Material Girl (38 page)

‘
Standard
?’ my old guy says, still in his overcoat, in spite of the heat.

‘So what have you got for me this afternoon?’ I ask, smiling.

‘Paper, dear?’ he asks, volunteering a folded
Standard
.

‘Yes, of course, but what else?’ I ask, confused.

‘It’s forty pence, dear,’ he says.

I feel rejected.

‘Yes, I know that it’s forty pence, but what else? I mean, you usually say something or … you say something to me, don’t you? I’m not going mad, I haven’t dreamt it. You say stuff, like you said “Thoreau” the other day, and I had to look him up on the computer, and he was a writer, an American writer, and you said that to me.’ I am almost desperate for him to agree. I am not going mad, but he looks at me like I’m an idiot.

‘Okay,’ I say, passing him my forty pence, ‘I must have been mistaken.’

He hands me the paper, folded in half. ‘Sometimes things are that simple,’ he replies.

I look up at him with a smile. ‘I knew you couldn’t stop yourself! Ha!’ I say, and walk off, aware that I sound like somebody.

Sometimes things should just be simple.

I grab my phone and call Ben.

‘What?’ he asks, instead of hello.

‘I am officially calling you to tell you that I am coming home early, tonight, on a Friday night, in case you are cooking food, or there is football on.’ I smile. That was easy.

‘Oh, I’m going to the pub for a few after work, but I shouldn’t be too late,’ he says, sounding a little bewildered.

‘Okay, well, that’s cool, I’ll see you later on.’

‘Okay, bye,’ he replies, confused.

‘I’m spending the evening with Ben tonight,’ I tell Dolly as I strip off her make-up. It is six o’clock and she has been tired all afternoon. She was up in the middle of the night with pains, she said, and the doctor had to prescribe her codeine. It has made her woozy.

‘Good,’ she says, her eyes closing in the chair. ‘Try tonight, Lulu.’

‘I will, I will,’ I say.

I even stop and buy vegetables on the way home, and chicken. I am going to eat a proper meal, the type that my mother might cook, and have one glass of wine, just one, and be civilised and grown-up and responsible. And maybe Ben will cry off from the pub early, because he knows I am at home, so I’ll cook a little extra, and then we can watch sitcoms and laugh, and maybe talk a little as well.

By nine o’clock Ben hasn’t come home, so I turn on the radio while I make dinner. Ben has it tuned to the same station wherever he goes. In the car, in the house, at work. The same songs, dad rock, everywhere, and all the time. I retune it quickly – it’s my house too – and find a golden-oldie station. Buddy Holly sings ‘Love is Strange’. I chop mushrooms and hum along. There are violins. Love and
violins are synonymous, aren’t they? Except my violins are playing sad songs. I need joyful violins, like Buddy Holly’s.

Two hours later I am crying, but it’s not my fault, they aren’t real tears. I have been watching a makeover marathon on cable TV. Selma, forty-two and twenty-three stone, lost her husband in a mudslide when they were on honeymoon in Venezuela. She broke both her legs at the same time, and because she is so heavy she has been having trouble recovering, and then she lost her job. After that she was evicted and now she is living back at her mother’s, except her mother is really ill, too, and probably won’t make it to Christmas. But Selma decides to leave for two months anyway, even though her mother might die while she’s gone, because it will be worth it, she says. So when they come to pick her up in a limousine bigger than the trailer she and her dying mother live in, it’s like she might be saying goodbye to her mum for good, and they both cry, a lot.

The following week they staple Selma’s stomach so she can only eat soup, and give her liposuction, veneers, hair extensions, a tummy tuck, a nose job, a breast reduction, and false nails. And she isn’t allowed to look in the mirror for those entire two months, and they don’t let her call home either, so she doesn’t know if her mum is dead or not, but apparently that all just adds to the suspense …

So two months later they do the ‘reveal’. She looks beautiful. They’ve sucked about three stone off her, and she’s lost another two herself. Her mother, who is still alive, barely recognises her. They hug and cry, but Selma can’t hug her too tight because she has still got bandages on under her cocktail dress. But she is beautiful. Selma can’t stop looking at herself in the mirror. Her mum cries so much when she sees her, and I wonder if it’s because she’s nearly dead, or because her daughter is suddenly beautiful.

