Material Girl

by Louise Kean

  Matt or gloss seems to be the ultimate decision at every make-up counter and in every life. Do I want my relationship matt or gloss? Reliable and dependable and staying put all day? Or shiny and eye-catching but likely to disappear with half a bag of chips or a large glass of red wine? What about my kisses, my nights out, my walks to work, my boyfriend – matt or gloss? For me there is no contest.

  Gloss is our sticky sparkly signature streak. Even a decade ago nobody was glossing. Who started this wet revolution that means our hair will always stick to our lips in the slightest gust of wind? Suddenly, as if they were obligatory like flu jabs for OAPs, we all owned three Juicy Tubes. More than just gloss, it is balms and salves and stains. If you sit on the bus or the tube, somebody will be rubbing something into their lips, diving into their bags for their little pot of almost nothing to smear over their mouths, only to kiss it, talk it, eat it off in moments, and have to reapply again. If the secret to giving up smoking is to replace one habit with another, buy a new lipgloss, tinted-brown nicotine flavour, and streak it on every time you feel stabs of withdrawal.

  When did our mouths become so defenceless? Suddenly they demand such attention. I can’t sort out my savings because I have to think about my lips; I can’t go and see my mother because I need to think about balm. Ben actually doesn’t like the gloss. When we first started seeing each other, during those early affair days that were never quite real, I would always gloss before meeting him. He’d turn up, consistently on time, and he’d lean in to kiss me, and I would be forced to retract slightly. ‘Just glossed?’ he’d ask, and I’d say yes. ‘The expensive one?’ he’d ask, and I’d say yes.

  Then we wouldn’t be able to kiss properly for about twenty minutes, so that I got my money’s worth out of my expensive application. The irony, of course, is that I was wearing it so he’d want to kiss me. The thought only occurs to me now that when Ben and I first met, in those strange early days when we were doing what we shouldn’t, we kissed freely in public. We rolled around in Green Park on a picnic blanket for Christ’s sake, gulping down miniature bottles of vodka, practically dry-riding each other, attracting uncertain looks from the park police who weren’t sure whether to film us or intervene. Another night, another clandestine date, and I sat with my legs wrapped around Ben on a bench under a tree, on the South Bank outside the NFT, as an orchestra of student film critics clicked a symphony of wine glasses behind us, and a warm night grew colder as we grew hotter. I thought that he wanted the affection that he and Katie had lost, and I thought I was his answer or his release. And yet now, three years down the line, he refuses to peck me on the lips on an empty train. Something has definitely happened, but I can’t think about it now, or again. I’m tired, and it’s too hard, and this is Selfridges beauty hall. I’m not going to ruin it. I’m not going to think about the theory that glossed lips spell sexual readiness to the opposite sex, and that Ben doesn’t want me to spell it out for him any more.

  I spend four hours in Selfridges, wandering all the floors, stopping for a glass of pink fizz in the champagne bar where you can sit and play the ‘How many people are wearing sunglasses indoors?’ game. Light-headed, I make my way to the designer floors, slipping into two thousand-pound dresses and sandals, dancing in front of gleaming mirrors like Cinderella, before throwing my own clothes back on, clothes that now seem like rags, and reluctantly returning my princess clothes to their rail-thin hangers and the rail-thin assistants who can only manage to hold two items at a time because they haven’t been on solids since Lent. Eventually I buy a pot of face soufflé, and one new lipgloss in ‘Fucked-Up-&-Over-Pink’. I don’t know what it means, but it sounds about right.

  My stomach grumbles that I haven’t had lunch, reminding me that I was thwarted in my biscuit hunt and it has now thoroughly worked its way through today’s only offering of champagne that I threw down a couple of hours ago, so I grab a slice of pizza from a hole in the wall by Bond Street tube, and idle down South Molton Street, to make my way back to Soho off the tourist track.

  I check my watch and it’s only just gone five o’clock. I can’t get to Gerry’s until eleven. For a moment I consider abandoning Gerry’s for tonight and going home early, surprising Ben, cooking us both dinner, collapsing in front of the TV, or something. Doing whatever it is that couples do, the kind who spend their evenings together. But the thought fills me with discomfort, I feel full on it, like I’ve eaten too much pasta and now I can’t move, my belly swollen and full of air. If I choose to spend the night at home with Ben it could easily be the end. A few hours is all I’ll need to turn our lives upside down, if I suddenly get reckless and brave, and I’m not ready yet.

