Being a Girl

by Chloë Thurlow

  Nothing is ever as it seems. Thank goodness.

  Under the doctor’s tutelage, I had become more confident. I knew how to hold my own in discussion. I knew how to walk, how to dress, how to present my chin, raised slightly, turned to one side. I had abandoned my wardrobe of jeans and trainers, ragged skirts and slashed shirts. I wore dresses that clung softly to my curves, stockings held by thin elastic garters, no knickers except on the odd occasion each month. I looked more refined, more sophisticated, more elegant. I looked older. I was older. I was nineteen, my body smooth and graceful, my thin arms like the necks of swans, my legs long and tapered in needle heels. A naked woman feels fully dressed in high-heeled shoes.

  This sense of being older wasn’t something friends would have observed, but a change I could see in the mirror’s reflection, in the subtle depths of my dark eyes, in the serene curve of my lips, in the retroussé slope of my little nose. I had lost all need of haste, all feelings of anxiety, and experienced a curious pleasure being in the midst of my contemporaries knowing that below my clothes I wore a badge of moonlight, that I had knowledge of things that few of them would ever know. The rowing blue named Guy or Oliver or James who had taken me home and plonked me down on his oar had no notion of what pleasure he may have had. What pleasures he may have given. The students talked about current affairs and fashion, skiing holidays and idle caprices. I had tasted the forbidden fruit and that night, as if drawn by fate, I would enter the Garden of Eden.

  As Binky and I clipped along in our heels towards the club, a limousine pulled up and a group of very important people stepped out. I knew they were very important by the way the faces of those queuing behind the blue rope lit up like the lamps on the seashore at twilight, the way tears fell from their eyes, the way they elbowed each other as they pressed forward. They waved their arms, the little girls showed their breasts, and the gorillas in dinner suits, film grips moonlighting by the look of them, pressed back like rugger props in a scrum, punching teary faces, manhandling slices of bare flesh and allowing one or two ragged nymphets to enter the hallowed portals of paradise.

  Two silky women in capes slid from the limo behind a tall man with silver hair in a ponytail and another, younger man, who had won best director for A Girl’s Adventure. His name was Van Van de Vere, and although the alliteration was becoming the soul of all that was cool, vogue and sexy, as I had yet to see the film, and as I only knew it was Van Van by the breathless chant of the fans, I didn’t get that heart-moving blast of adrenaline people seem to experience when they are confronted by the famous.

  Van Van was the rising star in whose slipstream David was setting out to follow, a pioneer taking high-concept erotica mainstream. Had David left the Majestic with us and remained with us that evening, he would have felt as if he had died and gone to heaven; at least he would have gone to the Garden of Eden. Such are the laws of probability and chance.

  I wasn’t drawn to celebrity in the same way and considered fame abstract and undependable. Imagine being famous and not being recognised. Imagine being known by reputation only and having to explain yourself all the time. I was once at a dire dreadful luncheon at the Tuscan villa where Daddy had grown up. Sitting at the long table under the lemon trees was an oil engineer from Texas who turned to the English woman at his side and asked in a voice to awaken the dead, ‘So, tell me, honey, what do you do?’ Her eyebrows shot up like arrowheads. ‘I am,’ she said, ‘the Minister of Health in the House of Lords,’ and the Italians all had a good giggle. They were not impressed by such things. The Italians at the table were all counts and princesses. Everyone in Italy has a title and, if they don’t, they do the courteous thing and make one up.

  I was only a little girl at the time but the brief exchange came back to me as the man with the silver ponytail marched along the pavement away from the screaming horde and placed his arm around my waist. He was tall, he was wearing a white suit and he had a Texan accent.

  ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Like a giant octopus, he engulfed Binky in his free arm.

  ‘I see everything at Cannes. Everything,’ he said. ‘You girls trying to get in?’

  We were now walking towards the club entrance, the fans screaming and crying, the girls tearing off their clothes, the boys tearing scripts from their shoulder bags.

  ‘Actually, no,’ I said.

  ‘Actually, no! Hey, Van Van, don’t you just love that accent?’

  ‘British,’ he said.

