The Make-up box
by Magda Knight

Something downtrodden and dowdy stares back at me in my bedroom mirror. Colourless lips and eyes hang in a horselike face. It's not a look I'm proud of. It's been etched into my bones by years of weary make-do. Behind me, my sister Miriam touches up her natural beauty from the make-up box she carries with her everywhere. I'm jealous. The bedroom reeks of her own personal musty scent - Chanel Number Whore. In what context did coming round to 'cheer me up' translate to lolling around in my bedroom and messing up my things?

What I actually say is "I think Rob will be back soon."

"Your inheritance married his looks," she replies unkindly. "I wish you could see yourself as he does, Susan. Just a sad little creepmouse who's bought herself some love."

This is why I prefer it when Miriam doesn't visit. I say something sharp and vampish and resourceful like "But - " and get no further. Miriam, a successful actress, is wanton by both profession and nature - a leading lady who's always in control.

"When he phoned to say he'd be late, you said he sounded happy, not contrite," says Miriam. "Not a good sign!"

"He's good to me," I persevere, embarrassed by my own words. "I don't know where I could find another like him." I glimpse Rob's face in a photo on my dresser, all golden and strong like Adonis.

"Fine," murmurs Miriam. She tweaks her sooty lashes into huge curling question marks. "Let's not talk of horrid Rob anymore. I know! Why don't we take our clothes off and prance around like great big cats?"

"Let's not!" I laugh.

Miriam clicks her tongue. "Creepmouse." To highlight the difference between us she strips down to her expensive underwear, delighting in my discomfort, then strokes the make-up box. "Do you remember when I was younger, and still Enid Rathsmore's understudy at The Imperial?"

I do, and in reward Miriam fishes out some face-powder from a lacquered compact I want to touch - but I don't think Miriam would let me.

"This box belonged to her. She said it was important to know its contents were special," says Miriam, licking her incisors in a feral fashion as if she is describing something other than powder or paint.

The initial H is embossed upon the box's lid, so I doubt the box originally belonged to Enid, but I say nothing as Miriam brushes powder over my forehead and cheeks. I'm no beauty, but suddenly I want to be.

"This powder contains lead. Like Queen Elizabeth the First wore." Miriam sounds like she's licking mangoes. "Killed her quite dead, silly woman. And made her hair fall out."

"Don't be silly," I scoff. "You don't get lead in modern cosmetics. Companies do far better with the organic ashes of children - and sea kelp." However, suggestion is a powerful thing and my skin starts to prickle.

Miriam looks dreamy as she draws out a tub of peacock blue. "Shut your eyes," she says firmly. I let her smear stuff across my lids. Pampering has been passed down by women through the centuries, I think. Miriam's voice sounds woollen in my ears.

"I envied Enid absolutely," she's saying. "I came to the theatre every night just to be around her glow. I helped her undress. I passed her flowers from the admirers she refused to see. I watched her paint her face. Everything I've learned about beauty, I've learned from Enid Rathbone."

"So what's in the eyeshadow?" I ask.

"Woad." Miriam cackles like a lost thing. "The first Briton fighters painted woad symbols on their naked skin before battle. The women fought too - Enid said so. They fought alongside their men, with woad on their chests and rags tied about them for their periods."

"I've seen the swords they would have had to lift at the British Museum," I mutter softly. I have, too. The British Museum is one of my favourite hideaways when Rob is working. Its musty dead corridors are perfect for a creepmouse like me. "They must have been brutes." Eyes closed, I feel beautiful. The dresser-table mirror before me is a gateway I don't yet dare pass.

"Enid sounds bloody mad," I say for good measure. "And what's that you're putting on my eyelashes?"

"Oh, she went downhill - a coke fiend, I believe - and they ended up putting her in a madhouse for glam old ladies," says Miriam with some relish. "And don't panic. It's just some Lancome mascara. There wasn't much left when I got my hands on the box. I had to replace it with my own."

Then the phone rings downstairs and I jump. My sister's breath tickles in my ear, hot and dark. "It's only him."

The odd thing is, I simply can't move. Maybe it's because Miriam is pushing me back into my seat. Maybe it's because I feel woozy. From the alcohol. Maybe.

