The Full Catastrophe Read online

  If ever there was a time for Terry, this was it. Over the phone, I explained the situation to Terry, who in his broad, thick accent said, ‘That doesn’t sound good. Come on in. Oh, and bring your contacts with you.’

  Great. I have a plan. There’ll be an ointment or something for this … Oh fuck. How am I going to get to Terry?

  I toyed with the idea of driving, and when I say toyed, I mean I went down to the garage, got in the car, turned the key, opened the garage door. It burns, the sun … it burns … I had become Dracula.

  A new plan – public transport. Through a complex process of only opening my eyes in fifteen to twenty second intervals, I managed to cross a major road, accidentally walk into three front yards, and not fall onto the tracks of Lewisham train station. By now I was starting to enter that phase where I thought, okay, I can’t see but maybe my other senses have become heightened. Maybe I can hear a crime three suburbs away.

  I finally made it to Terry’s. In his specially darkened room, he sat me in his examination chair, peeled my eyelids apart and shone a light in … and took a deep, confused breath.

  Terry was a fine, upstanding member of the Chinese community in Burwood and a consummate professional, so he would never say the words that I just knew he was thinking … ‘What the fuck have you done?’ He then asked to see my contacts.

  The moment he began unscrewing the lid I knew what I’d done. I realised how badly I’d fucked this up. He pulled out the little round plastic lens and held it to the light. There was a beat … He knew it too. One of us had to speak.

  ‘Marc,’ Terry said, ‘how long have you been wearing these for?’

  ‘Oh … um … six months.’

  ‘Marc, you know they’re monthlies, right?’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  The worst part was that six months was a lie. I had been wearing them for at least eighteen months. In that time, we would discover, calcifications had built up on the plastic. Scans would later reveal that they had dug tiny craters in my cornea. Under a microscope, my eyeballs looked like the surface of the moon – bashed and battered with the asteroids of my own searing incompetence.

  I wish there was a word for the experience of sitting in front of a medical professional when you have been diagnosed but there is not yet a prognosis. Surely there is a word in German for that moment, when your mind jumps to the worst-case scenario. I thought, I’m fucked. I can do one thing and I need my eyes to do it, and I’ve ruined it forever because I was too lazy to go and get new contacts.

  I was silently hyperventilating and Terry looked at me with an expression that seemed to say, ‘I’ve checked the back cupboard and I am fresh outta fucks to give.’ In fact, by that point, I’m quite sure the number of fucks Terry was giving had entered deep negative integers.

  But he was incredibly professional and prescribed some medicated eye drops and handed me a pair of glasses. Then, in the same manner that a parent chastises a disobedient child or a dog that’s just shat in the living room, Terry said, ‘I am never prescribing you contact lenses again.’

  That week of being semi-blind had a number of unexpected consequences. First, I got addicted to Twitter. Only open your eyes for thirty seconds, say something bitchy, ouch it burns. I also sat in my dark apartment filled with movies and came up with my first book.

  After a year of wearing glasses, a TV producer came up to me and said, ‘Hey, you should really wear contacts. Glasses just add an extra layer of wanker that you just don’t need.’ So I decided it was time to go back to Terry for the last time.

  I begged him for contacts. We struck a deal – dailies. Daily contact lenses that I wear to this day. A few months after this, Terry was on a golf course and had a heart attack and died.

  I still get my contacts from Terry’s shop; his son works there now. And to this day, every time I go to bed and flick out those contacts, as I close my eyes I see Terry’s incredulous look of disapproval, and I cannot help but smile.

  The Kangaroo Is Still Alive

  Kirstie Clements

  IT SHOULD BE smooth sailing when you’re the editor of a glossy fashion magazine, sitting at your gold desk, sipping champagne and matching belts to outfits. Enter the fashion editors, men and women who live in another world. It is made up of a sea of Emma Bovarys who are not satisfied with reality. As one fashion director said to me seriously one day when I was questioning a shoot budget, ‘I always think if you’re going to spend $5000, you may as well spend $10,000.’ Stylists don’t live in the real world. They don’t like the real world. They want the real world to be better – don’t we all?

