Eat My Heart Out (17 page)

‘Thank you,' I said. ‘It's such a relief. I've been moving around so much.'

‘How's Freddie?'

‘He's beating up young boys in Suffolk.'

‘Is that a gay thing?' said Sebastian's father, coming into the kitchen.

‘Harold,' said Sebastian's mother.

Another couple arrived. They were book critics. They talked at length about the pluses and minuses of historical fiction. ‘The prose perpetually runs the risk of descending into the purple, or merely kitsch,' said the woman. She was swinging her glass of red wine around as she talked.

‘God.' The male book critic bashed the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘Can we not use that word, darling? What does it even mean?'

They all laughed.

The female book critic was laughing too, but then she slammed her glass down on the counter and said: ‘Why do you always have to undermine me?'

‘Kitsch means the aftermath of experience,' I said. ‘It's like a ghost of experience. A ghost.'

They stared at me. I opened the Aga to toss the potatoes again.

The male critic said: ‘Is that a quote?'

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘Stephanie Haight told me. She's a worldrenowned intellectual.'

‘We know who Stephanie Haight is!' said the female critic. She produced
Falling Out of Fate
from her handbag.

‘Haight was such an influential figure for my generation,' said Sebastian's mother. ‘She made feminism so cool, so sexy. She was so fierce and dignified.'

‘And she's still got it,' said the female critic. ‘Her interpretation of the master/slave dialectic is scintillating. Like reading a thriller.'

‘I'm a feminist,' said Sebastian's father. ‘I've always called myself a feminist.' He reached on tiptoe to kiss Sebastian's mother.

‘But I still have to remind Harold to help with the childcare,' said Sebastian's mother.

They all laughed.

Two of Sebastian's intersex siblings wandered into the kitchen. The bigger one helped the smaller one to water a mint plant.

‘We don't believe in nannies,' said Sebastian's mother.

Soon dinner was served.

I watched my mother canoodle in the candlelight with Phillip. She was flushed, like a girl. He kept on smiling at me. I smiled at the cucumber and pomegranate salad.

‘Speaking of Haight,' said Sebastian's mother. She looked ravishing tonight; her long black Allegra-esque hair flowed free.

‘Hate?' said my mother. ‘Susan, this sangak bread is divine.'

‘Thank you, angel,' said Sebastian's mother.

‘I still find it a bit weird that you lot are friends now,' I said.

‘Well, I'm glad that they are!' said bald Phillip. ‘It was Harold and Susan who introduced me to your mother. Harold and I were at Birmingham together back in the Stone Age!'

‘No, Stephanie
Haight
,' said Sebastian's mother. ‘Who your daughter knows.'

‘Does she?' said my mother.

‘Yeah, she was my supervisor at Cambridge,' I lied.

‘You know, that was the thing,' said Sebastian's father. He was already drunk. ‘Sebastian never could forgive you for getting into Cambridge. He simply loathed UCL. Loathed it. Thought they were all beneath him.'

‘Sebastian was always gifted,' said my mother.

‘Gifted or got the gift of the gab,' said his father. ‘Who knows?'

Sebastian's mother put down her knife and fork and pressed her fingertips together. ‘It's a crucial age. Each young person has to recognise at some point the gap between his ego-ideal – his ideal self – and who he really is. Now, the question is. Do you strive to close that gap or just accept your shortcomings?' She looked at Sebastian's father. Then she turned to me. ‘Haight tweeted her blog post today about a young post-feminist woman who tried to write but couldn't come up with a word.'

I laughed. Then I stopped laughing. ‘Oh?'

‘That blank page was so resonant to me,' said his mother. ‘I remember when I first tried to give psychoanalytic papers at those big fancy conferences. I was petrified.'

‘That's so true,' said the female book critic. ‘It is a female thing. Because Carl.' She looked at the male book critic. ‘Can drink as much as he likes and get up in the morning, and write. Hung over or not. I can't do that. I can't afford to be complacent.'

‘But is that really a gender thing?' said the male book critic. ‘Because I like to enjoy myself?'

‘Women have to work ten times as hard,' said Sebastian's mother. ‘We have to overcome that voice in our heads which says:
No. You can't do it. You must fail
.'

I helped her clear away the starters.

‘You should take a look at that blog,' she said. ‘It got retweeted by Mental. The mental health charity. I do a lot of work with them.'

I blushed. ‘I don't think I'd be interested in that.' I excused myself and went outside for a cigarette.

Hal was strumming his guitar while we waited for the goose to rest. Everyone's faces looked happy and dazed. My mother looked happier than I had ever seen her.

