“I am going to buy you a present every time you get your period,” he also said to me.
“That’s quite a commitment.”
“So be it.”
Before the photos were released I used to sneak down to his darkroom in the cellar, flick on the strip light, and ogle myself. I was overjoyed they were going out into the world. That anticipation was mine and mine alone. I knew how well they’d do. I felt my own proximity to heat, to warmth, to … almost-love. I couldn’t wait. Could not wait. How did they make me feel? Adored. Seen. Validated. I wanted all those girls I went to school with to see. I felt as though I had that in my eyes as I stared out, lethal. Bow down, bitches.…
Kelly said: “Do you not feel a bit exposed?”
I said: “Are you making a photography joke?”
“No.”
“He’s an artist,” I said defensively. “It’s his job to expose things.”
A fudge! Similar: “Would you love him if he wasn’t an artist?”
Oh, but (I took my time with this one, pre-prepped): “Art wouldn’t be Art if he wasn’t an artist.”
He loved me, and I loved him. We did. We assuaged each other’s fears for as long as we could. But once the pictures were out, and people talked over me when he tried to introduce me, I saw myself for what I was: the silent partner. It was a legacy, but not my legacy. Half of me reveled in the glory of being seen; the other half felt undermined. But Art still saw me. Still saw right through. Didn’t he?
Like when he found me in the kitchen that Halloween—our third Halloween party in a row. We’d invited so many people—it must have been close to a hundred in the end. Pumpkin lights and cobwebs were strung along the banisters. The lounge was full of hags and zombies. I was in the kitchen, tipping pineapple juice into a pan of hot rum punch. A tower of vintage teacups teetered by the hob.
Art came up behind me silently and put his arms around me. “You okay?”
“Yeah!”
He’d moved in by then. I was still adjusting. It takes time—the rearrangement of your innermost parts, making space, accommodating. I rearranged myself, and my house, for him.
He said: “Stop stirring a sec.”
I stopped stirring (outside. I was still stirring inside).
“You know you’ve been in here since everyone arrived.”
“I’m busy making things.”
He turned me around. “Are you? Or are you hiding?”
I laughed. “Hiding! Why would I be hiding, in my own house, from my own friends? Hahahah!”
“Why are you making four hot cocktails?”
“Because it’s a party!”
“Are those … canapés?”
“Yes.”
“You look insane.”
I felt insane.
He whispered: “I don’t really want all these people here either. I like a lot of them, but I’d much rather we were relaxing in front of the TV.”
“It’s a party! Parties are relaxing! I love parties.”
“Do you? Or did you just want a houseful, and then you created a chaos to remove yourself from the situation?”
Fucking hell. That enquiry seared me to the bone. Here he was, slicing through my carefully curated kindness. I wondered how many other times he’d seen through my little charades: when I crossed a room to talk to someone who was on their own, knowing he was watching. I wanted all those people there because I wanted to be liked. And I liked a lot of them, really I did. But did I actually want to talk to them, all at once? Did I actually think I could talk to them all? Or did I fumble introductions, panic when more than one person tried to speak to me at once, make excuses to go to the toilet too many times, plan extravagant cocktails that would keep me in the kitchen until I was sufficiently liquored to blunder through some two-inch small talk with the equally liquored? All those exhibitions I smiled through. All those parties I hosted. All those dinners I presented. All that I was, I was not. I was a lie. The antisocial party girl.
He smiled—the archaeologist moving from hammer to brush. He said: “You know no one gives a shit? Everyone’s happy with wine. Calm down.”
“Are you telling me to calm down? As a man, to a woman?”
“No, just—yes. Calm down. Calm the whole fuck down, is that better?”
“Nope.”
He tried some cocktail and winced. “You know when you asked me about my worries? You know how you still ask me about my worries?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this is me, doing that. Checking in. Taking your temperature.”
I thought of the thermometer by the bed. I said, “Okay. Thank you.”
“Now, what is this?”
“Hot rum punch. My mother’s recipe.”
“How is Carmen?”
“Oh, she’s good. It’s Halloween. Busiest time of the year.”
SOMEONE SAYS
“Excuse me, can I sit down, please?”
I look up from Suzy’s Good morning from me and my oat cortado! to see a woman standing, holding the rail. She looks troubled. Faint, almost. Everyone else around me looks up from their phones too. A voice! A human voice in the vacuum! What can this mean? The end times?
The woman is directing her voice to a woman sitting in a priority seat. Faint Woman is wearing a BABY ON BOARD badge. (What was it that bastard said to me, the time I wore one? Did you lose your baby? Because he couldn’t see my bump, presumably. I felt too sick and embarrassed to question him further, on a packed train. Prescient, though. Prescient fucker.)
To my surprise—to everyone’s surprise—Priority Woman says no.
“Sorry?” Faint Woman says.
I look down, hard, at my blind phone.
