Model Misfit

Yup. If you think that the prospect of creating a new human life has in any way forced my father to grow up even slightly over the last six months you’d be wrong.

There’s a jellyfish called the Turritopsis nutricula, which Marine Biologists say is the only animal in the world that renders itself immortal by reverting back to adolescence every time it starts to age too much. All I’m going to say is: they obviously haven’t met my dad yet.

Let’s just see how long he sticks around.

Throwing my satchel into the corner of the hallway, I start a slow, stompy climb up the stairs. Six months ago they were pretty, white-painted wood; they are now covered in horrible beige, hard-wearing carpet with fiddly stair gates at either end. There used to be a space under the banister where the cat would climb the stairs and headbutt me from eye-level, as a kind of greeting. It’s been blocked up.

There are also fake plug-coverings in all of the plug sockets and padding around the edges of the tables and more gates in doorways, just in case we need to be herded safely from room to room like cattle.

I reach the newly safe and sanitised landing and stare at my parents. “What are you doing?”

“Hello, Harriet.” Annabel is wearing an enormous, elasticated, pin-stripe suit, and is calmly wiping one of my fossils with a cloth. “Sweetheart, why is your face gold? And what on earth happened to your jumper?” She looks down. “I know I’m full of pregnancy hormones, but I’m certain you were wearing two socks this morning.”

“Oh amazeballs!” Dad cries from the study. “You coloured yourself gold! To win an exam! That is creative genius!”

I think my head is about to explode. “I’m serious, what are you doing? You can’t clean fossils, Annabel. You are literally wiping away 230 million years of history!”

“I think this is a coating of dead skin cells and dust mites, actually. When was the last time you dusted these, Harriet?”

I grab the fossil from her. “This is an Asistoharpes! This is 395 million years old! Why don’t you just stick it in the washing machine while you’re at it?”

My stepmother raises her eyebrows in silence.

“I think if it’s survived that long it can handle a bit of wet cloth, don’t you?”

I ignore her and turn to Dad, who is standing on the office chair, trying to get down my collection of books about the Tudors. Every time he reaches for one he swivels slightly and has to hang on to the shelf for balance. “What are you doing?”

“There’s a whole load of stuff here that’s yours, Harriet,” he explains, reaching for a biography of Anne Boleyn and swivelling again. “So we’ve built some more shelves in your bedroom. This is going to be the baby’s room.”

I grab a few of my books off the bed from where they’ve just been thrown, willy-nilly. “This room is called the study, Dad. If this was a room for a baby, it would be called something else!”

“It is, Harriet,” Dad says, laughing. “We just renamed it.”

I can feel every single cell in my body fizzing and bursting like those crackly sweets that pop on your tongue. First Alexa, then Nat, now this. Today isn’t even making an effort to go to plan any more.

“There isn’t room in my bedroom for all my stuff!”

“Then throw some of it away,” Annabel suggests with a tiny smile. She’s cleaning another fossil. “Or we can put it in the attic. Or maybe in the garden. I imagine these rocks would probably be very happy there.”

My throat is getting tighter and tighter. “What do you mean throw it away? You can’t just throw preserved evidence of natural evolution in the bin!”

Annabel puts her hand gently on her enormous straining belly. “Harriet, what’s going on, sweetheart? Did your last exam go badly? What’s the matter with you?”

“Me? What’s the matter with both of you? Baby, baby, baby! It’s all baby, baby, baby!”

“Are you about to start singing Justin Bieber?” Dad asks. Annabel snorts with laughter and then puts her hand guiltily over her mouth.

My head pops.

“Oh my GOD!” I yell. “I hate you, I hate this house and THIS IS GOING TO BE THE WORST SUMMER EVER!”

And with one grand gesture, I burst into tears, sweep every single fossil I can into my arms and storm into my bedroom.

Leaving every window in the house rattling behind me.

Reasons Not to Think About Nick

1 He told me not to.

2 I’ve got much more important things to think about.

OK. So maybe I didn’t tell you everything.

