Material Girl

by Louise Kean

  I smile. ‘You’re a baby,’ I say.

  ‘How old are you?’ she asks.

  ‘Thirty-one,’ I tell her with a shamed laugh, like nobody was ever this old before. Not giant tortoises, not Moses or any of his wives up on Sinai, nobody. I’m the human miracle, I’m ancient.

  She raises her eyes and clicks her gum in her mouth. ‘I thought you were, like, twenty-eight maybe. But Jennifer Aniston is thirty-seven,’ she says with a smile. I think that is supposed to make everything better, heal the world. Jennifer Aniston is thirty-seven and looking good, and we can all sleep safe in our beds tonight.

  ‘Well, I feel old,’ I say, but it’s a lie. I’m scared I look old, that’s all. I still feel stupid and ridiculous and young.

  ‘Hell, who gives a fuck about age. I don’t. I don’t care if somebody is fifteen or fifty, or, like, eighty. If I like them, I like them.’ She thrusts her splayed fingers into her hair and shakes them. It is a little messier than it was a moment ago, and she seems satisfied.

  ‘Okay, but be careful how much you like the fifteen-year-olds because they aren’t even legal …’ I reply.

  ‘Yeah, but, you know, I knew what I was doing at fifteen, and I bet you did too. Fifteen-year-olds know, I don’t care what anybody says. I knew. I had my first bra when I was, like, eleven. And did you know, in the Netherlands, or somewhere like that, the sex age is, like, twelve or something? It’s got nothing to do with the government or whatever. You’re just ready when you’re ready.’

  ‘Well if it’s legal in the Netherlands,’ I say.

  She is chewing pink gum with her mouth open, and a speck has stuck itself to the gloss on her lips. ‘Besides, nobody even cares about, like, age any more, or any of it. I’m having surgery. I’m having Botox, everything. I’m already saving for it. I’ll have my boobs done. I’ve saved three hundred pounds already. I had six hundred but then I went to Ibiza last summer. It was wicked, though, I’d definitely go again. You should go, you’d love it!’

  I don’t know how she knows that I haven’t, or assumes I haven’t at least. But it’s true.

  ‘I just have to, you know, save some more. But it’s so hard!’ She hits her forehead with her palm and screams like a little girl, and rubs it and laughs.

  ‘Fuck,’ she says, smiling, shaking her head. I don’t know what that means.

  ‘You’ll care about getting older when you get older,’ I say, ‘whether you’ve saved for surgery or not.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She shakes her head, but seriously now. I stare out at Oxford Street as we inch along, a bus to our right, a bus to our left, flanked by monster department stores and mobile-phone shops and stalls selling three brightly coloured pashminas for five pounds. It’s like the red sea parting for our cab, with buses banked on both sides, and yet streams of people are still queuing at bus stops, cold and sad. A sea of disaffected faces staring in. Isabella keeps looking at me out of the corner of her eye, squinting, really.

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘I was just looking at your mascara: sorry! Was that annoying? Sorry! I just, I don’t know how you get it to go, like, like that.’ She flicks her fingers upwards by her eyelashes.

  ‘I think it’s just my eyelashes. They just go that way. But you could use curlers, if yours are too straight …’

  ‘No, they’re cool. Or maybe I will. It’s cool.’

  She touches my hand. She has this youth glossed over her, a sheen, like our lipgloss – hers cheap, mine expensive. I don’t know what I am doing. I am bored but I’m nervous. I think about Ben, at home maybe, thinking about the zoo maybe, worrying about me maybe, wondering where I am maybe. Or not. I am on a date with somebody else. Except it really doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t feel like cheating, like it would if I were sitting here with Gavin, or Tom. I could call Ben right now and tell him I am in a cab with this girl and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

  Except maybe she doesn’t think this is a date. Maybe we are just here to talk make-up and so I can give her free eyeliner. As if reading my mind, she says, ‘I’m so glad you came. I thought you would, but I wasn’t sure. But I thought you would.’ She smiles at me and winks.

  I smile back, but terrified.

  She leans forwards, her breasts, her hair, her chipped nail varnish, her smudged eyeliner, her gloss with the chewing gum stuck to it, to kiss me.

