Eat My Heart Out Page 11

  The octogenarian sat up. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Our eyes met.

  He got up and exited the reading room. I followed. He looked over his shoulder, unnerved. I smiled. I followed him onto the smoking terrace. He lit a pipe. I lit a cigarette. The statue of Mr Punch bowed to us, grimacing.

  ‘What are you in for?’ I asked the octogenarian.

  ‘Botany,’ he said, grimly.

  I followed him back through the cafeteria and that’s when I saw Sebastian.

  He was sliding a dirty tray of food into the rack. He didn’t see me. My heart started pounding. I followed him to the water fountain and hung back while he filled his cup. He drank three cups. Then he went into the men’s toilets. I must have been in a trance because I followed him in there. Men were pissing against the wall. They clocked eyes on me and started proclaiming that I was a girl. Sebastian had disappeared into one of the cubicles. I ignored the men. I waited for him.

  And waited.

  I felt a hand on my arm. Someone was trying to get me out.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  When the cubicle door did finally open, I saw that it wasn’t Sebastian at all.

  Ten

  I was standing outside Elephant & Castle tube. The snow had started again. The hideous pink shopping centre had been painted blue, but the elephant impaled on a spike persisted in its lurid pinkness. The roundabout roared in the blizzard. I called Freddie.

  ‘I need Sebastian and Allegra’s address,’ I told him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘No.’ He sounded fucked. ‘Samuel’s gone.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But Vic’s still here. He showed me his medal.’

  ‘Please, Freddie.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I’ll give you their address if you promise to come to my uncle’s for cream tea and pretend to be my girlfriend,’ he said.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘OK, I won’t give you their address then.’

  I could smell the lamb cooking before Allegra answered my knock on her bright green door. There was no bell. They lived in a low-rise block of council flats.

  ‘This place is no way near as nice as mine and Freddie’s,’ I told her. ‘Literally, how can you bring yourself?’

  ‘Oh, hi,’ she said. Her voice was rough. Her glorious black hair was clumped in a knot at the back. She was wearing Sebastian’s old T-shirt: I Wanna Start A Revolution From My Bed! ‘He’s not here. If that’s what you want.’

  ‘No.’ I hesitated. ‘I don’t want – that.’

  ‘What do you want then?’ Her legs were bare.

  Behind her, I could see backpacks open and books in piles. One corner of the living room was covered with newspaper and splattered with red paint.

  ‘Tea?’ She turned and wandered back down the hall, leaving the door open.

  After a few moments, I followed her. I closed the door behind me.

  The TV was on: Nighty Night, series two. Julia Davis in red lace was being chased over Cornish hills to the soundtrack of Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’.

  Allegra turned it off.

  ‘I love that programme,’ I said.

  She boiled the kettle. ‘I know.’

  ‘That’s my programme. I introduced you to that programme.’

  ‘I know. Seb doesn’t like it. He doesn’t think it’s funny.’

  ‘It is funny.’

  The living room was small.

  ‘My god, Allegra. You can’t swing a cat in here.’

  She poured the tea. ‘Has my brother moved in with you?’

  ‘No – I don’t know. He’s a nice boy.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘But Mum and Dad are so angry with him. More angry than they are at me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m not doing the Bar Professional Training Course.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She looked stern. ‘Because if I become a lawyer, I’ll die.’

  I laughed.

  She handed me the tea.

  ‘Have you poisoned this, Allegra?’ I said. ‘Because Freddie knows where I am. Plenty of people know where I am.’

  She studied my face. ‘Are you OK? You seem a bit … mentally unstable.’

  I laughed. ‘Yeah! Cos I’ve just been to the library. It’s a mentally unstable kind of place.’

  The window looked onto another window. I watched a woman watching TV; she got up, left the room, and returned with a banana.

  ‘It’s the over-achiever thing,’ Allegra was saying. ‘Like the J. D. Salinger thing. The Glass family. Because my parents had this thing that geniuses – genii.’ She laughed.

  I didn’t laugh.

