Eat My Heart Out (24 page)

‘Please forgive me for being so powerful,' I was saying, as Gabriella and Stephanie danced around the room to the ringtone on Gabriella's phone: ‘What Difference Does It Make?' by The Smiths.

Dr Kyle couldn't respond because he was gagged. He was bound with the standard issue bed sheets that the cleaner had diligently left folded in the wardrobe.

We had bumped into Dr Kyle on the way back to the bar from the seminar suite. He had been photocopying handouts in the admin corridor, drunk.

This had been my room. I hated it.

Dr Kyle twisted from side to side.

‘It's the overhead light or darkness,' I told him. ‘Because there's no bulb in the sidelight. Someone forgot to change the bulb.'

He twisted more.

‘Do you want to see what is happening to you?' I said.

He nodded. Then he shook his head.

Gabriella and Stephanie held hands and formed a ring. There wasn't much space between the bed and the desk. Steph kept banging into the desk chair. We had got his trousers and his boxer shorts round his ankles but his shoes wouldn't come off. I pulled and pulled, attending to each foot. Finally, the first one gave. I fell against the wall. The second one gave more easily. I unbuttoned his shirt.

Gabriella was explaining that she was an amateur surgeon in the eighteenth-century tradition. At that time, women were only entitled to be amateurs, but they took their work extremely seriously. She talked about the difference between the scatological and sentimental in contemporary art. Then she got out her surgical travel kit.

‘Are you listening?' she asked Dr Kyle.

He nodded. He was trying to recoil but the sheets were bound too tightly.

Gabriella sat down on the edge of the bed. She lit a cigarette.

I fixed one of Dr Kyle's socks over the smoke alarm.

‘Do you include a module on doomed romantic love in your social and political science syllabus?' said Steph. She lit her cigarette off Gabriella's.

The professor was trying to breathe.

‘Well, do you?' said Stephanie.

‘No,' I said. ‘They don't.'

‘Do you plan to include one?' said Steph.

He nodded, frantically.

‘Because let me tell you.' Steph wafted her smoke around the room so that it curled in the shadows. ‘It's really a key aspect of human culture that has been neglected by the humanities of a quasi-scientific bent. Those who have pretensions to
empiricism
.' She stood over him. Then she sat down next to him.

His sweat had soaked the bed.

‘The rise of the individual has coincided with the invention of romantic love as we know it. It's all about free choice.' Steph laughed.

Gabriella laughed too.

His eyes looked stricken.

Steph moved around the glass partition separating the bed from the sink. I saw her double-glazed form bend over the rushing tap. She returned. ‘Like if we think of the myths. Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard. They all experienced a preternatural feeling of truth in relation to the other, a purity so deep that they would prefer to be together in death than apart in life. Isn't that right, Ann-Marie?'

‘Yeah.' I told Dr Kyle: ‘It was really humiliating that time with the ice cream.'

‘The latter is a particularly fascinating case study,' Steph went on. ‘Abelard was a brilliant man. A scholar. Heloise was brilliant too. He taught her. But then her father got mad, as fathers tend to do.'

Gabriella laughed. ‘Oh, Steph, you can't generalise about
all
fathers.'

‘True,' said Steph. ‘The problem was that Heloise and Abelard weren't careful enough. They took risks. Because they were both literate, they wrote to each other. The letters survive.' She stared down at Dr Kyle. ‘Have you read them?'

He shook his head.

‘Oh, you must.' Steph became wistful. ‘They are too beautiful. The sentiment is so –
there
. They described in detail how they made love in a church, I think it might have been Notre Dame. This being the eleventh century I'm talking about. Maybe it was an act in praise of God – but it was punished as an act against Him.'

There was a long silence.

‘Heloise's father was a powerful man of the cloth and he simply had to send his wayward daughter to a nunnery,' said Steph. ‘Abelard, on the other hand, was castrated.'

Dr Kyle twisted harder.

‘Oh, you like that, do you?' said Steph. ‘Gabriella.'

Gabriella flipped open her pouch of instruments and produced a small scalpel. She handed it to Steph.

‘Like this,' Steph said. ‘Like this.'

She cut off Dr Kyle's balls with dexterity and threw them in the waste-paper bin, which was standing clean and empty under the desk, ready for the next girl.

