Material Girl (47 page)

‘I will, I promise,’ I say. She lets go of my hand as I stand up.

‘The Dorchester, one last time!’ she says to the driver, with a wink. I close the door and her car pulls away.

Back in the dressing room I grab my bag, and wrap newspaper around the wet stems of the pink roses, and head upstairs again without lingering. I find Tristan sitting with his legs stretched out at the front of the stage, resting on the palms of his hands behind him.

‘Hey,’ he says, as I walk to the centre of the stage, and lean.

‘Hey,’ I reply. ‘Don’t you want to go to the party? Don’t you want to read your reviews?’ I ask.

‘Oh, they’ll be average, Make-up, the critics hate this play anyway. And what does it matter? Dolly’s gone. We’re a one-night stand. A quick cheap thrill, gone tomorrow. The show will close when people realise she’s not coming back.’ Tristan looks up and around him, leaning his neck back, and shouts, ‘This bloody theatre! Damn you, damn you!’

I don’t know what to say and we stand in silence as I search for a silver lining. After two long minutes of sighs, I find one, of sorts.

‘But now you can do
Death in Venice
! With the priests! You won’t have sold your soul for nothing, Tristan.’

‘That’s true,’ he says, sitting up and brightening slightly.

‘As long as, you know, the priests will get on a bus with a man with no soul.’

‘Oh why not, love, they’ve all sold theirs to the same guy,’ he replies.

‘Don’t say that on the bus,’ I tell him, alarmed. ‘Anyway. How do you think it went? The applause was wonderful, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, it was. She was wonderful. The bastard is she only had the one performance in her.’ Tristan sighs again, and examines his fingernails.

‘Tristan, I can’t come back tomorrow either. I have to leave too,’ I tell him apologetically.

He looks up and smiles. ‘An urgent call from New York for you too, Make-up?’

‘Not quite. Rottingdean.’

He looks perplexed.

‘It’s near Brighton. On the coast. I have to go and see my mum.’

‘Oh, is she okay?’ he asks, pushing himself to his feet, wiping down his trousers.

‘Yeah, she’s fine. It’s not her, really, it’s me.’

‘Oh.’ Tristan stops dusting himself down and looks up at me. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m … okay, yes. It’s nothing fatal. It hurts at the moment, but I’ll be fine.’

Tristan smiles and winks at me.

I smile and wink back.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Ha!’ he shouts, and walks off backstage.

Gavin coughs. I turn and see him standing by one of the stalls’ entrances.

‘Gavin, you are always standing behind me, coughing,’ I say.

‘Why are you going?’ he asks, walking forwards slowly.

‘I just have to get out of London for a while, Gavin. Everybody should, sometimes. I have to clear my head. I think I’ve got a bit cloudy and I need some seaside air to wash those clouds away.’

Gavin stops a couple of steps away from me.

‘I’ll miss you,’ he says.

‘Will you?’

‘Very much,’ he replies, and I am amazed.

‘What?’ he asks, at the incredulous look on my face.

‘Nothing, really, it’s just that it’s funny. I’ve only known you, what, a week? And nobody has ever told me they’ll miss me before. I mean, apart from my mum, and she has to.’

‘Not even Ben?’ he asks, baffled.

‘Oh my God, especially not him! Sometimes I’d even ask him, “Did you miss me?” This was before we were living together, and he’d gone camping or walking with Iggy for a week, and he’d just say “No”. I think he thought I should admire his honesty …’

‘It explains a lot,’ Gavin says, placing a huge palm facing downwards on the stage as we stand in front of it, studying his fingers. He seems nervous.

‘Maybe it does. How many signs can a girl ignore? But not any more …’ I try to laugh, but it won’t quite come out.

‘How was the zoo?’ he asks.

‘Conclusive. Sad. But overdue.’ I say.

‘So … can I call you?’ Gavin says, and stops looking at his fingers, looking at me instead. I knew that the question was coming, in the way that you always know. Sometimes you can just see people’s hearts through their jumpers.

‘I don’t know, Gavin …’ I reply, looking him in the eye.