  ‘Are made not born,’ she went on. ‘So they pushed Samuel like really hard. With the whole chess thing. He became anthropophobic for a while.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘It means being scared of people,’ she said.

  ‘I know what it means.’

  ‘He just used to cower in the corner of the room between moves during competitions and stuff. From when he was about thirteen – he was fine before that. Mum and Dad said something happened to him at school because he wouldn’t go. He had CBT but it didn’t work.’ She sighed. ‘And now he’s dropped out. I was hoping he would be the good one so I could be the bad one!’ She smiled; I wanted to put my sunglasses on. ‘But I’m like not talking to Mum and Dad at all now and I hate them.’

  ‘That’s not very nice.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not very nice. I’m not prepared to be a simulacrum of a human being.’ She became angry. ‘I mean, why don’t I just make a façade of myself – like the kind of façades they put on buildings when they’re being renovated. The façade looks like the building but it isn’t actually—’

  ‘I know what a simulacrum is, Allegra.’

  ‘So when they come to London for dinner, I can just like send the façade of myself out to have dinner with them instead of me and operate it by remote control while the real me just sits on the sofa. Here. I can make it say all the right things at all the right times.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

  Silence.

  ‘Do you want to know where Sebastian is?’ she said.

  We were sitting on the arms of opposite sofas.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘He’s gone fishing!’ She laughed. ‘He’s at the Walthamstow Reservoir. Well, really it’s in Tottenham. He spends days and days there.’

  ‘In this weather? Allegra – you’ve pushed him over the edge. He’s trying to freeze himself to death to get away from you.’

  ‘That’s not a very dignified thing to say.’

  I stood up.

  She stood up too. Then she sat down again. She extracted a hairbrush from her bag and started brushing that long, stringy hair. The brush snagged at the back. Her hair transformed from dull black to inconceivably luscious black, like an advert. It shone and shone and seemed to absorb all the light in the room so that I began to wither like one of Ursula the sea witch’s poor unfortunate souls. A curtain of black fell over her face. ‘Can’t we just let bygones be bygones?’ she said.

  I stared at her.

  ‘I mean.’ She flipped the curtain of hair back and her face appeared. ‘What you and Seb had was sweet.’

  Lights had started to pop in my vision.

  ‘But you have to admit that you blocked him,’ she said.

  ‘Blocked what?’

  ‘You blocked him. His talent. Men like Sebastian come along once in a generation.’

  I laughed. ‘Are you joking?!’

  She considered me, sadly. ‘I’m sorry he doesn’t want you any more. I really am.’

  I ran at her and managed to get a fistful of that hair. She grabbed my hand. I pulled and pulled, waving her head around the room. She was screaming. When she loosened her grip on my hand, I yanked, hard. Strands of black hair came away
from her scalp. There was blood. I staggered backwards. She clutched her head. Her face was wrecked and flushed – more beautiful.

  ‘Get out,’ she said.

  ‘No.’ I stormed into the first room that I saw. It was their bedroom. There was Sebastian’s Goya print on the wall. It showed Saturn the old man with hollow, hunted eyes eating his baby son. Saturn had the baby’s head in his mouth; he looked caught in the act, furtive and guilty and disgusting.

  She was panting behind me.

  ‘Oh, when is he going to let those bloody daddy issues go?’ I shouted.

  ‘He can’t let it go!’ she screamed. ‘That’s the fuel of his art!’

  ‘What art?!’

  ‘Art!!!’ she cried, crazily. ‘His life is a work of art! He is a work of art!’

  Suddenly I was exhausted. I sat on the end of their bed. ‘Can I smoke in here?’

  She stared at me.

  ‘Well, can I?’

  ‘If you must. I always tell Seb to go outside.’ She sat down beside me. ‘But I guess it’s OK.’

  We sat for a long time.

  I was looking at Saturn.

  Finally, she said: ‘I’m sorry about what happened.’

  More silence.

