Thanks?
Let me know when you are ready to talk properly, with me xx
I’ll try x
Hope work is going okay? And I saw your mum is staying, hope that’s going okay?
Of course
Now THAT I’d like to read about xx
Thanks for the encouragement
X x x x
DRAFTS
Art,
DO NOT LINE-OF-KISSES ME. That does not constitute a sign-off. Oh thank you for bestowing your almighty kisses on me – shame you could not be arsed to compose ACTUAL WORDS, you illiterate blowhard.
Jx
ON THE BUS
I see a kid trying to use the window as a screen. He is two or three, in a little red mac. I watch him pressing and swiping across the misted-up glass, his finger-trails streaking through the condensation. I watch him become gradually more frustrated and confused as things pass behind the window, out of his control. His mother sits staring at her phone, unaware of his predicament. Eventually the kid gives up, and sits staring sadly out of the window as though it is just a window.
I feel his pain.
TABS
I open the front door to see a pile of bills on the mat, stretching up the hall. There are bills on the radiator shelf. How have I not noticed? Credit cards and god knows what. I can’t bear to open them.
Nor can I bear to tell my mother I have been fired.
I find my mother asleep in the lounge, the TV on – some awful serial-killer drama blaring towards its denouement. But nobody could have predicted what she’d find in the garbage … A half-empty gin bottle is on the floor, where it has fallen from her hand. A glass is balanced on the arm of the chair. There are melba toast crumbs on a plate on her lap. The room otherwise is neat and tidy – it’s like when they find incidents of spontaneous human combustion and there’s a radius of charred destruction and, beyond that, disquieting normality. I found her once on the bathroom floor, unconscious, face down, her fingers flexed, her nails in the grouting, like she’d been trying to claw her way out.
Her laptop is there on the floor. I open it and see there are tabs open – tabs on all my social media. My Twitter, my Instagram, my columns, my practically defunct website.
I turn off the TV. She wakes up.
‘Jenny! Sorry, I must have drifted off.’
I nod.
She collects her laptop from the floor. ‘I’ve started to pack,’ she says. ‘I’ll be out by nine a.m. tomorrow.’
I nod again.
‘Have you had a bad day, darling?’
‘I really have nothing to measure that against any more.’
‘Do you want a melba toast?’
I shake my head. ‘I think I’m going to go out and meet my friend Nicolette for a few drinks tonight.’
She replies almost too quickly: ‘Of course! You enjoy yourself! Here,’ she fumbles around on the floor for her bag, her purse, and takes out a fifty-pound note – a fifty-pound note! Saints alive – and hands it to me. ‘Get you and your friend a bottle of something nice on me.’
I sniff and take the money. ‘Thank you.’ Then a voice pops out before I can stop it. ‘Will you be here when I get back?’
‘Of course I’ll be here! I’m not going until the morning, remember.’
I nod. I stand there, coddled in this knowledge.
‘I took your advice, by the way. I went to see a therapist.’
I look at her. ‘No way.’
‘Way.’
‘You said you didn’t believe in therapy. You said you were too old. You said it made people worse.’
‘All those things may well be true, but I took your advice.’
‘And?’
‘It was as I suspected. My mother messed me up but I also owe all my success to her. A poisoned chalice is still a chalice, Jenny.’
‘I’ll pass on the poisoned chalice, thanks.’
‘Shame you don’t get a choice.’
‘Watch me.’
‘She asked me about my worst memory.’
‘Full on. No foreplay.’
‘I started telling her about the death of my mother, and how I missed it by five minutes.’ I look down. ‘And then I realised that wasn’t it at all. It was finding your suicide note.’
‘You can stay a little longer, if you like. If that would be useful to you, I mean.’
‘Would it be useful to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll stay!’
