Muse by Rebecca Lim
‘Just ignore them,’ she says, looking up at me from the stool she’s found from somewhere. All morning I’ve watched her playing with her little black phone, heading out into the corridor occasionally to take a call. ‘You’re doing surprisingly … great,’ she says encouragingly. ‘This has to be your best effort ever. You haven’t thrown a single thing. No one can quite believe it — I know, because I’ve been eavesdropping.’
The left-hand door opens and Tommy comes sailing in with a plump, smiling woman at his side, in her late twenties or early thirties. Unlike all the other glamazons in the building who are wearing top-to-toe Giovanni Re suits, she’s fearlessly dressed in a heavy, aubergine-coloured wool dress of a striking design with a forties-meets-seventies vibe, heavy wool ribbed tights in burnt orange, and vintage-looking dark and lime green Mary-Janes. Her straggly, shoulder-length hair has dark roots and bright yellow ends. I like how comfortable she seems in her own skin, and I like her face. It’s plain, but strong. There’s a fierce intelligence in her bright blue gaze that seems to take in everything around her.
‘This is Juliana,’ Tommy says. ‘Resident “special effects” guru. She’s Giovanni’s secret weapon — every show she’s put together for him since she left design school has been a sensation. We’ve been talking, and my Jesus-meets-Druid headwear idea for this gown was so, so off the mark. I’d completely forgotten that Giovanni’s had Juliana and her crew whip up something a little extra special for the show.’
He crosses back to the doorway and undoes the floor and ceiling bolts holding the right-hand door closed. ‘Ta dah!’ he sings, and opens the door with a flourish.
On my raised pedestal, above all their heads, I freeze in horror as I see what’s being wheeled up the hallway towards us, suspended by hooks on a steel clothing rack: three pairs of wings hanging like meat for sale at a butcher’s shop. One gold, one black, one white, their end feathers trailing upon the concrete floor.
They’re so lifelike, it’s as if they’ve been cut from some mythical creature. I almost expect to see blood dripping from them onto the concrete floor.
For a moment, that hateful sensation returns — of being balanced on razor wire over the shrieking abyss.
I feel so dizzy, so sick with dread, that the world seems to telescope, or the world is in me, and I lose any sense of up, of down, and fall off the pedestal onto the hard concrete floor, as if I have fainted. I stare, shaken, at the fluorescent lights above that give out such a cold, cold light, as if channelled from a distant galaxy.
‘Irina!’ Gia yells, dropping her phone and scrambling off her stool towards me as the black-clad seamstresses, as Tommy and Juliana flock around, lifting me into a sitting position.
‘I’m all right,’ I say gruffly, holding my pounding head. ‘It’s just vertigo.’
‘Vertigo?’ Gia says incredulously. ‘The podium’s about a foot off the ground! What are you talking about?’
But it is vertigo, which is as crazy as it sounds. It overcame me when I saw those things being wheeled towards us. I can’t take my eyes off them, though they both repel and fascinate.
Juliana follows the line of my sight and says haltingly, in heavily accented English, ‘You don’t … like them?’
I swallow hard, feeling nausea as the wings reach the doorway of the studio. I hear Juliana’s two assistants — one male, one female — squabbling a little in Italian as they try to manoeuvre the rack through the door without upsetting its cargo.
‘They’re so beautiful,’ I whisper, ‘that they look real.’
‘As if I have reached up and plucked them myself from the backs of angels?’ Juliana says happily. ‘That is what I hoped to achieve! Giovanni said I was mad to make them all — and all different. But when I see his designs, I could think of nothing else but the wings.’
‘You should see Juliana’s workroom,’ interjects Tommy with a grin. ‘It’s like a flock of angels moulted in there.’
‘A power,’ I say absently. ‘A power of angels.’
I want to look away from them, but I can’t. When I look at those wings, in my mind’s eye I see elohim with flaming swords upraised, engaged in combat, slaying their enemies with holy fire. And I don’t know if these are real memories — my memories — or whether they are things I have witnessed through touching another’s skin. All I know is that when we are angered, when we are called to do battle, when we are of a mind to kill, then and only then do we show our wings.
