Eat My Heart Out Read online

  ‘Freddie, get down from there,’ I said.

  ‘Oh good, you’re here,’ he said. ‘I wanted you to see me. Perhaps you most of all.’

  Bee man changed the video; a picture of a grim-looking topless woman appeared on the screen. Her long brown hair was positioned over one breast. Hi, my name’s Munchausen, how are you? came a man’s voice, accompanied by jittery electro.

  ‘Right.’ Jasper moved behind the tripod. The Bolex was ready.

  Freddie turned his plagued face towards Dave. ‘Sebastian?’ he said. ‘Sebastian? Ha, she got you back.’

  ‘This is not Sebastian, Freddie,’ I said. ‘This is Dave. Dave, these are my friends.’

  ‘My god,’ said Jasper, looking at Dave. ‘You’ve found his doppelgänger, Ann-Marie. The likeness is uncanny. Congratulations.’

  ‘What are they talking about?’ said Dave.

  ‘I did an installation about doppelgängers back in ’02,’ said the bee man from beneath his helmet. ‘I got loads of twins to like bump into each other on a busy street.’

  ‘Who’s Sebastian?’ said Dave.

  ‘He’s just this guy I went to school with,’ I said.

  ‘The love of her life who she was with for seven years until she destroyed him by sleeping with him.’ Freddie pointed to Jasper.

  ‘You said you’d never had a long-term relationship,’ said Dave.

  ‘I was joking,’ I said.

  ‘Enough,’ said Freddie. ‘Go.’

  The bee man casually kicked away Freddie’s chair.

  Freddie’s body fell, then lurched. His eyes bulged; he began to choke.

  ‘Relax,’ said Jasper.

  Freddie continued to writhe. I tried to grab the chair off the bee man but he wouldn’t give it to me.

  ‘In Switzerland, we believe in the right to die,’ he said. ‘No one should deny that right.’

  ‘You sound Scottish, not Swiss,’ I said.

  Dave went crazy; he tried to get Freddie to sit on his shoulders, but Freddie kept kicking him away. Freddie was about three feet off the ground. Jasper was laughing.

  Then Freddie’s body went limp.

  ‘Fuck.’ I was going into hysteria. ‘Fuck.’

  Dave managed to half throttle the bee man, ripping off his bee helmet in the process. He looked like an ordinary man in his mid-thirties beneath. Dave grabbed the chair. I grabbed the chair off Dave. Jasper attempted to block both of us. I climbed on the chair and tore at the knot around Freddie’s neck. That magazine ad of a ginger boy who wasn’t Samuel was stuck to the sweat on Freddie’s palm. When I finally managed to haul him down, it came unstuck and floated into the mouse shit on the floor.

  Eighteen

  ‘What’s the password?’ said the mouth.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Use your imagination.’

  The letter-box was very low down.

  ‘I don’t have an imagination. I don’t have time.’ I kicked the door.

  It opened.

  The green girl from the peanut factory was standing in the entrance hall of what was once a boys’ prep school. ‘The password is squat,’ she said, and disappeared through a door to the right.

  A meeting was going on. ‘He seemed like a nice guy,’ a girl with a bolt through her nose was saying. ‘But I knew from the way he was dancing that he was a spy.’

  Boys’ names were engraved on the wall in silver. Headmasters’ names were engraved in gold. The place was clean, but I could hear the menace of minimal techno warbling from below. They were having a rave in the basement. I went upstairs. Classrooms with blackboards had been turned into ill-defined lounge areas. Beds were piled on top of beds. A dog was chasing a dog. I wandered through corridors without knowing where I was going. There were stickers on a window: Ambition: The Desire To Tread On Others. And: Stop Mad Cowboy Disease.

  I found Samuel sitting on a camp bed in the last room on the third floor. One of his heinous Disney remixes was spinning, botched and repetitive. He was staring at his laptop, earphones in, back to me. This had been the sickroom. Ointments were still lined up on shelves. I lifted the needle off the record and yanked out Samuel’s earphones. He jumped; the laptop crashed to the floor. He was watching Splash. Daryl Hannah with her crimped blonde hair was wandering around Bloomingdale’s in a man’s suit.

