Louise Kean - Material Girl

LOUISE KEAN

Cover

Title Page LOUISE KEAN

ACT I: Late One Night at Gerry’s … ACT I

Scene I: Passion

Scene II: Politics

Scene III: History

Scene IV: Romance

Scene V: Violence

ACT II: Not a Rehearsal

Scene I: Hello Dolly!!

Scene II: Wife Wanted

Scene III: The Truth Game

Scene IV: The Heart Must Pause to Breathe

Scene V: Rapunzel

ACT III: The Show Must Go On!

Scene I: Zoo

Scene II: Like Steak

Scene III: The Half

Scene IV: Refuge

Scene V: Things Can Only Get Batter ?

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

I see the sign at the top of the first flight of steps. It’s waiting for me. In big red letters it says,

‘Don’t waste time.’

My heart stands still.

It’s an advert for planning your tube route before you leave home, picking up a map – available at all stations – and deducing that it’s far quicker to use the Piccadilly line, wherever humanly possible, than the District line, which is a geriatrically slow, joyless and painful push-pull to Earls Court, during which time any fresh and evil grey hairs on an otherwise sandy-blonde head will multiply ten-fold, and you’ll age five years. At least.

But of course it means more than that.

Monday. If it’s before ten a.m., and you take the left-hand exit at Green Park tube station, and it’s not raining – that central London rain that pesters rather than soaks – and you don’t have to thrust your umbrella up clumsily and fast in those strange seconds when you are outside but seemingly not getting wet, then run up the steps as quickly as you can, and you’ll burst onto Piccadilly like a deep-sea pearl diver coming up for gasped air.

Some people who are unaccustomed to the city are scared of its barking noise and its whippet speed and the sheer bulk of it – like a giant bellowing fat man on roller skates! – but London has never scared me. Even on my first visits as a child, squashed onto the coach from Norwich, taking huge bites out of my pre-packed ham and tomato sandwiches as soon as the back wheels of the coach were off the slip road and on to the motorway, and chewing on the straw I’d plugged into my carton of Five Alive, I was never scared because my mum was always with me. It was just the two of us taking our daytrip to London one Saturday every six months. As the coach finally pulled up and collapsed at Kings Cross we’d edge our way along the narrow aisle, bumping limbs on arm rests, shuffling towards the huffs and petrol-smelling puffs coming from the open coach door. Initially Mum would inch along behind me, but then twirl in front in one graceful manoeuvre like a Pans People dancer as she thanked the coach driver and jumped down to the street. She’d look up at me as I stood on the edge of the bus step, ready to throw myself off, and she’d say,

‘Now hold my hand, Scarlet.’

She’d reach out and take my sticky Five Alive hand as I jumped, and not let go again until we were climbing back onto the coach at the end of the day, grubby and happy and swinging a carrier bag each. Once Mum and I stopped coming I didn’t visit London again until I was eighteen and studying at a college in Brighton. Richard, my little brother by three years, is six foot three inches tall – mum says he ‘dangles from clouds’ and ‘accidentally head butts low flying birds’ – and yet the first time he had to take the tube on his own, aged seventeen, he was afraid.

‘Afraid of what?’ I asked, perplexed, and he said, ‘Getting in the way,’ as tuts and groans and exhausted coughs pushed past him at speed. But still London has never threatened me. It just makes promises that it sometimes fails to keep.

Turn right towards Piccadilly Circus. It’s a neon big-top of flashing traffic lights that always seem to be on amber: I never know whether to stay or go. Large red and blue delivery lorries toot their clowns’ horns; cars edging backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards. Advertising boards flicker, sizzling with the streams of electricity that crackle way above our heads, like horizontal streaks of lightning, accidents waiting to happen, claims waiting to be filed, damages waiting to be spent, while pop music sprays out from the open doors of Megastores, and French and German and Japanese students, with cameras constantly clicking, idle lazily on the steps of an Eros streaked by the dropped bombs of pigeons fat on Starbucks muffin wrappers.

McDonalds and Gap and Body Shop and Virgin. The four corners of the Circus, tomorrow the world …

I’ve lived here for eight years now, and if I was tripping down memory lane as well as Piccadilly I could nod a moment of acknowledgement to most corners of Soho, and Covent Garden, and Bloomsbury, and Marylebone, and Hyde Park, and Knightsbridge. I fell face first onto the pavement on that corner once, at three a.m. with one shoe on and one shoe off, drunkenly unbalanced and confused by the sudden three-inch difference in my leg lengths. And I stood on that corner for half an hour once, trying drunkenly to convince a doorman that he should let me and my rowdy group of actors and ad execs into a lap-dancing club, and that no, I wasn’t drunk, and wasn’t this a meritocracy? I was more impressed with the use of that word than he was, given that it didn’t actually make any sense at the time. London has conspired with me in fun too many nights for me to recall, and it has let me dream, perhaps a little too much. It has never offered me stability, or routine – the trains don’t even run on time and a London crazy can hijack your day by performing a striptease in Leicester Square, and your favourite café can serve you coffee and toast one morning and be an urban jewellery boutique two days later. It’s like a wonderful and exciting but slightly shallow old friend. Some days you feel like you mean everything to it, like it’s protecting you and loving you back, offering up surprises at every turn for your own personal entertainment. Other days you don’t even seem to exist and you get barged off the bus and you lose a heel in a hole in the street, and you can’t get cash from the machine, or a cab in the rain. You just can’t let it disappoint you, you have to see it for what it is. Some days it is simply off finding its fun elsewhere.

As you stare down Piccadilly, Green Park is to your right, the grass occasionally planted with a man in a suit, slumped in a deckchair that you can rent, ten pounds for two hours – who are these men that sit in the park at nine forty on a Monday morning? Why aren’t they walking crazy quickly, breaking a sweat on their freshly shaved upper lips, late for work? There must be something wrong with them, to just be sitting there at this strange working time of day, dressed up to litigate or administrate. Their wife must have left them in the middle of the night. Or they got to work only to be fired for sending too many personal emails, most of which could be classed as pornographic by any HR department worth its salt. Suits look out of place in the park, sitting on the grass, or in their ten-pound deckchairs that slope down the hill, pointing everybody’s feet towards the horses and carriages parked side by side in the Queen’s driveway.