  Then I said: ‘I think I walked out of my finals to make Sebastian love me again. I never thought of it before. But I think I thought maybe, if I failed my exams then maybe he would love me.’

  ‘But I got a first and he still loves me,’ said Allegra.

  Freddie had told me to meet him outside the fish and chip shop on Endell Street in Covent Garden. There were three fish and chip shops on Endell Street.

  I walked up and down for a while.

  Then I caught sight of that stooped, devastated form. Vic.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, punching Vic too hard on the arm. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Freddie came out of the shop, his face in a bag of chips. He looked ill. ‘Said he wanted to see you.’ Freddie’s mouth was full. ‘Said he couldn’t stand not to see you.’

  ‘Ann-Marie,’ said Vic. ‘I’ve taken the day off work. I don’t want to go to work any more. I don’t want to operate any more.’ He took my hand. ‘I want to be with you.’

  I pulled my hand away.

  ‘I want to be a bohemian,’ he said.

  ‘Come on, Freddie,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

  We left Vic waiting in the snow across the road from Freddie’s uncle’s flat.

  Freddie and I were sitting in a bamboo minimalist paradise. Professor Timothy Frank, retired, was leaning backwards in his bamboo throne as though a gale force wind were blowing in his face. To his left, there was a taxidermied seal. Its tail was raised and its fur was sparse and yellow. There was a weird, happy smile on its face.

  Professor Frank saw me looking at it. ‘Do you know why it is smiling like that?’

  Despite being made out of bits of car, the conceptual bust in our living room had captured something of the old man’s thunderous authority.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Because it has been got by the Mahaha.’ He laughed.

  The professor’s wife scuttled in with a tray of scones, strawberry jam, double, single, whipped, and clotted cream, and tea. Her hair was short like a boy’s. Her face was delicate and rotten. She was a rotten peach. She whispered instead of talking.

  They both looked about one hundred years old.

  Freddie and I smiled and said thank you very much.

  ‘Well, do you know who the Mahaha is?’ said the professor.

  ‘No, Uncle,’ said Freddie. ‘I’m afraid I do not.’

  ‘Did I not tell you to read arch and anth?’ he hollered.

  ‘Yes, Uncle,’ said Freddie. ‘But it’s all paid off now – studying history of art. I’m a curator. And a video artist. Thanks to your kind patronage. Letting us use your space.’

  ‘My space?’ said the professor. ‘It is not a space. It is a flat.’ He slathered his scone with both clotted and whipped cream. ‘When Freddie was a little boy, he loved nothing better than to hear my tales of the Arctic. For a long time Greenland was my area.’

  ‘You owned it?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘I am against colonialism of all kinds. Besides.’ He looked at his wife. ‘We couldn’t afford it on an academic pension!’

  She mimed laughing.

  ‘The Mahaha are demons of the cold. They wear no clothes whatsoever.’ He chuckled. ‘Despite the endless ice, as far as the eye can see. They are very strong and very sinewy and they leap about. Do you know how they kill their victims?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘They tickle them to death!’

  I laughed politely.

  Freddie laughed – too late.

  ‘They have very long fingernails. And they are always giggling. That’s how you can hear them coming.’ He looked at the seal. ‘They leave a frozen, twisted smile on the face of their victims.’

  ‘Do the Eskimos believe in them, though, or is it just a myth?’ said Freddie.

  ‘Eskimos is a pejorative term, nephew,’ said the professor. ‘The Inuit people have not suffered genocides of disease and now this cretinous global warming to be reduced to an igloo animated picture by you.’

  There was a photograph on the wall of the uncle standing next to a hole in the ice, raising a type of spear above his head. There was also a photo of him with an Inuit woman, bundled in matching furs, standing by an igloo with a gaggle of what looked like half-Inuit, half-Western children.

  ‘That’s Aguta,’ said the professor.

  There was silence.

  Then Freddie said: ‘I’ve brought this girl here to tell you that she is my girlfriend.’