"Only one more item to go." Miriam's voice echoes from a far-off place.

"Hit me," I say faintly. Something greasy is smeared on my lips.

"Lipsticks once contained pig-fat," says Miriam. "But that's too dull for Enid's lipstick." I make a noise like a question mark. Miriam's answer is drawn-out and slow.

"You were almost right, a little while earlier. Children."

I know what she means. And I'm not scared. Stories to scare a dowdy older sister at night. But a shadow brushes over me, and I open my eyes and gasp.

I see my own face. Clad in blue, the eyes in the mirror before me now look heavy and brooding. With newly powdered edges, my nose bisects my face straight and proud and my lips look thin and cruel, like a queen's.

I'm beautiful.

I realise my sister is staring. Something briefly flashes across her face - and if I didn't know better, I'd call it hatred.

"What?" I say.

"Nothing." And whatever passed over her face leaves it, and it's normal Miriam again.

I smile at her, genuinely grateful that she has come round. "It's wonderful."

We open another bottle, and when Rob's keys finally sound in the door, morning birdsong is coming from the garden and Miriam and I are lolling on the bed, weeping tears of laughter at old album photos.

"Put your clothes back on!" I hiss as I hear Rob stumble downstairs.

Miriam is flopped down with an arm across her. "I can't. I can't find them," she says, not even looking.

"There, silly. And over there!"

Miriam looks at me mournfully. I throw her shoes and jumper towards her.

"I have terrible dreams," she says with great dark eyes. "Every night. Women in despair. They're being degraded. Tortured, I think. By a woman stronger than them. A queen."

I'm lost for words. "Have you tried natural sleeping aids?"

Miriam gives me a look of such anguish that I impulsively hug her. Her nose runs into my shoulder.

"I care about you, Susan. You're my favourite sister."

"I'm your only sister," I grimace. This raises a smile, but not the flash of wolf's teeth I'm used to.

She tries one more time to stop me, but I have to go down to greet Rob, who's tired and smells freshly-showered, and when I return to the bedroom it's empty and the window lies open, curtains fluttering in the early morning air, and she's left Enid's box but all the photos of us as children have had Miriam's head cut away.

The next morning, I wake up to find Rob beside me, nuzzling my ear. I'm less concerned about where my glamorously cracked sister has run off to, and more concerned with the unlikely but delightful stiffness pressed into the base of my spine.

My husband and I engage in something we've not done in a very long while. I risk all and ask what has made him forsake the spare bedroom this time. He grins like a cat that's searched a dustbin and found cream.

"Gorgeous, you're gorgeous," he says throatily, and so we spend another happy couple of hours.
It is afternoon when I finally get up. My body is pure sweat, and the pillows are caked with mascara and rouge. Maybe it's my smeared face but Rob seems keen to leave and mutters about locating a pressed shirt for work. On a Sunday.

As he dresses, I take Miriam's make-up box into the bathroom. Rob is talking on the phone as I re-apply the blues and alabasters and reds to my ugliness with an unsure teenager's hand. He's speaking with the same throaty voice he used on me earlier this morning.

I try to concentrate on what I'm doing. And I begin to feel strange. This time I can't blame it on wine. Rob's voice fades like the last dream before morning. My hands feel like Miriam's did, last night. Languid and cold. As the blushes and powders go on I suddenly realise I'm beautiful. As beautiful as Miriam. As beautiful as a queen.

God, I'm beautiful.

Rob bangs on the door, he needs to use the bathroom, and I enjoy the power of remaining silent. What a stupid animal he is.

I trace irresistible lines around my eyes. I don't even mind when I see the kohl move of its own accord into curves and shadows that suit my eye sockets better than I could imagine. I watch fascinated as the peacock-blue powder reshapes itself to bring out the Elizabeth Taylor I never knew my eyes possessed.

I hear birds singing, far away. Streets away. My senses seem sharper. As sharp as the painted lines on my face.

I love this feeling. I search for its name, not used to describing my feelings, and realise it is something I have never experienced before, and sweetly cold.

As Rob bangs the door for my attention, I apply the make-up as thickly as possible. My strange feeling is now as fine and cold as mountain air which thins and is no more.

