Lost in Pacific Avenue
“The dress. The dress.”
“No, the bow should go more to the right.”
“We need more hair lacquer.”
“You’re making me anxious.”
“Where’s Phoebe? Where the hell is Phoebe?” shouts Lou. “I asked her to bring me the hairspray. How do you expect me to work without hairspray?”
“Lou…” I moan, staring at my reflection in the mirror.
“What is it?” he sighs as he fixes my fringe.
“I look like an elephant.”
“We’ve already discussed this, you do not look like an elephant – elephant are grey.”
“Okay, then – I’m a purple elephant.”
“Sam, this dress is gorgeous, you look amazing and your make-up is wonderful. The only thing that isn’t working is this hair, but I can’t perform miracles and Phoebe has vanished with the hairspray!”
“Tim, please,” I say, giving Lou my most candid look, “find Phoebe or I’ll have to take this dress off because it’ll be covered in blood.”
“Okay, I’m going… Otherwise we’ll have to fight over the body,” he says, rushing off to save both of us. As usual, the room is packed with technicians and workmen, but tonight is the last night and the anxiety is winning out over the stress. There are only five of us left in the competition, and so the few of us still hoping to win are trembling with fear while the others still have to wait around to appear in the coronation ceremony but know they’re already out of the running. I’ll let you imagine the atmosphere for yourselves – nobody is talking to anybody else any more. Some have been crying, others have felt ill, and one of them even fainted because she hadn’t eaten for three days for fear of not getting into her dress. When they told me that, I couldn’t believe it – I thought this was going to be was different. I mean, come on, isn’t a Beautiful Curvy contest supposed to help us to accept ourselves? But no. I’m surrounded by unhappy, insecure people who are fighting a continuous battle against the bathroom scales. There’s no way out.
“Will you stop chewing your damn nails?” Lou scolds me, yanking my hand out of my mouth.
“I can’t help it. I don’t even know how I got this far.”
“The acting part went really well. I still can hardly believe it, but you managed to string together a set of one-liners without causing any permanent damage to the jury. From here on out, it’s all downhill.”
“You sure know how to console a woman, Lou.”
“Hey, how about keeping still for one minute?” he shouts in my ear, stopping brushing my hair as he does.
“Mmm-hmm…”
His voice goes back to being normal, almost gentle. He doesn’t look at me, just at my hair, pulling at a lock from time to time. “Just to change the subject for a minute… you should talk to Al.”
“I know.”
“He was pretty crestfallen this morning.”
“I can imagine.”
“It wasn’t nice what he did,” says Lou with a shrug, “but put yourself in his shoes – it can’t have been an easy situation for him to deal with.”
“I’m not angry with him, Lou,” I say, and it’s true. Because Al hasn’t made me suffer – or maybe because I have hurt him so much that it would be unfair of me to be. “I was just a little shaken last night.”
“It would do him good to hear you say that in person. He really looks like he’s in a pretty bad way.”
“Okay, I’ll go and see him.”
“This is the best I can do,” says Tim, appearing with a large green can.
“Let me see – Boom Style? What the hell of a kind of brand is Boom Style?”
“The only one around, so make good use of it,” replies Tim, and so saying, he throws it to Lou and passes me a copy of The Chronicle. “This is for you, gorgeous: page seven. I’d read it, if I were you.”
“Seven? Why page seven? That’s the personals.”
“Fourth from the bottom. I put it on Twitter.”
“I want to read it, too!”
“You worry about my hair, Lou, we only have five minutes.”
“Five? Only five? Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
“I’m telling you now!” replies Tim, throwing up his arms in frustration, before shouting to everyone, “Move it, move it! I want to see Sienna Moore by the side of the road begging for long-lasting foundation tonight.”
“Breathe, Lou – just calm down and breathe,” I say, opening the newspaper distractedly. It feels a bit strange finding a copy in my hands again. I’m trying to move on, but it’s been such a huge part of my life for so long, I’m really struggling to accept that from today it will be just another daily newspaper to browse while I’m having coffee, and those names in bold under the articles are just strangers and not the people I’ve spent the last three years of my life with. “Are you sure it’s on seven page?”
“Fourth line from the bottom,” Tim says, biting into a donut.
“Yeah, keep going with the carbs and you’ll be advertising diet bars before long.”
“You’re just envious of my sculpted abdominals.”
“It’s what you’ve got in your brain that worries me.”
