Eat My Heart Out Page 20

  ‘What brings you here?’

  ‘To go on a date with you.’

  ‘With me?’ I looked down at my drink.

  ‘Yeah.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I like girls who are mad,’ he said. ‘I like difficult women.’

  ‘Are you a masochist?’

  He laughed. ‘No – what’s that? Someone who likes being tied up?’

  ‘No. Someone who likes pain, more broadly speaking. Like if I go like this.’ I picked up a fork that had been left along with the remains of a scotch egg bar snack and stabbed Dave’s hand.

  He screamed.

  The fork didn’t go all the way in.

  He gripped his hand, sweating.

  ‘You see,’ I said. ‘You’re not a masochist.’ I sipped my drink. ‘It’s a shame. I think I only like masochistic men. I mean, someone’s got to get fucked. And I’m pretty sick to death of it being me.’

  He asked the bartender for a glass of water.

  ‘So exactly what is it that you do for a living?’ I said.

  ‘Advertising,’ he gasped. ‘Brand development.’

  ‘So you manipulate the masses into thinking they’re depressed when they’re not, so they’ll buy a SAD lamp.’

  ‘Kind of.’ Dave’s face was returning to its usual colour. ‘But I’m an artist, really. Yeah, that’s what I do. I’m a light artist. I switched to light as a medium after I got the SAD account. It kind of gave me ideas – about how light is like awesome.’

  I looked at him with disdain.

  ‘It’s sculptural, you know?’ he said.

  ‘I can’t deal with another artist. I can’t deal with another artist with a messianic complex.’

  Dave laughed. ‘Yeah, I’ve struggled with that myself.’ He opened his arms wide as though nailed to a cross and lolled his head forward.

  An hour later, we were sitting on a steel island in a pop-up sushi bar called Moat. The island was surrounded by a grimy ditch, filled with fish trying to survive. The odds were against them – diners were dangling their rods into the ditch from their positions at steel tables, laughing as their bait squirmed and the fishes’ open mouths sucked at what would inevitably kill them.

  ‘Maybe you’re a sadist?’ I said.

  ‘No.’ Dave laughed. ‘I’m not that either. Do you like it here? Peckham’s getting more and more wicked.’

  ‘You’ve got to be one or the other. Either/or.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that’s how human nature works,’ I said. ‘I had to learn it off by heart for my social and political science exams. At Cambridge.’

  He didn’t look too impressed.

  ‘Cambridge,’ I repeated. ‘Not the ex-polytechnic, the actual Cambridge.’

  He laughed again.

  I blushed. ‘Yeah, well anyway we had to do all this Hobbes stuff – life is a war of all against all. We need a benign totalitarian dictator to restrain us from hurting each other. Because otherwise we would hurt each other. Life is nasty, brutish, and short.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ said Dave. ‘I’m having a very pleasant evening.’

  ‘But it will be short.’ I took off my coat and revealed the wedding dress. The whalebone was cutting into my ribs.

  Now he did look impressed. ‘Are we going to Vegas?’

  ‘No.’ I closed the coat. ‘I’m a commitment phobe. Like a man. I just fuck and go, that’s my thing. No hard feelings.’ I took a swig of beer.

  Dave’s line had trailed out of the water. It was lying on the steel decking.

  ‘I’d marry you,’ he said.

  I frowned.

  ‘I felt it as soon as I saw you,’ he went on. ‘You’re psycho. You’re just like me.’

  ‘You don’t seem that psycho.’

  ‘What I mean is,’ he said. ‘I’m not psycho myself, but I like to look after psycho girls.’

  ‘Oh god. The last thing I need right now is a co-dependent relationship. I’ve got enough of those already.’

  My rod started to tug. I was dragged towards the ditch. The fish had the tenacity of a shark.

  Dave was killing himself laughing.

  ‘Help!’ I shouted at the waiters, who weren’t Japanese at all.

  The waiters attempted to wrench the rod from my hands, but then I experienced a surge of übermensch power. I wheeled the thing frantically until the fish rose out of the water, its iridescent body already entering the death throes. I got it on the deck. It continued to writhe. I grabbed Dave’s bottle of beer, still half full, and smashed it over the fish’s head.

