What You Can Get With

By Mark Wagstaff

/ Fiction /   

The haul from the ladder tried her delts and nerves. That second, hung from the hatch, her toes ballet pointes, free of the ladder. That second she saw herself slip, fall, a broken bone and, worse, her precious face.

Not today. Today she grappled onto the roof, a fuss of strength over grace. Gravel breeze between parted lips. The caress of height on her skin. First time she climbed on the roof, she assumed everyone was at work, heads down, saving this expensive view for the weekend. Now summer was settled, it seemed odd no one else claimed their roof. She looked up and down the street. She stood at the edge, to see the next street over. Other roofs must be achievable. Others had skylights. But she was the living vertical, beside cold chimneys and slender old aerials she could remember no use for. She sat on the tar deck. She slid the canned margarita from her jeans. Warm, but that was okay.

She rode around the Circle, taking pictures of her pictures. No one recognised her in a trilby with her hair knotted. No one recognised her. That was okay. Better not look self-obsessed.

First shot. Edgware Road. ‘What You Can Get With Passion Fruit Martini.’ A tad obvious, but okay. The campaign played on heritage—a glamour drink, a sophistication—a wood grained hall with boys in tuxes and her in faux leopard—the passion fruit. The boys toasting with ice and a slice; her raising the can. Obvious in a fun way. A drink for people not bound by rules but who knew how to behave. She had that steeped into her, how to behave. How to photograph well without losing one’s spirit.

Second shot. Great Portland Street. ‘What You Can Get With Strawberry Daiquiri.’ Daiquiri was mindful. Because, Caribbean indigenous peoples. The campaign was fully researched. Rum and sugar suggested outdoor men, respectfully held in the foreground, lit to bathe in cool night air, a careful blend of skintones and roguish teeth. And her, dressed for tennis. Because, strawberries. The men with good, healthy globes of rum. And her, pinkie raised, with the can.

The photographer didn’t tell her to pinkie up. She didn’t, in usual drinking. But something about the moment, the staging, that fake wash of tropical light, made it essential. An imaginative instinct. Co-creator of her look. Her mother did it. Even so far down the road, her little finger would lance, rod-straight, from some filthy cup. As a girl she hated her mother’s pristine order. Then she hated her helplessness more.

Third shot. Aldgate. Something for the City. Cool, harder to read. ‘What You Can Get With Mint Mojito.’ A flock of girls from the agency, artfully unstyled in hoodies and rugby shirts. Posed at awkward angles, their limbs demanding. And her, in three piece pinstripe and a club tie. The wardrobe hire didn’t have time to measure. The suit cut tight. The waistcoat dug diagonals on her breasts. To secure a campaign a body must be invested. At one casual glance, the message looked skewed—dress-down was fun, suits were stuffy. Shouldn’t the cocktail girl get the tracksuit. But really it wasn’t that. Breathless, the art director explained it. The girls were the dealmakers, the quants, the money—such desirable brains, they could dress how they pleased. But she was the power, the focus of their all-nighters. She made them worthwhile. Sexual, how the art director explained it. Sexual, there, in the picture. So far as her mother had spoken at all, she didn’t want her to do dirty pictures. Her mother’s phrase, meaning skin. Her mother asked why she wasted five years at university, all that debt, to take her clothes off in public. And she didn’t even do that. She fronted services and products. With the height, the cheeks, the silk-blonde hair to sell. She hardly ever modelled clothes. That would get her noticed. But the agency sent the papery girls, the ones with translucent wrists. She had the look to sell pre-mix booze. That was progress.

The margarita can was summer blue. For picnics and bayside occasions. The cans colour-coded, to help busy drinkers. At the edge of the roof, warm air off the streets broke on the strengthening breeze. The sun dipped behind dusty clouds, grained with strings of matted hair from beneath mum’s table. Her mother stepped back from cleaning when corners vanished, when walls were filled, when rooms became small with products. She stopped cleaning even where she could reach, because what point to clean fractions of rooms. This woman who’d been proud of bleach burns.

This apartment topped the block. She called it the penthouse. That was the joke, first time she said it. Then it became that thing she said. Ten storeys down, a dissonant shape turned the corner. A large man, large on top. Biker beard, mop hair, muscle shirt, inked biceps. But his lower body was slender, in leggings like tights. His torso all noise but his hips a well of potential. He might be a dancer. One of those thrash ballet crews. Power and poise, his body its own momentum. He vanished under the sprawling leaves by the railway. The wild land. Where rats were.

