Eat My Heart Out Page 19

  ‘Do you have to be so childishly provocative?’ said Steph.

  ‘You see.’ Gabriella looked me. ‘I’m just gonna sew that shit up to make absolutely certain that nothing else can come out or get back in.’

  ‘Gabriella is from Brixton,’ said Steph, as though that explained everything.

  An hour later, we were sitting in a corridor at the BBC, drinking coffee.

  Francesca the researcher said that, due to the presence of a webcam in the studio, would I mind wearing a black bag over my head to protect my anonymity? No, scratch that. Would I mind wearing a white bag over my head to colour co-ordinate with the blank page that had appeared so strikingly pure on the blog post?

  ‘That’s fine,’ Stephanie answered for me.

  When Francesca had gone, Steph said: ‘You want to be famous, don’t you? Don’t all you little girls these days want to be famous?’

  ‘But how can I be famous if I’ve got a bag over my head?’

  Stephanie stared at the framed portrait of Bruce Forsyth hanging on the wall. ‘God, Gabriella can be so recalcitrant,’ she said. ‘She might not even come to my ceremony. You know when I met her, she was just a little life model—’

  ‘I heard you. At William’s.’

  ‘She was nothing but an ingénue – at Chelsea.’

  ‘I thought you said you discovered her at the Slade?’

  ‘It was I who urged her to pursue installation,’ said Stephanie. ‘It was I who urged her to go to Goldsmiths, right at the time when Michael Craig-Martin was tearing down every disciplinary membrane known to man – or woman. Gabriella had the drive because she was crazy. Her father raped her when she was a child, did you know that?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘So you didn’t read her cuttings?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you read my cuttings?’

  ‘What do you mean – cuttings?’

  ‘Have you googled me?’

  ‘No. I’m very busy, Stephanie.’ I paused. ‘Why does Gabriella want to stitch up her cunt so that nothing else comes out if she’s already had a hysterectomy?’

  Stephanie was silent.

  Finally she said: ‘She’s paranoid.’ She turned to me. ‘You’re going to have to think of something good. Something real good. Because I was just tired out from singing so I couldn’t think of anything isn’t gonna cut it. That’s not what’s gonna get the hits. And don’t tell them about the singing part.’ She had lipstick on her teeth. ‘If I were you, I’d dig deep.’

  Francesca led us into a studio. Once again, I was shut inside a glass box. This one was more spacious. A white felt bag was handed to me; it smelt of shoes. L. K. Bennett was printed on the side. I put the bag over my head.

  ‘We’re gonna use your real voice, OK?’ said Francesca.

  ‘OK,’ came my muffled voice.

  I saw a black object come closer; it was the microphone. Soon a woman with mellow tones was telling her listeners to contact their local leisure centres for more information on zumba classes. Then Stephanie was introduced. She must have been sitting in another box because I couldn’t smell Florida Water. She was explaining that while the hypersexualisation of society had been commented upon at length in the media—

  ‘What do you mean?’ said the mellow presenter.

  ‘I mean porn,’ said Steph. ‘It’s everywhere. What I’m talking about are the parallels between the mass-produced product called love and sadomasochistic pornography. Because all mainstream porn is sadomasochistic to a greater or lesser extent. Right.’

  ‘Can you give us an example?’

  ‘Like the erotic classic, Story of O,’ said Steph. ‘The main girl, O, is a successful fashion photographer. She’s got her own gig. But she’s in love with this guy, René. So René invites her to come to a secluded château at Roissy.’

  ‘We’re going off-piste!’ said the presenter.

  The lights of the studio burned through the bag.

  ‘If you’ll just wait.’ Stephanie was irritated. ‘So O goes to the château but it’s not like a romantic weekend away. Oh no. It’s a sexual slavery camp, Sadeian style.’

  ‘Sadeian?’

  ‘The Marquis de Sade. The eclipse of religion by science at the end of the eighteenth century threw the whole world, or at least the whole of Europe into doubt … basically. Look, Sade figured that any and all pleasure was up for grabs – bestiality, torture, you name it. It was pleasure without conscience. Unbridled jouissance.’

