Material Girl (22 page)

Seven suggests itself to me as the perfect magic number, but for everybody. It could be the world’s lucky number. In the same way that cats have nine lives, I wonder if I, if we all, have seven lives that we could live, seven different paths to follow, and the path we choose is dictated by some random choice that we make at some seemingly inconsequential point in our lives. Or even some deliberate turn that we take, while not fully understanding the implications at the time. And the result is the life we end up with.

Maybe when you are young, between the ages of five and six, you decide one Sunday afternoon that you prefer drawing
pictures of your cat to growing cress with your daddy. Little do you know that you would have become a world famous biological scientist if you had carried on with the cress, but that option floats away that Sunday afternoon like an old balloon after the birthday party ended.

Then, when you are thirteen, you decide to go out with Barry Bloss instead of Scott Taylor, because you like Barry’s hair better, and he’s got a cool bike. Scott, it turns out, was a sex hound who wanted it long before Barry did: inadvertently you sidestepped the option where you were knocked up at fifteen, Mrs Taylor by seventeen, divorced with two kids by twenty-five. Then, at eighteen, Brighton and Cardiff Universities both accept you to read Business Studies BSc Hons, but you choose Brighton because it’s closer to home and your dad doesn’t like driving much so you’ve got more chance of lifts back and forth at Christmas. So you don’t meet Mark, the man you would, maybe should, have married at twenty-seven, who lived in the room below the one you would have been assigned. You would have bumped into him on the stairs every day for the first two months, gate-crashed his Halloween party, and become friends. He would have kissed you in the summer rain outside the Student Union on the last night of your fresher year, but you chose Brighton instead, and although you had fun with lots of boys, none of them ever promised your idea of a life-changing love. So you leave Brighton single. Mark was one of your soul mates: but how were you to know?

Then, aged twenty-five, you drop your keys outside your front door while double-locking it one Tuesday morning because the house next door got burgled last weekend, and it takes a couple of seconds to bend down to pick the keys up and toss them carelessly into your bag. So you’re half-walking, half-running to Ealing Broadway station in the way
that you always do, and when you get to the main road you consider running out in front of an oncoming bus, but at the very last second you decide not to because you aren’t sure how fast you can go in your new heels, which are half an inch higher than your normal stilettos. Two seconds earlier and you would have chosen to run. If you had, that bus would have hit you when your heel got caught in the manhole in the middle of the road, and you tripped and fell to your knees. The bus was moving at twenty-eight miles an hour and couldn’t stop in time. So your neck doesn’t break, and blood doesn’t flood your mouth and your lungs as you kneel in the road in new heels, and you live, and don’t die. Option four.

Option five. You’re thirty-one. You live in a flat in Ealing with your boyfriend who has never told you that he loves you. After three years together, you realise you teeter precariously every day on the verge of tears, and decide to spend a day with him at the zoo. You determine that by the end of that day you will know what to do. You will either tell him that you’re leaving, or remember why you love him enough to stay for as long as it takes.

I reach for my phone.

‘Hey, it’s me,’ I say.

‘Hey,’ he says, waiting for me to apologise for before, because I always do.

‘When is your day off this week?’

‘Sunday.’

‘Good, that’s mine too. Will you come on a day out with me?’

‘Where do you want to go?’ he asks, suspicious, surprised.

‘Let’s go to the zoo,’ I say, and hang up the phone.

I spot the
Evening Standard
seller on Long Acre and get my forty pence out of my purse as I weave my way towards him, avoiding tourists and cracked paving stones.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘Afternoon, dear,’ he replies, folding a paper in half.

‘How are you?’ I ask, smiling.

‘I’m well, dear,’ he passes me my paper. ‘You chose option five.’

He smiles. I stare.

‘Was that the right one?’ I ask, accepting one end of the paper, while he still holds on to the other.

‘Who am I to say? I don’t know anything about anything. If you forced me, well, and I had to bet, I would say I would have gone for option six myself. But what do I know?’ he shrugs.

‘But is that better? Can I still change it?’ I ask, panic filling me like a bad transfusion.

‘Of course you can, dear, you can do anything.’

He begins sorting his money into change piles: short pillars of silver, sixty pence, ready change, for the people that give him pound coins.

