took on you was huge.’
The left banner, at least one hundred feet tall, features a colour photograph of a model with strong eye make-up and a sky-high beehive wearing a stunning red, vintage-style evening gown, the kind that Gia herself would kill to own. I realise belatedly that the dress looks vintage because the photograph itself is from another time, maybe the 1960s. And it’s in Giovanni’s signature red, rosso Re. It’s from the start of his career.
The right banner depicts a model whose small, symmetrical face is dominated by smoky, smouldering eyes; her long, caramel-coloured hair is tousled and unbound, and pulled forward over her shoulders. She’s wearing a gown that looks as if it’s made of chain mail created from molten gold. Her hands are wrapped around the bejewelled pommel of a golden sword, which she’s holding point down before her, like a medieval knight in a painting or on a tombstone. The model’s long, narrow feet are bare and she looks like a pagan warrior queen, a powerful sorceress.
The two images side by side are so stunning, and so unlike each other, that it takes me a moment to realise that the figure on the right is Irina. It’s the opening look from the parade, without the wings.
‘When was it taken?’ I whisper, craning my head up to study the vast image through the tinted windscreen of the limo. I would have remembered the sword. It would have made me recoil even more than the wings.
‘When we arrived three days ago,’ Gia replies softly. ‘But before … you did.’
Vladimir startles us both by saying loudly, ‘We’re in position.’
The car door on my side is suddenly thrown open and I have to shield my eyes from the sudden glare of camera flashes. Giovanni’s head of security leans in and Vladimir hands me out towards him.
‘Well, if it isn’t Little Miss Crackhead,’ I hear someone say nastily as I make my way under the arch, blinking as my eyes adjust to the level of light inside the Galleria.
In the strange way I sometimes have of seeing too much almost at once, I see that the building — a kind of glorified shopping mall that’s four storeys high — is cruciform in layout, shaped like a giant cross. That fact alone raises instant goose flesh on the backs of my arms. It’s formed of two covered arcades at right angles to each other, each with a vaulted, arched ceiling built of struts of iron and thousands of panes of glass. Where the two arcades meet in the middle, there’s an octagonal space, topped by a giant glass and iron dome that has to be over one hundred and sixty feet across. The floors of the Galleria are inlaid with mosaic tiles that form symbols and patterns of great beauty and rich colour, and there are colourful painted scenes upon the pendentives beneath the gigantic dome. It’s all stunningly beautiful.
The arcade I’m facing down forms the north–south axis of the cross. A team of black-clad men and women are putting the finishing touches to a narrow white catwalk that runs down its dead centre, and laying out white chairs in rows on either side. The catwalk features a circular platform that’s centred beneath the giant dome, and narrows again as you move away from the dome towards the northern end of the arcade. There it ends abruptly in a white, featureless ‘wall’ with a concealed opening, which is actually one wall set in front of another that runs back behind the first. The effect is such that the people I see coming and going through the narrow aperture seem to suddenly just appear or disappear.
More people are busy setting out white chairs around the central, circular platform, while others are standing at the iron railings of the third-floor balconies, carefully making final adjustments to the false wall of giant video screens that hides the shopfronts inside the Galleria from the audience. It’s as if real life is not allowed to intrude on the spectacle Giovanni has planned. I realise suddenly that all these people are busy turning this glorious building into a kind of giant blank canvas on which his final vision is to be projected.
Gia takes me by the arm as Juliana materialises in front of us, surrounded by security men in dark suits. There’s a worried crease between her strong, dark brows, but a smile lightens her expression when she meets my eyes.
‘You are just in time,’ she says to us both. ‘While they test the sound and the light, we make you ready, yes? Come this way.’
We’re absorbed into Juliana’s security detail and move as a group towards the northern end of the catwalk, through a sea of stares and whispers and gestures.
Someone abruptly turns on the lightshow. My hands fly up to my face in awe as the entire space — the blank white of the catwalk, the video screen-covered walls, even the chairs — is suddenly transformed into a moving, changing panorama of the universe. Giovanni has brought the cosmos inside: everywhere I turn, I see comets, black holes, supernovae, strange fissures in time and space, twisting and curling overhead, all around. Along one side of the arcade, a solid wall of stars melds into the weird towering shapes of stellar spires — so much like reaching fingers, the expelled breath of the universe itself. On the other, the remnants of supernovae morph into the surface of distant Io, then Saturn’s rings, then the boiling fury of the sun. Celestial bodies wheel and turn all about us, in every colour, in every hue, as if painted by an artist’s hand. And almost every person inside the Galleria stops what they’re doing to witness these acts of creation and death, time itself, unfolding all around us, moving across our skin, our faces.
As we walk beneath the giant dome, it comes to life, dripping with a cobweb of tiny, sparkling blue lights. A blue so pale and luminescent it’s almost the colour of holy fire.
And the music that suddenly bursts forth from the speakers is the operatic duet that was playing when I walked through the atrium of Atelier Re yesterday. Two voices, two soprani, singing a piercing melody so haunting, and so familiar, that I screw up my face in pain, trying to remember where I’ve heard it before, how I know it.
‘It’s the closing song,’ Juliana bellows cheerfully. ‘Your song. You appear in the white bride’s dress, the wings and boom — the voices, like the angels. The end. Happiness.’
Happiness?
It’s too much for me to process. I feel as if I’m spinning weightlessly, out of control, through space as those disembodied soprani sing: Sous le dome epais Ou le blanc jasmin Ah! Descendons Ensemble!
It’s French. Someone told me that once. From Leo Delibes’ Lakme. The Flower Duet. And it means: Under the thick dome where the white jasmine … Ah! We descend, together!
Lauren Daley and Jennifer Appleton sang that duet together one night, at an inter-school concert in the tiny town of Paradise. After that, their lives were never the same again.
I don’t believe in fate. I believe in coincidence, that’s how I’m wired. But when I hear the words Paul Stenborg uttered in another life, in Carmen’s life, coming at me from the surround-sound system at a volume loud enough to split my head open, I actually swoon. I fall to the ground.
And the uncaring universe that swirls and turns and changes above me, that reminds me so much of home, goes dark for a little while.
‘Irina?’
‘It’s a gigantic publicity stunt, I tell you.’ It’s a woman’s voice, malicious. Hint of an Irish accent. ‘The gold dress should’ve been mine, anyway. Couldn’t you just see it with my hair? I told Giovanni it was a mistake to cast her, from the word go.’
‘Irina?’
‘Was ist los?’ Another woman, speaking German, sounding curious.
Voices are coming at me from everywhere, in languages I don’t ever recall knowing or speaking — Japanese, Dutch, Korean, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Sudanese — almost all asking: What’s wrong with Irina? What’s she on? What’s she playing at? What’s her game?
I open my eyes to find that I’m backstage. I’ve been carried behind that blank white wall at the northern end of the building. I’m slumped untidily in a raised armchair before a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. It’s a make-up chair, I realise, as I see, on either side of me, models having their faces touched up or painted, all craning their swanlike necks, trying to get a look at me between brushstrokes. There are people everywhere, crammed into this narrow area alongside racks and racks of mind-blowingly beautiful, intricately detailed gowns. Some are in various states of undress, curlers piled high atop their heads; others clutch the weapons of beauty in their hands: brushes, dryers, tongs. A parade of elongated, idiosyncratic beauties passes behind my chair constantly, all wearing that fearsome demon facepaint Tommy devised: smoky eyes touched with gold, strong brows, and blood-red lips and nails.
I see Irina’s face in the mirror. Free of any make-up.
