Material Girl (23 page)

She fusses with one of the envelopes, trying to tear it open with her old purple nails, but her hands seem weak, and they tremble in their attempts. She can’t get a grip on the paper to tear it, her fingers slipping down it like it’s iced. I step forward, not sure whether to offer my help or not, but she immediately tosses it onto the side.

‘Bloody cards,’ she says.

She rests both of her palms flat on the counter, and turns her head over her shoulder to look me up and down. Her violet eyes reveal little this time. I glance down embarrassed, as I sometimes do on the tube in the mornings if I catch
somebody staring at me. Who are these people who have the confidence not to look away when your gaze locks with theirs?

‘I’m going to say something now, and I hope that you don’t mind.’ You can hear the booze in her voice. She fights hard to keep her consonants deliberate. The H in ‘hope’ is loud. ‘You look like a girl who cries too much for my liking. You look like a girl on the brink of tears. I won’t have that.’ She slaps her hand down on the counter, and turns to face me.

‘There will be no crying in this room unless I say so, do you understand? You can cry when somebody dies. If somebody dies. But apart from that you learn, and you straighten your back, and you smile.’ She presents me with a theatrical grin. ‘And put your breasts away. I don’t want those damn things stuck in my face while you’re putting on my mascara, you’re not breast-feeding.’ She glances at my chest in obvious distaste. ‘I suppose you’ve had them done, have you? All you silly girls do these days, I see the pictures in the paper. I never needed it. Don’t damn well pander to them. Men! Don’t let them think you should be more than you are, just to please them! Ha! Are they so hard to please? Big titties, small titties, pointy little titties like Ava had, but God they loved her! She was ten times too much for any man! Don’t throw your hoop in with those types, if all they want is titties! The point is they don’t have them! Don’t maim yourself for them! Tell them you want foot-longer manhoods, and ask them to chop into those! Ha! Would they be so foolish? Obviously not. But some silly girl has done it and now you all think you have to do it. Men should never be allowed to get it all their own way; it ruins them, like a bottle of good perfume exposed to sunlight, day in, day out. They go off. It’s a waste. A perfectly good man can be ruined by getting everything he wants, trust me on that.’

She sighs with the exhaustion that explanation of the obvious takes out of her. ‘I mean! I understand they insert some kind of water balloons in these girls’ chests? Is that what you’ve got in there? Balloons? Ha! How ridiculous! Any real man would feel like a fool groping at a couple of water balloons and getting excited, wouldn’t you think? It’s degrading for all concerned. You may as well tell them to hump sofa cushions! What’s wrong with a corset for evenings out? Because, darling, let’s be honest, all these girls parading around with their titties out and their bellies out and their skirts! Violently exposing themselves! I’ve had underwear that covers more than their cocktail dresses, and do you think men didn’t love me because of it? All these girls, stinking of the cheapest kind of sex, it’s not doing anybody any good. Don’t believe a man who says that he likes it, it makes him free like an animal, and no gentleman ever gave himself over to his animal side. A real man controls the lust in his loins, for the right time, the right place. And then – ha! Then you get the whole measure of him, and only you! Ha! That’s when the fun should start, behind closed doors! That’s the party! Ha!’

I open my mouth to speak but before I can she glares at my legs as if evil just walked into the room.

‘Are those polka-dot stockings?’ she asks, addressing my hold-ups.

‘Who in Christ’s name told you to wear those? The black skirt, the black v-neck, that cheap little scarf around your neck, are all acceptable – a little sombre perhaps, maybe somebody did die! Ha! But polka-dot tights? And with pink shoes? Pink shoes! My mother always said, “Only a woman with no obvious redeeming quality need ever wear whores’ shoes.” Apart from whores, of course, to make it obvious, and earn a living. And I have no problem with whores and don’t tell anybody that I do because I’ll call you a liar! If
they are using the only thing God gave them, so be it. Aren’t men the fools, to pay? Luckily for some of us he gave us a little more. And believe me, they’ll put no price on class.’

‘I like them,’ I say quietly.

‘Whores? Or those shoes, darling?’

‘My shoes …’ I whisper.

