Eat My Heart Out (15 page)

The hairy man came over. ‘Hey,' he said. ‘Quieten down.'

I apologised.

We went out for a cigarette. We were on Seven Sisters Road. The shop on the left sold plastic baskets and AA batteries. The place on the right was a loan shark's.

‘Can I ask how you're living?' I said. ‘How can you afford to sit not catching any fish all day?'

‘She's supporting me.'

I was speechless.

‘Yeah!' he shouted. ‘That's right! And I don't feel guilty! She says all artists need patronage! She says I'm doing her a favour by letting her be a patron of the arts!'

‘And who patronises her? Her parents?'

‘No,' he said, ferociously. ‘She works.'

‘Where?'

‘In the library. In Southwark local library.'

‘She's a librarian?'

‘Yeah! Bataille was a librarian. She's supporting public services. It's important.'

Some kids got off the bus. One spat on the floor. Then another one spat on the floor. Then two of them got in a fight. They drifted off, fighting.

We went back inside.

‘I'm going to have to go soon,' he said.

‘Me too. I have to go now in fact.' I didn't stand up.

Sebastian stood up. ‘I have to go.'

He paid, with her money.

Outside the café, he told me he was sorry.

He got on the bus, which came straight away.

I walked towards Seven Sisters tube, feeling like I was going to kill myself.

His bus got stuck in traffic. I ran for it, and jumped on at the next stop. He wasn't on the bottom deck. I ran up to the top deck, but he wasn't there either. I looked out the window: he'd got off the bus. He looked like he was looking for me, but when I ran downstairs again, the driver wouldn't let me off until the stop after the tube. I ran back towards where I had seen him, but he was gone.

I could have run away from Stephanie's then, but I didn't. She seemed to be the only person in the world who cared about me. I returned to Camden Square.

Marge opened the door. She went absolutely nuts when she saw that I'd bought a halal chicken instead of a Hampstead chicken. She asked me for the change and I handed over £2. I tried to explain that it was very expensive these days to drain the birds of blood prior to slaughter but she told me that I was a common thief. I let her shout for a while.

Steph was swinging around and around in the teak swivel chair in her study. Her hair had been combed back but her eyes were still glazed. She was playing with something white and frilly. She stared past me. ‘What's this?' She held up the frilly thing.

I turned around as though she might be addressing someone behind me, but there was no one in the hall. ‘I don't know,' I said. ‘A garter?'

She stretched the garter like a cat's cradle. ‘It came for you.' She kicked a box on the floor. Ribbon lay around it. ‘From your lover.' She held out a card, which read:
Dearest Miss Havisham. I'm glad you liked the pussy. Thou shalt not be jilted again. X

‘Oh,' I said. ‘That's from James.'

Steph threw the garter at me.

It was antique and beautiful. The lace was rotting.

‘Who's James?' she said.

‘James is just this old guy who I let eat me out the other day. I got really sick afterwards. He's nice though.' I paused. ‘He's like a sugar daddy.'

‘Sugar daddy?' Her eyes seemed to focus. ‘Have you not been listening to a word I've
said
?' She got up and shook me by the shoulders. I tried to push her off, but she had developed an
übermensch
strength.

Finally, she staggered back. ‘It hasn't worked,' she said. ‘The ceremony didn't work. It must be. It must be because Erzulie is still angry with me.'

‘What did you do?'

‘Exile, exile,' said Steph. ‘Subjugation in exile.' She took my arm. ‘Come with me.'

We were in the basement. The swimming pool shone before us but Steph pulled out a ring of jailer's keys and led me down a corridor to the left. It was carpeted with leopard print.

‘Like Graceland.' Her head whipped round. ‘You know what kitsch is?'

‘Erm. Kind of tacky stuff?'

‘No. Kitsch is the aftermath of a true experience.'

‘Yeah.' I nodded. ‘I keep having these aftermath experiences of love. They're not real experiences – like with James. I don't love him. It's nothing really.' I paused. ‘We don't have to do this, Stephanie.'

‘Do what?' She jangled her keys.

‘Whatever it is, what it is you're going to do to me. Yesterday was enough. I get it. I need to repent. I need to sort my life out and maybe do an internship at a women's domestic violence charity or something.'

Her smile was dark. ‘You don't get it,' she said quietly. ‘You really don't get it at all.'

‘What don't I get?' I said, desperately.

‘Liberation means a rejection of all that came before.'

