Nick didn’t want to talk to me so we could get back together. He wanted to tell me he had met somebody else. He wasn’t trying to woo me.
He was trying to warn me.
Snippets from my happy little email are starting to bounce around inside my head, and every time a line makes contact I sink further towards the centre of the earth.
I’ve been thinking about you lots! Five hundred miles.
Of course I have! Another five hundred.
Send me another message or ring me? Three hundred miles down.
I’VE MISSED YOU SO MUCH. Another thousand.
Four kisses, and a needy, keen smiley face: :) And I’m right in the middle where there’s nothing but flames and molten lava and hotness forever and ever and ever.
Oh my God. This doesn’t happen in any of the stories I love. Except maybe in the Hans Christian Andersen version of The Little Mermaid, and that doesn’t bode well for my immediate future.
No wonder I can’t find my voice any more. I probably sold it to a Sea Witch in return for legs.
“Harry-chan?” A soft hand lands on my shoulder. “You OK, Harry-chan? You are very paling, Harry-chan. Perhaps you are lagging jet now?”
I turn and look blankly at Rin’s pretty face.
“I-I-I …” I swallow. “I – umm – think I’m suddenly quite tired.” I turn around and start wobbling on jelly legs into the bedroom. “It’s been a really long day.”
I push Kylie-cat aside, crawl into my new bed fully dressed and wrap my arms around my legs. Today is starting to feel like one of those confusing nightmares where you wake up crying and sweating and hurting and you don’t quite remember why.
“Yes, you sleep,” Rin says, sitting on the edge of my bed and carefully tucking me in. The cat jumps up and starts kneading my legs, but Rin picks her up. “No, Kylie Minogue. Bad cutey. No making biscuits on Harry-chan while she sleeping.”
Then she follows my blank, shattered gaze to the door. “Nick is super handsome, ne? He is like prince or movie star or man in Abercrombie advert. One day I am hoping I will be in romantic twosome with Australian. Is it not perfect, Harry-chan? Like fairy tale?”
I can suddenly see Nick and Poppy: all cheekbones and glowing skin and perfect, magazine-approved beauty. Matching perfectly. Fitting perfectly.
“Yes,” I agree. “Exactly like a fairy tale.”
Just not mine.
And then I close my eyes and wish – with every part of my eternal mermaid soul – that I was at home, in England.
ow, I know many things.
I know that caterpillars have 4,000 muscles. I know that one in twenty people have an extra rib, and that astronomers have discovered that sometimes on Uranus it rains diamonds. I know that camels originated in North America, that killer whales breathe in unison when travelling in groups, and that there are more receptor cells in a single human eye than there are stars in the Milky Way.
But I clearly know nothing about boys.
And right now I’d trade in every single thing I’ve ever learnt for just the faintest idea of what it is I’m supposed to do next.
I can’t sleep, so I wait until Rin is softly snoring, drag my duvet into the bathroom and curl up in the empty bathtub with my phone. It takes Nat a while to work out what’s going on. This is because I’m crying so hard all she can make out for the first three minutes is “S-s-s”.
“Spots?” she guesses, peering down the webcam. “Sausages? Socks?”
I shake my head. “S-s-s …”
“Sun cream? Scissors?” I can see Nat’s brain scanning through her vocabulary for anything that starts with an S. “Caesar Salad?”
A little bubble of unexpected giggle-snot comes out of my nose. I try something different. “N-N-N …”
“Nipples? Nits? No offence, Harriet, but it’s starting to feel like I’m trying to communicate with a penguin. Calm down and try to finish a word.”
I obediently wipe my nose on the duvet (oh, come on, as if everybody in the world doesn’t do that when they’re heartbroken). Then I take a few deep breaths and finally manage to hiccup: “S-sorry. I’m s-s-so s-s-sorry, N-nat. Y-you w-were r-r-right and I-I was wr-wrong and N-Nick d-doesn’t c-care about m-m-m-me and h-he h-has a n-n-new girlf-f-friend and sh-sh-she lives in m-my flat in T-T-Tokyo and sh-she’s b-b-b-beautiful and I-I d-don’t know w-what to d-do and I h-hurt a-all ov-v-ver a-and I j-just w-want to g-g-go h-h-home.” And I promptly burst into tears again.