A tactile performer. A visual artist. The can became more in her hand than anyone else’s. She was return on investment. That money app grew more relevant, off her campaign. The vegetable snack brand got placement, with her image. She never looked the same across campaigns. Why she could travel unnoticed. She brought different looks, different hair, coloured lenses, a menu of attitude. Chameleon, she became what the product demanded.

Fourth shot. Tower Hill. ‘What You Can Get With Bloody Maria.’ She was proud of this. The art director, a little run down, a little hasty, went all-in riffing on the Bloody Tower. With her as some queen in ruffs and pearls, directing an execution. They had a girl with her neck marked up. But she told the art director that was corny. She was careful to pace disagreements. A good campaign, with socials and boosts, running over summer, was two months’ rent. Problematic girls, girls who argued, didn’t get booked. With quick humility, she laid her idea. They’d still use dungeon walls. Severe old stone was a given. She had a good red dress the same shade as the can. Instead of a lamé throne, she sat on a crate. Knees drawn, to give some thigh. One hand holding the tomato tequila mix, the other extending a string of rubies—chunky glass beads—to the girl with the neck. Precious stones not blood. No one quite understood how it worked but everyone loved it. She co-created that shoot. She was more than a face.

That was how her mother denied her, when her mother still had some order. She’d tell her she was no more than a face. Material, shaped and discarded. Her mother’s decay was quick but there were first signs. Awake at night, some incident would replay. When her mother spilled the bleach and scrubbed the carpet. When she dropped a pack of biscuits and picked up only the ones she could see. Linen in the drawer so long it mildewed. The grimy backs of kitchen shelves. Damp towels. Stained underthings. When her mother stopped unpacking what she bought. Torn clothes, with a wardrobe unworn. The fridge dewy with mould. The rooms sagging with boxes. She left that house soon as she could. Congratulated her courage at getting away. The stinky flat shares, shoebox bedsits, were nothing to the pathology of her mother’s possessive keeping.

Sometimes at night, she’d work out to the penny how much she could lay hold of on a moment. What she’d have to let slide so the rent was paid. Which debts she’d apologise for, again. A freelance face. A specified body. Good for this shoot, not that. Art directors squeezing her arms, fixing her hair, asking what this body was saying.

She paced the rim of the roof. Heel to toe, for balance. Up on the ledge. Just once. Just quick. Across the frame of streets, maybe someone looked from a window, someone with nothing or too much to do, looked at this breezy bright day. Saw a woman walk the rim of the roof. Saw her step on the ledge. They might think her a good size. They might think she had a good spine. And her hair caught the breeze an unfussy way and her shape sold a notion.

The second can lay on the gravel. Warm, flecked with clouds. No money for lunch, salad supper hours away, tequila had hold on her limbs. Restless, she centred herself, a roof goddess. A shadow pinned to the sky. Ten storeys down, a woman’s neat shirt and pale slacks reached the gate to the square. She didn’t see old trees or summer flowers. Toddlers mountaineering the slide while their mothers took pictures. She didn’t see these blocks or the rooftop woman, who learned how to stand and stood well. Involved in her phone, she relied on her feet to dodge tree roots breaking the path. She avoided benches and trash bins, slewed buggies, the chasing children, with minimal attention.

The campaign dropped socials. Virals. Her showing the can. The ads had voiceover. She didn’t speak. She worked to improve her voice. To lose her mother’s accent. But the studio sold AI voice. She didn’t pitch.

In the park, the woman stopped by the dry fountain. Ten storeys up it was plain her phone was busy. Her hair hung loose, shielding her eyes. This was what campaigns had to deal with. People must look up, see the ad. Read the ad, if they could. The strap was complex: ‘What You Can Get With’—they had to be intrigued enough to untangle that. If the campaign tanked, they wouldn’t book her again. The photographer was forgiven. It was never the photographer’s fault. The art director would say her vision hadn’t been fully delivered. The techs—fungible figures in black tees. It was her. She was the face of summer. Of summer made better by ready-mix drinks in a can. If sales were weak, the client would tell the agency and the agency would withhold her. Her ability to look like anyone wouldn’t help if her name was damaged. She’d be the girl who couldn’t sell booze in summer. And there was her problem, there in the park. All involvement, no attention.

