Eat My Heart Out Read online

  By the twentieth go, I was almost mute.

  Steph stood up and clapped. ‘Well done, you.’

  I sank back in the box, exhausted.

  ‘That signified the exaltation typically associated with the early feelings of love,’ said Stephanie. ‘Now the mood changes. We are remembering the first time. We are in the middle. This is your second most listened to song … a song to die for.’

  It began: ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’. The monitor showed Roberta Flack on Top of the Pops in 1972. She was wearing an African black and gold top and she had an afro. She was playing the piano.

  ‘Was it you who made them play it at the strip club?’ I croaked.

  Stephanie shrugged, faux-naïve. ‘You’ve listened to this song 5,873 times. You have given yourself brain damage listening to this song.’

  The rigmarole started again; she made me sing it, again, and again, and again.

  ‘Your husky voice suits this perfectly.’ She hugged herself. ‘This takes me back to the days when I fell in love with Leo. He was a brilliant man. An ice hockey player. I’ll tell you about him sometime.’

  Hours had passed. There were no windows and no natural light.

  I begged her for a glass of water. She gave me some iced tea.

  ‘Can I have a cigarette?’ I said.

  ‘No.’ She said things had changed now since I hadn’t learned my lesson and I was in danger of running away.

  ‘Who said I was going to run away?’ I rasped.

  ‘Now we smash through the pain barrier!!’ She raised her fist in the air. She gestured for me to do the same. ‘You’ve listened to this last song 11,785 times.’

  I began to panic. ‘Please don’t play this song,’ I said. ‘Please. It really brings back a lot of memories. I hate this song.’

  But the chords of ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ had started, and now she was dancing. ‘This is my era,’ she was saying.

  Nico was promising to reflect her lover, reflect her lover, reflect her lover.

  My heart was beating too fast. I tried to grasp the microphone but it slipped out of my hands. I took the headphones off.

  There was silence.

  She was screaming, but I couldn’t hear her. I lip-read: ‘You’re going to sing. Sing, sing until there’s nothing left.’

  I scrabbled at the door of the box. She marched through the glass wall, opened the door, and slapped me, hard.

  I could hear the song faintly through the earphones bouncing on their wire.

  ‘How do you feel?’ hissed Stephanie. She pressed a finger to my lips. She produced a fountain pen and a pad. ‘Get down.’ She pointed to the floor. ‘Write.’

  I sank to the floor.

  Steph was screaming at me about the semiotic chora that I was riding right now, transporting me to a time outside of time before I loved and lost, when my heart was still whole, not hopelessly splintered by the dictates of gender normativity.

  But it wouldn’t come.

  Nothing would come.

  Fourteen

  The next morning, I did run away.

  I returned to Clapham.

  The crazy lady with the Cabbage Patch doll was telling me why she preferred minimalism these days. Her trolley was covered with flattened white cardboard boxes. Her baby wore a white paper bag as a bonnet. ‘After an era of great busyness,’ she was saying. ‘There must be simplicity. Everything must be stripped down.’ She paused. ‘Or maybe it was the snow that inspired me.’

  Clapham Common was green again. It was Thursday.

  ‘They put me inside for the night,’ she said. ‘But I got out. I got out.’

  We were standing outside the Chinese takeaway on Clapham High Street. Raegan had begged me not to go, but I felt sure that it wouldn’t be long before bars were fitted to my bedroom window at Stephanie’s. I had taken James’s pussy with me.

  The sewage had risen still further from the basement of our flat. It had become an odour that I could taste. It tasted of tonic water and shit. The shit was real, as though a whole army of school children had been invited to shit all over the floor for want of any other way to entertain themselves. The remains of a Russian salad had fallen over the counter and dribbled down the cupboard doors. The fridge door had been left open. The TV was on. A copy of Steph’s novel, Abreaction, had been tossed onto the chaise longue. The bust of Professor Frank had been hacked at. The electric meat carver that my mother had bought us as a house warming present lay beside it. The hacking had been aborted because the tyres were so thick. It appeared that Freddie had resorted to stubbing his fags out on the Professor’s conceptualised forehead. No one was home.

  I went upstairs.

