Two-Faced, page 27
But Laura hadn’t seen Mia. According to her mum, she and Laura had been out all day, so nobody would have been in when she’d called round.
Letting Sammy in when he arrived a little later, Kim felt sick as she prepared to deliver the bad news. But Sammy had news of his own, and he started talking first.
‘Where’s my girl? I’ve got something to tell her, and she is going to love it.’ Flopping down onto the couch, he smiled up at Kim expectantly.
Perching on her chair, she said, ‘She’s, er, not here. She nipped out earlier, and—’
‘Oh, well, let’s hope she’s back soon, because I can’t wait to see her face when she hears this,’ Sammy jumped back in. ‘Have you heard of Blaze Cosmetics?’
Vaguely remembering having seen an advert in one of her magazines, Kim nodded. ‘I think so.’
‘New American company,’ Sammy went on excitedly. ‘All set to smash onto the market and give Max Factor and Rimmel a run for their money. Well, I had a call from them when I got to the office this morning . . . Seems they’re holding auditions to find the face for their UK campaign, and they’ve invited Mia along! So what do you think about that?’
‘It’s brilliant,’ Kim said, still feeling sick. ‘But I think we might have a problem.’
‘Oh?’ Sammy’s eyebrows crept together. Everything had been fine when he’d dropped Kim and her daughters off that morning, so he didn’t see how there could be a problem now.
Taking a deep breath, Kim briefly explained what had happened.
‘You’re joking!’ he groaned. ‘Have you spoken to Laura? You know what these girls are like – worst of enemies one minute, best of friends the next.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Kim said. ‘But she’s been out with her mum all day. And Kath’s not the kind to lie, so I know it’s true.’ Exhaling loudly now, she said, ‘To be honest, I don’t think Mia had any intention of going there in the first place. I think she only said it so she could get out of the house without me suspecting her. I reckon she’s gone back to him.’
‘Surely not,’ Sammy murmured disappointedly. ‘Not after everything we’ve done to get her back on track.’
‘Oh, she won’t be bothered about us,’ Kim told him bluntly. ‘She’ll only be thinking about herself – as usual.’
‘But she seemed so positive about getting back to work. I can’t believe she’d throw it all away again.’
‘I can. Anyhow, knowing her, she won’t think she’s throwing anything away. She’ll come waltzing back in when she’s ready, thinking everything’s hunky-dory.’
Sammy shook his head and glanced at his watch. ‘Well, it’s almost seven now. If she’s not back by ten, maybe we should think about calling the police and reporting her missing?’
‘They won’t do nothing,’ Kim told him gloomily. ‘They’ll just say she’s an adult, and she’s entitled to leave if she wants to.’
‘Not if we tell them we have genuine concerns for her safety,’ Sammy pointed out logically. ‘Surely if they knew the kind of danger she might be facing they’d have to look for her.’
‘And you don’t think they might want details?’ Kim asked pointedly, wondering why it was that really intelligent people like Sammy seemed to have no common sense.
‘Ah . . . in which case, it wouldn’t be long before they realised that it had been her in those photographs, and we’d be right back where we started.’
‘Exactly.’ Wringing her hands in a gesture of hopelessness, Kim said, ‘Anything we do will just make it worse. We don’t know where Steve hangs out, so we can’t go looking for her there. And even if we did manage to find her, the chances are she’d tell us to bugger off. We’ve got to face it . . . if she wants to be with him, we don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of getting her away until she wants to.’
‘But he beat her black and blue,’ Sammy reminded her worriedly. ‘And what about all that stuff she said about never going back to him?’
A little ashamed to have to admit it, Kim said, ‘She’s greedy, Sammy. She likes money, and he’s got money. She won’t walk away from that just because they’ve had a fight. Anyway, she probably thinks she’s punished him enough just by staying away for so long.’ Giving a derisive snort now, she added, ‘Knowing her, she’ll have made him grovel, and he’ll have bunged a load of cash at her, and she’ll be shopping as we speak.’
