Sleep Terreur

How Not to be a Chaperone...

You may or may not know this if you’ve only recently discovered me: before I started my career online, writing about beauty and gadding about with a vlogging camera, I was quite a successful international fashion model.

I know. It’s hard to picture it. Don’t worry, it was a long time ago (years of active service: 2001-2012) and I had longer hair then and bigger eyes. And breasts that didn’t rest on my stomach in the bath, and a chin that didn’t need daily plucking. And to be quite honest with you it would all be a bit of a distant memory had I not written a book about it.

But I have written a book about it - How Not To Be A Supermodel - and I am currently submerged in the most unexpectedly intense, all-encompassing pre-launch preparation phase that includes press interviews, podcast appearances and the recording of a rather lengthy audiobook.

The reason I mention the book now (I was going to wait another week or so before I started banging on so that you didn’t all hate me by the time publication date came around) is that this post contains a story that I completely forgot to put into it. Oops.

(In actual fact, there’s an entire folder full of stories and anecdotes that were supposed to go into the book - the folder is named USE THESE and I still managed to forget about it - and so I’m either going to have to write a sequel or include them in a very long series of Substacks!)

The post you’re currently reading was supposed to be a relatively vanilla, garden variety post on the Mastermind subject of sleep terrors. If sleep terrors can ever be considered garden variety. I was going to tell you about some of the surprising things I’d recently learned about them (including the fact that they only affect 2.2% of adults and also the fact that they can be linked to stress and trauma) and then go on to describe some of my recent sleepwalking adventures.

But then I found the aforementioned Folder of Wasted Opportunity and, inside it, a story about one of my most excruciating modelling memories. A night terror episode so inappropriate, so humiliating for all involved, that it is almost painful to regale.

Yet regale I will, for I am nothing if not eternally generous. At any rate, almost twenty years have passed since this particular event and if you can’t have a bit of a laugh at yourself two decades on then when can you? The only worrisome fly in the ointment is that I continue to have these stupid nocturnal occurrences decades later. Bumbling my way out into hotel corridors in the middle of the night and following imaginary babies up and down the stairs. It’s an issue.

But let us go back to 2006, when I was twenty five and had the face of an ingénue and the body of a nymph. Honestly, it’s hard to feel bad for that version of me. Swanning about in Paris for a huge advertising shoot, with no particular responsibilities or worries. Able to wear a vest top without a bra and sit down in a chair without anything creaking.

No, it’s the teenage girl I feel sorry for in this particular tale of mortifying woe. Karlie from Kansas. Because I’ll tell you what the young, anxious girl from Kansas hadn’t been expecting from her Paris trip, and that was waking up in the middle of the night to find a woman ten full years her senior standing on the bed and rattling the window shutters like King Kong. Completely stark bollock naked.

I don’t know how I’d managed to become this girl’s unofficial chaperone for the evening, that boiling hot day in Paris. I was all set for a carafe of something bright and crisp in a bistro near to Montmartre after a stressful day on a hairspray advertising shoot. The stylists had curled and backcombed my hair to within an inch of its life; it could have had its own postcode such was the area it took up around me. It was a fragrant, flammable cloud of yellow frizz, floating around my head, crackling with static electricity.

But there the girl was, when I opened the door to the apartment I was to stay in for the night; sixteen years old and wearing a gingham smock frock and white plimsols. She may as well have been chewing on a piece of straw, like something straight out of a story book. I don’t want to state the obvious and name the story book, because she was from Kansas and it would be a cheap shot, but put it this way; had I looked under the bed and found the Tin Man and then gone on to discover a Scarecrow in the shower stall I would not have been massively surprised.

At this point in my career, I had discovered weirder.

‘Hey,’ the girl said, ‘I’m Karlie.’ And then she burst into tears. I asked her if she fancied a stroll to Montmartre so that she could cry as we walked and thus save valuable time - it was already 8pm and I could see the window for my chilled carafe rapidly closing - and so we set off together, me with my huge backcombed mane of hair and her with her gingham dress, looking very much like Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion.

 We followed the yellow brick road to a little bistro on a very steep street and I quickly extracted the necessary key facts from Kansas Karlie: namely that she was sixteen, had never before left Kansas and didn’t have a parent with her because her family had a farm and five other kids to look after. She had been scouted by someone at a state beauty pageant, had obtained a passport via that same person and had been promised a sparkling career in Europe overseen by a responsible adult who would “100% stick to her like glue”. But the only adult contact she’d had so far had been at the airport when a taxi driver had held up a sign with her name on it. And he’d dropped her straight at the apartment, where a key had been – full marks for security – left in the lock at the front door.

‘Look,’ I said to her. ‘Don’t worry. It’s really scary travelling across the world, but you’re here now and I’m in the apartment with you until the morning so you have nothing to worry about. Alright?’

