Material Girl (3 page)

Ben snores so loudly I have tried to convince myself it’s not even him. It’s such a huge noise that some nights it is impossible to sleep through. I make-believe that it is a large and loud wind pushing through an autumn forest, or a gentle wave thudding onto a Thai beach as I rock in a hammock between two palm trees. I keep thinking it might help soothe me back to sleep. It hasn’t worked once.

Everything that I thought I knew has changed. Men say they like a challenge, when really they don’t. They want an easy life. They think somebody promised it to them. Women think that somebody promised them a white wedding and a baby, and happiness as well. Secretly we feel cheated without them. If only the dress and the baby were all it took.

Walk past the flower stall at the top of Berwick Street market, through to Wardour Street. Cut through St Anne’s Court, past the tour guide telling a group of German tourists that the Beatles recorded some of their biggest hits here, except he can’t remember which ones exactly, at this very studio. Cross over Dean Street, and through Soho Square. They have
shut the little house in the middle of the square, because of drugs and booze and cottaging. They closed down half of Soho Square’s smiles at the same time. But people still lie on the grass in all weathers with cardboard coffees next to them at nine-fifty in the morning. Walk through and towards Charing Cross Road. Turn right. You’re out of Soho.

I consider darting into Grey’s. It’s the large bookshop on Charing Cross Road. It’s been there for just over a century, getting bigger and bigger, gradually stocking more and more cookery and diet books. And other books, all the other kinds. I was in Grey’s twice last week. Isabella works behind the counter, mostly on the till. She’s a reason to buy, a need to delve into my purse, a depository for my loose change. I met her first by accident three weeks ago. I tripped over a woven mat at the front of the store as I nipped in to buy a poetry book for grand borrowed words for Ben’s third anniversary card – we don’t count the affair; we go from after that, from when he left – so I didn’t have to think of my own. I copied into his card:

A long time back

When we were first in love

Our bodies were always as one

Later you became

My dearest

And I became your dearest

Alas

And now beloved lord

Our hearts must be

As hard as the middle of thunder

Now what have I to live for?

I was wearing impractical grey court shoes that day, with three-inch heels and purple soles. Some days I feel like I’m
balancing on the top of the world in stilettos, and everybody is watching as I try to keep my balance and still look good, in heels. My purple soled shoes point violently before me with every step that I take, leading me on. It was one of these points that caught under the mat as I ran in, and I almost collapsed, tripping forwards, halfway between running and falling, not sure how it would end. I stopped myself by diving into a table of books by an author whose repackaged backlist was hot property now he’d had a bestseller. A few copies of his second book fell to the floor but I didn’t bother to pick them up, knowing they’d be sold in twenty minutes anyway. I straightened and checked myself, muttering ‘shit’ under my breath, and looked around to see if anybody had noticed. I saw her then, oblivious to what was happening with me, leaning forwards on the counter with her elbows beneath her, flicking through
Vogue
.

Her hair is unkempt as if she’s been out the back sleeping or shagging in a storeroom, and her long, dirty-blonde tresses have been mussed up. She has these huge breasts. They jut out like balloons about to burst. Her eyes are always smudged with black kohl, and her lips are glossed with a cheap little stick that she keeps under the counter. Her voice is deep and her words are rounded and moneyed. Grey’s know there is a reason to put her on that desk, front of store, like a poster, but the living breathing kind, the most attractive thing about the purchase you’ll make, even if it’s Shakespeare or Keats or Byron.

I found myself flirting with her on that very first day. I felt my own smile, the blood rushing to flush my cheeks into pink cushions. I felt my freckles, and my figure, and I found it hard to look Isabella in the eye. She flirts with everybody, I can tell. I felt a charge of electricity in me that day, hot wiring my senses, an urge to reach out and touch her, to
grasp her, to kiss the cheap gloss off her lips and grab her head by her long, dirty-blonde hair.

She has wild hair, like mine. Her chest, like a shelf for a thousand second glances, is shockingly apparent, like mine. Ben always says, when I plead with him to say something nice, ‘good rack’, and he laughs like it’s the funniest joke anybody has ever told, and not just really stupid, and slightly offensive. He never says anything that might make me feel good about myself. When I plead with him sometimes he just gets annoyed and says, ‘I don’t do it to order, Scarlet, my mind has gone blank now!’ and I scream, but silently. It makes me hate him a little, even if it passes. I never say anything at the time, but bring it up later when the arguments begin. Then I say, ‘You say you don’t do it to order, Ben, but you never bloody do it! Who is going to say something nice to me if not you, my boyfriend?’ Generally he squirms, but still says nothing. I saw his eyes glaze over halfway through reading the poem in his anniversary card, and he pecked me a kiss at the end, with his eyes closed. His card to me read:

Dear Scarlet,

Still gorgeous!