‘Well, I’ve got your number so maybe I’ll just call you anyway,’ he shrugs.

‘Okay, well, that’s another approach,’ I say, and give him the biggest smile that I can muster. ‘Dolly asked if you’d get somebody to pack her stuff up and send it to the Dorchester to forward on?’ I continue, picking up my flowers wrapped in newspaper.

He nods.

‘Bye, Gavin,’ I say, grabbing my bag, walking back down the aisle on my own, and away.

The
Evening Standard
seller is clapping his hands against the cold, outside Covent Garden tube station.

I check my watch. It is eleven fifteen. ‘Shouldn’t you be closed?’ I ask, confused.

‘I’ve got one paper left,’ he whistles.

‘Well I’ll take it!’ I say.

‘Forty pence please, my lovely,’ he replies.

I root around in the bottom of my bag for change.

‘Have you found it?’ he lisps. I look up and notice that another two teeth have disappeared, and now only two remain like an odd couple at the front of his mouth.

‘I’m just looking now,’ I say, concentrating on what my hand can feel in my bag.

‘But it looks like you’ve found it: what you lost,’ he persists.

I stare at him, and feel two twenty-pence pieces fall into my hand in my bag.

‘Maybe I have,’ I tell him.

‘It took a while,’ he comments, and offers me the paper, folded in half.

‘Bye,’ I say, accepting my
Standard
and walking away backwards.

‘Goodnight, my lovely,’ he replies, and I turn away before the rest of his teeth fall out.

Tuesday. I take a train to the seaside. I manage to sleep a little during the hour that it takes us to fly, metal sparking on metal, to Brighton. Last night’s sleep was fitful at best. I dozed in twenty-minute bursts, woken suddenly, consistently, violently, by night falls, or jumps, or spasms. I’d lurch forwards and wake myself up, over and over again. It’s not as if I miss the hugs, they weren’t there to miss. I miss his back, a little. I feel like I’ve misplaced something.

I am obviously overtired. When we speed past a cemetery I am overwhelmed by the peculiarity of keeping our dead in boxes in holes in the ground. When will there be more bodies in the ground than people walking on it? When will the dead bodies reach critical mass? Does the day draw near? Meanwhile we lose somebody and we store their bones and skin in a box and bury it somewhere to rot, and sometimes we go and see the space where they rot, and talk to it. Our dead are gone: if we want to we can talk to them anywhere, and just pretend we are on hands-free to Heaven. There are no polystyrene cups with string attached: one cup resting at one end on their grave plots, the string shooting high up into the sky to heaven, and our dead friend or lover or relative cross-legged on a cloud
with the other foam cup pressed to their ear, chatting away on the other end. Sometimes you lose people, and it’s better to let go. Retain a symbol, perhaps, of what they meant to you, but don’t keep turning back. You have to look forwards. It’s the only way to have a future, in anything!

I scan the train carriage and wonder if anybody else has been dumped in the last few days. Dumped. It’s such an absurd and terrible phrase. It makes me sound like trash. I know that there was more to it than that. I am sure Ben thinks we both did the dumping, by mutual consent, and consoles himself with the fact that it was us both somehow, like he gave me a choice that was more than ‘hurt or stop hurting’. Maybe that’s what men do, when they can’t face the fact that they are hurting somebody? Women acknowledge, through their own tears, that people get hurt. Ben, with his lack of tears, pretends that they don’t. Perhaps he was only able to continue behaving in the way that he did by not admitting that he was hurting me. It’s as old as the hills. There is a Japanese girl with huge headphones two seats in front of me, facing forwards. I wonder if she has just been dumped. She doesn’t look particularly melancholy, she looks like a student. I am pretty sure she is fine, but then I can think what I like about her really. You can violate anybody’s character with your own thoughts, if you want to. It’s strange and reassuring. Maybe she did get dumped this morning, because she is needy and desperate and clawing and whining, all of the time. Maybe she was that way after a month! At least it took me six months to get to the needy, desperate, whiny stage with Ben. Then I simply managed to drag that out into two and a half years. You’ve got to admire my stamina in a way. I should consider marathons. They say it’s a wonderful day. It’s the atmosphere that helps people finish, they say. It’s bizarre when you think of it. Loads of people just running through town. Just running. And loads of other
people standing around cheering and waving and clapping, while the other people run. I think a lot of people must simply go for the cheers. Who cheers you on normally, in everyday life? ‘Go on, Scarlet, dig deep! You can do it! Another ambivalent phone call! Another thoughtless gesture! You can stand it, go on! Another argument where you apologise for just being you, for even feeling something! Go on, girl! Another random cheating embrace that makes you hate yourself even more, desperate for affection! – go on, go on, go on!’ Where have my bloody cheers been?

