Material Girl (26 page)

He wears a gentle smile to soften the blow, and holds his hands out at his sides, palms facing the ceiling, like Jesus at the Last Supper in every painting I’ve ever seen of it, except Jesus wasn’t Hindi, or wearing a Romford Market kimono and an old lady’s hat. Not in the pictures I’ve seen, at least.

‘Don’t be scared,’ he says. ‘Don’t be scared to let go, or to cry! You can’t be scared to take your top off! It’s just a top! It’s just a torso, we’ve all got them!’ He tugs violently at the hair on his chest and I wince because it looks like it hurts. ‘Don’t be scared! Don’t be scared to kiss a boy, or to kiss a girl, to say what you think, to love a little or live a little or do what you want to do! You mustn’t be scared! As I said to Marco Rodriguez, who played a wonderful Maria in my
Sound of Music
– “You can’t be scared to be a nun!” And he was, at first. But then he found her. Through bravery and honesty he found the nun inside of him. And fuck me if it wasn’t the best damn rendition of “The Hills Are Alive” I’ve ever heard! Don’t be scared, boys and girls. As long as it’s legal in the Netherlands, don’t be scared to try it!’

He claps his hands again and smiles. The end.

‘Lulu,’ Dolly screams from the centre of the stage. The heads swish inwards. It takes me a moment to remember she is talking to me, as everybody else mutters and looks around, confused.

‘Hi?’ I say, stepping forwards.

‘Lulu?’ Tom Harvey-Saint says. ‘I thought her name was Scarlet?’

‘I’m going to sleep for an hour now, darling. Come and
do me then. In an hour! Stop grappling with your big new beau and set your watch, Lulu, I only need an hour. Wake me with a coffee. We need to get going.’

‘She left out the “Irish” in “coffee”,’ Gavin whispers to save us both from embarrassment, and re-crosses his arms. ‘Lulu?’ he asks me.

‘It’s a … well, it’s a short story actually. She thinks that Scarlet is a violent whore’s name. So I’ve had to change it, for her.’ I shrug like that’s reasonable.

‘Whose idea was Lulu? It’s the name I’d call my favourite cow if I lived on a farm,’ he says, with the tone of a bank manager declining me a loan.

‘My mum, who left home when I was a little girl, calls me Lulu when she tells me that she loves me,’ I say, raising my eyebrows.

Gavin doesn’t reply but looks as bashful as his generally expressionless face will allow. Why is a man with no expression in theatre? Or is he vital? Is Gavin, in fact, the antidote to the poison of their hamminess that would have killed me by now if it weren’t for him?

‘See, Gavin, it’s not just me that can say hurtful and unbelievably stupid things, is it?’

‘It is mostly you,’ he says.

‘That’s fair enough. Am I your favourite cow now?’

‘Shut up,’ he responds blankly.

Dolly pushes herself to her feet and makes her way down the steps at the side of the stage. Gavin takes a couple of paces forward but she waves him away.

‘Who is that ridiculous man?’ she mutters loudly, addressing nobody. ‘What was all that guffaw? All that dancing around? Olivier never danced around! Where’s my script? Somebody tell him I’m not taking my damned shirt off for anybody. I haven’t been nude in public for nineteen years and I’m not going to start again now!’

‘Scarlet,’ Tom Harvey-Saint shouts down from the stage. ‘If that is in fact your real name!’ His laugh is without charm, like a teenage boy spotting bare breasts on late-night TV.

‘Yes?’ I ask, already irritated.

‘You can do me now instead.’ He gestures with his head to the side of the stage, and I think I hear him whistle. Gavin and I glance at each other in alarm.

‘Did he just whistle at me?’ I ask Gavin.

‘I wouldn’t like to say.’ He looks angry.

‘Why would you whistle at somebody who’s about to wave a mascara wand near your eyes?’ I ask.

Gavin comes close to a smile.