Twenty

I tried to enter the church near our flat in Clapham, but a man of the cloth said: ‘Sorry, we're closing,' and shut the door in my face. I wanted to ask for forgiveness. I went round the side through the bushes. I could hear the murmur of a prayer meeting through the window. Bespectacled women had their heads down, Bibles open in their laps. I wanted to tell them all what had happened, but Steph had instructed me with unnerving calm as we drove back to London from Cambridge in the dawn light that if I ever uttered a word, she would ensure that my tenure on the Mental celebrity spokeswoman circuit had ended before it began. ‘But I don't want to be on it,' I said. She seemed not to hear. By way of a bribe, she said she'd organised a spot for me on
Sunday Brunch
, a live Channel 4 morning chat show – very blokey and jokey, but you want to reach outside your target audience, don't you?

‘Who is my target audience?' I asked her.

‘Oh,' she said, flitting a strand of peroxide hair off her face. ‘The mad, the bad, the sad – women, basically.'

I managed to get in the back door of the church and joined the prayer group. The man of the cloth handed me a Bible, but he didn't tell me the page so I had to read over the shoulder of the woman sitting next to me. She looked Scandinavian, around forty, with albino-blonde hair. She smiled and pointed to the passage.

The man sitting next to her raised his hand: ‘But why did God make him sit in ashes while he scraped broken pots over his skin?'

‘Darling,' said the Scandinavian woman. ‘It's broken pottery, not pots. It was
Satan's
suggestion.'

‘But God told Satan that he could suggest whatever he wanted.' The man looked like a banker made redundant; he was rumpled and boyish.

‘God was testing Job,' said the man of the cloth. ‘That's where the boils come in.'

I raised my hand. ‘Excuse me, what religion is this?'

The circle swivelled to look at me.

Then the Scandinavian woman laughed. ‘This isn't a religion,' she said. ‘This is a faith. We include all religions – we're omnists.'

‘Only on the weekend,' said her husband.

Nick was pouring Campari into glasses, cross-hatched and solid. I wanted to get my hands around that glass. I wanted to hold something tightly for a very long time and never let it go. I checked my phone; there was a message from Steph. I didn't read it. I heard a siren in the distance and pinched my twenty-denier tights until a hole and then a ladder ran down my thigh. ‘Oh, forgive me,' I said, rubbing the ladder.

Toril the Scandinavian looked at my hand, rubbing. Nick, who was in fact a banker made redundant, looked too. Their living room was decorated entirely in cream so that the Campari appeared like a vicious red threat.

The siren reached its peak and then died.

‘Thank you so much for having me here,' I told them, gulping the drink. It tasted like blood too thin to be used for a blood transfusion. I needed a blood transfusion. Someone, somewhere, needed a blood transfusion. I tried hard to make the cream walls transform into a carte blanche, a means to start again, but the sun passed behind a cloud at some great distance and it all became dirtied with shadow.

‘It's our pleasure,' said Toril. ‘Please. Tell us a little about yourself. Tell us about your journey.'

‘My journey? Oh, I don't have one of those.' I tried to laugh.

‘Everyone's on a journey,' said Toril. ‘Even Nick.'

He flopped into an armchair and grinned like a fool.

‘Life is a journey,' Toril continued. ‘Only, it doesn't end.' She shook her head vehemently. ‘No. Life goes on and on. It goes on and on and on.'

‘Really?' I said. ‘I'm looking forward to the end. I think it will be a blessed relief.'

‘Never say that.' Toril moved over to the mantelpiece, picked out a book, and handed it to me. ‘Have you read it?'

It was
The Prophet
by Kahlil Gibran. I shook my head.

‘You must. I can give you a reading list if you like. There's so much to read!! Once you realise that you're on a journey.'

‘Life is a constant process of self-improvement,' said Nick. ‘At least in this house.' He'd already downed his Campari.

The drinks cabinet looked antique; wooden owls with electrified eyes were entwined with stems that metamorphised into snakes.

‘Nick has much time on his hands these days,' said Toril. ‘So he is free to explore.'

I checked my phone; there was a message from Dave:

Woke up this morning feeling buzzin
. I'm like a baby with a rattle now that I've got you.

I wrote:

Dave, I don't know if I can be your rattle.

I still didn't open the message from Steph.

‘Do you have any spare rooms here?' I asked Toril.

‘Of course,' she said. ‘Nick and I are childless, sadly. It was one of our greatest misfortunes, but we've had to clamber over adversity to become stronger. Erm.' She held out her empty glass to Nick.

There was another cabinet, bigger, its façade teeming with a greater diversity of wildlife, in the right hand corner of the room.

‘It's our
wunderkammer
– our cabinet of wonders,' Toril explained. ‘Toys. Have you ever heard of the tragedy of success?'

‘Is that a band?' I felt my phone vibrate. It was Sebastian:

I have to see you.

‘No,' said Nick. ‘It's a philosophy that Toril had time to concoct despite being the sole breadwinner.'