I told you the stuff you might tell a teacher, or a neighbour or the old lady who works at the corner shop and won’t stop asking questions. But I didn’t tell you the real stuff. Not the stuff that counts.

I slide down the back of the door and stare blankly at the jumble of fossils now sitting in my lap. Here are some interesting facts I’ve discovered recently about the animal kingdom:

 The cuckoo is built with a small dip in its back so that it can toss out the other eggs as soon as it’s born.

 Mother pandas only care for one of their cubs, and allow the other to die.

 Shark embryos fight and eat each other in the womb and only the winner is born.

Don’t even get me started on what the spotted hyena does to its relations. Trust me, you really don’t want to know.

What I’m trying to say is, I’m incredibly excited about having a new brother or sister. Of course I am. Babies are cute – in a baldy, screaming kind of way – and a really big part of me can’t wait to meet my new sibling and buy it cute little dinosaur T-shirts and a miniature satchel and (eventually) matching crossword puzzles so that we can do them together over breakfast.

But another part of me is anxious.

Literature, history and nature repeatedly remind us that it’s not always TV deals and record contracts and matching outfits when it comes to siblings. If King Lear and the Tudor dynasty taught us nothing else, it’s that you might want to watch your back. Especially if you’re a half-sibling like me. Because if push comes literally to shove, somebody normally ends up getting kicked out of the nest.

Over the last six months, the baby has started taking over everything:

 First breakfast streamlined into one topic: did you know that the baby’s heart starts beating after twenty-two days? Did you know that by seventeen weeks it has fingerprints?

 Then random questions: do you think it’ll hate mushrooms, like Annabel, or cinnamon, like Dad?

 Then it started demanding olive milkshake and ketchup on ice cream and once – to my absolute horror – a bit of the white chalk from my maths blackboard.

 People started visiting and walking straight past me to ‘The Belly’.

 Annabel started looking tired all the time. Dad started looking anxious and being extraordinarily loud to make up for it.

 And the photograph of my mum on the mantelpiece mysteriously moved to the guest bedroom, as if that would help everyone forget what happened to the last person in this house who tried to have a baby.

Or the fact that the baby was me.

And – bit by bit, gate by gate – the house started changing, and my room started feeling smaller, and my parents stopped talking or thinking about anything else.

Then – without warning – Nick dumped me.

So I threw myself into the thing I’d kind of been neglecting for once: schoolwork. I studied at breakfast, lunch and dinner. I studied in the bath, and on the toilet, and on the bus, and in the shower by sketching maths equations into the steam on the glass. I even studied during modelling shoots, as you already know.

Basically, I stuffed my head with facts and formulas and dates and equations and lists and diagrams so there wouldn’t be room for anything else.

But now exams are finished, and school is over.

Nat is leaving for France.

Lion Boy is still gone.

I’m less important to my parents than someone who isn’t even born yet.

And all I can do is sit in my room, staring at my overcrowded new bookshelves and wondering what to do next.

Because that’s the truth about people with obsessively organised plans: we’re not trying to control everything in our lives. We’re trying to block out the things we can’t.

But now there’s nothing left.

Nothing but the baby.

nyway.

By the time I wake up the next morning – owner of the world’s most sparkly pillow – I feel a bit more hopeful. On the bright side, there is no way my life could get any worse.

Last night, everyone else in my year was getting ready to party. Sneaking out of the house in one outfit so they could change into a smaller one. Discussing in excited whispers who was going to kiss who, and who was going to wish they hadn’t. Giggling and laughing and getting ready to celebrate the end of compulsory education in a way they would never, ever forget.

Meanwhile, I was sitting on my bedroom floor on my own, painted gold, crying, with a shredded school jumper pulled over my head. I think that’s pretty much rock bottom, even by my own socially redundant standards.

Things always look better in the morning, though, and by the time I wake up I’m actually quite entertained to discover that I’ve left a trail of damp gold glitter behind me, like an enormous sparkly fairy.

