Eat My Heart Out (19 page)

‘Not in the same way,' said Steph.

‘I don't want to buy your book,' said Jean.

‘Thanks so much, Jean,' said the presenter, warmly. ‘We value your input. Now.' Paper was moved. ‘Vanessa is a young woman who has found recent fame thanks to a bad case of writer's block. Am I right, Vanessa?'

The lights got brighter. Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

‘Yes,' I said.

‘But your writer's block is more than a block, isn't it?'

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘I'm not a writer.'

‘Take your time.'

Time passed.

‘Can you tell us what happened to make you get so pent up inside?' said the presenter.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I can. I was a sexual slave.'

The presenter inhaled and then exhaled, slowly.

‘Not to a man, but a woman,' I said. ‘Not to my lover, but—'

‘Vanessa means slave in the metaphorical sense of the word,' said Stephanie.

‘I was a slave in the literal sense,' I said. ‘But that wasn't what made me not be able to write. I couldn't write because of guilt.'

‘The guilt of being a successful woman,' said Steph.

‘No,' I said. ‘The guilt of what I did.'

‘What did you do?' breathed the presenter.

‘It was my mother,' I said. ‘She started it off. She met the man only casually, in a pub. It was karaoke night. They did a duet together. I think it was Johnny Cash, ‘Ring of Fire'. And then before you know it – bang. She's pregnant at the age of fifty.'

They waited.

‘Well, I wasn't too happy about the whole thing. I was seven at the time. I thought my mother had been highly irresponsible. I didn't like my territory being encroached upon.'

‘Sibling rivalry is a very visceral emotion,' said the presenter.

‘Yes, it is,' I said. ‘So one day I was sitting at the kitchen table with my little brother on my knee. He was about nine months old. He had a little pink face. He was a very happy baby, always smiling.'

‘Hhmm,' said the presenter.

‘I was jiggling him up and down and he was laughing. In that moment I felt the power in my hands. You know like at school when you study biology and you find out about the different types of energy? I remember this diagram we had to draw of kinetic energy. It was a ball on the edge of a cliff. The ball wasn't moving, but the point was that it
could
move. It had the
potential
to move.'

‘Yes.'

‘Or be moved.'

More silence.

‘So I dropped him,' I said. ‘On his head.'

‘What happened?' breathed the presenter.

‘He got brain damage.'

‘
Good lord
.'

‘And then he died.' I paused. ‘They couldn't press charges because I was a minor.'

‘And that's why you couldn't write?'

I hesitated. ‘When I was staring at that blank page, I was thinking:
Why should I be able to express myself when he will never be able to express himself?
He never even learned to talk.'

I was waiting at a table in the BBC cafeteria while Steph bought me a chocolate éclair as a special treat for doing so well on the programme.

There was an exceptionally good-looking man on the next table. He looked almost exactly like Sebastian, except that Sebastian didn't have gappy teeth. This man was blond and bestial like Sebastian. He was fondling a large, rectangular box that seemed to contain a flat-screen TV.

‘Excuse me,' I said. ‘What is that?'

‘It's a SAD lamp,' he said. ‘For people who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. It simulates sunlight.'

‘Wow,' I said.

There was a silence.

‘Are you with Mental too?' I said.

‘No. What's that?'

‘It's this organisation for insane people. I'm their representative.'

He laughed.

‘Do you suffer from SAD?' I asked him.

He laughed again. ‘No! I sell them. Well – I manage the account. We're pitching the product to Science & Tech.'

Steph was returning with the éclair so I got the man to write down my number as quickly as possible. His name was Dave.

Sixteen

Hi Ann-Marie. How about dinner tonight? Dave X

I persuaded Stephanie to let me wander around Hampstead Heath for a few hours by myself in order to contemplate everything that I had learnt from her so far. I told her that I'd return to Camden in time to get ready for the ceremony.

But I went down to Clapham instead. The dress that I wanted to wear for my date with Dave was stowed somewhere at the back of my wardrobe in the flat.

Blue tarpaulin had replaced the curtains in the front windows.

Jasper was eating a salami sandwich in the kitchen, his feet on the table. The homeless woman had cleaned the place up nicely, but he was dropping his mayonnaise all over the floor. I smacked his legs down. Invitations to
Making A Racquet
were stacked up. They were printed with an image of a tennis racquet emitting musical notes with bee faces.

‘What's that buzzing?' I said.

I went into the living room.

A man wearing a bee-keeper's outfit was watching a black and white film about bees. Real bees were swarming around a hive that hung from our art nouveau light. The bee man was also eating a salami sandwich, but he had to struggle to get it up and under his white protective helmet.

‘Out,' he said. He was Scottish. ‘It's not safe.'

Wooden '70s-style tennis racquets were propped against the wall.

