Eat My Heart Out (12 page)

‘That's Aguta,' said the professor.

There was silence.

Then Freddie said: ‘I've brought this girl here to tell you that she is my girlfriend.'

The professor squinted. ‘But what about that chap wearing that … romper suit? Whom we saw in the park. I've got your number, boy. I was at Cambridge in the '30s. Yes, it was all the rage then – homosexuality. There were the communist poets with whom I sympathised on political grounds.'

‘Uncle Timothy fought for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War,' said Freddie.

‘But I did not sympathise with the likes of Auden, Spender, etc on the grounds of their sexual preferences,' the professor went on. ‘When I was a youth, it was a crime. Crimes were punished for the sake of the community. It is against the laws of reproduction, this.' He searched for the word.

The wife croaked something.

‘
Decadence
,' said the professor.

‘Oh, I'm not decadent,' said Freddie. ‘Oh, no. Ann-Marie and I are very much in love.'

‘Why?' thundered the professor.

‘Why are we in love?' Freddie looked at me. ‘Er.'

‘Because we've got a lot in common,' I said.

‘I intend to marry her,' said Freddie. ‘Once I've established myself on the circuit.'

‘And of what does this circuit consist?' said the professor.

‘Oh,' said Freddie. ‘Parties.'

The professor's face contorted.

‘And business,' said Freddie. ‘Lots and lots of business.'

‘Like father, like son,' said the professor. ‘Your father was like that, riding the wave, back in the '60s. Pop Art. What is Pop Art, may I ask you? Replicas of advertisements? For soup? And you call that a contribution to humanity?'

‘I don't think Father would put it in such highfalutin terms, Uncle.'

‘No,' said the professor. ‘He wouldn't. He'd laugh. If he can laugh, now that he's had a facelift. Living in
California
.'

‘Part time,' said Freddie.

‘Living in Switzerland.'

‘Part time. He's still got Hammerton Hall in Suffolk.'

The professor lurched to his feet. The wife handed him a cane. He got an object off a shelf, and handed it to me. It was a tiny white carving of a whale.

‘
That
is art,' said the professor. ‘They put it in the baby's mouth when it is born. To bring good luck.' He passed me a dagger. ‘That is walrus ivory. Look at the intricacy of the handle. Look at the craftsmanship.' He sat down. ‘Butterflies being murdered before the very eyes of the spectator is not art.'

‘Father hasn't bought any Hirsts since '97, I think,' said Freddie.

‘What about those,' I said, pointing to two glass cases hanging on the wall. One contained a psychedelic array of butterflies, their wings spread and pinned. The other contained petrol-blue birds, perched in their own compartments. Their beaks were open.

The professor stared at me. ‘I like you,' he said. ‘You are honest.'

Freddie laughed.

‘In this late industrial capitalist inferno, honesty is a rare quality,' said the professor. ‘It entails a kind of brutality. I've been saying that since the '50s when the mixed economy and the welfare state were not a phantasm.'

There was silence.

‘You are not a rower, Freddie,' said the professor. ‘All the men in our family were rowers. Even your father was a rower. Get up early, bracing cold. Row!'

The wife croaked.

‘She wants to know how you two met,' said the professor.

‘At a garden party,' said Freddie.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I was there all alone. I always do feel so alone at parties.'

‘I too have often felt alone at parties,' said the professor. ‘Continue.'

‘I was standing by the oyster tent, at the back of the queue.' I nodded. ‘And then the fireworks began at the far end of the field. By the river. It was night-time. They were the college colours, whatever college it was. I can't remember now. Blue, and yellow, and white. The fireworks looked like a stab in the dark to me.' I paused. ‘They made it worse – the sadness. The explosion of light made it worse. Everyone got terribly excited and ran off to see them better and so there was no queue for the oysters any more. So I took the opportunity to eat as many oysters as possible. I do adore oysters, don't I, darling?'

Freddie looked angry.

‘There were three different types: tabasco, shallots and sherry vinegar, or plain old lemon.' I looked at the professor with emotion. ‘Sometimes plain old lemon is the best.'

He nodded.

