Eat My Heart Out Read online

  Still nothing.

  I wrote down my number and left it on the bookshelf, which wasn’t well stocked at all. There was a military memoir and Fifty Shades of Grey and – oddly – something by Fay Weldon. For all his positive attributes, Vic was not an educated man.

  Two

  I never said that Allegra could come into my room, but she came in anyway.

  Her gift to me was a box of post-feminist cupcakes, decorated with tiny gold balls. I had been listening to an Amy Winehouse lament, writing an essay on Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. The sweetness of those cupcakes was harrowing. The sponge collapsed in my mouth like a cloud. And she would claim later that I was the witch.

  That was three years ago, during freshers’ week, before I got thrown out of halls for calling one of the porters a cunt. The college was supposed to be proud of its all-girls tradition, owner of the second largest feminist art collection in the world. We ate dinner under a portrait of an Iranian woman wearing a purdah, aiming a Kalashnikov.

  ‘Oh, I can’t tell you,’ Allegra had babbled. ‘I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have found someone who I can really relate to. Someone who makes me feel real.’ She produced a bottle of cheap red wine, rinsed out two cups, and toasted to our new-found sistahood.

  One wall of my college room was given over to a huge window that let in a lot of light. It looked out onto the college lawn, the sign saying ‘Keep off the lawn’, and the red star of the Texaco garage across the road. I was living for Sebastian’s weekend visits, when we would lie together all day and night in my single bed. But he wasn’t there that day. It was a Tuesday.

  Allegra told me that she was studying law under the duress of her family, that she wanted to be a performance artist, that she was heavily influenced by the Theatre of Cruelty, that she felt she couldn’t create anything unless she, you know, really forcibly broke some eggs. She feared that the eggs that she would have to break were her family.

  I stared at her liquid black hair, her chalk-white skin.

  ‘Except my brother Samuel,’ she went on. ‘He’s a chess champion at Eton and simply too good-natured.’ She said that she had waited all her life to meet a great man who would really wreck her youth and break her heart and make her feel something. ‘Anything would do.’ She looked at me with her grey eyes.

  And then she went completely mad.

  She grabbed the salt shaker and the packet of coffee and the sugar and started chucking them around the room. Then she grabbed the remaining cupcakes and smeared them over the exposed brick walls, along the ridges of the radiator, over the light bulb. She seemed to like the sensation of burning her fingers. She mashed the coffee into the sponge on the wall, forming a brown paste. She made abstract expressionist gestures.

  I sat on the bed, impassive. I watched her fuck the place up.

  Soon she sank, exhausted, beside me. She smiled.

  Then she passed out.

  I was thinking about Allegra as I journeyed back to Clapham after my night with Vic the war criminal. I was never more than five minutes away from thinking about her; my thoughts looped and returned always to the same point: she had ruined my life.

  On Clapham High Street, I stared at the glistening kidneys in the window of the organic butcher for a while, the strung up pheasants, the hearts. Stephanie Haight’s face was enlarged on a poster in the window of the bookshop. She had drooping eyes and scraggly blonde hair. Her lips were petulant. She must have been about sixty but the years had been injected out of her face. She wore jeans and a tartan shirt that recalled Generation X, to which she was too old to belong.

  I went into the shop.

  The bell rang and the man with the ponytail behind the counter looked up and smiled. ‘Hello there!’ he said. ‘And how is your young man?’

  ‘He’s fine, thanks. Don’t know where he is actually.’

  ‘He came in here just last week and was telling me all about how you two are thinking about getting engaged.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘He wanted to order a special edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. For his uncle.’

  ‘Oh, you mean Freddie. Freddie’s fucking nuts.’

  I stared intently at the Mind, Body & Spirit section, hoping that the man would stop talking to me. There was one other customer in the shop. A tiny dog was poking out of her handbag. I moved over to Gender Studies. The man’s questions were incessant. Yes, I was glad that that awful psychotic phase had ended. Yes, the standardisation of education was to blame for the fact that I’d totally lost my fucking marbles.