“I’m tired,” says Priority Woman. “I’ve had a bad night and I’ve got a busy day. Why are my needs not as great just because I’m not pregnant? Pregnancy is not a moral agent; it is a physical state. By giving you my seat I am perpetuating the idea that pregnant women are more valuable—and this does none of us any good.”
I look up. Faint Woman looks flummoxed. And tired, really tired. I look down again.
I want to speak up. I want to be that person who speaks up and punctures Priority Woman’s bubble of harmlessness for the sake of what is right. No—actually, I want this situation to end, right now. Why am I in this situation? It’s not fair. I don’t deserve it. Why am I under pressure like this?
I might tweet about how outrageous this is. I could do a phenomenally wrathful tweet about this, believe me.
I remain quiet.
“This is for the good of all of us,” Priority Woman says, “me sitting here and you not. Think of it as taking one for the team.”
I look up. Faint Woman is staring at me. The train moves off and she steadies herself.
JENNY, GET UP. A voice, from somewhere inside me. A deep, old, serious one. The voice of someone I don’t even know. GET UP RIGHT NOW.
I stand up and offer Faint Woman my seat. She accepts with a pointed “Thank you,” sits down, and immediately looks out of the window. I walk away, down the Tube.
Priority Woman is furious. She stands up and stomps after me, accosting me by the next set of doors.
“What was that about? I was making a point for womankind. It’s not progress, politeness, you know.”
I don’t know why or how, but I say: “The pregnancy was a red herring. I’m afraid it’s about kindness. If someone asks for your seat, then you give it to them, because they probably need it.”
“How do you even know she’s telling the truth?”
I look at Faint Woman. “She really is.”
“Prove it.”
People—everyone—are looking at us. We are the best entertainment available right now. I don’t care.
“What, you want me to go and buy her a pregnancy test and make her piss on it?”
“If you have to.”
“Fuck whether she’s telling the truth. The truth has nothing to do with what’s right.”
“You
’re a fucking idiot.”
She’s seething, Priority Woman. She’s seething at me. And I bow my head. I cower a bit, waiting for the next blow, but she just seethes, like a malevolent spirit.
I look out, at the spark-lit, scraggy walls of the tunnel. I pray to the spirits of trains and journey destinations that this woman gets off first, or I get off first, and we don’t have to walk with each other to the barrier. She gets off at the next stop. I thank the spirits.
I get off at King’s Cross. There’s a message from Kelly.
Hey. Not sure if your phone’s working but I see you’ve been on WhatsApp—can you give me a bell when you get the chance? Know you’re busy
I suppose I should text her, although why hasn’t she replied to my cry for help? I go to the toilets and sit down and breathe, expecting to cry, but I don’t cry. I wait for the notes of myself to hit my nostrils, to reassure me I’m alive in some small, low, semifragrant way. When I’m done, I wipe and check the tissue.
A REALLY BAD SIGN
Behold the new creative elite of Soho! That’s what I think every time I walk into Café Monocle. It’s bristling with pending influence. Café Monocle takes up the entire top floor of WerkHaus. In the very center, there’s a pool surrounded by striped lounges. I have a recurring nightmare where I end up in here by mistake with my mother and she skinny-dips.
I head for Gemma and Mia, who are by the main bar as always, working their way through a pile of Negronis. I tried to drink Negronis for a while to be in their Negroni gang, but I had to revert to Aperol Spritz. I just can’t do bitterness without fizz, and if that makes me primordial, so be it. I’m not even that fussed for drinking much anymore. I think, what’s the point? It will only turn warm in my mouth and then break down to acetone and other chemicals in my system within six or seven hours, which will only exacerbate my anxiety around 3 a.m. I’m a real gas.
A drone lands on the bar, almost toppling my drink. It looks like a patent white clutch bag.
“Tell me that doesn’t give you a wide-on?” shouts Mia. “Accessory of the season. The paps could make a killing with it. Up a skirt faster than a presidential hand.”
“Ugh.”
“Aperol Spritz?” says Mia. “In October? Are you trying to shift some kind of paradigm?”
“Nice hair!” says Gemma.
I touch my hair. I wanted to look like a youth. A boy, even. I had to go and get it put right by a professional. I shuddered as the hairdresser gave me a head massage, cursing myself for wearing an unpadded bra, hoping she wouldn’t notice that my nipples had gone erect. It was the most aroused I’d felt in months, and I hated it.
“Very short,” says Mia. “We’ll need to get more byline pictures, but maybe we should wait until you stabilize. You keep changing … shape.”
I take comfort from this, in that she’s not going to fire me if she’s suggesting fresh byline photos. It’s like when she asked for a breakfast meeting and I turned up nervous and then she ordered eggs and I relaxed because there’s no way you fire someone over eggs. You do it over coffee. Or yogurt, at a push.
Vivienne is drinking champagne. Vivienne only drinks champagne.
“Good evening, all,” I say, and find myself putting on a hint of a Yorkshire accent. Sometimes I put on my friends’ accents as a way of acquiring their special strengths in certain situations, like a superhero choosing from a set of skills.