‘But why would she take money from that animal when she knows she’ll be earning plenty of her own before too long?’
‘Because she don’t like waiting. When she wants something, she wants it now. You ought to know; you’ve seen her in action enough times.’
‘So we do nothing?’
‘Nothing we can do, except wait till she comes back. And that’s if she comes back, ’cos I’ve got a feeling she’s thinking we’ve forced her to choose between him and us.’
‘Well, if you’re right I hope she comes to her senses soon,’ Sammy said worriedly. ‘We’ve got several contracts in hand, and I’d hate to have to cancel them. But if we can’t get hold of her I’ll have no option.’
‘Are they important?’ Kim asked.
‘They’re all important,’ Sammy told her. ‘But I thought I’d start her off with a couple of the less taxing ones, to see how she coped before easing her back into the more high-profile things that are in the pipeline. This Blaze thing couldn’t have come at a worse time, but it was too good an opportunity to turn down.’ He sighed. ‘It’s my own fault. I should have said something when I first heard about it, because it might have made her think twice about taking off. But I didn’t want to build her hopes up in case it didn’t come to anything.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Kim asked. ‘I thought you said they only rang this morning.’
‘Yes, to invite her to audition,’ Sammy replied. ‘But they first contacted me a couple of weeks back, asking to see her portfolio, after their scout spotted her – sorry, Michelle – in the Evening News.’
‘You’re joking!’ Kim gasped.
‘Afraid not.’ Sammy shook his head. ‘It would have been amazing for her, because they’re planning a nationwide saturation campaign. But there’s no use harping on about it, because I’m definitely going to have to cancel it.’
‘Please don’t,’ Kim begged, terrified that Mia was about to lose out on her biggest chance yet. ‘I know I’ve been moaning about her, but I’m just pissed off with her for staying out so long. She’ll be back soon, I know she will. Let’s just give her a bit more time.’
‘Kim, this is too important to play around with,’ Sammy told her wearily. ‘If she comes back tonight, or even tomorrow morning, and she can prove she hasn’t been doing drugs – fine, I won’t cancel. But if she has done something, we both know she’ll be a mess again in no time. And I couldn’t let her to go ahead with the audition, because these Americans don’t mess around. If she won the contract and screwed it up they wouldn’t just terminate it, they’d sue the backsides off us.’
Chewing on her nails now, Kim peered at him thoughtfully for several long moments before saying, ‘I still don’t think you should cancel it.’ She held up her hand when he opened his mouth to argue and said, ‘Hear me out before you say anything . . . Right, let’s say we’re wrong, and she’s just met up with a mate and lost track of time. Then tomorrow she comes back all bright and breezy, only to hear that we’ve cancelled the audition because we don’t trust her. How’s she going to react to that, do you think?’
‘But what if we’re right, and she has gone back on the drugs?’ Sammy countered. ‘I don’t cancel, and she doesn’t turn up because, like you said, she’s chosen her boyfriend over us, and we can’t get hold of her to tell her about it. Or, worse, she does turn up and gets the job, then goes rapidly downhill and they can’t use any of the pictures. Both of our reputations go down the pan, and we get sued to boot.’
‘Maybe not,’ Kim said quietly. ‘I’m sure she’d quit the drugs if she had something important like this to look forward to.’
Giving her a doubtful look, Sammy said, ‘Come on, Kim, you don’t really believe that. How long has she been away from drugs while you were at my house? And how long did it take when I brought you back before she took off? I think we both know what that signifies.’
‘I know,’ Kim admitted gloomily. ‘But if this Blaze thing is as big as you say, we can’t just give up on her without a fight.’
‘You can’t fight for somebody who isn’t here to be saved,’ Sammy reminded her simply.
Sitting in silence for several minutes, Kim lit a cigarette and quietly thought things over.
‘There’s always our Michelle,’ she said after a while.
‘Oh no, I don’t think so.’ Sammy shook his head. ‘We both know she’s not cut out for the modelling life.’
