Eat My Heart Out Page 21

  I got out Heidegger: An Intro and said: ‘I won’t be needing this any more.’ I offered it to the man sitting opposite; he had a bushy beard and looked vaguely like a philosopher himself.

  ‘Who needs knowledge and even education at all when you have love?’ I said. ‘I was only getting an education anyway because that’s what you’re supposed to do. And I never really understood any of it. All I ever really wanted was someone to love, who loves me. The rest of – all of it – just seems like a waste of time.’

  ‘Really?’ said the man opposite. He was holding the book as though it were a bomb.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘See.’ I snatched it back and flipped to a random page. ‘Concept of Authentic Life: My existence is owned by me.’ I gave it back to the man. ‘I mean, who needs authenticity when you’ve got romance?’

  Dave laughed uncertainly.

  We were nearly two hours late for the Samuel Johnson Prize, but the winner hadn’t yet been announced.

  Steph went completely ape-shit when she saw Dave and told me that under no circumstances was he coming into the ceremony. I told her that under no circumstances was I coming in without him and so she better make sure an extra place was set at our table. She had brought the Lanvin contrast dress in a zip-up sack, carried by Marge, who was wearing a steel-grey fishtail dress. Raegan was wearing an early ’90s grunge ensemble of floral dress, DMs, and plastic jewellery bearing the letter R. Steph was stunning in a man’s brown suit and trilby.

  I changed in the toilet. Raegan did my hair and told me that I was pretty and that she’d fallen in love with my new boyfriend Dave because he was totally hot. She told me all about a documentary that she’d watched on YouTube about Drew Barrymore becoming a coke addict at the age of nine and how she couldn’t believe it because E.T. was one of her favourite films and if Gertie could be a coke addict then why couldn’t she?

  I told her I didn’t think that was a very good attitude because Drew Barrymore was already an extremely highgrossing star by the age of nine so she could no doubt afford to spend millions of dollars on rehab.

  Raegan pulled out a sachet of white powder and a £20 note and told me that she’d bought it off Steph’s cleaner Ilka, who’d been rehired. She racked up a few, very fat lines on the toilet seat and I told her that I didn’t think she should be doing that seeing as she was only twelve but she said it was a rite of passage for all pre-teens with broken homes.

  ‘I come from a broken home too,’ I told her. ‘My father left when I was born. I never knew him. I only ever knew my mother.’

  ‘Cool,’ she said.

  She did a line with deftness, pinched the bridge of her delicate American nose, and threw her head back. She offered the note to me.

  ‘You look at least sixteen in that outfit,’ I told her. ‘Maybe you are sixteen. Maybe you’re eighteen.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m twelve.’

  She blocked the cubicle door so that I had no choice but to do a line too.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘I think Ilka was getting her revenge on Steph for sacking her,’ I said. ‘This is like paracetamol or something.’

  But Raegan’s pupils had dilated to dots; she was gurning. She kept on tucking her hair behind her ears.

  ‘OK!’ I said.

  Dave was waiting in the corridor. ‘You look beautiful,’ he told me.

  ‘Do I look beautiful?’ stuttered Raegan. ‘You look like Justin Bieber. Or Justin Timberlake. Or a blond Justin Bieber. I mean Justin Bieber after he dyed his hair blond.’

  Our table was laden with flowers and stacked with copies of Falling Out of Fate. Steph and Marge were already seated. Dave was not dressed for the occasion at all; he was wearing a pair of red jeans and high-tops.

  ‘Didn’t you get my texts?’ Steph hissed at me.

  I checked my phone:

  Why have you run away again after everything I’ve done for you? Steph

  Come back, darling, I’m sorry. Steph

  If you come back, I’ll tell you the story, the whole story, whether I like it or not. Steph

  I guess this is karma. Erzulie must be punishing me. Steph.

  When will the badness flourish to its fullness and die? Steph

  ‘Steph,’ I whispered. ‘I told you I was going for a walk on the Heath. I was gone for like two hours.’

  ‘You were gone for five hours.’ She looked at Dave. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I met him on the Heath,’ I said.

