Material Girl

by Louise Kean

  ‘Do you think he’s being cruel to you?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I thrust my hands into my hair and deliberately mess it up. It’s supposed to be messed up, that’s the look that I want. Not too polished. Black eyes and gloss and messy hair. I like the drama of it – it counteracts my reality.

  ‘So it’s not deliberate, this disinterest, it’s not controlling?’

  ‘No, I just think … he’s gone off me, maybe … or …’

  ‘You think about it a lot, don’t you? You talk about it a lot. I’ve only just met you, this is the second conversation we’ve had, and we’re talking about it again … does that seem a little strange, a little self-involved, if you stop and think about it?’

  I don’t know how to explain to Tristan that it is what we do these days: figure out ways to be perfect. Isn’t that the point? Talk about it and thrash it out and pull your life apart, tear it into pieces to find the bits that don’t work and try and toss them out and put it back together. Every TV show that we watch and get hooked on and cry in front of and that exposes all our faults has made pop psychologists out of all of us, hasn’t it? That’s what we do now! Rip ourselves apart to find the flaws. I don’t know who I am supposed to be obsessed with, if not myself? And if I’m not obsessed with anybody, or anything, then what will I do with all that thinking time on the tube or the bus, or staring off into space while I stir my Alpen? I hear talk of people who ‘let things go’, who say ‘fuck it’ to diets and their hair and their relationships and love. But that’s just propaganda, surely? I don’t know anybody who actually lives like that. Nobody really feels like enough any more, do they? Not here at least. And now Tristan is saying I am obsessed with my love life, but who else is there to be obsessed with it, if not me? Certainly not Ben!

  ‘Well, it’s a big deal when you’re going through it, maybe the biggest thing. And anyway, you brought it up this time, Tristan.’

  ‘Yes I did, didn’t I? I wonder if you are just trying to muster up the courage? To say goodbye? If you are slowly putting yourself back onto the market, before it’s too late. It’s not too late yet, Make-up, they’ll still fall at those pointed heels of yours.’

  ‘I don’t know about that, I … God, I don’t know, I don’t want to think about it like that, I just want to work it out with Ben.’

  ‘But clearly he doesn’t love you, or he loves somebody else, somebody new, perhaps? Or somebody still?’ He looks at me in the mirror, and sees my mouth fall open.

  I wonder if it is Tristan who is being cruel. He has stumbled over my darkest fears almost straight away, but it feels like he is toying with me. There is a camp menace to him, like Hannibal Lecter playing with make-up brushes. I sit back a little further in my seat in case he decides to take a quick and sudden bite out of my nose.

  ‘I guess I’m just trying to work it all out, in my own head,’ I say.

  ‘Do you have any proof?’ he asks, matter-of-factly.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of infidelity, adultery – that your man is ripping at the flesh of another?’

  ‘Yes. I think so, anyway. I found a text from his ex, saying that she couldn’t meet him as arranged ‘later that night’, with a kiss. And he told me that was the night he was going out with his mate. But when I confronted him he wasn’t even angry that I had checked his phone, he just seemed relieved that I believed him when he said it was a mistake. She meant to send it to somebody else, he said. It didn’t actually have his name in it, so I believed him. But I shook and cried for fifteen minutes.’

  ‘So you don’t trust him at all?’

  Tristan watches himself as he thrusts out his Adam’s apple, and his crotch as well, as he talks. He juts out those parts of him that make him a man, but then counters it with a strange swish of his hand, or lightness of touch. It all seems very deliberate, experimental. He is trying to find the moves that work.

  ‘I would trust him, if he could just articulate how he felt, sometimes, about me, but he never does. I feel terrible for not trusting him sometimes. I don’t know what goes on in his head.’

  ‘Nor he yours, I’m guessing. And don’t feel terrible yet, you might be right! But he told you once? I mean, you fell for him once?’

  ‘He started, but then he stopped. He kind of drew me in, then closed the door. But it’s as if I’m halfway through …’

  ‘Your leg is caught in his door?’

  ‘Something like that, I suppose.’ I laugh sharply.

