Material Girl (37 page)

It has a banner blazing behind it. ‘Look Up’, it says.

Every time that my phone buzzes in my pocket I pray that it’s Ben, but I also pray that it isn’t. He could make it better, if he wanted to, but he doesn’t seem to have it in him. He’s no grand-gesture kind of guy, and it’s getting to that stage. Soon, ‘I’m sorry, Scarlet, I love you’ won’t even be enough. I’m already too damaged for that. No, it won’t be enough. When was the first time that you glimpsed the edge of the world, and thought that you might fall off?

I think I hear kids in a playground somewhere, in central
London, at the back of Covent Garden, and I stop and stand still and listen. I can definitely hear a playground and children screaming and running. I can hear laughter, and even though I know that they are learning to be awful to each other, there is still joy. I hear the delight and the squabbles and the cheers and the arguments, skipping ropes cutting through the air, and hopscotch on concrete, and footballs being booted carelessly from one end of the court to the other. Even though I know that some of them will learn to hate each other this morning, it is still wonderful. They don’t hate each other yet.

I wander up a Majestic aisle and hear somebody say, ‘
I’ve got to stay slightly drunk to bear the pain
.’ I assume it must be Dolly in a rare moment of candour, but looking up I see it is Audrey Winston, Dolly’s understudy and also the actress playing ‘the Witch of Capri’, or something like that – Tristan told me, but I’ve forgotten already.

‘Again, but with a laugh, Audrey, please. You need to make light of it more. It’s not riddled with meaning, she’s removing the meaning. Again, please, love.’

Audrey says it again, to Gavin, who is standing in the middle of the stage looking ridiculous in Dolly’s purple turban.

‘What’s going on?’ I mouth at him, tapping the face of my watch. It isn’t eleven thirty yet, and generally they wait for Dolly to rehearse Dolly’s scenes.

‘Tristan’s having a panic,’ he mouths back, but then looks away.

Tristan has covered his eyes again at the front of the stage.

Gavin reads lines back at Audrey, who hams it up for all she is worth.

‘
Sally was trying to prove she was a generation younger than she was and thought she could get away with it,
’ she says, smiling at Tristan theatrically. He gets up and walks
out. Gavin walks off backstage. Audrey stands in the middle of the stage and looks around for somebody to impress, but nobody comes. She sits down quietly on the chaise longue.

I follow Gavin and call after him, but he is moving too quickly. I call out his name again, but by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs he has disappeared completely.

Tom comes round the corner to a round of applause and screaming girls in his head. He is wearing a crisp light-blue shirt with a stiff collar and the top two buttons undone, and well-cut dark jeans. He has a jumper tied around his waist. He looks like he’s walked off a runway.

‘Have you upset simple Gavin?’ Tom asks, sidling up towards me.

‘No. Maybe. I don’t bloody know, and he’s not simple,’ I reply, trying not to be affected by the light sting of his aftershave on my senses. It smells like Penhaligons, dignified and manly.

‘Nice outfit,’ he says, raising his eyes and giving a little whistle. I am wearing a navy blue polo shirt, a white pleated knee-length tennis skirt, and navy Mary Janes with white heels. I’ve got a string of long pink pearls beneath my collar, and my hair hangs heavily down my back, tousled and finger-dried. I’m wearing my heartbreak lip-gloss again; it just seems to go with everything these days.

‘Do you know when Dolly is coming in?’ I enquire. I have a pang as if I haven’t seen her for a while. How much gin will she have knocked back today?

‘She’s not due in until two apparently, she’s had to see a doctor this morning.’

‘Oh my God, why?’ I ask, a sick feeling flooding my stomach.

‘Oh, nothing apparently, she just moaned a lot in the night and now she wants some valium or something. So … we find ourselves with some time on our hands.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ I say.

‘Why, what have you got to do?’

I stand and think. ‘No, you’re right, nothing really.’

‘Good, let me buy you lunch then.’ Tom stands above me and gives me a cheeky smile. His eyes are deep and dark, and they sparkle with a dirty evil. I think he has a fan club. I think there might be whole websites devoted to him. And in spite of myself I can understand it.