Luv ‘n’ hugs

Ben

He won’t even spell it properly. I assume he doesn’t want me getting any ideas.

I’ve been into Grey’s three times since the fall, for poetry. I think she must recognise me by now. I check my hair, my own lips, my own smudged and more expensively glossed smile courtesy of the freebies I get sent in the hope that I’ll slick them all over somebody famous, and not just keep
them for myself. I’ve bought
Orlando
, and
The Bell Jar
, and
On the Road
, all to impress Isabella. I feel a madness grip me when I see her, scared that my tongue will loosen and suddenly say something huge and strange and unfamiliar to another woman. I feel like I want to ask her out, to touch her hair and her hand, run my fingers across her lips, and trace the smooth round lines of her face. She is twenty-three maybe.

She’s me. A younger me, if I focus on her hair and her breasts and the gloss on her lips. Her eyes aren’t as deep as mine: hers are darker, and the wrong shape. I would like to kiss her. A younger me. I mention my age in so many conversations these days, it’s like it’s dripping out of me, like a shaving cut on my ankle that won’t stop bleeding. I’m thirty-one! I’ve said it first! Then I pause, and I wait for the payoff –
Oh my God! You don’t look it!
If a younger man smiles at me on the tube, or if he winks at me in a bar, if he tries to chat me up, I end up blurting out, ‘I’ve got bras older than you.’ I guess I’m admitting that I want to fuck a younger me, with my young tight skin and smooth thighs, but the contents of my young head as well. Back then I was front of store too. Back then I was good enough for anybody, and I felt like I could get anybody I wanted, if I put my mind to it. Because I know how Isabella feels – the rapt attention, the spotlight. I’ve felt it too. I want to keep feeling it, but now the spotlight is shifting.

When I was twelve, and my teeth stuck out angrily at the front, my mum marched me to the dentist to get braces. I was forced to wear a head brace at bedtime that looked like a motorcycle helmet with elastic bands that dug into my cheeks and left marks in my skin until breaktime the following morning. I had a perm that my brace flattened every night, and I was too scared to wash my hair in the mornings in case the curls fell out as my eighteen-year-old hairdresser said
they might, so I tried to coax the flat bits of my hair up with backcombing and hairspray.

Mum and I went together to get my brace one weekend. We got my first bra the weekend before, and my perm the weekend before that. She showed me how to shave my legs and told me to wear sanitary towels and not tampons for the first year of my periods. She called me every night at ten p.m. to say goodnight. Sometimes Richard would deliberately run a bath so he didn’t have to say goodnight to her, and I’d make up a story like he had a stomach ache or something, so Mum didn’t feel bad. Mum put me on a diet for six months when I was fourteen. No boys had been interested in me up until that point. She said, ‘You might not believe this but I’m just trying to make it easier. You should have every choice there is, Scarlet, I want you to hold all the cards.’ I’d told her that I’d been called a few names on the way home from school by a ratty older girl who was known as the local thug and the local bully. She shouted ‘thunder thighs’ at me as I hurried home on my own one day, and the same thing the following week. Kids will always remind you what bit of you it is that stands out.

Then one night I had my first brush with magic. A year after the diet and the braces and the perm and two days before my sixteenth birthday, I went to bed. I woke up the following morning and something had changed. I went to bed a slightly goofy teenager with puppy fat and frizzy hair, and I woke up kind of pretty. Straight-toothed. Slim. Sleek-haired. No more spiteful red elastic-band marks in my cheeks. No more thunder thighs. That day I walked to school with Helen as usual, and three boys from the local comp rode past us on their bikes but then rode back and did wheelies in front of us. One shouted out, ‘Oi blondie! I want to snog you.’ I told my mum that weekend and I thought she’d be
pleased. But she sighed heavily and said, ‘Believe me, Scarlet, when I say that I did it for the right reasons.’

