Material Girl (6 page)

The stage is in front of us, and all of the house lights are up. It is smaller than I anticipated, and apologetic without a spotlight.

‘I’m not having this conversation if you are going to cry again.’ Gavin talks over his shoulder at me as we stride along the aisle. ‘Plus, do you talk about anything else? Have you tried cracking a few jokes? Or is it just constant relationship angst over a mound of self-help books and copies
of
Cosmopolitan
? Because if that’s the case I don’t think I blame this guy …’

I blink twice in quick succession. I am startled and affronted. I can talk about other things; I talk about other things all the time!

‘I can talk about other things …’ I say, sneering at him.

‘Well thank God for that,’ Gavin says, and stops walking abruptly behind a short Indian man who stands with his back to us while gesticulating wildly, his hands conducting an imaginary opera. Nobody appears to be paying him much attention, and a clove cigarette flashes wildly between the stubby fingers of his left hand, sprinkling ash and sparks onto his chocolate-brown suede loafers. He wears a dark grey suit and a black polo-neck, and has very thick and very high dark hair that seems to have been set in one of those old-lady hairdresser’s, an hour under the machine with a
Woman’s Weekly
and a word search, sucking on a boiled sweet, all clicking teeth and concentration.

Young people in jeans and Sergeant Pepper and Mr Brightside T-shirts mill around in front of him paying him no mind, while every couple of seconds somebody completely new appears and carries a large plank of wood precariously from one side of the stage to the other. Everything that could possibly be covered in material has been – a dark-red brushed velvet with a grey and brown pattern of twisted leaves. The stage needs sweeping. It is insulated with a thin layer of dust, broken up by discarded McDonald’s wrappers. I count at least five Starbucks cups that have toppled onto their sides like the drunks on Tottenham Court Road.

Gavin says, ‘Tristan’, but the little man in front of us doesn’t turn around. He is shouting in a low, thick theatrical voice that he has shoplifted from the men’s floor of a 1950s department store.

‘But fucking love! I can’t fucking make it work! It’s
obviously too dark! It’s too heavy and shameful and dirty and depressed – it’s an old velvet whore hanging from its whore’s bed – it’s been used, it’s on the cheap, it’s dragging all of us down with it to its old rotten-toothed whore old age …’ His shoulders droop, and the clove cigarette burns close to his fingers. He takes a violent last drag and stubs it out on the aisle. I hear him whisper, ‘Now I’m depressed.’

When nobody says anything, he takes a huge breath and demands of the room, ‘Has anybody got any uppers?’

‘Tristan?’ Gavin repeats, but louder this time.

Tristan spins around to face us. He is wearing oversized black plastic sunglasses reminiscent of Jackie Onassis, although they are clearly very cheap. His suit is well cut but still appears to be a size too big for him. So this is Tristan Mitra. He tilts his head down to look at us above his plastic glasses and something devilish twinkles in his eyes as he flashes me a huge wide charming smile. I’ve read about him in the
Standard
. It was the opening night of his debut play as a director, an all-male version of
The Sound of Music
at the Brixton Art House, and the press were trying to track him down for a quote because of its rave reviews. They found him in the Charing Cross police station on Agar Road. He’d been arrested for being drunk in charge of a wheelchair on Old Compton Street. He’d run over the feet of twelve sets of tourists, but unlucky thirteen had been a policeman. They found the owner of the wheelchair in a pub at the bottom of Wardour Street with a bottle of vodka and a beef pie. He said that Tristan had offered him two hundred quid for the chair, plus the vodka, and he had just really fancied a drink. But now he couldn’t get home.

Tristan has appeared in the gossip columns as well – he’s rumoured to be having an affair with Phillipe Ellender, the set designer, and I read a thing last week that said he
might be having a thing with Dolly Russell herself, which seems utterly bizarre. When they asked him for a quote he said, ‘Loving somebody and not telling them can hurt more than being rejected by them. It’s like rejecting yourself.’ And even though he has a reputation for being able to drink all night, he recently came home so appallingly trashed that he flew into a jealous rage directed at his mother’s chinchilla, Charlton, and tried to microwave it … The RSPCA got involved at some point, that’s why it was in the paper.

