Eat My Heart Out (3 page)

Three

Dear Vic,

Last night was truly extraordinary. Thank you.

Plato said that we were all born with two heads and four arms and four legs. I didn't have a Hellenistic education because I went to a comprehensive school. I'm the only one of all my friends who went to a comprehensive school – apart from Sebastian, who isn't my friend or my boyfriend any more. He comes from a decadent, progressive family in Islington. He is one of six siblings who all look intersex, but they are all excellent at a musical instrument. I never did that either. Nietzsche would say I suffer from
ressentiment
.

Sebastian looks a bit like a Nietzschean blond beast. He started off at an exclusive left-wing boarding school, but then he got expelled at the age of twelve for fighting. He had to fight at my school too. The rudeboys hated him because he was upper middle-class. I remember this one time when we were thirteen. We were in the corridor between lessons. It was packed with people screaming and fighting and the teachers couldn't control it. Sebastian pretended that he was pushed too close to me and held my hand by accident but I knew he did it on purpose. So I bent his hand backwards.

He was in a lot of pain but he wouldn't scream for mercy. Instead he grabbed my hair and got me in a headlock. I bit his stomach. He wouldn't let go and I wouldn't let go. Neither one of us would ever let go.

We walked to the next lesson like that – a two-headed monster. It took the teacher at least half an hour to separate us. There was a circle of red marks on his white shirt – it was his blood, but it was my teeth.

Soon after that we fell in love.

Plato said that Zeus got angry and ripped all the hermaphrodites in half and made them into normal humans with only one head, two arms, and two legs. But they were doomed by an overwhelming sense of what they had lost. They were doomed to spend the rest of their lives searching for the half that they lost.

That's how I've felt since I left your terraced house this morning. I spoke to the operators in the kitchen. They seemed really nice. What's the name of their blog again?

With love,

Ann-Marie X

Back at the flat, I lay on my bed for about three hours, watching Beyoncé's ‘Déjà Vu' video again and again and again. I watched her shimmy across the screen in a colonial-style grass skirt against a fake backdrop of dry earth and deep sky. She waved her beautiful arms around dementedly and kicked up the dust and then collapsed on the floor at the song's crescendo, screaming about seeing her lover everywhere she went
.

I pulled on my red silk kimono. The bathroom door was closed. I could hear Freddie running a bath and the squeal of an American cartoon.

‘I'm coming to jump in there with you in just about ten minutes!' I shouted.

I had a look in the living room; it was fucked. Freddie's portrait of me had been unhinged from the wall and lay on the coffee table, covered in white dust and a rolled note. He painted it last summer on the roof at Hammerton Hall, the stately home where his father keeps all his art but never visits. Maxine, the housekeeper, had decked the roof out in fairy lights and candles because I think she wanted to turn Freddie straight. I had lain on blue velvet with my clothes off while he pretended to be seized by inspiration: a cigarette clenched between his teeth, splattered with paint the approximate shade of my skin. He had insisted that I wear a sapphire necklace that belonged to his mother. The result was a hybrid of Francis Bacon and soft-focus '70s porn. My mouth was a yawning black chasm and there were boxing-gloves on my feet, but my lips and nipples were painted a tender pink. Maxine said that the portrait made me look about ten times more beautiful than I am in real life. Freddie loathed it; he couldn't even accept it as self-consciously derivative. He said that it revealed him in a light that he didn't want to be revealed in. I said that I thought the portrait was supposed to be of me? He said no – he had exposed
himself
as sentimental, as sentimental as a dirty old flasher in the park. I asked him: ‘How is a flasher sentimental?' And he said: ‘A flasher is just a Romantic at heart. He just wants to be naked under the trees.' Freddie decided to give up painting altogether and invest his creative potency in video art. Now he only works in 8mm.

Next to the chaise longue, there was a bust of Freddie's uncle, Professor Timothy Frank, an esteemed anthropologist. The bust was commissioned by Freddie's father who hated Freddie's uncle. It looked like the remnant of an exploded car factory. The face was more or less a steering wheel embedded in a tyre.

There was a lot of tribal hunting equipment too: scythes and axes, charged with a preternatural energy. They were full of wrath. They didn't want to be estranged from their country of origin. There was a taxidermied peacock with fanned feathers.

In the kitchen, I ate some chicken livers and stale bread, checking my phone constantly. Vic hadn't called or texted.

I went back upstairs.

Now the bathroom door was ajar. Disney's
The Little Mermaid
was playing on our old mini TV, which stood on a marble plinth at the end of the bath. I watched the screen as I got my tights off in the hall.

‘Keep singing!' barked Ursula the sea witch, reaching her phantom fingers down Ariel's throat and usurping her voice.

Ariel spasmed; her tail turned into legs.

‘This bit is like so romantic,' came a voice. It wasn't Freddie's voice.

I pushed the door open.

There was a boy in the bath. He wasn't Freddie.

‘Who the fuck are you?' I said.

The boy turned his freckled, crying face towards me.

I knew who he was; he was Samuel, Allegra's younger brother. I hadn't seen him since the day after the night of the crème de menthe – that was nearly two years ago. He used to be a preppy little bastard but now he had transformed into a hipster of some description.

‘Get out,' I said.

His hair was ginger, not black like hers. His body was thin and white, but not exactly alabaster like hers. His eyes were not grey like hers, but hazel. He had the same high domed forehead as her and I hated him violently.

I attempted to haul the TV into the bath water.

He leapt out.

The cord strained. The TV rocked on the edge.

It didn't go in.

Now Ariel was scrabbling on the shore, trying to figure out how to walk.