  Blood shot out.

  I was pleased.

  The restaurant flashed red. There was a blast of giggly Japanese electro-pop. The waiters shook my hands high in the air, a prize fighter.

  The hipsters cheered.

  The waiter removed Dave’s rod from his hands. ‘She got the fish first,’ he explained. ‘So that should be enough for both of you.’

  ‘Yeah, so after we broke up, I just had to reconnect with myself again,’ Dave was saying. ‘Find the part that I had lost by being with someone – the same person – for so long. Do you know what I mean?’ He was shovelling bits of my catch into his mouth with chopsticks.

  They had skinned, boned, and decapitated the fish at our table. I could tell that the weak English waiter wanted to be sick at the sight of the heart still pounding, the gills still desperate for life.

  ‘I don’t really know what you mean, no,’ I said. ‘I’ve never really been in a long-term relationship due to my commitment phobia. For me, being in a relationship is like being buried alive in quicksand.’

  ‘Do you have to be buried in quicksand though?’ said Dave. ‘Don’t you just fall in, and that’s that.’

  ‘Yeah. Like falling in love. You put one toe in and then bang, before you know it, you’re fully submerged and you can’t breathe. It’s terrifying.’

  Dave laughed.

  ‘You laugh a lot,’ I said. ‘You’re always laughing.’

  He stopped laughing.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I like it.’ I must have been getting drunk on the sake.

  ‘So anyway I just always had this mad passion for Japan,’ he said. ‘Like the goddamn horn for the place.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s just that expression – it’s quite distasteful. Some of the things you come out with are a bit not up my street.’

  ‘What is up your street then?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘So I went travelling there – Japan – for like six months.’

  ‘Did you discover your Zen?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He put down his chopsticks. ‘Yeah. Totally. There was this one festival in a place called Kumamoto. They get all the horses really drunk on sake and blindfold them and parade them through the streets like totally pissed out of their minds. It’s worse than a fucking Saturday night in Leicester Square.’

  ‘I was in Leicester Square on Saturday night,’ I said. ‘Were you following me?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Because I’ve got a stalker called Vic. He’s properly psycho.’

  ‘Anyway, the horses are like totally humiliated. They’ve lost control – against their will.’

  The waiter appeared with the pièce de résistance – a cauldron of fish-head soup, boiling over a gas ring. ‘The eyes are a delicacy,’ said the waiter. He looked like he would throw up. ‘If lovers eat an eye each, they stay conjoined forever. So the ancient Japanese saying goes.’ He placed the eyes on a little dish.

  ‘In that case,’ I said. ‘I’m not eating it.’ I shook my eye into the ditch; the fish devoured it.

  Dave ate his eye with relish.

  ‘You’re going to stay conjoined forever with one of those fish then,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘The fish will remind me of you.’

  ‘Thanks. Do I look like a fish?’

  ‘No, you look like
a gazelle.’

  ‘What’s that again?’

  ‘Something graceful.’

  I stared into my bowl.

  Soon another lucky diner caught a fish and the electro-pop started again.

  ‘Tell me about your art,’ I said.

  ‘It’s like … based on the phenomenological turn? Like Merleau-Ponty’s concept of being embodied in the world?’

  ‘Yeah, he got that from Heidegger. I’ve been reading all about Heidegger. How we’re just thrust into the world and it’s not our choice so we’ve got to make the best of it.’

  ‘That sounds like self-help. And he didn’t get it from Heidegger. He got it from Husserl.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Our plates were cleared away.

  ‘This date is so cringe-worthy,’ I said. ‘I hate myself, I hate Heidegger, whatever. I hate fish. I don’t like England. I don’t like you. Or your teeth.’

  He covered his mouth. ‘Hey. I’m really self-conscious about my teeth.’

  ‘No.’ The room was starting to spin. ‘I do like your teeth. I love them. And I love you. There, I said it. I’ve fallen madly in love with you so now you can just fuck me up so just get it over and done with, would you?’

  Dave pushed me against the betting shop next to the restaurant.

  We were kissing, he was stroking my hair, he was telling me that I was beautiful. I didn’t kick him in the nuts or even bite very hard.