‘Gavin! Love! Mountain of a man! Giant Gavin! Ho, ho, ho, green giant!’ he sings and does a strange little dance, ‘Giant Gavin! Love! … Are you on any prescription medication? You’re not on codeine, are you?’

‘No,’ Gavin replies flatly, and Tristan stares at him still, but his smile begins to fade.

‘I had morphine once,’ I say, to try and cheer up this strange little man, this large-voiced wide-eyed director of the stage, who is no more than five foot five.

His face explodes into a huge smile again and I can’t help but smile too.

‘Morphine! I’d fucking kill for some morphine now!’

He has the most English voice I have ever heard, a cross between James Bond and the Queen, it’s made of silk. When he says ‘morphine’ he exclaims it, like his own personal Eureka!

‘Gavin, love, giant, man mountain, bouncy castle, can we get any morphine? Is there a hospital nearby? Better yet, St John’s Ambulance Headquarters? They are easily fooled those St John’s guys, they don’t get that much action you see.’ He lowers his glasses and winks at me and I feel myself blushing. He notices it, stops, smiles and winks again. ‘So they’ll chuck anything at you given the chance. Last year I was at the Streatham fete with my mother – she was selling chutney –
and frankly I was bored stupid, and I saw the St John’s Ambulance there and couldn’t believe my luck! I wandered over and just casually mentioned that I’d twisted my arm unpacking two boxes of Mum’s finest, and asked them to improvise me a splint and they bloody did it in seconds out of a bloody
Daily Telegraph
! It was fucking marvellous! It was splint poetry! Broken-bone poetry! It’s dark in here, isn’t it? I think it’s the bloody curtain …’

Tristan spins around to face the stage and it feels like the light has gone out. Next to me, Gavin sighs quietly.

‘Could it be the glasses?’ I ask.

‘No, love, no …’ Tristan turns back to face us, but doesn’t take them off. ‘I wear them all the time now. I got them free from some fucking teenage magazine –’ He lights another clove cigarette without offering either Gavin or I the pack, and inhales deeply. Blowing out a large smoke ring, he points through its centre at nothing with his finger. ‘–
Jackie
or
Shirley
or
Tarty
or something like that, some teenage slutty magazine. And it was one pound fifty at the newsagent’s! And these were stuck to the front of this magazine, like a bloody godsend! My eyes had been so red that month anyway, and above them it said something like, “How to know if the time is really right to let him touch you” … or “Give him your cherry but keep the box that it comes in” … or “Don’t let him lick you” … or something.’ He stops and counts something on his fingers and mutters quickly.

Gavin and I exchange a glance. Tristan is like a walking spotlight. I don’t want him to spin around again. I don’t think Gavin likes him as much as I do, but maybe he’s just too high up. I am five foot five, five foot eight in my heels today, and Tristan is at least three inches shorter than me. If we stood back to back in bare feet we’d probably be the same height, except his hair is really high.

‘And I just thought perfect!’ Tristan is talking again. ‘They
ground me, but let me be me. They steal the me from me. They remind me that everything is filtered, through experience. You know not one person that comes to see this shit-shambles of a play will see it the same? We all see it through our life filters – who we’ve loved, who we’ve screwed, who’s screwed us. If they were the fucking
one
, or they just wanted to get their leg over and then they did it with your best mate one Wednesday night after football practice.’

Tristan stops talking and lowers his glasses again, fixing me with a stare. His pupils are almost black. I feel the colour rushing to my cheeks. I am caught in his tractor beam.

‘By the time you reach twenty you are emotionally shot to shit, and I’m thirty-six! That’s fucking awful, isn’t it? How the hell did that happen? But that’s the world. That’s life. That’s London.
Non, regrette rien
. We are all a little damaged –’ he pushes his sunglasses back up to cover his eyes, ‘– shop soiled with the juices of lovers old, just not broken, not quite broken. Do you have any uppers?’

‘No, sorry.’ I shake my head and feel really bad. I would love to be able to give him an upper right now – not that I think he needs it, but he just really seems to want one. We stand in a temporary silence, which I decide to smash.

