you?’ she said, smiling her tight smile.

  ‘Can’t bear hordes. You know that.’

  I listened to the crowd. Stunners, beauts and goddesses was how some people described the models. Others called them scrawny slappers and bags of bones. The mums mostly called them the horrible names. Perhaps they thought they were bad examples to be setting their own daughters. Later, Mr Hitchcock would call the models Hard Work in Female Form, which seemed like an accurate description.

  Some of them wore tight dresses in pink or acid yellow. Others had on white trousers, or leather skirts that only just covered their bottoms. They had legs that looked longer than garden hoes but they still walked around in high heels. Taller than any man I knew and thinner than any woman.

  When the models lined up in a row, the effect was even worse. My mum whistled at the sight of them, ‘Christ almighty. They’m just like you see in the magazines. I better put some lippy on meself, case your father do go and get ideas.’

  The stupidest models had their middles twisted, hands on their hips, and necks stretched up like they were swans. Showing themselves off to their best advantage, they must have thought. Like the dopey women in old novels who kept walking around the edge of the room so that rich blokes could eye them up better.

  I turned to my mum again and I said, ‘Look how twisty they are. Imagine if they was laid flat on the ground instead of standing and you traced around their bodies with a pen. They wouldn’t even look human.’

  She did a big gasp as if I had shocked her. ‘What a sinister thing to say,’ she said, linking her arm in mine ‘making ‘em sound like murder victims’.

  ‘I didn’t mean that, I just meant that they don’t stand normal. They’re all bendy like they’ve been gutted or something.’

  ‘Jenny!’

  ‘It’s true though.’

  Han was loitering around but I couldn’t bring myself to look at his face, in case he was perving at the girls. I couldn’t have stood that. So I looked around for Mr Hitchcock instead, but he was nowhere to be seen. I remembered it was pension day and he’d most likely be down the town, doing his weekly shop before going off to read his newspaper at the allotments. It was a shame, I thought, because he loved anything stupid, and this was about as stupid as it got. I promised myself I would make as many mental notes as I c
ould, so that he wouldn’t miss out on anything.

  I looked over at my dad who was staring at the fluffy sky as if it was the most worrying thing in the world, and I wondered what he could see that I couldn’t. Once he got my mum to come and collect me early from school because he claimed to have seen three sixes in the clouds above the Sports Hall and he was worried it meant some psycho kid was going to go postal with a shotgun. Didn’t happen, but we had a nice afternoon playing chess down the beach.

  I turned my attention back to the scene in front of me and started eavesdropping on all sorts of conversations, but nobody seemed to know much about the girls, which was frustrating. Eventually I cornered the coach driver, who was happy to speak to us once I offered him a Wine Gum. According to him, these girls had come from a top London hotel with a red carpet outside, and four-poster beds in the rooms and Jacuzzis on the roof. The coach driver was called Kenneth and what he told us had everybody listening.

  Chapter 3The girls had been dead lucky to get on that show because more than forty thousand other girls had applied too, but they didn’t show any appreciation. From what Kenneth said, they weren’t exactly angels.

  ‘Those girls are trouble with a capital T.’

  My mum nodded him on to keep dishing the dirt, and he ate nearly all my sweets as he did.

  ‘I had to pick ‘em up at 4 o’clock in the ruddy morning and what was they doin? Not ready. No. Not all packed up. No. They was nowhere to be seen. I had to get out of the cab and go looking for them. And what did I find? Well, I’ll never forget it as long as I live. When I went along that red carpet to see where the hell they was, they was running naked through the lobby, throwing underpants on chandeliers and belching like drunken hooligans. Boobs and bums everywhere, I tell you. Boobs and bums EVERYWHERE.’

  ‘Nude?’ my mum said, looking them over again.

  ‘Nude as newborn puppies. Bad eggs if you ask me. You’d never see young ladies behavin’ like that in my day. You can only hope that this here will be the making of them. Shock of their lives, mind, what they got coming.’

  ‘Don’t they need to be in London for them catwalk show thingies? Why are they here?’ I asked.

  Kenneth’s face lit up like a pinball machine.

  ‘That camp thing, you know, what’s it called?’

  ‘Eh?’ I said. I was sure putting up tents and singing kumbaya around a fire was not on a supermodel’s list of must-have skills.

  ‘You know . . . bootcamp!’

  ‘What kind of thing is a bootcamp then?’ Mum asked. My dad had wandered over the moment Kenneth lit a ciggie and he shook his head at our ignorance. Dad cleared his throat:

  ‘Bootcamp is a system designed by the US military to sort out bad apples. Horrible kids that have been spoilt all their lives go to bootcamp to get the discipline. Up at dawn. Five mile run. Drill. Assault courses. Scrubbing out toilets with toothbrushes. Morning bath in the sea. Cold beans for tea. That sorta thing. They can kiss goodbye to all that slap.’

  Kenneth grinned even wider.

  ‘Thassit. There’s hardly a sober one between ‘em, so they’ve been brought here to get their acts together. Producer lady says they’d all’ve been sent home on Day 1 if they wasn’t so physically promising. Alcoholics, we have here. Drug addicts. Thieves. And there’s plenty of them anorexics, as you can see yourself. You only got to look at the bones on them. So they have to sort them out, don’t they? They can’t have these bits of stuff making the modelling industry look like it’s full of junkie scum with eating disorders. Only ten of the twenty’s going to make it into the . . . now what did they call it again . . . Catwalk Queen Mansion, I think were it, up there in London. And they’re going to make them do photo shoots and such, while they’re here, to see who’s a natural and who’s rubbish at being photogenic. But like I say, they can’t all get through so ten of them is definitely for the chop.’ He made a karate-chopping motion. ‘It’s gonna be bloody murder out there,’ he said, grinning. ‘Nothing like a spot of competition for bringing out the devil in women.’