  Binky glanced at me and shrugged. She was dressed in a black backless shift with a neckline that hung in swags and showed her long white neck to best effect. As a blonde she looked well in black. I was wearing a Diane von Furstenberg dress revealing one shoulder, the slant of the neckline repeated in the angle of the hemline, those 26 grams of golden thread complemented by Jimmy Choo shoes, a chain-mail evening bag shaped like a new moon and earrings consisting of three rings of gold, each containing a shifting universe of glittering stars, a Christmas gift from Dr Martin.

  The dress, as Mummy remarked when she bought it for me at Christmas, was not designed so much to be worn as to be taken off. Now that Mummy had lost the parental fear that her daughters were going to rush out and get pregnant, something that happens for some arcane reason on council estates in the North of England, she was making a superhuman effort to treat Binky and me more as apprentices than rivals, and saw herself as the master of seduction. Except for dipping each day into the Daily Mail, Mummy was not burdened with the ordeals of a formal education and believes girls should know how to ride, how to dress, how to cross their legs, when necessary and with elegance, and how to flirt in at least two languages as well as English. ‘Anyone who doesn’t know one of the three really isn’t worth speaking to.’

  Was Mummy proud of us? I think she probably was.

  I smiled back at Binky and the Texan tightened his grip around us. We were birds of paradise and he was the king of the jungle.

  The dinner suits parted like a black and white tide and, to the tune of the hiss and whistle of those still behind the blue rope, we entered the Garden of Eden, something of a misnomer, I thought. The club was dark, smoky and vast, like a railway station, with French rap screeching from big speakers and endless avenues of arches like a Giorgio de Chirico painting, the colonnades disappearing into the foggy ruins of time, a phrase I remembered from somewhere and which seemed terribly apt. Creepers climbed the columns supporting the arches and from the overhanging branches shiny red apples hung just above my head. They were made of plastic.

  One of the girls who had slid in with us was on her knees before the biggest of the big doormen, her mouth stretched in a rictus over the bulging head of his manhood, the gorilla clutching the girl’s hair in the same fist that had been pummelling the eager faces outside and driving his erection into the delicate tissue of her gaping throat. This was her price for entering paradise. After choking down the doorman’s stuff, she would wipe her lips, hook her little bra back in place and be free to pursue the stars, the producers, the directors, the men in suits.

  ‘That’s how Marilyn got started,’ the Texan said.

  He had been watching me watching the girl’s oral exercise and although I couldn’t see myself booking my passage in this way, a girl in a man’s world does what she has to do to get where she wants to go. The Texan shoved a folded bank note into the doorman’s top pocket and, as if this were a cue on stage, he leaned back, pulled the hose from the girl’s mouth and sprayed her face in a wash of thick milky gruel. The girl stuck out her tongue and shook her head as if in religious ecstasy as she lapped up the last hesitant squirts.

  From my chain-mail bag I produced a Kleenex and, as the girl wiped her face, she couldn’t take her eyes off the man whose hand was still around my waist.

  ‘Is that Tyler Copic?’ she asked, her eyes glazed, her mouth still open.

  ‘I’ve no idea, we haven’t been introduced,’ I rep
lied.

  The Texan found this amusing and steered me away from the girl as you would from a beggar on the King’s Road.

  My companion was indeed Tyler Copic, which he revealed in the modest way of someone who anticipates being known and, in spite of my dearth of film knowledge, the result of a boarding school education, I did recall having seen his credit on cinema screens on several occasions. Now that Tyler Copic was focusing on me more fully, I was focusing on him and realised that while his hair was prematurely silver, his face was young, a long, fine-boned, finely sculpted face with carved cheek bones, a Roman nose and resourceful, pale-blue eyes that could have been copied from the blue of Wedgwood china.

