It’s definitely me – I recognise the freckles, the too-far-apart eyes, the pointy nose and vacant expression – but underneath it in neatly italicised letters is written:
HANNAH MANNERS
model-artist-performer-dancer-actress
I’ve been hyphenated five times?
Even in my panic I can’t help feeling quite impressed: pushy American model Kenderall would be so jealous of me right now.
“Trained at RADA?” Annabel frowns over my shoulder. “Graduated from a dance programme with the Royal Academy of Arts? A summer with the Royal Shakespeare Company? Harriet, do you have a Nobel peace prize knocking around somewhere that I don’t know about?”
The entire document is packed with achievements.
Short films I’ve starred in, awards I’ve won, songs I’m capable of singing entirely a cappella. There’s a brief summary of the time I triumphed in The Phantom of The Opera, and a paragraph all about just how wide my splits are and how fast I can backflip. My emotional range, apparently, is quite outstanding.
Except none of it was me, obviously.
Having known me for a year now, I’d imagine you’ve already worked that out for yourself.
“Stephanie’s sent them the wrong details,” I say in a blank voice. “She actually, literally thinks I’m Hannah Manners.”
Yah, Hannah, darling. That’s what I said.
I look at Annabel with wide eyes.
I can’t do this. I can’t film an international television commercial as if I’m somebody who knows exactly what they’re doing. I struggle to behave like a normal human being in private, let alone when it’s being recorded for posterity and shown to millions.
I glance at the brief again.
Like, literally millions. This is being shown in England. France. Italy. America. South America. Spain. Portugal. Russia. Australi—
Oh my God. Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmy—
Hydrogen. Lithium. Sodium. Potassium …
“Harriet, sweetheart.” Annabel sits down next to me on the bed and gently pulls my hands away from my face. “This is exactly why I’m here: to sort out misunderstandings like this. Just give me a few minutes, and I’ll go and explain everything.”
She stands up and grabs her briefcase: always ready to fight some kind of legal battle, even on holiday.
Except … then what?
Annabel tells them I have the emotional range of a peanut, and then what happens? It’s too late to get sent home now. I’ll have to model anyway: they’ll just know I’m not good enough before I’ve even started.
Plus … isn’t this what I wanted? The opportunity to be someone better? Someone … starrier? Even if it means – temporarily – being someone else? Maybe Hannah can teach me a few things on my list while I’m at it.
And that does it.
“Don’t tell them,” I say firmly, standing up and forcing my breathing to slow back down again. “Annabel, if this is the girl they want, then this is the girl they’re going to get.”
I wave the paper in the air.
I can be risky. I can be confident. I can be brave.
Annabel frowns and looks at me steadily for a few seconds. “Are you sure? Because, sweetheart, you really don’t have to do this.”
“I know,” I say, putting the paper on the table. “This time I want to.”
n the forests of central Africa grows a plant called the Pollia condensata. It produces tiny iridescent fruit that reflect pinpricks of light, and biologists claim that it is officially the shiniest living organism in the world.
It used to be, anyway.
Ali politely takes Annabel to the riad hammam for a complimentary massage while I ‘get ready’. (“Fifteen years,” she says, grinning at me. “Tell your father to drag me out by my toenails.”) Then he leads me into the atrium and introduces me to a small, blonde, spiky-looking stylist called Helena.
Over the following hour, I am transformed from a human being into something that could be attached to the side of a car and used as a wing-view mirror.
With little dobs of glue, Helena gradually covers me head to toe in sequins and tiny bits of glass, beads, silver and gold, necklaces and bangles and hair clips and fake purple lashes. My dress is sparkly: red and pink and gold and silver. Even my face and hands have been sprayed so heavily with twinkle that every time I look down my vision glints, as if I’ve got a temporary case of glaucoma.
Seriously: National Geographic may want to send someone over. I am definitely breaking some kind of light-reflective record.
