Blaze

by Di Morrissey

  ‘Will you tell me what happens?’ said Sally earnestly. ‘I had a girlfriend whose mother left her with her dad when she was a kid and her father beat her up and abused her. She ran away and found her mother and her mother was on drugs and tried to make her work as a prostitute to bring in money for her habit. I mean, aren’t some families awful? Mine are boring, but at least they’re ordinary.’

  Miche shrugged. ‘What’s ordinary?’

  ‘What I wanted to escape from,’ giggled Sally. ‘Hey, gotta go. See ya at the shoot.’

  Donald was laid-back and unfazed about the merry-go-round they seemed to be riding. He’d been hired for a week by Blaze for this shoot, so the delays at the outset didn’t faze him. He didn’t mind hanging out with Miche on the fringes of the entourage, understanding he was forbidden to take any candid shots of Sally. Blaze abided by the agency agreement, so he spent his time watching Sally – her moods, the way her body moved, assessing her personality.

  To Miche, it seemed a crazy way to work. Time, schedules, organisation, whatever she understood as professionalism was abandoned in what appeared to be a pursuit of a good time above all else.

  Miche lost all sense of time, order and focus as she trailed along with Sally. She thanked Nina in her mind, day after day, for setting her up to stay in the residence of the Australian Ambassador to France and his wife, Claudia.

  When she did return to the elegant, quiet mansion after the raging of the modelling crowd, it resettled Miche, even if she did arrive home at all hours.

  One evening, over dinner in the formal sitting room, waited on by a butler, Miche told Claudia and Bernard of the strange world of fashion, models and magazines.

  ‘I’m sorry to be creeping in so late. I thought I knew about partying in New York, but these people are crazy. I’m certainly discovering stuff to write about. I hope it’s printable,’ she added with a grin.

  Claudia was less amused. ‘I insist you take our driver with my car to ferry you about and act as an unofficial bodyguard. Or use the embassy car and driver. Don’t you think that’s a sensible idea, darling?’ she asked her husband.

  The ambassador hesitated. Embassy cars were only to be used for official business. He decided to deal with matters on an as-need basis. ‘As Nina’s friends, we feel very responsible for you, Miche. It seems to me I’ve heard a few bad stories about this modelling business . . . something to do with girls going to wealthy Arabian countries for parties and not being able to leave.’

  ‘Used as sex slaves,’ added Claudia in a low voice.

  Miche laughed. ‘Claudia, surely not. Maybe back in the seventies there were stories . . .’ She turned to Bernard. ‘That is, unless you know something? Maybe I should accept your offer of a driver.’

  ‘It pays to err on the side of caution. I can’t remember anything specific very recently. Maybe a bit of gossip at a diplomatic reception. Certainly nothing of substance for your article.’

  ‘We’re on call. I’ll give you Bernard’s private number at the embassy. You phone us any hour of the day or night if you have any problems, and one of us will be there. I don’t want Nina to think I’m not looking after you,’ said Claudia.

  ‘Thank you both, very much. You and Nina are very close,’ remarked Miche.

  ‘Oh yes, we were your age when we were best friends. We met in Sydney when we were fancy free and ready to set the world on fire. Nina was in magazines and I was at secretarial college. Then my parents, who were also in the diplomatic service, sent me to Switzerland to a finishing school. Nina came to Paris once back in those early years, to write a story just as you are doing now. I met up with her again and we had such a delicious time. “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay”, to quote the writer and actress, Cornelia Otis Skinner. Nina was covering the collections for the first time. She and Lucien were so in love, and then I met Bernard.’ She gave her husband a fond look. ‘Our lives started to change after that, but it never altered the friendship between us. The friends you make in your youth seem to stay as the bright benchmarks of your life.’

  ‘Who is . . . was . . . Lucien?’ asked Miche. ‘Nina has never mentioned him. My mother only told me about Paul Jansous, that marriage.’

  ‘She never talked about him once they went their own ways. Too painful, I suspect. One day you must ask your god-mama the story of her life.’ Claudia reached over and touched her arm. ‘We all have secrets in the corners of our hearts, chérie.’

  Miche didn’t need to call on the services of the embassy driver. Sally quickly learned to hire limos, replete with booze, drugs and rock and rollers to ferry them to clubs and parties.