This is the third episode I have watched. They all just seem to get more tragic. But look how they look! Look how they have been transformed for this one moment.

I mute the TV and lay my head back on the sofa and wonder why it means so much to look in the mirror and see something wonderful when you’ve never seen it before? Is it because we think it will make people love us a bit more than they already do? Is it because it makes us feel that we inch a little closer to love? Or that maybe we’ve just found a shortcut?

I turn off the TV at one a.m., turn off the lamp in the living room so it’s dark, and stare out of the window. It’s noisy, the late bars are just chucking people out to the clubs. It’s a clear night, and I am distracted by what seems like a shooting star. I think it must be a CIA plane, or a satellite crashing to earth. But then I see another one, and another. People on the street below start to look up as well, as the stars shoot across the sky. There is a shooting-star storm outside my window. If Ben were here he would say it’s like the
Day of the Triffids
, and we should cover our eyes. But Ben isn’t here. At two a.m. I crawl into bed on my own.

Saturday. I squeeze my eyes open just enough to register the numbers on our Mickey Mouse alarm clock. If you actually set the alarm it sings ‘It’s a Small World After All’ in a squeal so high-pitched it affects fishing channels and diverts whales up the Thames towards Richmond. So obviously we don’t set it. I forgot and set it once a little while ago and it caused mayhem! Ben uses the alarm on his mobile phone to wake him up every morning. I hate the noise that it makes, like a pulse that grows steadily louder and more menacing, thudding through me until it makes the walls and my bones shake. Although it doesn’t wake me it consistently penetrates and ruins my dreams. That tinny beeping pulse tolls in at seven a.m. every morning, and it always means that Ben is leaving. Ben never ignores his alarm. I am more likely to encounter Lord Lucan hiding under our duvet with one finger to his lips ‘shushing’ me not to reveal his whereabouts than I am to find Ben snoozing his phone to spend more time with me between the sheets.

Mickey Mouse says it’s six twenty-three a.m. I roll over
heavily in bed, expecting to see the moles on Ben’s back, but he isn’t there. He hasn’t come home.

Despite my nagging anxiety, I drift off again, my body automatically shutting down at the ungodly hour. I wake up again a couple of hours later. Forcing my eyes open I register through a sleep blur that Mickey says eight thirty-two, as suggested by the light streaming in through the curtains. I hear somebody crashing up the stairs, and I know that it was the front door slamming that woke me. The bedroom door creaks quietly open, and seconds later so does Ben’s cupboard. I hear him swear softly under his breath, ‘bollocks’, followed by the sounds of him frantically kicking off his trousers and scrambling into a new pair, and throwing on a clean shirt. He tiptoes out of the room and closes the door behind him. I hear him bash about in the kitchen, say ‘bollocks’ twice more, and still I don’t get up.

I check my phone at nine a.m. while munching on a bowl of Alpen, leaning on the kitchen counter in a vest and knickers. There is a text from Ben, sent fifteen minutes ago, which reads: ‘I STAYED AT IGGY’S’

It’s to the point at least.

I consider a thousand quick replies, but then simply text back: ‘DON’T FORGET THE ZOO TOMORROW’

Ten minutes later, as I am about to step into the shower, my phone buzzes. Ben’s text reads: ‘ARE WE STILL GOING? WHY?’

I take a long and deliberate shower and scrub at my scalp, opening up the follicles so that the fury can get out and not cause my head to explode. I sometimes think that showers should be fattening, high-calorie indulgences. The water pushing you away and soaking you and warming you is just too good a feeling to be fat free.

Dripping on the bathroom mat, I reply: ‘WHY NOT’

No question mark, I don’t want a reply.

I moisturise my body with cocoa butter and spray perfume in all the right places. I take my time on my hair – first blow-drying, then straightening, then curling the ends. I apply my make-up base, ready to be added to later for full effect. It feels important that I look my best today. I need to compete.