Finally, Helena daubs me with sticky red lip gloss, blue eyeshadow and three inches of very pale foundation, and then secures an enormous, heavy gold watch round my wrist. It looks like something that could be used to locate a submarine underwater.
“Try not to lose it,” she whispers to me under her breath. “If that’s even possible. It looks like it has a tracking device inbuilt.”
“It doesn’t,” a voice says from the doorway. “Sadly, because that would be super useful. Oh, you’re just a veritable phantasmagoria, Hannah! Exactly as I dreamt it. Well done, lady whose name I can’t remember.”
“I just followed your directions,” Helena says, holding up a stick-figure picture she’s been glancing at the entire time. I’d assumed it was a nostalgic keepsake from her five-year-old daughter. “The credit is all yours, Kevin. Please. Take all of it.”
“It just came to me, you know? I wanted Bollywood crossed with Strictly Come Dancing and I think we’ve achieved it. Or I’ve achieved it, really. You just did the sticking.”
A young, thin, slightly goat-like man hops into the room and holds his hand out to me. He’s wearing little brown furry boots, a white T-shirt, brown skinny jeans, a tartan scarf and a small curly beard, and for a few seconds he reminds me so much of Mr Tumnus, I’m tempted to check him for horns and warn him about the perils of fraternising with humans.
“I’m Kevin Holland, the director. But of course, you already know that.”
I shake his hand carefully.
How would I already know that? Is he wearing a name badge I haven’t spotted?
Be confident, err … Hannah.
“Oh yes. Kevin Holland. Of course.”
“Constantly being recognised everywhere I go is such a nuisance,” he continues, rubbing a hand over his beard. “I wasn’t prepared for this level of fame, you know. All the awards. All the attention. Just this time last year, I had thirty Twitter followers. Thirty. Can you believe that?”
He looks at me with shock and indignation.
Studies have shown that we like people more when they mirror our own actions back at us, so I rub my chin too: inadvertently scratching myself with a sequin in the process.
“No, Kevin, because that is unbelievable.”
“Now I have a blue tick and thirty-five thousand followers, and who are they all? Who knows? Who cares?”
I’m tempted to say: thirty-five thousand people probably know and care, but I bite my tongue.
“Then I meet Jacques Levaire at a big Hollywood party in Hackney and he’s all, ‘Hey, Kev, Kevin, Kevin Holland. I know you normally do profound art films that really mean something, but I would like to pay you an OBSCENE wad of money to bring that astonishing creative vision to my new line of expensive watches.’”
I stare at Kev-Kevin-KevinHolland in surprise.
Huh. Maybe that’s just how people talk in Hackney.
“I totes see what normal people miss, you know?” he continues cheerfully. “Like a superhero with x-ray vision, except I can view straight into the human heart, which is even more useful.”
It really isn’t.
Unless you’re a surgeon, and judging by the state of his nails, this seems unlikely. But that sounds like a very geeky and Harriet Manners response, so instead of sharing this thought I toss my head back with a little laugh.
You can do this, Harriet. You are star-like.
“Absolutely!” I laugh loudly. “And what is your …
modus operandi for this particular direction? I’d really like to channel the right creative vision. Are we thinking Marlowian? Millerian? A touch of Stoppardian with an air of Wildean?”
Kevin blinks a few times, as well he might.
I have literally no idea what I just said: I’m just naming playwrights I know and making long words out of them.
“Modus operandi?” he says faintly. “Creative vision? Stoppardian? Millerian?”
I flush. “Umm, by which I meant …”
“Oh, I know what you meant,” he says, grabbing my hands and kissing both of them. “Finally, they send me a professional I can actually work with.”
He drags me over to the door of the riad, bangs it open with a flourish and spreads his arms out wide in the sunshine.
“Now, Hannah, let’s make some art, shall we?”
emaa el-Fnaa is an ancient marketplace in the centre of the walled city of Marrakech. It’s an enormous open square used by both locals and tourists, and the origin of its name is unclear.