  Freddie’s room was filled with balloon animals that must have been blown up days before because most had deflated to become wisps, poor unfortunate souls of balloon animals. My bedroom door was closed. The smell got stronger.

  I heard something move inside.

  I opened the door.

  Vic was sprawled across the bed, naked. His eyes were glassy.

  I screamed.

  ‘I’ve been waiting,’ he said. His black hair hung lanker. His penis began to stand up, but I was more concerned about the state of my bedroom. It had been terrorised. The walls were smeared with faeces. There were handprints of shit everywhere, but also nods to the history of twentieth-century art: de Kooning-like gestures in shit that coalesced at times into shit figuration. A naked woman had been sketched in shit on the wall over my bed. Her nipples were fingerprints, her eyes were fingerprints, her whole body looked as though it had been poked into being. I covered my nose and mouth.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ said Vic. He sat up and held out his arms.

  I waded through the piles of clothes that had been turned out from the chest of drawers. My feet crunched. I looked down: dozens of broken egg shells were strewn over the carpet. Their yolks had transformed into a variant of milkshake. There were sachets in which the remnants of a black substance swirled. There was a tiny hammer on my dressing table. The mirror inside the wardrobe door bore the black word: Butchered.

  ‘Fucking Allegra,’ I said. ‘God. She’s so melodramatic.’

  ‘It was like this when I came in,’ said Vic.

  I sat down on the bed. He tried to stroke my hair and I let him for a couple of seconds but then I pushed him off and stood up.

  ‘She hasn’t even got any new ideas,’ I said. ‘She already did this performance like two years ago. With the squid ink.’ I laughed at the memory. ‘She puts a sheet over her head and then tapes eggs to her eyes. She’s already got her assistant Sue to inject the eggs with squid ink. Then she looks like this mental ghost or nun or something. She gets Sue to tap the eggs with a hammer.’ I picked up the hammer. ‘So that the squid ink kind of squirts out of her eyes. It’s hilarious.’

  ‘You know the person who did this?’ The pits in Vic’s face had expanded to become holes. ‘I thought you’d had a break-in – the door was open.’

  I managed to get Vic dressed and out of the house with threats to call the police and, when that didn’t work, I promised to call him.

  ‘I’ll call you, I’ll call you, I’ll call you,’ said Vic, mimicking my voice. ‘All I ever hear from you is I’ll call you.’

  ‘How else do you expect to hear from me, Vic? By pigeon? I’ve just been so busy with work commitments – now that I’ve got a new job at the bank.’ He didn’t believe that I’d turned into a ‘square’ just at the moment when he’d stopped being a ‘square’ so I had to go into elaborate detail about my daily administrative tasks and how organising other people’s money was a sobering way to fill one’s time. I said that now he and I could afford to go on dinner dates to Carluccio’s like other couples. I gave him a pair of Freddie’s old brogues to wear, but I noticed when I tried to find an outfit that most of Freddie’s clothes had gone. His camera equipment had gone too.

  I gave the key to the flat to the homeless lady with the minimalist trolley. I told he
r she could stay there as long as she cleaned it up.

  Freddie wasn’t answering his phone. I called Jasper. He told me that they were shooting on location. He said that Freddie never wanted to see or speak to me again. I used the £48 left over from the halal chicken to buy a train ticket to Suffolk.

  There was a little boy wandering out of the gates of Hammerton Hall. He was wearing a top hat and tails and his face was cut. He looked stunned. I asked him if he knew where he was going, but he ran away from me. He went in the direction of the village.

  Maxine the housekeeper was riding a horse around and around the paddock. I knew her well; she had fried us all black pudding the morning after the night of the crème de menthe, which had taken place in a drawing room here. It had been filled with Sarah Lucas sculptures: stockings stuffed with oranges and aggressive tabloid montages. Freddie always said that his father was a follower; he’d caught the YBA wave a couple of years too late. That night, Maxine had assisted our game of truth or dare by fishing the bottle of crème de menthe out of the recycling bin and rinsing it. She had remained in a dark corner, watching. The fire reflected in Jasper’s face as he brandished the bottle. Allegra was prostrate. I looked away. Afterwards, Freddie saluted Maxine for being unshockable. She had been an artist herself back in the ’80s, but it never worked out.

