LOUISE KEAN

Material Girl

Contents

Cover

Title Page

ACT I: Late One Night at Gerry’s …

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

ACT I

Scene I: Passion

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.

Walk ten paces towards the Circus on Piccadilly and you are sucked into the shade of the Ritz walkway. It’s really a time tunnel. Occasionally, the day after a full moon, plump accountants have been known to enter at one end but never come out of the other. But it’s only ever plump accountants … There are five steps between each column, and on the left two men in peaked hats and expensive overcoats offer to open big gold-plated doors for you, that lead into the most famous hotel in the world. Most days I want to go in, but I never do. I could drown in wealth for a day, or a lifetime. I could live in a lift or a laundry cart. They wouldn’t let you be uncomfortable at the Ritz; it has diamonds for sale in the window that are as big as apples.

Glance around you as you walk diagonally across Albermarle Street. You’ll begin to notice that most faces are bored. Some are as blank as a freshly wiped blackboard. But that’s any city on the way to work. It’s the architecture that makes it magical, and the buildings that breathe. Don’t be confused, that isn’t smog: it’s just Fortnum & Mason letting off some steam. All cities are a mirror of bored faces. The trouble starts when you try to ignore it, or shrug your shoulders and think that it’s okay. If you do, if you accept it, and try to overlook the palpable everything in the air, then somewhere your name gets rubbed off a list. A small part of you doesn’t exist any more, and that’s just the start. Soon you won’t register anything, and they’ll get you, the zombies, the bored, blank faces – that’s what happened to them. They noticed everybody else was bored, and they shrugged and tried to ignore it, and it got them. That night they rolled over in their sleep, and breathed in, part-breath, part-snore, a strange sleeping gasp. And those gasps mean that you have just inhaled something bad. They breathed in boredom that night, and woke up the next day with a blank look on their face. Blank as they poured their coffee, blank as they showered, blank as they locked the door, blank on the train. If I wasn’t so scared of suffocating I’d sleep with tape over my mouth. Ben sleeps with his mouth wide open.

Last Friday Ben offered to cook dinner for us both, if I could get home from work before ten o’clock. He bought two microwave meals. Three years, and that’s what we are – one stringy chicken chow mein, one runny lasagne. Ben has never told me he loves me. He says it doesn’t mean that he won’t.

We live together in Ealing, in a little flat above a shop that sells organic moisturiser, wooden rocking horses and chilli oil. It’s called ‘Plump and Feather’. There are always five people in there, and one of them is always talking animatedly with the lady who runs it, who wears long linen things and has a lazy salt and pepper plait in her hair, and a beatific smile that implies she has just finished teaching a yoga class and she might actually be God herself. And there is always a child. Just one. Not always the same one. I don’t know whose they are.

There is a door at the side of the shop with a worn-out-looking bell. If you press it Ben will answer because he always seems to be in and I always seem to be out. He gets in from work at a quarter to six. He is the manager of an electrical store in the precinct in Ealing. I get in around three a.m. if the shoot I’m working on has run late into the night, or if the actors have insisted I stay until the very end to remove their make-up for them, and not just leave them a bottle of quality cleanser and a stack of cotton wool. Or if we’ve finished on time and then gone for drinks. Mostly shoots don’t finish more than an hour late because they have to pay the crew overtime. Mostly it’s the going for drinks that makes me late home. It hasn’t always been that way. Gradually, like a tap dripping into a bath that will overflow soon, my nights have got longer. I’m not always working, but recently the idea of going home to that flat turns my stomach, like discovering something small and white in a chip-shop sausage.

Only half the bed and a bowl in the kitchen seem like mine, the bowl that I eat my cereal out of, either when I get up at eleven a.m. or when I roll in late at night. Ben does a weekly shop, and buys tins and things – I see them in the cupboards next to my muesli. And he always buys me two more boxes of Alpen. He buys long-life UHT milk. Nothing fresh seems to last more than a day in that flat. I bought some roses from Tesco not long after we’d moved in. I bought a vase as well, and filled it with tepid water and a little sugar like my nanny used to do, and I bashed the stems the way she did, and dropped my orange roses in. They had already wilted the following afternoon, their heads hanging heavily on their stems like starving foreign children without the energy to support their necks. The next morning they were dead. My mother swears by Tesco’s roses, ‘At least two weeks, sometimes more!’ I’m not suspicious, but …

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 …

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.

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.’

She is generally more sympathetic than that; she must have been having a bad day.

When Mum left I always knew it wasn’t my fault, and I never dreamt I could get her to come back. My life changed, but it wasn’t that bad. My weekends with Mum were now packed full of fun and adventure and talking. She seemed happy and the way that she put it everything was exciting. Dad was never a great talker, and now Mum and I could witter on all day about nothing and not hear him sighing dramatically in the background because he couldn’t hear the football on the TV. Sometimes on a Friday night I even went so far as pouring salt in Richard’s baked beans as they sat simmering on the hob, crossing my fingers that he would get stomach cramps in the night. Then he wouldn’t be able to come and see Mum that weekend, and it would just be the two of us instead.

She moved out to a house on the other side of Norwich and she painted it herself. She let me help, and we both put on oversized shirts that she bought at Oxfam and tied our hair up in scarves so we looked like 1940s war widows working in munitions. We painted her living room orange! Dad would come and pick me up on Sunday nights and they’d look at each other on the doorstep with confusion, trying to remember who the other was. They were like chalk and cheese, they were never even meant to be a part of each other’s lives. My mum would smile at least, and ask Dad how he was. My dad would look embarrassed and batten down the hatches of his emotions as always, particularly now that my mother had become a whirlwind on her own. He would give nothing away.

A year ago I asked Mum if Dad ever told her he loved her. ‘Yes,’ she said, nodding earnestly, ‘but only when I asked of course. The thing is, Scarlet, with your father, he was raised differently. You never knew his parents but they were both very strict. Whereas you know Grandma and Grandpa, they can’t stop giving you hugs! I was so lucky, Scarlet, and so loved, that I found it easy to show it to your father. I hope that’s how I make you feel now, I don’t ever want you to guess about my feelings for you, and neither should Richard. Of course, Richard is so kind, so good-natured, he has nothing but love in him, and he was lucky when he met Hannah so young, but they are so right for each other, and she is such a lovely girl, with such a lot of love to give too.’

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, with concern.

‘I love you and Richard utterly. When I left people didn’t think that was possible, but in a way I left because I loved you. I always thought you knew that. Katharine Hepburn said “loved people are loving people”, and I believe that. Your dad didn’t have that sense of being loved, and he didn’t know how to show it to me.’

‘Is that why you left?’

‘Scarlet, things are rarely that black and white. I loved him, it was very hard. But you know that your father loves you, don’t you, Scarlet?’

‘Of course, he’s just not … demonstrative.’ Dad has never hugged me with abandon, he chooses his words carefully, and trips over sentiment clumsily. He can’t express himself, I know that. He can laugh, and does. But he can’t cry.

‘You’ve noticed that, Scarlet, and yet …’

‘And yet?’ I asked, waiting for her to go on.

‘Be careful, Scarlet. There isn’t just one type of man for you.’

Mum lives by the sea now, in a little village called Rottingdean, a couple of miles outside of Brighton, on her own. She prefers it that way. She takes long walks on the beach and reads a lot, and sees films with the man who lives next door.

Standing outside the Majestic Theatre I read the poster in the opposite frame: ‘Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore: previews start Monday 20th!’

There is a guy selling the Evening Standard a little further up the road. I check my watch and skip up towards him, rummaging for forty pence in my bag. It is always too late to get a paper by the time I get out in the evening, and it’s my only source of news. If half the world goes up in smoke I’ll read it in the Standard. Otherwise I might never know. Plus I like to leave it for Ben so he can do the sudoku. It’s a little thing I do, a point of contact, the Evening Standard left on the kitchen table. I hope he smiles when he sees it in the mornings, before I am even out of bed. I hope he thinks of me when he picks it up. I think of him when I leave it there at night.

I hold my hand out with my forty pence.

Behind the stand the old guy is wearing a flat cap and an overcoat. His glasses are thick and slightly smeared with grease. He smiles at me and I notice he only has his front four teeth, top and bottom, the rest are missing. I wonder if he can still whistle.

‘Have you got it?’ he asks.

‘Is it forty pence?’ I reply.

I look down at the two twenty-pence pieces in my outstretched palm, confused.

‘Or have you lost it?’ he asks, lisping the words through his four teeth.

‘Sorry? I don’t understand.’ I offer him my forty pence again, but he doesn’t take it. He smiles. Perhaps he is an idiot.

‘Your passion for life,’ he says. ‘You had it …’

I stare at him. He smiles and takes the forty pence from my hand, and replaces it with an Evening Standard, folded in half. A man walks over and offers him forty pence, which he takes as he passes him a paper and says, ‘Thank you, sir.’ An older woman nudges me out of the way as she offers him her change, and he passes her a paper and says, ‘Thank you, dear.’

I turn and walk back towards the theatre. I feel a buzzing in my bag, and reach in for my phone. I am standing outside The Majestic’s back door when I answer. ‘Hello?’

‘It’s me,’ Ben says. ‘I popped back to get the post, in case they’d delivered my Xbox game. They hadn’t, but you have a letter … from some clinic.’

‘I’ll open it when I get home.’

‘Why have you gone to a clinic?’

‘Women’s stuff.’

‘Okay. I’ll see you later then.’

‘Ben – we have passion, right?’

‘Sorry?’

‘We have passion … in our lives …’

I sense him squirming at the end of the phone.

‘I don’t understand what you mean, I’m working …’

‘I have to go,’ I say, and hang up.

I stare at the cobbles beneath my feet. Snapping myself out of my trance I reach forwards for the handle of the theatre’s back door, but as I do I notice a piece of paper, a leaflet, is stuck to the bottom of my shoe where my heel has pierced it. I have been walking with it pinned to me all this time, like a cheap joke. I lean against the wall, trying to keep my balance as I lift my foot in the air, and snatch the leaflet off. It’s an underground map.

On the front, in big red letters, it says,

‘Don’t waste time.’

Scene II: Politics

You know those days just before Christmas when there are lights everywhere, in Highgate village or anywhere in London? I don’t mean the orange and red neon glory lights of Oxford Street or Regent Street, with their torrents of swarming shoppers below who fill every spare inch of pavement, as those lights, unlike puppies, are just for Christmas, and not for life. I am talking about the branches of white lights that string across the high streets of villages, dusting the everyday with Christmas sparkle, enough to remind you that it’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year. Some of those dotted lights even shine out from people’s windows, the optimistic ones. I think they should leave those lights up forever, for every day of the year. I’d like a life like that. Those strings of cheap diamonds are like a shared and hopeful smile. They punctuate the functional with magic, and increasingly that’s what I feel slipping away. My magic reserves are depleted, like dwindling natural resources, and they need a little topping up. I need a world with a little more magic.

Rain spits at the tips of my shoes sticking out in to the alley, as I loiter inside the backdoor of The Majestic, leaning against a grubby wall. I could call Ben back. My phone sits in my hand like a grenade. I always call him back. Ben can leave cross words for hours, for days. It’s like he wears blinkers or has tunnel vision. I know that men and women think differently but Ben is like a computer.

The Ben that I recognise now is his reflection in a monitor, on his PC screen: he is mostly otherwise engaged with technology. I check his phone constantly. I hate myself for doing it – I know it makes me a cliché. The act of rifling surreptitiously through his texts when he isn’t in the room, while nervously listening for the sound of his feet padding down the hallway to signal his return, epitomises the change from ‘old confident me’ to ‘fresh and pathetic me’ like an exclamation mark. But I have found texts from her. They always end with a kiss. I sat outside her office for an hour once, crying. She organises events for banks. Ben never fails to remind me, subtly or otherwise, that it was he and Katie that were hurt by their break-up, as if they are an exclusive club with a restricted membership of two.

Katie. I have to whisper it, like a swear word in a nursery. Apparently my feelings at the time paled in comparison to how badly they both felt, even given his constant emotional yo-yoing back and forth, from me to her to me to her. Ben doesn’t think it was painful for me, as I tried desperately to begin a proper and exclusive relationship with him, this man that I had fallen in love with, as he sat and cried for somebody else, and I hugged him to try to make it better. They are friends again now, but I’ll never be Katie’s ‘favourite person’ apparently. Ben finds it easier to blame me for the breakdown of his relationship rather than the two people who were actually in it, and in a way I let him. I do feel guilty about her. I feel like being obsessed with her gives me a reason to stay with Ben. Leaving him now would be like kicking her in the teeth again, this woman I’ve never met. A part of me believes that Ben would like me to leave, so that he can go back to her and settle back into his old-man chair in his old-man relationship and just call me a ‘phase’. He can pretend that he didn’t want anything else, just for a little while.

Ben ‘catches up’ with Katie once a month, either on the phone or in person. When I tried to say that I thought that once a month might be a little excessive, he told me I couldn’t tell him what to do. I tried to explain that I wasn’t telling him what to do, but rather letting him know how his actions made me feel, and he told me, with irritation in his voice and a hateful exhausted look on his face, that I had to get used to it because it was going to happen whether I liked it or not.