That last time, she went as a success. Off the back of strong placement for serum hair enrichment, she dialled clothes she could send back next day, a blowdry and full hands of nails. A train ride, eyes to the window, ignoring grubby lads who chanced their arm. She didn’t get a cab from the station. She walked up the hill, all the dismal childhood houses: different doors, different windows, different cars in the drive, still the same. Past the weepy-willowed cul-de-sac where that rich girl lived, who was her friend sometimes. Whose mother cooked with wine. The corner where she got hit on the head by a kicked-wide football one summer night. The boy who came to claim it tried asking her out. He touched the bruise and said they could go somewhere. He looked seventeen. So much older. The neighbours’ little girl, who tagged her around that summer. Always in that yellow dress. She guessed they were gone. They must be. Who would stay.

Fifth shot. Victoria. ‘What You Can Get With Negroni.’ A palace garden party. That same flock of girls, pastiched as clockwork princesses, slurped blue gunk through barber straws. And her, in a glorious midnight dress, side-buttoned and breath tight, an enormous Epsom hat artful over one eye. The can catching tangerine light from stained glass. She wanted that dress. She wasn’t a strong enough name to keep the clothes. Her profile said she had ideal structure and fresh presentation for campaigns aimed at twenties to forties ABC1s with strong values and high to moderate disposable income. Her tall muscularity, relatable features and easy poise scored highly for campaigns where she represented an enviable position, someone consumers could aspire to be. She was twenty-eight and made ramen for Sunday lunch, from the remains of a week’s cold suppers. She couldn’t land the glossies. Chameleon, not couture.

Two margaritas and, still, that bite to the air. This weather should be hot. The campaign was now. Now was summer. Those clouds spread on this sinewy breeze wouldn’t stop people enjoying her product—for the runtime, it was her product. But she needed that uptick, she needed people drinking who hadn’t thought of drinking till sunshine made their bones lazy. She needed those cans in gardens, at the beach, soaked into wicker-basket picnics. A quantified success in the trades. To get the next job.

That sticky hopelessness, seeing her mother’s house. The white slat fence her mother bought to stop kids walking on the wall. The red painted ledges—painted red because that’s what grandma had done to spite some long-dead neighbour in a distant, torn-down street. The grass trimmed by the man next door, so his borders wouldn’t get wretched with weeds. The same empty teenage anguish as every soaked and scorching afternoon when she turned the corner, when she got off the bus down the hill, after another school day.

From the roof these flats, their kitchen corners and rollerblind bedrooms, offered sly hopes of attention. Did she influence these people? That glimpsed shape at a sink. That shadow on glass. Did she inspire them to buy product? Product they loved. Did they want to be whatever she was in that ad in the corner of their screen? Her mother asked why she wasted five years at university, and the debt, not knowing more debt would follow. A first and a masters in media: how was that waste? She could get an agency job, a business laptop, a seat in a co-work space. She could book time and scope sites. With clients she knew their sex words: impressions, churn rate, conversion. But she wanted to be the face on the wall. Present, when far away.

Quick and restless she kicked the ledge, scowled at the breeze, detested the clotted sky. Summer should be summer. Drawstring heat an invitation to drink. She’d slam the cans at their windows. Rattle their doors. They needed this mix in their lives. They must drink. Good weekly numbers would light her socials. With ten thousand followers she was snapping at swipe up country. And the quality in those follows: art directors, agency partners, photographers with access. She got three figure posts praising this campaign. She starred up the one that called her an artist of expression. That was elevation. As long as she got sales. What her mother never understood. She wasn’t the best looking girl in school. Others, the few, had sympathetic beauty, their elegance and range a trail to follow. But hers was the agile face, the adaptable body. Hair up or down, a few strikes of makeup, hard or glossy light. She was the eye’s invested guide. She didn’t outgun the product. The crucial skill of the midrange.

That last time, she went as a star. The clothes, the blowdry, the nails, accessorized with a bag and bracelets, she wanted her mother to think this her daily look. Dropping by between yacht parties. She worked to lose her mother’s accent and, walking uphill, practised vowel sounds. The distance she travelled to get away clung with her scent. And that familiar desolation, at the house where she fretted those shallow, quiet nights.

Sixth shot. Notting Hill Gate. ‘What You Can Get With Mai Tai.’ Obvious dumb fun. The Mai Tai a California stage prop. Notting Hill was the West Coast of central London. The art director rigged screens with stereotypic la-la bimbos. Sun-drenched miles of hair and pristine teeth. Girls looking puzzled, goofy, theatrically alluring. Sex and stupidity comically overheated. All her. Twenty screens of processed her. And in front, the living blonde, dressed for the street in skate chic. Looking ten years younger with pale foundation and a gold filter. The sunset can strapped to her belt. Among all that creativity, she was actually on the skateboard, limbs rising to the ollie. They got midair footage for a viral. The crew applauded when she landed upright. Modest, she said she grew up skating. They assumed so.

