Eat My Heart Out (8 page)

‘London sometimes feels like a desert where the best thing to do is just stay put,' said my mother. ‘And send up a flare rather than risk walking when one never does know when one's supply of food and water will run out!'

Empty wine bottles covered the oak table so I couldn't see it. A Clarice Cliff serving platter bore the remains of smoked salmon blinis. An earthenware bowl of crème fraîche had exploded over the oak, seeping into its sagacious cracks like Polyfilla.

‘Everything in the world is ruined!' I screamed.

‘Watch your mouth,' said my mother.

‘I didn't swear.' I sank into a chair.

My mother assembled a tower of salmon; I ate it. She passed me a bowl of feta-stuffed cherry tomatoes and I ate those too. I picked up a wine bottle and shook it into my mouth but there was nothing.

‘You look ill,' she said.

‘I'm a rapist,' I told her.

A man wearing a brown suit wandered into the kitchen. Hair grew out of his ears.

Mother stared at me. ‘I'm very concerned about you,' she said. ‘I read the Wikipedia page on Nietzsche. I'm concerned that you've become a Nazi. We've always had a lot of Jewish friends.' She crossed her arms.

‘I'm Jewish,' said the man.

‘Nietzsche was not a fucking Nazi!' I screamed. ‘That is a total travesty! It was Lisbeth his sister who gave his sodding walking stick to Hitler! Nietzsche never would have given him that walking stick! He
hated
nationalism.'

‘But what about fascism?' said the man. ‘It's not a laughing matter.' He turned to my mother. ‘Some commentators think that the Western world has entered a neo-fascist phase.'

My mother blushed. ‘Gosh, if only Phillip were here.'

‘Who's Phillip when he's at home?' I shouted. I swept about four or five bottles off the table in one gesture and lay my head on the oak. Olive oil had spilled; it covered my forehead.

‘I think everyone's had a bit too much to drink,' said the man, rocking back on his heels and staggering into the door.

People were crouching on the floor in Sebastian's room, smoking weed and listening to Café del Mar chill-out music. I could see their younger faces trapped like ghosts in their older faces. I could see the younger ones straining to get out.

‘That's the thing,' a woman with straight grey hair wearing a tribal neck brace was saying. ‘She just woke up one morning after fourteen years and said:
I've had enough
. She packed her bags and left. You can't blame him for being angry.'

‘Yes, but to drive her car into a wall?' said a man. ‘That car meant a lot to her. It was her father's car.'

‘There are too many cars in this city anyway,' said the woman.

They all laughed.

‘There are too many people,' said the man. ‘I heard he bought a house in Tuscany.'

‘Yes,' said the woman. ‘And Diane decided she'd made a horrible mistake and bought a house on the other side of the mountain and begged him to take her back but he'd already got shacked up with a local woman! A potter! A local ex-pat Swedish woman who makes pottery in her own kiln!'

‘Excuse me,' I said. ‘This is my room. Would you mind if I have just a few moments in here by myself?'

The man pointed to the licence plate stuck to the door, which said:
SEBASTIAN
, and beneath:
STATE OF ARIZONA
.

‘Oh yeah,' I said, exhausted. ‘Olive bought him that when she first eloped. That was a long time ago.'

They didn't move.

I climbed over them and lay on the bed. I got under the duvet. It was the same duvet that Sebastian and I had slept under for years. It smelt of him.

There was a lull in conversation.

‘I think I need a refill,' said the woman. ‘Shall we?'

They left.

I burrowed all the way down until the world was black and safe. Then I got up and locked the door. I had a look through Sebastian's wardrobe: his collection of old rags. He'd always despised fashion. I found his old bobbly grey school trousers in a drawer and put them on. Then I found an old school shirt and black school jumper and put those on too. There was nothing on the walls except a framed black and white photograph of Jorge Luis Borges looking boss-eyed. Sebastian lived in a flat with Allegra now.

The wait for the toilet downstairs was unbearable.

I banged on the door.

Sebastian's older sister Olive opened it a crack. ‘Oh, honey!' She pulled me inside.

Her husband Hal was sitting on the floor by the bath smoking a tube of tinfoil.

‘Is that heroin?' I said.

‘No.' She sat on the edge of the bath. ‘Don't mind us.'

Hal sat back, dead-eyed. He wore no shirt.

‘What is it then?' I said. ‘Crack?'

‘It's just weed,' said Olive. She stared at me intently while I pissed. ‘Are you all right?'

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘I'm fine.'

‘Is that my brother's school uniform?'

There was banging on the door.

‘Come in!' murmured Hal, his head against the white tiles. He was American.