I think that Ben would prefer life to escape him rather than acknowledge that he is terrified of getting in touch with his emotions, but I don’t want that. Happiness isn’t fear. Fear leads to hate, and hate leads to the dark side … I know because Ben and his mate Iggy watch Star Wars constantly – the DVD Special Edition, the Director’s Cut Four Disc DVD, the Special Director’s Cut Ten Disc Super Edition. Cue Darth Vader heavy breathing. But I’m not ready for the dark side. I can still feel the force, even if Ben can’t. And I’ve always been afraid of the dark …

I suppose I should acknowledge that Ben thinks he’s just fine. ‘Men don’t talk,’ he says, like that’s reason enough for us not to sort things out, not to be happy.

I throw my phone into my bag in despair. My head is hot but the rain cools the air around me as I feel my face crack and crumble like an earthquake in a desert, my make-up disintegrating as I start to cry.

I startle myself with a short sharp laugh of surprise.

Then I cry again.

The prospect of leaving Ben makes me shake. I cannot contemplate being without him, of how scared I am of being alone no matter how cowardly it makes me feel … I desperately grab in my bag for my phone again, as if I am suddenly on a ten-second deadline and if I don’t speak to him before the timer runs out our relationship will explode. I find it and claw it open, and hit his number.

I just need to hear his voice. I need us to say important things that cement our feelings for each other somehow, so that I can get through the day. Ben and I don’t discuss marriage or kids, because I don’t want to put too much pressure on him. But, then, I am thirty-one now and I want those things, and maybe he does too. Lots of other people do, so why not us, and why am I so scared to say it? I don’t have to goad him into loving me and then, and only when he tells me he is ready, will we be allowed to admit that we want babies. I am not going to be scared to say that I want to have children anymore! Maybe if I just say it then he will too …

It rings five times before he answers and I immediately say, ‘Ben, it’s me.’

‘I’m working …’

‘I want to have children.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I want you to know that I want to have children.’

‘Right …’

‘And?’

‘And what? I’m working …’

‘I am telling you that I want to have children.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose you do …’

‘Well what do you think?’

‘About what?’

‘About having children?’

‘I think I want to have them too …’

He sounds like he is searching desperately for the right answer on some quiz show, like Blockbusters: ‘I’ll have whatever will make her stop talking please, Bob?’

‘Soon?’ I ask. ‘Do you want to have them soon?’

‘I … I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.’

‘Well … what do you think about?’

‘What? I’m working.’

‘Yes, but I’m thirty-one.’

‘Right …’

‘I think about things … about marriage … and stuff …’

‘Right …’

‘What do you think about those things?’

‘I … I don’t know … Scarlet, I’m working …’

‘Oh, okay, do you want to talk about it later?’

‘I … I don’t know … maybe … another time …’

I want to cry. Again. I realise we haven’t even had a conversation. Ben has just deflected me. I kick my words at him like weak volleys to his chest. He doesn’t even have to move off his spot. He doesn’t even have to stretch. He just stands there and bats me away with ‘maybes’ and ‘I don’t knows’ and I don’t even challenge him for anything more. A stronger woman would punch that ball back out of his hands, make him stand three feet from the penalty spot, then fire it at his testes. But I am not that woman … I thought that I was, but then I met Ben. If one person shuts down eventually the other one does too. I kick like a girl now.

‘Okay, I’ll see you later then,’ he says, finishing the conversation off.

‘You can’t wait to get off the phone, can you?’

‘No, it’s not that, but I’m working.’

I can hear his mates in the store laughing in the background. I can hear that they are watching Dude, Where’s My Car? again.

‘But … but what about … I just … Okay, fine. I’ll see you later.’

The phone line goes dead.

I don’t know who is more scared, me or Ben? It’s like Halloween round at our flat. But it’s the prospect of staying with him as our relationship rots beneath us that scares me the most.

And what if there is nobody else out there for me? Helen always tells me not to be ridiculous when I say that, but I worry that Ben and I just don’t try anymore, and what will make that any easier with somebody else? Maybe I am just creating problems, but I have a head full of questions. Maybe he’s having an affair? Maybe he doesn’t like sex? Or intimacy? Or anything that means you have to be close to another person? This is the man I want to marry, a man who won’t even give me a hug unless I ask for it and sometimes not even then. Will we even kiss at the altar?

Of course, the thought that constantly lingers is: Why did you leave your wife if you don’t love me? Did you start loving me and then stop? Are you seeing her again? I know they didn’t do ‘public displays of affection’, or ‘pda’s’ as Ben once described them. I thought expressions like that were the reserve of eight-year-old girls. At the time I wasn’t even talking about a passionate kiss, I was asking him for a peck on the lips on a half-full Virgin train. But Ben won’t do public displays of affection, not on a train, not now. The obvious question is of course, why?

But Ben won’t ask the ‘why’ questions either. He says ‘this is who I am’, even if he knows it won’t make him happy. As long as he can’t get upset, then he need never ask ‘Why?’

I don’t want that life. I want a deliberate passionate honest time.

It’s my mother’s fault for calling me Scarlet.

You can’t give a child that name and not expect her to live …

There is a loud cough – somebody is lurking awkwardly at the end of the corridor and has probably heard my entire conversation with Ben, and has certainly seen me standing here crying like some pathetic soap-opera wife.

He’s large, he looks fleshy and heavy like a saturated sponge.

I swipe at my tears.

‘Can I help?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know, maybe – do you think anybody has a relationship where the man comes up behind the woman while she is, say, washing up, and puts his arms around her waist, and whispers in her ear, “You look gorgeous even when you are washing up”? Does anybody have that? Even after three years? Or ever? Or is that just in films? Is that too much to ask? Because that’s what I want. Do I want too much? And also, to have somebody who says nice things to me, like, “You look really pretty tonight”, or “You really make me laugh”, or just something sometime that is spontaneous, you know? That makes me feel wanted, or valued at least. Do men do that, anywhere? Or is that just in romantic comedies? Also, I’d like to be hugged in the middle of the night, and sometimes even woken up to have sex. Does that sound strange to you? Because I know some men who just aren’t interested, at all. I know one man in particular who has explicitly been told that it is very much okay to wake me up in the middle of the night to have sex, and I won’t be annoyed, or tired, in fact I’d love it! I would love to have sex with him in the middle of the night! I have actually told him that he can do that. But he never wakes up! Not only that, he never even rolls over and hugs me! We sleep in the same bed, and he never even hugs me …’

‘Do you hug him? Do you wake him up?’ the saturated sponge asks me directly.

‘I used to. I gave up. It felt like I was in the persuading business. And who wants to feel like they are persuading somebody to hug them? It’s degrading …’

‘Does this man, is this, your husband?’

‘Boyfriend,’ I whisper, ashamed and mildly appalled to be having this conversation with somebody that I assume is a new colleague. But then Helen always says, ‘Scarlet, you’d ask advice from the speaking clock if it would answer you back.’ I suppose I am hoping that soon somebody, anybody, might tell me what I want to hear. Until then I’ll simply add to the weight of various strangers’ experiences that I am amassing in my head.

‘I think that …’ I see his thoughts flash across his wide face like a red line that signifies a heartbeat across a monitor. I see him actually thinking about what I’ve said in an effort to answer it, and not just recoiling at the emotion of it all. He and Ben would not be friends. Ben would probably accuse him of being gay. Of course he might be gay, but he seems too big … He starts to speak, then stops, then starts again.

‘I think that if I was in bed each night with a woman that I loved, I would want to hug her, and kiss her, and … certainly wake her up if she was offering what … has apparently … been offered. I would certainly do that. And if I loved her, of course I would want to hold her. Who else do you get to hold like that? Not your mum, or your friends. Who else can hug you like that? I mean, not all night, a man needs sleep, but certainly I would want to, and would hug her … Oh Christ …’

I am crying again.

‘What’s your name?’ I ask, regaining control and sweeping a finger beneath each of my eyes to mop up my tears.

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean why? I’m not undercover police …’

‘Gavin,’ he says, with a degree of suspicion.

‘Okay, Gavin, who maybe has drugs in his pocket or some outstanding parking tickets? Do you think I should break up with him and go speed-dating? Except my best friend Helen said her cousin went and she said the whole process made her feel like she was a human iPod. You just keep skipping past really good songs, thinking the next one might be better …’

Gavin looks a little bewildered. His cheeks are flushed, as if he has just climbed three flights of stairs, or necked two glasses of red wine in quick succession.

‘I’m the stage manager,’ Gavin says.

‘Okay … does that mean you aren’t allowed to answer questions about speed-dating?’

‘I don’t mean to upset you again … or more … but you can’t be in here if you are nothing to do with the theatre and … I’d rather take it up the arse from a seven-foot convict with the nickname Big Greased Shirley than go speed-dating.’

‘My God! You’d hate it that much? Do you think that’s a masculinity issue? That you don’t want to be judged by women? I mean, it could be okay … some people say it’s fun … speed-dating … not taking it up the arse … but some people say that’s fun too … I’ve never … I mean, I’ve thought about it, but … I’m not that kind of girl … except what is that kind of girl, really? A girl who likes sex? That’s fine, isn’t it, today? In this century? Like when men describe a woman as “dirty” but in a good way, I always thought that meant taking it up the … you know … but then I found out it just means that she’ll smile during sex … or not kick you off. But also, I am allowed to be in here. At least I think I am. Like I’d just be standing here crying if not? Of course I could be just watching the rain and crying over my rubbish relationship … except of course it’s not rubbish … that’s unfair … and I’m not that pathetic. At least I’m trying not to be … or maybe I am … but I’m Scarlet White, I’m Dolly Russell’s new make-up artist.’

I offer Gavin my hand to shake, thrusting my Evening Standard back under my other arm.

‘Scarlet White? In the dining room with the lead piping?’ Gavin shakes but doesn’t seem in any way stirred.

‘Hmmm, just the half a mile short of funny,’ I say, eyeing him with suspicion at the cheap and quick jibe.

‘Okay, well Dolly won’t be in for a couple of hours yet – she’s a late starter, the first wave of pills and gin don’t break on her beach until noon – but that’s good if you want to have a look around, and I can introduce you to some people, the rest of the crew – the director’s downstairs freaking out about the karma of the curtain … it’s too heavy apparently – he says it could bring us all down …’

Gavin’s delivery is so dry it’s as if he’s reading his lines from a sheet of paper. I wonder if I’ll ever know when he’s joking. I don’t know whether to laugh or not now. He must be my age. He is twice my weight and height. He has that slightly ginger but just brown hair that suggests Scottish ancestry to me, although that’s unfounded as I don’t know anybody Scottish and never have. Still, Gavin looks like he could wear a kilt and toss cabers on BBC1 on Sunday afternoons.

He ducks expertly as we weave our way along a maze of thin grey corridors, and somehow he manages not to bang his over-large head on a thousand dirty pipes hanging from the ceiling above us. The pipes are so close together that if he wasn’t ducking so swiftly he’d actually be banging out a tune. Part of me wishes he’d stop ducking because I want to know how it sounds, although Gavin would end up with concussion. I skip to keep up in my heels, my purple skirt swishing silk at my knees, my legs in fishnets flashing beneath. We are moving at speed, Gavin’s stride is long, and I start to feel a little sticky in my black cashmere cardigan that crosses directly over my heart. Neither Gavin nor I speak for what must be a whole minute; it’s a long, strange silence like the ones observed on the radio on VE Day or September 11th. I feel us trapped in a moving, uncomfortable bubble, thinking desperately of something to say while trying to catch my breath. A very short man appears around the corner in front of us. I mean, he is clinically short. Gavin acknowledges him with a nod of his head, and as I hug the wall to let him pass I glance down and see that he is completely bald on top.

‘Goodness, I didn’t even realise! I should have read the play beforehand, I know, but it was such a last-minute booking … normally I work on film sets, TV commercials … I haven’t done that much theatre, or any, really …’

‘Didn’t realise what?’ Gavin asks as we turn the corner.

‘That there were dwarves in the play. Is it a fantasy? Or science fiction? I didn’t realise Tennessee Williams wrote that sort of thing as well.’

Gavin stops abruptly and looks at me, and I screech to a halt a couple of steps later and turn to face him.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘He’s an electrician …’

‘Oh …’

I see Gavin shaking his head as he starts walking again and I run a little to keep up, my heels clicking on the cold concrete of the floor, my back sweaty under my cashmere, my top lip prickling under my make-up, my hairspray starting to scratch at my head. I don’t think I have ever been this mortified. Gavin isn’t talking to me. Maybe he and the dwarf are really good friends, although they’d look ridiculous walking down the street together. In my mind I can only picture the smaller guy sitting on one of Gavin’s massive shoulders, perhaps in a jaunty hat and eating an apple … but I know that’s wrong. I decide to break the silence with a change of subject, terrified of how Gavin might choose to introduce me to the rest of the crew, especially if there are any more … electricians.