My wedges fight my toes down the stairs backstage, but what price five foot seven? Tom is already in his room when I get there. The door is flung open dramatically, and he sits centre stage, waiting for applause. It’s a shoebox, an old school cupboard with bad plumbing that gurgles loudly like an angry, stupid child. There are bare stone walls and two bright exposed bulbs dangle dustily from the ceiling. Tom has stuck a poster on the wall where a window should be, but isn’t. It’s a poster of himself and a thin blonde girl who I vaguely recognise. They are both staring seriously at the camera, wearing dark suits, with crossed arms and legs slightly apart, like police investigators who stand in TV posters. In real life, when police investigators talk at press conferences when a child has just been snatched or a city broker’s body found, they always disappoint me. They never stand the way they are supposed to – kind of mean and firm, depressed but determined – and they are never sexual. Every police investigator on the force, on TV, is leading a troubled sex life. The real ones always look far too exhausted and ordinary to do it more than once a month with their husband or wife of fifteen years.

The poster shouts ‘
DeathWatch
’ in large red letters, and below that, ‘
They’ve got their eyes on the murder capital of the City … and each other. Only on BBC1
.’

The floor is bare and plastic, as is Tom’s rickety chair. He has shoved about twenty cards with hearts on the front underneath the metal clips of his mirror. He is sitting, bare-chested, on the chair in the middle of the room. His stomach is ironing board flat. There isn’t enough space to walk around him. I will have to be front or back. His chest is hairless like a Chippendale’s, or a girl’s. I am relieved that the sight of it makes me squirm. It looks cold and clammy like a slab of unidentified flesh dragged from a river. I don’t want to touch it.

‘Put your tits away, Tom. You can save the glamour-model look for Tristan,’ I say in the doorway.

‘I don’t want to get make-up on my shirt. Don’t go shy on me now, Lulu,’ he smirks.

‘It’s Scarlet to you,’ I say.

‘Okay, Scarlet, haven’t you ever seen a six-pack before?’

‘Do you have to draw those lines on your stomach with shoe polish? Your sheets must be disgusting,’ I say, putting my box down on the side.

‘Shoe polish? I don’t think so. Feel this.’ He grabs my arm around the wrist and I scream as he smacks my hand against his stomach. It feels hard and cold and bumpy. I wrench my hand away and take a step back.

‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ I shout, flustered, the blood rushing to my head.

‘Oh calm down, Scarlet, everything’s such a drama with you. Now, shall we get on?’ He closes his eyes and tilts his face upwards to the ceiling. ‘All we need, I think, is good foundation – I like Clinique – a little eyeliner, a bit of contour around my nose, maybe a touch of colour on my lips, but just tint, not gloss, and a hint of mascara should do it, but brown-black, not black.’

‘Okay, Boy George, but I have to work in silence,’ I say.

He shrugs and smirks.

Five minutes later all that I can hear are our breaths, coinciding with each other like a pulse to this little room, and the pipes as they gurgle. Tom has an incredibly handsome face. It’s objective, it’s a fact, no matter what the fashion or the time or the look, he will always be handsome. As I sponge on foundation I can feel his breath on my hand, and his lips part as I lean closer to him to apply eyeliner. For a moment I smell sickness again, but it passes and I ignore it. I can see why, when drunk, I found him so appealing. What is it about beauty that can override our other senses, and obscure the nastiness or the pettiness or the dullness of a character, when that character is draped in a good-looking skin? I could kiss him, still. As vile as I find him, arrogant and childish and humourless, I could still kiss him. Beauty is hypnotic – you forget, temporarily at least, the evil that can lurk beneath. I guess that’s what love is for. It’s the feeling deeper, the reason more. Love beats beauty like paper covers rock. We need to love people so we don’t have sex with monsters.

Even when Ben and I have fought about big things, or bored each other silly, there is still something about him, about the curve of his shoulders, the space on his neck beneath his ear, that I want to sink into and kiss clean. Sometimes when we are having sex, when we were having sex, I could lose myself in his arms or his shoulders or his neck, lose myself in kissing him. His skin tastes the way it should, tastes right and clean and substantial and strong. I could lose myself in kissing Ben, even now, and yet I know he has never lost himself in kissing me. Sometimes I tried to guide him there, to lead him softly to a place where he could just honestly kiss my back, for instance, for kissing’s sake, because he was allowed, because it was my back and I gave it to him to kiss
and touch and stroke, because I wanted him there. But he couldn’t see it aside from sex. His cock, and not love, always guided him. Maybe he has always been that way, with Katie – her name still whispered like ‘cancer’ in a doctor’s waiting room – or me, or any of his childhood girlfriends. Maybe his sex has always been calculated, and he has never lost himself in affection. Or maybe it is just me.

