Eat My Heart Out Page 9

  ‘Congratulations!’ said the room, hugging her.

  Samuel ran into one of the cubicles, but he must have changed his mind when he saw all the shit because he ran out again. He flung his ginger arms around my neck. He was crying. His vertical hairstyle had wilted in the heat.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

  ‘Why is he trying to punish me?’ he sobbed. ‘I was already punished.’

  ‘Punished for what?’

  Green girl shoved Samuel. ‘Hey man. What the fuck did he do?’

  ‘Do you two know each other?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’ She addressed the room: ‘Who could hurt this cute ginger mermaid boy?’

  ‘Yeah,’ came the consensus.

  ‘Freddie,’ said Samuel. ‘He was getting off with this mixedrace guy right in front of my face. I think he was half Japanese and half … black.’ He was scared of the word. ‘He’s got a flat-top.’

  ‘Cap?’ I said.

  ‘No. Afro.’

  ‘I’ll kill him!’ shouted green girl.

  ‘Don’t get involved,’ I said. ‘These are my friends. Besides, you’re pregnant. You shouldn’t be doing anything strenuous at all.’

  ‘I’ll do what I want with my own fucking baby!’ she screamed in my face.

  Samuel was holding my hand as he explained his love of Ariel: ‘She has beautiful red hair like mine. I used to get teased at school. Before I learnt to love myself as beautiful. The boys used to pull down my pants in the changing room to look at my pubes. I used to collect the characters. I had the whole collection – Flounder the fish and Sebastian the crab. From McDonald’s Happy Meals?’

  ‘I used to collect those too. Everyone did.’

  ‘But I had to hide them at school. I had to hide them at home too. I had to pretend to my mum that I only wanted the Happy Meals for the cheeseburger. But I never even gluted the cheeseburger.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I never ate it.’

  We were sitting on the dirty mattress in the back alley.

  ‘I watched the film over and over,’ he went on. ‘Because the scene where King Neptune finds Ariel’s trove of treasures from the human world and destroys her statue of Eric – that was just like my life. My mother found all my shit and destroyed it all up in the place. She told me I wasn’t a cronkite.’

  ‘Samuel,’ I said. ‘Alienated people often develop a rich inner life.’

  ‘What does alienated mean?’

  ‘Alienated means … feeling like an alien, landed from another planet. I’ve always felt like an alien. Freddie is an alien too. That’s why we became friends.’ I paused. ‘I don’t know why we’re friends now.’

  ‘You and Freddie are so deck. You are so sophisticated. Thank you for letting me hang around with you.’

  ‘I didn’t let you,’ I said.

  Samuel looked like he would cry again, so I said: ‘I mean I like that you’re hanging around with us. It’s just a bit weird for me because your face looks like Allegra’s.’

  He put his arm around my shoulders. ‘There’s something hard about Allegra,’ he said. ‘Don’t ever tell her I said this. She was always hard. Maybe it’s the will to win. I never had it.’ He looked at me. ‘But you’re not hard. You only pretend to be hard. Maybe that’s why you’re not winning.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Well. It’s a long race.’

  I was about to tell Samuel the unabridged story of how his sister poleaxed my relationship, but he leapt to his feet and shouted: ‘I’ve got to find Freddie.’

  He was gone.

  I got out Heidegger: An Intro and scanned the index for F – Fallen-ness. I turned to page 18. One is fallen into the world and one cannot get out. Then I pulled out Stephanie’s book and read from a chapter called ‘Monomania’:

  In the nineteenth century, French psychiatrist Pierre Janet identified a condition called ‘monomania’. It was an overwhelming obsession with one person or idea. Janet analysed a lot of bright young women, confined to a domestic life. This was the Madame Bovary syndrome.

  These women devoured books. They existed in their own fantasy worlds. Many of them were obsessed with romantic love. It was love that they exalted above all else. But like Madame Bovary, many were crushed by the failure of reality to live up to their ideals. Many went mad.

  In the early 1960s, Betty Friedan identified ‘the problem that has no name’ in her seminal book, The Feminine Mystique. ‘The problem that has no name’ was the depression that descended on young middle-class women who graduated from college and then became housewives and mothers. They never developed careers, although their minds were as alive as their husbands’. To counter their misery, they medicated.

