The Reimagined Lives of Footballers: Dimitar Berbatov
"Much better to be genuinely striking. Challenging. Puzzling. To exist at the point where ugly and beauty intersect."
In the second installment of this imaginative series, Kyle Picknell sets the scene for an alternate reality that doesn’t seem all too far away from our own…
He moves like death in a shopping mall. Gliding and skulking soundlessly through the fountain and the food court. A heap of bones in a cloak. It made him irresistible to the designers in Paris, Milan and London, those that swear by haute couture, and they became desperate to crown and robe him, and have him haunt their catwalks too.
The lie is that fashion models must be pretty or handsome. In fact, it is better if they’re not. There is nothing to be gained from faces that make you change seats on a train, a second precious glance out the window. Much better to be genuinely striking. Challenging. Puzzling. To exist at the point where ugly and beauty intersect. Possessing the kind of face that people cannot categorize as one thing or the other- evoking a hapless attempt either way. Sharp or blunt. Beautiful or ugly. This is not how they demand your gaze but how they keep it: a violent shaking of the lens just when you think the colour in the eyes is starting to come into focus.
Even so, conventions must be upheld. He was tall, thin, pale just like the rest of them. Oil-slick hair. Quiet, snarling lips. Disdain everywhere he looked. That is the famed outward appearance of high fashion: glum and sullen, bored of its own existence. An unfortunate vampire who can’t stand the sight of blood. Nothing new there. The difference was that he did not strut like the others, clacking their heels and shaking the bracelets on their wrists to alert everyone to their ongoing presence. No. He moved completely without sound. As though the particles in the air had already made way, leaving nothing but perfect emptiness for him to step into.
There was always a terrible feeling in the room whenever he reached the apex of his walks, the point at which the others were taught to stop, to lift their chin, to shift their weight, to swing their shoulders, raise an eyebrow or two, provocation, then to turn, and retreat. He did not do any of those things, other than stop, and that he did too long. He lingered at the end of the runway as though it were a diving board.
Catwalks were not typically a place for deeper introspection, but he made them so, insisting upon it, peering through the nodders and the tutters and the face-strokers in the front rows as though he knew all their secrets and could have killed them for it. Only when it was demeaning for him did he withdraw, his shoulders dragging behind and his head a wrecking ball, the neck curving forwards under its weight; the posture of a young boy abruptly told to leave the dinner table, straight to bed without dessert. He didn’t want to be there, sure. But he didn’t particularly want to leave, either. The problem, and it was a problem, was that the more he did this, the more they wanted him back. The more they wanted to cover him in their glorious, hideous clothes.
He was a cloud of cigar smoke.
You can follow Kyle Picknell on Twitter @KylePicknell.
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