Eat My Heart Out (2 page)

He woke up, screaming. ‘What the fuck are you doing?'

I rubbed the cigarette out between my fingers.

Now the room was ablaze with morning.

‘Do you love me?' I said. ‘Now that we've had sex?'

He pretended to sleep again.

Finally he mumbled: ‘We didn't have sex.'

‘But do you love me anyway though? Because we might have sex in the future?'

He sat up. ‘What about the pussies from the refuge?' His face looked dire in the light. ‘What about the red silk kimono? Who are you?'

‘Yeah, I'm not in the habit of going out in nightwear. I do own one though. Freddie's always trying to borrow it.'

‘You know it's really off-putting for a girl to keep on going on about her ex-boyfriend on a first date.'

‘Freddie's not my ex-boyfriend, I told you. And this isn't our first date, Vic. We met in a past life. I was your faithful concubine. But now I'm an empowered woman.' I corrected myself: ‘I'm a woman in the process of becoming empowered.' I laughed. ‘If you'll only let me.'

Vic lay down again.

I rolled another cigarette.

‘No,' he said, and tossed it somewhere. ‘You're desperate.'

I laughed. ‘No, Vic. That's the trouble. I think I'm desperate, I even want to be desperate, but I'm not. The sad truth is that I'm not. Maybe if I was, then you'd love me.' I stood up, exhilarated. ‘But I'm not.'

I got dressed quickly.

‘You're all the same,' he mumbled, face down in the pillow.

The front hall was adorned with black and white photographs of Big Ben, captured from a range of surreal angles. This was a terraced house. I could hear operators talking in the kitchen. I went in.

There was a breakfast bar. Operators – two men and a woman – were sitting around it on matching stools. There was a laptop. On the screen, there was a picture of marmalade on toast. A real piece of half-eaten toast was spotlit on the counter.

‘Yeah,' the woman was saying. She had brown hair, and no distinguishing features whatsoever. ‘And put the date and time. And say what it is.'

‘What is it?' said the man, fingers poised over the keyboard.

‘Toast,' said the woman.

‘Hi!' I said. ‘I'm Ann-Marie! Vic's new friend.'

They stared at me.

There was an empty stool – Vic's? I perched on it, taking a bite out of the toast, nodding with approval. I could see that the marmalade on the screen was a more brilliant shade of amber. It had been photoshopped.

‘I'll probably be hanging round here a whole lot more from now on,' I said.

They continued to stare.

The woman plunged a cafetiere. They didn't offer me any coffee.

‘Vic told me what happened in the army,' I lied. ‘It's terrible. I'm really hungover. We got totally trashed. I don't usually get this trashed any more, not since I went on this mad detox diet for the six months leading up to my finals.' I nodded. ‘I just graduated. I got a double-starred first actually, from Cambridge.'

They didn't look impressed.

‘My director of studies, Dr Kyle, said that I could easily win a scholarship to Harvard or some other Ivy League place,' I said. ‘Maybe a more progressive one, but I said I just want to be free, you know? Like now.' I finished off the toast. My voice sounded dead: ‘I'm free.' I got off the stool. ‘Well, um. I better … go to work.'

‘Vic never talks about what happened,' said the woman. ‘It's dangerous for him to talk about it. It triggers things.' She looked at one of the men. ‘I told him he shouldn't hang around that meat market. Why seek out what you're most afraid of?' She held the fridge door open. ‘Vic is terrified of meat.'

‘Oh?'

‘Yeah,' said one of the men. ‘Ever since the accident in the woods when he was in the army, he can't go near it. The doctor told him not to go near it.'

‘I can empathise with that though,' I said. ‘I only ever want what I hate.'

‘Well, you're special.' She pulled out some raspberries and closed the fridge.

I was about to leave and never come back, but then I changed my mind and ran upstairs. I tried every door before I got the right one. There he was, a corpse. I got out my notebook. I thought about writing him a love poem.

‘Vic?' I knelt beside him. ‘What did you do? What happened in the woods?'

Nothing.

‘Did you kill someone?'

Still nothing.

I wrote down my number and left it on the bookshelf, which wasn't well stocked at all. There was a military memoir and
Fifty Shades of Grey
and – oddly – something by Fay Weldon. For all his positive attributes, Vic was not an educated man.