  Now Maxine got off the horse and told me they were in the dining room, but that Freddie had said he’d kill me soon as look at me. The bright green English countryside appeared refreshingly blameless and boring, as though nothing could ever happen here. A crow flew above. The pigs were asleep, Maxine said.

  Freddie was wearing a black balaclava with a top hat and a black poncho. He was jousting with Jasper who was dressed the same except that his hat had fallen off in the effort to stab Freddie with the point of his sword. The ceiling was high and the walls were panelled, but instead of portraits of successive generations of Freddie’s family, there hung Bruce Nauman neons, kicking their legs up in fascist uniformity or lying in chain gangs of oral sex.

  ‘Are these originals?’ I called from the far end of the room, and my voice echoed back: Are these originals, originals, originals?

  Freddie the caped crusader ran at me with his jousting stick and didn’t stop so that I was forced to exit the room and close the door behind me.

  ‘Can we be friends?’ I said through the door. ‘Didn’t you get my text? I told you I was sorry.’

  I heard the sword hit the door and twang.

  I moved away. ‘Sorry,’ I repeated.

  Freddie opened the door. He pointed the sword at my throat.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘We’re even, OK? You got Allegra to fuck up my room so badly and all my stuff is just fucked up and you let that psycho Vic in. He’s dangerous, Freddie.’ I could only see his eyes through the balaclava.

  ‘Do you have any idea how long my uncle has lived?’ said Freddie.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Ninety-four years. Do you have any idea how many days and hours it will take him to recount his life fucking story? Hhhmm – well.’ He waved the sword. ‘The Greenland years alone were fraught with daily risks to life and limb thanks to his rugged determination to hunt like the Inuit man, to fuck like the Inuit man—’

  ‘Freddie can you put your sword down, please? I’m really at the end right now. I’m exhausted. I’m at the end.’ I sat down on the floor and started to cry. I was wearing one of Stephanie’s smocks and one of Stephanie’s duffel coats; I had stolen them from the dirty laundry basket before I left.

  Freddie sat beside me. He pulled down the balaclava. ‘To keep the flat, I have to write up Uncle’s whole life in the form of an oral history,’ he said. ‘Not a biography. He wants it in the form of folk tale, a myth. To ensure he becomes a legend.’

  I laughed.

  Freddie laughed too.

  We sat in silence for a while.

  Finally he said: ‘I didn’t tell Allegra to fuck your room. She found out that Sebastian met up with you and went really fucking nuts. I think she thinks he’s still in love with you or something. She said that when he got back from seeing you, he was just moping around the flat, saying he didn’t want to go to Mexico any more.’

  We were sitting on the floor in Freddie’s studio. It was in the attic at Hammerton Hall. The windows looked over the forest, turning blue in the afternoon. A harsh light shone down on a high-backed chair. There was a bottle of shoe-polish, black, and a rag. There was blood on the green carpet.

  ‘There is nothing to dream of,’ Jasper was saying. ‘So nothing connects with nothing.’ He was drinking a bottle of ale. ‘That’s how one always feels after a bout of booting.’ He lay on his back.

  ‘It’ll get picked up,’ said Freddie. ‘For sure.’

  Another young boy dressed in top hat and tails appeared at the door. Maxine stood behind him. She disappeared. He was different from the stunned boy that I had seen by the gate; he wasn’t bleeding.

  ‘Please sir, can I have some more?’ said Jasper, falsetto.

  He and Freddie laughed.

  The young boy looked as fresh as an apple. He held out a piece of paper in a plastic sleeve. ‘Here’s my extra-curriculars,’ he said.

  Jasper stood up and stretched. He sat in the chair.

  ‘Wet bob. Good. Dry bob. Kneel there.’ Freddie pointed to the space at Jasper’s feet. ‘Now I told you this is artistic hey so no recompense but you will be in my show Making A Racquet. Jasp is doing tech.’

  The boy nodded. ‘I’ve always wanted to be in the arts,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been arty.’