  ‘But wasn’t he in the BBC cafeteria this afternoon—’ She shook her head. ‘You missed the dinner.’ She looked distraught. ‘There was a dinner before.’

  Dave leaned across me and told Steph: ‘My ex-girlfriend was a big fan of your work. She did an MA in Gender Studies. Never stopped talking about your rereading of Deleuzean de-stratification. She said it was important as a woman to retain a small amount of the strata, to not let go of the strata entirely.’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Steph. ‘Don’t burn all your bridges, not all at once.’ She looked at me.

  ‘Victoria said that was why she was going out with me,’ said Dave. ‘I was the strata.’

  Steph smiled at Dave warmly.

  The waiters were pouring champagne.

  Raegan reached for a flute.

  Marge slapped her arm. ‘What’s wrong with you, honey?’ she was saying. ‘I know it’s exciting but it’s not that exciting.’

  Raegan gripped the edge of the white-clothed table. ‘It’s exciting,’ she was saying, over and over, her eyes whorls of black. She leapt up. ‘I’ve got a trick.’ She attempted to pull the tablecloth out from under the miscellaneous flutes and ice buckets.

  ‘No,’ said Marge. ‘No. We’ll have to talk to Dr Garrison when we get home about increasing your Ritalin prescription.’

  ‘See?’ I said to Dave. ‘Americans are obsessed with prescription drugs.’

  The chatter of liberals at leisure was silenced by the appearance on the stage of a round woman who looked like an opera singer. She was wearing a blue velvet tent. The blue seemed outrageously vivid to me.

  Dave put his hand on mine. He asked if he could have some of whatever I had had; I said there was none left.

  ‘Where’s Vic?’ I was saying. ‘I’m so scared that Vic will come, please don’t let him come.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dave. ‘I’ll protect you.’

  ‘You see?’ I said. ‘I don’t need knowledge if I’ve got love.’ I turned to Steph. ‘There’s nothing else you can do to me. More than what you’ve done. The future is uncertain.’

  ‘The future is always uncertain,’ said Raegan.

  The opera singer went on and on about the state of nonfiction and the state of publishing and the threat of the internet and the exciting possibilities of e-books and the danger that e-books were deregulating the world. ‘In the words of David Lynch,’ she quipped. ‘We take our screens to bed.’

  Everyone laughed.

  Raegan bashed her fork too hard against her empty flute; it cracked. Marge tried to escort her outside for a telling off. Raegan held onto the edge of the table again, but Marge prised her fingers away. They disappeared.

  A tall man in a bow tie appeared on the podium and read out the nominees. He described Falling Out of Fate as the culmination of a life spent in women’s letters.

  Steph snorted. ‘Or just letters.’

  Along with the cultural history of ceruse, the other nominated books included a history of the London sewer system in the Victorian times, a biography of the butler of Lord Douglas-Home, an account of the demise of ash trees, and a recently discovered account of the Boer War from the perspective of a man who had been shot for desertion.

  ‘Then how the hell did he give an account?’ I said.

  ‘He wrote it before,’ said Steph.

  ‘And finally a heart-wrenching memoir of one man’s struggle to be reunited with his daughter after his wife discovered that he was having an affair with one of her best friends,’ said the hos
t.

  A picture of a Hispanic-looking man with red-framed glasses appeared on the screen. His name was Greg Perez. It was Raegan’s father, Marge’s ex-husband. Raegan had shown me a photo of him when we were drawing at the kitchen table a few days ago. His book was called Distance.

  Marge returned with Raegan, whose eyes were looking all over the place. Water had been splashed on her face. The Drew Barrymore make-up had run. She got more excited when she saw her father on the screen.

  ‘And the winner is …’

  There was silence.

  ‘Stephanie Haight for Falling Out of Fate.’

  Steph stood up, too fast. The table tipped; Marge caught it.

  Steph walked to the podium and assumed the calm authority of a professor. She thanked her publisher, her agent, Marge, Raegan, me. ‘And most of all,’ she said. ‘I’d like to thank Greg, for making our affair public.’

