Material Girl

I gasp. Tristan nods his head seriously.

‘Although they had been involved for barely three months they were being too indiscreet, and news had reached her husband, the world-famous director Sir Terence Till. Sir Terence placed an outraged and irate long-distance call from a set in Egypt telling Joanna to behave. Teddy at least had the decency to turn the gun on himself afterwards, aiming straight through his heart as well. So the strange little play’s curtain failed to rise the following night, as both the leads’ hearts were streaked across a dressing-room wall.’

I look around urgently – ‘Not this room, Tristan? Not these walls?’ – feeling a cold chill run down my spine, the kind you get when you are a kid and somebody pokes out the game ‘Does-this-make-your-blood-run-cold?’, finishing with a grab on the back of your neck. I shudder.

‘It’s possible,’ he says, seriously, ‘it’s very possible. Anyway, controversy courted The Majestic again six years later, in November 1974, when a performance of Hair so shocked a four-hundred-pound Presbyterian Texan banker that he suffered a massive heart attack in the second row. The banker died, and so did the show, after two months and below-average ticket sales, even for The Bridesmaid.’

‘We should move to another venue,’ I say earnestly, nodding my head, ready to pack up my things and dust off the bad luck I can feel settling in on me and Tristan as we sit for too long in one place in this cursed theatre.

‘Too late, the tickets have been sold, Make-up. Then, in 1981, as a protest against the Falklands war, some of the younger members of the cast of The Iceman Cometh – the ones blessed with better bodies and less inhibition – seized the opportunity to host a naked sit-in on the stage of The Majestic. It quickly descended into a televised orgy that had to be disbanded by policemen in plastic gloves. It was the sight of the gloves that my mum, actually, remembered from the six o’clock news that evening. She hadn’t spotted the blink-and-you-missed-it glimpse of an erect penis on television, the first to officially appear on UK terrestrial TV, according to The Guinness Book of Records. But she saw the gloves. Typical mum, ha!’ he says, shaking his head affectionately.

‘So then The Majestic closed, again, for refurbishment in 1989, looking sad and tired, and in desperate need of a facelift, Botox, any and all kinds of surgery that might be on offer. It reopened in 1995, polished and tightened, but some say lacking some of its old character.’

‘I wish you hadn’t told me the shooting bit,’ I say, looking around me feeling creepy, ‘I’m going to have trouble going to the kitchen on my own now.’

‘Stop it, Make-up, you’re a grown woman. So! That brings us up-to-date. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, starring Dolly Russell, and directed by me, Tristan Mitra, will mark her return to the London stage for the first time in eighteen years!’ Tristan swirls on the spot and claps his hands like he’s just finished conducting a big band.

‘And, so, what about Dolly?’ I ask, exasperated.

‘Oh yes, of course, Dolly. What can I tell you about Dolly Russell? Other than that she drugged the last Make-up? Ha! Don’t be put off by that! It just shows guile. Well,’ he hushes his voice to a low murmur, to a purr, ‘I don’t know how old she is … maybe seventy-two, maybe sixty-eight, it’s hard to say. But she hasn’t been on stage for over fifteen years. I’ve barely had her up there yet, without some screaming match or tantrum or silent seething fit. And that’s just me. Ha.’

He picks up my large powder brush. Its bristles still sparkle silver from my last job on Friday, glistening up dancers for the cover of a disco album – two emaciated eighteen-year-old girls who ate half a bag of crisps each on a twelve-hour shoot. Tristan dusts his face with it lightly, breathing in while he does. He leans towards me and, with serious intent, dusts my cheeks with it too. I step back a little, against the counter. He stares at me. I realise that I am his new Girls World. I just hope he doesn’t try to cut my hair with nail scissors.

‘The light in here is really bad,’ I say, embarrassed, ‘it’s far too dark.’

‘Shush,’ he says, and moves my arms that I have crossed against my chest back down to my sides, like a shop mannequin.

‘She didn’t get her Oscar until she was thirty-three, for The Queen Wants a King. Have you seen it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

He picks up another brush, flicks it against his palm, and puts it down again. I want to tell him to stop now but I don’t.

