How to Be a Woman

by Caitlin Moran

  This policeman isn’t going to listen to all of this – not even if he has a couple of drinks, which I have offered him, with a wobbly attempt at hospitality and normality. I am slightly surprised he turns it down – when I got locked out of my last flat and the fire brigade had to break in for me, we all had beers out on the patio afterwards while I told them some gossip stories about Oasis.

  Firemen just like to party more, I think, as I promise the policeman that we will be quieter now, and that it was all just a misunderstanding.

  ‘Just a domestic,’ I say to him, as he leaves. It sounds like quite a grown-up thing to say. Grown-ups say this about their relationships, on EastEnders. I’m being quite adult about the whole thing.

  Days later, I escape the house with the stupid new dog – now old – and walk to the Heath. I lie under a tree – dressed in my nightie, with a coat thrown over it – and stare up at the leaves. I skin up a joint – just a small one. One appropriate for 2pm.

  The people around you are mirrors, I think to myself. The dog is paddling in the lake. I watch her lap at the water.

  You see yourself reflected in their eyes. If the mirror is true, and smooth, you see your true self. That’s how you learn who you are. And you might be a different person to different people, but it’s all feedback that you need, in order to know yourself.

  But if the mirror is broken, or cracked, or warped, I continue, taking another drag, the reflection is not true. And you start to believe you are this … bad reflection. When I look in Courtney’s eyes, I see a crazy, overbearing woman with unbearable good fortune, who is trying to ruin him.

  I pause.

  I love him, but be hates me. That’s what I see. I will have to tell Courtney to leave. I can’t live with him any more.

  I go home.

  *

  Courtney won’t leave.

  ‘I’m not going until I can find a flat as nice as this,’ he says, firmly. ‘I’m not going to go and live somewhere shitty. I’m not going to break up with you and live in fucking … Cricklewood. That wouldn’t be fair.’

  He announces that night we won’t fuck any more: ‘I’m too depressed to fuck you,’ he says. ‘Fucking you will make things worse.’

  The mirror gets darker. I almost can’t see my face.

  A weekend away! That’s what we need. Fresh air and the countryside. We just need to get out of London. It’s London that’s the problem: London, with Cricklewood in it, which Courtney fears. It is London that is destabilising us. We’ll be fine somewhere else.

  Some friends of Courtney’s are recording their new album in Wales, and invite a group of us to go and stay with them for the weekend. As far as everyone’s concerned, Courtney and I are still the hot couple on the block: the pop star and the teenage TV presenter, partying all night long. Only Caz knows the truth, from all those 2am phone calls. She sits opposite me now, on the train out of Paddington, heading west. I invited her at the last minute – promising her the chance to hang out with a famous band, and drink as much as she likes.

  ‘I wouldn’t come if it was a band I liked,’ she says, when I ask her. ‘That would be weird. But given that I think they’re a bunch of tossers, I’ll come. Drinking enormous amounts of famous arseholes’ champagne is the duty of the true revolutionary.’

  We’ve all ordered drinks from the onboard bar – the train is the pre-show party. I’m reading Private Eye, and laughing. On my third laugh, Courtney snaps, ‘Stop laughing. You’ve made your point.’

  ‘I’m just … laughing,’ I say.

  ‘No – that’s not your normal laugh,’ Courtney says. He’s drunker than everyone else. ‘You only laugh like that around other people.’

  Everyone has gone silent. This is awkward.

  ‘I think she’s just … laughing, Courtney,’ Caz says, sharply. ‘Although I can understand why that might not be something you’ve heard a great deal, and might alarm you.’

  I kick Caz under the table to shut up. I feel embarrassed that she is now having to deal with our secret blackness. This is private. The admin of my soul. I should be able to contain it. I just won’t laugh any more.

  At Rockfield, autumn is unbearably beautiful: a Welsh autumn makes an English summer look gauche, and flat. The frost spangles the mountainside. While Courtney goes off to have one of his interminable ‘sprucing’ sessions – fiddling with his hair for hours in the mirror, pouting – Caz and I stand in the driveway, cramming blackberries into our mouths, and then chase each other around a field, like kids. The air is hard, like iron. I laugh hysterically, and then find myself worrying.

  ‘Has my laugh changed?’ I ask Caz. ‘Does it sound more … London-y?’