  He reached out to me. I let him cry into my hair for a long time.

  ‘I’m trying,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to get past the cartoons and move onto to some real live pictures.’

  ‘They’re not real or live,’ I said. ‘It’s a film from the ’80s.’

  ‘I was thinking about you.’ Samuel wiped his nose. ‘Because in this one, the mermaid’s got the upper hand. She doesn’t sacrifice anything. She returns to the sea and Tom Hanks follows her. He sacrifices his life in New York for her and becomes a merman. He sacrifices his life in New York.’ He shook his head, baffled. ‘Freddie told me what that woman Stephanie told you about Ariel, but I don’t believe it. Or maybe I believe it.’

  ‘So you have seen Freddie?’

  ‘No. Not since that night.’ He started to cry again.

  ‘Samuel,’ I said. ‘This is serious. You know I don’t like you. I’ve never liked you and I don’t like your sister either.’

  ‘I thought you did like me!’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’

  More crying.

  ‘But Freddie tried to take his own life last night.’

  Samuel stared at me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s right. Commit suicide. He would have died if it wasn’t for me.’ I sat on the camp-bed. ‘It pains me to say it but he’s madly in love with you.’

  Green girl appeared in the doorway, brandishing an old Nando’s chicken box. She didn’t recognise me at all. ‘Dude,’ she addressed Samuel. ‘Is this girl bothering you?’

  ‘No.’ He looked happy.

  Daryl Hannah was shoplifting. Tom Hanks was trying to stop her.

  ‘OK, well do you have any like detergent?’ said green girl. ‘Or bleach. I need really strong bleach to really fuck the stains.’

  ‘What stains?’ said Samuel.

  ‘Here.’ Green girl produced a pair of pink gingham knickers from the chicken box. She twirled them around her finger. Ants swarmed out of the crotch and over her hand and arm. She didn’t react. ‘Or I might just go to the allotment and just like leave them there.’

  I escorted Samuel and all his belongings back to Clapham in a taxi.

  It turned out that the balloon animals in Freddie’s bedroom were the brainchild of Samuel, who had been promised a balloon animal installation in Freddie’s show.

  ‘Don’t you know that Koons did that back in the ’80s?’ said Dave. He was sprawled on the chaise longue in the living room. I was sprawled on top of him.

  Jasper had made a Lancashire hotpot, which he was forking into his mouth straight out of the pan. He passed the pan to Dave, who lifted it up and drank the gravy.

  ‘Mate,’ said Dave. ‘This is fucking sick.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Jasper.

  Samuel was playing with his balloons in front of the Victoriana screen. ‘Who’s Koons?’ he said.

  ‘Samuel’s a genius,’ said Freddie. There was a deep bruise around his neck. ‘He’s my pet. He’s superlative.’

  ‘Superfluous, don’t you mean,’ said Jasper.

  ‘Koons is like the proper Damien Hirst,’ said Dave. ‘His puppy is like legendary. It’s as big as a building and it’s wicked. It’s made out of flowers.’

  I went upstairs to check my emails.

  Dear Ann-Marie,

  Why do they insist on reporting in the press that I won?

  The people who I love the most always die. It’s patently obvious that Greg was just a zipless fuck, albeit prolonged, because he’s still alive. Did I tell you already? ‘Zipless fuck’ was a phrase coined by Second Wave feminist Erica Jong in her seminal 1973 novel, Fear of Flying. Why don’t they paste his face on t
op of mine in all the publicity shots of that ghastly ceremony? Did you read the master/slave chapter of Falling Out of Fate yet?

  Until I see you.

  Steph

  Sebastian called me on Skype.

  ‘Hey.’ He was in his bedroom at his parents’ house. ‘You were brilliant on the radio.’

  ‘Did you hear it?’

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I want to tell you something. I think if I tell you, things will be different between us. Maybe we can start again. Maybe we can.’

  ‘Sebastian, I’m really busy at the moment.’

  ‘Wait. I never told you this before.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I didn’t get chucked out of boarding school for fighting. That was a lie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just wanted you to think that I was strong. You were always getting in fights.’

  ‘What did you get chucked out for then?’

  ‘I was sleepwalking. I used to get up in the middle of the night and just wander around the countryside around the school and just kind of end up in weird places, like in the woods and stuff.’