  I jump backwards in my seat so sharply that I smash my head on the window. I scream, ‘Shit!’

  ‘What the hell?’ the cabbie asks, yanking open his dividing window.

  ‘It’s nothing, I just banged my head!’ I say, rubbing it like crazy to dull the pain.

  ‘You sure you’re all right, love, there wasn’t a bump in the road or anything,’ he says.

  Maybe not in yours, mate. Maybe not in yours.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Isabella asks, half worried, half smiling. She covers her mouth to pretend she isn’t giggling.

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry, that was stupid. I just … I just …’

  ‘Okay, okay. Composure. Be calm, breathe.’ She shakes my hand to loosen me up.

  ‘I’m calm, I’m calm,’ I say, rubbing my head.

  ‘Okay, then, can I ask you something, like, personal?’

  ‘Okay …’ I say.

  ‘Haven’t you ever kissed a woman before?’

  Immediately I think: shouldn’t that be ‘Have you ever kissed a woman before?’ Because ‘haven’t’ implies that everybody is doing it …

  ‘No, sorry, I haven’t.’

  She stares at me, eyes white and wide in disbelief.

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘No. It’s fine, you are a bit older, I guess.’

  ‘What does that mean? Older than what?’ I ask, incredulous.

  ‘Nothing, I just … So you’ve only ever kissed, like, boys? Like, men?’

  ‘Yes, why is that so hard to comprehend?’

  ‘It’s not. It is just … it’s just a bit strange. I can’t think of any of my friends, you know, who have only been with blokes … oh, hang on, maybe Charlotte. No, she was seeing Daisy for a while. Hang on …’ She sits and thinks.

  ‘But I’m straight,’ I say, as if that’s explanation enough.

  ‘Okay,’ she replies, grimacing.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, ignoring it, nodding my head so that it’s straight too.

  ‘So why are you here with me? Oh my God!’ She covers her mouth with her hand and her chipped nail-polished childish fingers. ‘Did you think we were just, like, becoming friends?’

  ‘No, I don’t know what I thought. I just thought … that I wanted to come. And that you … you remind me of me a bit.’

  ‘Oh my God! Well, at the very least you’ll have snogged a woman by the end of tonight! I feel like a teacher!’ she says, sitting up and doing a prim impersonation of Miss Jean Brodie, straightening her collar, brushing down her jeans. I noticed outside Grey’s, when she sauntered out and said ‘hello’, that she is wearing baggy jeans that are so loose they are bunched around her crotch, giving the impression of a full set of working testes. And she has gone mad with the blusher again; she is disfigured by violent streaks of red scarred across both cheeks. It makes her look a little ridiculous, like a gargoyle, but she is still young enough to carry it off.

  ‘Okay … maybe …’ I say.

  The cab turns left along Regent Street, and then right, travelling along the back of Selfridges. I wish we were going there instead, I feel lost. We pull up outside a Turkish restaurant, ‘Levant’.

  ‘I’ll get this,’ I say, and she jumps out with a grateful smile.

  When I say thank you for my receipt, the cabbie gives me a wink and says, ‘No, thank you!’

  I turn to go in but Isabella grabs me by my hands, jumping up and down like she’s just eaten too many blue Smarties.

  ‘No, wait, wait, wait. One second. So, just so I’m clear, you’ve got a boyfriend then, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, shrugging.

  ‘Okay,’ she replies
, nodding wisely. ‘Well, this should be interesting!’ Sticking her fingers in her hair and messing it up again, she turns to go in.

  ‘Okay, you hold on for one minute. So haven’t you got a boyfriend?’ I ask, confused. I just assumed that she would have.

  ‘Not really. I was seeing this guy, Rupert, but he was, like, really possessive. He didn’t want me seeing anybody else, or, you know, even kissing anybody else, and I’m just too young, you know, for that kind of commitment. And then he said we could still go out anyway, but then I said no. Because he would always be trying to control me, you know?’

  ‘But you go out, I mean you date, boys and girls? I mean, men and women?’

  ‘Yeah, of course.’

  ‘So you’re bisexual?’ I ask.

  She rolls her eyes dramatically and sighs. ‘Oh God, I don’t know. Who cares? I mean, who’s asking, really? I’m like, whoever I like, then I like. Those kinds of boxes? They are, like, for other people. I don’t think people do that any more …’ she explains sagely.