‘It’s very good. It’s the only role I’ve seen her in with no vanity. Isn’t that ironic? They demand she be painted and pretty at all times but they give her an Oscar for being plain, as if being ugly were such an impossible task for her that they had to reward it … Do you think it’s harder to be beautiful or plain, Make-up? I mean, in the mornings, how long does it take you? Because you’re a beauty, but I can tell it needs a little work now. A little more effort than it was five years ago, right?’

‘Maybe a little,’ I say, cringing at the thought of the price of my night cream, and my day cream, and my paraffin cleanser.

‘And a little more moisturiser than before? A little more time spent slicking away at those laughter lines?’ He picks up a tub of thick cream, and scoops a dessert spoonful onto the back of his hand. He sticks a deliberate finger into it and draws it out slowly, so that a dollop sits clumsily on its end. Reaching out, he takes my arm, and absent-mindedly smears the cream up and down my skin, rubbing it in smoothly as he traces the veins from my wrist to my elbow with his finger. He holds my arm firmly at the wrist with his other hand. I don’t pull away but I feel that if I did he would grip it a little tighter, a little firmer, and resist. I am being seduced by a man with no interest in sex. I am certain he knows the effect that he has.

‘But it’s still worth it of course, all the effort, isn’t it? It’s still worth the lingering looks on the tube, and the glances that you notice as you walk down the street, the smiles and the winks. The men who can’t turn away, who will picture you later, picture you tonight, think of you instead of their dowdy other halves. These men who think you’re out of their league, who would love to have a piece of you, an afternoon slice of you with their tea. It’s worth that extra twenty minutes in the morning, isn’t it, for the approval, isn’t it, Make-up?’

Tristan dips his little finger into a pot of thick sticky silver glitter. It’s not mine, I don’t know what it is used for. Starlight Express maybe? When he removes his finger the glitter is dripping off it like honey fresh from the pot trickling off Pooh’s paws. Nearby, maybe two or three rooms away, a woman is singing ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ soft and high. It feels like midnight.

‘Absolutely,’ I whisper. He leans towards me again. With one hand on my shoulder for balance, he raises himself up onto his toes so that we are face to face as he smudges the glitter across my lower lip with his little finger. I find it impossible to believe that he has no libido. Maybe it’s a rumour that he has spread himself as a cunning plan, like the men who tell women they are gay so that they will let them fondle their breasts. Or was it just me that fell for that, late one night in Gerry’s? (When should I start to worry that the extent of my experience is ‘late one night in Gerry’s’?) And I’ve done far worse than that.

‘She’s been married four times,’ Tristan says, still staring at me but rubbing his hands together to get rid of the last drops of cream and glitter, ‘and has one daughter, whom she never sees – I think she might live in upstate New York near her dad, Dolly’s third husband, I believe, the actor Peter Deakin. He did a lot horror stuff, he was the wolf man for a while. I think the daughter’s name is Chloe, but she’ll tell you if she wants to. And when you meet her, when you meet Dolly, you’ll realise she must have been quite something, way back when.’

He reaches for a tissue and wipes his hands, before tossing it casually on the floor, and I lean down to pick it up and throw it in the bin.

Tristan smiles and says ‘control, I see’ when I do this. I shrug and smile an apology.

He looks at himself in the mirror, touching his hair lightly, straightening his jacket, flicking a speck of white something off his collar.

‘Your bloke,’ he says, still looking at himself. ‘A bit of a monster, is he? A bit of a hound?’

‘Not at all, not a monster. Just … disinterested … not as enthusiastic as I’d like him to be.’

‘Ah, but is he disinterested in life as well?’

‘No. There are things that he likes, that he loves – PlayStation games, and childish films and things …’

‘Do you think he’s being cruel to you?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ I thrust my hands into my hair and deliberately mess it up. It’s supposed to be messed up, that’s the look that I want. Not too polished. Black eyes and gloss and messy hair. I like the drama of it – it counteracts my reality.

‘So it’s not deliberate, this disinterest, it’s not controlling?’

‘No, I just think … he’s gone off me, maybe … or …’

‘You think about it a lot, don’t you? You talk about it a lot. I’ve only just met you, this is the second conversation we’ve had, and we’re talking about it again … does that seem a little strange, a little self-involved, if you stop and think about it?’

