Material Girl

by Louise Kean

  ‘Yes but she’s a star, and I’m just Make-up. Are you sure she hasn’t just changed her prescription or something? Or got a bigger hip flask?’

  Gavin looks at me.

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be you? Maybe she likes having a pretty young girl to boss around, maybe you remind her of her?’

  ‘Yeah right, with my constant tears and moaning – Gavin, she thinks I’m pathetic.’

  ‘Scarlet you aren’t pathetic. Maybe she feels a little needed. Maybe she thinks you are fun and you’ve just gone the wrong way, backed the wrong horse. Maybe you do remind her of herself.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘God no, Gavin. I’m just … not me. I’m nothing special. It must be the gin.’

  ‘Okay’ he shrugs, and gives me a doubtful look.

  We don’t stop half way across the bridge because that is what lovers would do. I do look down the river though, towards the city, as we walk. I can’t see the view in the other direction because a railway line herded with Charing Cross trains obscures my view of parliament and The London Eye. We descend the steps to the South Bank and walk towards Festival Pier. I gulp.

  I remember meeting Ben here, for our second date. We arranged to meet at the bottom of the pier at seven p.m one Thursday night. I was early, for once in my life, and as I saw him coming I had to look at my feet, then at tourists, then at the river. He took an age to reach me, and I couldn’t look at him, I was so nervous, and terrified that he would see straight through me, and realise instantly how much I felt for him, even then. I thought we were saving each other. I realise now that I believed, even then, that he was in love with me. If I had known that it was so much less, I might have run back up those steps and far away. As it was I waited for him, all that time as he got closer and I just stood there, scared by my own feelings. He didn’t say anything when he reached me, he just kissed me straight away, with a forceful tongue and his eyes closed. Christ I hope he even realised it was me. Perhaps if I’d been unlucky, or lucky instead, the girl next to me would have done.

  Gavin’s phone rings.

  ‘Hi, is everything okay? Did you? And how was it, what did he say? I’m sure he doesn’t, you know what he’s like, he just needs his space sometimes.’ A quick surprised laugh. ‘That’s fantastic, good for you, I bet you look great. I haven’t forgotten, I’ll go and buy it this week and bring it with me in a couple of weeks. Okay, I’ll speak to you soon. Yep, you too, and to dad. Okay bye.’

  ‘Was that your mum?’ I ask, genuinely moved.

  ‘Yep. Sorry. She’s trying to get my dad to join the lawn bowls team with her, and he’s not sure. It’s only because he’s scared all the men there will fall in love with her.’

  ‘And will they?’

  ‘Probably. She’s a gorgeous old girl my mum.’

  ‘You sound close.’

  He shrugs. ‘She’s my mum, of course.’

  We follow the line of the river until we reach Waterloo Bridge and cut up to cross back again towards the bottom of Covent Garden.

  ‘Have you been to the Tate Modern?’ I ask him.

  ‘Yep, you?’

  ‘Not yet. I keep meaning to go, but I don’t want to go on my own.’

  ‘Won’t ‘he who shall not be named’ go with you?’ he asks smiling.

  ‘No, he doesn’t think it will interest him. I’ll have to wait until they have a Star Wars exhibition, or Lord of the Rings, or something.’

  ‘So he won’t just go because you want to go then?’ he says, like he understands something.

  ‘Gavin, Ben won’t do anything just because I want to do it. He actually says that to me, ‘You can’t tell me what to do’ when I suggest things we could do at the weekends. Mostly he wants to watch the football, or go to the pub, or sometimes IKEA …’

  ‘Jesus,’ Gavin whistles, a little disgusted.

  ‘We said we weren’t going to talk about him,’ I say, aware that even in his absence he is infiltrating my walk and ruining my mood.

  ‘Okay, I know. I just want to say one thing. Not all men are like that, Scarlet.’

  I nod. ‘I know, it’s just easy to forget sometimes. And you know, people change after a while.’

  ‘No they don’t. Not always. I’d go to the Tate again Scarlet, it’s great.’

  I nod my head in reply, and when he looks down at me I smile and shrug. I can’t make that plan, not yet at least. It would be unfair.

  We grab a sandwich and walk back down Long Acre.

