Eat My Heart Out (16 page)

I found Madeline the head waitress in the cloakroom and she accused me of stealing the lost property box. She told me to pay for it. I said I didn't have any money and besides you couldn't put a price on things that were lost, could you? Surely that was the beauty of lost things?

She threw me out.

I wandered around the block.

I returned to William's and persuaded the new door bitch, who was called Bethany, to let me print out my CV. She told me that she was working on a project about the aesthetics of Americana as part of her Fine Art BA at Saint Martins. She had spent the previous afternoon taking pictures of different branches of Ed's Diner.

I went into every restaurant, bar, and pub in Soho, giving out my CV. They all told me that there was nothing. I went into Ed's Diner and told them that my friend was a famous artist who had just taken pictures of the place for a big exhibition on the aesthetics of Americana at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, but they said they'd never heard of Gagosian.

‘But you've heard of Beverly Hills, right?'

‘What's that got to do with us.'

I tried every retail outlet in Covent Garden. My vision got hot and demented at the sight of all those clinking gold and silver charms in Accessorize, hanging on their racks. The music jangled, the lyrics self-obsessed and love-struck. Everyone said no. I went down a narrow street off the piazza. A back door was open. I went downstairs. Now I was in another American diner, decorated with neon tubes like the Naumans hanging on Freddie's father's panelled walls. But these neons were advertising Coca-Cola and peach melba. ‘Hit the Road Jack' was playing. It was empty.

I went back upstairs.

There was a woman smoking by the back door. She was wearing a T-shirt that said
Give It Wings
over a picture of a flying, smiling hamburger. I asked her if there were any jobs. She said one of their promo girls had just walked out. She took my CV.

I pointed to her T-shirt and asked what it meant.

‘Hurry the fuck up,' she said.

Hi Olive!

Hope you're well!

Was wondering if I could stay in Sebastian's bed for a while?

I've just run away from this cult.

Thanks so much.

Ann-Marie X

Three hours later, I was sitting up in Sebastian's bed, wearing Sebastian's childhood pyjamas and navy-blue dressing gown, nestled under Sebastian's familiar old duvet. Olive was sitting on the bed, her back against the wall. Her legs lay over mine. Her husband Hal was serenading us both with a song that he was currently working on. His face screwed up with anguish as he strummed the guitar. ‘
You promised
,' he sang. His voice sounded a bit like Bruce Springsteen. Hal was from Jersey just like Bruce, said Olive.

‘
You promised you'd be different this time, that you weren't like all the other guys, but you weren't different, you let me down and blew my mind, just like they did
.'

‘Is he talking about a former … boyfriend?' I whispered to Olive.

‘No,' she said, solemnly. ‘He's talking about Obama.'

‘
I trusted you, you mother-fucking asshole
,' Hal went on. The song caved into Martha Wainwright's ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole', which was about her absent father.

‘I mean,' said Olive. ‘I had my doubts but you know we all hoped he wouldn't screw us in the ass like the last guy.'

Hal stopped, finally.

Olive and I applauded.

Sebastian's parents were at work. Most of the intersex siblings were at their independent day school, except for one, who was pretending to be ill. He/she was scraping the bow back and forth over his/her cello in the next room.

‘You know you can stay here as long as you want,' Olive was saying to me. She had lent me £500 and her old laptop. ‘Mom and Dad are going to be psyched.'

They went for a walk in the park.

I checked my email.

Ann-Marie,

I pushed you too fast, and for that I'm sorry. Let me try to explain.

I've been propelled towards excess in my actions by a sense of the overwhelming tragedy that has befallen the good name of feminism. Now feminism is a dirty word, a synonym for hairy lesbian. All my life, I've wanted to prove the detractors wrong. I've wanted to maintain myself as an example of otherness, of what the other
can be
. I've hoped to inspire, but I can see that with you, I've gone too far.

When I was browsing through my teenage notebooks a few years ago, I came across a charming picture of Zelda Fitzgerald that I had taped in alongside a quote: ‘Hysterically, she began to run.' It was taken from Zelda's novel,
Save Me the Waltz
. At that age, I fetishised madness to the extent of daydreaming constantly about being locked up in a mental asylum, about watching the yellow wallpaper begin to crawl and writhe of its own accord. To be out of one's mind and beside oneself. I too wanted to run.

However, I soon realised that hysteria – dependence of any sort – is anathema to survival. One must retain one's own inner balance. To do so is a political act.

Only later would I dare – and I
did
dare – to even conceive of the idea of writing. Of writing about my own experience as a means to write about women in general. Yes, I was accused of universalism – how could I possibly speak for the particular? But what those blue-blood Ivy League bitches failed to understand was that I
was
the particular. They had more in common with their class than their sex. I was destined to be a hairdresser.

This is all terribly incoherent. What I mean is – I apologise for becoming that which I have spent my career condemning. Hysterical, inchoate.

Today, The Symbolic constitutes our flesh and blood, our very souls. It is clear to me that you, Ann-Marie, are an embodiment of The Symbolic. Looking into your sarcastic eyes is like looking into the post-feminist whirly-pool itself.

I shouldn't be surprised – nor, in fact, disappointed. We are all made by history.

I want to tell you about my ice hockey player. I want to tell you what happened and why the sistahood hate me and why I can never go home to America – except for the occasional publicity tour. I want to shine a light for you, so that you may rise where I have fallen. Yes, I have fallen. One becomes preoccupied with the subjects that most captivate – no, capture – one. I must confess that I remain a hopeless romantic.

Please come back.