We were halfway through the goose when the front door opened and Allegra appeared in the kitchen. She was wearing a tiny black mini-dress and a pair of ripped black tights. Sebastian appeared behind her.

‘This is all very nice,' said Allegra. ‘How nice.'

There was a long silence.

Sebastian was looking at the goose. ‘Is there any left?' he said.

‘We thought we'd just drop by because we're all out of mosquito repellent,' said Allegra.

‘Can't you buy that at the airport?' said Sebastian's father.

‘Nonsense,' said his mother. ‘We must have some somewhere. But – oh dear. There isn't any room.'

Allegra and Sebastian had to sit with the kids on the collapsible card table. Sebastian gnawed the remains of the goose carcass. I could feel the nihilistic pull of Allegra's presence. This went on for a few moments. There was conversation about the state of the economy.

Then I stood up. ‘Get out!' I shouted at Allegra. ‘Get out! This is my house!'

She stood up too. ‘This is not your house!'

‘And what the fuck, you smeared your shit all over my walls.'

The party went into shock.

‘You'd moved out,' said Allegra. ‘That was an experiment. Haven't you ever heard of Mary fucking Barnes?'

‘Yes,' said Sebastian's mother. ‘She was a very interesting woman.'

‘She was like a schizophrenic who came off medication thanks to R. D. Laing,' said Allegra. ‘She smeared her shit over the walls because she didn't have any paint and then they gave her paint and she became an internationally acclaimed fucking artist.'

‘So what?' I screamed. ‘Smear your shit over your own walls if you want to!'

‘Now, now,' said Sebastian's father.

‘This needs to run its course,' said Sebastian's mother, sagely. ‘This is abreaction.' She turned to me. ‘Have you read Haight's novel?'

I shook my head.

‘It's wonderful.'

I clattered the dishes in the sink. ‘When are you two actually
going
to Mexico?' I said. ‘Because you've been leaving for like a week now.'

‘I don't know,' said Sebastian.

‘He doesn't know!' said Sebastian's father. He raised his glass. ‘He doesn't know. He never knows.'

‘That's enough, Dad,' said Olive. ‘Leave him alone.'

‘When are you going to make a man of yourself, Sebastian?' said Sebastian's father.

Sebastian stood up. ‘I would like to make a man of myself. Let's see now. I broke my fucking leg so that I could be a fucking short-arse like you. I maimed myself just to get your approval,
Dad
.'

‘That was an accident, Sebastian,' I said. ‘Because I made you dance with me on that slippery floor.
And I imagined a different space, where no dancing is
. Do you remember that poem I wrote for you?'

‘What?' the book critics were saying. ‘What? What?'

‘He did it unconsciously on purpose,' said Olive.

Hal began to strum his guitar again so that we had to shout louder over the music. His song was rambling and tuneless.

‘And playing the Hooray Henry,' Sebastian's father went on. ‘Going punting in that godforsaken boater. Going to formal halls, when you didn't even belong to a college.'

Fifteen

Abreaction: A Novel

Chapter 1

Sisyphus was named as such because her parents intimated from her startling hazel eyes that she was doomed to roll a rock up to the top of a hill, only to have it roll down again, so that she would have to roll it up again, and so on, for all eternity.

They would have her believe that her fate was inscribed in her name.

When Sisyphus won a scholarship to St Anne's College, Oxford, she was ecstatic. She surmised that there was no need to hold a pillow down over her well-meaning parents' faces as they slept because now she was free.

She had fallen twice thus far.

The first boy she fell in love with was a local gangster called Simon. He was born of Chinese descent but his parents anglicised his name. He wore a diamond in his ear and he starred in black and white TV ads for oriental-style noodles. It was a time when Chinese cuisine had barely entered the UK.

All the girls loved Simon. Sisyphus knew she would never get him because she was so morbidly obese. He was subject to much racism from the teachers and she longed to position her whale-like body in front of him in the form of a human shield, but he bullied her along with the rest. It was then that she came to understand the veracity of the Auden line: ‘Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.'

She prayed to the moon that Simon would love her back. She devised superstitions, wishing for particular patterns of numbers to occur. Soon, she became a slave to those patterns. They ruled her with a logic that she herself had created.

The moon's face remained impassive outside her bedroom window. Simon continued to appear in flickering black and white on the screen, and sometimes in the form of a jingle on the radio. Sometimes she doubted that Simon was real at all.

On the upside, she discovered a mystical inner world. Her desire for him was celestial, not sexual. It belonged to the stars; stars exploded within her. He seemed to be the most powerful person in the universe. He was the sun around which she revolved, just like the songs said it should be. But if he didn't exist then maybe her circular path had no centre?