‘Well that says a lot,’ she says, with an evil smile to herself, like Elizabeth the First signing a death warrant and planning her outfit for the execution.

‘So. Well. What’s your name then?’ Slumping back down into her seat again, she tugs off her rings, reaching for a pot of hand-cream. She scoops a dollop into her palms and it squelches through her fingers and makes a sound like squeezing rotten fruit until it bursts.

‘Scarlet,’ I say. She chuckles and grimaces.

‘Oh dear. Oh darling. That’s unfortunate! You can’t win, can you? Who gave you that name? The same person that gave you those shoes, I’ll bet? No, that’s far too violent a name for me to deal with. Does anybody call you anything else?’

‘My boyfriend calls me Scar …’ I apologise.

‘Like from an accident, like pain?’ she says, and shrieks a laugh, slapping one of her thighs at the same time, leaving a creamy palm-print on her trousers that I hope will stain forever.

‘I don’t … I mean, I think it’s just easy. He just abbreviates it.’

She raises her eyes to heaven. ‘Is that what you think? Well, okay … Anybody else call you anything less damning?’ she asks.

I search in my head to find something else, and not humiliate myself by making something up to please her.

‘My mum used to call me Lulu.’ I have almost forgotten that she did, and still does sometimes, occasionally, but not
often. Only when she’s had a couple of glasses of Pinot Noir and then tells me that she loves me. But she used to use it all the time, when I was very young, and we were playing in the garden or she was tickling me. Richard would glug with joy in his pram as she’d chase me round the garden, screaming, ‘I’m coming to get you, Lulu!’ with her tickle fingers out, and I shrieked with laughter, and she did too. Whenever I picture my mother being truly happy, she’s outside. I think even the biggest room hemmed her in, if there was somebody else in it. She needs silence, preaching its virtues to me every time I speak to her, when I am confused or angry or sad. ‘You need to sit alone, Scarlet. You need to listen to yourself. You’ll see. Sometimes you need to think about who you are, to enable you to be who you should be.’ I am generally confounded, but I nod and I smile, and sometimes I even try to sit, without the radio on or the TV, or Ben’s Xbox blowing things up in the background. It’s never a real silence. I can always hear the cars on the street, or a police siren screeching down the Broadway, or the bell on the door downstairs daintily tinkle with the steady stream of yummy mummies flowing in and out of Plump and Feather. My mum says there is silence where she is, and I think that’s why she’s there. But London is loud. It’s a town-crier place. You can feel lonely in London, but you can never feel alone.

‘Used to?’ Dolly says.

‘When I was a little girl mostly, before she left home. She doesn’t use it much now.’

‘Why did she leave? To join the circus?’ Dolly chuckles again.

‘No. I don’t … know … really, she just wasn’t happy, wanted different things.’

‘Different to you?’

‘No. Different things out of life … and she and my dad drifted apart.’

‘You’re probably overestimating how close they were to begin with. But still. I can understand that, of course. So she saddled you with Scarlet then ran off with a sailor, eh?’ She smiles at me. I don’t know what to say. ‘Well. Good for her. At least she had the sense to change it, your name I mean, in private. Learn from your mistakes, that’s what I say. So, then. I’m going to call you Lulu. I had a Great Aunt Lulu, she drank meths and married an Israeli carpenter called Joseph. Very droll.’

I don’t like the way that it sounds on her beetroot-stained lips. When my mum says it, after two large wines, ‘I love you, Lulu’, it’s like a soft gurgle, something a baby might say by mistake, without knowing what it’s saying. But the way that Dolly Russell says it, quick and sharp like two gunshots? It stings, and it makes me feel ridiculous.

‘Actually, I think … I don’t think I like it,’ I say. ‘I think it might upset me. I don’t see my mum as much as I’d like, and can’t we just use something else? Or maybe Scarlet might grow on you?’

‘Lulu suits you though, darling. LULU! Ha! It’ll be fine. It won’t hurt after the fifth or sixth time, like plucking your eyebrows or poisoned injections in your forehead. I’ve had some of those. And I’ll tire of shouting it in this little room soon enough.’

‘I really …’

She glares at me. I stop talking.

‘Now, then. Do you have any gin?’ She looks around to see if she can spot any.

‘Sorry?’

