The Look (17 page)

W
hen I get home, careful to avoid Dad, I catch Ava in the middle of a scarf-tying rehearsal in our bedroom — experimenting with the best fabrics and tying methods to keep them from slipping off at crucial moments. It’s for her first style session at the hospital.

She looks pale, still recovering from a busy week, but when I tell her what happened at Somerset House she screams so loud with delight that Dad rushes in, terrified she’s had a seizure. He sees me and I have to explain about the hat. Not good. That takes a little while. He nearly has a seizure himself. Then he leaves us to it so he can get back to his book.

I don’t tell him about Crazy Tina, and I don’t ask about his meeting with the TV researcher. Instead, Ava and I sit side by side on the edge of her bed, squished up in front of the mirror, checking out our bare heads.

“Did she really say you were unique?” Ava asks. She has a point: Without our very different hair, our similarities shine through.

“Yes. She says I have a Jean Shrimpton quality, combined with a Twiggy zing.”

“Who’s Jean Shrimpton?”

AHA! A model that Ava hasn’t heard of and I have! All that research over the summer has totally paid off.

“She was a model in the sixties,” I say airily. “She modeled for Bailey.”

“Bailey?”

AHA AGAIN!

Ava sees the grin on my face and rolls her eyes. “OK, OK. I get the picture. So? What did Cassandra Spoke say when she saw you? And what are you going to do?”

I shrug happily. “No idea. Cassandra liked the look. She could hardly say she didn’t, the way Tina went on about it. I know I said I’d never touch modeling again, but there was something about Tina …”

When she spotted me, it was as if she could see Xena standing there. I even told her about my warrior princess thing while we were watching the catwalk show, and she nodded, like that was perfectly normal. She got it, instantly. It was as if nothing could shock her.

“There was something so exciting about her,” I say to Ava, passing her a new scarf to try. “She totally
carpes
the
diem
. And she knows
everyone
. She waved to Anna Wintour in the front row and Anna
smiled back
. I can’t wait to tell Mum.”

“Yeah.” Ava grins. “She’ll be knocked out.”

Which only shows how little we know our own mother.

When she gets in from work, looking as tired and stressed as normal, I try to cheer her up by giving her the full story. From the look on Mum’s face, though, I might as well be
telling her I just got arrested. She doesn’t scream delightedly. Instead, she drags Dad and me to the dining table for a family conference.

“So let me get this straight,” she sighs. “Some stranger accosted you on the street?”

“Yes.”

“And told you she
liked your hair
?”

“Pretty much.”

“Because it reminded her of a French actress?”

“American actress,” Ava corrects her, wandering over to join us. “Jean Seberg — you know. She acted in some French films, though. And she had totally iconic hair.”

Mum doesn’t look convinced. “And you followed this woman to a fashion show that just happened to be on right around the corner?”

“Well, yes, at Somerset House —”

“And now she’s telling you she’s going to make you a supermodel.”

“Not exactly,” I correct her. “She just pointed out that she’s helped the careers of the last six girls to appear on the cover of
Vogue
. And of course I wouldn’t believe her just like that, but Cassandra Spoke agreed. She says Tina’s really famous in the fashion world. She gave Karl Lagerfeld ideas for the last Chanel collection.”

Mum’s stress peaks at a new level. “But I thought you’d given all that up!”

“Me, too.”

“The last time we discussed this you were in tears, darling, because you said everyone was better than you.”

“I did,” I agree in a very small voice. “But you said I was fabulous, Mum. And Tina agrees. She’s just … on a different level from everyone else. If she wants something to happen, she can make it happen. And she says she might never have spotted me if I had a full head of hair. It’s this” — I touch my head — “that makes the difference. I’m better prepared now, Mum. It won’t all be so new and confusing.”

“And heartbreaking,” Mum adds.

I move on quickly. I’d rather not remember the heartbreaking bits. “Before, they just sent me along for any old job. Tina says she’ll only send me for things she knows I can get, and she’ll tell them I’m coming.”

Mum sighs. “What do you think, Stephen?”

But Dad doesn’t answer. He’s looking at Ava in a way that instantly reminds me of the day he first noticed the lump on her neck.

“Are you all right, love?” he asks.

Ava nods. Her face is gray and there are dark blue shadows under her eyes. Her eyelids flicker for a moment. And then she sinks sideways out of her chair and onto the floor.

Mum leaps up and rushes over to check her.

“It’ll be her red-cell count,” she says, sounding panicked. “The nurses said they were worried.”

Dad carries Ava gently to bed while Mum grabs the phone to call the hospital. They put her on hold while they try to find a nurse from Ava’s team to talk to her.

“Ted, I haven’t got time for this,” she says to me irritably, phone in hand. “Your father seems to think you’re old enough to make up your own mind about what you do. He said something
about lettuce recently that I didn’t catch, and frankly I wonder about him sometimes. You’re
not
old enough to make up your own mind, but I’m too tired to argue, so here’s the deal: You can try doing what this woman suggests for a while, as long as it doesn’t affect your schoolwork in any way. If you get a job, Dad or I will come with you to make sure you get treated properly. Hopefully you’ll get at least one happy experience out of these shenanigans. Hello?”