  ‘The problem that has no name’ was a modern incarnation of monomania. In both cases, women were stifled to the point of insanity. In the prime of life, their minds and bodies straining to explore the world, they went inside. They went inside the house, they went inside themselves. This introspection intensified their romantic obsessions.

  They wanted to fall in love with gods, not men. They fantasised about men other than their husbands – the pseudo-Heathcliffs of cheap romance novels. They wanted to lose themselves in a higher being that would pall the sense that life was not worth living.

  Romantic love – idolatrous, based on distance – was itself a form of self-medication. It made them feel like they were flying when in fact they were going nowhere. When in fact they didn’t need to fly at all. They needed to stand up on their own two feet and walk. To figure out a practical way to survive. To get their heads out of the goddamn clouds! That would be a good start.

  Both monomania and ‘the problem that has no name’ were caused by claustrophobia, by limited space. Today, our fixation with love is caused by the opposite – it is caused by agoraphobia, by too much space.

  I closed my eyes and tried to sleep through the time it would take Vic to get from Chalk Farm to Hackney Wick.

  I opened my eyes to find the Incredible Hulk ramming something wet and fragile into my mouth. ‘Toke,’ green girl was saying. ‘Toke it.’

  I did. ‘Should you really be smoking that?’ I looked at her stomach.

  ‘Sure. Why not?’ She tried to ram a pill in my mouth, but I spat it out.

  ‘I’m clean,’ I told her.

  ‘Were you a junkie?’

  ‘No, I just did too much ketamine at university.’

  ‘Your friend Freddie is fucked on K right now.’

  ‘Great.’ I checked my phone: fourteen messages.

  Where the fuck are you, Vera?

  Who are all these peanut-eaters?

  If you’ve led me up the garden path, I’ll fucking gut you, cock-tease slag.

  What do you want to drink?

  Hackney is v friendly

  Everyone on the dance floor seemed to be suffering a simultaneous epileptic fit. And there, by the bar, was Vic. I could tell that he had been enjoying himself in my absence.

  He was trembling with excitement. The formlessness of his spine appalled me all over again. He looked like a string of saliva.

  I approached him from behind and clamped my hands over his eyes.

  He wriggled like a worm on a hook. His arms were full of Red Stripes.

  ‘Guess who?’ I shouted into his ear.

  ‘This is wicked!’ he shouted back. ‘You’re wicked …’ He turned around to kiss me.

  I gagged. But I let him.

  Two boys in drainpipe trousers came over.

  Vic gave them each a Red Stripe.

  ‘Thanks Vic, man,’ said one.

  They walked away.

  ‘Vic,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t let people take advantage of you.’

  ‘What do you want to drink?’

  ‘A double vodka and tonic, please.’

  ‘They only serve Red Stripe.’

  ‘You were supposed to hunt me down and kill me, not buy me a fucking beer.’

  He threw me against the wall and gripped my neck so th
at I couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Stop,’ I croaked.

  He loosened his grip.

  ‘No!’ I screamed. ‘Tighter!’

  He tightened his grip.

  ‘You’re not supposed to do what I say,’ I rasped.

  I tried to get my leg around his waist, but now he was really cutting off the oxygen supply to my brain. I managed to slide down the wall.

  ‘Stupid little rich girl.’ He faltered. ‘Rich bitch.’

  ‘Vic, do I look rich to you?’

  He stared at me for a long time. ‘No.’

  The mermaid mirages flew harder and faster. Samuel was crouched next to Freddie, who was sitting in the middle of the dance floor with his legs drawn up beneath him, saying: ‘Don’t touch me. Don’t ever touch me. If you touch me, I’ll die.’

  A very good-looking mixed-race guy with a flat-top afro was having a screaming argument with a very good-looking girl with an undercut to the left. ‘What the fuck?!’ she was saying, over and over.

  I pushed through the crowd and said to Freddie: ‘What have you taken?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken nothing.’

  ‘K-hole,’ said Samuel.

