Material Girl (45 page)

I sit outside Katie’s office for an hour, looking up at the building’s windows and wondering which one is hers. I can see small figures moving about behind them, but I couldn’t tell you if one of them was my own mother, the distance is too great. I wonder if Katie was the first person Ben called, to tell her we were finally through. I haven’t learnt this much about anything since I crammed for my exams. Feelings should be policed. I’ll never be naïve again. Like your virginity, once it’s gone, it’s gone. The major difference, of course, between then and now, is that I aced my GCSEs.

A sheet of the
Standard
crunches along the pavement and sticks itself to my leg as I try to kick it off. The wind is wrapping it around my calf and I shake myself wildly rather than just lean down and rip it away. I can tell by the layout that it is the review section. Tonight is the first night of previews for the play. It doesn’t feel like anything to do with me now. The cast and crew seem to have melted away in the last twelve hours, unimportant and unrelated to my life and what’s happening in it, and yet without them I know I wouldn’t be sitting here, feeling lost. These ridiculous theatre people, all bursting with emotion and strange passion, demanding I confront my fears and my failings and my dead-on-arrival
relationship. Maybe if I had taken the Andrex job I had been offered last week instead – two days on a set in St Albans with a mum and a little boy and seven puppies – I’d be going home to Ben again tonight? In fact I think that I know I would. But this was my fifth choice, my fifth road and choice and path out of lucky seven, and this time I took it. I don’t know what made me so brave yesterday. I don’t know if I’ll be that brave again, if choices six and seven present themselves so obviously.

It’s grey today, and cold. I shiver in the bus stop as an old lady with black and grey steel-wool hair and skin the colour and consistency of the best dark chocolate sits down heavily next to me and gets out a clump of orange knitting.

The needles begin to click quickly and don’t pause for respite. She isn’t even watching her fingers. She stares across the road, just as I do. Perhaps her ex-boyfriend’s ex-wife works in that building too, and she has been sitting here for forty years, wondering when the right time would be to go and apologise to somebody who demands no apology? Perhaps she is knitting a huge banner, in orange, that she will drape across the main road when she is finished so that everybody knows that she is sorry too. I am struck with an electric shock of clarity at the absurdity of my situation, like sparks flying from her knitting needles and burying themselves arrow-like into my goose-pimpled skin.

I sit up straight, roll back my shoulders, and address the building in front of me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

The needles pause. ‘It’s no problem,’ the old lady says. And then begins clicking again.

I walk back to the station.

I barely recognise the theatre as I walk up the aisle at ten fifteen. There are no discarded Starbucks cups or holders or
brown bags or muffin wrappers or juice bottles. The stage has been swept, and polished as well I think. The aisles are clean. The rocks and the villa and the swathe of the ocean are lit by a bright white and pink glow. I spot Gavin and the electrician at the side of the stage sorting through wires. One of the runners polishes a mirror like it’s a Gestapo death-squad demand – any streaks and you die! – while another remakes the large bed that sits on the left-hand side of the stage, plumping up feather cushions to bursting point.

Tristan is talking earnestly at his assistant while listing things on his fingers, as the boy makes notes on an A4 pad. Tristan isn’t wearing his funeral hat today, or his Jackie Onassis sunglasses, or his pink beads, or his Romford Market kimono. He is wearing a white shirt, a black tie, and a dark grey suit. He looks like Sammy Davis Junior’s cousin, just flown in from Mumbai.

Everybody looks like they mean business today.

I slip up the stairs at the side of the stage and go quietly down the corridor to Dolly’s room, and nobody notices. I feel partially invisible, as if some of me has been scrubbed out, albeit temporarily, although the exact length of time is yet to be determined.

Dolly hasn’t arrived yet, as I expected. My stomach grumbles loudly in the quiet of her room. I place my box on the table and walk to the kitchen to make a slice of toast, determined to keep it down.

Passing the toilet I hear somebody being violently sick on the other side of the door. It sounds loud and serious and uncontrollable. If I hadn’t already thrown up the food in my stomach this morning the noise itself would make me sick again too. I knock on the door timidly.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask, but whoever it is retches again in reply. ‘Okay, well, I’ll be in the kitchen if you need anything,’ I tell them, and run away.

