How to Build a Girl

The next day, Krissi asks Mum if he can move out of the room he shares with me and Lupin, and have his own bedroom.

  ‘Of course!’ Mum says, brightly. ‘I’d be delighted! I’ll just pull a fabulous big bedroom for you – out of my arse! Do you want a pony, too? And a stable? I’ve got one of those up here too, I think!’

  ‘I could have the dining room,’ Krissi says, coldly.

  This throws Mum.

  ‘The dining room?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve thought about it. We all eat in the front room anyway.’

  This is true. All meals are plates on laps, on the sofa, or floor. Or standing in the kitchen, eating lumps of cheese and bread, on the hoof.

  ‘You can’t have the dining room,’ Mum says, flatly.

  ‘I need my own bedroom,’ Krissi says.

  There is a new, impressive immovability to him, since all plans for him to go to university seemed to go quiet. A sense of ‘And that was the last time you ever got to screw me over. From now on, I am unyielding. I will fight’.

  Obviously I know he’s asking to move into the dining room because I have wanked him awake over weeks of Satanic fantasies – so I am guiltily provoked into immediately backing him to the hilt on this plan.

  ‘I think Krissi should have his own room,’ I say. ‘He’s seventeen, and needs his privacy.’

  ‘I really do need my privacy,’ Krissi says, resolutely not looking at me. ‘And I need more room, for my seedlings.’

  Krissi has recently taken up gardening, with the intention of growing vegetables, so that we don’t die of scurvy. Our bedroom is full of random pots labelled ‘Marrow’, ‘Peas’, ‘Tomatoes’ and ‘Chilli’.

  As is the way of our family, there then follows a gigantic, heated debate on the subject of Krissi having the dining room, in which everyone piles on, and uses the opening of one sibling request in order to put in their requests for things, too. At one point, Lupin is angling for a bicycle, a bedside lamp and a Transformer.

  But by 4pm, Mum has capitulated. Krissi’s bed is in the dining room – where the table once was. And the table is now in my bedroom, where I will use it as a desk ‘for my writing’.

  By nightfall, the dining room has a sign on the door that says ‘Alan Titchmarsh’s Sex Pad’ – written by me – and Krissi is arranging his seedlings on the makeshift shelving system constructed of planks and bricks.

  And I – I have a desk! At last! No matter that half the table is covered with boxes of toys and clothes – the other half, marked off with a strip of Sellotape, is all mine: a place where I can finally write.

  I move all my pictures and quotes from over my bed, and put them on the wall behind the desk, instead. I have new things to add, that I have found in the last few weeks. Larkin’s ‘Lines On A Young Lady’s Photograph Album’, with the lines ‘A real girl, in a real place’, and ‘unvariably lovely’ picked out in red. Unvariably lovely. Unvariably lovely. A real girl, in a real place. I put a big picture of John Kite next to it. That was when I was a real girl, in a real place.

  There’s also a list titled ‘My Best Words’, which I have been collecting as assiduously as others might collect butterflies, or brooches: Shagreen. Uxorious. Mimosa. Cathedral. Colloidal Mercury. Iodine. Waxwing. Lilac. Jaggery. Atholl Brose. Zoo.

  In these weeks where I am getting so little work, I feel I have to gather a better grade of weaponry: I must make sure I have all the best, sharpest, most potent words on my wall – so that, when I am called into battle again, I will be able to fight instantly, unbeatably – and never be relegated again.

  I also have the central pages of the London A-Z pinned to the wall, which I have been studying and learning like my times-table. I want people to think that London is where I come from – that I was born in London, and was just accidentally misplaced. When I go back among the adults there, I want to seem as if I know this place better than they do: I want to be able to immediately and casually be able to say, ‘Yes – Rosebery Avenue, EC1. You would get there via the Clerkenwell Road. You pronounce Marylebone Road “Marra-lee-bun Road”, and the pubs around Billingsgate Market stay open all night, and into dawn, and breakfast. You see, I know all the roads in London. I know all of London. This place is not mysterious to me. I always knew I would come here. This is my real home. We had another life quite by mistake – but it is all better now. It’s all quite better now.’

  I am going to get back down to London as soon as I can, where I will be a real girl, in a real place, again.

