Madame Magot's Boarding House for Models

Here’s an exclusive extract from my book, How Not to be a Supermodel. In this part of my chaotic and perilous modelling journey I am flown back from a financially fruitless month-long stay in New York, put straight onto the Eurostar to Paris and sent to lodge at a deserted boarding house of horrors that may or may not have previously “disappeared” its previous guests. Enjoy.

(Abridged.)

Chapter 8: Tell Me You’d Love to be Me

Hey babe,’ said Texana, my agent. ‘I need to fly you out of New York tomorrow.’

Thank God, I thought. New York was unbearably hot and, in all, I had been away from home for over two months. I was starting to feel quite lonely, despite my lively group of friends and the colourful carousel of dinners and parties..

‘You’re off to Paris,’ said Texana, ‘and we’re putting you up at Madame Magot’s.’

Oh. I wasn’t sure what upset me more, the acute disappointment that I wasn’t actually going home after all or the fact that Texana was making me stay at Madame Magot’s. I’d never stayed there but I’d heard things; the very name of the place struck fear into my heart. Some said that this infamous boarding house for models was at the entrance to a graveyard; others uttered dark words about the food that was served. My own additional issues with the idea of staying at Madame Magot’s were that a) any accommodation identified by the name of its madame was surely a place of ill-repute and b) maggots.

But I had no say in the matter; Elle France, the magazine I’d be flying in for, wouldn’t pay for a hotel. My own coffers were bare, having paid off my debts and then failed to actually work for a month. I wasn’t in a position to be choosy. And so to Madame Magot’s I would reluctantly go, the mere idea of the place sending my imagination, which was prone to being over-active, into warp-speed overdrive.

Iin my mind I was going to stay in a place that was no doubt a front for a brothel, the grubby workings overseen by a giant, writhing mother-maggot. In my mind, Madame Magot would be in her little Parisian salon like a smaller version of Jabba the Hut, her pale, pulsating flesh writhing about upon her antique horsehair sofa. Would she be feasting on some sort of decomposed foodstuff, served upon a silver platter? Would she be sucking up a putrid liquid through a straw as her blowfly prostitutes buzzed frenetically around her?

The whole situation made me itch. I knew a few models who had once lain their weary heads down at these particular lodgings but – mysteriously – they had disappeared from the modelling scene. Perhaps they had been ingested by Madame Maggot and her troupe of promiscuous flies.

The most frustrating aspect of the entire debacle was that my call time in Paris wasn’t until a very reasonable 11am; the first Eurostar out from Waterloo in the morning would have seen me safely in the studio with whole hours to spare. But instead I was to be shunted out of London the night before and placed in the care of a (potential) carrion-eating bawd.

And I did arrive at night, too. Not in the evening, as would have been civilised, but at around ten-thirty, when the only restaurant still serving dinner was a McDonald’s and the Place du Clichy was alive with people up to no good. Still, it set the tone. I bought some cigarettes from a tabac owner with one eye and then stopped in the doorway of the shop to surreptitiously read my Paris equivalent of the A–Z, the Paris Poche. It was never advisable to let anyone see you with a map at any time of day, but at night, near Place du Clichy, making it obvious that you didn’t quite know where you were going was an invitation to get press-ganged into the sex trade. And so, being able to read your map in secret, whilst pretending to do something else completely different, was a vital skill for an international fashion model.

I, par example, did a very good line in sticking my head into my bag to look at my street map, which would already be open to the correct arrondissement, whilst all the time pretending to rummage for a lighter. I’d take a long hard look at the pages whilst jangling my keys and noisily stirring around in the bag, memorising each and every street name and Metro station for the next part of my route as though I was playing an intense, high-stakes version of Kim’s game: having a quick peek of the goods, covering them up and trying to remember as many rues and boulevards and avenues as I possibly could, just to get me to the next place of safety. Place du safety.

There was no other option though. How else would you have found your way around, in 2002? Telepathy?

As it turned out, Madame Magot’s wasn’t a brothel at all. Though, to be quite honest, that would have been preferable because at least there would have been some sort of life in the place. As it stood (creaky, dark, a concreted-over front garden filled with dying plants), I appeared to be the only resident.

Madame Magot, who was wearing a skin-tight t-shirt and leggings, both in a disconcertingly maggoty shade of peach, had taken a full three minutes to come to the door and hadn’t seemed to be expecting me. Still, she had gruffly let me in and then led me down a dimly lit corridor to my room, passing as we went lots of other rooms off to the right and left, each containing just a simple single bed and small bedside cupboard. And each of them empty. Where were all of the models?

At the end of the corridor, she threw open a door and flicked a switch.

‘Et voilà!’ she said, as the strip lights on the asbestos-tiled ceiling flickered to life. The room expanded before me like something from a nightmare: beds, beds and more beds – eight of them altogether – all of them neatly made up but very obviously unoccupied. It was like a scene from a horror movie, possibly about orphanages, and the hairs on the back of my neck instantly prickled. Giant maggots I had mentally prepared for, and I had even practised the French for ‘I’m not for sale!’, but there was no way I was going to sleep in a room with that many empty beds. It would be asking for trouble, especially from the spirit world. Which I didn’t really believe in, by the way, but I was always wary of giving too much easy encouragement – you had to be careful not to set the scene with these things. There were situations that almost demanded paranormal activity: for example, walking through a graveyard, alone, at night. Why would you ever do that unless you want a hand to suddenly appear from the side of a tomb? Going into a dark basement for no reason when there was a storm outside. Again: complete no-no. Sleeping in a room with seven empty beds in a creaky house in a backstreet of Paris? You’d have to be insane!