I’ll wash my hair later this week and go in and see Isabella then. I wonder if this makes me gay, but I’ve always thought that there is something not quite right about lesbians, who, like vegetarians, seem to spend their entire lives trying to replace meat. I’ve often thought that they are just too scared to admit that they actually quite like the meat, because they’ve spent so long thinking they shouldn’t. It’s really far more judgemental than fucking a man. Or eating a bucket of KFC. Would the sex equivalent of a vegetarian tucking into a guilty KFC be a lesbian having a one-night stand with a fireman? And a really well-cooked juicy steak would be the equivalent of a ten-year relationship with a six-foot chiselled paediatrician called Doug? I don’t think I could ever give up meat completely.

Turn left off Charing Cross Road, and cut down through that little road with antique book shops and framers, and a dance shop at the end that sells tutus and taffeta and beautiful ballet pumps for children – ivory satin with ribbons that trail across the window. It leads you out onto St Martin’s Lane. Yes, you could have just walked a straight line down Piccadilly, and through Leicester Square, but who cares? It’s more fun this way. And now Starbucks is calling.

There is a sign resting on the counter, above the muffins and chocolate cake. It tells me that my barista’s name is Henri and he is single. Then, in what I think might be his own handwriting, it says, ‘He is nice guy, give him a try.’

This is the reason I am scared of being on my own. My barista is so desperate he is advertising himself with the croissants. I always believed relationships were supposed to be more than that: equal parts attraction, chemistry, fireworks, which make a life-changing love. These are the things I have
always dreamt of, that I dream of still – it’s more than selling yourself on the cheap and anybody who wants to make an offer is in with a chance. Henri isn’t looking for much, but he has resorted to advertising himself with the muffins. The void between the fairytales in my head and the life I am living widens daily.

I deliberately don’t walk through Chinatown anymore. There is a small door there. I haven’t seen it but somebody told me about it a couple of months ago, late one night, in Gerry’s. It was a stocky Russian film extra who smelt like pepperoni. He said that one day he and his friend had gone into Chinatown to sleep with a prostitute, up the stairs behind one of these little doors that has a broken neon sign outside saying ‘young model’. The Russian pepperoni guy had gone upstairs while his friend waited downstairs. Ten minutes later the Russian came back down with a cheap fading smile, and found his friend ashen, blabbering and crazy. There were tears in his eyes. He said that he had been leaning on the frame of the door, whistling to himself, thinking about his turn upstairs with the young model. Suddenly he’d felt a suction like a giant Hoover pulling him back through the adjacent doorway. He grabbed hold of the wooden frame around the door but his fingers slipped away. He grabbed instead for the broken neon sign that said ‘young model’ but had been dragged backwards, sucked into the doorway, screaming. Nobody had even noticed.

‘But what was in there? How did you get out?’ the Russian asked him.

With that his friend had collapsed. He awoke eight hours later, shouting ‘Sylvia!’ and he hadn’t spoken since. The pepperoni Russian thinks it is a time portal. He said that his friend loved a girl, Sylvia, when they were children, but he hadn’t seen her for twenty years. So I don’t walk through
Chinatown now. I can’t run the risk of being sucked thirty years into the future, finding myself staring with alarm at old-aged Ben and I as we shout the same spiteful lines at each other only with bent backs and brittle bones. Plus the cobbles in Chinatown play havoc with my heels.

Walk up Long Acre. My agency said that The Majestic Theatre is on the right-hand side, because I can’t tell one theatre from another. I stop at the front entrance and consider the posters that already hang in the glass boxes at the top of some small stone steps, adjacent to big crimson doors. ‘
Dolly Russell returns to the West End
’ says one, and underneath is a picture of an actress, in Forties furs and a pencil skirt, with a cigarette-holder in one hand, backlit on a sparse stage. It is obviously an old shot – she must be well on the way to seventy now. I’ve brought the thick concealer in case I need it, and two different types of base to smooth out lines. Her face bears an arrogance that you don’t see these days. She looks like a woman who made men chase her, in a time when women were far more compliant. Maybe that’s the last time love existed, back when we were all a little more selfless. I moaned to my mother on the phone last week, almost crying because I am so emotionally exhausted all the time, and of course confused. She said, ‘Jesus, Scarlet, will you stop whining? Don’t tell me about this awful modern female experience you girls are having. I wasn’t allowed to do A-Levels, for Christ’s sake.’