My chest floods with warmth. She hugs me from where she’s sitting and her head is against my stomach. I think about how when she was a foetus in my grandmother’s womb she already had eggs inside her, and one of those eggs would become me. What would become three of us was there, in one body, all at once – like those Droste-effect pictures that show a girl reading a book with a picture on the book of a girl reading a book with a picture on the book of a girl reading a book with a picture on the book of a girl …
Mum,
I am sorry to do this at Christmastime, and I know the sight of my body in the bath is going to be a terrible thing to come home from the Bahamas to, I just thought it best to get it out of the way while you were away. I also thought New Year (New Millennium!), New Start – and what better time to have a complete life overhaul than now? Once the funeral’s out of the way, you and Roger can crack on with your chic new life together. I just hope his wife understands. Once you tell her your daughter committed suicide she’s bound to let you off the hook.
As for my reasons, let’s just say I have come to feel desultory about my impending existence, and it’s an attitude that is rather incompatible with life. You know what I can’t tolerate? Consciousness. Specifically this consciousness. I’m hoping you’re wrong about everything and I don’t end up stranded in this consciousness for all eternity except with no body, because my body is the one part of me I actually like, apart from my thighs, and the second teeth on either side of my front teeth, and my shapeless feet and lack of discernible eyelashes and brows.
I read an interesting thing the other day about bees. In a honeybee colony, the queen bee rules while her daughters do nothing but work. They forgo the chance to have offspring of their own, despite being physically capable of producing sons. When the queen dies, the workers find an egg of suitable age and feed it royal jelly, resulting in a royal successor, but sometimes they don’t succeed, leaving the colony queenless. It’s a risk. They give it all up for the good of the hive. Imagine that kind of altruism.
I’m afraid I just don’t have it in me.
So, farewell.
Jenny x
GRANMA SAID
‘Oh, it’s you two again, is it?’
‘Hi, Granma,’ I said. The day room was beige and maroon, like her nightgown. She ignored me. ‘Where’s my little dog?’ she said. She meant Nathaniel (the spaniel).
‘Nathaniel’s fine,’ my mother said.
This was a lie. The dog was dead.
Granma turned to me as though I was a pleasant stranger in need of advice. She gestured to my mother: ‘She lies, this one. You’ve got to watch her.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘Ever since she started doing all that stuff. I said to them all, I was the one born with a caul, but you don’t see me flaunting myself to the bereaved.’
‘I don’t—’ my mother began.
I looked around the room. It wasn’t a big room but it was bigger than her bedroom – I hated it when we had to go and see her in there. The garibaldi biscuits and Imperial Leather talcum powder – Imperial Leather: in another universe it was a fetish mag for colonialists – all got me asking how I could ever enjoy an evening again. How could anyone?
‘As for those cards,’ Granma continued, ‘they used to do it when they were little and I never paid much attention. Eleanor brought some home from a boyfriend one day and a whole troupe of them went up to the loft to use them.’
‘That was a Ouija board,’ my mother said, fluffing a cushion for no one.
‘I heard screaming and went up there and there was a girl with a broken leg lying wailing in the corner.’
‘Something broke her leg?’ I said.
‘No,’ my mother said quickly.
‘She already had the broken leg when she went up there,’ said Granma. ‘But her crutches had come alive and started hitting her. So they all said, anyway.’
My mother looked down.
‘What?’ I said. I had never heard this story.
‘Still, she made an okay living out of it in the end. Not that I ever saw much of it.’ Granma turned to me. ‘You were supposed to get rich and look after me,’ she said. ‘When are you going to marry a rich man?’
‘I am a rich man,’ I said, quoting Cher.
‘I was in Coronation Street,’ my mother said.
‘For one episode,’ my Granma said. ‘No good at putting yourself forward, that’s why. Expects it all handed to her on a plate. Expects them to come chasing her.’
‘I need you to sign something, Mum,’ said my mother, and reached into her bag. She pulled out a small stack of stapled papers.
I looked at a woman sitting in a chair opposite. She was holding a baby doll and trying to feed it from a small plastic bottle. The doll didn’t want to drink from the bottle, so the woman started rocking it instead.
I heard Granma say, ‘Forget what you need. There’s something I need to say to you, Carmen. Something I need to ask you.’
I turned around and looked at her, and for a second it was like she was the old Granma there – lucid as you like. Eyes that could split light.