Miriam was strong. I was weak. Not now.

I decide I will ravish Rob in this very bathroom. I don't know where this thought comes from but it feels fine and strong. So I unbutton my chemise. As I unlock the door and stand in wait, an image comes unbidden of three women in fluted white dresses, crying in the dark. Their hair is oiled and braided. They should be dancing, not weeping. Something grand and chill stands over them.

I put it out of mind.

Rob is angry when he comes into the bathroom but I ravish him as I promised myself I would, and he enjoys it more than I do. Our coupling is dull, so I vary my movements until the pleasure is all mine, not his. My movements become exotic, then something else. Something dangerous. And then he complains that it chafes, it burns, and then he's not moaning any more, but screaming. And when I'm finally done I know he is too, because he doesn't move. He lies broken. He won't be moving again.

Covering him with a bath towel I go into the bedroom. The phone is ringing.

I pick it up. A woman breathes "Hello? Can you talk now?"

"Rob has left the building," I say.

She recovers herself with professional ease.

"Could you pass on a message from his secretary?" She says crisply. "He needs to reschedule this afternoon's meeting. Here is my direct number."

As she gives me a number that is already stored on Rob's phone I start to laugh.

After a long while I stop. "Are you still there?" I ask with genuine interest. When the shaken girl says she is I hang up and get dressed. These clothes have never looked so good on me. Not just Italian, but Renaissance. I could eat myself.

I wonder what I should do next. But I already know where I have to go and what I have to do, somewhere deep down.

On the way to the British Museum, I see a vendor hawking today's headlines.

"Latest, missus, latest!"

A few steps later I realise it is my sister that I have just seen on the front page. A photo of Miriam from many years back, wearing a tutu and grinning the gap-toothed smile of an impossibly happy child.

There's only one way you get on the front cover of a tabloid with an idealised picture like that.

I almost cry for the death of my sister. I want to discover how it happened. But then I see the reflection of my glorious face in a shop window, and stop to paint it once more. Then everything seems better, and I don't worry about Miriam anymore.

"Make a donation, love?"

A uniformed porter points me towards the donation box outside the marbled steps of the British Museum. My favourite haunt. The donation box contains several dollars and yen, a grubby penny and what looks like some madman's inept attempt at a home-made bomb.

He's a nice old porter. No harm to anyone. He blushes deep red when I wink at him. My power over men seems considerable today. I hope he doesn't have a heart problem. Unfortunately, as I pause briefly to monitor his heartbeat with extremely heightened senses and something approaching concern, I discover he does. Rob's mobile phone beeps in my pocket. I must have brought it with me. I switch it off, and drop it in the donation box.

The rooms in the British museum feel cool. They feel musty even though anything old in them is behind glass. I drape my hands over the few things that are permitted to be uncovered. I sense I'm not just browsing here, today.

I speed past the Egyptian and Sumerian exhibits. Such rubbish. I pause in the Roman room, swaying my head from side to side. I ignore the people that look at me oddly. If they had any sense, they'd ignore me.

The make-up feels like a smart second skin on my face now, like a guiding system. I think it knows which way to go. Miriam must have sensed it, when she was alive. But she controlled the make-up better than I did. I let the make-up control me.

I get to one of the rooms holding the sad remnants of ancient Greece and stop dead.

It's a sculpture of seedy Pan with his hooves and pipes but no, that's that's not right. What else is here? Zeus? More interesting. There's a nice picture of...

Europa. A human girl seduced by Zeus in his bull-form. It's not a good likeness but I've seen this girl before. There's another picture beside Europa's. Io. Another human conquest. One so lovely that, when Zeus seduced her, his wife raised such hell that he changed Io from a pretty maiden into a pretty heifer.

I'm seeing a pattern here. Cattle-obsessed Zeus aside, more than one. Because doesn't Io look familiar? And who was the third girl he went with? Semele? I don't need a picture of her to see I'm onto something. None of them began with 'H', but they were definitely the girls in that cold, dark place I imagined earlier today in the bathroom. I recall, suddenly, how Miriam said something about dreams, and girls being tortured by a queen in a terrible place. Poor Miriam.

I'm very close now. What did Zeus do with Io before he turned her into a cow?