Her second love was called Billy. He fell in love with Sisyphus because she was assertive, like a man. She bulldozed people on the way home from school like a man. And if he closed his eyes, he could just about imagine that she was in fact a man.

Billy had fantasies of being tied to a lamp-post and beaten by Sisyphus. While researching her thesis on romantic masochism in the work of Simone de Beauvoir years later, Sisyphus would come to realise that Billy had been using her as a way of punishing himself for his own illicit homosexual desires. He wouldn't come out of the closet until he was married with two children.

Billy made her the aggressor in the relationship. She felt herself to be an aggressor in any case because she was always compelled to defend herself. She was angry as hell. She was defensive as hell. She had to be. It's called survival. She would fight and fight and fight, and Billy would whimper and cry. She would wish that he was a real man, a macho man, but then all the macho men ridiculed her mercilessly. They wanted childlike girls, who had no ambitions of their own.

Sisyphus had nothing
but
her ambition. She allowed Billy to make her orgasm from behind but all the time she was plotting her escape from her family and his terrible silhouette cast on the wall of his father's shed. That's how she knew she didn't love him: she abhorred his silhouette.

Years later, when her head was bent over the tomes in the Robbins Library, Harvard, she would realise that both Simon and Billy had been mere pretexts for her to seethe with a solipsistic passion. It was a private passion, upon which they could not trespass.

On an unconscious level, she had ensured in both cases that reciprocity was impossible. She loved Simon; he didn't love her. Billy loved her, but she didn't love him. He only loved her because he was lying to himself and the rest of society.

Someone was always turning away. But did it have to be so?

The rock which Sisyphus rolled up her hill would soon become heavier still. Indeed, soon the hill would turn to ice. The surface would become so slippery that rolling the rock would be nigh on impossible. She would meet Leo, an extraordinary American ice hockey player.

I read Steph's novel on the night bus headed towards Camden Square. I didn't want to stay in Sebastian's bed after that furore. And I couldn't be sure that the crazy woman had cleaned all the shit off my bedroom walls in Clapham yet.

Stephanie promised to reinstate her cleaner, Ilka. She promised that there would be no more sadism, no more chores. She said she loved me, and that without me, she was nothing. She said all this in a stream of consciousness while Marge stirred and stirred that damn chicken soup for the soul, made with my halal.

Raegan was the only one I was happy to see.

There was a hamper of Harrods bespoke offal on my bed. It had been there for some time; it was rotting. The urinal scent of kidneys overwhelmed the Florida Water.

There was a note:

M
A CHERIE
C
AMILLE
,

D
ID YOU RECEIVE THE GARTER
? O
H, HOW
I
DRIVE MYSELF TO THE POINT OF DEMENTIA OF A NIGHT IMAGINING YOU SLIPPING THAT ELASTIC OVER YOUR LITHE THIGH
. I
IMAGINE SINKING MY SORROWFUL TEETH INTO THAT THIGH
. S
ORROWFUL BECAUSE YOU DO NOT WRITE, YOU DO NOT CALL
. D
O YOU THINK OF ME
? C
AN
I
HOPE THAT YOU DO
?

O
UR NIGHT TOGETHER WAS INCENDIARY
. I
NCINERATE ME AGAIN, MY PRECIOUS ONE
. L
ET ME INCINERATE YOU
. J
OUISSANCE COMES IN CLOUDS ACROSS MY VISION AND
I
CAN'T THINK, AND
I
CAN'T SEE
. I
YEARN TO TAKE YOU UP TO THE
C
HARTREUSE
M
OUNTAINS AND SAMPLE THAT MONKISH BLUE LIQUEUR
. O
H, HOW WE WOULD SCANDALISE THEM
! I
YEARN TO MAKE THE
F
ATHERS DISAVOW THEIR FAITH AND THEIR GUILT
. T
HEY WOULD, AFTER ONE LOOK AT YOUR SILKEN SKIN
.

Y
OU HAVE BROUGHT OUT MY PLAYFUL SIDE
! I
WANT TO SEE YOU IN THE WHITE OF
M
ISS
H
BEFORE SHE STOPPED ALL THE CLOCKS AND LET THE RATS GNAW AT HER CAKE
. W
ILL YOU WEAR HER DRESS FOR ME
?

S
ALUD
,

J
AMES
X

I had taken Stephanie at her word that she would give me anything I wanted so the following morning we went to Selfridge's. I wanted to buy a new outfit for the Samuel Johnson Prize that evening. It was Friday.

