Eat My Heart Out Read online

  ‘I’m a criminal.’ Vic slithered off the bed. ‘I belong down here,’ he said.

  Nine

  ‘Samuel.’ I knocked on Freddie’s door. It was Monday morning. ‘Samuel.’ I wanted to tell him what Stephanie had told me about the mermaid sacrificing everything for love and then suffering excruciating pains in her feet with every step that she took, but when I entered Freddie’s room, Samuel had gone. Freddie was alone.

  Clapham Common was covered with snow.

  On the tube, I read Steph’s book:

  Women use the weapons of the weak. We are coquettish; we preen. We are less than ourselves in order to get more for ourselves. What some scoundrel ‘feminist’ academic recently called erotic capital.

  I skipped to a chapter called ‘Free Love?’

  I remember reading an article about a beautiful young blonde girl with flowers in her hair and the words FREE LOVE painted in red on her forehead. She was a hip girl in Greenwich Village. This was the late ’60s. She was having fun. She was far-out. I can’t recall the details exactly but I know that she was high and she was naked and she was dancing. The crowd were far-out too. They were nice. Everyone was in love with everyone else because the old bonds had been destroyed. All bonds were oppressive so they were all destroyed. So there was no duty, no restraint.

  The party turned against the girl. It happened in the street. She was gang-raped by men who were flower-children. Everyone watched. No one helped. I can’t remember if she was murdered or if she simply sustained horrendous injuries, but those words remained printed on her forehead: FREE LOVE.

  A woman opposite was reading the Metro: there was a picture of a man with his face bandaged. He was ironing, grinning at the camera.

  When the woman got off, I picked up the paper. The bandaged man lived in a twenty-first-century household; he did the housework while his wife earned the money. He had been ironing like a bitch when the phone rang. Because men’s brains aren’t programmed to multi-task, he had absent-mindedly picked up the searing hot iron and stuck it to the side of his face. He hadn’t had time to say Hello? before the iron branded his skin with the mark of his emasculation.

  I was late for work by an hour. I went round the back and said good morning to the slaves in the kitchen. There was a treacherous trail of ice leading up the stairs to the offices on the top floor. I could hear William screaming: ‘They could come at any moment! Any moment, they could come!’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  William was bent over his desk, scrabbling through picked animal remains. It was mostly bones, fine and delicate. Not cow or pig, too big to be chicken. ‘Rabbit!’ he ranted. ‘Rabbit is for eating, OK?’ He brandished a skull. ‘In this country, we do not fuck rabbits.’

  Michel the sous-chef was leaning against a crate of gin, his arms folded. ‘I was just trying to show her a good time. She should think herself lucky.’ He laughed. ‘I fucked all of them just the same. Even the fat ones. She should be grateful.’

  The rabbit remains were making a terrible mess on the desk. Invoices were covered in bone jelly. William’s hands were glistening with fat. ‘It was rape,’ he was saying. ‘I’m going to find the evidence.’

  Michel laughed some more. ‘William, you English are the fucking crazy bastards! How are you going to find evidence of rape in stock bones? We only saved it for stock.’

  William was opening and closing desk drawers. He found a battered pair of glasses. ‘I haven’t put these on for a long time,’ he said. ‘But now I’m going to put them on.’ He inspected each bone, turning it over.

  ‘I admit,’ said Michel. ‘I did it. Everyone saw it. Everyone laughed.’ He pointed to me. ‘She saw it.’

  ‘But I didn’t laugh,’ I said.

  William registered my presence for the first time. ‘You saw the rape?’

  ‘It wasn’t really rape,’ I said. ‘Because the rabbits were dead.’

  ‘So it’s necromancy,’ said William.

  ‘Necrophilia, do you mean?’ I said. ‘And bestiality, yeah.’

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ said Michel. ‘She’s just the door bitch. She don’t have no skills except looking nice.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Actually I hang the coats up too.’

  William picked up a handful of bones and then rained them down on the desk. ‘The people could come at any moment.’

  ‘What people?’ said Michel. ‘Customers?’

