Put Your Paws Up

It all started from the very moment that Juliet Tyler saw the light of day.

“Congratulation Mrs Tyler, you have a beautiful baby girl!”

Maybe it is standard for a nurse to say those words to a fresh young mother, but when Mrs Tyler held her tiny baby girl in her arms for the first time she was convinced of the truth that all fifty-two centimetres of her moments old girl, were the most beautiful fifty-two centimetres in the world. She believed ardently that Juliet was the most beautiful baby to ever grace the planet. Even the nurses spent more time cooing over Juliet than over the other babies. Juliet would smile up at everyone through her still bright blue eyes and gargle happily at anyone who reached out to her, in a vain attempt to share some of the beauty she possessed.

Mrs Tyler never ceased to tell her daughter just how beautiful she was. She never grew tired of it. Neither did those strangers in the street who would stop to coo into the baby pram, and announce that Juliet was the most beautiful baby they had ever seen. Juliet was her mother’s most prized treasure, which she loved to share with the world; her beauty was her mother’s crowning achievement and her lifelong investment. She entered her daughter into Beautiful Baby contests and by the age of five she had come out victorious three times in a row and had stared in four commercials.

As a young girl Juliet never really considered her looks. She never glanced too long into a mirror and was rather nonchalant at all the fuss that her mother created around her beautifully symmetrical and appealing face. However, once she reached that age at which boys began to care about her and she became interested in them, it was her face that gave her the game advantage.

As a young girl Juliet watched the funeral procession of Princess Diana on television. She sat in front of the screen cross-legged, eager to take in all the images that flashed across. Juliet was so deeply impressed by the crowd and the flowers that were thrown onto the car, often obscuring the windscreen so the vehicle had to stop every now and then to remove the flowers. Such a great beauty of a person had moved a whole nation and it’s hearts. Juliet often found herself wishing that she could be like that too, but on more than one occasion she was reminded that she was just a pretty face. No more and no less.

In High School she had a difficult time because of her wide appeal to the majority of the boys in their class. She had the jocks weak at the knees and the arty boys hid sketches of her between their thick drawing pads. She never had a lonely Friday night. Her dating history was wide and varied with her parents frequently loosing the overview of who was currently in their house.

But with great beauty comes great pain.

The abuse that she was greeted with on a regular basis from all the girls in school was her main torment. None of them seemed to understand, Juliet attempted to pin it all down to jealousy. She tried not to show how much it hurt her but at times she genuinely struggled. She received both physical and mental blows; this only resulted in her insecurities rising while her time spent on making herself more beautiful increased. The little angry red scares on parts of her body that were easily hidden, spoke their own stories, and yet the extreme hurt only added to her mysterious beauty that nobody could really understand.

Despite being one of the most beautiful people anyone had ever met, she was at the same time the most insecure. To hide this she acted out in extremes, leaving home the minute she finished High School and moving to New York to make money with her face.

In the city that never slept she found her new life and a new escape. The minute that the daylight faded and the neon lights of the clubs grew brighter she would hit the streets. Dressed to kill and with men following her like puppies, she would throw herself in the dark clubs where the moonlight could not reach and she could dance in the dark with the thundering music drowning out all the compliments from men that she had already heard before. It seemed ironic that she would hide her face in the dark underground clubs that spawned all over Manhattan, but she wanted to be able to be free from having to force her personality through her face. She just wanted to be free and with the lights out no one would judge her and finally she could let loose. Dancing in the dark meant that no matter how much she was falling apart and tearing at the seams, no one would see.

And yet the men of the dark night world would clamour around her, craving her attention. Showering her with compliments that so many men before them had shared with her, wanting to buy her affection with drinks, expensive drugs or even paying her to spend the night with them. She felt that there was nothing wrong with that, she had beauty and might as well make a profit of it. It was her own way of battling her security to her side and standing up to the curse that the beauty had began to turn into.

She couldn’t keep a steady boyfriend. Juliet had tried, Lord knows she had tried and yet none of the boys ever wanted to stay around.

“You’re a mess Juliet.”

She thought he was the one. Out of all the nameless faces in the bar she had chosen him and yet now, after so long and such hard work, he rejected her. After having put up with watching all the Marilyn Monroe films there were, letting her read Sylvia Plath’s poetry to him and dealing with her affixation of Jean Benet Ramsey, the fallen child beauty queen. But in the end he couldn’t deal with it anymore. He couldn’t deal with the ironic amount of insecurities and prescription drugs that were so similar to Judy Garland from whom Juliet took so much fatal inspiration. He couldn’t stand to go out in the evenings with her; it made her look like a tramp to him when she revelled in the attention that she received in the dark. She was a tramp to him, the way she fed off the besotted men like a vampire, with a grin firmly in place knowing all the while what she was doing.

But the fast lifestyle and the dangerous choices all started leading to one thing: the slow and brutal decay of the face that had launched so much of her life.

She needed her face, she needed to get that attention, the light needed to shine out when she danced in the dark, and yet her beauty was part of the slow corruption of herself. She was stressed and it showed. Her hair became thin and lank, her face showed lines which were painful reminders of cigarettes and drugs. So Juliet began to inject anything that promised eternal beauty: concoctions that were not legal and rarely tested and promised the revival of morose skin that had been abused for so long now despite it being so valuable. Poison. That was what she was injecting into herself, but she could do what she wanted to do.

After all she was a free bitch.

But she was a lonely free bitch. She never had girlfriends; they had always resented her beauty and felt inferior to her. The only other girls she could surround herself with were equally beautiful girls who had little substance. But their beauty was a bond that they could share, all were lost and falling apart under the perfect mask. Together they danced and let the monsters gather around them.