Eat My Heart Out Page 17

  ‘Is he talking about a former … boyfriend?’ I whispered to Olive.

  ‘No,’ she said, solemnly. ‘He’s talking about Obama.’

  ‘I trusted you, you mother-fucking asshole,’ Hal went on. The song caved into Martha Wainwright’s ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’, which was about her absent father.

  ‘I mean,’ said Olive. ‘I had my doubts but you know we all hoped he wouldn’t screw us in the ass like the last guy.’

  Hal stopped, finally.

  Olive and I applauded.

  Sebastian’s parents were at work. Most of the intersex siblings were at their independent day school, except for one, who was pretending to be ill. He/she was scraping the bow back and forth over his/her cello in the next room.

  ‘You know you can stay here as long as you want,’ Olive was saying to me. She had lent me £500 and her old laptop. ‘Mom and Dad are going to be psyched.’

  They went for a walk in the park.

  I checked my email.

  Ann-Marie,

  I pushed you too fast, and for that I’m sorry. Let me try to explain.

  I’ve been propelled towards excess in my actions by a sense of the overwhelming tragedy that has befallen the good name of feminism. Now feminism is a dirty word, a synonym for hairy lesbian. All my life, I’ve wanted to prove the detractors wrong. I’ve wanted to maintain myself as an example of otherness, of what the other can be. I’ve hoped to inspire, but I can see that with you, I’ve gone too far.

  When I was browsing through my teenage notebooks a few years ago, I came across a charming picture of Zelda Fitzgerald that I had taped in alongside a quote: ‘Hysterically, she began to run.’ It was taken from Zelda’s novel, Save Me the Waltz. At that age, I fetishised madness to the extent of daydreaming constantly about being locked up in a mental asylum, about watching the yellow wallpaper begin to crawl and writhe of its own accord. To be out of one’s mind and beside oneself. I too wanted to run.

  However, I soon realised that hysteria – dependence of any sort – is anathema to survival. One must retain one’s own inner balance. To do so is a political act.

  Only later would I dare – and I did dare – to even conceive of the idea of writing. Of writing about my own experience as a means to write about women in general. Yes, I was accused of universalism – how could I possibly speak for the particular? But what those blue-blood Ivy League bitches failed to understand was that I was the particular. They had more in common with their class than their sex. I was destined to be a hairdresser.

  This is all terribly incoherent. What I mean is – I apologise for becoming that which I have spent my career condemning. Hysterical, inchoate.

  Today, The Symbolic constitutes our flesh and blood, our very souls. It is clear to me that you, Ann-Marie, are an embodiment of The Symbolic. Looking into your sarcastic eyes is like looking into the post-feminist whirly-pool itself.

  I shouldn’t be surprised – nor, in fact, disappointed. We are all made by history.

  I want to tell you about my ice hockey player. I want to tell you what happened and why the sistahood hate me and why I can never go home to America – except for the occasional publicity tour. I want to shine a light for you, so that you may rise where I have fallen. Yes, I have fallen. One becomes preoccupied with the subjects that most captivate – no, capture – one. I must confess that I remain a hopeless romantic.

  Please come back.

  Stephanie

  P.S. It was Beckett who said: ‘Fail better’. Failure is but a route to creativity. For that reason, and to prove to you that perfectionism only serves to sap one’s white milk dry, I have taken the liberty of scanning the tabula rasa that you left on the floor of the recording studio before you ran out and abandoned me just like Leo. The page remains virgin snow – its virginity is perhaps more meaningful than anything you could possibly write. It is a testament to the silence of your generation of young women, who neglect to vote despite the fact that your forebears starved to death to win the vote. There is a beauty to the blankness of your page, imprinted, as it is, with the ever-so-slightly sweaty marks of your growing anxiety as I bore down all the more heavily upon you and the night turned to day. It is now available to download on my website.

  In order to access Stephanie’s website, I had to watch an animated cupid aim his arrow at the heart of an unsuspecting little girl, wearing glasses and reading a book. When the arrow hit her, the little girl immediately dropped the book and stamped on her glasses. Her eyes were stunned and blind; this was illustrated by her bumping into furniture. Cupid was laughing. The girl held her arms straight out in front of her like a zombie and then proceeded to walk over the edge of an animated cliff.