  ‘We call them guests,’ screeched William. ‘Not the guests. The TV people, asking if one of their contestants can have a trial.’

  Michel made a face at me.

  I laughed.

  ‘This is a trial,’ said William.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Michel. ‘You’re an asshole. What about that time you stuck that oyster up your asshole? We served that.’

  William almost smiled. ‘That was before I became a professional.’

  ‘That was last week,’ I said.

  There was a poster of a baby peeking out of a flowerpot over William’s desk.

  ‘Let me put it to you very simply.’ William swung his desk chair backwards and straddled it like a mobster. ‘I had a call from immigration.’

  The atmosphere in the room changed.

  ‘You’re not French,’ said William. ‘And your name isn’t Michel. And you’ve got no papers.’ He paused, sadistically. ‘You’ve got no papers so you’ve got no right to be working in my establishment.’

  ‘But I’ve been working here for nearly a month,’ said Michel. ‘Payday is Friday.’

  William stood up. He said, breezily: ‘Yes, well, Mihaita.’

  Michel went white.

  ‘You are a Romanian national. We can’t pay you for your work so far and if you don’t make a fuss and go quietly then we won’t make a fuss about the rabbit rape.’

  ‘You have to pay him!’ I said. ‘He works about fourteen hours a day for you!’

  William threw a handful of bones at my head; they hit me.

  ‘If he goes, I go,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not going,’ said Michel.

  ‘OK then!’ I shouted. ‘I quit.’ I paced across the room and grabbed the lost property box. It was full of the designer clothes that all the private members forgot when they got fucked in the club.

  The brothel opposite had been boarded up. The walls were black with smoke damage. I sprinted around Soho for a while, nearly breaking my neck on the ice, dazzled by freedom.

  There was one bar open. It had a sign in the window: What is your future?

  I went downstairs.

  ‘Running Up That Hill’ by Kate Bush was playing. The bar was empty. There was a picture of Shirley Temple stencilled onto a mirror: her ringlets, her angelic fake face, puckered in a look of surprise. There was a map of the human chakras and a smell of incense, burnt out.

  I rang the bell on the bar.

  A Rottweiler growled at me, then barked. A woman appeared and castigated it. She had pendulous breasts. A gold silhouette of Queen Nefertiti bounced on a chain between them. She looked old and perceptive. ‘We’re closed,’ she said.

  ‘Please. Can I at least have a drink?’

  She stared at me. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Double Jameson’s on the rocks?’

  She poured it slowly.

  Time had slowed.

  ‘I can’t pay you,’ I said. ‘I’m unemployed.’

  ‘What do you have?’

  ‘This.’ I rooted through the lost property box. There was a pashmina from Oscar de la Renta. I tossed it to her.

  She smelt it.

  ‘You can sell it on eBay,’ I said.

  ‘OK.’ She sat down behind the bar and produced a pack of tarot cards. She got a whiskey for herself. It was still only ten in the morning. She lit a cigar; it was laced with something – hibiscus, perhaps. I asked her for one; she obliged. The smoke curled around us. The song changed to ‘Wuthering Heights’.

  ‘Greatest Hits.’ Her voice was rough. She turned the first ca
rd over. It showed an unsmiling sun and a circle of broken columns. ‘You have been cursed,’ she said.

  ‘I knew it.’

  ‘Yes. Some witches have put a curse on you.’ She paused, thoughtful. ‘They must have got your photo from somewhere.’

  ‘When?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe they took it on their phone when you weren’t looking.’ She turned over another card. It showed a man hanging upside down by a noose tied round his neck.

  ‘But death means rebirth, right?’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘Death means death. You play near the gallows.’

