Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library Read Online Free PDF

in any job. Myself, I am so bored of tits. They’re all over the walls of the studio, big ones, wee ones. Mainly big ones. They’re just tits. There are days when I feel dismayed by the repetitiveness of it all, the stupidity. The stupid costumes, the ridiculous scenarios. Men are so easy to snare. One of the magazines I appear in sells for seven quid in the newsagents. Seven quid! Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps. Much Ado about Nothing, you know. Or was it As You Like It? Fucking hell.
    Lunchtime. We film in a block of rented offices, a concrete, square place with a rubbish café. I go to the café, order a baked potato in a plastic box. I’ve brought Pride and Prejudice with me, the copy I use for studying: highlighted fluorescent yellow all over, the spine battered and creased.
    ‘Hiya.’
    I look up and to my irritation see the photographer’s assistant sitting down opposite me at the table. We’ve had a few of his sort, and they’re all the same. Slouchy hats, sculptured facial hair, just out of university, think they’re going to end up in far-flung corners of the world shooting pictures of Aids orphans and politicians and unfortunate victims of unfortunate disasters, but instead end up in the back street of a bad area of Glasgow, shooting breasts.
    ‘Hello,’ I say darkly.
    He taps my book with a long finger. ‘Wouldn’t have thought girls like you would—’
    ‘What?’
    He looks at me.
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘What? A girl like me wouldn’t be reading an actual book? What am I meant to be reading in my lunch hour, bra catalogues?’ A couple of the office workers turn around.
    He leaves. I shake the book open. Do you know, I bought a copy of Cosmopolitan a couple of weeks ago and they had one of those stupid foil-covered male nude pull-outs. And all the men they’d asked to be in it were doctors and lawyers and aeronautical engineers. You don’t get that in any of the bloody magazines I appear in.
    Sometimes they ask the girls for a comment. They always want some vacuous, dim-witted remark about some topical issue.
    ‘So what do you think about immigrants, Maya?’ the photographer asked. The eye of the camera clicked loudly, open and shut, open and shut.
    ‘In the context of immigration or emigration?’
    He looked bemused. ‘Both.’
    ‘Right. Well firstly, I think the media has vastly misrepresented the number of immigrants coming into the country, and I think the reporting has been biased. I recently bought a newspaper and there was an article about the falling birth rate in Britain and how this was going to bring everything to its knees in the future; the NHS, state pensions and so on. But on the other page there was an article about how there were too many immigrants flooding into the country. Now, to me, there’s a contradiction there that smacks of racism. What they’re saying is that there aren’t enough white babies being born. If there’s a demographic argument that birth rates are falling too fast, then why the hell shouldn’t we be welcoming immigrants, especially those with young families? And there’s a possible genetic benefit for the health of the native population as well, particularly in a place like Glasgow where a high proportion of native Glaswegians have an ingrained genetic predisposition towards diseases linked to the immune system, like heart disease. So if the two populations interbred and mingled, this could be genetically beneficial. Although naturally whether this integration did occur would be dependent on social and cultural factors. So, in short, I’m in favour of it. And I think the media has fanned the issue because it sells papers,’ I finished.
    He stared at me. My breasts jiggled. ‘Right,’ he said.
    He looked disconcerted. A man like me is allowed to be intelligent, a woman is not. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. Northanger Abbey. I experienced a slight thrill at