Читать книгу Material Girl - Louise Kean - Страница 5

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 ten-fold, 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 in, 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 T-shirts 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 …

Keep walking along Piccadilly and you’ll pass the Royal Academy of Art on the left. You can only glimpse it from the road but it has a large courtyard with a fountain in the middle. In the summer you can sit out in that courtyard late into the evening – they have a bar and a jazz band, and you can see the sun set, sipping on a cold beer, surrounded by banners for exhibitions that aren’t ever as appealing as just sitting late into the night, drinking a beer or a cocktail or a glass of wine. Or sometimes all three …

Helen calls as I trip across Old Bond Street.

‘It’s definitely true,’ she says, sounding shell-shocked and numb, somehow absent from herself.

‘How do you know?’ I ask.

‘I checked his phone. He has texts.’

‘Who from?’

‘Her name is Nikki – with an “i”.’

‘How awful.’

‘I know. I suppose he could have spelt it wrong … or it might be abbreviated … not that it matters …’

Helen falls silent and I know what she is thinking – that the ‘i’ in Nikki means she is younger than we are. It’s the first time, really, that they can be younger than we are. I don’t think it should mean anything, while knowing that it does.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do they say?’

‘Sex stuff. She calls his cock a dick. Apparently she likes licking it like a lollipop.’

‘How awful.’

‘I know.’

‘What about the babysitter?’

‘I drove him home last night when I dropped Deborah off.’

‘Does your sister know you’re having sex with her babysitter?’

‘Hmmm? No … I don’t think so.’

‘Did you do it again?’

‘In the back of my car.’

‘Okay.’

‘I have to go. I have a squash match in an hour, I need warm-up time.’

‘Helen, why don’t you sleep with somebody from squash, if you want something …’

‘I don’t want something, particularly. I have to go. I’ll speak to you later.’

Helen’s husband Steven is having an affair with somebody called Nikki, with an ‘i’. Speak of infidelity begets infidelity. I feel like I started it. I clearly remember the night I sat them both down and guiltily told them I’d been seeing a married man. Steven said, ‘But most people find most people attractive, don’t they? Just pick somebody single instead, Scarlet, because somebody else always comes along.’ Helen hadn’t even blinked. That didn’t seem like the right thing to say in front of your wife. Or ever.

So now Helen is having an affair, or sex at least, with the seventeen-year-old kid who baby-sits her eight-year-old niece. He is a beautiful young blond boy, with skinny muscles that all seem to curve towards his groin. A curtain of long hair hangs across one of his eyes, and his pout squashes through. He has just moved down from Liverpool with his family, and when he speaks it’s with a soft Scouse accent, to ask for fat coke and a pepperoni pizza for dinner, or a blowjob. Helen describes him as pretty. ‘My beautiful boy,’ she says. She was only seventeen when she started seeing Steven, and she’s been with him ever since. ‘Steven was just never that pretty,’ she says, ‘whereas Jamie is the best-looking boy in his class. Do you remember Paul Vickery?’ she asked me. Of course I did. He was the best-looking boy in our class. He had black hair and cheeky eyes and the makings of a teenage six-pack.

‘He was shagging an older woman too, wasn’t he, at the time? I could never have got Paul Vickery,’ she smiled, shaking her head.

‘You’ve kind of got him in the end, Helen,’ I say, and she nods, because it hasn’t escaped her either.

Take the last chance to turn left just before the Circus, and walk up Air Street. It’s short and dark with narrow pavements, banked by a cramped dry-cleaner’s and a cramped café. But you’re through it in moments, and you’ll explode onto Regent Street. Don’t overestimate the speed of the buses, don’t wait for the pedestrian crossing or the traffic lights, just run across the road, it will take them forever to catch you. Walk straight up part two of Air Street. Cheers, the themed pub full of American summer students and interns, is on the right. At nighttime it gets packed with young English guys, all hoping to get lucky with a sorority girl giddy and drunk on dreams of Prince William.

China White is on this street. It’s no more than a hole in the wall, an unassuming door and some Chinese letters by the side of a tiny box window that has fairy lights in it against a white background. You can’t actually see in, but I think they can probably see out. Trendy eyes dancing at the window, searching for the next victim of an undisclosed door policy. You’re at the bottom of Soho.

