Louise Kean - Material Girl

Helen and I haven’t spoken about it again. But I’m racking them up, all these bad deeds that make me hate myself. I threw a stone at Jenny, and then I took Ben from his wife.

Walk through Golden Square. Cut through one gate on the south side, and exit at the gate on the east side. There are already a couple of men sitting on different benches, swigging from cans of lager. One of them looks unwashed and tired and drunk and old. He has bare feet and long dirty toenails that you glimpse by accident but you will never be able to forget. He looks like he is cultivating those nails to enable him to scamper up trees, forage for berries. They could lever him into bark, half man, half cat. The other guy looks ordinary, in jeans and a T-shirt. But he has a can of special brew too.

The night that I met Ben, in a bar on Old Compton Street, he stared at me for twenty-five minutes. At first I thought he might be having some kind of seizure or fit. He just stared. His friends were talking around him, but he wasn’t engaging with the conversation. I thought it suggested passion, which is rare these days. It was quite something to feel the heat of his undiluted attention. Something about me meant that he couldn’t look away. I was unnerved but amazed. It felt terribly wonderful.

I went over to Ben and introduced myself. We realised within twenty minutes that both our dads are called Patrick, and that they both wear a glass eye. Those things aren’t that common. I’m not superstitious, but … The difference is that my dad lost one of his real eyes playing national league badminton, and if he has three beers at family parties he pops the phony one out to scare the kids. Ben’s dad lost his eye in an accident at the printing factory, but refuses to admit that he has a glass one. I don’t know how that works exactly, but I hope he cleans it …

Ben snores so loudly I have tried to convince myself it’s not even him. It’s such a huge noise that some nights it is impossible to sleep through. I make-believe that it is a large and loud wind pushing through an autumn forest, or a gentle wave thudding onto a Thai beach as I rock in a hammock between two palm trees. I keep thinking it might help soothe me back to sleep. It hasn’t worked once.

Everything that I thought I knew has changed. Men say they like a challenge, when really they don’t. They want an easy life. They think somebody promised it to them. Women think that somebody promised them a white wedding and a baby, and happiness as well. Secretly we feel cheated without them. If only the dress and the baby were all it took.

Walk past the flower stall at the top of Berwick Street market, through to Wardour Street. Cut through St Anne’s Court, past the tour guide telling a group of German tourists that the Beatles recorded some of their biggest hits here, except he can’t remember which ones exactly, at this very studio. Cross over Dean Street, and through Soho Square. They have shut the little house in the middle of the square, because of drugs and booze and cottaging. They closed down half of Soho Square’s smiles at the same time. But people still lie on the grass in all weathers with cardboard coffees next to them at nine-fifty in the morning. Walk through and towards Charing Cross Road. Turn right. You’re out of Soho.

I consider darting into Grey’s. It’s the large bookshop on Charing Cross Road. It’s been there for just over a century, getting bigger and bigger, gradually stocking more and more cookery and diet books. And other books, all the other kinds. I was in Grey’s twice last week. Isabella works behind the counter, mostly on the till. She’s a reason to buy, a need to delve into my purse, a depository for my loose change. I met her first by accident three weeks ago. I tripped over a woven mat at the front of the store as I nipped in to buy a poetry book for grand borrowed words for Ben’s third anniversary card – we don’t count the affair; we go from after that, from when he left – so I didn’t have to think of my own. I copied into his card:

A long time back

When we were first in love

Our bodies were always as one

Later you became

My dearest

And I became your dearest

Alas

And now beloved lord

Our hearts must be

As hard as the middle of thunder

Now what have I to live for?

I was wearing impractical grey court shoes that day, with three-inch heels and purple soles. Some days I feel like I’m balancing on the top of the world in stilettos, and everybody is watching as I try to keep my balance and still look good, in heels. My purple soled shoes point violently before me with every step that I take, leading me on. It was one of these points that caught under the mat as I ran in, and I almost collapsed, tripping forwards, halfway between running and falling, not sure how it would end. I stopped myself by diving into a table of books by an author whose repackaged backlist was hot property now he’d had a bestseller. A few copies of his second book fell to the floor but I didn’t bother to pick them up, knowing they’d be sold in twenty minutes anyway. I straightened and checked myself, muttering ‘shit’ under my breath, and looked around to see if anybody had noticed. I saw her then, oblivious to what was happening with me, leaning forwards on the counter with her elbows beneath her, flicking through Vogue .

Her hair is unkempt as if she’s been out the back sleeping or shagging in a storeroom, and her long, dirty-blonde tresses have been mussed up. She has these huge breasts. They jut out like balloons about to burst. Her eyes are always smudged with black kohl, and her lips are glossed with a cheap little stick that she keeps under the counter. Her voice is deep and her words are rounded and moneyed. Grey’s know there is a reason to put her on that desk, front of store, like a poster, but the living breathing kind, the most attractive thing about the purchase you’ll make, even if it’s Shakespeare or Keats or Byron.

I found myself flirting with her on that very first day. I felt my own smile, the blood rushing to flush my cheeks into pink cushions. I felt my freckles, and my figure, and I found it hard to look Isabella in the eye. She flirts with everybody, I can tell. I felt a charge of electricity in me that day, hot wiring my senses, an urge to reach out and touch her, to grasp her, to kiss the cheap gloss off her lips and grab her head by her long, dirty-blonde hair.

She has wild hair, like mine. Her chest, like a shelf for a thousand second glances, is shockingly apparent, like mine. Ben always says, when I plead with him to say something nice, ‘good rack’, and he laughs like it’s the funniest joke anybody has ever told, and not just really stupid, and slightly offensive. He never says anything that might make me feel good about myself. When I plead with him sometimes he just gets annoyed and says, ‘I don’t do it to order, Scarlet, my mind has gone blank now!’ and I scream, but silently. It makes me hate him a little, even if it passes. I never say anything at the time, but bring it up later when the arguments begin. Then I say, ‘You say you don’t do it to order, Ben, but you never bloody do it! Who is going to say something nice to me if not you, my boyfriend?’ Generally he squirms, but still says nothing. I saw his eyes glaze over halfway through reading the poem in his anniversary card, and he pecked me a kiss at the end, with his eyes closed. His card to me read:

Dear Scarlet,

Still gorgeous!

Luv ‘n’ hugs

Ben

He won’t even spell it properly. I assume he doesn’t want me getting any ideas.

I’ve been into Grey’s three times since the fall, for poetry. I think she must recognise me by now. I check my hair, my own lips, my own smudged and more expensively glossed smile courtesy of the freebies I get sent in the hope that I’ll slick them all over somebody famous, and not just keep them for myself. I’ve bought Orlando , and The Bell Jar , and On the Road , all to impress Isabella. I feel a madness grip me when I see her, scared that my tongue will loosen and suddenly say something huge and strange and unfamiliar to another woman. I feel like I want to ask her out, to touch her hair and her hand, run my fingers across her lips, and trace the smooth round lines of her face. She is twenty-three maybe.