by India Knight
I am beginning to depress myself, and I haven’t even got dressed yet. Lou rang this afternoon, quizzing me about the kind of ‘look’ Frank liked best – how should I know? The female look, I told her. The look that has a vagina. Don’t bother getting dressed, I said. She giggled stupidly and said she was off shopping. Meanwhile, I hate all my dresses and the kind of look Yungsta likes is not, I imagine, a look I am capable of mustering up: I’m twenty years too old. Why am I about to spend the evening with a man whose vocabulary flummoxes me and whose hand gestures make me want to laugh?
We’re on to lipliner now, and I smile as I remember Frank’s pitch-perfect imitation of Yungsta’s patois cadences. I smile, and I don’t know what comes over me, but suddenly I wake up. Get over it, I tell myself. Get over whatever’s bugging you. You don’t have to take a vow of chastity, or become a lesbian, or have an affair with a married man. You’ve been asked out on a date by someone nice-looking, and single, who is clearly interested in you. Now pay attention. Sort your face out, fish out your sexiest dress, and be grateful, you whining cow. Go get ’em. Be fabulous. Look like you’re a dirty ride.
I can hear the front door slam and then Frank, not seen since lunch time yesterday, chatting easily to Mary and Honey downstairs. I hear him come up and call my name. ‘I’m in the bathroom,’ I shout back, ‘getting ready.’
‘Let’s go together,’ he says through the door. ‘Louisa and, er, the DJ are making their own way from Regent’s Park Road.’
‘OK. I’ll be out in ten minutes.’
‘No hurry – I have to have a shower and shave and so on. Find some clothes. I’ll see you downstairs. Call a cab, though, would you, if you finish first?’
‘OK.’ Why is he making such an effort? Usually, when Frank goes on dates, he brushes his teeth and maybe – maybe – changes his T-shirt. He is going to unusual trouble for Louisa, I realize. So what? So bloody what? I am making an effort for Adrian. And, I realize in a flash of lucidity, I am going to pull out all the stops.
I’m really glad I know how to do make-up properly. I cleanse my face free of modest, wholesome, gild-the-lily Take 1, and spread all my brushes out in readiness for Take 2, the paint-myself-a-new-face option. I fish around in my make-up bag: here we go, I tell myself, my stomach contracting. Here we go. Concealer. Light-reflecting foundation, custom-mixed. Touche Eclat. Minutely subtle shading, around the nose and under the chin. (Oh, yes, I can be very professional: my Parisian adolescence didn’t go to waste.) Cheeks: with my two blushers, I can give myself cheekbones like paperknives, and I do. New eyebrows, with the help of tweezers, some brown powder and a hard pencil: straight and demure, very vampy. Eyes like a cat’s: three shadows, which change the shape of my eyes completely and turn them into long, wide almonds.
Eyelash curlers. Three coats of mascara, and an eyelash comb. And Vaseline, on my lips, because I don’t actually want to look like a prostitute. I take a step back and admire my handiwork: fabulous. Five stars. Someone else’s confident, pouty, sultry face stares back at me: I don’t know her, but she’s pretty lovely, and she winks at me. My work is done. I shove my brushes back into the make-up case and turn off the light.
‘Blimey,’ says Frank, looking me up and down rather solemnly. ‘You scrub up well.’
‘Thought I’d make an effort,’ I reply breezily, as though I didn’t already have face-ache from my two tons of slap. ‘You know, for my date. For Adrian. Sexy Adrian of sexiness. Sexy Adrian of total ride-worthiness. Just as you have, I see. How sweet. New shirt?’
‘Yeah,’ Frank shrugs. His duck-egg-blue shirt works very well with his grey eyes. ‘But it’s hardly the same thing. I’ve never seen you with proper make-up on. Your sexy make-up of sexiness.’ He is grinning, but also sort of gawping, boggling, immediately making me feel that I’ve overdone it by a mile, which I expect I have. ‘New dress?’
‘This?’ I shrug back. ‘Pah! No, it’s ancient.’ I am wearing – and already feeling slightly uncomfortable in – a heavily corseted black number, purchased a couple of years ago in a moment of madness. (Mary had to come and lace me in earlier, making me feel like Scarlett O’Hara.) Still, as pulling dresses go, this one is fairly impressive: up go the bosoms, in goes the waist, out sticks the bottom. It’s got arms, so I don’t have to expose my thirty-eight-year-old’s crêpiness, and it’s got a longish, straight skirt, so ditto re thighs. It’s pretty sexy, the dress, but it does make me feel slightly on display. I mean, all that flesh: too much information, really. Too much information, too soon.
