2cool2btrue by Simon Brooke Read Free Book Online

most of our friends. But Paul wanted to try some other agencies, so one hot afternoon in July, street map and travelcard in hand, feeling like a complete jerk, I followed him from one address to another. On one occasion, just as we were leaving a girl called to us.
    “Sorry, excuse me a minute.”
    Paul froze. This was it, at last, a break—someone had seen what the others had missed, someone ready to take a chance, trust an instinct. The girl looked closely at him and said, “Can you leave this at reception on your way out,” as she handed him a large envelope. Whether it was simply economy of effort on a hot day or just casual sadism, I don’t know, but, either way, I was already pretty sick of this.
    Then, after I had been so keen to leave yet another large, sun-flooded room full of beautiful people talking on the phone and surrounded by photographs of even more beautiful people, that I had walked into the stationery cupboard instead of out onto the landing, still saying, “Okay, thanks anyway, g’bye. No problem, thanks,” I secretly decided I’d do just one more of these and then leave Paul to it.
    So, finally, we visited a woman called Penny who was based in an attic in a street just off the King’s Road in Chelsea. She was on her own apart from a very pretty-looking Oriental bloke in a black polo neck, and a rather preppy girl in a faded denim jacket. Cig in mouth, she flicked through Paul’s cards at ninety miles an hour as the others had done and said they were really great but they weren’t quite right for her at the moment. Then she looked at mine.
    But this time she did it at thirty miles per hour and then showed them to the Oriental bloke. He looked through as well, looked up at me, raised his eyebrows at her and nodded and then handed them back. Then she called over to the girl to get a portfolio. She began to slide them into it, taking a moment to choose the best order for them.
    “Okay, lovey, you’ll have to get some more done and we’ll need to talk about a card,” she said as she pushed my stupid, clumsy, amateur pictures into plastic wallets inside the black, shiny book with JET written in big red letters over the front. Still with the cig in her mouth, its ash wilting precariously now, she showed me a contract and told me to sign at the bottom, which I did in a slight daze, with the pen the girl gave me as I opened my mouth to ask for one. Paul looked on as we both realised that weirdly enough, at the end of this long, hot, exhausting day, our faces glazed with perspiration and pollution, I had done it. I had entered the world of modelling, even though I wasn’t really sure I wanted to.
    Afterwards Paul was dismissive. “Never mind, mate, thanks for coming along with me,” he said over a very welcome cold beer in the Chelsea Potter in the King’s Road.
    “No problem,” I said, just wishing we could swap places. He obviously wanted it so much and I just wasn’t that bothered.
     
    Penny’s agency grew, moved to bigger offices, took on more people, and my career has sort of taken off with it over the past eight years. My current booker, Karyn, joined three years ago and we speak almost every day. We sometimes go out for a drink, and I was the first person she rang after she split up with her boyfriend. She came over for dinner, which should have been fun, but she and Lauren didn’t seem to get on, so I don’t mention one to the other now.
    Am I good-looking? Well, I must have something, although I’m never quite sure what it is. When I first started working, one girl said to me thoughtfully, “You’ve got the kind of face I’d like to see if I was lost in a foreign railway station and I didn’t speak the language.”
    I think that’s a compliment.
     
    Having waved modelling goodbye—perhaps only temporarily, of course—my first day in my new job, on the second floor of a building in Soho, drags a bit because there is so little for me to do. The office itself has maroon