What's a Girl Gotta Do?

by Holly Bourne

  Shiny Suit did not know what to do with himself. But he drew his legs closer together.

  I used the opportunity to spread mine wider.

  I was relying heavily on the fact that people in London are willing to accept just about any kind of weird or rude behaviour, just as long as they aren’t late for work.

  So far, it was working. Shiny Suit looked horrified, and yet he said nothing.

  “This is so great, isn’t it?” I said. “Really airs out your bits?”

  A large snort came from Amber’s direction.

  Shiny Suit’s eyes opened wider, but still he said nothing.

  The Tube slowed. “This is our stop,” Will called.

  I closed my legs and stood up, staring the man down, who was determinedly looking everywhere but at me. Evie and Amber could hardly stand, they were laughing so hard.

  The doors beeped and slid open, revealing a huddle of people waiting to clamber on board.

  “Lottie,” Will warned.

  I leaned over and said very calmly and politely to the man, “Maybe be a bit more mindful about how far you spread your legs, mate.” God knows why I’d just used the word “mate”. Acting male was rubbing off on me very quickly.

  I didn’t wait to see the look on his face before I turned and jumped down onto the platform, the girls and I holding each other up, we were so hysterical.

  We emerged onto the polluted, crammed bustle of Oxford Street – inhaling the fumes of about ten million buses.

  We were discussing the Tube episode with Will. Who was playing devil’s advocate, as per bloody usual.

  “I’m just saying,” he said, “I’m not sure it’s a sexist thing. I mean, it’s uncomfortable having…you know…”

  “A penis?” I provided, and felt a surge of joy when he blushed slightly.

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “And balls…” It was my turn to go red. “I sit like that all the time! It’s uncomfortable having to keep your legs closed.”

  Amber rolled her eyes at him as we dodged past the scrum of girls clamouring to get into the flagship Topshop.

  “Yes, well, do you think it’s comfortable for girls to be constantly squished up against the wall just so you can air your balls? Is your comfort more important than ours? Evie, where are we going?”

  Evie, who was on smartphone-map duty, poked at her phone, looking lost.

  “Erm – maybe that way?” She pointed up a side street. We took her uncertain words as gospel and followed the direction of her finger.

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” Will continued. “You’re muddling up my words. As usual. I’m just saying I don’t think it’s deliberate. It’s just, like, what guys do for comfort. It’s not intentional.”

  We’d just passed three gorgeous-looking coffee places in a row but I resisted the urge to go in. Coffee always made me over the top, and I was fizzing inside enough as it was. In fact, my stomach felt pretty determined to empty itself and I hoped there would be a loo at the BBC studios.

  I was going to argue back, but decided to save my energy for the interview. With a nod of my head, I let Amber at him instead.

  “It doesn’t matter that it’s not intentional,” Amber ranted, her hands up in the air with anguish. “This is the whole point…”

  And her rant took us all the way – including a wrong turn and a backtrack – to the BBC Broadcasting House.

  We all stopped and looked up at it – causing at least four annoyed business-type people to thump into us and tut.

  I felt so ill.

  It was huge. The building stretched upwards in a giant horseshoe – gleaming all green and curvy and important-looking.

  “Woah,” Will said. So stunned the argument ended. “Lottie, this is the real deal.”

  Then, without making any big drama about it, he took my hand – entwining his fingers with mine. The touch shot electrical currents all up my arm, sending tingles to everything. My heart began beating even faster than it already had been.

  To distract myself, I reached out and took Amber’s hand. She looked at it, smiled, then she reached out and took Evie’s.

  We all stood there, in a line, staring up up up at a place that had the power to tell so many more people than our tiny town what we believed in and why it was right.

  “I’m going to mess this up,” I said, my voice catching in my throat. Fear rendering my vocal chords useless, which is very un-bloody-helpful when you’ve got a day full of interviews in front of you.