At twenty-five, I did like to think of myself as the old and wise one. I was basically geriatric compared to most of the new girls coming up through the ranks and I’d done my time in some of the shoddier cities and the shabbier apartments. I’d stayed awake all night in some of the places I’d been put up, listening to the men who would linger around at my hostel door, leaning against it and smoking, making me all too aware of the measly wooden barricade that stood between us. I’d trotted through empty train carriages to avoid the weird man in the long coat who’d started to undo his buttons as I glanced over the top of my book, and I’d negotiated my way through Place du Clichy at 1.30am when my Eurostar had pulled in to Paris late and I hadn’t been able to get a taxi to my lodgings.

I felt in control, I felt experienced and – above all – I felt protective. It was my duty to take this sixteen year old – sixteen for Christ’s sake! – under my wing and, for the next twelve hours, okay eleven hours (time was ticking on), care for her as though she was my very own foster child. Albeit a surprise foster child that I wasn’t aware existed and wasn’t being paid to look after.

‘I’ve been where you are,’ I continued, philosophically, sipping at my chilled white wine. It was a beautiful summer’s evening, filled with the very particular Parisian hot-weather scent-blend of car fumes, cigarette smoke and sewer-simmered shit. ‘I’ve felt completely lost, and lonely and scared. And believe me, there are things to be scared about.’

I lit a cigarette and blew a thin, sophisticated stream of smoke out of the side of my mouth so that it bypassed her face and instead jet-streamed directly into the open maw of a nearby diner who was about to bite into a piece of steak. See? I was really looking out for the kid.

‘Once,’ I said, ‘I got flashed at by a woman in a fur coat in the toilets of the Haagen Daz café in Leicester Square.’ I wasn’t quite sure why I was telling Karlie this, because she looked confused and slightly horrified and admittedly as an anecdote it was kind of out of the blue.

‘She was completely bare under the coat and had one foot up on the toilet seat,’ I continued, seemingly unable to stop myself from hurtling along on my random and horrifying and completely irrelevant trajectory, ‘and I could see everything, she was sort of displaying it at me.’

‘Everything?’ said poor Karlie.

‘All the bits,’ I said. Had I been able to blow smoke rings I would have done so during this pregnant pause, but I made do with taking another large glug of my wine. ‘My point is,’ I said, not knowing what an earth my point was, ‘that nothing like that is going to happen to you.’

I left a five euro note wedged beneath the ash tray, stood up with a scrape of my metal-legged chair and put a hand on Karlie’s shoulder. ‘Alors,’ I said, because I was a woman of the world and evidently so completely at home in Paris that I could crack out some French, ‘on y va.’

Let’s go.

And God, I’d like to say that I boosted the kid’s confidence and put her at ease, that I made her first night in this new city, new country - new continent! – a comfortable one. The sort of night you’d have if you were away with a much older sister; fun, thrillingly independent, but with the distinct feeling that there was a safety net hovering just beneath you should you need it. All I had to do was tell her not to drink the tap water when she was brushing her teeth and then say goodnight; success should have been virtually guaranteed. 98% of our remaining time together would be spent with one or both of us fast asleep and there’s very little room for error when you’re unconscious.

But I hadn’t banked on my weird night terror condition rearing its ugly head.

This condition had never been diagnosed, but then neither had it ever caused me any real inconvenience . Until now. I would wake up terrified, imagining some terrible catastrophe was playing out in front of my very eyes but unable to move away from the danger or scream out to warn others. Often I would think that the ceiling was falling down towards me or that the opposite wall was moving closer to the bed, or pushing away to form a long corridor in front of me, Time Bandits style. And usually I would just lie there, petrified and rigid, eyes wide open and breath held, until I snapped out of it or until whoever was sharing my bed managed to rouse me.

But sometimes – not often – I would manage to move from my lying position and I would go to the door to attempt escape, or I would find myself on the floor next to the bed or sitting bolt upright, wildly flailing my arms about. And obviously because this was the night I’d decided to care for a sixteen year old farm girl from Kansas, it was also one of the rare nights my brain decided to have a night terror and also release me from its usual cruel muscle paralysis. Paralysis would have been preferable in this particular scenario, let me tell you, not least because it was a hot and muggy evening and so I’d chosen to sleep entirely naked.

And so not only was the sixteen year old Kansas girl woken from her slumber by a lion-maned maniac rattling at the wooden window shutters in a futile attempt to escape unknown-but-apparently-very-immediate horrors, she was greeted by a naked lion-maned maniac.

All the bits.

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I’m pretty sure this is partly why I’m so reluctant to room-share now, as a grown adult, with anyone other than my husband. And my downright refusal to bed-share with friends. I know that lots of women bunk up with their mates and go on weekends away and split the cost of hotel rooms, but I simply cannot do it.

It’s too risky.

Aside from my other quirks (I have an almost pathological fear of my feet accidentally touching someone else’s, to name but one) and the fact that I am violently protective when it comes to personal space, I just couldn’t have another witness to one of my nocturnal cabaret shows.

Far better for me to career about in the dark in an unknown room with nobody to come to my aid…

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How Not To Be A Supermodel is released on 29th August 2024 in hardback, e-book and audiobook formats. Waterstones deliver worldwide, if you are not in the UK and would like your book soon after publication day.