by Helen Razer
This was the stuff. This was hard fucking stuff. If C’arter’s messages had been the ex’s black tar, then those produced by this John person were my China white.
When manufactured with care, words can kill the pain of depilation and divorce for a bit. These were words handmade for me and, if we don’t count Eleni’s labour on my long untended person, they were the most generous opiate that had been given to me in years.
Public Service Announcement: When seeking attachment via internet after being dumped again and again in the shitter, do try not to go bonkers for the very first person you meet who bothers to use a comma and dislikes your least favourite band.
Of course, perhaps Johns are not so very rare. Perhaps there are plenty of quite clever people on the internet adept at customising jokes about your local weather forecast. But I did not know if this was the case and, even if I did, I would not have found this funny person, who apparently did not look like a Wookie, any less intoxicating. He was the first person since she left to really write for me. He was the first who cared enough to regularly punctuate. Even with an em dash. Which isn’t easy on an iPhone.
‘Are you going to meet him?’ said Eleni.
‘Meet whom? I really have no notion of your meaning, young lady. Also, I think I can feel an unsightly hair remaining on my dolphin.’
Eleni, whose waxing is invariably seek-and-destroy, said that she had left no hair unpunished and reminded me that not only was I fairly crap when it came to concealing my emotions, but that I, being blind to a medical definition, had set my phone font to Very Extra Large. For the hour I had believed myself to inhabit a private potboiler, trading smut about the weather just like Lana Turner and John Garfield before they murder that unwanted husband in the heat, Eleni had been reading from over my dolphin.
‘No, I will never meet him. I would like him to remain only a collection of funny words.’
‘Look,’ said Eleni. ‘He’s not that funny. But, even if he were, the point is, you spend too much time talking and writing words. Probably, this anti-whatever-it-is does, too. Your hoo-hoo is waxed and your nails are done, and if you put some make-up on you won’t look so tired. So go and meet him with your new manicure. There’s a good chance he’ll like the colour. Which is “Lava”, by the way. And beautiful. Not that you even care. It looks like he spends as much time typing in commas and things as you. You’ll be, what’s the word, copacetic. Simpatico. Whatever. And if you are, that’s good for me, because you’ll start coming back to the salon every week. Which will make me richer and you not so crazy with words. Live your life. Live your break-up, Helen. Don’t write it.’
I told Eleni again that I had no intention of meeting anyone for whom I had already developed such an inimical passion. And then I explained I was booked for the night with a slab of Big Slavic Cock.
‘Date anti-cantaloupe, catheter, or whatever he is called,’ said Eleni. ‘Then date the big dick Russian. Date the sleepwear lady. The chicken man. Date everyone. It’s better than drinking or crying. Date them all. I dare you to go on one hundred dates. Now, give me some of your money.’
11
Forty-nine hours and one hundred stupid ideas since she left
Right. The matter of my survival was settled. I would go on one hundred dates. I would do so within the year. That would become the plan. And if it seems a little rash or capricious, well, yes, it was.
If you have not been horribly dumped, you may consider it unwise to base a plan on the self-interest of a beauty therapist who has just attacked your arsehole. If you have been horribly dumped, you may consider it unwise not to do so.
Maddie called as she said she would, and I gave her my one hundred news.
‘Why the hell not?’ she said. ‘You should blog about it.’
As advice to enhance one’s Online Brand, this was very sound—people might even like to read about someone else’s Whacky Dating Mistakes. As a route back to mental health, however, it was terrible. The best, and the most achievable, course of action was to keep things, for the moment, to myself.
There were a number of other reasons to not publish, chief among them that writing for an audience, even of consumers of discount beauty services, so often determined my emotional fate. I became what I wrote, and had never been able to write what I wanted to become.
Further, having been so recently the subject of unwanted surveillance, I needed a period of privacy.
I know there is a view that it is ‘empowering’ to celebrate and share one’s imperfections broadly and perhaps, on occasion, this holds true. I am certain, for example, that the many women who post empowering naked pictures of themselves on Facebook feel thrilled by their moment of control. But I just wanted to stare at my own imperfect image for a while and learn, if not to affirm it, to actually tolerate those parts of it that I could.
Finally, I had already tried to write down an account of my condition for others to read. This was all I had:
This year, I received a bag of expired dicks for Christmas and a colander of cold sick in time for New Year.
Which does not a moving first-person narrative make. My whining was so thin and unforgivable even I knew to throw it in the bin.
The only writing for which I upheld any talent or enthusiasm at all was direct correspondence. This faculty was of no interest to RedHot, who I would meet in a little over two hours. I should have been checking my closet to see if it contained anything that wasn’t elasticised to wear in front of this apparently real man. Instead, I checked on messages from the phantom, John.