  “No, you’re not,” they all said, at exactly the same time, like magic.

  thirty-six

  “How much make-up do you use on the male presenters?” I asked the make-up artist.

  “Umm, they still get a bit of powder but that’s about it,” she answered, scraping my long dark hair back into a headband.

  “Then that’s all I want. A bit of powder.”

  She furrowed her eyebrows. “You sure? I’m booked in to do you for forty minutes.”

  “I’m sure. Just top my face up with powder then we’re good to go.”

  She picked up a teeny tiny brush and sucked on the end of it, which didn’t seem very professional to me.

  “Your left eyeliner flick is wonky,” she pointed out.

  “It will be fine,” I reassured her.

  I’d done my own make-up that morning and was determined to stay looking like me. Not some professionally-coiffed version of whatever the media wants a young feminist to look like. Also, I needed a lot of attitude and eyeliner – to look like Lottie. The few times Mum and Dad had made me groom properly for a wedding or something, it was always terrifying to look at myself. I’m pretty – the sort of pretty that feels unfair. Like I’ve lucked out too much. If I didn’t backcomb my hair and shovel eyeliner on, I looked so symmetrical and as-girls-are-told-they-should-look that even I hated me. I did not want that version of me all over the papers and TV. I didn’t want to be a “pretty” feminist. I didn’t want to make it that easy for them.

  I’d been to the toilet twice, and still felt like I had another four trips in me. Getting inside the BBC had been like entering a spaceship. Glass walls grew up to higher than I could tilt my head back. We’d had to give our names at this ginormous desk, sign in, get given special visitor IDs and wait for “Jane” from “Hospitality” to let us through the security doors.

  Shortly after, I was separated from my friends.

  “Girls, Will, come with me. You can see Charlotte afterwards. We’ve given you front row seats.”

  “What? They can’t come with me?”

  We’d hugged ferociously, and I’d welled up – like we were saying goodbye for ever.

  “You’re going to be amazing,” Evie whispered, with me and Amber in a headlock of a hug.

  “You will,” Amber promised.

  I held onto their words like they were precious pearls. But backstage, all alone, I felt them roll out of my hands and get lost in the corridor.

  Will had given me a stiff hug goodbye, and I’d hung on longer than was probably appropriate. “You’ll be fine,” he’d said into my ear, making all the hairs on my neck stand up. “Just be the annoyingly intelligent, charming, rampant feminist that I know you are.”

  And I’d clung even tighter, and made myself very confused about something that had nothing to do with the fact I was about to go on national television.

  Now I was being powdered and told I wasn’t going to meet the presenters until the moment of the actual interview. Some lady dressed all in black explained what questions they were going to ask. She’d clapped me on the back when I’d explained my project and said, “Brilliant, I wish I’d had the guts to be you at school,” which filled me with a temporary glow that everything might be okay after all.

  But now, with a bored make-up artist sitting on the chair in front of me, I was beginning to lose faith.

  “So, why you here today?” She began the laborious process of putting all her brushes and pots back into her giant case.

 
; “They’re, umm…I’ve been doing a project,” I said. “A project about feminism. And, well, our hits are almost at one hundred and fifty thousand.”

  The lady – through my haze of nerves I vaguely remembered her telling me her name was Gill – carried on packing up her stuff.

  “I’m not a feminist,” she said. Just like that – straight out there with it.

  “Oh, can I ask why not?”

  She glanced up, but looking at me differently, like suddenly it wasn’t so friendly any more.

  “Because don’t all feminists hate men?” she said. “I don’t hate men. I love them! I love my boyfriend, I love my dad—”

  I interrupted her. “Feminism isn’t about hating men. It’s not about that at all. It’s just about equal rights.”

  She didn’t look like she was listening, or maybe she was listening but not taking it in. She was very trendy – with a pierced eyebrow and tattoos all up her arm. “I guess I just don’t feel the need for it, you know? But good luck with your interview.”

