Material Girl Read online

  LOUISE KEAN

  Material Girl

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  ACT I: Late One Night at Gerry’s …

  Scene I: Passion

  Scene II: Politics

  Scene III: History

  Scene IV: Romance

  Scene V: Violence

  ACT II: Not a Rehearsal

  Scene I: Hello Dolly!!

  Scene II: Wife Wanted

  Scene III: The Truth Game

  Scene IV: The Heart Must Pause to Breathe

  Scene V: Rapunzel

  ACT III: The Show Must Go On!

  Scene I: Zoo

  Scene II: Like Steak

  Scene III: The Half

  Scene IV: Refuge

  Scene V: Things Can Only Get Batter?

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ACT I

  Late One Night at Gerry’s …

  Scene I: Passion

  I see the sign at the top of the first flight of steps. It’s waiting for me. In big red letters it says,

  ‘Don’t waste time.’

  My heart stands still.

  It’s an advert for planning your tube route before you leave home, picking up a map – available at all stations – and deducing that it’s far quicker to use the Piccadilly line, wherever humanly possible, than the District line, which is a geriatrically slow, joyless and painful push-pull to Earls Court, during which time any fresh and evil grey hairs on an otherwise sandy-blonde head will multiply tenfold, and you’ll age five years. At least.

  But of course it means more than that.

  Monday. If it’s before ten a.m., and you take the left-hand exit at Green Park tube station, and it’s not raining – that central London rain that pesters rather than soaks – and you don’t have to thrust your umbrella up clumsily and fast in those strange seconds when you are outside but seemingly not getting wet, then run up the steps as quickly as you can, and you’ll burst onto Piccadilly like a deep-sea pearl diver coming up for gasped air.

  Some people who are unaccustomed to the city are scared of its barking noise and its whippet speed and the sheer bulk of it – like a giant bellowing fat man on roller skates! – but London has never scared me. Even on my first visits as a child, squashed onto the coach from Norwich, taking huge bites out of my pre-packed ham and tomato sandwiches as soon as the back wheels of the coach were off the slip road and on to the motorway, and chewing on the straw I’d plugged into my carton of Five Alive, I was never scared because my mum was always with me. It was just the two of us taking our daytrip to London one Saturday every six months. As the coach finally pulled up and collapsed at Kings Cross we’d edge our way along the narrow aisle, bumping limbs on arm rests, shuffling towards the huffs and petrol-smelling puffs coming from the open coach door. Initially Mum would inch along behind me, but then twirl in front in one graceful manoeuvre like a Pans People dancer as she thanked the coach driver and jumped down to the street. She’d look up at me as I stood on the edge of the bus step, ready to throw myself off, and she’d say,

  ‘Now hold my hand, Scarlet.’

  She’d reach out and take my sticky Five Alive hand as I jumped, and not let go again until we were climbing back onto the coach at the end of the day, grubby and happy and swinging a carrier bag each. Once Mum and I stopped coming I didn’t visit London again until I was eighteen and studying at a college in Brighton. Richard, my little brother by three years, is six foot three inches tall – mum says he ‘dangles from clouds’ and ‘accidentally head butts low flying birds’ – and yet the first time he had to take the tube on his own, aged seventeen, he was afraid.

  ‘Afraid of what?’ I asked, perplexed, and he said, ‘Getting in the way,’ as tuts and groans and exhausted coughs pushed past him at speed. But still London has never threatened me. It just makes promises that it sometimes fails to keep.

  Turn right towards Piccadilly Circus. It’s a neon big-top of flashing traffic lights that always seem to be on amber: I never know whether to stay or go. Large red and blue delivery lorries toot their clowns’ horns; cars edging backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards. Advertising boards flicker, sizzling with the streams of electricity that crackle way above our heads, like horizontal streaks of lightning, accidents waiting to happen, claims waiting to be filed, damages waiting to be spent, while pop music sprays out from the open doors of Megastores, and French and German and Japanese students, with cameras constantly clicking, idle lazily on the steps of an Eros streaked by the dropped bombs of pigeons fat on Starbucks muffin wrappers.

