Eat My Heart Out (7 page)

‘So you like being owned?' purred James.

‘No,' I said. ‘That's not what I meant.' I laughed. ‘We ran away to Paris after our SATs. When we were fourteen. We left in the middle of the night and got the coach to Dover. Sebastian had stolen the money from his parents. Then we got the ferry. It was amazing – we went out on the deck in the pitch black darkness and you couldn't see the horizon. Everything looked black. We got wet from the water.' I laughed again. ‘Obviously. It was the sea. We stayed away for three days. My mother went fucking crazy but his parents didn't even notice that he'd gone. They thought he was on a school trip that they'd forgotten about.'

‘Hmm.'

‘When we came back, there was this awful meeting with my mother and his parents. His mother said that we should give our children roots and wings, but my mother said that ambition is the best form of contraception and the French are notoriously sex-mad.'

‘Yes, you are.'

‘She said that France is a sex-mad country but Sebastian's father said:
But a lovely place for a romantic weekend away at this time of year
. Sebastian said his father wanted him to die because he was too tall. My mother tried to stop me from seeing Sebastian, so I ran away to his house and lived there. I used to always feel so safe in his house. I only went back home when she said I could carry on seeing him, but she threw all the party invitations from his parents straight in the bin in future. She hated the whole family after that – because they were louche. His parents were always having parties.'

James was tugging at the ends of my pussy bow. He realised that it was stitched in place. He unzipped the blouse at the back. My hair got caught in the zip. I lifted my hair up and he told me that the nape of my neck was exquisite. I felt like I would cry – the way he was touching me was so gentle.

‘Get off,' I said.

He paused. ‘All right.' He paced the room. The carpet was salmon-pink. ‘I know you're young,' he said. ‘I mean, I know I'm old.'

‘You're not that old.'

He had unzipped his trousers. I could see a swarm of Bart Simpson faces on his boxer shorts.

He knelt down before me and clutched my hands. ‘You've talked about your lost love,' he said. ‘Now let me talk about mine.'

I yawned. ‘All right.'

‘When Margaret died, I thought I could never love again. I thought I would never see another woman's face who I would know, just know. That familiarity is.' He closed his eyes. ‘What I miss the most.' His eyelashes were grey. ‘I know you were only joking when you said you loved me before, because you can't love me, because we only just met.' He released my hands. ‘Why would you love an old man like me?' He stood up and fiddled with the iPod on the wall. He turned the TV off.

The song began: ‘I'll Be Your Mirror'.

‘Turn it off,' I said. ‘Please.'

We lay next to each other on the bed for a long time.

‘It's a coincidence that you like pussies,' I said, eventually. I had my back to him. ‘Because I once rescued some pussies from a refuge.'

‘Where are they now?'

‘Oh. I don't know. I had to take them back to the refuge.'

An hour passed.

James heaved himself on top of me. He whispered in my ear: ‘I was always faithful to Margaret, right to the end. I cared for her for eight years. But she always said to me:
After I've gone, James, please feel free to impart jouissance to whomsoever you do wish. Otherwise it is a crime against women
.'

‘A crime?'

‘Yes. And let me tell you, there was crime
in
her jouissance too. The way she howled when she came. It reminded me of an animal caught in a trap.' He rolled off me. ‘It was the same sound that she made in the hospital bed during her last moments on earth. She howled like she was coming. She howled because she wanted more of life.'

His tongue slid into my mouth; I pulled away. He sucked on my nipple like an energetic little baby and I let him for as long as I could. Then I sat up and lit a cigarette. Out of the window, I watched the traffic circling around something in the distance.

‘This is a non-smoking room,' he said.

I put my cigarette out on the lid of the truffle box. ‘Would you say that Margaret was your muse, James?'

‘Perhaps. I never thought of it before.'

‘Because there was this one time that Sebastian and I were sitting on a bench outside Finsbury Park station and he was like:
I never believed in the concept of the muse until I met you
. We were about eighteen. I had no idea what a muse was. He said a muse was a mythic woman who inspired men to make great literature. The men extracted her feminine essence. She couldn't create anything herself. Sebastian said he was going to extract my essence. He sounded really mean when he said that. I got up and I was like – I remember that he was smoking a Marlboro Menthol –
I'm not your fucking muse.
Then I ran off. He caught up with me. He said that being a muse could be really sexy like
Betty Blue
. We had watched that film recently. I said:
But the woman goes crazy. She gouges out her own eye
. And he said:
But the man writes a novel about it, so it's worth it
. And I was like:
It's worth her losing an eye?
'

James stuck his finger inside of me.