  The blog post was titled: ‘Cat Got Your Tongue?’ Steph reminded her readers that in Spanish lengua meant both the tongue in your mouth and your language – like mother tongue. My blank white sheet stood like a monument on the screen, a tower of nothingness, to which I had contributed – nothing. The tags were trauma, disenfranchisement, and voicelessness. Steph had written an emotive caption about how she couldn’t possibly reveal the identity of the (un)author, but suffice to say that she (un)spoke for a whole bottled-up generation of young women. The bottled-up part was a play on the fact that my generation were all alcoholics, who sought escape from the dictates of the meritocracy in the form of drink. Girlwithacurl456 had commented underneath:

  I getting fukd because its fun, it makes me wanna get fukd more.

  I also had an email from Vic:

  I don’t know how you got down into that submarine, but I saw you, waiting your turn with no shame, wanting it with no shame. Your hair was blonde, not brown. You dyed it, slut. Think you can escape me? Letting all five sailors do it all over you, holding you open. I could see all the way inside of you and I didn’t like what I saw. Your tits were orange and bigger. You were loving it. They didn’t buy you a drink or warn you when they were going to do it and then they bukkaked all over your face. They gave you a pearl necklace and then you licked it all up and snowballed with your friend, who looked just like you too. I never want to see you again.

  ‘Yeah, I joined a cult once,’ Olive was saying.

  It was evening. I was face down on the bed. She was trying to feel out my root chakra. It was somewhere at the base of my spine. Apparently, it was blocked. I had been telling her about Stephanie.

  ‘But I only lasted like one day,’ she went on. ‘Before Hal came and got me. I had been trying to get away from Hal in the first place because we had a fight. I wanted something of my own – I was on the verge of training as a physiotherapist. But then this girl came up to me at a café when I was crying. She was very beautiful but she looked zonked out of her mind. When I got to the ranch everyone was drifting around like totally placid, but the daily routine was actually really regimented. There was this one guy – Matt – real charismatic. He was the leader. He read books, Wilhelm Reich and stuff, and tried to practise it on the girls.’

  ‘What, the orgasmatron?’

  ‘Is that the box you go in to come?’ She laughed. ‘Yeah. Shit like that. It was deep. There was a lake there, and I remember thinking this whole place is like a placid fucking lake. And just below the surface, there are sharks.’

  ‘That feels good,’ I said. Her hands were hovering above my shoulder blades.

  ‘They tried to stop Hal from taking me because they’d already changed my name to Paula.’

  I laughed.

  ‘No, it was serious. This guy Matt twisted everything. It was a mind-fuck.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Stephanie was a mind-fuck. But I kind of feel sorry for her. She’s lost.’

  Olive leaned forward and whispered very close to my ear: ‘No, honey. You’re lost.’

  That evening, Sebastian’s parents were having a dinner party. They asked me to join them.

  Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ was playing as the amuse-bouches were wheeled out: plates of halloumi and baba gha
noush. A balding man with glasses was sitting on the sofa, trying to engage Hal in a conversation about Syrian politics. Sebastian’s miniature father slung an arm around my shoulders and told me how pleased they were that I was staying. He introduced me to the balding man, who was called Phillip. His bald head glowed as he rammed some of that halloumi in his mouth. ‘Oh, your mother never stops talking about you,’ Phillip told me.

  A few minutes later, my mother turned up, wearing a red dress and red lipstick like mine and red shoes.

  Phillip’s head glowed more aggressively. It was obvious they knew each other well.

  I stood squarely in front of my mother and asked Phillip how he came to be at this party. He said that he was a human rights solicitor. I asked Phillip if there were likely to be any human rights abuses at this party?

  He laughed nervously.

  ‘Ann-Marie,’ said my mother. ‘Don’t be like that. I’ve wanted you to meet Phillip since …’ Phillip the bald beau was moving into her house, it transpired. My old room was going to be turned into a study where Phillip could examine in total privacy the shocking wounds of torture victims.

