by Cathy Kelly
‘There’s half an hour to go before the start time on the adverts,’ Lola said. ‘It’s only nine thirty. We said ten.’
‘Yeah,’ Izzie fretted, ‘but I’ve been to find-a-model castings where girls have been queuing all night to be first in line.’
‘That’s ordinary models,’ Lola shrugged. ‘They’re a whole different story. Too much caffeine and nicotine makes them jittery. Being normal makes you less desperate.’
Izzie laughed. ‘Hope that’s true,’ she said. It was so simple, it probably made perfect sense.
She thought back to her first casting years before when she’d been utterly in love with the world of fashion and modelling, and watched endless leggy gazelle-like creatures sway in and out of the room, each one more beautiful than the last.
When one girl had erupted into tears as they looked at her and the panel had raised collective eyebrows, the girl had rushed from the room and Izzie had hurried out after her.
‘It’s the zit, isn’t it?’ the girl had said, shaking with nerves and misery. She’d pointed to an almost invisible bump on her cheek, which she’d expertly hidden with concealer. ‘I knew they’d notice it, I knew it. And I’m so fat. Look!’ She’d reached down and tried to grab non-existent flesh around her concave belly.
She wore tight, low-rise jeans that revealed her bones jutting out like knobs on a Braque sculpture.
In a shoot for designer clothes, with her hair carefully windswept and a dusting of St Bart’s tan over her body, she’d look amazing. In the flesh and with tears on her hauntingly thin face, she looked like a fragile child-woman. Izzie had been horrified at the girl’s obvious self-hatred and by the easy way the other people on the panel were able to dismiss her.
‘But she’s so upset, Marla,’ Izzie wailed afterwards to her colleague from Perfect-NY when they all took a coffee break.
‘That’s why we’re not seeing her again,’ Marla whispered. ‘If she cries in front of us, what’ll she do in front of the client? It’s about more than looks, Izzie. She’s got to toughen up if she wants to make it.’
That was the first time Izzie had seen the reality of fashion. For her, it might be an exciting female-friendly industry where women’s beauty and brilliance was prized. But it could also be cruel.
By eleven that morning of the first SilverWebb casting, Izzie knew she’d made the right move. This was genuinely unlike any other casting she’d ever been at. It was like being in the backyard of Goddesses R Us, where Zeus was trying to find the perfect example of womanhood.
Women of every shape and colour crowded down one end of the loft, and whereas at normal castings wariness was a tangible currency, these women squealed and laughed and chattered at full blast.
‘I can’t believe I’m here!’ shrieked one woman.
‘This is what I’ve been waiting for all my life!’ yelled another.
‘I’m never going to be 00 but my daddy says I’m OhOh!’ laughed a third.
‘I’m going to get coffee.’
‘And cake?’
‘Better get some for everyone.’
Izzie and Carla grinned. At normal castings, diet soda, black coffee and cigarettes were the only staples. Here, muffins, non-skinny lattes and candy might work better.
Seven hours later, they had signed up eight models and the last one was a triumph. Six foot, statuesque and blonde, Steffi had been a school gymnast and cheer-leader, but she’d always been too big for ‘normal’ modelling.
She moved with the grace of a lioness and her face was poetry with a sexy smile that lit up the room. When they’d finished, Steffi had said she wanted to treat everyone to a drink to celebrate. Her boyfriend wanted to come over and celebrate too.
‘Sounds good to me,’ said Lola, rubbing a stiff neck.
‘Sure,’ said Izzie, who had nowhere else to be. It had been a very successful day and they had another casting tomorrow: SilverWebb was due a little downtime.
‘There’s a nice bar around the block,’ Carla said.
Steffi, Lola, Izzie and Carla piled in the door of the bar.
‘Hey, I like this place,’ said Steffi delightedly. She really was gorgeous, Izzie thought, and everyone in the bar clearly agreed with her, because they all stopped what they were doing to look at the tall blonde with the long legs and wide, all-encompassing smile.
‘Now where will we sit? Over here by the window and we can see what’s going on?’ She walked over to a banquette by the window and sat down, beaming out at everyone, happy with the world. Her happiness was infectious. Grinning, Izzie went and sat down beside her.
