Eat My Heart Out Page 15

  I was in another wasteland.

  I climbed over a turnstile.

  There was a white swan in another canal. Its head was underwater.

  I found him.

  He was standing on a small hill, tangled on all sides by weeds. He was wearing a long dark coat and it was open and blowing in the wind. He had his back to me. His stance was wide-legged and proud. He was holding a fishing rod.

  I circled the hill until I could get a look at his face.

  Yes. It was definitely Sebastian.

  His expression was that of a man contemplating the sublime power of nature. But he was overlooking an empty children’s playground. One swing had been unhooked from its frame. The seesaw was smashed in two. When he saw me, his frown got more metaphysical.

  Then he smiled.

  Now he was running down the hill. ‘Do you know that stalking is an offence?’ he was shouting.

  ‘Were you trying to look like Caspar David Friedrich, posing like that?’ I said.

  He tried to give me a kiss on the cheek, but I folded my arms.

  Lurid images of bacon and eggs ran above the counter. The man frying the eggs looked depressed. All the customers looked depressed. Sebastian was saying how much he loved the café because it was real.

  ‘My god,’ I said. ‘She’s put words in your mouth.’

  Our coffees arrived; they were weak and instant.

  A woman with a purple rinse dropped all her change on the floor.

  ‘I’ve become a lesbian,’ I told him. ‘Yep. That’s right. I’m gay now.’

  He made a face.

  ‘You’ve made me gay,’ I added.

  There was a silence.

  ‘Lucky Allegra never found out about that time in the ball pit,’ I said.

  ‘It wasn’t in the ball pit.’

  ‘OK. In Jasper’s father’s apartment after we bumped into each other in the ball pit.’

  It had happened just after my non-graduation, last summer. I hadn’t seen Sebastian for nearly a year. Freddie had forced me to go to a festival called A La Merced in Andalucia. Jasper invited us to stay in his father’s holiday apartment. It was unfurnished. Of course he had purchased a king-size bed for himself that he was intending to abandon on departure. He invited me to get in it with him, but I said no. The three of us went to a restaurant and watched hedonists flow like an English Dragon towards the main stage, wrecking the tranquillity of the mountains. Teenage girls with vacant eyes were handcuffed and marched out by police. Jasper said he couldn’t wait because Prodigy was headlining and ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ was his favourite song. We made a human chain but then someone stamped on my heel and I lost my flip-flop. I lost Freddie and Jasper. Then I lost my other flip-flop. I ran around barefoot for a long time. Bits of glass and stones got stuck in the soles of my feet, but I didn’t feel it because I was high. Next thing I knew I was on a bouncy castle. I went down a slide. I landed in a ball pit. Sebastian was in the ball pit. I had no idea that he was at the festival and he had no idea that I was at the festival. I thought it was fate.

  He asked me what I was doing there and I said I was attending a conference on EU subsidised export laws and he said no, what are you really doing here? He was there because Olive’s husband Hal was playing. Democracy of Sand was getting quite big then – before the lead singer had a schizoid episode. Allegra was at the Edinburgh Festival with Sue. I was coming down. My feet started to throb. They were bleeding. Sebastian offered to get a first-aid kit from his VIP tent but I said no, I’d rather suffer than let you help me at all. He said: ‘You always refused to come to a festival with me, I thought you didn’t like loud music.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, but it’s different with Freddie.’ And he said: ‘Different how?’ And I said: ‘Different because I’m not in love with Freddie.’

  Sebastian came back to the apartment with me. I didn’t tell him that it was Jasper’s father’s apartment because he never would have come. I said it was Freddie’s father’s. He pulled the glass and stones out of my feet with my tweezers and poured Jasper’s sherry from Jerez over the cuts. It was agony. He wanted to get in Jasper’s king-size bed but I said no fucking way. I wouldn’t tell him why not. We found a deflated air bed in the cupboard. It was dusty and stank of rubber. After two hours, he managed to pump it up. We lay together for a long time without talking. We must have fallen asleep because when we woke up there was no air left in the bed and we were on the floor and drowning in black rubber. It covered my face. All I could see was black and all I could breathe was rubber and the person lying next to me was a stranger. I tried to stand up but my feet had swollen in the night. I screamed in pain and fell backwards and then he had me, anyway.

  Now his cheeseburger and chips arrived.

  ‘I don’t believe in fate any more,’ I was saying. ‘Since I moved in with Stephanie – my girlfriend.’

  Sebastian was shoving the burger in his mouth.

  ‘She’s famous,’ I said. ‘She’s like a famous intellectual.’

  ‘Yeah right.’ Ketchup ran down his wrist.

  I wiped it for him.

  ‘Get off,’ he said. ‘You’re right. It’s not fate or coincidence. Because you stalked me into the ball pit like you stalked me today. Like you stalked me yesterday coming round to the flat and the day before that, coming round to my parents’ house. Problem with you is that you don’t even know any more what’s real and what’s fake because you’re so much in your own fantasy world.’

  ‘What’s real and what’s true, don’t you mean.’