‘Sometimes I say to Ben, that’s my boyfriend, I say, “Say something nice”, and he says, “I don’t do it to order”, and I say, “Okay, Ben, but you never fucking do it!”’

I hear Gavin sigh but I ignore it because I have Tristan’s full attention, as long as his eyes are open under his sunglasses.

‘“You never do it, Ben!”’ I carry on. ‘And I just think that if you are going to be with somebody it might be nice if they said nice things, to cheer you up, and let you know why they are with you – that it’s not just killing time, because they don’t love you and they don’t initiate sex so really there isn’t much point, but they aren’t ending it so …’

Tristan whips off his sunglasses and stares at me in alarm.

‘I want you to know that I haven’t taken these off for four days and that includes sleeping and a court appearance,’ he says, nodding his head at me to make his point, so I completely understand the gravity of his action. The whites of his eyes are riddled with red veins like worms inching around his massively dilated pupils.

‘Fucking hell,’ he says, shaking his head now. ‘Are you in an actual relationship? Do people still do that? We should definitely talk about that – I’m interested. Just not right now. But let’s definitely talk later. Who are you?’ He asks me with the accent on ‘are’, as if I may be an imposter, or an alien, or it might actually be important to somebody.

Gavin answers before I can. ‘New Make-up for Dolly.’

And I don’t sound that important after all. I’m not even the original. I’m a replacement, sloppy seconds – again.

‘Right, right, right, right.’ Tristan nods with each word, with complete understanding. ‘What happened to Old Make-up?’ he asks Gavin seriously.

‘She quit.’

‘But why?’ Tristan asks.

‘Dolly spiked her drink.’

Tristan’s eyebrows rise simultaneously and a smile tweaks the corners of his mouth.

‘With what?’

‘The doctor said it was probably speed.’

‘Lucky bitch,’ Tristan whispers and gazes off to one side, as if remembering some long-forgotten afternoon with a long-forgotten lover in a long-forgotten field, somewhere long forgotten. He turns back to Gavin.

‘Who’s Dolly’s dealer?’ he asks seriously.

‘I don’t know, Tristan,’ Gavin replies, with no more expression in his voice than if he were reading the Ikea instructions for a self-assembly three-drawer chest, but Tristan doesn’t seem to mind.

‘Right. Right. Right.’ He nods his head again, computing the information.

‘Make-up,’ he turns to me.

‘Yes?’

‘Who’s your dealer?’

‘I don’t … I don’t really have one …’

‘Right. Okay. Two things. Number one – watch your drinks. If you think she’s spiked it bring it to me and I’ll test it … Let’s go to Gerry’s later and we can talk properly then. You do go to Gerry’s, right? Next door to the Subway at the bottom of Dean Street? Fucking Subway, how did they get to be everywhere all of a sudden? But I do love their meat!’

Gerry’s is a bar in Soho that is open all night for people like me, and Tristan, and anybody really. People who need to carry on drinking for a little while after the curtain goes down.

‘Yep.’

‘Good.’ He nods and turns to leave.

‘What was the second thing?’ I ask before he goes.

He pivots on his heel and fixes me with another smile, sucking on the arm of his plastic glasses.

‘Are the pillows real?’ His eyes jump down to my chest and he moves his glance from one to the other as if a tennis match is being conducted across my cleavage.

‘They’re all mine,’ I say with a smile.

‘Good for you. Lady luck. No jogging, though, Make-up, it could be carnage. Gerry’s then. Gavin! I’ll be back in ten, I need to do a thing.’

He pushes on his glasses and walks towards the front of house, disappearing quickly through a set of swing doors.

Gavin and I stand in silence and watch him go. I feel exhausted. Something crashes loudly on the stage behind us.

‘Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt your feelings,’ Gavin says while still staring at the swing doors.

‘Tristan?’ The pillow talk could have offended less of a girl than me. I’m used to it, however, from Ben.

‘No, your bloke. This Ben.’

‘And just drifting on without any kind of emotional investment isn’t hurting my feelings?’ I ask, still staring at the swing doors myself.