  I looked at this woman. This perfectly nice woman who also happened to perfectly disagree with everything I was about to go on TV to say. And I knew there’d be others like her out there. And they might not be as polite. And they’d be watching and disagreeing and thinking I was disgusting or wrong or messed-up or lonely or mentally ill or bitter or a slut or a prude or a killjoy or a whinge-bag or a bra-burner or a yeller or a lesbian or a man-hater or an attention-seeker or maybe just even a teenager. Either way, whichever bullshit label they wanted to give me, they were going to stick it on me. I wasn’t in my nice little Spinster Club bubble any more – where the only people who didn’t agree with me were a spurned rugby player, girls like Jenny, and some arrogant cameraman who really needed to stop being so annoyingly attractive. I was about to walk onto a stage, in front of a camera that would transmit the very essence of what I believed as a human person all around the country to other human persons who might just think I was an uptight idiot.

  I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.

  To be judged. Tested. Held up as a shining beacon of what I cared about the most.

  What if I screwed it up? What if I didn’t make sense?

  “Oooh, love, we need to touch up your powder already, you’re dripping.”

  The lovely-but-unfeminist make-up lady came at me with a poufy brush, dabbing my damp forehead. The edges of my vision vanished.

  “Are you okay? Hang on, help! I think she’s going to…”

  Everything went black – just like they tell you it does when you faint.

  thirty-seven

  The producer, Chloe, was awfully nice about it.

  “Happens all the time,” she said, handing me a glass of water. She’d come all the way out of her important room to check I was okay.

  “I don’t usually…do that.”

  She smiled a warm smile. “You don’t normally go on national television.”

  “Oh don’t remind me, you’re making it worse.”

  She laughed as she scribbled something down on her clipboard. She was cool-looking, wearing jeans and Converse, with a big woolly jumper.

  I was beginning to get the feeling back in my fingers. My breathing was returning. Though my body was still acutely aware it was about to get shoved in front of a camera while I ripped open my soul and bled all over the purple sofa.

  Did souls bleed actually?

  And if they do, what colour is the blood?

  Hang on, that’s not a helpful thought right now.

  “Thank you for being so nice about it,” I told her.

  The warmth of her smile radiated off me so much I could almost have got a tan.

  “You think you’re going to be okay to go on? We need you in ten minutes.”

  Ten minutes. Ten of the Queen’s minutes. Hang on, was it just pounds the Queen had? Oh dear, fuzzy brain. Candyfloss brain. This would not do. I couldn’t expect to be prime minister if I went totally goo-goo the moment I got any publicity.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, sounding just about as confident as I was – which wasn’t much.

  “Good. I’m really excited to watch your piece, Lottie.” She took my glass away from me and put it down on a table. I hadn’t noticed it shaking in my fingers. “I’m the one who suggested we book you. I love your project. God, I wish I’d had your guts when I was your age.”

  I looked up at her slowly. “You…you do?”

  She nodded. “Girl, you’re fearless.”

  I was?

  “You’re just what we need. I’m so glad you’re doing what you’re doing.”

  Her smile was tanning my insides now – my intestines would need aftersun, she’d made me feel so warm, and strong and, more importantly…right.

  “Thank you,” I squeaked.

  “Now, you ready to meet Jordan and Sue?”

  Jordan Gold and Sue Phillips were the presenters. I’d watched them countless times through my TV – they were always on in the background of my life. Jordan was famously a “silver fox” – everyone always commented on his shiny grey hair. Sue couldn’t get mentioned in any newspaper without the word “curves” being used. She was the body shape tabloid newspapers always dragged out as “healthy” or “pro real-women” – like maintaining a double-D chest with a tiny waist didn’t take a considerable number of eating restrictions and trips down the gym…

  Uh-oh…I was going to have to say a lot of things they wouldn’t like.

  Just as I was taking another quick desperate gasp of air, Chloe reached over and squeezed my hand, like we were the best of friends.

  She lowered her voice to a whisper.

