Material Girl (41 page)

‘What are you doing tomorrow, Make-up?’ he asks from the front of the stage, flicking imaginary specks off of his
jacket, and addressing me in the first row of the stalls.

‘I’m going to the zoo, with Ben,’ I say, crossing my arms.

‘Right.’ He nods his head. ‘Silence and tears,’ he adds finally.

‘Let me guess … Byron?’ I ask.

‘You got it,’ he says.

‘We’ll see,’ I reply. He flashes me a smile and walks off to the wings.

I spot Gavin loitering by the steps at the side of the stage.

‘Hi Gavin, how are you?’ I ask. It feels like ages since I have spoken to him properly.

He doesn’t answer my question, but says instead, ‘You’re going to the zoo with your bloke tomorrow, then?’

‘Yes, I am,’ I say, nodding and smiling.

‘London Zoo? Sounds ominous.’ He shoves his hands into his jeans pockets and lowers his chin to his chest.

‘Maybe …’ I reply. ‘I don’t know yet. How was your dinner with Arabella?’ I ask.

‘Didn’t happen. Decided not to go. Decided not to do that anymore.’ Gavin stares at his feet.

‘Oh,’ I say.

‘Well … be brave,’ he says, and looks me in the eye for a moment, before wrenching his hands out of his pockets, turning and jogging up the steps by the stage three at a time.

‘Why does everybody keep saying that to me?’ I ask as he heads backstage.

He turns to face me. ‘Because we can see you’ve got it in you.’ Gavin exits stage left.

What do they know? I’ve got to get through tonight first.

I am no good at kissing strangers. I think too much about what they are thinking, care too much about what I’m doing, worry too much about my intentions. Kissing Ben, the first time, and even now, is a different experience to anybody I’ve ever kissed before. It was like we knew each other straight away. We didn’t even have the same kissing technique: he was firmer, more of a pusher; I was slower and definitely softer. But it was like we knew each other anyway. With others, with strangers, I’m no good at kissing. I’m not reckless with abandon, wild and free and crazy. Unless I’m drunk. Then it’s easy, but I don’t remember it the next day. I just remember that it was easy.

Isabella breaks the ice by giving me my Steinbeck that she got on discount and refuses to take the money for now. She hails a black cab on Charing Cross Road and ushers me into it before her, gesturing with her handful of chipped nail varnish, as if we are on an old-fashioned date and I am the woman. She is all wide eyes and smiles, and control as well. In the cab she tells me, unprompted, that she is twenty-three.

I smile. ‘You’re a baby,’ I say.

‘How old are you?’ she asks.

‘Thirty-one,’ I tell her with a shamed laugh, like nobody was ever this old before. Not giant tortoises, not Moses or any of his wives up on Sinai, nobody. I’m the human miracle, I’m ancient.

She raises her eyes and clicks her gum in her mouth. ‘I thought you were, like, twenty-eight maybe. But Jennifer Aniston is thirty-seven,’ she says with a smile. I think that is supposed to make everything better, heal the world. Jennifer Aniston is thirty-seven and looking good, and we can all sleep safe in our beds tonight.

‘Well, I feel old,’ I say, but it’s a lie. I’m scared I look old, that’s all. I still feel stupid and ridiculous and young.

‘Hell, who gives a fuck about age. I don’t. I don’t care if somebody is fifteen or fifty, or, like, eighty. If I like them, I like them.’ She thrusts her splayed fingers into her hair and shakes them. It is a little messier than it was a moment ago, and she seems satisfied.

‘Okay, but be careful how much you like the fifteen-year-olds because they aren’t even legal …’ I reply.

‘Yeah, but, you know, I knew what I was doing at fifteen, and I bet you did too. Fifteen-year-olds know, I don’t care what anybody says. I knew. I had my first bra when I was, like, eleven. And did you know, in the Netherlands, or somewhere like that, the sex age is, like, twelve or something? It’s got nothing to do with the government or whatever. You’re just ready when you’re ready.’

‘Well if it’s legal in the Netherlands,’ I say.

She is chewing pink gum with her mouth open, and a speck has stuck itself to the gloss on her lips. ‘Besides, nobody even cares about, like, age any more, or any of it. I’m having surgery. I’m having Botox, everything. I’m already saving for it. I’ll have my boobs done. I’ve saved three hundred pounds already. I had six hundred but then I went to Ibiza last
summer. It was wicked, though, I’d definitely go again. You should go, you’d love it!’

