Material Girl (15 page)

I don’t know what to buy today that won’t look like my own pathetic prop, an excuse to give her my money and two minutes of my time. Glancing at the shelves quickly I grab
Don Quixote
. Heading towards the till I see that somebody else is serving too, a bespectacled guy in an ill-fitting jumper. He puts the grey in Grey’s. Isabella has just started serving two awestruck schoolboys in uniform, but Mr Grey is nearly finished with his pissed-off suit whose glance flickers sporadically to the chewing-gum beauty to his right. If I get in line now I’ll miss her. I dart to the magazine stand and watch the pissed-off suit try and throw a smile at Isabella before he leaves, but she doesn’t catch it. Mr Grey stands at the till for a moment, but when nobody else appears he hits a few buttons to presumably lock his till, picks up a stack of books and heads off towards science fiction. I grab
Vogue
as the schoolboys finish paying, and move quickly to the till.

‘Hi,’ she says, and smiles.

‘Hi,’ I reply, and pass her my Cervantes and my
Vogue
.

She runs the codes under the plastic thing that bleeps.

‘This one’s heavy!’ she says, flipping
Don Quixote
over and widening her eyes. ‘It would take me weeks! But this is more my style,’ she adds, stroking the glossy
Vogue
, chewing her gum. ‘I think she’s beautiful.’ She gestures to Catherine Zeta Jones, who glares at us from the cover.

‘She’s old-school glamorous, and there’s not much of it about these days,’ I say.

Arabella looks at me and smiles. ‘You’re right – I love glamour. But look at us, I think we both do!’ She flicks her hands at her hair, and nods at me, and I smile, stupidly pleased.

‘That’s eight pounds forty-five then,’ she says with a smile.

I pass her my card.

‘You come in here quite a lot, don’t you?’ she continues.

‘Yes – I work around Soho most days, so it’s my local.’

‘My local’s the Gay Hussar,’ she says, and giggles.

‘A different kind of local,’ I reply.

‘Maybe, but sometimes I just go in there at lunch, read my
Vogue
, have a vodka, it’s not that different. Other than the vodka.’ She holds my books in her hands, but doesn’t put them in a bag. ‘I always think you look wonderful,’ she says, and I feel like twenty capillaries have burst in each of my cheeks.

‘Oh, thank you. I enjoy it, you know, dressing up, and I am a make-up artist so …’ I knew that would get her. She is ignoring the line of men queuing behind me, and I hear them tut loudly when Mr Grey comes dashing over and shouts ‘Who’s next please?’ A Financial Director throws both Isabella and I daggers, like we’ve just ruined his year.

‘You’re a make-up artist? Do you get free stuff?’ Her eyes widen between hastily smudged black kohl.

‘Yes,’ I say, nodding my head, smiling like it’s obvious, that I’m old and cynical while she’s still young and innocent.

‘Good stuff? Like good mascaras and glosses and things?’

‘Yes, and rubbish as well of course!’

‘Christ, I’d be happy with the rubbish, you know, anything. So you work around here?’ She cocks her head to one side childishly.

‘At the moment, yes. Down the road at one of the theatres in Covent Garden.’

‘So what do you do for lunch?’

‘I haven’t had a lunch yet, today was my first day there.’

‘But, like, what do you normally do for lunch?’ she asks, playing with my books. They still aren’t in a bag.

‘Who’s next please?’ shouts Mr Grey, and I hear more tutting behind us.

‘Well most of the time I’m on set. I don’t really get a lunch break, and I have to be there constantly during the day in case people need touching up or whatever.’

She grins at me like I’ve said something naughty. I grin back, feeling a little ridiculous. It’s the kind of joke that Ben would like.

‘So, like, what time is an early finish for you then?’ she asks, and I blink a few times. She is full of confidence; I wonder if anybody has ever turned her down; I wonder if she even knows what it feels like to be rejected, or hear the word ‘no’.

Something happens. Suddenly I remember how to play this game.

‘I’m not sure yet. Sorry.’ I check my watch. ‘I have to get going, but if I get a chance I’ll pop back in later in the week,’ I say, and give her a grin.

‘Oh, okay,’ she says. With a slice of disappointment and a shrug she thrusts my books into a Grey’s plastic bag.

