Material Girl (14 page)

‘Without a doubt, Patrick, I would rather do that!’

My dad would leave for the pub defeated, but he would still leave. Maybe he should have stayed one night and sat with my mother instead, but he never did. I loved him but he did what he wanted to do, and yet didn’t seem to understand it when she left. I saw the signs, and I wasn’t even ten. My mother was very beautiful, and we went to Selfridges as a treat sometimes on our day trips to London, to buy her face cream and wander around the beauty hall, rubbing lotions on the back of our hands, and then holding them just under our noses to smell our own skin. She told me that every cream, every perfume, smelt differently on each person’s skin. It would smell differently on hers than it would on mine, she said, but only a little. The difference would be much more profound on somebody else who didn’t have the same blood, but because we were related, to an extent we shared the same skin. But I had my daddy’s skin too, so it would still be a little different. She would rub some cream into her hand first, and then my hand as well, and then we’d compare smells. I always hoped the back of my hand would smell exactly like my mother’s, and sometimes she conceded that it did, and we’d both grin.

All the women behind the counters paid her lots of attention because she was so beautiful. Her hair was already grey. It had been a tumble of long, dark curls in her wedding photos,
but had turned quickly to silver in her first years of marriage, like an adverse reaction to my father or the institution itself, and by the age of thirty-one, my age, her hair was like platinum wool, piled up dramatically, high on her head like the most expensive yarn in the shop. She had huge bright blue eyes, lively and Irish, and a square jaw, and a strong nose. All the women tried to spray her with perfume as we walked past but she just ignored them, and said, ‘No thank you, no thank you.’ I think she could only afford the face cream.

My father didn’t trap her, my mother trapped herself. I think that’s what made her sad. He simply settled into the life that they had chosen. My mum chose it too, then quickly found that she hated it, but couldn’t break free, not with me and my brother as well. So when she really couldn’t take any more, and she finally left, she left without us.

Everybody tells me I look a lot like her. At family parties my grandmother always says it, ‘Ahh, it’s like looking at Catherine again!’ And my mother says it herself sometimes when I see her, which is at least once a month because she comes up to town. She has only met Ben a couple of times, though, he doesn’t seem to make it for the dinners that we plan, and I am happy to have her to myself anyway. But I could tell what she was thinking when she met him because her smile gave her away: it’s the same one that I give when I am not quite sure about somebody and there are thoughts mashing in my mind that I shouldn’t share. She is always polite, and she always smiles, asks questions, and kisses him hello and goodbye. I try to get down to the house in Sussex, she tells me to come and take walks on the beach to clear my head, but it’s so hard to find the time. I should go more often …

That was the other thing that Ben and I discovered within half an hour of meeting each other. Both our mothers left when we were little. My mum called my brother and me the evening of the day that she left, and the next day, and the
day after that. She kept calling us, even if we hadn’t done anything and had nothing to say, and arranged to take us for days out to museums and zoos and stately homes. We all knew that she would never come back for good. Ben’s mum did come back, after five years away and not a card for contact. One day she walked out and he stopped having a mummy, then five years later she reappeared, when Ben was thirteen, as if nothing had happened, and Ben’s dad took her back without question or hesitation.

Ben’s an only child. You can always tell them from a mile away. They don’t understand that you can argue and make-up within minutes. They don’t understand that you can argue with somebody your own age and know it will be okay. They don’t understand divided attention. I think there should be posters in clinics and doctors’ surgeries and also petrol stations that read:

‘
Whatever you do, have more than one child! Make it at least two or nothing!

‘Warning: Only children are monsters! Crime rates would be cut by ninety per cent if everybody had a brother or sister!
’ I think that Ben might be different if he’d had a brother or sister. It might have made it easier when his mum left, or even when she came back. It would have stopped him feeling so alone. It’s like the world shut him out then and now he refuses to come back in.

When I reach Selfridges and push open the heavy doors, allowing a stream of ladies to leave before I enter, I feel the familiar breath of Selfridges’ air rush to kiss me hello. I nod hello back. Today I am in search of creams and potions to paint over the cracks before that crucial point when the cracks become too damn obvious, and no paint will do.