Samuel clung to me, wet and ludicrous. I pushed him off. He was almost as tall as Vic. With shaking hands, he returned the TV to its plinth. He got back in the water.

A moronic smile appeared on his face. ‘Look.' He pointed to the screen.

Eric the prince was trying to interpret Ariel's damp-eyed sign-language. They were standing by a rock on the beach.

Samuel put on my exfoliating mitts and lavered himself up. ‘Freddie is so analogue,' he said. ‘That's why I love him.'

I tried to drag Samuel out of the bath by the arm, but he shook me off with ease. He said, sadly: ‘Yeah, Freddie told me you had a lot of anger management issues after you totally caught the G. She gave you the G. Because even though people are from the same blood buffet, it doesn't mean they're the same type of sick gangster. What she did was frigidaire.'

‘What the fuck are you talking about?' I said. ‘Where's Freddie?'

He guffawed. ‘Sleeping it off. Last night we got more than shellacked and Freddie boggled and like got hit on by a flavourless but then he hit on me and I was like you can totally tap this. You're a juicer and a hypo but I love you.'

‘What?'

‘Oh, yeah, right.' He blushed. ‘That's how they speak in Brooklyn. In Williamsburg. I'm reading this.' A wet copy of
Shoplifting from American Apparel
by Tao Lin lay on the bath mat. ‘Have you read it? Freddie told me to read it. He's going to improve me.'

‘That's mine,' I said. ‘I haven't read it.'

He laughed. ‘Where are my manners, babes?' He held out his hand. ‘I'm Samuel.'

‘I remember.' I didn't take his hand.

‘Freddie told me that you two are like majorly liquid even though he's not a CK1.'

‘A what?'

‘That you're on a spectrum.'

‘We're not on a spectrum.'

‘He said it was like
The Cement Garden
and incestuous and shit all up in this place but that I shouldn't be perturbed if you got jealous because one thing he likes and can't stand about you is your temper.' Samuel turned back to the TV.

Now the crazy French chef was trying to murder the blatantly racist rendition of a crab with a cleaver.

Samuel laughed until the tears welled up in his eyes again. He addressed me with sincerity: ‘You're the coolest bitch I've ever seen.'

Freddie was concealed inside the silk drapes of his four-poster. The room was fetid and smelt of yeast. Sex. The curtains were closed, but I could see the full blue condom that had bellyflopped into a brogue.

I crawled into the bed. ‘Freddie.'

He was asleep.

‘Freddie, why did you let Allegra's brother in here?' I prised his eyelids open. His eyeballs were a brilliant red. ‘Get him out.'

Freddie smiled and pulled me down against him so that my face was pressed against his naked chest. ‘This is nice,' he said. ‘I love you.' He kissed me on the forehead.

I lay down next to him and smoked a cigarette. Then I got up and attempted to lock the door, but the lock was broken.

Samuel appeared wrapped in my towel and sang in a falsetto: ‘Say My Name!' He got into bed too.

I was stuck between them.

The gloom was unbearable; I got up and opened the curtains.

‘Freddie says you love Beyoncé because you went to a black school and that is sick,' said Samuel.

The morning light seemed to wash the room. I saw the full horror: more full condoms; three more. More white dust.

Now Freddie and Samuel were kissing, graphically.

I shook Freddie until he turned away from Samuel and turned towards me. ‘It's finally happened!' I said. ‘I felt it – the
coup de foudre
!! Vic and I had sex so hard last night that now I can't even walk properly!!'

‘Deck,' said Samuel.

I spat in his face.

He looked like he would cry again.

‘That's not very nice, is it?' said Freddie. ‘You got on very well with Samuel when we all spent that lovely weekend together in Buckinghamshire.' He turned to Samuel. ‘When your parents were in the Maldives.'

‘Yeah, it was awful.' I addressed Samuel: ‘You've changed. You used to be a chess champion.'

‘Yeah but now I'm a hipster.' Samuel nodded earnestly. Then he shook his head. ‘No. I forgot. I'm not meant to say that I'm a hipster. But I am one.' He bared his private school teeth: they were straight and white like hers. ‘I got the braces taken off and everything! I was just waiting to get them taken off before I made my last exit to Hackney.'

Dear Vic,

A man with arrested development has invaded the house. If you don't write back to me soon I'm going to kill myself. That is not an empty threat. I never did see the point in living unless some form of meaning was erected out of the raw, overwhelming nothingness. I guess that's the point of being an artist. Are you an artist, Vic? Could you ever be one? I doubt it.

I'm glad. Artists are like megalomaniac ageing despots who build halls of mirrors around themselves in order to block out the world that dares to be itself e.g. autonomous. They veer between arrogance and insecurity.

I think I'm falling more and more in love with you.

Ann-Marie X

I sat in the basement on an upturned plastic bucket and switched on the projector. I had to cover my nose and mouth; the smell of sewage was unbearable. It was dark and I was alone except for the mice. We turned this space into a screening room a few months ago.

Our Super-8 installations flickered like sun on water. There I was dressed up in a mohair jumper and white shirt, my hair coiffed, my ankle-socks pristine, preparing milk and cookies in a Formica kitchen, kissing two child actors whom Freddie had hired for the day, laying them down for a nap, duct-taping the bedroom door shut and sticking my head in the oven. There I was dressed up in an Edwardian hat, traipsing into the River Cam in the middle of the night, piling rocks into my pockets, looking depressed though ready. Drowning. There I was gassing myself in a parked car in a garage – that was Anne Sexton. She was less well known, but Freddie had wanted a trilogy. His lucky number was three, but only if pressed – really, he wasn't superstitious at all. He'd won a young film-makers' bursary from Sundance.