Sabine by A.P.

Her leading, you following.
    Yes, why not? Or vice versa, seeing that that’s the whole beauty of the same-sex relationship in my experience: no fixed roles, no leading and following, no domination. No overdog or underdog, simply an unleashed pair coursing along together side by side. Equals. A draw. Love seventeen and advantage no one.
    Does the butcher shop metaphor hold if it is you I am dressing for, Sabine? No, it doesn’t and it didn’t. I wasn’t meat that day, minced or sliced or otherwise, and I didn’t cram myself into a tidy package with a view to the customer: I made myself – freely, willingly, autonomously – as pretty as I possibly could for the sheer glee of it, full stop.
    On this occasion too I remember the dressing ceremony in the fugged-up bathroom as clearly as if it were yesterday and there had been no fug. Although, seeing as it was the last time in my life that I was ever totally, straightforwardly, unalloyedly happy, it is quite possible I constructed much of the memory in hindsight using pieces of other days –wishful remembrance and hardly any fact at all. Christopher’s voice beating out ‘Blueberry Hill’ in bad fake American: ‘My heart stood steeheel’. He is getting himself into the part. With his hair pomaded into an Elvis crest, and a guitar borrowed from Mme Goujon’s teenage son, he is going as a pop singer. Matty in the bath, shaving her legs and cursing herself for having waxed them on a par with the arms: it has made things worse, made the hairs grow inwards and now not even the razor can crop them.
Mierda.
Black stockings is the only answer. But black stockings on an angel …? Too late now to switch to that red affair and go as a Flamenco dancer, it needs sewing.
Mierda, mierda, mierda.
What can she do? Stay starkers and go as the Yeti, Christopher suggests, ducking to avoid a wet sponge. Serena and Tessa squabbling over a filthy starched petticoat, passed around between us so often, as we shift from Greco mode to Bardot, that its ownership record is lost. I have a feeling it is actually mine, brought back from America by my dad, but to say so would only complicate matters at this stage. Besides, it has gone the shape and colour of a rotten cauliflower. Who wants Bardot anyway? Who wants Greco either? Tonight I am to be Cleopatra. I will have no traffic with the musty pile of dressing-up clothes Aimée has put at our disposal – no telling who has worn those tawdry time-stained dresses, and when and where and in what mood. (Why, she did, you idiot. Forties boxes,thirties clingers, twenties sheaths, even second Empire crinolines like as not – she wore them herself, in a mopey mood, all down the decades.) Instead I have settled on a comparatively clean sheet, which I have just finished draping round myself in a sexy Liz Taylor fashion, anchoring it at the top to the struts of Serena’s strapless bra and then clamping it in at the waist with a gold chain belt. On my feet I have a pair of sandals, also gold – perhaps more slave than queen, but still – and my arms, neck, head and ears are garnished by all the fake jewellery we have managed to assemble between us – quite a haul. I have a bottle of instant suntan also, nicked by Tessa from a party during the hols, which no one else dares use, and while all these other things are going on I am staring at myself in a soggy little pond of mirror, rubbed free of steam, to watch the effect develop. At present my blackheads are just getting blacker, but on the last glimpse before we leave I shall be bowled over by my own appearance: two kohl-rimmed elfin eyes in a shining brown face, ringed around by curls and glitter. Never before have I been so bewitching. Hindsight, like I said, is a great fudger of memories, but I think even then, at the very moment that I gasp and wonder, I have a kind of presentiment that never will I be so again; that tonight, come later