Hugo’s lying patiently at my feet. I give him a quick cuddle to let him know I’m mentally stable again, then hop out of bed to grab my phone and switch it on. It gets so little activity these days, sometimes I actually forget I have one.

Which is why it’s a bit of a shock when it rings immediately.

“Hello?”

“Ferret-face, is that you?”

I never know what to say to questions like that.

“Hi, Wilbur. It’s Harriet.”

“Oh, thank holy dolphin-cakes,” my agent sighs in relief. “I was starting to think you’d spontaneously combusted. I just read about a man that happened to, Kitten-cheeks. One minute he was washing up and the next minute, POOF. Just a few bubbles and a broken plate.”

I blink a few times. Sometimes talking to Wilbur is like falling out of a big tree: you have to just try and catch a few branches to hang on to on the way down. “Is everything OK?”

“Not enormously, Baby-baby Panda. I’ve left nineteen messages on your answer machine, but you’re a naughty little lamp-post and haven’t answered a single bunny-jumping one of them.”

Sugar cookies. I’d totally forgotten about the mess I made of the shoot yesterday. “Is this about Yuka?”

She’s going to hang-draw-and-quarter me like they did in the sixteenth century. Except she’s going to do it with words instead of a sword and it’s probably going to hurt more.

“It most certainly is, Poodle-bottom. Time is, as they say, of the essential oils. Where have you been?”

I swallow with difficulty. “I-I-I-I’m so sorry, Wilbur.”

“It might be too late now, my little Monkey-moo,” Wilbur sighs. “There are forms to fill in, things to sign, governments to inform.”

They’re going to tell the government? That seems a little bit excessive, even for Baylee. “Please, Wilbur. I won’t do it again.”

“Once is enough, Cupcake-teeth. It normally is.”

I close my eyes and sit heavily on my bed.

I don’t believe this. I actually don’t believe it.

It’s not even eight o’clock in the morning yet; I haven’t even opened the curtains. There’s sleep in my eyes and the imprint of Winnie the Pooh’s nose on my cheek. And it looks like I’ve just been fired.

t was only a matter of time.

I’m like the donkey in the Aesop’s fable who dressed in a lion skin and got away with it until the fox heard him bray. I’ve been waiting for six months for the fashion industry to realise I’m their donkey and chuck me back out again.

I quickly put Wilbur on speakerphone, throw the mobile across my room and climb miserably back into bed. Then I pull a pillow over my head.

You know what? I think I am just going to stay here. I’m almost certain that nobody will notice. I’ll be like Richard III, and in hundreds of years archaeologists will find my skeleton buried under some kind of car park, where future people keep their spaceships.

Or jet packs.

Or magnetically levitating transporters.

Or flying bubbles.

I’m just trying to work out if in 500 years they’ll have finally found a way to replace the wheels in my trainers with rockets when some of Wilbur’s nonsensical words start filtering in through the pillow. “Candle-wick.” “Rabbit-foot.” “Potato-nose.” “Tokyo.”

Tokyo?

I lift the sparkly pillow so I can hear a bit better.

“…so there’s going to be a lot of work to do before you go … and oh my gigglefoot that reminds me you need to pick up some spot cream because we do not want any dermatological disasters like last time you went abroad, do we, my little Baby-baby Unicorn? Eat some more vegetables before you get there and …”

The tiger beetle is proportionately the fastest thing on earth. If it was the size of a human, it could reach 480 mph. I’m on the other side of the room so quickly I reckon I would leave it panting and retching behind me.

“Hello?” I pick the phone up, drop it and then grab it again and start randomly whacking buttons. “Hello? Hello? Wilbur? Hello? Are you there? Hello?”

“Where else would I be, Owl-beak? This is my phone, isn’t it?”

“What did you just say?”

“Love bless you, Plum-pudding. I forget your family has a problem with earwax. I said, try and eat some more vegetables before you land in Tokyo, or Yuka’s going to kick off again and we all know what that means.”

My entire body suddenly feels like it’s been electrocuted. Before I land in Tokyo? “I’m not fired?”