  I take my last bite of pizza and dance past Fenwicks window, stopping briefly to look at scarves.

  As I make my way through Hanover Square I feel something lightly dust my face. Somebody must be leaning out of an office window, sprinkling fairy dust, or maybe coke, or maybe anthrax, on Hanover Square. It’s lightly powdering us all. For a moment I am in a snow-globe and I turn as I walk, mimicking a mechanical ballerina with her arms outstretched, my palms and face angled upwards, letting whatever it is fall on me. Maybe it will scar. Maybe it will heal everything. I stop in the middle of the square and watch it settle on the pavement. A man in a suit and a boy with a rucksack have stopped as well, in front of me, and are studying the flakes as they fall.

  ‘It looks like snow?’ I say after a beat.

  ‘I know,’ agrees the boy with the rucksack.

  ‘But it’s September,’ I say, confused.

  ‘And it’s sunny,’ adds the boy.

  The man with the suit sticks out his hand and catches a flake. ‘It’s a snowstorm,’ he says, as the flake melts in his palm.

  ‘But it’s warm,’ I say.

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ he replies, and walks off.

  The boy shrugs and smiles at me and walks off too.

  The flakes have stopped falling. It was a minute-long snowstorm, in central London at the end of an Indian summer. I look down at the pavement, and though it looks a little damp it is already drying in patches.

  I cross Regent Street and follow Beak Street back into Soho, then down and along Old Compton Street to the junction of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue.

  I am in two minds. I check my watch – it’s still not six – and I pivot on the spot. A young guy walks past me, whistles, and says ‘nice’, but I ignore him.

  I fluff up my hair, straighten my skirt, and head for Grey’s.

  I don’t see Isabella for twenty minutes. Just as disappointment starts to bubble in my stomach, I glimpse a mess of long blonde hair and black roots sauntering up from the film section, carrying a couple of books that look like props. She is wearing a cheap silky grey dress that is higher at the front than the back, and falls just above her knees, with a dark red cardigan knotted over her chest. Each breast resembles an empty upturned fruit bowl beneath it. She’s chewing gum, but then she is always chewing gum. She wears scuffed black ballet slippers, and she doesn’t bother picking her feet up off the ground as she walks. She kicks along the carpet, carelessly creating static with each step.

  She makes her way to the till and appears impervious to the stares of schoolboys and salesmen and financial directors and journalists and busmen around her. She doesn’t have the time to acknowledge each one, she’d be exhausted, she’d never get anywhere, she’d be here all night. She drops the books she’s been carrying lazily behind the till, and bends over to retrieve a sheet of price stickers. I feel the sharp intake of breath from the men around me suck the air out of the room, as her dress falls forwards at the front with her cardigan and the sharp indent of her cleavage is revealed, like a lonely, thin ravine between two ominous mountains, like a parting of two waves. The juices of desire spewing out from all the men around me almost slide me off my feet. Lust can tear a house down, or fire rockets into space. It’s the last untapped natural resource, we’ll get to it eventually, whe
n the oil runs out and the smoking stench blocks out the sun and the sky turns black. The sparks in Grey’s could light Sydney Harbour at New Year, from the static in Isabella’s shoes shifting along the carpet to the tiny blue flickers of light dancing around this herd of groins. I am almost scared to trip into their eyelines, afraid of what might happen if I block their view, afraid they might move to see her and not me, just afraid, really, that I’ll be no more than a nuisance and somebody will come along and pick me up and dump me on the street with a thud so I don’t spoil their time with her alone.

  I don’t know what to buy today that won’t look like my own pathetic prop, an excuse to give her my money and two minutes of my time. Glancing at the shelves quickly I grab Don Quixote. Heading towards the till I see that somebody else is serving too, a bespectacled guy in an ill-fitting jumper. He puts the grey in Grey’s. Isabella has just started serving two awestruck schoolboys in uniform, but Mr Grey is nearly finished with his pissed-off suit whose glance flickers sporadically to the chewing-gum beauty to his right. If I get in line now I’ll miss her. I dart to the magazine stand and watch the pissed-off suit try and throw a smile at Isabella before he leaves, but she doesn’t catch it. Mr Grey stands at the till for a moment, but when nobody else appears he hits a few buttons to presumably lock his till, picks up a stack of books and heads off towards science fiction. I grab Vogue as the schoolboys finish paying, and move quickly to the till.