I don’t know how to explain to Tristan that it is what we do these days: figure out ways to be perfect. Isn’t that the point? Talk about it and thrash it out and pull your life apart, tear it into pieces to find the bits that don’t work and try and toss them out and put it back together. Every TV show that we watch and get hooked on and cry in front of and that exposes all our faults has made pop psychologists out of all of us, hasn’t it? That’s what we do now! Rip ourselves apart to find the flaws. I don’t know who I am supposed to be obsessed with, if not myself? And if I’m not obsessed with anybody, or anything, then what will I do with all that thinking time on the tube or the bus, or staring off into space while I stir my Alpen? I hear talk of people who ‘let things go’, who say ‘fuck it’ to diets and their hair and their relationships and love. But that’s just propaganda, surely? I don’t know anybody who actually lives like that. Nobody really feels like enough any more, do they? Not here at least. And now Tristan is saying I am obsessed with my love life, but who else is there to be obsessed with it, if not me? Certainly not Ben!

‘Well, it’s a big deal when you’re going through it, maybe the biggest thing. And anyway, you brought it up this time, Tristan.’

‘Yes I did, didn’t I? I wonder if you are just trying to muster up the courage? To say goodbye? If you are slowly putting yourself back onto the market, before it’s too late. It’s not too late yet, Make-up, they’ll still fall at those pointed heels of yours.’

‘I don’t know about that, I … God, I don’t know, I don’t want to think about it like that, I just want to work it out with Ben.’

‘But clearly he doesn’t love you, or he loves somebody else, somebody new, perhaps? Or somebody still?’ He looks at me in the mirror, and sees my mouth fall open.

I wonder if it is Tristan who is being cruel. He has stumbled over my darkest fears almost straight away, but it feels like he is toying with me. There is a camp menace to him, like Hannibal Lecter playing with make-up brushes. I sit back a little further in my seat in case he decides to take a quick and sudden bite out of my nose.

‘I guess I’m just trying to work it all out, in my own head,’ I say.

‘Do you have any proof?’ he asks, matter-of-factly.

‘Of what?’

‘Of infidelity, adultery – that your man is ripping at the flesh of another?’

‘Yes. I think so, anyway. I found a text from his ex, saying that she couldn’t meet him as arranged ‘later that night’, with a kiss. And he told me that was the night he was going out with his mate. But when I confronted him he wasn’t even angry that I had checked his phone, he just seemed relieved that I believed him when he said it was a mistake. She meant to send it to somebody else, he said. It didn’t actually have his name in it, so I believed him. But I shook and cried for fifteen minutes.’

‘So you don’t trust him at all?’

Tristan watches himself as he thrusts out his Adam’s apple, and his crotch as well, as he talks. He juts out those parts of him that make him a man, but then counters it with a strange swish of his hand, or lightness of touch. It all seems very deliberate, experimental. He is trying to find the moves that work.

‘I would trust him, if he could just articulate how he felt, sometimes, about me, but he never does. I feel terrible for not trusting him sometimes. I don’t know what goes on in his head.’

‘Nor he yours, I’m guessing. And don’t feel terrible yet, you might be right! But he told you once? I mean, you fell for him once?’

‘He started, but then he stopped. He kind of drew me in, then closed the door. But it’s as if I’m halfway through …’

‘Your leg is caught in his door?’

‘Something like that, I suppose.’ I laugh sharply.

‘Ha! And you don’t know whether it will hurt more to try and push the door open, or tear your leg back out!’ Tristan folds and unfolds the cuffs on his polo-neck jumper.

‘Well …’ He takes a deep breath and finally looks away from the mirror,

‘I need to think about this one some more. The only thing I can offer, from my twisted perspective, love, is that what makes a woman of forty more attractive than a girl of eighteen is not her body but her confidence. Don’t fold, Make-up. Don’t dither. Toughen up. Let’s have some fun.’

‘I’m thirty-one. I’m not forty,’ I say, as I feel stupid tears rush to my eyes.

‘I didn’t say that you were, Make-up. Now, how do you feel about nudity?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nudity, how do you feel about it, and in particular cast session nudity?’

‘Uncomfortable pretty much sums it up.’

‘But what if it were just me? You see, I’ve been body-brushing with a toothbrush recently, rather than following any traditional bathing ritual, and I wonder if it doesn’t give me a shine that I’d like to share. I’ve been reading a lot about Major General Charles Orde Wingate, heard of him?’

‘Well, Tristan, I can’t say that I have …’ The tears recede and I can’t help but smile.

