[Lucy is alone, flicking through the magazines and cuttings that are strewn around the set]
These are the messages from the rest of the world. Too fat – too thin – bad hair – wrong clothes. Drunk in the street – drunk in a cab – no knickers – no dignity – no integrity. Pictures of perfection, pictures of degradation. These are the ways in which everyone is wrong.
Maybe you’d be surprised, right, but Art was never really my strong point. Except I’m only talking about Art with a capital A and a classroom yeah – those lessons with regulation sketchpads and tiny tiny tubes of multicoloured glitter that if you breathed the wrong way would swoop and up and fly all everywhere and get stuck in the carpet for the rest of the year. And gunged up bottles of acrylic paint, where you’d get that thick crust around the neck like an old toothpaste tube, and the crust would grow until there was just a tiny dot-hole and maybe you could make the bottles fart painty air at each other but there was no more wet sticky colour oozing out. Now my paint comes in tins for the walls – each one a different colour so that when I get bored I can spin round and look at another.
And pipe cleaners – hundreds of lurid pipe cleaners, which was strange, wasn’t it, because when did anyone actually set about cleaning a pipe that small, or bother about whether it was pink or purple? We were instructed on how to make birthday cards out of macaroni and glue, and red-yellow-blue primary coloured smears of mummy and daddy and me; years and years of crumpled decorations for the fridge. Pretty as a picture? I don’t think so. We just had wonky crosses for hands and black splodges for eyes, like snowmen with coal.
See, though, for those old people – the old teachers – the old parents – the old pictures were enough. Well done, well done, tick, tick, gold star. “How beautiful, darling.” How beautiful. Nothing’s ugly when it’s a little piece of your younger you swished across paper with a paintbrush, moulded into papier-mâché, stamped out with a cut-up potato.
But now it’s high definition, 360 degrees, glossy-papered snapshots of – well, it’s reality, they say. This is the real world. This is what you didn’t notice before. The spots and stains and smudges – this is painting by numbers and these are the people spilling over the lines. See the scars of crash diets and bad stylists and ugly breakups. Bodies pushed and pulled and twisted, smiles slicked on and scratched away, thin veneers.
Do you remember painting PVA glue across your hands and letting it dry crinkly-stretchy like egg whites? And gently-gently pulling it off, trying to get one whole piece like peeling an apple, rolling off this clear-grey-white film like it was a painless part of yourself? It was like stories about hatching chicks or butterfly cocoons or growing snakes. Now you can just buy the peeling-off in tubes with added vitamins or anti aging. Or you can pay a beautician to do it for you.
Zoom in, zoom in. No space here for second skins.