‘So the silver service catering staff in their black suits and bow ties were shucking as fast as they possibly could for me. The food was all included in the price of the ticket. For a hundred quid one wants to get one's money's worth!' My voice had become posh. ‘I remember the deftness with which they gripped the shells in a serviette and inserted the knife and twisted it, whetting my appetite further. I could feel my appetite becoming demonic. The way they wrenched the shell open with a flick of the wrist to reveal that grey, creamy mollusc.' Now I looked at the range of creams on the table. ‘The way they squeezed that lemon for me with such fortitude, never for one moment stopping to say:
Aren't you sure you've had enough, dear?
'

Freddie dug his nails into my hand.

‘But I never did have enough. I could never, ever have enough. I wanted more, so much more. I wanted everything, all of it, all of the time. I wanted to keep eating until I was dead.'

There was silence.

‘I must have downed about twenty or thirty, knocking my head back, letting the juice run down my chin. I was sweating. The salt was making me thirsty. I reached for the champagne and downed that too. Soon the iodine was overwhelming me. Overwhelming my sense of reason. I was lost in the sea, in the rock pools.'

‘Oysters are farmed,' said the professor.

‘I was lost in the farms, then,' I said. ‘Deep down underwater and drowning. I felt as though someone had me by the back of the head and was forcing my face down in salt water and I couldn't breathe.' I closed my eyes. ‘But no one told me to stop. Not one of the catering staff said:
Careful, love. You know those are aphrodisiacs.
So a surging feeling of love was starting to rise within me. I was turned inside out with it. I felt as though I had a vortex in my chest of monumental emotion that was spiralling upwards and upwards and out of my mouth.' I stopped. ‘And then I saw Freddie.'

They waited.

‘The fireworks ended. The crowd cheered. But that was all in the background because my vision had narrowed and my world had narrowed and now there was only him.'

They waited some more.

‘Can you tell me where I can use the toilet?' I said.

There was a taxidermied crow on a fake branch on the cistern. It held some kind of stick in its beak. The plaque said that it was a native of New Caledonia, one of the few non-primates to be able to make and use tools. Levi-Strauss's
Culinary Triangle
was framed above the sink. The points of the triangle were marked:
Raw, Cooked, Rotten
.

I looked out of the window. Vic was standing in a phone box. He'd taken his shoes off. The snow continued to fall. He was looking up at the flat. He didn't see me.

Down the street, kids were making a snowman, its face adorned with a horizontal brick, which may have been a nose or a mouth.

‘I was just saying how rare it is to find a young person who is attuned to the unseen spiritual forces that govern our fates,' the professor said when I returned to the living room. ‘It is a given in all indigenous cultures around the world. It is only the imbecilic white man who has spoiled all that, who has expunged the human reverence for mystery from the world.'

‘Ann-Marie doesn't know anything about indigenous cultures,' said Freddie. ‘She's barely been out of England.'

‘Shut up,' I said. ‘Sebastian and I went to Morocco. That's my ex-boyfriend,' I told the professor. ‘We were looking for Paul and Jane Bowles' house. That's where Sebastian learned to do whirling dervish dancing.' I laughed. ‘Now he's going to Mexico with Allegra.'

The professor tapped the cases of butterflies and birds with his cane. ‘Those are from Mexico. The hummingbirds are sacrificed to the plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl. It is purification. These are merely tourist trinkets, of course. Although I saw footage of a human sacrifice from the early part of the twentieth century while I was doing fieldwork. It was remarkable.' He leaned forward; the bamboo groaned beneath him. ‘Five priests on top of a pyramid, hidden – somewhere in the jungle. It contravened all rights, all modern laws. The Spaniards had done away with most of the old practices. I recall a man, not screaming, not running for his life. Just waiting. Waiting. One of the priests stabs him in the gut.' He thrust his fist. ‘And twists – just like shucking an oyster – and pulls out the heart. It's still beating. They put it in a bowl, held by a statue of the god they are worshipping. It is a great honour to be killed like that.' He sat back and said to me: ‘I wish my nephew were interested in my stories.'

‘I am interested, Uncle,' said Freddie.

‘The Inuit elders are the storehouse of all the knowledge in the community,' he went on. ‘It is a pernicious myth that they are slain by their children when they are no longer useful. Why would you kill a living library?'