  I tried to think. ‘No. But Allegra was always going up to Castle Mound in Cambridge, where the gallows used to be. She said thousands of people were hung there. It looks over the whole of the countryside. One night she went up there when there was a storm. It was raining, and there was thunder and lightning and everything. She said she wanted to feel the charge of the dead. She tried to go into a kind of Bacchic trance. She had had a very classical education. But when she came back, she was drenched and she said she felt nothing. She couldn’t feel the charge. She couldn’t feel the dead. She said she felt stupid. She sat on the radiator and then she just kind of looked at me and said: You’ve got the charge, Ann-Marie. Naturally. I haven’t got it. She seemed really resentful. That was before anything happened with Sebastian. Freddie said the charge meant being evil. Then Allegra said: My housemistress always told us that achievement is 99 per cent effort and only 1 per cent natural ability. So all I have to do is like work really hard. Freddie laughed and said: To become evil? What are you talking about, Allegra? But I knew what she was talking about.’

  The woman contemplated me through her shroud of smoke. She turned over another card. It showed a naked man and a woman, bound by a black snake. ‘The lovers,’ she said. ‘You lost your twin. Your mirror. Your best friend.’

  I went cold. ‘I mean, I guess that was implicit in the story I just told you,’ I said. ‘You could have gauged that from my story.’

  She shook her head. ‘No. You have suffered a fracture of the soul. You are cut in half. One part of you is woman, the other part is striving to be man.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a man!’ I said.

  ‘You want to be tough and alone like a man. Sleep with men like a man sleeps with women.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘No.’ I stood up.

  ‘You lost him because you wanted to be like him. To be better than him.’

  ‘I wanted to be equal to him,’ I shouted.

  ‘You wanted to be the same as him.’

  ‘No!’ I shouted. ‘Equal!’

  The Rottweiler barked. ‘Men and women can never be equal,’ said the woman. ‘It’s not written in the stars. There is one more card.’

  I sat down again.

  She turned it over. ‘The Empress.’ It showed a woman in an orange dress in a meadow. ‘Fertility,’ she said. ‘You have three sons?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Two sons?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘One daughter?’

  ‘I haven’t got any kids.’

  ‘The witches drowned your kids in a river.’

  I stood up and walked out. ‘Babooshka’ was playing.

  ‘I want my old job back,’ I told Madeline.

  She was manning the reception.

  ‘Look, I’m dressed for it and everything,’ I said. I gestured to the pussy bow.

  The phone rang; she took a reservation.

  When she hung up, I said: ‘I was really excited at first, but now I’m scared. Really, really scared.’ I was sweating. ‘I’m scared of freedom.’

  She stared at me.

  ‘Where’s William?’ I said.

  ‘He’s gone to A&E. He had a fight with Michel.’

  ‘Well, I need to talk to him. I’ll call him on his mobile.’

  ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘He’s unconscious. And he told me that if you came and asked for your job back, I was to say no absolutely not, fuck off.’

  ‘Well, that’s not very nice. How did he say that if he was unconscious?’

  ‘He said that before. And oh – this came for you.’ She went into the cloakroom and returned with a white box.

  I sat on a bench in Soho Square and opened it. There was a blue fluffy toy cat inside, wearing a pair of crotchless, decayed white lace knickers. The knickers weren’t stitched onto the cat; they had been added.

  There was a note:

  I HEAR YOUR SIGHS OF ECSTASY RECUR THROUGHOUT MY DREAMS AGAINST A BACKGROUND RHYTHM OF A MILLION PURRING PUSSIES. I AWAIT. YOURS, JAMES X

  I walked along Oxford Street without a purpose. To my left, a man was selling fake celebrity-endorsed perfumes to a crowd of tourists, who spritzed themselves liberally with the testers so that the toxically sweet scent conspired with the pollution to make the air unbearable. That must have been where Madeline bought hers. Another man was watching out for the police. The snow had stopped, but the gutters were lined with it. The white had turned to black, not quite black. There were cars and cars. A bus swung to a stop and a woman carrying ten Liberty bags and a dog got off. The dog got trapped inside the automatic doors; its paws skidded everywhere as the bus began to move again. The dog was being strangled by the lead. A man in a suit banged on the bus driver’s window. The dog was saved. I could feel the onset of an existential crisis. The crowd was bombing towards me but there was no face that I recognised. I wanted to see Sebastian. I wanted so badly to see him that I tried by the power of my will to turn these strangers’ faces into his. I wanted to see his blond hair and his absurd, rugged beard. I wanted to see his tall shape. I wanted to tell him that I would forgive him for everything but then I remembered that I was guilty as well. I wanted to ask his forgiveness. I wanted to say I’m sorry for boiling Allegra’s hamster but she really had it coming. I wanted to say I’m sorry for that night at the dreadful May ball, when I made you dance with me on a very slippery floor, surrounded by all those Cambridge girls, dressed up like catalogue princesses in two-tone gauze. And all the men in top hats and tails. The band was playing ‘Big Spender’. The princesses tried to roll their hips in a pseudolesbian way for all the men who watched with contempt. Or was it lust? Jasper was there. That was the night he and Allegra met. I told him to ask her to dance, and he did, and I told him that she wanted to sleep with him, and then she did. But before that I was watching your eyes the whole time because your eyes were watching her and I was sick with jealousy. Freddie spilled champagne on the floor. And then I made you push me away and twirl me back towards you, holding my hand all the time. I was holding your hand. And then you fell. You broke your leg.