There were none. So I answered his latest:
MidLifeISIS: Foot licking? I have not yet been treated to such an invitation. I have, however, been offered the use of many, many penises yet to see their 20th birthday. It’s very disappointing, to be candid, and you are, to date, the only identity for which I would not recommend some sort of urgent psychiatric or after-school care. Anyhow. Should we talk on the telephone or do we exchange messages for some time in the hope a mild limerence develops? Thank you, in any case. You have made me laugh at least once.
Mild limerence. One laugh. Would not recommend a psychiatrist. Way to underplay this hot commodity’s intrinsic value. Actually, I had already visualised our wedding. Which would take place in a factory but would not, due to (a) my queer and Marxist politics and (b) my refusal to meet this man, in reality take place at all. Still. I was suddenly thin and it seemed a great shame not to make this known to many people who would marvel how I could pull off a white dress at my age.
This was limerence. Which could not, by the terms of its particular definition, ever be anything like ‘mild’. I had misused this word as badly as I had misused my clitoris in recent days. Heavens, but I may have been quite close to rubbing the thing clean off.
Anticathexis: Limerence. Well. My rash Google embargo is over. ‘Limerence is romantic infatuation that produces unusually obsessive fantasy.’ I’m not really sure how limerence develops through the medium of text alone, although it does happen occasionally, I’m told. Sorry your online dating experience has been so disappointing. This place can tend to be the toilet for floating anonymous turds. Its low, low price of absolutely nothing also means that people tend to treat it as a chat room rather than an instrument by which contact can be made with a real person.
Oh! Oh. But did he mean that he was also using this place as a chat room? I mean, clearly I was using this place as a chat room where he was concerned. I had no intention then to ever meet him and interrupt the pleasure of his text, notwithstanding my coy reference to a conversation by telephone. But it seemed vital that he believed that this was my intention and vital, of course, that I in contrast could believe in his intention to meet me. Vital if the mild limerence were to develop.
Which I knew it had in text. And not at all mildly.
I began to compose a reply, and was looking for how to spell and use the word ‘propinquity’ like a grown-up when a message from Maddie appeared on my phone.
> ‘Close the app and open your closet,’ she wrote. ‘It’s time to get dressed for date number one.’
12
Fifty hours and three chickens
I opened the closet, and the smell of her surged out.
Then, this very physical sensation of loss was disturbed, when I heard her keys in the door. But I didn’t hear the person I felt that I had lost; she had in that short space of time become something very different. The stubborn stain of her in my memory, which had not, even for a second of internet chat, dissolved, bore only scant relation to the reality that was now moving through the house.
Of course, she hadn’t really changed. The only thing that had changed was her inability to tolerate our life together. Still, this person appeared, as I understand such a person does to dumped people, as though a shady surgeon had opened the head, removed the brain and replaced it with a clockwork devil.
No one will ever be more of a stranger to you than your departed love.
Here she was, she said grimly, to pick up some of her things. And she was a pack-rat who had so many things, and she wanted to bring them to a place where she and they could ‘grow’.
It had occurred to me to break or burn many of these things. But as I am less vengeful than I am lazy, I had destroyed only one. This was the ‘assemblage’ on which she had ‘collaborated’ with Sandra, winsome mother-of-two. It was a bracing multimedia piece I liked to call You Fucked My Wife In The Shed So I Broke It.
She started banging on about creative expression and freedom and the like, and then she mentioned the Facebook hacking business.
‘You were spying on me,’ she said.
‘You were spying on me,’ I said.
It was stale and ugly. I really couldn’t bear either of us.
I thought about who I might call to divert me from the shit person I allowed myself to become with her, and I could only think of the barbecue-chicken man. He said he’d pop over with a tasty chook for a tasty etc. just as soon as he could.
I took Eleven, just in case she tried to catnap him, and locked both of us in the bathroom. I waited for the chicken man.
‘You buy a lot of chickens,’ he said when he promptly arrived.
‘Yes, I do. Do you have a points program so I could get the occasional free bird?’
He had said that he didn’t but that this was a fine idea.
‘I should call it Frequent Flyer,’ he said of my suggestion. Being quite preoccupied, I did not remind him that chickens, like most animals suitable for profitable slaughter, were not often known to fly.
A chicken myself, I had not yet set any rules for the ex. I ought to have made a date by which she must clear her gingivitis from the house. I ought to have asked for her keys. But I held myself back for a couple of reasons.
First, I believed, as most fresh garbage does, that I hadn’t really been tossed. I told myself I didn’t even want to be retrieved—not by that unfamiliar devil that would only take my soul back to clockwork hell. But I didn’t quite believe she wouldn’t try. (Truly believing in one’s status as rubbish takes time.)
Second, here she was clearly having a relapse. She didn’t come right out and tell me that if I was to shout and throw things, as is the usual entitlement of a divorcée, her condition would worsen, that her legs would stop working altogether, that the pain in her trigeminal nerve would leave her flat for a week. But, by now, she didn’t need to.
She was pretty sick, my ex. Not cancer, but one of the other big illnesses that would begin with slow paralysis and end in premature death. For five years now, she had faced not only the palpable decline of her central nervous system but also the indignity of a diagnosis to which ‘Awareness’ ribbons are so routinely applied.
