Eat My Heart Out (10 page)

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 that 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?'

‘I'm a criminal.' Vic slithered off the bed. ‘I belong down here,' he said.

Nine

‘Samuel.' I knocked on Freddie's door. It was Monday morning. ‘Samuel.' I wanted to tell him what Stephanie had told me about the mermaid sacrificing everything for love and then suffering excruciating pains in her feet with every step that she took, but when I entered Freddie's room, Samuel had gone. Freddie was alone.

Clapham Common was covered with snow.

On the tube, I read Steph's book:

Women use the weapons of the weak. We are coquettish; we preen. We are less than ourselves in order to get more for ourselves. What some scoundrel ‘feminist' academic recently called erotic capital.

I skipped to a chapter called ‘Free Love?'

I remember reading an article about a beautiful young blonde girl with flowers in her hair and the words FREE LOVE painted in red on her forehead. She was a hip girl in Greenwich Village. This was the late '60s. She was having fun. She was far-out. I can't recall the details exactly but I know that she was high and she was naked and she was dancing. The crowd were far-out too. They were nice. Everyone was in love with everyone else because the old bonds had been destroyed.
All
bonds were oppressive so they were
all
destroyed. So there was no duty, no restraint.

The party turned against the girl. It happened in the street. She was gang-raped by men who were flower-children. Everyone watched. No one helped. I can't remember if she was murdered or if she simply sustained horrendous injuries, but those words remained printed on her forehead: FREE LOVE.

A woman opposite was reading the
Metro
: there was a picture of a man with his face bandaged. He was ironing, grinning at the camera.

When the woman got off, I picked up the paper. The bandaged man lived in a twenty-first-century household; he did the housework while his wife earned the money. He had been ironing like a bitch when the phone rang. Because men's brains aren't programmed to multi-task, he had absent-mindedly picked up the searing hot iron and stuck it to the side of his face. He hadn't had time to say
Hello?
before the iron branded his skin with the mark of his emasculation.

I was late for work by an hour. I went round the back and said good morning to the slaves in the kitchen. There was a treacherous trail of ice leading up the stairs to the offices on the top floor. I could hear William screaming: ‘
They could come at any moment! Any moment, they could come!
'

‘Who?' I said.

William was bent over his desk, scrabbling through picked animal remains. It was mostly bones, fine and delicate. Not cow or pig, too big to be chicken. ‘Rabbit!' he ranted. ‘Rabbit is for eating, OK?' He brandished a skull. ‘In this country, we do not fuck rabbits.'

Michel the sous-chef was leaning against a crate of gin, his arms folded. ‘I was just trying to show her a good time. She should think herself lucky.' He laughed. ‘I fucked all of them just the same. Even the fat ones. She should be grateful.'

The rabbit remains were making a terrible mess on the desk. Invoices were covered in bone jelly. William's hands were glistening with fat. ‘It was rape,' he was saying. ‘I'm going to find the evidence.'

Michel laughed some more. ‘William, you English are the fucking crazy bastards! How are you going to find evidence of rape in stock bones? We only saved it for stock.'

William was opening and closing desk drawers. He found a battered pair of glasses. ‘I haven't put these on for a long time,' he said. ‘But now I'm going to put them on.' He inspected each bone, turning it over.

‘I admit,' said Michel. ‘I did it. Everyone saw it. Everyone laughed.' He pointed to me. ‘She saw it.'

‘But I didn't laugh,' I said.

William registered my presence for the first time. ‘You saw the rape?'

‘It wasn't really rape,' I said. ‘Because the rabbits were dead.'

‘So it's necromancy,' said William.

‘Necrophilia, do you mean?' I said. ‘And bestiality, yeah.'

‘Don't listen to her,' said Michel. ‘She's just the door bitch. She don't have no skills except looking nice.'

‘Thanks,' I said. ‘Actually I hang the coats up too.'

William picked up a handful of bones and then rained them down on the desk. ‘The people could come at any moment.'

‘What people?' said Michel. ‘Customers?'

‘We call them
guests
,' screeched William. ‘Not the
guests
. The TV people, asking if one of their contestants can have a
trial
.'

Michel made a face at me.

I laughed.

‘This is a trial,' said William.

‘No, it isn't,' said Michel. ‘You're an asshole. What about that time you stuck that oyster up your asshole? We served that.'

William almost smiled. ‘That was before I became a professional.'

‘That was last week,' I said.

There was a poster of a baby peeking out of a flowerpot over William's desk.

‘Let me put it to you very simply.' William swung his desk chair backwards and straddled it like a mobster. ‘I had a call from immigration.'

The atmosphere in the room changed.

‘You're not French,' said William. ‘And your name isn't Michel. And you've got no papers.' He paused, sadistically. ‘You've got no papers so you've got no right to be working in my establishment.'

‘But I've been working here for nearly a month,' said Michel. ‘Payday is Friday.'

William stood up. He said, breezily: ‘Yes, well,
Mihaita
.'

Michel went white.

‘You are a Romanian national. We can't pay you for your work so far and if you don't make a fuss and go quietly then we won't make a fuss about the rabbit rape.'

‘You have to pay him!' I said. ‘He works about fourteen hours a day for you!'

William threw a handful of bones at my head; they hit me.

