I make an embarrassed but pleased peeping sound.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m taking full credit for the hair. But she had all the beauty. She’d be so stoked right now.” Then Dad spins me round again so that my toes are on top of his feet and starts half-carrying, half-dancing me out of the bathroom. “Roar for me?” he demands.
“Rooooaaaar.”
“That’s the one. Now let’s go get ’em, Tiger.”
“I think this is leopard, actually,” I point out, looking at the coat. “Tigers have stripes.”
Dad gives me his widest grin. “Then let’s go get ’em, Leopard.”
It takes another four minutes to get out of the bathroom, and by the time I’m back in the hotel room, Dad has corrected the leopard analogy to “baby giraffe learning how to ice-skate”.
Which is extremely unkind. I’d like to see him try and walk with eight-inch spikes attached to his feet. Plus, giraffes never lie down and there are at least three points where I’m sort of horizontal.
“Well, this isn’t going to work, is it?” Wilbur points out eventually. “At this rate you’ll be way too old to model by the time we get down to the shoot, Angel-moo. You’ll probably be in your early twenties and what good is that to anyone?”
“I could put my trainers back on?” I suggest, getting them out of my bag.
Wilbur visibly flinches. “A next season, perfectly cut, limited edition Baylee coat worn with… are they supermarket own-brand trainers?” He swallows. “I think I just sicked up in my mouth. Fashion sacrilege. I can’t allow it. Not while there’s a breath left in this beautiful body of mine.” He frowns and looks around the room. “Luckily I’m brilliant as well as stunning,” he adds happily. “And I have an idea.”
Ten minutes later, I enter Red Square with my entourage behind me. It’s not exactly the entrance I was hoping for. In fact, I believe I’ve got my head in my hands for all of it.
Nick takes one look at the wheelchair, accurately guesses why I’m in it and gives a very uncool shout of laughter so loud that pigeons fly off the top of a nearby statue. Yuka isn’t quite as impressed.
“Would somebody like to tell me,” she hisses as she stalks towards where I’m sitting, glaring at the seven people standing behind me, “who broke my model?”
legant. Dignified. Graceful.
Three words that don’t describe me in the slightest. Five people have to pick me out of the wheelchair and carry me to where Nick is waiting in the snow, in front of St Basil’s Cathedral, and when they plop me down, it takes another few minutes to get me balanced enough to remain vertical on my own. Which I can just about manage. As long as I focus really hard, don’t move a muscle and scrunch my toes up into claws inside the shoes for leverage. And keep my hands out at the sides like a tightrope walker. None of which is aided by Dad’s continuous laughing.
Or – for that matter – Nick’s.
I’m briefly introduced to the photographer, Paul, who is a thin blond man without – as far as I can see – one single flamboyant tendency. He looks totally focused on the job, which is actually even more worrying. At least with Wilbur, it’s possible to forget that there’s a great deal riding on me.
It’s not a little metamorphosis experiment any more. It’s a job. It’s very expensive. It’s very important. And it matters to a lot of people.
“Look at me doing wheelies in the snow!” Wilbur screams in the background, spinning around in the wheelchair.
The photographer takes one look at him, grinds his teeth and looks back at Nick and me. “I just need to set up lighting,” he says in a tense voice, looking up at the sky. It’s starting to snow harder and the sky is a little darker than it was before. “Can somebody get my light reflector?”
A young boy races off and then runs back with a big gold circle.
“Just make yourself comfortable for a few minutes,” he says, fiddling with a little black box as the boy starts flicking the gold circle around. “I’ll take a few test shots when everything’s perfect.” He fiddles with the box again and then looks up. “Somebody might as well get Gary.”
Gary? Gary? Who the hell is Gary?
I look at Nick, who I’ve managed to avoid making eye contact with since I came back from the hotel. I feel extremely self-conscious now that my hair’s all gone. Like the Wizard of Oz after the curtain’s come down. Nick has his hands in the pockets of a large army-style coat and his hair gelled into a Mohican. He scrunches up his nose at me and my internal organs turn inside out again.
Shouldn’t I be immune to him by now? Or is he like the human version of the common cold?
“You want to watch out,” he says in his slow drawl. “Gary’s vicious.”