  ‘Hi,’ she says, and smiles.

  ‘Hi,’ I reply, and pass her my Cervantes and my Vogue.

  She runs the codes under the plastic thing that bleeps.

  ‘This one’s heavy!’ she says, flipping Don Quixote over and widening her eyes. ‘It would take me weeks! But this is more my style,’ she adds, stroking the glossy Vogue, chewing her gum. ‘I think she’s beautiful.’ She gestures to Catherine Zeta Jones, who glares at us from the cover.

  ‘She’s old-school glamorous, and there’s not much of it about these days,’ I say.

  Arabella looks at me and smiles. ‘You’re right – I love glamour. But look at us, I think we both do!’ She flicks her hands at her hair, and nods at me, and I smile, stupidly pleased.

  ‘That’s eight pounds forty-five then,’ she says with a smile.

  I pass her my card.

  ‘You come in here quite a lot, don’t you?’ she continues.

  ‘Yes – I work around Soho most days, so it’s my local.’

  ‘My local’s the Gay Hussar,’ she says, and giggles.

  ‘A different kind of local,’ I reply.

  ‘Maybe, but sometimes I just go in there at lunch, read my Vogue, have a vodka, it’s not that different. Other than the vodka.’ She holds my books in her hands, but doesn’t put them in a bag. ‘I always think you look wonderful,’ she says, and I feel like twenty capillaries have burst in each of my cheeks.

  ‘Oh, thank you. I enjoy it, you know, dressing up, and I am a make-up artist so …’ I knew that would get her. She is ignoring the line of men queuing behind me, and I hear them tut loudly when Mr Grey comes dashing over and shouts ‘Who’s next please?’ A Financial Director throws both Isabella and I daggers, like we’ve just ruined his year.

  ‘You’re a make-up artist? Do you get free stuff?’ Her eyes widen between hastily smudged black kohl.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, nodding my head, smiling like it’s obvious, that I’m old and cynical while she’s still young and innocent.

  ‘Good stuff? Like good mascaras and glosses and things?’

  ‘Yes, and rubbish as well of course!’

  ‘Christ, I’d be happy with the rubbish, you know, anything. So you work around here?’ She cocks her head to one side childishly.

  ‘At the moment, yes. Down the road at one of the theatres in Covent Garden.’

  ‘So what do you do for lunch?’

  ‘I haven’t had a lunch yet, today was my first day there.’

  ‘But, like, what do you normally do for lunch?’ she asks, playing with my books. They still aren’t in a bag.

  ‘Who’s next please?’ shouts Mr Grey, and I hear more tutting behind us.

  ‘Well most of the time I’m on set. I don’t really get a lunch break, and I have to be there constantly during the day in case people need touching up or whatever.’

  She grins at me like I’ve said something naughty. I grin back, feeling a little ridiculous. It’s the kind of joke that Ben would like.

  ‘So, like, what time is an early finish for you then?’ she asks, and I blink a few times. She is full of confidence; I wonder if anybody has ever turned her down; I wonder if she even knows what it feels like to be rejected, or hear the word ‘no’.

  Something happens. Suddenly I remember how to play this game.

  ‘I’m not sure yet. Sorry.’ I check my watch. ‘I have to get going, but if I get a chance I’ll pop back in later in the week,’ I say, and give her a grin.

  ‘Oh, okay,’ she says. With a slice of disappointment and a shrug she thrusts my books into a Grey’s plastic bag.

  ‘Thanks, bye,’ I reply, and run out without looking back, hearing the next guy in the queue practically throw himself at her counter behind me.

  Walking quickly down to Leicester Square I turn left onto Long Acre. When I get to The Majestic the back door is closed, so I walk around to the front and sit down on the steps. Catching my breath I gulp twice in quick succession and practically gag. Coughing a little I pat my chest for comfort rather than necessity.

  I laugh out loud. I lean back, letting my arms on the steps behind me bear my weight. The afternoon sun soaks my face for a while.

  My face cools, my freckles dart back in, and I open my eyes to swear at the cloud that has stolen my sun, but it is Gavin standing in front of me, three steps down but still big enough to block out the rays.

  ‘Have you been here all this time?’ he asks, sounding only slightly more interested than the kids in yellow hats who ask, ‘Do you want fries with that?’