‘No, baby,' said Olive. Like Stephanie, Olive had acquired an American twang. They had been living in Santa Fe for eight years.

She had blonde hair like Sebastian, but hers was shaved off. She was as good-looking as him. She held my hands between both of hers. ‘You know the awesome thing about mourning is, you know what the lost object is. You can feel, taste it,
wear
it.' She nodded to my uniform. ‘The real bastard is melancholia because you don't know what that object is.'

‘That's what I've got,' murmured Hal.

‘Honey, you are supremely talented,' she said. ‘Democracy of Sand are gonna get a second shot.'

‘You should come to one of our gigs,' said Hal.

‘I'd love to.' I got off the toilet.

‘Wait,' said Olive. ‘I haven't seen your delicious face for ever such a long time.' She pulled me down onto the bathroom floor. She stroked my forearms. ‘It was because, like, Seb had this Oedipal gig going on with Dad,' she told Hal.

‘That's rough,' he mumbled.

‘Rough, yeah,' she went on.

More banging on the door.

‘Hold up!' she hollered. ‘Because first of all Seb wanted to copy Dad to like please him but then the more he copied him, the more he realised that he was in danger of surpassing him.'

‘When did Sebastian try to copy his Dad?' I said. ‘He hates economists.'

‘Oh, I mean only in the abstract,' said Olive. ‘Like, to be the big boss guy. Seb was never allowed to win at
anything
.' She spread her hands. ‘For fear of being cast out. Right.'

Hal opened his eyes. ‘You know, I've got big love for your mom for giving you guys the verbal skills to articulate your shit. I still can't figure out why me and my bro Paul got so much beef after all these years.'

‘The psychoanalytic lexicon must be handled with care,' said Olive. ‘It should come with a warning.'

There was silence.

Hal dragged himself into a standing position, and stuck his head under the shower. He shook his long brown hair.

‘Honey,' said Olive.

‘Sorry.' He produced a spoon full of black fudge and lit it.

I covered my mouth and nose with Sebastian's jumper. ‘That's one thing I said I'd never do. Smack.'

‘That's not smack,' said Olive. ‘It's just weed.' She stroked my hair. ‘And Allegra looks like Mom, right? With that long, luscious black hair. Like a black-haired Barbie doll or something. Mom always said to me:
Remember that when men tell you you're beautiful, they're just talkin' to your wrapper. It's the shiny packaging that conceals the real product
.'

‘Why do you use metaphors of the marketplace to like criticise the fucking marketplace all the time?' Hal was drooling.

‘Oh, honey. You're so smart.' Olive crawled over to Hal and kissed him.

Before I left, she said: ‘Remember that you're welcome in this family.'

The woman with the parrot earrings was getting into a cab when I finally staggered into the sunshine. She was telling the driver to go to Balham. I asked her if she could drop me off. Those parrots continued to laugh all the way back to South London.

‘Thanks,' I told her, getting out.

‘It's just such a shame that you missed everything,' she said.

‘What do you mean?'

‘You only got there just at the very end, when everything was nearly over.'

Seven

Dear Vic,

Thank you for this morning. I really do appreciate your athleticism and best efforts to make me come, though I'm sure you know as well as I that the female orgasm is more akin to a wave machine than a pistol firing once followed by resounding silence.

When I looked at you lying face down on the hallway carpet, the light created a kind of halo around your head and made me think that you were given to me by God. I don't believe in Him any more, since I read Nietzsche. The death of God happened apparently in the nineteenth century or possibly earlier, but He only really died because we all stopped believing in Him. I don't think I ever believed in Him. My mother brought me up an atheist.

But I always believed in love. How does one live without love, Vic?

Luckily you and I don't have to worry about that any more.

Ann-Marie X

P.S. It's funny that you called me a bunny-boiler. You know me so well, even though you don't know me at all. You were almost right. But I boiled a hamster, not a bunny.

It happened the night after the crème de menthe – about two years ago. We'd been playing truth or dare at Hammerton Hall, Freddie's father's country estate. I dared Jasper to fuck Allegra with a bottle of crème de menthe. Allegra wasn't keen, but she went along with it. Sebastian was furious – he thought we'd degraded her.

The next morning, we all got in Jasper's Alfa Romeo and drove to Allegra's parents' house in Buckinghamshire. Her parents were in the Maldives.

It was three in the morning and Sebastian and Jasper got in a fight in her parents' kitchen. They got in a fight because they were both in love with Allegra. Even though Sebastian was still going out with me.

Jasper said to me: ‘If I were you, I'd be really humiliated that my boyfriend is prepared to fight a duel for another girl.' And I said: ‘Fuck you all.'