‘Uh,’ I said, gesticulating wildly at the cavernous room with its primrose yellow walls that looked so sickly in the striplight, ‘Il y a une autre chambre, Madame?’

‘Non,’ said Madame Magot, ‘c’est le seul.’

And that was that. Me, the beds, my frantic mind – suddenly all alone together.

There was also the room’s piéce de résistance: a huge, self-contained shower cubicle made from brown and cream plastic that stood to one side like a portal into another world. Or just a portal to the 1970s. It was singularly one of the most disturbing things I had seen in my life, perhaps because of my moderate claustrophobia but also because it could have been a centrepiece to pretty much any frightening movie I had ever seen. The door was made from smoked brown plastic, so that if someone had been crazy enough to ever take a shower in it then they would have been just about visible from the outside. Now, I appreciated that nobody in their right mind would want to shower inside a completely sealed, windowless plastic box, but equally, why would anyone want to wash in full view of seven other people? What a decision to have to make: shower in the dark within France’s scariest bedroom (Tourisme de France awards 2001) or put on a sort of disturbing body- washing peepshow performance for numerous spectators who may or may not be ghosts.

It was late but I couldn’t sleep until I had inspected the unit. I was at once repulsed and fascinated. What secrets did this shower stall hold? The inside of it was so spattered with various stains that it looked as though someone had been cooking their dinners on the tray. On the back wall, a long brown hair; on the shower attachment, a smear of soap. The curious thing was that there were still a few water droplets here and there, suggesting that the horror shower had been used fairly recently – who the hell had been in the shower?

By this point, it was almost midnight. I smoked a cigarette at the window looking over the front garden with its grave- like stone planters. In my heightened state of paranoia I couldn’t bring myself to actually lean out of the window, lest one or more ghouls crept up behind me and pushed me out – or worse! – and so I stood side-on, the eight beds kept permanently in my peripheral vision. This meant that I almost set fire to the nylon net curtain, but the numerous scorch marks told me I hadn’t been the first to assume that particular smoking position. I envisioned all of the models before me, sidling up to the window and gingerly lifting the sash. What had become of them? How I longed for one of them – just one would be fine – to be here.

This was my eternal conundrum as a travelling model. To share or not to share. On the one hand, sharing my personal space with a virtual stranger wasn’t the most enticing of ideas, but on the other, I had never been good at sleeping alone in an empty house – every creak was the psychopath edging nearer, every glint in a tree outside was the man who’d been watching me through binoculars for the past week, tracing my every step from room to room.

Unsurprisingly, it was a fitful sleep that I had in the chambre of forgotten souls, with all the striplights kept on and a long sock tied around my eyes as a makeshift sleep mask. I descended the stairs in the morning, very obviously unwashed and in a state of mild shock.

‘You didn’t want to use the brown shower, no?’ said Madame Magot. She appeared to be drinking wine, which seemed unusual for such an early hour, but perhaps, I thought, one person’s getting up was another’s winding down time. Maybe it had been a busy night for the blowflies.

‘Many girls hate the douche brun,’ she said.

Now, look. I don’t want to be sued so I’ll make it really clear that Madame Magot was absolutely not a brothel owner. Had I been of normal mind and not cursed with the imaginative faculty of a horror film director then I’m sure that my stay in the room of eight beds would have been an entirely different experience. I would have slept soundly and without a sock tied around my head.

But it just so happened that I had been cursed with an imagination that was both overactive and morbid, which posed a real problem for me seeing as though half of my job description could have been summarised as “attractive lone female traveller”. And my incessant fantasy-factory of a brain had once more been on a self-sabotaging rampage, scaring me half out of my wits and leaving me bone-tired, ever so slightly jumpy and with a head of unwashed hair.

My travels so far had been pockmarked with harrowing incidents that had only occurred within the confines of my own mind. There was that suspected Mafia incident that marked my arrival to New York, when I was certain that the taxi driver was going to use the shovel in his boot to bury me alive. Or the time in Norway when I’d taken a ghost bus to the airport. There was the driver in Holland who’d stopped for a sleep, the taxi in Turkey with banging in the boot, and a whole load of other plane, train and automobile rides that had given me enough material to write a series of thriller novels. And yes, fine, the coach trip in Norway had been alright in the end, it was only empty of passengers and creepy as all hell because most of the flights at the airport had been cancelled. And yes, OK, the banging in the boot of the Turkish minivan had actually been a small goat, not the first kidnapped person in what was obviously going to be a busy night of kidnaps, but try explaining any of that to a highly-strung brain that loves to predict the worst.

People would ask me whether I loved the travelling part of my job.

‘Oh, it must be absolutely brilliant,’ someone, probably called Brian, would say. ‘Your mum said you’ve just been in Italy! What an adventure!’

‘Goodness, to go to Paris,’ Jean would chime in. ‘I’d love to be you, so young and free and just travelling around. Croissants, little bookshops, the Eiffel tower.’

Oh yes, Jean, that’s all I do when I’m in Paris, eat croissants that’ll make me fat, visit bookshops in all my spare time and stand in front of the bloody tour Eiffel waiting to be mugged. Not on your nelly – I’m too busy avoiding sex traffickers and dodging ghosts in graveyards, all thanks to my wildly out-of-control imagination. My life is like a high-adrenaline video game, Jean. Every blind corner hides an axe murderer, every lodging could be the place of my demise. Try living with that inside your cranium and then tell me you’d love to be me.

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