Like furies. Like harpies. Like birds of prey.
No, that’s not quite right.
We don’t need wings to propel ourselves from the ground, because we can materialise anywhere we wish — any height, any depth — so long as we know where, so long as we can see it in our mind’s eye. Will it, and it is done.
No, we use our wings to strike fear into the hearts of our enemies. Like a cobra’s hood, a scorpion’s tail, they are a symbol of power, a portent. They serve as a warning of the terror to come.
We angels are misconceived in the human world. People perceive us as kindly and bountiful, when, in truth, we are about as fluffy, as gentle, as yielding, as rattlesnakes.
As I stare at Juliana’s wings, I realise where the sensation of vertigo came from. It’s something I keep buried, something I try not to think about too much, because I can’t reconcile this phobia of mine with what I used to be. I have a terrible fear of heights.
Fear doesn’t even begin to describe how terrified I become when I even visualise myself being any great distance off the ground. When I think about the actual mechanics, even the bare concept, of flying, I break out in a cold sweat and my left hand burns with pain.
I look at the circle of concerned faces and, refusing all offers of assistance, climb unsteadily to my feet. Juliana takes down the first set of wings — every feather on the balsawood frame handcrafted from a light, brittle kind of metal and painted gold — and guides my arms through the leather straps of the harness. The wings are a perfect fit; they’re lighter even than the dress. They could be my wings; although, in truth, the wings of the elohim, our weaponry, our glowing raiment, all these are fashioned out of our own energy. We don’t carry them around with us. They’re part of us. When we need them, they’re simply there.
Tommy arranges my unbound hair upon my shoulders then says triumphantly, ‘Voilà!’
Everyone in the room takes a small step away from me, their hands clasped together, their eyes welded upon me. And, to a man, to a woman, they all sigh.
The wings are taller than I am. They’re like the wings from a painted religious icon made real. And every second they are on my back, I shudder.
Tommy tilts his head and cups the side of his face in his hand as he studies me. ‘You were right, Juliana. Nothing else is needed. Just the wings. They’re enough.’
He walks around me a couple more times with Juliana and Valentina following anxiously in his wake. I wonder if they can see me shaking.
‘Perfection,’ Tommy finally pronounces, and I almost collapse again — with relief, this time — as Juliana finally removes the wings from my shoulders.
It’s after 5 pm when I’m allowed at last to leave Studio 4, bound for another part of the building where the moneyed haute couture clients have their private showings. Gia and Juliana chat in rapidfire Italian like old friends as they lead me back through Atelier Re. I see that the building is steadily emptying of its fashionable occupants. In small groups, they leave their seamless workstations, their pattern-cutting tables, bead boxes, rolls of fabric and hat blocks, meeting rooms and endlessly curated collections of elegant clothing, grouped by season, for the front exit, where Giovanni’s security team looks into each person’s face and bids them farewell by name.
Someone has turned off the sound system and the building is quiet, but I’m still haunted by that aria that was playing when I entered the building, so many hours ago. The melody keeps tugging at me, and I realise that, like the ability to recognise certain languages, the ability to
I’m back in the leather pants and simple cashmere tunic that Gia picked out earlier today, but I’ve had her throw the high-shine, high-heeled, torture-device shoes into Irina’s holdall. I stalk the cold, brushed-concrete floors in my long, bare feet, still wearing the heavy, mask-like make-up that Tommy and his team of stylists came up with for the fourteen models taking part in the anniversary parade. I catch sight of my reflection in a glass window as I pass by: eyes ringed in smoky black kohl, lids filled in right up to the brow line with a glittering grey eye shadow, the inner and outer corners of my eyes illuminated in gold. My lips and nails are the same blood red that I first saw on Gudrun — rosso Re, my manicurist had confided as she’d filled in the nails of my hand, Giovanni Re’s signature shade of red, his trademark colour. The make-up artists had finished by dusting my cheek and brow bones with a fine, gold powder. I don’t think I’ve ever looked so truly alien.