  ‘The only thing to do is claw them back,’ he said.

  I found Stephanie’s book. Falling Out of Fate was printed in pale blue letters above an image of a woman falling out of a cage made of hearts. She was plummeting through an empty blue sky to her death.

  ‘Going like hot cakes,’ he said.

  I flipped to About the Author.

  Stephanie Haight was born in Bermondsey and educated at her local secondary modern before winning a scholarship to St Anne’s College, Oxford. She completed her PhD on romantic masochism in the work of Simone de Beauvoir at Harvard University in 1980. She has written widely for titles including the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. Her books include Master or Slave? How Submission is Reversed and Other Tales from the Women’s Movement, and a novel, Abreaction. After many years of living in New York, she has recently returned to London.

  The man was talking to the dog woman.

  I put the book down the front of my tights and exited the shop.

  I got halfway across the road before I felt a hand on my arm. The light was about to turn green.

  ‘I saw you,’ snarled the dog woman. Her face was expensive. Her coat was vintage tweed, like mine. I wanted to ask her if she got it from Beyond Retro.

  ‘I’m not a corporation.’ The ponytail man was shaking his head. His lone dangly earring swung from side to side. It was a Native American dream catcher.

  ‘Have you spent a lot of time in the States?’ I asked him.

  Dog woman had perched on the edge of the desk. ‘Will you take this seriously?’ she barked. ‘It’s a serious offence. We could call the police.’

  ‘Please do,’ I said. ‘Be my guest. I’ve got nothing to live for anyway. The man I love doesn’t love me. I thought it was Sebastian who was the love of my life but now it transpires it’s Vic.’

  ‘What about Freddie?’ said the man.

  ‘Actually my great-great-great-grandmother was a thief too,’ I told him. ‘She was a prostitute in Whitechapel. And she got deported for beating the shit out of this gentleman. My mother’s got the prison records on the wall.’

  His face reddened; he flapped his arms.

  ‘What have you got to say for yourself that’s serious?’ said the woman.

  ‘I don’t want to be free,’ I said, with passion. ‘Sometimes I feel free but most of the time I feel trapped anyway, in all this freedom.’ I gestured to Stephanie’s book on the desk. ‘That’s why I’m interested in her. She seems to know what she’s talking about.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said the man.

  ‘Call the police,’ said dog woman. ‘She’s not even sorry.’

  ‘I thought you were against the system?’ I said to the man.

  ‘Not when I am the system,’ he said. ‘It’s my shop.’ He trod around the office.

  Piles of unsellable books were stacked everywhere.

  ‘I don’t have any money,’ I said. ‘It’s Freddie with all the money. We live in his uncle’s flat, rent-free. That’s the only way we can afford to live in such a yuppie area.’ I looked at dog woman.

  She bared her teeth; they were perfect.

  ‘We don’t belong here,’ I said. ‘I don’t belong anywhere near here.’

  The man didn’t look convinced.

  ‘I’m mental, remember?’ I said. ‘Cambridge made me mental.’

  I could see him begin to waver, but then d
og woman shouted at him: ‘Can I talk to you in the shop?’

  Alone, I turned to the first chapter of Stephanie’s book. It was called Falling.

  To fall is a woman’s destiny; it is the culmination of her destiny. Eve fell because she ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Since that first biblical Fall, any woman with a sexual appetite, any woman who fucks outside of marriage, has been deemed ‘fallen’. The woman who fucked for love, lust, or money ‘fell’ pregnant and was shamed by the community.

  Bridget Jones – that blueprint for a free generation – fell all over the place. Her slapstick naivety meant that she could rarely stand up without falling flat on her face and demonstrating her incompetence and the incompetence of women in general for the sake of a few laughs.

  While the fallen woman was once a figure of damnation and moral outrage, now we are all fallen. We are encouraged to fall. Because falling endears us. It ameliorates our strength. We fall in love.

  Following the sexual revolution and the Second Wave women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s, in which I played a key role, the values that kept woman in her place – albeit in a second, an inferior place – seem to have dissolved. In fact, they have merely changed form.