  ‘It’s so cool,’ she told Miche. ‘I just ring up and charge it back to the agency.’ If this was a new game, she was learning the rules on the run.

  Miche and Donald tagged along. This was research? To Miche it was mind-blowing.

  They were in a stretch limousine and it was after 10 p.m. They’d been part of a swelling entourage in a photographic studio where Sally and two other top models were shot in evening wear. It had seemed more like a party with loud music, endless liquor and champagne and one model and four guys locked in a toilet doing coke. The French fashion editor had been screaming about the clothes. An assistant kept insisting the group in the loo were doing hair and make-up. By the time the model emerged, she was wildly stoned.

  Miche fidgeted on the periphery of this seeming madness. Donald chatted casually to the studio people. Sally cruised through the shoot unperturbed. Her make-up and hair had taken two hours.

  Miche nudged Donald. ‘Is this what you spend your time doing?’

  He was vague. ‘The fashion stuff is neurotic. So are major movie stars. I only do profiles now. I’m good at them. But I kinda like feature stuff where you have to shoot on the run.’

  Sally was ready. She looked like a somewhat mad Alice in Wonderland, sitting cross-legged on the floor, her ballgown heaped around her, holding a sleepy white rabbit. The other two girls – one fair, one dark, in dazzling, clinging dresses that seemed to be cut from rich Indian tapestries – were draped over each other on plush cushions. One held a huge peacock fan, the other the end of a brass hookah. She looked dazed and pretended to drag on the pipe and the next instant rolled on her back, gagging.

  For a moment the photographer’s assistant thought she was play-acting. Then the other girl screamed, ‘God, she’s out of it. Do something!’

  There was a rush as everybody dropped what they were doing and someone dashed to the phone. ‘Call the medics!’

  The fashion editor started to go crazy as the girl began to gag. ‘Take the dress off her. It’s a Valentino, it will be ruined . . .’ The dressers leapt in, dragging the gown off the unconscious girl, pulling a baggy sweater onto her thin, convulsing body. Donald slipped outside to wait in the street, leaving Miche standing on the sidelines in the studio. Within minutes, ambulance paramedics rushed in and the girl was carried from the studio.

  The fashion editor grabbed one of the male nurses, shouting in French, ‘Can she work tomorrow? We need this picture!’

  Sally, still holding the tranquillised rabbit, hadn’t moved.

  The photographer flung up his hands. ‘Merde!’

  ‘Call the agency. See if they can find another girl. And we’re not paying for that stupid bitch,’ snapped the fashion editor, who worked for one of the second-rate glossies. They’d blown half the month’s budget on this shoot in an effort to boost sales.

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’ Miche tentatively asked the French photographer.

  ‘Guess so. I’ve seen this before. Let’s wrap it and go to a club.’

  ‘Here we go again,’ Donald said quietly to Miche. He opened his jacket slightly, showing her a small pocket camera and gave a slight smile. ‘There are a couple of shots in here for your story.’

  ‘God, keep it quiet. If they find out you’ve sneaked shots of a top model drugged out of her mind, they’ll throw us out.’

  ‘Or worse,’ sa
id Donald, and strolled out of the studio to where the partygoers were piling into several waiting stretch limousines. They travelled in a haze from the studio to the club as they’d been doing every night. No one seemed to eat, everyone had their own supply of uppers, downers, poppers, pills and phials of white powder.

  Sally seemed unconcerned, finding it all ‘a bit of a hoot’, telling Miche, ‘A few of the girls were so wired during the last shows, I don’t know how they didn’t fall off the catwalk.’

  ‘What about you?’ asked Miche.

  ‘I started using pot in school. A couple of the photographers on shoots here give me stuff to help me loosen up. Course they then put the hard word on you,’ she added with a world-weary shrug.

  ‘Don’t take any ’ludes,’ advised Donald. ‘In the old days, they’d give them to the new models who’d pass out and then they’d take porn shots. Those girls were never booked for a serious fashion shoot again.’

  ‘The old days? You’re not over thirty, are you?’ asked Miche.

  He grinned. ‘So people tell me stories. Some of those old-fashioned guys are legends now. Not nice legends. They’ve been known to feel bored and horny and call the agencies to send new models – male and female – round for look-sees, make them drunk, drug them and screw them silly. Same with the hairdressers and make-up guys and girls.’