  Freddie turned on his Bolex and beamed the light into the boy’s eyes. ‘Now shine. That’s right.’

  The boy started shining Jasper’s shoes, which were already shiny. ‘Is this right?’ said the boy, working the cloth back and forth.

  ‘Say nothing,’ said Freddie.

  The boy shined each shoe for a long time.

  And then Jasper kicked the boy swiftly in the face.

  The boy staggered back, clutching his nose. Dark blood leaked out of his nostrils and trickled over his lips. His eyes showed terror.

  The boy staggered to his feet.

  Jasper stared into the distance.

  The camera kept rolling.

  I followed the boy out of the room and round the fountain in the courtyard. It was guarded by a ring of stone toy soldiers, shooting or being shot. They were replicas of components of a Chapman brothers’ installation that Freddie’s father couldn’t afford to buy.

  The boy must have thought that I was part of Freddie and Jasper’s creative team, because when I tried to catch up with him, shouting that I wanted to help, he ran faster.

  I got on the train and returned to London, desperate.

  I had no money, no job, and nowhere to live.

  I walked all the way from Liverpool Street station to Soho. A girl who I didn’t know had taken over the reception at William’s. She wore a Minnie Mouse bow on her head. She asked if she could help me? She had never heard of me before. I went down to the kitchen and asked the new sous-chef if I could have the staff meal. It was nearly ready: grey mutton and chips. He hadn’t heard of me either. I swore on my life that I had been a door bitch here for five solid months until Monday morning. I asked the other chefs to corroborate but they kept their heads down and whittled away at their courgette flowers.

  I found Madeline the head waitress in the cloakroom and she accused me of stealing the lost property box. She told me to pay for it. I said I didn’t have any money and besides you couldn’t put a price on things that were lost, could you? Surely that was the beauty of lost things?

  She threw me out.

  I wandered around the block.

  I returned to William’s and persuaded the new door bitch, who was called Bethany, to let me print out my CV. She told me that she was working on a project about the aesthetics of Americana as part of her Fine Art BA at Saint Martins. She had spent the previous afternoon taking pictures of di
fferent branches of Ed’s Diner.

  I went into every restaurant, bar, and pub in Soho, giving out my CV. They all told me that there was nothing. I went into Ed’s Diner and told them that my friend was a famous artist who had just taken pictures of the place for a big exhibition on the aesthetics of Americana at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, but they said they’d never heard of Gagosian.

  ‘But you’ve heard of Beverly Hills, right?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with us.’

  I tried every retail outlet in Covent Garden. My vision got hot and demented at the sight of all those clinking gold and silver charms in Accessorize, hanging on their racks. The music jangled, the lyrics self-obsessed and love-struck. Everyone said no. I went down a narrow street off the piazza. A back door was open. I went downstairs. Now I was in another American diner, decorated with neon tubes like the Naumans hanging on Freddie’s father’s panelled walls. But these neons were advertising Coca-Cola and peach melba. ‘Hit the Road Jack’ was playing. It was empty.

  I went back upstairs.

  There was a woman smoking by the back door. She was wearing a T-shirt that said Give It Wings over a picture of a flying, smiling hamburger. I asked her if there were any jobs. She said one of their promo girls had just walked out. She took my CV.

  I pointed to her T-shirt and asked what it meant.

  ‘Hurry the fuck up,’ she said.

  Hi Olive!

  Hope you’re well!

  Was wondering if I could stay in Sebastian’s bed for a while?

  I’ve just run away from this cult.

  Thanks so much.

  Ann-Marie X

  Three hours later, I was sitting up in Sebastian’s bed, wearing Sebastian’s childhood pyjamas and navy-blue dressing gown, nestled under Sebastian’s familiar old duvet. Olive was sitting on the bed, her back against the wall. Her legs lay over mine. Her husband Hal was serenading us both with a song that he was currently working on. His face screwed up with anguish as he strummed the guitar. ‘You promised,’ he sang. His voice sounded a bit like Bruce Springsteen. Hal was from Jersey just like Bruce, said Olive.

  ‘You promised you’d be different this time, that you weren’t like all the other guys, but you weren’t different, you let me down and blew my mind, just like they did.’