‘And you’ve grown, I see,’ says Frank, still staring, looking down at my fuck-me footwear, a narrow, black suede pair of pointy boots with killer stiletto heels. These hurt like crazy, and will prove to be a fatal mistake if we have to walk anywhere, or – God forbid – dance. I really, really hope my DJ date doesn’t take us dancing. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might until now, stupidly.
Frank looks at my knees, then his watch. ‘Nice pins. Did you call the cab?’
‘Yes, he’ll be ten minutes.’
Frank is pacing around the living room like a child.
‘Calm down, Frank, we won’t be late.’
Frank smiles briskly, and carries on pacing. I’ve never seen him so filled with anticipation for a date before, especially considering he saw Louisa only yesterday. Only this morning, perhaps, if he really didn’t come home, the filthy, disgusting pig-stopout. With this elaborate whale-boned corsetry, it would be agony to sigh, so I don’t. I put my pink velvet coat on instead – my favourite coat, this, with its wide belt and no buttons.
Twenty slightly awkward minutes in the taxi later – he preoccupied, me longing to ask him about Louisa but thinking the better of it just in case I didn’t like his answers – we pull up outside Melon, which is heaving with young trendies with eccentric facial hair (boys) and facial piercings (girls) and stupid low-slung trousers (both).
‘I feel like I’ve come to collect my daughter from the school disco,’ I whine. This all suddenly strikes me as a very bad idea. What am I doing here, and dressed like this?
‘I feel like you’ve wrapped me up, stuck a ribbon around me and handed me to your mate,’ says Frank – his first complete sentence in twenty minutes – but I ignore him.
‘Hello,’ I say. ‘I’ve come to collect Honey from Year 5. Honestly, Frank – I feel ancient.’
‘If this were the school disco, you’d be the mum all the boys fancied,’ Frank says kindly, ‘so don’t worry about it. Come on,’ he says, giving me the nicest smile of the evening so far and taking me by the hand. ‘Let’s go and find them.’
We squeeze and weave our way through a packed crowd of people standing shoulder to shoulder and shouting through their goatees. The music is very loud; the décor industrial: concrete, lots of grey paint, exposed ducts. (Funny how this look never goes away: I remember being in places like it fifteen years ago. We thought it was really modern even then.) Beyond the hall-like bar area, though, the space opens out into a sitting area of sorts: an angular, spiky-looking row of concrete tables, hard-seeming chairs and functional, brown banquettes – not quite the comfortable den one would have wished for, but better than nothing. Adrian and Louisa are sitting down, facing a small rectangular table, drinking cocktails out of Duralex glasses. We see them first; Frank’s warm, dry hand tightens imperceptibly around mine, and then he lets go.
‘Wow,’ Adrian whistles loudly, standing up. ‘You look amazing.’ He says the words in a perfectly ordinary Home Counties voice and then corrects himself, coughing. ‘Fly,’ he says, puzzlingly.
I kiss him hello demurely. I think I’ll keep my coat on for a while. A pin from my chignon is digging into my head.
‘Hello,’ says Frank to Louisa in a low voice. She is looking extraordinarily pretty, like a flower, or an angel, all fresh-faced, blonde wholesomeness, but with a killer body. One look at her, and I immediately feel overegged. Her low-slung, embroidered Maharishi trousers show off that enviably flat and bronzed
stomach; a slinky little vest top shows off her tight, pert chest and muscular upper arms. Her eye make-up is a perfect example of the ‘I’ve spent three hours putting on make-up that looks like I’m wearing none’ look so popular, I’ve noticed, with men, who claim such women are natural beauties until they accidentally catch them bare-faced and vomit with shock. But Louisa is a natural beauty. Even bare-faced, she looks like a prettier, softer, fresher version of Madonna. With the make-up, she looks sensational.
I feel extremely overdressed and not natural at all. Even my coat looks like it’s about to go to the opera.
‘You look great,’ says Frank to Louisa.
We all sound like teenagers going on their first date.
‘You don’t look too bad yourself,’ says Lou from beneath her eyelashes. ‘Come and sit down.’