A nurse speaks to her briefly down the line, then asks her to hold again. She sighs and forces herself to stay calm, but her shoulders are shaking and any minute now she’s going to need another tissue. I’d love to go up and hug her to say thank you, but I’m worried that if I touch her, she might crack. Somehow, my mother has a way of giving me what I want and making me feel extremely bad about it.

“And if you do get any money,” she continues in the same irritable tone while she holds some more, “you can use the first payment to buy your father a new fedora. In the meantime, will you please go and put a bandana on, or something, if you refuse to wear that expensive hairpiece round the house? You look disconcertingly like Uncle Bill when he joined the Royal Marines, and it’s giving me a headache.”

By the time Mum gets to talk to the head nurse overseeing Ava’s care, Ava has come to and she’s feeling weak, but OK. The hospital says to bring her in in the morning, when they’ll check red-cell count. They seem to think she’s better off in her own bed tonight, although I wonder. She’s hot and uncomfortable, finding it hard to sleep. As do I.

At midnight, she wakes up from a fitful doze and puts the light on.

“What’s the matter?” she asks.

I don’t know how she can tell there’s a problem. I’m lying flat in bed, with my eyes closed, but I suppose when you share a room with someone for a year, you get to know them pretty well.

“Mum.”

Ava sighs. “She’s got a lot on her mind. Don’t take it personally.”

I lie there not saying anything. Even so, Ava senses what I’m thinking.

“She’s doing too much. She’s trying to hold the job down, and come to the hospital with me, and … all the other stuff. That’s why she gets so ratty. She doesn’t mean it.”

“I know,” I sigh back.

I open my eyes and turn to Ava. She looks dreadful: pale and sweaty. Even her lips are gray. No wonder the nurses were worried.

“Maybe I shouldn’t push it,” I suggest. “Mum obviously doesn’t want me to.”

“What did she actually say?”

“She said yes, I could do some jobs. She said she wants me to get some ‘happiness out of these shenanigans.’”

With difficulty, Ava leans up on one elbow and smiles at me. “Then that’s what you should do. Tina di Gaggia sounds fantastic. Listen — why don’t you give it until Christmas? See if she can really help you. I’ll have my results by then. We can compare notes …”

Oh, right. I can find out if I’m a supermodel yet, and Ava can find out if she’s still alive. Brilliant. In fact, the more I think about it, the crazier it seems.

“Ted? You’re not crying?” she asks.

“No,” I admit. “I’m giggling. I was just thinking about us comparing notes.”

Ava thinks about it for a minute and giggles, too, coughing with the effort. In fact, we both keep setting each other off even after she turns the light back off and the rest of the flat goes silent. Cancer gives you a really weird sense of humor. Either that, or there’s something wrong with both of us.

A
s if I needed further proof after our first meeting, Tina di Gaggia is like nobody else I’ve ever met. On Monday — less than twenty-four hours after meeting me — she leaves me a voice mail while I’m at school. I love her unusual accent: sort of Italian, sort of American, with maybe a hint of Spanish. I wish I knew where she was from. Rio, maybe? Or Rome? I feel as if I ought to know, so I don’t dare ask. It’s like not knowing about Mario Testino.

“OK,” the message says, “so here’s the deal, Teddy-girl. We HAVE to meet tomorrow, Tuesday. I’ve been talking about you, my hotness, and there is NEWS. I’m back to NYC Wednesday, so it’s now or never, and it has to be now. I’m sending a car to pick you up at six, so dress nice, do your face, and we’ll do some test shots at my hotel. Frankie and Cassandra will be there, so we’ll have a ball. LOVE. YOU.”

Can she possibly be serious? I call Frankie to see if she has a clue what’s going on, and it turns out that everything’s arranged. Tina has a suite at Claridge’s, and we’re going to meet there. She’s told various people about me and they’re keen to see pictures,
but of course there aren’t any decent ones of me with my new Jean Seberg hairdo.

“When she said ‘dress nice,’ what did she mean?”

“Oh, you know, cool and funky,” Frankie says, as if those aren’t two of the most unnerving words in the world.

“And ‘do your face’?”

“Light makeup. Nothing OTT. Focus on the eyes. Oh, and you might want to get your brows threaded.”

She’s right. My caterpillar is impressively luxuriant at the moment, after a few weeks of being left alone. But I have SCHOOL tomorrow and we don’t have a team of stylists on tap at Richmond Academy.

“And what’s she going to do, exactly?”

“Oh, just take a few shots to show some people in New York. Let Cassandra see what she has in mind. See how things go.”

“Please tell me this isn’t normal.”

Frankie laughs. “No, Ted. This isn’t normal. Nothing to do with Tina G ever is. It’s why people love working with her. They say the
G
is for gold, by the way, because everything she touches … you know.”

