Cherries In The Snow (29 page)

‘You would look amazing pregnant!' said Marley one morning and then blushed. ‘But really … you would look like a fertility goddess. Sometimes I have to shake myself not to think about it.'

‘Gross,' I said. But it didn't seem that gross.

For Christmas Montana and Jolene got me a tutu, in honor of my crime.

‘I thought that was the funniest shit ever,' said Jolene. ‘Actually, I have one too. Every girl should have one.' Because it was from Jolene, it was the most expensive she could find, pink netting folded over and filled with fake rose petals.

Marley taught me how to vacuum and I vacuum in my tutu. I found I kind of liked the satisfaction of making something
clean so fast. Sidney Katz followed me between my two rooms, pointing out fur balls with his paw.

Jolene's line of bath products was as successful as her Cool Yoga videos.

I spend most weekends at Marley's and often Montana and I collide. She sits on my lap, straddling me. Her father, with whom we are both deeply in love, fixes whole-wheat pancakes in the kitchen as she leans in close as a lap dancer, her flaxen locks tickling my nose, and whispers, ‘Oh, Sadie, you're pretty, I'm
sorry
you have dark hair.'

‘I like it. I think it suits me.'

‘Yes, well, I suppose. But I could never have it because I want to be a ballerina.'

Montana has never been to the ballet, just the ballet in her head. We've all been to the ballet in our heads. And it's always us dancing. And it's always our daddy, or someone who looks like our daddy, twirling us over their shoulders. On cue Marley walks in and she leaps into his arms. ‘Papa! Papa!' she cries, smothering him in kisses. He squeezes her tight. ‘One day,' I want to tell her, ‘one day you're gonna say' – and I feel I should warn him too – ‘you're gonna scream “Put me down!” ' But I keep that to myself.

I never said sorry before I met Marley, never. He made me want to take responsibility for my actions. He didn't make me. He never made me do anything. And that made me want to. I began apologizing sooner and sooner, the space between the crime and the apology shrinking like a Gobstopper in my mouth.

I hadn't seen my dad in so long and yet we talk on the phone so often that it was almost awkward the extent to which we just picked up where we left off. I wondered what he would make of Marley. They were both loud. Loud in their love of
their families and of their lives. ‘Exhibitionists,' tutted my mother, although really, neither of them were in the slightest.

My mother insisted they fly business class, which I knew Dad could not afford, but somehow he did it. She was happy, ecstatically so, in Manhattan, because she could see celebrities in restaurants – some she had even slept with, one who even remembered her. We all went to brunch at Balthazar, and halfway through her eggs Benedict, my mother, whose head was darting around the room looking for famous people, suddenly stopped dead still. She began to blush. Striding toward us came Albert Finney, jowly, older, but still every inch the star.

‘Oh,' said Albert Finney, ‘Mia.' She quaked that he recalled her name. ‘It's been decades, but you look just as beautiful as you ever were.' She left with a smile and kissed my father, and he kissed her back. Odd to see that instance where interest in someone else could make you love your partner more, your flesh and blood lover made more beautiful to you by the recognition of a hologram love.

Out on the icy sidewalk after our Christmas brunch, Montana took an almighty
klonk
to the head. Everyone gathered around her and waited for her to cry, but she twisted and twisted her face almost inside out, and when it twisted back into place, there were no tears and we all went on our way.

Just then Montana snaked her hand into mine. I couldn't decide whether to put my free hand in my father's or in Marley's. So I did neither. I held my own hand.

With the end of Holly and Ivy, so came the end of Grrrl. There was no official disbanding, just a call from Ivy that I needn't come to work Monday and would I perhaps like to see the new Richard Avedon exhibition with her instead. Although I had worked hard on finding the name that would move Grrrl to the next level, I was philosophical. One day after I got my
final check, our makeup simply wasn't on the shelves anymore, like a lover who just stops calling. In a human, that's cruel and unforgivable. In a lipstick, it has a tender poetry, like the phrase ‘Cherries in the Snow.' Our fans didn't have a chance to stock up on their favorite products because they didn't know what was about to happen. And that is how we got to the next level: They will miss us. They will have, while cooking meat, loaf for their two kids in a Long Island suburb, from time to time memory flashes of the cleavage-tipped lipstick that they felt awkward and excited about putting on their mouth when they were twenty-one years old.

It was sad that an all-girl company had to fall apart. But we were all just a bunch of little girls, bossy, needy, attention-seeking, and easily hurt. If we had been an all-woman company, we might still be going right now. Sometimes I miss the chatter across phone lines and the eyebrows raised above computer screens. But I enjoy having my days to myself. And though money will soon be a worry, it isn't yet: Ivy, who it came down to in the end, gave me a very generous severance. She gave herself a good one too, taking off to Costa Rica for a month and returning brown, slim, and squeezed dry of tears. Just as Holly had to confront the truth that she really wasn't a lesbian, Ivy had to confront the truth that she really was.

Ivy and I don't talk about it, so I'm not sure if Holly's still with Isaac. I don't see her anymore. Wait. I saw her once, in the aisle of Sephora where our counter used to be. I looked into the mirror angled above the Fresh counter as I was trying on lotus eye gel and saw in the reflection Holly, tiny, standing alone in the space now occupied by Hard Candy, looking dazed. I was going to ask her if she needed help. But I didn't.