I returned to the kitchen.

‘Where's Freddie?' I asked Jasper.

‘Fred's left me in the shit with the show,' he said. ‘I'm hoping it's not going to be a shit show. He's left me to do everything because he's got something wrong with him so I need to send the press releases out and put all the fucking art in there and like move shit around and call people up and turn the fucking lights on. Opening's tomorrow.'

Upstairs, my wallpaper had been hosed down. The eggs had been swept away. It was pristine. Stacks of wood and bits of metal grate had been arranged on the landing. There was a wicker chair with the seat missing in the corner. The drapes of Freddie's four-poster had been replaced with tarpaulin. It was a blue cave.

‘Come back,' he croaked from inside.

‘I am back,' I said. ‘I'm here.'

‘Not you.'

I stuck my head in. He pointed a trembling finger up. A picture of a gaunt, geometric ginger model, torn from a magazine, had been pinned to the ceiling of the bed.

‘Who's that?' I said.

‘Samuel.' He turned away.

‘Freddie, that's not Samuel. That's just some random guy.'

‘I don't feel well. I feel unwell.'

He didn't have a fever.

‘I've become what I hate,' he said. ‘Get the camera.'

I found the Bolex on his dresser and began to film.

‘I am but a broken dandy,' he said.

‘Where's my friend who I said could stay here?'

Freddie sat up and lit a cigarette. ‘If you're talking about that homeless wench, then I threw her out. I mashed her up. I fucked up her face.'

The dress that I was looking for was wrapped around a stack of unopened letters from the Student Loans Company. I unfurled its white taffeta. The shoulders ballooned, the skirt ballooned, the bodice was restrictive, fitted with a real whalebone corset. It was the dress that my mother had worn to marry my father.

I put it on.

In the mirror, I looked like Princess Diana on her wedding day.

‘You look like the bride of Frankenstein,' said Freddie, in the doorway.

‘I hope Dave's not a commitment phobe,' I said, twirling in the mirror. ‘This old guy James wants me to wear it for him but Dave is one of the best-looking people that I've ever met in my life.'

Dave was waiting by the clock tower at Clapham Common tube. I stood across the road outside O'Neill's Irish-themed pub for about fifteen minutes, watching him. The dress was hidden under Freddie's trench coat. Dave seemed to be pretending that he couldn't see me. He turned away. I turned away too, and stared at the Londis on the corner. When I turned back, he was staring at me, but then he turned away again. He hid behind the station. Then he crossed the road in the opposite direction.

I watched him go.

He stopped outside a bar called Be At One. Rugby players were drinking pints. He continued to watch me. I watched him. We stood like that, watching each other, while cars drove between us, for five, then ten minutes. Finally, I crossed the road towards him. He retreated. Now he was outside the Indian takeaway. He ran across the road that I had just crossed, dodging cars, and disappeared into the tube.

‘Fuck you,' I told a rugby man.

I went into Be At One and sat at the bar; it was awful. Painful pinks and disco purples had been carefully selected. A group of women were talking about someone who had slept with someone else who really shouldn't have slept with that person because she knows Lily likes him and besides he's practically married to Fiona. I ordered a Sex on the Beach and waited while the bartender carved out a pineapple accoutrement.

I saw Dave walk past, outside. He seemed agitated. Then he walked past in the other direction.

The bartender slid my drink towards me. It was exploding with sparklers. ‘That'll be £10.99, please,' he said.

‘I thought you said it was on the house,' I said.

‘When did I say that?'

Dave walked into the bar. He stood next to me, flustered.

My heart started racing.

He paid for the drink and ordered one for himself. ‘Why did you do that?' he said.

‘Do what?' I sipped the drink and winced; it was vile.

The bartender looked crushed.

‘Just standing there,' said Dave. ‘Staring at me across the road when you knew I was waiting for you. We said meet by the tube.'

‘I don't know.' My hands were shaking. ‘I wanted to make you wait.'

‘Why?'

‘To reverse the terms of gendered history.'

His hands were shaking too.

‘Why did you run off?' I said.

‘Because. I didn't know. What you were doing. I thought you would follow me.'

‘I thought maybe you'd felt my evil aura pulsing all the way across the road and changed your mind,' I said. ‘I'm just warning you now that I'm very difficult to go out with. I'm almost impossible to go out with.'

Dave's drink arrived.

A girl with straightened hair came over and slung an arm around each of us. She was drunk. ‘God, you've really hit the jackpot,' she told me. ‘I would.' She pumped her pelvis against Dave's bar stool.

He blushed.

She staggered off.

‘Dave,' I said. ‘If that is your real name.'

‘Why wouldn't it be?'

‘What brings you here?'

‘To go on a date with you.'