Too late in the afternoon for clouds to pass. Breeze kicked through the scaffolded sky. From the wild land by the railway, leaves clamoured against the air. Ten storeys up, their sound joined wind in the wires, the shifting of loose chimney stacks, the patter of gravel on townhouse roofs below. Another drink would be good. She didn’t want to climb inside, to close the hatch on the day. She should post these shots to her socials. Make a storytime of the journey. Drop a tease that, maybe, she attracted a little attention. She ought to, dressed down in a trilby. The important thing was to show she was busy. Busy people got work. Tomorrow she’d clean the flat, change the bed, wash her day clothes. Check listings. Call the agency. The agency she helped grow. They had so many women now. Young women were their own product. How many would last, as she lasted. Sleeping on floors, living on scraps, those endless early years. She’d uptalk the campaign, like she already knew the week’s numbers. Tell the agent they should build on momentum. Skincare. She hadn’t done skincare in ages. Good samples. Or fast fashion. A brand that got burned on ethics and needed redemption. Or ready meals—free food. The agent would say they always considered her. There’d be a job. She never believed it, till she hit submit on the contract. What if it became longer than she could hold out? Six months, the longest she held out. Jeans slipping off her faint waist and two weeks from homeless. She promised herself she’d never give up, blind to the limit of never.

Ten storeys down, deep into summer, days developed their rhythm. Kids clustered along the high road. They hung at the chicken shop. At first faint dusk, they gathered. When she walked the neighborhood, to check billboards and screens, the kids looked the same. Wearing what young people wore that summer. Always excited, always involved, they brought back her days of school summer. But sharper. More experienced. More aware. Less moonshiny grand adventures. Less doubt. Less poetry. At that age so much was forever. Friendship. Endurance. The chase to some future to carry them high, away from that sick town. Where had those friends gone. What sustained them. Solid careers, their bills always paid. Businesses that flourished. In warm arms every night, or some nights. Children to carry forward what they couldn’t. Where were they. The pretty ones. The girls who seemed so likely. When they saw an ad where she had a corner credit, did they think of that girl at school with that same name.

Friends now were university friends. Friends in the business. They’d treat her a cocktail. Delighted to meet her in the bar. Flattered at this anonymous form in earbuds and an outlet dress. This familiar construction that, still, could wait unnoticed. While her face sped by a million journeys a day. When someone visited town, someone she last worked with in seminars on content positioning, they assumed for her a life of unwavering glamour. That word, the M word, attached to her every gesture. To mean more than standing for hours, making fractional adjustments to the angle of her fingers, the tilt of her head, while the photographer asked what this body was even saying.

She waited for her mother to answer the door. She kept a key—for emergencies, the urgent dash—but preferred to be a guest. She didn’t want to embarrass her mother in some hobbled moment.

The woman was thin, drained, her steak pudding-cheeks collapsed. Older, staring through crusted eyes as though asked to recall a moment in some vanished year. They weren’t close. Never shared secrets. Her mother didn’t know who she was.

Nothing to be done. The house, worse than she’d seen it, smelled of mouldy food, of damp, of shit. Bags and boxes spilled from each corner. Each room reduced to narrow lanes cut between towers of junk. Things broken and not got rid of. Things bought in anger. Things gathered because her mother’s fear of loss choked her reason. Unique, irreplaceable, everyday things took possession. Her mother belonged to this dense cargo. It owned her. She couldn’t stop buying. She couldn’t remember her face in faded, yellow-frame pictures. In sunny dresses, hemmed with light. She couldn’t connect the awkward girl shying from the camera to this dissonant elegance assaulting her treasure. Shouting what’s this and what’s to be done. This creature with its plumped-out curls, its bracelets all a-jangle.

A sentimental child might start, hand in hand, to dissect how it came to this. To make a plan. To speak of restoration. She didn’t. She called the ambulance. She signed the forms.

Seventh shot. The client made seven. They wanted to brand them the Magnificent Seven but there were paper issues. Seventh shot. Paddington. Crowded top left of the Circle. ‘What You Can Get With Cosmopolitan.’ A parody. Paddington, as gate to Heathrow, was gate to the world. The concept was jetset. Not Heathrow as it existed, reeking of perfume concessions and long walks. A golden age set: spacious seats and fine dining, fern enclosures and glossy bricks of fashion pages. Stewardesses in choux bun hats and abbreviated skirts. A drinks trolley, chaperoned by a young man’s flawless posture, with cans of ready-mix cocktails—what else for a thirsty body. A rainbow arched the window, to honour the drink’s gay pedigree. And her, in a serious travel dress: retro green, geometric collar and matching cloche. Pearls and a pilot pin. Sipping from the carmine can, lips glistening red.

