September 2014
‘Cheers Millsy!’ says Dominic.
James clinks glasses and downs his dark rum in one.
‘Good shit.’
A model drapes a long arm around James’s shoulder and raises a fashionably thick eyebrow.
‘Wow, you didn’t waste time with that, want another?’ she says in swishy Dutch tones.
‘I’ll get them,’ says James, going to stand up, before bejewelled fingers press him, urging him to sit down from his crotch. James’s rectangular glasses slide down his sun-dappled nose.
A bronzed half-Dutch, half-Peruvian goddess swaggers over to the bar, still wearing the bikini and sheer kaftan from the day’s shoot, even though the sun has long since set. Dominic and James couldn’t stand another hour in Pez’s company, so they left him, his assistant Joe and the hair and make-up girls, back shooting pool and drinking and smoking the local produce in a beach bar on the seven-kilometre stretch of sand that runs up this western corner of Jamaica. James hoped Lisa and Yoshie would ditch Pez’s lecherous looks and clumsy chat-up lines and go and have fun without him, they were better than that, but they didn’t, and he couldn’t watch it any more. So James made his excuses and jumped in the taxi with Dominic to head back to the hotel on the winding rocky cliffside road away from the party. Just before the taxi door closed, a supermodel slipped in the back seat onto James’s lap, even though there was space for her in the front. Two hours and four drinks later, the three of them are among the last guests in the bar at the luxe cliff-edge bolthole.
‘You lucky bastard, Millsy. Lena Molina wants to knob you!’ Dominic looks like a kid at Christmas, happy that his friend is getting this kind of attention, envious that, just like when they were at uni, when James wasn’t the single one, or interested in girls other than Kitty, Dominic is again overlooked for his taller, quieter, less charming buddy. Not that Dominic would ever cheat on Josie. Fiercely loyal to his friend, fiercely loyal to his girlfriend.
James blushes and pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose as they both look to the woman standing at the timber and thatched hotel bar. Dip-dyed hair starts brown at Lena’s crown and turns gold as it waves down to the middle of her back, finishing like spun sugar on a deliciously pert bottom. Long lean legs that could wrap twice around Dominic’s stout frame glisten and reflect the fairy lights that adorn the bar. More jewellery than clothes kiss sun cream and sun-drenched skin. James and Dominic have seen a lot of Lena Molina’s body over the past few days shooting the Femme campaign. Dominic can’t believe his mate is about to see even more.
Lena saunters back, perched on sky-high wedges, with six shot glasses teetering in large unsteady hands. She puts them on the wooden table on the edge of an artfully lit cove.
‘Here. Let’s have some fun!’ she says, thrusting two shots into James’s hands and nodding at Dominic to help himself if you must as she plonks the rest down. An inconvenience at the table.
Dominic knows James has never slept with a supermodel, so he graciously takes Lena’s hint and makes his excuses.
‘Mate, they’re all yours,’ he says, nudging the shot glasses back across the table so they all sit temptingly in front of James. Six soldiers leading him to his doom.
Lena smiles, that’s exactly what she wanted to happen.
‘Night night, Damian,’ she says with a dazzling white smile.
Dominic is too embarrassed to correct her, as if he didn’t feel insignificant enough already.
Lena slides in closer to James and drapes a long angular arm over his strong tanned shoulder. She’s used to getting what she wants.
*
‘Here’s an idea,’ says Alex, taking a sip of a skinny soy latte. ‘I had a meeting with Gina from FASH+ yesterday, and she said sales of plus-size clothes are going through the roof right now – so why don’t we do a late summer beach story focusing on big girls?’
Maya bursts into the meeting room, 1.1, carrying a tray of pastries from the canteen.
‘Sorry I’m late, breakfast anyone?’
Cressida looks at her Rado watch but doesn’t say a thing.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ says Emma, plucking a pain au raisin out from the basket and enjoying her new curves. They suit her too.
‘My big big sister is rinsing my staff discount code lately,’ pipes up Chloe mid-doodle. ‘She says FASH+ is the only big girl’s brand that is bang on trend.’
Olivia scratches her chin with a shiny sharp red talon.
‘Really?’ snarls Cressida.
‘Well most twenty-something girls don’t take their holidays during the school holidays,’ continues Alex. ‘So a FASH+ holiday wardrobe story on the home page would feel double appropes right now, now kids are back at school and FASH+ is flying,’ he says, peering over horn-rimmed glasses at his colleagues around the desk as his idea starts to take hold. Liz gives a deferential nod.
