Читать книгу Material Girl - Louise Kean - Страница 7

After twenty minutes and a series of fearful moments and with still no sign or news of Dolly, I wonder if there has been some kind of problem; if she has thrown a tantrum on learning of my lack of theatre experience, or is upstairs leading a drunken conga across the stage, or has Gavin pinned to a wall somewhere, teaching him her version of living. Just then somebody begins knocking a tune on the door – tap tap, tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap … pause … tap tap … I recognise it as the Tapioca song from Thoroughly Modern Millie. I love musicals. Everybody in a musical is so in love with life itself that they keep bursting into song.

When I was very little and Mum had housework to do on rainy afternoons, she used to sit me and Richard in front of BBC2 to watch the likes of Calamity Jane, or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, or Hello Dolly, or Thoroughly Modern Millie. She said she thought them far less harmful than violent cartoons starring He-Man and the Masters of the Universe that were showing on the other channel. Richard would be bored within minutes and sit in the corner scribbling with crayons or banging things. I’d get annoyed at the interruption, but not enough to turn off the TV. After about twenty minutes Mum would wander in with a bottle of polish in her hand and say, ‘Oh I’ll just watch this bit for five minutes’ as the seven brothers high-kicked at a barn dance, or Julie Andrews sang ‘Babyface’, then she’d settle down on the sofa. After a couple of minutes, when I was certain she was staying put, I’d get up and go and sit next to mum, curling up on the sofa beside her. She’d tuck me under her arm and stroke my hair as she hummed along to the songs and the rain poured down outside, flooding the holes in the driveway, and Richard scribbled joyously on his paper – and then the walls – in the corner.

I shout ‘Come in’ but the tapping continues, so I trip to the door and throw it open. Tristan Mitra practically falls through.

‘Tristan?’

‘Make-up!’ he exclaims with a beam. I smile back at him. ‘Why were you tapping the Tapioca song on my door?’ I ask.

‘What better song to tap?’ he asks, and because I don’t have an answer we stand in what could be an uncomfortable silence, before it is mercifully shattered by Tristan exploding with laughter, a false falsetto laugh that catches us both off-guard.

‘Are you looking for Dolly?’ I ask him, straightening my skirt, ruffling up my hair.

‘Not at all, not one bit. I was looking for you! Looking at you. You really are quite gorgeous, but then you know that. Of course you know that, what beautiful woman isn’t aware of the effect she has on the people around her, but is it a curse as well, I wonder? Does it leave you slightly bewildered, Make-up, when somebody isn’t quite as impressed with you as you think they should be? So much so that it has you reaching for the lipstick and the diet books?’

‘I’m sorry, Tristan, I don’t think I remember the question …’

He waves his hand, it isn’t important.

‘I thought you might want me to fill you in on the theatre, and Dolly herself, before the old monster descends.’

He turns his hands into claws, makes his teeth into fangs, and pretends to walk down some stairs. He looks like he is attempting the Thriller dance. I don’t know how to react and he laughs again, hard and loud like a punch in the air.

I think he must have found those uppers.

‘That would be helpful, Tristan, if you wouldn’t mind, if you have time. I really don’t know much about this theatre stuff at all, or Dolly, and I feel that I should …’

Tristan moves into the little room and suddenly it feels crowded and claustrophobic, what with the lilies and the velvet and the cards, and Tristan as well, who seems to be everywhere all at once. He is half the size of Gavin, but twice the presence. I tuck myself away in the corner by my make-up box, but he wanders over and stands in front of the brushes laid out on the table, appraising them seriously.

‘Smoke and mirrors, smoke … and … mirrors …’ He selects a cheekbone brush of fine hair and, with closed eyes, sweeps it down the length of his nose.

Opening his eyes slowly he turns to face me.

‘So, The Majestic Theatre.’ He gestures around him with a sweeping motion of his arms. ‘Well. I always say that if you’re going to fill a gap you should fill it completely. Let’s start at the beginning.’ He taps the end of my nose with the brush delicately, and then steps back to appraise his work.

‘The Majestic Theatre on Long Acre, Covent Garden, was commissioned in 1880. Queen Victoria instructed that somebody build a “beautiful building to fill an ugly space, and quick!”’ he says, doing a fair impression of the Queen’s low, moneyed voice, while simultaneously his eyebrows tango and his chin tucks into his neck to signify an old lady’s multiple chins. ‘But it was twelve spiteful years in the making. The first of those years was spent attempting to evict the tramps and drunks and whores who lived on the intended site, a sprawling old hat factory, wrenched from the family Hobson – hat makers for three centuries – after William Hobson the ninth dabbled with opium to ease the pain from his arthritis and became joyfully addicted. Lucky bastard.’ Tristan smiles and circles the make-up brush on my cheek softly and slowly as if to aid concentration.

‘Of course, the family didn’t realise before it was too late that their profits and their business were going up in smoke – ha! So, ignored by the bank, which had more pressing concerns in India and America, Hobson’s hat factory became three floors of filth and sin. But the drunks and the tramps and the whores are the most resilient of us all, Make-up, clutching on to life, so far down that there are no rules, getting by because not getting by is the graveyard. Hobson’s hat factory was their home, and there’s no place like home. They kept coming back. And who can blame them?’

Bored with the cheekbone brush, Tristan replaces it on the side and addresses the counter as he searches for a new and exciting tool.

‘Each night they were herded up and horded out with horns and whistles and truncheons and punches, to allow the necessary preparations for the following night’s demolition. But by midday they were grubbily sneaking past the hired security, or getting them drunk on cheap vodka, or laid, or high! Wonderful, wonderful, ingenious! And so the process would begin again that night, with whistles and bells and punches, a mini war, before the place could be blown. But by the following midday they were back again …’

‘Tristan?’ I interrupt, as he flicks the back of his hand with an eyebrow brush, ‘how do you know all of this?’

‘Research, Make-up.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘It must have taken you ages!’

‘Not really. I could tell you the same about most of the theatres. I have to know the history of a theatre before I work there. It would be like you applying a new eye-shadow, say, to a client, and not knowing where it came from or what was in it …’ he says with a smile.

‘Oh. Right. Exactly,’ I say, desperately trying to remember any of the eye shadow science I learnt at college. Nope, mostly forgotten.

‘Where was I?’ he asks.

‘Drunks and whores who wouldn’t leave,’ I say.

‘Right. Well. One black January London night when the construction unit had taken all that they could, soaked in swearing and spitting and the vomit and faeces being thrown at them in buckets, and the urine being sprayed on them from third-floor windows like vile spurts from peculiar water pistols, they took action. Forty-seven drunks and tramps and whores vanished the night they blew up the old hat factory, at one a.m.’