‘Yeah,' I went on. ‘So like a couple of months later, our teacher entered us both for this writing competition. We both got shortlisted. We had to go to the Royal Festival Hall. It was really boring. The man who was a poet or something was going on and on and then he announced the winner of the prose category. Sebastian won it for “The Reluctant Muse”. He went up to the stage like a fighting cock and read a bit of it – something like:
“I'm not your fucking muse,” she shouted into the biting North London wind
.' I laughed. ‘I was shaking because I was so nervous but it turned out I won the poetry category. So it was fine. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to look at him. My poem was called “I'm Not Your Fucking Muse”, and there was a line in it which said:
I'll fuck you up
.'

‘That's charming,' said James.

‘On the way home, the teacher was going on about how Sebastian and I were going to be like Ted and Sylvia.
But Ted cheated on her
, I said.
And Sylvia killed herself
. The teacher said:
Well, you can be like Ted and Sylvia without the cheating and killing yourself parts
, and Sebastian was like:
Don't worry, miss. Ann-Marie and I will be together forever
.' I stopped.

There was a long silence.

Finally James said: ‘Who's Ann-Marie? I thought your name was Camille?'

‘Oh – yeah. That was before I changed my name. Camille is my stage name. But I changed it by deed poll, so it's real.'

‘So you're an aspiring actress?'

‘Yeah.'

James held my breasts from behind and murmured: ‘What really turns you on?'

I paused. ‘Offal.'

‘Offal?'

‘Yeah. Tripe in cream and onions and … hearts. Big, bouncy hearts that crunch like an apple when you bite into them and stuff kind of spews out. And kidneys, smelling of piss.'

‘Piss?'

‘Yeah,' I said with passion. ‘
Piss
.' I jumped off the bed. ‘Play, boy!'

James looked startled.

‘Play!' My voice was imperious. ‘Why don't you play?' I went back to my normal voice. ‘That's what Miss Havisham says to Pip in
Great Expectations
.'

‘Have you done a lot of am-dram?'

‘Yes. And professional stuff. RSC stuff. I played Miss Havisham – at Cambridge.'

‘I can just imagine you in rotting white lace,' he said, lurching forwards and grabbing me with both hands. His face looked full of hate for a moment. Then he pushed me backwards on the bed and I couldn't see his face any more, but I could feel his mouth latch onto my Venus fly-trap and eat it out like a little boy who's terrified his plate will be snatched away at any moment. He ate and ate and ate. My heart was banging. I tried to push his head away, but his scalp was too well-oiled and my hands kept slipping off. He was good at it. I began to moan. I tried to sit up, but he pushed me back down. I had a terrible feeling of losing, as though he were taking the most precious thing I owned.

And then I came.

I lay there, limp and blank.

It seemed to blot out something there in the darkness. It seemed to blot out the darkness itself.

James's face appeared, wet and triumphant.

I said thank you like a good little girl leaving a friend's birthday party, dressed, and ran down leather corridors until I was alone again in the blue light of dawn. I staggered to the nearest rubbish bin and was violently sick.

Six

The force of love was acting on me as I made my way back, groping blindly and ecstatically to a place that I could call home.

It would have to do.

I walked all the way from the ASH Hotel to Russell Square. Then I got a bus to Chalk Farm. The pub where Vic and I had fallen in love stood empty and dark in the dawn. The last hedonists of that Saturday night were slouched around Camden Lock, staring at their own shattered reflections in the water. Men and women wearing rainbow-coloured wool were splashing Red Stripe onto the tongues of their panting dogs. The Wetherspoon's was closed; it was too early to get a breakfast meal deal. The bongs and Che Guevara berets and sets of rubber underwear looked terrifyingly sticky, as though nothing had ever been wiped down anywhere in the world.

Finally, I found Vic's terraced house. It was dark inside.

I picked up a stone from a nearby water feature and threw it at a first floor window. It rebounded.

There was silence.

I called Vic's phone; he didn't pick up. I called a further seven times.

Then I texted:
I'm outside
.

A light came on.

Vic opened the door, thumbing his eyes further into his face. He was wearing a pair of crisp khaki pyjamas. ‘What are you doing here, Ann-Marie?'

‘You remembered my name,' I swooned.

‘Yes.'

‘Can I come in?'

‘No.'

I barged in anyway, and shut the door behind me. ‘Why didn't you reply to any of my emails, Vic?'

‘You're a bunny-boiler, that's why.'

