place.’
‘Just concentrating,’ I laughed, oddly unable to accept the compliment. Usually I rolled around in professional praise like a pig in shit. ‘Just trying to get it right.’
‘Trust me –’ Al tapped me on my uninjured knee – ‘when you get to my age, you can tell these things. I know when someone’s got a passion for something. You were a million miles away.’
‘I suppose I was,’ I said, looking down at the camera. She gazed back up at me with love. Maybe this was meant to be. Or maybe Al was a crazy old beach bum who didn’t have a blind clue what he was talking about.
‘Don’t waste time worrying about the things you don’t have,’ he went on, imparting his pensioner wisdom. ‘This is what you should be doing.’
‘I hope you’re right.’ I unconsciously stroked the camera case and looked at Al. He was nodding sagely.
‘I always am,’ he said, hopping to his feet far faster and with more grace than I ever could and holding out his hand again. ‘Well, I have places to be, things to do. What a pleasure it was to meet you, Vanessa.’
‘And you, Al,’ I said, sad to see him go. ‘Thank you for being so kind about my pictures.’
‘Just honest,’ he corrected me as he took off in a jog. An actual jog. ‘Hope to see you again.’
‘Maybe I’ll jog back to the cottage,’ I murmured, turning to look at the mile or so I’d wandered in the past couple of hours. Hmm. Maybe I’d just have a lovely walk.
The walk back to the cottage might not have helped me look any better in my bikini, but it did give me time to think and develop a little bit more confidence in my photos. So far I hadn’t quite managed to cock up entirely, but I wasn’t doing terribly well with my double identity. I was still very much Tess, and, as I’d established, Tess was not working for me. I needed to work on Brand Vanessa. Obviously my Vanessa wasn’t going to be quite the same as the original, but there was definitely some room for improvement on my previous personality. Settling down at the desk, I pulled a pad of thick white paper and a couple of coloured markers out of the drawer. Coloured markers made everything better. I drew a thick black line down the middle of the page, and on one side, at the top, I wrote ‘TESS’, and on the other ‘VANESSA’.
‘Right – work mode,’ I whispered, shifting around to edge the last remaining grains of sand out of my bikini bottoms. ‘What is Brand Tess?’
Taking the cap off my green pen, I started with words I was sure of. Loyal, honest, dedicated, hardworking, a good friend, quite funny, relatively clever. Genuine. I stopped. I had run out of steam worryingly quickly. Looking at the list over and over, I began to wonder, was I a good friend? Amy and I had been besties since before we were born, and, yes, I had plenty of work buddies, but how many other genuine friends did I have other than shithead Charlie? Who was I forgetting? My sisters were hardly beating the door down to hang out with me. With gritted teeth I added some more words to the list that I didn’t like nearly as much. Shy. Walkover. Lazy. Boring.
I sort of knew I was boring. Amy might not have had a steady job in ten years, but she was always trying something new or going off on an adventure. Before this, the furthest my passport had taken me in the past two years was on a work trip to Brussels, and I’d spent most of the time throwing up after some dodgy moules frites. And I’d only had the moules frites because someone had made me. That was the old Tess Brookes, someone who thought eating shellfish and chips was a wild night out. The girl who had been waiting for her best friend to fall in love with her and kick-start her life. But my life didn’t need kick-starting; it needed a crash cart and a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart à la Mia Wallace. By coming to Hawaii and pretending to be Vanessa, I’d effectively Pulp Fiction-ed my own existence. But what now?
I had to change. I couldn’t sit through another meal blushing at Nick Miller and start sobbing on the beach every time a complete stranger even hinted towards a romantic interest back at home. If Tess was boring and lazy and cowardly, what was Vanessa? I took the lid off the red pen.
Bitch. Slut. Selfish. Mean. Gorgeous. Lazy.
Well, what do you know – we had something in common: we were both lazy mares.
‘Not that I would mind adding slut to my column as well,’ I told the empty room. The empty room was sympathetic.
Not only had sleeping with Charlie been the worst idea since Amy had tried to make toast at university by ironing a loaf of Kingsmill, but it had also reminded me that my ladyparts didn’t exist exclusively to cause me agony once a month and keep hot-water bottle companies in business. I had the raging horn and there was nothing I could do about it. Well, there was quite literally one thing I could do – Nick Miller. But I was almost certain that would be the second worst idea since Amy’s amateur Heston Blumenthal moment. However, that was exactly what Vanessa would have done, I thought to myself – she would have shagged him then and there last night. Over the table. Probably with Kekipi filming the whole thing. I might hate her, but when she wanted something, she took it. I’d spent ten years waiting for Charlie to get drunk and bored enough to put it in me. Presumably Vanessa had put less than ten minutes’ work into getting him to shag her with such enthusiasm – and then he’d taken her on a mini-break to Wales within a week. Granted, I had very little interest in going on a mini-break to Wales, but I was sure there was a lesson to be learnt somewhere in there.
Putting pen to paper, I scribbled down some more words. Assertive. Bold. Fickle. Sexy. Carefree. Un-self-conscious. Proud. Adventurous. Exciting. Confident. Basically, Vanessa was all the things I wasn’t. I noticed the Vanessa column was a lot longer than the Tess column. And a lot more interesting.
With all my keywords written down, I moved on to the next part of my rebrand. My visual message. After several deep breaths, I locked myself in the bathroom and stripped off. OK. It wasn’t so bad. I’d definitely seen worse on Embarrassing Bodies. Clearly I’d spent considerably more hours sitting on my arse than hammering the treadmill, but I was only twenty-eight, I’d mostly stayed off the pies, and gravity hadn’t been too cruel a mistress. My ridiculous boobs balanced out my slightly too big arse, and my middle wasn’t squishy to the point of offence. I could wear a bikini and get away with it if I tried not to slouch and breathed in. All the time. And no one really had arms like Jennifer Aniston, did they? Like most things in life, it was all about finding the right angle.
I untangled my plait and fingered my hair into loose, frizzy waves. With the right amount of Frizz Ease, this could be managed. Or maybe I could cut it all off and dye it blonde. Or shave my head. It had worked for Miley Cyrus. Not so much Britney. Maybe just a trim. But something was still missing? Vanessa still had something I didn’t, aside from a gap between her thighs. I was missing an attitude, confidence. Vanessa just didn’t give a shit.
Grabbing either side of the sink, I leaned in towards the mirror and stared myself in the big, brown, bloodshot eye.
‘You don’t give a shit,’ I told myself. I didn’t look convinced. I mostly looked a bit cold. The AC was on very, very high. ‘You are brave and bold and you get what you want out of life.’
I’d always been very, very good at selling my campaigns to clients, even when I thought they were ludicrous. The trick was to find a way to believe it, to find the truth in what you were saying and selling. But where was my truth?