  ‘I am old!’ I say. ‘But let’s go in anyway, before it’s past my bedtime.’

  ‘We’re going to have so much fun!’ Isabella says, clapping her hands and jumping up in the air.

  I wince as her breasts jump as well, seemingly independent of the rest of her, bouncing violently towards her chin. I think she might knock herself out. We must be the same cup size and I would never jump like that, I’d be scared that I’d give myself two black eyes, or there would be an earthquake in China. But she doesn’t care. She isn’t a younger me at all. She is a thousand times less scared. I don’t know if it’s money, or breeding, or just the generation that separates us. It seems a lot happened in those years. Now it would appear that there are no boxes any more, and everybody is kissing everybody, and there is no such thing as straight or gay or bisexual, for girls at least. In London at least.

  We sit on low sofas at our table in the bar, surrounded by cushions, sipping on house wine, and picking at vine leaves and rice things, and meatballs, and we find easy small-talk in Vogue and InStyle.

  I am almost immediately hazy with the smoke, as pink clouds form and float behind my eyes – everything becomes a little woolly and confused, and I have to fight to focus. Purple and bruised sunken sofas, crumpled cushions covered in sequins. Swathes of muslin swing from the ceilings, and a belly-dancing woman, loaded with gold coins hanging from her clothing, flexes her breasts. She is actually flexing her breasts.

  ‘So what’s your boyfriend like?’ Isabella asks, pouring us more red wine.

  ‘He doesn’t love me,’ I say, almost casually now, I am so used to saying it.

  ‘Shit. Men. You know, I am just, like, learning now, that they are, like, completely rubbish. They only love the ones that are mean to them, it’s true! I bet you’re just too nice. It’s like Rupert only really liked me when I said I didn’t want to see him any more. He, like, completely freaked out, and was all, like, “But I really like you, and we have great sex and we have this connection, blah blah blah.” But it’s all horseshit. My friend Jemmy – Jemima, but we all call her Jemmy – she is so utterly, like, foul to boys, and they all just queue up for her. And she isn’t even that pretty although her arse is amazing. But she just acts like she isn’t even interested and all these boys just, like, swarm over her, like she’s honey or something. Are you gonna dump him?’

  ‘Ben?’ I ask, and two grains of sticky rice fall out of my mouth onto the table. ‘Well, it’s a bit more complicated than just “dumping” him.’

  ‘Why?’ Her eyes swell whenever she asks a question.

  ‘It just is. You’ll see, when you’ve lived with somebody, and your lives become … entwined. Somebody owns the computer, and the car, and, you know, the sofa …’

  ‘Oh, like, just stuff?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s more than that …’

  ‘Yeah, because that’s just stuff. Like, it’s not a life. It’s just things.’

  ‘Well it’s more than that – you’re used to having them around and – you’ll understand soon enough.’

  Isabella looks like she doesn’t believe me.

  ‘Okay, but when my mum and dad split up it was just because he said “Araminta, I’ve been seeing somebody else and I don’t love you any more”, and she said, “Okay, have you thought about this?”, and he said, “Absolutely”, and so she said, “Leave tonight”, and he did. And they had, like, the house in Fulham, and the house in the Cotswolds, and the chalet in Courchevel, and Poppy – that’s our mare – and, like, two cars and, you know, the business. And me and Jez and Minty and Georgie as well. But my mum still told him to leave because he didn’t love her.’

  ‘Okay. Well, that was very brave of her, but also, and no disrespect to your parents of course, but if you are that wealthy then you have a safety net and you don’t have to worry about bills and things like that, and it’s easier.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I mean my mum hadn’t worked since she was a model, since she was eighteen, and she didn’t even have, like, typing skills or anything. She couldn’t even use Excel. And the business had taken some hits, and we certainly weren’t loaded.’

  ‘You have a mare,’ I say, ‘you’re loaded.’

  ‘Not any more. Mum had to sell her to pay for Minty’s nose job.’

  Isabella takes a slug of wine to numb the pain of her lost mare or her sister’s plastic surgery, I am not sure which.

  ‘So where is he tonight? Your boyfriend?’ she asks me, forking up another meatball and forcing the whole thing into her mouth at once.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I shake my head.

