Material Girl

by Louise Kean

  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.’

  Scene II: Politics

  You know those days just before Christmas when there are lights everywhere, in Highgate village or anywhere in London? I don’t mean the orange and red neon glory lights of Oxford Street or Regent Street, with their torrents of swarming shoppers below who fill every spare inch of pavement, as those lights, unlike puppies, are just for Christmas, and not for life. I am talking about the branches of white lights that string across the high streets of villages, dusting the everyday with Christmas sparkle, enough to remind you that it’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year. Some of those dotted lights even shine out from people’s windows, the optimistic ones. I think they should leave those lights up forever, for every day of the year. I’d like a life like that. Those strings of cheap diamonds are like a shared and hopeful smile. They punctuate the functional with magic, and increasingly that’s what I feel slipping away. My magic reserves are depleted, like dwindling natural resources, and they need a little topping up. I need a world with a little more magic.

  Rain spits at the tips of my shoes sticking out in to the alley, as I loiter inside the backdoor of The Majestic, leaning against a grubby wall. I could call Ben back. My phone sits in my hand like a grenade. I always call him back. Ben can leave cross words for hours, for days. It’s like he wears blinkers or has tunnel vision. I know that men and women think differently but Ben is like a computer.

  The Ben that I recognise now is his reflection in a monitor, on his PC screen: he is mostly otherwise engaged with technology. I check his phone constantly. I hate myself for doing it – I know it makes me a cliché. The act of rifling surreptitiously through his texts when he isn’t in the room, while nervously listening for the sound of his feet padding down the hallway to signal his return, epitomises the change from ‘old confident me’ to ‘fresh and pathetic me’ like an exclamation mark. But I have found texts from her. They always end with a kiss. I sat outside her office for an hour once, crying. She organises events for banks. Ben never fails to remind me, subtly or otherwise, that it was he and Katie that were hurt by their break-up, as if they are an exclusive club with a restricted membership of two.

  Katie. I have to whisper it, like a swear word in a nursery. Apparently my feelings at the time paled in comparison to how badly they both felt, even given his constant emotional yo-yoing back and forth, from me to her to me to her. Ben doesn’t think it was painful for me, as I tried desperately to begin a proper and exclusive relationship with him, this man that I had fallen in love with, as he sat and cried for somebody else, and I hugged him to try to make it better. They are friends again now, but I’ll never be Katie’s ‘favourite person’ apparently. Ben finds it easier to blame me for the breakdown of his relationship rather than the two people who were actually in it, and in a way I let him. I do feel guilty about her. I feel like being obsessed with her gives me a reason to stay with Ben. Leaving him now would be like kicking her in the teeth again, this woman I’ve never met. A part of me believes that Ben would like me to leave, so that he can go back to her and settle back into his old-man chair in his old-man relationship and just call me a ‘phase’. He can pretend that he didn’t want anything else, just for a little while.

  Ben ‘catches up’ with Katie once a month, either on the phone or in person. When I tried to say that I thought that once a month might be a little excessive, he told me I couldn’t tell him what to do. I tried to explain that I wasn’t telling him what to do, but rather letting him know how his actions made me feel, and he told me, with irritation in his voice and a hateful exhausted look on his face, that I had to get used to it because it was going to happen whether I liked it or not.

  I think that Ben would prefer life to escape him rather than acknowledge that he is terrified of getting in touch with his emotions, but I don’t want that. Happiness isn’t fear. Fear leads to hate, and hate leads to the dark side … I know because Ben and his mate Iggy watch Star Wars constantly – the DVD Special Edition, the Director’s Cut Four Disc DVD, the Special Director’s Cut Ten Disc Super Edition. Cue Darth Vader heavy breathing. But I’m not ready for the dark side. I can still feel the force, even if Ben can’t. And I’ve always been afraid of the dark …

  I suppose I should acknowledge that Ben thinks he’s just fine. ‘Men don’t talk,’ he says, like that’s reason enough for us not to sort things out, not to be happy.

  I throw my phone into my bag in despair. My head is hot but the rain cools the air around me as I feel my face crack and crumble like an earthquake in a desert, my make-up disintegrating as I start to cry.

  I startle myself with a short sharp laugh of surprise.

  Then I cry again.

  The prospect of leaving Ben makes me shake. I cannot contemplate being without him, of how scared I am of being alone no matter how cowardly it makes me feel … I desperately grab in my bag for my phone again, as if I am suddenly on a ten-second deadline and if I don’t speak to him before the timer runs out our relationship will explode. I find it and claw it open, and hit his number.

  I just need to hear his voice. I need us to say important things that cement our feelings for each other somehow, so that I can get through the day. Ben and I don’t discuss marriage or kid
s, because I don’t want to put too much pressure on him. But, then, I am thirty-one now and I want those things, and maybe he does too. Lots of other people do, so why not us, and why am I so scared to say it? I don’t have to goad him into loving me and then, and only when he tells me he is ready, will we be allowed to admit that we want babies. I am not going to be scared to say that I want to have children anymore! Maybe if I just say it then he will too …

  It rings five times before he answers and I immediately say, ‘Ben, it’s me.’

  ‘I’m working …’

  ‘I want to have children.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I want you to know that I want to have children.’

  ‘Right …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what? I’m working …’

  ‘I am telling you that I want to have children.’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose you do …’

  ‘Well what do you think?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About having children?’

  ‘I think I want to have them too …’

  He sounds like he is searching desperately for the right answer on some quiz show, like Blockbusters: ‘I’ll have whatever will make her stop talking please, Bob?’

  ‘Soon?’ I ask. ‘Do you want to have them soon?’

  ‘I … I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.’

  ‘Well … what do you think about?’

  ‘What? I’m working.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m thirty-one.’

  ‘Right …’

  ‘I think about things … about marriage … and stuff …’

  ‘Right …’

  ‘What do you think about those things?’

  ‘I … I don’t know … Scarlet, I’m working …’