At school, Helen and I and a group of boys in our class threw stones at a girl called Jenny with buckteeth and big ears and a lazy eye. One lunchtime we threw stones at her in the playground. I held on to mine for ages, rolling it around in my ten-year-old hand, desperate to drop it on the ground and just run away, but then somebody saw me hesitating, so I threw it low and fast and it hit her on the knee. I saw a trickle of blood squirt down her leg onto a dirty sock that sat lazily around her calf because the elastic had gone. She didn’t cry, just stood in the corner covering the one side of her glasses that wasn’t protected by plasters to gee up her lazy eye. She wasn’t allowed to get the good glass scratched, those glasses were expensive I’d heard her mother shout at her when she picked her up from school most days. Jenny’s mum wore a fur coat and Jenny wore socks that didn’t stay up. Jenny’s mum would half talk, half shout – ‘Did you scratch that glass? It’s expensive!’ – and Jenny would say ‘no, no, no’ really quickly, three times like that in succession, as she ran to keep up with her mother’s old fur. She did the same in class, when Mrs Campbell asked if it was Jenny who had knocked pink paint all over the aprons. It wasn’t her at all: it was Adam Moody. Mrs Campbell didn’t punish her or anything, she just assumed that she had been close by, and she was clumsy, and I suppose a little ugly and easy to blame. The day we threw stones I heard Jenny muttering ‘no, no, no’ as she covered the good glass …

Helen and I haven’t spoken about it again. But I’m racking them up, all these bad deeds that make me hate myself. I threw a stone at Jenny, and then I took Ben from his wife.

Walk through Golden Square. Cut through one gate on the south side, and exit at the gate on the east side. There are already a couple of men sitting on different benches, swigging from cans of lager. One of them looks unwashed and tired and drunk and old. He has bare feet and long dirty toenails that you glimpse by accident but you will never be able to forget. He looks like he is cultivating those nails to enable him to scamper up trees, forage for berries. They could lever him into bark, half man, half cat. The other guy looks ordinary, in jeans and a T-shirt. But he has a can of special brew too.

The night that I met Ben, in a bar on Old Compton Street, he stared at me for twenty-five minutes. At first I thought he might be having some kind of seizure or fit. He just stared. His friends were talking around him, but he wasn’t engaging with the conversation. I thought it suggested passion, which is rare these days. It was quite something to feel the heat of his undiluted attention. Something about me meant that he couldn’t look away. I was unnerved but amazed. It felt terribly wonderful.

I went over to Ben and introduced myself. We realised within twenty minutes that both our dads are called Patrick, and that they both wear a glass eye. Those things aren’t that common. I’m not superstitious, but … The difference is that my dad lost one of his real eyes playing national league badminton, and if he has three beers at family parties he pops the phony one out to scare the kids. Ben’s dad lost his eye in an accident at the printing factory, but refuses to admit that he has a glass one. I don’t know how that works exactly, but I hope he cleans it …

Ben snores so loudly I have tried to convince myself it’s not even him. It’s such a huge noise that some nights it is impossible to sleep through. I make-believe that it is a large and loud wind pushing through an autumn forest, or a gentle wave thudding onto a Thai beach as I rock in a hammock between two palm trees. I keep thinking it might help soothe me back to sleep. It hasn’t worked once.

Everything that I thought I knew has changed. Men say they like a challenge, when really they don’t. They want an easy life. They think somebody promised it to them. Women think that somebody promised them a white wedding and a baby, and happiness as well. Secretly we feel cheated without them. If only the dress and the baby were all it took.

Walk past the flower stall at the top of Berwick Street market, through to Wardour Street. Cut through St Anne’s Court, past the tour guide telling a group of German tourists that the Beatles recorded some of their biggest hits here, except he can’t remember which ones exactly, at this very studio. Cross over Dean Street, and through Soho Square. They have shut the little house in the middle of the square, because of drugs and booze and cottaging. They closed down half of Soho Square’s smiles at the same time. But people still lie on the grass in all weathers with cardboard coffees next to them at nine-fifty in the morning. Walk through and towards Charing Cross Road. Turn right. You’re out of Soho.

