Material Girl

by Louise Kean

  The poster shouts ‘DeathWatch’ in large red letters, and below that, ‘They’ve got their eyes on the murder capital of the City … and each other. Only on BBC1.’

  The floor is bare and plastic, as is Tom’s rickety chair. He has shoved about twenty cards with hearts on the front underneath the metal clips of his mirror. He is sitting, bare-chested, on the chair in the middle of the room. His stomach is ironing board flat. There isn’t enough space to walk around him. I will have to be front or back. His chest is hairless like a Chippendale’s, or a girl’s. I am relieved that the sight of it makes me squirm. It looks cold and clammy like a slab of unidentified flesh dragged from a river. I don’t want to touch it.

  ‘Put your tits away, Tom. You can save the glamour-model look for Tristan,’ I say in the doorway.

  ‘I don’t want to get make-up on my shirt. Don’t go shy on me now, Lulu,’ he smirks.

  ‘It’s Scarlet to you,’ I say.

  ‘Okay, Scarlet, haven’t you ever seen a six-pack before?’

  ‘Do you have to draw those lines on your stomach with shoe polish? Your sheets must be disgusting,’ I say, putting my box down on the side.

  ‘Shoe polish? I don’t think so. Feel this.’ He grabs my arm around the wrist and I scream as he smacks my hand against his stomach. It feels hard and cold and bumpy. I wrench my hand away and take a step back.

  ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ I shout, flustered, the blood rushing to my head.

  ‘Oh calm down, Scarlet, everything’s such a drama with you. Now, shall we get on?’ He closes his eyes and tilts his face upwards to the ceiling. ‘All we need, I think, is good foundation – I like Clinique – a little eyeliner, a bit of contour around my nose, maybe a touch of colour on my lips, but just tint, not gloss, and a hint of mascara should do it, but brown-black, not black.’

  ‘Okay, Boy George, but I have to work in silence,’ I say.

  He shrugs and smirks.

  Five minutes later all that I can hear are our breaths, coinciding with each other like a pulse to this little room, and the pipes as they gurgle. Tom has an incredibly handsome face. It’s objective, it’s a fact, no matter what the fashion or the time or the look, he will always be handsome. As I sponge on foundation I can feel his breath on my hand, and his lips part as I lean closer to him to apply eyeliner. For a moment I smell sickness again, but it passes and I ignore it. I can see why, when drunk, I found him so appealing. What is it about beauty that can override our other senses, and obscure the nastiness or the pettiness or the dullness of a character, when that character is draped in a good-looking skin? I could kiss him, still. As vile as I find him, arrogant and childish and humourless, I could still kiss him. Beauty is hypnotic – you forget, temporarily at least, the evil that can lurk beneath. I guess that’s what love is for. It’s the feeling deeper, the reason more. Love beats beauty like paper covers rock. We need to love people so we don’t have sex with monsters.

  Even when Ben and I have fought about big things, or bored each other silly, there is still something about him, about the curve of his shoulders, the space on his neck beneath his ear, that I want to sink into and kiss clean. Sometimes when we are having sex, when we were having sex, I could lose myself in his arms or his shoulders or his neck, lose myself in kissing him. His skin tastes the way it should, tastes right and clean and substantial and strong. I could lose myself in kissing Ben, even now, and yet I know he has never lost himself in kissing me. Sometimes I tried to guide him there, to lead him softly to a place where he could just honestly kiss my back, for instance, for kissing’s sake, because he was allowed, because it was my back and I gave it to him to kiss and touch and stroke, because I wanted him there. But he couldn’t see it aside from sex. His cock, and not love, always guided him. Maybe he has always been that way, with Katie – her name still whispered like ‘cancer’ in a doctor’s waiting room – or me, or any of his childhood girlfriends. Maybe his sex has always been calculated, and he has never lost himself in affection. Or maybe it is just me.

  ‘You’ve got a good touch,’ Tom says, as I dot a slightly red tint on his lips and smudge it in with my thumb.

  I don’t reply.

  ‘It’s light,’ he says, without a smile, without opening his eyes.

  I don’t know why but I have to pause to control my breathing.

  ‘It’s the lightest thing about you, Scarlet. You’re so angry the rest of the time, you’re positively spiky. If the rest of you were as graceful as your touch it would be quite something. I think you try too hard, Scarlet,’ he says.

