Raven Smith: The Boy with the Pearl Earring

The crater that was once my wardrobe is now deliciously cavernous. But lockdown has eased and I’m lacking in any clothes that don’t seem like reheated Christmas leftovers. They’re all nice sides, but don’t feel like a main course. We’re all of us tiptoeing back out, nosing our way into restaurants and bars. (Our noses are, of course, inherently ominous. Nostrils are spreaders of droplets that fly through the air with the lightness of ease, ready to settle on a QR code menu before infecting the next patron. And what of our nose rings? What’s the value of a septum piercing underneath an ER mask? Ditto your red lipstick or designer stubble.)

The smartest way through this season of emergence? To magpie. To spy a shiny piece and take it as your own. To beachcomb something iridescent when the Thames is low. To pirate treasure for your own ends. Of course you need something that works visually at a socially distanced two metres, like looking through binoculars at our Kes. That’s where a pearl comes in. You don’t need binoculars for a pearl earring. It’s dazzling in a knowing way. It sits in the space between vanilla and showstopper. Between landline and teleport. Between the Amish and showgirls.

Masks are a necessary evil, but when I’m back propping up the bar (or outside table), I don’t want to shrink like a sartorial violet. When I’m out I want to grab your attention nonchalantly, as if I’m the perfume of your first love, caught on the breeze and you’re instantly transported to the follies of youth. I want to be intriguing like a Polaroid that’s slowly appearing. Nobody actually wants Met Gala dresses outside of the Met Gala, do they? All those deliberately jarring colours, all those sequins and feathers. They irritate rather than inspire.

And so to the enduring lustre of a pearl earring. I cannot get enough of the stage-whispering drama of a real pearl. A miniature full moon that eclipses a reheated outfit and whispers of the fun yet to be had. A hard lump of condensed joy — like evaporated milk in a boarding school — that’s been brought in by the tide and up to your lobe. Into your ear it goes and the world gets brighter, your head inflated like a helium balloon.

At dinner, your pearl earring is a pendulum of intrigue hypnotising your company like Derren Brown between Russian roulettes. You nod, catch the light and your dinner date is mesmerised, desperate to whisk you away on the Orient Express through Alpine climes for bunkbed frotting. A pearl is always romantic, but not like a hammy Mills & Boon. A pearl is your ear on Berocca after a night of rampant love-making with someone two leagues above your own sex bracket. People arguably have affairs simply for the newness of the orifices, but a pearl earring is an affair to remember, the one that got away returning like a boomerang for a single night of unadulterated lust.

A pearl doesn’t change an outfit. It diverts attention. Nobody’s looking at your eye bags when you’re in a pearl earring. It’s a cure-all. Prison body yet to manifest? Get a pearl. Roots down to your knees? Get a pearl. Lost a tooth? Pearl. I wonder if I can get a shipment of them out to that orphanage? Scientists have yet to confirm pearlescent remedies in the fight against corona, but I have a good feeling in my waters.

A pearl earring felt unnecessarily extravagant during lockdown, banana-bread batter stalactiting from its orb as I baked in pyjamas. But now that we’re free it’s the perfect date for your face, dangling over your obligatory mask. The tequila in the sunrise. The slippery in the nipple. The second woo in woo-woo. I’m gagging to slip the sweet mental ring through my ear and paint the town red, the almost intravenous dazzle powering me through till dawn. It is said that diamonds are a girl’s best friend. But who needs friends in this economy?