‘But this would be different from the last time,’ Kim persisted. ‘I mean, she had to try and act then, but she wouldn’t really have to do anything this time, apart from smile and let them put make-up on her.’
‘You know there’s much more to it than that.’
‘Maybe so,’ Kim conceded. ‘But we’re only talking ifs here, don’t forget. If Mia doesn’t turn up, Shell can stand in for her. And if she gets the job, Mia would be so made up that she’d be bound to pull her socks up and get on with it. If she didn’t get it, we wouldn’t really have lost anything. And at least they couldn’t say that Mia just hadn’t bothered turning up.’
‘I don’t know,’ Sammy murmured doubtfully, still thinking it would be best to just cancel.
‘Well, I think it’s worth considering,’ Kim said firmly. ‘You didn’t know the difference last time Shell stood in for her. And you know how good she looks since she got her hair done like Mia’s. And how amazing was it when Mia did her make-up for her that time? Even I would have had a job telling them apart if I hadn’t been there to see it all. And,’ she added, hitting him with her biggest gun, ‘it was her that the scout noticed in the first place, so she obviously takes a good picture.’
Sammy couldn’t deny the truth of this, but he still thought it would be a huge mistake to put a complete novice forward for such a high-profile campaign.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said. ‘But we’ll need to speak to Michelle about it before we make any decisions, because we’ve asked a lot of her already and I don’t want her to feel as if she’s being coerced into it.’
‘I’m sure she’ll do it when she realises what a massive opportunity it is for Mia,’ Kim said – sure that she could persuade her into it. ‘Anyway, we’re still only talking ifs here. For all we know, Mia could be on her way home as we speak.’
‘I sincerely hope so,’ Sammy said. ‘I really do.’
Mia didn’t come home that night, or the next morning. And when she still hadn’t shown up the day after that, Kim resigned herself to the fact that she’d definitely done a runner.
Less well-versed in the selfishness of teenage girls, Sammy was convinced that something must have happened to her, because surely she wouldn’t just stay away without at least letting them know that she was all right. Humouring him, even though she knew that it was pointless, Kim rang around the local hospitals to see if Mia had had an accident and been rushed in – which, of course, she hadn’t. And she’d even agreed to call the police, telling them that she was concerned because Mia had been under a lot of pressure lately. But, as she’d told Sammy from the start, they said that, as an adult, Mia was perfectly entitled to leave home without telling anybody. And, yes, they would keep a general eye out for her, and they would certainly inform Kim if any bodies matching her description turned up. But that was as far as they were willing to go. There would be no search, because, frankly, there was no reason to suspect that Mia was in any kind of danger.
Michelle agreed with her mum. Mia was fine; she’d just done her usual trick of making a mess and walking away from it, leaving them to pick up the pieces. She was furious with Mia for that, because she’d already sacrificed so much to help her. Michelle’s reputation was in tatters, and she’d had the humiliation of having to try and convince her tutors that the coke incident was a one-off which would never be repeated, only for them to inform her that she couldn’t come straight back to college without first undergoing a course of counselling to ensure that she was mentally fit enough to continue.
Yet, despite knowing that it was Mia who had put her in that position, Michelle still couldn’t completely condemn her sister. Mia was an addict, and addiction was no laughing matter. Nor was it something that could be as easily fixed as her mum and Sammy had seemed to think. She had fooled them all into thinking that she was ‘cured’ after that extended stay at Sammy’s, but, in hindsight, Michelle knew that she should have known better. She’d covered addiction at college, and the general consensus seemed to be that you couldn’t help an addict until the addict was ready to accept help. Until then, they would do whatever it took, and tell you whatever they thought you wanted to hear, in order to get you off their backs so they could get out and score their next hit.
Feeling guilty for not saying any of this to her mum and Sammy, which might have put them on their guard and prevented this latest disaster, Michelle agreed to stand in for Mia at the Blaze audition. She was truly dreading it, but she figured that she had to do something to bring Mia to her senses and get her firmly back on track. And if something as big as this potentially was didn’t do it, nothing would.