‘You do realise that every man in the bar is staring at you?’ she asked.
Steffi laughed, a rich, sexy, throaty laugh.
‘I know,’ she said mischievously. ‘And I like it! Hey, girls, let’s celebrate my new career, I can’t believe I’m going to be a model!’
‘You should believe it,’ said Lola, sitting down beside her. ‘You’ve got a great look.’
‘You say the nicest things.’ Steffi squeezed Lola’s arm happily. ‘It’s gonna be such fun working together, and I can’t wait for you all to meet Jerry. You’re going to love him!’
Carla came back from the bar carrying a tray with four glasses and a bottle of white wine.
‘This moment deserves champagne but this was all they had,’ she said. ‘I got peanuts too. Wine and peanuts are major food groups, right?’
‘Right.’ Izzie nodded.
‘Fantastic,’ said Steffi, grabbing a pack of peanuts. ‘I’m starved.’
The three SilverWebb women looked at each other and laughed.
‘You are so different from most models we know,’ Lola remarked.
‘You mean that I eat?’ said Steffi, between mouthfuls. She even ate sexily, Izzie thought with admiration. ‘I hate girls who don’t eat. Like, why?’
By the time Steffi’s boyfriend, Jerry, arrived with a couple of his friends to celebrate, the girls had finished their bottle of wine and were dickering over the idea of ordering a second.
‘Jerry!’ squealed Steffi when she saw him.
He was tall, good looking, maybe six or seven years older than Steffi and clearly besotted with her. With a brief hello to everyone else, he caught her and grabbed her in a bear hug, whirling her around the bar floor, not caring who saw him.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ he said.
‘Baby, right back at you,’ Steffi beamed and they kissed, slowly, with the burn of real passion.
‘Way to go, man,’ said one of his friends, clapping.
‘Isn’t she something?’ Jerry said, still holding on to Steffi.
That was when the emotion of the day finally got to Izzie. Gorgeous Steffi seemed to symbolise everything the Silver-Webb Agency stood for: beautiful real women who were at peace with who they were.
And yet finding Steffi for their agency highlighted just how much of an outsider Izzie felt and how badly she’d got it wrong. Steffi was hugging the man in her life on this special day and Izzie was sitting there, smiling, drinking celebratory wine – knowing that when her glass was empty she’d be going home to an empty apartment.
Izzie guessed there was probably the same age difference between Steffi and Jerry as there was between herself and Joe Hansen, but Joe had never whirled her around in pride at her achievements or showed her off to his friends saying, ‘Isn’t she something?’
Instead, he took her to quiet, out-of-the way restaurants lest they met anyone. She’d been essentially hidden, whereas Steffi was fêted and adored in public.
How ironic that, as one of the bosses of the new SilverWebb Agency, she was supposed to be the wise, clever one, running models’ careers and yet, right now, she felt like the novice who knew nothing. Pre-Joe, she’d been so shrewd and sensible, but not any more. It had taken Joe, and Gran’s stroke, to show her that she didn’t know diddly squat.
‘I have to go,’ she said, reaching around for her handbag.
‘No,’ shrieked Car
la, Lola and Steffi in unison.
‘You can’t,’ said Lola. ‘We haven’t celebrated enough.’
Then she corrected herself: ‘But if you have somewhere to go…’
Izzie thought of where she had to go: home, then maybe to the launderette. She needed to buy a few groceries. She was out of coffee filters and granola.
‘You don’t need to rush off, do you?’ asked Carla gently, gazing at her friend with worry on her face.
Carla knew that Izzie had no vital appointments except with her television remote control.
‘OK,’ Izzie said. ‘I’ll stay for one more.’
An hour later, Carla was getting on like a house on fire with one of Jerry’s pals and even Lola, who had never quite decided whether she preferred men or women, was talking animatedly to his other friend.
Somehow Izzie had got stuck in the corner seat and she felt like a spiky, uninhabitable island in a sea of loved-up couples. She couldn’t do small talk any more: she’d lost the knack, along with her sense of humour and her sense of knowing what life was about.
