Rebecca Lim: Muse

She hangs up and glares at me. ‘We have a serious problem. A five-year-old girl could do better “top model” than you can. The models Giovanni’s assembled for this love fest are the best-of-the-best, and they’re mostly humourless robots spliced with piranha — they will eat you alive then fight over your bones, and your clothes. You have to get this right or Irina’s ruined anyway. Her new donkey walk might even push the Lake Como disaster off the front pages. As soon as everyone at the Galleria gets a load of the way you’re moving right now? Pandemonium.’

I can’t even visualise the things she’s told me to incorporate into my walk, let alone put them all together.

‘Could you have put me in jeans that are any tighter or longer than these?’ I complain as I duck-walk past her. ‘And what’s with the chain mail shirt? The gold dress Giovanni made for me is lighter than this.’

‘Oooh,’ Gia snarls, ‘I wish I could show you how Irina does it!’

I’m suddenly reminded of the memories I lifted straight out of Giovanni Re’s head when I touched his skin that first time. Of how Irina had gotten up on that makeshift catwalk and transformed from a sixteen year old with bad hair, clothes and eye make-up, into a steely-eyed, ground-shaking Valkyrie.

‘Is this how?’ I say as I recreate how I saw Irina move in my mind’s eye.

I pivot sharply at a point near the front door of the suite and stalk back the other way, pausing dramatically near the dining table Gia shoved to one side before angling my body first one way, then another, and pivoting again to stalk back down the cleared area towards her. To say there’s a tearing pain in my arches, ankles and calves from trying to move quickly in the eight inch heels would be a giant understatement. Everything is simultaneously numb and on fire.

Gia’s tight expression clears as I get nearer to her. ‘Better,’ she breathes. ‘That’s much closer to the way she walks — we can work with this. But straighten your head and neck — imagine a string pulling you up by the top of your scalp. Loosen your arms, but don’t throw them out too wide; more weight on the ball of the foot, more length between the steps; and the eyes, give me knowing and sultry and —’

‘Go to hell?’ I finish for her.

I make subtle adjustments to Irina’s posture, her speed, her stalk, and do the pause, angle, pause, angle I picked up out of Giovanni’s memory, then pivot and power back down the room away from Gia. When I get there, I place Irina’s hands on her bony hips and look at Gia over my shoulder, shaking out Irina’s mane of burnt caramel-coloured hair.

‘Exactly,’ Gia murmurs. ‘You’ve got it. That go-to-hell stare of hers. It’s perfect. Better than perfect. There’s nothing robotic about you, you don’t seem as jaded as Irina’s been lately. She’s been phoning it in. But you? It’s like you’re doing it for the first time.’

I burst out laughing at her words, and Gia — looking startled — can’t help but join me a second later.

‘I suppose you are,’ she says.

But then her laughter dies and she doesn’t say anything more for several minutes, she just twirls her fingers a few times, indicating that I should turn, keep moving, turn, keep moving.

The doorbell suddenly peals loudly and Gia claps her hands.

‘You need fuel, right? That’s what you called it the other day; it kind of stuck in my head when you said it, because Irina likes to pretend that food is entirely unnecessary to sustain life. Let’s have a quick pit stop to get your story straight. We need to come up with something that will convince all the people it took to restrain you last night — physically and medically — that you’re well enough to walk. And then we need to hustle. Everyone’s waiting impatiently for the star to arrive.’

‘Juice, toasted panini filled with roasted vegetables and goat’s cheese, fruit salad,’ Gia says as she lifts the silver domes off the food on the tray. ‘Just eat. We can move all this furniture back later.’

We perch on armchairs close to each other as Gia fires questions at me.

‘You thought you saw a …?’

‘Dog,’ I reply firmly, taking a bite of the still warm, golden-brown, crescent-shaped sandwich. ‘A large dog. Standing in the road. Directly in front of the car.’

‘O-kay,’ Gia says with her mouth full, ‘that could work. But why couldn’t anyone else see it?’

I take another big bite of my panini, and lick a splodge of thyme-encrusted goat’s cheese off my lower lip as I think. ‘I had a reaction to the stuff Felipe put in my drink. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know the drink was spiked. Felipe’s not around to contradict me, is he?’

Gia shakes her head. ‘Won’t wash. Giovanni’s physician took a blood sample and it showed negative for traces of drugs or alcohol. You were stone-cold sober and drug-free when you saw that “dog”. How do you explain that?’

I finish my sandwich, and drain the glass of pineapple juice Gia’s placed in front of me in one hit before reaching for the bowl of fruit pieces and a fork. ‘The way I tried to pass myself off to you as Irina,’ I say, as I chew. ‘I have a mental illness …’

Gia’s eyes widen and she puts her panini back down on the plate on her knees. ‘And what Felipe gave you exacerbated some underlying condition you’re too afraid to have checked out. It’ll mean a stay in a rehab facility in the not-too-distant future, but even though you’re feeling very fragile, you’re physically well enough to do one last charity appearance …’ She crosses back to the trolley and puts her half-eaten panini back on it. ‘Works for me.’

She takes a sip of her juice, then puts it down, lost in thought. I cross over to her and put my glass and plate down next to hers. I see her shoulders tense as she zeroes in on the backs of my hands. Is it my imagination, or is Irina’s skin the tiniest bit … luminescent? When I stare harder at it, it just seems like ordinary skin to me.

I know Gia’s biting back a million questions as she crosses over to the console table near the door and picks up the telephone receiver. She looks down and dials a number.

‘I’ve always liked puzzles,’ she mutters as she waits for someone to pick up. ‘Who knew one day I’d end up working for one?’

It’s probably a ten-minute walk from my hotel to Galleria Vittorio Emanuele — the place where the parade’s supposed to take place. But when you’re Irina Zhivanevskaya you don’t ever walk anywhere unless you’re paid to do it. So we drive there, and it takes us twenty minutes to make it from my suite to the car. The whole time Vladimir watches me, stony-faced, with his wise-guy eyes, and says nothing. He doesn’t even try to make nice, because at some subterranean level, he doesn’t recognise who I am any more.

Gia watches him watching me and calls Gianfranco, feeding him the fake story we’ve worked out together, in fluent Italian. Then she calls Giovanni’s head of security and tells him the same story, in the same language, and says we’re on our way. Lastly, she calls someone at Irina’s management company’s head office in New York to let them know that Giovanni Re won’t be suing for breach of contract now, because Irina’s feeling much, much better.

It takes us another half-hour to reach the edges of the Piazza del Duomo, where paparazzi surround the car, shouting twenty questions in almost as many languages. Some of them even start banging on the outside of the limo. But the driver just keeps crawling forward at a snail’s pace and, like an overcrowded life raft complete with clinging humanity, we edge closer towards a grand, triumphal arch at least one hundred feet high.