As I walk barefoot through the emptying building — almost weaving with exhaustion — I rip off my false eyelashes and let them flutter to the ground like butterflies. Shake out the sleek topknot Tommy insisted on for the bridal look and run my fingers down through the wavy strands of Irina’s hair. There’s so much pressure inside my skull that it feels as if it’s about to split open. The heavy pounding of Irina’s heart forms the soundtrack to my progress.
Gia takes my elbow as we cross the now quiet atrium. Juliana is leading us towards a spiral concrete ramp at the far side of the building, and I realise it’s the main staircase connecting all four floors of Atelier Re. I study the elegant spiral that rises and twists so far above us.
‘How far up are we going?’ I say through gritted teeth.
Two storeys I can handle. Four might kind of be pushing it, for me.
Three lives back, when I’d woken as a single mother called Lucy who lived in a filthy, high-rise apartment in a virtual ghetto of government-owned tenements, I’d had to make sure that I never looked out the windows. Every time I stepped out of the lift that had stunk of vomit on the twenty-second floor, I’d stayed clear of the balcony that ran parallel to the apartment entrances on that level. Each time I’d been forced to return to Lucy’s flat — because it was nightfall, because there was nowhere else safe to go — I’d hugged the inner wall, inching painfully towards Lucy’s front door, her listless, malnourished baby on my hip, almost overcome with vertigo and a strange sense of shame. Back then, I hadn’t understood why. But I do now, because it’s somehow linked to the reason I’m even here on earth at all.
‘Second floor,’ Gia replies, shooting me a glance. ‘You didn’t go back to sleep this morning, did you? After that … nightmare you had. Your eyes are practically burning holes in your head.’
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ I reply simply. ‘And it didn’t help that Felipe offered me a morning heart-starter of vodka mixed with pure liquid meth.’
‘He what?’ Gia says, turning to me in disbelief.
‘No biggie,’ I say wearily, the way Ryan would, forgetting how strange it might sound in Irina’s Moscow-via-Novosibirsk accent until I’ve said the words. ‘I handled it.’
The thought of Ryan fires off more starbursts of pain somewhere in the region of Irina’s neural cortex and I clutch at my head momentarily, hearing that achingly familiar voice crying into the border between sleep and wakefulness: Mercy, where are you?
Gia pulls her mobile phone out of her leather jacket. ‘Management have got to be told. I knew there was a reason I hate that guy.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘Just drop it. He won’t be troubling Irina again. I made sure of that.’
I’m still not quite sure how, but it doesn’t matter now.
Gia gives me a weird look and replaces her phone in her pocket uncertainly.
I look neither left nor right as we ascend the ramp to the second storey of Atelier Re, the knuckles of my left hand white upon the smooth, concrete banister, my right gripped tightly around the handles of Irina’s handbag, as if it is a life jacket.
The corridors on the second floor are softened by lush, honey-coloured carpets, and the high, art deco-style ceilings are punctuated by enormous modernist chandeliers, white, like floating clouds. It’s a different world up here: timber-panelled walls and traditional-looking wall sconces, antique furniture mixed in effortlessly with modernist pieces in a way I’ve come to recognise as quintessentially Giovanni. We move past a private lift and a couple of life-sized ceramic sculptures that seem almost two-dimensional, like freestanding paintings. On the flat surface of one sculpture there’s a boy playing a pipe, painted in strong and hasty brushstrokes. On the other, a warped caricature of a female figure — eyes in the wrong places; crazy, funfair colours.
‘Picassos,’ Gia says, without stopping, and I crane my head to look back at them, at the strange energy in the lines.
Juliana stops outside a door, knocks on it gently.
‘Entra!’ a male voice calls out.
Juliana opens the door. Giovanni is framed in the doorway, seated at a colossal writing desk and surrounded by bookcases and shelving, undoubtedly priceless art and memorabilia, figurines, awards, framed photographs of himself with people who must be notable in some way. The only source of light in the room is a desk lamp upon the table.