I wear a flimsy pink silk shirt-dress with floppy collars and cuffs, a men’s black cummerbund, and high black rattan court shoes with toe cleavage. I have painted my toenails baby pink, and I pull my hair back into a loose ponytail, posting two pearl drops through the holes in my ears. At the last second I disregard ‘Heartbreak Blue’ gloss for ‘Grapefruit’ Juicy Tube. Today is not a day for heartbreak.

Riding the tube with the Saturday shoppers and tourists up into town I think about Ben’s text messages. You can be a ‘why’ person or a ‘why not’ person. You can seize things, do things, or not. You can look for the positives or the negatives. If Ben asked me, today, ‘Why do you love me?’ I think I would be inclined to say ‘Why not?’ just to prove a point. It doesn’t have to be explained to me, or justified, or dragged out of me begrudgingly. Why not?

I take the tube all the way to Covent Garden station and walk the short distance back down Long Acre to the theatre, glancing in shoe shops and clothes shops as I go. For the first time in what seems like an age I don’t feel emotionally exhausted. I see a young girl walking towards me and before I can stop myself I wince and whisper ‘Oh no …’ She is breaking one of the new and as yet undeclared public decency laws. They haven’t been advertised on the tube next to the poetry, or leafleted on lampposts, or inserted into
HEAT
alongside adverts for women’s car insurance, but we all know these laws. This late-teenage girl with a sour face has a tight ponytail, gel-scraped back from her head aside from two
long, stiff poker-straight sections of hair that hang either side of her centre parting like switchblade curtains that cut each of her cheeks in half. She is striding towards me with, and here is the illegal bit, an entire rubber ring of stomach flesh naked and spilling over the top and out of her jeans, squeezed out further still by the tight cropped top that has been forced over her chest. The protruding rolls at her stomach are translucent, veined and fatty like sausage meat that’s just been piped into its skin casing.

I see a couple of women on the other side of the road glance over and double-take in shocked horror as they pass her. I can only imagine how many insults she will have to endure today, as they are clumsily hurled at her out of white van windows, and from scaffolding platforms, and outside McDonald’s and Burger King and KFC. Just for wearing clothes that don’t fit, on a frame that bulges, she will shock mostly everyone that she passes. Perhaps she won’t care about any of those remarks; not knowing their perpetrators will enable her, perhaps, to dismiss them as soon as she hears them, like water trickling out of her ears. Somebody might say that she looks disgusting; another will ask her, rudely, to put her fat away where they don’t have to look at it; someone else still might heckle her as ugly without even noticing her face. Every put-down that she will undergo will be generated by the way that she looks. Strangers will think they can comment on her, to her, in the street. We are all that shallow now. I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings but perhaps she just saw me wince? We all sit in judgement, like some undisclosed beauty council in constant session, passing out rulings and sentences:
Imperfections should be hidden at all times! Not hideously exposed like a museum of the grotesque!
I don’t even know how not to judge this girl any more, and how not to be that shallow? I don’t know to stop myself being repelled
by the bad judgement she made this morning while getting dressed, very possibly in the dark …

Tristan is dancing backwards and forwards at the front of the stage as if he’s rehearsing a samba but he’s lost his partner. Ordering the young crew around to move props and stage minutiae that nobody will notice but him, he manages to chain-smoke his clove cigarettes and eat a hamburger while constantly ashing the carpet beneath his feet. Gavin stares at each flicked amber with alarm, terrified that it may be the spark that brings the house down.

‘Is Dolly in yet?’ Towering above him in three and a half inch heels I tap Tristan on the shoulder. He spins on one foot and stares at me in disbelief, as if I just popped out both of my eyes and gave them to him as an early birthday present.

‘Are you taking the piss?’ he screams, an octave higher than I have ever heard him before.

‘No,’ I say, alarmed, taking a hasty step backwards. Gavin, who is unscrewing a vent at the side of the stage, looks over towards us with blank concern, if there is such a thing.

‘Is she fuck, Make-up! We only open on Monday, it’s the last day of rehearsals, it’s a quarter to twelve, and she hasn’t turned up yet!’

Gavin stands up straight, his screwdriver in hand, and takes a couple of steps towards us.