The campaign was two months’ hard work. In winter, pretending summer. Dark early mornings fixing her look, the correct blonde accessory for each can. Every hour told to sit, to turn, to bring each authentic gesture, to be credible with her body. Recording the socials. Getting tagged on replies to the socials. Keeping her channels refreshed, without spoiling the reveal. The centre of everything. Detached from the crowd. When the crew went for drinks after a shoot, she’d stay just the one. A different craft. Not part of their evening. She did a couple of small shoots since. Just infill. Just colour. The rent would get paid. The cocktail client might run a reprise for Christmas. If the numbers were good.

She checked socials, built replies, her phone screen iconic in rooftop haze. A careful balance, always. Access meant good word of mouth, a reputation as easy to work with. But she had to keep distance. She was the frame for the product. She showed how it could be used and enjoyed. A face. A hand. A contortion of bones. Never more than what she advertised. To work all the time, to pitch for top brands, to be known and stay anonymous. With nothing to fall back on, with money dissolved in her mother’s care and funeral, with a vow that she’d never step down to a day job, she had to keep busy.

Scrolling, she slipped through years of campaigns. The mausoleum of her back pages. Beneath her alibi faces, she saw how much she’d changed. A little freshness gone, her cheeks sharpened on years of salad suppers. Her eyes, once dreamily satisfied, at one with hard light. Her artifice more practised. Her naturalness more assured. Selling was no stepping stone for her. It was her. These looks and gestures, tilts and turns, the grit in the shell to generate value. A sound choice to front any campaign, with no blemish of bad behaviour, no bullhorn opinions, no presence outside this work. Activated for the duration. On hold till needed.

The sting of air on her stripped-down face was summer passing. A breeze across rooftops, to carry off time. At her back lay years of solid work. A scatter of pictures, the embodied value of desire, guiding the eye to satisfying choices. There were just these days to sell this product, until technicians reprogrammed the screens. Until, across the tube tracks, her face was peeled from the wall. Sometimes, travelling round, she was surprised to see an old poster, forgotten where the site hadn’t been switched out. A poster from months before, from a wrapped campaign. Still displayed. Still selling. Faded with rain, creased from cold air. Still selling. A ghost of long-lost time, made up and styled, turning fractions this way and that.

Every year girls left the business. To move away. Try something new. Steady money and regular meals. Some because they wanted to. Some whose phones stopped ringing. Onscreen, with the thickening sky, the wind making string of her bangs, she still gave good face, good profile, her skin rigorously smoothed, her eyebags cemented. Product still held her together. She had this year and next, at least that. She ran and swam. Always easy to work with. Never precious. There were chances for the older look. The muse with a touch of grey. It wasn’t all hygiene and supplements. With the right instincts, the right choices, she could endure. But she had to land something big. A top brand. A fashion shoot. A job to make her name. There was no possibility to fail, living bare months from defeat. If a client crashed in a scandal. If she fell downstairs. If the agent stopped taking her calls. The humiliation of running logistics for someone else’s shoot.

Ten storeys down, day was gone. Dusk swirled with leaves and litter. Across the park, in the next street, lights came into windows, accepting the fall of another day. How had it been, those final years in her mother’s house, when night came, when feeble light died against stacked products, bought and unused. When had desire become compulsion. Her mother always bought more than she used. Maybe that came from her family: born poor, excess was comfort. She’d wanted to believe her mother was okay. At least that. When they had nothing to say to each other.

Ten storeys down, the park lay waiting the man to lock the gate. When he drove away in his dark green van, the kids had to climb the spiked fence or brave the wild land by the railway, with its rats and shifty ground. That’s where she went, after her mother’s desolate funeral. Still in her camera-ready dress, she pushed her way through biting branches to the wall above the tracks. She stayed till it was dark and every sound was predatory. She breathed the trash and trains. She felt only necessity.

Ten storeys up, she locked her phone. There was time to search new brands, new opportunities, new demands for a face that could change like water.

To the east, a broken cloud let in the first stars. On clear nights she’d climb to the roof to watch the sky spin stars around. She’d forget the apartments and streets. Alone, cross-legged, stars swirling overhead, the smell of distance, the sharp-eared cry of a fox, and her malleable, unbreakable self.

To the west, the dying sun shot ragged light against the evening. She stood inside that fading brilliance. She raised the margarita can. From dusk, the sun struck blue. What You Can Get With.