The wife croaked.

‘There is an Inuit saying, which I think you will appreciate, Ann-Marie:
The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls
.'

I smiled.

‘Because they eat 90 per cent meat. And if they don't kill respectfully, the animal spirits can return and avenge themselves on the eaters.'

The wife croaked her agreement.

The professor shut his eyes. ‘I wanted a nice girl with a bell on her bike and not too much up here.' He tapped his head. ‘But my wife was a Magdalene scholar. I was a research fellow and a fully assigned Apostle. She was doing her thesis on Julian of Norwich.' He turned his eyes on me.

There was silence.

The wife raised a scone right up to my face, but I shook my head. She moved it closer until she was almost mashing the scone into my mouth. I shook my head again. She smeared the scone with clotted cream, then jam, then squirted whipped cream on top. She shoved it near my face again. I batted her away with my hand. She dropped the scone face down on my empty plate and looked at me with malice. I picked up the jam jar and scooped out a handful. I shoved it in my mouth like an animal.

Freddie snatched the jar off me.

I snatched it back. I threw it against the wall; it smashed. Red jam exploded over white. The base of the jar had remained intact and now I knelt beside it, pawing the jam into my mouth.

‘Freddie
is
gay,' I said.

Vic ran towards me through the snow when I came out of the building. His feet were dark purple, almost black. He was shaking uncontrollably.

‘Ann-Marie,' he said. ‘I've been waiting for you.'

‘So wait,' I said.

‘What's that stuff around your mouth. Is it – blood?'

I looked up: the sky was white and blank.

‘But we've been to each other's houses,' Vic was saying, desperately. ‘I've met your friends. Freddie made me an
affogato
this morning. It means
drowned
in Italian. I learnt something new!! I'm learning new things every day with you!! I feel like I'm looking at the world like new!!'

He tried to take my hands but I pulled away and walked in the direction of the tube.

He scrabbled along beside me. ‘This is love,' he said.

I turned to him. ‘Vic. That's a dream. It's a nice dream. I'll call you.'

Eleven

Dear James
,

Thanks so much for the pussy. I'm not working at that restaurant any more. Please send any future presents to 29 Camden Square, London. I don't know the postcode yet
.

Camille X

It was Tuesday. I was staying with Stephanie. She had been understanding when I'd turned up at her door with nowhere else to go. I couldn't go back to the flat in Clapham after all that chaos at Freddie's uncle's.

The child ballerina was doing cartwheels around the crosstrainer as I broke through my personal pain threshold. I was wearing a leotard that belonged to Stephanie. Lana del Rey's ‘Video Games' was playing on the screen: faded footage of the Chateau Marmont coalesced with the percussionless music and the golden light of serotonin in my veins to lull me into an oceanic state.

The ballerina stopped cartwheeling and stood by the machine. ‘I saw you,' she said. ‘In the restaurant. You were
working
.'

‘Yes,' I panted.

‘Are you working here now?'

‘No. I don't know.'

‘Then what are you doing here?'

‘Auntie Steph said I could use her gym. My one's out of order.'

‘She's not your actual aunt.'

‘She's not your aunt either.'

‘Are you going to stay here for like ever?'

I started on the weights.

That satanic looked returned to her face: ‘Are you like
going out
with Auntie Steph?'

Auntie Steph was waiting for me in the kitchen with a glass of iced tea. She wiped the sweat off my face then led me upstairs to the walk-in shower. She watched while I exfoliated. I smiled at her uneasily through the glass and she smiled back. She handed me a fluffy towel. Then she handed me a paper heart, coloured in with red felt-tip. A safety pin had been stuck to the back.

‘I give all of my guests one of these,' she explained. ‘It's a goofy little thing. My friend Gabriella is an artist and she makes them. Their spirit is deliberately crude and cute, even childish. They are actually very valuable – limited edition – but she gives them to me in bulk because I helped her out when she was on the way up.' She brushed a strand of my wet hair behind my ear. ‘Like you.'

I thanked her.

‘Gabriella is really a force of nature,' she went on. ‘She was horribly shy when I met her. Like you.'

I said nothing.

‘Now she is unrecognisable. She does a lot of work on
Das Ding
. Do you know what that is?'