  ‘Ha! And you don’t know whether it will hurt more to try and push the door open, or tear your leg back out!’ Tristan folds and unfolds the cuffs on his polo-neck jumper.

  ‘Well …’ He takes a deep breath and finally looks away from the mirror,

  ‘I need to think about this one some more. The only thing I can offer, from my twisted perspective, love, is that what makes a woman of forty more attractive than a girl of eighteen is not her body but her confidence. Don’t fold, Make-up. Don’t dither. Toughen up. Let’s have some fun.’

  ‘I’m thirty-one. I’m not forty,’ I say, as I feel stupid tears rush to my eyes.

  ‘I didn’t say that you were, Make-up. Now, how do you feel about nudity?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Nudity, how do you feel about it, and in particular cast session nudity?’

  ‘Uncomfortable pretty much sums it up.’

  ‘But what if it were just me? You see, I’ve been body-brushing with a toothbrush recently, rather than following any traditional bathing ritual, and I wonder if it doesn’t give me a shine that I’d like to share. I’ve been reading a lot about Major General Charles Orde Wingate, heard of him?’

  ‘Well, Tristan, I can’t say that I have …’ The tears recede and I can’t help but smile.

  ‘Churchill described him as a man of genius, who might have become a man of destiny. But he died, in a burning crash of a plane, in Burma. 1944.’

  ‘Okay … and he used to conduct sessions in the nude?’

  ‘Hmm? Yes, yes, he did. Of course his were with soldiers, but I think there might be something in it. Strip away our pretensions, make us real, cut to the chase. Beauty is truth after all. If we were all a little nude, once a day, the world would be a much less violent place. I know it’s a fucking cliché but I believe it. Of course there is always the danger that somebody is going to become unspeakably aroused, but that doesn’t really affect me … Do you know he inflicted some terrible defeats on his enemies, on the invincible Japanese! And he believed the best way to survive tropical heat was a diet of raw onions.’

  ‘Have you tried that as well?’

  ‘Yes, I tried. It gets tropical in Streatham in August. But it gave me terrible flatulence. I was like a human wind machine, and the stench! It is impossible to function when you are terrified to be in small spaces, afraid of what your own body might inflict upon those around you … I couldn’t be in here, right now, with you, if I were still doing it. Of course sometimes it was wonderfully amusing, it depended on the company. In lifts, hilarious! Inevitably it was my mother that made me stop. She’s a wonderful woman but with little tolerance for anything other than her own peculiar rituals. It’s nothing to do with her legs, she’s just that way.’

  ‘Her legs?’ I ask.

  ‘They barely work any more,’ he replies, nodding.

  I remember reading in the Standard that he lives with his mother in Streatham, and that she is disabled, but I can’t remember how it happened.

  ‘Why don’t they work?’ I ask, trying my best to seem sincere and not just nosey.

  ‘She has a tumour, Make-up, that is pressing down on her spinal cord, and is hard for them to reach without risking complete paralysis. She says that she is lucky, of course, that it has only affected the lower half of her body, but that’s bullshit. She’s a religious woman, and I thank God that she is, even though of course I don’t believe in it at all.’

  I want to say, ‘But you’ve just thanked God’, but decide that now
isn’t the time.

  ‘So she fell over one day and never got up. Dad’s dead, so that’s that. She’s going nowhere, and she cooks a wonderful lamb curry, and …’ He nods his head quietly, and squeezes his eyes shut.

  I don’t know what else to say, so I change the subject. ‘Do you think Dolly might be here soon, Tristan?’

  He presses the balls of his palms into the sockets of his eyes. ‘I fucking hope so, love, otherwise we’ll never open!’ he shouts, and whips away his hands to clap loudly, spinning in a full circle and biting his lower lip with his teeth, thrusting his groin back and forth like a 1970s porn star, like some second-rate Russ Meyer gyrating horror.

  ‘Are you okay then?’ he asks me.

  ‘Yes, but I think I need biscuits.’

  ‘Kitchen’s down the hall, didn’t bouncy Gavin show you?’

  ‘He told me, I’ll find it, it’s fine.’