  Gradually, people began to clap.

  Steph didn’t return to the table.

  ‘It starts with lesions,’ the short, fat, serious man was saying. ‘Lesions the shape of lenses that appear on the branches.’ He shuddered. ‘And then there are the fungi that sprout. They look appetising – one is almost tempted to make a fungi risotto. But oh no they’re not.’ He slurped his gin and tonic.

  Dave and I looked at each other.

  ‘Here.’ The man pulled his iPhone out of his pocket. ‘Have you heard of the Ashtag? It’s an app that spots dieback.’

  ‘I’m sorry you didn’t win,’ I told him.

  Raegan had attached herself to her father’s leg as he accepted consolations. She had a hunted look in her eye, like Freddie at the peanut factory. The liberal intelligentsia had turned into a mob; they bumped and grinded to one of Adele’s more upbeat numbers, letting their hair down, letting it all hang out, letting the joy of being liberal lift the sense that the wrong horse won. Greg had been the favourite. Greg had managed to mix erudition with emotional pain, contextualising the latter within the ongoing debate about the rights of fathers and the dubious rights of mothers to wreak revenge via the children. ‘It was Stephanie who got revenge,’ I overheard a renowned panellist remark to an even more renowned commentator and critic. ‘They should have given it to that fabulous work on ceruse. I read it. It was fabulous. His insights on red and how it is not what we think it is and Elizabethan purity more generally were really startling.’

  ‘Startling how?’

  ‘They were just really startling to me.’

  Dave and I were dancing with the expert on Victorian sewers, who was only twenty. It transpired that he was a child prodigy who’d gone up to Oxford at the age of fourteen, chaperoned by his father, who was eager to buy a tandem so that they could ride around Oxford together in the style of another child prodigy from the ’70s whose name the sewer man couldn’t remember. He didn’t mind that his sewer book hadn’t won because he said he’d had a jolly good time splashing around in the sewers with a torch strapped to his head. He said he had the rest of his life to win. He screamed with joy every time a new song came on; ‘Twist and Shout’ got a particular rise out of him.

  I checked my phone.

  Come to the pool. Please. Stephanie. Leave your man behind.

  There was another:

  The hotel pool. Not the pool at home.

  Steph was sitting in a deckchair with her back to the black shape of London. The pool was on the roof, lit from within. It deserved to be filmed for an R&B video. A few people were laughing by the bar in the corner but they didn’t seem to belong to the award ceremony. I sat in the deckchair next to Steph, then got up and turned it around so that I could see the view.

  ‘I can’t believe he beat me,’ she said, lighting a cigarette. She lit one for me too.

  The waitress came over and she ordered two bourbon highballs.

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘Greg. I can’t believe I let him win.’ She shook her head. ‘He won. If only I’d written harder, if only I’d tried harder, I could have done it. But there was something inside of me saying don’t do it, you can’t do it. That thing inside of me will never go away.’

  Our faces were slanting in different directions.

  ‘I tried to kill it in a multitude of ways,’ she said. ‘I did everything. But the voice telling you you’re shit is a selffulfilling prophecy.’

  ‘Stephanie,’ I said. ‘What are you talking about? You won. Where’s the award?’

  ‘Don’t laugh at me. I can take it.’

  ‘Take what? You won.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you mean that he won metaphorically or what?’ I said.

  Steph laughed. ‘Ann-Marie, you’re delusional. Were you there? Or were you too absorbed in your new zipless fuck? That’s what we used to call it – back in the old days.’ She unbuckled her ankle-boots and kicked them off. ‘Greg won in real life. It was my punishment for doing what I did to Marge. It’s karma. I fucked the balance. But Marge is worse. Marge internalised the negative voice on a scale that even I can’t fail to marvel at.’ Steph laughed again. ‘She stays with me because I’m the one who killed her spirit.’

  ‘Marge seems quite spirited,’ I said.