I find bread for toast, but can’t stomach it, so I pour myself a cup of hot water and head back. The door to the bathroom flies open as I am about to pass, flooding the corridor with the stench of fresh vomit. It reminds me that I have smelt it here a few times already. I have to throw my hand violently over my mouth and nose and breathe in the moisturiser on my hands deeply to stop my eyes from watering.

Tom Harvey-Saint adjusts his shirt and walks out of the bathroom. Cue gasps from his horrified teenage fan club. His eyes are red and swollen, and he looks pale like runny egg-white.

‘Tom, are you okay?’ I ask, alarmed.

‘Of course I’m okay. It’s just some bad prawns,’ he says, straightening his cuffs and tucking his shirt in to the tops of his trousers, over the flat board of his stomach.

‘Okay,’ I say, and a penny drops as he walks off. It’s not just the girls who are on show these days …

A waft of lavender swarms over me as I reach the dressing-room door, and I know that Dolly has arrived.

She is already sitting in her chair, shaking quietly. A pile of cards lay unopened in her lap, and two fresh bunches of orange and pink roses have appeared in vases on the counter.

Her eyes look red and puffy as well. A single card sits in front of the flowers. It has a glossy photo of two young children on the front, a boy and a girl, and their mother in the middle, trying to keep them all together for a hug while the kids squirm and laugh for the camera. The woman looks like Dolly.

‘My daughter, Lulu,’ she says, nodding at the card.

I pick it up and study the photo. She is haughty, and beautiful. I place it back down on the counter.

‘No, read it, Lulu. You can read it.’

‘Okay,’ I say, and pick it up again, flicking it open.

It says,

Good Luck, Mum. Sorry we can’t be there
.

Chloe, Dan, Danny and Charlotte x

‘Well that’s nice,’ I say, placing it back down on the side.

‘I thought they might still come,’ she replies, and coughs.

There is a rap on the door, and she whispers, ‘Come in.’

One of Gavin’s runners pokes his head around the doorframe. ‘Sorry, more flowers,’ he says, carrying two more vases full of black roses.

‘Never apologise for roses, just put them over there.’ Dolly gestures to the corner.

The boy backs out and closes the door behind him.

‘When do you want to start today?’ I ask her. ‘I mean, I don’t even know how this works – if the performance starts at seven thirty, do you need time on your own beforehand?’

She looks up at me sadly. ‘Of course, none of them think I’ll go on, Lulu.’

‘Oh.’ I place the blusher brush that I have been playing with back down on the side. ‘Do you think you will?’ I ask.

‘I will. Of course I will! I have never been afraid of anything. I’m not going to start now.’

‘It’s probably okay, though, if you are a bit afraid, Dolly,’ I say, and shrug.

She shakes her head, biting trembling lips closed. ‘Why are you so sad?’ she asks, glancing up and noticing the tears in my eyes.

‘Ben moved out last night. I ended it, yesterday. In front of a paddling pool of penguins at London Zoo. Well, that’s not strictly true. I didn’t end it. I asked him if he loved me and he just said “No”. So, what else could I do?’

I shrug and try not to cry.

‘Nothing else, Lulu. You could do nothing else. And how do you feel now?’

‘Terrified,’ I say with a laugh, tears streaming down my
face. She reaches out and takes one of my hands. We are both shaking.

‘The terror will pass, Lulu. But the strength remains.’

I nod my head. ‘But I feel like I failed,’ I say, my lip crumbling.

‘Do you love him?’ she asks sternly, her eyes red too.

‘Yes,’ I reply, pressing my lips together to control myself.

‘Well then, you didn’t fail. Do you hear me, Lulu? You must never see loving somebody as a failure. Not loving somebody: now that’s entirely different. Now put Ella on and let’s make me look beautiful! Ha!’

Ella sings ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ while I dust her with make-up and blot both her eyes and mine every now and then. I chuck twelve tissues away in total.

‘Well, I have a cast talk to attend,’ Dolly says, pushing herself to her feet. ‘You stay here, Lulu, you don’t need to go outside today. It’s cold!’