Wilbur shrieks with laughter. “Au contraire, my petit poisson. Yuka has a brand-new job for you in Japan, and if we get moving I should be able to get flights sorted in time.”

I stare at the wall in silence.

I’ve been obsessed with Japan since I was six years old. It’s the Land of the Rising Sun: of sumo and sushi; karaoke and kimonos; mountains and manga. Homeland of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Studio Ghibli; of Hayao Miyazaki and Haruki Murakami. Mecca for geeks and freaks and weirdos. I have dreamt about visiting Japan ever since …

Well. Ever since I realised it existed to visit.

Oh my God: this could fix everything. It will be my New and Infinitely More Glorious Summer Plan 2 (NAIMGS2). I can make a brand-new flow chart. It’s perfect.

And, yes, it might only be a temporary solution, but everybody knows that if you put enough temporary solutions together you’ve got something that lasts a very long time indeed.

“YES!” I shout, picking Hugo up and giving him the biggest, most twinkly kiss of his life, right between his eyebrows. “When do I leave? What’s the plan?”

“You leave on Saturday, my little Panda-pot. And BOOM!” he adds after another stunned silence. “Your fairy godmother strikes again.”

ight. Time to initiate the New Plan.

The first and most important step to convincing your parents that you are a responsible nearly-adult, capable of foreign jaunts, is obviously not being painted gold. So I hop in the shower and scrub myself until I no longer look like the death mask of Tutankhamen.

Then I peruse my wardrobe for something that says I am an authoritative and totally trustworthy girl on the cusp of womanhood. Something that says I can be sent very far away without any repercussions.

In a moment of poetic inspiration, I put on the most expensive thing I own and grab the matching accessories. I spend a few minutes fiddling on my laptop, then stride confidently into the kitchen to face my parents.

“Zac?” Annabel’s saying, pouring ketchup into an open tin of pears and mixing it up with the end of an empty biro. “For a boy or a girl?”

“Either. It’s very gender neutral.” Dad pauses and then adds, “Plus it’s the name of a Macaw from San Jose who can slam twenty-two dunks in one minute.”

“Vetoed.”

“What about Zeus?”

“Zeus? As in the lightning-lobbing Greek father of Gods and Men?”

“As in the world’s tallest dog. Great Dane. Nice eyes.”

Annabel laughs. “I don’t care how nice his eyes are, Richard. Vetoed.”

“Archibald, the world’s smallest bull?”

Annabel looks calmly at Dad. “I think it’s time to give Harriet back her Guinness Book of Records.”

Dad shakes his head. “I’m surprised at you, Annabel. Do you have no respect for the majesty of the animal kingdom?”

“I have plenty of respect for it, Richard. I just don’t particularly want it coming out of my uterus.”

“Liz?”

“You’d better be referring to the Queen.”

“Of course I am,” Dad says indignantly. “Two of them, in fact. Both fierce examples of female power, independence and majesty.” He pauses. “And, you know … Hurley.”

I quickly cough from the doorway before there’s only one parent left alive to appeal to. Then I walk regally into the centre of the room.

“Father. Annabel.” I look at Hugo who scampered down here at the first whiff of cheesy-bacon. “Dog. I would like to open this session by apologising profusely for my behaviour yesterday. It was an untimely display of vivaciousness due to the unexpected ruination of my Summer of Fun Flow Chart. I should have found a way to express my entirely valid opinions more reasonably.”

I pause to see if this heartfelt apology has sunk in. They’re both staring at me with wide eyes. Ha. I feel a bit like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m totally going to nail this.

“Secondly,” I say, putting my laptop down on the table and pressing a button so that it shines at the wall. “I have something very important to show you.”

There are a few seconds of impressed, awed silence.

Then my parents burst into laughter so loud that Hugo steps back and starts barking at the ceiling.

“Brilliant,” Dad gasps. “What’s she wearing this time?”

“I think it’s her bridesmaid dress from Margaret’s wedding,” Annabel whispers, wiping her eyes. “You can still see where she sat on a candle during the after-dinner speeches.”