  ‘That’s a bit of a sick job, isn’t it?’ I said to him.

  ‘No,’ said my mother. ‘It is a very important job. Phillip helps people from all over the world.’

  ‘Seems to me that people who want to help other people are often just suffering from narcissistic personality disorder,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I looked it up on the internet.’

  Sebastian’s mother was basting a goose in the kitchen. It was mammoth, more like a pterodactyl. I helped her with the potatoes and the curly kale.

  ‘We’re so glad to have you,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you. You know you can stay here for as long as you like.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s such a relief. I’ve been moving around so much.’

  ‘How’s Freddie?’

  ‘He’s beating up young boys in Suffolk.’

  ‘Is that a gay thing?’ said Sebastian’s father, coming into the kitchen.

  ‘Harold,’ said Sebastian’s mother.

  Another couple arrived. They were book critics. They talked at length about the pluses and minuses of historical fiction. ‘The prose perpetually runs the risk of descending into the purple, or merely kitsch,’ said the woman. She was swinging her glass of red wine around as she talked.

  ‘God.’ The male book critic bashed the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘Can we not use that word, darling? What does it even mean?’

  They all laughed.

  The female book critic was laughing too, but then she slammed her glass down on the counter and said: ‘Why do you always have to undermine me?’

  ‘Kitsch means the aftermath of experience,’ I said. ‘It’s like a ghost of experience. A ghost.’

  They stared at me. I opened the Aga to toss the potatoes again.

  The male critic said: ‘Is that a quote?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Stephanie Haight told me. She’s a worldrenowned intellectual.’

  ‘We know who Stephanie Haight is!’ said the female critic. She produced Falling Out of Fate from her handbag.

  ‘Haight was such an influential figure for my generation,’ said Sebastian’s mother. ‘She made feminism so cool, so sexy. She was so fierce and dignified.’

  ‘And she’s still got it,’ said the female critic. ‘Her interpretation of the master/slave dialectic is scintillating. Like reading a thriller.’

  ‘I’m a feminist,’ said Sebastian’s father. ‘I’ve always called myself a feminist.’ He reached on tiptoe to kiss Sebastian’s mother.

  ‘But I still have to remind Harold to help with the childcare,’ said Sebastian’s mother.

  They all laughed.

  Two of Sebastian’s intersex siblings wandered into the kitchen. The bigger one helped the smaller one to water a mint plant.

  ‘We don’t believe in nannies,’ said Sebastian’s mother.

  Soon dinner was served.

  I watched my mother canoodle in the candlelight with Phillip. She was flushed, like a girl. He kept on smiling at me. I smiled at the cucumber and pomegranate salad.

  ‘Speaking of Haight,’ said Sebastian’s mother. She looked ravishing tonight; her long black Allegra-esque hair flowed free.

  ‘Hate?’ said my mother. ‘Susan, this sangak bread is divine.’

  ‘Thank you, angel,’ said Sebastian’s mother.

  ‘I still find it a bit weird that you lot are friends now,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’m glad that they are!’ said bald Phillip. ‘It was Harold and Susan who introduced me to your mother. Harold and I were at Birmingham together back in the Stone Age!’

  ‘No, Stephanie Haight,’ said Sebastian’s mother. ‘Who your daughter knows.’

  ‘Does she?’ said my mother.

  ‘Yeah, she was my supervisor at Cambridge,’ I lied.

  ‘You know, that was the thing,’ said Sebastian’s father. He was already drunk. ‘Sebastian never could forgive you for getting into Cambridge. He simply loathed UCL. Loathed it. Thought they were all beneath him.’

  ‘Sebastian was always gifted,’ said my mother.

  ‘Gifted or got the gift of the gab,’ said his father. ‘Who knows?’

  Sebastian’s mother put down her knife and fork and pressed her fingertips together. ‘It’s a crucial age. Each young person has to recognise at some point the gap between his ego-ideal – his ideal self – and who he really is. Now, the question is. Do you strive to close that gap or just accept your shortcomings?’ She looked at Sebastian’s father. Then she turned to me. ‘Haight tweeted her blog post today about a young post-feminist woman who tried to write but couldn’t come up with a word.’