‘So Gavin, pretend you have a girlfriend …’

He stops and glares at me again.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘I do have a girlfriend,’ he says.

‘Oh. I didn’t mean anything by it, Gavin … Okay, well, moving on, what if you and your girlfriend were just sitting on the sofa one night, watching the TV, and she said to you, “Say something nice to me”?’

‘Why?’ he says, and I can’t decide if he is just irritated, or if he already hates me like Greenpeace hate Shell. Either way I carry on regardless – I can’t make it any worse.

‘Because she’s just had a miserable day, her feet really hurt because she’s been breaking in new sandals, she’s had a row with her dad about the importance of correctly filling out cheque-book stubs, and she needs somebody to say something wonderful. She needs to feel special …’

‘I mean,’ Gavin says, pushing a door open then turning back to address me, ‘why haven’t I said something nice anyway?’

‘Oh …’ That’s floored me.

He steps back to allow me to walk through the door before he does.

‘Exactly,’ I say. Exactly. I think my voice might have just broken.

The stage is in front of us, and all of the house lights are up. It is smaller than I anticipated, and apologetic without a spotlight.

‘I’m not having this conversation if you are going to cry again.’ Gavin talks over his shoulder at me as we stride along the aisle. ‘Plus, do you talk about anything else? Have you tried cracking a few jokes? Or is it just constant relationship angst over a mound of self-help books and copies of Cosmopolitan? Because if that’s the case I don’t think I blame this guy …’

I blink twice in quick succession. I am startled and affronted. I can talk about other things; I talk about other things all the time!

‘I can talk about other things …’ I say, sneering at him.

‘Well thank God for that,’ Gavin says, and stops walking abruptly behind a short Indian man who stands with his back to us while gesticulating wildly, his hands conducting an imaginary opera. Nobody appears to be paying him much attention, and a clove cigarette flashes wildly between the stubby fingers of his left hand, sprinkling ash and sparks onto his chocolate-brown suede loafers. He wears a dark grey suit and a black polo-neck, and has very thick and very high dark hair that seems to have been set in one of those old-lady hairdresser’s, an hour under the machine with a Woman’s Weekly and a word search, sucking on a boiled sweet, all clicking teeth and concentration.

Young people in jeans and Sergeant Pepper and Mr Brightside T-shirts mill around in front of him paying him no mind, while every couple of seconds somebody completely new appears and carries a large plank of wood precariously from one side of the stage to the other. Everything that could possibly be covered in material has been – a dark-red brushed velvet with a grey and brown pattern of twisted leaves. The stage needs sweeping. It is insulated with a thin layer of dust, broken up by discarded McDonald’s wrappers. I count at least five Starbucks cups that have toppled onto their sides like the drunks on Tottenham Court Road.

Gavin says, ‘Tristan’, but the little man in front of us doesn’t turn around. He is shouting in a low, thick theatrical voice that he has shoplifted from the men’s floor of a 1950s department store.

‘But fucking love! I can’t fucking make it work! It’s obviously too dark! It’s too heavy and shameful and dirty and depressed – it’s an old velvet whore hanging from its whore’s bed – it’s been used, it’s on the cheap, it’s dragging all of us down with it to its old rotten-toothed whore old age …’ His shoulders droop, and the clove cigarette burns close to his fingers. He takes a violent last drag and stubs it out on the aisle. I hear him whisper, ‘Now I’m depressed.’

When nobody says anything, he takes a huge breath and demands of the room, ‘Has anybody got any uppers?’

‘Tristan?’ Gavin repeats, but louder this time.

Tristan spins around to face us. He is wearing oversized black plastic sunglasses reminiscent of Jackie Onassis, although they are clearly very cheap. His suit is well cut but still appears to be a size too big for him. So this is Tristan Mitra. He tilts his head down to look at us above his plastic glasses and something devilish twinkles in his eyes as he flashes me a huge wide charming smile. I’ve read about him in the Standard. It was the opening night of his debut play as a director, an all-male version of The Sound of Music at the Brixton Art House, and the press were trying to track him down for a quote because of its rave reviews. They found him in the Charing Cross police station on Agar Road. He’d been arrested for being drunk in charge of a wheelchair on Old Compton Street. He’d run over the feet of twelve sets of tourists, but unlucky thirteen had been a policeman. They found the owner of the wheelchair in a pub at the bottom of Wardour Street with a bottle of vodka and a beef pie. He said that Tristan had offered him two hundred quid for the chair, plus the vodka, and he had just really fancied a drink. But now he couldn’t get home.

Tristan has appeared in the gossip columns as well – he’s rumoured to be having an affair with Phillipe Ellender, the set designer, and I read a thing last week that said he might be having a thing with Dolly Russell herself, which seems utterly bizarre. When they asked him for a quote he said, ‘Loving somebody and not telling them can hurt more than being rejected by them. It’s like rejecting yourself.’ And even though he has a reputation for being able to drink all night, he recently came home so appallingly trashed that he flew into a jealous rage directed at his mother’s chinchilla, Charlton, and tried to microwave it … The RSPCA got involved at some point, that’s why it was in the paper.

‘Gavin! Love! Mountain of a man! Giant Gavin! Ho, ho, ho, green giant!’ he sings and does a strange little dance, ‘Giant Gavin! Love! … Are you on any prescription medication? You’re not on codeine, are you?’

‘No,’ Gavin replies flatly, and Tristan stares at him still, but his smile begins to fade.

‘I had morphine once,’ I say, to try and cheer up this strange little man, this large-voiced wide-eyed director of the stage, who is no more than five foot five.

His face explodes into a huge smile again and I can’t help but smile too.

‘Morphine! I’d fucking kill for some morphine now!’

He has the most English voice I have ever heard, a cross between James Bond and the Queen, it’s made of silk. When he says ‘morphine’ he exclaims it, like his own personal Eureka!

‘Gavin, love, giant, man mountain, bouncy castle, can we get any morphine? Is there a hospital nearby? Better yet, St John’s Ambulance Headquarters? They are easily fooled those St John’s guys, they don’t get that much action you see.’ He lowers his glasses and winks at me and I feel myself blushing. He notices it, stops, smiles and winks again. ‘So they’ll chuck anything at you given the chance. Last year I was at the Streatham fete with my mother – she was selling chutney – and frankly I was bored stupid, and I saw the St John’s Ambulance there and couldn’t believe my luck! I wandered over and just casually mentioned that I’d twisted my arm unpacking two boxes of Mum’s finest, and asked them to improvise me a splint and they bloody did it in seconds out of a bloody Daily Telegraph! It was fucking marvellous! It was splint poetry! Broken-bone poetry! It’s dark in here, isn’t it? I think it’s the bloody curtain …’

Tristan spins around to face the stage and it feels like the light has gone out. Next to me, Gavin sighs quietly.

‘Could it be the glasses?’ I ask.

‘No, love, no …’ Tristan turns back to face us, but doesn’t take them off. ‘I wear them all the time now. I got them free from some fucking teenage magazine –’ He lights another clove cigarette without offering either Gavin or I the pack, and inhales deeply. Blowing out a large smoke ring, he points through its centre at nothing with his finger. ‘– Jackie or Shirley or Tarty or something like that, some teenage slutty magazine. And it was one pound fifty at the newsagent’s! And these were stuck to the front of this magazine, like a bloody godsend! My eyes had been so red that month anyway, and above them it said something like, “How to know if the time is really right to let him touch you” … or “Give him your cherry but keep the box that it comes in” … or “Don’t let him lick you” … or something.’ He stops and counts something on his fingers and mutters quickly.

Gavin and I exchange a glance. Tristan is like a walking spotlight. I don’t want him to spin around again. I don’t think Gavin likes him as much as I do, but maybe he’s just too high up. I am five foot five, five foot eight in my heels today, and Tristan is at least three inches shorter than me. If we stood back to back in bare feet we’d probably be the same height, except his hair is really high.

‘And I just thought perfect!’ Tristan is talking again. ‘They ground me, but let me be me. They steal the me from me. They remind me that everything is filtered, through experience. You know not one person that comes to see this shit-shambles of a play will see it the same? We all see it through our life filters – who we’ve loved, who we’ve screwed, who’s screwed us. If they were the fucking one, or they just wanted to get their leg over and then they did it with your best mate one Wednesday night after football practice.’

Tristan stops talking and lowers his glasses again, fixing me with a stare. His pupils are almost black. I feel the colour rushing to my cheeks. I am caught in his tractor beam.

‘By the time you reach twenty you are emotionally shot to shit, and I’m thirty-six! That’s fucking awful, isn’t it? How the hell did that happen? But that’s the world. That’s life. That’s London. Non, regrette rien. We are all a little damaged –’ he pushes his sunglasses back up to cover his eyes, ‘– shop soiled with the juices of lovers old, just not broken, not quite broken. Do you have any uppers?’

‘No, sorry.’ I shake my head and feel really bad. I would love to be able to give him an upper right now – not that I think he needs it, but he just really seems to want one. We stand in a temporary silence, which I decide to smash.

‘Sometimes I say to Ben, that’s my boyfriend, I say, “Say something nice”, and he says, “I don’t do it to order”, and I say, “Okay, Ben, but you never fucking do it!”’

I hear Gavin sigh but I ignore it because I have Tristan’s full attention, as long as his eyes are open under his sunglasses.

‘“You never do it, Ben!”’ I carry on. ‘And I just think that if you are going to be with somebody it might be nice if they said nice things, to cheer you up, and let you know why they are with you – that it’s not just killing time, because they don’t love you and they don’t initiate sex so really there isn’t much point, but they aren’t ending it so …’

Tristan whips off his sunglasses and stares at me in alarm.

‘I want you to know that I haven’t taken these off for four days and that includes sleeping and a court appearance,’ he says, nodding his head at me to make his point, so I completely understand the gravity of his action. The whites of his eyes are riddled with red veins like worms inching around his massively dilated pupils.

‘Fucking hell,’ he says, shaking his head now. ‘Are you in an actual relationship? Do people still do that? We should definitely talk about that – I’m interested. Just not right now. But let’s definitely talk later. Who are you?’ He asks me with the accent on ‘are’, as if I may be an imposter, or an alien, or it might actually be important to somebody.

Gavin answers before I can. ‘New Make-up for Dolly.’

And I don’t sound that important after all. I’m not even the original. I’m a replacement, sloppy seconds – again.

‘Right, right, right, right.’ Tristan nods with each word, with complete understanding. ‘What happened to Old Make-up?’ he asks Gavin seriously.

‘She quit.’

‘But why?’ Tristan asks.

‘Dolly spiked her drink.’

Tristan’s eyebrows rise simultaneously and a smile tweaks the corners of his mouth.

‘With what?’

‘The doctor said it was probably speed.’

‘Lucky bitch,’ Tristan whispers and gazes off to one side, as if remembering some long-forgotten afternoon with a long-forgotten lover in a long-forgotten field, somewhere long forgotten. He turns back to Gavin.

‘Who’s Dolly’s dealer?’ he asks seriously.

‘I don’t know, Tristan,’ Gavin replies, with no more expression in his voice than if he were reading the Ikea instructions for a self-assembly three-drawer chest, but Tristan doesn’t seem to mind.

‘Right. Right. Right.’ He nods his head again, computing the information.

‘Make-up,’ he turns to me.

‘Yes?’

‘Who’s your dealer?’

‘I don’t … I don’t really have one …’

‘Right. Okay. Two things. Number one – watch your drinks. If you think she’s spiked it bring it to me and I’ll test it … Let’s go to Gerry’s later and we can talk properly then. You do go to Gerry’s, right? Next door to the Subway at the bottom of Dean Street? Fucking Subway, how did they get to be everywhere all of a sudden? But I do love their meat!’

Gerry’s is a bar in Soho that is open all night for people like me, and Tristan, and anybody really. People who need to carry on drinking for a little while after the curtain goes down.

‘Yep.’

‘Good.’ He nods and turns to leave.

‘What was the second thing?’ I ask before he goes.

He pivots on his heel and fixes me with another smile, sucking on the arm of his plastic glasses.

‘Are the pillows real?’ His eyes jump down to my chest and he moves his glance from one to the other as if a tennis match is being conducted across my cleavage.

‘They’re all mine,’ I say with a smile.

‘Good for you. Lady luck. No jogging, though, Make-up, it could be carnage. Gerry’s then. Gavin! I’ll be back in ten, I need to do a thing.’

He pushes on his glasses and walks towards the front of house, disappearing quickly through a set of swing doors.

Gavin and I stand in silence and watch him go. I feel exhausted. Something crashes loudly on the stage behind us.

‘Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt your feelings,’ Gavin says while still staring at the swing doors.

‘Tristan?’ The pillow talk could have offended less of a girl than me. I’m used to it, however, from Ben.

‘No, your bloke. This Ben.’

‘And just drifting on without any kind of emotional investment isn’t hurting my feelings?’ I ask, still staring at the swing doors myself.