I don’t know how she knows that I haven’t, or assumes I haven’t at least. But it’s true.

‘I just have to, you know, save some more. But it’s so hard!’ She hits her forehead with her palm and screams like a little girl, and rubs it and laughs.

‘Fuck,’ she says, smiling, shaking her head. I don’t know what that means.

‘You’ll care about getting older when you get older,’ I say, ‘whether you’ve saved for surgery or not.’

‘I don’t think so.’ She shakes her head, but seriously now. I stare out at Oxford Street as we inch along, a bus to our right, a bus to our left, flanked by monster department stores and mobile-phone shops and stalls selling three brightly coloured pashminas for five pounds. It’s like the red sea parting for our cab, with buses banked on both sides, and yet streams of people are still queuing at bus stops, cold and sad. A sea of disaffected faces staring in. Isabella keeps looking at me out of the corner of her eye, squinting, really.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘I was just looking at your mascara: sorry! Was that annoying? Sorry! I just, I don’t know how you get it to go, like, like that.’ She flicks her fingers upwards by her eyelashes.

‘I think it’s just my eyelashes. They just go that way. But you could use curlers, if yours are too straight …’

‘No, they’re cool. Or maybe I will. It’s cool.’

She touches my hand. She has this youth glossed over her, a sheen, like our lip-gloss – hers cheap, mine expensive. I don’t know what I am doing. I am bored but I’m nervous. I think about Ben, at home maybe, thinking about the zoo maybe, worrying about me maybe, wondering where I am maybe. Or not. I am on a date with somebody else. Except it really doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t feel like cheating,
like it would if I were sitting here with Gavin, or Tom. I could call Ben right now and tell him I am in a cab with this girl and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

Except maybe she doesn’t think this is a date. Maybe we are just here to talk make-up and so I can give her free eyeliner. As if reading my mind, she says, ‘I’m so glad you came. I thought you would, but I wasn’t sure. But I thought you would.’ She smiles at me and winks.

I smile back, but terrified.

She leans forwards, her breasts, her hair, her chipped nail varnish, her smudged eyeliner, her gloss with the chewing gum stuck to it, to kiss me.

I jump backwards in my seat so sharply that I smash my head on the window. I scream, ‘Shit!’

‘What the hell?’ the cabbie asks, yanking open his dividing window.

‘It’s nothing, I just banged my head!’ I say, rubbing it like crazy to dull the pain.

‘You sure you’re all right, love, there wasn’t a bump in the road or anything,’ he says.

Maybe not in yours, mate. Maybe not in yours.

‘Are you okay?’ Isabella asks, half worried, half smiling. She covers her mouth to pretend she isn’t giggling.

‘Yes. I’m sorry, that was stupid. I just … I just …’

‘Okay, okay. Composure. Be calm, breathe.’ She shakes my hand to loosen me up.

‘I’m calm, I’m calm,’ I say, rubbing my head.

‘Okay, then, can I ask you something, like, personal?’

‘Okay …’ I say.

‘Haven’t you ever kissed a woman before?’

Immediately I think: shouldn’t that be ‘Have you ever kissed a woman before?’ Because ‘haven’t’ implies that everybody is doing it …

‘No, sorry, I haven’t.’

She stares at me, eyes white and wide in disbelief.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘No. It’s fine, you are a bit older, I guess.’

‘What does that mean? Older than what?’ I ask, incredulous.

‘Nothing, I just … So you’ve only ever kissed, like, boys? Like, men?’

‘Yes, why is that so hard to comprehend?’

‘It’s not. It is just … it’s just a bit strange. I can’t think of any of my friends, you know, who have only been with blokes … oh, hang on, maybe Charlotte. No, she was seeing Daisy for a while. Hang on …’ She sits and thinks.

‘But I’m straight,’ I say, as if that’s explanation enough.

‘Okay,’ she replies, grimacing.

‘Okay,’ I say, ignoring it, nodding my head so that it’s straight too.

‘So why are you here with me? Oh my God!’ She covers her mouth with her hand and her chipped nail-polished childish fingers. ‘Did you think we were just, like, becoming friends?’

‘No, I don’t know what I thought. I just thought … that I wanted to come. And that you … you remind me of me a bit.’