Twenty minutes later I take my third gulp from Dolly’s hipflask and shudder violently. I look at my phone. I shouldn’t call him. Everybody always says, ‘Don’t call them, let them miss you, leave them alone to realise their mistake,’ blah, blah, blah. But they don’t know me, and they don’t know Ben. And they don’t know Dutch courage until they’ve tasted whatever it is in Dolly’s hipflask.

I hit Ben’s number in my phone.

‘What if I took it all back?’ I say, as soon as he answers.

Silence, and then, ‘We can’t, Scarlet, can we? It’s done now.’

I think he sounds relieved. Then he says, ‘Don’t be sad, Scar, we had a great three years.’

If he were here I’d slap him. It occurs to me like a bucket of water thrown in my face that he may be oblivious to the pain that he has caused. He just doesn’t feel it, and it enables him to say things like that. I want to scream, ‘But I feel
ruined! Like a goddamn overcooked steak!’ And I want to say, ‘No, we didn’t have three great years. I am exhausted! And I’m damaged! And it was a waste of my time!’

But I don’t say it, and I don’t even know why. Maybe because I feel like I’m a little drunk, and maybe because I don’t want to hurt him, even now, when I really think that he deserves to know. He’ll be happy soon enough, whether I tell him or not: he left us a long time ago.

‘I’m scared,’ is what I say instead.

‘I’m sorry,’ he answers, but he doesn’t sound it.

‘God, Ben,’ I whisper, I can’t shout any more, ‘you just sound so … so ambivalent about the whole thing …’

He raises his voice. ‘I’m not ambivalent, Scarlet, but we’ve broken up.’

‘Don’t say it like that, it was only last night! Don’t say it like it’s been months and it’s a done deal!’ I say, raising mine too.

‘But it is a done deal,’ he replies, exasperated again.

Silence.

‘You took the first get-out I ever gave you, didn’t you? But you never did it yourself …’ And now it’s Ben’s turn to fall silent on the other end of the phone.

I sit in his silence for twenty seconds before he says, ‘Well …’

Maybe it’s the last thing I’ll ever hear him say.

‘Fine. It’s done,’ I snap, and hang up.

‘It’s the half, Dolly, what do you want to do?’

Dolly stares at herself in the mirror without acknowledging Tristan, who jumps once on the spot in the doorway and squeezes his eyes shut. I lean against the back wall and watch the scene nervously. Tristan is standing in front of Gavin, who fills the doorway completely. Like Little and Large, Gavin towers head and shoulders above Tristan, even when Tristan jumps. Gavin looks down at Tristan’s crown, once, alarmed.

‘She is driving me crazy, crazy! Edelweiss, edelweiss, edelweiss …’ Tristan whispers, tapping his cheeks with his fingers.

Dolly’s eyes, reflected in the mirror, cannon across the room to address him, as she growls, ‘Get out! Get out! Get them out, Lulu, will you?’ Dolly spins around and shouts at me, wringing her hands. ‘It’s the half, don’t you people know anything about actors, anything! I need my space. I need time alone! Get out!’ She turns to face the wall and covers her eyes.

Tristan and Gavin look at me for direction.

I shrug and shoo them back through the door and into the corridor.

‘I’ll be outside if you need me, okay,’ I say, pulling the door closed quietly behind me.

‘Not you, Lulu!’ Dolly says, and spins around. ‘You can stay.’

‘Are you sure? Don’t you need to be alone?’ I ask, confused.

‘Just stay here. Please?’ she replies.

I take a step back into the room, and turn around to push the door closed on Tristan, who looks wounded: his mouth falls open like his jaw has just lost the springs that held it together.

I mouth ‘sorry’, and close the door in his face, wincing when he fails to move even an inch backwards and the wood softly shunts his nose.

Dolly is sitting in her chair, facing the mirror again. She stares at herself in distaste. ‘Look at me,’ she whispers. ‘Look at me. Who wants to see me now? Look at the state of me. I’m a sight, a wreck, aren’t I? I’m the bloody Blackpool Tower. Nobody is bothered about me. It’s Tom they’ve come to see, or Arabella. Nobody is here for me anyway. What does it matter?’