‘I don’t see a gun to your head …’ Gavin turns to me as if breaking out of a trance. I snap myself out of it as well. I wonder whether Tristan has opium sewn into his suit. He has left us both dazed and a little cloudy.

‘But …’ I shake my head to clear it, ‘but I love him, Gavin … it’s so hard …’

‘Nothing is that hard really … look at the facts …’ He turns and walks towards the stage. I follow.

‘Okay,’ I count on my fingers, ‘he doesn’t say he loves me. He doesn’t want to have sex with me. He doesn’t say nice things to me, even when I ask him to …’

‘Has he ever said anything nice to you?’

‘He said I was “electrifying” once …’

‘Electrifying? What does that mean?’ Gavin looks nonplussed.

‘I know. Pretty much nothing. It made me sound like a waltzer at a fun fair …’

‘Or a broken hair-dryer,’ Gavin offers as we walk through a small door at the side of the stage.

‘Thanks, Gavin, thanks very much.’

‘Is he seventy-five? Or a miner?’ he asks.

‘No … He’s thirty-three and he runs a branch of Dixons … Are there any miners left? You know, after Thatcher?’

‘Not really. You should leave him.’ He says this with some certainty, and I wonder how he can be so sure.

‘But why doesn’t he leave me, Gavin, if he wants to? I love him! If he doesn’t want to be with me, why is he still with me?’

We reach a small door backstage that has been freshly painted lilac. A sign that reads ‘Do NOT disturb’ swings from the doorknob, as well as what looks like a lavender sachet, the type they sell at school fetes, that somebody’s granny made at her club. Gavin turns the knob as he says, ‘Because he’s weak.’

I feel hugely disloyal. I hate that Gavin has just said that. He doesn’t even know Ben. I have painted this picture, and it is obviously an awful one.

‘I don’t know, Gavin, I don’t think that’s fair. He’s come from a really hard place, he left his wife for me, and …’

I start to defend him, but Gavin fixes me with a stare, from way up high. Maybe that is it – he’s weak. I hadn’t thought of that.

‘Scarlet. He’s weak. Most men are.’

‘But I thought that men were supposed to be the strong ones?’ I say, quietly confused.

‘They are … This is it.’ Gavin shrugs at the little room and it feels like the room shrugs back.

‘We might need you to make-up some of the other leads. Our Cast Make-up, Greta, is about eighty. She’s always got a hipflask full of Drambuie on the go. We can’t let her do eyeliner. We haven’t got enough insurance.’

‘Fine.’ I dump my make-up box on a table covered in flowers and cards, in front of a long, thin, badly lit mirror. ‘As long as Dolly’s okay with me doing it I’m happy to.’

‘It’s cool, you could get here at midday every day and still have time to do the two other principals before she turns up.’

‘Anybody I know?’ I unclip the three locks on my carrier. It’s like a portable Fort Knox, but the prospect of it falling open on the tube and thousands of pounds’ worth of make-up tumbling out to be crushed under loafers and court shoes is unthinkable.

Gavin passes me a polystyrene cup of instant coffee that has appeared like magic. ‘Arabella Jones and Tom Harvey-Saint,’ he says as I take a sip.

I spit it back out all over Gavin’s huge trainers.

‘Didn’t realise he was in it, did you?’ Gavin smirks at me.

‘No … I didn’t realise he was in it.’ The blood rushes from my legs to my head and I lean back against the table urgently.

‘Fancy him, do you?’ Gavin asks, but as if he is reading court notes back to a jury.

I gulp but don’t answer.

‘Watch out Ben,’ he whistles, and edges towards the door.

The side of the room that isn’t the table and mirror and flowers and cards is cushions and more flowers, a large gold chair with deep red velvet backing, and a tall lamp with a fuchsia scarf thrown over it to soften the light. It’s a tiny space crammed with decoration, an old room dressed up to the nines.

A noisy fan blows hot air out in the corner, but it seems fairly warm anyway.

‘Do we really need that?’ I ask Gavin, nodding at the heater.

‘Yep. The pipes are rubbish and she likes it to be twenty-four degrees.’

‘The lighting in here is terrible,’ I say, spinning around, trying to find another plug socket.

‘She won’t have it any brighter either, and when you meet her you’ll see why,’ he says. ‘Do you need anything before I go?’

‘Where’s the kitchen?’

‘Down the hall, second turn on the left.’

‘Where’s the bathroom?’

‘Hers is opposite, you can use that if you’re discreet. Anything else?’

I rack my brain, trying to stumble across the gaps in my knowledge, all the necessary pieces of information that could be missing. Theatre is new to me, it’s not my thing. I do shoots. I do hanging around all day eating crap from a van and dabbing sweat off actors or singers with a puff pad. I do wine at lunch on set and pretty much all afternoon. I do big airy warehouse spaces, not strange little rooms with scarves thrown over lamps and bad heating.

‘Is Tristan crazy?’ I ask finally, as it seems to be the most pertinent question I can ask. ‘I mean, previews are supposed to start next week, aren’t they? That’s why they got me in and didn’t wait for someone with theatre experience, my agency said. But it kind of … doesn’t seem ready?’

Gavin smiles and the room feels warmer. He coughs, looks away, and then back at me. It is a theatrical move. Maybe you can’t help it if you work in this environment, maybe these strange dramatic pauses and looks and asides are contagious? Maybe everybody here is crazy.

‘Is Tristan crazy?’ he repeats. ‘No more than any of the rest of them. He likes the sound of his own voice. And he can be very charming, for a short bloke from Streatham with a pill habit. But you’ll get used to it. He calls everybody “love” so he doesn’t have to remember names. It’s actually quite clever. But you’re okay, you’ll be Make-up.’

‘Isn’t it funny, I mean funny strange – maybe funny tragic for me – that one man can be so easy with it, and another so mean?’ I sip my coffee and lean back on the counter.

‘With what?’ he asks, half of him out of the door, but still loads of him in the room.

‘The L word. Love. Ben won’t say it. Tristan can’t stop. So is he gay?’

Gavin takes a step back into the room and pushes the door ajar behind him. ‘No, not gay. I’m sure he’ll tell you. He told me three days after I met him and it took him a while to warm to me, he said because of the height thing. It’s … Tristan is a non-libidinist. That’s his phrase, not mine. It means he doesn’t think about sex. Or care about sex. He doesn’t want sex.’ Gavin’s eyes widen like spaceships in his face, illuminated and strange and high up in the sky.

I stop myself taking another sip of coffee, and angle my neck to look up at him and make sure he isn’t joking. But he nods his head and doesn’t even smirk.

‘He doesn’t care about sex?’ I ask.

‘Nope.’

‘And he doesn’t think about sex?’

‘Nope.’

‘But men are supposed to think about sex every seven seconds or seven minutes or something, aren’t they?’

Gavin coughs, embarrassed. We’ve spent at least half an hour together this morning … reckoning on those figures Gavin has felt fruity and not admitted it a few times already.

‘Christ, that’s the statistic that keeps me awake at night when Ben doesn’t want to … you know … But Tristan doesn’t even think about it? How does that work? How do you stop yourself? That would be fantastic!’

‘You think? Christ, I think it would be awful.’

‘But Gavin, I mean, if it didn’t even bother you, if you didn’t even think about it, life would be so much easier. If I didn’t miss sex so much there would be far fewer problems in my relationship.’

‘It’s not fantastic, it’s weird. And so is your bloke by the sounds of it, so don’t go thinking that not thinking about sex is an answer to anything. Sex is the thing that keeps most of us going!’

‘Shouldn’t that be love, Gavin?’

‘I’ll take sex over love most days. It doesn’t hurt half as much, under normal circumstances at least!’

I grimace at Gavin, but he just winks and I blush. It’s not him, I blush if anybody winks at me. I find it intimate and peculiar and sexual. I’d blush if my own grandmother winked at me, and then of course I’d throw up.

‘So Tristan doesn’t have sex, ever?’

‘Oh no, that’s not true, I think he has it quite a bit. It’s just not about him. He doesn’t care if he gets it or not. I think he does it for other people …’

‘But – I’m sorry, Gavin, for all these questions – but how does he get … you know … aroused? If he doesn’t want it, or care about it?’

‘My guess is Viagra. Any more questions?’ Gavin pulls the door open again with one of his huge hands. He could be a one-man circus, with a few lights around his torso, offering rides on his palms for fifty pence or a pound. I’m sure I could sit in one of those hands.

‘Gavin, what’s your girlfriend like?’

‘What’s she like?’

‘Is she freakishly tall too?’ I smile at him and I see a smile form in his eyes in return. The big Gavin smiles must be rationed, like chocolate in the war.

‘Not freakishly tall, but not short like you either.’

‘I am not short, I am five foot five, which is two inches above average. Is she pretty?’

‘Why all the questions about my girlfriend?’

‘I’m just interested, Gavin. Other people’s relationships interest me. I just wonder what you go for, what your type is. Everybody has a type. Some men just go for baubles, decoration. The only thing more attractive to a man than a beautiful woman is an easy life. And I just wondered what your type is. Beautiful or easy?’

Gavin looks at me with an element of serious concern. I don’t think he likes this line of questioning. But he answers anyway.

‘Arabella? She is very beautiful. And not at all easy. So there’s your answer I guess.’

‘Arabella from the play? But Gavin, she’s stunning!’

‘And?’ he asks me, like a dry old maths teacher waiting for an answer from a stupid young pupil.

‘And nothing, nothing at all. That wasn’t surprise, I just meant … good for you!’

Gavin lowers his head and inspects the coffee I spat out onto his trainers, which is drying into a dirty stain that looks a bit like the birthmark on Gorbachev’s forehead.

‘We’ll see,’ he says, half out of the door now. ‘She is gorgeous. But she’s definitely not easy, and it can wear you down.’

‘Not easy is the best kind!’ I say, as he is almost gone, but I hear him mutter ‘Tell that to your boyfriend,’ just as the walkie-talkie on his belt starts spewing white noise and static, and I hear a muffled voice say,

‘Dolly’s at the back door.’

My door opens again and Gavin pokes his head back in. ‘Dolly’s arrived,’ he says, and turns to leave.

‘Should I wait here?’ I shout, a hint of panic in my voice.

‘Depends on her mood. She might throw you out, she might want to meet you straight away. You may as well stay, I suppose. I’ll try and gauge how she is before she gets down here.’

‘Should I be scared?’ I ask him.

‘I don’t know, are you scared of most things?’

‘It’s starting to feel that way.’

‘Well if you are she’ll sense it, like an attack dog, so try and keep it under control. And don’t worry, with any luck she’ll be hammered.’

Gavin shuts the door.

I unpack and inspect my brushes to see if any of them need replacing, and open up a couple of samples that a new make-up company have sent me. I check my own hair in the mirror and mess it up a little, and re-gloss. The trouble with talking is that it wears your gloss away. I think about sitting, but I don’t know where Dolly will want to sit, and I don’t want her to burst in and chuck me straight back out again for nabbing her favourite spot. I try to lean back nonchalantly, cross my arms, uncross them, strike a relaxed non-fearful pose that doesn’t just look ill at ease and terrified.

I spot a press pack sitting on the desk, and a picture of Tristan sticks out. Somebody has childishly drawn long eyelashes on him, and a pencil-thin moustache. Below the picture the text reads:

Directed by Tristan Mitra, Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore has been staged at The Majestic once before, starring Hollywood screen idol Joanna Till. The play marks Tristan’s debut in the West End, fresh from the success of his all-male adaptation of The Sound of Music at the Brixton Art House. He previously worked for the DSS for thirteen years, but was fired, which he believes intrinsic to his direction of the play.

I pick up another page and see a heavily air-brushed close-up of Dolly. You can tell it’s air-brushed because no matter how good the make-up there would still be the suggestion of lines around her eyes and lips, but her face is like a porcelain mask instead. I skim-read text. It mentions Laurence Olivier and David Niven, but then nothing of note for two decades, until recently when it seems she’s been in some TV movies, playing ‘the popular grandmother detective Mrs Mounting for the Hallmark Channel series Mrs Mounting Investigates.’ From David Niven to the Hallmark Channel then. I toss the pack back onto the counter, sit on my hands to stop them from shaking, and wait for Dolly Russell to make her grand entrance.

Scene III: History

After twenty minutes and a series of fearful moments and with still no sign or news of Dolly, I wonder if there has been some kind of problem; if she has thrown a tantrum on learning of my lack of theatre experience, or is upstairs leading a drunken conga across the stage, or has Gavin pinned to a wall somewhere, teaching him her version of living. Just then somebody begins knocking a tune on the door – tap tap, tap tap tap tap, tap tap tap tap … pause … tap tap … I recognise it as the Tapioca song from Thoroughly Modern Millie. I love musicals. Everybody in a musical is so in love with life itself that they keep bursting into song.