“Oh, ssh! I can’t understand anything with all this yapping.” I flip the page back and forth a few times, not noticing anything out of the ordinary. There is a message from Angus who is looking for a Brazilian with a green card for love without any hassle from the immigration office, then there is Christo, an ‘eighty-two year old with attractive pension and great medical insurance seeking forty year old’ and Tanya, a specialised physiotherapist, ‘home visits only, hygiene guaranteed…’ But I don’t see what any of this has got to do with me – the last time I let someone touch my neck I was in a neck brace for three months. “I don’t understand, Tim.”
“Fourth line from the bottom.”
“Which column?”
“The last!”
“The last… the last… the last… this one?” I ask, pointing, while I read:
Yesterday, in Pacific Avenue, the newspaper lost one of its most trusted employees. Her name is Sam Preston, and she’s an intelligent, capable, unselfish woman and an excellent journalist. She disappeared at two forty-five in the morning without leaving a trace, and since that moment, the newspaper has been in total chaos. The computers refuse to co-operate, the printers don’t work and the whole editorial staff is at its wits’ end – especially me, because for me she was not just an anonymous employee but a trusted friend and a special person I knew I could count on in my hour of need. But most of all, she was Sam, my Sam, the only person able to make me think straight and realise when I’m going over the top and the only one who knows how to make me feel special even though there’s not really anything special about me. It’s impossible not to recognise her – she’s a beautiful woman with long, chocolate coloured hair and big eyes. If you happen to find her, please contact our switchboard as soon as possible. We are all anxiously awaiting her return.
Dave Callaghan, Deputy Editor of The Chronicle.
“Two minutes!” They pull the newspaper from out of my hands, and yank me up from my chair.
“No, wait a… a moment.” I desperately try to retrieve the newspaper, but someone else pushes me away, a girl with earphones leads me to the exit and from that moment on it’s all just a succession of hands grabbing at me and pushing me about. Because now, we are anonymous faces in search of fame and only those who survive deserve to be treated with respect.
“Hey, come on, hey!”
“Look over there. Stop…” The flash of a camera blinds me. “One more.”
“Ready?”
“Yes, bring in the next one,” and suddenly I’m on the set at the end of the catwalk.
“Two hundred and four. It’s two hundred and four’s turn, where is she?”
“Outside, she’s on her way.”
“Two hundred?”
And in the meantime, I stand there, a hostage of my destiny, with a Maroon 5 song playing as background music and the voice of a speaker who is describing my elegant purple dress.
And then there’s him, Dave, in my mind. With each step I take, a word of that article, of last night, of that first time on the carpet. What if I told you that at this moment, I couldn’t care less about the competition any more? Because right now, I just want to be there, at The Chronicle, to get my hands on him – and strangle him!
That is no way to behave. You can’t act like that and the next day put that ad in the newspaper. How the hell am I supposed to react?
But anyway, I really don’t have time to think about all that now – I need to concentrate on trying not to kill myself as I set off unsteadily on my heels, blinded by the lights and the camera flashes, at the centre of a catwalk that has shown me what the world out there is like while I insisted on staying shut up indoors.
Come on, Sam. Just a few more seconds…
I take a deep breath, pull my tummy in and take one last turn, showing off for the cameras as though I’d been born in the spotlight. It all lasts less than a minute, just long enough to reach the end, pause for a second and then turn round. How many times have I done this over the last few days? And yet every time it feels as though it were the first: the same embarrassment, the same ridiculous awkwardness. There are people who get used to the spotlight right away but I think I’m part of that small minority who will always feel a fish out of water, whatever bowl you decide to put me into. But I give it my best shot and after I have demonstrated my incompetence on the catwalk, I join the others and try and hide behind the floral decorations. At that point, it’s the presenter’s turn, as a flashing red light on a monitor set among the audience warns us. T.J. Steel – they couldn’t have chosen someone more flavour of the month.
“Welcome back!” he cries as he takes the floor and launches into a convoluted explanation of the concept of Curviness and the importance of psychological support during each stage of growth, which is actually just a pointless list of advice, buzzwords and cool sounding statistics taken from industry magazines. And along with him come the nutritionists, investors and representatives of companies that produce low-fat products, all equally prepared to support the fight against eating disorders. Nobody, however, mentions how much each of them is getting paid to appear, or the incredible amount of publicity that just being here is giving them. What a disappointment, it’s a real shame. The original idea wasn’t bad at all, but the idea was Al’s, so it couldn’t not have been good. It’s all the rest that leaves something to be desired.
