Short story: The Boy Who Invented Lipstick By Karl Whitney - - - - In the morning you would find me asleep in bed. For me, the morning is the best time to sleep and dream. Physically I would be in a bed in a sleepy suburban housing estate, but really I would be somewhere else: in a dream world governed by rules not applicable in the outside world. I slept on, late, everyday. I was unemployed, and living in my parents’ house again after a spell in university and an unsuccessful cohabitation with a girlfriend who had recently left me. There’s something about being unemployed that sends you back to square one, that forces you to reconsider your life, review what you’ve done with it and try to discern where you’re going with it. Luckily, I had been able to avoid such self-analysis by spending all my time watching videos and listening to music. I was also reading. With so much time on my hands I was able to read whatever was lying around the house: books on history, biographies of rock stars, cheap novels you could read in a couple of hours. I was reading this one book about a guy who, when he was thirteen, invented lipstick. Okay, he didn’t invent lipstick, but he invented some special kind of lipstick that made him a lot of money. There were a lot of strange books in that house, books like that one. I was 23, and hadn’t invented anything. When I was five I tried to make a cannon out of a toilet roll tube and some caps from a toy gun. The plan was that the cannon would be able to shoot a potato or something out into our back garden. I made a fuse from twine, and tied it to the end of the tube. I stuffed the paper caps into one end of the tube (one of my friends told me they were made from gunpowder, and stuff like that made a big impression on you when you were five). I pushed in the potato, then lit the fuse. The fuse went out. I lit it again; it went out again. I kicked the cannon down the garden. A couple of days later I recovered the invention from under a rose bush and threw it on the fire. The caps were damp, and only some of them went off in the flames. I was pretty sure, at that point, that I was no inventor. In contrast, the kid in the biography was able to make lipstick with his chemistry set or whatever. That was impressive. That was an achievement. Maybe he had invented a cannon that worked when he was five, and that gave him the confidence to go on and do other things like invent lipstick. His mother tried out the lipstick one day, and found that it didn’t smudge, unlike the other stuff she wore. She knew someone who worked in a big cosmetics company in New York, and so, she was able to get an interview with the head of the company. It happened one cold winter morning, in a large wooden boardroom in a tall building in Manhattan. There was a long dark wooden table, and at one end sat the boy and his parents. At the other end the head of the company and his advisors were sitting and discussing what to do about the boy’s discovery. They agreed to pay the family millions and give them stock in the company as well. The parents were really happy; the boy didn’t even smile, just looked out of the big window with the cold rain running down it. I’ve always liked books about other people’s lives. Not just biography, but stories as well. They give you an idea how to live your own life, too. One day, when I was lying on the sofa reading the book about the boy who invented lipstick, there was a knock on the door. It was during the day, and I didn’t usually answer the door then, because it was usually someone trying to sell something. But I answered it anyway. It was a girl, and she was selling something. Cosmetics, she said, and smiled, but you’re probably not interested in this stuff, she said. I said it was funny that she was selling cosmetics. She asked why and I told her about the book I was reading. She had short dark shoulder length hair and wanted to become a doctor. She was about twenty, and had a shy look in her eye. But she talked all the same about all sorts of things. I suppose all that selling stuff door to door might make you kind of lonely, I said. “Sometimes, but no more than any other kind of job” “I mean, you must just get the door closed on you a lot,” I said. She told me that she did, but not as much as you’d expect. “I’ve had worse jobs, like when I worked in a restaurant. That was hell.” She had worked in a restaurant in town, just outside of the city centre. The place was dingy and didn’t do much business, even at breakfast and lunchtime. The owner was as sleazy as his restaurant, and made advances to her when business was quiet, which was most of the time. She put up with his harassment, but found another job quickly – the one she was doing now. She said she had to go, that she had another couple of estates to cover in the area today. I really liked her, so asked her for her phone number. She smiled, asked for a pen, and scribbled her number on the back of a receipt for groceries she had in the pocket of her coat. Then she was gone. I went back to the couch and picked up the book again. A couple of weeks went by, and when you’ve got nothing to do and all day to do it, time starts to work strangely. For example: the morning would seem to last a long time, then it would be evening and time would seem to speed up. In the evenings my family would be home, so I stayed in my room mostly, listening to music. But, because morning lasted so long, I started to sleep in later and later, thus cutting out the dead hours before midday. It also meant I stayed up later at night watching bad television until the early hours of morning. I decided to try and find a job, something that would distract me from the days of TV and books and weird time. To get a job, you need a CV: a piece of paper with what you’ve done with your life and where you’ve been. If you’re lucky, this piece of paper will sing of your achievements and the