Eat My Heart Out (21 page)

‘Then how the hell did he give an account?' I said.

‘He wrote it
before
,' said Steph.

‘And finally a heart-wrenching memoir of one man's struggle to be reunited with his daughter after his wife discovered that he was having an affair with one of her best friends,' said the host.

A picture of a Hispanic-looking man with red-framed glasses appeared on the screen. His name was Greg Perez. It was Raegan's father, Marge's ex-husband. Raegan had shown me a photo of him when we were drawing at the kitchen table a few days ago. His book was called
Distance
.

Marge returned with Raegan, whose eyes were looking all over the place. Water had been splashed on her face. The Drew Barrymore make-up had run. She got more excited when she saw her father on the screen.

‘And the winner is …'

There was silence.

‘Stephanie Haight for
Falling Out of Fate
.'

Steph stood up, too fast. The table tipped; Marge caught it.

Steph walked to the podium and assumed the calm authority of a professor. She thanked her publisher, her agent, Marge, Raegan, me. ‘And most of all,' she said. ‘I'd like to thank Greg, for making our affair public.'

Gradually, people began to clap.

Steph didn't return to the table.

‘It starts with lesions,' the short, fat, serious man was saying. ‘Lesions the shape of lenses that appear on the branches.' He shuddered. ‘And then there are the fungi that sprout. They look appetising – one is almost tempted to make a fungi risotto. But oh no they're not.' He slurped his gin and tonic.

Dave and I looked at each other.

‘Here.' The man pulled his iPhone out of his pocket. ‘Have you heard of the Ashtag? It's an app that spots dieback.'

‘I'm sorry you didn't win,' I told him.

Raegan had attached herself to her father's leg as he accepted consolations. She had a hunted look in her eye, like Freddie at the peanut factory. The liberal intelligentsia had turned into a mob; they bumped and grinded to one of Adele's more upbeat numbers, letting their hair down, letting it all hang out, letting the joy of being liberal lift the sense that the wrong horse won. Greg had been the favourite. Greg had managed to mix erudition with emotional pain, contextualising the latter within the ongoing debate about the rights of fathers and the dubious rights of mothers to wreak revenge via the children. ‘It was Stephanie who got revenge,' I overheard a renowned panellist remark to an even more renowned commentator and critic. ‘They should have given it to that fabulous work on ceruse. I read it. It was fabulous. His insights on red and how it is not what we think it is and Elizabethan purity more generally were really startling.'

‘Startling how?'

‘They were just really startling to me.'

Dave and I were dancing with the expert on Victorian sewers, who was only twenty. It transpired that he was a child prodigy who'd gone up to Oxford at the age of fourteen, chaperoned by his father, who was eager to buy a tandem so that they could ride around Oxford together in the style of another child prodigy from the '70s whose name the sewer man couldn't remember. He didn't mind that his sewer book hadn't won because he said he'd had a jolly good time splashing around in the sewers with a torch strapped to his head. He said he had the rest of his life to win. He screamed with joy every time a new song came on; ‘Twist and Shout' got a particular rise out of him.

I checked my phone.

Come to the pool. Please. Stephanie. Leave your man behind.

There was another:

The hotel pool. Not the pool at home.

Steph was sitting in a deckchair with her back to the black shape of London. The pool was on the roof, lit from within. It deserved to be filmed for an R&B video. A few people were laughing by the bar in the corner but they didn't seem to belong to the award ceremony. I sat in the deckchair next to Steph, then got up and turned it around so that I could see the view.

‘I can't believe he beat me,' she said, lighting a cigarette. She lit one for me too.

The waitress came over and she ordered two bourbon highballs.

‘Who?' I said.

‘Greg. I can't believe I let him win.' She shook her head. ‘He won. If only I'd written harder, if only I'd tried harder, I could have done it. But there was something inside of me saying
don't do it, you can't do it
. That thing inside of me will never go away.'

Our faces were slanting in different directions.

‘I tried to kill it in a multitude of ways,' she said. ‘I did everything. But the voice telling you you're shit is a selffulfilling prophecy.'

‘Stephanie,' I said. ‘What are you talking about? You won. Where's the award?'

‘Don't laugh at me. I can take it.'

‘Take what? You
won
.'

‘No.'

‘Do you mean that he won metaphorically or what?' I said.