When I was very little and Mum had housework to do on rainy afternoons, she used to sit me and Richard in front of BBC2 to watch the likes of Calamity Jane, or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, or Hello Dolly, or Thoroughly Modern Millie. She said she thought them far less harmful than violent cartoons starring He-Man and the Masters of the Universe that were showing on the other channel. Richard would be bored within minutes and sit in the corner scribbling with crayons or banging things. I’d get annoyed at the interruption, but not enough to turn off the TV. After about twenty minutes Mum would wander in with a bottle of polish in her hand and say, ‘Oh I’ll just watch this bit for five minutes’ as the seven brothers high-kicked at a barn dance, or Julie Andrews sang ‘Babyface’, then she’d settle down on the sofa. After a couple of minutes, when I was certain she was staying put, I’d get up and go and sit next to mum, curling up on the sofa beside her. She’d tuck me under her arm and stroke my hair as she hummed along to the songs and the rain poured down outside, flooding the holes in the driveway, and Richard scribbled joyously on his paper – and then the walls – in the corner.

I shout ‘Come in’ but the tapping continues, so I trip to the door and throw it open. Tristan Mitra practically falls through.

‘Tristan?’

‘Make-up!’ he exclaims with a beam. I smile back at him. ‘Why were you tapping the Tapioca song on my door?’ I ask.

‘What better song to tap?’ he asks, and because I don’t have an answer we stand in what could be an uncomfortable silence, before it is mercifully shattered by Tristan exploding with laughter, a false falsetto laugh that catches us both off-guard.

‘Are you looking for Dolly?’ I ask him, straightening my skirt, ruffling up my hair.

‘Not at all, not one bit. I was looking for you! Looking at you. You really are quite gorgeous, but then you know that. Of course you know that, what beautiful woman isn’t aware of the effect she has on the people around her, but is it a curse as well, I wonder? Does it leave you slightly bewildered, Make-up, when somebody isn’t quite as impressed with you as you think they should be? So much so that it has you reaching for the lipstick and the diet books?’

‘I’m sorry, Tristan, I don’t think I remember the question …’

He waves his hand, it isn’t important.

‘I thought you might want me to fill you in on the theatre, and Dolly herself, before the old monster descends.’

He turns his hands into claws, makes his teeth into fangs, and pretends to walk down some stairs. He looks like he is attempting the Thriller dance. I don’t know how to react and he laughs again, hard and loud like a punch in the air.

I think he must have found those uppers.

‘That would be helpful, Tristan, if you wouldn’t mind, if you have time. I really don’t know much about this theatre stuff at all, or Dolly, and I feel that I should …’

Tristan moves into the little room and suddenly it feels crowded and claustrophobic, what with the lilies and the velvet and the cards, and Tristan as well, who seems to be everywhere all at once. He is half the size of Gavin, but twice the presence. I tuck myself away in the corner by my make-up box, but he wanders over and stands in front of the brushes laid out on the table, appraising them seriously.

‘Smoke and mirrors, smoke … and … mirrors …’ He selects a cheekbone brush of fine hair and, with closed eyes, sweeps it down the length of his nose.

Opening his eyes slowly he turns to face me.

‘So, The Majestic Theatre.’ He gestures around him with a sweeping motion of his arms. ‘Well. I always say that if you’re going to fill a gap you should fill it completely. Let’s start at the beginning.’ He taps the end of my nose with the brush delicately, and then steps back to appraise his work.

‘The Majestic Theatre on Long Acre, Covent Garden, was commissioned in 1880. Queen Victoria instructed that somebody build a “beautiful building to fill an ugly space, and quick!”’ he says, doing a fair impression of the Queen’s low, moneyed voice, while simultaneously his eyebrows tango and his chin tucks into his neck to signify an old lady’s multiple chins. ‘But it was twelve spiteful years in the making. The first of those years was spent attempting to evict the tramps and drunks and whores who lived on the intended site, a sprawling old hat factory, wrenched from the family Hobson – hat makers for three centuries – after William Hobson the ninth dabbled with opium to ease the pain from his arthritis and became joyfully addicted. Lucky bastard.’ Tristan smiles and circles the make-up brush on my cheek softly and slowly as if to aid concentration.

‘Of course, the family didn’t realise before it was too late that their profits and their business were going up in smoke – ha! So, ignored by the bank, which had more pressing concerns in India and America, Hobson’s hat factory became three floors of filth and sin. But the drunks and the tramps and the whores are the most resilient of us all, Make-up, clutching on to life, so far down that there are no rules, getting by because not getting by is the graveyard. Hobson’s hat factory was their home, and there’s no place like home. They kept coming back. And who can blame them?’

Bored with the cheekbone brush, Tristan replaces it on the side and addresses the counter as he searches for a new and exciting tool.

‘Each night they were herded up and horded out with horns and whistles and truncheons and punches, to allow the necessary preparations for the following night’s demolition. But by midday they were grubbily sneaking past the hired security, or getting them drunk on cheap vodka, or laid, or high! Wonderful, wonderful, ingenious! And so the process would begin again that night, with whistles and bells and punches, a mini war, before the place could be blown. But by the following midday they were back again …’

‘Tristan?’ I interrupt, as he flicks the back of his hand with an eyebrow brush, ‘how do you know all of this?’

‘Research, Make-up.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘It must have taken you ages!’

‘Not really. I could tell you the same about most of the theatres. I have to know the history of a theatre before I work there. It would be like you applying a new eye-shadow, say, to a client, and not knowing where it came from or what was in it …’ he says with a smile.

‘Oh. Right. Exactly,’ I say, desperately trying to remember any of the eye shadow science I learnt at college. Nope, mostly forgotten.

‘Where was I?’ he asks.

‘Drunks and whores who wouldn’t leave,’ I say.

‘Right. Well. One black January London night when the construction unit had taken all that they could, soaked in swearing and spitting and the vomit and faeces being thrown at them in buckets, and the urine being sprayed on them from third-floor windows like vile spurts from peculiar water pistols, they took action. Forty-seven drunks and tramps and whores vanished the night they blew up the old hat factory, at one a.m.’

Tristan widens his eyes.

‘Hell!’ I say, appalled.

‘The explosion woke the bits of the city that were sleeping, but nobody cared. And by nine a.m. all the rubble had been cleared.’

‘My God, they just blew up all those people?’ I ask, confused.

Tristan nods his head theatrically.

‘Yes, Make-up, they did. Business is business, and they had plans in place, people were already on the payroll. The architect of The Majestic, Henry Lee, was the brother of the renowned architect Charles Lee, who had just remodelled Her Majesty’s Theatre into an Opera House to gushing critical acclaim. The Times said, “Charles Lee uses line with a conventional splendour.” Henry was twelve years younger than Charles, but two inches taller and with size twelve feet. Their mother had been startled by the pregnancy that was Henry, believing that at thirty-four she was well past childbearing age. Henry had always felt like a mistake, poor bastard. His mother looked bemused when she saw him. His father, the civil servant Charles Lee Senior, met Henry’s adoring stares with a mixture of irritation and anger. When Henry’s mother died of a blood disease at forty-four, Charles Lee Senior took a ten-year-old Henry to one side at her burial and whispered, “It was you. You were too much for her.”’ Tristan says it in a thick, comical Irish accent.

‘Tristan, are you making this up?’ I ask, irritated that he has taken me for a fool.

‘No! Absolutely not! Make-up, what would make you say such a thing?’

‘Well, you didn’t say they were Irish for a start.’

‘That was just for colour, Make-up – do you want this to be interesting or not?’

‘Can’t you just tell me about Dolly now?’ I ask, fidgeting.

‘Soon, Make-up. Patience is a virtue. Cleanliness is next to Godliness and patience is the hobby of angels.’

I sigh. He gives me a reproachful look and carries on.

‘The Majestic was Henry’s first commission, and a fateful one. He dreamt of six tiers to seat two thousand people, but was plagued by doubts and insecurities, violently ripping up new plans, sometimes throwing them on the fire and beginning again. Then there would be nine tiers, then twelve, then twenty! At the age of thirty-three he had been drinking heavily for eight years, to soften London’s hard edges, even though he knew that softening hard edges was not necessarily an advantage for an architect. Henry had recently fallen savagely and obsessively in love with a Spanish prostitute named Vanessa who had long, thick dark hair like a mare’s, and which had never been cut. It was overrun with lice like wood mice in a forest but Henry didn’t care. She had large pendulous breasts that sat heavily on her chest, ravaged by little stretch marks where the pendulums began to swing. This was Henry’s favorite spot – he would lay his head on those tears after six or seven minutes of furious drunken lovemaking that inevitably ended shamefully limp. He would weep quietly as she tickled his cheek with strands of her long, black, infested hair.’

‘Yuk,’ I whisper, grimacing.

‘Close your eyes and have some humanity,’ he says to me, as he sweeps a brush across my eyelids. ‘All of the money from The Majestic’s commission was quickly slipping away, spent on cheap sloe gin and night after night with Vanessa, who had got wise to the drunken architect’s feelings and upped her prices. But that’s women for you. And poor Henry was in love, helpless in the face of her inflation. When his pockets were finally empty he began stalking her late into the night, jumping clumsily out from the shadows, tripping over his drunken size twelve feet only to blow her a kiss and run away. Vanessa carried on whoring, Henry carried on behaving erratically, and The Majestic’s construction faltered as more plans were thrown on the fire. Finally, the foreman, frustrated by Henry’s absence from the site for five straight days, called his brother, Charles Lee, to report Henry missing. Henry was found three days later on the floor of an old boarding house in Hoxton, with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a gun in the other, and the original set of plans laying face up on his chest, dusted with blood. A single gunshot to his head had finished him off, or maybe it was Vanessa, or maybe it was The Majestic.’

‘Oh no, how terrible!’ I say, instinctively covering my mouth with my hand.

Tristan removes it and places it on my lap.

‘Wait, it gets worse. Charles Lee wiped the blood from the plans, accepted the commission to finish The Majestic for five times the fee that had already been paid to his dead brother, and reworked them. A strangely sober three-tier theatre was completed on Long Acre in 1892. It still had the curved lines of Henry’s original plan, shaped like a sympathetic woman, but the softer edges had been hardened, to ensure it stayed up when horses trotted past.

‘Unfortunately for the theatre’s investors the shows that had been scheduled to appear at The Majestic had long since found alternate sites, some of them enjoying splendid runs that had already come to an end! The theatre, although completed, stood empty for fifteen months. Then in 1893 Dickie Black and Leonard White of the Black and White Circus enquired whether the large, vacant, sad and lonely building on Long Acre with a flaking painted sign hanging over its curved entrance still had its entertainment licence, and whether it was for sale. The investors had just that week taken the expensive decision to have it demolished and the land sold on, but instead took a very reasonable price, and had none of the trouble of getting rid of the sad old girl.

‘Black and White immediately posted a huge red and gold sign below The Majestic that read, “Coming Soon! Black & White’s Freaks Circus of Passion, Politics, Fairytale and Violence.” Six weeks later they replaced the ‘Coming Soon!’ with a ‘Now Open!’. It became an instant hit with local workers, soldiers in from the docks, drunks and whores and commoners and thieves. Bearded ladies and midgets galloped around the stage nightly, drinking their way through every show, spraying their audience with whiskey and ignoring the fights and the flatulence, laughing and shouting and swearing at the audience and each other. The performances became more and more debauched, full nudity was de rigueur by the time the police moved in one sticky summer night in 1899, closing the act and the theatre down for breaching public decency laws and open acts of pornography.

‘Black and White hotfooted it to Venice rather than face the pornography rap, plus a second and more sinister charge of attempting to breed freaks by mating them. The Majestic stood cold and lonely again through two punishing winters.’

‘No, Tristan,’ I put my hand up. ‘Stop it now. You are making it up. Nobody breeds freaks,’ I say, shaking my finger at him reproachfully.

‘Oh, Make-up, so naïve. They still do it to this day in some of the southern states of America.’ Tristan nods his head at me convincingly.

‘Shut up, no they don’t, you are being ridiculous.’ I stand up but Tristan pushes me back down onto my stool.

‘Make-up, I’m not finished. And who has done the research, you or me? And who wants to look like a fool in front of Dolly Russell, perhaps the last true Hollywood starlet, when she asks you what you know about theatre?’

‘I can just say some stuff about plays and things. I’ve read some … Arthur Miller,’ I say, thankful that I could remember the name of an American playwright.

‘And the cartoon section in the Sunday Times as well, Make-up? Come on now, sit down, you need to know this.’

Tristan is obviously enjoying himself.

‘But don’t you have stuff to do?’ I ask, exhausted.

‘Yes. This. Now, in March 1901, looking for a venue to stage his dancing act The Sabines, Pierre Christophe Magrine, a French businessman who had made a name for himself as a slick mover amongst his contemporaries, and the chorus girls if you get my gist, bought The Majestic as a venue for his style of evening entertainment. On the day the renovators removed the boards from the entrance, triumphantly kicking the door down, an evil stench seeped out. Covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, swiping at their watering eyes, they weaved their way to the back of the stage, following the smell as it became increasingly passionate, leading them finally to a small locked cupboard, big enough for a chair and a mirror and a shelf. Evil curiosity made them break that door down too, and a dozen well-fed screaming rats hurtled out across their feet. The workmen found the bearded lady decomposed in her dressing room. She still sat stiffly on a small chair in front of a mirror that had been smashed. By the streaks of blood on the glass it was fair to say that punching her reflection had been the dying act of a circus freak. The floor of the theatre was littered in rat droppings, and the walls were stained sticky and brown with cigarette tar, but The Majestic was cleaned up again.’

