Louise Kean - Material Girl

She’s me. A younger me, if I focus on her hair and her breasts and the gloss on her lips. Her eyes aren’t as deep as mine: hers are darker, and the wrong shape. I would like to kiss her. A younger me. I mention my age in so many conversations these days, it’s like it’s dripping out of me, like a shaving cut on my ankle that won’t stop bleeding. I’m thirty-one! I’ve said it first! Then I pause, and I wait for the payoff – Oh my God! You don’t look it! If a younger man smiles at me on the tube, or if he winks at me in a bar, if he tries to chat me up, I end up blurting out, ‘I’ve got bras older than you.’ I guess I’m admitting that I want to fuck a younger me, with my young tight skin and smooth thighs, but the contents of my young head as well. Back then I was front of store too. Back then I was good enough for anybody, and I felt like I could get anybody I wanted, if I put my mind to it. Because I know how Isabella feels – the rapt attention, the spotlight. I’ve felt it too. I want to keep feeling it, but now the spotlight is shifting.

When I was twelve, and my teeth stuck out angrily at the front, my mum marched me to the dentist to get braces. I was forced to wear a head brace at bedtime that looked like a motorcycle helmet with elastic bands that dug into my cheeks and left marks in my skin until breaktime the following morning. I had a perm that my brace flattened every night, and I was too scared to wash my hair in the mornings in case the curls fell out as my eighteen-year-old hairdresser said they might, so I tried to coax the flat bits of my hair up with backcombing and hairspray.

Mum and I went together to get my brace one weekend. We got my first bra the weekend before, and my perm the weekend before that. She showed me how to shave my legs and told me to wear sanitary towels and not tampons for the first year of my periods. She called me every night at ten p.m. to say goodnight. Sometimes Richard would deliberately run a bath so he didn’t have to say goodnight to her, and I’d make up a story like he had a stomach ache or something, so Mum didn’t feel bad. Mum put me on a diet for six months when I was fourteen. No boys had been interested in me up until that point. She said, ‘You might not believe this but I’m just trying to make it easier. You should have every choice there is, Scarlet, I want you to hold all the cards.’ I’d told her that I’d been called a few names on the way home from school by a ratty older girl who was known as the local thug and the local bully. She shouted ‘thunder thighs’ at me as I hurried home on my own one day, and the same thing the following week. Kids will always remind you what bit of you it is that stands out.

Then one night I had my first brush with magic. A year after the diet and the braces and the perm and two days before my sixteenth birthday, I went to bed. I woke up the following morning and something had changed. I went to bed a slightly goofy teenager with puppy fat and frizzy hair, and I woke up kind of pretty. Straight-toothed. Slim. Sleek-haired. No more spiteful red elastic-band marks in my cheeks. No more thunder thighs. That day I walked to school with Helen as usual, and three boys from the local comp rode past us on their bikes but then rode back and did wheelies in front of us. One shouted out, ‘Oi blondie! I want to snog you.’ I told my mum that weekend and I thought she’d be pleased. But she sighed heavily and said, ‘Believe me, Scarlet, when I say that I did it for the right reasons.’

I’ll wash my hair later this week and go in and see Isabella then. I wonder if this makes me gay, but I’ve always thought that there is something not quite right about lesbians, who, like vegetarians, seem to spend their entire lives trying to replace meat. I’ve often thought that they are just too scared to admit that they actually quite like the meat, because they’ve spent so long thinking they shouldn’t. It’s really far more judgemental than fucking a man. Or eating a bucket of KFC. Would the sex equivalent of a vegetarian tucking into a guilty KFC be a lesbian having a one-night stand with a fireman? And a really well-cooked juicy steak would be the equivalent of a ten-year relationship with a six-foot chiselled paediatrician called Doug? I don’t think I could ever give up meat completely.

Turn left off Charing Cross Road, and cut down through that little road with antique book shops and framers, and a dance shop at the end that sells tutus and taffeta and beautiful ballet pumps for children – ivory satin with ribbons that trail across the window. It leads you out onto St Martin’s Lane. Yes, you could have just walked a straight line down Piccadilly, and through Leicester Square, but who cares? It’s more fun this way. And now Starbucks is calling.

There is a sign resting on the counter, above the muffins and chocolate cake. It tells me that my barista’s name is Henri and he is single. Then, in what I think might be his own handwriting, it says, ‘He is nice guy, give him a try.’

This is the reason I am scared of being on my own. My barista is so desperate he is advertising himself with the croissants. I always believed relationships were supposed to be more than that: equal parts attraction, chemistry, fireworks, which make a life-changing love. These are the things I have always dreamt of, that I dream of still – it’s more than selling yourself on the cheap and anybody who wants to make an offer is in with a chance. Henri isn’t looking for much, but he has resorted to advertising himself with the muffins. The void between the fairytales in my head and the life I am living widens daily.

I deliberately don’t walk through Chinatown anymore. There is a small door there. I haven’t seen it but somebody told me about it a couple of months ago, late one night, in Gerry’s. It was a stocky Russian film extra who smelt like pepperoni. He said that one day he and his friend had gone into Chinatown to sleep with a prostitute, up the stairs behind one of these little doors that has a broken neon sign outside saying ‘young model’. The Russian pepperoni guy had gone upstairs while his friend waited downstairs. Ten minutes later the Russian came back down with a cheap fading smile, and found his friend ashen, blabbering and crazy. There were tears in his eyes. He said that he had been leaning on the frame of the door, whistling to himself, thinking about his turn upstairs with the young model. Suddenly he’d felt a suction like a giant Hoover pulling him back through the adjacent doorway. He grabbed hold of the wooden frame around the door but his fingers slipped away. He grabbed instead for the broken neon sign that said ‘young model’ but had been dragged backwards, sucked into the doorway, screaming. Nobody had even noticed.

‘But what was in there? How did you get out?’ the Russian asked him.

With that his friend had collapsed. He awoke eight hours later, shouting ‘Sylvia!’ and he hadn’t spoken since. The pepperoni Russian thinks it is a time portal. He said that his friend loved a girl, Sylvia, when they were children, but he hadn’t seen her for twenty years. So I don’t walk through Chinatown now. I can’t run the risk of being sucked thirty years into the future, finding myself staring with alarm at old-aged Ben and I as we shout the same spiteful lines at each other only with bent backs and brittle bones. Plus the cobbles in Chinatown play havoc with my heels.

Walk up Long Acre. My agency said that The Majestic Theatre is on the right-hand side, because I can’t tell one theatre from another. I stop at the front entrance and consider the posters that already hang in the glass boxes at the top of some small stone steps, adjacent to big crimson doors. ‘ Dolly Russell returns to the West End ’ says one, and underneath is a picture of an actress, in Forties furs and a pencil skirt, with a cigarette-holder in one hand, backlit on a sparse stage. It is obviously an old shot – she must be well on the way to seventy now. I’ve brought the thick concealer in case I need it, and two different types of base to smooth out lines. Her face bears an arrogance that you don’t see these days. She looks like a woman who made men chase her, in a time when women were far more compliant. Maybe that’s the last time love existed, back when we were all a little more selfless. I moaned to my mother on the phone last week, almost crying because I am so emotionally exhausted all the time, and of course confused. She said, ‘Jesus, Scarlet, will you stop whining? Don’t tell me about this awful modern female experience you girls are having. I wasn’t allowed to do A-Levels, for Christ’s sake.’