  ‘Were you actually asleep though?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. Except they never believed me. They thought I was just being a juvenile delinquent. But I was scared when I woke up in the woods and I had no idea how I got there.’

  ‘You never sleepwalked with me.’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Do you sleepwalk with Allegra?’

  ‘Yes. I started sleepwalking again after you and I broke up. I don’t walk very far now. Usually I just walk to the kitchen or the living room and start watching TV. But she loves it. She says Artaud sleepwalked.’

  ‘Did you wet the bed as well when you were at boarding school?’

  He sat back; the lens pointed at the corner of his ceiling. His face looked very tall.

  ‘Look, Sebastian,’ I said. ‘I have to confess something to you, too. I’ve met someone else.’ I paused. ‘I never thought it would happen, but it has happened. He’s unbelievably charismatic.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Dave works hard plus he’s just a gifted conversationalist, which is the ideal combination. The problem with you is that you’re quite talented but you’re also lazy so you need Allegra to pussy-whip you into doing anything the whole time.’

  ‘Fuck you.’ He disappeared. The screen showed a series of moving abstractions. His laptop must have landed at a bad angle on the bed; I saw dark blue. Then there was nothing.

  I had tried to persuade Freddie to wear a polo neck for the opening of Making A Racquet – to hide the bruise around his neck. But he wanted people to see that he had suffered for the art. Jasper had enlisted a team of his father’s employees to do everything. He had flown someone in from Cologne to do the lighting. Vice was filming. Scene & Herd from Artforum was here. Everyone was here, it seemed, except the bee man, who had apparently gone into anaphylactic shock. ‘Which is strange,’ said Jasper, watching the backside of a waitress as she shouldered a tray of devils-on-horseback.

  Dave was whipping out business cards, saying: ‘There’s a person who matters. There – that person. He really matters.’

  ‘It’s off-putting,’ I told Jasper.

  We were standing at the bar. The crowd was contained in the first gallery, which was separated from all the others by a black curtain. The walls were exposed brick. There was no art on display.

  ‘We get them fucked first,’ Jasper explained. ‘They’re more inclined to review well and buy this shit.’

  ‘Is it shit?’ I said.

  Jasper laughed. ‘Freddie knows it’s shit, I know it’s shit. More to the point, Freddie’s father knows it’s shit and he’s paying for the space.’

  The space had recently housed the remains of defunct trains. Living trains still thundered overhead.

  Dave came over.

  ‘Sebastian, I was just saying to Ann-Marie,’ said Jasper.

  ‘Dave,’ said Dave.

  ‘How fucking hot it was when Ann-Marie and I were in the back of my Alfa Romeo,’ Jasper went on. ‘When we were parked outside Allegra’s parents’ house in Buckinghamshire that night after the crème de menthe. We had all driven straight from Hammerton Hall because Allegra was keen to leave the scene of her spoliation. She said the smell of mint had penetrated the whole county of Suffolk. She said she would never chew chewing gum again, or brush her teeth with mint-flavoured toothpaste. What other kind of toothpaste is there? I asked her.’ Jasper laughed. ‘Babe, you’re cornered. Allegra was always moaning. But she and I.’ He gestured to me. ‘We literally tore it down. The leather interior was cannibalised, but I didn’t care. It was worth it to see her sullen face crease in an orgasm that seemed to have no end.’

  Dave put his arm round my shoulders. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘That’s my girlfriend.’

  ‘She’s incapable of love,’ said Jasper.

  ‘I’ll ask you to kindly leave your drinks at this point,’ Freddie announced. ‘The work can’t take it.’

  Everyone laughed.

  We went through the black curtain.

  Allegra was sitting cross-legged on a raised platform in the second gallery. Her glorious black hair was hidden under a frizzy blonde wig and she wore a loose white dress. An opera began to play.

  ‘Madame Butterfly,’ said Jasper.

  To the right of Allegra, there was a transparent perspex bath, filled with water.

  The crowd gathered.

  A light fell on her. Everyone else was in darkness. The light turned into an image, projected onto her face, so that her blank white skin became another face, a man’s brown hair, a business suit. The image rippled away from her; it settled on the bath, and became clear. It was Michael Douglas.