‘How will I know if I’ve picked right, though?’ I ask him, trying to catch his eye as he mumbles numbers at the money, performing calculations in his head, but a woman asks me to move as she offers up her forty pence. He swaps it for a paper, and asks, ‘Do you want the property section?’ She shakes her head, and he says, ‘Excuse me, dear’ to me, gesturing that I move out of the way. A young guy in a T-shirt that says ‘
Your mother loved it
’ volunteers his money to him now.

The
Standard
seller starts to whistle.

‘I wondered if you could,’ I say.

He smiles and carries on. It’s ‘All You Need Is Love’.

As I walk back up to The Majestic I pass a series of people on the street, all of whom seem familiar. It seems to me that they are the same three people that I see everywhere. They walk in and out of my life, like extras, and
I’ve always seen them before. I swear I just held the door open for one of them at the clinic, and another sat next to me on the tube this morning. The same three people are playing all the bit parts in my life. Maybe God or the Devil or whoever is running this crazy show hasn’t got enough people to go around any more, to flesh out all the stories being told down here.

I amble up towards the stage. Gavin is moving boxes three at a time into the wings. None of the cast is around. I can’t see Tristan or hear him either. When Gavin spots me he mutters something under his breath, as he lowers a batch of boxes down and walks to the front of the stage, his giant hands on his giant hips. He is wearing a T-shirt that says
‘It IS the size of the boat
’ in bright pink on grey. You can’t miss it. I wonder if I should buy a T-shirt that reads ‘
I’m good at sex
’: it seems to be the fashion these days.

‘You’re late,’ he says, as if he expected nothing less.

I check my watch: it’s midday.

‘I thought you said there was no late?’ I reply.

‘There is today. She’s waiting for you downstairs, she’s been here for half an hour.’ He raises his eyebrows and looks at me like I’ve done something wrong, and I should have known better, and I am hugely irritated. I want to slap him away from me, as if he were tracing the very tip of a feather up and down my shinbones and I had my hands tied together behind my back. That kind of irritating. The kind that makes you want to scream.

‘Shit. Okay. Gavin, is this bad? Are you going to call my agency? Will I get fired?’

‘Don’t be so bloody dramatic, Scarlet. Just go.’ He turns his back on me in favour of the boxes. The air between us is electric with his animosity, which is at best inappropriate, and at worst downright rude. He didn’t even proposition me
outright, last night; I don’t know why his feelings are so bruised. But I have a more pressing concern.

I tap down the corridor to Dolly’s room. My heels click like castanets on the concrete. As I try to run in a bra that was not built for exercise, my breasts bounce about like footballs that my ribs keeps ‘heading’ upwards to my chin. I skid around a corner at speed and find myself thrown against Tom Harvey-Saint. He doesn’t miss a beat, and grabs the flesh at the top of my arms like Clark Gable grabbed Vivian Leigh in
Gone With The Wind
. I find myself inches from his face.

‘No running in the halls, Scarlet, or I’ll have you in for detention,’ he whispers with a smirk.

‘Let me go,’ I manage, my heart banging so fast in my chest that I am scared he will hear it.

‘If you want me to,’ he says, and practically throws me away. I gasp, and run past him, screeching to a halt outside of Dolly’s room. With one hand on the doorknob I freeze like a musical statue at a childhood party as somebody yanks the stylus up off a Bucks Fizz record. The ‘Do NOT Disturb’ sign has been removed, but the lavender parcel is still there. My heart is in my mouth. Do I knock? Do I wait to be announced, and if so, by whom? Should I just go in?

‘Damn well get in here.’ The old-lady mid-Atlantic voice from behind the door is louder than a whisper, softer than a shout, but it means business.

I push the door open a fraction, only enough to be able to poke my head around, and with eyes closed declare ‘I’m so sorry’ before Dolly can say anything. The smell of lavender invades my nostrils. It has intensified in the room tenfold since yesterday; I expect we’ll be the scene of an imminent and violent wasp storm, stung to death before we’ve even said our hellos.

I open my eyes and smile.