  I had reached Oxford Circus tube. The God squad man was pacing in his usual spot, blasting the crowd with capitalist revisions of the Bible: ‘Do you want to be a sinner or a winner?’

  ‘Can I borrow your megaphone for just one moment?’ I asked him.

  He moved his mouth away from it. ‘No.’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘I want to tell everyone that love is a chimera.’

  ‘I don’t know what that word means.’

  ‘Love?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Chimera.’

  I followed the crowd down the steps to the tube. I couldn’t decide whether to go left or right. I stared at the list of stops for a long time. I could hear the scream of a train approaching, northbound. The dead air lifted my hair. It was warm. I ran at the tracks as the scream turned into a thunderous wail, but my decision to die came just a second too late. The train was already in the station. I got on it. A woman was knitting to my right. I watched her fingers loop and curl the wool over the needles, clicking happily away. She was making a red scarf. I wanted to throw my arms around her so badly but I decided to get off instead and found myself at Euston, power-walking to a place where Sebastian and I had spent days and years together.

  The guard at the British Library checked my bag and then I we
nt down to the locker room and left my stuff. I took the lift up to the first floor and scanned the faces of the people along the gangway, but no one was Sebastian. A couple were leaning in for a kiss against the railing around the glass tower of books that ran through the centre of the building.

  The guards in Rare Books were happy to see me. They asked me why I never came any more and I told them that I had finished my exams. I decided not to tell them that I’d got a double-starred first. ‘You lost so much weight,’ they said. ‘We were worried about you.’ They asked me where my fella was and I said I didn’t know. I said I was looking for him – had they seen him? They couldn’t remember.

  I sat down opposite an octogenarian who had fallen asleep with his head on a pile of books. I got out my copy of Falling Out of Fate, and read at random:

  Telos was Aristotle’s word for an overarching goal or guiding spirit in life. It was a guiding light, a thing to move towards. A meaning. A telos is what all humans need in order to make life meaningful. The point of philosophy was to learn how to live the good life – not a life of limitless pleasure, but a life of balance. Ethics and pleasure were not dissociable.

  The octogenarian grunted.

  Now we have lost our telos. There is no spirit to guide us. Or rather, we have been left free to invent or choose our own. I say ‘left’ free. We have been abandoned by God in our freedom. Although He, in the form of the church, the family, and, in women’s case, the patriarchy, oppressed us, controlled us, He also watched over us. He told us what to do. He told us the difference between right and wrong. And when we did wrong, we were punished. Now the rules are hazy.

  Love is the telos of the modern world. It is a modern idea. We reach for The One as a means to construct a whole ethical and pleasurable universe. In short, to give life meaning.

  The purveyors of love – the love songs, romantic comedies, ads, dating sites – promote love as a route to solving the meaning of life. These products are for the most part directed at women. The job of loving remains feminine. This is what University of Chicago academic Lauren Berlant calls ‘the female complaint’. Turn on any TV in any country in the Western world and you will find a channel on which a woman is complaining that her man doesn’t love her enough, doesn’t need her enough, isn’t emotionally available or faithful or honest or committed enough. The whine goes on; but it is not natural. It is—