Material Girl. Louise Kean
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Название: Material Girl
Автор: Louise Kean
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Зарубежные любовные романы
isbn: 9780007389292
isbn:
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.’
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 СКАЧАТЬ