  ‘No.’ Stephanie shook her head. ‘She’s dead inside. So am I.’ She tossed her cigarette on the floor. ‘My hope is that things will change generationally. But you’ve fallen at the first hurdle. You’re falling.’

  Our highballs arrived.

  ‘I—’ I started.

  She cut me off.

  ‘I met him on the ski lift,’ she said.

  Her eyes glazed over.

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  I waited.

  Her eyes went back to normal again. ‘Yes.’ She downed her drink and waved for more. ‘It was snowing, obviously. It was chance. We went up, up. That night in the cabin was a bliss that I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you what it is to stare into the eyes of a man with whom you are in love and come simultaneously.’

  ‘With Greg?!’

  ‘No.’

  More drinks arrived.

  ‘With Leo. My American ice hockey player. He held my hand in a way that – He held my hand.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I became an American for him. I followed him there. He told me that this was it. It was it. I changed my name, got a Green Card. I changed my heart. I made it pliable. Open.’ She grimaced. ‘Every night, night after night.’

  I waited.

  ‘I enrolled in grad school at Harvard. He had gone to Yale. He was very well-bred. We didn’t have much to talk about, looking back. In fact we had nothing to talk about at all. I was so bored, sitting in restaurants. I kept the smile on my face but I just found him tedious as hell.’

  I laughed. ‘Dave’s quite boring.’

  ‘Yes.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘But my god is he cute!’

  We both laughed.

  ‘Leo never made me wait,’ she said. ‘That’s why I loved him. He was always there. Sure – I could be tricky at times. Some nights I wanted to work on my thesis but I would go to a movie with him or watch him play or hang out with his friends. I didn’t mind because I was with him. I let my studies slide. I didn’t mind. I let my mind slide. I didn’t mind. I let myself slide into him like … something inevitable.’

  A woman staggered over and asked for a light. Steph handed it to her.

  ‘But he got poached,’ said Steph.

  ‘By a woman?’

  ‘No! By the Toronto Maple Leafs. He went pro. He was that good.’

  ‘Is that an actual team?’

  ‘One of the best. We carried on long distance. I was twentyfive. I wrote him every week, great, massive outpourings of love. And he wrote me, the best he could. Not so poetic. But I didn’t care. I used to get so excited by his letters.’ She looked at me. ‘They were mostly about Maple Leaf strategy, league tables, chances. The letters got shorter. And then no letter arrived. I kept writing. I wrote for six weeks. I can’t t
ell you the anxiety I went through. I became superstitious, again. Eventually, I went up there because I was worried that he had had an injury and the coach hadn’t told me. But he hadn’t had an injury. No. He wasn’t hurt at all.’

  There was another long silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘He’d got engaged to a Maple Leaf cheerleader. Do you know they can skate and cheer at the same time?’

  I laughed.

  Steph stood up. ‘I want you to go,’ she said. ‘Go free.’

  She wrote me a cheque for £5,000.

  I stared at it for a moment, and then I put it in my handbag.

  I returned to the party without Stephanie.

  Dave was on the dance floor. He and I danced until four in the morning, and then we took a taxi back to Clapham.

  The window-shattering power of Nina Hagen’s 1979 Rockpalast performance of ‘Naturträne’ greeted us in the hall, drowning out the hum of bees.

  It was coming from the basement.

  The stench in our screening room was compounded by the alarming vision of Nina, stretched from floor to ceiling on the screen, baby dummies hanging from her ears, opening her mouth too wide to be human.

  More urgently, Freddie was standing in dandy regalia on a chair in the centre. One end of the cord of my red silk kimono was tied around his neck; the other end was attached to a makeshift scaffolding, fashioned out of the bits of wood that the homeless woman had collected and left upstairs, nailed together with all the ineptitude of one who has never done a day of manual labour in his life.

  Jasper was steadying the chair on which Freddie stood. He looked delighted. The bee man in his white astronaut-like outfit was slouched against the wall, watching the video of Nina, batting a tennis racquet back and forth, saying: ‘She was extraordinary.’

  ‘Change it to No Bra,’ commanded Jasper. He was wearing some kind of purple college robe.