‘If he goes, I go,' I said.

‘I'm not going,' said Michel.

‘OK then!' I shouted. ‘I quit.' I paced across the room and grabbed the lost property box. It was full of the designer clothes that all the private members forgot when they got fucked in the club.

The brothel opposite had been boarded up. The walls were black with smoke damage. I sprinted around Soho for a while, nearly breaking my neck on the ice, dazzled by freedom.

There was one bar open. It had a sign in the window:
What is your future?

I went downstairs.

‘Running Up That Hill' by Kate Bush was playing. The bar was empty. There was a picture of Shirley Temple stencilled onto a mirror: her ringlets, her angelic fake face, puckered in a look of surprise. There was a map of the human chakras and a smell of incense, burnt out.

I rang the bell on the bar.

A Rottweiler growled at me, then barked. A woman appeared and castigated it. She had pendulous breasts. A gold silhouette of Queen Nefertiti bounced on a chain between them. She looked old and perceptive. ‘We're closed,' she said.

‘Please. Can I at least have a drink?'

She stared at me. ‘What do you want?'

‘Double Jameson's on the rocks?'

She poured it slowly.

Time had slowed.

‘I can't pay you,' I said. ‘I'm unemployed.'

‘What do you have?'

‘This.' I rooted through the lost property box. There was a pashmina from Oscar de la Renta. I tossed it to her.

She smelt it.

‘You can sell it on eBay,' I said.

‘OK.' She sat down behind the bar and produced a pack of tarot cards. She got a whiskey for herself. It was still only ten in the morning. She lit a cigar; it was laced with something – hibiscus, perhaps. I asked her for one; she obliged. The smoke curled around us. The song changed to ‘Wuthering Heights'.

‘
Greatest Hits
.' Her voice was rough. She turned the first card over. It showed an unsmiling sun and a circle of broken columns. ‘You have been cursed,' she said.

‘I knew it.'

‘Yes. Some witches have put a curse on you.' She paused, thoughtful. ‘They must have got your photo from somewhere.'

‘When?' I said.

‘Maybe they took it on their phone when you weren't looking.' She turned over another card. It showed a man hanging upside down by a noose tied round his neck.

‘But death means rebirth, right?' I said.

She shook her head. ‘Death means death. You play near the gallows.'

I tried to think. ‘No. But Allegra was always going up to Castle Mound in Cambridge, where the gallows used to be. She said thousands of people were hung there. It looks over the whole of the countryside. One night she went up there when there was a storm. It was raining, and there was thunder and lightning and everything. She said she wanted to feel the charge of the dead. She tried to go into a kind of Bacchic trance. She had had a very classical education. But when she came back, she was drenched and she said she felt nothing. She couldn't feel the charge. She couldn't feel the dead. She said she felt stupid. She sat on the radiator and then she just kind of looked at me and said:
You've got the charge, Ann-Marie. Naturally. I haven't got it
. She seemed really resentful. That was before anything happened with Sebastian. Freddie said the charge meant being evil. Then Allegra said:
My housemistress always told us that achievement is 99 per cent effort and only 1 per cent natural ability. So all I have to do is like work really hard
. Freddie laughed and said:
To become evil? What are you talking about, Allegra?
But I knew what she was talking about.'

The woman contemplated me through her shroud of smoke. She turned over another card. It showed a naked man and a woman, bound by a black snake. ‘The lovers,' she said. ‘You lost your twin. Your mirror. Your best friend.'

I went cold. ‘I mean, I guess that was implicit in the story I just told you,' I said. ‘You could have gauged that from my story.'

She shook her head. ‘No. You have suffered a fracture of the soul. You are cut in half. One part of you is woman, the other part is striving to be man.'

‘I don't want to be a man!' I said.

‘You want to be tough and alone like a man. Sleep with men like a man sleeps with women.'

‘No,' I said.

‘Yes,' she said.

‘No.' I stood up.

‘You lost him because you wanted to be like him. To be better than him.'

‘I wanted to be equal to him,' I shouted.

‘You wanted to be the same as him.'

‘No!' I shouted. ‘Equal!'

The Rottweiler barked. ‘Men and women can never be equal,' said the woman. ‘It's not written in the stars. There is one more card.'

I sat down again.

She turned it over. ‘The Empress.' It showed a woman in an orange dress in a meadow. ‘Fertility,' she said. ‘You have three sons?'

‘No.'

‘Two sons?'

‘No.'

‘One daughter?'

‘I haven't got any kids.'

‘The witches drowned your kids in a river.'

I stood up and walked out. ‘Babooshka' was playing.

‘I want my old job back,' I told Madeline.

She was manning the reception.

‘Look, I'm dressed for it and everything,' I said. I gestured to the pussy bow.

The phone rang; she took a reservation.

When she hung up, I said: ‘I was really excited at first, but now I'm scared. Really, really scared.' I was sweating. ‘I'm scared of freedom.'

She stared at me.

‘Where's William?' I said.

‘He's gone to A&E. He had a fight with Michel.'

‘Well, I need to talk to him. I'll call him on his mobile.'

‘You can't,' she said. ‘He's unconscious. And he told me that if you came and asked for your job back, I was to say no absolutely not, fuck off.'

‘Well, that's not very nice. How did he say that if he was unconscious?'