  ‘Don’t talk to me.’ Freddie looked shocking; he had aged forty years.

  ‘Don’t you even talk to me, though!’ said Samuel. ‘Seeing as you got off with that flavourless guy right in front of my face.’

  ‘Is that a racial slur?’ said Freddie. ‘Fucking public school boys.’

  ‘Freddie,’ I said. ‘You are a public school boy.’

  ‘Flavourless means straight in Brooklyn,’ said Samuel. ‘I’m not racist.’

  Freddie looked up at me. ‘Scarlet woman. You have turned me against all women. You have turned me gay.’

  ‘You were gay to begin with,’ I said.

  I called a taxi; the man said we’d have to wait round the corner because he didn’t pick up from illegal raves and if we vomited in his car, we were paying for it.

  Vic and I returned to the bar to stock up on beers.

  ‘Let me get it,’ I told him. ‘I don’t like to be indebted.’

  There was a voice behind me. It was saying: ‘Yeah, a bottle of water too, please. Thanks so much.’

  I turned around.

  The voice belonged to Allegra. She was standing in front of me, a vision of sweat: her glorious black hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat, her luminous skin was streaming with sweat, her black rags were heavy with sweat. They were clinging to her. They were his black rags. She was wearing his clothes.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hi!’

  ‘Hi!’ I said.

  ‘Hi!’ said Vic.

  We both ignored him.

  There was a silence.

  ‘Sorry to miss you at, er – his parents’ party,’ she said. ‘We didn’t know you were coming.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know I was going,’ I said. ‘Until I got there.’

  ‘Hm,’ she said. ‘So how are you!’

  ‘How are you, Allegra?’

  ‘Oh, you know! Packing.’

  Another silence.

  Then she said: ‘I know Sebastian would love to see you.’

  ‘Vic,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

  The barman leaned towards her and shouted: ‘Sorry, what else was it, love?’

  ‘She’ll have a crème de menthe,’ I shouted back.

  ‘Ann-Marie,’ she said. ‘That’s a bit inappropriate, don’t you think?’

  I started to laugh. I was laughing so hard that I had to bend over to get my breath. Vic slammed me on the back. When I stood up again, she was gone.

  The song on the radio was promising that sometimes the sun went round the moon and sometimes the snow came down in June. I looked out of the window and saw that the snow had started to fall on the streets of Hackney. But it was November, not June. It was supposed to fall.

  Vic snaked his arm backwards and I held his hand. He was sitting in the front next to the driver. Freddie was squashed between Samuel and I in the back.

  Freddie was grey. He was saying: ‘Foucault was right. We are made of the power that oppresses us.’ He laughed bitterly into his own sick-covered T-shirt. ‘It’s better than the panopticon!! It’s much, much better!! One no longer has to even stand in the middle of a circle of windows to be constantly watched!! One need only to be! To be is to be watched! Because the eyes are within us! They are fucking swarming within us!’

  ‘Are you sure he didn’t take acid?’ I asked Samuel.

  ‘Don’t you people work?’ said the taxi driver. ‘In my day, Sunday night was for resting. Ironing shirts and having a roast and watching telly.’

  ‘Things have changed in the post-war period,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Watch it,’ said the driver.

  ‘Are you watching me too, mister?’ Freddie screeched. ‘March me to the guillotine, mister! With a hood over my head before all the townspeople because I will take their jeers, I will take their caterwauls.’ He turned to Samuel: ‘But we are not losing that flat, Ann-Marie.’

  ‘She’s Ann-Marie,’ said Samuel, pointing at me.

  Freddie jerked forward; his head got trapped between his knees. ‘I love you,’ he said to the floor.

  ‘Who?’ said Vic.

  Vic and I were lying fully clothed on the detritus of my bed. Nietzsche quotes were scrawled in my rabid hand over rolls and rolls of white revision wallpaper. I had been trying to find a particular quote the week before from The Birth of Tragedy. It was something about superabundance leading to explosion. I put on TLC’s ‘Creep’. Vic asked to see my Facebook profile. I told him that I wasn’t on Facebook or Twitter or anything. He said he’d searched for me but he couldn’t find me.