  McDonalds and Gap and Body Shop and Virgin. The four corners of the Circus, tomorrow the world …

  I’ve lived here for eight years now, and if I was tripping down memory lane as well as Piccadilly I could nod a moment of acknowledgement to most corners of Soho, and Covent Garden, and Bloomsbury, and Marylebone, and Hyde Park, and Knightsbridge. I fell face first onto the pavement on that corner once, at three a.m. with one shoe on and one shoe off, drunkenly unbalanced and confused by the sudden three-inch difference in my leg lengths. And I stood on that corner for half an hour once, trying drunkenly to convince a doorman that he should let me and my rowdy group of actors and ad execs into a lap-dancing club, and that no, I wasn’t drunk, and wasn’t this a meritocracy? I was more impressed with the use of that word than he was, given that it didn’t actually make any sense at the time. London has conspired with me in fun too many nights for me to recall, and it has let me dream, perhaps a little too much. It has never offered me stability, or routine – the trains don’t even run on time and a London crazy can hijack your day by performing a striptease in Leicester Square, and your favourite café can serve you coffee and toast one morning and be an urban jewellery boutique two days later. It’s like a wonderful and exciting but slightly shallow old friend. Some days you feel like you mean everything to it, like it’s protecting you and loving you back, offering up surprises at every turn for your own personal entertainment. Other days you don’t even seem to exist and you get barged off the bus and you lose a heel in a hole in the street, and you can’t get cash from the machine, or a cab in the rain. You just can’t let it disappoint you, you have to see it for what it is. Some days it is simply off finding its fun elsewhere.

  As you stare down Piccadilly, Green Park is to your right, the grass occasionally planted with a man in a suit, slumped in a deckchair that you can rent, ten pounds for two hours – who are these men that sit in the park at nine forty on a Monday morning? Why aren’t they walking crazy quickly, breaking a sweat on their freshly shaved upper lips, late for work? There must be something wrong with them, to just be sitting there at this strange working time of day, dressed up to litigate or administrate. Their wife must have left them in the middle of the night. Or they got to work only to be fired for sending too many personal emails, most of which could be classed as pornographic by any HR department worth its salt. Suits look out of place in the park, sitting on the grass, or in their ten-pound deckchairs that slope down the hill, pointing everybody’s feet towards the horses and carriages parked side by side in the Queen’s driveway.

  Walk ten paces towards the Circus on Piccadilly and you are sucked into the shade of the Ritz walkway. It’s really a time tunnel. Occasionally, the day after a full moon, plump accountants have been known to enter at one end but never come out of the other. But it’s only ever plump accountants … There are five steps between each column, and on the left two men in peaked hats and expensive overcoats offer to open big gold-plated doors for you, that lead into the most famous hotel in the world. Most days I want to go i
n, but I never do. I could drown in wealth for a day, or a lifetime. I could live in a lift or a laundry cart. They wouldn’t let you be uncomfortable at the Ritz; it has diamonds for sale in the window that are as big as apples.

  Glance around you as you walk diagonally across Albermarle Street. You’ll begin to notice that most faces are bored. Some are as blank as a freshly wiped blackboard. But that’s any city on the way to work. It’s the architecture that makes it magical, and the buildings that breathe. Don’t be confused, that isn’t smog: it’s just Fortnum & Mason letting off some steam. All cities are a mirror of bored faces. The trouble starts when you try to ignore it, or shrug your shoulders and think that it’s okay. If you do, if you accept it, and try to overlook the palpable everything in the air, then somewhere your name gets rubbed off a list. A small part of you doesn’t exist any more, and that’s just the start. Soon you won’t register anything, and they’ll get you, the zombies, the bored, blank faces – that’s what happened to them. They noticed everybody else was bored, and they shrugged and tried to ignore it, and it got them. That night they rolled over in their sleep, and breathed in, part-breath, part-snore, a strange sleeping gasp. And those gasps mean that you have just inhaled something bad. They breathed in boredom that night, and woke up the next day with a blank look on their face. Blank as they poured their coffee, blank as they showered, blank as they locked the door, blank on the train. If I wasn’t so scared of suffocating I’d sleep with tape over my mouth. Ben sleeps with his mouth wide open.