Steph laughed. ‘Ann-Marie, you're delusional. Were you
there
? Or were you too absorbed in your new zipless fuck? That's what we used to call it – back in the old days.' She unbuckled her ankle-boots and kicked them off. ‘Greg won
in real life
. It was my punishment for doing what I did to Marge. It's karma. I fucked the balance. But Marge is worse. Marge internalised the negative voice on a scale that even I can't fail to marvel at.' Steph laughed again. ‘She stays with me because I'm the one who killed her spirit.'

‘Marge seems quite spirited,' I said.

‘No.' Stephanie shook her head. ‘She's dead inside. So am I.' She tossed her cigarette on the floor. ‘My hope is that things will change generationally. But you've fallen at the first hurdle. You're falling.'

Our highballs arrived.

‘I—' I started.

She cut me off.

‘I met him on the ski lift,' she said.

Her eyes glazed over.

I had no idea what she was talking about.

I waited.

Her eyes went back to normal again. ‘Yes.' She downed her drink and waved for more. ‘It was snowing, obviously. It was chance. We went up, up. That night in the cabin was a bliss that I can't tell you. I can't tell you what it is to stare into the eyes of a man with whom you are in love and come simultaneously.'

‘With Greg?!'

‘No.'

More drinks arrived.

‘With Leo. My American ice hockey player. He held my hand in a way that – He held my hand.'

There was a long silence.

‘I became an American for him. I followed him there. He told me that this was it. It
was
it. I changed my name, got a Green Card. I changed my heart. I made it pliable. Open.' She grimaced. ‘Every night, night after night.'

I waited.

‘I enrolled in grad school at Harvard. He had gone to Yale. He was very well-bred. We didn't have much to talk about, looking back. In fact we had nothing to talk about at all. I was so bored, sitting in restaurants. I kept the smile on my face but I just found him tedious as hell.'

I laughed. ‘Dave's quite boring.'

‘Yes.' She lit another cigarette. ‘But my
god
is he cute!'

We both laughed.

‘Leo never made me wait,' she said. ‘That's why I loved him. He was always there. Sure – I could be tricky at times. Some nights I wanted to work on my thesis but I would go to a movie with him or watch him play or hang out with his friends. I didn't mind because I was with
him
. I let my studies slide. I didn't mind. I let my mind slide. I didn't mind. I let myself slide into him like … something inevitable.'

A woman staggered over and asked for a light. Steph handed it to her.

‘But he got poached,' said Steph.

‘By a woman?'

‘No! By the Toronto Maple Leafs. He went pro. He was that good.'

‘Is that an actual team?'

‘One of the best. We carried on long distance. I was twentyfive. I wrote him every week, great, massive outpourings of love. And he wrote me, the best he could. Not so poetic. But I didn't care. I used to get so excited by his letters.' She looked at me. ‘They were mostly about Maple Leaf strategy, league tables, chances. The letters got shorter. And then no letter arrived. I kept writing. I wrote for six weeks. I can't tell you the anxiety I went through. I became superstitious, again. Eventually, I went up there because I was worried that he had had an injury and the coach hadn't told me. But he hadn't had an injury. No. He wasn't hurt at all.'

There was another long silence.

‘I'm sorry,' I said.

‘He'd got engaged to a Maple Leaf cheerleader. Do you know they can skate and cheer at the same time?'

I laughed.

Steph stood up. ‘I want you to go,' she said. ‘Go free.'

She wrote me a cheque for £5,000.

I stared at it for a moment, and then I put it in my handbag.

I returned to the party without Stephanie.

Dave was on the dance floor. He and I danced until four in the morning, and then we took a taxi back to Clapham.

The window-shattering power of Nina Hagen's 1979 Rockpalast performance of ‘Naturträne' greeted us in the hall, drowning out the hum of bees.

It was coming from the basement.

The stench in our screening room was compounded by the alarming vision of Nina, stretched from floor to ceiling on the screen, baby dummies hanging from her ears, opening her mouth too wide to be human.

More urgently, Freddie was standing in dandy regalia on a chair in the centre. One end of the cord of my red silk kimono was tied around his neck; the other end was attached to a makeshift scaffolding, fashioned out of the bits of wood that the homeless woman had collected and left upstairs, nailed together with all the ineptitude of one who has never done a day of manual labour in his life.

Jasper was steadying the chair on which Freddie stood. He looked delighted. The bee man in his white astronaut-like outfit was slouched against the wall, watching the video of Nina, batting a tennis racquet back and forth, saying: ‘She was extraordinary.'