Stephanie

P.S. It was Beckett who said: ‘Fail better'. Failure is but a route to creativity. For that reason, and to prove to you that perfectionism only serves to sap one's white milk dry, I have taken the liberty of scanning the tabula rasa that you left on the floor of the recording studio before you ran out and abandoned me just like Leo. The page remains virgin snow – its virginity is perhaps more meaningful than anything you could possibly write. It is a testament to the silence of your generation of young women, who neglect to vote despite the fact that your forebears starved to death to win the vote. There is a beauty to the blankness of your page, imprinted, as it is, with the ever-so-slightly sweaty marks of your growing anxiety as I bore down all the more heavily upon you and the night turned to day. It is now available to download on my website.

In order to access Stephanie's website, I had to watch an animated cupid aim his arrow at the heart of an unsuspecting little girl, wearing glasses and reading a book. When the arrow hit her, the little girl immediately dropped the book and stamped on her glasses. Her eyes were stunned and blind; this was illustrated by her bumping into furniture. Cupid was laughing. The girl held her arms straight out in front of her like a zombie and then proceeded to walk over the edge of an animated cliff.

The blog post was titled: ‘Cat Got Your Tongue?' Steph reminded her readers that in Spanish
lengua
meant both the tongue in your mouth and your language – like mother tongue. My blank white sheet stood like a monument on the screen, a tower of nothingness, to which I had contributed – nothing. The tags were
trauma
,
disenfranchisement
, and
voicelessness
. Steph had written an emotive caption about how she couldn't possibly reveal the identity of the (un)author, but suffice to say that she (un)spoke for a whole bottled-up generation of young women. The bottled-up part was a play on the fact that my generation were all alcoholics, who sought escape from the dictates of the meritocracy in the form of drink.
Girlwithacurl456
had commented underneath:

I
getting fukd because its fun, it makes me wanna get fukd more.

I also had an email from Vic:

I don't know how you got down into that submarine, but I saw you, waiting your turn with no shame, wanting it with no shame. Your hair was blonde, not brown. You dyed it, slut. Think you can escape me? Letting all five sailors do it all over you, holding you open. I could see all the way inside of you and I didn't like what I saw. Your tits were orange and bigger. You were loving it. They didn't buy you a drink or warn you when they were going to do it and then they bukkaked all over your face. They gave you a pearl necklace and then you licked it all up and snowballed with your friend, who looked just like you too. I never want to see you again.

‘Yeah, I joined a cult once,' Olive was saying.

It was evening. I was face down on the bed. She was trying to feel out my root chakra. It was somewhere at the base of my spine. Apparently, it was blocked. I had been telling her about Stephanie.

‘But I only lasted like one day,' she went on. ‘Before Hal came and got me. I had been trying to get away from Hal in the first place because we had a fight. I wanted something of my own – I was on the verge of training as a physiotherapist. But then this girl came up to me at a café when I was crying. She was very beautiful but she looked zonked out of her mind. When I got to the ranch everyone was drifting around like totally placid, but the daily routine was actually really regimented. There was this one guy – Matt – real charismatic. He was the leader. He read books, Wilhelm Reich and stuff, and tried to practise it on the girls.'

‘What, the orgasmatron?'

‘Is that the box you go in to come?' She laughed. ‘Yeah. Shit like that. It was deep. There was a lake there, and I remember thinking this whole place is like a placid fucking lake. And just below the surface, there are sharks.'

‘That feels good,' I said. Her hands were hovering above my shoulder blades.

‘They tried to stop Hal from taking me because they'd already changed my name to Paula.'

I laughed.

‘No, it was serious. This guy Matt twisted everything. It was a mind-fuck.'

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘Stephanie was a mind-fuck. But I kind of feel sorry for her. She's lost.'

Olive leaned forward and whispered very close to my ear: ‘No, honey. You're lost.'

That evening, Sebastian's parents were having a dinner party. They asked me to join them.

Leonard Cohen's ‘Dance Me to the End of Love' was playing as the
amuse-bouches
were wheeled out: plates of halloumi and baba ghanoush. A balding man with glasses was sitting on the sofa, trying to engage Hal in a conversation about Syrian politics. Sebastian's miniature father slung an arm around my shoulders and told me how pleased they were that I was staying. He introduced me to the balding man, who was called Phillip. His bald head glowed as he rammed some of that halloumi in his mouth. ‘Oh, your mother never stops talking about you,' Phillip told me.

A few minutes later, my mother turned up, wearing a red dress and red lipstick like mine and red shoes.

Phillip's head glowed more aggressively. It was obvious they knew each other well.

I stood squarely in front of my mother and asked Phillip how he came to be at this party. He said that he was a human rights solicitor. I asked Phillip if there were likely to be any human rights abuses at this party?

He laughed nervously.

‘Ann-Marie,' said my mother. ‘Don't be like that. I've wanted you to meet Phillip since …' Phillip the bald beau was moving into her house, it transpired. My old room was going to be turned into a study where Phillip could examine in total privacy the shocking wounds of torture victims.

‘That's a bit of a sick job, isn't it?' I said to him.

‘No,' said my mother. ‘It is a very important job. Phillip helps people from all over the world.'

‘Seems to me that people who want to help other people are often just suffering from narcissistic personality disorder,' I said. ‘Yeah, I looked it up on the internet.'

Sebastian's mother was basting a goose in the kitchen. It was mammoth, more like a pterodactyl. I helped her with the potatoes and the curly kale.

‘We're so glad to have you,' she said. ‘I can't tell you. You know you can stay here for as long as you like.'