I pause, recalling. To protect his wife Hera from detecting his infidelity he hid the world in a blanket of cloud.

Ah. The queen.

My painted face sniffs the air and drags me forward, and when I stop in front of her bust, I feel like I have come home.

She seems blank in cold stone. But my make-up knows what to do. I couldn't stop if I wanted to.
Ignoring the screams of those around me, I smash the glass and walk up to Hera's bust to drip a little of the blood from my cut wrist onto her marble curls.

There is a great crying and shuddering in the earth. Someone brave runs up to stop me doing any of this. I fling out an arm to protect myself, and they fly backwards and break against something. It feels like the old part of me is coming back, because I moan in fear. Tears form when I search for that poor person's heartbeat and realise it isn't there any more.

People flee the room, and I feel CCTV cameras whirr round to watch me. I wish I could flee too, but don't think I can.

Finishing what I started, I paint the statue's stone face with the contents of its owner's make-up box.

Like Miriam did with me, like I did with myself, I languidly, lovingly apply a base shadow of lead. Then eyeshadow. Then eyeliner. Then a fatty lipstick blush whose contents I finally believe to be more than just a fairytale told from one silly sister to another. Even though the mascara is just from Lancome, when I finally apply it a crack appears in the ground beneath my feet, and the stone head opens its mouth in a silent 'O' and comes to life.

Where there was a larger-than-life stone head, there is a larger-than-life stone woman. A good eight feet.

Where there was a stone woman, there is a live one. Not soft like us. Not coloured like us, or warm like us, or breathing in the way we do. Her skin is somewhere between putty and granite and pure diamond brilliance and fire. As strong and as impossible to grasp as a dream. In the flesh, this giantess is less filled-in and rounded than human beings are, with their infidelities and their fear and their shiny buttoned uniforms. Infinitely more powerful.

And I realise that Hera, goddess, queen, wife of Zeus, eternal, now walks the earth.

The first thing she does, this nearly-stone giantess, is beckon towards me.

I tuck the make-up box into my shoulder bag and walk forward.

She slams me in the stomach so hard I look down and to my surprise see half of myself spilling on the floor all bloody and fatty and red.

It doesn't hurt. I want to let go, curl up, die. But the painted queen in me doesn't.

I sink to the floor.

"Is it yours, then?" I ask.

Hera stares with great stern blank eyes that look not just at me, but through to the other side of the world.

"Yes," She says. "Give it to me before you die."

"Why?" I say. This riposte is one I would have thought brilliantly witty - for me - in those that long-ago age when I still had a glamorous sister. If half of me wasn't wet and pulp on the floor, I think I could have come up with something better, now.

"My handmaidens wear it," says Hera, though her lips don't move. "They die at my hand, then I paint them with my own colours. We are thus bonded for..."

She stops. Maybe goddesses don't have a word for eternity, although they probably wish they did for talking to stupid mortals like us about concepts we'll never get the grip of. Like the contents of my stomach, I think, scrabbling on the floor and trying to stuff it all back in.

"Together in joy." She gives up, and stops the sentence there.

I feel the giantess press a seamed not-quite-stone hand to my gut. I can read the future in my entrails. I get the feeling my entrails are quite a lot longer than my future is likely to be.

I sniff the air. There's something curious about it. Although every cell in my body screams with borrowed life, and I'm badly in the red, my senses are still fine and powerful enough to sense, oh, everything. And what I smell is blood. Museums should always smell of blood, I think. It suits them better than floor polish.

Hera speak again, her voice sounding strong and old. "You are my handmaiden now. Die by my hand. You will serve me for ever. This will be joy for you."

"Oh, piss off," I say. I think it's lucky that she's not been here awhile, and doesn't know what the word means. "It was you in Miriam's dreams, wasn't it?"

I feel myself increasingly slipping into my old Susanish personality in the presence of the real queen. And, actually, being a creepmouse isn't all bad. It's nice to be so vulnerable and petty and human. How great and strong the little things can be.

Her dark eyes bore into me. I realise that Homer was right. The poet of course, not the cartoon. Hera is indeed 'ox-eyed' - and I believe that, like oxen she does have a human soul.