I don’t know the promise in all of their creams, the dreams they threaten to deliver and whether they ever come true. I don’t know how much of the science is real. I don’t know
whether having a laboratory in France makes me believe their claims any more or less, but I believe that there is a power to positivism that can keep some of those lines at bay. Thinking that you are taking care of yourself, even if those creams are nothing but mayonnaise, is an advantage. You might smile more at least, and smile like you mean it.

I stop in front of the MAC counter: it’s a carnival, a riot, an underwater reef, vibrant and unexpected. My eyes swim across whole banks of colour, all things bright and beautiful: nail polish and eye-shadow, eye cream and eyeliner, mascara and brow brushes and brow colour and brow tint, lip tint, lip-gloss, lipstick, lip-liner, lip plump, blusher, highlighter, foundation, concealer, light coverage, medium coverage, matt or gloss.

Matt or gloss seems to be the ultimate decision at every make-up counter and in every life. Do I want my relationship matt or gloss? Reliable and dependable and staying put all day? Or shiny and eye-catching but likely to disappear with half a bag of chips or a large glass of red wine? What about my kisses, my nights out, my walks to work, my boyfriend – matt or gloss? For me there is no contest.

Gloss is our sticky sparkly signature streak. Even a decade ago nobody was glossing. Who started this wet revolution that means our hair will always stick to our lips in the slightest gust of wind? Suddenly, as if they were obligatory like flu jabs for OAPs, we all owned three Juicy Tubes. More than just gloss, it is balms and salves and stains. If you sit on the bus or the tube, somebody will be rubbing something into their lips, diving into their bags for their little pot of almost nothing to smear over their mouths, only to kiss it, talk it, eat it off in moments, and have to reapply again. If the secret to giving up smoking is to replace one habit with another, buy a new lip-gloss, tinted-brown nicotine flavour, and streak it on every time you feel stabs of withdrawal.

When did our mouths become so defenceless? Suddenly they demand such attention. I can’t sort out my savings because I have to think about my lips; I can’t go and see my mother because I need to think about balm. Ben actually doesn’t like the gloss. When we first started seeing each other, during those early affair days that were never quite real, I would always gloss before meeting him. He’d turn up, consistently on time, and he’d lean in to kiss me, and I would be forced to retract slightly. ‘Just glossed?’ he’d ask, and I’d say yes. ‘The expensive one?’ he’d ask, and I’d say yes.

Then we wouldn’t be able to kiss properly for about twenty minutes, so that I got my money’s worth out of my expensive application. The irony, of course, is that I was wearing it so he’d want to kiss me. The thought only occurs to me now that when Ben and I first met, in those strange early days when we were doing what we shouldn’t, we kissed freely in public. We rolled around in Green Park on a picnic blanket for Christ’s sake, gulping down miniature bottles of vodka, practically dry-riding each other, attracting uncertain looks from the park police who weren’t sure whether to film us or intervene. Another night, another clandestine date, and I sat with my legs wrapped around Ben on a bench under a tree, on the South Bank outside the NFT, as an orchestra of student film critics clicked a symphony of wine glasses behind us, and a warm night grew colder as we grew hotter. I thought that he wanted the affection that he and Katie had lost, and I thought I was his answer or his release. And yet now, three years down the line, he refuses to peck me on the lips on an empty train. Something has definitely happened, but I can’t think about it now, or again. I’m tired, and it’s too hard, and this is Selfridges beauty hall. I’m not going to ruin it. I’m not going to think about the theory that glossed lips spell sexual readiness to the opposite sex, and that Ben doesn’t want me to spell it out for him any more.

I spend four hours in Selfridges, wandering all the floors, stopping for a glass of pink fizz in the champagne bar where you can sit and play the ‘How many people are wearing sunglasses indoors?’ game. Light-headed, I make my way to the designer floors, slipping into two thousand-pound dresses and sandals, dancing in front of gleaming mirrors like Cinderella, before throwing my own clothes back on, clothes that now seem like rags, and reluctantly returning my princess clothes to their rail-thin hangers and the rail-thin assistants who can only manage to hold two items at a time because they haven’t been on solids since Lent. Eventually I buy a pot of face soufflé, and one new lip-gloss in ‘Fucked-Up-&-Over-Pink’. I don’t know what it means, but it sounds about right.