  In his white suit, white shirt and white Cuban-heeled cowboy boots, Tyler Copic could have been the high priest of a New Age religion, and it occurred to me that film is the new religion, that in a fragile society shorn of traditional values and lacking traditional close-knit communities, film stories like campfire stories provide the tribe with morals and meanings, the good guys tend to triumph and the villains meet a deserved and ghastly end. You can learn how to persevere, practise patience, be a good buddy and how to hold a knife and fork properly from watching movies. More people go to the cinema than go to church. Film is the culture. As the producer of Van Van’s A Girl’s Adventure, Tyler was showing us new ways to live, new ways to love, new relationships, true liberation. Amélie Ames and Greta May, striding ahead in their capes, were the two actresses whose selfless performances would take the erotic to a general audience. To the world. In my Diane von Furstenberg silk dress I was caught in the vanguard of Cannes magic.

  ‘What did you think of the film?’ Tyler asked, pulling me closer, his large hand gripping my side.

  ‘I haven’t seen it,’ I replied.

  ‘You haven’t seen it? I thought everyone had seen it. I’ll get a copy sent over to you. Did you see Brokeback Mountain?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘A Girl’s Adventure’s better.’

  ‘I’m sure it is.’

  ‘You did that short, what was it called?’

  ‘Cheats.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. Did you fuck the old guy?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Come on, there’s no secrets in the movies.’

  ‘A lady,’ I said, ‘never explains.’

  He grinned and I thought I was going to crumble into dust as his big hand squeezed down like a vice on my hip bone.

  I had almost lost sight of Binky and the rest of our group. The Garden of Eden was in permanent twilight and they were all dressed in black, Van Van in the same sort of suit that David had chosen, Amélie and Greta in velvet capes that had a metallic blue tinge and gave them the look of blackbirds in flight. As we caught up with them and made our way through the colonnades I heard voices softly whisper Tyler Copic, Van Van de Vere, A Girl’s Adventure like a chant, like a mantra, and I thought if I ever became famous I would disguise my name and wear a mask.

  We moved into an alcove with a domed roof and an oval table encircled by a red velvet banquette. It was like being inside an egg. A waiter appeared with a fizzing magnum of champagne.

  ‘It is the first law of the universe,’ Tyler Copic remarked, ‘never say no to champagne.’

  ‘I never do,’ I replied.

  ‘Hey, I like you, what was your name?’

  ‘Milly Petacci.’ I glanced at Binky. ‘My sister, Roberta.’

  ‘Binky,’ she said, and raised her glass.

  ‘You’re so British,’ said Van Van.

  ‘Italian, actually,’ she told him.

  He grinned. ‘That’s just what I mean.’ Van Van stroked a blonde curl from her eye and she purred magnificently.

  With her hair in waves about her wide cheekbones and her eyes half-shaded by long lashes, my little step-sister had quietly gone retro. She had borrowed all the Brigitte Bardot films in Daddy’s collection and had analysed the discreet charms of BB’s body language, every shrug and pout, every turn of heel and toss of her golden mane. I was growing very fond of my sister and was glad she would be coming up to King’s.

  The actresses had settled beside me on the curve of the banquette, their movements studied like mime artistes, their hoods framing chalk-whitened faces with elliptical eyebrows and carmine lips. Like well-brought-up children in olden times, they lowered their heads and bowed slightly as they said their names. When they cast off their capes, I all but lost my poise. Words rose to the tip of my tongue where they withered to silence. Amélie Ames and Greta May were all that is desirable, tempting, illicit, the fruit in the Garden of Eden.

  My gaze went from Amélie to Greta and back again. They straightened their shoulders and sat erect as if posing for a photograph. The girls were identically dressed, a mirror image in a gorgeous assembly of black leather leashes and straps that buckled about their throats, wrists and ankles. A harness crossed their breasts horizontally in such a way that their nipples were permanently erect, the upper strap of the harness connected to the ring in the throat band. In the ring was a silver disc that, as I would later discover, spun on a central axis and, when spinning, revealed a name. Around their waists, the girls wore studded belts that supported a fringe of leather thongs that danced and slithered midway down their slender thighs. They were not clothes they were wearing, not costumes, but the livery of display.

