Who's That Girl?

by Mhairi McFarlane

  The Peacock was at the bottom of Mansfield Road. She could walk home from here. Through the gathering dusk and noise of a Friday night that was only getting started for everyone else, Edie trudged the streets of her youth, past antique shops, a Caribbean food store, newsagents, real ale pubs, and some kind of strange empty-looking place apparently selling ballerina costumes and stick-on moustaches. Men cat-called her from a fried chicken shop doorway and she grimly ignored them.

  Somewhere right now in London, everyone she worked with was massing in the Italian wine bar, gleefully ripping her to shreds, while she was up here, banished from the kingdom, despised. She felt bad Nottingham was associated with so much torment and exile, but honestly, who could blame her? The words from the rabble on that thread haunted her. Was she really a grotesque predator? Perhaps this was what it was like to have a mirror held up to you, and hear other people describe what they saw.

  When she’d finished wrestling her key in the lock, Meg was waiting for her in the hallway. She wore an expression which almost made Edie laugh, even in this dark hour: chin tucked down, glowering from under her brow, cheeks puffed out with righteous indignation. It was so incredibly similar to stroppy child Meg, and gave Edie a pang of maternal love. Then, she twigged that this was no humorous simulation of childhood tantrums. Meg was blazing.

  ‘You APOLOGISED FOR ME? How DARE YOU?’

  ‘Wha—?’

  ‘That old Nazi next door starts giving me shit again and says oh and your sister says you’ll stop getting your suck sacks out blah blah and I was like WHAT and she says you WENT to TALK to HER and SAY I WAS SORRY? Could you BE a bigger traitor?’

  ‘Megan, what’s all this bloody squawking!’ Edie’s dad called from the front room.

  ‘I didn’t say that, I asked her not to call the police …’

  ‘You didn’t say we wouldn’t go topless?’

  ‘I said you probably wouldn’t …’

  ‘Oh my God, why are you such a cow?!’ Meg shouted, clearly having worked herself into a state where no explanation from Edie would be good enough anyway. ‘You had to go straight round and start making me sound the bad person, when she had a go at us for no reason. Just because you’re so uptight you secretly agree with her!’

  ‘Meg,’ Edie said, feeling a volcanic bubble-up of rage she had no ability to quell, ‘JUST FUCK OFF AND LEAVE ME ALONE. FOREVER.’

  Her volume momentarily stalled Meg. Edie roughly pushed past her and bombed up the stairs, chest heaving, and slammed her bedroom door with enough vicious force she guessed her dad would leave it at least an hour before daring to approach her. Sod it, sod them all – she was going to have to move out, this was disastrous.

  Edie looked around her shabby room, and her not-fully-unpacked case on the floor, a signifier of her feelings for sure.

  She flopped on to her bed, face down, and discovered she didn’t have the energy to cry. Instead she wondered, if she took too many aspirin and waited to slide away, how many people she’d hurt. Her dad. Meg, she supposed. Although she’d consider it as the all-time attention grab one-upmanship. Hannah. Nick. Richard. A pretty small number, for someone who’d reached thirty-five years of age.

  The thing about her reputation, she finally accepted – it was like Elliot’s anonymity. She’d given it away and she was never getting it back.

  23

  ‘You have to eat,’ was one of those stupid admonishments, Edie thought. Like the way, whenever anyone said: ‘There’s nothing worse than …’ they always named something there were tons of things worse than.

  You don’t have to eat, as long as you’re not in the grip of dangerous disorder and food is available when you need it. You can get by on barely eating perfectly well.

  And Edie had no appetite. Whenever she faced a plate of food, her stomach would knot in the misery of the memory of that online conversation. She even went back and forth over some of the lurid claims: she was throwing herself at every man? Could that be true, even if she thought it wasn’t? Was she throwing without knowing?

  Either way, there were undoubtedly many more people in the world who hated her than loved her; a startling thought. She was partly denying herself as punishment. As one of society’s repulsive creatures, she was subsisting on a monstrous diet of forkfuls of Meg’s ‘Chickpea and Orange Gumbo’ (beyond unpleasant, an aggressive act), ‘Seitan and Date Curry’ (a culinary date with Satan), and the odd packet of barbecue- flavour Hula Hoops.