‘I can't remember?'

‘It's The Thing. The Thing called It.'

‘Like in
The Addams Family
– the thing called It with all the hair hanging over its face?'

Steph laughed. ‘No, no. It's The Thing called It that is Unnameable, Unspeakable, Unwritable, Unrepresentable. It's very Žižek. Gabriella is immensely influenced by Žižek but I just can't get on with his interpretation of Lacan through a Hegelian lens.'

I was dripping on her carpet. ‘We weren't allowed to study Žižek at Cambridge.'

‘Oh,' said Stephanie. ‘You went to Cambridge?'

‘The real Cambridge,' I said. ‘Not the ex-polytechnic.'

‘Why would I doubt it? You are phenomenally intelligent.'

‘Am I?'

‘You are an Ivy League girl, through and through. You have that look of frustration.'

I wrapped the towel tighter around myself. ‘My director of studies, Dr Kyle, said that Žižek was too alive. He thought that was a funny joke. We only studied men who are dead. Although I didn't really study anything because I was always drunk or high.'

‘That's a conspiracy.' Stephanie combed my wet hair with her fingers. ‘To get young people
wasted
just at the moment when they have access to the knowledge, not to mention the time, to really learn hard and topple the system. The drinking culture is urged on by the institution.'

‘Really?'

‘Covertly.'

I sat down on the edge of the bath. ‘I remember one time we were studying
Utopia
by Thomas More?'

She sat down beside me. ‘Go on.'

‘All the public school boys and girls in the class were laughing about utopia, saying it couldn't possibly exist. They kept saying that the name itself meant ‘no place'. Like that was a brilliant thing to know.'

She waited.

‘So I put up my hand, which I never normally did, and Dr Kyle pointed to me and I said:
Why can't it exist?
And he said:
Because it can't
.'

Stephanie was staring at the bathroom floor.

‘I never put my hand up again,' I said.

She was still staring at the floor.

Eventually, I said: ‘Why does Gabriella make hearts?'

Steph took the heart brooch out of my hands and pinned it carefully to my towel. She stood up and stroked my shoulders. ‘Because hearts are everywhere, yes, but they remain the great Unrepresentable. The heart is only a symbol. It is an inadequate symbol. It points to the greatest of Unrepresentable darknesses.'

We were standing in a room painted pale blue. It had white curtains and a narrow single bed. ‘I keep it for him,' she was explaining.

There was a toy lion on the bed, and a pile of
New Yorker
s on the mantelpiece. Dried flowers stood around the room in jars. They had the same prickly scent as Steph's perfume.

‘Florida Water,' she said. ‘I spritz everything I can with the stuff. I simply love it. These are – were – orange blossom.'

‘Lovely,' I said.

‘I keep this room because it keeps me thinking that one day he'll come home, but I know he's never coming home.'

‘Your husband?'

She laughed. ‘God, no. I never want to see any of
those
again. No – my son.'

‘Where's he gone?'

‘Oh, Snowdonia now. He lives in a yurt. He's got his botanicals and his druid friends. They're a closed community up there.'

The black bin liner of clothes that I had hauled over from Freddie's was stuffed in the walk-in wardrobe.

‘He was very sensitive,' said Steph. ‘Maybe too sensitive for this world.' She touched the curtains. ‘He enrolled at film school in New York but then he got into bad things, starting running with a bad crowd.'

‘The druids?'

‘No, this was way before. He could have been the next Hal Hartley but he became a taxi driver.'

‘That's wonderful!!' I said. ‘I've got a thing about taxi drivers!'

‘You shouldn't. Sure, you get a lot of great conversations but what's the use of that if all you do when you come home at night is worship the devil.' She touched the desk, the chair, the unplugged printer. ‘He was very angry with me.' She turned to me: ‘You can burn the nights in here in complete and unrelenting solitude, if you like.'

Stephanie was showing me a framed tabloid picture of Amy Winehouse. There was a red heart nestled in Amy's mountainous black hair. The heart was pierced by cupid's arrow and
Blake
was written across it.

We were in Steph's study.

