The Glue Factory
I am not prepared for this level of intimacy. I haven’t had the level three regime of pampering that would put me at ease to be in this position —shower, face mask, exfoliate, shave everywhere, deep condition of the hair, a blast of perfume— the militant disguise of any and all bodily functions. None of the rigamarole I’ve learned as the fairer sex to make it seem like I wake up in a cloud of perfectly coiffured hair and shit sugared almonds. Yet here I am, voluntarily lying on my back with one unshaven leg in the air as a man I've just met holds my bare foot an inch away from his face. I’ve been walking all day, how much does the offending foot hum by now? I furtively pull my skirt down as he begins to squeeze said foot, worried I’m also inadvertently giving him full viewing of the meat show.
He releases my foot.
“Lie on your side would you?”
With the stress of wanting to appear graceful having the opposite desired effect, I crash onto my left side and imagine he sees an otter doing an ungainly barrel roll. Before I know it he is cradling my torso with my face planted into his armpit, hands gripping my shoulder blades.
“Breathe with me.”
We heave in and out in unison as if we’re preparing for a tandem skydive and then...CRACK. I exhale with pleasure.
There are two things I’ve come to accept about myself. The first is that I will put myself through abject humiliation if I believe there will be a positive pay off. The second is if I see a sign for discounted chiropractic treatment I will take it.
An effusive American expat with big paw-like hands, in my pain-relief-induced euphoria I begin to daydream about us skipping through meadows together as he cracks the toes in my other foot while reeling off the countries he's visited. But then he breaks the daydream by asking how old I am.
“Really!” he exclaims then motions me to sit up. “Well, you’re in good condition. But your right leg is a lot shorter, that’ll take a few adjustments to correct,” he adds while ushering me out of the door.
“You too!” I reply, now doing Geisha-like bowing. My back immediately seizes up again as I leave grimacing, realising my response made absolutely no sense.
What’s great about being a woman negotiating the world is you realise not only is your value set by predetermined additional Top Trumps factors of class, finances, race, education etcetera, etcetera, but also by how bangable you are. And how you have a finite time in which to capitalise on your stock before you either rebrand into your second life as a doting mother or are relegated to the tragedy of being a spinster. It’s an old trope that, despite being in the midst of overhauling how we discuss and think about gender, sex and sexuality, is an enduring one.
“Good condition” I repeated over in my head. The older I’ve got the more I'm used to strangers describing me like I’m a secondhand car or an ailing racehorse to the point where it no longer feels like a personal affront. One last big dash left in the old nag, if I can just drag my stumpy right leg past the finish line one more time before I’m shipped off to the glue factory.
Since leaving my twenties I’ve started to sag and soften in a way the apple and Diet Coke a day me would’ve once found frankly unacceptable, and take great pleasure in cupping my own gut as I lie in front of the TV. I can no longer argue the sprinkle of white hairs on my crown are sun damage or that the rogue hair which sprouts from my chin every few months is a one-off. My knees click without fail when I squat and I listen to ‘Ocean Ambience on a Tropical Island (Maldives)’ every evening to offset the tinnitus that has worsened with every passing year.
Regardless of possessing so few of the practical and financial comforts I thought I’d have by my thirties, I am enjoying them. I spent so much of my formative years being made acutely aware that I had to think of myself as a product to be sold, that to now be on the proverbial shelf is quite liberating.
I’d still been writing, interning, scraping part-time jobs when I found myself on a treadmill of screen tests. A new media goldrush saw every online platform trying their hand at YouTube content, throwing reams of shit at a wall to see what would stick. It was driven home, quite without any regard to my flimsy twenty-something ego, that though I wasn’t pretty, eloquent or clean-cut enough for terrestrial TV, I was just malleable enough that I could work for “online”. The men of new media were all mouthy private school boys casting themselves as their own main character but the women were to be recruited from the outside. Quietly absorbing the steady drip of humiliation I toughed it out hoping there would be a big payday on the horizon. There was not.