  Power metamorphosises.

  Culture is an atmosphere.

  It is not simply men who do not want to give up their position of dominance over women. The whole cultural atmosphere is tuned to keep women falling.

  This atmosphere is what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called The Symbolic.

  The Symbolic is everywhere, it is everything.

  The Symbolic is what the authorities tell you to do, but, more generally, it is what the world tells you to do. And here’s the twist: the world doesn’t have to tell you do it.

  Women obey without knowing they are obeying. The choice is always already made.

  ‘We’re going to let you go,’ said the man. He looked devastated. ‘Because I was young once.’

  ‘I was young once too,’ I said. ‘I can’t quite remember. I think I was happy.’

  Three

  Dear Vic,

  Last night was truly extraordinary. Thank you.

  Plato said that we were all born with two heads and four arms and four legs. I didn’t have a Hellenistic education because I went to a comprehensive school. I’m the only one of all my friends who went to a comprehensive school – apart from Sebastian, who isn’t my friend or my boyfriend any more. He comes from a decadent, progressive family in Islington. He is one of six siblings who all look intersex, but they are all excellent at a musical instrument. I never did that either. Nietzsche would say I suffer from ressentiment.

  Sebastian looks a bit like a Nietzschean blond beast. He started off at an exclusive left-wing boarding school, but then he got expelled at the age of twelve for fighting. He had to fight at my school too. The rudeboys hated him because he was upper middle-class. I remember this one time when we were thirteen. We were in the corridor between lessons. It was packed with people screaming and fighting and the teachers couldn’t control it. Sebastian pretended that he was pushed too close to me and held my hand by accident but I knew he did it on purpose. So I bent his hand backwards.

  He was in a lot of pain but he wouldn’t scream for mercy. Instead he grabbed my hair and got me in a headlock. I bit his stomach. He wouldn’t let go and I wouldn’t let go. Neither one of us would ever let go.

  We walked to the next lesson like that – a two-headed monster. It took the teacher at least half an hour to separate us. There was a circle of red marks on his white shirt – it was his blood, but it was my teeth.

  Soon after that we fell in love.

  Plato said that Zeus got angry and ripped all the hermaphrodites in half and made them into normal humans with only one head, two arms, and two legs. But they were doomed by an overwhelming sense of what they had lost. They were doomed to spend the rest of their lives searching for the half that they lost.

  That’s how I’ve felt since I left your terraced house this morning. I spoke to the operators in the kitchen. They seemed really nice. What’s the name of their blog again?

  With love,

  Ann-Marie X

  Back at the flat, I lay on my bed for about three hours, watching Beyoncé’s ‘Déjà Vu’ video again and again and again. I watched her shimmy across the screen in a colonial-style grass skirt against a fake backdrop of dry earth and deep sky. She waved her beautiful arms around dementedly and kicked up the dust and then collapsed on the floor at the song’s crescendo, screaming about seeing her lover everywhere she went.

  I pulled on my red silk kimono. The bathroom door was closed. I could hear Freddie running a bath and the squeal of an American cartoon.

  ‘I’m coming to jump in there with you in just about ten minutes!’ I shouted.

  I had a look in the living room; it was fucked. Freddie’s portrait of me had been unhinged from the wall and lay on the coffee table, covered in white dust and a rolled note. He painted it last summer on the roof at Hammerton Hall, the stately home where his father keeps all his art but never visits. Maxine, the housekeeper, had decked the roof out in fairy lights and candles because I think she wanted to turn Freddie straight. I had lain on blue velvet with my clothes off while he pretended to be seized by inspiration: a cigarette clenched between his teeth, splattered with paint the approximate shade of my skin. He had insisted that I wear a sapphire necklace that belonged to his mother. The result was a hybrid of Francis Bacon and soft-focus ’70s porn. My mouth was a yawning black chasm and there were boxing-gloves on my feet, but my lips and nipples were painted a tender pink. Maxine said that the portrait made me look about ten times more beautiful than I am in real life. Freddie loathed it; he couldn’t even accept it as self-consciously derivative. He said that it revealed him in a light that he didn’t want to be revealed in. I said that I thought the portrait was supposed to be of me? He said no – he had exposed himself as sentimental, as sentimental as a dirty old flasher in the park. I asked him: ‘How is a flasher sentimental?’ And he said: ‘A flasher is just a Romantic at heart. He just wants to be naked under the trees.’ Freddie decided to give up painting altogether and invest his creative potency in video art. Now he only works in 8mm.