  One good thing happens, in this otherwise broken-gollum month: on the 29th, I finally receive a cheque for all the work I had done for the D&ME so far: £352.67. I go up town, and buy a telly from the junk shop, and install it in the front room to whoops and cheers. The kids run over and kiss the television, leaving kiss-marks all over the screen.

  ‘We are back in business,’ Krissi says, plugging it in, turning it on, and lighting the front room back up with its beautiful, flickering glow. We watch the news for the first time in months, and the weather, and cookery programmes. Spitting Image have made a John Major puppet that’s all grey, and can’t understand why the economy is going down the pan. There aren’t as many jokes.

  ‘Telly was funnier when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister,’ Lupin says, wisely.

  That night, we sit up until 3am watching Hammer House of Horror, and eating piles of grated cheese. I love money. A broken thing can become unbroken. I knew I could prove Paul Tillich wrong. All I did need was some money. Money makes everything better.

  FIFTEEN

  Finally, the call comes – Kenny asks me down to another editorial meeting: ‘It feels like we haven’t seen you in a while, Wilde.’

  For a moment, I blink at the name – it’s been so long since I invented Dolly Wilde, and no one else has used that name in weeks.

  ‘Thursday, midday, Wilde,’ Kenny says. ‘Come with ideas. God knows we could use them.’

  It looks like I have been forgiven, for whatever I did wrong in my John Kite feature. Or, at least, I am being given another chance.

  Excited by hearing Dolly’s name again, I remember how much I loved her, and I resurrect her in earnest.

  I prepare Dolly for London like I am her lady’s maid: in the sink, I first bleach her hair, and then dye it cherry red – the colour of Dorothy’s shoes, the colour of Miki Berenyi, from Lush. I build Dolly’s eyes up, with swooshes of black eyeliner; I dress her in hold-up stockings, a black dress and her top hat.

  I have made my notes, now, you see, on how to build a girl, and put her out in the world. Everyone drinks. Everyone smokes. Boozy Miki Berenyi is a damn fine woman. You come into a room, and say things, like you’re in a play. You fake it ’til you make it. You discuss sex like it’s a game. You have adventures. You don’t quote musicals. Whatever everyone else is doing, you do that. You say things to be heard, rather than to be right.

  You keen at street-lights, thinking they are the sun.

  Wolverhampton train station, and I get onto the train like I am a bullet, being shot out of a dirty gun. The view from the window is like flicking through a book: rooftops, back gardens, canals – wastelands like plates of over-boiled cabbage. I can’t wait wait wait to get out of this town, and be in London again. I’m going to make every moment like a hot mad dream that I can sick back up into my mouth, at will, and taste again and again when I’m back here, eating chapattis and staring at dirty walls.

  When you come out of the tunnel, outside Euston Station, the walls are high, and white, and draped with ivy. It looks like you are entering ancient, wealthy Rome.

  D&ME. Lift. Corridor. Going straight into the always-deserted Ladies, I head to the mirror.

  ‘Hello again,’ I say to myself. I’m prepared, this time. I have a packet of fags in one hand – Silk Cut, the cigarettes of the working-class woman – and, in the other, a bottle of booze. I’ve made an executive decision to start drinking, here, in front of my peers at the magazine. This is what I do now.

  It h
ad taken me a long time to decide which bottle of booze I was going to buy, and bring down here. It seems to be a key thing in being adult – your drink of choice. In books, people make snap judgements as to your character, wholly based on what drink you choose.

  ‘Ah, a whisky man!’ they say. Or, ‘But of course – champagne!’

  In the end – in the off-licence by the station, next to a shaking tramp – I went for the bottle of Mad Dog 20/20, the bright green ‘fortified wine’ so popular in the nineties.

  Not only is it cheap, and a cheerful colour, but I have also observed that this is the empty bottle most regularly found next to makeshift campfires of burnt bed-springs and car batteries, on The Green. This has worked by way of a very successful low-rent viral marketing campaign on me – marking MD 20/20 out as the premiere alcohol of choice for young people such as myself.

  I think about having a nip of Mad Dog before I go into the meeting – right now, in the Ladies – but decide not to.

  There’s no point in drinking if no one’s watching.

  The Meeting Room is nearly full when I walk in. They’re sitting on chairs, and on the table, talking and smoking.