At the same time, an on-and-off boyfriend had become a bigger fixture in my life as I drifted away from friends and set my tunnel vision on this, as yet, fruitless career. Looking back I realise this wasn’t a coincidence. Both him and the slog of screen tests I found myself in were adept at this balancing act of being both superficially supportive and covertly destructive. I’d have agents and directors critique everything about me so casually that I forgot what normal human interaction should be like. Then I’d meet my ashamed-to-present-me-as-a-girlfriend partner who’d pointedly mention how he noticed I’d constantly refresh my makeup when I was with him or listen to the music I knew he liked. It felt both cruel and anodyne at a time where the concept of gaslighting was yet to be picked apart in soft-psychology Twitter threads. For me, it was just a rumbling dread of having a magnifying glass held up to my insecurities and watching me squirm that I had to put up with. I began to feel like an amoebic blob, constantly morphing and contorting myself to other people's expectations and still getting nowhere.
You don’t appreciate the cumulative effect of this kind of slog until you break. It was one more screen test, this time a small set up in a Soho basement that smelt of musty laundry; just one man and a camera, a few lights, and a sloppily thrown up photography background. The girl before me walked out beaming like a sentient Pantene advert, her smile dropping as we made quick up-and-down assessments of each other as we crossed paths. There was a tall bar chair with a bag set on it in the centre of the room. As he repositioned the camera he asked me to pick an object at random out of the bag, and I’d have to talk about it for as long as I could. I pulled out a small blue flashlight on a keyring. Stumped for a few seconds which felt like an eternity, I launched into a QVC sales pitch about how it could be used for everything from morse code to spelunking. Then I held it underneath my face and told a corny, protracted ghost story about a poltergeist in a hospital. I tailed off hoping it was enough.
“Is that all? Play with it or something."
I frowned down the camera.
“Come ooon,” he goaded.
The words were totally innocuous but something about his tone irritated me so much that I slammed the flashlight back down onto the chair so it made a satisfying ‘clack’. His face suddenly reappeared from behind the lens in panic but I was already flouncing out of the room, bellowing “PRICK” as I went through the door, making sure to emphasise that nice hard ‘Kuh’ sound. Gulping back sobs on the bus, within the hour my non-agent, who refused to represent me until I’d caught a big fish, was calling. I deleted her voicemails without listening to them as they came in, knowing what they said anyway. Things that’d follow me for a long time after that. How I was difficult, unreasonable, not cut out for an industry like this if I were so easily rattled.
I decided to stop at my non-boyfriend’s, for some reason expecting sympathy where I’d never found it before. I recounted the stupid day I had to him, raising my voice in comedic disbelief the more he joked that I’d overreacted until we were both shouting. The mood flicked so abruptly that what could’ve been a bitter row escalated into a shoving match, then a scuffle. Widely overestimating my strength I found myself flummoxed as he was able to grip my whole body with one arm and dug the knuckles of his other hard into my back pressing a kidney. I stopped trying to wriggle free and flopped down on the edge of his bed. Winded with shock more than anything the mundanity of my surroundings seemed to become overwhelming all of sudden. The beep of a pedestrian crossing outside now deafening and clumsy flecks of paint on the skirting board coming into sharp focus. There was a fleeting silence, then before he stormed out the room a kick to the top of my thigh as I turned away from him. It left a pink, raised shoe print that prickled when I touched it and I was grateful. I had another screen test the next week and at least I wouldn’t have to explain any marks on my face.
It was not, I remember, a great day.
What, I wonder, would that day have been like if I had a morsel of the self-worth I have now. If I had the distance to sit back and observe how the professional mingling with the personal so seamlessly, can make one person feel both meritless in their career and patently unlovable in their private life. What would any modern woman’s twenties be like if she came already armed with the nirvana you reach in your thirties from becoming wise to the world’s bullshit?
After that fateful last screen test, my column started to pick up the pace, earning enough low-level notoriety that snippets would inexplicably be reposted on porn sites and people would post me weird shit in the mail. Enough traction that it was quickly commissioned into a video series. We shot two episodes a day at the princely presenting fee of £500 each, which I was warned I should be grateful for, and within the same year, I was enjoying being brown-nosed at the launch party. I felt smug as my face was projected onto the walls, blissfully unaware of the rapid depreciation of my stock it marked and the fall from grace that would follow.
You cannot, I learned, stop the skid into the glue factory so you may as well embrace it.
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