  I feel the thought of tears behind my eyes, without the tears appearing. Nobody died.

  ‘You’re finished,’ I say, and step back.

  His eyes peel open slowly and he turns to study himself in the mirror to his right. He stares long and hard, as I do. His chin is a box of clean lines, his nose strong and broad. He looks like somebody traced him from a picture. He is a diagram entitled ‘How a man should look’.

  ‘It’s good. We could still go a shade lighter on the eyeliner, but it’s good,’ he says. He turns to me and smiles. Without speaking he reaches out for my hand and turns it over, so my palm faces upwards to the ceiling. He lowers his made-up face and kisses the middle of my palm lightly, right between my heart line and my head line, and he whispers ‘thank you’ so I can feel his breath where his lips were. I let him. To brush him away would be an ugly insult to what he is. It would be denying his beauty, and, at this moment, I shouldn’t and I can’t. He looks me in the eye, and I catch my breath again.

  There is a quick rap on the door and it opens, nudging me forwards, closer to Tom, who presses my open palm against his chest as I am pushed against him.

  Gavin stands in the doorway and glances down at my hand, and then says, ‘Dolly will be waiting,’ and closes the door.

  Tom drops my hand like a hot stone.

  ‘Dolly will be waiting, Scarlet,’ Tom repeats, widening his eyes, smirking again now, and it’s as if that smirk is everything that he really is. Everybody has a gesture that is theirs, that typifies them or defines them. A blush, or a wave, or a laugh, or a nod, or a single raised eyebrow with a cocked head – it’s your own personal stamp on the world. And everywhere you go and everything you do can be stamped ‘Scarlet was here’ with a blush or a wave. It’s a stamp on the consciousness of others, the thing that they’ll remember when you’ve left the room, it’s leaving your mark. Tom’s stamp is his smirk. It smashes away my momentary doubts and reminds me who he is, and what drives him. As long as he keeps smirking, I should be okay.

  ‘Dolly?’ I whisper.

  Dolly sits back in her chair asleep. Her head has fallen to one side like a snapped twig on an old branch. She snores quietly, a soft, wet, rhythmic grunt through her nose, interposed with quick fluttery gasped breaths that rightfully belong on a hospital ward. A glass of water and a couple of pills on the counter patiently wait for her to wake. Something makes me lift the glass and sniff the water and my suspicions are confirmed. It’s the alcoholic kind, otherwise known as gin. Ella Fitzgerald plays softly from the CD player in the corner, ‘Someday He’ll Come Along’, the lullaby of an old lady. Dolly’s silk scarves shimmer with dust over the lamp, and the room glows gently through purple silk. It’s a heavy kind of quiet, as it always is in a room in which somebody is sleeping. ‘Do NOT Disturb’ signs hang invisibly in the air.

  ‘Dolly,’ I whisper again, and reach for her hand. It’s cold as I squeeze it. Her eyes open slowly.

  ‘Has it been an hour already?’ she asks me groggily.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ I place my box down on the counter. This room feels like home after the starkness of Tom’s cupboard.

  ‘No need to be afraid, that’s all I need. A quick cat-nap. I’m not an invalid. Not yet at least. A light snooze, that’s all that was.’

  She rubs her eyes and shifts herself in her chair, and as she does I hear a short quick fart.

  ‘Where are my p
ills, where are my pills?’ she demands loudly with a sudden embarrassed anger, batting me backwards and out of the way. She lean forwards and grabs the glass, and glugs the gin like the water we both pretend it is. She leaves a couple of mouthfuls at the bottom of the glass. There is no spirit shiver, as in films. She is gin-ready.

  ‘Shall I start?’ I ask.

  ‘Well why else would you be here?’ she snaps.

  I spritz her face with water, then toner, and wipe it gently with a muslin cloth, but very little comes with it. She isn’t wearing any make-up already.

  ‘No blues, only browns on my eyes, Lulu,’ she says firmly.

  ‘I was going to try a grey as well, to bring out the violet,’ I say.

  She pauses for thought. ‘Okay, you can try that. We’ll see, we’ll see.’

  We can both smell her fart, there isn’t room enough in here for us not to, there is nowhere for the smell to drift to and nothing for it to hide behind. It smells musty, like damp silken wool. Dolly winces beneath my fingers.