‘She killed herself because she was ugly?’ I ask, appalled.

‘Not just ugly, Make-up, a freak.’

‘But lots of women have hair on their faces, most girls wax, or laser, or whatever …’

‘Not back then, Make-up. Back then it made you a freak, and freaks don’t get married and have kids and get loved back.’

‘Yes they do, that’s an awful thing to say! You don’t just love somebody because of the way they look …’ I admonish him, slapping away the brush he’s been running up and down my nose.

‘Hush, Make-up. No lies in here please, let me finish my story. The Sabines – feathered, sequinned and high-kicking – remained at the theatre for nine years before Magrine set sail for Hollywood and the moving pictures. By this time The Majestic had established itself as a popular venue for light entertainment. Magrine sold the theatre on to a fresh set of investors, and a new management board was established. A series of light comedies played throughout 1910 and 1911, decadent and fun and attended mostly by lower middle-class workers, but disaster struck in 1912 when a discarded cigarette in a props cupboard sparked a blaze that had, by the time the firemen arrived, gutted the entire front and back of stage. All sets were destroyed, as was the curtain and the boxes. The roof had substantial fire damage, as the heat had crept quickly up the walls, and the building was judged to be unsound unless the top tier was pulled out. One unusually mild September night in 1913, The Majestic went from holding a spectacular one thousand seats to a mere six hundred and forty-three. Some of the bigger bitches of the time suggested that “The Majestic” was far too grand a name for a two-tiered theatre, and that it should be changed … But after an extensive renovation that lasted five years and employed the art deco style so popular in Paris at the time, although in clumsy contrast to the front of house, The Majestic, still known as The Majestic, reopened in 1918.’

‘Ta da!’ I say. ‘And then they showed some plays, and then it was Dolly Russell’s turn, and then …’

‘Stop it. I’ve nearly finished.’ Tristan glares at me.

‘Do you promise? I feel like I’m back in my history A-level,’ I say.

‘But weren’t they good times?’ he asks.

I think about history class, sitting next to Helen, flirting with Simon Howells across the room over textbooks filled with black and white pictures of war.

‘Yes, actually,’ I admit with a shrug.

‘Good. Then learn something new. The Majestic became known for its musical theatre, staging 267 performances of No, No, Nanette before it transferred to The Palace Theatre at Cambridge Circus. And although The Majestic fared well in the Twenties with numerous Noël Coward productions, nothing ever seemed to really take off. The Majestic just couldn’t get a hit. It became known amongst actors and crew as a “warm up” theatre, with shows that sold reasonably but rarely sold out. It was then that The Majestic earned its nickname, in theatre circles, as The Bridesmaid. For example …’ He takes a step back and strikes an affected pose.

‘Fur and feathers and lipstick: “What’s next for you, darling?”’

He jumps a foot and turns to face the space he has vacated.

‘Cravat, purple shirt and slacks: “I’m starting rehearsals next month for Noël Coward at The Bridesmaid, darling.”’

A jump. ‘Fur and feathers and lipstick: “Where were you hoping for, darling?”’

Jump. ‘Cravat, purple shirt and slacks: “The Apollo. Damned shame. Maybe next year. Drink, darling?”’

He stands still and straightens his now-crooked glasses.

‘A faulty oil lamp started the blaze that ravaged the old girl again, in 1931. It swept through The Bridesmaid like fleas in a halfway house, killing two tramps who slept under the sympathetic curves of the front entrance each night. The theatre was left for dead for two years, occasionally sighing and groaning to let Londoners know it was still there. She was past her best, charred and black with soot, damp from fire hoses, with rotting carpets and rats, the terrible rats, infesting her again, chewing at her insides. A sad and lonely old Bridesmaid, hoping for a little luck and love.’

‘Why are you looking at me like that, I have luck and …’ My words trail off.

‘Make-up, don’t be so sensitive. The Majestic was spectacularly reopened on the third of September 1939! Ta da! Of course, the timing was a little unfortunate, and her big night was dampened spitefully by the speech made by Neville Chamberlain at eleven fifteen that morning –

“This country is at war with Germany … now may God bless you all, and may he defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall be fighting against …” Still, the old girl was up and running again just in time: some nights they acted by candlelight, some nights they acted in the dark, which was more than could be said for other prettier theatres who dropped their curtain at the first sound of a siren.

‘Ivor Novello musicals trilled though the Forties and Fifties, with their beguiling talk of kingdoms of love and beauty and starlight, stepping lightly aside for the more sombre, stern faces of The Postman Always Knocks Twice and A Streetcar Named Desire as the Sixties drew in. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore first opened in 1968.’

‘With Joanna Till?’ I ask, feeling, finally, like I can contribute – I read that name in the press pack.

‘That’s right. Well done. Gold star. Initially it was a far from controversial or even noteworthy opening. Lacking the public pulling power of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or Streetcar, the critics called it a “strange little play for the strangest little theatre in the West End, and surely only being staged as a vanity project for Joanna Till.”’

‘Joanna Till had been one of the first studio stars in her youth, an international beauty with platinum curls that framed a pale complexion and a perfect cupid’s bow permanently painted on her delicate lips throughout the 1920s. By the time she came to play Mrs Goforth, the dying monster at the heart of the play – who has seen off numerous husbands and is now a recluse in an Italian villa dictating her memoirs to her young and beleaguered assistant – Joanna was an alcoholic who ate barely one meal a day, and whom few saw out of make-up. But an old beauty still sang in her eyes, reminding those close enough that she was once the greatest prize to be won, the cup on the table, the lady in the booth at the front of the mile-long “dime for a kiss” queue. The memory of what she had been haunted all of her movements. Her fingers danced and flickered nervously about her face, trying to cover every line simultaneously, attempting to distract any audience from the age that had set in and which now clung to her once-beautiful features like an evil moss to smooth pebbles in a lake.

‘One of the only members of the company that she allowed close was her young co-star Edward “Teddy” Hampden, who played the impertinent but handsome visitor Chris, and who, at thirty-five, was twenty-eight years Joanna’s junior.’

‘Good for her!’ I mutter, but Tristan ignores me.

‘Joanna could be heard giggling from behind her dressing-room door in the afternoons, after matinee and before evening. She rarely spent any time alone, aside from “the half” – the half an hour before each performance when she would shoo away her young admirer and compose herself. But even then, occasionally, he was allowed back in. The controversy murmured in every nook of The Bridesmaid. Teddy shot Joanna through the heart, six hours after she finished their affair over a cajun salmon lunch at the Savoy.’

I gasp. Tristan nods his head seriously.

‘Although they had been involved for barely three months they were being too indiscreet, and news had reached her husband, the world-famous director Sir Terence Till. Sir Terence placed an outraged and irate long-distance call from a set in Egypt telling Joanna to behave. Teddy at least had the decency to turn the gun on himself afterwards, aiming straight through his heart as well. So the strange little play’s curtain failed to rise the following night, as both the leads’ hearts were streaked across a dressing-room wall.’

I look around urgently – ‘Not this room, Tristan? Not these walls?’ – feeling a cold chill run down my spine, the kind you get when you are a kid and somebody pokes out the game ‘Does-this-make-your-blood-run-cold?’, finishing with a grab on the back of your neck. I shudder.

‘It’s possible,’ he says, seriously, ‘it’s very possible. Anyway, controversy courted The Majestic again six years later, in November 1974, when a performance of Hair so shocked a four-hundred-pound Presbyterian Texan banker that he suffered a massive heart attack in the second row. The banker died, and so did the show, after two months and below-average ticket sales, even for The Bridesmaid.’

‘We should move to another venue,’ I say earnestly, nodding my head, ready to pack up my things and dust off the bad luck I can feel settling in on me and Tristan as we sit for too long in one place in this cursed theatre.

‘Too late, the tickets have been sold, Make-up. Then, in 1981, as a protest against the Falklands war, some of the younger members of the cast of The Iceman Cometh – the ones blessed with better bodies and less inhibition – seized the opportunity to host a naked sit-in on the stage of The Majestic. It quickly descended into a televised orgy that had to be disbanded by policemen in plastic gloves. It was the sight of the gloves that my mum, actually, remembered from the six o’clock news that evening. She hadn’t spotted the blink-and-you-missed-it glimpse of an erect penis on television, the first to officially appear on UK terrestrial TV, according to The Guinness Book of Records. But she saw the gloves. Typical mum, ha!’ he says, shaking his head affectionately.

‘So then The Majestic closed, again, for refurbishment in 1989, looking sad and tired, and in desperate need of a facelift, Botox, any and all kinds of surgery that might be on offer. It reopened in 1995, polished and tightened, but some say lacking some of its old character.’

‘I wish you hadn’t told me the shooting bit,’ I say, looking around me feeling creepy, ‘I’m going to have trouble going to the kitchen on my own now.’

‘Stop it, Make-up, you’re a grown woman. So! That brings us up-to-date. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, starring Dolly Russell, and directed by me, Tristan Mitra, will mark her return to the London stage for the first time in eighteen years!’ Tristan swirls on the spot and claps his hands like he’s just finished conducting a big band.

‘And, so, what about Dolly?’ I ask, exasperated.

‘Oh yes, of course, Dolly. What can I tell you about Dolly Russell? Other than that she drugged the last Make-up? Ha! Don’t be put off by that! It just shows guile. Well,’ he hushes his voice to a low murmur, to a purr, ‘I don’t know how old she is … maybe seventy-two, maybe sixty-eight, it’s hard to say. But she hasn’t been on stage for over fifteen years. I’ve barely had her up there yet, without some screaming match or tantrum or silent seething fit. And that’s just me. Ha.’

He picks up my large powder brush. Its bristles still sparkle silver from my last job on Friday, glistening up dancers for the cover of a disco album – two emaciated eighteen-year-old girls who ate half a bag of crisps each on a twelve-hour shoot. Tristan dusts his face with it lightly, breathing in while he does. He leans towards me and, with serious intent, dusts my cheeks with it too. I step back a little, against the counter. He stares at me. I realise that I am his new Girls World. I just hope he doesn’t try to cut my hair with nail scissors.

‘The light in here is really bad,’ I say, embarrassed, ‘it’s far too dark.’

‘Shush,’ he says, and moves my arms that I have crossed against my chest back down to my sides, like a shop mannequin.

‘She didn’t get her Oscar until she was thirty-three, for The Queen Wants a King. Have you seen it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

He picks up another brush, flicks it against his palm, and puts it down again. I want to tell him to stop now but I don’t.

‘It’s very good. It’s the only role I’ve seen her in with no vanity. Isn’t that ironic? They demand she be painted and pretty at all times but they give her an Oscar for being plain, as if being ugly were such an impossible task for her that they had to reward it … Do you think it’s harder to be beautiful or plain, Make-up? I mean, in the mornings, how long does it take you? Because you’re a beauty, but I can tell it needs a little work now. A little more effort than it was five years ago, right?’

‘Maybe a little,’ I say, cringing at the thought of the price of my night cream, and my day cream, and my paraffin cleanser.

‘And a little more moisturiser than before? A little more time spent slicking away at those laughter lines?’ He picks up a tub of thick cream, and scoops a dessert spoonful onto the back of his hand. He sticks a deliberate finger into it and draws it out slowly, so that a dollop sits clumsily on its end. Reaching out, he takes my arm, and absent-mindedly smears the cream up and down my skin, rubbing it in smoothly as he traces the veins from my wrist to my elbow with his finger. He holds my arm firmly at the wrist with his other hand. I don’t pull away but I feel that if I did he would grip it a little tighter, a little firmer, and resist. I am being seduced by a man with no interest in sex. I am certain he knows the effect that he has.

‘But it’s still worth it of course, all the effort, isn’t it? It’s still worth the lingering looks on the tube, and the glances that you notice as you walk down the street, the smiles and the winks. The men who can’t turn away, who will picture you later, picture you tonight, think of you instead of their dowdy other halves. These men who think you’re out of their league, who would love to have a piece of you, an afternoon slice of you with their tea. It’s worth that extra twenty minutes in the morning, isn’t it, for the approval, isn’t it, Make-up?’

Tristan dips his little finger into a pot of thick sticky silver glitter. It’s not mine, I don’t know what it is used for. Starlight Express maybe? When he removes his finger the glitter is dripping off it like honey fresh from the pot trickling off Pooh’s paws. Nearby, maybe two or three rooms away, a woman is singing ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ soft and high. It feels like midnight.