‘Not necessarily?'

She snapped her fingers. ‘Erm, hello? Man was woman's
god
. He only got knocked off his pedestal – metaphorically died, if you will – back in the '60s and '70s when the sistahood, in which I played a key part …'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘After the death of the patriarchal god, a void opened up. It is harrowing to think about that void. Male writers had to think about it back in the nineteenth century when
their
god died. Like Dostoyevsky. He had to think about it. We have to think about it
now
.' She opened a leopard-print door.

It was the recording studio.

She locked the door behind us. ‘This place is completely soundproof,' she said. ‘It's like a panic room but better. It's like a torture chamber but where healing happens.'

She positioned me inside a large glass box. It was slightly bigger than a coffin. She planted some headphones on my head and pointed to a microphone.

‘I really can't sing,' I said.

She said something back, but I couldn't hear it.

I took the headphones off.

‘I said,
but can you scream
?' she said. ‘Because no one can hear you in here, anyways.' To demonstrate, she screamed – loud. She kept screaming. Then she started grunting from the back of her throat.

Eventually she left the box, locking me inside it. She moved behind a glass wall. A bank of a million buttons lit up. She gestured for me to put the headphones back on.

We were facing each other.

Her voice boomed loud in my ears: ‘The sirens ensnared Odysseus by singing their deadly song. He couldn't resist. They say a way to a man's heart is through his stomach. Well, a way to a woman's heart is through her ears.' She slid up the buttons on the mixing desk. ‘I've taken the liberty of consulting your personal effects.'

‘My what?' I shouted, but my voice was muffled.

‘Your laptop,' boomed Stephanie. ‘Your top three most played
tunes
on iTunes. Whimsies you can't stop listening to. Candy you can't stop eating. First, I'll play the original. Then it's your turn. You sing along. I want feeling. This is catharsis. This is your chance to get it out once and for all. To expunge those saccharine lyrics until they are dead to you. Until you realise you have been aping sentiment all along. In descending order.'

The celestial chords of Beyoncé's ‘Halo' began to play. Her voice was like an injection of honey, emptying the world of reality and replacing it with happiness. A large monitor outside my box showed Beyoncé bathed in quasi-religious light, make-up free, admiring her lover as he slept. She sung that she was addicted to his light. The song was arresting and lulling at once. It was an ecstatic dream, a way to return. ‘Halo, Halo, Halo'. It ended.

‘Now your turn,' boomed Steph.

An instrumental version began.

‘I can't sing,' I said into the microphone.

‘Try!' screeched Steph. ‘You've got to try!'

I tried my best to imitate Beyoncé, her evangelical conviction. I got carried away.

When the song ended, Steph boomed: ‘This is an example of the Spirituals of slavery reincarnated through the twentiethcentury Afro-American gospel tradition and thus corralled via auto-tune into contemporary rhythm-and-blues pop that straddles both Christianity and secular individualism in its quest for a lover with a halo in lieu of baby Jesus himself!' She sounded deranged. ‘Beyoncé is a light-skinned African-American woman with dyed blonde hair and Caucasian features who wants it and gets it all ways at once: she wants girls to run the world as long as they are sliding around in the dust wearing nothing but bikinis and sucking their forefingers.'

‘Hey,' I said. ‘Don't say that. I love Beyoncé.'

‘I know you do,' said Steph. ‘I know you do. The problem with you post-feminist girls is that you love with all your hearts what you know in your heads to be wrong. You love it ironically.'

There was silence.

‘I don't!' I said. ‘I love her truly. She's a career woman. She's equal to Jay-Z. They've got one of the best relationships in the industry.'

Steph laughed. ‘You speak as though you're part of that industry. But you're not part of any industry. Except mine.'

The song began again, and again, and again.

‘Louder!' screamed Steph.

But it was never good enough.

I tried harder.

She castigated me harder.

Finally, on the twelfth or thirteenth go, she said she liked the sound of my harmony.

I was going hoarse.

Then she told me I'd fallen off.

‘Fallen off what?' I rasped.

‘Fallen.' She shook her head.

By the twentieth go, I was almost mute.

Steph stood up and clapped. ‘Well done, you.'

I sank back in the box, exhausted.

‘That signified the exaltation typically associated with the early feelings of love,' said Stephanie. ‘Now the mood changes. We are remembering the first time. We are in the middle. This is your second most listened to song … a song to die for.'