I consider darting into Grey’s. It’s the large bookshop on Charing Cross Road. It’s been there for just over a century, getting bigger and bigger, gradually stocking more and more cookery and diet books. And other books, all the other kinds. I was in Grey’s twice last week. Isabella works behind the counter, mostly on the till. She’s a reason to buy, a need to delve into my purse, a depository for my loose change. I met her first by accident three weeks ago. I tripped over a woven mat at the front of the store as I nipped in to buy a poetry book for grand borrowed words for Ben’s third anniversary card – we don’t count the affair; we go from after that, from when he left – so I didn’t have to think of my own. I copied into his card:

A long time back

When we were first in love

Our bodies were always as one

Later you became

My dearest

And I became your dearest

Alas

And now beloved lord

Our hearts must be

As hard as the middle of thunder

Now what have I to live for?

I was wearing impractical grey court shoes that day, with three-inch heels and purple soles. Some days I feel like I’m balancing on the top of the world in stilettos, and everybody is watching as I try to keep my balance and still look good, in heels. My purple soled shoes point violently before me with every step that I take, leading me on. It was one of these points that caught under the mat as I ran in, and I almost collapsed, tripping forwards, halfway between running and falling, not sure how it would end. I stopped myself by diving into a table of books by an author whose repackaged backlist was hot property now he’d had a bestseller. A few copies of his second book fell to the floor but I didn’t bother to pick them up, knowing they’d be sold in twenty minutes anyway. I straightened and checked myself, muttering ‘shit’ under my breath, and looked around to see if anybody had noticed. I saw her then, oblivious to what was happening with me, leaning forwards on the counter with her elbows beneath her, flicking through Vogue.

Her hair is unkempt as if she’s been out the back sleeping or shagging in a storeroom, and her long, dirty-blonde tresses have been mussed up. She has these huge breasts. They jut out like balloons about to burst. Her eyes are always smudged with black kohl, and her lips are glossed with a cheap little stick that she keeps under the counter. Her voice is deep and her words are rounded and moneyed. Grey’s know there is a reason to put her on that desk, front of store, like a poster, but the living breathing kind, the most attractive thing about the purchase you’ll make, even if it’s Shakespeare or Keats or Byron.

I found myself flirting with her on that very first day. I felt my own smile, the blood rushing to flush my cheeks into pink cushions. I felt my freckles, and my figure, and I found it hard to look Isabella in the eye. She flirts with everybody, I can tell. I felt a charge of electricity in me that day, hot wiring my senses, an urge to reach out and touch her, to grasp her, to kiss the cheap gloss off her lips and grab her head by her long, dirty-blonde hair.

She has wild hair, like mine. Her chest, like a shelf for a thousand second glances, is shockingly apparent, like mine. Ben always says, when I plead with him to say something nice, ‘good rack’, and he laughs like it’s the funniest joke anybody has ever told, and not just really stupid, and slightly offensive. He never says anything that might make me feel good about myself. When I plead with him sometimes he just gets annoyed and says, ‘I don’t do it to order, Scarlet, my mind has gone blank now!’ and I scream, but silently. It makes me hate him a little, even if it passes. I never say anything at the time, but bring it up later when the arguments begin. Then I say, ‘You say you don’t do it to order, Ben, but you never bloody do it! Who is going to say something nice to me if not you, my boyfriend?’ Generally he squirms, but still says nothing. I saw his eyes glaze over halfway through reading the poem in his anniversary card, and he pecked me a kiss at the end, with his eyes closed. His card to me read:

Dear Scarlet,

Still gorgeous!

Luv ‘n’ hugs

Ben

He won’t even spell it properly. I assume he doesn’t want me getting any ideas.

I’ve been into Grey’s three times since the fall, for poetry. I think she must recognise me by now. I check my hair, my own lips, my own smudged and more expensively glossed smile courtesy of the freebies I get sent in the hope that I’ll slick them all over somebody famous, and not just keep them for myself. I’ve bought Orlando, and The Bell Jar, and On the Road, all to impress Isabella. I feel a madness grip me when I see her, scared that my tongue will loosen and suddenly say something huge and strange and unfamiliar to another woman. I feel like I want to ask her out, to touch her hair and her hand, run my fingers across her lips, and trace the smooth round lines of her face. She is twenty-three maybe.