  ‘Yeah I know about jouissance,’ I said. But my voice wasn’t amplified.

  There was silence; maybe Steph and the presenter were looking at me.

  ‘Sade’s encyclopaedia of perversions is mechanical,’ said Steph. ‘Dry as a bone. It is love as hate. Sex without respect for the other.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Stephanie.’ The presenter chortled. ‘I thought we were talking about Story of O. Wasn’t that written in the ’30s?’

  ‘1954,’ said Steph. ‘By a woman. No one knew her identity until the ’90s. But the point is that René puts O in this hellish situation. There are strict rules governing her every move. She must be 100 per cent available to her so-called masters every minute of the day and night, she must open every orifice to them, she must never look them in the eye, she must never speak unless spoken to.’

  ‘That’s shocking,’ said the presenter. ‘I’m sure that still goes on in some parts of the developing world. Maybe even the developed world. It’s terrible when women are taken against their will—’

  ‘But that’s the point.’ I heard a thud; Steph must have banged her fist on the table. ‘O isn’t taken against her will. O consents. She consents because she loves René. She is a slave to love.’

  ‘She must have self-esteem issues,’ said the presenter.

  ‘No,’ said Steph. ‘My argument in Falling Out of Fate by Stephanie Haight, published by Penguin, £18.99 hardback available in all good book stores and on Amazon and in a Kindle edition, is that O is an archetype. She is an archetype of normal femininity.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the presenter. ‘At no point have I consented to sexual slavery in the name of love.’

  ‘What about mental slavery?’ said Steph. ‘Why do you think Fifty Shades did so goddamn well? Because women found a mirror.’

  ‘That book is pure fantasy. It’s wish-fulfilment.’

  ‘Exactly.’ I heard Steph sit back, satisfied.

  ‘I want to hear what some of our listeners who’ve been calling in think about your argument. Here’s Jean from Vauxhall.’

  ‘Hi Jean,’ said Steph. ‘Wait – isn’t this show pre-recorded?’

  ‘Jean’s been waiting on the line,’ said the presenter.

  ‘Hi,’ said Jean. ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You’re talking about things that only make sense to a tiny per cent of the population.’

  ‘You tell me, Jean,’ said Steph. ‘Haven’t you ever waited for a man? Haven’t you ever paced the room, wondering what he’s thinking, what he’s doing, where he is, who he’s with, whether he loves you enough or at all?’

  ‘Men wait too,’ said Jean. ‘When Chris and I started seeing each other—’

  ‘Not in the same way,’ said Steph.

  ‘I don’t want to buy your book,’ said Jean.

  ‘Thanks so much, Jean,’ said the presenter, warmly. ‘We value your input. Now.’ Paper was moved. ‘Vanessa is a young woman who has found recent fame thanks to a bad case of writer’s block. Am I right, Vanessa?’

  The lights got brighter. Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘But your writer’s block is more than a block, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not a writer.’

  ‘Take your time.’

  Time passed.

  ‘Can you tell us what happened to make you get so pent up inside?’ said the presenter.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can. I was a sexual slave.’
r />   The presenter inhaled and then exhaled, slowly.

  ‘Not to a man, but a woman,’ I said. ‘Not to my lover, but—’

  ‘Vanessa means slave in the metaphorical sense of the word,’ said Stephanie.

  ‘I was a slave in the literal sense,’ I said. ‘But that wasn’t what made me not be able to write. I couldn’t write because of guilt.’

  ‘The guilt of being a successful woman,’ said Steph.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The guilt of what I did.’

  ‘What did you do?’ breathed the presenter.

  ‘It was my mother,’ I said. ‘She started it off. She met the man only casually, in a pub. It was karaoke night. They did a duet together. I think it was Johnny Cash, ‘Ring of Fire’. And then before you know it – bang. She’s pregnant at the age of fifty.’

  They waited.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t too happy about the whole thing. I was seven at the time. I thought my mother had been highly irresponsible. I didn’t like my territory being encroached upon.’