  Sebastian laughed.

  ‘The real is what everyone thinks is there,’ I said. I didn’t feel like eating my saveloy. ‘But the true is what’s really there. But it’s not always visible, or logical. But it is true.’

  ‘You pulled Allegra’s hair out of her head.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said. ‘I hate you. Leave me alone. Don’t even talk to me. Don’t even try and come near me.’

  The depressed chef cleared away our plates.

  ‘Do you ever actually catch any fish in that lake?’ I said.

  ‘It’s a reservoir. No.’

  ‘Then why do you sit there all day?’

  ‘Because it lets me think,’ he said. ‘Because. I like to think that one day I might catch a fish, if I sit there long enough.’

  ‘Just sitting doesn’t get you anywhere,’ I said. ‘That’s what I love about my girlfriend, Stephanie. She’s spent her whole life realising her ambitions. Just realising and realising them. She’s a doer.’ I picked up the salt.

  Sebastian took the salt out of my hands. ‘I am doing,’ he said. ‘I’m planning my novel in my head.’

  ‘And what’s that going to be about?’

  ‘It’s a monumental work. About modernity, set in Mexico. Yeah. I’m using Mexico as a paradigm for modernity.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘It’s for posterity,’ he said.

  I laughed.

  He sat back. ‘This is why,’ he said. ‘This is why. She doesn’t laugh at me. She doesn’t laugh.’

  ‘Yeah because she’s got no fucking sense of humour!’ I shouted.

  The hairy man came over. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Quieten down.’

  I apologised.

  We went out for a cigarette. We were on Seven Sisters Road. The shop on the left sold plastic baskets and AA batteries. The place on the right was a loan shark’s.

  ‘Can I ask how you’re living?’ I said. ‘How can you afford to sit not catching any fish all day?’

  ‘She’s supporting me.’

  I was speechless.

  ‘Yeah!’ he shouted. ‘That’s right! And I don’t feel guilty! She says all artists need patronage! She says I’m doing her a favour by letting her be a patron of the arts!’

  ‘And who patronises her? Her parents?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ferociously. ‘She works.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the library. In Southwark local library.’

  ‘She’s a lib
rarian?’

  ‘Yeah! Bataille was a librarian. She’s supporting public services. It’s important.’

  Some kids got off the bus. One spat on the floor. Then another one spat on the floor. Then two of them got in a fight. They drifted off, fighting.

  We went back inside.

  ‘I’m going to have to go soon,’ he said.

  ‘Me too. I have to go now in fact.’ I didn’t stand up.

  Sebastian stood up. ‘I have to go.’

  He paid, with her money.

  Outside the café, he told me he was sorry.

  He got on the bus, which came straight away.

  I walked towards Seven Sisters tube, feeling like I was going to kill myself.

  His bus got stuck in traffic. I ran for it, and jumped on at the next stop. He wasn’t on the bottom deck. I ran up to the top deck, but he wasn’t there either. I looked out the window: he’d got off the bus. He looked like he was looking for me, but when I ran downstairs again, the driver wouldn’t let me off until the stop after the tube. I ran back towards where I had seen him, but he was gone.

  I could have run away from Stephanie’s then, but I didn’t. She seemed to be the only person in the world who cared about me. I returned to Camden Square.

  Marge opened the door. She went absolutely nuts when she saw that I’d bought a halal chicken instead of a Hampstead chicken. She asked me for the change and I handed over £2. I tried to explain that it was very expensive these days to drain the birds of blood prior to slaughter but she told me that I was a common thief. I let her shout for a while.

  Steph was swinging around and around in the teak swivel chair in her study. Her hair had been combed back but her eyes were still glazed. She was playing with something white and frilly. She stared past me. ‘What’s this?’ She held up the frilly thing.

  I turned around as though she might be addressing someone behind me, but there was no one in the hall. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘A garter?’

  She stretched the garter like a cat’s cradle. ‘It came for you.’ She kicked a box on the floor. Ribbon lay around it. ‘From your lover.’ She held out a card, which read: Dearest Miss Havisham. I’m glad you liked the pussy. Thou shalt not be jilted again. X

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s from James.’

  Steph threw the garter at me.

  It was antique and beautiful. The lace was rotting.

  ‘Who’s James?’ she said.

  ‘James is just this old guy who I let eat me out the other day. I got really sick afterwards. He’s nice though.’ I paused. ‘He’s like a sugar daddy.’

  ‘Sugar daddy?’ Her eyes seemed to focus. ‘Have you not been listening to a word I’ve said?’ She got up and shook me by the shoulders. I tried to push her off, but she had developed an übermensch strength.

  Finally, she staggered back. ‘It hasn’t worked,’ she said. ‘The ceremony didn’t work. It must be. It must be because Erzulie is still angry with me.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Exile, exile,’ said Steph. ‘Subjugation in exile.’ She took my arm. ‘Come with me.’

  We were in the basement. The swimming pool shone before us but Steph pulled out a ring of jailer’s keys and led me down a corridor to the left. It was carpeted with leopard print.