‘Thanks, bye,’ I reply, and run out without looking back, hearing the next guy in the queue practically throw himself at her counter behind me.

Walking quickly down to Leicester Square I turn left onto Long Acre. When I get to The Majestic the back door is closed, so I walk around to the front and sit down on the steps. Catching my breath I gulp twice in quick succession and practically gag. Coughing a little I pat my chest for comfort rather than necessity.

I laugh out loud. I lean back, letting my arms on the steps behind me bear my weight. The afternoon sun soaks my face for a while.

My face cools, my freckles dart back in, and I open my eyes to swear at the cloud that has stolen my sun, but it is Gavin standing in front of me, three steps down but still big enough to block out the rays.

‘Have you been here all this time?’ he asks, sounding only slightly more interested than the kids in yellow hats who ask, ‘Do you want fries with that?’

‘God, no. I’ve been all over.’

‘What are you doing now?’

‘I’m not sure, I’ve run out of things to do before Gerry’s. What about you?’

‘I’m ready for the pub. We’re all going. You want to join us?’

‘Why not!’

I push myself to my feet, shiver slightly as I feel the evening draw in, and make my way back to Soho.

Tucked into a corner of Soho Spice between Arabella’s skinny nervous understudy, and giant Gavin, and chewing on a Chicken Kashmiri, I eyed Tom Harvey-Saint at the end of the table attempting to feed nan bread to a model that Gavin informed me he had seen with Tom a couple of times. Her name was Angel and her limbs were so long that her hands seemed like distant relatives of her shoulders, and her eyes glared out angrily from her skinny face. I noticed that she and Tom shared a Chicken Tikka with no rice but then pushed their chairs back simultaneously and disappeared to the toilets. Tom emerged ten minutes later, and Angel followed a couple of minutes after that, grabbing her bag and leaving without saying goodbye to anybody, including Tom, who glanced around the table and remembered that I was there, and tried to catch my eye. I kept trying not to look back but as a study in self-restraint it wasn’t impressive, and became even less so the more wine that I consumed.

As Soho turned neon we stumbled south towards the Crown and Two Chairmen on Dean Street, for more wine. I chatted vaguely to Tristan’s assistant who told me it was his birthday, but still didn’t tell me his name. Tom Harvey-Saint disappeared, while Gavin and Arabella flirted in a corner by the cigarette machine. We left the pub as they rang the bell for last orders, and I noticed the mist again. A mist
keeps falling on London, every night at 10.55 p.m. It’s the Last Orders bell that seems to toll it in. It settles heavily within minutes and obscures the faces of strangers and anybody more than three feet away. It forces me to look really hard and closely at the people I am with, to make sure they are the people I should be with. Tonight I’m not so sure.

Five hours and one curry and two bottles of red wine later I sit cross-legged talking to Tristan at a table in Gerry’s. It’s twenty minutes until midnight, but it’s still early for Gerry’s.

They buzzed us in, somebody is a member, and we plummeted down the steps into the one large room. It’s busy, there must be forty of us in total all squinting at the old actors’ photos on the walls to see who we’re standing next to tonight.

‘I think my life bubble’s bursting, Tristan. Can you take those bloody glasses off now please?’

‘I can’t, love, no. It’s too smoky.’ Tristan is playing an imaginary piano with his fingers. It looks like Billy Joel, and it’s certainly not Chopin. His index finger bangs the air delicately while the rest tickle the space between us, racing to catch up.

‘Then stop lighting those sodding cigarettes!’ I lift my arm to sniff my cardigan suspiciously. ‘I smell like a French shrubbery,’ I whisper, to myself more than anybody else.

‘Look. No. Stop it! Stop playing me up, Make-up. No tantrums. No stamping your stiletto. I’m not one of your boys. You won’t wind me around your pretty little painted finger, love, you won’t tie me up in knots. No batting those eyelids, no pouting, no half-smiles and dropped chins and glances up. Stop it. Jesus!’ He shakes his head and his piano-playing fingers fold into fists at either side of his squeezed-shut eyes. At least I think they are squeezed shut. The muscles around his cheeks tighten, but the Jackie O’s obscure my view.