Allegra was just loving it, crying on the stairs. Freddie was off somewhere with Allegra's younger brother Samuel, who was only about fifteen then. That must have been the first time they met.

I tried to get up the stairs, but Allegra grabbed me by the ankle and said: ‘Why did you suggest that with the crème de menthe, what the fuck is wrong with you, blah, blah?' And then she said: ‘I never would have gone out with Jasper in the first place if you hadn't marched me down to Ann Summers on the high street and made me buy that stupid frilly French maid uniform, and then marched me over to Emmanuel College bar, and found Jasper, and handed me over.'

‘Allegra,' I said. ‘What are you talking about? You're mental.'

She accused me of orchestrating her whole relationship with Jasper, just to get her away from Sebastian, and I said: ‘No, Allegra. This might be beyond your understanding but I orchestrated your whole relationship with Jasper
to make Sebastian want you more
.'

‘Why?' she said. Her face was stunned and waxy like a teen horror heroine – straight to DVD.

‘Because,' I said. ‘Because.'

Then I went upstairs and lay down on Allegra's bed, which was covered with all her cuddly toys. The walls were covered with her certificates and the mantelpiece was groaning under the weight of all those trophies. She'd been head girl and hockey captain and Desdemona, Cordelia, Juliet in all her school plays. There was a poster of Molly Ringwald above her dressing table. Her pet hamster Vera was scampering inside its cage, spinning inside its fluffy wheel. It was driving me nuts. Vera just did whatever the hell she felt like regardless of the people she hurt.

I fell asleep.

When I woke up, it was about four in the morning. The house was silent. It was a terrible house, like anyone who attempted to live there would immediately die, but Allegra always got so touchy when Jasper said anything bad about it. He likes to think of himself as a cruel libertine. His father owns every car in the world, or something like that. He's very rich. That's what he and Freddie have in common.

I went into Allegra's parents' bedroom. She and Sebastian were lying on the bed on top of the covers. They weren't touching, they were fully clothed, but they were next to each other, and I could tell that he had been looking at her before she fell asleep because he was facing her. She was on her back. I wanted to kill myself, and then I wanted to kill him, and then I wanted to kill her, and then I decided to kill that hamster, Vera.

I got it out of the cage and went downstairs to the ranchstyle kitchen, which was wrecked. I waited for the water in the pan to reach a rolling boil, then I dropped Vera in, just as though I were making pasta and pesto.

A sonic violation of Ariel the Little Mermaid was taking place in the living room. Samuel had installed his turntables, and now he was attempting to amalgamate ‘Part of Your World' with a hellish industrial clanking noise. The dumb purity of Ariel's voice became hysterical and hacked to pieces:
I want to be, be, be where the people are, are, are
.

I closed my laptop, ran down to the living room, and shouted: ‘Get out. Out.'

Samuel turned the music off. Then he sat down and started to cry.

‘That is so manipulative,' I told him.

He cried more.

Freddie came into the room and kicked over the Victoriana triptych dressing screen in the corner. It was adorned with the face of a little blonde girl wearing a white nightdress, surrounded by cherubs carrying white handkerchiefs.

‘Bloody squat-dwelling Samuel,' Freddie said to me. ‘You'll never guess what happened this morning.'

‘What about the restaurant bill?' I said. ‘That's £790.'

‘Relax. Jasp paid it. Over the phone. Or he got someone else to pay it. Over the phone. He said it's a gift for you.'

‘For me?! It was you and him eating the bloody pig's head. Remember that I'm the only one here with an actual profession.'

‘Ha!' said Freddie. ‘Call that a profession?
Serving?
No one I know would serve.' He rooted around in his satchel and pulled out the weekend papers. He found his tobacco. ‘Samuel and I were walking in Hyde Park this morning and who should we see but my bastard uncle and aunt.' He gestured to the malformed bust of Professor Frank. ‘Yeah, and Samuel was wearing that stupid babygro.'

‘Onesie,' said Samuel.

‘And holding a transparent bronze parasol, for crying out loud.'

‘From Japan,' said Samuel.

‘We were holding hands. My uncle's eyes nearly popped out of his head. He is such a fucking homophobe.' Freddie hauled Samuel upwards by his onesie, resurrected the dressing screen, and shoved him behind it. ‘I don't want to look at your face, you fucking faggot!' Freddie screamed. ‘You have ruined my opportunity to lead an ordinary life with a woman. With her.' He looked at me.

I sat on the chaise longue and flicked through a lifestyle supplement. ‘Freddie, we don't have a life. We're not actually together.'