  ‘God, you guys sound close.’

  ‘I know it sounds bad … but …’ I shrug and smile.

  ‘Do you love him?’

  ‘Yes, unfortunately.’ I take a hit of red wine.

  ‘You see, now that’s the complicated part,’ she says, chewing on meat, sucking the tomato sauce off her grubby fingers. ‘But I don’t think I could love somebody who didn’t love me back.’

  ‘Oh my God, of course you could. Of course you could!’ I say.

  ‘No, I mean, I couldn’t stay with them. It would be too depressing. And it would make me all, like, needy, and wanting to talk to them about it all the time, you know? You know when women get like, all, why doesn’t he love me, blah, blah, cry, cry? How fucking depressing! I would hate that. Like, you know, a victim?’

  I don’t say anything, because I am nearly choking on the vine leaf in my mouth.

  ‘You know what? Us being here, it, like, completely makes sense. I’ve seen you every time you’ve come in, I think. And I couldn’t believe it when you said we should go out, because you are so glamorous. You are so beautiful.’ She touches my face with a tomato-stained finger.

  I wince.

  ‘Don’t you like me doing that?’

  ‘I’m just not used to it,’ I say, shrugging stiffly.

  ‘You mean from girls?’ she asks, doing it again. I force myself to keep my eyes open and not pull backwards.

  ‘No, I mean, at all.’

  ‘Doesn’t your boyfriend tell you you’re beautiful?’

  ‘No. Although he did describe me as his Jag XK8 once.’

  ‘Like, a car?’

  ‘Not like a car. It is a car.’

  ‘Why did he call you a car?’

  ‘He was being nice. It’s his favourite car. It’s his dream car. He was being lovely.’

  ‘Like, when rappers say that girls remind them of Jeeps, like that?’

  ‘I don’t know, Isabella, but I think he was being nice.’

  ‘Why couldn’t he just tell you you’re beautiful?’

  ‘You know what, he really was being nice. I can’t attack him for that.’

  ‘Okay, but I think you are expecting way too little. If that was the nicest thing that my boyfriend said to me, well. He wouldn’t be my boyfriend.’ She leans back and rubs her belly, bloating out her cheeks, without vanity.

  ‘You
’re not scared, are you, Isabella. Of anything. Of being alone?’ I say, staring at her. She’s like a well of honesty.

  ‘No. I like being on my own sometimes. Like, sometimes I just have to be, for a while, to even think.’

  ‘But I mean of being alone permanently. Not getting married, not having kids.’

  ‘No, I’m not scared of that. Why should I be?’ she says, shaking her head.

  ‘I’m just trying to remember how I was, eight years ago. No, I still think I wanted babies and marriage.’

  ‘But why? Why them and not other stuff?’ she asks, considering the rice and meat remnants on the plates in front of us, deciding whether any of it is worth eating. She prods things with her fork.

  ‘Because that’s what I want. What I thought most women wanted. Or I thought I wanted … Or …’

  ‘Oh, okay, is that why you’re with your bloke, when he calls you a car, because you’re scared of being on your own?’

  ‘He was being nice. The car thing, he really was being nice.’

  ‘Well I think he should be able to say more than that. He’s not, like, eighty. Is he?’

  ‘No, he’s not eighty.’ I shake my head and sigh. Why does everybody keep asking me if he is ancient?

  ‘You should definitely dump him. And you shouldn’t worry, Scarlet, about being on your own, if you don’t want to be. Look at you. You’re beautiful.’

  ‘I don’t feel beautiful. I feel false, and made up, and unreal, and a fraud.’

  ‘Well …’ She moves a strand of hair away from my face, tucking it behind my ear. ‘I think you are glorious,’ she says.

  ‘And I think you’re lovely,’ I say back, and smile.

  She leans forwards to kiss me.

  I throw myself backwards so violently that I fall into the lap of a guy on the next sofa. My head lands in his groin, and I find myself staring up at his chin. I am flailing in a strange position, my stomach muscles too weak to hoist me back up. The guy inhales on his strawberry pipe deeply, exhales through his nose, and says, ‘Either that’s a woman in my lap or I can’t take my hubbly bubbly!’