  ‘Good walk,’ I say, ‘although my feet hurt now.’

  ‘I have to get back,’ he says, and brushes my hand with his. I look away and he walks off in long strides.

  The cast are mid-rehearsal as I creep in. Tristan sits in front of the stage with his hands either side of his eyes. He is topless, his chest dark like tea and covered with black hair. Tom is topless too, hairless and bronzed and unreal. Arabella is pale, and wearing a bra and a silk vest. All of the understudies mill around, topless too, skinny and hungry. Dolly has taken off her turban. After a while she spots me sitting a couple of rows back, and raises her eyes at Tom’s bare chest, grimacing, mocking him with a wicked old smile, and I stifle a laugh.

  They are performing now, there is no more chatter, and it is as if two worlds exist in this one room. There is my reality, and theirs, and they are so convincing that I believe both of them at once. There is a bubble on the stage that is Italy, and Tom’s name is really Chris, and Arabella’s name is really Blackie, and Dolly is really somebody called Mrs Goforth.

  This alternate reality is punctured occasionally when Dolly forgets a line or needs a cue. Tristan is sitting a row in front of me, directly in the centre of the stage, and every time Dolly fluffs he covers his eyes gently. Only after a few minutes have passed will he remove his hands and open his eyes again. Tom and Arabella and the rest of the cast are word-perfect. It is only Dolly who stops and starts. I can see her hands trembling from a distance.

  ‘Bloody chair,’ she says, tripping over a large old armoire, and Tristan covers his eyes again. ‘I do need the company of … or I need males … or … just give me the bloody line will you!’ she demands of the wings.

  I hear a whisper from stage right.

  ‘Well you’ll need to speak up, I can’t damned well hear you!’ she shouts. Her hands tremble a little more. She shoves them into the pockets of her trousers clumsily.

  There is muttering off-stage. Tristan sits perfectly still before them, his eyes covered.

  Everybody sits or stands around the stage, frozen, staring forwards. Gavin, fiddling with an exit sign above a door, stops and looks down, waiting. Tom and Arabella look around them wildly for a life jacket or a float.

  ‘I need the company of men … I need …’ Dolly yanks her shaking hands out of her pockets, bringing them up to her face. Her fingers shake and dance at her temples as she tries desperately to remember.

  I breathe in, and hold my breath.

  ‘Just give me the damn script,’ she shouts finally, walking unevenly to the side of the stage, snatching a bundle of papers from an anonymous hand.

  She reads it and composes herself. Somebody coughs nervously. Gavin still keeps looking down. Dolly tosses the play on the floor, and turns to face Arabella. Fixing her with a sad old determined glare, Dolly says,

  ‘I do need male company, Blackie … that’s what I need, to be me.’

  A pin drops somewhere and everybody hears it.

  Tristan peels his hands away from his eyes.

  I breathe out with relief.

  I am flicking through InStyle when Dolly comes back down to the room.

  ‘Don’t talk to me, Lulu, I’m too tired to talk.’ She walks to the counter, sparks a match clumsily and lights a lavender candle. Her hands are still shaking a little. She flicks on the CD player and lowers herself heavily into her chair, which puffs out a little dust when she lands on it. She has a salty tidemark around her hairline. ‘Just clean this rubbish off so that I can go home.’


  I dampen a cotton-wool pad with cleanser and swipe gently at her eyes. She twitches occasionally. The flame from the candle twitches at the same time. She begins to hum along gently to Ella Fitzgerald, ‘My Funny Valentine’, as I circle at the hollows of her cheeks with fresh cotton wool.

  Turning to open a new bottle of cleanser I see a fresh pile of envelopes have been delivered. ‘You’ve got more love letters today,’ I say. ‘You certainly have a lot of admirers.’

  ‘I’ll open them tomorrow,’ she responds quietly.

  I toss a piece of muslin into a bowl of water to soak, and scoop some cleanser into my palms, rubbing the paraffin in circles onto her face. Her skin moves with my fingers for longer than it should, then lazes back into place as I move my hand higher.

  ‘I’m just going to leave that on for a couple of minutes,’ I say softly.

  She nods.