‘You’ve got a good touch,’ Tom says, as I dot a slightly red tint on his lips and smudge it in with my thumb.

I don’t reply.

‘It’s light,’ he says, without a smile, without opening his eyes.

I don’t know why but I have to pause to control my breathing.

‘It’s the lightest thing about you, Scarlet. You’re so angry the rest of the time, you’re positively spiky. If the rest of you were as graceful as your touch it would be quite something. I think you try too hard, Scarlet,’ he says.

I feel the thought of tears behind my eyes, without the tears appearing. Nobody died.

‘You’re finished,’ I say, and step back.

His eyes peel open slowly and he turns to study himself in the mirror to his right. He stares long and hard, as I do. His chin is a box of clean lines, his nose strong and broad. He looks like somebody traced him from a picture. He is a diagram entitled ‘How a man should look’.

‘It’s good. We could still go a shade lighter on the eyeliner, but it’s good,’ he says. He turns to me and smiles. Without speaking he reaches out for my hand and turns it over, so my palm faces upwards to the ceiling. He lowers his made-up face and kisses the middle of my palm lightly, right between my heart line and my head line, and he whispers ‘thank you’ so I can feel his breath where his lips were. I let him. To brush him away would be an ugly insult to what he is. It
would be denying his beauty, and, at this moment, I shouldn’t and I can’t. He looks me in the eye, and I catch my breath again.

There is a quick rap on the door and it opens, nudging me forwards, closer to Tom, who presses my open palm against his chest as I am pushed against him.

Gavin stands in the doorway and glances down at my hand, and then says, ‘Dolly will be waiting,’ and closes the door.

Tom drops my hand like a hot stone.

‘Dolly will be waiting, Scarlet,’ Tom repeats, widening his eyes, smirking again now, and it’s as if that smirk is everything that he really is. Everybody has a gesture that is theirs, that typifies them or defines them. A blush, or a wave, or a laugh, or a nod, or a single raised eyebrow with a cocked head – it’s your own personal stamp on the world. And everywhere you go and everything you do can be stamped ‘Scarlet was here’ with a blush or a wave. It’s a stamp on the consciousness of others, the thing that they’ll remember when you’ve left the room, it’s leaving your mark. Tom’s stamp is his smirk. It smashes away my momentary doubts and reminds me who he is, and what drives him. As long as he keeps smirking, I should be okay.

‘Dolly?’ I whisper.

Dolly sits back in her chair asleep. Her head has fallen to one side like a snapped twig on an old branch. She snores quietly, a soft, wet, rhythmic grunt through her nose, interposed with quick fluttery gasped breaths that rightfully belong on a hospital ward. A glass of water and a couple of pills on the counter patiently wait for her to wake. Something makes me lift the glass and sniff the water and my suspicions are confirmed. It’s the alcoholic kind, otherwise known as gin. Ella Fitzgerald plays softly from the CD
player in the corner, ‘Someday He’ll Come Along’, the lullaby of an old lady. Dolly’s silk scarves shimmer with dust over the lamp, and the room glows gently through purple silk. It’s a heavy kind of quiet, as it always is in a room in which somebody is sleeping. ‘Do NOT Disturb’ signs hang invisibly in the air.

‘Dolly,’ I whisper again, and reach for her hand. It’s cold as I squeeze it. Her eyes open slowly.

‘Has it been an hour already?’ she asks me groggily.

‘I’m afraid so.’ I place my box down on the counter. This room feels like home after the starkness of Tom’s cupboard.

‘No need to be afraid, that’s all I need. A quick cat-nap. I’m not an invalid. Not yet at least. A light snooze, that’s all that was.’

She rubs her eyes and shifts herself in her chair, and as she does I hear a short quick fart.

‘Where are my pills, where are my pills?’ she demands loudly with a sudden embarrassed anger, batting me backwards and out of the way. She lean forwards and grabs the glass, and glugs the gin like the water we both pretend it is. She leaves a couple of mouthfuls at the bottom of the glass. There is no spirit shiver, as in films. She is gin-ready.

‘Shall I start?’ I ask.