Tristan widens his eyes.

‘Hell!’ I say, appalled.

‘The explosion woke the bits of the city that were sleeping, but nobody cared. And by nine a.m. all the rubble had been cleared.’

‘My God, they just blew up all those people?’ I ask, confused.

Tristan nods his head theatrically.

‘Yes, Make-up, they did. Business is business, and they had plans in place, people were already on the payroll. The architect of The Majestic, Henry Lee, was the brother of the renowned architect Charles Lee, who had just remodelled Her Majesty’s Theatre into an Opera House to gushing critical acclaim. The Times said, “Charles Lee uses line with a conventional splendour.” Henry was twelve years younger than Charles, but two inches taller and with size twelve feet. Their mother had been startled by the pregnancy that was Henry, believing that at thirty-four she was well past childbearing age. Henry had always felt like a mistake, poor bastard. His mother looked bemused when she saw him. His father, the civil servant Charles Lee Senior, met Henry’s adoring stares with a mixture of irritation and anger. When Henry’s mother died of a blood disease at forty-four, Charles Lee Senior took a ten-year-old Henry to one side at her burial and whispered, “It was you. You were too much for her.”’ Tristan says it in a thick, comical Irish accent.

‘Tristan, are you making this up?’ I ask, irritated that he has taken me for a fool.

‘No! Absolutely not! Make-up, what would make you say such a thing?’

‘Well, you didn’t say they were Irish for a start.’

‘That was just for colour, Make-up – do you want this to be interesting or not?’

‘Can’t you just tell me about Dolly now?’ I ask, fidgeting.

‘Soon, Make-up. Patience is a virtue. Cleanliness is next to Godliness and patience is the hobby of angels.’

I sigh. He gives me a reproachful look and carries on.

‘The Majestic was Henry’s first commission, and a fateful one. He dreamt of six tiers to seat two thousand people, but was plagued by doubts and insecurities, violently ripping up new plans, sometimes throwing them on the fire and beginning again. Then there would be nine tiers, then twelve, then twenty! At the age of thirty-three he had been drinking heavily for eight years, to soften London’s hard edges, even though he knew that softening hard edges was not necessarily an advantage for an architect. Henry had recently fallen savagely and obsessively in love with a Spanish prostitute named Vanessa who had long, thick dark hair like a mare’s, and which had never been cut. It was overrun with lice like wood mice in a forest but Henry didn’t care. She had large pendulous breasts that sat heavily on her chest, ravaged by little stretch marks where the pendulums began to swing. This was Henry’s favorite spot – he would lay his head on those tears after six or seven minutes of furious drunken lovemaking that inevitably ended shamefully limp. He would weep quietly as she tickled his cheek with strands of her long, black, infested hair.’

‘Yuk,’ I whisper, grimacing.

‘Close your eyes and have some humanity,’ he says to me, as he sweeps a brush across my eyelids. ‘All of the money from The Majestic’s commission was quickly slipping away, spent on cheap sloe gin and night after night with Vanessa, who had got wise to the drunken architect’s feelings and upped her prices. But that’s women for you. And poor Henry was in love, helpless in the face of her inflation. When his pockets were finally empty he began stalking her late into the night, jumping clumsily out from the shadows, tripping over his drunken size twelve feet only to blow her a kiss and run away. Vanessa carried on whoring, Henry carried on behaving erratically, and The Majestic’s construction faltered as more plans were thrown on the fire. Finally, the foreman, frustrated by Henry’s absence from the site for five straight days, called his brother, Charles Lee, to report Henry missing. Henry was found three days later on the floor of an old boarding house in Hoxton, with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a gun in the other, and the original set of plans laying face up on his chest, dusted with blood. A single gunshot to his head had finished him off, or maybe it was Vanessa, or maybe it was The Majestic.’

‘Oh no, how terrible!’ I say, instinctively covering my mouth with my hand.

Tristan removes it and places it on my lap.

‘Wait, it gets worse. Charles Lee wiped the blood from the plans, accepted the commission to finish The Majestic for five times the fee that had already been paid to his dead brother, and reworked them. A strangely sober three-tier theatre was completed on Long Acre in 1892. It still had the curved lines of Henry’s original plan, shaped like a sympathetic woman, but the softer edges had been hardened, to ensure it stayed up when horses trotted past.

‘Unfortunately for the theatre’s investors the shows that had been scheduled to appear at The Majestic had long since found alternate sites, some of them enjoying splendid runs that had already come to an end! The theatre, although completed, stood empty for fifteen months. Then in 1893 Dickie Black and Leonard White of the Black and White Circus enquired whether the large, vacant, sad and lonely building on Long Acre with a flaking painted sign hanging over its curved entrance still had its entertainment licence, and whether it was for sale. The investors had just that week taken the expensive decision to have it demolished and the land sold on, but instead took a very reasonable price, and had none of the trouble of getting rid of the sad old girl.

‘Black and White immediately posted a huge red and gold sign below The Majestic that read, “Coming Soon! Black & White’s Freaks Circus of Passion, Politics, Fairytale and Violence.” Six weeks later they replaced the ‘Coming Soon!’ with a ‘Now Open!’. It became an instant hit with local workers, soldiers in from the docks, drunks and whores and commoners and thieves. Bearded ladies and midgets galloped around the stage nightly, drinking their way through every show, spraying their audience with whiskey and ignoring the fights and the flatulence, laughing and shouting and swearing at the audience and each other. The performances became more and more debauched, full nudity was de rigueur by the time the police moved in one sticky summer night in 1899, closing the act and the theatre down for breaching public decency laws and open acts of pornography.

‘Black and White hotfooted it to Venice rather than face the pornography rap, plus a second and more sinister charge of attempting to breed freaks by mating them. The Majestic stood cold and lonely again through two punishing winters.’

‘No, Tristan,’ I put my hand up. ‘Stop it now. You are making it up. Nobody breeds freaks,’ I say, shaking my finger at him reproachfully.

‘Oh, Make-up, so naïve. They still do it to this day in some of the southern states of America.’ Tristan nods his head at me convincingly.

‘Shut up, no they don’t, you are being ridiculous.’ I stand up but Tristan pushes me back down onto my stool.

‘Make-up, I’m not finished. And who has done the research, you or me? And who wants to look like a fool in front of Dolly Russell, perhaps the last true Hollywood starlet, when she asks you what you know about theatre?’

‘I can just say some stuff about plays and things. I’ve read some … Arthur Miller,’ I say, thankful that I could remember the name of an American playwright.

‘And the cartoon section in the Sunday Times as well, Make-up? Come on now, sit down, you need to know this.’

Tristan is obviously enjoying himself.

‘But don’t you have stuff to do?’ I ask, exhausted.

