The joy of talcum powder and not giving a shit

Or how I grew into the woman I met in a gym in West London twenty years ago

A long time ago I was a member of a well known chain of gyms. I lived in Ladbroke Grove in a crummy flat, and worked long hours doing focus groups all over the place, and yet still managed to haul myself out of bed 2-3 times a week and workout. I marvel at it now (though would also argue that I didn’t have children and would often spend Sundays lying in bed eating pastries I’d bought from Sainsbury’s up the road).

Growing old was not something on my radar. I was instead preoccupied with colleagues that got on my nerves (lots of material), my boyfriend and his desire to never settle down, and the fact that my downstairs neighbour played drum and bass music so loud at night I couldn’t sleep. I also had an underlying belief that I would be Kate Moss’s best friend. Most of my socialising decisions were based on this belief (i.e. trying to hang out in spaces that she was known to frequent).

In the changing rooms at this gym, I’d see a woman, an older woman. I’d hazard a guess she was in her seventies. She had an old-school, Golden Girls style bouffant of permed grey hair and hadn’t had any work done to her face (this wasn’t unusual -it was only really American celebrities who were trying that shit out).

This woman would stand naked, standing on a towel, rummage in her bag a moment, and produce a giant, pot of talcum powder. She would distribute this talc all over her body. By the time she’d finished she’d be entirely white, and she’d then pad over to the hairdryers, leaving white foot prints all over the floor, and calmly blow dry her hair, staring dead straight at her reflection. Still naked.

A talcum-powdered Wonder Woman.

I took a friend with me one morning, and we were getting changed and this woman showed up. There was a certain etiquette back then (I haven’t frequented a gym for a long time so don’t know if this has changed), but you basically got changed under your towel, or sat on the bench and tried to wriggle into your clothes. You did not show your body. If you were in the shower then you jumped out, and quickly wrapped your towel around.

This woman, this older woman had chutzpah.

‘Look it’s that white talcum powder lady,’ my friend said, nudging me in the side.

I was trying to get my leg into my knickers but had them the wrong way round, my one leg still damp from the shower so the pants had rolled into an annoying belt fixed to my knee. I was feeling hungry, stressed and had an intense day at work lined up.

‘She isn’t embarrassed,’ I said, ‘It’s as if she wants us to see everything.’

‘Her pubes are totally white,’ my friend said (to be fair it was hard to tell if she had white pubes or whether it was the talc) ‘She doesn’t care. It’s enviable really.’

Later we bought ourselves an overpriced smoothie in the cafe downstairs, and jumped on the tube. We talked about Kate Moss and how she was perhaps not in love with Pete Doherty, how he was possibly a bit smelly because he looked that way, then we tried to better understand why she had stopped going out with Johnny Depp. (who back then was seen as a regular hunk with no evidence to suggest otherwise). Then onto work where it was more focus groups, more work, more gym, more covering up, more not being able to even see that there was any correlation between the beauty ideal we were being sold i.e. Kate Moss, and how this meant we had to cover our bodies up in the gym in the first place.

Eventually I stopped going to gym. I started frequenting a fertility clinic and all my budget went into that instead. So much budget. I stopped even being interested in Kate Moss and I crouched in busy toilets in Marylebone, and injected hormones into my tummy. I counted days till egg collection day, then awaited to hear news on fertilisation and then on developing embryos. I bought an enormous book that had hundreds of graphs in it to help me track my fertility (not realising I was long, long past this point now). I lay on my back whilst I was scanned by a man with a giant, slithery device that he covered with a condom (the least erotic setting for a condom ever). Eventually after suffering three miscarriages, I was fortunate enough to have babies. I know I was fortunate because many of my peer group in the IVF clinic did not get that far. The children eventually grew up a bit. I left my job. I started writing. I got another job and then became perimenopausal. I started to feel rage at everything. Even Kate Moss made me rage.

My body changed.

One morning I was in the supermarket and spotted talcum powder on the shelf. I picked it up. It was of course ‘safe talcum powder’ as the real stuff had been banned (due to it being damaging for your health apparently). I bought some. I started using it when I got out the bath. I liked the smell of it. The way it stopped my thighs from chaffing together when I walked. I liked the ritual of sprinkling it over myself and seeing my skin turn chalky. I found it comforting. I knew it wasn’t sexy. It was possibly not something Kate Moss would do but I did it nonetheless.

One day I stood appraising myself in the bathroom mirror. My nipples pointing towards the floor. The flesh on my arms hanging down like the wings of a bat. I was dusted like an iced bun in talcum powder. I felt clean and safe and holy.

YOU ARE A WISE GROWN UP WOMAN NOW AND YOU CAN COVER YOURSELF IN TALC IF YOU WANT TO.

I thought about the talcum powder Wonder Woman. I wondered if she was still walking this Earth. I pictured her floury footsteps on the gym floor. I thought about how she refused to hide away. How she refused to struggle under the towel with her knickers caught on her damp knees.

‘I wish you well,’ I said under my breath.

The glimmer in her eye. That was it. She no longer gave a shit.