Material Girl by Louise Kean Read Free Book Online Page B

department store.
    ‘But fucking love! I can’t fucking make it work! It’sobviously 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 hemight 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