  ‘Lovely Gavin, I have to remind myself that he’s not, you know, slow … simple, retarded, him being so big. But he’s sharp as a tack really. Acid-tongued. I like it. It keeps me on my toes.’

  ‘Okay, well I’m going to go and find those biscuits I think.’

  ‘Good for you, but just the one, mind! Keep your chin up, Make-up. Stop thinking about your bloke if you can. We aren’t worth it!’ He throws me a huge grin – he doesn’t believe that for a second.

  ‘I’ll try,’ I say, and edge past him to leave. He trots off in the other direction, singing what sounds like ‘Anything Goes’ segued into ‘Let’s Get It On’.

  I edge down a grey hallway, in and out of the patches of dirty light cast by infrequent and dim bulbs, speeding up through the strange shadowy spots that make me nervous with Tristan’s talk of shootings and blood-spattered walls. My heels clicking on the hard cold floor announce me to any potential murderers or psychopaths or evil spirits lurking behind dark doorways: they’ll hear me coming and be fully prepared to leap out and grab me, pull me into the darkness with them, smother my face and paw me to near death. I am convinced that’s what will happen. I make this daily exhibition of myself, in my heels and my skirts and my gloss, and I put myself on show even though I know that it is dangerous. I don’t go unnoticed, and it’s a cracked-up world. Soho is full of loners and losers, producers and pirates, prostitutes and pimps, directors and producers and more producers. Everybody claiming to produce something, so where is it all? I click my way into everybody’s view, and it’s a perilous route to take. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one with the biggest audience, and that has made all the difference. My heels tap out ‘look at me, look at me, look at me’, and by the way please note that I won’t be able to run that fast in three and a half inch stilettos. It is as if I have accepted my fate. I’ll be strangled with my own sparkly scarf, a victim of my own need to be appreciated in a world full of crazies.

  In a badly lit 1970s kitchen that is dusted in crumbs I hunt through grubby cupboards for some Digestives or Rich Tea.

  ‘Can I help?’

  Someone is lurking in the doorway behind me and I freeze, one arm in the cupboard, precariously reaching out on tiptoes back to the furthest corners, looking for the good biscuits that have been scrupulously hidden.

  What if I just don’t turn around?

  ‘Can I help you?’ he says again, but louder this time, and yet I sense he doesn’t move an inch, he doesn’t come and reach for the biscuits for me. He doesn’t really mean to help. What he means is ‘turn around and let me see you’.

  I rest my weight back onto my heels and drop my arms in exhaustion. I recognise his voice. I don’t want to turn around.

  ‘I was just trying to find some biscuits.’ I address the Cortina-beige wall in front of me.

  There is a dramatic pause, so dramatic it would be noted in a script and the audience might be fooled into holding their breath. I hold mine …

  ‘I know you,’ he says, quietly, evenly, ‘have we worked together before?’

  My heart sinks like Leo at the end of Titanic.

  ‘Only at Gerry’s,’ I say.

  And still I don’t turn around.

  It was spring. It was the first week after the clocks had changed, when you feel that extra hour of daylight every evening enriches your life. Every year, that first week after the clocks change, the light takes us all by surprise, and I feel enlivened and hopeful for a summer of love and laughter and finally fulfilled dreams. That first week after the clocks change is the most magical week of the year.

  I was working a nothing job that day, which paid only average money. A reality-TV star was filming his exercise video. We were in a studio located off a newly sanitised Carnaby Street. It’s all flagship sports stores now, surf brands and trendy trainers. More thought goes into the image on the front of the plastic bags than it does to war or peace or revolution or anarchy or any of those things, that don’t seem relevant any more to girls who like to shop and boys who like to watch football. Apathy and the end of conscription go hand in hand, at least that’s what my grandfather used to say. The only people that care are extremists. Protesting at anything these days seems at best disruptive, at worst showing off. Just shop instead. I don’t even protest at the interest rates on my store cards. Walk through central London on a Saturday waving a placard with a group of gypsies with dogs on bits of string? For what? The spirit of Carnaby, of fashion or punk or change, has become nothing more than a Daily Mail headline, a national ticking-off at the odd drug habit. Nothing is persuasive enough to sweep us up, up and away any more. The only counter-culture I’m interested in is the Benefit counter in Selfridges. That’s just the way it is. Some things change. Unless I want to picket Chanel to use fatter, shorter models because this impossibly young and impossibly skinny ideal is starting to hurt me, at thirty-one and one hundred and forty pounds. But then I just look unattractive because I can’t keep up, because I’m not pretty enough or skinny enough any more. Better to just take a little longer in front of the mirror, spend a little more on powder and paint, and pray that nobody notices.