‘This is what inspired Gabriella's heart phase,' she was saying. ‘Amy used to wear that heart in her hair all the time. I used to see her around Camden all the time, reeking like an alcoholic and desperate. It was unbelievably sad. Her love for that terrible man had implanted itself in her brain, at the centre of her soul, to the extent that she had no thoughts beyond him. But he was just a
him
, you know? He could have been anybody. The point was that she was an addict. A love addict. Like you. Now look.' She pulled an art book about Frida Kahlo off the shelf. She showed me a picture of Frida done up in a virginal gown, tight and high at the neck. An image of Diego Rivera was emblazoned on her forehead. ‘Like a third eye,' said Steph. ‘He became her sight. He slept with her sister, you know? She was tragic but she was great.' She closed the book. ‘Amy was tragic and great but she couldn't make it. This culture killed her. The Symbolic killed her.'

I was shivering.

‘It will kill you too if you let it,' said Steph.

We were in the den. I was wearing a voluminous dungaree-dress that belonged to Stephanie. It was frayed and comfortable. ‘For loafing!' she said.

Stephanie produced a ball of hot-pink mohair wool and two sets of knitting needles. ‘This is likewise a Gabriella creation,' she explained. ‘Of course Gabriella has always borrowed a lot of her concepts from me because you see conceptual artists are trained in
art
, not philosophy. Even though
the idea
is supposed to take precedence over
the execution
. Many conceptual artists are in fact conceptually barren.'

‘Was Gabriella the artist you were talking about in the restaurant?'

‘Now, now.' Steph frowned. ‘Were you eavesdropping?'

I blushed.

‘It's OK if you were.' She laughed. ‘Eavesdropping is the best bad habit going for a writer.'

‘But I'm not a writer,' I said. ‘I mean, I used to write some really bad, really corny poems about my ex-boyfriend sometimes, but that was just like therapy mainly. Sebastian, my ex, he's the writer.'

Stephanie tossed the ball of wool at me. ‘
You
are the writer,' she said. ‘You
will
be a writer. I saw it in you right away.'

‘You did?'

‘Don't ever let me hear you put yourself down again or I'll throw you out on the street.'

She showed me how to loop the wool and work the needles until our clicking became synchronised. Gabriella had provided a knitting pattern. Steph explained that it was a Project. It was an intervention into the genealogy of the Penelope myth. By imitating the conventions of traditional femininity – knitting – we were actually subverting those conventions. Our hot-pink blanket was already growing. Eventually we would send it to Gabriella and she would photograph it and possibly include it in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale next year.

As we got through jug after jug of iced tea, chatting and laughing, Steph explained her plan for me: she had conceptualised a course of action through which I could achieve transcendence over my demons.

‘Oh, you don't have to do that!' I said. ‘I don't have any demons!'

Steph gave me a look.

‘I mean, I do, but – they're fine.'

‘It's best to get started as soon as possible.' She said that when we had finished knitting for the day, Marge would escort me to a location in Hoxton, where I would audition. She wouldn't tell me what I was auditioning for.

Marge drove in dead silence, her mouth a line. She stopped on the edge of Hoxton Square and pointed me down a oneway street. There was a club called Sparkle Hard. She threw me a packet of baby wipes, then drove off.

The queue of girls extended down the street and spiralled in on itself so that I had to get to the middle to stand at the back. They wore fishnets with black seams that vanished under petticoats. Beauty spots were stuck on their cheeks. Their hair was set in waves. The girl in front of me wore a lurex choker so red and wet-look that it appeared her throat had been slit. The lips of her friend were glossed a flamingo pink and when she opened her black coat I saw that she was in fact dressed as a flamingo, albeit a highly pornographic one. Pink feathers hung from her nipples. Her skin looked thin and blue; too thin to protect her from anything. The cold was lacerating.

‘I heard that they were gonna like film this,' said the flamingo girl to her friend.

‘Really? Oh my god, who is?' said the friend.

‘I don't know, some kind of crazy fashion blogging thing. Or art thing. Definitely not a sex thing.'

‘No, this is definitely not a sex thing.' The friend paused. ‘But Chloe, I don't want my mum to see this. You said no one would see this.'

‘No one's gonna see it, Milly,' said Chloe.

‘Yeah, except on the
internet
,' said Milly. ‘And what if it like goes viral.'