Material Girl (2 page)

I started an argument with Ben about domestic stuff that night, screaming at him that he had left a ring of filth around the bath. He looked bewildered as I shouted, oblivious to the argument that really raged in my head where I yelled, ‘My flowers died! It’s a sign! No good will come of this!’ I’d thought that Ben might buy me flowers or do something significant on the day that we moved into our flat. Nothing. We didn’t even have sex because he was too tired from lifting boxes. And we didn’t have sex the following morning because his stomach felt bad from the ‘moving in’ curry we’d eaten the night before.

I’m afraid that I have left it too late, made a bad decision, and now I might not find somebody else. I hadn’t said ‘I love you’ for nine years when I said it to Ben. Of course I’d said it to my mum and dad, and Richard and his boys, my nephews, I say it all the time to them. But my recent relationship past was more ships in the night than dropped anchors. Three months here, six months there, nobody that lasted long or went any deeper than dating does. That’s what
caught me off-guard with Ben – the need to spend time together was violently instant. I didn’t think we were playing games, although admittedly he was married, but he told me straight away that he was unhappy, and that emotionally it was over, and we only discussed her once. We were sitting in a pub behind Green Park, and we’d just played three games of drunken pool, and he’d won all three. We slumped down into the snug with dopey smiles and he said, ‘She doesn’t even like me any more, Scarlet’, and I said, ‘I won’t be a shoulder to cry on. We have something, Ben, you and I. We have a strange and certain chemistry. This is new to me. I have never felt like I’ve found a new best friend before. So I’m not just a cushion for you to fall onto when you snap your marriage apart and you’re thrown back by the blast. This already means more than that. I wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t.’

It wasn’t until later that she seemed to consume us both – like she’d slipped into the room silently and was a constant third person in the corner looking on.

I’m getting older, I’m thirty-one. My breasts have fallen an inch in the last year. I have stretch-marks around my bottom, and even a couple on my stomach. I have lines, plural, around my eyes. Last night I traced the lines with my middle fingers. These tiny red routes that map all my days spent in the sun, all the late nights that I didn’t moisturise, that I drunkenly swiped at my eyes and rubbed hard, too hard, to remove thick black kohl and mascara, with every swipe breaking every rule in my make-up artist’s manual. I pulled gently at the skin on my cheekbones, watching as it lazed back into place. The spring has sprung, my bounce isn’t what it was, my ball has deflated. It’s a fresh fear that has crept up on me, maybe it lives in the creases of laughter lines or crows’ feet, and it makes you scared to leave. Then you hate yourself for being a coward and staying without
affection, and the lines get deeper, and the fear moves in permanently and brings all its bags with it. Soon you don’t even recognise yourself – who is that girl constantly on the brink of tears? Do I even know her? And who is that desperate exhausted girl picking apart every little thing that her boyfriend says, nagging and needy, clawing for some much needed sign that he cares? Oh Christ, it’s me. So then you convince yourself it would be crazy to leave, and that you expect too much and want what you shouldn’t. You convince yourself you’re crazy because it’s easier that way. You don’t know what else to do, when you don’t even know yourself anymore.

After four months of our affair, Ben left his wife for me. They had been married for a year, but together for ten. I’m obsessed with her now, significantly more than I am obsessed with him. I haven’t met her, but I’ve seen pictures. She’s all limbs. She played hockey for her school. She is elegant, and her smile seems to carry on around her cheeks to her ears, and she’s got a dimple in her chin. She doesn’t wear much make-up, and she wears cream round-neck T-shirts and black trousers to work, and low black court shoes. She is sensible and she smiles. Ben forgot to take the photo of them on honeymoon out of his wallet, or at least that’s what he told me when I found it and cried. They were standing on Etna smiling at the camera with their arms around each other, the volcano smoking in the background. It erupts every year, Ben said when I found the photo, and as if that was so interesting it might startle away my tears. And the eruptions occur along the same plate in the earth, so a series of sooty mouths smoke in a black ashen line. Sometimes the tour guides that work on Etna only get a couple of hours’ notice, he said, before their livelihood disintegrates again for that year; nodding his head, imparting the tidbit that he picked up in Sicily with his brand-new wife. I don’t know where he has
put that photo but I have a horrible feeling that I will find it some day, by accident, stuffed into one of his computer books. I wouldn’t believe him if he told me he had thrown it away. I know that he loved her.

The night that Ben and I first kissed, we inched towards each other with smiles. We sat on stools at the bar facing each other. We were a human mirror, both with our hands propped on our stools between our legs. With another inch forwards our knees touched. Then I leant across and put my hands on Ben’s knees to support myself. Then he kissed me, grabbing a handful of the hair on the back of my head. We kissed for a minute, but then he pulled away and said, ‘But I love Katie’, and it’s the only time I have ever heard him use that word about another living person. Then he kissed me again.

I’m obsessed with what she does, what she likes, this woman I feel Ben and I have wronged together. I have a victim, and I want to know what makes her smile. I want to make her laugh, to know that she’s happy. I don’t suppose I needed Ben but I took him anyway, because I fell in love, and it was like nothing I had ever known. At the time it was full of promise. Now I realise that there is a bridge between us that we’ll never cross, and that maybe nobody ever does. He wants a tattoo on his thigh but it can’t just be a rose or an anchor or a Chinese symbol, it has to mean something. It has to represent something of significance to him. He’s been thinking about it for the last six months and nothing has occurred to him yet …

Keep walking along Piccadilly and you’ll pass the Royal Academy of Art on the left. You can only glimpse it from the road but it has a large courtyard with a fountain in the middle. In the summer you can sit out in that courtyard late into the evening – they have a bar and a jazz band, and you can see the sun set, sipping on a cold beer, surrounded by
banners for exhibitions that aren’t ever as appealing as just sitting late into the night, drinking a beer or a cocktail or a glass of wine. Or sometimes all three …

Helen calls as I trip across Old Bond Street.