‘Yes. This. Now, in March 1901, looking for a venue to stage his dancing act The Sabines, Pierre Christophe Magrine, a French businessman who had made a name for himself as a slick mover amongst his contemporaries, and the chorus girls if you get my gist, bought The Majestic as a venue for his style of evening entertainment. On the day the renovators removed the boards from the entrance, triumphantly kicking the door down, an evil stench seeped out. Covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, swiping at their watering eyes, they weaved their way to the back of the stage, following the smell as it became increasingly passionate, leading them finally to a small locked cupboard, big enough for a chair and a mirror and a shelf. Evil curiosity made them break that door down too, and a dozen well-fed screaming rats hurtled out across their feet. The workmen found the bearded lady decomposed in her dressing room. She still sat stiffly on a small chair in front of a mirror that had been smashed. By the streaks of blood on the glass it was fair to say that punching her reflection had been the dying act of a circus freak. The floor of the theatre was littered in rat droppings, and the walls were stained sticky and brown with cigarette tar, but The Majestic was cleaned up again.’

‘She killed herself because she was ugly?’ I ask, appalled.

‘Not just ugly, Make-up, a freak.’

‘But lots of women have hair on their faces, most girls wax, or laser, or whatever …’

‘Not back then, Make-up. Back then it made you a freak, and freaks don’t get married and have kids and get loved back.’

‘Yes they do, that’s an awful thing to say! You don’t just love somebody because of the way they look …’ I admonish him, slapping away the brush he’s been running up and down my nose.

‘Hush, Make-up. No lies in here please, let me finish my story. The Sabines – feathered, sequinned and high-kicking – remained at the theatre for nine years before Magrine set sail for Hollywood and the moving pictures. By this time The Majestic had established itself as a popular venue for light entertainment. Magrine sold the theatre on to a fresh set of investors, and a new management board was established. A series of light comedies played throughout 1910 and 1911, decadent and fun and attended mostly by lower middle-class workers, but disaster struck in 1912 when a discarded cigarette in a props cupboard sparked a blaze that had, by the time the firemen arrived, gutted the entire front and back of stage. All sets were destroyed, as was the curtain and the boxes. The roof had substantial fire damage, as the heat had crept quickly up the walls, and the building was judged to be unsound unless the top tier was pulled out. One unusually mild September night in 1913, The Majestic went from holding a spectacular one thousand seats to a mere six hundred and forty-three. Some of the bigger bitches of the time suggested that “The Majestic” was far too grand a name for a two-tiered theatre, and that it should be changed … But after an extensive renovation that lasted five years and employed the art deco style so popular in Paris at the time, although in clumsy contrast to the front of house, The Majestic, still known as The Majestic, reopened in 1918.’

‘Ta da!’ I say. ‘And then they showed some plays, and then it was Dolly Russell’s turn, and then …’

‘Stop it. I’ve nearly finished.’ Tristan glares at me.

‘Do you promise? I feel like I’m back in my history A-level,’ I say.

‘But weren’t they good times?’ he asks.

I think about history class, sitting next to Helen, flirting with Simon Howells across the room over textbooks filled with black and white pictures of war.

‘Yes, actually,’ I admit with a shrug.

‘Good. Then learn something new. The Majestic became known for its musical theatre, staging 267 performances of No, No, Nanette before it transferred to The Palace Theatre at Cambridge Circus. And although The Majestic fared well in the Twenties with numerous Noël Coward productions, nothing ever seemed to really take off. The Majestic just couldn’t get a hit. It became known amongst actors and crew as a “warm up” theatre, with shows that sold reasonably but rarely sold out. It was then that The Majestic earned its nickname, in theatre circles, as The Bridesmaid. For example …’ He takes a step back and strikes an affected pose.

‘Fur and feathers and lipstick: “What’s next for you, darling?”’

He jumps a foot and turns to face the space he has vacated.

‘Cravat, purple shirt and slacks: “I’m starting rehearsals next month for Noël Coward at The Bridesmaid, darling.”’

A jump. ‘Fur and feathers and lipstick: “Where were you hoping for, darling?”’

Jump. ‘Cravat, purple shirt and slacks: “The Apollo. Damned shame. Maybe next year. Drink, darling?”’

He stands still and straightens his now-crooked glasses.

‘A faulty oil lamp started the blaze that ravaged the old girl again, in 1931. It swept through The Bridesmaid like fleas in a halfway house, killing two tramps who slept under the sympathetic curves of the front entrance each night. The theatre was left for dead for two years, occasionally sighing and groaning to let Londoners know it was still there. She was past her best, charred and black with soot, damp from fire hoses, with rotting carpets and rats, the terrible rats, infesting her again, chewing at her insides. A sad and lonely old Bridesmaid, hoping for a little luck and love.’

‘Why are you looking at me like that, I have luck and …’ My words trail off.

‘Make-up, don’t be so sensitive. The Majestic was spectacularly reopened on the third of September 1939! Ta da! Of course, the timing was a little unfortunate, and her big night was dampened spitefully by the speech made by Neville Chamberlain at eleven fifteen that morning –

“This country is at war with Germany … now may God bless you all, and may he defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall be fighting against …” Still, the old girl was up and running again just in time: some nights they acted by candlelight, some nights they acted in the dark, which was more than could be said for other prettier theatres who dropped their curtain at the first sound of a siren.

‘Ivor Novello musicals trilled though the Forties and Fifties, with their beguiling talk of kingdoms of love and beauty and starlight, stepping lightly aside for the more sombre, stern faces of The Postman Always Knocks Twice and A Streetcar Named Desire as the Sixties drew in. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore first opened in 1968.’

‘With Joanna Till?’ I ask, feeling, finally, like I can contribute – I read that name in the press pack.

‘That’s right. Well done. Gold star. Initially it was a far from controversial or even noteworthy opening. Lacking the public pulling power of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or Streetcar, the critics called it a “strange little play for the strangest little theatre in the West End, and surely only being staged as a vanity project for Joanna Till.”’

‘Joanna Till had been one of the first studio stars in her youth, an international beauty with platinum curls that framed a pale complexion and a perfect cupid’s bow permanently painted on her delicate lips throughout the 1920s. By the time she came to play Mrs Goforth, the dying monster at the heart of the play – who has seen off numerous husbands and is now a recluse in an Italian villa dictating her memoirs to her young and beleaguered assistant – Joanna was an alcoholic who ate barely one meal a day, and whom few saw out of make-up. But an old beauty still sang in her eyes, reminding those close enough that she was once the greatest prize to be won, the cup on the table, the lady in the booth at the front of the mile-long “dime for a kiss” queue. The memory of what she had been haunted all of her movements. Her fingers danced and flickered nervously about her face, trying to cover every line simultaneously, attempting to distract any audience from the age that had set in and which now clung to her once-beautiful features like an evil moss to smooth pebbles in a lake.