‘With me?' I looked down at my drink.

‘Yeah.'

There was a long silence.

‘I like girls who are mad,' he said. ‘I like difficult women.'

‘Are you a masochist?'

He laughed. ‘No – what's that? Someone who likes being tied up?'

‘No. Someone who likes pain, more broadly speaking. Like if I go like this.' I picked up a fork that had been left along with the remains of a scotch egg bar snack and stabbed Dave's hand.

He screamed.

The fork didn't go all the way in.

He gripped his hand, sweating.

‘You see,' I said. ‘You're not a masochist.' I sipped my drink. ‘It's a shame. I think I only like masochistic men. I mean, someone's got to get fucked. And I'm pretty sick to death of it being me.'

He asked the bartender for a glass of water.

‘So exactly what is it that you do for a living?' I said.

‘Advertising,' he gasped. ‘Brand development.'

‘So you manipulate the masses into thinking they're depressed when they're not, so they'll buy a SAD lamp.'

‘Kind of.' Dave's face was returning to its usual colour. ‘But I'm an artist, really. Yeah, that's what I do. I'm a light artist. I switched to light as a medium after I got the SAD account. It kind of gave me ideas – about how light is like awesome.'

I looked at him with disdain.

‘It's sculptural, you know?' he said.

‘I can't deal with another artist. I can't deal with another artist with a messianic complex.'

Dave laughed. ‘Yeah, I've struggled with that myself.' He opened his arms wide as though nailed to a cross and lolled his head forward.

An hour later, we were sitting on a steel island in a pop-up sushi bar called Moat. The island was surrounded by a grimy ditch, filled with fish trying to survive. The odds were against them – diners were dangling their rods into the ditch from their positions at steel tables, laughing as their bait squirmed and the fishes' open mouths sucked at what would inevitably kill them.

‘Maybe you're a sadist?' I said.

‘No.' Dave laughed. ‘I'm not that either. Do you like it here? Peckham's getting more and more wicked.'

‘You've got to be one or the other. Either/or.'

‘Why?'

‘Because that's how human nature works,' I said. ‘I had to learn it off by heart for my social and political science exams. At Cambridge.'

He didn't look too impressed.

‘Cambridge,' I repeated. ‘Not the ex-polytechnic, the actual Cambridge.'

He laughed again.

I blushed. ‘Yeah, well anyway we had to do all this Hobbes stuff – life is a war of all against all. We need a benign totalitarian dictator to restrain us from hurting each other. Because otherwise we would hurt each other. Life is nasty, brutish, and short.'

‘I don't believe that,' said Dave. ‘I'm having a very pleasant evening.'

‘But it will be short.' I took off my coat and revealed the wedding dress. The whalebone was cutting into my ribs.

Now he did look impressed. ‘Are we going to Vegas?'

‘No.' I closed the coat. ‘I'm a commitment phobe. Like a man. I just fuck and go, that's my thing. No hard feelings.' I took a swig of beer.

Dave's line had trailed out of the water. It was lying on the steel decking.

‘I'd marry you,' he said.

I frowned.

‘I felt it as soon as I saw you,' he went on. ‘You're psycho. You're just like me.'

‘You don't seem that psycho.'

‘What I mean is,' he said. ‘I'm not psycho myself, but I like to look after psycho girls.'

‘Oh god. The last thing I need right now is a co-dependent relationship. I've got enough of those already.'

My rod started to tug. I was dragged towards the ditch. The fish had the tenacity of a shark.

Dave was killing himself laughing.

‘Help!' I shouted at the waiters, who weren't Japanese at all.

The waiters attempted to wrench the rod from my hands, but then I experienced a surge of
übermensch
power. I wheeled the thing frantically until the fish rose out of the water, its iridescent body already entering the death throes. I got it on the deck. It continued to writhe. I grabbed Dave's bottle of beer, still half full, and smashed it over the fish's head.

Blood shot out.

I was pleased.

The restaurant flashed red. There was a blast of giggly Japanese electro-pop. The waiters shook my hands high in the air, a prize fighter.

The hipsters cheered.

The waiter removed Dave's rod from his hands. ‘She got the fish first,' he explained. ‘So that should be enough for both of you.'

‘Yeah, so after we broke up, I just had to reconnect with myself again,' Dave was saying. ‘Find the part that I had lost by being with someone – the same person – for so long. Do you know what I mean?' He was shovelling bits of my catch into his mouth with chopsticks.

They had skinned, boned, and decapitated the fish at our table. I could tell that the weak English waiter wanted to be sick at the sight of the heart still pounding, the gills still desperate for life.

‘I don't really know what you mean, no,' I said. ‘I've never really been in a long-term relationship due to my commitment phobia. For me, being in a relationship is like being buried alive in quicksand.'