‘I just ate,’ I reply.

‘Then you’ll eat again,’ he says, and grabs my hand, pulling me behind him and then pushing me up the stairs in front of him. I can smell his aftershave and it’s making me giddy.

Walking down and towards the Covent Garden piazza, I can’t help but feel like I’ve been dipped in gold or draped in diamonds. It is one thing to get stared at by builders and cabbies and couriers, but quite another to walk somewhere with Tom Harvey-Saint. His blue shirt cuts crisply through the murky browns and drab reds of the tourists. It is still warm, for September, and we turn right at the piazza and head towards the sandwich shops behind the Strand.

Teenage girls look at him, women stop and stare. Well-dressed men, i.e. gay men, follow him with their eyes and smile. We don’t talk, but he places his hand on my back and guides me through the crowds of tourists milling around on the cobbles, staring at jugglers and mime artists and comedians.

‘Street performers, how depressing,’ he whispers to me. ‘They always try too hard. And I bet they don’t pay their taxes.’

I am silently appalled, and yet utterly overwhelmed by the attention we receive as we walk through the square. There are wolf whistles, which I ignore, of course, because I don’t know if they are for Tom, or me, or both of us. One thing
is for certain: I have never felt quite so admired as I do right now, and I think I suddenly understand a little something about Tom. If I am confused by the way the world treats ‘pretty’, what must it be like to be him? He is crass, and rude, and arrogant. But everybody loves him on sight. I wonder who he would be if he didn’t look the way that he does. I wonder what parts of his personality got subdued, overlooked, because he didn’t need to do much more than shave in the mornings to have the world love him.

We grab crayfish and rocket sandwiches and two bottles of water from Pret a Manger, and a chocolate brownie to share, and Tom pays for them all without a word.

‘There is a square up here, behind this church, that I go to sometimes,’ he tells me.

‘Behind a church?’ I ask, arching an eyebrow with surprise.

‘Sometimes I even confess my sins – if you’re a good girl I might just let a few slip today.’ I look at him for a beat too long, and then turn away. I hear him chuckle.

‘I don’t mind sitting on the grass if you’ll sit on this,’ he says, offering me the duck-egg blue jumper hanging loosely around his waist. He smiles. I am amazed how easily he affects me. My willingness to cut beauty a break and forgive all previous offences is disturbing.

I cross my legs in front of me at the ankles, eat my sandwich and sip at my water. Tom inspects the grass quickly for mud, and then lies down in a model pose, propped up on one elbow, feeding himself his sandwich greedily with the other hand. He closes his eyes and faces the sun, and we sit in a warm silence. The square is half-full, and anybody who isn’t reading or talking seems to be staring at us. And I thought I got my fair share of stares on my own.

‘The sun feels good, doesn’t it,’ he says with his eyes closed, face angled towards the sun.

‘Yep,’ I reply as nonchalantly as I can.

‘Imagine you’re on a beach, Scarlet, in some little bikini, or maybe even topless – do you go topless, Scarlet?’

‘Sometimes,’ I say, taking a large bite of my sandwich as an excuse not to talk.

‘I love the way women’s breasts shine in the sun, their nipples dark brown from the heat, there is something so natural about it.’ I can feel him looking at me and I refuse to look back.

‘You look at women’s boobs on the beach, now there’s a surprise,’ I say sarcastically, trying to draw that line of conversation to a close.

Tom coughs, and pushes himself to his feet. ‘I’ll be back in a minute, nature calls’ he says, and darts off towards the street. I sit back in the sun and concentrate on forgetting everything, relieved that I put factor twenty moisturizer on my face this morning so I can sit here exposed but guilt free.

After five minutes Tom lands back down beside me and takes a slug of water.

‘Everything okay?’ I ask him.

‘Why shouldn’t it be?’ he asks smugly.

‘I don’t know, because you are you,’ I say, still facing the sun with my eyes closed.