She’s me. A younger me, if I focus on her hair and her breasts and the gloss on her lips. Her eyes aren’t as deep as mine: hers are darker, and the wrong shape. I would like to kiss her. A younger me. I mention my age in so many conversations these days, it’s like it’s dripping out of me, like a shaving cut on my ankle that won’t stop bleeding. I’m thirty-one! I’ve said it first! Then I pause, and I wait for the payoff – Oh my God! You don’t look it! If a younger man smiles at me on the tube, or if he winks at me in a bar, if he tries to chat me up, I end up blurting out, ‘I’ve got bras older than you.’ I guess I’m admitting that I want to fuck a younger me, with my young tight skin and smooth thighs, but the contents of my young head as well. Back then I was front of store too. Back then I was good enough for anybody, and I felt like I could get anybody I wanted, if I put my mind to it. Because I know how Isabella feels – the rapt attention, the spotlight. I’ve felt it too. I want to keep feeling it, but now the spotlight is shifting.

When I was twelve, and my teeth stuck out angrily at the front, my mum marched me to the dentist to get braces. I was forced to wear a head brace at bedtime that looked like a motorcycle helmet with elastic bands that dug into my cheeks and left marks in my skin until breaktime the following morning. I had a perm that my brace flattened every night, and I was too scared to wash my hair in the mornings in case the curls fell out as my eighteen-year-old hairdresser said they might, so I tried to coax the flat bits of my hair up with backcombing and hairspray.

Mum and I went together to get my brace one weekend. We got my first bra the weekend before, and my perm the weekend before that. She showed me how to shave my legs and told me to wear sanitary towels and not tampons for the first year of my periods. She called me every night at ten p.m. to say goodnight. Sometimes Richard would deliberately run a bath so he didn’t have to say goodnight to her, and I’d make up a story like he had a stomach ache or something, so Mum didn’t feel bad. Mum put me on a diet for six months when I was fourteen. No boys had been interested in me up until that point. She said, ‘You might not believe this but I’m just trying to make it easier. You should have every choice there is, Scarlet, I want you to hold all the cards.’ I’d told her that I’d been called a few names on the way home from school by a ratty older girl who was known as the local thug and the local bully. She shouted ‘thunder thighs’ at me as I hurried home on my own one day, and the same thing the following week. Kids will always remind you what bit of you it is that stands out.

Then one night I had my first brush with magic. A year after the diet and the braces and the perm and two days before my sixteenth birthday, I went to bed. I woke up the following morning and something had changed. I went to bed a slightly goofy teenager with puppy fat and frizzy hair, and I woke up kind of pretty. Straight-toothed. Slim. Sleek-haired. No more spiteful red elastic-band marks in my cheeks. No more thunder thighs. That day I walked to school with Helen as usual, and three boys from the local comp rode past us on their bikes but then rode back and did wheelies in front of us. One shouted out, ‘Oi blondie! I want to snog you.’ I told my mum that weekend and I thought she’d be pleased. But she sighed heavily and said, ‘Believe me, Scarlet, when I say that I did it for the right reasons.’

I’ll wash my hair later this week and go in and see Isabella then. I wonder if this makes me gay, but I’ve always thought that there is something not quite right about lesbians, who, like vegetarians, seem to spend their entire lives trying to replace meat. I’ve often thought that they are just too scared to admit that they actually quite like the meat, because they’ve spent so long thinking they shouldn’t. It’s really far more judgemental than fucking a man. Or eating a bucket of KFC. Would the sex equivalent of a vegetarian tucking into a guilty KFC be a lesbian having a one-night stand with a fireman? And a really well-cooked juicy steak would be the equivalent of a ten-year relationship with a six-foot chiselled paediatrician called Doug? I don’t think I could ever give up meat completely.

Turn left off Charing Cross Road, and cut down through that little road with antique book shops and framers, and a dance shop at the end that sells tutus and taffeta and beautiful ballet pumps for children – ivory satin with ribbons that trail across the window. It leads you out onto St Martin’s Lane. Yes, you could have just walked a straight line down Piccadilly, and through Leicester Square, but who cares? It’s more fun this way. And now Starbucks is calling.

There is a sign resting on the counter, above the muffins and chocolate cake. It tells me that my barista’s name is Henri and he is single. Then, in what I think might be his own handwriting, it says, ‘He is nice guy, give him a try.’

This is the reason I am scared of being on my own. My barista is so desperate he is advertising himself with the croissants. I always believed relationships were supposed to be more than that: equal parts attraction, chemistry, fireworks, which make a life-changing love. These are the things I have always dreamt of, that I dream of still – it’s more than selling yourself on the cheap and anybody who wants to make an offer is in with a chance. Henri isn’t looking for much, but he has resorted to advertising himself with the muffins. The void between the fairytales in my head and the life I am living widens daily.