  ‘God, no. I’ve been all over.’

  ‘What are you doing now?’

  ‘I’m not sure, I’ve run out of things to do before Gerry’s. What about you?’

  ‘I’m ready for the pub. We’re all going. You want to join us?’

  ‘Why not!’

  I push myself to my feet, shiver slightly as I feel the evening draw in, and make my way back to Soho.

  Tucked into a corner of Soho Spice between Arabella’s skinny nervous understudy, and giant Gavin, and chewing on a Chicken Kashmiri, I eyed Tom Harvey-Saint at the end of the table attempting to feed nan bread to a model that Gavin informed me he had seen with Tom a couple of times. Her name was Angel and her limbs were so long that her hands seemed like distant relatives of her shoulders, and her eyes glared out angrily from her skinny face. I noticed that she and Tom shared a Chicken Tikka with no rice but then pushed their chairs back simultaneously and disappeared to the toilets. Tom emerged ten minutes later, and Angel followed a couple of minutes after that, grabbing her bag and leaving without saying goodbye to anybody, including Tom, who glanced around the table and remembered that I was there, and tried to catch my eye. I kept trying not to look back but as a study in self-restraint it wasn’t impressive, and became even less so the more wine that I consumed.

  As Soho turned neon we stumbled south towards the Crown and Two Chairmen on Dean Street, for more wine. I chatted vaguely to Tristan’s assistant who told me it was his birthday, but still didn’t tell me his name. Tom Harvey-Saint disappeared, while Gavin and Arabella flirted in a corner by the cigarette machine. We left the pub as they rang the bell for last orders, and I noticed the mist again. A mist keeps falling on London, every night at 10.55 p.m. It’s the Last Orders bell that seems to toll it in. It settles heavily within minutes and obscures the faces of strangers and anybody more than three feet away. It forces me to look really hard and closely at the people I am with, to make sure they are the people I should be with. Tonight I’m not so sure.

  Five h
ours and one curry and two bottles of red wine later I sit cross-legged talking to Tristan at a table in Gerry’s. It’s twenty minutes until midnight, but it’s still early for Gerry’s.

  They buzzed us in, somebody is a member, and we plummeted down the steps into the one large room. It’s busy, there must be forty of us in total all squinting at the old actors’ photos on the walls to see who we’re standing next to tonight.

  ‘I think my life bubble’s bursting, Tristan. Can you take those bloody glasses off now please?’

  ‘I can’t, love, no. It’s too smoky.’ Tristan is playing an imaginary piano with his fingers. It looks like Billy Joel, and it’s certainly not Chopin. His index finger bangs the air delicately while the rest tickle the space between us, racing to catch up.

  ‘Then stop lighting those sodding cigarettes!’ I lift my arm to sniff my cardigan suspiciously. ‘I smell like a French shrubbery,’ I whisper, to myself more than anybody else.

  ‘Look. No. Stop it! Stop playing me up, Make-up. No tantrums. No stamping your stiletto. I’m not one of your boys. You won’t wind me around your pretty little painted finger, love, you won’t tie me up in knots. No batting those eyelids, no pouting, no half-smiles and dropped chins and glances up. Stop it. Jesus!’ He shakes his head and his piano-playing fingers fold into fists at either side of his squeezed-shut eyes. At least I think they are squeezed shut. The muscles around his cheeks tighten, but the Jackie O’s obscure my view.

  ‘Just act natural, Make-up! And tell me: are you happy?’

  ‘Me act natural? Me? That’s rich, Elton air-piano John!’ I tut at him childishly and roll my eyes so quickly it makes me light-headed. ‘Am I happy? No. Of course not. Who can manage happiness when their relationship is ending? It’s not party time, it’s not knock-knock jokes with every other line of conversation around at my house! It’s not all whoops of excitement and belly laughs and “Ooh my thong’s too tight and my boyfriend thinks I’m a size eight and I’m really a size ten and I shouldn’t eat those two squares of chocolate but I’m gonna and aren’t I scatty but cute and pass the Lambrini.” SHIT! This is serious stuff, Tristan. I’m going to end up on my own.’ My shoulders sag dramatically as if God has just poured an invisible bucket of water over my head and now I’m soaked and heavy and dripping. It’s a deliberately pathetic look and I ham it up even further with a pout.