My mother put the papers on the tray table and looked at Granma expectantly. ‘What?’
There was the sudden, unmistakable stench of hot piss. My mother sat back. None of us looked at each other. I put my hand on Granma’s back. Her spine felt like the end of an escalator, vertebrae rippling under rubber. She gripped her stick. ‘I forgot.’
After a minute or so had passed, my mother placed the papers gently on the side table. ‘You need to sign this so that we can sort the money to pay for this place.’
Granma looked at the form. ‘I’ll have the lamb.’
‘No,’ my mother said, ‘it’s not a menu. It’s something for you to sign, about money.’
‘Lamb,’ Granma said, ‘just put lamb. You’re getting on my nerves, now.’
My mother handed her the pen. ‘You need to sign it, Mum. Here.’ She pointed with her finger.
Granma took the pen and diligently wrote the word ‘Lamb’ in the signature box.
‘Oh no, that’s not right!’ My mother snatched up the form. ‘Your name’s not Lamb, is it? I’ll have to get another form.’
Lamb’s eyes were big and frightened behind her glasses.
‘It’s okay,’ said my mother. ‘We’ll sort it.’
There was a tone in my mother’s voice that made me feel sick with hope.
ALL MY CIRCUS, ALL MY MONKEYS
I meet Nicolette at eight in the cheap pub near Goodge Street with the stained-glass windows and stained upholstery to match. I’m wearing a ‘Nostromo’ T-shirt and an amber necklace. It’s an outfit that I think suggests a rich internal life. My hair is done but not too done, and my black denim skirt is short enough to suggest tasteful but empowering nudity.
Nicolette arrives in a bad mood.
‘What news from town, sister?’ I cry.
‘I’ve cracked my screen again,’ she rages.
‘Oh. Here, have some awful wine.’
‘Thanks. Oh, it’s even more awful than usual. I almost want to congratulate them behind the bar.’
‘It’s just so cheap, you can’t argue.’
‘You really can’t. I also think something about it pleases me when the rest of my life is relatively tasteful.’
Nicolette puts her phone on the table. It is indeed very cracked.
‘What happened?’
‘Mood malfunction.’
‘Ah.’
‘So that’s sixty quid even with insurance.’
I sigh. ‘I have my own courtesy-phone debacle to deal with right now. Look. The fact we have to pay for all these devices is in itself outrageous. It’s like a modern version of the window tax.’
‘Oh my god, that’s EXACTLY what it is. Charging me for my windows on the fucking world!’
This is how we have these times together. We drink and we riff in our own little echo chamber. We’ve even started calling it ‘The Prosecco Chamber’. Gross, right? But here we are. I know that Nicolette has had as sheltered a life as me, devoid of any real hardship, which is depressing, although it does make the whole thing easier to work with.
I drink more wine and gag.
‘So, how are you?’ Nicolette says. ‘I keep seeing his stupid photos everywhere.’
‘You don’t have to say that.’
‘No, I mean it. They’re everywhere.’
‘I meant the stupid bit.’
‘Oh.’
‘You’re a pal.’
‘So, how are you?’
‘Pretty awful. I got fired, had a fight with my oldest friend because she objected to me leaving her grown-up child in the street, and, worst of all, Art’s seeing a woman I’m obsessed with online.’
Nicolette makes a sound like a human balloon withering and I am just so elated and relieved that someone finally gets the enormity of this. I put my hand on her arm. ‘Thank you, Nicolette, for making that awful sound.’ She makes it again. I thank her again. ‘So in answer to your question, all I can say with any surety is that I am … continuing.’
‘Well, that’s something,’ says Nicolette. ‘I’m going round in circles. Or maybe it’s a vortex, spiralling slowly inwards to its inevitable own obliteration. On my way here I walked past a place called Highcroft Mews and I had a flash of my future: gated suburban blocks of identical houses, clipped bushes, jet-washed brick. I thought to myself, Someday I’m going to have an affair with someone who lives in a place like this. We’ll share average bottles of wine and only fuck drunk. And the worst thing is, it’ll feel like a break from the old routine.’