‘One of the only members of the company that she allowed close was her young co-star Edward “Teddy” Hampden, who played the impertinent but handsome visitor Chris, and who, at thirty-five, was twenty-eight years Joanna’s junior.’

‘Good for her!’ I mutter, but Tristan ignores me.

‘Joanna could be heard giggling from behind her dressing-room door in the afternoons, after matinee and before evening. She rarely spent any time alone, aside from “the half” – the half an hour before each performance when she would shoo away her young admirer and compose herself. But even then, occasionally, he was allowed back in. The controversy murmured in every nook of The Bridesmaid. Teddy shot Joanna through the heart, six hours after she finished their affair over a cajun salmon lunch at the Savoy.’

I gasp. Tristan nods his head seriously.

‘Although they had been involved for barely three months they were being too indiscreet, and news had reached her husband, the world-famous director Sir Terence Till. Sir Terence placed an outraged and irate long-distance call from a set in Egypt telling Joanna to behave. Teddy at least had the decency to turn the gun on himself afterwards, aiming straight through his heart as well. So the strange little play’s curtain failed to rise the following night, as both the leads’ hearts were streaked across a dressing-room wall.’

I look around urgently – ‘Not this room, Tristan? Not these walls?’ – feeling a cold chill run down my spine, the kind you get when you are a kid and somebody pokes out the game ‘Does-this-make-your-blood-run-cold?’, finishing with a grab on the back of your neck. I shudder.

‘It’s possible,’ he says, seriously, ‘it’s very possible. Anyway, controversy courted The Majestic again six years later, in November 1974, when a performance of Hair so shocked a four-hundred-pound Presbyterian Texan banker that he suffered a massive heart attack in the second row. The banker died, and so did the show, after two months and below-average ticket sales, even for The Bridesmaid.’

‘We should move to another venue,’ I say earnestly, nodding my head, ready to pack up my things and dust off the bad luck I can feel settling in on me and Tristan as we sit for too long in one place in this cursed theatre.

‘Too late, the tickets have been sold, Make-up. Then, in 1981, as a protest against the Falklands war, some of the younger members of the cast of The Iceman Cometh – the ones blessed with better bodies and less inhibition – seized the opportunity to host a naked sit-in on the stage of The Majestic. It quickly descended into a televised orgy that had to be disbanded by policemen in plastic gloves. It was the sight of the gloves that my mum, actually, remembered from the six o’clock news that evening. She hadn’t spotted the blink-and-you-missed-it glimpse of an erect penis on television, the first to officially appear on UK terrestrial TV, according to The Guinness Book of Records. But she saw the gloves. Typical mum, ha!’ he says, shaking his head affectionately.

‘So then The Majestic closed, again, for refurbishment in 1989, looking sad and tired, and in desperate need of a facelift, Botox, any and all kinds of surgery that might be on offer. It reopened in 1995, polished and tightened, but some say lacking some of its old character.’

‘I wish you hadn’t told me the shooting bit,’ I say, looking around me feeling creepy, ‘I’m going to have trouble going to the kitchen on my own now.’

‘Stop it, Make-up, you’re a grown woman. So! That brings us up-to-date. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, starring Dolly Russell, and directed by me, Tristan Mitra, will mark her return to the London stage for the first time in eighteen years!’ Tristan swirls on the spot and claps his hands like he’s just finished conducting a big band.

‘And, so, what about Dolly?’ I ask, exasperated.

‘Oh yes, of course, Dolly. What can I tell you about Dolly Russell? Other than that she drugged the last Make-up? Ha! Don’t be put off by that! It just shows guile. Well,’ he hushes his voice to a low murmur, to a purr, ‘I don’t know how old she is … maybe seventy-two, maybe sixty-eight, it’s hard to say. But she hasn’t been on stage for over fifteen years. I’ve barely had her up there yet, without some screaming match or tantrum or silent seething fit. And that’s just me. Ha.’

He picks up my large powder brush. Its bristles still sparkle silver from my last job on Friday, glistening up dancers for the cover of a disco album – two emaciated eighteen-year-old girls who ate half a bag of crisps each on a twelve-hour shoot. Tristan dusts his face with it lightly, breathing in while he does. He leans towards me and, with serious intent, dusts my cheeks with it too. I step back a little, against the counter. He stares at me. I realise that I am his new Girls World. I just hope he doesn’t try to cut my hair with nail scissors.

‘The light in here is really bad,’ I say, embarrassed, ‘it’s far too dark.’

‘Shush,’ he says, and moves my arms that I have crossed against my chest back down to my sides, like a shop mannequin.

‘She didn’t get her Oscar until she was thirty-three, for The Queen Wants a King. Have you seen it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

He picks up another brush, flicks it against his palm, and puts it down again. I want to tell him to stop now but I don’t.

‘It’s very good. It’s the only role I’ve seen her in with no vanity. Isn’t that ironic? They demand she be painted and pretty at all times but they give her an Oscar for being plain, as if being ugly were such an impossible task for her that they had to reward it … Do you think it’s harder to be beautiful or plain, Make-up? I mean, in the mornings, how long does it take you? Because you’re a beauty, but I can tell it needs a little work now. A little more effort than it was five years ago, right?’

‘Maybe a little,’ I say, cringing at the thought of the price of my night cream, and my day cream, and my paraffin cleanser.

‘And a little more moisturiser than before? A little more time spent slicking away at those laughter lines?’ He picks up a tub of thick cream, and scoops a dessert spoonful onto the back of his hand. He sticks a deliberate finger into it and draws it out slowly, so that a dollop sits clumsily on its end. Reaching out, he takes my arm, and absent-mindedly smears the cream up and down my skin, rubbing it in smoothly as he traces the veins from my wrist to my elbow with his finger. He holds my arm firmly at the wrist with his other hand. I don’t pull away but I feel that if I did he would grip it a little tighter, a little firmer, and resist. I am being seduced by a man with no interest in sex. I am certain he knows the effect that he has.

‘But it’s still worth it of course, all the effort, isn’t it? It’s still worth the lingering looks on the tube, and the glances that you notice as you walk down the street, the smiles and the winks. The men who can’t turn away, who will picture you later, picture you tonight, think of you instead of their dowdy other halves. These men who think you’re out of their league, who would love to have a piece of you, an afternoon slice of you with their tea. It’s worth that extra twenty minutes in the morning, isn’t it, for the approval, isn’t it, Make-up?’