  ‘Sibling rivalry is a very visceral emotion,’ said the presenter.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘So one day I was sitting at the kitchen table with my little brother on my knee. He was about nine months old. He had a little pink face. He was a very happy baby, always smiling.’

  ‘Hhmm,’ said the presenter.

  ‘I was jiggling him up and down and he was laughing. In that moment I felt the power in my hands. You know like at school when you study biology and you find out about the different types of energy? I remember this diagram we had to draw of kinetic energy. It was a ball on the edge of a cliff. The ball wasn’t moving, but the point was that it could move. It had the potential to move.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or be moved.’

  More silence.

  ‘So I dropped him,’ I said. ‘On his head.’

  ‘What happened?’ breathed the presenter.

  ‘He got brain damage.’

  ‘Good lord.’

  ‘And then he died.’ I paused. ‘They couldn’t press charges because I was a minor.’

  ‘And that’s why you couldn’t write?’

  I hesitated. ‘When I was staring at that blank page, I was thinking: Why should I be able to express myself when he will never be able to express himself? He never even learned to talk.’

  I was waiting at a table in the BBC cafeteria while Steph bought me a chocolate éclair as a special treat for doing so well on the programme.

  There was an exceptionally good-looking man on the next table. He looked almost exactly like Sebastian, except that Sebastian didn’t have gappy teeth. This man was blond and bestial like Sebastian. He was fondling a large, rectangular box that seemed to contain a flat-screen TV.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘What is that?’

  ‘It’s a SAD lamp,’ he said. ‘For people who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. It simulates sunlight.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  There was a silence.

  ‘Are you with Mental too?’ I said.

  ‘No. What’s that?’

  ‘It’s this organisation for insane people. I’m their representative.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Do you suffer from SAD?’ I asked him.

  He laughed again. ‘No! I sell them. Well – I manage the account. We’re pitching the product to Science & Tech.’

  Steph was returning with the éclair so I got the man to write down my number as quickly as possible. His name was Dave.

  Sixteen

  Hi Ann-Marie. How about dinner tonight? Dave X

  I persuaded Stephanie to let me wander around Hampstead Heath for a few hours by myself in order to contemplate everything that I had learnt from her so far. I told her that I’d return to Camden in time to get ready for the ceremony.

  But I went down to Clapham instead. The dress that I wanted to wear for my date with Dave was stowed somewhere at the back of my wardrobe in the flat.

  Blue tarpaulin had replaced the curtains in the front windows.

  Jasper was eating a salami sandwich in the kitchen, his feet on the table. The homeless woman had cleaned the place up nicely, but he was dropping his mayonnaise all over the floor. I smacked his legs down. Invitations to Making A Racquet were stacked up. They were printed with an image of a tennis racquet emitting musical notes with bee faces.

  ‘What’s that buzzing?’ I said.

  I went into the living room.

  A man wearing a bee-keeper’s outfit was watching a black and white film about bees. Real bees were swarming around a hive that hung from our art nouveau light. The bee man was also eating a salami sandwich, but he had to struggle to get it up and under his white protective helmet.

  ‘Out,’ he said. He was Scottish. ‘It’s not safe.’

  Wooden ’70s-style tennis racquets were propped against the wall.

  I returned to the kitchen.

  ‘Where’s Freddie?’ I asked Jasper.

  ‘Fred’s left me in the shit with the show,’ he said. ‘I’m hoping it’s not going to be a shit show. He’s left me to do everything because he’s got something wrong with him so I need to send the press releases out and put all the fucking art in there and like move shit around and call people up and turn the fucking lights on. Opening’s tomorrow.’

  Upstairs, my wallpaper had been hosed down. The eggs had been swept away. It was pristine. Stacks of wood and bits of metal grate had been arranged on the landing. There was a wicker chair with the seat missing in the corner. The drapes of Freddie’s four-poster had been replaced with tarpaulin. It was a blue cave.

  ‘Come back,’ he croaked from inside.