I deliberately don’t walk through Chinatown anymore. There is a small door there. I haven’t seen it but somebody told me about it a couple of months ago, late one night, in Gerry’s. It was a stocky Russian film extra who smelt like pepperoni. He said that one day he and his friend had gone into Chinatown to sleep with a prostitute, up the stairs behind one of these little doors that has a broken neon sign outside saying ‘young model’. The Russian pepperoni guy had gone upstairs while his friend waited downstairs. Ten minutes later the Russian came back down with a cheap fading smile, and found his friend ashen, blabbering and crazy. There were tears in his eyes. He said that he had been leaning on the frame of the door, whistling to himself, thinking about his turn upstairs with the young model. Suddenly he’d felt a suction like a giant Hoover pulling him back through the adjacent doorway. He grabbed hold of the wooden frame around the door but his fingers slipped away. He grabbed instead for the broken neon sign that said ‘young model’ but had been dragged backwards, sucked into the doorway, screaming. Nobody had even noticed.

‘But what was in there? How did you get out?’ the Russian asked him.

With that his friend had collapsed. He awoke eight hours later, shouting ‘Sylvia!’ and he hadn’t spoken since. The pepperoni Russian thinks it is a time portal. He said that his friend loved a girl, Sylvia, when they were children, but he hadn’t seen her for twenty years. So I don’t walk through Chinatown now. I can’t run the risk of being sucked thirty years into the future, finding myself staring with alarm at old-aged Ben and I as we shout the same spiteful lines at each other only with bent backs and brittle bones. Plus the cobbles in Chinatown play havoc with my heels.

Walk up Long Acre. My agency said that The Majestic Theatre is on the right-hand side, because I can’t tell one theatre from another. I stop at the front entrance and consider the posters that already hang in the glass boxes at the top of some small stone steps, adjacent to big crimson doors. ‘Dolly Russell returns to the West End’ says one, and underneath is a picture of an actress, in Forties furs and a pencil skirt, with a cigarette-holder in one hand, backlit on a sparse stage. It is obviously an old shot – she must be well on the way to seventy now. I’ve brought the thick concealer in case I need it, and two different types of base to smooth out lines. Her face bears an arrogance that you don’t see these days. She looks like a woman who made men chase her, in a time when women were far more compliant. Maybe that’s the last time love existed, back when we were all a little more selfless. I moaned to my mother on the phone last week, almost crying because I am so emotionally exhausted all the time, and of course confused. She said, ‘Jesus, Scarlet, will you stop whining? Don’t tell me about this awful modern female experience you girls are having. I wasn’t allowed to do A-Levels, for Christ’s sake.’

She is generally more sympathetic than that; she must have been having a bad day.

When Mum left I always knew it wasn’t my fault, and I never dreamt I could get her to come back. My life changed, but it wasn’t that bad. My weekends with Mum were now packed full of fun and adventure and talking. She seemed happy and the way that she put it everything was exciting. Dad was never a great talker, and now Mum and I could witter on all day about nothing and not hear him sighing dramatically in the background because he couldn’t hear the football on the TV. Sometimes on a Friday night I even went so far as pouring salt in Richard’s baked beans as they sat simmering on the hob, crossing my fingers that he would get stomach cramps in the night. Then he wouldn’t be able to come and see Mum that weekend, and it would just be the two of us instead.

She moved out to a house on the other side of Norwich and she painted it herself. She let me help, and we both put on oversized shirts that she bought at Oxfam and tied our hair up in scarves so we looked like 1940s war widows working in munitions. We painted her living room orange! Dad would come and pick me up on Sunday nights and they’d look at each other on the doorstep with confusion, trying to remember who the other was. They were like chalk and cheese, they were never even meant to be a part of each other’s lives. My mum would smile at least, and ask Dad how he was. My dad would look embarrassed and batten down the hatches of his emotions as always, particularly now that my mother had become a whirlwind on her own. He would give nothing away.