‘Oh my God! Well, at the very least you’ll have snogged a woman by the end of tonight! I feel like a teacher!’ she says, sitting up and doing a prim impersonation of Miss Jean Brodie, straightening her collar, brushing down her jeans. I noticed outside Grey’s, when she sauntered out and said ‘hello’, that she is wearing baggy jeans that are so loose they are bunched around her crotch, giving the impression of a full set of working testes. And she has gone mad with the blusher again; she is disfigured by violent streaks of red scarred across both cheeks. It makes her look a little ridiculous, like a gargoyle, but she is still young enough to carry it off.

‘Okay … maybe …’ I say.

The cab turns left along Regent Street, and then right, travelling along the back of Selfridges. I wish we were going there instead, I feel lost. We pull up outside a Turkish restaurant, ‘Levant’.

‘I’ll get this,’ I say, and she jumps out with a grateful smile.

When I say thank you for my receipt, the cabbie gives me a wink and says, ‘No, thank you!’

I turn to go in but Isabella grabs me by my hands, jumping up and down like she’s just eaten too many blue Smarties.

‘No, wait, wait, wait. One second. So, just so I’m clear, you’ve got a boyfriend then, right?’

‘Yes,’ I say, shrugging.

‘Okay,’ she replies, nodding wisely. ‘Well, this should be interesting!’ Sticking her fingers in her hair and messing it up again, she turns to go in.

‘Okay, you hold on for one minute. So haven’t you got a boyfriend?’ I ask, confused. I just assumed that she would have.

‘Not really. I was seeing this guy, Rupert, but he was, like, really possessive. He didn’t want me seeing anybody else, or, you know, even kissing anybody else, and I’m just too young, you know, for that kind of commitment. And then he said we could still go out anyway, but then I said no. Because he would always be trying to control me, you know?’

‘But you go out, I mean you date, boys and girls? I mean, men and women?’

‘Yeah, of course.’

‘So you’re bisexual?’ I ask.

She rolls her eyes dramatically and sighs. ‘Oh God, I don’t know. Who cares? I mean, who’s asking, really? I’m like, whoever I like, then I like. Those kinds of boxes? They are, like, for other people. I don’t think people do that any more …’ she explains sagely.

‘I am old!’ I say. ‘But let’s go in anyway, before it’s past my bedtime.’

‘We’re going to have so much fun!’ Isabella says, clapping her hands and jumping up in the air.

I wince as her breasts jump as well, seemingly independent of the rest of her, bouncing violently towards her chin. I think she might knock herself out. We must be the same cup size and I would never jump like that, I’d be scared that I’d give myself two black eyes, or there would be an earthquake in China. But she doesn’t care. She isn’t a younger me at all. She is a thousand times less scared. I don’t know if it’s money, or breeding, or just the generation that separates us. It seems a lot happened in those years. Now it would appear that there are no boxes any more, and everybody is kissing everybody, and there is no such thing as straight or gay or bisexual, for girls at least. In London at least.

We sit on low sofas at our table in the bar, surrounded by cushions, sipping on house wine, and picking at vine leaves and rice things, and meatballs, and we find easy small-talk in
Vogue
and
InStyle
.

I am almost immediately hazy with the smoke, as pink clouds form and float behind my eyes – everything becomes a little woolly and confused, and I have to fight to focus. Purple and bruised sunken sofas, crumpled cushions covered in sequins. Swathes of muslin swing from the ceilings, and a belly-dancing woman, loaded with gold coins hanging from her clothing, flexes her breasts. She is actually flexing her breasts.

‘So what’s your boyfriend like?’ Isabella asks, pouring us more red wine.

‘He doesn’t love me,’ I say, almost casually now, I am so used to saying it.

‘Shit. Men. You know, I am just, like, learning now, that they are, like, completely rubbish. They only love the ones
that are mean to them, it’s true! I bet you’re just too nice. It’s like Rupert only really liked me when I said I didn’t want to see him any more. He, like, completely freaked out, and was all, like, “But I really like you, and we have great sex and we have this connection, blah blah blah.” But it’s all horseshit. My friend Jemmy – Jemima, but we all call her Jemmy – she is so utterly, like, foul to boys, and they all just queue up for her. And she isn’t even that pretty although her arse is amazing. But she just acts like she isn’t even interested and all these boys just, like, swarm over her, like she’s honey or something. Are you gonna dump him?’