Green Girl (3 page)

Oh to be polished, a seamless image, a film still.

Her mother in her fur coat. Like someone from New England. Regal. Special. Untouchable. Her mother always perfect, an indestructible fortress. Ruth knew all of her outfits, knew their translation. The permanence of her gold jewelry. How cold it was, how heavy, like a lead weight. Her hands so cold. The smell, the taste of her lipstick. She never appeared to sweat. The dust of loose powder. She was allowed to kiss her goodbye, briefly, at the waist, when her mother went out. Never Mommy. She did not want to spoil her hair, sprayed into a helmet, unmovable, the impression she brought into a room. She wished to arrive unsullied. Even when they were in the same room she always appeared like a photograph, a screen of gauze Ruth could not penetrate.

In the aftermath of her mother’s death Ruth felt free, terribly free. Like an umbilicus had been snapped. A weird phrase flits through her head. I am an orphan, not quite. Her loneliness contracts, filling her like a well.

Perhaps without a mother one can no longer be young.

Her head throbbing, Ruth stumbles to the loo, as she had started to call it, preferring the elegant simplicity of it to BATH-room or WASH-room. She brushes her teeth while sitting on the toilet, a trickle of warm against her inner thigh, leaning over to spit out the icy blue froth, holding her hair back in a ponytail, taptapping her brush against the sink. Another knock on the door. Housekeeping. The voice is not English. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Just five more minutes! She must put on her armor. She must put her face on.

She gets out her makeup bag, which she rests against the faucet. Her sole purchase from Liberty, with its vibrant print of pinks and oranges. She paints her face carefully today. She paints her own blank slate. The process soothes her. Gray eyes open wide, pouting into the smeared mirror, she powders her face. Swishswishswish. The pale beige powder spills onto the white porcelain, making muddy water when she turns on the faucet.

She paints her blank canvas of a face. Grinning like a grotesque clown, she dips the same brush into a compact of blush—an angry pink—and smooths it on her cheekbones, rubbing away the two mannequin dots that form, up, up, towards her temples. Opening eyes widewider, she applies mascara. The trick is the mascara. She sculpts her lashes. Up, up, up. Her doll eyes lend her the look of the permanently startled.

The final touch. The lips. With a brush, she dabs on the wad of gooey pink lip gloss, the faintest pink, and dots her lips. She looks at the glass. A girl smacks, smiles back. A polished surface. She is airbrushed to perfection.

She looks happy.

Happy. The word echoes back. Happy. Happy. Happy.

She ties on her Sonia Rykiel striped dark blue trench coat (bought with her discount at Horrids), fits her black beret over limp blonde hair hurrying past her shoulders. Her dark uniform. The trappings and suits of woe. As if to offset her youthful glow. Ruth finishes off the ensemble with her black plastic Jackie O sunglasses to protect herself from the glare, of the sun or otherwise. Her sunglasses slide on her head. We see her in profile.

As she closes her door, she sees Agnes coming out of her room down the hall. A girl like Agnes spends the entire morning putting herself together. Or putting herself back together. Agnes did not wear clothes. She wears a costume. Green girls and their costumes, their trying on of brazen identities. Some green girls very in vogue wear cigarette jeans, but girls like Agnes and Ruth only smoke cigarettes. They are the type of green girls to model themselves on
La Nouvelle Vague
, they are new and they are vague. They are the type to wear skirts and dresses with stockings, a specific classification. Today Agnes is wearing a tight cherry-red cardigan and a vintage mustard yellow A-line. A darker mustard trench coat. Enormous sunglasses engulfed her face, as if to cultivate an air of mystery.

Out last night? Ruth asks. A feather voice. She hasn’t yet practiced her lines for the outside world. The answer was always yes. She is just trying to make conversation. Balancing her large purse like a piece of luggage (only the necessities!) Agnes rummages around, emitting annoyed noises. Gawd I got so pissed four pints dunno how I got home. Ruth smiles her small way, saying nothing.

Staring into the dull silver of the elevator doors Agnes swirls out her red lipstick, which she strokes firmly onto her lips, back and forth, a brick the same shade as her penciled-in Marlene Dietrich eyebrows, matching her china doll moon face framed by brazenly red hair carefully flipped up. Agnes’ hair color changed with her whims, more violent seasons than the city’s monochrome. It’s my signature she would say. For someone like Agnes it was important to have a signature. How else will she remember herself?

How are the British bitches treating you at Horrids? Agnes smacks her lips together, smiling pleased at herself in the reflection. Shocking things tended to eject from that red mouth. Ruth shrugs. She is a deaf-mute.

Crouching down on her heels out of the Pandora’s bag comes large doorknockers that she fastens to each ear, plastic cherry-red the same as the sweater. She crouches down like an athlete in training (no pain no gain!). A bandage is half fallen off her ankle, revealing blood in the cotton, two identical vampire bites above her heels.

The bell sounds. The two girls crowd into the cage. First floor, going down, comes the proper and prompt reply. The sister to Ruth’s mobile phone.