  It was bad mannered, I’m sure, but it was hard for me to take my eyes off Amélie and Greta, at the deft arrangement of black leather crossing their skin, at their pink rosebuds emerging like spikes from the gap in the harness and reversing the tired cliché of revealing the breasts while concealing the nipples. Amélie wore tattoos on her shoulders and legs. Unlike the snake in my little movie, the tattoos were real, a hawk, a lizard, a dragon with a fiery tongue, words in Gothic script I couldn’t read. Greta May had unblemished skin the colour of cream. But virgin pure or esoterically illustrated, the girls were coolly exotic, their outfits exhibiting all the pleasures of paradise and warning, too, that only the initiated should dare approach. They belonged to a world that I didn’t know and would glimpse that night for the first time.

  As they moved, the thongs parted to expose on Amélie the clipped stripe of fur ornamenting her mount. Greta was sitting with her chin resting on her knee, her left foot in gladiator sandals raised on the banquette, her legs open to reveal the silver rings piercing the lips of her shorn vagina. I gazed down at her moist gash and she pulled at the rings, opening the lips still wider and showing me the pink fruit within. I glanced up and, when our eyes met, I caught a glimpse of her features behind the mask of chalk. I knew Greta May, I knew her from somewhere. But where?

  ‘Have we met before?’ I said.

  ‘On the hockey field. In the swimming baths. At pony club.’

  She smiled. Now I remembered. Greta had gone to Saint Sebastian’s like Binky and me. She was much older, 22 or 23, but I could recall the willowy girl in the sixth form when I was in the third taking the lead role in school plays. She had been everything I wanted to be and it felt that night as if fate had drawn us together, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Greta slid her bottom towards me on the banquette and I couldn’t resist leaning forward and teasing the rings glittering between her legs. She closed her eyes as a wave of pleasure coursed through her body.

  I glanced at Binky, but she was engrossed in conversation with Van Van. As I had observed before, my sister was more concerned with being admired than experimenting with the erotic, and it was Tyler Copic who woke me from this moment of disorientation by tapping the rim of my champagne glass with his own.

  ‘Do you like what you see?’ he asked. He flashed a glance at the two girls.

  I nodded slowly, judiciously. ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  He leaned closer. ‘They belong to me,’ he said.

  Tyler was wearing a signet ring with a backward C and a regular T that stood out above the dull silver band. He pressed the ring against my arm and his initials, TC,
were printed on my skin, white for a moment then fading back to the brown of my suntan. The backward letters reminded me of the scene when Ricky first sees the tattoo in the mirror in Cheats, and again I had the sensation that everything was linked and that everything was how it was meant to be.

  They belong to me.

  I didn’t know what he meant, not exactly, and felt breathless trying to imagine things beyond my imagination.

  I took a sip of champagne and Tyler refilled the glass.

  Beyond the egg, figures drifted by like phantoms in the swirls of smoke. I saw faces I recognised and faces I thought I recognised. I saw young men carrying bags filled with film scripts and was reminded of the Pleiades, those wayward sisters in Greek mythology punished for killing their husbands by being forced to carry water in vessels so artfully holed they are always empty when they reach their destination. The Pleiades were more than mere stars. They were a constellation.

  I saw girls with silicone-frozen pouts, silicone-frozen breasts, Cannes suntans. It was the hottest spring on record and news teams from across the globe were capturing the outbreak of nudity claiming the town. Girls were leaving the beaches and cruising the Croisette in nothing but Prada shades and sometimes in nothing at all. They were making the updates on Korean TV, Venezuelan TV, Albanian TV, CNN, and no one they knew would see their segment, and they wouldn’t see their segment, but it didn’t matter. For a second, just a second, they were the news.

  Young men stopped to shake Tyler’s hand, to pay obeisance to Van Van de Vere. They praised Amélie and Greta, who closed their eyes behind fluttering eyelashes and turned unsmiling back to each other.

  A dwarf wearing a mortar board stopped and held out his little hands as he spoke.

  ‘Voilà!’

  On the black surface of his headwear were shiny pills of many colours. I didn’t try them. I didn’t want to. Nor did Binky. To be who I am I did not need drugs, if that was what the little pills were. I had in Cambridge been taken to the edges of my own reality, to that place where you are able to look below the surface of things, and what I had seen made me realise that life is too brutal and fleeting to do anything other than what pleases you and what pleases me is best viewed through unclouded eyes.