"My handmaidens were queens in your world," She says. "Elizabeth, Boudicca, Cleopatra, Victoria. You may have this honour." She breathes cold air into my face, as cold as the unknowable space around constellations.

"Give it a rest," I gasp, trying to make my breath as short as possible - because it hurts. It hurts so much, now, whereas before I couldn't feel a thing. "Semele, Io, Europa. Zeus's victims. The ones you wrongly thought were his whores. They're your handmaidens, aren't they? Oh, I have it all figured out," I say. "You get jealous, you hate a woman, so you kill her. With this make-up, this paint. Then you torture her on Mount Olympus, doing whatever mean, bitter things it is you do. Well, you're not getting me!"

Let's hope it doesn't end badly - Greek punishments were always so eternal, I remember.

Hera bends her awful face closer to mine. I can't help but stare into that hewn geology, those eternally dark-marbled eyes. I see now that for all my madness (and I have broken my mind today as much as my body, I admit) I am still human. A human can only be insane. Divine madness, now - that's something else. Hera's mad in a way I'll never comprehend. She's had all eternity to practise.

In spite of my playground taunts she stays still. No matter. Nothing matters anymore. I've killed my husband and he really was an unpleasant piece of work, so I don't feel bad about that, and I've been mad and divine all in one day. It's probably time to go.

But a girl never leaves the house without her make-up intact, so with one free hand I delve into the make-up box still in my shoulder bag and painstakingly apply lead powder to my cheeks. They're smeared with my own ichor and I must look a sight - but still. Eyeshadow next, and the cobalt blues and iridian greens try valiantly to arrange themselves into a fitting death-mask for a queen, the powders and unguents moving like dying butterflies across my lids.

"Human girls are ugly," says Hera. "They always will be."

I realise she is almost a poster child for the feminist cause, because the poor girl with the philandering husband is clearly as mad as hats. She cocks her head like a bird, and I know she is going to do something ghastly soon. So, with my most likely final breath, I search for some last great wisdom, a gift of truth from a human to a god.

"Zeus hates your guts because you always were a bitch and you always were a bore -"

Pretty good last lines.

But they are my last lines, and that is indeed my final breath, because in one swift move Hera grips me by the larynx lifts her terrible arm high so that my head is slammed all over the ceiling, and most of it stays there when she throws my body to the floor in a crumpled crimson rosette.

And I wonder if I'm alive or not, and what I'm feeling, and if I am, then why, and then everything goes dark.

Then it goes light again. I can see again. I'm still here.

I have to admit, I'm puzzled.

I'm also somehow not here. Some of me, but not much, is somehow on the floor. Some of me looks out from where I remember my body having fallen. Some of me - I can't figure it out, at first - is looking out at the artefacts of ancient Greece, and I realise that it is as if I am looking at them from Hera's own eyes.

With something born less of logic and more of tragic intuition, I finally understand what I have, in dying by Hera's hand, become.

Hera applies more of me to her face, swooping down on the make-up box she has removed from my broken doll's frame with the grace of a victor. I know I shouldn't, but I can't help myself - I obediently start to contort, first as peacock blues, then as lead-whites, then finally as fine pitch-black lines, helping her to create the perfect face. No, damn it. I'm not just following orders. I actually want to assist her. I yearn for it.

Their presence is not strong at first, but I soon have the feeling that there are others here with me, too. Fallen women. Captives. One of them is my sister, I think. One of them is myself.

Eager to please, re-arrange ourselves on our queen's face as she examines our work in a mirror. We have to agree, we all look beautiful.

We turn, mere passengers as Hera turns towards a window in the old museum room. We can only look as she sees what lies beyond: street lights and a pretty English afternoon sky. We cannot hear this, but because I've lived in this time I imagine the sounds of strangers flirting in the lovely innocent London beyond, cars honking and foreign students laughing about whatever it as that foreign students delight in.

Oh god. It's all so fragile and beautiful.

We feel ourselves stretch as Hera smiles with lips that we know, proudly, are as red as a maiden's blush.

Hera's put her make-up on.

She's ready for a night on the town.

 

- Magda Knight specialises in stories that twist sideways from the everyday. Amongst other places, she has been published in 2000AD.

 

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