‘It’s definitely true,’ she says, sounding shell-shocked and numb, somehow absent from herself.

‘How do you know?’ I ask.

‘I checked his phone. He has texts.’

‘Who from?’

‘Her name is Nikki – with an “i”.’

‘How awful.’

‘I know. I suppose he could have spelt it wrong … or it might be abbreviated … not that it matters …’

Helen falls silent and I know what she is thinking – that the ‘i’ in Nikki means she is younger than we are. It’s the first time, really, that they can be younger than we are. I don’t think it should mean anything, while knowing that it does.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do they say?’

‘Sex stuff. She calls his cock a dick. Apparently she likes licking it like a lollipop.’

‘How awful.’

‘I know.’

‘What about the babysitter?’

‘I drove him home last night when I dropped Deborah off.’

‘Does your sister know you’re having sex with her babysitter?’

‘Hmmm? No … I don’t think so.’

‘Did you do it again?’

‘In the back of my car.’

‘Okay.’

‘I have to go. I have a squash match in an hour, I need warm-up time.’

‘Helen, why don’t you sleep with somebody from squash, if you want something …’

‘I don’t want something, particularly. I have to go. I’ll speak to you later.’

Helen’s husband Steven is having an affair with somebody called Nikki, with an ‘i’. Speak of infidelity begets infidelity. I feel like I started it. I clearly remember the night I sat them both down and guiltily told them I’d been seeing a married man. Steven said, ‘But most people find most people attractive, don’t they? Just pick somebody single instead, Scarlet, because somebody else always comes along.’ Helen hadn’t even blinked. That didn’t seem like the right thing to say in front of your wife. Or ever.

So now Helen is having an affair, or sex at least, with the seventeen-year-old kid who baby-sits her eight-year-old niece. He is a beautiful young blond boy, with skinny muscles that all seem to curve towards his groin. A curtain of long hair hangs across one of his eyes, and his pout squashes through. He has just moved down from Liverpool with his family, and when he speaks it’s with a soft Scouse accent, to ask for fat coke and a pepperoni pizza for dinner, or a blowjob. Helen describes him as pretty. ‘My beautiful boy,’ she says. She was only seventeen when she started seeing Steven, and she’s been with him ever since. ‘Steven was just never that pretty,’ she says, ‘whereas Jamie is the best-looking boy in his class. Do you remember Paul Vickery?’ she asked me. Of course I did. He was the best-looking boy in our class. He had black hair and cheeky eyes and the makings of a teenage six-pack.

‘He was shagging an older woman too, wasn’t he, at the time? I could never have got Paul Vickery,’ she smiled, shaking her head.

‘You’ve kind of got him in the end, Helen,’ I say, and she nods, because it hasn’t escaped her either.

Take the last chance to turn left just before the Circus, and walk up Air Street. It’s short and dark with narrow pavements, banked by a cramped dry-cleaner’s and a cramped café. But you’re through it in moments, and you’ll explode onto Regent Street. Don’t overestimate the speed of the buses, don’t wait for the pedestrian crossing or the traffic lights, just run across the road, it will take them forever to catch you. Walk straight up part two of Air Street. Cheers, the themed pub full of American summer students and interns, is on the right. At nighttime it gets packed with young English guys, all hoping to get lucky with a sorority girl giddy and drunk on dreams of Prince William.

China White is on this street. It’s no more than a hole in the wall, an unassuming door and some Chinese letters by the side of a tiny box window that has fairy lights in it against a white background. You can’t actually see in, but I think they can probably see out. Trendy eyes dancing at the window, searching for the next victim of an undisclosed door policy. You’re at the bottom of Soho.

At school, Helen and I and a group of boys in our class threw stones at a girl called Jenny with buckteeth and big ears and a lazy eye. One lunchtime we threw stones at her in the playground. I held on to mine for ages, rolling it around in my ten-year-old hand, desperate to drop it on the ground and just run away, but then somebody saw me hesitating, so I threw it low and fast and it hit her on the knee. I saw a trickle of blood squirt down her leg onto a dirty sock that sat lazily around her calf because the elastic had gone. She didn’t cry, just stood in the corner covering the one side of her glasses that wasn’t protected by plasters to gee up her lazy eye. She wasn’t allowed to get the good glass
scratched, those glasses were expensive I’d heard her mother shout at her when she picked her up from school most days. Jenny’s mum wore a fur coat and Jenny wore socks that didn’t stay up. Jenny’s mum would half talk, half shout – ‘Did you scratch that glass? It’s expensive!’ – and Jenny would say ‘no, no, no’ really quickly, three times like that in succession, as she ran to keep up with her mother’s old fur. She did the same in class, when Mrs Campbell asked if it was Jenny who had knocked pink paint all over the aprons. It wasn’t her at all: it was Adam Moody. Mrs Campbell didn’t punish her or anything, she just assumed that she had been close by, and she was clumsy, and I suppose a little ugly and easy to blame. The day we threw stones I heard Jenny muttering ‘no, no, no’ as she covered the good glass …

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 …