Tristan dips his little finger into a pot of thick sticky silver glitter. It’s not mine, I don’t know what it is used for. Starlight Express maybe? When he removes his finger the glitter is dripping off it like honey fresh from the pot trickling off Pooh’s paws. Nearby, maybe two or three rooms away, a woman is singing ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ soft and high. It feels like midnight.

‘Absolutely,’ I whisper. He leans towards me again. With one hand on my shoulder for balance, he raises himself up onto his toes so that we are face to face as he smudges the glitter across my lower lip with his little finger. I find it impossible to believe that he has no libido. Maybe it’s a rumour that he has spread himself as a cunning plan, like the men who tell women they are gay so that they will let them fondle their breasts. Or was it just me that fell for that, late one night in Gerry’s? (When should I start to worry that the extent of my experience is ‘late one night in Gerry’s’?) And I’ve done far worse than that.

‘She’s been married four times,’ Tristan says, still staring at me but rubbing his hands together to get rid of the last drops of cream and glitter, ‘and has one daughter, whom she never sees – I think she might live in upstate New York near her dad, Dolly’s third husband, I believe, the actor Peter Deakin. He did a lot horror stuff, he was the wolf man for a while. I think the daughter’s name is Chloe, but she’ll tell you if she wants to. And when you meet her, when you meet Dolly, you’ll realise she must have been quite something, way back when.’

He reaches for a tissue and wipes his hands, before tossing it casually on the floor, and I lean down to pick it up and throw it in the bin.

Tristan smiles and says ‘control, I see’ when I do this. I shrug and smile an apology.

He looks at himself in the mirror, touching his hair lightly, straightening his jacket, flicking a speck of white something off his collar.

‘Your bloke,’ he says, still looking at himself. ‘A bit of a monster, is he? A bit of a hound?’

‘Not at all, not a monster. Just … disinterested … not as enthusiastic as I’d like him to be.’

‘Ah, but is he disinterested in life as well?’

‘No. There are things that he likes, that he loves – PlayStation games, and childish films and things …’

‘Do you think he’s being cruel to you?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ I thrust my hands into my hair and deliberately mess it up. It’s supposed to be messed up, that’s the look that I want. Not too polished. Black eyes and gloss and messy hair. I like the drama of it – it counteracts my reality.

‘So it’s not deliberate, this disinterest, it’s not controlling?’

‘No, I just think … he’s gone off me, maybe … or …’

‘You think about it a lot, don’t you? You talk about it a lot. I’ve only just met you, this is the second conversation we’ve had, and we’re talking about it again … does that seem a little strange, a little self-involved, if you stop and think about it?’

I don’t know how to explain to Tristan that it is what we do these days: figure out ways to be perfect. Isn’t that the point? Talk about it and thrash it out and pull your life apart, tear it into pieces to find the bits that don’t work and try and toss them out and put it back together. Every TV show that we watch and get hooked on and cry in front of and that exposes all our faults has made pop psychologists out of all of us, hasn’t it? That’s what we do now! Rip ourselves apart to find the flaws. I don’t know who I am supposed to be obsessed with, if not myself? And if I’m not obsessed with anybody, or anything, then what will I do with all that thinking time on the tube or the bus, or staring off into space while I stir my Alpen? I hear talk of people who ‘let things go’, who say ‘fuck it’ to diets and their hair and their relationships and love. But that’s just propaganda, surely? I don’t know anybody who actually lives like that. Nobody really feels like enough any more, do they? Not here at least. And now Tristan is saying I am obsessed with my love life, but who else is there to be obsessed with it, if not me? Certainly not Ben!

‘Well, it’s a big deal when you’re going through it, maybe the biggest thing. And anyway, you brought it up this time, Tristan.’

‘Yes I did, didn’t I? I wonder if you are just trying to muster up the courage? To say goodbye? If you are slowly putting yourself back onto the market, before it’s too late. It’s not too late yet, Make-up, they’ll still fall at those pointed heels of yours.’

‘I don’t know about that, I … God, I don’t know, I don’t want to think about it like that, I just want to work it out with Ben.’

‘But clearly he doesn’t love you, or he loves somebody else, somebody new, perhaps? Or somebody still?’ He looks at me in the mirror, and sees my mouth fall open.

I wonder if it is Tristan who is being cruel. He has stumbled over my darkest fears almost straight away, but it feels like he is toying with me. There is a camp menace to him, like Hannibal Lecter playing with make-up brushes. I sit back a little further in my seat in case he decides to take a quick and sudden bite out of my nose.

‘I guess I’m just trying to work it all out, in my own head,’ I say.

‘Do you have any proof?’ he asks, matter-of-factly.

‘Of what?’

‘Of infidelity, adultery – that your man is ripping at the flesh of another?’

‘Yes. I think so, anyway. I found a text from his ex, saying that she couldn’t meet him as arranged ‘later that night’, with a kiss. And he told me that was the night he was going out with his mate. But when I confronted him he wasn’t even angry that I had checked his phone, he just seemed relieved that I believed him when he said it was a mistake. She meant to send it to somebody else, he said. It didn’t actually have his name in it, so I believed him. But I shook and cried for fifteen minutes.’

‘So you don’t trust him at all?’

Tristan watches himself as he thrusts out his Adam’s apple, and his crotch as well, as he talks. He juts out those parts of him that make him a man, but then counters it with a strange swish of his hand, or lightness of touch. It all seems very deliberate, experimental. He is trying to find the moves that work.

‘I would trust him, if he could just articulate how he felt, sometimes, about me, but he never does. I feel terrible for not trusting him sometimes. I don’t know what goes on in his head.’

‘Nor he yours, I’m guessing. And don’t feel terrible yet, you might be right! But he told you once? I mean, you fell for him once?’

‘He started, but then he stopped. He kind of drew me in, then closed the door. But it’s as if I’m halfway through …’

‘Your leg is caught in his door?’

‘Something like that, I suppose.’ I laugh sharply.

‘Ha! And you don’t know whether it will hurt more to try and push the door open, or tear your leg back out!’ Tristan folds and unfolds the cuffs on his polo-neck jumper.

‘Well …’ He takes a deep breath and finally looks away from the mirror,

‘I need to think about this one some more. The only thing I can offer, from my twisted perspective, love, is that what makes a woman of forty more attractive than a girl of eighteen is not her body but her confidence. Don’t fold, Make-up. Don’t dither. Toughen up. Let’s have some fun.’

‘I’m thirty-one. I’m not forty,’ I say, as I feel stupid tears rush to my eyes.

‘I didn’t say that you were, Make-up. Now, how do you feel about nudity?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nudity, how do you feel about it, and in particular cast session nudity?’

‘Uncomfortable pretty much sums it up.’