Tom props himself up on his elbow. ‘Scarlet, I’m going to say something and I don’t want you to jump down my throat.’

‘What?’ I ask, ready to jump down his throat.

‘You seem sad. You look sad. I mean, you look great, but also sad. And nothing is more attractive on a woman, on anybody in fact, than a smile.’ To prove it he smiles at me from beneath his dark fringe. I look away.

‘So are you?’

‘Am I what? Sad? A bit, yes.’

‘Because you’re not having any sex?’ he asks earnestly.

‘Oh my God, what is wrong with you? You seem all normal and almost nice and then you say the weirdest, strangest things!’

‘What? What did I say? I’d be sad if I wasn’t having any sex, that’s fair!’

‘Okay, it’s partially the sex, but it’s bigger than that. I think I’m just confronting some stuff that I have ignored for too long. And yes, it’s making me a little sad. My life isn’t what I thought it would be.’

‘What did you think it would be?’ he asks, addressing his bottle of water.

‘Undoubtedly happy,’ I reply.

‘Let’s play the truth game,’ he says, wiping his hands on a Pret napkin.

‘Oh my God, are we kids?’ I ask.

‘No. But it’s a good game. You can either ask me something, and I have to tell the truth, or I can tell you something about you that I think is the truth.’

‘Fine. Whatever. Ask me something,’ I say, looking around the square for something else to do.

‘Do you really go topless?’

‘Yes, sometimes. Only in private. Not on the beach.’

‘Why not on the beach?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do your nipples go dark brown when you do?’

‘Yes. My turn. Have you ever told a woman that you love her?’

‘Yes.’

‘That wasn’t your mother, or your grandmother, or some other old relative?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you mean it?’

‘As much as I can, yes. Right, my turn.’

‘Fine, tell me something then. This is getting boring,’ I say, hot and bothered and flustered and pissed off and ready to leave.

‘Okay, you think too much. About love and all that shit.’

‘Nice,’ I say, refusing to really listen.

‘And you over analyse everything, and when you do that you kill it,’ he continues matter-of-factly, like I should know this already.

‘Okay, but has it ever occurred to you that if you aren’t happy you should find out the reason why? Hmmm?’ I ask him, like he’s the class dunce.

‘Maybe it’s the constant questioning, Scarlet – the “Oh my God, am I happy? Am I unhappy? Does he love me, doesn’t he love me?” that actively makes you unhappy, have you thought about that?’

‘I don’t think that’s true.’ I don’t want to hear any more. Why is everybody so determined to tell me how I should behave?

‘You should just stop thinking so much. Just live it.’ Tom sits back, satisfied with himself.

‘Women think, Tom. That’s what we do.’

‘And that’s why men leave you. Or don’t love you. Most men just want a simple life.’

‘Then pick a simple woman,’ I say, jumping to my feet and walking off.

I hear him call my name once, but that’s it.

The first months that Ben and I were together were wonderful, when he opened up to me, and seemed happy to see me, and
wanted
to see me, in fact. I thought I’d found something. But then the door started to close. Initially his feelings were a wave pouring out and over me, it was like some kind of relief for him to talk. It was never dramatic or overly analytical, but it was open and it was honest. I believe there are things that he told me that he has never told anybody. He told me how he felt when his mother left and how it felt when she came back. He told me how he coped with being lonely by making lonely the best way to be. But then, a few months after he’d left Katie – her name still whispered like the word
‘bomb’ on a jumbo jet – he just stopped talking. Something happened, I don’t know what, but Ben just closed off. We carried on, but every day with him got harder, like I was pushing a ball of hay up a hill and it was gathering straw and dirt and grass and getting heavier and heavier. I feel like Ben let me walk a few steps ahead of him and then watched as I turned one way, and he decided to turn the other. One night, he breathed something in, and it was something bad, and that night he decided not to love me. Maybe it’s that simple.

I walk briskly up Long Acre towards the theatre, noticing that I only get half of the attention that I received when Tom was by my side. I reach into my bag for my purse.