I ♥ The 60s
I most enjoy the montages they begin with: Profumo, Martin Luther King, Lyndon Johnson, The Stones, the Technicolor hippies dancing circularly, Cilla Black. An entire decade condensed into perhaps thirty seconds, without any of the boring bits about geopolitical something or other. In fact, when the talking heads come on, I usually mute the set. UKTV History are the best regular source, repeating docs purloined from the BBC, both overviews and focuses on single subjects: Beatlemania, civil rights, the sexual revolution. I know the lines off by heart now, about the teenagers who “suddenly had money in their pockets”, about the “swaying of the old order”. Then, come the end, I’ll go to bed, and dream.
Once a week, walking back from the office, I stop by Borders, and ask the staff for any relevant new titles. If I’m feeling particularly risqué, I will, after tea, pull on my Biba jacket and floral mini-skirt, flare up my eyelashes, and go to the 60s Jive at the bingo hall down the Old Kent Road. Coming home, amid the vodka-struck barbarians of Peckham, hoots of “Wide Load!” sometimes cut the air. Once, wearing my Marianne Faithfull Girl On A Motorcycle catsuit, a lout in pimpled skin and tracksuit bottoms emerged from the shadows and propositioned me. “I like a girl with a bit of meat on ‘er”, he slurred. Given the relative rarity of such occurrences, I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended. Walking past the Goldsmiths University union I find myself spotting girls in the same leather jacket, ankle-boots, kohl eyes. They all have Anita Pallenberg’s hair, and a look of hungry ease I can’t manage. They stand on the pavement swirling their drinks, discussing boys, all twenty years younger than me.
On Saturdays, I take my Vespa (first-run F-reg) to Carnaby Street. These days it’s mostly fancy-soap shops for Guardian types, but a handful of boutiques remain, their frontages redressed in pastel tones. I kill the hours stretching towards evening by going through the same three racks. In the changing room, I was putting off my leaving without, as per usual, buying anything. I flicked around to see a man’s eye peeping in at a curtain-crack. There was something rather dashing about its iris, reminding me of David Hemmings. Creeping out later, I could see him better – he had Freewheelin’-era Dylan’s hair, and an expression stolen from Michael Pitt in The Dreamers.
We sat at an outside café table – something I never do, as it always rains – and I squinted at him through big Twiggy sunglasses, eating my éclair in what I hoped was a carefree way. When he came back to my place (“for a drink” – I felt like Elizabeth Ercy in The Sorcerers), his eyes immediately took in the room. I always felt the mess reflected a ditzy Holly Golightly quality onto me – the kind of girl too much in demand to clean, for whom life is one long game. He looked towards my cupboard, and a momentary shock ran through me that he might find my other DVDs. (Well, a girl in my position needs some assistance in that area of enjoyment.) I interrupted him with the question of what he’d like to drink.
Pause. A Coke?
I felt like I should offer him a tab or something, but had nothing to hand. Even asking that had been hard enough. I sipped my highball across from him on the sofa. I prayed the room might become a time-machine, sucking in the essence of that decade, dissolving the space between us. There would be no effort required: all would fall into place, the very air possessed of luminosity, white heat. So many years of devotion, crowding the place with its spirits, and I, I would be now the initiate. I put on a record. He nodded as The Doors’ ‘Five To One’ came on. A potential future, sealed in vinyl, slipped underneath the needle. He gestured to me to stand up, and held me in his arms. He said, with a laconic look, You know, you have eyes like Patty Hearst.
It was my third husband who encouraged me. One day, as I brought him his tea, he began looking me up and down. I could see him, as I bent to put the tray on the floral table-cloth, making a close and enthusiastic study of my cleavage. All through dinner, he would glance at my lips as I took a sip of water, as if appraising the value of a freshly-caught squid. In one of the many lulls, I asked him, When are we going to that new club? You said you’d take me two weeks ago, and we haven’t gone. You know, he replied, some men don’t like showing off their wives in public. Men prefer women to be, y’know… pneumatic. He shovelled up another forkful of peas and steak, and chewed noisily, as if to say he would speak no more. I was wearing my low-cut polka-dot dress. Looking down at my plate, I could see how it caught the outline of my breasts, a gentle curvature down to my ribcage. I tried to calculate what angle they currently sloped at, what the ideal angle would be, or where, on a scale of 1 to 10, my body was, and should be.
One afternoon, when I came home early from work, I found him fucking Sandra on the iffy-smelling sofa in the front room. Though the hairy back of his neck obscured her face, I recognised the grunts and yelps as belonging to the voice I heard over our fortnightly cocktails. Neither of them noticed me in the doorway, but I could see her breasts generously wobbling as if they were independent of her, the curve of her lips, and his decidedly less-than-clean arse straining with effort. She was, I decided, too good for him, though once the divorce proceedings were underway he no doubt still saw a lot of her.
I spent a few months staying home every evening. The house we had lived in together seemed to grow smaller each hour, the walls, their magnolia floral relief wallpaper colouring and peeling, narrowing until I was forced into my room, wanting the night to be done with. The first time, afterwards, I went to a club, I ended the night keeping a look-out for a taxi while my friend Louise satisfied her new companion in an alcove. The next day I booked my first appointment with the surgeon.
I had my secondary-school reunion a couple of weeks ago. I was stood by the punchbowl, speaking to Matt, who had a crush on me in Year 9, and was apparently now a biochemist. His eyes were hidden behind smeared bottle-thick glasses, patchy two-day stubble and acne scars making him instantly recognisable. As he fell silent for the nth time, I mentioned the implants. Breasts, arse, lips, calves, labia, appendix, several areas of sub-dermal fat. The majority of my paycheque went into a savings account, month after month. A different area each time, sometimes not knowing what I was going to get until I had the menu in front of me, cash to hand. A different surgeon each time, rotating around the city, explaining to them each time, Oh no, these are my own. As I spoke, my tits wobbled over the buffet table. Matt reached for another drink, gulped it down like a cat swallowing a fish. Do you mind if I…?, he said after a pause, and started feeling my arms, working his way up to my cheeks, down to my breasts, as if he were testing a steak. I could see from the way he rolled his eyes as he crouched towards my abdomen that he’d had a few more than I’d thought.
So, what are you doing tonight? Well now, that is a question.