  ‘I am back,’ I said. ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Not you.’

  I stuck my head in. He pointed a trembling finger up. A picture of a gaunt, geometric ginger model, torn from a magazine, had been pinned to the ceiling of the bed.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I said.

  ‘Samuel.’ He turned away.

  ‘Freddie, that’s not Samuel. That’s just some random guy.’

  ‘I don’t feel well. I feel unwell.’

  He didn’t have a fever.

  ‘I’ve become what I hate,’ he said. ‘Get the camera.’

  I found the Bolex on his dresser and began to film.

  ‘I am but a broken dandy,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s my friend who I said could stay here?’

  Freddie sat up and lit a cigarette. ‘If you’re talking about that homeless wench, then I threw her out. I mashed her up. I fucked up her face.’

  The dress that I was looking for was wrapped around a stack of unopened letters from the Student Loans Company. I unfurled its white taffeta. The shoulders ballooned, the skirt ballooned, the bodice was restrictive, fitted with a real whalebone corset. It was the dress that my mother had worn to marry my father.

  I put it on.

  In the mirror, I looked like Princess Diana on her wedding day.

  ‘You look like the bride of Frankenstein,’ said Freddie, in the doorway.

  ‘I hope Dave’s not a commitment phobe,’ I said, twirling in the mirror. ‘This old guy James wants me to wear it for him but Dave is one of the best-looking people that I’ve ever met in my life.’

  Dave was waiting by the clock tower at Clapham Common tube. I stood across the road outside O’Neill’s Irish-themed pub for about fifteen minutes, watching him. The dress was hidden under Freddie’s trench coat. Dave seemed to be pretending that he couldn’t see me. He turned away. I turned away too, and stared at the Londis on the corner. When I turned back, he was staring at me, but then he turned away again. He hid behind the station. Then he crossed the road in the opposite direction.

  I watched him go.

  He stopped outside a bar called Be At One. Rugby players were drinking pints. He continued to watch me. I watched him. We stood like that, watching each other, while cars drove between us, for five, then ten minutes. Finally, I crossed the road towards hi
m. He retreated. Now he was outside the Indian takeaway. He ran across the road that I had just crossed, dodging cars, and disappeared into the tube.

  ‘Fuck you,’ I told a rugby man.

  I went into Be At One and sat at the bar; it was awful. Painful pinks and disco purples had been carefully selected. A group of women were talking about someone who had slept with someone else who really shouldn’t have slept with that person because she knows Lily likes him and besides he’s practically married to Fiona. I ordered a Sex on the Beach and waited while the bartender carved out a pineapple accoutrement.

  I saw Dave walk past, outside. He seemed agitated. Then he walked past in the other direction.

  The bartender slid my drink towards me. It was exploding with sparklers. ‘That’ll be £10.99, please,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you said it was on the house,’ I said.

  ‘When did I say that?’

  Dave walked into the bar. He stood next to me, flustered.

  My heart started racing.

  He paid for the drink and ordered one for himself. ‘Why did you do that?’ he said.

  ‘Do what?’ I sipped the drink and winced; it was vile.

  The bartender looked crushed.

  ‘Just standing there,’ said Dave. ‘Staring at me across the road when you knew I was waiting for you. We said meet by the tube.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ My hands were shaking. ‘I wanted to make you wait.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To reverse the terms of gendered history.’

  His hands were shaking too.

  ‘Why did you run off?’ I said.

  ‘Because. I didn’t know. What you were doing. I thought you would follow me.’

  ‘I thought maybe you’d felt my evil aura pulsing all the way across the road and changed your mind,’ I said. ‘I’m just warning you now that I’m very difficult to go out with. I’m almost impossible to go out with.’

  Dave’s drink arrived.

  A girl with straightened hair came over and slung an arm around each of us. She was drunk. ‘God, you’ve really hit the jackpot,’ she told me. ‘I would.’ She pumped her pelvis against Dave’s bar stool.

  He blushed.

  She staggered off.

  ‘Dave,’ I said. ‘If that is your real name.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’