A year ago I asked Mum if Dad ever told her he loved her. ‘Yes,’ she said, nodding earnestly, ‘but only when I asked of course. The thing is, Scarlet, with your father, he was raised differently. You never knew his parents but they were both very strict. Whereas you know Grandma and Grandpa, they can’t stop giving you hugs! I was so lucky, Scarlet, and so loved, that I found it easy to show it to your father. I hope that’s how I make you feel now, I don’t ever want you to guess about my feelings for you, and neither should Richard. Of course, Richard is so kind, so good-natured, he has nothing but love in him, and he was lucky when he met Hannah so young, but they are so right for each other, and she is such a lovely girl, with such a lot of love to give too.’

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, with concern.

‘I love you and Richard utterly. When I left people didn’t think that was possible, but in a way I left because I loved you. I always thought you knew that. Katharine Hepburn said “loved people are loving people”, and I believe that. Your dad didn’t have that sense of being loved, and he didn’t know how to show it to me.’

‘Is that why you left?’

‘Scarlet, things are rarely that black and white. I loved him, it was very hard. But you know that your father loves you, don’t you, Scarlet?’

‘Of course, he’s just not … demonstrative.’ Dad has never hugged me with abandon, he chooses his words carefully, and trips over sentiment clumsily. He can’t express himself, I know that. He can laugh, and does. But he can’t cry.

‘You’ve noticed that, Scarlet, and yet …’

‘And yet?’ I asked, waiting for her to go on.

‘Be careful, Scarlet. There isn’t just one type of man for you.’

Mum lives by the sea now, in a little village called Rottingdean, a couple of miles outside of Brighton, on her own. She prefers it that way. She takes long walks on the beach and reads a lot, and sees films with the man who lives next door.

Standing outside the Majestic Theatre I read the poster in the opposite frame: ‘Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore: previews start Monday 20th!’

There is a guy selling the Evening Standard a little further up the road. I check my watch and skip up towards him, rummaging for forty pence in my bag. It is always too late to get a paper by the time I get out in the evening, and it’s my only source of news. If half the world goes up in smoke I’ll read it in the Standard. Otherwise I might never know. Plus I like to leave it for Ben so he can do the sudoku. It’s a little thing I do, a point of contact, the Evening Standard left on the kitchen table. I hope he smiles when he sees it in the mornings, before I am even out of bed. I hope he thinks of me when he picks it up. I think of him when I leave it there at night.

I hold my hand out with my forty pence.

Behind the stand the old guy is wearing a flat cap and an overcoat. His glasses are thick and slightly smeared with grease. He smiles at me and I notice he only has his front four teeth, top and bottom, the rest are missing. I wonder if he can still whistle.

‘Have you got it?’ he asks.

‘Is it forty pence?’ I reply.

I look down at the two twenty-pence pieces in my outstretched palm, confused.

‘Or have you lost it?’ he asks, lisping the words through his four teeth.

‘Sorry? I don’t understand.’ I offer him my forty pence again, but he doesn’t take it. He smiles. Perhaps he is an idiot.

‘Your passion for life,’ he says. ‘You had it …’

I stare at him. He smiles and takes the forty pence from my hand, and replaces it with an Evening Standard, folded in half. A man walks over and offers him forty pence, which he takes as he passes him a paper and says, ‘Thank you, sir.’ An older woman nudges me out of the way as she offers him her change, and he passes her a paper and says, ‘Thank you, dear.’

I turn and walk back towards the theatre. I feel a buzzing in my bag, and reach in for my phone. I am standing outside The Majestic’s back door when I answer. ‘Hello?’

‘It’s me,’ Ben says. ‘I popped back to get the post, in case they’d delivered my Xbox game. They hadn’t, but you have a letter … from some clinic.’

‘I’ll open it when I get home.’

‘Why have you gone to a clinic?’

‘Women’s stuff.’

‘Okay. I’ll see you later then.’

‘Ben – we have passion, right?’

‘Sorry?’

‘We have passion … in our lives …’

I sense him squirming at the end of the phone.

‘I don’t understand what you mean, I’m working …’

‘I have to go,’ I say, and hang up.

I stare at the cobbles beneath my feet. Snapping myself out of my trance I reach forwards for the handle of the theatre’s back door, but as I do I notice a piece of paper, a leaflet, is stuck to the bottom of my shoe where my heel has pierced it. I have been walking with it pinned to me all this time, like a cheap joke. I lean against the wall, trying to keep my balance as I lift my foot in the air, and snatch the leaflet off. It’s an underground map.

On the front, in big red letters, it says,

‘Don’t waste time.’