  I consider making up an excuse: that I’ve left something upstairs that I have to urgently run and retrieve, just to be out of this room and give her a chance to spray the smell away with lavender, but I don’t. She’ll live.

  I squirt a perfecting serum onto my hand and dab it on with my middle finger around her eyes, to smooth out her lines. I pad the ball of my finger gently over her skin that is old and creamy and creased like the disturbed top layer of milk on the turn.

  ‘Much better today, Lulu,’ she says with her eyes closed.

  ‘What is?’ I ask, dabbing the serum around her lips as well, and on the lines that fold in her face like soft round paper creases, that run from the edge of her nostrils to the corners of her mouth.

  ‘Your outfit,’ she says, ‘I like your tie.’

  I study her face as I take a handful of moisturiser and press my palms together to heat it. I don’t say anything.

  ‘I’m not being wicked, Lulu, I really do like it. You have character. You look like a principal boy! Ha!’

  I knew it was too good to be true. I still don’t say anything.

  ‘No, seriously, darling,’ she says, as I press my warm palms onto her cheeks, then her forehead, then her nose, swapping the moisturiser from me to her. ‘I think that you look fun!’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, but just to say something. I don’t mean it.

  ‘Well, darling, if you can’t take a compliment I won’t give you any more. Goodness, Lulu, don’t be so churlish. My mother told me when I was very young that compliments are like kisses – the best ones are unexpected. If I merely told you that, say, you look lovely, or wonderful, it would sound predictable, or worse, insincere, and it wouldn’t mean anything in the giving. Like giving chocolates at Christmas or roses on Valentine’s Day, it would be an empty gesture. But you do look fun, and fun is the thing you should be called! You look like a girl to be around, today.’ Her words slur into each other slightly. ‘You do’ is ‘youdo’ instead.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘thank you.’ I pat the last of the moisturiser into her skin in silence. Her breathing slows as Ella sings ‘Stormy Weather’ softly in the background.

  ‘Can I turn the light up now, just a little?’ I ask.

  ‘Just a little,’ she says.

  I search the wall for the main light switch. It is a brand-new dimmer. It stands out on the wall like a patch of skin that was covered by a plaster during sunbathing, now ripped off to reveal the surrounding tan.

  ‘I got Gavin to put it in,’ she says, with her eyes half-open.

  I turn it slowly.

  ‘That’s enough,’ she says firmly, as I am barely halfway to the level of light that I need.

  ‘Just a little more while I do the base maybe?’ I ask.

  ‘No, that’s enough,’ she says. ‘So. Tell me, Lulu, what you did with the rest of your day yesterday? I need some entertainment, I shall fall asleep again if not. I want to know what you young girls get up to.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’ I ask, rooting around absent-mindedly in my make-up box.

  ‘Well, for a start, did you make love?’

  I am poised to trace away the thin grey bags that hang beneath her eyes with a Touche Éclat. My hand stops in midair.

  ‘No lovemaking yesterday, no.’

  ‘But do you make love often?’

  ‘How often is often?’ I put the tip of the brush to her skin.

  ‘Well that depends on how old you are, darling. Once every five years would be reasonably often for me these days, and about as much as my old heart could take!’ She chuckles to herself. ‘But you young girls are at it like the Romans,’ she says, ‘I read it in the papers. Everybody is having sex these days.’

  ‘About once a month, I guess.’ That’s a lie, unless I am counting indiscretions. With Ben, that’s a lie. It’s been months.

  ‘Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh Lulu. That is a shame,’ she grimaces. ‘Don’t like it much? Or just not very good at it?’

  I squeeze a worm of foundation onto my wrist and squash it angrily with a sponge before dabbing at her nose.

  ‘No, it’s not me. I’d like it far more often than I get it, given the option.’

  ‘But you’re a woman, darling, and women always have the option! A woman who wanted it every night of the week could get it – although God knows why she would – but if she did, she could get it. We have the option, we’re further removed from the instinct, darling, and we aren’t as animal as men. Why in heaven’s name do you believe that you don’t have the option?’

  ‘My boyfriend … well … he doesn’t like sex as much as I do.’

