‘#BRINGBACKTHEBUSH’ IN BARRELHOUSE
Sometimes you lose your grip and write a story about swallowing frogs, and that is okay.
I worked with Soraya before she was famous – back in ’93 when she was 14 years old, 6 foot 2 and size 0 – with ankles and wrists so snappable, so daddy-long-legged, she looked like she could crawl up a wall and live on the ceiling. I was her chaperone, her assistant, whatever she wanted me to be – I was also a qualified Vet with six years’ zoo experience, five internships in Botswana, and three years working with Rhesus macaques at the ‘Wild Croydon’ drive through safari park, watching monkeys fuck the ventilation grills right out of Ford Fiestas, tearing off windscreen wipers, throwing shit at families sitting in cars, tired humans eating ham sandwiches, waiting it out, pissing into bottles, crying.
I was happy to get a new job with Soraya. I would do it for a few years, then leave. Start over, in Kruger, or the Serngeti, Zambia, Zimbabwe, India, Sri Lanka, somewhere wild I would not be a keeper, and not be kept.
Back then, Soraya ate cotton wool balls soaked in orange juice for breakfast so she didn’t get fat. I’d fetch them for her, from Sainsbury’s.
Then came the frogs.
In London, it was frogs; in some countries, it was beetles, tiny green grasshoppers, or at one Model Agency in Peru, fire ants. But young London models, they all carried frogs in their mouths. It was mandatory. They were given one, their first day at work, when they went in to be measured and weighed.
Here’s a frog, said the agency.
Hold it. Smile.
It’s not just a question of how much pain and wilderness you can swallow, how many things you let crawl inside you; it's a question of being a perfect creature, one of the three or four women in the world with The Natural Look.
Back in the day even Twiggy had to snort House Spiders.
Christy Turlington wouldn’t get out of bed for less than 10,000 aphids.
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