Adrian pats the banquette beside him, so I sit down too. Alas, I am not able to return his sartorial compliment: my date looks like an arse, as Frank might put it. He is certainly handsome under all the clobber, but seems intent on ruining his looks with a series of grotesque accessories. The first problem is facial hair: in honour of our date, Adrian has trimmed his goatee so that it is perfectly minuscule, a tiny tuft of black hair sprouting like a growth or squashed bug from his otherwise more than presentable chin. He is also wearing huge coloured plastic shades, à la Bono, in pale pink, which makes his green eyes look like rabbits’. Plus, if there’s one person I physically can’t abide, it’s Bono (Bono! Bono! What’s wrong with these people?), so the look doesn’t do much for me – it dimly reminds me of insects with huge boogly eyes, in fact. Further down, we have gold jewellery around the neck and wrists, and a beige track suit, apparently two sizes too big, though curiously tight around the crotch, I notice, glancing down. Still, he looks comfy, at least, and the tracky’s worn with nothing underneath so that I can see his well-developed, gym-friendly chest, which is mildly sexy. It is a sign of my advanced years, though, that instead of focusing on the perfect pecs, I imagine him, yearningly, in beaten-up jeans and a cashmere jumper. He’d look so much nicer. Why is he wearing so many rings on his fingers? Does he have bells on his toes, too? And has he never watched Ali G, for heaven’s sake?
‘Whatchou drinkin’?’ Adrian asks, his thigh pressing against mine.
‘Champagne cocktail, please.’
‘Not in here, mate,’ he laughs. Mate! Men who call you ‘mate’ ought to be shot.
‘Glass of champagne, then, pal.’
‘Me too,’ says Louisa. ‘Hi, Stella. You look fantastic.’
‘Thanks. You too.’
‘Hoegaarten for me,’ says Frank. He is looking at me most curiously, almost as though he wanted to laugh.
People walk up and down past our table: it’s a little like being at the zoo. They are extraordinary creatures. I see why Adrian chose this venue, though: he blends in perfectly. He occasionally detaches himself from the frankly lacklustre conversation – Frank oddly tense, until the drink kicks in, Louisa too gabby, Yungsta too patois, me too bemused by him – to high-five somebody, or throw those weird hand shapes at somebody else, or mumble nonsensical phrases. Frank seems to know a couple of people here and there too. Louisa and I sit admiringly, glad to have been allowed out, imagining a world not dominated by being by oneself.
‘I’m hungry,’ says Frank eventually. ‘And I’m pretty sure, without having to ask, that Stella is too. What’s the plan, mate?’
‘Thought we’d chill for a while, mate, yeah?’ says Adrian. ‘And then maybe grab a bite down the road. I’m working at eleven.’ He pulls a load of flyers out of his pocket. ‘Here – you is all on the list. VIP room. All the extras, know what I mean?’ He sniffs pointedly and grins.
Oh, no, not drugs. Oh, no no no. I can’t stand drugs: they’re number one on my list of Things People Shouldn’t Do Past the Age of Twenty-five. (Top three: 1. Drugs. 2. Tantric sex. 3. Highlights/any hairstyle denoting generous use of ‘product’. And that’s just the tip of a very large iceberg.) All those middle-aged men in naff suits you see, running around Soho coked out of their heads, make me depressed. All those blokey blokes in their thirties, taking Ecstasy and dancing around their suburban living rooms, digging out their dungarees and waving their arms about and pretending that it’s 1988 and that their hair didn’t recede and that life didn’t disappoint them … could anything be sadder or more piteous? Grimmer still are the ones who spent their adolescence swotting up and dissecting mammals (instead of taking drugs and bunking off school, which is the French way: we get it out of our system early), and who now stagger around coked up to the eyeballs, believing themselves to finally be ‘cool’ at the age of forty-two – aargh. I know loads of them through Dominic, who was not averse to the odd line himself and who’d spend the occasional blokes’ night out with his male clients doing this kind of thing, usually involving dropping some Es. He’d always come back horny, too, and drool all over me, and when I’d finally be awake enough to respond to his drug-fuelled desires, I’d discover his penis had shrunk – Ecstasy does this – so that it looked like a little snail. A tiny, weeny little snaily. You don’t want to start thinking of your partner’s penis as a little snaily, believe me: thin end of the wedge.