  ‘Like Graceland.’ Her head whipped round. ‘You know what kitsch is?’

  ‘Erm. Kind of tacky stuff?’

  ‘No. Kitsch is the aftermath of a true experience.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I nodded. ‘I keep having these aftermath experiences of love. They’re not real experiences – like with James. I don’t love him. It’s nothing really.’ I paused. ‘We don’t have to do this, Stephanie.’

  ‘Do what?’ She jangled her keys.

  ‘Whatever it is, what it is you’re going to do to me. Yesterday was enough. I get it. I need to repent. I need to sort my life out and maybe do an internship at a women’s domestic violence charity or something.’

  Her smile was dark. ‘You don’t get it,’ she said quietly. ‘You really don’t get it at all.’

  ‘What don’t I get?’ I said, desperately.

  ‘Liberation means a rejection of all that came before.’

  ‘Not necessarily?’

  She snapped her fingers. ‘Erm, hello? Man was woman’s god. He only got knocked off his pedestal – metaphorically died, if you will – back in the ’60s and ’70s when the sistahood, in which I played a key part …’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘After the death of the patriarchal god, a void opened up. It is harrowing to think about that void. Male writers had to think about it back in the nineteenth century when their god died. Like Dostoyevsky. He had to think about it. We have to think about it now.’ She opened a leopard-print door.

  It was the recording studio.

  She locked the door behind us. ‘This place is completely soundproof,’ she said. ‘It’s like a panic room but better. It’s like a torture chamber but where healing happens.’

  She positioned me inside a large glass box. It was slightly bigger than a coffin. She planted some headphones on my head and pointed to a microphone.

  ‘I really can’t sing,’ I said.

  She said something back, but I couldn’t hear it.

  I took the headphones off.

  ‘I said, but can you scream?’ she said. ‘Because no one can hear you in here, anyways.’ To demonstrate, she screamed – loud. She kept screaming. Then she started grunting from the back of her throat.

  Eventually she left the box, locking me inside it. She moved behind a glass wall. A bank of a million buttons lit up. She gestured for me to put the headphones back on.

  We were facing each other.

  Her voice boomed loud in my ears: ‘The sirens ensnared Odysseus by singing their deadly song. He couldn’t resist. They say a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Well, a way to a woman’s heart is through her ears.’ She slid up the buttons on the mixing desk. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of consulting your personal effects.’

  ‘My what?’ I shouted, but my voice was muffled.

  ‘Your laptop,’ boomed Stephanie. ‘Your top three most played tunes on iTunes. Whimsies you can’t stop listening to. Candy you can’t stop eating. First, I’ll play the original. Then it’s your turn. You sing along. I want feeling. This is catharsis. This is your chance to get it out once and for all. To expunge those saccharine lyrics until they are dead to you. Until you realise you have been aping sentiment all along. In descending order.’

  The celestial chords of Beyoncé’s ‘Halo’ began to play. Her voice was like an injection of honey, emptying the world of reality and replacing it with happiness. A large monitor outside my box showed Beyoncé bathed in quasi-religious light, make-up free, admiring her lover as he slept. She sung that she was addicted to his light. The song was arresting and lulling at once. It was an ecstatic dream, a way to return. ‘Halo, Halo, Halo’. It ended.

  ‘Now your turn,’ boomed Steph.

  An instrumental version began.

  ‘I can’t sing,’ I said into the microphone.

  ‘Try!’ screeched Steph. ‘You’ve got to try!’

  I tried my best to imitate Beyoncé, her evangelical conviction. I got carried away.

  When the song ended, Steph boomed: ‘This is an example of the Spirituals of slavery reincarnated through the twentiethcentury Afro-American gospel tradition and thus corralled via auto-tune into contemporary rhythm-and-blues pop that straddles both Christianity and secular individualism in its quest for a lover with a halo in lieu of baby Jesus himself!’ She sounded deranged. ‘Beyoncé is a light-skinned African-American woman with dyed blonde hair and Caucasian features who wants it and gets it all ways at once: she wants girls to run the world as long as they are sliding around in the dust wearing nothing but bikinis and sucking their forefingers.’

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Don’t say that. I love Beyoncé.’

  ‘I know you do,’ said Steph. ‘I k
now you do. The problem with you post-feminist girls is that you love with all your hearts what you know in your heads to be wrong. You love it ironically.’

  There was silence.

  ‘I don’t!’ I said. ‘I love her truly. She’s a career woman. She’s equal to Jay-Z. They’ve got one of the best relationships in the industry.’

  Steph laughed. ‘You speak as though you’re part of that industry. But you’re not part of any industry. Except mine.’

  The song began again, and again, and again.

  ‘Louder!’ screamed Steph.

  But it was never good enough.

  I tried harder.

  She castigated me harder.

  Finally, on the twelfth or thirteenth go, she said she liked the sound of my harmony.

  I was going hoarse.

  Then she told me I’d fallen off.

  ‘Fallen off what?’ I rasped.

  ‘Fallen.’ She shook her head.