There was a double-page spread of Stephanie Haight standing in a spacious kitchen. She looked radiant in a tan suede jacket and dungarees. There were overtones of cowgirl. Cowhide was draped over an armchair.
I got this in Seattle in '92. Grunge had just dropped. Some said that Generation X was shocked and numb. They were shocked by their own numbness. In that case, Generation Y and Generation Z are just numb without the shock. They are used to it
. There was a poster:
I'll Be A Post-Feminist In A Post-Patriarchy!
There was a mannequin lying on her back with her legs stretched horizontally over her head, so that she was folded in two and flat. She was wearing thigh-high latex boots and a pair of tiny knickers. A black leather cushion was strapped to her backside to make a coffee table. She wore blue eye shadow and a short blonde wig.
This is a rip-off of the classic Pop Art piece by Allen Jones. I bought it in 1988. I don't know if he was being ironic or just straightforwardly offensive but it gets some laughs. I like watching people's faces as they laugh to see if they secretly approve of it in some dark corner of who they are. That's false consciousness – a retro term these days. There are scant terms now for the forces that make women blind to their own condition, but I'm still fighting.

Freddie turned to me. ‘I tried to tell them that Samuel was my intern for
Making A Racquet
. That's the group show I'm curating. It all centres around an emerging bee-artist who has some issues about bees. He's going to hit them with a racquet – plus they make a noise. They buzz. You're invited to the opening. It's Saturday.'

‘Great.'

Freddie seized me. ‘If they find out I'm a queer, they'll take the flat away and we'll be homeless.' He disappeared behind the screen.

I turned back to the magazine. Stephanie lived in Camden Square. The view from her kitchen showed a tree with torn bits of paper stuck to its trunk. There was a picture of Winehouse next to the tree, looking confrontational in yellow.
I wanted to buy a property as close to Amy as possible. Next door was the closest I could get. I saw it all: the hounding, and then, the final slaying. I saw the preamble and the epilogue of the slaying. I'm not voyeuristic. I just felt so terribly sorry for her. I wanted to protect her. She is an icon of our times. Her pathos and rage exist in the tradition of Billie Holiday. Her aura of tragedy is that of all women who feel more
.

Samuel was gushing something about his mermaid DJ set that evening at a disused peanut factory in Hackney Wick. He begged me to write and perform a spoken word poem about a mermaid.

‘No,' I said. ‘I don't want to do that.'

Freddie was smiling at his own reflection in the mirror; Samuel was looking with lovesick eyes at Freddie. I had to get away from these idiots.

I located Stephanie's house on the map and got on the tube to Camden.

An hour later, I was standing outside Stephanie's house in Camden Square, reading the torn tributes to Amy stuck on that tree. Someone had left a can of Stella at the base, along with a candle. A polka-dot ribbon had snagged in the branches of a nearby bush.

Nothing was growing.

An Anglo-American voice said behind me: ‘It's so nice of you to leave those. Most people have stopped.'

I was holding a bunch of pink carnations.

Stephanie stood before me.

She had a dog on a lead. She nodded at the flowers. ‘We welcome mourners.'

‘Oh,' I said. I was nervous. ‘No. These are for you.'

We were sitting at Stephanie's big wooden kitchen table. It was mahogany, she told me. I was dazzled.

There was another mannequin, which had been moved out of the lifestyle photographer's shot. ‘I wanted to keep her all to myself,' Stephanie was saying, sipping her Java Deluxe. The mannequin was bent down on all fours. A leather cushion was strapped to her back. ‘I wanted to keep her private, safe. It's silly, really.' She scrunched up her nose and shook her head.

I heard myself saying: ‘No. It's not silly at all. I know exactly what you mean.'

‘You do?'

The house was cavernous and comfortable. The central heating was turned up high. There was a feeling of calm.

‘Well,' I said. ‘Only in my small way. My flatmate Freddie and I made a series of films in the summer – of different women writers, committing suicide.'

Her eyes widened. ‘How fascinating. Why?'

‘It was Freddie's idea. I think he admires tragic women. He likes to watch women die.'

‘Is he a queen?'

‘Yeah – if that's an empowered word.'

‘Queens can be just as oppressive as normal men.'

I laughed, nervously. ‘Surely there's no such thing as normal?'

‘Oh, but there is.' She blew on her coffee. ‘Go on.'

‘I guess he got the idea from me because I was always going on about how there are no strong women role models, you know? No one who we want to aspire to.' I reddened. ‘Apart from you, of course.'

Now we were wandering around the edge of her swimming pool, downstairs in the basement. Stephanie had commissioned an architect from LA to design the house. Faint pink light fell over the water from an obscure source. The ladder sparkled in the light. The drains sparkled. The walls were painted chlorine-blue to match the water.