  I had been propositioned three times already that day by the reality star, but each time he failed to realise that he had already met me, and only half an hour earlier had asked me if I’d like to do a line of coke and give him a quick hand-job in the ladies’ toilets. I politely declined both. He was a charmless farmer from Devon called Roger, devoid of all charisma, but who had been the least offensive of the fools shut away in a house for the winter. Roger won seventy grand and a couple of months’ worth of notoriety, but the car-crash kind. He was loved and hated simultaneously by the same people. His aftershave was so strong, he actually smelt like desperation.

  So it had been a depressing day. When we finished at about seven thirty the sun was not long down, and the dark was still light. Somebody suggested noodles so we all ploughed down to Busaba Eathai on Wardour, and crowded around a table. Some of the guys were high already, but I was off everything but the booze, trying to clear up my act and my head. Ben had started leaving me disapproving notes about the little clingfilm bags he was finding in my jeans when he did the washing, and although the coke was rarely mine – I just always seemed to end up with the bag because I’ve never been a snorter, just a dabber on my gums, and you only need the bag for that – I didn’t want another argument. I didn’t want another spotlight thrown on the distance between us, and the different directions we were moving in.

  We made our way through five or six or ten bottles of South African wine – the cheap good stuff. We crammed noodles into our mouths and felt early spring warmth in the chilled night air. I started to think about wearing open-toed shoes. I sat with the assistant producer, a tiny girl with dark hair and eyes who was up for anything as long as it involved laughter, and the public schoolboy A&R, obviously trying too hard to be ‘street’ in oversized jeans and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, but fun nonetheless. He referred to everything and everybody as adding value or not adding value. Thankfully I was informed that I added value, and I wa
s almost tragically grateful.

  Three German tourists sat on the corner of our table, laughing loudly at their own jokes – they too added value! It’s a strange phenomenon, this sharing of tables. It’s peculiarly un-London, to throw open your space and your conversation to any Tom, Dick or Harry who has money to pay and noodles to eat. It’s become remarkably popular, I think, because of its possibilities. Lunch is more fun when the opportunity to meet the love of your life is tossed into the pot as well.

  The Germans had strong noses and red cheeks that looked like they’d blister in the sun. They were having a wonderful time too. We tried to engage them in conversation, but if their English was broken our German was destroyed – the public schoolboy could ask ‘How fast is your woman?’ but that was the extent of our European union. They left eventually, to be replaced by two Italian homosexuals who kissed in the corner. They were both very dark and fragile and beautiful and the assistant producer and I were hypnotised as they gently brushed each other’s lips. It was the easiest kiss I’d ever seen a man give, and it was to another man. In the end they asked me to stop staring at them. I tried to explain it was because I thought them beautiful, but they didn’t care for the reason.

  We drank lots and ate little, and the night started to melt away. Then somebody mumbled, ‘Gerry’s?’

  We stumbled across Soho to the bottom of Dean Street, and through the familiar little doorway. It was dark in there, it always is. You lose everybody you know as soon as you get in, they all drift away to talk to strangers. Perhaps that’s the appeal of the place – the promise of anonymity. I ordered something large and red and the man leaning next to me at the bar offered to pay for it. I said,

  ‘Uh oh, that’s trouble. I shouldn’t be accepting drinks from strange men.’

  ‘Then why have you?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I’m poor and drunk,’ I replied. ‘But then you already knew that.’

  ‘I guessed the drunk bit, I would never have known about the poor.’

  ‘How charming.’ My eyes focused. ‘You’re incredibly handsome,’ I said.