Countdown to Babyhood

Chloe was having the best birthday of her life and she owed it all to her boyfriend. Rob had made breakfast in bed - her favourite of blueberry pancakes with bacon and syrup - and then taken her blindfolded downstairs.

“Kinky,” she said, but there was a very wholesome reason for her temporary blindness.

Strewn from sofa to television stand were presents of varying sizes, wrapped up uniformly in hot pink wrapping paper. Like a child on Christmas morning, she leapt down to rip them all apart and see what was in inside. Makeup palettes, dresses, bags, shoes: it was an assortment of all her favourite things. Rob was such a thoughtful gift-giver, but that went hand-in-hand with being such an attentive listener. Indeed, Chloe thought Rob was a unique man in that respect: he took note of her feelings, made everything so special for her whenever he could, and he always supported her interests to the best of his abilities. She had never known him to be any different. If she felt it was within her power to do so, she would have labelled him the only truly feminist man she knew.

While she rushed upstairs with her new clothes to strut in front of their full-length mirror, Rob waited in the living room. In his hand was, metaphorically speaking, the biggest gift of all despite its rather diminutive size. When she finally came downstairs, she was greeted by her boyfriend holding a ticket to go and see the greatest popstar alive.

“OH MY GOD!” Chloe bounced around the living room with joyful abandon. She grasped the ticket tightly and pumped her fist in the air as if she’d won an Olympic medal, forcing Rob to stand well clear in case of a sharp hit to his body. Chloe could not believe she was finally getting to see her favourite artist of all time: Alexa Sweet. When she finally calmed herself, she flung her arms around him and pulled herself up on her tiptoes to kiss him firmly on the lips.

“Aren’t these insanely expensive?” she asked, to which he shrugged and gave a goofy smile.

Fortunately, Rob was by no means broke. Working at a private neuroscience centre might not have sounded like the most glamorous thing in the world and Chloe didn’t fully understand his job, but it had been his passion for years. She admired that about him, as he had that rare ability to pursue his dreams and not go bust doing it. She, meanwhile, had flitted from supermarket to call centre to reception desk ever since university without ever settling for more than a year or so. In the five years since graduation, her English Literature degree had come up just once when a particularly irate yet articulate customer at the call centre quoted King Lear at her. She didn’t feel much pressure to do much more than she was already doing, however, as Rob managed to take care of everything and never asked her to split bills or pay half of his mortgage. That was another arrow to his feminist bow, so to speak, though it helped that he was five years older and had never rented.

The late morning and early afternoon went by like a blur, with Chloe racing around the house to get ready for that night’s big show. Handily, Rob offered to go with her to the station and drop her off, whereupon she was going to meet her best friend, Natasha. She had kept the secret for a few days on Rob’s orders, which was absolutely torturous, but she knew she couldn’t do otherwise seeing as he had paid for her ticket as well. On the drive to the station, Rob ran through the plan with his girlfriend.

“I know you don’t get into London too often, so I’ve drawn up a map and sent it to you. But, just to be clear: basically, once you’re on the train to King’s Cross, you just need to follow the directions on there. Change at Stratford, take the Jubilee Line, go down to North Greenwich, and then you’re there…” Rob explained, though Chloe’s attention was trained on picking the right Alexa Sweet song to listen on the drive. Out of the corner of his eye, Rob spied her fiddling with her phone to find one and then decisively pressed on Sweet’s debut album. Sweetness was released in 2014 and took the charts by storm with its mix of countryfied pop-rock and synth music. On their first date, Chloe knew Rob was the one when he had confessed that he was a ‘Sweetie’ - the term for Alexa Sweet’s diehard fans - and that Sweetness was one of his favourite albums. All the other men she knew that commented on Sweet’s music were surely seething misogynists in her view. Those who criticised her music as “tastelessly infantile” or “mediocre late capitalist garbage” were merely idiotic men - she assumed they must be men - who had never felt joy. Rob was different from those incel weirdos.

The title track of the album played for the last few minutes of the drive. Chloe threw her hands in the air and shouted the lyrics out of the window, showing off to all the passers-by that she had tickets to the biggest gig of the year (and, perhaps, even the century). Once at their destination, Rob sent her off with a kiss. He held her chin in the palm of his hand and caressed her cheek, leaning in to kiss it and then darting to her lips. Chloe giggled through it. When he pulled away, she leant in and kissed him once more.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve you, baby. You’re literally the perfect man. Thank you so so so much!” Chloe squealed.

“Baby girl, you’re getting exactly what you deserve.” He winked at her and she blew him a kiss as she closed the passenger door. As he pulled away, Chloe went to grab her ticket and find Natasha. In the queue for the same ticket machine, she saw her best friend. Chloe called her name and she turned on the heels of her cowboy boots.

“Girrrrrrlllllll, look at your outfit!” Natasha exclaimed in excitement. Chloe’s outfit was a sequin-covered dress in pink, a bedazzled denim jacket, and a pair of white cowboy boots. Natasha had her own pair of lavender cowboy boots on, matched with denim booty shorts, a lavender t-shirt, and a tanned suede jacket with a sort of cowboy fringe along the arms. Lavender was Alexa Sweet’s second album, released in 2016, and the colour became something of a motif for Sweeties. She had since moved through a few other colours - the white phase of 2019’s Stargazer and the striking pink of 2022’s Girlhood - but the lavender trend still held with those who got into her music in the mid-2010s.