‘Change it to No Bra,' commanded Jasper. He was wearing some kind of purple college robe.

‘Freddie, get down from there,' I said.

‘Oh good, you're here,' he said. ‘I wanted you to see me. Perhaps you most of all.'

Bee man changed the video; a picture of a grim-looking topless woman appeared on the screen. Her long brown hair was positioned over one breast.
Hi, my name's Munchausen, how are you?
came a man's voice, accompanied by jittery electro.

‘Right.' Jasper moved behind the tripod. The Bolex was ready.

Freddie turned his plagued face towards Dave. ‘Sebastian?' he said. ‘Sebastian? Ha, she got you back.'

‘This is not Sebastian, Freddie,' I said. ‘This is Dave. Dave, these are my friends.'

‘My god,' said Jasper, looking at Dave. ‘You've found his doppelgänger, Ann-Marie. The likeness is uncanny. Congratulations.'

‘What are they talking about?' said Dave.

‘I did an installation about doppelgängers back in '02,' said the bee man from beneath his helmet. ‘I got loads of twins to like bump into each other on a busy street.'

‘Who's Sebastian?' said Dave.

‘He's just this guy I went to school with,' I said.

‘The love of her life who she was with for seven years until she destroyed him by sleeping with
him
.' Freddie pointed to Jasper.

‘You said you'd never had a long-term relationship,' said Dave.

‘I was joking,' I said.

‘Enough,' said Freddie. ‘Go.'

The bee man casually kicked away Freddie's chair.

Freddie's body fell, then lurched. His eyes bulged; he began to choke.

‘Relax,' said Jasper.

Freddie continued to writhe. I tried to grab the chair off the bee man but he wouldn't give it to me.

‘In Switzerland, we believe in the right to die,' he said. ‘No one should deny that right.'

‘You sound Scottish, not Swiss,' I said.

Dave went crazy; he tried to get Freddie to sit on his shoulders, but Freddie kept kicking him away. Freddie was about three feet off the ground. Jasper was laughing.

Then Freddie's body went limp.

‘Fuck.' I was going into hysteria. ‘Fuck.'

Dave managed to half throttle the bee man, ripping off his bee helmet in the process. He looked like an ordinary man in his mid-thirties beneath. Dave grabbed the chair. I grabbed the chair off Dave. Jasper attempted to block both of us. I climbed on the chair and tore at the knot around Freddie's neck. That magazine ad of a ginger boy who wasn't Samuel was stuck to the sweat on Freddie's palm. When I finally managed to haul him down, it came unstuck and floated into the mouse shit on the floor.

Eighteen

‘What's the password?' said the mouth.

‘I don't know,' I said.

‘Use your imagination.'

The letter-box was very low down.

‘I don't have an imagination. I don't have time.' I kicked the door.

It opened.

The green girl from the peanut factory was standing in the entrance hall of what was once a boys' prep school. ‘The password is squat,' she said, and disappeared through a door to the right.

A meeting was going on. ‘He seemed like a nice guy,' a girl with a bolt through her nose was saying. ‘But I knew from the way he was dancing that he was a spy.'

Boys' names were engraved on the wall in silver. Headmasters' names were engraved in gold. The place was clean, but I could hear the menace of minimal techno warbling from below. They were having a rave in the basement. I went upstairs. Classrooms with blackboards had been turned into ill-defined lounge areas. Beds were piled on top of beds. A dog was chasing a dog. I wandered through corridors without knowing where I was going. There were stickers on a window:
Ambition: The Desire To Tread On Others
. And:
Stop Mad Cowboy Disease
.

I found Samuel sitting on a camp bed in the last room on the third floor. One of his heinous Disney remixes was spinning, botched and repetitive. He was staring at his laptop, earphones in, back to me. This had been the sickroom. Ointments were still lined up on shelves. I lifted the needle off the record and yanked out Samuel's earphones. He jumped; the laptop crashed to the floor. He was watching
Splash
. Daryl Hannah with her crimped blonde hair was wandering around Bloomingdale's in a man's suit.

He reached out to me. I let him cry into my hair for a long time.

‘I'm trying,' he said. ‘I'm trying to get past the cartoons and move onto to some real live pictures.'

‘They're not real or live,' I said. ‘It's a film from the '80s.'