‘Absolutely,’ I whisper. He leans towards me again. With one hand on my shoulder for balance, he raises himself up onto his toes so that we are face to face as he smudges the glitter across my lower lip with his little finger. I find it impossible to believe that he has no libido. Maybe it’s a rumour that he has spread himself as a cunning plan, like the men who tell women they are gay so that they will let them fondle their breasts. Or was it just me that fell for that, late one night in Gerry’s? (When should I start to worry that the extent of my experience is ‘late one night in Gerry’s’?) And I’ve done far worse than that.

‘She’s been married four times,’ Tristan says, still staring at me but rubbing his hands together to get rid of the last drops of cream and glitter, ‘and has one daughter, whom she never sees – I think she might live in upstate New York near her dad, Dolly’s third husband, I believe, the actor Peter Deakin. He did a lot horror stuff, he was the wolf man for a while. I think the daughter’s name is Chloe, but she’ll tell you if she wants to. And when you meet her, when you meet Dolly, you’ll realise she must have been quite something, way back when.’

He reaches for a tissue and wipes his hands, before tossing it casually on the floor, and I lean down to pick it up and throw it in the bin.

Tristan smiles and says ‘control, I see’ when I do this. I shrug and smile an apology.

He looks at himself in the mirror, touching his hair lightly, straightening his jacket, flicking a speck of white something off his collar.

‘Your bloke,’ he says, still looking at himself. ‘A bit of a monster, is he? A bit of a hound?’

‘Not at all, not a monster. Just … disinterested … not as enthusiastic as I’d like him to be.’

‘Ah, but is he disinterested in life as well?’

‘No. There are things that he likes, that he loves – PlayStation games, and childish films and things …’

‘Do you think he’s being cruel to you?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ I thrust my hands into my hair and deliberately mess it up. It’s supposed to be messed up, that’s the look that I want. Not too polished. Black eyes and gloss and messy hair. I like the drama of it – it counteracts my reality.

‘So it’s not deliberate, this disinterest, it’s not controlling?’

‘No, I just think … he’s gone off me, maybe … or …’

‘You think about it a lot, don’t you? You talk about it a lot. I’ve only just met you, this is the second conversation we’ve had, and we’re talking about it again … does that seem a little strange, a little self-involved, if you stop and think about it?’

I don’t know how to explain to Tristan that it is what we do these days: figure out ways to be perfect. Isn’t that the point? Talk about it and thrash it out and pull your life apart, tear it into pieces to find the bits that don’t work and try and toss them out and put it back together. Every TV show that we watch and get hooked on and cry in front of and that exposes all our faults has made pop psychologists out of all of us, hasn’t it? That’s what we do now! Rip ourselves apart to find the flaws. I don’t know who I am supposed to be obsessed with, if not myself? And if I’m not obsessed with anybody, or anything, then what will I do with all that thinking time on the tube or the bus, or staring off into space while I stir my Alpen? I hear talk of people who ‘let things go’, who say ‘fuck it’ to diets and their hair and their relationships and love. But that’s just propaganda, surely? I don’t know anybody who actually lives like that. Nobody really feels like enough any more, do they? Not here at least. And now Tristan is saying I am obsessed with my love life, but who else is there to be obsessed with it, if not me? Certainly not Ben!

‘Well, it’s a big deal when you’re going through it, maybe the biggest thing. And anyway, you brought it up this time, Tristan.’

‘Yes I did, didn’t I? I wonder if you are just trying to muster up the courage? To say goodbye? If you are slowly putting yourself back onto the market, before it’s too late. It’s not too late yet, Make-up, they’ll still fall at those pointed heels of yours.’

‘I don’t know about that, I … God, I don’t know, I don’t want to think about it like that, I just want to work it out with Ben.’

‘But clearly he doesn’t love you, or he loves somebody else, somebody new, perhaps? Or somebody still?’ He looks at me in the mirror, and sees my mouth fall open.

I wonder if it is Tristan who is being cruel. He has stumbled over my darkest fears almost straight away, but it feels like he is toying with me. There is a camp menace to him, like Hannibal Lecter playing with make-up brushes. I sit back a little further in my seat in case he decides to take a quick and sudden bite out of my nose.

‘I guess I’m just trying to work it all out, in my own head,’ I say.

‘Do you have any proof?’ he asks, matter-of-factly.

‘Of what?’

‘Of infidelity, adultery – that your man is ripping at the flesh of another?’

‘Yes. I think so, anyway. I found a text from his ex, saying that she couldn’t meet him as arranged ‘later that night’, with a kiss. And he told me that was the night he was going out with his mate. But when I confronted him he wasn’t even angry that I had checked his phone, he just seemed relieved that I believed him when he said it was a mistake. She meant to send it to somebody else, he said. It didn’t actually have his name in it, so I believed him. But I shook and cried for fifteen minutes.’

‘So you don’t trust him at all?’

Tristan watches himself as he thrusts out his Adam’s apple, and his crotch as well, as he talks. He juts out those parts of him that make him a man, but then counters it with a strange swish of his hand, or lightness of touch. It all seems very deliberate, experimental. He is trying to find the moves that work.

‘I would trust him, if he could just articulate how he felt, sometimes, about me, but he never does. I feel terrible for not trusting him sometimes. I don’t know what goes on in his head.’

‘Nor he yours, I’m guessing. And don’t feel terrible yet, you might be right! But he told you once? I mean, you fell for him once?’

‘He started, but then he stopped. He kind of drew me in, then closed the door. But it’s as if I’m halfway through …’

‘Your leg is caught in his door?’

‘Something like that, I suppose.’ I laugh sharply.

‘Ha! And you don’t know whether it will hurt more to try and push the door open, or tear your leg back out!’ Tristan folds and unfolds the cuffs on his polo-neck jumper.

‘Well …’ He takes a deep breath and finally looks away from the mirror,

‘I need to think about this one some more. The only thing I can offer, from my twisted perspective, love, is that what makes a woman of forty more attractive than a girl of eighteen is not her body but her confidence. Don’t fold, Make-up. Don’t dither. Toughen up. Let’s have some fun.’

‘I’m thirty-one. I’m not forty,’ I say, as I feel stupid tears rush to my eyes.

‘I didn’t say that you were, Make-up. Now, how do you feel about nudity?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nudity, how do you feel about it, and in particular cast session nudity?’

‘Uncomfortable pretty much sums it up.’

‘But what if it were just me? You see, I’ve been body-brushing with a toothbrush recently, rather than following any traditional bathing ritual, and I wonder if it doesn’t give me a shine that I’d like to share. I’ve been reading a lot about Major General Charles Orde Wingate, heard of him?’

‘Well, Tristan, I can’t say that I have …’ The tears recede and I can’t help but smile.

‘Churchill described him as a man of genius, who might have become a man of destiny. But he died, in a burning crash of a plane, in Burma. 1944.’

‘Okay … and he used to conduct sessions in the nude?’

‘Hmm? Yes, yes, he did. Of course his were with soldiers, but I think there might be something in it. Strip away our pretensions, make us real, cut to the chase. Beauty is truth after all. If we were all a little nude, once a day, the world would be a much less violent place. I know it’s a fucking cliché but I believe it. Of course there is always the danger that somebody is going to become unspeakably aroused, but that doesn’t really affect me … Do you know he inflicted some terrible defeats on his enemies, on the invincible Japanese! And he believed the best way to survive tropical heat was a diet of raw onions.’

‘Have you tried that as well?’

‘Yes, I tried. It gets tropical in Streatham in August. But it gave me terrible flatulence. I was like a human wind machine, and the stench! It is impossible to function when you are terrified to be in small spaces, afraid of what your own body might inflict upon those around you … I couldn’t be in here, right now, with you, if I were still doing it. Of course sometimes it was wonderfully amusing, it depended on the company. In lifts, hilarious! Inevitably it was my mother that made me stop. She’s a wonderful woman but with little tolerance for anything other than her own peculiar rituals. It’s nothing to do with her legs, she’s just that way.’

‘Her legs?’ I ask.

‘They barely work any more,’ he replies, nodding.

I remember reading in the Standard that he lives with his mother in Streatham, and that she is disabled, but I can’t remember how it happened.

‘Why don’t they work?’ I ask, trying my best to seem sincere and not just nosey.

‘She has a tumour, Make-up, that is pressing down on her spinal cord, and is hard for them to reach without risking complete paralysis. She says that she is lucky, of course, that it has only affected the lower half of her body, but that’s bullshit. She’s a religious woman, and I thank God that she is, even though of course I don’t believe in it at all.’

I want to say, ‘But you’ve just thanked God’, but decide that now isn’t the time.

‘So she fell over one day and never got up. Dad’s dead, so that’s that. She’s going nowhere, and she cooks a wonderful lamb curry, and …’ He nods his head quietly, and squeezes his eyes shut.

I don’t know what else to say, so I change the subject. ‘Do you think Dolly might be here soon, Tristan?’

He presses the balls of his palms into the sockets of his eyes. ‘I fucking hope so, love, otherwise we’ll never open!’ he shouts, and whips away his hands to clap loudly, spinning in a full circle and biting his lower lip with his teeth, thrusting his groin back and forth like a 1970s porn star, like some second-rate Russ Meyer gyrating horror.

‘Are you okay then?’ he asks me.

‘Yes, but I think I need biscuits.’

‘Kitchen’s down the hall, didn’t bouncy Gavin show you?’

‘He told me, I’ll find it, it’s fine.’

‘Lovely Gavin, I have to remind myself that he’s not, you know, slow … simple, retarded, him being so big. But he’s sharp as a tack really. Acid-tongued. I like it. It keeps me on my toes.’

‘Okay, well I’m going to go and find those biscuits I think.’

‘Good for you, but just the one, mind! Keep your chin up, Make-up. Stop thinking about your bloke if you can. We aren’t worth it!’ He throws me a huge grin – he doesn’t believe that for a second.

‘I’ll try,’ I say, and edge past him to leave. He trots off in the other direction, singing what sounds like ‘Anything Goes’ segued into ‘Let’s Get It On’.

I edge down a grey hallway, in and out of the patches of dirty light cast by infrequent and dim bulbs, speeding up through the strange shadowy spots that make me nervous with Tristan’s talk of shootings and blood-spattered walls. My heels clicking on the hard cold floor announce me to any potential murderers or psychopaths or evil spirits lurking behind dark doorways: they’ll hear me coming and be fully prepared to leap out and grab me, pull me into the darkness with them, smother my face and paw me to near death. I am convinced that’s what will happen. I make this daily exhibition of myself, in my heels and my skirts and my gloss, and I put myself on show even though I know that it is dangerous. I don’t go unnoticed, and it’s a cracked-up world. Soho is full of loners and losers, producers and pirates, prostitutes and pimps, directors and producers and more producers. Everybody claiming to produce something, so where is it all? I click my way into everybody’s view, and it’s a perilous route to take. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one with the biggest audience, and that has made all the difference. My heels tap out ‘look at me, look at me, look at me’, and by the way please note that I won’t be able to run that fast in three and a half inch stilettos. It is as if I have accepted my fate. I’ll be strangled with my own sparkly scarf, a victim of my own need to be appreciated in a world full of crazies.

In a badly lit 1970s kitchen that is dusted in crumbs I hunt through grubby cupboards for some Digestives or Rich Tea.

‘Can I help?’

Someone is lurking in the doorway behind me and I freeze, one arm in the cupboard, precariously reaching out on tiptoes back to the furthest corners, looking for the good biscuits that have been scrupulously hidden.

What if I just don’t turn around?

‘Can I help you?’ he says again, but louder this time, and yet I sense he doesn’t move an inch, he doesn’t come and reach for the biscuits for me. He doesn’t really mean to help. What he means is ‘turn around and let me see you’.

I rest my weight back onto my heels and drop my arms in exhaustion. I recognise his voice. I don’t want to turn around.

‘I was just trying to find some biscuits.’ I address the Cortina-beige wall in front of me.

There is a dramatic pause, so dramatic it would be noted in a script and the audience might be fooled into holding their breath. I hold mine …

‘I know you,’ he says, quietly, evenly, ‘have we worked together before?’

My heart sinks like Leo at the end of Titanic.

‘Only at Gerry’s,’ I say.

And still I don’t turn around.

It was spring. It was the first week after the clocks had changed, when you feel that extra hour of daylight every evening enriches your life. Every year, that first week after the clocks change, the light takes us all by surprise, and I feel enlivened and hopeful for a summer of love and laughter and finally fulfilled dreams. That first week after the clocks change is the most magical week of the year.