‘But what if it were just me? You see, I’ve been body-brushing with a toothbrush recently, rather than following any traditional bathing ritual, and I wonder if it doesn’t give me a shine that I’d like to share. I’ve been reading a lot about Major General Charles Orde Wingate, heard of him?’

‘Well, Tristan, I can’t say that I have …’ The tears recede and I can’t help but smile.

‘Churchill described him as a man of genius, who might have become a man of destiny. But he died, in a burning crash of a plane, in Burma. 1944.’

‘Okay … and he used to conduct sessions in the nude?’

‘Hmm? Yes, yes, he did. Of course his were with soldiers, but I think there might be something in it. Strip away our pretensions, make us real, cut to the chase. Beauty is truth after all. If we were all a little nude, once a day, the world would be a much less violent place. I know it’s a fucking cliché but I believe it. Of course there is always the danger that somebody is going to become unspeakably aroused, but that doesn’t really affect me … Do you know he inflicted some terrible defeats on his enemies, on the invincible Japanese! And he believed the best way to survive tropical heat was a diet of raw onions.’

‘Have you tried that as well?’

‘Yes, I tried. It gets tropical in Streatham in August. But it gave me terrible flatulence. I was like a human wind machine, and the stench! It is impossible to function when you are terrified to be in small spaces, afraid of what your own body might inflict upon those around you … I couldn’t be in here, right now, with you, if I were still doing it. Of course sometimes it was wonderfully amusing, it depended on the company. In lifts, hilarious! Inevitably it was my mother that made me stop. She’s a wonderful woman but with little tolerance for anything other than her own peculiar rituals. It’s nothing to do with her legs, she’s just that way.’

‘Her legs?’ I ask.

‘They barely work any more,’ he replies, nodding.

I remember reading in the Standard that he lives with his mother in Streatham, and that she is disabled, but I can’t remember how it happened.

‘Why don’t they work?’ I ask, trying my best to seem sincere and not just nosey.

‘She has a tumour, Make-up, that is pressing down on her spinal cord, and is hard for them to reach without risking complete paralysis. She says that she is lucky, of course, that it has only affected the lower half of her body, but that’s bullshit. She’s a religious woman, and I thank God that she is, even though of course I don’t believe in it at all.’

I want to say, ‘But you’ve just thanked God’, but decide that now isn’t the time.

‘So she fell over one day and never got up. Dad’s dead, so that’s that. She’s going nowhere, and she cooks a wonderful lamb curry, and …’ He nods his head quietly, and squeezes his eyes shut.

I don’t know what else to say, so I change the subject. ‘Do you think Dolly might be here soon, Tristan?’

He presses the balls of his palms into the sockets of his eyes. ‘I fucking hope so, love, otherwise we’ll never open!’ he shouts, and whips away his hands to clap loudly, spinning in a full circle and biting his lower lip with his teeth, thrusting his groin back and forth like a 1970s porn star, like some second-rate Russ Meyer gyrating horror.

‘Are you okay then?’ he asks me.

‘Yes, but I think I need biscuits.’

‘Kitchen’s down the hall, didn’t bouncy Gavin show you?’

‘He told me, I’ll find it, it’s fine.’

‘Lovely Gavin, I have to remind myself that he’s not, you know, slow … simple, retarded, him being so big. But he’s sharp as a tack really. Acid-tongued. I like it. It keeps me on my toes.’

‘Okay, well I’m going to go and find those biscuits I think.’

‘Good for you, but just the one, mind! Keep your chin up, Make-up. Stop thinking about your bloke if you can. We aren’t worth it!’ He throws me a huge grin – he doesn’t believe that for a second.

‘I’ll try,’ I say, and edge past him to leave. He trots off in the other direction, singing what sounds like ‘Anything Goes’ segued into ‘Let’s Get It On’.

I edge down a grey hallway, in and out of the patches of dirty light cast by infrequent and dim bulbs, speeding up through the strange shadowy spots that make me nervous with Tristan’s talk of shootings and blood-spattered walls. My heels clicking on the hard cold floor announce me to any potential murderers or psychopaths or evil spirits lurking behind dark doorways: they’ll hear me coming and be fully prepared to leap out and grab me, pull me into the darkness with them, smother my face and paw me to near death. I am convinced that’s what will happen. I make this daily exhibition of myself, in my heels and my skirts and my gloss, and I put myself on show even though I know that it is dangerous. I don’t go unnoticed, and it’s a cracked-up world. Soho is full of loners and losers, producers and pirates, prostitutes and pimps, directors and producers and more producers. Everybody claiming to produce something, so where is it all? I click my way into everybody’s view, and it’s a perilous route to take. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one with the biggest audience, and that has made all the difference. My heels tap out ‘look at me, look at me, look at me’, and by the way please note that I won’t be able to run that fast in three and a half inch stilettos. It is as if I have accepted my fate. I’ll be strangled with my own sparkly scarf, a victim of my own need to be appreciated in a world full of crazies.

In a badly lit 1970s kitchen that is dusted in crumbs I hunt through grubby cupboards for some Digestives or Rich Tea.

‘Can I help?’

Someone is lurking in the doorway behind me and I freeze, one arm in the cupboard, precariously reaching out on tiptoes back to the furthest corners, looking for the good biscuits that have been scrupulously hidden.

What if I just don’t turn around?

‘Can I help you?’ he says again, but louder this time, and yet I sense he doesn’t move an inch, he doesn’t come and reach for the biscuits for me. He doesn’t really mean to help. What he means is ‘turn around and let me see you’.

I rest my weight back onto my heels and drop my arms in exhaustion. I recognise his voice. I don’t want to turn around.

‘I was just trying to find some biscuits.’ I address the Cortina-beige wall in front of me.

There is a dramatic pause, so dramatic it would be noted in a script and the audience might be fooled into holding their breath. I hold mine …

‘I know you,’ he says, quietly, evenly, ‘have we worked together before?’

My heart sinks like Leo at the end of Titanic.

‘Only at Gerry’s,’ I say.

And still I don’t turn around.

It was spring. It was the first week after the clocks had changed, when you feel that extra hour of daylight every evening enriches your life. Every year, that first week after the clocks change, the light takes us all by surprise, and I feel enlivened and hopeful for a summer of love and laughter and finally fulfilled dreams. That first week after the clocks change is the most magical week of the year.