‘I was thinking about you.' Samuel wiped his nose. ‘Because in this one, the mermaid's got the upper hand. She doesn't sacrifice anything. She returns to the sea and Tom Hanks follows her. He sacrifices his life in New York for her and becomes a merman. He sacrifices his life in
New York
.' He shook his head, baffled. ‘Freddie told me what that woman Stephanie told you about Ariel, but I don't believe it. Or maybe I believe it.'

‘So you have seen Freddie?'

‘No. Not since that night.' He started to cry again.

‘Samuel,' I said. ‘This is serious. You know I don't like you. I've never liked you and I don't like your sister either.'

‘I thought you did like me!'

‘No,' I said. ‘I don't.'

More crying.

‘But Freddie tried to take his own life last night.'

Samuel stared at me.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘That's right. Commit suicide. He would have died if it wasn't for me.' I sat on the camp-bed. ‘It pains me to say it but he's madly in love with you.'

Green girl appeared in the doorway, brandishing an old Nando's chicken box. She didn't recognise me at all. ‘Dude,' she addressed Samuel. ‘Is this girl bothering you?'

‘No.' He looked happy.

Daryl Hannah was shoplifting. Tom Hanks was trying to stop her.

‘OK, well do you have any like detergent?' said green girl. ‘Or bleach. I need really strong bleach to really fuck the stains.'

‘What stains?' said Samuel.

‘Here.' Green girl produced a pair of pink gingham knickers from the chicken box. She twirled them around her finger. Ants swarmed out of the crotch and over her hand and arm. She didn't react. ‘Or I might just go to the allotment and just like
leave them there
.'

I escorted Samuel and all his belongings back to Clapham in a taxi.

It turned out that the balloon animals in Freddie's bedroom were the brainchild of Samuel, who had been promised a balloon animal installation in Freddie's show.

‘Don't you know that Koons did that back in the '80s?' said Dave. He was sprawled on the chaise longue in the living room. I was sprawled on top of him.

Jasper had made a Lancashire hotpot, which he was forking into his mouth straight out of the pan. He passed the pan to Dave, who lifted it up and drank the gravy.

‘Mate,' said Dave. ‘This is fucking sick.'

‘Cheers,' said Jasper.

Samuel was playing with his balloons in front of the Victoriana screen. ‘Who's Koons?' he said.

‘Samuel's a genius,' said Freddie. There was a deep bruise around his neck. ‘He's my pet. He's superlative.'

‘Superfluous, don't you mean,' said Jasper.

‘Koons is like the proper Damien Hirst,' said Dave. ‘His puppy is like legendary. It's as big as a building and it's wicked. It's made out of flowers.'

I went upstairs to check my emails.

Dear Ann-Marie,

Why do they insist on reporting in the press that I won?

The people who I love the most always die. It's patently obvious that Greg was just a zipless fuck, albeit prolonged, because he's still alive. Did I tell you already? ‘Zipless fuck' was a phrase coined by Second Wave feminist Erica Jong in her seminal 1973 novel, Fear of Flying. Why don't they paste his face on top of mine in all the publicity shots of that ghastly ceremony? Did you read the master/slave chapter of
Falling Out of Fate
yet?

Until I see you.

Steph

Sebastian called me on Skype.

‘Hey.' He was in his bedroom at his parents' house. ‘You were brilliant on the radio.'

‘Did you hear it?'

‘Listen,' he said. ‘I want to tell you something. I think if I tell you, things will be different between us. Maybe we can start again. Maybe we can.'

‘Sebastian, I'm really busy at the moment.'

‘Wait. I never told you this before.'

‘What is it?'

‘I didn't get chucked out of boarding school for fighting. That was a lie.'

‘What?'

‘I just wanted you to think that I was strong. You were always getting in fights.'

‘What did you get chucked out for then?'

‘I was sleepwalking. I used to get up in the middle of the night and just wander around the countryside around the school and just kind of end up in weird places, like in the woods and stuff.'

‘Were you actually asleep though?' I said.

‘Yeah. Except they never believed me. They thought I was just being a juvenile delinquent. But I was scared when I woke up in the woods and I had no idea how I got there.'

‘You never sleepwalked with me.'

‘No …'

‘Do you sleepwalk with Allegra?'

‘Yes. I started sleepwalking again after you and I broke up. I don't walk very far now. Usually I just walk to the kitchen or the living room and start watching TV. But she loves it. She says Artaud sleepwalked.'

‘Did you wet the bed as well when you were at boarding school?'

He sat back; the lens pointed at the corner of his ceiling. His face looked very tall.