There is a man, thirty-five maybe, except I always get ages wrong. He gave my red swollen eyes a suspicious look when he sat down opposite me at the little train table. They are the glory seats, the train tables. If you can get one whole one to yourself then you win! But he didn’t look away. He gave me a smile. Maybe he thinks I am going to a funeral or to see a dying aunt, travelling sadly out of town. In my head I can make him anything. In my head he can be the type of man who cares about people, and isn’t self-absorbed and self-obsessed. He has an iPod nano, and he is listening to something melodic, leaving it alone, not fast-forwarding through every track to get to the next one, in case it’s better. He looks relaxed. Ben used to make play lists for his iPod, loads of them. He liked his dad rock. I would go so far as to say he almost loved it. Note the almost, let’s not get carried away.

I said to him once, ‘Do you know why I think you love your music so much, Ben?’

And he said, ‘No, surprise me!’ just like that, sarcastic straight away.

So I said, ‘Because it’s the closest you get to emotion. You think it’s “genius” that somebody had a feeling and wrote it down, because you could never do the same. And you sing their feelings with emotion, but you do know that they actually felt them, right? If you think about that, Ben, all these
people writing down their emotions, does it put you off the songs a bit? Like mould gathering around the top of them? Because, you know, being you, you’d think that it would …’

‘Another fascinating dissection of my character, Scarlet, thank you,’ he’d said, sighing and weary and bored and not really listening. He should have listened sometimes.

‘You know what’s really sad? You couldn’t write a line of one of those songs,’ I’d say, under my breath and behind his back when he’d walk off into the kitchen, singing. ‘The closest you get to expressing your feelings is singing what Jon Bon Jovi feels. Now that, Ben, is sad.’

It occurs to me that I will need to stop having these thoughts soon. When should I leave him alone? Stop picking apart his character to find the bit that explains my rejection? Maybe this is me sitting at the grave of our relationship with the foam cup to my ear and the string in the air, a ladder to the sky, hoping he’ll pick up. Maybe I need to look forwards. Out of the window I glimpse the sea.

My mum lives in Rottingdean village, in a house by the lake. There is a path that separates her garden from the rushes. People have been warning her about damp in her foundations since she moved in, fifteen years ago, but the walls haven’t fallen down yet. It is an old house, though, with dark wood beams and low ceilings. Gavin would have to come in on his knees or risk a crick in his neck.

I get a taxi to Rottingdean from Brighton station, and somehow my mum does what she always does, and is standing at the front door of her house as my taxi pulls up. Her grey hair is still long and pinned on her head, her glasses have slipped halfway down her nose, and she’s wearing an old jumper that she gardens in, and wellies.

‘Hello darling!’ she shouts, grinning and waving, as I pull up.

‘Have you been standing there all morning, Mum?’ I ask over my shoulder as I pay the cabbie.

‘No, darling, I just this second opened the door. You know I can be a little bit psychic, Scarlet. I thought you might get that train as well.’

I lug my bag along the short path, and drop it down at her feet. She opens her arms out wide and hugs me, hard and tight, like she’s counting my bones. I start to cry and she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t know yet, I haven’t told her, but it doesn’t matter. You are allowed to cry when your mum hugs you. That’s allowed. Eventually she whispers in my ear, ‘Silly stuff? Or is something wrong?’