When things were cool in her world, she tended to remit. When they hotted up, so did the sheath around her nerves. I knew that stress enflamed her lesions; even the neurologist had said so. Hot weather. Heated conversation. People with infectious fevers. All these things were to be avoided.
It was, I think, an El Niño January. It was very hot and she was possibly a bit drunk. She’d left our breezy home for the unventilated attic of an old boyfriend; a chap with dreadlocks, a longstanding commitment to veganism and one of the frailest tempers you could hope to find this side of La Scala. With him, she would have little to eat, no place for peace and scant respite from the sun. All of which is to say she was now very shaky on her legs and the plaques inside her body needed no further heat from me.
I tried to hush. I crammed some chicken into my unmanageable gob.
Okay. I’ve now divulged that she was very ill and, in so doing, that I am an uncaring tit. You are at your liberty to loathe me and wonder that I could hack the Facebook account of a crippled lady. Or that I could not more easily forgive her incapacity and her infidelity and her moods. Or that I had told her, as I did now, that the things she had written to C’arter and Sandra were embarrassing shit.
I never did claim to be a tolerable human. I never did say that I was good. I only said that I was wounded.
Here she, or someone like her, was in the house. Here she was, telling me that she needed money and she truly hoped we could still be friends. Then she was screaming at me that I was a fascist when I told her that I had quit my job. A real, controlling, fascist bitch.
Here she was, sorting through her file of all the essays she had ever written in high school and smiling. I could not face her love for her own former efforts when she now didn’t love me at all.
Christ. Why was she looking for yesterday’s splendour when she hadn’t even bothered to pack her immune-modulators for today? Did she need me to give her the injection? Oh, fuck her. Let her plaques flare up.
It was all fucking awful. I liked myself every bit as much as I liked the ‘assemblage’. Which is to say, I held myself in no esteem at all, I felt a great surge of revulsion for the thing. I wanted to break it and myself.
We were both pathetic, most evidently when together. But especially me.
I’m telling you this as clearly as I can: there are reasons that she needed to be away from a prick like me. This is not a double-bluff. I damaged her work. I picked her apart. I did not hide my revulsion.
I locked myself away from her in the bathroom again and fed Eleven a small part of the chicken. I knew that this grief chicken must be our last. I was powerless to stop the weeping, the masturbation, the weeping masturbation and the pain, but I knew I could resist the chicken. I accepted a final chicken and I never became Frequent Flyer cardholder Number One.
As I looked at the cadaver of my indulgence, it occurred to me that, about to begin the first of one hundred dates, I now had a private customer loyalty program of my own. Of course I would be the sole administrator and the first and only member, and the reward would not be chicken but love. Or, if not love, then a life not so lacking in intimate supervision that I would again carelessly coat my cat or my twat in chicken grease.
For points, I would collect people instead of chickens. I would take myself on one hundred dates, as Eleni had advised as she plucked me. I would meet persons believing that one of them might love me and I might love them back. And I could even tell all of them about the formal nature of my project. Why not? If I told them ‘This is date twenty-seven of one hundred’, it might be cause for conversation and stop me from droning on about Karl Marx and/or my terrible break-up.
She was in the next room fondling her past. I was in bed with the grief-chicken making calculations for my future.
By my oily reckoning, the average number of more- or-less suitable love objects a person generally meets in a Western lifetime before a mutual declaration of love is made must be around, say, fifteen. I reasoned that I could easily exceed this figure in quite a short period. A year. After all, I was unencumbered by (a) gender preference (b) dignity and, having newly told my line manager to go and fuck herself with a concrete dildo, (c) regular employment. So I certainly had the time, if not the money, to date my way to the pos
sibility of reward.
If I was sure to be polite and plainly disclose in advance my intentions, I would be loving and chosen.
It was January the Somethingth: I would need around two dates a week derived from internet profiles, existing friendship networks and, perhaps, the home-delivery food community.
She shouted again that she needed money. I called out to her, ‘Sorry, no money. I’m broke.’ Because I was.
She said, ‘I have called my representative about that and she says you are legally obliged to offer me financial support.’
Familiar with her incapacity to use the phone for any purpose beyond immediate pleasure, I said, ‘So Boozy Jo’s Instant Hooch Delivery is dabbling in family law these days, is it?’
She said, ‘Fuck off,’ and knowing that her dad was able and willing to offer her money, I felt free to return this tribute through the bathroom door.
I wrote down some Terms and Conditions for the scheme:
1. If Helen fails to meet someone who can love her within a year, then her reward will be never having to bother loving anyone again. She will commit to a life of pleasant solitude.
2. If Helen does not fail, then she will be loved. And she will love. And, no, Helen doesn’t think of love as the antidote to all her appalling poison. She simply has excess love and prefers somewhere to store it. She is a fool for love. There is little for Helen to achieve in making any contrary claim. Is there, Helen?