Woman's Body: An Owner's Manual

Using makeup G23

Makeup can accentuate the face’s good points and disguise its bad ones, such as: a broad nose, a long nose, a broad jaw, wide cheeks, a round chin, a broad forehead.

We draw dots above our eyebrows and I paint a line that runs from the furthest point of my tear ducts back to meet with the outer tips of my eyebrows. Moon boots and PVC trousers and just a bra on top to display the line drawing of a shark I've had tattooed onto my midriff. On Saturdays we go to Pop Scene. We get in because the alcohol makes us know how to stand in the line. We know to look the bouncer in the eye and smile, and if that is not enough, my friend has her boobs with her.

We dance and, like the rest of the women there, we grind against boys to music and kiss them with our eyes closed, as if we are so into it we need to shut down our other senses. I try going to the bar with one boy and he buys me a drink. There is no conversation, because none will come, and when he asks my age I tell him the truth, and he leaves to go to the loo and doesn’t come back. It’s an altogether better thing when no one talks.

At school in art I draw my face over and over again, because I haven’t done any thinking about what I should be drawing, and also because I feel like I don’t know what I look like anymore, as if different bones have grown up and over my old ones. I stay up through the night in my bedroom and paint over the black walls with what I decide is blood red. My makeup gets stranger and heavier.

In Pop Scene I meet a boy with lamb chop sideburns and glasses and it’s the start of a good thing. I lose it to him on a kitchen counter in Ealing. We break up three years later, on the same day that I get a letter from a university. My mother says of him ‘Well, I’ll always love him because I feel like he saved your life.’

Something happens the year I turn eighteen. I stop wearing high heels and makeup. I cut my hair, which until recently has been long and dyed blue-black. I cut it myself to a close crop and bleach it badly so that some patches are white and some are yellow. I start wearing baggy jeans and singlet tops with vague logos on them – an 8, or a badly drawn dragon, a pair of lips, or an apple with a worm poking out of it. It makes little difference to me. I take after my mother and become a bra-less type so that my breasts nose at the front of these tops, not purposefully, but like I’m wearing what I slept in. I only wear trainers and I do not shave my legs – I can’t imagine ever bothering again. I learn to throw a punch, learn how not to break my thumbs in the process and I adopt a new walk with a low centre of gravity. I want to be strong and stocky, both feet evenly planted on the ground like I’d be hard to knock over.