‘I made it up on the tube,' said Toril. ‘On the way to work. And compounded the finer points at a retreat that Nick and I go to in Idaho called Skearth. The name is a fusion of sky and earth.' She smiled at some fond memory. ‘The tragedy of success is what afflicts the very successful, those who are predisposed to win. They suffer a superabundance and so run the risk of exploding.'

‘Yeah, I know what you mean.' I nodded. ‘That's like how I felt after Finals. It's what Nietzsche talks about in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
. The prophet comes out of the wilderness after so many years of being alone because he's got so much honey that he can't contain it. He's got to give his honey to … someone.' My eyes met Nick's.

I excused myself and went into the garden to smoke.

I paced in a circle seven times.

Then I opened Steph's text.

I told him that if he presses charges, the President of the college will receive an anonymous email about his affair. He claimed that he wasn't having an affair but I said no doubt you were thinking about having an affair. We all saw the way he was looking at that history of art piece of ass. I said I'd tell about the others too. He's married with children. It will finish his career. Plus does he really want everyone to know that he's got no balls. Steph

The message from Dave was full of unhappy emoticons. He said that he wanted to hold me right now. I replied that it was the middle of the afternoon and people only hold each other at night. He replied straight away that he would hold me day or night, which I was sure was a song lyric. Finally I wrote:

You can have my emotion or my sexuality, Dave. Which one? I'm afraid you can't have both.

As Toril showed me out, she made me promise that I would return to the church the following week, when we would be studying the Book of Leviticus.

I arranged to meet Dave for lunch at Lorelei on Bateman Street in Soho. I texted Sebastian and told him to come along too.

When I arrived, Dave was sitting in front of the wall mural of the Rhineland mermaid, waving to her doomed sailors. Her naked breasts and long blonde hair were out of focus.

‘This place is sick,' said Dave.

‘Freddie and I used to come here all the time when I worked at William's,' I said. ‘Everyone comes here. Media people, film directors, everyone.' I opened the menu. ‘I think I'll have the penne ragù. I always have that.'

The waitress came over; he ordered the same as me. I changed my order to the amatriciana.

‘I thought you said you always have the ragù?' said Dave.

The waitress went away.

The restaurant's front window was fogged artificially so that the view of the street was obscured. Still, I saw the blond beast himself come striding up Bateman Street.

The bell rang.

Sebastian stepped inside and shook off the snow.

‘Hey,' said Dave. ‘Isn't that the guy from last night?'

Sebastian was flushed and intensely good-looking from the cold. I stood up and he kissed me hello. When Dave stood up too, I saw that Sebastian was taller than him.

‘Hey,' said Dave.

‘Hey,' said Sebastian. ‘What's he doing here?'

They stared at each other.

The waitress returned with our food.

Sebastian ordered the ragù and then changed his mind when he saw that Dave had ordered it.

‘I'm surprised you've got the nerve to actually order food,' said Dave.

‘Why?' said Sebastian. ‘I'm hungry.' He ordered the T-bone steak, the only thing on the menu that cost more than £5.

‘I want a steak too actually,' said Dave. ‘Yeah. I really feel like a steak.'

‘But your food's already arrived,' I said.

‘Well, I want a steak
and
pasta. The pasta is only the starter.'

Sebastian had brought along his fishing tackle. He propped it against the table. He started talking about how Allegra was on the verge of totally smashing it and how he was so in love with her, more in love than ever.

Dave relaxed.

When Sebastian's steak arrived, I said: ‘You know, it's a real shame. I thought I could kill two birds with one stone but I haven't killed either bird.' I pushed my plate away.

‘What are you talking about?' said Dave.

‘Doppelgängers are supposed to die when they see their twin,' I said. ‘But you're both still alive.'

I walked out.

When I got back to the flat, Samuel was bursting balloon animals with the back of his diamond stud earring. Freddie was screaming in his underwear about how not every single person in the world wants to curl up in a little ball and watch Disney cartoons all weekend.

‘Has anyone seen my wedding dress?' I said. ‘I'm going to see this old guy, James, and he wants me to wear it. I wore it to the awards thing but I can't find it anywhere. Maybe I left it there.' I moved to make a cup of coffee, but Samuel barged into me and pointed the back of his stud in my face.

‘You brought me back to him,' he shouted. ‘You only did it to get revenge on me for being related to Allegra, didn't you?'

I said nothing, holding the kettle.

‘Didn't you?'

The crazy woman was standing outside Clapham Common tube. She was wearing my wedding dress. She had a black eye. Her cheek was bruised. There was no sign of the doll.

‘Hey,' I said. ‘That's mine. That was my mother's.'