  As the editor, you’re in charge of the money. And the stylists, they’re in charge of wasting it. In fact, most of my job wasn’t doing all the fabulous stuff you’d assume it would involve. Most of my time as editor at Vogue Australia was spent upstairs battling management. I’m not using names in order to protect the identities of the deluded.

  Let me tell you about one particular shoot in South Africa.

  I got an email one day. ‘We’d like to offer you a trip to South Africa.’ Shooting, shooting, editorial, lovely, lovely, lovely. I took it to my then fashion director.

  ‘That’ll be great,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want to go to South Africa. I want to go to Botswana.’

  ‘But the trip that’s been offered is to South Africa.’

  ‘Botswana has better animals.’

  ‘Okay, right, so South Africa is free, Botswana isn’t.’

  This particular stylist always attracted trouble. We used to call her ‘If it wasn’t one thing it was always another’. She decided one day that it was crucial to have a certain Polish supermodel feature in Vogue Australia. The model was already coming to Australia and we had to get her for the magazine. And she was coming in with her boyfriend.

  ‘Oh, okay, great,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, no, actually we have to pay for their fares now’ … ‘Oh, no, now it’s business class.’

  So we paid for business-class airfares for both of them, even though they were coming anyway. Well, that was awesome. And we had to put them up in a hotel – The Intercontinental, mind you.

  In the middle of the night they changed hotels because they didn’t like the decor and went to The Four Seasons. We paid.

  The stylist decided they had to go to a desert location, and that required a light plane. They love excess baggage on light planes. So now they were going to the middle of Australia, the Polish supermodel and her boyfriend. And my poor deputy editor. She was the one who had to endure the torture, not me. Back in the office, when it was finally over, all she wanted to do was go home and take a Valium.

  They needed to go out on a recky and they’d been told not to drive after dark for various reasons, one of which was that you could hit a kangaroo. So they went driving after dark in a convoy of two, maybe three, jeeps (I’m sure when I signed off the bills there were three) and they hit a kangaroo. The supermodel completely freaked out. She’s vegan. She’s an animal lover. She hasn’t eaten for months. So, she asked, ‘Is the kangaroo all right?’ The crew knew the kangaroo was not all right.

  ‘Yes,’ they told her, ‘the kangaroo’s going to be fine.’

  She went back to the hotel and said, ‘I can’t shoot if there’s something wrong with that kangaroo. I won’t be shooting.’

  The crew rallied in the bar, wondering what to do. It was late at night when they went back to find the kangaroo. It was dead, unfortunately, so they dragged it off the road and buried it, because they had to drive that same route the next day.

  In the hotel bar the supermodel was absolutely traumatised, until they said, ‘We went back and we did some stuff and we just rubbed it and it hopped away.’

  ‘Oh, okay. I guess I can shoot in the morning, then.’

  When they woke up the next morning it had rained, and it hadn’t rained in Lake Eyre for three years. So they couldn’t shoot. And that was that.

  Animals often got in the way of our shoots.
You know the old saying, ‘Never work with animals or children.’ We didn’t work with children often, but we did work with animals a lot. Once the fashion crew and the stylists were out of your sight, it was a free-for-all. I’d sign off all the trips and then wonder: What are the team doing in Egypt today? Oh, they’re doing a camel casting. They are literally casting for camels? I thought they’d just get one that wasn’t as mangey as the others, but the casting took half a day.

  My favourite time was when editors were about to go away and we’d do what’s called a ‘run-through’. We’d go into the fashion stock room where all the clothes were hanging and all the accessories were lined up. It was a bit like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. I’d ask, ‘What are you shooting? Where are you shooting? Who are you shooting?’ And remind them that it was all about product, product, product. It’s a business, after all.