  ‘That is, without doubt, the stupidest question I have ever been asked,’ Caz says. She finds a fallen branch, and beats my coated arse with it until I fall to the ground, crying with laughter.

  The studio is where Queen recorded ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ – with cries of ‘What would Freddie do!?’ we open champagne, and pour it into pint glasses. I immediately spill mine over the mixing desk, and shout, ‘You know Freddie would have done that! It’s like his GHOST IS INSIDE ME!’ whilst trying to mop it up with my cardigan.

  Courtney is thrilled to be in a proper studio: ‘Finally, I’m home!’ he says, slouching in a swivel chair, and playing on one of the band’s very expensive Martin guitars. He starts to play a couple of their hits to them – but with new lyrics ‘that I’ve written myself’.

  The band listen, politely, but they clearly wish he’d stop.

  ‘Woo! It’s a spontaneous happening! I can review it!’ I say, trying to move the mood on.

  ‘Not unless you’ve learned how to write yet,’ Courtney replies, strumming a G minor, and puffing on a fag. I’m so embarrassed that I take Ecstasy, just for something to do with my face.

  As the E warms up inside, and the rest of the room melts, I see Caz is quietly watching me. Before today, I haven’t seen her for months – so long I’d almost forgotten who I am when I’m with her. Her face becomes a mirror: I can see reflected in it a teenage girl with blasted pupils, sitting alone on a chair, looking very, very tired, even though I am talking fast.

  She is a true mirror, I think. I should look into her more often. I can see myself in there. I can see my good points and my bad points – but I recognise that face. I feel like I haven’t seen that face in a long, long time. Not since I was a child.

  We stare at each other for an age – just good, old-fashioned off-your-face staring.

  In the end, Caz just raises an eyebrow at me. I know what she’s saying. She’s saying: ‘What?’

  I mouth back: ‘I hate him.’

  She mouths back: ‘That’s because he’s a knob-skin. They’re all knob-skins.’

  I go and sit next to Caz, on the floor. We sit there for what seems like an age, watching Courtney, and the band, and some giggling girls who seem to have appeared from nowhere.

  Rhythms and patterns establish themselves in the room. Circles of people curling forward, like chrysanthemum petals, over cocaine – then exploding outwards, into nose-rubbing, and violent chat. Slow kissing in corners – then triumphal returns to the throng. People face to face with guitars, Beatles-style, starting a song – then suddenly stopping, with barks of laughter, before another starts again.

  Caz and I have maracas. We are shaking them in a manner that can only be described as ‘sarcastic percussion’. Every so often, someone asks us to stop – but we just start again, very quietly, a minute later. It’s making us happy.

  Sitting on the floor, in the corner, everything else looks like a scene happening on a television. It looks like a play. Until I came over and sat with Caz, I was in the show, too. But now I’m sitting with her, I can see I’m not. I’m not in this made-up story. I never have been. I’m just a viewer, watching it at home, on TV. Just like me and Caz used to watch everything on TV. I hold her hand. She holds it back. We keep on shaking our maracas at the TV with our free hands. I’ve never
held Caz’s hand before. Maybe it’s just because we’re so off our tits. Mum should have given us Ecstasy when we were little. We would have got on so much better.

  I don’t know how long we’ve been sitting like this when Courtney comes over, and looks down at us. He’s still holding the very expensive Martin guitar, and strumming on it like he’s Alan-a-Dale, but in a suede jacket, with receding hair.

  ‘Hello ladies,’ he says, superciliously. He’s grinding his teeth quite badly.

  We shake our maracas at him. My pupils are blasted. Caz’s are like saucers.

  ‘Hello, Courtney,’ Caz says. She manages to put an admirably vast amount of hatred in every letter of his name, whilst still sounding ostensibly civil.

  ‘We were all wondering – could you stop the maracas now?’ Courtney continues, with exaggerated politeness.

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t,’ Caz replies, with equal politeness.

  ‘Why?’ Courtney asks. He speaks with icy courtesy.

  There is a pause.

  ‘Because you’re a total dick,’ Caz says, as if she is the Queen, greeting the High Commissioner in Zaire at a garden party. She shakes her maraca, by way of punctuation.