‘I guess holiday clothes are harder to cram into a carry-on when there’s so much bloody material in FASH+ sizes,’ ponders Cressida, click click clicking her FASH branded pen on and off as she looks out of the window.
‘I’m off to Ibiza next week,’ says Olivia, ignoring Cressida’s obvious disgust; excited by Alex’s suggestion. ‘I would be willing to do a beach edit while I’m away. I could get my mates to style up the pics, put nice filters on it.’
Cressida’s face falls. ‘Nope. Sorry. I’m all for championing big girls, Olivia, but no matter what filter you use, they just don’t look good on the home page.’
Maya does an internal groan and feels upset for Olivia, before her mind wanders to the tiny frame of Kitty Jones, who she hasn’t seen since the day after Jack White when she was curled into James Miller’s arm. Maya hasn’t seen James Miller much either. The odd morning here and there, not at all in the past week. Since seeing him with his girlfriend, Maya vowed to create some distance, to get on at a different carriage, because it hurts too much to see him. But despite knowing that this is the sensible thing to do, she misses Train Man terribly.
*
James rubs two bleary eyes and tries to focus through the white swathes of mosquito net that surround his four-poster bed. Impaired by short-sightedness and rum, he rolls out of his side of the bed and perches on the edge, focusing on the white flip-flop lines on his bronzed feet beneath him. He looks across at the other side of the bed as he stretches and slinks across the villa to open the cabaña doors that look out to sea. The sun is only just rising and yesterday’s flat jade waters have turned grey and moody as waves bubble and foam towards the rocks of the cliff edge and the wooden parasol at the end of his own private promontory. Sea air offers regeneration and James stretches out his arms and inhales the taste of a heavy night. A chest expands, a heart sinks. James looks back into the pristine luxury of the suite he has sullied to see his camera sitting on the bed next to where he slept fitfully. It gives him an idea.
With a wide mouth and a flat finger, James inserts contact lenses that also spent the night fizzing, then throws on faded maroon shorts, a pinstriped T-shirt and a pair of black Havaianas. With care and respect, James lifts his new camera, his first foray into digital photography with the SLR he bought for the trip, loops the strap around his neck, picks up his sunglasses and walks out of his villa. James winds on a limestone path away from the Caribbean Sea, blinking his lenses into place. He passes the infinity pool and meanders through the hotel to the restaurant. Staff are setting the breakfast tables for the early risers.
‘You want breakfast, sir?’ calls the soft tone of a beautiful Jamaican lilt.
James looks over at the waiter and shakes his head. ‘Not now thanks, Rico, but do you know where I can hire a moped?’
‘Sure thing. Take mine,’ he says, patting James on the back and rummaging in the pocket of his perfectly pressed white linen trousers for a key. ‘No hire, just treat her like you would a beautiful woman huh?’ he smiles knowingly, having worked the late shift behind the bar last night as well as the early one this morning. ‘Here, lemme show you.’
Rico leads James out under the fans and thatched roof of the open-sided restaurant to the parking lot beyond reception. Crisp shirt, pristine and white. Teeth so dazzling James remembers he hasn’t cleaned his own.
‘Take her. She’s full. All cool,’ he shrugs.
‘Thanks mate, I’ll be careful,’ says James, starting the engine and lowering Wayfarers over his lenses. James feels very English and very uncool, but manages not to wobble as he turns out of the sea-edge sanctuary down the winding road towards the tourist end of town.
As James scoots, his foggy senses are awakened with the tut tut tut of the engine. Past wooden shacks with broken posts, painted in light blues, bright pinks, black gold and emerald green. He sees signs for jerk chicken, patties and Red Stripe, all painted with a thick brush and an unsteady hand. Conch shells sit by the roadside, giving James a satisfactory sense of being half a world away from the solitude of Hazelworth, away from the drudgery of MFDD, away from the shame he has felt since June.
James looks out to sea, witnessing it transform with every revolution of the moped wheel, from grey to royal blue on the horizon. By the bottom of the hill, at the town’s one roundabout, the sea is now jade over a still and sandy seabed. James turns left onto the road that runs behind the beachfront hotels, along the back of the tourist strip. A portly man hoses down a hotel entrance. A white woman with dreads carries a trestle table. A moped piled high with crates of ackee overtakes James, a burst of colour peeping out of the slats in the wooden crate, wakening him further. Tourists sleep after a night of rum and reggae, and James leaves them behind as gravel stones jump gaily at his wheels and he zooms on the single lane highway out of town.