‘Churchill described him as a man of genius, who might have become a man of destiny. But he died, in a burning crash of a plane, in Burma. 1944.’

‘Okay … and he used to conduct sessions in the nude?’

‘Hmm? Yes, yes, he did. Of course his were with soldiers, but I think there might be something in it. Strip away our pretensions, make us real, cut to the chase. Beauty is truth after all. If we were all a little nude, once a day, the world would be a much less violent place. I know it’s a fucking cliché but I believe it. Of course there is always the danger that somebody is going to become unspeakably aroused, but that doesn’t really affect me … Do you know he inflicted some terrible defeats on his enemies, on the invincible Japanese! And he believed the best way to survive tropical heat was a diet of raw onions.’

‘Have you tried that as well?’

‘Yes, I tried. It gets tropical in Streatham in August. But it gave me terrible flatulence. I was like a human wind machine, and the stench! It is impossible to function when you are terrified to be in small spaces, afraid of what your own body might inflict upon those around you … I couldn’t be in here, right now, with you, if I were still doing it. Of course sometimes it was wonderfully amusing, it depended on the company. In lifts, hilarious! Inevitably it was my mother that made me stop. She’s a wonderful woman but with little tolerance for anything other than her own peculiar rituals. It’s nothing to do with her legs, she’s just that way.’

‘Her legs?’ I ask.

‘They barely work any more,’ he replies, nodding.

I remember reading in the Standard that he lives with his mother in Streatham, and that she is disabled, but I can’t remember how it happened.

‘Why don’t they work?’ I ask, trying my best to seem sincere and not just nosey.

‘She has a tumour, Make-up, that is pressing down on her spinal cord, and is hard for them to reach without risking complete paralysis. She says that she is lucky, of course, that it has only affected the lower half of her body, but that’s bullshit. She’s a religious woman, and I thank God that she is, even though of course I don’t believe in it at all.’

I want to say, ‘But you’ve just thanked God’, but decide that now isn’t the time.

‘So she fell over one day and never got up. Dad’s dead, so that’s that. She’s going nowhere, and she cooks a wonderful lamb curry, and …’ He nods his head quietly, and squeezes his eyes shut.

I don’t know what else to say, so I change the subject. ‘Do you think Dolly might be here soon, Tristan?’

He presses the balls of his palms into the sockets of his eyes. ‘I fucking hope so, love, otherwise we’ll never open!’ he shouts, and whips away his hands to clap loudly, spinning in a full circle and biting his lower lip with his teeth, thrusting his groin back and forth like a 1970s porn star, like some second-rate Russ Meyer gyrating horror.

‘Are you okay then?’ he asks me.

‘Yes, but I think I need biscuits.’

‘Kitchen’s down the hall, didn’t bouncy Gavin show you?’

‘He told me, I’ll find it, it’s fine.’

‘Lovely Gavin, I have to remind myself that he’s not, you know, slow … simple, retarded, him being so big. But he’s sharp as a tack really. Acid-tongued. I like it. It keeps me on my toes.’

‘Okay, well I’m going to go and find those biscuits I think.’

‘Good for you, but just the one, mind! Keep your chin up, Make-up. Stop thinking about your bloke if you can. We aren’t worth it!’ He throws me a huge grin – he doesn’t believe that for a second.

‘I’ll try,’ I say, and edge past him to leave. He trots off in the other direction, singing what sounds like ‘Anything Goes’ segued into ‘Let’s Get It On’.

I edge down a grey hallway, in and out of the patches of dirty light cast by infrequent and dim bulbs, speeding up through the strange shadowy spots that make me nervous with Tristan’s talk of shootings and blood-spattered walls. My heels clicking on the hard cold floor announce me to any potential murderers or psychopaths or evil spirits lurking behind dark doorways: they’ll hear me coming and be fully prepared to leap out and grab me, pull me into the darkness with them, smother my face and paw me to near death. I am convinced that’s what will happen. I make this daily exhibition of myself, in my heels and my skirts and my gloss, and I put myself on show even though I know that it is dangerous. I don’t go unnoticed, and it’s a cracked-up world. Soho is full of loners and losers, producers and pirates, prostitutes and pimps, directors and producers and more producers. Everybody claiming to produce something, so where is it all? I click my way into everybody’s view, and it’s a perilous route to take. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one with the biggest audience, and that has made all the difference. My heels tap out ‘look at me, look at me, look at me’, and by the way please note that I won’t be able to run that fast in three and a half inch stilettos. It is as if I have accepted my fate. I’ll be strangled with my own sparkly scarf, a victim of my own need to be appreciated in a world full of crazies.