  ‘Yeah. These guys tell you if you don’t sleep with them, they won’t use you. Stuff ’em, I don’t care.’ Sally peered out into the Paris night.

  ‘So . . . what happened? Did you complain to your agency? You’re only sixteen,’ probed Miche.

  ‘The bookers didn’t seem to care. Said they’re not my mother. If I had a problem, to go to Françoise – she runs the Paris office. I only met her when I was signed up. But you know, the more I don’t give a shit, the more they want me.’ Sally seemed unconcerned.

  ‘If you’re fucking up, you don’t run to mother,’ muttered Donald.

  ‘How long do you want to do this?’ asked Miche. ‘What happens if you’re not flavour of the moment any more?’

  Sally leaned back in the limo’s leather and took a drag of her joint. ‘I’ll piss off. Do something else. Go back home.’

  Donald raised his eyebrows. ‘Yeah, sure. You’re sixteen, making more money in a good week than your father earns in a year. Your face is on newsstands round the world. You could give this up – the parties, hanging out with the A-list? Come on . . . now you do sound sixteen.’

  ‘What would you do, if you were me?’ she shot back.

  Donald grinned. ‘Go for it. Give ’em hell, babe.’ He winked at Miche. ‘You’re on the right end of a top story. She’s too cocky to keep her mouth shut.’

  Sally waved her arms. ‘Let’s break out the bubbly.’ She yanked a champagne bottle out of the small bar in the limo. ‘I don’t care. I escaped tonight. Avoided that PR lady, anyway. She had more coke in her bag than anyone. So, let’s live it up.’

  ‘What did you do with her?’ asked Donald.

  ‘I introduced her to this hunk model from another agency. She fell instantly in lust, and the last I saw of them they were gazing into each other’s blurry eyes.’

  The car headlights and streetlights flickered into the mellow interior of the plush car. Miche caught the look on Donald’s face as he watched Sally with part admiration, part sadness. He’d seen it all before.

  Tony Cox and Jacques Triton were gloriously drunk. They had come to rest in the depths of the Parrot Club after another of their nights on the town. From their first social outing, the travel editor and the son of Baron Triton had connected, despite the disparity in their backgrounds. Both had a strong taste for a sybaritic lifestyle and Tony was happy to introduce Jacques to the nightclubs available to rich, trendy young professional men. Blaze’s travel editor came from a wealthy North Shore family and, from their first exploration of the hip/yuppie/shake-it scene in Sydney, they recognised in each other the same need for extreme indulgence that bordered on saturnalia.

  It had started out as a social introduction to a city, but quickly the barriers had fallen away and Jacques attracted around him a coterie of rich, fast-living Beautiful People with well-connected names. It amused Jacques that this heavyweight, social, often profligate set came with family money acquired through sometimes unclassy means.

  What started as two young men out for a fun time soon sank into the heady world of lap-dancing in Sydney’s more raunchy restaurants, and experiments with new drugs and pills amid the constant availability of cocaine. They set a pattern that was whispered in media corridors, and on occasion, hinted at publicly.

  They had spent lunch and the afternoon in Jacques’ pet eating hole, in a risqué private room where sexy, partly clad waitresses spoon-fed them, sat in their laps and wiggled their buttocks to the music, until, teasingly, they escaped the men’s growing need and desire, and sometimes spontaneous orgasms. From the inebriated, titillating lunch, a visit to a high-class brothel became a regular event.

  Now, hours later, club-dazed, eyes glazed, they sank into the leafy green cushions of a booth beneath the mock jungle plants and stuffed parrots. Music blared and lights flashed across the dance floor where a few couples moved independently of each other, lost in their own headspace of light and noise.

  Tony finished his drink. ‘It’s that time. Stay, go, nightcap, find a girl?’ He resisted looking at his watch. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d fallen into a cab outside a club at dawn to get home for breakfast, shower and straight into the office.

  Jacques downed his champagne. ‘Where’re the women? It’s a desert out there. Where’re the models? They’re the party girls.’

  Tony looked around. ‘Must be having their beauty sleep.’