  Next to the chaise longue, there was a bust of Freddie’s uncle, Professor Timothy Frank, an esteemed anthropologist. The bust was commissioned by Freddie’s father who hated Freddie’s uncle. It looked like the remnant of an exploded car factory. The face was more or less a steering wheel embedded in a tyre.

  There was a lot of tribal hunting equipment too: scythes and axes, charged with a preternatural energy. They were full of wrath. They didn’t want to be estranged from their country of origin. There was a taxidermied peacock with fanned feathers.

  In the kitchen, I ate some chicken livers and stale bread, checking my phone constantly. Vic hadn’t called or texted.

  I went back upstairs.

  Now the bathroom door was ajar. Disney’s The Little Mermaid was playing on our old mini TV, which stood on a marble plinth at the end of the bath. I watched the screen as I got my tights off in the hall.

  ‘Keep singing!’ barked Ursula the sea witch, reaching her phantom fingers down Ariel’s throat and usurping her voice.

  Ariel spasmed; her tail turned into legs.

  ‘This bit is like so romantic,’ came a voice. It wasn’t Freddie’s voice.

  I pushed the door open.

  There was a boy in the bath. He wasn’t Freddie.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ I said.

  The boy turned his freckled, crying face towards me.

  I knew who he was; he was Samuel, Allegra’s younger brother. I hadn’t seen him since the day after the night of the crème de menthe – that was nearly two years ago. He used to be a preppy little bastard but now he had transformed into a hipster of some description.

  ‘Get out,’ I said.

  His hair was ginger, not black like hers. His body was thin and white, but
not exactly alabaster like hers. His eyes were not grey like hers, but hazel. He had the same high domed forehead as her and I hated him violently.

  I attempted to haul the TV into the bath water.

  He leapt out.

  The cord strained. The TV rocked on the edge.

  It didn’t go in.

  Now Ariel was scrabbling on the shore, trying to figure out how to walk.

  Samuel clung to me, wet and ludicrous. I pushed him off. He was almost as tall as Vic. With shaking hands, he returned the TV to its plinth. He got back in the water.

  A moronic smile appeared on his face. ‘Look.’ He pointed to the screen.

  Eric the prince was trying to interpret Ariel’s damp-eyed sign-language. They were standing by a rock on the beach.

  Samuel put on my exfoliating mitts and lavered himself up. ‘Freddie is so analogue,’ he said. ‘That’s why I love him.’

  I tried to drag Samuel out of the bath by the arm, but he shook me off with ease. He said, sadly: ‘Yeah, Freddie told me you had a lot of anger management issues after you totally caught the G. She gave you the G. Because even though people are from the same blood buffet, it doesn’t mean they’re the same type of sick gangster. What she did was frigidaire.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I said. ‘Where’s Freddie?’

  He guffawed. ‘Sleeping it off. Last night we got more than shellacked and Freddie boggled and like got hit on by a flavourless but then he hit on me and I was like you can totally tap this. You’re a juicer and a hypo but I love you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, right.’ He blushed. ‘That’s how they speak in Brooklyn. In Williamsburg. I’m reading this.’ A wet copy of Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin lay on the bath mat. ‘Have you read it? Freddie told me to read it. He’s going to improve me.’

  ‘That’s mine,’ I said. ‘I haven’t read it.’

  He laughed. ‘Where are my manners, babes?’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m Samuel.’

  ‘I remember.’ I didn’t take his hand.

  ‘Freddie told me that you two are like majorly liquid even though he’s not a CK1.’