It began: ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face'. The monitor showed Roberta Flack on
Top of the Pops
in 1972. She was wearing an African black and gold top and she had an afro. She was playing the piano.

‘Was it you who made them play it at the strip club?' I croaked.

Stephanie shrugged, faux-naïve. ‘You've listened to this song 5,873 times. You have given yourself brain damage listening to this song.'

The rigmarole started again; she made me sing it, again, and again, and again.

‘Your husky voice suits this perfectly.' She hugged herself. ‘This takes me back to the days when I fell in love with Leo. He was a brilliant man. An ice hockey player. I'll tell you about him sometime.'

Hours had passed. There were no windows and no natural light.

I begged her for a glass of water. She gave me some iced tea.

‘Can I have a cigarette?' I said.

‘No.' She said things had changed now since I hadn't learned my lesson and I was in danger of running away.

‘Who said I was going to run away?' I rasped.

‘Now we smash through the pain barrier!!' She raised her fist in the air. She gestured for me to do the same. ‘You've listened to this last song 11,785 times.'

I began to panic. ‘Please don't play this song,' I said. ‘Please. It really brings back a lot of memories. I hate this song.'

But the chords of ‘I'll Be Your Mirror' had started, and now she was dancing. ‘This is
my
era,' she was saying.

Nico was promising to reflect her lover, reflect her lover, reflect her lover.

My heart was beating too fast. I tried to grasp the microphone but it slipped out of my hands. I took the headphones off.

There was silence.

She was screaming, but I couldn't hear her. I lip-read: ‘
You're going to sing. Sing, sing until there's nothing left
.'

I scrabbled at the door of the box. She marched through the glass wall, opened the door, and slapped me, hard.

I could hear the song faintly through the earphones bouncing on their wire.

‘How do you feel?' hissed Stephanie. She pressed a finger to my lips. She produced a fountain pen and a pad. ‘Get down.' She pointed to the floor. ‘Write.'

I sank to the floor.

Steph was screaming at me about the semiotic chora that I was riding right now, transporting me to a time outside of time before I loved and lost, when my heart was still whole, not hopelessly splintered by the dictates of gender normativity.

But it wouldn't come.

Nothing would come.

Fourteen

The next morning, I did run away.

I returned to Clapham.

The crazy lady with the Cabbage Patch doll was telling me why she preferred minimalism these days. Her trolley was covered with flattened white cardboard boxes. Her baby wore a white paper bag as a bonnet. ‘After an era of great busyness,' she was saying. ‘There must be simplicity. Everything must be stripped down.' She paused. ‘Or maybe it was the snow that inspired me.'

Clapham Common was green again. It was Thursday.

‘They put me inside for the night,' she said. ‘But I got out. I got out.'

We were standing outside the Chinese takeaway on Clapham High Street. Raegan had begged me not to go, but I felt sure that it wouldn't be long before bars were fitted to my bedroom window at Stephanie's. I had taken James's pussy with me.

The sewage had risen still further from the basement of our flat. It had become an odour that I could taste. It tasted of tonic water and shit. The shit was real, as though a whole army of school children had been invited to shit all over the floor for want of any other way to entertain themselves. The remains of a Russian salad had fallen over the counter and dribbled down the cupboard doors. The fridge door had been left open. The TV was on. A copy of Steph's novel,
Abreaction
, had been tossed onto the chaise longue. The bust of Professor Frank had been hacked at. The electric meat carver that my mother had bought us as a house warming present lay beside it. The hacking had been aborted because the tyres were so thick. It appeared that Freddie had resorted to stubbing his fags out on the Professor's conceptualised forehead. No one was home.

I went upstairs.

Freddie's room was filled with balloon animals that must have been blown up days before because most had deflated to become wisps, poor unfortunate souls of balloon animals. My bedroom door was closed. The smell got stronger.

I heard something move inside.

I opened the door.

Vic was sprawled across the bed, naked. His eyes were glassy.

I screamed.

‘I've been waiting,' he said. His black hair hung lanker. His penis began to stand up, but I was more concerned about the state of my bedroom. It had been terrorised. The walls were smeared with faeces. There were handprints of shit everywhere, but also nods to the history of twentieth-century art: de Kooning-like gestures in shit that coalesced at times into shit figuration. A naked woman had been sketched in shit on the wall over my bed. Her nipples were fingerprints, her eyes were fingerprints, her whole body looked as though it had been poked into being. I covered my nose and mouth.

