by Emma Forrest
And even if they didn’t live together, what were she and Liev going to do? Go out on dates? Have dinners together, intimate candle-light suppers? Go to the roller rink? Decide whether or not they liked each other enough to ‘go all the way’? She was here, now, a grown-up more childish but less childlike than she was when he knew her. If she let him get to know her, then what? Well, then what? Just because she knew, when it was over, that she did not want him, didn’t mean she didn’t want him to want her as much as he ever had. As much as she had imagined he had.
‘You think that we would stand a chance in the real world?’
‘How do you know I’m talking about the real world? You don’t know where I’ve been at. You don’t know the places I could take you to see if this could work. Reality needn’t come into it. You could keep me inside your head, where I’ve always been, only this time you would be in my head too.’
‘I don’t know what you mean …’
‘You wouldn’t have to know. You would just have to trust me. Do you think you could do that?’
‘Liev, for the longest time you were the only person I could trust. Which makes no sense at all, I know, because you weren’t even there. But whenever I felt someone did me wrong, whenever I felt hard done by, I imagined you telling them off, leaping to my defense. Would I have been right?’
‘Of course you would. You think this was about sex, don’t you? The reason I was trapped behind glass?’
‘I … children are very sexual. There’s nothing more sexual than a twelve-year-old girl.’
‘That wasn’t what I wanted. That’s not what I was afraid of. There’s something in my life that’s a lot bigger than sex. Honestly, I don’t do sex at all.’
She wondered if it was a drug he had given up or a drug he had never been interested in. ‘This isn’t going to be about God again, is it? Because I’ve been hearing a lot about Jesus Christ and his old man lately. If you’re going to talk about Jesus I’m going to have to say to you what I said to Marcelle and to that awful nun …’
‘No, not God.’
‘Oh, fuck. Not heroin? Is that why you were always indoors?’
‘No,’ he laughed, ‘not heroin.’
‘Then what?’
‘Do you trust me?’
‘You and me alone in this room right now? Yes, I trust you.’
‘Good. Because right now is all we have going for us. You and me don’t exist beyond this room. I don’t know how you got into the situation that led you to this hospital bed. But I think I can give you a fresh start so that you never come back.’
‘Oh, you can, can you?’ She cocked an eyebrow at him.
‘Don’t be coy with me. You don’t have to do that. Just be yourself.’
Smarting at his jibe, she turned her face away. ‘I can’t remember how to do that.’
‘That’s why I’m going to help you.’
‘And you don’t want to have sex with me?’
‘No. I guess … if that were an option for me then, yes, of course I would want to make love to you. This penetration you people have such a fixation on, if you wanted me to do that, I would.’
‘What people? Liev, it’s not a new practice.’
Liev shook his head at her vulgarity. Then he unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, laying it on the chair. His body was not messy, as she had expected. It was not as she had expected at all. Broad and sinewy, his chest was so pale that, between patches of fur, she could see the veins beneath the skin. And within those veins she could clearly see the ebb and flow of blood, rich purple-red. He crawled onto her bed. He pulled himself on top of her, and turned her head to the side. The cut on her neck was still there. With a pointed tongue he licked the scratch, following it from beginning to end as she looked to the door for advice, desperate for a doctor or nurse to pass by. He bit down and she was not fearful anymore. The pain was little; his teeth on her neck felt like two tiny rabbit punches.
Then ruby was everywhere. Then ruby was gone. Then ruby was clean. Then Ruby was saved.
‘Mommy,’ she whimpered.
Her childhood friend asked a question, the words coated in blood. ‘Do you think that you can let me go in the morning?’
‘Yes,’ she answered, her voice steady now, ‘I think so.’
stick a fork in me, I’m done
The sun baked through the window and her first thought, on waking, was whether or not she was cooked yet. A doctor was taking blood from her arm in a syringe that caught the light like a spinning top. She watched the silver retract and the red it took with it, terribly suave and persuasive as Ruby pleaded, ‘Don’t go. I need you here with me.’
‘I think something happened in the night,’ said Ruby to the doctor. ‘I think he’s gone.’
‘Who’s gone?’
‘The man who you had watching me.’
‘There was no man, Ruby. I don’t think that Sister Ann would appreciate that insult one little bit. She was watching you again last night. She said she had so enjoyed your conversation about religion the other day, she requested to watch you again. She said you slept sound as a baby. I must say, you are looking so much better than when you came in here. Look at your arms.’
She looked at her arms, as instructed, but there was nothing there to see. Skin, but nothing on the skin. Nothing etched on it or cut from it. The silver syringe had dug its national flag in an expanse of pure white.
flavors
The twins picked me up. Red twin cried and smothered my face with kisses. But Yellow twin just shook her head and muttered, ‘You’re dumb,’ as though I had tipped a rude waitress too much money. ‘Let’s get ice-cream,’ she added and Red twin immediately dried her tears and perked up. ‘YEAH!’ she honked. ‘Pistachio!’
‘YEAH,’ squawked Yellow twin, ‘kids who have just tried to kill themselves should eat a lot of pistachio!’
‘But I want macadamia,’ I pleaded as I pulled my dress over my head.
‘No,’ snapped Yellow, as she buckled my shoe, ‘that’s only for people recovering from accidents with kitchen utensils.’
the start
The day I got out of hospital, the Gay Pride Parade was slithering across the West Village like a bedazzled snake. As I swung through the revolving doors, ‘Some WHERE over the rainbow!’ played from a sound system. I blocked my ears, because I’d just come back from there and it hadn’t been at all as I’d expected.