  Before I can stop myself, I laugh – a gigantic, unsexy honk, with a definite Wolverhampton accent.

  ‘He is!’ I say, joyfully. I am in the throes of revelation. ‘A total dick!’

  ‘A total dick,’ Caz confirms, formally, shaking her maraca.

  ‘Christ, you really can’t handle your drugs, can you?’ Courtney says, to me. ‘You’re embarrassing yourself.’

  ‘The thing is,’ I say to Caz, totally ignoring Courtney, ‘is that I can’t even break up with him, because I was never going out with him in the first place. I’ve been imagining the whole thing.’

  ‘A total, imaginary dick,’ Caz says again. We shake our maracas in unison.

  ‘Courtney, I’m going to go home and change the locks,’ I say, cheerfully. Still holding hands, me and Caz stand.

  ‘We’re going to order a cab now,’ I say, to the room. ‘Thank you for having us, everybody. I’m sorry I short-circuited your mixing desk with champagne. That was an error.’

  Courtney’s shouting something, but I can’t really hear him. We leave the room at a lick, running as fast as we can now, to get a cab; to get back to London; to find some chewing gum, to stop this interminable teeth-grinding. We’ve just ordered a cab from Reception when I realise I have left one, important thing undone.

  ‘Stay there,’ I say to Caz.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she yells.

  ‘STAY THERE!’ I bellow, running back down the corridor. I burst into the studio. Everyone looks up. Courtney looks at me with a combination of fury, self-pity, and a vast amount of cocaine. But he looks like he will take me back, if I truly apologise. If I really mean it. If I love him. If, in my heart, I love him.

  ‘Can we keep the maracas?’ I ask.

  CHAPTER 9

  I Go Lap-dancing!

  I have no idea what to wear to a strip club. It’s one of the biggest wardrobe crises of my life.

  ‘What are you wearing?’ I ask Vicky, on the phone.

  ‘Skirt. Cardigan,’ Vicky says, lighting a fag.

  ‘What shoes?’

  ‘Boots. Low heel.’

  ‘Oh, I was going to wear boots, low heel, too,’ I say. ‘We can both wear boots, low heel. That’s good. We’ll be matchy.’

  Then a bad thought occurs to me. ‘Actually, maybe we shouldn’t both wear boots, low heel,’ I say. ‘If we look too matchy, people might think we’re an act. You know. Like a lesbian act. And try and touch us.’

  ‘No one would believe you’re a lesbian,’ Vicky sighs. ‘You’d make a terrible lesbian.’

  ‘I wouldn’t!’ I say, indignantly. This offends my ‘can do’ nature. ‘If I wanted, I could be a great lesbian!’

  ‘No you couldn’t,’ Vicky says. ‘You’re offensively hetero-sexual. You fancy Father Christmas. By no stretch of the imagination could Father Christmas be construed to have Sapphic androgyny. He wears Wellington boots indoors.’

  I can’t believe Vicky is doubting my ability to be a lesbian, if I really wanted to be. She’s seen how versatile I can be on a night out. Once, when we went to Bournemouth, we blagged our way backstage of a performance of Run For Your Wife, and convinced Jeffrey Holland – Spike in Hi-de-Hi! – that we were prostitutes, just to see his reaction. He said ‘Blimey!’ in a very edifying manner. My capabilities are endless. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

  ‘Maybe I’ll wear trainers, instead,’ I say.

  Vicky has asked me if I want to join her for a night out at Spearmint Rhino, on Tottenham Court Road. It’s the year 2000, and strip clubs – for so long regarded as the holding pen for the last few sad, sweaty fucks on earth – have become acceptable again.

  Britpop and Loaded have been all about the rediscovery the British working class’s monochrome tropes – pubs, greyhound racing, anoraks, football in the park, bacon sandwiches, ‘birds’ – and strip clubs come under this heading. ‘Ladettes’ now enjoy a night out in the classier strip clubs of the metropolis. Various Spice Girls have been pictured in strip clubs, smoking cigars and cheering the acts on. Zoe Ball and Sara Cox attended strip-club hen nights. Titty-bars are being marketed as an exciting, marginally loucher version of the Groucho Club – just somewhere for anyone who liked to start a night out at 1am.