Two

I never said that Allegra could come into my room, but she came in anyway.

Her gift to me was a box of post-feminist cupcakes, decorated with tiny gold balls. I had been listening to an Amy Winehouse lament, writing an essay on Montesquieu's
The Spirit of the Laws
. The sweetness of those cupcakes was harrowing. The sponge collapsed in my mouth like a cloud. And she would claim later that I was the witch.

That was three years ago, during freshers' week, before I got thrown out of halls for calling one of the porters a cunt. The college was supposed to be proud of its all-girls tradition, owner of the second largest feminist art collection in the world. We ate dinner under a portrait of an Iranian woman wearing a purdah, aiming a Kalashnikov.

‘Oh, I can't tell you,' Allegra had babbled. ‘I can't tell you what a relief it is to have found someone who I can really relate to. Someone who makes me feel
real
.' She produced a bottle of cheap red wine, rinsed out two cups, and toasted to our new-found sistahood.

One wall of my college room was given over to a huge window that let in a lot of light. It looked out onto the college lawn, the sign saying ‘Keep off the lawn', and the red star of the Texaco garage across the road. I was living for Sebastian's weekend visits, when we would lie together all day and night in my single bed. But he wasn't there that day. It was a Tuesday.

Allegra told me that she was studying law under the duress of her family, that she wanted to be a performance artist, that she was heavily influenced by the Theatre of Cruelty, that she felt she couldn't create anything unless she, you know, really forcibly broke some eggs. She feared that the eggs that she would have to break were her family.

I stared at her liquid black hair, her chalk-white skin.

‘Except my brother Samuel,' she went on. ‘He's a chess champion at Eton and simply
too
good-natured.' She said that she had waited all her life to meet a great man who would really wreck her youth and break her heart and make her feel
something
. ‘Anything would do.' She looked at me with her grey eyes.

And then she went completely mad.

She grabbed the salt shaker and the packet of coffee and the sugar and started chucking them around the room. Then she grabbed the remaining cupcakes and smeared them over the exposed brick walls, along the ridges of the radiator, over the light bulb. She seemed to like the sensation of burning her fingers. She mashed the coffee into the sponge on the wall, forming a brown paste. She made abstract expressionist gestures.

I sat on the bed, impassive. I watched her fuck the place up.

Soon she sank, exhausted, beside me. She smiled.

Then she passed out.

I was thinking about Allegra as I journeyed back to Clapham after my night with Vic the war criminal. I was never more than five minutes away from thinking about her; my thoughts looped and returned always to the same point: she had ruined my life.

On Clapham High Street, I stared at the glistening kidneys in the window of the organic butcher for a while, the strung up pheasants, the hearts. Stephanie Haight's face was enlarged on a poster in the window of the bookshop. She had drooping eyes and scraggly blonde hair. Her lips were petulant. She must have been about sixty but the years had been injected out of her face. She wore jeans and a tartan shirt that recalled Generation X, to which she was too old to belong.

I went into the shop.

The bell rang and the man with the ponytail behind the counter looked up and smiled. ‘Hello there!' he said. ‘And how is your young man?'

‘He's fine, thanks. Don't know where he is actually.'

‘He came in here just last week and was telling me all about how you two are thinking about getting engaged.'

‘Did he?'

‘He wanted to order a special edition of Vasari's
Lives of the Artists
. For his uncle.'

‘Oh, you mean Freddie. Freddie's fucking nuts.'

I stared intently at the Mind, Body & Spirit section, hoping that the man would stop talking to me. There was one other customer in the shop. A tiny dog was poking out of her handbag. I moved over to Gender Studies. The man's questions were incessant. Yes, I was glad that that awful psychotic phase had ended. Yes, the standardisation of education was to blame for the fact that I'd totally lost my fucking marbles.

‘The only thing to do is claw them back,' he said.

I found Stephanie's book.
Falling Out of Fate
was printed in pale blue letters above an image of a woman falling out of a cage made of hearts. She was plummeting through an empty blue sky to her death.

‘Going like hot cakes,' he said.

I flipped to
About the Author
.