Two glasses of wine had given her a headache and she thought maybe some orange juice would help. She wriggled out of the corner, hauling her handbag after her, and went up to the bar, where the bartender proceeded to ignore her.
‘Hey,’ she said loudly, ‘seeing as how I’m invisible, should I use my superpowers for good or for world domination? What do you think?’
The bartender turned around and she noticed, in a dispassionate, model-agency-scout kind of way, that he was pretty good looking. Younger than her, of course: everyone was younger than her now. He was mid-thirties and athletic. Once upon a time, she might have expected him to flirt mildly with her but not any more. Nobody was ever going to flirt with her again because she couldn’t bear it and they seemed to sense that.
‘Superpowers, huh? What sort of hero are you precisely?’ he asked, leaning against the bar.
‘I don’t know, possibly Really Bad Flu Woman,’ Izzie said. ‘Or else Shield Woman, in that I have an invisible shield that keeps people away from me. It’s a Star Wars vibe, very modern, very technological.’
‘Right,’ said the bartender, stretching the word out into several syllables.
‘Yeah,’ Izzie went on. ‘It’s an invisible shield and people bounce off it if they get too close, so they just stop coming. Invisible Shield Woman, that’s me. Could I have an orange juice, by the way?’
‘Do you want that with a side of Xanax?’ he asked.
‘Oh, what the hell, give me a side of Xanax too.’ She sat on a bar stool. This was clearly the way her life was going to be: no relationships, but possibly lots of interesting, if strange, conversations with bartenders and waitresses in coffee bars. That was what happened to women on their own, she decided. They talked a lot to strangers.
‘You’re not feeling the party spirit?’ the bartender said, slapping down the orange juice.
‘No,’ Izzie sighed. ‘I have an anti-party shield thing going on too. Do you ever sit and watch people having fun and just not be able to join in?’
The guy raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m a bartender,’ he said. ‘That’s what I do for a living – watch people party and not join in.’
‘Yeah, sorry,’ she said. She drank her juice quickly. ‘Could you send over another bottle of wine to the party crew in the corner?’ she said. ‘I’ll pay. I better get out of here before I destroy the atmosphere altogether.’
‘Is this a work party?’ the guy asked.
‘Sort of,’ said Izzie, and then the confessional nature of the bar stool got to her and she blurted out: ‘We run a model agency and we’ve just had our first casting. Steffi,’ she gestured over to where the beautiful blonde woman was sitting, ‘is our newest signing.’
‘Yeah, she’s a fox,’ said the bartender.
The way he said it made Izzie feel about a hundred and ten years old. He was looking at Steffi with pure admiration. He hadn’t looked at Izzie that way. Once, men in bars had looked at Izzie, taking in her curves and her beautiful hair, admiring the feistiness in her. Not any more. Her feistiness and her attractiveness had all been sucked out by Joe.
She put some money on the bar. ‘Keep the change,’ she said, her voice dull, and she walked out quickly before anyone could see her go.
SIXTEEN
Tamarin in late September was a breathtakingly beautiful month. Summer had been patchy, with rain squalls, as if the goddess who ruled summer had been fractious, had thrown her toys out of the pram and cast a pall over weddings and barbecues and parties. Then in September, her mood changed, bringing glorious sultry days. The drive from Waterford meant a road that cut through a sweep of hills and suddenly Tamarin lay in front of you.
Jodi wanted her mother to sit in the front seat beside Dan so she’d get the full effect of the beauty of Tamarin when they arrived, but because Aunt Lesley was on the trip too, Jodi’s mum had suggested that Lesley take the front seat.
‘You’re going to love this, Karen and Lesley,’ Dan said, purposefully cheerful as he looked back and winked at his mother-in-law.
Karen smiled at him but Aunt Lesley just gave her usual sour glare.
When her mother had suggested bringing Lesley on the much-talked-about trip, Jodi had groaned over the phone.
‘Mum, please, no. I’ve wanted you to visit for so long and Lesley will hate it.’
Three weeks of her mother was a pleasure for Jodi, but three weeks of her aunt would be the reverse.
‘You know your aunt’s been a bit down ever since Uncle Philly left,’ Karen said.
Jodi was only surprised it had taken her uncle so long to actually leave. The man deserved some sort of a medal for staying with her all those years.