  Sue came out of the crowd. Her bob was concealed under a brown wig. She was carrying a box that thudded from within.

  The water in the transparent bath began to boil.

  Allegra relieved Sue of the box. She opened it, and, with an expert grip, produced a live white bunny. She held it aloft by the ears. Its eyes were pink.

  ‘Why do you have to make things so difficult?’ Allegra asked the bunny.

  The image of Michael Douglas had drifted to the rear of the platform. Sue stood beside it, an arm around its phantom shoulders. A second image appeared: that of a little boy. No, it was a little girl who looked like a boy. I remembered the child actress being particularly cute and undeserving of the violence inflicted on her pet bunny by Glenn Close.

  Allegra dangled the rabbit over the boiling water. Madame Butterfly got louder. The crowd went ooohhh. Maybe they didn’t think she would drop it in because she was so pretty but yes she did – there it went – body writhing, visible through the side of the bath so that everyone could watch it die.

  Blood came out of its ears.

  Eventually, the bunny floated to the surface.

  Sue manoeuvred her squat body into a position of attack. She pulled out a butcher’s knife; a departure from the movie, in which Michael Douglas’s wife is a model of harmlessness. But Allegra had no intention of remaining faithful to the movie or to anything else for that matter because now she grabbed the knife out of Sue’s hands, scooped her up, and dropped her too in the boiling bath. Sue flailed next to the bunny corpse. I could tell by the expression of pure panic on her face that this had not been part of rehearsals.

  Sue begged Allegra to get her out.

  ‘I guess this is what they call the sublime,’ said Allegra.

  There was only one artwork in the second gallery. It was very small and low down on the floor. Our view was blocked by the crowd.

  Samuel was garbling about being so proud of his sister because she was going to get like loads of kale. Dave seemed to know what Samuel was talking about; he agreed that Allegra was tubular but was she doing a carpet?

  Samuel shook his head vehemently.

  ‘My debut is dedicated to you,’ Samuel told me. ‘For bringing me back to Freddie.’ He led
us through the crowd.

  The artwork was a mangled balloon polyp, freshly inflated.

  ‘It’s a lark!’ said Samuel. ‘Like having a lark!’

  ‘Man, I wish I’d met you sooner,’ Dave told me. ‘Your contacts are beyond. You could have totally put me in this show.’

  I let go of his hand.

  Allegra was talking to a man with a thin face and a flamboyant tie.

  ‘That’s Der Santo,’ said Dave. ‘He’s a significant collector. I can’t believe he’s interested in her.’

  ‘I can’t believe it either,’ I said. ‘That performance was terrible.’

  ‘What are you talking about?!’ said Dave. ‘It was arresting.’

  The third gallery had nothing in it but a beehive in a glass box.

  The fourth gallery contained a series of black and white films called Shine Me. Each showed a different boy, first bending to polish Jasper’s shoes, then being kicked in the face. The boys’ fear was visceral, as Dave put it. Jasper’s face had been censored.

  One wall of the fifth gallery was covered in a screen that showed me, ludicrous in canary yellow, going under. The magnolia bubbles in the vast martini glass drenched my feathers, got in my eyes. Flack’s ‘The First Time’ was playing. That rancid ballad. In the centre of the gallery, a normal-sized martini glass stood on a plinth. There was a single yellow feather inside.

  ‘I’m going to kill Freddie,’ I said. ‘He must have – how the fuck did he get that footage?’

  ‘The found-object really enhances the Bergsonian sense of duration,’ said a redhead.

  ‘Yes,’ said her friend. ‘The glass functions almost like a visual madeleine.’

  People were sitting on the circular leather sofas of a private members’ club in London Bridge, holding jars containing limited edition dead bees, thrilled that they had had the opportunity to fork out £500. The bees had been killed and jarred by the bee man’s assistants. He still hadn’t turned up. The after-party was supposed to be sponsored by Grey Goose, but Jasper had forgotten to get in touch with them or any other drinks manufacturer. Jasper had paid for all the vodka himself. ‘Still, it looks better if people think brands are willing to invest,’ he told Dave and I. ‘Investment being a kind of belief.’