22
The audition was being held in London, in a private function room at the Hilton where the New York-based Blaze executives were staying.
They already had a specific idea in mind of the kind of girl who would ultimately front their campaign, so they had sent their scout out a few weeks ahead of time to find as many likely candidates as possible who fitted their criteria. Then, after poring over each of the proposed girls’ portfolios, they had cherry-picked the best ten and invited them along to the audition.
To the untrained eye, the waiting area seemed to be filled with the same girl in different clothes. But to Sammy’s finely honed eye, there was only one who posed any real threat to Mia – or, rather, to Michelle. And he’d have liked to have been able to reassure Michelle of this but the poor girl was too tense for conversation.
Sitting beside him now, she was struggling just to stay seated. As far as she was concerned, every one of the other girls was gorgeous and deserved to be here, but she, Michelle, was an impostor. And it didn’t matter how many times her mum tried to remind her that it had been her picture that the scout had originally spotted, as far as she was concerned that wasn’t her, that was her imitating Mia – the girl they really wanted; the one who had earned the right to be here after working her socks off for two long years. And now Michelle was walking in and stealing her thunder.
Or not, because there was no way she was going to get this job. Not with all these gorgeous proper models to compete against.
The make-up artists began to call the girls through to a side room to get them ready. The products that they would be using would all be Blaze ones, to make sure that the girls’ skin-types suited the new range – because the last thing they needed was to choose a girl who immediately broke out in an unsightly rash. Once ready, each girl would then go through to face the panel, where they would be viewed in person for the first time and photographed before a final decision was made.
Leaving Michelle, because this was the part of the torturous journey that she really would have to face alone, Sammy went out to collect Kim from the hotel foyer. He took her for a coffee and a bite to eat, holding a confident smile in place as he told her what had been happening so far, and what was probably happening now.
Beneath the jovial words, Sammy was actually a nervous wreck. Michelle was just about holding it together, and if she performed anything like the last time she could well be coming out on a stretcher in a very short space of time. But still, he had to give her credit for putting herself through this. She owed Mia nothing, and yet, once again, she’d stepped in to try and salvage something from the mess that Mia seemed to be determined to make of her life.
He couldn’t deny that he was fond of Mia, having spent so much of the last two years championing her with a dedication that she probably didn’t deserve. But he’d always thought that she had something about her that was worth the effort. She was a beautiful girl and he’d excused her often bad attitude as high spirits, telling himself that when she matured she would have the potential to really make something of herself. But since this latest episode the scales had begun to fall from his eyes and he’d realised that she was never going to change. If anything, her attitude would get worse – and he’d already had a taste of that when she’d threatened to sack him at the first taste of success.
If only Mia were more like her sister, he believed that she could truly have the world at her feet. Michelle was every bit as beautiful – even if neither of the girls could see it. But she was also polite, reasonable, and intelligent – qualities that were sadly lacking in Mia. The only problem being that Michelle just didn’t have the same vain urge to be famous; and she was so insecure about herself that she was unlikely to do well at this audition – if she got through it at all.
Back in the waiting area, Michelle had been made up and was waiting her turn to face the panel. Three girls had been in already, and had all come out within minutes with tears streaking their cheeks – which didn’t help Michelle’s nerves, because if they had been rejected she stood even less chance of getting through than she’d thought.
Taking a deep breath when the girl sitting next to her was called in, Michelle stared at the floor and gave herself a talking-to. All right, she already knew that she wasn’t going to win, so there was no point letting it tie her up in knots. Sammy had told her just to do her best – and not to worry if she failed because at least she’d turned up, so nobody could say that Mia was unreliable. She looked the part, thanks to the make-up artist’s wizardry, so now she had to stop thinking of herself as shy, plain Michelle and make-believe that she was Mia. It would be a struggle, but she could do it – she had to do it.