  Last Friday Ben offered to cook dinner for us both, if I could get home from work before ten o’clock. He bought two microwave meals. Three years, and that’s what we are – one stringy chicken chow mein, one runny lasagne. Ben has never told me he loves me. He says it doesn’t mean that he won’t.

  We live together in Ealing, in a little flat above a shop that sells organic moisturiser, wooden rocking horses and chilli oil. It’s called ‘Plump and Feather’. There are always five people in there, and one of them is always talking animatedly with the lady who runs it, who wears long linen things and has a lazy salt and pepper plait in her hair, and a beatific smile that implies she has just finished teaching a yoga class and she might actually be God herself. And there is always a child. Just one. Not always the same one. I don’t know whose they are.

  There is a door at the side of the shop with a worn-out-looking bell. If you press it Ben will answer because he always seems to be in and I always seem to be out. He gets in from work at a quarter to six. He is the manager of an electrical store in the precinct in Ealing. I get in around three a.m. if the shoot I’m working on has run late into the night, or if the actors have insisted I stay until the very end to remove their make-up for them, and not just leave them a bottle of quality cleanser and a stack of cotton wool. Or if we’ve finished on time and then gone for drinks. Mostly shoots don’t finish more than an hour late because they have to pay the crew overtime. Mostly it’s the going for drinks that makes me late home. It hasn’t always been that way. Gradually, like a tap dripping into a bath that will overflow soon, my nights have got longer. I’m not always working, but recently the idea of going home to that flat turns my stomach, like discovering something small and white in a chip-shop sausage.

  Only half the bed and a bowl in the kitchen seem like mine, the bowl that I eat my cereal out of, either when I get up at eleven a.m. or when I roll in late at night. Ben does a weekly shop, and buys tins and things – I see them in the cupboards next to my muesli. And he always buys me two more boxes of Alpen. He buys long-life UHT milk. Nothing fresh seems to last more than a day in that flat. I bought some roses from Tesco not long after we’d moved in. I bought a vase as well, and filled it with tepid water and a little sugar like my nanny used to do, and I bashed the stems the way she did, and dropped my orange roses in. They had already wilted the following afternoon, their heads hanging heavily on their stems like starving foreign children without the energy to support their necks. The next morning they were dead. My mother swears by Tesco’s roses, ‘At least two weeks, sometimes more!’ I’m not suspicious, but …

  I started an argument with Ben about domestic stuff that night, screaming at him that he had left a ring of filth around the bath. He looked bewildered as I shouted, oblivious to the argument that really raged in my head where I yelled, ‘My flowers died! It’s a sign! No good will come of this!’ I’d thought that Ben might buy me flowers or do something significant on the day that we moved into our flat. Nothing. We didn’t even have sex because he was too tired from lifting boxes. And we didn’t have sex the following morning because his stomach felt bad from the ‘moving in’ curry we’d eaten the night before.

  I’m afraid that I have left it too late, made a bad decision, and now I might not find somebody else. I hadn’t said ‘I love you’ for nine years when I said it to Ben. Of course I’d said it to my mum and dad, and Richard and his boys, my nephews, I say it all the time to them. But my recent relationship past was more ships in the night than dropped anchors. Three months here, six months there, nobody that lasted long or went any deeper than dating does. That’s what caught me off-guard with Ben – the need to spend time together was violently instant. I didn’t think we were playing games, although admittedly he was married, but he told me straight away that he was unhappy, and that emotionally it was over, and we only discussed her once. We were sitting in a pub behind Green Park, and we’d just played three games of drunken pool, and he’d won all three. We slumped down into the snug with dopey smiles and he said, ‘She doesn’t even like me any more, Scarlet’, and I said, ‘I won’t be a shoulder to cry on. We have something, Ben, you and I. We have a strange and certain chemistry. This is new to me. I have never felt like I’ve found a new best friend before. So I’m not just a cushion for you to fall onto when you snap your marriage apart and you’re thrown back by the blast. This already means more than that. I wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t.’