Stephanie Haight was born in Bermondsey and educated at her local secondary modern before winning a scholarship to St Anne's College, Oxford. She completed her PhD on romantic masochism in the work of Simone de Beauvoir at Harvard University in 1980. She has written widely for titles including the
New York Review of Books
and the
London Review of Books
. Her books include
Master or Slave? How Submission is Reversed
and
Other Tales from the Women's Movement
, and a novel,
Abreaction
. After many years of living in New York, she has recently returned to London.

The man was talking to the dog woman.

I put the book down the front of my tights and exited the shop.

I got halfway across the road before I felt a hand on my arm. The light was about to turn green.

‘I saw you,' snarled the dog woman. Her face was expensive. Her coat was vintage tweed, like mine. I wanted to ask her if she got it from Beyond Retro.

‘I'm not a corporation.' The ponytail man was shaking his head. His lone dangly earring swung from side to side. It was a Native American dream catcher.

‘Have you spent a lot of time in the States?' I asked him.

Dog woman had perched on the edge of the desk. ‘Will you take this seriously?' she barked. ‘It's a serious offence. We could call the police.'

‘Please do,' I said. ‘Be my guest. I've got nothing to live for anyway. The man I love doesn't love me. I thought it was Sebastian who was the love of my life but now it transpires it's Vic.'

‘What about Freddie?' said the man.

‘Actually my great-great-great-grandmother was a thief too,' I told him. ‘She was a prostitute in Whitechapel. And she got deported for beating the shit out of this gentleman. My mother's got the prison records on the wall.'

His face reddened; he flapped his arms.

‘What have you got to say for yourself that's serious?' said the woman.

‘I don't want to be free,' I said, with passion. ‘Sometimes I feel free but most of the time I feel trapped anyway, in all this freedom.' I gestured to Stephanie's book on the desk. ‘That's why I'm interested in her. She seems to know what she's talking about.'

‘That's not the point,' said the man.

‘Call the police,' said dog woman. ‘She's not even sorry.'

‘I thought you were against the system?' I said to the man.

‘Not when I am the system,' he said. ‘It's my shop.' He trod around the office.

Piles of unsellable books were stacked everywhere.

‘I don't have any money,' I said. ‘It's Freddie with all the money. We live in his uncle's flat, rent-free. That's the only way we can afford to live in such a yuppie area.' I looked at dog woman.

She bared her teeth; they were perfect.

‘We don't belong here,' I said. ‘I don't belong anywhere near here.'

The man didn't look convinced.

‘I'm mental, remember?' I said. ‘Cambridge made me mental.'

I could see him begin to waver, but then dog woman shouted at him: ‘Can I talk to you in the shop?'

Alone, I turned to the first chapter of Stephanie's book. It was called
Falling
.

To fall is a woman's destiny; it is the culmination of her destiny. Eve fell because she ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Since that first biblical Fall, any woman with a sexual appetite, any woman who fucks outside of marriage, has been deemed ‘fallen'. The woman who fucked for love, lust, or money ‘fell' pregnant and was shamed by the community.

Bridget Jones – that blueprint for a free generation – fell all over the place. Her slapstick naivety meant that she could rarely stand up without falling flat on her face and demonstrating her incompetence and the incompetence of women in general for the sake of a few laughs.

While the fallen woman was once a figure of damnation and moral outrage, now we are all fallen. We are encouraged to fall. Because falling endears us. It ameliorates our strength. We fall in love.

Following the sexual revolution and the Second Wave women's movement of the 1960s and '70s, in which I played a key role, the values that kept woman in her place – albeit in a second, an inferior place – seem to have dissolved. In fact, they have merely changed form.

Power metamorphosises.

Culture is an atmosphere.

It is not simply men who do not want to give up their position of dominance over women. The whole cultural atmosphere is tuned to keep women falling.

This atmosphere is what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called The Symbolic.

The Symbolic is everywhere, it is everything.

The Symbolic is what the authorities tell you to do, but, more generally, it is what the world tells you to do. And here's the twist: the world doesn't have to tell you do it.

Women obey without knowing they are obeying. The choice is always already made.

‘We're going to let you go,' said the man. He looked devastated. ‘Because I was young once.'

‘I was young once too,' I said. ‘I can't quite remember. I think I was happy.'