  I turn and tidy away the bottles, flinging dirty bundles of cotton wool into the waste-bin. The CD has stopped and I press play, and she starts to hum along gently to Ella Fitzgerald again, but then falls silent. I wring out the muslin, and begin wiping off the cleanser on her face.

  ‘All that time to put it on, all this time to take it off,’ she whispers.

  I don’t say anything.

  ‘I met Ella, you know, Lulu. We were friends for a while. In 1950 I think it was. I was nearly twenty-one.’

  ‘How wonderful,’ I say quietly.

  ‘Yes, it was 1950, because that was the year that I went to my first opium party in Hollywood. Everybody wore a kaftan then and not much underneath. It was way up in the hills, away from the hordes, high up above Mulholland Drive. A large flat house with a roof that hung over the walls like a wild mushroom, the poisonous kind. It was dark all the way up the hill, we had a chauffeur of course, and we climbed higher and higher, and then I spotted the house up above us, two hundred feet away. It was a haze of orange light, like somebody lit a fire in the sky. I smoked a cigarette, of course, you can hear that in my voice, that I started smoking far too young, and I watched the fire get closer, and I knew I was moving in the right direction. It was the birthday of the wife of some producer or other, some big hotshot. And it was a pretty big deal. Do you know they gasped as I walked through the door? And other people were there. Marilyn was there. Jane, too, but it was me that made them gasp, and they didn’t know me then. I was still starting but it was the black hair instead of blonde, you see. It was pulled up at the sides, black curls tumbling down my back, and I wore a white kaftan with dark pink piping around the neck, and no bra. You could see the outlines of my nipples through that material, it was flimsy, I knew that when I put it on. But Charlie said “leave it” and pulled my hands away when I tried to cover myself up. I stood out. Charlie was my manager at the time but of course we were lovers as well – he took me and paraded me around like a carnival princess at some local fete. There weren’t many of us English girls over there – just me, Diana, Elizabeth of course, but she was already in a different league. I had only been over there for a year, not even that. And we had just changed my name.’

  She coughs slightly into a handkerchief. I press moisturiser into my palms again to heat it.

  ‘What was it before?’ I ask.

  ‘Mary Long. Charlie said it had no magic. I always kind of liked it. It was my great aunt’s name, and she had been a showgirl, and it was good enough for her. But Charlie changed it, along with everything else. Of course he was right, but still. My mother always called me Mary, or Marie sometimes, as did my sisters. But to everybody else I became Dolly. And Russell was Charlie’s last name. That was before we married, but still. He said, “Take it now,” so I did, and then by the time we were married I already had it, you see. There was nothing new on my wedding day, not even the ring. It was one I’d been wearing for months, that Charlie had persuaded some jeweller to give us on the cheap for some premiere or other. And Charlie slipped it off just before the ceremony, and then slipped it on again when we said, “I do.” Not every wedding is the stuff of dreams, Lulu. But I was young. I didn’t know better.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, and try not to sound sad.

  ‘I met a man at that party,’ she says. ‘He was Persian. Stank of cognac and money. He was a lot of fun that night, and he kept cracking jokes like Groucho Marx, but he was old enough to be my grandfather. His fingers were wrinkled like he’d left them in to soak. His teeth were the colour of my mother’s eggnog at Christmas. Charlie told me to be nice to him, he was investing in pictures, and big. I slept with him, for money, I think it’s fair to say. I wanted a mink and Charlie couldn’t afford it. I told the Persian that I wanted a mink, and then I slept with him, and two days later it arrived at my house in a pink box with grey tissue paper and a bow the colour of blood.’

  I rest my palms on her face and press the moisturiser in. I stand back and she looks shiny and old.

  ‘I don’t know where it’s gone, the mink. I never took to it; I think maybe I lost it when I moved to Denver. But of course, I can’t lose the memory.’

  She sits in silence. Her hands tremble at her sides.