  My dad gave him his ‘too true’ look, which seemed to annoy my mum.

  ‘You wouldn’t think such angelic looking girls could be so rotten inside,’ my mum said, her eyes scanning them. ‘Not a line or a spot on any of them. Glows, they do.’

  ‘Body is very resilient at that age. Can take heroin and all sorts,’ Kenneth said, as if he knew about stuff like that. ‘The oldest one is probably not even old enough to buy a pint of beer in America.’

  My mum looked sad, even though she was only young herself, but she thought her best was behind her, whatever that meant.

  My dad stubbed out the cigarette he had bummed off Kenneth and put his arm around Mum’s shoulders. ‘Weak vintage, that lot,’ he said. ‘Not one of them a patch on you.’ He kissed her on the forehead and she smiled sadly.

  ‘I wish I had a patch of that young skin. Just round me eyes would do.’

  I didn’t think their skin was that good. Up close some of them had zits, and at least three looked like they had proper acne behind the layer of thick foundation.

  But they were all skinny. It doesn’t really show on telly how thin models are. When you see them in a group, they’re all that way, so they sort of look normal, but when you stand them next to a normal person they look bizarre. The models that came to our town were so thin that when they turned to the side they was no thicker than a lamppost. Long necks and long legs, like pretty ostriches. Cleopatra was the thinnest of them all. She’d have had the Olympic medal for skinniness. Even I couldn’t stop looking at the models, so God only knew the effect they’d have on the lads of Hayle.

  Han must have known that I was there but he hadn’t come over to me. Without meaning to, I turned towards him. He was staring intently at one of the models. It was Cleopatra. An ache started up in the back of my throat. Why was he looking at her? She wasn’t even the prettiest of them. She was kind of strange actually. Chest flatter than driftwood. As I watched, I saw her return Han’s gaze, but her expression didn’t change. Then her eyes flitted over to me again. Maybe Han did like the anorexic supermodel type after all, which was just about as far from me as you could get. Han kept on staring and I tried not to imagine what might be going through his head.

  Distracting me from these horrible thoughts, Kenneth said, ‘I wouldn’t trust them for a second. They’re all bloody menaces, and her there with the red hair and the holey stockings is the ringleader. The filthiest mouth on the maid. Her jokes could make your ears spontaneously combust. It’s never right.’

  ‘What’s that one called?’ I pointed to Cleopatra.

  ‘Her? Oh. She’s got a very strange name. What was that old computer system called, the one with the running hedgepig?’

  I happened to know that, as I’d inherited my dad’s console.

  ‘The Sega Megadrive.’

  ‘That’s it: Sega.’

  ‘Sega?’

  ‘Or is it Sega…No. I tell a lie. It’s Vega.’

  ‘Like Las Vegas?’ I said. ‘That is truly sad.’

  ‘No, it’s Vega like the star, correct? Vega is the name of a star.’ My dad said, authoritatively.

  ‘That cannot be her real name,’ I said.

  ‘Why not? Your boyfriend’s parents named their kid after Han Solo,’ my dad said, winking.

  ‘How do you know that about the star?’ my mum asked, butting in.

  ‘It was in that film with Jodie Foster. Contact. ‘

  ‘Oh so it was. The aliens came from there,’ my mum said.

  ‘Definitely Vega,’ Kenneth said, rolling the word around his mouth.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Aliens can’t live in a star. They’d have been from a planet in orbit around the star.’ My dad again.

  ‘You’ve got to give it to them,’ my mum said. ‘They’re miracles.’

  ‘Aliens are n
ot miracles,’ my dad said. ‘It’s just another kind of evolution.’

  ‘No, not bleeding aliens. Those girlies are miracles. Pretty faces AND thin bodies too. There’s hardly any women in this world that get both. They must feel like they’ve won the Lottery looking like that.’

  ‘The Genetic Lottery,’ my dad said.

  ‘Doesn’t mean they’re happier than other people,’ I said.

  ‘You can bet your knickers they are.’ This was my mum again. ‘They won’t have to lie on their bedroom floor to button their jeans, will they? And they’ll never have to watch what they eat with metabolisms like that. They’ll never get heckled by people in cars as they cycle up hills. And tell me this now, what man is going to be ashamed to have any of that lot on his arm?’

  ‘Well, there’s more to life than looks,’ my dad said. ‘You don’t know how intelligent they are or how funny. What with all that dieting and beautifying, they’re probably quite boring. Not like our Jenny here.’

  ‘I could watch them forever, just to see what they do, and see if they do it like normal people.’

  ‘They’re not gods, Mum.’

  ‘Don’t you be getting all threatened now, Jen. There’s no cause for you to feel badly. You’ve got a lovely face and a nicely rounded figure. You’ll be glad of them child-bearing hips one day, you mark my words. Anyway, as my mother said to me, it’s better not to be the most beautiful girl in town because when you get older, you won’t have nearly so far to fall.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I said. I was about to give her a mouthful about feminism and sexism and any other ism that came to mind, but out of the corner of my eye I saw a movement and when I turned, I saw a tall thin man standing on the highest dune, and he either had a camera or binoculars, because light was glinting off the lens.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I thought, ‘and why is he watching from way up there?’ but what happened next made me forget him.

  Chapter 4An old dear came waltzing up the path as fast as she could. She had blue hair, a yellow coat and she was holding her face with one hand. The other hand was dripping with blood. Even the show’s cameramen turned around to get it on film.