The personal shopper was throwing Oscar-style gowns at me: a yellow satin Cavalli, a bustier McQueen printed with dragonflies. Finally, I settled for a Lanvin contrast silk. The front was black and the back was red. It cost £2,320.

‘Are you sure you don't mind?' I asked Stephanie, when we were seated at HIX Champagne & Caviar Bar on the fourth floor. I had already disposed of the receipt for the dress in the ashtray outside.

‘Sure.'

‘I mean I'm gonna need shoes to go with it,' I said, my mouth full of osetra caviar and hot buttered toast. ‘Can't wear these.' I gestured to my old door bitch ballet pumps.

Her phone rang. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘Yes. Yes, of course she will. Protected? No problem. Thanks, Francesca.'

‘Who's Francesca?' I said, when she got off the phone.

‘She's a researcher on
Woman's Hour
. They heard about your (un)authored blank page from the MD of Mental. They want to run an item on it.' She tried to look excited. ‘They want you on the show!'

‘Excuse me,' I said, gesturing to a waiter. ‘Can I have …' I checked the menu. ‘The white duck egg with the osetra again. Thanks.'

‘This will be great for your profile,' she said.

‘I don't want a profile. Do you mind if I go outside for a cigarette?'

‘I am trying to help you, Ann-Marie.' Steph wasn't eating. ‘I wouldn't even be going to this phoney awards ceremony tonight if you didn't want to go.'

‘But your book might win.'

‘Me or that awfully boring history of Elizabethan ceruse. Like a man could understand the historical significance of a cosmetic that causes death by lead poisoning.' Steph snorted. She tugged at her straw-blonde hair. ‘Well, do you want to go on
Woman's Hour
or don't you?'

The duck egg arrived.

‘What's my fee?' I said.

‘Victims don't get a fee just for being victims. That's not how it works.'

‘How does it work, Stephanie?' I pulled out
Abreaction
and flipped through it. ‘I'm looking forward to finding out what
Sisyphus
did to Raegan and Marge.'

She took the book out of my hands and put it on the table. ‘You'll need a bag too,' she said. ‘I spotted an adorable Mulberry spongy leather medium hobo that you could use day to day. Not just for tonight. Not just for tonight.' Her eyes returned to the Erzulie state. Then she smiled briskly and said: ‘I know what! We'll call on Gabriella on the way to the BBC! That'll be wonderful for you, won't it?'

Gabriella's studio was in London Fields.

Hipsters wearing white surgical masks and gowns were bent over what looked like a corpse. Its flesh-coloured feet were protruding from one end of the operating table. The studio was huge and white with compartments everywhere. Images of operations were propped on shelves. One face recurred: that of a woman turned yellow by the antiseptic fluid wiped across her skin, turned yellower still by the bruises left by incisions. Here, her eye was cut open, the iris a technicolour blue. Here, her breast was removed, leaving a textured red mess. Here, her breast had been appliquéd back on, the stitches made of hot-pink wool.

One of the masked hipsters made a big fuss of Stephanie, who strode over to the corpse and demanded: ‘Gabriella? Gabriella? Is she under?'

The hipster pulled the sheet away from the corpse's face to reveal a hyper-real fibreglass dummy. Its eyes were that same technicolour blue. I tried to get a look at the gaping wound on which the hipsters were working and saw that there was yet another fibreglass dummy tucked inside the stomach. The second, smaller dummy was likewise being operated on. There was yet another dummy inside of her, inside of her. The dummies got smaller and smaller so that the last was no bigger than a finger.

‘It's called
The Russian Within
,' said the hipster. ‘It's a comment on
Anna Karenina
. And like, Russian dolls.'

‘Where is she?' said Stephanie.

The hipster led us through another studio where something was being blowtorched. It was obscured by a sheet.

‘Gabriella was always interdisciplinary,' Stephanie said.

We entered an office.

Gabriella was slouched behind a large white desk. ‘Tell them I don't care about the cost,' she was saying down the phone. ‘I want ostrich. It's the soft – yes, the soft. And the fire in the grate and the ice in the glass. I want a lot of ice in the glass and I want the glass to be very big. And I want lizards – two, maybe three, crawling up the wall. I want the walls to move. No – I don't want the walls to actually move, I want the lizards to make the walls seem like they're – yes.' She had been doodling a lizard on a pad. Now she looked up. ‘Etienne,' she said. ‘I have to go.' She opened her arms wide to Stephanie. ‘
Mum
.'

‘I wish you wouldn't call me that,' said Steph.

‘You love it,' said Gabriella, lighting a cigarette.

Steph lit up too.

So did I.

We all three stood in silence, smoking.

I tried not to stare at Gabriella.