It reminds me of King Midas. He turned his own daughter into gold and she died. It wasn’t a happy ending.

“Er, I’ll be all right, won’t I?” I ask.

Frankie pauses for a second, but her voice is firm and bright when she answers. “Yes, angel. This is as lucky as it gets. Don’t worry about a thing.”

When I get home, Mum’s in the hall, pulling on her coat over her green uniform.

“How’s Ava?” I ask.

“They’re keeping her in overnight,” she says, with a tight smile and a frightened look in her eyes. “I’m just going to visit.”

I feel my heart plummet.

“What’s happening?”

Mum looks at her watch. “I’m not exactly sure. I think she’s having the transfusion now.”

“Blood transfusion?”

“Yes.”

I picture wires and blood and needles, and Ava hooked up to … I don’t know what. Ava all by herself. I feel sick. I need to see her.

“Can I come with you?”

“No need, darling,” Mum says briskly. “Dad’ll be home soon.”

“But I want to. Please?”

She scans my face, which mirrors the fear in hers. I don’t want to be here by myself, waiting for Dad, not knowing what’s going on. She gives in.

“OK,” she sighs. “But go and grab a banana first. I don’t want you fainting on me, too.”

On the way to Ava’s ward, I try to ignore all the signs saying O
NCOLOGY
, and the fact that so many patients look thin and pale. I try to forget the image of Ava this morning, when her sleeping head on the pillow seemed so fragile that I suddenly had to lean down and make sure she was still breathing.

But I’m glad I came. When we get to Ava’s ward, we find her lying peacefully in a bed by a window, with a tube of dark red blood disappearing under her pajamas, where the line goes into
her chest. The blood comes from a bag hooked up to a stand behind her. It’s not as bad as I imagined at all. She still looks tired, but her skin has lost its gray tinge and she opens her eyes and smiles to see us.

“You missed the best bit, T,” she says quietly, with a wicked glint in her eye. “There was this enormous needle. They took my Hickman line and they —”

“Ugh! Shut up! You’re teasing.”

She grins.

“How’s it going, darling?” Mum asks, fussing around her and plumping her pillows. “What did the doctor say?”

“No idea,” Ava says, leaning back on the pillows.

Mum goes off in an anxious huff to check with the nurses.

I stand beside Ava’s bed, trying to look at home here, like I don’t know that all the teenagers in this ward have cancer. Like I do scary stuff like this all the time, and it’s not scary at all. The glint in Ava’s eye changes to something kinder.

“Why don’t you pass me my phone?” she says to me. “It’s been going off for ages and I can’t reach it.”

I dig it out of her bag, which is in the cabinet beside her, and help her check her messages, because she’s not up to fiddling with phone buttons right now.

“Ooh! Jesse!” she says. “Good. Open that one.”

The message turns out to be a video. I play it for her and hold the screen so we can both see it. There’s her boyfriend, looking beyond gorgeous in bleached hair and red trunks, standing on deck under a cloudless blue sky, smiling at the camera and singing a silly but sweet “get well soon” song about the transfusion. It would be cute, if he didn’t happen to be standing in the middle
of four Red-Bikini Babes, all with their arms around each other, all singing along. How he ever thought this would cheer Ava up, I can’t imagine.

“I’m sure they’re just friends,” I say unconvincingly.

“Yeah. Whatever.”

“Which is Barbie Girl?”

“That one.”

“I see what you mean.”

She sighs and shoves the phone under a pillow. “So, how about you, T? Any news from Tina? I’ve been telling everyone you’re a model.”

“Hardly!”

“
So?
” she insists.

“Well, as a matter of fact, Tina did call. She wants me to go to Claridge’s tomorrow evening so she can take pictures and show them to New York.”

It feels absurd to be saying this here, under these circumstances. But she asked.

“Ha! Told you!” Ava grins. Suddenly, she looks much better, but I feel sick again.

“I can’t do it,” I explain. “Frankie says I need to look cool and funky. And get rid of this …” I point to the caterpillar. “And I’ve got nothing to wear. And whenever I try and do smoky eyes I look like a startled panda. And I —”

“But you want to?” Ava interrupts.

“Yes. I
want
to. But I —”

“I’ll be out tomorrow morning. And I’ll be full of shiny red blood cells. I’ll be your makeup girl and stylist when you get back from school, OK?”

“Really?”

“Of course. But,” she adds sternly, “you’ll have to do your own eyebrow. If we wait till tomorrow, the patch will still be pink.”

“What? With
tweezers
?
By myself?
”

I realize I’ve raised my voice a bit at this point. I glance around the ward and notice a few faces staring back at me sympathetically.

Ava gives me a mocking smile. “They see your head and assume we’re talking about your next chemo regime — not just
plucking a few hairs out
, T. Jeez.”

“OK, I’ll pluck them,” I promise. By now I’m totally puce. Ava’s really enjoying herself. “But you mean it? You’ll help me?”

She leans forward with that glint in her eye. “Try and stop me. I’ve seen you getting ready for parties. You need me
so bad
.”