It means either ‘courtyard in front of a mosque’, ‘the mosque of death’ or ‘assembly at the end of the world’.
I’m going to vote for the latter.
It’s dusk by the time we get to the square and it feels exactly like walking into an exotic fairyland, or maybe Christina Rossetti’s enchanted goblin market.
During the day the square is filled with orange-juice stalls, ladies painting hands with intricate patterns of henna, medicine men selling cures and potions, tooth-pullers with teeth laid out in front of them and people selling little glasses with MOROCCO painted on them just in case anyone has forgotten what country they’re in.
But at night, everything changes.
The sun sets and the city shifts: music starts and spaces are filled with acrobats, dancers and musicians. Storytellers sit on the ground, fortune-tellers under umbrellas, snakes fight, monkeys dance and drums thump.
Lights are everywhere: scattered on the floor on tablecloths covered with candles and night-lights, and every now and then a whizzing blue light launches into the air: thrown by an enthusiastic child.
Marrakech during the day is wonderful, but Marrakech at night-time?
Totally magic.
“Gosh,” Annabel says as Ali leads us quietly between stalls. She’s now glowing and relaxed, and also sneaking quite a lot of little confused glances at my make-up and costume. “Harriet, you look very …”
Then she pauses for at least thirty seconds while she considers her internal thesaurus.
“Dazzling,” she finally settles for.
I pull a face, because I know exactly what she means. Held at the right angle, I could be used to create a small fire.
Ali smiles slightly and walks us past a vulture perched on the floor with a chain round its neck, beyond a group of backflipping dancers, to a corner that’s been sectioned off.
In the middle of it are enormous bright white lights and a team of people, holding cameras and looking in little screens.
And around them is an even larger circle of tourists.
Chatting, laughing, taking photos. Waiting patiently for the performance to begin.
I abruptly feel a bit nauseous.
There are a lot of fascinating attractions in Jemaa El-Fnaa, and it looks like I just became one of them.
“Sooooo sorry,” Kevin says, barging forward and dragging me through the crowd. “They must have heard I was here. There’s just no privacy for the famous, is there? No respect for the integrity of artists.”
“Is that Steven Spielberg?” somebody whispers. “Is this the new Indiana Jones film?”
“Is that the blonde girl from Twilight? She’s not as pretty in real life, is she?”
“OK,” Kevin continues as he pushes me quite aggressively into an open space and leaves me there while he runs next to the camera and picks up a blackboard. “I really want this to be fresh and unstilted. Feel the moment, you know? So I’m going to start rolling immediately, see how the two of you interact. See what the chemistry is like.”
I blink and stare in concern at the growing crowd.
The two of us? Oh my God. Not again.
Over the last ten months, I have modelled with a beautiful Australian boy, a white kitten called Barry, a strident New Yorker, a cockroach, a sad girl called Fleur and an octopus with very little patience for my shenanigans.
I fell in love with one, knocked the other over and made the rest of them hate me. As far as chemistry goes, it’s not a brilliant start.
“Bring out Richard,” Kevin shouts, clicking his blackboard together. “ACTION.”
I turn in astonishment – half expecting to see my father – and out of the crowd walks a little brown furry creature on all fours: round brown eyes, tail straight upwards.
They have got to be kidding me.
Because I’ve said this before, obviously, but I’ve never meant it literally.
Richard is a monkey.
ow, I love monkeys.
Monkeys share ninety-three per cent of their DNA with humans. They communicate with accents, play games, recognise photos of their friends and express affection by cuddling each other. They have even been known to lie to each other: yelling tiger so that the others retreat to the trees and they can keep a special food treat for themselves.
Monkeys are one of the sweetest, most curious and most fascinating species on the planet, and they’re third on my list of all-time favourites (under 1. elephant and 2. panda).