  ‘Vic, that’s so sweet,’ I said. ‘I’ve been searching for you. I’ve been searching for you all my life.’

  We watched the snow fall outside the window, cuddling. He kicked a soiled sanitary towel off the bed and said: ‘Christ, this room is like what’s-her-face. Tracey Ermine.’

  I didn’t bother to correct him.

  There were screams from Freddie’s room, then silence.

  ‘Vic, it was so funny that we were in a taxi just now,’ I said. ‘Because when I was working in the restaurant last night, the lights went out at exactly the same time that a taxi driver came in. I thought that you must love me because you had a poster of Taxi Driver on your wall.’ I turned to him in the dark. ‘Do you love me now?’

  ‘What is it with you and your mate, Freddie? Always asking people if they love you.’

  ‘Freddie and I are both incredibly needy.’ I paused. ‘Do you, though?’

  Vic shifted away from me. ‘I’m scared of love.’

  I squeezed him as hard as possible, wrapping my arms and legs around him like a boa constrictor. He let me do that for a couple of seconds and then he leapt off the bed and shouted: ‘How the fuck can I love you if you don’t know what I’ve done?’ He crashed around the room. ‘If you knew what I’d done, you wouldn’t love me.’

  I sat up and lit a cigarette. ‘Tell me then.’

  ‘All three bridges were bombed.’ He scraped back his hair. ‘Cluster bombs were coming out of the sky and all the city people were running to the countryside because they thought they’d be safe in the countryside.’

  I could see his open pores in the glare of the street light.

  ‘Don’t look at me when I’m talking to you,’ he shouted.

  I faced the wall.

  ‘And don’t turn on any of the lights.’ He marched across the room, tripping over my new black leather duffle bag from Topshop, and pulled the curtains closed. They fell off the rail; I had never bothered to hook them. He stared down at the cheap lilac fabric and said: ‘I don’t want any light. I’m too guilty for light.’ Several minutes passed while Vic tried to hook the curtains. Eventually, he just left them on the floor.

  I waited.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I need to be away from you. I need to not have you in my
line of sight.’ He got in the wardrobe. The door wouldn’t close. He got out and sat on the floor at the end of the bed.

  I couldn’t see him at all.

  ‘We set up as quick as we could,’ he said. ‘There was a tent. The villagers had killed a pig in the morning.’

  ‘So, like you didn’t kill a pig yourself?’ I said.

  He raised his hand above the bed and fired an imaginary gun at me.

  ‘I had this fantasy of you killing a pig, that’s all,’ I said.

  He lowered his hand. ‘They hadn’t drained the carcass properly. It was running all over the instructions manual for the contractible deep-fat fryer. It was Jeremy’s job to man the deep-fat fryer. We needed an accompaniment for the pork. It got cold at night. I could hear the planes coming, more bombs. A tree caught fire. People were screaming. Children. Children were screaming. Through the trees, I could see the river on fire.’

  ‘Wow.’

  His voice became vague. ‘Because I knew in my heart of hearts that it was wrong that we were there.’

  ‘So were you like anti-war?’

  ‘We got an old woman from the village to help us chop the potatoes. No time for peeling. The fat had run into the gutter.’ He paused. ‘It was a special kind of gutter. Jeremy tossed the first batch of potatoes in the fat.’

  There was silence.

  ‘And then the whole damn thing exploded.’ Vic crawled up the bed and lay his head on my stomach like a child.

  ‘The whole village?’

  ‘No. The whole deep-fat fryer.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Jeremy was only eighteen years old, an apprentice from Yorkshire. He was engaged to a beautiful young girl called Melanie but now he will never again see how beautiful she is.’ He raised his head. ‘What gets me the most is that it was a British design. Manufactured in Sheffield.’

  ‘The bombs?’

  ‘No. The fryer. Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?’

  ‘Yes, Vic, yes. But so – you were …? What was your role?’

  ‘I was the supervisor.’

  ‘But you weren’t a soldier?’

  ‘I was a military caterer.’

  ‘So you weren’t even fighting?’

  ‘Cooking for fighting men is fighting.’

  ‘But you’re not a war criminal?’