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen – MR ELTON JOHN!!!!!’ I announce myself. Most people laugh – so I’m already winning compared to last time.

  ‘Wilde,’ Kenny says, looking up at me, and my hair, and my MD 20/20. ‘You’ve gone Joplin.’

  I open the bottle of Mad Dog, and offer it to the room.

  ‘Aperitif?’ I ask. Everyone demurs. I take a small swig from the bottle.

  This is the first alcohol I have ever drunk. It’s fucking appalling – a brutal assault on primarily, it feels, my eyes, which bulge, and fill with tears.

  ‘Ah, thank God. That’s better,’ I say, putting the bottle down on the table, and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. Fake it ’til you make it. ‘Last night was vicious.’

  There is more amused laughter. This ‘boozy rock child’ thing is going down far better than all the stuff about Annie. I have, clearly, found my niche.

  ‘Well, before Wilde locates and then throws a television out of the window, we’d better start this meeting,’ Kenny says, kicking the door closed from where he sits.

  If I had to review me at this Editorial Meeting, compared to my first one, I would give me a solid seven stars out of ten. Not only do I make three jokes that make the room laugh – on the subject of Prince being a sex symbol, I say, ‘I’m sorry, but, speaking as a woman – which I almost always am – Prince is just too small to be sexy. Unless you put jump-leads up his arse, and used him as a vibrator.’ BIG laugh for that one – but, by the end, I’m quite pissed, too.

  If I’d had to guess, before, what ‘being pissed’ felt like, I would never have guessed this unusual result: your knees feel warm, and your anxiety alchemises down into something syrupy, and pleasant, and malleable. Like all medicines, it tastes revolting – but it makes you better. It makes you better. If I had just four spoonfuls of this a day, I would never need to bite my knuckles again. Alcohol is the cure for biting, and worry. Mary Poppins drinks her spoonful of rum punch. John Kite watches her, lasciviously. My thoughts spiral up, on a pleasant alcohol vortex.

  At the end of the meeting, Kenny gives the customary indication that the business is over – ‘Off we jolly well fuck to the pub!’ – and this time, off I jolly well fuck to the pub, too.

  This is the second pub I’ve ever been in – and Dublin didn’t count, really, because I only drank Coke in there.

  This time, however – expansively medicined on the MD 20/20 – I suddenly realise that, of all the buildings in the world – art galleries and hospitals and libraries and good homes – pubs are the best kind of building. As my dad has always insisted, they are the palaces of the proletariat. The castles of cunts.

  In 1993, pubs are at the height of their splendidness, and nobility. Every street corner in every city is studded with one of these glorious Victorian citadels: opulent with gold-gilt mirrors, huge mullioned windows, and tables varnished and re-varnished brown so many times, that they look like they’ve been lacquered with beef gravy.

  Each table has an ashtray in the centre – and, when you all sit down, you realise that this is the hub of your group.

  Through the afternoon and evening, the table will whirl round and round, faster and faster, like a wheel – but as long as you can keep flicking your fag-ash into the hub, at the centre, you will not fall off the table, or go flying out of the door. It is good of pubs to put their ashtrays in the places least prone to centrifugal gravity. Landlords are men of safety, and science. These buildings have been proven to work.

  ‘Dolly – what do you want?’

  The staff of D&ME have taken a large table, and Kenny is getting the drinks in. I have £4 in my purse, which I reach for, but Kenny gestures for me to put it away.

  ‘What you drinking?’ he asks, again.

  ‘Another MD 20/20 would go down nicely, sir,’ I say. Kenny looks at me.

  ‘Yes – I don’t think they sell Mad Dog here,’ Kenny says, carefully. ‘Although we could go and ask one of the tramps under Waterloo Roundabout if they could sell you a shot. I’m sure you could trade it in for a … rat, or a damp newspaper, something.’

  I think of all the other drinks I’ve ever heard of. I can’t think of many. I keep thinking of Cary Grant in an airport lounge, asking for something – but I can’t remember if it’s a ‘High Ball’, or a ‘Screw Ball’, and I don’t want to get it wrong. What drinks are there?

  ‘A cider and soda, please,’ I say, eventually. Kenny stares at me.

  ‘A cider … and soda?’ he repeats.

  ‘Yes!’ I say, brightly. ‘It’s a Midlands thing. Sir.’