  I laughed. Then I stopped laughing. ‘Oh?’

  ‘That blank page was so resonant to me,’ said his mother. ‘I remember when I first tried to give psychoanalytic papers at those big fancy conferences. I was petrified.’

  ‘That’s so true,’ said the female book critic. ‘It is a female thing. Because Carl.’ She looked at the male book critic. ‘Can drink as much as he likes and get up in the morning, and write. Hung over or not. I can’t do that. I can’t afford to be complacent.’

  ‘But is that really a gender thing?’ said the male book critic. ‘Because I like to enjoy myself?’

  ‘Women have to work ten times as hard,’ said Sebastian’s mother. ‘We have to overcome that voice in our heads which says: No. You can’t do it. You must fail.’

  I helped her clear away the starters.

  ‘You should take a look at that blog,’ she said. ‘It got retweeted by Mental. The mental health charity. I do a lot of work with them.’

  I blushed. ‘I don’t think I’d be interested in that.’ I excused myself and went outside for a cigarette.

  Hal was strumming his guitar while we waited for the goose to rest. Everyone’s faces looked happy and dazed. My mother looked happier than I had ever seen her.

  We were halfway through the goose when the front door opened and Allegra appeared in the kitchen. She was wearing a tiny black mini-dress and a pair of ripped black tights. Sebastian appeared behind her.

  ‘This is all very nice,’ said Allegra. ‘How nice.’

  There was a long silence.

  Sebastian was looking at the goose. ‘Is there any left?’ he said.

  ‘We thought we’d just drop by because we’re all out of mosquito repellent,’ said Allegra.

  ‘Can’t you buy that at the airport?’ said Sebastian’s father.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said his mother. ‘We must have some somewhere. But – oh dear. There isn’t any room.’

  Allegra and Sebastian had to sit with the kids on the collapsible card table. Sebastian gnawed the remains of the goose carcass. I could feel the nihilistic pull of Allegra’s presence. This went on for a few moments. There was conversation about the state of the economy.

  Then I stood up. ‘Get out!’ I shouted at Allegra. ‘Get ou
t! This is my house!’

  She stood up too. ‘This is not your house!’

  ‘And what the fuck, you smeared your shit all over my walls.’

  The party went into shock.

  ‘You’d moved out,’ said Allegra. ‘That was an experiment. Haven’t you ever heard of Mary fucking Barnes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sebastian’s mother. ‘She was a very interesting woman.’

  ‘She was like a schizophrenic who came off medication thanks to R. D. Laing,’ said Allegra. ‘She smeared her shit over the walls because she didn’t have any paint and then they gave her paint and she became an internationally acclaimed fucking artist.’

  ‘So what?’ I screamed. ‘Smear your shit over your own walls if you want to!’

  ‘Now, now,’ said Sebastian’s father.

  ‘This needs to run its course,’ said Sebastian’s mother, sagely. ‘This is abreaction.’ She turned to me. ‘Have you read Haight’s novel?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It’s wonderful.’

  I clattered the dishes in the sink. ‘When are you two actually going to Mexico?’ I said. ‘Because you’ve been leaving for like a week now.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sebastian.

  ‘He doesn’t know!’ said Sebastian’s father. He raised his glass. ‘He doesn’t know. He never knows.’

  ‘That’s enough, Dad,’ said Olive. ‘Leave him alone.’

  ‘When are you going to make a man of yourself, Sebastian?’ said Sebastian’s father.

  Sebastian stood up. ‘I would like to make a man of myself. Let’s see now. I broke my fucking leg so that I could be a fucking short-arse like you. I maimed myself just to get your approval, Dad.’

  ‘That was an accident, Sebastian,’ I said. ‘Because I made you dance with me on that slippery floor. And I imagined a different space, where no dancing is. Do you remember that poem I wrote for you?’

  ‘What?’ the book critics were saying. ‘What? What?’

  ‘He did it unconsciously on purpose,’ said Olive.