‘Just act natural, Make-up! And tell me: are you happy?’

‘Me act natural? Me? That’s rich, Elton air-piano John!’
I tut at him childishly and roll my eyes so quickly it makes me light-headed. ‘Am I happy? No. Of course not. Who can manage happiness when their relationship is ending? It’s not party time, it’s not knock-knock jokes with every other line of conversation around at my house! It’s not all whoops of excitement and belly laughs and “Ooh my thong’s too tight and my boyfriend thinks I’m a size eight and I’m really a size ten and I shouldn’t eat those two squares of chocolate but I’m gonna and aren’t I scatty but cute and pass the Lambrini.” SHIT! This is serious stuff, Tristan. I’m going to end up on my own.’ My shoulders sag dramatically as if God has just poured an invisible bucket of water over my head and now I’m soaked and heavy and dripping. It’s a deliberately pathetic look and I ham it up even further with a pout.

‘Stop it …’ Tristan is wagging a stiff and angry finger at me so ferociously that it makes his pink beads swing around his neck like a hula girl gone wrong. He points to my shoulders and gestures for me to sit up, so I do, and I drop the pout with a huge slug of red wine. Red. It’s not Chardonnay, it’s red, so red that it’s staining the inside of my lips. Very slowly he gives me a grin, which gets wider by the second, until eventually I see his teeth. His mouth is huge, and so wide it should be painted on like a clown’s.

‘You will end up alone if you don’t stop fucking moaning, love! But, still, I have to concede that you’re a little dark, Make-up, and of course I like that. I like the devil in you, you’re a fallen angel. You know that’s what devils are – angels that fell from the sky during the battle of heaven. When the angels rebelled God punished them and sent them to the fiery furnace at the centre of the earth!’ He nods his head and is terribly earnest. I pay attention. ‘But riddle me this, Angel, if not now, when were you last happy?’

I don’t even have to think about it, I already know. It’s a
question I’ve asked myself a hundred times recently. I don’t count sheep when I can’t sleep: I drive myself crazy with nightmare posers like that. It’s a peculiar masochism, and, I believe, a genuinely female form of torture.

‘Five or six months after Ben and I first got together. Nearly three years ago. We were only really happy for the time it took him to leave his wife, and then maybe a couple of months after that. Then he opened the door sneakily when I wasn’t looking and let her back in the room. And he seemed to forget, suddenly, what it was that he saw in me, like he’d fallen and banged his head and had selective amnesia. It made me feel like one of those supermarket-sized bars of Dairy Milk chocolate – better to dream about than actually have, because afterwards you feel a bit sick and all you’re left with is guilt.’

‘So … what’s changed since then?’ Tristan asks, as he watches the ice cubes rock at the bottom of his glass.

‘Him.’

‘Not you?’ he asks, surprised.

‘No.’ I shake my head but the word doesn’t sound right. I have trouble forming the ‘o’. It’s as if I cannot tell a lie, on this occasion. Because of course I can lie and I do, most of the time.

‘Not you at all?’ he asks. With one finger he reaches behind his ear and flicks the arm of his glasses so they spring up and down on his nose like Groucho Marx.

‘Well, maybe a bit …’

I have changed. When Ben and I first met he thought I was exciting. I was wide-eyed and innocent and fun. I laughed all the time, and I made him run through the streets with me. And although he ran with reluctance he was still smiling while he did it. I was the confident one and he made me feel like a breath of fresh air. When I made him laugh it felt like a victory, and when he kissed my head, or ran his hand across my back, I felt like the only person that would see that side of him. I thought that I’d managed to open the door to somewhere
deeper, a place that he’d never let anybody in before. But then he pulled it shut again.

Now I’m this weird cake-mix of disinterest and desperation. A sprinkling of neediness coupled with long, thick lashings of ‘never there’. When I do see Ben I spend my time squirming my way under his arm into a contrived cuddle, which is part of the reason that I try not to see him too much. There is only so much twisting my neck can take without snapping! The mere idea of Ben walking up to me and throwing his arms around me, bear-hugging me to near-death without some kind of coaching, is laugh-out-loud funny. It’s funny awful, if such a thing exists. It’s not funny ha ha. I have changed.