Dolly sits in her velvet chair, examining the rings on her fingers. Her knees are slightly apart, and she leans back gracelessly. Her back curves with the chair for support. She wears a shin-length velvet housecoat in deep catholic purple, and a long gold chain with a black locket on the end hangs around her neck, the locket itself sitting so low that it has made a cushion of her rounded old-lady belly. She looks, if not plump, bloated. Plump is too young a word. Plump implies bounce or softness. Dolly looks brittle. Her hands rest on either side of her knees on the velvet of the chair, weighed down by the huge amethyst and amber rings that she inspects, which are apparently far more interesting than me. She wears expensive light brown trousers with crisp creases sliced down the middle that she obviously didn’t press in herself, but also what appear to be dark brown men’s shove-on slippers from the cheapest section of Marks & Spencer. Her hair is very short and jet-black, obviously colour-treated, and styled in spikes like black ice stalagmites on her head: like barbed wire to stop intruders. Her cheeks are heavy with gravity and coursed through with tiny fine lines. Her rounded jowls resemble weights around her neck. Her eyes are wide and violet and glassy, each one topped by a thin black pencil acute accent. In contrast to the rest of her face her forehead is completely smooth. The Botox bell peals in my head. It is striking at this distance.

The only make-up I can detect on her face is a dark bloodstain of lipstick smeared across her mouth, as if she’s just sucked down a whole tin of beetroots. Her fingers dance slightly by her sides with a faint tremble. I witness a small but constant shaking in the furthest reaches of her limbs. She neither smiles nor frowns. Now she is done staring at her rings, and stares at me instead, expectantly. Her eyes are suddenly clear, if not her expectation.

‘Hi,’ I say.

Then my phone rings.

Her eyes widen as I reach inside to grab at it, apologising again, ripping it out to see the name of the caller, surprised I even have a signal in here. It carries on ringing.

‘Turn the damn thing off, darling,’ she says flatly, in a transatlantic drawl, and I fumble with buttons to make it stop before throwing it on the side. It knocks over one of her cards and I grimace.

‘Well,’ she says, addressing her rings again. ‘I can be late for you.’ She sighs and runs her amber ring up and down and up her finger again, sliding it over the knuckle. ‘You, on the other hand, cannot be late for me. And do you know why?’

‘Because you’re …’

She interrupts me with a glare and I stop talking.

‘Because I’m the one with my picture at the front of the theatre.’ She smiles and blinks slowly. ‘I don’t care what your excuse is, or how much terrible magnetism there may be between you and Mr Harvey-Saint.’

I gasp, but if she hears it she ignores it.

‘A woman should always be late for a man, I have always said that and always will, and don’t say anything else to anybody because I’ll denounce you for a liar. I don’t disapprove of that. Men should wait. But a woman should never be late for another woman, particularly in these circumstances, but still. A woman’s time is precious: she has things, so many things, to attend to, to be at her best. Don’t waste her time by thinking your time is more valuable. But for now, I’m not staying. I thought that I might, but I find myself exhausted, worn out by the dreadful journey, this damned London traffic. But! But, but, but … I wanted to see you, of course. They told me poor Yvonne left, and of course it made me sad as I thought she was very good. Very good.
Apart from her lip-lines, which were, of course, terrible. And her eye-lines. Everything, really. Let’s be honest, the poor girl is in entirely the wrong profession, she has no arm for make-up. The best have always have a certainty in their hand. But still. She’s left. It’s sad. And now you’re here.’ A smile rushes across her eyes. She doesn’t seem sad. She pushes herself to her feet, but the effect isn’t dramatic: she is surprisingly small, five feet two perhaps, smaller than me. She reaches forwards for a fresh batch of unopened colourful envelopes.

‘Fans,’ she whispers at me, widening her eyes like a flasher. ‘Who would have thought I’d still have them? But here they are. Friends, really. Who write to say hello, to tell me they still think of me. It’s sweet. Because of DVDs, mostly, I’m sure. They get to see me again. And yet it seems a dreadful waste of paper. I saw on the news, about the forests. I should say something really. Tell them to stop writing. But of course I love them as well. They are like love letters to me these days. I don’t get many any more. In my time I’ve had plenty. Boxes full, houses full. But not now. And you miss what you’ve had, of course. A woman needs love letters. We don’t ask for much. You can only dream of what you haven’t had, but it’s a loss if you’ve known it and then it slips away.’