The magic slippers were a half size too small. The lollipops the little people handed me tasted of oral sex with a pervert. Halfway down the yellow brick road a cop pulled out from nowhere and ticketed me for speeding. I kept running into tiny actresses with huge eyes and bigger voices, hooked on speed, begetting other actresses with huge eyes and bigger voices hooked on speed, like a Golden Age of Hollywood hall of mirrors. And the only wicked witch I ever got to throw water on was myself. Flying monkeys – lovers stalked and spurned – cackled as I melted into a waxy green puddle on the floor. But by then I was too tired to care. I decided it was OK to melt if it meant that I didn’t have to be the villain anymore.
Fingers in my ears, I surveyed the variety of banners being waved from the passing floats: ‘Coalition of Gay Latinos’, ‘Association of Leather Slaves’, ‘Female to Male Transgender Society’. It reminded me of the video store four blocks west of my apartment, where the sci-fi section is not listed in alphabetical order, but contains a zillion sub-sections including ‘Cyber-Punk’, ‘Time Travel’ and ‘Dystopia’. I think the theory is, if you keep dividing and sub-dividing a group, eventually the group is one – you and you alone. Then you have a name, your true name to describe what you are.
I don’t believe, nowadays, that Ruby is such a bad description. There are connotations of blood, but also of oranges, the vanity of lipstick, and the many-faceted translucence of the stone itself. Hold me up to the light in order that you might truly see who I am. In the dark, I’m not really me. This is how it will be. I made myself melt and now I get to reconfigure myself as
I choose: girl born, not from mother or father, not from nature or nurture, not from a lover who treated her badly or a lover who treated her well. Girl born of the girl herself. Once you have made yourself ugly, succeeded in your hare-brained mission beyond your wildest dreams, there is nothing left to do but become beautiful again.
Acknowledgements
Thanks: to Alexandra Pringle for bringing me to Bloomsbury and to Marian McCarthy for editing with such insight and sensitivity; to Felicity Rubinstein, a great agent and dear friend; Terry Richardson, for the beautiful cover photo; to Jeffrey Rosecan, for helping me see the good. Thanks, for their early input, to Jon Ronson, Angela Boatwright, Sarah Bennett and Lisa Forrest. Thanks, also, to the uniquely nurturing staff of the Chateau Marmont hotel, where chunks of this book were written. Last but not least, thanks to Chris Potter, an old fashioned guy.
A Note on the Author
EMMA FORREST is the author of the novels Namedropper, Thin Skin and Cherries in the Snow, the memoir Your Voice in My Head and editor of the non-fiction anthology Damage Control. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a screen writer.
By the Same Author
Namedropper
Cherries in the Snow
Damage Control (editor)
Your Voice in My Head
Also Available by Emma Forrest
Namedropper
Meet Viva Cohen: a teenage schoolgirl bombshell. Her bedroom walls are plastered with posters of silver-screen legends, and underneath her school uniform she wears vintage thigh-high stockings. Her best friends are a drugged-out beauty queen and an ageing rock-star, and she lives in London with her gay uncle, Manny.
Viva spends her days gate-crashing gigs, skiving her exams and trying to live life as glamorously as her number one icon, Elizabeth Taylor. But then she sets out on a pilgrimage: in search of real love, experience and Jack Nicholson. Wicked-tongued, star-fixated, clever and restless, Viva is like no other girl — and this is no ordinary summer…
‘Shred, cool, sure and insightful’
Independent
‘Sparky, bright and savvy, Viva Cohen is the sort of teenager most of us would have burned our A-ha posters to have been friends with … sit back and enjoy Forrest’s eclectic cast’
Daily Mail
‘Precocious, intelligent and original’
Time Out
Cherries in the Snow
In Sadie’s head, she’s a novelist. In real life, she spends her day searching for the ultimate way to say red at Grrl, an ultra hip make-up company. In her sex life, she’s a modern-day Lolita who’s never dated a man under forty. Then Sadie falls in love with Marley, a graffiti artist with a firm commitment to another woman: his eight-year-old daughter, Montana. Sadie isn’t used to competing for a man’s affections and certainly not with a little girl who is uncannily like herself. Real love could just be too grown up for her…
Cherries in the Snow is a novel about womanhood, love, and lipstick. Flippant, sexy, acid and smart, this is Emma Forrest at her most dazzling.
‘This is so much more than a love story. Forrest is a beautiful writer: sharp, pithy, engaging and gut-wrenchingly honest ****’
Metro
‘Captures the neurotic vibe of single life in the city … Winningly honest about jealousy, sex and distinctly ungirlie bodily functions, Forrest puts her hyper-informed interest in slap and pearlescent artifice to good use’
Independent
‘[Cherries in the Snow] has pace, energy and eccentric, valid observation. And it has Emma Forrest’s voice – flippant, irreverent and modern’
Observer
Your Voice in My Head
‘It’s difficult to write a convincing tale of depression that’s also an entertaining romp, but Forrest has done it’
Sunday Times
Emma Forrest was twenty-two when she realised that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity. Lonely, in a cycle of self-harm and damaging relationships, she found herself in the chair of an effortlessly optimistic psychiatrist – a man whose wisdom and humanity would wrench her from the vibrant and dangerous tide of herself after she tried to end her life. A modern day fairy tale, Your Voice in My Head is a dazzling and devastating memoir, clear-eyed and shot through with wit. In her unique voice, Emma Forrest explores depression and mania, but also the beauty of love – and the heartbreak of loss.
‘Emma Forrest is an incredibly gifted writer, who crafted the living daylights out of every sentence in this unforgettable memoir. I can’t remember the last time I ever read such a blistering, transfixing story of obsession, heartbreak and slow, stubborn healing’
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love
www.bloomsbury.com/emmaforrest
First published 2002
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2002 by Emma Forrest
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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eISBN: 978-1-4088-6022-9
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