  The only person she didn’t want to notice her ‘nil by mouth’ was her dad. He no doubt thought her wan appearance and palpable misery were to do with having to be at home, which upset her. Edie could explain, but what comfort was there in him hearing that story? The idea made her skin crawl.

  When putting on a brave face for his sake, she tried to fix her sights on a horizon where she’d be happier. Back in London, at a different agency, maybe she’d meet someone. And the wedding story would be nothing more than an occasional flinch when someone she’d never met before said, ‘That was YOU?’ after it passed into urban legend.

  She and Meg weren’t speaking. The temperature inside the house had plummeted to new lows. She suspected Meg had a calendar in her room with the weeks crossed off until Edie left.

  On a warm day in the garden, when Meg was mercifully at the care home and her dad was in the spare room marking exam papers (he still did work for the Open University), Edie was sat in the garden, waiting for her next call from Elliot’s PA, reading a crime novel, trying to convince herself it could be worse. A murderer could be after her. She was failing: she’d take the Silent Skinner over Lucie Maguire, any day.

  A head appeared over the fence. ‘Where’s my book, then?’

  It was the Ken Dodd-like woman, Meg’s nemesis. Edie had hoped she’d forget about this. Meg’s wrath if she caught Edie sneaking across to the neighbours’ didn’t bear thinking about. She had also sussed this woman was a hardcore eccentric, and from her recycling bottle collection, the sort of person who Richard codenamed a ‘possibly volatile liquid’.

  ‘Er. Do you definitely want to see it?’

  ‘I said I did. Or are you backing out of our arrangement? I didn’t call the Dibble on your sister.’

  Edie, despite herself, smiled at ‘Dibble’. The woman was holding on to the fence posts and staring at her beadily, expectantly. Edie had a stab of sensing the woman was lonely. Edie’s visit was a bigger deal to her than she realised.

  ‘I could come round now?’ she said.

  ‘Now is fine,’ said the woman, and disappeared behind the fence.

  Edie took her sunglasses from her head and walked through the house, collecting her laptop from the kitchen on the way. Hmm, should she tell her dad where she was going? It’d implicate him, if Meg asked. She checked her watch. Meg wouldn’t be home for hours yet. Best to slip round and slide back, unobserved.

  She knocked next door with her laptop under her arm and felt foolish. The woman answered.

  ‘Hi! It’s Margaret, isn’t it?’

  ‘Margot!’

  ‘Margot, sorry. I’m Edie.’

  ‘Yes. You said before. I thought I was meant to be the barmy forgetful old biddy.’ Margot was dressed in a mohair top that made her look like a giant white rabbit, and black swishy silk palazzo trousers. She had a very full face of make-up, and the ever-present fag on.

  Edie tightly smile-grimaced and thought bejeez, this is going to be hard work. The interior of the woman’s house was infused with the warm scent of tobacco, a surprisingly anachronistic smell now. The décor couldn’t have been more different to the threadbare middle-class retired academia look next door. The carpets were thick and pale powdery pink, the light fittings tear-drop chandeliers.

  Edie was led into the front room, which had a giant flat- screen television and two rather beautiful grey and yellow budgies chirruping and hopping about in a domed cage. Some very flouncy cream-gold curtains with frilly pelmets were held back with tasselled tie-backs. There were funn
y sort of ornaments dotted about: a crystal ball with LED lights inside it, and a small plastic-looking tree with metal leaves. Edie had a feeling they all came from catalogues she wouldn’t know existed. There was a vase of stargazer lilies, petals turning ochre-yellow and a shower of pollen dust collecting beneath.

  Margot sat in a chair by the electric fireplace, a swan-shaped ashtray, a glass and a bottle of Martell cognac next to her. She didn’t appear to have started consuming the daily dose, but Edie couldn’t be sure.

  She gingerly lowered herself on to an overstuffed peach sofa and said: ‘If I open my laptop I can show you …’

  Edie had selected a page of absolutely bog-standard background detail on Elliot, material that had almost entirely been drawn from elsewhere, reworked to avoid any claim of passing off, and zero risk if Margot called the Mail with it.