‘Those were fucking messages in a bottle, Vic,' I said. ‘Do you know what a message in a bottle is? It's sent in
faith
, Vic,
faith
. Do you know what
faith
is?'

‘Quiet,' he said. ‘You'll wake the operators.'

Light fell through the front door and illuminated his ghastly feet. I got down on my knees and tried to kiss them.

‘Get off.' He kicked my cheek by accident.

I gripped my cheek and stood up. I made my eyes look stricken. Then I slid down the wall until I was squatting on the floor.

‘Hey.' Vic knelt down in front of me. ‘Sorry.' He tried to move my hand away, but I wouldn't let him.

‘So you're a woman-beater as well as a war criminal?' I said. ‘Goes with the territory does it, using women as a weapon of war?'

He stood up again.

I pulled down his khaki pyjama bottoms. He tried to pull them back up but I was already sucking his flaccid penis. He pushed my head back but I made my mouth into a black hole of suction.

‘Stop it,' Vic was saying. ‘Stop it.' His penis rose, in spite of himself.

I sucked more vigorously.

Vic pulled my hair hard until I couldn't take the pain any more; I let his penis go. He came, volcanically, all over my face. His semen felt like warm rain.

When I opened my eyes, he was staring down at me in disgust.

‘Because I love you,' I said.

He released my hair and disappeared down the hall into the kitchen.

I followed him.

Three tampons were laid out on the draining board.

‘Whose are those?' I demanded.

Vic threw me a wad of kitchen towel, but I didn't wipe my face. ‘The operators,' he said. ‘I'm going back to bed now. It's the middle of the night.'

‘No, Vic, no.' I pointed to the sky beyond their sorry substitute for a conservatory. It was split with hot yellow light. ‘It's early. It's now, Vic! Now!!!'

I tried to corner him beside the fridge, but he slipped around me. I picked up one of the tampons and demanded: ‘What kind of woman leaves their private business right here for all the world to see?'

‘It's for the guinea fowl.' Vic was washing his hands with the same government-certified antiseptic gel that we use in the restaurant.

‘Is that your pet name for her?'

Now I dropped the tampon and drew a knife out of the rack; it was serrated.

‘Hey,' said Vic, moving round the other side of the breakfast bar. ‘That's dangerous.'

‘Where is this
guinea fowl
?' I said in a baby voice. ‘Sorry it's the time of the month so you won't be able to fuck her like you want to. Or maybe you're not squeamish at all?'

Vic had his hands flat on the counter. ‘Please Ann-Marie. Put that down.'

I swiped it through the air.

He said very slowly: ‘The guinea fowl is not a woman. It is for the food blog. Jan read somewhere that food photographers used to put tampons in a bowl of water and then microwave them. They tuck the tampons in the bird's cavity. It means they keep on steaming. It looks good.'

‘And who the fuck is Jan?' I said.

‘The operator who you met. She's the creative director of the blog.'

‘Sure.'

The rising sun behind him made him look worse and worse, illuminating every flaw on his face.

Vic straightened up. ‘It's a fact. They can't do it on commercial ad campaigns now but the internet doesn't have to comply with the Trade Descriptions Act. They can do whatever the fuck they like.'

I pulled open the fridge. There was a hump, wrapped in tinfoil. I tore at it. Meat. I ripped off a leg.

‘Stop!' Vic screamed. ‘Stop it, please!' He got the broom and jabbed the guinea fowl out of my hands. He hauled me out the front door, and slammed it.

I heard the bolts slide.

I was alone in the street again.

I leaned on the bell with all my weight.

Vic wouldn't open the door without the chain on it. He threatened to call the police. I told him that I was dirty and begged for more kitchen roll. He tried to slide it through the crack, but I said no I was absolutely filthy and needed soap and water and a proper rinse down.

He opened the door.

I forced him against the wall so that his head banged against a photo of Big Ben. I pinned him in place with my pelvis. I grinded him as mechanically as I could. His eyes rolled up in his head. I pushed my tongue into his mouth. He was saying: ‘No, no, no.'

I ripped off my pussy bow and pencil skirt and pushed him inside of me. I hammered.

He screamed.

‘Fuck you,' I was saying. ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.'

He tried to push me off but I wouldn't get off.

Finally he threw me across the hall and crawled frantically towards my handbag. He was tossing my shit all over the place: Golden Virginia and
Heidegger: An Intro
and balls of hair from my hairbrush. He found the condoms.

‘Don't think I don't know what your game is,' he sneered.

‘Vic,' I said. ‘I want to do it bareback.'