I was working a nothing job that day, which paid only average money. A reality-TV star was filming his exercise video. We were in a studio located off a newly sanitised Carnaby Street. It’s all flagship sports stores now, surf brands and trendy trainers. More thought goes into the image on the front of the plastic bags than it does to war or peace or revolution or anarchy or any of those things, that don’t seem relevant any more to girls who like to shop and boys who like to watch football. Apathy and the end of conscription go hand in hand, at least that’s what my grandfather used to say. The only people that care are extremists. Protesting at anything these days seems at best disruptive, at worst showing off. Just shop instead. I don’t even protest at the interest rates on my store cards. Walk through central London on a Saturday waving a placard with a group of gypsies with dogs on bits of string? For what? The spirit of Carnaby, of fashion or punk or change, has become nothing more than a Daily Mail headline, a national ticking-off at the odd drug habit. Nothing is persuasive enough to sweep us up, up and away any more. The only counter-culture I’m interested in is the Benefit counter in Selfridges. That’s just the way it is. Some things change. Unless I want to picket Chanel to use fatter, shorter models because this impossibly young and impossibly skinny ideal is starting to hurt me, at thirty-one and one hundred and forty pounds. But then I just look unattractive because I can’t keep up, because I’m not pretty enough or skinny enough any more. Better to just take a little longer in front of the mirror, spend a little more on powder and paint, and pray that nobody notices.

I had been propositioned three times already that day by the reality star, but each time he failed to realise that he had already met me, and only half an hour earlier had asked me if I’d like to do a line of coke and give him a quick hand-job in the ladies’ toilets. I politely declined both. He was a charmless farmer from Devon called Roger, devoid of all charisma, but who had been the least offensive of the fools shut away in a house for the winter. Roger won seventy grand and a couple of months’ worth of notoriety, but the car-crash kind. He was loved and hated simultaneously by the same people. His aftershave was so strong, he actually smelt like desperation.

So it had been a depressing day. When we finished at about seven thirty the sun was not long down, and the dark was still light. Somebody suggested noodles so we all ploughed down to Busaba Eathai on Wardour, and crowded around a table. Some of the guys were high already, but I was off everything but the booze, trying to clear up my act and my head. Ben had started leaving me disapproving notes about the little clingfilm bags he was finding in my jeans when he did the washing, and although the coke was rarely mine – I just always seemed to end up with the bag because I’ve never been a snorter, just a dabber on my gums, and you only need the bag for that – I didn’t want another argument. I didn’t want another spotlight thrown on the distance between us, and the different directions we were moving in.

We made our way through five or six or ten bottles of South African wine – the cheap good stuff. We crammed noodles into our mouths and felt early spring warmth in the chilled night air. I started to think about wearing open-toed shoes. I sat with the assistant producer, a tiny girl with dark hair and eyes who was up for anything as long as it involved laughter, and the public schoolboy A&R, obviously trying too hard to be ‘street’ in oversized jeans and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, but fun nonetheless. He referred to everything and everybody as adding value or not adding value. Thankfully I was informed that I added value, and I was almost tragically grateful.

Three German tourists sat on the corner of our table, laughing loudly at their own jokes – they too added value! It’s a strange phenomenon, this sharing of tables. It’s peculiarly un-London, to throw open your space and your conversation to any Tom, Dick or Harry who has money to pay and noodles to eat. It’s become remarkably popular, I think, because of its possibilities. Lunch is more fun when the opportunity to meet the love of your life is tossed into the pot as well.

The Germans had strong noses and red cheeks that looked like they’d blister in the sun. They were having a wonderful time too. We tried to engage them in conversation, but if their English was broken our German was destroyed – the public schoolboy could ask ‘How fast is your woman?’ but that was the extent of our European union. They left eventually, to be replaced by two Italian homosexuals who kissed in the corner. They were both very dark and fragile and beautiful and the assistant producer and I were hypnotised as they gently brushed each other’s lips. It was the easiest kiss I’d ever seen a man give, and it was to another man. In the end they asked me to stop staring at them. I tried to explain it was because I thought them beautiful, but they didn’t care for the reason.

We drank lots and ate little, and the night started to melt away. Then somebody mumbled, ‘Gerry’s?’

We stumbled across Soho to the bottom of Dean Street, and through the familiar little doorway. It was dark in there, it always is. You lose everybody you know as soon as you get in, they all drift away to talk to strangers. Perhaps that’s the appeal of the place – the promise of anonymity. I ordered something large and red and the man leaning next to me at the bar offered to pay for it. I said,

‘Uh oh, that’s trouble. I shouldn’t be accepting drinks from strange men.’

‘Then why have you?’ he asked.

‘Because I’m poor and drunk,’ I replied. ‘But then you already knew that.’

‘I guessed the drunk bit, I would never have known about the poor.’

‘How charming.’ My eyes focused. ‘You’re incredibly handsome,’ I said.

‘I’m an actor.’ He pinched his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger, as if appraising a painting in the Portrait Gallery, or a piece of broken china in a boot sale.

‘That makes sense. You may as well play to your strengths.’

‘Are you a model?’ he asked.

‘I am quite clearly five foot five. We both know that I am not a model.’

‘You could be a different kind of model, it doesn’t have to be catwalk.’

‘If you are asking me if I am a hand model, I find that offensive.’

‘Not at all. You could be a model of the more glamorous variety.’ He reached out and moved a strand of hair away from my eyes. I blinked him away.

‘You’re hoping I take my top off for a living?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I’m sorry to disappoint, but these puppies stay caged most days. I’m Make-up.’

‘Why don’t I ever get a Make-up like you? All mine are married with three kids.’

‘Your wife probably hires them,’ I said, without a smile.

‘I’m not married. Are you?’

‘Not yet. I have a “Ben”.’

‘And where is your “Ben” this evening?’

‘Playing Championship Manager with a warehouse assistant from Ealing Dixons.’

‘He sounds like fun.’

‘Yeah, well, you don’t know him. He has other qualities.’

‘Like what?’

‘You don’t care, so I’m not going to answer. Thanks for the drink.’

I walked off, proud of myself. The guy was on the make, I was obviously too drunk, and it showed but I still resisted. I didn’t want to meet anybody that night. It had become too frequent, too easy lately. A peck on the lips before home-time turning into a full-blown kiss, and I didn’t know who I was kissing and if I would ever see them again. It made me feel wretched. The first time that I kissed somebody else I didn’t realise it was happening until my lips were merged with his, and once I’d started, like eating a chocolate digestive at eleven a.m. on the first day of a new diet, it seemed pointless to stop. I’d start my fidelity again tomorrow. And the ‘being unfaithful’ part, in itself, was so unexceptional and run of the mill and ordinary that it just didn’t seem like that big a deal. He was an ad exec and we were drunk at eight p.m. on a shoot for the Carphone Warehouse, and we had stumbled into the wardrobe cupboard to find funny hats to wear. As I said, we were drunk. He kissed me, and I kissed him back, and the passion felt so unfamiliar it was akin to riding the rapids at Center Parcs, or jumping up and down on a bouncy castle – it didn’t seem bad, because I didn’t love him or care about him. It just seemed like a fun thing to do at the time, and nothing at all to do with Ben. It was three hours later that I experienced delayed shock, like whiplash, and I burst violently into tears.