  ‘Oh,’ Margot waved a claw-like hand, with a fan of bones that stood out like piano strings. ‘I can’t see that tiny thing, dear. You’ll have to read it.’

  Edie adjusted herself on the sofa and thought teenage-resentful thoughts; this is so weird and why do I have to do this.

  ‘It’s quite scrappy and draft stage, so forgive me.’

  Edie cleared her throat and started reading. Oh dear, it looked flat enough on the page. Read aloud, Jackanory style, it was truly thin stuff. It was then that Elliot discovered a refuge in acting … parents had hoped he might prefer law and medicine but soon saw what it meant to him … blah blah Artful Dodger … blah blah the smell of the greasepaint.

  In mild embarrassment at the tedium, Edie didn’t look up until she was interrupted by a funny wheezy noise. She glanced up to see Margot had nodded off.

  No manners – but what a critic.

  For a moment, Edie thought she was doing it for effect. Nope.

  ‘Margot?’ she said. ‘Margot!’

  The woman snapped awake and looked at her, then let go of an anarchic whoop of a cackle. ‘Oh dear! Oh Sorry! I just drifted off … and I asked you to read it. Oh dear, hahaha.’

  Edie smiled and tried not to be offended.

  ‘It’s a bit banal, though, darling, isn’t it? Is he really that dull? What a shame. All trousers and no mouth. Where is the hell-raising? Where are the anecdotes?’

  Edie felt a little stung on Elliot’s behalf.

  ‘He’s not boring. I think he’s just very guarded about what he can say because he’s got so famous.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He could get into trouble.’

  ‘With who?’

  ‘Uh … The press could take things out of context.’

  ‘So give them context. You’re the writer, doll face.’ Margot peered at her. ‘You do have a doll face. Are you married? Stepping out?’

  ‘No and no.’

  ‘Good for you. Marriage is a terrible mistake.’

  Margot leaned closer and Edie held her stomach in a bit, feeling self-conscious.

  ‘You’re young and beautiful, why not have a go at this boy while you’re at it? Might liven him up. Or is he a homosexual? Sadly true of so many of the exquisite ones.’

  Edie laughed at this.

  ‘I’m not young, I’m thirty-five,’ Edie said. ‘Or beautiful, but thank you for saying so.’

  Margot tapped her cigarette into the ashtray.

  ‘What a shame. You won’t believe it until it’s too late. Don’t waste the young and beautiful years being anxious, darling. There’s plenty of old and ugly ones coming.’

  Edie laughed politely again.

  ‘I was an actress,’ Margot said.

  ‘Were you?’ Edie said, politely and disbelievingly, wanting to leave again. What if the woman was full-tilt fantasist barmy?

  ‘Not a good one,’ Margot said, ‘I was rather crummy. But I looked bloody good doing it, darling.’

  Edie smiled.

  ‘Were you in anything I’d have heard of?’

  ‘I doubt it, you’re too young. I’ve got a photo of a show, here … The Girl Upstairs, it was called. It was a farce. You don’t really have them now. Unless you count your sister’s antics.’

  Margot stood up, momentarily like a faun on new legs, steadied herself and picked up a framed black-and-white photo on top of a drinks cabinet.

  ‘This was a promotional, you know, to publicise it. We toured all over the country.’

  Edie took it from Margot’s mottled hands. ‘Is that you?’ she said, knowing she sounded incredulous, and that disbelief was slightly rude.

  ‘It was 1958, so I’d be twenty-seven.’

  ‘What was your name? Did you have a stage name, I mean?’

  ‘No, I used my own name, Margot Howell. My agent wanted me to change it, I think I probably should have.’

  Woah. Margot looked astonishing.

  Edie wanted to effuse, without being insulting. She mentally scored out her first two reactions: you look so young! and you were so beautiful! She settled on: ‘What an incredible picture.’

  Margot wasn’t a bit pretty, back in the day. She was full on, sixties French chanteuse crossed with Avengers-era Diana Rigg’s knock-out gorgeous.

  The cheekbones, that remained fearsome in the present day, and the huge swivelling eyes had looked wonderfully sultry in her youth. Young Margot gazed out at the camera through whirlpools of dark eyeliner, her features set off to great effect by a thick black fringe, the rest of her hair worn up.