He was tearing at the packet with his teeth.

‘I want there to be nothing.' I knelt beside him. ‘I want there to be nothing between us at all, no layer of protection at all, separating you from me.'

‘Yeah,' said Vic. ‘Then you'll be coming back round here next time at the crack of dawn and telling me that it's mine.'

‘You can withdraw.' I took the condom out of his hands.

‘I don't want to withdraw. What about pre-cum?'

‘That's a myth,' I said.

‘What about disease?'

‘I want your disease, Vic.' I chucked the condom down the hall. ‘I want you to infect me like you said, with everything that you are and everything that you will be. You'll be a great man one day, I know it.'

‘I don't have many more days,' said Vic. ‘I'm approaching forty.'

‘Forty is the beginning of life,' I said. ‘That's when you really start to know yourself.'

Vic looked doubtful.

His penis was dead.

‘We'll get it back, Vic, I swear,' I said. ‘We'll get it back together.' I started doing an erotic dance on the stairs, wrapping one leg around the bannister and gyrating against it.

Vic ran down the hall and rolled the condom on his penis before I could stop him. It looked like a transparent blue holiday banana boat. He turned me around on the stairs and pushed himself into me. My fingers kept sliding around the carpet.

Jan the operator opened one of the white doors on the first floor landing. She paused on her way to the toilet, and contemplated us.

Vic came, squawking something about a man called Jeremy who didn't deserve to lose his sight.

Amy Winehouse had been reduced to her formal elements on the wall behind the bus stop at the lock. Her graffitied spirit urged me to destroy myself with drink and drugs and heartbreak.
Go on
, she snarled.
Death by love is honourable for a woman. Everyone needs a chance to prove themselves
.

A bus arrived and I got on without checking where it was going.

I waited for a sign.

It came:
Angel
.

I had the great idea of breaking into Sebastian's parents' house and positioning myself at the head of their wonderful old oak kitchen table, the site of so many of our lively debates. I wanted to rest my head on the cool oak surface for a while, perhaps tracing my fingers over the familiar cracks. I would leave before his family woke up to discover that I'd completely lost my fucking mind.

I walked along Upper Street until I got to Highbury & Islington tube. Then I crossed the road. There was the familiar row of Georgian houses.

I would need a brick to smash a window.

But no.

The front door was open. Sebastian's parents were having a party.

Baby boomers were filing into black cabs, talking about how naughty it was to be out after the sun had risen. The street was shining with light. I put my sunglasses on.

A middle-aged woman in a black velvet cape accosted me in the hallway. Wooden parrots swung from her ears. ‘You've missed all the celebrations!' she said. ‘You've missed an unforgettable time that is absolutely not to be missed!'

I took my sunglasses off. ‘What is everyone celebrating?'

‘Winter!' She hugged herself and pretended to shiver with the cold, then disappeared into the living room.

I followed her.

Couples were swaying to the opening chords of Roberta Flack's heinous swansong, ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face'. It was the song that had propelled my parents to fall in love under a glitter ball on a cruise ship in 1984; it was the song that the drunk girls had been singing on Chalk Farm Road when Vic and I got the taxi back to his; it was the song that recurred within me, a dead ideal. I looked for the source of the doom and there she was: my mother. She was standing guard over the iTunes.

The parrot woman attempted to get a look at the screen, but my mother blocked her.

‘This is my favourite,' my mother was saying.

‘But haven't we already heard it?' said the woman.

‘There's nothing like hearing things again,' said my mother.

Now Sebastian's parents appeared. His mother was at least two foot taller than his father. They'd always reminded me of a Robert Crumb cartoon, the Amazonian woman bearing the man on her back.

His father held up his hands. ‘Don't worry,' he told me. ‘They've gone.'

‘They've got a lot of packing to do,' said his mother. ‘Sebastian will leave everything to the last minute. Luckily Allegra is a planner.'

‘Wait,' I said. ‘Is this party
still
their leaving party? When are they
actually
leaving?'

‘No,' said his mother. ‘This isn't their leaving party. They had that at a Mexican-themed bar the night before last called – I can't remember what it was called. This is a completely different party. No one's leaving here!'

‘This is just a winter soirée,' said his father.

‘How come you are friends with my mum now?' I said. ‘I didn't think you were friends.'

‘Oh,' said my mother. She had the laptop under her arm. ‘Ann-Marie, I had no idea at all that you were invited, otherwise I could have given you a lift from home.' She was jauntier than I'd ever seen her.

‘I came from somewhere else,' I said. ‘It wouldn't have worked.'