  I sent two young fashion editors to Bali for seven days to shoot two stories. We’d done the big run-through and it was all about merchandise, merchandise, merchandise.

  Being a nice boss, I said, ‘You know what, girls? This will be an intense couple of shoots, so you can stay an extra day and just relax and come back that night.’

  So they came back and they were really tanned.

  ‘Can I see the pictures?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  I look at the shots, and say, ‘Where are the clothes?’

  ‘Yeah, so we changed the brief. We decided to do nudes.’

  ‘Woah, twenty-seven pages of nudes. I can see a bikini bottom there, what advertiser is that?’

  ‘Oh, no. That’s vintage.’

  My last ‘stylists gone wild’ story is my favourite. It was Greece 2000, just before the Olympics; a big Greece story with lots of supermodels. We flew over with a stylist I wasn’t entirely sure of, and I was there to keep an eye on the whole thing. I had briefed everyone – I want glamour, I want this, I want that. I want shiny. I want blue hair. I want navy and white stripes. I want red lipstick and gold sandals. I want the whole Mykonos vibe.

  There we were in Mykonos, in a beautiful 5-star hotel, and everything seemed perfect.

  But the stylist hated me.

  They said to me, ‘We’re just going in the van to find a spot for the shoot, then we’re going to send the van back to get you.’

  Fine. So I was sitting in this beautiful hotel, reading The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller, you know, trying to get in the Greece zone. Time passed. No van.

  The van never came back. I didn’t know where they were, but I tried not to panic. I knew that I had briefed and briefed and briefed up the wazoo about what I wanted to see, so it should be fine.

  Eventually they returned and I said, ‘So you got some glamorous pictures?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re awesome. They are great. You’re going to love them.’

  It was digital, post-polaroid, so I couldn’t really see anything … until we were back in Sydney. They had driven the model to what appeared to be an abandoned, bombed field. It looked like it had been in a nuclear explosion. There was a gypsy caravan and beside it, a burning oil drum, and they took the shots next to it. God knows what I spent on that trip. I had to go up to management and say, ‘Look at these amazing pictures,’ with a straight face.

  Vogue attracts really great talent and it attracts completely fucking crazy people. There are some stylists you don’t even know are working for you.

  I got a phone call one day from Harley Davidson, and it went like this.

  ‘Hi, this is Harley Davidson.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘When are we getting our bikes back?’

  ‘Umm, I don’t know … where are your bikes?’

  ‘Well, your fashion editor came in this week and borrowed two Harleys.’

  ‘All right, did you get some paperwork, a business card or anything?’

  ‘No, no we didn’t.’

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘He came and put two bikes on the back of a van and then he drove off, and I was expecting them back.’

  ‘I’m sorry, we haven’t borrowed any Harleys for a shoot. Can you tell me what this person looked like?’

  ‘Well, he stood out from my usual customers.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Well, he was dressed in women’s clothes.’

  ‘He was dressed in women’s clothes?’

  ‘Yes, and he had high heels on.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  ‘And he had this thing, this feather thing around his neck.’

  ‘A feather boa?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They had literally given two Harley Davidson motorbikes to this marvellous guy, who clearly fitted their mental image of a Vogue stylist.

  Then it happened again. A jeweller rang me.

  ‘Kirstie, when are the jewels and the diamonds and the Rolexs coming back from the shoot?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Your stylist borrowed them this morning and we’re expecting them back, because you only borrowed them for the day. And now it’s four o’clock.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, there is no shoot,’ I said.

  And she said, ‘No, no, no, Michael borrowed them.’

  ‘Who’s Michael?’

  ‘The Vogue stylist Michael,’ she said.

  ‘We don’t have a Michael. You know better than this, to give away jewels.’

  ‘But,’ she said, ‘he’s been coming in for eighteen months.’

  Over an eighteen-month period this man Michael would go to the shop to borrow things, take them away and then return them. On this particular sting, he had five different jewellers lined up whom he’d been visiting all that time, and they trusted him because he’d been handing the stuff back.