I was working a nothing job that day, which paid only average money. A reality-TV star was filming his exercise video. We were in a studio located off a newly sanitised Carnaby Street. It’s all flagship sports stores now, surf brands and trendy trainers. More thought goes into the image on the front of the plastic bags than it does to war or peace or revolution or anarchy or any of those things, that don’t seem relevant any more to girls who like to shop and boys who like to watch football. Apathy and the end of conscription go hand in hand, at least that’s what my grandfather used to say. The only people that care are extremists. Protesting at anything these days seems at best disruptive, at worst showing off. Just shop instead. I don’t even protest at the interest rates on my store cards. Walk through central London on a Saturday waving a placard with a group of gypsies with dogs on bits of string? For what? The spirit of Carnaby, of fashion or punk or change, has become nothing more than a Daily Mail headline, a national ticking-off at the odd drug habit. Nothing is persuasive enough to sweep us up, up and away any more. The only counter-culture I’m interested in is the Benefit counter in Selfridges. That’s just the way it is. Some things change. Unless I want to picket Chanel to use fatter, shorter models because this impossibly young and impossibly skinny ideal is starting to hurt me, at thirty-one and one hundred and forty pounds. But then I just look unattractive because I can’t keep up, because I’m not pretty enough or skinny enough any more. Better to just take a little longer in front of the mirror, spend a little more on powder and paint, and pray that nobody notices.

I had been propositioned three times already that day by the reality star, but each time he failed to realise that he had already met me, and only half an hour earlier had asked me if I’d like to do a line of coke and give him a quick hand-job in the ladies’ toilets. I politely declined both. He was a charmless farmer from Devon called Roger, devoid of all charisma, but who had been the least offensive of the fools shut away in a house for the winter. Roger won seventy grand and a couple of months’ worth of notoriety, but the car-crash kind. He was loved and hated simultaneously by the same people. His aftershave was so strong, he actually smelt like desperation.

So it had been a depressing day. When we finished at about seven thirty the sun was not long down, and the dark was still light. Somebody suggested noodles so we all ploughed down to Busaba Eathai on Wardour, and crowded around a table. Some of the guys were high already, but I was off everything but the booze, trying to clear up my act and my head. Ben had started leaving me disapproving notes about the little clingfilm bags he was finding in my jeans when he did the washing, and although the coke was rarely mine – I just always seemed to end up with the bag because I’ve never been a snorter, just a dabber on my gums, and you only need the bag for that – I didn’t want another argument. I didn’t want another spotlight thrown on the distance between us, and the different directions we were moving in.

We made our way through five or six or ten bottles of South African wine – the cheap good stuff. We crammed noodles into our mouths and felt early spring warmth in the chilled night air. I started to think about wearing open-toed shoes. I sat with the assistant producer, a tiny girl with dark hair and eyes who was up for anything as long as it involved laughter, and the public schoolboy A&R, obviously trying too hard to be ‘street’ in oversized jeans and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, but fun nonetheless. He referred to everything and everybody as adding value or not adding value. Thankfully I was informed that I added value, and I was almost tragically grateful.

Three German tourists sat on the corner of our table, laughing loudly at their own jokes – they too added value! It’s a strange phenomenon, this sharing of tables. It’s peculiarly un-London, to throw open your space and your conversation to any Tom, Dick or Harry who has money to pay and noodles to eat. It’s become remarkably popular, I think, because of its possibilities. Lunch is more fun when the opportunity to meet the love of your life is tossed into the pot as well.

The Germans had strong noses and red cheeks that looked like they’d blister in the sun. They were having a wonderful time too. We tried to engage them in conversation, but if their English was broken our German was destroyed – the public schoolboy could ask ‘How fast is your woman?’ but that was the extent of our European union. They left eventually, to be replaced by two Italian homosexuals who kissed in the corner. They were both very dark and fragile and beautiful and the assistant producer and I were hypnotised as they gently brushed each other’s lips. It was the easiest kiss I’d ever seen a man give, and it was to another man. In the end they asked me to stop staring at them. I tried to explain it was because I thought them beautiful, but they didn’t care for the reason.

We drank lots and ate little, and the night started to melt away. Then somebody mumbled, ‘Gerry’s?’

We stumbled across Soho to the bottom of Dean Street, and through the familiar little doorway. It was dark in there, it always is. You lose everybody you know as soon as you get in, they all drift away to talk to strangers. Perhaps that’s the appeal of the place – the promise of anonymity. I ordered something large and red and the man leaning next to me at the bar offered to pay for it. I said,

‘Uh oh, that’s trouble. I shouldn’t be accepting drinks from strange men.’

‘Then why have you?’ he asked.

‘Because I’m poor and drunk,’ I replied. ‘But then you already knew that.’

‘I guessed the drunk bit, I would never have known about the poor.’

‘How charming.’ My eyes focused. ‘You’re incredibly handsome,’ I said.

‘I’m an actor.’ He pinched his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger, as if appraising a painting in the Portrait Gallery, or a piece of broken china in a boot sale.

‘That makes sense. You may as well play to your strengths.’

‘Are you a model?’ he asked.

‘I am quite clearly five foot five. We both know that I am not a model.’

‘You could be a different kind of model, it doesn’t have to be catwalk.’

‘If you are asking me if I am a hand model, I find that offensive.’

‘Not at all. You could be a model of the more glamorous variety.’ He reached out and moved a strand of hair away from my eyes. I blinked him away.

‘You’re hoping I take my top off for a living?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I’m sorry to disappoint, but these puppies stay caged most days. I’m Make-up.’

‘Why don’t I ever get a Make-up like you? All mine are married with three kids.’

‘Your wife probably hires them,’ I said, without a smile.

‘I’m not married. Are you?’

‘Not yet. I have a “Ben”.’

‘And where is your “Ben” this evening?’

‘Playing Championship Manager with a warehouse assistant from Ealing Dixons.’

‘He sounds like fun.’

‘Yeah, well, you don’t know him. He has other qualities.’

‘Like what?’

‘You don’t care, so I’m not going to answer. Thanks for the drink.’

I walked off, proud of myself. The guy was on the make, I was obviously too drunk, and it showed but I still resisted. I didn’t want to meet anybody that night. It had become too frequent, too easy lately. A peck on the lips before home-time turning into a full-blown kiss, and I didn’t know who I was kissing and if I would ever see them again. It made me feel wretched. The first time that I kissed somebody else I didn’t realise it was happening until my lips were merged with his, and once I’d started, like eating a chocolate digestive at eleven a.m. on the first day of a new diet, it seemed pointless to stop. I’d start my fidelity again tomorrow. And the ‘being unfaithful’ part, in itself, was so unexceptional and run of the mill and ordinary that it just didn’t seem like that big a deal. He was an ad exec and we were drunk at eight p.m. on a shoot for the Carphone Warehouse, and we had stumbled into the wardrobe cupboard to find funny hats to wear. As I said, we were drunk. He kissed me, and I kissed him back, and the passion felt so unfamiliar it was akin to riding the rapids at Center Parcs, or jumping up and down on a bouncy castle – it didn’t seem bad, because I didn’t love him or care about him. It just seemed like a fun thing to do at the time, and nothing at all to do with Ben. It was three hours later that I experienced delayed shock, like whiplash, and I burst violently into tears.

That was it, I had cheated. I had spent all this time terrified that Ben would be unfaithful, and I had just let a cocky guy from Kent called Dave cop a feel of me through my blouse, and tell me that he loved it when I scratched my nails across his stomach under his shirt. It felt awful then, and awful the next time, four months later at three a.m. in the corner of a bar called Push on Dean Street, with a stuntman I’d met half an hour earlier. He had deliberately set himself alight only two hours previously.

That was just a kiss. Eight months later I went home with a guy called Jonathan who was the post-production supervisor on a short film I’d been working on. I consoled myself that at least I’d known him for three days when it happened. I’d called Ben the next day and told him I’d crashed at my brother’s because it was closer, and he hadn’t seemed bothered, he certainly hadn’t questioned me as I would have questioned him if he had stayed out all night. In a way I wish he had, and I’d been forced to admit it there and then. The lack of suitable grilling the next day just compounded the reasoning in my head for doing it: Ben didn’t care.

That night at Gerry’s, walking away from another possible indiscretion, I collapsed in a corner and chatted to an old bloke in a checked suit with a red nose and three strips of hair that sat on his crown like rashers of bacon. He was hammered on whiskey, but he managed to tell me that I bore a sharp resemblance to his first and favourite wife, only that I was fatter.

I noticed the handsome sleaze staring at me from the bar, trying to catch my eye. I ignored it, but eventually he was by my side again, putting another glass of red into my hand.

‘I can’t shrug you off tonight, can I?’

‘I’m Tom Harvey-Saint. And you are?’

‘Scarlet.’

‘That’s a very evocative name. Do you have a giant “A” on your chest?’

‘Not yet, no, but I’m working on it.’

‘You seem sad, Scarlet, and I’d like to help.’

‘I bet you would. Help me out of these wet clothes perhaps?’

‘Well that’s a very depressing way of looking at things. What could be so bad? Look at us, here, tonight, drunk in a glorious city full of beautiful people. What could be so wrong?’

‘That’s not enough for me. I need more than that. Five years ago that was enough, but not now. I need more than wine and London.’

‘Darling, don’t say you’re tired of London, you know what that means.’

‘Maybe I am, maybe I am tired of life. Of my life at least.’

‘Maybe you’re just drunk, darling, and feeling a little dramatic. Let’s not be pompous, it does nothing for you.’

‘I’m not being pompous … I just feel blue.’

‘But Scarlet can’t be blue! What can I do?’ He was stroking my thigh, running his fingers up and down my leg, his digits creeping towards places they shouldn’t. I wanted to shrug him off like a dirty shirt, but at the same time hug him like a five-day-old puppy.

‘Christ, I just want something beautiful to happen! And I want it to happen to me! Have I made that many wrong decisions? Are my expectations so disjointed from reality? Have I been that hateful that I don’t deserve to be happy?’

‘Fuck all that, darling, just live. Wake up. Just have fun. It’s every man for himself.’

‘No it’s not. It can’t be.’

‘Well what do you think the answer is?’

‘I think the answer is to find somebody who wants what you want. And who wants to be honest. And realises that’s a valuable commodity, if you find it. I need somebody to be my refuge …’

‘I completely agree. My name is Tom and I’ll be your air-raid shelter tonight.’

‘Oh you’ll agree with anything I say right now.’

‘Damn right. You have beautiful eyes.’

Tom Harvey-Saint took me by the hand and led me outside Gerry’s, into an alley between a pub and a walk-in health centre.

Tom Harvey-Saint had pecs like paving slabs. I had sex with him in that alley, by accident, in that I let him, I was drunk enough to allow lust to take over. It was violent sex, awful, savage; he thrust into me like a kitchen knife.

I crawled home to Ben that night in a cab, but slept on the sofa, in case he could sense it somehow, smell infidelity on my skin. I wish I had told him then, or that I could tell him now. Lies are so depressing.

‘Gerry’s? Are you a barmaid?’ he asks now.

I turn around. Tom Harvey-Saint leans in the doorway, ready for his close-up. He is as handsome as the last time I saw him. He is tall enough to dominate any room, and dark enough to catch any woman’s eye. He has wide grey eyes and a full bottom lip that looks like it’s just been bitten – it probably has been, for effect. His chest is like a barrel, and his stomach flattens under his belt like a snowboard. He is wearing a dark green short-sleeved polo shirt tucked into khakis. Both of his forearms rest on the doorframe on either side of his head. It looks like a casual pose, but I still can’t get out.

‘No, I’m not a barmaid. I’ve just seen you in Gerry’s.’

‘Good old Gerry’s. That must be it then. What are you doing here?’

‘Make-up. For Dolly. And you and Arabella as well apparently.’

‘Fantastic. I’ve never had a Make-up that looks as good as you. Mine are always married with three kids.’

‘So you’ve said.’ I nod my head at him, but he ignores it.

‘I do feel like I know you though …’ He stares at me and smiles.

I shrug, grit my teeth and hope he’ll leave.

‘Maybe I’ll see you later, then, at Gerry’s?’ he asks. He can’t use my name because of course he doesn’t know it.

‘Maybe.’

‘I’m Tom Harvey-Saint by the way,’ he adds, stretching out his hand to be shaken, knowing full well that I would recognise him from his appearances as Rob McKenzie on Death Watch – if I didn’t recognise him already, that is.

‘Scarlet.’ I rush out my answer, hoping he’ll forget it as quickly, and offer him my hand sharply. Instead of shaking it he grabs it, turns it over and kisses my palm, looking thoughtful for a second, flickers of recognition sparking behind his eyes. When I yank my hand back he seems alarmed.

‘Sorry, but I’ve just bleached my brushes and I don’t want you to inhale,’ I say.

I dart past him, making sure not to catch his eye, but the hairs on my arms silently stand up and scream as they graze the hairs on his. His neurons and my neurons or his atoms or my protons or something are diametrically apposed or aligned or whatever the science is that means my body lurches towards him dangerously. There is a dark pocket of something wild that hides deep inside of me that threatens my sanity when I am near a man like Tom Harvey-Saint. I practically run back to Dolly’s room. Shutting the door behind me I catch my breath. I hold my hands out in front of me and see what I already know, that they are shaking. I feel like he preyed on me, and yet I was compliant at the time. I think he realised that night that I was past the point of right and wrong or conscious decision-making, and that it was apparent that I didn’t know what I was doing, or who with. I just try not to think about it. The only person I have told is Helen. She called him all sorts of names, but I wondered, even then, if I was just making excuses for myself, for my actions. I did it. That’s that.

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