‘Good point, Mildred,’ I mutter, as I pull up outside our house and prepare to get out to open the gate.
Dan is working late because there is a big economics conference in town and he’s one of the speakers. It’s athree-day thing and to be honest he adores these conferences. It gives him a chance to sit in on other people’s talks in ugly conference halls and have animated discussions with others for whom economics is their very life.
‘Economics is not my life, Freya,’ he always insists in a wounded voice when I say this and I grin back.
‘Not your life, sweetie,’ I say, ‘but you know if it was a toss up between me, say, losing a limb and you having to miss all these conferences forever, I’d probably have to learn to do things with just one hand.’
‘I am hurt,’ he says, pretending to be wounded.
‘I’m only kidding.’
I know stuff like that isn’t his life but he does love it. So tonight it’s just me and the three children at home. Teddy is in bed and for once she’s tired and appears to be going to sleep without asking, ‘Why isn’t Daddy reading me my story tonight, I want Daddy,’ because Daddy of course isn’t there.
But she’s gone to sleep, miraculously.
Liam is reading on the couch in the kitchen because I’ve said he has to cut down on Super Mario to half an hour on school days. He really is such a good kid – I must have done something right, I tell Mildred bitchily. There is no comeback. She must be having her dragon wings resprayed or something.
Lexi is in her room, possibly doing something withmake-up. I know this because when I run up to tell her to turn her music down as her little sister is in bed, Lexi’s dressing table is covered with Surella products. At this point, she hasn’t actually applied anything and I manage to rein in my temper, an irrational temper I fully agree, and hope that she is just doing a little bit of messing around.
Lots of girls practice withmake-up and do crazy things with their faces that freak their mothers out. I didn’t but Scarlett, at age sixteen, was a great one fortraffic-stopping lipstick and enough mascara and eyeliner so that she could barely blink.
My mother, typically, never batted an eyelid and would say: ‘That’s interesting, honey,’ whenever Scarlett emerged from her room looking like she was about to go on stage on Broadway. If any of us thought we were going to get a screaming: ‘You will not leave this house looking like that’, lecture from my mother, we were mistaken.
It was, my mother told me later, a little bit like hearing small children say rude words.
‘If you sound shocked, they say it again one hundred times, possibly in front of their teacher. But if you largely ignore it, then the desire to shock goes. Scarlett usually rubbed most of it off in the cloakroom under the stairs before she went out.’
Mum had taught me well.
So I am ready for this phase. Or at least I think I am.
Now that Lexi has a bag full of appalling Surella products, I am no longer as primed as I’d hoped to be.
I go upstairs half an hour later to say that she only has twenty minutes more before bed.
‘Lexi, honey,’ I whisper, giving the lightest of knocks on her shut door. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Sure.’
Her voice sounds different, as if she’s practising a part in a play. The lights are all on and I stare at my Lexi in horror. She looks unrecognisable from my beautiful little girl.
She’d borrowed a skimpy silver camisole of mine, which is far too big and falling down off her shoulders. She’s clearly used all thelimb-bronzing gel so that now she is a bizarre golden shade all over. Her face, her beautiful face ... it’s caked with base. Literally caked.
She’s managed to put on false eyelashes, although I don’t know how they’ve stuck with the amount of positively glittering eyemake-up on her delicate eyelids. And her mouth is outlined into a parody of a mouth, a mouth that looks as if it’s been injected with chemicals to make it swell up.
She’s tried contouring and while her artistic skills can’t be faulted, she’s given herself cheekbones that gleam and hollows in astill-baby face that shouldn’t be hollowed. Worse, she’s tried to contour her narrow collar and breast bones, creating shadows as if she’s inviting people – boys – to look down.
She’s trying to look sexy and it’s that bitch Elisa’s fault, all of it.
All myThursday-night-calm goes out the window and though we’re standing on the landing, mere yards from Teddy’s door, I can’t keep my voice down. ‘What have you done to yourself?’
‘I’m wearing mymake-up. I thought I’d try something new, I am fourteen, you know,’ says Lexi defiantly.
‘But you just look ... it’s not good, you’re hiding your beauty and it’s ...’ The words come out of my mouth before I can stop them racing out like an express train. ‘It’s cheap. I can’t believe you’ve done this to yourself.’
Lexi’s little chin gets higher.
‘I sent Elisa a picture on Instagram,’ she says, ‘and she replied right back and said it was fabulous and maybe they’d use it in their marketing.’