  ‘No shortage of them in Europe and the States. Ring up one of the agencies and have them sent over by the truckload.’ Jacques gave a short laugh. ‘I should start a new business here. There are always pretty girls wanting to be models. A magazine is a good place to start.’

  ‘And if you own the magazine, you own the girls. Hey, I like it,’ chortled Tony.

  They both stood and were heading through the near-deserted club when a burst of laughter caught their attention. Two attractive girls and an older man were settling themselves on the stools at the bar.

  ‘Hey, this is more like it.’ Jacques was looking at the blonde girl. Petite yet buxom, she was striking, if a little theatrical looking. Her friend was tall, dark-haired and, to Tony, the man looked vaguely familiar. He followed Jacques, who cruised into the bar and went straight to them.

  ‘Congratulations, you have won party animals of the week award. We thought we were going to snare the trophy.’ Jacques was all humorous Gallic charm.

  The small blonde, who looked to be around thirty, gave him a cool, slightly arrogant look. She reminded Jacques of a chihuahua, tiny in stature yet big in self-confidence. ‘And what’s the award?’

  ‘A live parrot that can sing all the songs of Simon and Garfunkel,’ said Jacques off the top of his head.

  ‘Who?’ asked the dark girl.

  The man laughed. ‘Now you’re showing your age, kiddo.’

  ‘I’ll take the prize. So long as it can sing Sound of Silence,’ challenged the blonde.

  ‘Give me your address and I’ll have it delivered first thing in the morning.’ Jacques bowed and kissed her hand.

  ‘Would you fellows like a nightcap? We’ve been celebrating my daughter’s graduation as a fully fledged fashion designer.’

  ‘With her own label,’ added the blonde.

  ‘This is your father?’ asked Tony, quickly clarifying the situation.

  ‘John Bass, my daughter, Patti, and her pal, er, Tallulah.’ The older man made the introductions.

  ‘Tallulah? You don’t look like a Tallulah,’ said Jacques, sitting on the bar stool next to the blonde.

  ‘I’m not,’ she answered enigmatically.

  Tony stood between the two girls as Mr Bass signalled to the waiter.
<
br />   ‘Champagne.’

  ‘The gentlemen have been drinking Moët & Chandon. The same?’

  ‘Why not?’

  The blonde Tallulah looked at Jacques. ‘Supporting your country’s wines, eh?’

  ‘I’m Belgian, via the US.’ He gave a charming smile. ‘So who are you? Let me introduce myself.’

  ‘You don’t need to do that, Monsieur Triton.’

  Tony laughed, seeing Jacques’s composure wobble slightly. ‘You have been in the social pages a bit lately, Jacques.’ He turned to both girls. ‘I’m Tony Cox.’

  John Bass shook his hand. ‘Should we also know you?’

  ‘Not at all. Though you look familiar if I may so, sir.’

  Tallulah leaned closer to Tony. ‘He’s CEO of Vortex Bank. The one that bankrolled the new telecommunications company.’

  ‘Of course!’ Tony clapped his hand to his head. ‘Sorry. You were all over the business pages. I signed on. Should I buy shares? I love dot coms. It’s thanks to guys like you I can dial up the newspaper, download the fruit prices in Istanbul . . .’

  ‘Do you two work together?’ Patti, the budding fashion designer, spoke up.

  ‘Yes, you could say that. But we have more in common out of the office,’ said Jacques graciously.

  ‘What he means is, he’s the boss. I’m a mere hack travel editor,’ said Tony.

  ‘Which Triton publication do you write for?’ asked Tallulah with sudden interest.

  ‘Blaze.’

  ‘Oh, it’s great. Do you know the editor?’ jumped in Patti.

  Before Tony could answer, Tallulah threw back her head. ‘Ahh! Alisson Gruber. How do you find working for the Yank Tank, Tony?’

  Jacques grinned. ‘Is that what they call her?’

  Bass topped up their glasses as Tony, very relaxed after so many drinks, confided, ‘Hell, yes. She breathes fire and has scorched a few backsides. I mean,’ he looked at Jacques, ‘I’m not telling tales out of school.’

  Jacques shrugged. ‘She isn’t my favourite person. Though my father thinks she’s pretty hot.’

  ‘She’d have to be good to run the place, wouldn’t she?’ commented Bass. ‘Where’s Nina Jansous? I thought it was her baby.’