Nat sits bolt upright. “What? He’s in Tokyo? You’re in Tokyo? Are you freaking kidding me?”
To say that I am not in the mood for kidding anyone right now is the understatement of the century. “I j-just s-saw him.”
Nat’s face disappears, and somewhere in the background I can hear things being zipped. I sniffle and wipe my eyes on a separate bit of soggy bedding. “Nat? Are you listening?”
“No.” Her head pops back into the screen. “I’m packing my bags and coming to get you.”
I smile. Toby was right: Nat is my non-kissing soulmate. I want things to stay exactly how they always have been: like salt and pepper, strawberries and cream, cheese and Marmite. Two halves of the same teddy-bear-shaped friendship necklace.
Although Nat might be being slightly optimistic. She has no transport and no money and she’s in deepest, darkest France. At 11 mph it’s going to take the poor pig nearly a month to get here.
“D-don’t be silly,” I hiccup, feeling a little bit calmer already. “Your mum will ground you for the rest of your life and then she’ll ground your ghost. I’ll be OK.”
Nat pauses, and then throws her passport on the floor with a frustrated growl. “Ugh. Seriously: what is wrong with boys?”
We both ponder this important question. It feels like one of the ancient, unanswerable ones. You know:
Why Are We Here?
How Big Is The Universe?
Is There A God?
What Is Wrong With Boys?
“S-s-so …” I sniffle on to my hand. “What do I do, Nat? Tell me, and this time I promise I’ll listen.”
We sit in comfortable silence while my Best Friend thinks about it. When we were little we would do this every time one of us fell over and scraped a knee, until it didn’t hurt any more. As if – just by being together – we could somehow share the pain. As if in some way we still can.
Finally, Nat makes a decision. “Pretend you don’t care, Harriet. Pretend you never have.”
I frown. “Nat … I didn’t even have the thespian skills required to play a tree in our Year Two performance of Snow White, remember?”
Nat laughs. “You fell off the stage and just lay there, waving your branches around until your dad came and stood you back up again. It was hilarious.”
It really was not. I couldn’t look Miss Campbell in the eye for months. She said I ruined the entire performance and maybe she would take that Drama job in Scunthorpe after all. “I don’t think I can do it,” I admit quietly. “It’s …” How do I even put this? “It’s Nick.”
“Which is why it’s even more important.” I can see Nat’s furious rash climbing up her neck again. “We can’t let him win. He’s not ruining this for you. Let me remind you, Harriet, YOU ARE MOD-EL-LING IN TOK-Y-O. You’re the luckiest girl ever. EVER. You pretend, and you pretend as hard as you can.”
This is all so confusing. One minute I’m being taught that lying is bad and I should never do it, and the next I’m being told to do it as convincingly as possible. Clearly when it comes to boys, every lesson I’ve ever learnt is supposed to be inverted. Why wasn’t there a class in this at school?
I cannot believe I wasted three years of my life doing woodwork.
“Harriet, listen to me. Will you please just trust me?”
I look at the floor and nod. If I had listened to Nat in the first place I’d now be two months into getting over Nick. I’d be much, much closer to being fine. “OK,” I agree. “I’ll pretend.”
“Good,” Nat says. “I
didn’t want to be right, Harriet. I just didn’t want this to happen. I didn’t want him to hurt you.”
I’m so glad I don’t have to do this on my own.
“I miss you, Nat,” I say in a tight voice. “Can we never, ever fight, ever again?”
Nat laughs. “Of course we’re going to fight again. That’s what we do. I’m going to kick your skinny butt for the rest of eternity.” She looks at her nails. “Call whenever you need me. All I’m doing is trying not to milk cows.”
“Really? What’s it like? Is it all squidgy?”
“No idea. I keep telling people I’m not touching a cow’s boob like a big cow lesbian so I have yet to find out.” Nat grins and blows me a kiss. “This feels weird to say because it’s totally broad daylight here, but: go to bed, Harriet. Things will look better in the morning. They always do.”
