CHAPTER ONE
‘If someone had told you, ten years ago, you'd be standing here doing this, you wouldn't have believed them, would you?' Anastasia asked, adjusting the strap of her lacy bra. She piled a ma** of artificial blonde curls onto the top of her head before letting them fall perfectly around her slender shoulders. ‘I mean, modelling? It's not something your career adviser usually recommends, is it?'
I glanced up from the ridiculously painful kneeling position I'd been locked in for the last fifteen minutes and stared daggers at the clueless blonde.
‘Well, no, it's not,' I shuffled from side to side, trying to ignore the shooting pains in my kneecaps. ‘But, to be fair, if someone had sat me down and told me I'd be spending most of my life covering bite marks on your arse, I might have found “model” more believable.'
‘Yeah, sorry about that.' She shuffled her b**bs around while I fought the urge to scrawl ‘slag' across her bum cheeks in Ruby Woo lipstick. ‘This new bloke's a bit kinky. Think I'm just going to stick with one boyfriend from now on. I mean, it might be dull as sh**, but I'm thinking go with the one who isn't into all that weird stuff, you know? Thank god we didn't have this shoot last week – you'd never have been able to cover up the rope burns on my wrists …'
Breathing out, I blocked Anastasia's mid-Atlantic, Eastern-Europe-via-Ess** drawl and focused on the job at hand. If there was one thing I was good at, it was focusing on the job at hand. Rachel ‘Blinkers' Summers, make-up artist extraordinaire and queen of elective deafness. It was one of those jobs that sounded super fancy and terribly exciting but, in reality, being a make-up artist boiled down to getting up very early, standing around for hours, making someone else look beautiful and then going home very late. Glamorous.
But at least there was the all-inclusive workout. My kit currently weighed in at over thirty pounds, and lugging it backwards and forwards on the Tube had more or less replaced my weekly run. And there was a chance you might meet the odd celebrity, but all that really meant was that you too could experience the wonder of covering up evidence of s**ual exploits so sordid that you could never watch Coronation Street ever again. There wasn't a soap star alive that wasn't into something weird. Happily, most days, I was just locked up in a studio in exotic Parsons Green, powdering body parts from dawn till dusk. It was hardly conducive to going home, whacking on the false eyelashes and glamming myself up for a night out with the celebs I'd been rubbing shoulders with all day. In fact, it was mostly conducive to going home, running a bath and pa**ing out by myself while my boyfriend, Simon, watched TV.
I could never date a chef, I thought, sponging on one last layer of body foundation. He might be the best cook in the whole world, but he's not going to want to whip me up a seven-course tasting menu when he walks through the door. You'd be lucky to get spaghetti hoops on toast for two. Not that I even had that in the house, I lamented. It was Friday, which meant tomorrow was Saturday, and Saturday was food shopping day. It really didn't feel like a weekend unless I'd had my blood pressure tested by a run around Sainsbury's. Unfortunately that usually meant Friday-night dinner was a dodgy low-cal ready meal left over from my last diet, or pizza. Which explained why, on occasion, I needed the ready meals.
‘Raquel, you're always so quiet,' Ana said loudly, arching her back to get a look at my handiwork. ‘What are you thinking about?'
‘Nothing,' I lied, stepping back to take a critical look at her now perfectly peachy arse. Not a trace of her s**ploits to be seen; just as well seeing as this was a shoot for multipacks of high-street undies. I wasn't sure my mum would want to buy a five-pack of knickers that enticed wannabe rock stars to gnaw on your rear end. Or maybe she would: she and dad had been divorced for twenty years, after all, so it had been a long time since anyone had rocked her kasbah. I hoped. Ew.
‘You're done.' I waved her off with one final flick of the bronzer brush. ‘Go on.'
Ana clapped her hands together and skipped over to her happy place. In front of a camera. Behind said camera, Photographer Dan called out words of encouragement, snapping away while Ana threw herself around the fake bedroom set with all the gusto that I guessed had resulted in her getting bitten on the backside in the first place. It was pretty impressive stuff. I tucked my long blonde hair behind my ears and tried not to be jealous. It was a while since I'd been thrown around a bedroom.
I shook my head at the cavorting occurring in front of me. What did ‘a break' even mean? Both television and movies, my most trusted advisors in life, had shown us that breaks were never actually a good thing. Fingers crossed, Simon was staying away from copy girls. This was, after all, the relationship all of our friends were jealous of because we were so incredibly sorted. Five years in and we were all set with the mortgage, a proper car, irritating pet names used in public, everything. I was certain he was going to propose. I actually had the odd wedding magazine stashed in my work kit, hidden away like girl p**n. What's more, we still Did It relatively often, which as far as I could tell, was a pretty big achievement after five years. OK, so it wasn't like a Dita von Teese show every night (you try rocking stockings and suspenders when you've been up since six trying to make the latest ‘celeb' kicked off Strictly look as though they haven't been on a forty-eight-hour bender), but it was good. We were still good. Or at least, I thought we were. It was possible my standards had lowered without me realizing.