I hope that the whole thing is at least of some use. And I wonder: how much use has it been for me?
Yesterday I had a job, an identity, a boyfriend. Yes, okay, an imaginary boyfriend, but even that was, in its way, a kind of security. And now? I’m unemployed, my wardrobe has developed a split personality and if we’re being totally honest, not even Samson looks at me the way he used to.
“Pfffff…” I hate waiting.
“And as I told you before, now that all of the contestants have walked the catwalk we can start the televoting.”
I go back to staring at T. J. Steel, and listen to him distractedly while I wait for our big moment to come.
“Now let’s bring our finalists over here.” He gestures with his microphone to a girl who, followed by the camera, leads us over to him without ever stopping smiling. I’d much rather not be compelled to follow her, but I promised myself that this time I would go through with it, so even though there is a part of me scoping out the emergency exits, I wait for them to give T.J. the envelope containing the name of the winner.
“God…” whispers a panicky Angelina, visibly agitated. I glance over at her. “Take it easy,” I say, acting as though all this was just a walk in the park for me. It’s a shame my knees are knocking, because I’d really like to be able to say that I’m just standing here pretending to be interested for the sake of the public, but as soon as that envelope arrives I start panicking too. It feels like I’m getting palpitations: my hands start sweating, my heart is beating madly. I didn’t think it could happen to me, but apparently it has: I have finally discovered that deep down I’m just the same as all the others – if I see a sceptre I start drooling, and I want the crown for myself and my subjects to applaud admiringly. Finally, I’m normal!
“So let’s find out the names of the three winners of the Beautiful Curvy Contest!”
My attention is totally focused on the presenter as, with mounting adrenaline, I watch the first two eliminations: Dorothy’s out, Madison’s out. That leaves three of us: Me, Angelina and Sienna.
Third envelope.
“In third place at the first running of the Beautiful Curvy Contest is…”
Moment of panic. “Number 72, Sienna Moore.” Oh my God. I don’t believe it. Blood is going to flow. I turn to Sienna, hoping that she’s not going to pull a hatchet out of her bustier, but no: she smiles, weeping with emotion and looking like the image of happiness. She takes the flowers, goes over to the microphone and thanks the jury, wishing all of us the success we deserve, because as far as she’s concerned this is already a great achievement for her and blah, blah, blah… does anyone actually believe all this guff they come out with?
Wait a minute, but… if Sienna’s out, does that mean only Angelina and me are left? I mean, that means… that I actually have a chance of being this year’s Face of Curvy?
Okay, don’t faint. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a competition. A stupid beauty contest that’s not going to change your life in any way. No.
“And the winner… a moment of silence, please. The winner, the next Face of Curvy, the testimonial of the Beautiful Curvy collection is…”
I can’t breathe, I feel sick. This can’t be happening, it can’t be. I don’t believe it. Wait until I tell my mother…” Number 304, Angelina Johnson.”
Woah. Okay.
My excitement vanishes instantly.
The audience starts to applaud and the orchestra starts to play the theme music, and I’m overcome with a powerful urge to cry. But why? Wasn’t it just a stupid beauty contest?
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” shrieks Angelina, while a cascade of celebratory confetti pours down onto the whole studio. Everyone hugs, everyone seems happy, everyone loves each other. We’ll see if they’re still being so affectionate in the changing rooms in five minutes. Oh, stop being a sourpuss just because you didn’t win, Sam! Honestly, you’re amazing – you’ve spent the last three weeks saying you don’t care and look at you now! You don’t deserve the crown any more than Sienna Moore – there, I said it!
“Sam, Sam, I won!” The winner comes over to me and, to my complete surprise, takes me in her arms and squeezes me tight, dripping mascara on my shoulder. “I didn’t think I’d ever do it. I was sure you would win,” she confesses between sobs. “You’re so beautiful… I… I can’t believe it,” and at that point I burst into tears too, and I couldn’t say if it’s for Dave or for the contest or for Al. Right now, I don’t understand anything, but there’s one thing I do know: I’m happy for her, because this was her dream, not mine and at the end of the day, this is how it was supposed to go. At least one of us has achieved her goal. It might take me a while, but… I’m not going to give up, no. If with all her hard work Angelina has managed it, that means we all can. Perhaps that’s the real reason for Curvy – to give us the illusion that if you really want it, everything is possible. And perhaps from the illusion comes the desire to try for real – and who can say where you’ll get to if you actually stand up and start walking?