great things you’ve done with your career. If you’re unlucky, the whole thing just seems to laugh at you, mocking your failure to hold down even the most basic job. My CV was of the laughing, mocking kind. One day, I went to an employment agency to try and get a job. I had called them, and the woman on the other end of the phone had told me to come in and talk to them, to do some tests and see what I jobs was suitable for. The office of the employment agency was in the city, and had a blue plastic sign outside and bright lights inside. The people inside, sitting behind the fake wood desks, had taken on some of the characteristics of their workplace. They were bright and open, and all wore the same colours as the plastic sign outside. I gave my name, said I had an appointment, and was shown into a small cubicle where there was a computer and an office chair on wheels. I sat down in the chair, moving it around slightly with my feet. When the woman I was there to see walked into the room I stopped playing with my chair and tried to look serious and interested in finding work. She asked what kind of work I was interested in, and I said probably office work. She asked why and I told her because I had a degree in English literature and because of that it seemed suitable. She laughed, and I don’t know why. I had to do typing tests on the computer that was on the desk. The woman from the agency went out while I did these – probably to other people who were sitting in other cubicles exactly the same as mine, all waiting to do the same test and find the same job. When it was all over, I left the office and went walking around town. They said they’d get in touch with me when something came up, that it might be a couple of weeks before they could match my skills to a suitable job. They said something like this; the words they used could have been slightly different though. I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking, you see, about the girl I had met on my doorstep, and the job she had and the job she used to have, and the man who tried to molest her. He was married, I was sure, and lived somewhere not far from the café. He hardly ever went home, though, and when he did he barely spoke to his wife, just sat on the sofa watching TV. Every so often he put up a sign for a job in the window of his café and gave it to the first pretty, vulnerable girl who came in looking for a job. As I walked down the street near the university I stared at the people who passed by me. They were tall or short or fat or slim, and none of them noticed I was staring at them, and if they did notice, they didn’t show any sign they knew I was looking. You could always sense when someone was staring at you, at least that’s what I thought. But when you’re in the city every day, walking back from lunch to the job you don’t like, lots of people stare at you and lots of people don’t. I suppose you learn not to notice either way. It was on the bus home I met her again. This time she was going to an interview for another job. She said the one she had was finishing up, and she had to look out for other opportunities. I told her about my trip to the employment agency. She said I should register with other companies, that that’s the only way to get something good. Already I had had enough of these agencies with their vague promises and their plastic signs, but I didn’t tell her that. I just nodded. She got off the bus and went to her interview somewhere along the way, with redbrick buildings and a crossroads and bad traffic. She told me she had a day free tomorrow, and would call over to my house in the morning. That night I sat curled up downstairs watching a documentary about celebrities who had it all. It was a famous businessman from the 1930s who had lost all his money and had committed suicide. He was still very young when he died. They identified him from his fingerprints because the shotgun made such a mess of his face. A bell rang, edging itself into the dream I was having. A man was setting up a noose for another man who looked like an outlaw. I just stood there with a crowd of people who must have been standing in that desert town just to watch him swing. Then, the church bell started to ring, and everybody turned to find out what was going on. I woke slowly to hear the doorbell being pushed again. I stumbled downstairs. After we made love we lay together on the sofa, talking. She had gone to the interview and the interview had gone well, she said. I told her again about my employment agency, and how I get tired of looking for jobs I don’t really like. Around two o’clock her phone rang, and it was the people who had interviewed her yesterday; she had got the job. She smiled and thanked them, then hung up the phone and sat next to me, but more rigidly than she had been sitting earlier, and a couple of inches away from me too. She had got the job. “They want me to work for them, but in Cork” “Oh … that’s good, isn’t it?” “Yeah, well, I mean, my family are here in Dublin, but … it’s a good job, better than what I’ve been doing.” “That’s true”, I said, and stared off into the distance, out through the window to the trees behind the house. They barely stirred; there was no wind. She left the house not long after, saying she’d be busy over the next few days, but would ring me soon. I nodded, knowing. The door closed and I watched her walk down the street, disappearing behind the hedge a few houses away, out of sight. The boy who invented lipstick was found in his office aged thirty-three. The gun lay in front of his desk, having blasted itself free of his grasp when the shot was fired. A note was found on a shelf in the corner of the room, it read: ‘No more, no more, no more.’ Outside the rain had stopped, and the sun began to cut its way through the grey clouds of morning. -------- Stories | Home | About This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.