“Hardly,” Vivienne replies. “There’s so many other things I’d rather be doing.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Fecal vomiting.”
“What’s that?”
“Apparently a really bad sign.”
I turn and try to make conversation with Gemma but it’s too loud and effortful. I crash around. A few years ago, at a party in Dalston, Kelly and I met a man with a taximeter hung round his neck. He had adapted it to run off time, not distance. He kept the meter running while he was talking so that everyone could see how much his time was worth. Kelly had a conversation with him (more of a row, really) worth £26.42. He was a web designer. We thought he was a twat. Now, here, I can see where he was coming from. I should have a sign across my forehead that reads: SORRY, NOT IN SERVICE.
“What’s your star sign?” Gemma says.
Ah! Star signs. I can do this. If I concentrate. Let me totally get into my now. Although the other day someone asked me which Hogwarts house I was and I said, “Blacksticks,” before I realized that’s a type of cheese.
“I bet you’re something watery, aren’t you … like Pisces,” says Gemma.
“Scorpio.”
“Apparently, Scorpios make the best journalists.”
“Do they?”
“Yes. They’re excellent at research.”
“I only really write about my life.”
“But that takes the most research. In your mind. I really loved your piece about cohabiting with women. Ignore the haters, that’s all I can say. I thought it was great.”
“What haters?”
“The comments.”
I swallow. “Below-the-line is my cardio,” I say weakly.
I look around the bar. On the chalkboard menu is a dish that makes me sad whenever I see it: Squid cooked in its own ink. It strikes me as callous to serve up an animal in its own defense mechanism. I take a picture and post it, with the caption:
Talk about kicking a cephalopod when it’s down #THESQUIDSARENTALLRIGHT
I’ve barely posted it when Mia motions me toward her. “Where is he?” she says. “Art?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Does it matter all that much?”
“Yes, it does, actually,” Mia says. “I want to offer him a job, if he isn’t too busy.”
“A job?”
“We need another house photographer.”
“I thought it was company policy to only employ women.”
“We also need to think about our profile. Feminism will understand. Besides, we’d be fools not to capitalize on our unique access. And if there’s one thing feminism hates more than the patriarchy, it’s fools.”
She looks at me. I drink some more of my drink and take a breath.
“Art might not make it,” I say, “because even though we do still hang out together a lot of evenings, we are not super-officially together-together anymore if you know what I mean.”
Mia looks at me. “Sorry, what?”
“We are together in every way apart from the technical way.”
“Technical way?”
“It’s an intense modern friendship.”
“What?”
“We broke up.”
“Oh dear God! Why?”
“It was very amicable. Zero animosity. No one did anything bad to anyone. That’s why we’re still able to be close.”
Mia stares at me. She doesn’t believe me, that much is evident.
She says, “You must be devastated.”
“No, really, I’m not.”
“It was seven years!”
“But I look on it as the perfect length, really. Relationships should not be judged by their continuation but by their quality. Also, why do things have to last forever in order to be deemed a ‘success’? Things can come to an end and not have failed. My relationship with Art was a complete success. But it had a sell-by date. And now it’s over.”
“Good Lord! You’re a gibbering mess!”
Someone comes over to talk to Mia and I stand there, useless, tensely curled, like a prawn, as my mother would say. I get out my phone and check my likes. One hundred and counting. I should get back to doing the animal ones more often. I could borrow a cat for a day.
Mia is talking about me to the person she is with. “Devastated,” she is saying. “Dev-a-stated.”
And then I do my regular thing: I go through Suzy Brambles’s follows to check she is still following me. It’s just a habit, really. A formality. It’s the extra dopamine kick I need tonight, seeing myself there, amidst the—
Wait.
No.
I am not where I usually am.
My heart plummets.
My thumb panics.
I go out of the app and go in again.
I am still not there.
I turn my phone off.
Turn it on again.
I go through her follow list twice—no mean feat, there are more than six hundred people on there. But, it would seem, I am no longer one of them.
I bend my knees and do some heavy breathing.
MIA SAYS
“It’s clear you’re heartbroken, Jenny.”
She pulls me upright and takes my drink.
“I’m really not that bothered about Art.” My voice is a pipsqueak.
“You’ve gone ashen!”
“It’s all the Aperol.”
“You’ve only had two. You seemed like the perfect couple. Those first photos he took of you! The ones that blew up. They captured AN AGE. They characterized an entire summer of my life.”
“What we always had was a solid friendship, and that is what we still have,” I say measuredly. “So it’s not really a breakup, more a … change of definition in terms of our relationship. Who needs to label things in this day and age anyway? It’s much more progressive to keep things loose. We’re just as close, we just don’t have sex. But we weren’t having that much sex anyway. So in terms of the day-to-day, nothing has really changed.”
Mia puts her arm around me. “I think you’ll get back together,” she says. She looks reassured. “It’s just a blip.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Would you excuse me, Mia? I have to go now.”
“Of course.” She pulls off her arm. I exhale and move away.
“See you Wednesday.”
“Take the time you need.”
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