Once the pair had ceased chatting about their respective ensembles, they rejoined the queue and got their tickets. Once on the train, it was time to take selfies and post them to make all their friends, acquaintances, and even strangers jealous. Chloe and Natasha were not old friends but had become fast friends since they met at a Christmas party for Rob’s workplace three years prior. Unsurprisingly, very few of the neuroscientists had girlfriends to bring along and so Chloe and Natasha were hardly spoilt for choice when it came to female company. It just so happened, though, that they were both huge fans of Alexa Sweet, cute dog memes, and reading. The pair hit it off and, soon thereafter, Rob and Natasha’s partner Christian grew friendlier too. The foursome went on double dates, went over to each other’s houses, and were even planning a couples’ holiday to Greece for the following summer. Chloe counted her lucky stars that she had made such a good friend since moving out of London and into Rob’s house. Natasha was kind and excitable and funny, just as Chloe saw herself, and there was a real carefree spirit to her that was almost infectious. While close in character, they were very different in appearance: where Chloe was slender and blonde, with fair skin and green eyes, Natasha was a tall and full-figured woman with olive skin and jet black hair. Her height did make Natasha a great friend for gigs as Chloe could climb atop her friend’s shoulders and survey the stage and the crowd with ease.

Following Rob’s careful instructions, Chloe and Natasha weaved their way through the crowded tunnels at Stratford and managed to find their way onto the Jubilee Line to North Greenwich. Through a mass of fellow Sweeties - almost all of them twenty-somethings in sparkly outfits or pink and lavender hues - and stadium security, the pair found a spot to take more pictures and freak out about what they were about to see. They bought overpriced bubblegum pink cocktails and posted pictures of those online, cheered halfheartedly through the support acts that they had never heard of, and all the time awaited the arrival of their idol.

Finally, the lights all went out and the sky came over dark, the stage filled with smoke, and then the music began to play. All the lights flashed and suddenly the stadium was bathed in blazing gold as Alexa Sweet rose from beneath the stage. Dressed in an aquamarine cross between a sundress and a bathing suit, Alexa strutted her stuff across the stage as she belted out ‘Long Live Summer’ and ‘Loverboy’. Chloe and Natasha knew every word and tried to match the superstar in volume, though they were drowned out by the throngs of fellow Sweeties adding to the cacophony.

Sweet went through the rest of the Sweetness album, the summery vibe of the music making the whole stadium feel as though it were bouncing. She left for a moment only to return in a lavender pinafore dress and cream turtleneck to do an acoustic rendition of her Lavender album, which was an overall slower and more countryfied medley of songs. After a fifteen minute interval, she arrived on stage via Santa’s sleigh dressed in a reveal in white velvet dress and matching hat with fur trim. The songs picked up in tempo and tone once more, which led nicely into the Girlhood phase. This was the latest album, the one that put Alexa Sweet on the map and saw her clean up at award show after award show. This was the sound of the post-pandemic generation, of the search for youth and freedom and girl power in a world that felt so oppressive and dull. Sweet had toured before in zany outfits, but this one - the one that kicked off her Girlhood part of the show - was something else.

Alexa Sweet rode onto the stage on an oversized tricycle, painted pink with white flames on the side. Her blonde hair was in two buns atop her head and her makeup had shifted from the classy to the garish, with heavy pink and blue eyeshadow on each eye and her lips a hot pink. Her outfit was a short-sleeved and legless pink romper, a hood at the back and a white frilly trim at its edges. She looked like an overgrown baby, as if a 29 year old toddler had wandered onstage. And yet, as the Sweeties swayed to the music in unison, there was no look of disgust or confusion. They cheered and whooped for her, endorsing this image of infantile femininity as a glorious act of resistance to patriarchal norms.

“Omg, how fucking cute is that?!” Natasha squealed. Chloe readily agreed and jumped up and down while waving her hands in the air. After stumbling through ‘Hold My Own Hand’ and ‘Eternal Girlhood’, Alexa shuffled onto her knees and went up to the edge of the stage with her microphone in hand.

“Hey evewyone!” she giggled as she waved. All her fans waved back in unison and screamed “hey” back. Alexa Sweet giggled again and bounced on her knees. “I gotta get you Sweeties to help me, okay? We all gotta count down frommmmmmmm… ten!”

Alexa showed four fingers - one digit on the right hand and three on the left - and everybody laughed. Chloe laughed too, though she was a bit nervous. What was going on? Why was the music gone all of a sudden? In its place, the backing track to ‘Princess’ had been swapped for a quiet yet melodious… nursery rhyme. ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ was playing and the biggest popstar in the world was dressed and speaking like a toddler. This was weird and Chloe wanted out. She shook Natasha but Natasha didn’t respond: the countdown had started.

“Ten.”

“Nine.”

“Eight.”

Chloe didn’t know where to look, so she looked for security, but they were all gone.

“Seven.”

“Six.”

She tried to turn around and leave but the huddled mass of Sweeties blocked her path, their jaws slack and eyes glassy. They all spoke as one.

“Five.”

“Four.”

“Three.”

Chloe span around to face the stage and saw that Alexa’s grip on the microphone was loosening, just as drinks and phones were plummeting to the floor of the stadium. Everybody was going limp from the arms down.

“Two.”

Natasha smiled. Chloe grimaced. Then, the lights all went out.

“One.”