  ‘One day I’ll take you home with me,’ he was saying. ‘I’ll take you back to Devon with me. You’d love it there. I’ll introduce you to my mum and dad. There’s just miles and miles of fields and the sky is endless. You’ll feel free.’

  ‘I don’t want to feel free,’ I said. ‘I want to feel constrained by something that’s not evil, something that I can trust. Dave, how old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-seven.’ He took my hand and we walked to the bus stop.

  ‘I suffer from anxiety,’ I told him, as we sat down on the top deck.

  ‘That’s OK. I’ve got loads of downers.’

  I rested my head on his shoulder.

  In front, there was another couple, and a man sitting alone, wearing a red woolly hat.

  ‘Can I tell you a story?’ said Dave.

  I kissed him again. ‘I like kissing you,’ I said.

  The man in the red hat jerked.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘There was this one time that me and my mates went down to this little cove, called Mill Cove, near where I live. We stayed up all night doing shrooms.’

  I was watching the red hat.

  ‘It was way intense. The world looked so beautiful, I almost couldn’t bear it. That’s when I decided to be an artist.’

  ‘That’s a nice story,’ I said.

  ‘No. That’s not it. I started getting all these stones and stuff that were lying around on the beach and organising them in these circles. They were totally random, but kind of complete in themselves. You know what I mean?’

  The man in the hat stood up; he sat down again.

  ‘I felt like I was creating order for the first time in my life,’ Dave went on. ‘Not artificial, hostile order, but true, pure, natural order. And I looked at my friends and they were just as they were – complete.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s like that when you’re high.’

  ‘No.’ He pulled his hand away.

  I took it back. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘We were all sitting round this fire and the night sky looked so beautiful, and then, as dawn was coming, we saw this ship on the horizon. At least, we thought it was a ship.’ He paused. ‘The ship’s lights seemed to be blinking on and off but it wasn’t coming any closer. The sky was insane – just amazing, open, falling colour. Then the girls started to cry. They said the light was blinking because the ship was in trouble and it wanted us to help. They said the ship was sinking, but it was too far away and we couldn’t swim that far out to help so we better run to the village but the village was too far away so …’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The sun came up. They said the ship wanted to be seen for just an instant before it disappeared entirely—’

  The man in the red hat twisted his head round.

  It was Vic.

  He seemed to be flinching from an imaginary threat. His lips were horribly elongated.

  ‘Don’t listen to a word that comes out of her mouth,’ Vic told Dave. ‘She’ll tell you she’s not an actress, but she is. She’ll tell you she’s not acting, but she is.’ He stood up. The parka that I had lent him flopped open to reveal his gnarled nakedness. His penis began to stand up. His nipples looked like blind eyes. Hair crawled over his shoulders from his back like a monster trying to throttle him to death.

  ‘Do you know this man?’ said Dave.

  The couple had stood up too. They were backed against the front window.

  ‘A is for all’s well that ends well,’ said Vic. ‘M is for murder on the bus. Murder on the Dance Floor.’ He laughed. His tongue was scabrous. ‘I see you in all the scenes of all the films that you said I should never watch. With that woman. That Hispanic woman, eating her out, licking her out.’

  ‘Vic,’ I said. ‘Porn’s not real.’ I turned to Dave. ‘I swear I’ve never been in a porno.’

  An empty bottle of Lucozade rolled across the floor, knocking into the metal legs of chairs.

  ‘I saw you with your schoolgirl uniform and then you were in the woods with Jeremy and Jeremy told you that you’d been a very bad girl.’

  The bus had stopped.

  The driver was coming up the stairs.

  Vic picked up the Lucozade bottle and smashed it over the railing that ran along the backs of the seats. Orange-tinted glass flew everywhere. The driver moved to restrain Vic, but he brandished a shard of glass and started laughing again.

  ‘Do you know that Ann-Marie is a Dutch name?’ said Vic. ‘I looked it up on the internet. Are you Dutch?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Are you fucking Dutch?’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘No. Vic, I’m not Dutch.’