He puts down the pen he is holding and takes off his tortoiseshell frames for a moment, rubbing at his eyes.
‘All finished?’ he says wearily in English. ‘Good, good.’
He gets up from the desk, but his hand slips off the edge and he almost falls, and just catches himself on the way down. He stands there a moment, head bowed, breathing hard.
Juliana rushes across the room to steady him. ‘You need rest, Zio,’ she chides, almost tearfully.
Zio, she called him. Uncle. I didn’t see the resemblance before, but now, looking at them both together, I notice it around the eyes and nose.
Giovanni pats her hand. ‘Soon, soon, cara. But first, I must thank Irina for her hard work today, and apologise that there is one more thing she must attend to before she leaves us.’
Juliana hands her uncle his lion-handled walking cane and he struggles towards me across the priceless, hand-knotted silk carpet with the name of its maker, and his god, woven into the borders of the pattern. ‘Please, follow me,’ he says.
I don’t need to touch him to sense his strange and feverish anxiety.
‘There’s no need to exert yourself, Giovanni,’ I reply. ‘I can find my way with Juliana’s help.’
He shakes his head and the feeling of anxiety that hangs about him seems to deepen. Maybe he’s worried that I’ll screw up and upset his best client.
‘I must make the introductions,’ he says tightly. ‘It is only … right.’
‘I’ll behave,’ I say reassuringly.
‘I’m sure you will,’ he says distantly, patting my arm briefly. ‘But will she?’
He ushers me out of the room towards a wide corridor opposite his office that has several doorways leading off it. Gia and Juliana fall into step behind us, suddenly quiet, sensing something in Giovanni’s mood. He limps towards a door marked with the number three in Roman numerals and turns the handle.
In the strange way I sometimes have of seeing too much, all at once, I see that the room is decorated in a soothing palette of blonde wood and navy and ivory furnishings. It’s very brightly lit by an enormous crystal chandelier, and every wall is covered in a floor-to-ceiling mirror that reflects the room’s only occupant — a young girl sitting, with her back to us, in a cream-coloured leather tub armchair. There’s a doorway opposite the girl that leads to a large dressing room — also brilliantly lit — that’s partially obscured by a navy velvet curtain.
I see all of this before the girl even turns and looks at us directly with her pale blue eyes. I’m surprised by how young she is. I’d been expecting someone far older, because if I’ve learnt one thing today — only seriously rich people can
The young woman looks poised, serene and beautiful, so I’m shocked when her eyes fly to my face and flare with an antagonism so strong that it’s like a presence in the room.
I don’t need to touch her to feel it. She hates Irina. Would happily scratch her eyes out.
I’m instantly wary. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Gia and Juliana look at each other uneasily. Evidently, Giovanni hadn’t told them whom we were meeting.
‘Bianca!’ he says warmly, spreading his arms in welcome.
The young woman rises and places a kiss on each of his cheeks. ‘Giovanni,’ she replies, smiling. ‘So good of you to make time for me in your punishing schedule.’
‘You will treat her … gently?’ he says.
She gives him a reassuring smile and I realise suddenly that this is some kind of set-up. Who is this girl to Irina? Not a friend, clearly.
‘All I’m going to do, Mastro Re,’ she says laughingly in a European accent that’s hard to pin down, as if she’s been schooled in many places, ‘is give my credit card a severe workout. When I heard Irina would be here today, I thought to myself: Who better to showcase your designs than the incomparable Irina? It’s high time we met properly.’ Her eyes are suddenly hard as they flick to me. ‘We’ll have a cozy little … chat, won’t we, Irina? We have plenty to catch up on. Lots of mutual acquaintances to chew the fat over. It’s so rare that our schedules line up in this way.’
Giovanni’s eyes skitter nervously across my face before returning to Bianca. ‘Then you won’t mind if I leave you in the hands of my niece, Juliana?’ he says, almost relieved. ‘I think you know each other? And Irina’s assistant, Gia.’