‘You’re not even married.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve always known that a dire, depressing affair is my ultimate fate. Much more than the marriage part.’
She goes to the bar. When she gets back I start telling a story about someone who says I’m back in town! at the point of orgasm. As I’m telling the story it dawns on me that it’s actually her story I’m telling back to her. Fuck. This has happened to me before. Sometimes it’s harder to back-pedal than others. I wonder whether I’ve got the sympathetic bias right. I’m telling it from the point of view of taking the piss out of the person who says I’m back in town. It’s so hard to be spontaneous and thoughtful at the same time. This is why you’re generally better off staying in and watching TV or interacting safely on the internet behind a semi-affected persona. The outside world demands too much reality. And I find reality stressful in the extreme. Reality doesn’t give a person enough thinking time. It renders one ill prepared. For a moment, I’m fucked. I pull things round by telling her an embarrassing thing I once said after an orgasm: Mmm, that’s welcome! If in doubt, self-denigrate.
‘I know a story like that,’ Nicolette says. She looks confused. ‘What am I going to do about my phone? It’s the fourth one this year. Did you know 15 per cent of phone users in the UK are operating with a cracked screen?’
‘I believe it.’
‘It’s like they DESIGNED it to be painful, difficult and expensive. A glass phone! Fucking larks.’
We drink through the pain.
Hours later, we are in a private members’ bar. Everyone loves a private members’ bar until they’re in one. I’ve been to the toilet twice to take cocaine and I think everyone in here is highly aware of this fact, particularly the pianist. I also possibly have a nosebleed, or a runny nose, one of the two. I feel genuinely fantastic. We have had a bottle of expensive wine because this is th
e kind of place that sells nothing else – a rash proposition when I am literally sinking into debt. Fuck it! We have thus far put three pictures each on Instagram, and one video of us flossing with a doorman.
‘Let’s promise not to regret these and delete them tomorrow,’ Nicolette says. ‘It’s always such a giveaway when people do that. Let’s OWN the social media fall-out.’
‘Agreed.’
The wine slides down my throat. It is cocaine’s throat now. It is cocaine’s world.
‘What did you fight about with your old friend?’ says Nicolette.
‘Kelly?’
‘I haven’t met Kelly, have I?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘I know who she is, though. I saw a picture of her online – she left a funny comment on a picture of yours so I clicked through.’
‘Hm, yes, she does that.’
‘She looks quite moody in her pictures. I’m generally scared of women with big fringes. They always seem more noble or judgmental, or both. She seems to wear a lot of dungarees and Breton tops.’
‘She does love a Breton top.’
‘What did you fall out about?’
‘It’s too involved to go into at this stage. But I think she might be leaving me.’
‘Leaving you?’
‘And London. The whole shebang.’
‘God, I can’t imagine leaving London. I am going to live in the city forever. I feel as though the capital is the perfect place to continue my studies of love and life. So many hearts, lost and hunting.’
‘What’s going on in your dating life?’
‘Oh, it’s a ride, for sure. You’ll have to get on this! I’m thinking of changing my Tinder profile to men and women.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m sick of the men. I am increasingly sick of men.’
‘Such an extreme response though, for a heterosexual.’
‘I might not be a heterosexual.’
‘Not even a sex tourist; a sexuality tourist.’
‘What’s wrong with tourism? Tourism is how you find out whether you want to emigrate.’
The next time I take stock of my whereabouts, I am in the smoking area of the same bar – a tiny New York-style black iron fire escape with a few ferns waving from the landings. Six or seven of Nicolette’s media friends are with us. I cannot remember a single one of their names, but I am enjoying telling them what I think about everything very much and in that way they are my most treasured audience to date. I also find I have acquired new and abundant knowledge on matters such as globalism, juvenile correctional facilities, and the output of Radio 4. Someone asks me whether I am familiar with the work of Rembrandt. I say: ‘Was he the one who wrote the theme tune to Friends?’ No one laughs. I fear this is because few of them are familiar with the work of Friends.
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