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