I yawn and nod, suddenly feeling exhausted and drained. But also as if I’ve abruptly let go of something heavy. Or maybe something heavy has let go of me. By the time we say goodbye and I crawl back into my enormous bed – puffy but totally dry-eyed – I know exactly what my New and Infinitely More Glorious Summer Plan 3 (NAIMGS3) plan is:
Lie. Again.
This is my big adventure. I have travelled 6,000 miles and fifteen years to get here. I came to Japan to have the best summer of my life, and I am going to have it.
And no boy is going to ruin it for me.
Experts say that people with abnormally high IQs often have problems sleeping. Which is no doubt why I’m snoring within thirty-five seconds.
“Harry-chan?”
Something tiny and soft prods my face. I roll over, open my eyes and promptly shoot straight into the wall behind me. It’s almost totally pitch-black, but I can vaguely see the outline of Rin’s face, two centimetres from mine. She leans slightly closer and inexplicably prods me with her finger again. “Harry-chan,” she says. “You are squeaking like tiny mouse. Bad dreaming?”
“Mnnneugh,” I mumble. “Whatimezit?”
“Four am.” Rin says this as it looks: 4am.
“M’so sorry,” I yawn, sitting up straighter. “Did I wake you up?”
“No.” Rin perches on the end of my bed, picks up a still-sleeping Kylie and points to the huge earphones hanging around her neck. “I sleep super soundly. I listen to nandakke … Scotlands. Whales. But battery passes on and man wakes me. For you, boom boom boom at door.”
I sleepily try to rearrange the sentences. “There’s a man at the door for me?”
“Yes. So I came to awaken you up.” Rin beams proudly and prods my face again. “I did good job, ne?”
Blinking, I grab my blue dolphin hoody and press the light on my Winnie-the-Pooh watch. It’s just after 4am. I can’t count out the possibility that I might still be dreaming. Although – if I am – I’ll have to reassess what I eat before bedtime. It’s certainly not one of my better ones.
In a daze I stumble through the corridor, open the front door and stare in bewilderment at the man standing there. He’s wearing white gloves, a black suit and a black hat. I peer down at his little white socks. “Michael Jackson?”
“No. My name is Shinosuke. I am your chauffeur. The car is waiting outside to take you to the first photo shoot. You have five minutes to get ready.”
I look at my watch again. “Now?”
“Not now,” Shinosuke says, frowning. “I just told you. In five minutes.”
OK: are they kidding me? Yuka wants me to do my first shoot at 4am? When I landed in the country nine hours ago? After a fourteen-hour flight? On four hours of sleep? With jetlag and a badly broken heart?
On second thoughts, I don’t know why I’m surprised. This is the heartless world of fashion: I’m actually quite touched Yuka didn’t drag me there straight from the airport by my eyebrows.
I nod briefly, race into the bedroom and grab my suitcase. I still haven’t unpacked, so I drag everything into the bathroom so I don’t wake up Poppy or Rin (she’s already back in her bunk, snoring quietly with Kylie lying across her stomach). I quickly dress in whatever’s at the top of the pile – my black and yellow stripy leggings and my Batman T-shirt – and tie my hair in a ponytail. Then I rally my inner model and glance briefly in the mirror.
Flaky skin, swollen eyes. A red dent from a pillowcase button on my cheek, an ink blob on the end of my nose and two enormous stress spots erupting by my mouth. And I still haven’t cleaned the gravy off my chin.
Yet again, my inner model has clearly decided to stay there.
A couple of seconds later I’m running through the flat while brushing my teeth then out of the front door while cramming a chocolate biscuit into my mouth (I realise I got the biscuit and the toothpaste the wrong way round).
There’s a huge black limousine waiting outside, and as soon as I appear it moves forward ominously by a couple of centimetres and the door swings open.
“Four minutes fifty seconds,” I mumble through my mouthful, looking at my watch and clambering into the back seat. “Totally nailed it!”
“Congratulations,” a cold voice says from a metre away, wiping a spray of chocolate crumbs off her face. “If only we could say the same for your personal hygiene.”
A light switches on over my head.
And there – staring at me – is Yuka Ito.
elieve it or not, the last time I saw Yuka Ito is actually the last time you saw Yuka Ito.