“Oh, thank God. I thought my daughter had turned into an enormous toilet-roll holder.”

I wait patiently for them both to stop giggling. I’m totally going to remember this moment when it comes time to put them in a retirement home.

“This outfit,” I say, nobly deciding to rise above both of them, “may be a bridesmaid dress, but if you use your imagination it represents something much bigger.”

I press a button on my laptop, and an image of a cygnet shines on to the wall. “I was once an ugly duckling—”

Dad puts his hand up. “With feathers all stubby and brown?”

I stick my tongue out at him and press the button again. The picture changes from cygnet to swan. “But in the last six months, I have grown up a lot. I have transformed.” I click quickly through a few photos of tadpoles and frogs, caterpillars and butterflies I copied from Google. “But what happens at the end of a transformation … is that where the story ends?”

I point at the slide that says:

TRANSFORMATION → WHAT NEXT?

“Yes.”

I scowl. “It’s a rhetorical question, Dad. The implied answer is clearly no.”

“Keep going, Harriet,” Annabel says through a mouthful of ketchup pear. “I’m curious to see where this will end up.”

“Does a caterpillar sit on the same leaf when it’s a butterfly? No! It goes for a little fly and sees something of the world. Does the tadpole stay in the same pond once it’s a frog? No! It stretches its legs, goes for a jump, explores other waters.” I gesticulate energetically with my matching fake flower bouquet. “Did Cinderella go back to cleaning hearths once she married the prince?”

“Probably,” Dad says. “They didn’t have women’s rights back then. She had to do the cooking too, and probably a bit of laundry.”

“For the love of sugar cookies, Dad, stop answering rhetorical questions.”

I take a deep breath and compose myself again.

“Transformation means moving forwards. If a butterfly stays on the same leaf and a frog stays in the same pond, then they may as well have stayed a caterpillar or a tadpole. There was no point in metamorphosing.”

“Wrap it up now, Harriet,” Annabel says gently.

I had an entire slide about a dragonfly, but maybe I’ll leave that for the encore. I click to the final slide, and a picture of Mount Fuji shines on to the wall with my face hastily copied and pasted on top of it.

“So, in summary: I assert my right to go to Tokyo for a modelling job. Thank you for listening.” And I plonk myself triumphantly down on a chair.

Excellent. That should do it.

Maybe I won’t be a physicist after all. I’ll be a lawyer, and my poetic and powerful Powerpoint presentations will be made into poignant fridge magnets for years to come.

Dad’s expression reminds me of Hugo when we get takeaway pizza. “Japan? The agency wants Harriet to go to Japan? Annabel, that’s where those little trees that look like big trees but smaller come from. Can I go with her, Annabel? Please?”

“Richard,” Annabel says, “if you had a full-sized koala lodged in your abdomen, would you want me to stay with you?”

Dad looks horrified. “Definitely.”

“Then let’s assume I feel the same way, shall we?” She turns back to me with a softer voice. “We can’t take you to Japan, sweetheart. I wouldn’t be able to get through the doors of the aeroplane, for starters, and I need your dad here because I could go into labour at any moment. You understand, don’t you?”

I nod. Of course I understand that.

Annabel’s eyes widen. “So what you’re actually asking is to go to Tokyo, entirely on your own? At fifteen years old?”

“Yuka will be th—” I start, and Annabel looks at me sharply.

She has a point: Cruella De Vil would make a more reassuring guardian.

I clear my throat and clutch my fake flower bouquet as tight as I can. “Like Cinderella, I believe it is my turn to stop cleaning hearths.”

“Harriet,” Dad points out. “You don’t even make your own bed.”

“I’m talking symbolically.” Dad clearly doesn’t understand the subtleties of the English language. “Please?”

Annabel smiles. “Come here,” she says affectionately, and when I perch on the sofa next to her she nudges me with her shoulder and spikes another pear with her biro. “Listen, we know things are hard for you at the moment, Harriet. Don’t think we haven’t noticed.”