In a badly lit 1970s kitchen that is dusted in crumbs I hunt through grubby cupboards for some Digestives or Rich Tea.

‘Can I help?’

Someone is lurking in the doorway behind me and I freeze, one arm in the cupboard, precariously reaching out on tiptoes back to the furthest corners, looking for the good biscuits that have been scrupulously hidden.

What if I just don’t turn around?

‘Can I help you?’ he says again, but louder this time, and yet I sense he doesn’t move an inch, he doesn’t come and reach for the biscuits for me. He doesn’t really mean to help. What he means is ‘turn around and let me see you’.

I rest my weight back onto my heels and drop my arms in exhaustion. I recognise his voice. I don’t want to turn around.

‘I was just trying to find some biscuits.’ I address the Cortina-beige wall in front of me.

There is a dramatic pause, so dramatic it would be noted in a script and the audience might be fooled into holding their breath. I hold mine …

‘I know you,’ he says, quietly, evenly, ‘have we worked together before?’

My heart sinks like Leo at the end of Titanic.

‘Only at Gerry’s,’ I say.

And still I don’t turn around.

It was spring. It was the first week after the clocks had changed, when you feel that extra hour of daylight every evening enriches your life. Every year, that first week after the clocks change, the light takes us all by surprise, and I feel enlivened and hopeful for a summer of love and laughter and finally fulfilled dreams. That first week after the clocks change is the most magical week of the year.

I was working a nothing job that day, which paid only average money. A reality-TV star was filming his exercise video. We were in a studio located off a newly sanitised Carnaby Street. It’s all flagship sports stores now, surf brands and trendy trainers. More thought goes into the image on the front of the plastic bags than it does to war or peace or revolution or anarchy or any of those things, that don’t seem relevant any more to girls who like to shop and boys who like to watch football. Apathy and the end of conscription go hand in hand, at least that’s what my grandfather used to say. The only people that care are extremists. Protesting at anything these days seems at best disruptive, at worst showing off. Just shop instead. I don’t even protest at the interest rates on my store cards. Walk through central London on a Saturday waving a placard with a group of gypsies with dogs on bits of string? For what? The spirit of Carnaby, of fashion or punk or change, has become nothing more than a Daily Mail headline, a national ticking-off at the odd drug habit. Nothing is persuasive enough to sweep us up, up and away any more. The only counter-culture I’m interested in is the Benefit counter in Selfridges. That’s just the way it is. Some things change. Unless I want to picket Chanel to use fatter, shorter models because this impossibly young and impossibly skinny ideal is starting to hurt me, at thirty-one and one hundred and forty pounds. But then I just look unattractive because I can’t keep up, because I’m not pretty enough or skinny enough any more. Better to just take a little longer in front of the mirror, spend a little more on powder and paint, and pray that nobody notices.

I had been propositioned three times already that day by the reality star, but each time he failed to realise that he had already met me, and only half an hour earlier had asked me if I’d like to do a line of coke and give him a quick hand-job in the ladies’ toilets. I politely declined both. He was a charmless farmer from Devon called Roger, devoid of all charisma, but who had been the least offensive of the fools shut away in a house for the winter. Roger won seventy grand and a couple of months’ worth of notoriety, but the car-crash kind. He was loved and hated simultaneously by the same people. His aftershave was so strong, he actually smelt like desperation.

So it had been a depressing day. When we finished at about seven thirty the sun was not long down, and the dark was still light. Somebody suggested noodles so we all ploughed down to Busaba Eathai on Wardour, and crowded around a table. Some of the guys were high already, but I was off everything but the booze, trying to clear up my act and my head. Ben had started leaving me disapproving notes about the little clingfilm bags he was finding in my jeans when he did the washing, and although the coke was rarely mine – I just always seemed to end up with the bag because I’ve never been a snorter, just a dabber on my gums, and you only need the bag for that – I didn’t want another argument. I didn’t want another spotlight thrown on the distance between us, and the different directions we were moving in.