The tut tut tut of the engine chugs inland, to a road shaded by a canopy of trees where ropey vines burst down. James sees two boys playing football in the road ahead and slows down cautiously, worried that one of them might run out in front of his bike were the ball to do the same. The smaller of the two boys points at James and laughs.
‘Neymar!’ he says. The other boy giggles. James stops his bike, lifts his Wayfarers and laughs. In an office on the other side of the world, Maya doesn’t know how James’s dimples have deepened right now.
James is baffled. Charmed. Wanting to capture the boys’ laughter on camera.
‘Mind if I take a picture?’ he says, raising his camera from around his neck.
‘For sure,’ says the smallest of the two, giving a little flourish of footwork over the ball as he does. Suddenly James remembers what it felt like to be five and not shy of showcasing your talents.
‘You know Messi?’ asks the older boy, more serious than his brother.
‘Not personally I’m afraid. I’m from England.’
‘Then you Rooney!’ laughs the smaller one, losing control of the ball as he giggles.
‘Nope, not as rich.’
The boys stop playing football long enough for James to take a few shots. He shows them their pictures on the screen of his digital SLR. Both boys look with pride.
James says thank you and bids them farewell.
‘I’ll look out for you boys in the Champions League!’ he says with a smile.
‘Bye Wayne Rooney!’ the boys shout in unison cheekily and laugh, clutching their bellies.
James restarts the engine on Rico’s bike and heads further on the sun-dappled road under the lush green canopy.
A rumble in his stomach reminds him what time of day it is and that he ought to get back for breakfast, for the final day of shooting Lena Molina for Femme. He drives past a wooden sign painted in thick black brush strokes. It says: Miss Delilah’s Great Tasting Patties. The word SECRET bursts out of a red love heart and James knows he has to stop.
He turns off the engine, kicks out the stand, and walks into an open-sided building with a wood and tin roof. A large woman with short grey hair and pendulous breasts sitting atop the waist of a blue cotton skirt walks over to James.
‘You wanna eat or just coffee?’
The smell of Blue Mountain coffee and fried plantains in Miss Delilah’s own kitchen out the back is too tempting for a rumbling rum-tainted tummy and James senses this is a place without a menu: you eat whatever the chef fancies making.
‘Whatever you’re cooking please.’
The woman smiles and walks away.
‘Are you Miss Delilah?’ James calls out.
‘Yah,’ she says as she disappears through a multicoloured beaded curtain to start cooking James’s breakfast. The room is empty, and James sits on a turquoise wooden chair, silently scrolling through his photos from the trip so far. Maybe digital is better than old-school 35mm film.
Pots and pans clink in the kitchen.
Ten minutes later Miss Delilah walks back through the beaded curtain with a plate bursting with saltfish, ackee, callaloo and fried plantains. An oily sunburst of yellows and greens certain to give James his zing back.
‘Thank you Miss Delilah.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she sings in a smooth voice that dances up and down an octave. She walks away to fetch coffee then returns and pulls up a chair at James’s table. ‘Where you from?’
‘London.’
Miss Delilah takes a sip of what looks like a glass of squash but is mango nectar.
‘What’s a handsome man like you doin’ out here on ya own?’
‘I’m here for work. Just having a little wander, taking some photos before we go back to the beach to do a photo shoot.’ James feels embarrassed about how easy his life is, given that his office today is a seven kilometre stretch of sand, but then he realises it is for most people who live around here.
‘Most boys like you come here on honeymoon but I don’t see no ring.’
James blushes. ‘Nope, no bride.’
Miss Delilah’s lined face crumples in surprise. ‘You don’t have a girlfriend?’ she sings.
James shakes his head.
‘My niece Violet lives in London. You should see her – boom – she is beautiful.’
James thinks the way Miss Delilah said all of the syllables of ‘beautiful’ was beautiful.
‘I’m sure she is.’
Miss Delilah watches James eat. Her serene and kindly face makes him feel comfortable, not self-conscious. The lace tablecloth and ramshackle kitchen remind James of his grandmother’s house – although geckos don’t climb the walls at breakfast in Kent.
‘You wanna take a photo of me? Tell the world about Miss Delilah?’
‘I’d love to,’ James says, tucking into the mysterious scrambled-egg-like texture of a tropical fruit. ‘Thanks.’
‘Great, when you’re done, we’ll do it in front of my sign. Take it to Violet, show her I’m healthy.’
‘Will do.’