  ‘There was one, Lulu, even that early on. It was the sex. His name was Don, like Don Juan I joked, and he was a carpenter at Universal, on the set of my first feature. Of course by then Charlie had gone back to his second wife and I was glad to be rid of him. And Universal had signed me for three pictures anyway, so I got another manager easy enough and somebody they liked as well, not a small-time chancer like Charlie. But Don opened his eyes and looked at me, Lulu, while he kissed me. He kissed me while we made love. I felt it moved him to be with me. A lot of men, they can only kiss with their eyes closed, because they are scared of what they’ll feel if they open them. But Don used to hug me at strange times. Huge unexpected hugs. He used to knock me off my feet with the things he’d say. Small things, stupid things, not poetry, he was just a carpenter, but just silly things. He wasn’t scared either, of his emotions, of being left. He was, probably, the most marvellous man I have ever known, and yet I never married him, because I never expected it to last. He died, unexpectedly, a year after I’d last seen him. It didn’t make it any less perfect. It made it perfect, in a way. He moved to New York one month for work, in the theatre can you believe? And he stayed, and it went on and on, and he never came back. There was an accident, on a set, and that was that. I certainly loved him, but then in a way I loved them all. I loved Charlie as well, he had his qualities, we had good times. Charlie and I hustled together and I wouldn’t change it, Lulu. Love isn’t such a crazy concept, you shouldn’t put it on a pedestal, or let your chap do that either. I was happy to love them all, I saw its benefits, even though I rarely stayed for long. But I learnt early on that telling somebody that you love them makes you love them, in a way. And not telling somebody that you love them makes you not love them. And now that seems obvious, to me, and that any idiot should know it. It’s a door you can open or a door you can keep closed. That’s all it is. Sometimes somebody will open it for you, but sometimes it’s shut so tight we have to do it ourselves, open it for them. Sometimes you have to say it to let yourself feel it.’

  ‘We’re done,’ I say, wiping the leftover moisturiser into my hands and wishing I’d taped everything she’d said so I could play it back to Ben in his sleep – slip the earphones on and hope he learns it all subconsciously like a foreign language, and wakes up a new man.

  She opens her eyes slowly. ‘What will you do tonight, Lulu?’ she asks me.

  ‘I’m not sure. I might hang around and go for some drinks at Gerry’s.’

  ‘You should go home. You should see your chap, Lulu. Don’t prolong the agony if you don’t have to. Be brave. A woman needs to be brave. We have too much to lose.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say, wishing she hadn’t even suggested it. ‘What will you do tonight, Dolly?’ I ask, reaching down for her bag to pass it to her.

  ‘Sleep, mostly. Of course my daughter will call – she was supposed to call last night,
but she must have got caught up, or the damned stupid hotel staff mucked up the lines again and didn’t put her through. I expect she’ll call tonight.’

  I hand her the bag, and she walks towards the door.

  ‘Tomorrow, then,’ she says, and leaves.

  I turn off the lamps, pull off the scarves because I’m afraid of fire, and duck out of the back entrance without saying goodbye to anybody else. I don’t want to get caught by Tom, he can take off his own damn make-up.

  It’s warm, early evening, five o’clock. There was a time when my five o’clocks were late. Now it seems so early, I am generally still on set, on my third glass of wine, we’ve only just finished lunch and we are kicking in for the main body of the shoot, hoping to get everything done by eleven. But I remember a time when it seemed like the end of the day, when kids were washing up for dinner and mums were burning fishfingers, and Newsround was about to come on, and then Blue Peter, and my dad would come in from work and wash his hands and sit at the table. It’s funny how quickly I grew up, and how easily I forget. My life isn’t what I thought it would be. I realise now that I thought I would be like the adults in my childhood, and that I would be the one cooking the fishfingers by now.

  I check my watch and wander down to the Evening Standard seller.

  ‘Hello,’ I say.

  ‘Thoreau?’ he responds.

  ‘No, I said hello,’ I reply.

  ‘I know. Thoreau,’ he says again.

  I sigh. ‘Sorry?’ I ask. I realise that I am too tired tonight to even think. It’s warm and a bead of sweat trickles down the back of my neck, beneath my hair, tracing my spine like that game I used to play with my brother when we were kids: ‘Does – this – make – your – blood – run – cold?’ we’d ask, pressing fingers into each other’s backs and then grabbing at each other’s necks, squealing at the inevitable shiver.

  ‘Thoreau,’ repeats the seller.

  ‘What about him?’ I ask.