‘Look, Sebastian,' I said. ‘I have to confess something to you, too. I've met someone else.' I paused. ‘I never thought it would happen, but it has happened. He's unbelievably charismatic.'

He said nothing.

‘Dave works hard plus he's just a gifted conversationalist, which is the ideal combination. The problem with you is that you're quite talented but you're also lazy so you need Allegra to pussy-whip you into doing anything the whole time.'

‘Fuck you.' He disappeared. The screen showed a series of moving abstractions. His laptop must have landed at a bad angle on the bed; I saw dark blue. Then there was nothing.

I had tried to persuade Freddie to wear a polo neck for the opening of
Making A Racquet
– to hide the bruise around his neck. But he wanted people to see that he had suffered for the art. Jasper had enlisted a team of his father's employees to do everything. He had flown someone in from Cologne to do the lighting.
Vice
was filming. Scene & Herd from
Artforum
was here. Everyone was here, it seemed, except the bee man, who had apparently gone into anaphylactic shock. ‘Which is strange,' said Jasper, watching the backside of a waitress as she shouldered a tray of devils-on-horseback.

Dave was whipping out business cards, saying: ‘There's a person who matters. There – that person. He really matters.'

‘It's off-putting,' I told Jasper.

We were standing at the bar. The crowd was contained in the first gallery, which was separated from all the others by a black curtain. The walls were exposed brick. There was no art on display.

‘We get them fucked first,' Jasper explained. ‘They're more inclined to review well and buy this shit.'

‘Is it shit?' I said.

Jasper laughed. ‘Freddie knows it's shit, I know it's shit. More to the point, Freddie's father knows it's shit and he's paying for the space.'

The space had recently housed the remains of defunct trains. Living trains still thundered overhead.

Dave came over.

‘Sebastian, I was just saying to Ann-Marie,' said Jasper.

‘Dave,' said Dave.

‘How fucking hot it was when Ann-Marie and I were in the back of my Alfa Romeo,' Jasper went on. ‘When we were parked outside Allegra's parents' house in Buckinghamshire that night after the crème de menthe. We had all driven straight from Hammerton Hall because Allegra was keen to leave the scene of her spoliation. She said the smell of mint had penetrated the whole county of Suffolk. She said she would never chew chewing gum again, or brush her teeth with mint-flavoured toothpaste.
What other kind of toothpaste is there?
I asked her.' Jasper laughed. ‘
Babe, you're cornered
. Allegra was always moaning. But she and I.' He gestured to me. ‘We literally tore it down. The leather interior was cannibalised, but I didn't care. It was worth it to see her sullen face crease in an orgasm that seemed to have no end.'

Dave put his arm round my shoulders. ‘Hey,' he said. ‘That's my girlfriend.'

‘She's incapable of love,' said Jasper.

‘I'll ask you to kindly leave your drinks at this point,' Freddie announced. ‘The work can't take it.'

Everyone laughed.

We went through the black curtain.

Allegra was sitting cross-legged on a raised platform in the second gallery. Her glorious black hair was hidden under a frizzy blonde wig and she wore a loose white dress. An opera began to play.

‘
Madame Butterfly
,' said Jasper.

To the right of Allegra, there was a transparent perspex bath, filled with water.

The crowd gathered.

A light fell on her. Everyone else was in darkness. The light turned into an image, projected onto her face, so that her blank white skin became another face, a man's brown hair, a business suit. The image rippled away from her; it settled on the bath, and became clear. It was Michael Douglas.

Sue came out of the crowd. Her bob was concealed under a brown wig. She was carrying a box that thudded from within.

The water in the transparent bath began to boil.

Allegra relieved Sue of the box. She opened it, and, with an expert grip, produced a live white bunny. She held it aloft by the ears. Its eyes were pink.

‘Why do you have to make things so difficult?' Allegra asked the bunny.

The image of Michael Douglas had drifted to the rear of the platform. Sue stood beside it, an arm around its phantom shoulders. A second image appeared: that of a little boy. No, it was a little girl who looked like a boy. I remembered the child actress being particularly cute and undeserving of the violence inflicted on her pet bunny by Glenn Close.

Allegra dangled the rabbit over the boiling water.
Madame Butterfly
got louder. The crowd went
ooohhh
. Maybe they didn't think she would drop it in because she was so pretty but yes she did – there it went – body writhing, visible through the side of the bath so that everyone could watch it die.