  “Make sure you bring up the age gap,” she hissed. “Jordan has never co-presented with any woman less than ten years younger than him.”

  It was all I needed to hear to know I was going to be just fine.

  “And we’re filming in five, four, three…two…” The producer didn’t say the word “one”. He just pointed at us, and a bright red light came on.

  I was sitting on the sofa, opposite Jordan and Sue, who grinned inanely at me. The lights were so bright I couldn’t see the audience – worse than that, I couldn’t see Evie and Amber in the audience.

  I was alone. I was sweating.

  This was happening.

  Jordan and Sue turned their perma-grinned faces to the cameraman and started talking, all smooth, like they’d done it a million times before, because they had.

  “Now, we have a special guest with us today on the show.” Sue’s boobs were trying to break free from her tight wrap dress. “Charlotte Thomas’s video channel has been rocketing in hits this week due to a very interesting project she’s started.”

  “Yes,” Jordan said, taking his turn on the autocue. There was a proper autocue, and me, MY NAME, was on the autocue. Somehow I had ended up on an autocue? “She decided that for a month she would call out every instance of sexism she saw – no matter how small…”

  I couldn’t really hear them properly. Time was slowing to sludge. Nothing seemed real. Was this real? I pinched my hand. It hurt. It was real.

  Jordan finally turned to me. Yikes, his teeth were white. I was almost blinded by them. They looked just regular white whenever I watched him on the TV, but here, in real life, especially under all these hot lights, they glowed so brightly we could use them to help land planes, or stand him at the top of a lighthouse and get him to help steer ships away from the rocks and…and… Oh shit, Lottie, he’s asking you a question and there’s a national television camera pointing at you and you can’t stop thinking about his teeth.

  “So, Charlotte,” he said, already laughing. “I guess, if you want to be true to this project, you’re going to have to tell us what you’ve already noticed here that’s sexist?” He laughed again then, all fake and yeah-let’s-see-you-try.

  Sue tittered too. “Yes, let’s get that bit out of the way, shall we? Then we can get to talking about what led you to take such drastic action.”

>   I froze up. I couldn’t say, could I?

  I had to say – that was the point. That was always going to be the point.

  The lights were so hot, my skin so slick. I could feel sweat powering through the thick layer of powder on my forehead, damp patches erupting beneath my newly hairy armpits.

  “I…I…”

  I stammered. I never stammer. I’m always about the words, the attention, teaching, preaching…

  “Go on,” Jordan said. “You don’t have to be afraid of us. We can take it.”

  Could he?

  I thought of Evie and Amber in the audience. I thought of Megan at college, spending every day trying not to bump into Max for whatever reason she was too scared to tell us. I thought of all the girls watching, who may’ve been waiting for someone like me to say things they’d always thought but had never been able to put into words. I thought of women being spoken over in meetings. I thought of girls not being able to walk to school without being leered at. I thought of girls who didn’t get the chance to go to school at all…

  So my mouth opened and I found myself saying:

  “Well, for one, Jordan… Why are your female co-presenters always at least ten years younger than you, and never the other way round?”

  thirty-eight

  The pop and instant fizz of a champagne bottle opening.

  Oh my lordy, Mum and Dad were actually drinking.

  Dad expertly caught the stream of bubbles in the glass and poured it in, quickly swapping it for another glass as it got full.

  Mum was still hugging me. So tight I couldn’t breathe.

  “My baby. On the telly. I’m so proud of you, Lottie.”

  I sank into her, so tired. So very tired. I’d been running on past-empty since we’d all collapsed on the train back from London. We’d gone straight from the studio to the newspaper office, then an interview, then a photoshoot where they asked me to get out my hairy legs, then another office, then another studio.

  I’d told the story of the van men sexually harassing me so many times I’d started to doubt it was real.

  I’d been asked if I was single, and then had to point out how sexist that was, so many times I wanted to stab things into people’s eyeballs.