‘I’ve got to cheer her up, Jodi. She’s my big sister, after all. We’ll have fun, don’t worry.’
Fun and her aunt Lesley were not words that went together, Jodi decided.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ she said to Dan later.
‘Nonsense,’ said Dan, who took everything in his stride. ‘It will be great. If my parents come too for a week, we’ll all have a blast. We haven’t all been together since the wedding.’
‘Right,’ said Jodi. She’d planned to show her mother around Rathnaree and talk to her about everything from the miscarriage to the research she’d been doing, but she couldn’t imagine doing that with Lesley.
Lesley had a way of trampling dreams and ideas underfoot. Jodi couldn’t see herself sobbing in her mum’s arms over the miscarriage with Lesley tapping her toe impatiently in the background. And she wanted to talk about it; talking helped.
She and Dan had gone to a miscarriage support group a couple of times and it had been the most enormous help. Just not feeling alone and hopeless, that was what made it so useful, Jodi thought.
But there would be no chance of talking with bloody Lesley here.
And then a thought had come to her: poor Anneliese was still very down, for all everyone else said she was getting over it and wasn’t she a marvel. If she asked Anneliese to come round with her, Mum and Lesley, then things might be bearable.
Anneliese would be the perfect person to accompany them – a catalyst, so to speak, for Lesley’s misery, and if she was with the three of them, then Anneliese wouldn’t have so much time to spend sitting on the beach looking sadly out to sea, which was where she appeared to spend most of her time.
Jodi was worried about her, but unsure what to do about it.
‘I can’t very well phone Izzie up and say, “Your aunt is crazy and has lost the will to live,” now, can I?’ she said to Dan.
‘Tell Yvonne,’ he replied. ‘They work together in the Lifeboat Shop and Yvonne would know what to do.’
Jodi thought of their chatty, scatty next-door neighbour and then of Anneliese, who didn’t take too many people into her confidence. Jodi felt honoured that Anneliese talked to her so much. Since that awful night they’d encountered the woman Anneliese’s husband had left
her for, they’d become friends.
‘You’ve seen me at my worst,’ was how Anneliese put it.
Despite their closeness, she just knew that Anneliese would die of embarrassment if Jodi approached Yvonne about her behaviour.
But she had to do something. The past couple of weeks, she’d dropped in on Anneliese to update her on the admittedly slow progress she was making on the Rathnaree history and each time Anneliese had seemed even more disconnected and distant.
The only positive in Anneliese’s life was that she’d gone back to work in the garden centre outside town: at least that way she met people. But Jodi had an uncomfortable feeling that this wasn’t enough.
Everyone’s life had gone back to normal except for Lily’s and Anneliese’s. Izzie was in New York, Beth was happy in Dublin waiting for her baby to come along, and even Nell and Edward had been seen walking through Tamarin one night hand-in-hand, a fact which had scandalised a good part of the population.
Lily was now in Laurel Gardens, a large nursing home on the Waterford Road and apparently wonderful. As for Anneliese – well, she was stuck, it seemed to Jodi. Her life was frozen, not going forward, not going backwards, just stuck in a sad limbo.
‘I know it’s a cliché, but isn’t it all so green?’ said Jodi’s mum happily.
‘It’s very small though, Karen, isn’t it?’ said Lesley. ‘The way you talk about Tamarin, I thought it was a big place, Jodi, but it’s not. Sort of a two-horse town.’
Jodi didn’t look at her mother, but she knew, if she had, Mum would be shooting her an anguished Sorry, but she is miserable over Phil glance.
As Dan drove down through the streets of Tamarin, Jodi resigned herself to the fact that her aunt wasn’t going to be impressed. It was so different from home, from the sense of space in Brisbane. Tamarin was small, its houses clustered together in a way that was so very European, so Irish, lots of dwellings perched close beside each other as if huddling for warmth against the wind and the rain. And now, with the sun beating down, much of the town looked quaint and other-worldly. There were whole rows of houses, dating from the early nineteenth century, and the odd big house from a moneyed merchant. And further in, near the harbour, the fishermen’s houses, tiny, cramped and yet so pretty with their sea-blue doors.