The brief for the tower shoot was one sentence long: "Girl on skates blows the perfect bubble." I remember thinking: lovely, easy day, home by four. I would like to formally apologise to that version of me.
A bubble-gum bubble, it turns out, is a diva. Too small and it reads as a pink dot; the retoucher asked if it was 'a lens flare situation'. Too big and it pops on your nose and you spend four minutes being de-gummed by a makeup artist who has seen things. And the perfect bubble - the taut, round, catalogue-grade sphere - lasts about a second and a half, which is roughly the time it takes a photographer to say "hold that".
So we counted. Rather, Elza, the art director's assistant, counted, keeping a tally on the back of a call sheet like a prison movie. Bubble one through nine: warm-ups, no comment. Bubble seventeen: popped on my chin the exact moment a tour group walked past, to scattered applause. Bubble twenty-six: photographer's favourite, art director hated the cloud behind it. The cloud. Bubble thirty-three: I got the giggles, which is fatal, because you cannot inflate gum and laugh at the same time - this is simply anatomy.
Bubble forty-seven. Hands on hips, chin up, tower blazing red behind me, and a bubble so round and so smug that the whole crew went quiet. Second and a half. Click. Elza drew a triumphant box around the tally and wrote 'FORTY-SEVEN' like a lottery number, and honestly? It felt like one.
The frame ran everywhere that summer - bus stops, two metro stations, one very large supermarket wall. My grandmother told her entire building. Nobody who sees it will ever know it was forty-seven takes deep, and that's the whole trick of this job: the work is invisible, the bubble is forever.