  ‘Ann-Marie means bitter grace in Dutch,’ he mumbled. Then he used the sharpest end of the shard to engrave into the skin of his stomach: A.M.

  My initials were a pink line then a running red gash.

  Seventeen

  As soon as the driver opened the doors of the bus, I began to run, hysterically.

  Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

  God is love, god is light. Light is Dave, the light-maker!

  Where is he?

  I looked back. I had left him attending to Vic, who had collapsed on the floor of the top deck. I had expected Dave to run after me; he hadn’t.

  I ran into Tesco on Clapham High Street.

  I grabbed a basket and skipped down the florescent meat aisle. I swung the basket as though it were a holy thurible able to bless the packets and packets of gleaming red ruby meat, rippled with a fat so white it hurt. There was purity in the world. There was passion in the world. I was alive. Hallelujah!

  I stopped, entranced, at the offal section. The hearts, ripe and obscene, seemed to morph into Dave’s pendulous testicles – I was sure they would be pendulous – blood-bursting and full of the promise of future generations. We would mate! We would mate!

  I clawed at the hearts with love streaming through my veins. There would be twenty, thirty children! There would be eternal children! Dave and I would move in with his parents in Devon and I would waddle about the rose-covered cottage, as happy as a fat pregnant duck. His kindly mother with twinkling eyes and flour on her hands from making so much bread would pat my stomach and possibly perform an age-old family ritual of swinging a locket around my stretch-marked belly in order to tell whether I would be gushing forth a little Dave or a little Ann-Marie. If I had a boy, I would call it Sebastian.

  I put the packet in my mouth and tore at it with my teeth. The watery blood that swirled around the edges of the meat ran straight into my throat.
I bit down on the heart with urgency. It crunched like a hard peach. Dense, slaughter-heavy scents overwhelmed me. I had an urgent need to masturbate. I put the brown and messy meat between my legs, crouching awkwardly on the floor. The florescent lights became gamma ray bursts.

  ‘Ann-Marie!’ Dave was running down the aisle towards me. He stopped, sweating. ‘What are you doing?’

  I threw the packet back on the shelf. ‘It should be perfectly obvious what I’m doing, Dave.’ I stood up. ‘You’ve ruined it now.’

  ‘Ruined what?’

  ‘I was having a wonderful time – remembering you.’

  ‘Well, here I am!’

  ‘No, Dave. You don’t understand. It’s better if we skip this part. If we fast-forward to the beginning and the middle and the end and let the tragic chorus begin and let me feel sad and maybe I’ll even write a poem about it. Maybe I was close to writing then – with the meat.’ I gestured to the hearts, which looked as though they had been mauled by a pack of wolves.

  A Tesco worker came striding down the aisle with a mop. She was irate. ‘Didn’t you hear the announcement?’ she was saying.

  I ran out of the supermarket, grabbing a copy of Grazia on the way. I didn’t stop until I reached the tube. I hid behind the public toilets. There were no police cars. Then I saw Dave, panting. He was looking for me. I watched his discomfort for a while, then, when his back was turned, I ran and jumped him from behind, just as I had jumped Vic on our first date. Dave didn’t fall though; he was stronger. He held onto the park railings, saying nothing, until I began to feel foolish. I got down.

  ‘You’re playing games,’ he said. ‘You’re always playing games. What about that poor guy, Vic? You didn’t even wait for the ambulance. He was on a stretcher—’

  ‘Was he strapped down?’

  ‘They said he’d lost a lot of blood, that he had hypothermia as well. They said he was homeless.’

  ‘He’s not homeless. He lives with a whole load of operators – as long as he’s not dead, that’s the main thing.’

  Dave stared at me.

  ‘I hope they put Vic in a secure enough straitjacket,’ I said. ‘Because I can’t imagine the lengths he will go to if he’s allowed to roam the streets as a free man.’

  I explained to Dave on the tube that I had run to the meat aisle for protection because Vic was terrified of meat. Dave said he wished he’d bought me a packet of pork chops as protection, like garlic is protection against vampires. I was thrilled that he was entering into the spirit of things. People were staring at us in the carriage; probably because we looked like a couple from a romantic comedy, totally made for each other, both appearance-wise and personality-wise.