  Unfortunately, he’d recruited a young woman. He’d put an ad in the paper saying, ‘I’m a Vogue stylist and I need an assistant’ and this woman had answered it. She was only nineteen. He made her collect all the jewels, so that it was her face on the camera. Then he told her to meet him at an intersection in Paddington between one and two o’clock, carrying millions of dollars’ worth of jewellery. When he collected them from her, he got into a taxi and it drove off, leaving her wondering, Where’s the shoot?

  She was smart enough to call Vogue. When she came in, she started to hyperventilate and had a complete panic attack; we had to call an ambulance. She was on my floor, on oxygen, and I had jewellers calling me, asking, ‘Where are the Rolexs?’ ‘Where is the Cartier?’

  The man was eventually arrested, and it turns out he only had one arm. So he was literally a one-armed bandit.

  Finally, the scam that I like to call ‘Puccigate’.

  A young junior assistant, who was smart and devious enough to make her way into our office from another department, put in a request for a couture bridal gown from Pucci. Now, your relationships with the overseas suppliers are tenuous. You have to be so careful and make sure that everything is sent back within twenty-four hours, wrapped in tissue. Anyway, this young woman said she was with Vogue and on her request, Pucci sent her a $35,000 couture dress.

  A short time passed and Pucci called us, asking where their dress was, and all we could say was, ‘We don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  My deputy started to investigate and someone said to her, ‘I think this girl over in another department has requested it.’

  We got on her Facebook page and found out she was getting married soon. So we went over to her department.

  ‘Do you maybe have a Pucci dress?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t, but that’s your signature on the form.’

  ‘No, no, no.’

  We had to get to the bottom of this, so my deputy kept riding her. Pucci were on our case every day and we were trying to pretend nothing had happened. ‘Oh, the couture dress – where could it be? I think it’s on a shoot.’

  Meanwhile, the young w
oman kept saying, ‘No, no, no.’

  As it turns out, she had stuffed it in a drawer at home. Knowing we were on to her, she pulled it out and put it in a post bag. This was a $35,000 dress that needed to be archived. When we found out what was going on, we said to Pucci, ‘It’s going back to you, but perhaps not in the way you’re expecting, and maybe, just maybe, you’re not going to be that thrilled.’

  Then it got lost. Of course it did. It was lost in London.

  I had to go up to management and tell them what had happened. Management had zero idea of what we did downstairs every day, and they said, ‘Who cares?’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘If it were me I would fire her, but that would just be me.’

  As it transpires, at the end of it all, she went off on sick leave and sued us for stress.

  Do I Smell?

  Kate McClymont

  AS I CHATTED to people in the foyer, I kept a close watch on them. Were they breathing through their mouths? Did they involuntarily take a step back when I came near? In short, do I smell?

  The reason for my anxiety is that – although I only ever write the nicest things about the loveliest of people – of late some of these people have been making rather unpleasant remarks suggesting a catastrophic failure in my personal hygiene.

  A couple Saturdays ago, there I was fast asleep when my phone beeped. Who could be sending me a text at 1.46 am?

  It was Eddie Hayson and he was texting to tell me I was a ‘dirty unwashed beast’.

  It is tragic enough to be called a beast, but to be called a dirty unwashed beast by that pillar of the sporting world, Eddie Hayson, is, in my mind, catastrophic. After all, just because Eddie Hayson is a former bankrupt, brothel-owning chronic gambler who has been banned from every TAB in the country and from Sydney’s Star Casino, and who may or may not be involved in match fixing, does not mean he hasn’t got an acute sense of smell.

  Was he lying awake, tossing and turning in the wee hours of the morning thinking someone really has to tell her? Especially given that the previous week he was trying to do me a favour. On a quiet Sunday afternoon Eddie Hayson accidentally sent me a message saying: ‘Race 5 Port Macquarie no 2 Urban Prince. Get on it.’