My stomach grumbles that I haven’t had lunch, reminding me that I was thwarted in my biscuit hunt and it has now thoroughly worked its way through today’s only offering of champagne that I threw down a couple of hours ago, so I grab a slice of pizza from a hole in the wall by Bond Street tube, and idle down South Molton Street, to make my way back to Soho off the tourist track.

I check my watch and it’s only just gone five o’clock. I can’t get to Gerry’s until eleven. For a moment I consider abandoning Gerry’s for tonight and going home early, surprising Ben, cooking us both dinner, collapsing in front of the TV, or something. Doing whatever it is that couples do, the kind who spend their evenings together. But the thought fills me with discomfort, I feel full on it, like I’ve eaten too much pasta and now I can’t move, my belly swollen and full of air. If I choose to spend the night at home with Ben it could easily be the end. A few hours is all I’ll need to turn our lives upside down, if I suddenly get reckless and brave, and I’m not ready yet.

I take my last bite of pizza and dance past Fenwicks window, stopping briefly to look at scarves.

As I make my way through Hanover Square I feel something lightly dust my face. Somebody must be leaning out of an office window, sprinkling fairy dust, or maybe coke, or maybe anthrax, on Hanover Square. It’s lightly powdering us all. For a moment I am in a snow-globe and I turn as I walk, mimicking a mechanical ballerina with her arms outstretched, my palms and face angled upwards, letting whatever it is fall on me. Maybe it will scar. Maybe it will heal everything. I stop in the middle of the square and watch it settle on the pavement. A man in a suit and a boy with a rucksack have stopped as well, in front of me, and are studying the flakes as they fall.

‘It looks like snow?’ I say after a beat.

‘I know,’ agrees the boy with the rucksack.

‘But it’s September,’ I say, confused.

‘And it’s sunny,’ adds the boy.

The man with the suit sticks out his hand and catches a flake. ‘It’s a snowstorm,’ he says, as the flake melts in his palm.

‘But it’s warm,’ I say.

‘Stranger things have happened,’ he replies, and walks off.

The boy shrugs and smiles at me and walks off too.

The flakes have stopped falling. It was a minute-long snowstorm, in central London at the end of an Indian summer. I look down at the pavement, and though it looks a little damp it is already drying in patches.

I cross Regent Street and follow Beak Street back into Soho, then down and along Old Compton Street to the junction of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue.

I am in two minds. I check my watch – it’s still not six – and I pivot on the spot. A young guy walks past me, whistles, and says ‘nice’, but I ignore him.

I fluff up my hair, straighten my skirt, and head for Grey’s.

I don’t see Isabella for twenty minutes. Just as disappointment starts to bubble in my stomach, I glimpse a mess of
long blonde hair and black roots sauntering up from the film section, carrying a couple of books that look like props. She is wearing a cheap silky grey dress that is higher at the front than the back, and falls just above her knees, with a dark red cardigan knotted over her chest. Each breast resembles an empty upturned fruit bowl beneath it. She’s chewing gum, but then she is always chewing gum. She wears scuffed black ballet slippers, and she doesn’t bother picking her feet up off the ground as she walks. She kicks along the carpet, carelessly creating static with each step.

She makes her way to the till and appears impervious to the stares of schoolboys and salesmen and financial directors and journalists and busmen around her. She doesn’t have the time to acknowledge each one, she’d be exhausted, she’d never get anywhere, she’d be here all night. She drops the books she’s been carrying lazily behind the till, and bends over to retrieve a sheet of price stickers. I feel the sharp intake of breath from the men around me suck the air out of the room, as her dress falls forwards at the front with her cardigan and the sharp indent of her cleavage is revealed, like a lonely, thin ravine between two ominous mountains, like a parting of two waves. The juices of desire spewing out from all the men around me almost slide me off my feet. Lust can tear a house down, or fire rockets into space. It’s the last untapped natural resource, we’ll get to it eventually, when the oil runs out and the smoking stench blocks out the sun and the sky turns black. The sparks in Grey’s could light Sydney Harbour at New Year, from the static in Isabella’s shoes shifting along the carpet to the tiny blue flickers of light dancing around this herd of groins. I am almost scared to trip into their eye-lines, afraid of what might happen if I block their view, afraid they might move to see her and not me, just afraid, really, that I’ll be no more than a nuisance and somebody will come along and pick me up and dump
me on the street with a thud so I don’t spoil their time with her alone.