That was it, I had cheated. I had spent all this time terrified that Ben would be unfaithful, and I had just let a cocky guy from Kent called Dave cop a feel of me through my blouse, and tell me that he loved it when I scratched my nails across his stomach under his shirt. It felt awful then, and awful the next time, four months later at three a.m. in the corner of a bar called Push on Dean Street, with a stuntman I’d met half an hour earlier. He had deliberately set himself alight only two hours previously.

That was just a kiss. Eight months later I went home with a guy called Jonathan who was the post-production supervisor on a short film I’d been working on. I consoled myself that at least I’d known him for three days when it happened. I’d called Ben the next day and told him I’d crashed at my brother’s because it was closer, and he hadn’t seemed bothered, he certainly hadn’t questioned me as I would have questioned him if he had stayed out all night. In a way I wish he had, and I’d been forced to admit it there and then. The lack of suitable grilling the next day just compounded the reasoning in my head for doing it: Ben didn’t care.

That night at Gerry’s, walking away from another possible indiscretion, I collapsed in a corner and chatted to an old bloke in a checked suit with a red nose and three strips of hair that sat on his crown like rashers of bacon. He was hammered on whiskey, but he managed to tell me that I bore a sharp resemblance to his first and favourite wife, only that I was fatter.

I noticed the handsome sleaze staring at me from the bar, trying to catch my eye. I ignored it, but eventually he was by my side again, putting another glass of red into my hand.

‘I can’t shrug you off tonight, can I?’

‘I’m Tom Harvey-Saint. And you are?’

‘Scarlet.’

‘That’s a very evocative name. Do you have a giant “A” on your chest?’

‘Not yet, no, but I’m working on it.’

‘You seem sad, Scarlet, and I’d like to help.’

‘I bet you would. Help me out of these wet clothes perhaps?’

‘Well that’s a very depressing way of looking at things. What could be so bad? Look at us, here, tonight, drunk in a glorious city full of beautiful people. What could be so wrong?’

‘That’s not enough for me. I need more than that. Five years ago that was enough, but not now. I need more than wine and London.’

‘Darling, don’t say you’re tired of London, you know what that means.’

‘Maybe I am, maybe I am tired of life. Of my life at least.’

‘Maybe you’re just drunk, darling, and feeling a little dramatic. Let’s not be pompous, it does nothing for you.’

‘I’m not being pompous … I just feel blue.’

‘But Scarlet can’t be blue! What can I do?’ He was stroking my thigh, running his fingers up and down my leg, his digits creeping towards places they shouldn’t. I wanted to shrug him off like a dirty shirt, but at the same time hug him like a five-day-old puppy.

‘Christ, I just want something beautiful to happen! And I want it to happen to me! Have I made that many wrong decisions? Are my expectations so disjointed from reality? Have I been that hateful that I don’t deserve to be happy?’

‘Fuck all that, darling, just live. Wake up. Just have fun. It’s every man for himself.’

‘No it’s not. It can’t be.’

‘Well what do you think the answer is?’

‘I think the answer is to find somebody who wants what you want. And who wants to be honest. And realises that’s a valuable commodity, if you find it. I need somebody to be my refuge …’

‘I completely agree. My name is Tom and I’ll be your air-raid shelter tonight.’

‘Oh you’ll agree with anything I say right now.’

‘Damn right. You have beautiful eyes.’

Tom Harvey-Saint took me by the hand and led me outside Gerry’s, into an alley between a pub and a walk-in health centre.

Tom Harvey-Saint had pecs like paving slabs. I had sex with him in that alley, by accident, in that I let him, I was drunk enough to allow lust to take over. It was violent sex, awful, savage; he thrust into me like a kitchen knife.

I crawled home to Ben that night in a cab, but slept on the sofa, in case he could sense it somehow, smell infidelity on my skin. I wish I had told him then, or that I could tell him now. Lies are so depressing.

‘Gerry’s? Are you a barmaid?’ he asks now.

I turn around. Tom Harvey-Saint leans in the doorway, ready for his close-up. He is as handsome as the last time I saw him. He is tall enough to dominate any room, and dark enough to catch any woman’s eye. He has wide grey eyes and a full bottom lip that looks like it’s just been bitten – it probably has been, for effect. His chest is like a barrel, and his stomach flattens under his belt like a snowboard. He is wearing a dark green short-sleeved polo shirt tucked into khakis. Both of his forearms rest on the doorframe on either side of his head. It looks like a casual pose, but I still can’t get out.

‘No, I’m not a barmaid. I’ve just seen you in Gerry’s.’

‘Good old Gerry’s. That must be it then. What are you doing here?’

‘Make-up. For Dolly. And you and Arabella as well apparently.’

‘Fantastic. I’ve never had a Make-up that looks as good as you. Mine are always married with three kids.’

‘So you’ve said.’ I nod my head at him, but he ignores it.

‘I do feel like I know you though …’ He stares at me and smiles.

I shrug, grit my teeth and hope he’ll leave.

‘Maybe I’ll see you later, then, at Gerry’s?’ he asks. He can’t use my name because of course he doesn’t know it.

‘Maybe.’

‘I’m Tom Harvey-Saint by the way,’ he adds, stretching out his hand to be shaken, knowing full well that I would recognise him from his appearances as Rob McKenzie on Death Watch – if I didn’t recognise him already, that is.

‘Scarlet.’ I rush out my answer, hoping he’ll forget it as quickly, and offer him my hand sharply. Instead of shaking it he grabs it, turns it over and kisses my palm, looking thoughtful for a second, flickers of recognition sparking behind his eyes. When I yank my hand back he seems alarmed.

‘Sorry, but I’ve just bleached my brushes and I don’t want you to inhale,’ I say.

I dart past him, making sure not to catch his eye, but the hairs on my arms silently stand up and scream as they graze the hairs on his. His neurons and my neurons or his atoms or my protons or something are diametrically apposed or aligned or whatever the science is that means my body lurches towards him dangerously. There is a dark pocket of something wild that hides deep inside of me that threatens my sanity when I am near a man like Tom Harvey-Saint. I practically run back to Dolly’s room. Shutting the door behind me I catch my breath. I hold my hands out in front of me and see what I already know, that they are shaking. I feel like he preyed on me, and yet I was compliant at the time. I think he realised that night that I was past the point of right and wrong or conscious decision-making, and that it was apparent that I didn’t know what I was doing, or who with. I just try not to think about it. The only person I have told is Helen. She called him all sorts of names, but I wondered, even then, if I was just making excuses for myself, for my actions. I did it. That’s that.