  She was wearing a fitted black cocktail dress with a scoop neck, pulled tight under the bust into an eye-wateringly tiny waist. She had slender legs, pinched together daintily, and held a cigarette aloft. Fagging had been a lifelong love, clearly.

  Men in tuxedos posed clustered around her, proffering lighters. It was such a well composed, glamorous scene it deserved to be one of those posters that end up in every halls of residence bedroom: like the Parisian kiss or Marilyn on the grate.

  ‘I love this!’ Edie said, half sighing.

  ‘Those were the days,’ Margot said.

  She took the picture from Edie and replaced it on the cabinet, and Edie had a sense she was quietly gratified by her reaction. Edie couldn’t help feel operatically sad for Margot that she’d once been so dazzling, and was now stuck here with two budgies for company.

  Edie’s phone rang and she was guiltily pleased to have an excuse to leave.

  ‘It’s my dad,’ she said to Margot, ‘I better take it.’

  Margot nodded.

  ‘Your actor. It seems to me it’s his book and his name is on it and he could put what the blinking heck he pleases in it.’

  Edie nodded back, and answered her phone.

  24

  Edie ran into her dad in their hallway, so he was saying: ‘Whatever are you there for?’ into his phone to her as she faced him.

  They switched off simultaneously.

  ‘Dad, don’t tell Meg I went to see Margot, will you?’

  ‘That old sociopath?’ her dad said.

  ‘Not a nice way to talk about my sister,’ Edie said, doing a thumbs up.

  ‘Why would you visit her?’

  Edie decided to gloss over the bit with the tits, cannabis and threats to call the police.

  ‘She wanted to read my book. Did you know she used to be an actress?’

  ‘She must be going Method on the part of a histrionic old brandy-sodden harpy, then. The slanging matches we’ve had about the state of the front garden. I think she thinks she’s living in the Versailles of north Nottingham. Either her eyesight or her mind’s seriously going, if so.’

  ‘Shhh,’ Edie said, conscious the walls weren’t that thick.

  ‘Hah, really,’ her dad said. ‘The woman is not upsettable. Would that I could.’

  ‘She’s scandalous but she’s quite … enlivening. And honest.’

  ‘Hmm. Truthful and wise are not the same thing.’

  Edie’s phone rang again and she saw Richard’s name.

  ‘Ah, work,’ she said, bounding up the stairs with her heart thudding.

 
; ‘Hi, Edie? Some bad news, I’m afraid. The book project is cancelled.’

  ‘What? Why?’ Edie was shocked, and oddly bereft, as she closed her bedroom door behind her. She’d never wanted the job but now it was hers, and it had been snatched away.

  ‘The “talent”, as we’re probably ironically calling him, has changed his mind again. Ac-turds, eh.’

  Edie hard-swallowed and said: ‘He seemed fine with it when I last saw him …’

  ‘Oh no one’s saying you did anything wrong. The good news is, they’ll pay a hefty chunk of the fee for mucking you around. All’s well that almost ends well. Now, we need to have a one-to-one meeting and decide how best to reintegrate you into civilised society down here. Jack Marshall and I came to a grown-up agreement that he should gift his singular talents to another agency.’

  Edie sagged. ‘And she lost Jack his job’ would be the view of the Lucie coven.

  ‘So it’s down to how you and Charlotte can make this work. I have no doubt you can.’

  ‘Richard,’ Edie said, tremulous, ‘it’s not going to be possible. She absolutely loathes me.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not someone she’d choose as birthing partner or executor of her will right now, but everything is surmountable, especially when people want to keep being paid their salary. I will host a peace-making chat between the three of us that will be brief, to the point, and entirely tears-free. Unless they’re my tears.’

  Edie almost wailed ‘No!’ and bit it back. This was her boss. She’d brought him all this aggro. Still, there was no way she was standing in a room with Charlotte ever again, if she could help it. The thought of returning to that agency … It would be like a kindly headmaster making them shake hands in his study, but the playground would be an entirely different matter.

  ‘I will suggest to Charlotte that if this is something she can resolve in a marriage then it’s something she can resolve in the workplace.’