‘Make-up?' Photographer Dan shouted across the set.
Nodding obediently, I trotted over, wielding my powder brush, ignoring his elaborate tuts and sighs. Dan was one of my more regular partners in knicker-shooting crime and I was used to his ‘artistic' temperament, but that didn't mean he wasn't a ma**ive pain in the arse. However, spending six hours together in the middle of a desert, waiting for a fading supermodel to vomit everything she's eaten since 1996 so you can get one photo, really helps you bond with your work buddies. So I let it go.
‘Take your time, Raquel.' Dan held his ma**ive camera up in the air with one hand and gave me the filthiest look he could muster. ‘It's not like anyone has anything else to do today, is it?'
I returned the politest smile I could muster while mentally flashing him a great big wa*ker sign. He knew I hated it when Ana called me Raquel. It was so bloody affected. She knew my name, she wasn't Eurotrash, she was from Basildon and her name was Anne Smith. I never bothered to point out that she'd gone to school with my cousin. Until she dropped out before her exams. Ten years on and she was lying about more than just her name. Twenty-two, Ana? I think not. Sadly, she and Dan were a frustrating combo, and k**ing them with kindness was the only way to get through the day. A row was usually exactly what Dan was looking for – he loved getting my back up, but I was nothing if not professional. Blowing the excess powder off my brush, I flicked it lightly across Ana's glowing (but not even slightly 22-year-old) skin, while she and Dan giggled at each other. Behold, make-up-artist-slash-invisible woman.
‘Done?' Dan asked, checking I'd powered her b**bs sufficiently. I didn't know for sure but I was pretty certain that, off set, Dan and Ana weren't being quite so professional as me. In fact, I was pretty certain he was one of the men who had been nibbling on her jacksy. I recognized the bite marks from the last time he'd eaten half my sandwich without asking. Well, maybe he wasn't the bottom-biter but he was definitely up to something with Ana. He was probably the dull one. Crazy s** romps with someone who was only interested in checking out his own biceps couldn't be much fun for a supermodel.
‘Just a minute,' I confirmed, looking my model over from every angle. I might think Ana was a vacuous slapper, but I did care about my job.
But no, I thought to myself, stepping out of the bright lights and back into the shadows, if someone had told me I'd be doing this in ten years, I really wouldn't have believed them.
‘Goodbye, Raquel,' Ana breezed by in a flurry of air kisses, swathed in at least three pashminas. In August. ‘And, Dan, it was so lovely to work with you again. I hope I will see you soon.'
The air kisses in his direction weren't nearly so breezy, and the subtlety of her charade was somewhat undermined by the fact that the stylist, Dan's a**istant, Collin, and I all heard her ‘whisper' that she'd be waiting for him in the car. Ah-ha. Suspicions confirmed. At least he had the decency to look embarra**ed about it. I chose to take the high road and carried on packing away my kit. There was no way I was getting involved with this. In the six years we'd worked together, he must have shagged enough models to open his own branch of Victoria's Secret, but Ana was actually a name. Good for Dan, finally made it into the Premiership after years in the lower leagues. He was dedicated to his cause, if nothing else.
‘Night, Rach,' he shouted across the studio, sheepishly heading out after his latest conquest. I gave him a quick wave before settling down in the make-up chair and pulling out my notebook. Cue satisfied sigh. Whizzing through page after page of my own handwriting, I finally found today's date, written in blue at the top of the page. My to-do list. Taking a black pen out of my handbag, I crossed off the tasks achieved with one straight, black line: drop off dry cleaning, buy toilet roll and knicker shoot. Still to go, buy wine, bikini wax, wash hair (it was almost down to my arse; honestly, it really was a task that warranted its own bullet point) and call my brother.
OK, so maybe my attachment to the lists was slightly unhealthy, and possibly the buzz I got when I crossed something off shouldn't be quite so satisfying (another indication that my s** life wasn't all that it should be?), but I had a system. Write in blue, cross it off in black, new list every day, don't go to sleep until they're all done or rolled over. I couldn't help it; apparently I had some sort of genetic defect that prevented me from achieving anything unless it was written down. I blamed my GCSE science teacher, who told me making lists would help with my revision. I might have failed double modular science but I pa**ed obsessive-compulsive order development with flying colours. To be honest, I knew which had come in more useful over the last twelve years and it wasn't anything to do with a working knowledge of photosynthesis. Well, hopefully biology would come into play tonight because tonight I had bigger fish to fry.
Tonight, I was going to lure Simon back into the big bedroom.