Dreamgirl Chapter 7: “Everyone seeing you from different angles you couldn’t have imagined”

Words: Emma Forrest

Make it stand out

Casey knows she does not want children, and got herself sterilised some time ago. 

I have tried to be a good Mother, to know what is my daughter’s and what is mine - our clothes, our interests, our fears. It’s the hardest thing to keep track of, those boundaries, when you come from the same body and then are shrunk to a single parent house hold. I remain very, very aware of her bad luck that I am the only single parent in class. 

Past midnight, a dad to whom I’ve been polite on a school trip, unexpectedly messages me to say what a hard time he’s having in his marriage and that he just needs to be held. I throw the phone down as if it’s a nest of spiders. I go to bed shaken and wake up outraged. What fantasy is he projecting on to me that makes him think I’m a woman to whom he can send such a message? 

Maybe I have an open face? Maybe I have an overflowing body, that makes men think that I’m emotionally messy? Maybe it’s to do with the openness with which I’ve written my books, the content of which is all online? I realized, very recently, that the Mother at school who turned on me so suddenly, had also, perhaps, been been projecting on to me, what she’d wanted me to be. And that I hadn’t turned out to be who she’d decided I was. As audiences do when they fantasise about a movie star. Or a porn star. 

“Maybe I have an open face? Maybe I have an overflowing body, that makes men think that I’m emotionally messy?”

In a London pub on a rainy morning, right before she goes back to the airport, Casey and I compare the worst pictures of ourselves available on google. She pulls one up on her phone and hands it to me. It has been taken behind the scenes on a set and is a picture of her having water inserted into her vagina via a rubber tube, so she can fake squirting. She sighs. “They didn’t even colour grade it”. 

I pull up a portrait that was on the cover of a newspaper supplement to go with an excerpt from my last book. I look fifty-five. The photographer who took it was so young and beautiful, I was ashamed to ask if there was anything he could do to make me look less old. “But I guess there wasn’t”, I say. Casey studies it. 

“You don’t look old. You look very, very sad”, she says and I am touched. That was the saddest year I’d ever had. Then she fact checks these pages and asks me to note that fisting refers to her inserting her hand into a woman’s ass, not into their vagina. She watches me make the correction, and leans forward:

“But you can keep it the way it was if that’s how your mind had conjured it”.

As Casey is driven away, I think of her climbing up the rocks, a champion concentrating on the places to put her fingers. Men - and women - watching her body as she climbs: from one perspective you are this, from another that, to one viewer you are safe, to another reckless. Everyone seeing you from different angles you couldn’t have imagined, because you were micro focused on how, in your incremental movements, you could find a way to stay safe and get higher. 

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6