  Partly out of journalistic hunger to cover the phenomenon, and partly because newspaper editors are invariably excited by pictures of female hacks in a strip club, the Evening Standard have asked Vicky to go spend an evening in ‘The Rhino’, in order to see what all the fuss is about.

  ‘It’s against every single one of my feminist principles. These are arenas of abuse,’ I said, when she called.

  ‘The manager is giving us complimentary champagne all night,’ Vicky said.

  ‘I will meet you there at 9pm,’ I said, with all the dignity I could muster.

  From the pavement outside, the club has an odd air. Looking through the doors, the place is covered in ornate gold mouldings, red walls and twinkling lights; it’s overdone, ersatz glamour looking like some kind of putative Titty Disneyland. As we hesitate on the wrong side of the rope banner, a couple of punters roll up, and are ushered inside by the bouncers.

  I am amazed at how confident and untroubled they seem – not guilty at all. I would have presumed you would make some excuse for visiting a strip club – saying loudly, to the bouncers, ‘I am doing a collection, on behalf of the sick children,’ or, ‘Council. I’ve come to check your electrics,’ or, in a fake Mexican accent, ‘This Pret A Manger, yes?’

  Instead, they walk in – slightly sweaty suits, slightly hawkish eyes – as if it’s perfectly normal to leave the office, then relax by paying very young women to reveal their labia. What a lovely social circle I have, I reflect, not for the first time. All of my male friends would be genuinely horrified to go to a strip club. They all wear cardigans, collect vinyl, and fetishise loose-leaf tea. They would never want to pay to see a stranger’s labia. Indeed, my boyfriend still says, ‘Thank you, that was very nice,’ after he’s seen my labia, and we’ve been together for four years.

  ‘This is like an AGM for Bad Husband Material,’ I say to Vicky, as we go in. ‘Everyone here has left a trail of sad girlfriends and wives.’

  Still, the free champagne is very free, and we have a table, right down the front, by the catwalk – or ‘twat walk’, as Vicky renames it. For the first hour, we treat Spearmint Rhino like a pub, albeit one with the occasional distraction of some tits floating over our heads. One particularly enjoyable conversation about the imminent purchase of a new winter coat is interrupted by some buttocks suddenly arriving in our eye line but, to be fair, I’ve had this happen to me in a Wetherspoons before. After two hours, some of the ‘girls’ come over to chat, and, as is the way of all gatherings of women, we all start gossiping: Vicky in her cardi, me in my jac
ket, the girls in diamante bras and itchy-looking thongs.

  By 1am, we’re pretty tipsy, have been given a private dance that has left us both quite discombobulated – this chick has an arse like heaven – and we’ve been regaled with an amazing story about a very famous TV presenter and habitué of the club, which ends with the line, ‘So his wife found out he had herpes – on Christmas Day!’

  We are in our booth rofling away, thinking, ‘This is just like the Groucho, but with real twats, instead of metaphorical ones. This is actually OK.’

  The PR comes over to us.

  ‘I’m off home,’ she says, pulling on her coat. ‘You ladies are welcome to stay, if you want.’

  I look down the neck of the champagne bottle. There’s still a good two glasses left.

  ‘We’ll stay!’ I say, brightly. ‘My personal motto is: never walk away from a loaded bottle.’

  The PR leaves us to carry on our evening unchaperoned. Cheerfully topping up our glasses, I’m just about to launch into a lengthy anecdote about the one time I offered to strip for a lover – sadly ruining the mood by accidentally treading in a bowl of porridge I’d left by the bed that morning – when two bouncers approach our table.

  ‘Evening, constables,’ I say, merrily.

  ‘It’s time for you to go, ladies,’ they say, looking very stern and unyielding.

  ‘I assure you, I have only had a few weak ales,’ I said, slightly cross-eyed. ‘I’m perferly fine to remain here.’

  ‘Time to go,’ the bouncer said, pulling my chair back from the table. His buddy does the same to Vicky. We are hustled out in less than a minute, in a flurry of coat-grabbing and indignation.

  On the pavement, we are outraged.

  ‘Why? Why are we being thrown out?’ we screech. ‘We’re simply taking a wry, sideways look at stripping! We’re COLUMNISTS! We’re QUALIFIED for this! We’re BONA FIDE! We’ve BEEN ON RADIO FOUR!’