I know this isn’t a very tolerant way of thinking – I’m sure millions of perfectly charming people my age take drugs – but I do think there are some things which youth has a monopoly on and drugs are one of them. What’s funny and wild and fun in a twenty-year-old just looks desperate and sad-beyond-tears in someone twice that age. Eurgh. And the bloody coke-fuelled inane chat that makes you want to tear your ears off and throw them on the floor in disgust … Oh, bugger. Drugs. On top of everything else, we’re now to be the oldest swingers in town. I might have known. Cherry on the cake of my evening.
We move on to dinner, to one of those fur-coat-and-no-knickers restaurants that looks fabulous and serves disgusting food. Louisa and I slope off to the loo as soon as we’ve sat down.
‘So,’ she says from the cubicle next to mine.
‘So,’ I reply.
We both begin to pee, in perfect unison.
‘It’s going really well, I think.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Adrian really likes you.’
‘That’s nice.’
Rustle rustle with the paper, flush. A woman two cubicles down parps away like a trumpet. It always seems odd to me that people apparently store up their wind especially for visits to restaurants, the loos of which are always filled with women who seem to have considerable trouble with trapped wind until their buttocks hit the wooden lavatory seat of a public place.
Lou and I meet again by the sinks. My weird, sultry, pouty face greets me in the mirror, and gives me a shock. We catch each other’s eye and smirk; the woman in the cubicle actually groans with pleasure, or perhaps relief: she sounds like she’s just come. Lou and I start giggling as we wash our hands. Then she floofs out her blonde curls artlessly and opens her mouth wide, checking her teeth for spinach.
‘Do you think Frank likes me?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’
‘No, I mean, do you think he likes me, you know, in that way?’
‘Yes.’ I reapply a bit of blusher. ‘I’m sure he does. You have a va … you have private parts, don’t you?’
‘Stella!’
‘What? It’s true.’
‘Do you really think he likes me?’
‘God, Lou, I’ve just said so twice, haven’t I?’
‘Are you sure,’ she says, clutching my arm, ‘that you don’t mind? It’s just you seem in a bit of a funny mood.’
‘That’s probably because I’ve spent the past hour listening to a lecture about hip-hop,’ I smile. ‘Sorry. That’s cheered me up, though.’ I gesture at the parpster’s lair.
‘Adrian really fancies you, I can tell.’
‘We’d be a brilliant match if I were deaf.’
‘So you’re absolutely sure you don’t mind? About Frankie?’
Franki
e now, is it? I heave a giant, ultra-exasperated, couldn’t-care-less sigh.
‘Absolutely sure. Now stop bugging me about it, Lou.’
‘He is just so great,’ Louisa says with a beatific smile, much as a born-again Christian might say of the Lord Jesus.
‘Mmm. He’s not that great, Lou.’ Do I tell her? Do I not? I am sorely tempted. But then I tell myself that Frank has never behaved badly to me, that his personal life is none of my business, and that I really shouldn’t pick this moment to dump all over my friend’s evening. Which isn’t to say I am not tempted. But I resist.
‘What happened yesterday?’ I ask, unpinning my hair and then pinning it up again more messily for added sex-appeal. ‘When you went to see his pictures?’
‘His pictures are great, aren’t they? Just great,’ she gushes. ‘I must say, I do love a bit of the old figurative art. A person who can actually draw. Or paint. Or both. Have you seen his sketches? They’re beautiful. That lovely one of you …’
‘Of me? He’s never drawn me. He draws cows. As you’ll have seen.’
‘Yes, but there’s that titchy one of you and Honey. You must have seen it, surely?’
‘Oh, that,’ I lie. Knowing that Frank has a secret drawing of me, with or without Honey, gives me a strange mini-thrill which I am unwilling to discuss with Lou. ‘And then what?’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday. After you’d admired his cows, me included.’
‘Oh,’ she giggles. ‘We had a cup of tea and I told him all about myself.’
‘Including Alex’s dad walking out on you?’
‘Oh, yes. He was so sympathetic. One of the things – the many things – that I like about him is that he seems to be really kind-hearted. But butch with it, you know, not all sappy and sandally and horrible. Don’t you think?’
‘Up to a point.’ I’m biting my tongue, though I must say Frank’s hypocrisy could win awards. ‘Superficially.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Nothing.’
Lou shrugs and snaps her powder case shut.