  The professor squinted. ‘But what about that chap wearing that … romper suit? Whom we saw in the park. I’ve got your number, boy. I was at Cambridge in the ’30s. Yes, it was all the rage then – homosexuality. There were the communist poets with whom I sympathised on political grounds.’

  ‘Uncle Timothy fought for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War,’ said Freddie.

  ‘But I did not sympathise with the likes of Auden, Spender, etc on the grounds of their sexual preferences,’ the professor went on. ‘When I was a youth, it was a crime. Crimes were punished for the sake of the community. It is against the laws of reproduction, this.’ He searched for the word.

  The wife croaked something.

  ‘Decadence,’ said the professor.

  ‘Oh, I’m not decadent,’ said Freddie. ‘Oh, no. Ann-Marie and I are very much in love.’

  ‘Why?’ thundered the professor.

  ‘Why are we in love?’ Freddie looked at me. ‘Er.’

  ‘Because we’ve got a lot in common,’ I said.

  ‘I intend to marry her,’ said Freddie. ‘Once I’ve established myself on the circuit.’

  ‘And of what does this circuit consist?’ said the professor.

  ‘Oh,’ said Freddie. ‘Parties.’

  The professor’s face contorted.

  ‘And business,’ said Freddie. ‘Lots and lots of business.’

  ‘Like father, like son,’ said the professor. ‘Your father was like that, riding the wave, back in the ’60s. Pop Art. What is Pop Art, may I ask you? Replicas of advertisements? For soup? And you call that a contribution to humanity?’

  ‘I don’t think Father would put it in such highfalutin terms, Uncle.’

  ‘No,’ said the professor. ‘He wouldn’t. He’d laugh. If he can laugh, now that he’s had a facelift. Living in California.’

  ‘Part time,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Living in Switzerland.’

  ‘Part time. He’s still got Hammerton Hall in Suffolk.’

  The professor lurched to his feet. The wife handed him a cane. He got an object off a shelf, and handed it to me. It was a tiny white carving of a whale.

  ‘That is art,’ said the professor. ‘They put it in the baby’s mouth when it is born. To bring good luck.’ He passed
me a dagger. ‘That is walrus ivory. Look at the intricacy of the handle. Look at the craftsmanship.’ He sat down. ‘Butterflies being murdered before the very eyes of the spectator is not art.’

  ‘Father hasn’t bought any Hirsts since ’97, I think,’ said Freddie.

  ‘What about those,’ I said, pointing to two glass cases hanging on the wall. One contained a psychedelic array of butterflies, their wings spread and pinned. The other contained petrol-blue birds, perched in their own compartments. Their beaks were open.

  The professor stared at me. ‘I like you,’ he said. ‘You are honest.’

  Freddie laughed.

  ‘In this late industrial capitalist inferno, honesty is a rare quality,’ said the professor. ‘It entails a kind of brutality. I’ve been saying that since the ’50s when the mixed economy and the welfare state were not a phantasm.’

  There was silence.

  ‘You are not a rower, Freddie,’ said the professor. ‘All the men in our family were rowers. Even your father was a rower. Get up early, bracing cold. Row!’

  The wife croaked.

  ‘She wants to know how you two met,’ said the professor.

  ‘At a garden party,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was there all alone. I always do feel so alone at parties.’

  ‘I too have often felt alone at parties,’ said the professor. ‘Continue.’

  ‘I was standing by the oyster tent, at the back of the queue.’ I nodded. ‘And then the fireworks began at the far end of the field. By the river. It was night-time. They were the college colours, whatever college it was. I can’t remember now. Blue, and yellow, and white. The fireworks looked like a stab in the dark to me.’ I paused. ‘They made it worse – the sadness. The explosion of light made it worse. Everyone got terribly excited and ran off to see them better and so there was no queue for the oysters any more. So I took the opportunity to eat as many oysters as possible. I do adore oysters, don’t I, darling?’

  Freddie looked angry.

  ‘There were three different types: tabasco, shallots and sherry vinegar, or plain old lemon.’ I looked at the professor with emotion. ‘Sometimes plain old lemon is the best.’