Taped to the wall of the lift is today’s dinner menu, a haiku of gagging dishes steamed and stewed and breaded that kept the pace of Ruth’s week.

Dinner Menu

Curried Chicken

Mashed Peas

Stewed Aubergine

Plum Crumble and Custard

British food was the current catastrophe of Ruth’s life. She hadn’t eaten a regular meal since she arrived. As far as Ruth knew Agnes did not eat at all, except lipstick and coffee and cigarette smoke. Agnes cultivated a look of old Hollywood, starving her curvy frame into an hourglass. Ruth loved old movies too. She was nostalgic for a past in which she didn’t exist.

Agnes begins chattering about a film she has just seen. A Japanese film with bondage. And then it was so BIZ-arrre.... That is Agnes’ signature word. Everything to Agnes was BIZ-arre, the fact that Ruth said “candies” instead of “sweets” or “jellies” was BIZ-arre, and Ruth, Ruth was always BIZ-arre. Ruth thinks that the film sounds too gruesome and she wouldn’t be at all interested in seeing it, and what’s the point, since Agnes had given all the scenarios away. But she stays silent and lets her talk. Ruth tries not to encourage Agnes too much, or she’ll be taken hostage forever. But for now, trapped in the little box, she has no choice but to play her audience.

The two girls drop off their room keys in the lobby, to the mournful Algerian receptionist who Ruth shyly smiles at. The lobby is stacked with heavy wooden furniture. Lining the walls are framed photographs of royal visitors stricken with self-importance, the Queen clasping palms with her immaculate white gloves, next to a painting of the place’s dour-faced founder.

Outside, London is smeared with a wind-blown sameness. Agnes is still going on and on about the film (won’t she shut up?). Ruth isn’t listening. She is stone underneath her dark glasses. The gray day has already clouded over her thoughts. And anyway she can’t really understand most of what Agnes is saying. Ruth keeps in step with Agnes’ purposeful click-clack on the wet pavement.

For some reason Agnes had decided that they were besties, Ruth did not know why, but she did not try to resist it. She was flattered by the attention. And everyone else she had met in London was so clean and dry. Agnes was messy. There were always runs in her stockings, or her clothing was too tight, accidents of white flesh spilling over.

Agnes takes out her mobile. Her fingers begin furiously tapping out a text message while walking. She is a concert pianist manufacturing false sentiments. A novelist of nothing new.

Work today? She finally looks up. Ruth shakes her head. Reprieve, her voice squeaks again. Lucky bitch. Agnes works as a barista at one of the coffee chains on Oxford Street, her apron, filthy with brown espresso smears, usually peeking out of her purse. They are part of the demimonde in London, foreigners working humiliating jobs on the high streets where they are “girls.” Shopgirl. Coffeegirl. They are Clara Bow and Joan Crawford flap-flapping about the screen before the Handsome Rich Man (anyday!) comes and saves them from a life of soul-sucking poverty.

Ruth had visited Agnes at work once, Agnes frantic catering to a long queue of impatients, hair held back by a red scarf, plastic bangles from Topshop jangling up her plump white arm. Before the coffee shop Agnes used to work at Topshop but got sacked, for various conspiracy theories Agnes would be all too ready to divulge. Just ask.

Want to grab a pint later? Headache, Ruth begs off. Sorry.

No worries Agnes shrugs although she is pouting with those pretty red lips. You can tell she’s pouting because she doesn’t want you to forget it. She has lit a cigarette and she has stopped talking. This is her way of punishing Ruth. It’s called the silent treatment. Girls like Agnes and Ruth communicate by frozen telepathy.

Ruth now stops to light a cigarette, Agnes reluctantly stops with her, cupping pink hands. She brands Ruth’s with the end of her burning ciggie, and there is an intimacy to this. Ruth blows her smoke out into the gray air, watching it intermingle. This is to punctuate the moment, a ritualistic cease fire.

They walk down Edgware Road together. They both stop to check themselves out in the window, maybe to make sure they are still there. They walk past all the wonders of W2 kebob shops, men sucking on hookahs, video rental shops with posters of veiled mysterious eyes, jewelry stores selling rows and rows of gold chains, newsagent placard outside MAN BEATEN TO DEATH WITH CLUB (Ruth shivers), tabloids with screaming headlines a famous movie star who is getting a divorce or adopting a child from the Third World or going to rehab or something.

At night these girls lie in bed and think of celebrities, how beautiful they are, what they are doing at that very moment, what they are like in real life.

Ruth promises again to meet up with Agnes—soon soon. Agnes doesn’t walk for long not in those heels they are red and vintage as well she is already wincing she is handicapped by the cobblestones. Ideally she would take a limo everywhere or at least a cab, but she has not struck it rich, not yet, so for now she takes the train. But the town’s full of eligible bachelors.

Ruth is heading off for a little adventure on foot. She has decided to walk to Liberty. Liberty is like my Tiffany’s, she thinks. She had just seen the film in a matinee.

As Ruth crosses the road, she holds her breath and imagines a black mini-cab throttling towards her crashing into her, crushing her shin bones. Ever since she got to London she had developed a morbidity about being suddenly murdered among the masses.