  ‘Is he homosexual?’ she asks frankly, as if enquiring about the price of milk. ‘There were a lot of them around in my day, parading as a good catch for a girl when they were far more interested in their golfing buddies!’

  ‘No, no. Not homosexual.’ I shake my head and laugh.

  ‘Are you sure, darling? I mean, have you actually asked him? Because a man who doesn’t like sex is hiding something.’

  ‘He’s not gay,’ I say, irritated, ‘we just don’t see each other very much, we keep really different hours.’

  ‘How different?’ she asks as I pad colour around her forehead. I’ve dragged back her hair with a thick black Alice band. I half-expected clumps of it to fall off in my hand when I touched it, and would not have been at all surprised if she had been completely bald like one of Roald Dahl’s witches.

  ‘Just different. He works nine to five and I don’t.’ I don’t want to talk about this with her, she’s only using me for sport, she’ll just end up laughing at me anyway. And then she’ll drug me like the last poor fool. I change the subject. ‘So, to answer your question, what did I do yesterday afternoon? I went to see a friend,’ I say.

  ‘Where and why?’ she asks.

  ‘At her house and … because she is my friend.’

  ‘And how was your friend? And does she have a name?’

  ‘Her name is Helen and she was pretty miserable actually. Her husband’s mistress is pregnant, and her seventeen-year-old lover just tried to kill himself.’

  I wait for a shocked gasp that doesn’t come. Instead she says, ‘I see,’ and her mouth curls up at the edges into a small smile. ‘How suburban, and exciting!’ she says wickedly.

  ‘Exciting is not the word I’d use,’ I reply, trying to dab away the red lines on her nose. The gin has had its effect. I squeeze a little green concealer onto my index finger and follow the lines of them where they crawl onto her cheeks.

  ‘But that’s why they are doing it, isn’t it, Lulu, for excitement? That would seem obvious to me. What did they expect?’

  ‘No, they … I don’t think … it’s complicated, and …’ I have stopped dabbing.

  ‘And while you are trying not to agree with me on that, darling, tell me this – what is this obsession with killing people these days? Or killing oneself? I understood it back in my day, with the homosexuals, or the bankrup
t, the ones who couldn’t face it. It drove them to early drink and speed, and pipes and goodness knows what else had just come in on the boat from China, but today it’s so unnecessary. I mean, we used to play at it all the time in those days, of course, but we always knew what we were doing – a handful of painkillers – but never valium, we all knew that – and a slug of gin, a tearful phone call and they’d all come running. But we never did ourselves any real harm.’

  ‘That’s a pretty big thing to play at,’ I say, mixing concealer with foundation on my wrist.

  ‘Oh but darling, you had to, all the new starlets were doing it. You had to get your name in the gossip rags somehow, and it was far more acceptable than it getting out that you were having an affair with a married man, or a studio boss. No, you had to get in the mags or they wouldn’t use you, you see, because you weren’t known. But you couldn’t get known for affairs with married men, darling, because it hurt your popularity, and then all the studio wives would tell all their studio husbands not to hire you, and then everything became far too hard. The smart girls knew that. Not that you weren’t having the affairs, of course, but it wasn’t news, it couldn’t be, the studios were too powerful back then, much more powerful than the public, much more powerful than some tencent rag full of tittle-tattle. So, you see, you had to have them write about you, darling, but it had to be the right things, and the bosses would never let their affairs get out. That stopped for a while, the tittle-tattle mags. But I see it’s started again, now, hasn’t it? I always felt terribly sorry for those girls, the desperate girls, taking their tops off in public, sleeping with whomever, wherever, whenever, and then spilling the beans. They didn’t realise, you see, that it wouldn’t get them work. They never got the parts, you see. Because back then, Lulu, you needed talent as well. You couldn’t get by on just your looks. Not just your looks. Now you can build a whole career out of it. It’s plainly wrong, of course. People think that’s all they have to be. No wonder everybody’s got so fame-hungry, darling, when goodness knows, all you have to do these days is have a bit of surgery and hope that somebody likes the look of you. There’s no more to it than that, is there? These girls. Don’t they know they should have a talent as well? Their mothers should have told them that. Don’t put yourself in the firing line, naked, without a talent or something to shield you. Because by Christ they’ll want to shoot you down. If you’re naked, well? One shot will kill you. They can see where your heart is.’