‘It wasn't me,' said Vic. He sat up and held out his arms.

I waded through the piles of clothes that had been turned out from the chest of drawers. My feet crunched. I looked down: dozens of broken egg shells were strewn over the carpet. Their yolks had transformed into a variant of milkshake. There were sachets in which the remnants of a black substance swirled. There was a tiny hammer on my dressing table. The mirror inside the wardrobe door bore the black word:
Butchered
.

‘Fucking Allegra,' I said. ‘God. She's so melodramatic.'

‘It was like this when I came in,' said Vic.

I sat down on the bed. He tried to stroke my hair and I let him for a couple of seconds but then I pushed him off and stood up.

‘She hasn't even got any new ideas,' I said. ‘She already did this performance like two years ago. With the squid ink.' I laughed at the memory. ‘She puts a sheet over her head and then tapes eggs to her eyes. She's already got her assistant Sue to inject the eggs with squid ink. Then she looks like this mental ghost or nun or something. She gets Sue to tap the eggs with a hammer.' I picked up the hammer. ‘So that the squid ink kind of squirts out of her eyes. It's hilarious.'

‘You know the person who did this?' The pits in Vic's face had expanded to become holes. ‘I thought you'd had a break-in – the door was open.'

I managed to get Vic dressed and out of the house with threats to call the police and, when that didn't work, I promised to call him.

‘I'll call you, I'll call you, I'll call you,' said Vic, mimicking my voice. ‘All I ever hear from you is
I'll call you
.'

‘How else do you expect to hear from me, Vic? By pigeon? I've just been so busy with work commitments – now that I've got a new job at the bank.' He didn't believe that I'd turned into a ‘square' just at the moment when he'd stopped being a ‘square' so I had to go into elaborate detail about my daily administrative tasks and how organising other people's money was a sobering way to fill one's time. I said that now he and I could afford to go on dinner dates to Carluccio's like other couples. I gave him a pair of Freddie's old brogues to wear, but I noticed when I tried to find an outfit that most of Freddie's clothes had gone. His camera equipment had gone too.

I gave the key to the flat to the homeless lady with the minimalist trolley. I told her she could stay there as long as she cleaned it up.

Freddie wasn't answering his phone. I called Jasper. He told me that they were shooting on location. He said that Freddie never wanted to see or speak to me again. I used the £48 left over from the halal chicken to buy a train ticket to Suffolk.

There was a little boy wandering out of the gates of Hammerton Hall. He was wearing a top hat and tails and his face was cut. He looked stunned. I asked him if he knew where he was going, but he ran away from me. He went in the direction of the village.

Maxine the housekeeper was riding a horse around and around the paddock. I knew her well; she had fried us all black pudding the morning after the night of the crème de menthe, which had taken place in a drawing room here. It had been filled with Sarah Lucas sculptures: stockings stuffed with oranges and aggressive tabloid montages. Freddie always said that his father was a follower; he'd caught the YBA wave a couple of years too late. That night, Maxine had assisted our game of truth or dare by fishing the bottle of crème de menthe out of the recycling bin and rinsing it. She had remained in a dark corner, watching. The fire reflected in Jasper's face as he brandished the bottle. Allegra was prostrate. I looked away. Afterwards, Freddie saluted Maxine for being unshockable. She had been an artist herself back in the '80s, but it never worked out.

Now Maxine got off the horse and told me they were in the dining room, but that Freddie had said he'd kill me soon as look at me. The bright green English countryside appeared refreshingly blameless and boring, as though nothing could ever happen here. A crow flew above. The pigs were asleep, Maxine said.

Freddie was wearing a black balaclava with a top hat and a black poncho. He was jousting with Jasper who was dressed the same except that his hat had fallen off in the effort to stab Freddie with the point of his sword. The ceiling was high and the walls were panelled, but instead of portraits of successive generations of Freddie's family, there hung Bruce Nauman neons, kicking their legs up in fascist uniformity or lying in chain gangs of oral sex.

‘Are these originals?' I called from the far end of the room, and my voice echoed back:
Are these originals, originals, originals?

Freddie the caped crusader ran at me with his jousting stick and didn't stop so that I was forced to exit the room and close the door behind me.

‘Can we be friends?' I said through the door. ‘Didn't you get my text? I told you I was sorry.'

I heard the sword hit the door and twang.