  It wasn’t until later that she seemed to consume us both – like she’d slipped into the room silently and was a constant third person in the corner looking on.

  I’m getting older, I’m thirty-one. My breasts have fallen an inch in the last year. I have stretch-marks around my bottom, and even a couple on my stomach. I have lines, plural, around my eyes. Last night I traced the lines with my middle fingers. These tiny red routes that map all my days spent in the sun, all the late nights that I didn’t moisturise, that I drunkenly swiped at my eyes and rubbed hard, too hard, to remove thick black kohl and mascara, with every swipe breaking every rule in my make-up artist’s manual. I pulled gently at the skin on my cheekbones, watching as it lazed back into place. The spring has sprung, my bounce isn’t what it was, my ball has deflated. It’s a fresh fear that has crept up on me, maybe it lives in the creases of laughter lines or crows’ feet, and it makes you scared to leave. Then you hate yourself for being a coward and staying without affection, and the lines get deeper, and the fear moves in permanently and brings all its bags with it. Soon you don’t even recognise yourself – who is that girl constantly on the brink of tears? Do I even know her? And who is that desperate exhausted girl picking apart every little thing that her boyfriend says, nagging and needy, clawing for some much needed sign that he cares? Oh Christ, it’s me. So then you convince yourself it would be crazy to leave, and that you expect too much and want what you shouldn’t. You convince yourself you’re crazy because it’s easier that way. You don’t know what else to do, when you don’t even know yourself anymore.

  After four months of our affair, Ben left his wife for me. They had been married for a year, but together for ten. I’m obsessed with her now, significantly more than I am obsessed with him. I haven’t met her, but I’ve seen pictures. She’s all limbs. She played hockey for her school. She is elegant, and her smile seems to carry on around her cheeks to her ears, and she’s got a dimple in her chin. She doesn’t wear much make-up, and she wears cream round-neck Tshirts and black trousers to
work, and low black court shoes. She is sensible and she smiles. Ben forgot to take the photo of them on honeymoon out of his wallet, or at least that’s what he told me when I found it and cried. They were standing on Etna smiling at the camera with their arms around each other, the volcano smoking in the background. It erupts every year, Ben said when I found the photo, and as if that was so interesting it might startle away my tears. And the eruptions occur along the same plate in the earth, so a series of sooty mouths smoke in a black ashen line. Sometimes the tour guides that work on Etna only get a couple of hours’ notice, he said, before their livelihood disintegrates again for that year; nodding his head, imparting the tidbit that he picked up in Sicily with his brand-new wife. I don’t know where he has put that photo but I have a horrible feeling that I will find it some day, by accident, stuffed into one of his computer books. I wouldn’t believe him if he told me he had thrown it away. I know that he loved her.

  The night that Ben and I first kissed, we inched towards each other with smiles. We sat on stools at the bar facing each other. We were a human mirror, both with our hands propped on our stools between our legs. With another inch forwards our knees touched. Then I leant across and put my hands on Ben’s knees to support myself. Then he kissed me, grabbing a handful of the hair on the back of my head. We kissed for a minute, but then he pulled away and said, ‘But I love Katie’, and it’s the only time I have ever heard him use that word about another living person. Then he kissed me again.

  I’m obsessed with what she does, what she likes, this woman I feel Ben and I have wronged together. I have a victim, and I want to know what makes her smile. I want to make her laugh, to know that she’s happy. I don’t suppose I needed Ben but I took him anyway, because I fell in love, and it was like nothing I had ever known. At the time it was full of promise. Now I realise that there is a bridge between us that we’ll never cross, and that maybe nobody ever does. He wants a tattoo on his thigh but it can’t just be a rose or an anchor or a Chinese symbol, it has to mean something. It has to represent something of significance to him. He’s been thinking about it for the last six months and nothing has occurred to him yet …