‘Did you bring any gin with you?’ she says again, enunciating every syllable.

‘Sorry, nobody told me to. And it’s not even one p.m. yet …’ I reply with a smile that I hope reflects that I mean well.

‘Well.’ She looks down at her hands as she keeps rubbing
them together like Fagin collecting the spoils, ‘I wasn’t asking for your advice, I was asking for your gin.’

‘I don’t have any, sorry,’ I say quietly.

She shoves the rings back onto her fingers, grabs the gold arms of the chair with both hands and pushes herself to her feet.

‘It wasn’t to drink, Lulu. It was to clean my rings. But anyway. Be here on time tomorrow,’ she says, picking up her coat.

‘Sorry, but what time is that?’ I ask.

She moves towards the door, and I lean against the wall to allow her enough room to get past, but she stops directly in front of me.

‘What are you so sorry for? Sorry this, sorry that. Who did you kill?’

‘Sorry?’ I ask again.

‘The apologies, and the tears! Store them both up for when somebody you care for dies, or you accidentally kill somebody, in a speedboat or with a knife or something. Don’t even apologise to me, darling. The only thing worse than a girl with no respect for other women is a girl with no respect for herself. You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, have you? Did somebody die? And was it your fault?’

‘No. I guess it’s just a habit. Sor—I’ll try. But there are other bad things too, that you can do. Not just killing somebody.’

Dolly smiles and it throws her off-balance, and suddenly she is leaning dangerously like the tower at Pisa. She grabs for me and I lurch out to catch her. We lace our hands together automatically, and I feel her palm and the inside of her fingers are still slippery with hand-cream. I take her weight to keep her up.

‘No more apologies. Anywhere. I bet you’ve said enough sorries for a lifetime,’ she says. Her hand is cold in mine.

Gavin knocks and opens the door. ‘Your car is upstairs, Dolly,’ he announces. He glances at me, but it’s cold like a day-old bath.

‘On time is any time before I’m here, darling,’ she says to me, snatching away her hand, but Gavin has already seen me holding it. She straightens her back for the man that just entered the room. Her hand flies up to her cheek, and her fingers dance across her face nervously, obscuring her from vision.

‘Gavin, help me up the stairs, will you?’ she says with a roguish smile and a wink to him, reaching forwards to take one of his hands. It seems to me that she is perfectly capable of walking on her own. Maybe she just likes the lean on a man. She tucks her arm into Gavin’s, who is forced to squat to half his size so that she can reach. I contemplate suggesting he give her a ‘wheelbarrow’ to finish her off, but think better of it. As the door swings shut behind Gavin I hear her cry ‘Lulu!’ one last time, and snort a laugh. She leaves without a goodbye.

I feel the tears spring to my eyes as if they have just been told ‘at ease!’ and they suddenly have permission to erupt now that she has left. But nobody has died. I’m not supposed to cry.

‘You learn, you straighten your back, you smile,’ she said. Whatever the hell that means. But I’m damned if I’m going to let her catch me crying either, she’s probably hovering outside with a glass to the wall, giggling evilly with Gavin and waiting for me to break down. There is spite in her, I can tell.

I grab for my phone before I can weaken – I still have one bar of reception – and check my messages.

‘You … have … ONE … new message. First message sent … today … at … twelve … forty … three: ‘Scarlet, it’s Helen. I’m at the hospital. Don’t worry, it’s not me. It’s Jamie.
He … oh God, Scarlet, he slit his wrists. I tried to … well, I tried to end it and … Steven’s not here. He left last night. Nikki with an “i” is pregnant. He didn’t go out, came home early, proclaimed, “We need to talk.” Then she stumbled up the driveway while I was opening a bottle of wine, banging on the door, shouting out his name. “
Baby!
” She kept shouting it, Scarlet, like he’s hers … anyway, she’s claiming she’s pregnant. And, well, they left. He left. Scarlet, can you meet me at the hospital? I don’t really know what I’m doing and they keep telling me to turn my phone off – something to do with equipment failing – so if I don’t answer come to St George’s A&E in Tooting. But I think his mum is coming, Jamie’s mum’s … Christ, Scarlet, what do I do? Bye.’