I moved away. ‘Sorry,' I repeated.

Freddie opened the door. He pointed the sword at my throat.

‘Look,' I said. ‘We're even, OK? You got Allegra to fuck up my room so badly and all my stuff is just fucked up and you let that psycho Vic in. He's dangerous, Freddie.' I could only see his eyes through the balaclava.

‘Do you have any idea how long my uncle has lived?' said Freddie.

I shook my head.

‘Ninety-four years. Do you have any idea how many days and hours it will take him to recount his life fucking story? Hhhmm – well.' He waved the sword. ‘The Greenland years alone were fraught with daily risks to life and limb thanks to his rugged determination to hunt like the Inuit man, to fuck like the Inuit man—'

‘Freddie can you put your sword down, please? I'm really at the end right now. I'm exhausted. I'm at the end.' I sat down on the floor and started to cry. I was wearing one of Stephanie's smocks and one of Stephanie's duffel coats; I had stolen them from the dirty laundry basket before I left.

Freddie sat beside me. He pulled down the balaclava. ‘To keep the flat, I have to write up Uncle's whole life in the form of an oral history,' he said. ‘Not a biography. He wants it in the form of
folk tale
, a
myth
. To ensure he becomes a
legend
.'

I laughed.

Freddie laughed too.

We sat in silence for a while.

Finally he said: ‘I didn't tell Allegra to fuck your room. She found out that Sebastian met up with you and went really fucking nuts. I think she thinks he's still in love with you or something. She said that when he got back from seeing you, he was just moping around the flat, saying he didn't want to go to Mexico any more.'

We were sitting on the floor in Freddie's studio. It was in the attic at Hammerton Hall. The windows looked over the forest, turning blue in the afternoon. A harsh light shone down on a high-backed chair. There was a bottle of shoe-polish, black, and a rag. There was blood on the green carpet.

‘There is nothing to dream of,' Jasper was saying. ‘So nothing connects with nothing.' He was drinking a bottle of ale. ‘That's how one always feels after a bout of booting.' He lay on his back.

‘It'll get picked up,' said Freddie. ‘For sure.'

Another young boy dressed in top hat and tails appeared at the door. Maxine stood behind him. She disappeared. He was different from the stunned boy that I had seen by the gate; he wasn't bleeding.

‘Please sir, can I have some more?' said Jasper, falsetto.

He and Freddie laughed.

The young boy looked as fresh as an apple. He held out a piece of paper in a plastic sleeve. ‘Here's my extra-curriculars,' he said.

Jasper stood up and stretched. He sat in the chair.

‘Wet bob. Good. Dry bob. Kneel there.' Freddie pointed to the space at Jasper's feet. ‘Now I told you this is artistic hey so no recompense but you will be in my show
Making A Racquet
. Jasp is doing tech.'

The boy nodded. ‘I've always wanted to be in the arts,' he said. ‘I've always been arty.'

Freddie turned on his Bolex and beamed the light into the boy's eyes. ‘Now shine. That's right.'

The boy started shining Jasper's shoes, which were already shiny. ‘Is this right?' said the boy, working the cloth back and forth.

‘Say nothing,' said Freddie.

The boy shined each shoe for a long time.

And then Jasper kicked the boy swiftly in the face.

The boy staggered back, clutching his nose. Dark blood leaked out of his nostrils and trickled over his lips. His eyes showed terror.

The boy staggered to his feet.

Jasper stared into the distance.

The camera kept rolling.

I followed the boy out of the room and round the fountain in the courtyard. It was guarded by a ring of stone toy soldiers, shooting or being shot. They were replicas of components of a Chapman brothers' installation that Freddie's father couldn't afford to buy.

The boy must have thought that I was part of Freddie and Jasper's creative team, because when I tried to catch up with him, shouting that I wanted to help, he ran faster.

I got on the train and returned to London, desperate.

I had no money, no job, and nowhere to live.

I walked all the way from Liverpool Street station to Soho. A girl who I didn't know had taken over the reception at William's. She wore a Minnie Mouse bow on her head. She asked if she could help me? She had never heard of me before. I went down to the kitchen and asked the new sous-chef if I could have the staff meal. It was nearly ready: grey mutton and chips. He hadn't heard of me either. I swore on my life that I had been a door bitch here for five solid months until Monday morning. I asked the other chefs to corroborate but they kept their heads down and whittled away at their courgette flowers.