But I don’t love seeing them with a chain round their neck. I don’t love seeing them dragged across the ground of a paved market square.
And I definitely do not love having one shoved into my arms while the chain is secured tightly round my wrist and a little man with a beard is yelling: “Go on then, Manners! DO something!”
Richard wraps his little furry arms round my neck and stares into my face with huge, sad eyes and a little leathery nose.
And I suddenly want to cry.
“This is a macaque,” I say, disentangling his tiny hands gently. “A Barbary macaque.”
“Stop shooting!” Kevin shouts as Richard starts curiously picking at a bit of shiny plastic on my dress. “No, it’s not. It’s a monkey.”
“You don’t understand.” My throat is starting to tighten. “A Barbary macaque is a monkey. It’s the only macaque not found in Asia, and it’s an endangered species. There are fewer than six thousand of these left in the wild.”
Kevin frowns. “Well it’s not in the wild now so what are you complaining about? Action.”
I make the chain looser, and Richard – monkey, not father – clambers up on to my shoulder, then sits firmly on top of my head.
“You’re upsetting him,” I say fiercely as I feel his little furry tail curl down the back of my neck. “He shouldn’t be here. He should be out in the mountains with his mum and dad. Or his girlfriend.”
“CUT,” Kevin yells. “I thought you were used to working with animals? What about all that time at the circus?” He clacks his board again. “I’m not paying you to whine. Action.”
The crowd is starting to murmur unhappily.
“I don’t think he’s famous at all,” somebody whispers.
“And I’m not sure she is either. She’s definitely not pretty enough to be in Twilight. Or Indiana Jones, for that matter.”
Richard clambers back down into my arms and stares at me again, hand carefully placed on my chin, and I look up in a panic to where Annabel is standing at the front of the crowd in a sharp white shirt and grey trousers, arms folded.
She looks exactly as furious as I feel and is clearly just waiting for some kind of sign from me to leap into action.
Help, I communicate silently, and with a quick motion my stepmother stands directly in front of the camera so that it’s totally blocked.
“Stop filming,” she says coldly. “I’m a lawyer, and if this shot isn’t cut immediately, animal rights organisations will be contacted. Your client does not
need that kind of publicity. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
Kevin glares at her like an irritated seven-year-old.
Any second now, he’s going to stamp his feet, tell her he hates her and wishes he’d never been born before stomping to his bedroom. I can’t believe I ever thought Yuka Ito was insensitive. By comparison, she was an angora rabbit.
“Fine,” Kevin finally sighs angrily, flinging his scarf on to the ground. “Take the flaming monkey away. He was rubbish on camera anyway.”
A man comes and grabs Richard from me. He clings for a few seconds, little chocolate-coloured eyes still fixed on mine, then lets go.
I watch him leave with a lump in my throat.
Then I give myself a little shake and try to snap back into a slightly less antagonistic, fierce kind of mood. I’m here to do a job, after all. “I’m really sorry if I ruined your advert, Kevin. Would you like me to … umm.” What can I offer him instead? “Handstand? Cartwheel? Make a long string of origami cranes?”
I can only do one of those things, so I may have to learn the others pretty quickly.
“No, thank you. I’ve got a much better idea.”
Kevin looks around at the still mesmerised crowd and gives the first broad smile I’ve seen since I met him.
“Ladies and gentlemen, bring out the snakes.”
m not a lot happier, draped in four poor snakes.
But I’m supposed to be a professional, so I try my absolute hardest to look like I might be.
With the cameras rolling, I start swaying as gracefully as I can – waving my arms assertively – so that the film crew can capture me “at one with nature”. Despite the fact that nature doesn’t look like it really wants to be at one with me.
The large green one keeps trying to tie itself round my neck, and I’m not entirely sure I blame it.
“Kiss it,” Kevin hisses as the smaller brown one slides over my shoulder and peers with a tickling tongue into my ear.
“Excuse me?”