I'm not angry at her and I don't hate her. It's just that some of the things you loved when you were thirteen you still love when you're twenty-five. And some of them don't make sense
anymore. I do hang out with Ivy. Marley likes her a lot, and now that she's lost weight, Montana finds her less objectionable. I sometimes see a supersheer lip-gloss ghost of Holly. And then she vanishes, and Marley appears next to me, a real flesh-and-blood man with his rough hands resting softly on my waist. When I was a little girl, I chose Holly. But she never chose me back. It's important to feel chosen by the person you love. I've hung on to her mother's Kanebo lipstick. I've wanted to give it to her, explain what it meant to me. But I don't think Holly's ready to go to those deep places. Not yet. One day.

My breasts are still falling, you know, but it doesn't make my heart lurch the way it used to. I have a very good bra, sensible, white, sturdy, and when I take it off, the only people who see them are me or Marley. And he loves them. And I, lying back in the bath, seeing my breasts float in the water above me like shopgirls taking a weight off their feet, can deal with them.

One day as the water drained, I sat at my desk, writing a birthday card to my father, a yellow towel knotted across my wayward chest, bright red mouth because even in the bath I've always said you need your Cherries. I looked at my lipstick short list pinned to the corkboard, unused, never to be seen by Holly, let alone the cosmetic-hungry public:

And I kind of had an idea for a novel. I wiped off my lipstick and turned on the computer.

Many thanks to Carrie Thornton at Crown and Chiki Sarkar at Bloomsbury; to my longtime friend and London agent, Felicity Rubinstein, and to my New York agent and new friend, Emma Parry; to Elinor Burns at Casarotto Ramsey, who read this book at least fifty times; and Lisa Forrest, who read it forty-eight.

Special thanks to Bonnie Thornton and Suzette Pilgrim for allowing me to poke around their psychological makeup bags, to Nick Knight for taking my photograph, and to Jennifer Belle in whose writing workshop this novel was born. I owe so much of the good cheer in these pages to Perry and Junior, Dr Shannon O'Kelly, Cliff Curtis, Nikkie Eager, Sassica Francis-Bruce, Jeffreys ‘F' and ‘R' and the one-and-only, incredible Judy. Without Sarah Bennet and her techie genius, the manuscript would have been lost forever.

EMMA FORREST
is the author of the novels
Namedropper
,
Thin Skin
and
Cherries in the Snow
, the memoir
Your Voice in My Head
and editor of the non-fiction anthology
Damage Control
. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a screen writer.

Namedropper
Thin Skin
Damage Control
(editor)
Your Voice in My Head

Meet Viva Cohen: a teenage schoolgirl bombshell. Her bedroom walls are plastered with posters of silver-screen legends, and underneath her school uniform she wears vintage thigh-high stockings. Her best friends are a drugged-out beauty queen and an ageing rock-star, and she lives in London with her gay uncle, Manny.

Viva spends her days gate-crashing gigs, skiving her exams and trying to live life as glamorously as her number one icon, Elizabeth Taylor. But then she sets out on a pilgrimage: in search of real love, experience and Jack Nicholson. Wicked-tongued, star-fixated, clever and restless, Viva is like no other girl — and this is no ordinary summer…

‘Shred, cool, sure and insightful'
Independent

‘Sparky, bright and savvy, Viva Cohen is the sort of teenager most of us would have burned our A-ha posters to have been friends with … sit back and enjoy Forrest's eclectic cast'
Daily Mail

‘Precocious, intelligent and original'
Time Out

Meet Ruby: a bedraggled, stinking romance heroine. At fifteen Ruby left home, got herself an agent and became a film star. Now twenty, she lives alone, in a world of hotels and fast food. Destructive and charming, cutting is Ruby's hobby. Her hair, her arms and occasional tattoos – her newest accessory is a bloodline necklace.

Ruby is a seductive blend of heroine and whore. She has left the man who loves her, been fired by her agent, and is starring in a film opposite the delectable Aslan. It is quite possibly her last chance.

‘Electric, irreverent prose. When people talk about “voice”, this is what they mean'
Ethan Hawke

‘Skeletal and luminous,
Thin Skin
takes the coming-of-age novel to places it has never been before'
Julie Burchill

‘A wonderfully distinctive mix of humour, the captured rawness of desires, and the enchantment of these lives'
JT LeRoy

‘It's difficult to write a convincing tale of depression that's also an entertaining romp, but Forrest has done it'
Sunday Times

Emma Forrest was twenty-two when she realised that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity. Lonely, in a cycle of self-harm and damaging relationships, she found herself in the chair of an effortlessly optimistic psychiatrist – a man whose wisdom and humanity would wrench her from the vibrant and dangerous tide of herself after she tried to end her life. A modern day fairy tale,
Your Voice in My Head
is a dazzling and devastating memoir, clear-eyed and shot through with wit. In her unique voice, Emma Forrest explores depression and mania, but also the beauty of love – and the heartbreak of loss.

‘Emma Forrest is an incredibly gifted writer, who crafted the living daylights out of every sentence in this unforgettable memoir. I can't remember the last time I ever read such a blistering, transfixing story of obsession, heartbreak and slow, stubborn healing'
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of
Eat Pray Love

www.bloomsbury.com/emmaforrest

First published in Great Britain 2005

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 2005 by Emma Forrest

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to quote from: ‘Born to Run' by Bruce Springsteen. Published by Zomba Music Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. And:
Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition
by Jim Cullen, published by Helter Skelter Publishing.

All rights reserved
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eISBN: 978-1-4088-6021-2

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