After I humiliated her on national television, kissed her nephew and nearly destroyed the entire Baylee brand, I haven’t run into her since. She’s stayed in what I would imagine is a tower made out of fairy skulls, surrounded by molten lava and the bodies of aged models, and I’ve stayed buried under books in a semi-detached, three-bedroom house in Hertfordshire.
Which – I’ll be totally honest – is exactly how I like it.
Swallowing my biscuit as quickly as I can, I squint upwards at the spotlight and then back at Yuka. She’s so tiny, and so pale, and so completely dressed in black from head to toe that she totally disappears into the car seats, and all you can see is a small white face, hovering in the air. There’s a faint iciness around her, and I’m not entirely sure it’s all down to the air conditioning.
Yuka Ito looks at me, and then switches the light off. I think this might be going quite badly already.
“Harriet Manners,” she says in a clipped voice, looking straight at my spots. “I thought we had agreed that you were to stop producing pus. It was part of your new contract.”
I try to cover as much of my face with my fingers as I can. “I’m really sorry.” The apologies have started already, and I haven’t even properly sat down yet. “I don’t really know where they come from.”
Yuka looks pointedly at the remnants of the chocolate biscuit in my hand. “I can offer a few suggestions.”
“Actually,” I say, “there are numerous scientific studies that show that chocolate isn’t actually a cause of acne and that it comes from hormonal—”
Yuka narrows her eyes and my survival instinct finally kicks in. I shut up, put the rest of the biscuit in my satchel and anxiously clear my throat. Change the subject, Harriet. “I – umm – didn’t think you would be here, Yuka. I thought you would be” – arranging your winged monkeys – “with the other models. In one of the other countries.”
“Everybody else I employ knows how to organise themselves,” Yuka says, folding her hands neatly in front of her. “That’s why I employ them.”
I try not to notice the implication now hanging in the air. “Well, it’s very nice to see you again,” I lie. “How is your … umm …” Think fashion. Think emotional connection. Think mutual interests. “… hat feeling?”
How is your hat feeling? It’s not one of the all-time great conversation starters.
“Harriet. What is a model?”
Oh, God. She’s testing me already. It’s a good thing I’ve looked it up in the dictionary quite a few times over the last few months, just to check what it is I’m supposed t
o be doing. “A standard or example for imitation or comparison?”
“Precisely.” Yuka lowers her eyes. “The world’s female population does not want to look like a crime-fighting bumblebee.”
I glance down at my outfit. I look like I’m about to don a black face mask and start karate-kicking wasps and possibly grasshoppers. “I was in a hurry and it was at the top of my suitcase?”
“Then don’t pack it.”
In China there is a dish called ‘Drunken Shrimp’, which involves little shrimps being put into a hot broth of strong liquor and then eaten while still alive and wriggling. I’m starting to understand how they feel.
“Yuka,” I say, taking a deep breath: “I just want to take this opportunity to say how grateful I am to be given a chance to come to see Tokyo, and to be a part of—”
“Gratitude is not necessary,” she interrupts, holding up a hand. “I want your face for my new brand. That is why I am paying you.”
I flush with pleasure, even though it does sound a bit like she’s about to slice it off and attach it to some kind of elaborate necklace. “What’s the label called?”
Yuka looks at me as if she’s already regretting her decision. “Yuka Ito.”
“Ah.”
“However,” she says, leaning back in the seat slightly, “I would like to make three things clear.”
I quickly scrabble in my satchel for a pen and a piece of paper. “Shoot,” I squeak, and then clear my throat in embarrassment. “I mean, please go ahead, Yuka Ito. Please. Thank you very much. Please.”
Yuka looks at me in silence and a line appears between her eyebrows. “Wilbur explained to you that the next few weeks require your complete discretion. Understood?”
I nod enthusiastically, and write 1. Discretion.
“I have not flown you to Tokyo to party. This is a job, and you will be working extremely hard. Clear?”
I nod, slightly less enthusiastically, and write 2. Not a holiday.
I guess that means I can wave goodbye to my planned trip to the Meguro Parasitological Museum, then.
Yuka narrows her eyes. “This launch campaign is a unique blend of Western and Eastern ideology. Every shoot will take stereotypical images and pull them apart: question and celebrate them. It will be powerful, fragile, feminine.”