#bringbackthebush, by Elisabeth Ingram Wallace
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.
Cindy Crawford once ate an Astronaut – Billy – he was the first bonobo in space. It was 1985. She drank his blood, right from his papercut paws. It made the world walk on space boots around her.
Helena Christenson had banana-slugs in her cheekbones, and Kate Moss drank Scotch by the pint, wearing handcuffs made of blue lobsters. Today, she licks goldfish iced into cubes. They melt her bones into water, their three-second brains make her skitter and glow.
Look after yourselves, their Agents said. You are for sale. Moisturise, moisturise, moisturise, and carry a frog in your mouth, and each time you get paid, upgrade. Experiment. Parrot fish, termites, walking stick beetles.
It’s even harder today than in the nineties.
Today’s natural women must hide, and post mindfulness mantras on Instagram, from their homes inside the Creatura CropScience Insectarium, in Durham, North Carolina.
Don’t even ask what’s blended inside that 'Green Goddess' smoothie.
- Ok it’s millipedes -
millipedes, pangolin, okapi, fire-fly, elephant-shrew.
One year Vogue decreed ‘The Full Bush Is Back!’ #bringbackthebush
Soraya had 37 silkworms sewn inside her vagina.
That was the year I’d visit the butterfly house every weekend. When I stepped outside, my pockets flickered, and the next day my skin was slicker, clung tighter to my bones.
But I couldn’t compete.
That was the year the models got longer and spidier and taller, gecko eyed, cat-walked, wasp-hard, swarm strong, they drank deep-sea electric eels, filled up their guts with fire, zapped and hollowed their frames, began to swarm and hornet into something beetled, angular. They fed their beauty, breakfasted on spasms, bird spine and wine, their tears had four brains and tentacles, sandpaper creatures rasped from their guts, gripped their intestines tight, night rattled against their incisors, their tongues rasped, sometimes they gagged, choked up pug-nosed balls, phlegmy and twitching, they’d hide pain in their pockets, carry it, gobbed in their fists, smear it on walls, leave it grotting, glow worming, crawling in the toilet pan.
After each shoot, they’d scurry to the toilets – puke puke puke – then all line up at the mirror. Chew gum. Put on lipstick, check their teeth. Smile white, smile hard, smile bone.
Sometimes they’d keep smiling, other times one girl would break, break the window, break the mirrors, split herself in two, slice the veins in her arms, in her perfect snappable wrists and I’d think I need those cotton wool balls now, soak up the blood, swallow the weight away.
Sometimes I think of Soraya, and grab a daddy-long-legs trapped in a bus window, gulp it down. Once, I tried a bee. Something angry, trying to get free.
Blood red Ladybirds plucked fresh from a tree.
The internet tells me I’m not beautiful, tells me I become less each year. Still, sometimes I think of Soraya, a soft scratch, clench of paw, I shut my eyes and I’m back there. ‘96, in the red corridor where I’d decapitate her lunch, a Cuban Macaw – its own eggs still hatching, quickly mayonaised into coleslaw.
Sometimes I think of Soraya, a new hatched model in 1993.
How in 91, 92, I’d drive my golf cart up to a Ford Fiesta, the one with the monkeys gang-banging on the bonnet, and I’d get out and be the bigger monkey. There were forty of us then, paid to do a job.
Mimic their sound – said the Safari bosses. Their hoots and their cries.
Pretend to be the bigger monkey, we were told, and that was easy, because we were; most times the Rhesus would run off with a hub-cap or an exhaust pipe, but if it didn’t, if a monkey kept smashing wing mirrors and chewing glass and bleeding gums and ripping plastic handles, kicking in doors screaming screaming screaming, I’d shoot it with a rubber bullet.
Then a tranq dart.
Then I’d drive it to the Vet Centre, put it on the table, sign a H37 form, and leave.
Elisabeth Ingram Wallace is the winner of The Mogford Short Story Prize, Writing the Future, and a Scottish Book Trust ‘New Writers Award.’ In 2020, she won the QuietManDave Prize at Manchester Metropolitan University, as well as the Fractured Lit and Forge Literary Magazines’ Flash Fiction Competitions. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Atticus Review, Flash Frontier and many other journals and anthologies, including Best Microfiction 2019. A founding editor of ‘BIFFY’, the Best British and Irish Flash Fiction series, she is currently Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, and Senior Editor for Flash Fiction at TSS Publishing.
elisabethingramwallace.com