  ZZ looks up at me, momentarily. He’s from the Midlands. He knows it’s not a Midlands thing.

  ‘Well, I’m living and learning,’ Kenny says, going over to the bar and putting the order in. I can see the bar man’s reaction to ‘Cider and soda’. Kenny shrugs at him. ‘It’s apparently big in the Midlands,’ he tells him. ‘You may wish to make note of the recipe – lest Slade come to town.’

  When Kenny brings it over, saying ‘Your cider and soda, Wilde’ – clearly still amused by the whole thing – I reply, ‘Thank you very much, sir.’

  ‘Are you, in fact, being Elvis Presley there?’ Kenny asks.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I reply. ‘Thank you very much, sir.’

  ‘Okay,’ he replies.

  The editor raises his glass. ‘Cheers, everyone!’

  ‘Cheers!’

  We all clink glasses. It feels like the Three Musketeers, clinking swords. I’m in a gang I’m in a gang I’m in a gang.

  ‘Is there a reason you’re all in black?’ Kenny asks, sitting next to me.

  ‘It’s for all the future lovers I’ll kill,’ I say, cheerfully. I feel very cheerful. Invincibly cheerful. Like Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. I could so easily do a musical number right now. Instead, after ten minutes of discussing REM (‘I’ve known them for five years. Wankers,’ Kenny says) I feel brave enough to finally ask Kenny why I’ve had so little work recently.

  ‘Kenny – why aren’t I getting any more big features?’

  ‘Well,’ Kenny says, awkwardly, shifting in his seat. ‘Ah. Wilde. The thing is. Your John Kite interview …’

  ‘What?’ I say, with all the braveness of King Arthur.

  ‘We were kind of … disappointed, to be honest,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘You want the truth?’

  No! Of course I don’t!

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It read a bit … fannish,’ Kenny says, almost apologetically. ‘You sounded like some hysterical teenage girl at Heathrow Airport, banging on the doors and shouting “WE WANT THE ROLLERS!”’

  He looks at me, and then remembers I am a hysterical teenage girl, and that I also probably don’t know who the Bay City Rollers are.

  ‘No offence,’ he adds. Then, gentler: ‘Hey – do you have a bit of
a crush on John Kite?’

  ‘No,’ I say, miserably. It’s an obvious ‘No’ of ‘Yes’.

  ‘Because it felt like the last paragraph was basically a marriage proposal. You know? I mean, we’ve all been there. But Dolly – we’re music critics, not … fans. I’m thinking of you. How you come across to the reader.’

  I can’t really hear him, because, in my head, I am very busily writing a massive note to myself, that reads: ‘CRUCIAL INFORMATION FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE: DO NOT WRITE LIKE A FAN, OR BE IN LOVE.’

  Kenny can see that I’m on the verge of crying, and so he steers the conversation into less fraught territory.

  ‘And your musical reference points were a bit … off. You compare Kite’s album to Deacon Blue and one track off The Best of Simon & Garfunkel. No mention of American Music Club, or Nick Drake, or Tim Buckley?’

  I shrug, in further misery. Nick Drake is next on my list of albums to get out of the library, when I get some money. And I’ve never even heard of Tim Buckley. How many fucking bands do you have to listen to, to be a proper music journalist? If it’s more than 200, this is going to take ages. I can only get five albums out at a time on my teenage ticket.

  ‘Can I claim getting CDs out of the library on expenses?’ I ask, suddenly. ‘They’re 20p each. Can I claim it like travel, and “refreshments”? It would be useful.’

  For a minute, Kenny seems so astonished that, for the first time I’ve ever witnessed, he is silent. He finally says:

  ‘Wilde – you can get any album you want. Ring up the PRs and they’ll send you a Jiffy bag full of every Godforsaken hairy attention-seeking bunch of onanists, bed-wetters and arse-holes in the canon of Western rock. You can fill your boots with as much Superchunk, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and Bum Gravy as you can handle. And then, if you decide you don’t like a particular platter of substandard grebo hackery, you can sell it, for a tidy sum. Bryce Cannon of this parish has been subsi-dising a healthy, by which I mean fatal, cocaine addiction on the proceeds of this system for nearly four years, now. This is Club Tropicana. Linx are free.’