The Helen 100

by Helen Razer

  ‘All book sluts report to me!’ she cried, and I checked to make sure this wasn’t, in fact, Odette.

  I gave the hot librarian five dollars and took a name tag and began to fill it in. Libre-dom said, ‘Not so fast, Sunshine, the librarian keeps the records around here,’ and she asked me my name so she could write it in her fair and consistent hand.

  I began to say the word ‘MidLifeISIS’, but managed to stop myself before the first syllable was done.

  ‘Sorry?’ said la fetishista.

  ‘Um. Mi. Min. My name is Minnie.’

  Who the fuck is called Minnie, other than a well-known mouse and a single quirky human entertainer about once every fifty years? Minnie sounded like a fake name, so I was not surprised a bit when Catwoman handed the name tag back and said, ‘O-kay Minnie. Enjoy a night honestly and openly connecting with others as yourself, Minnie.’

  My name may not have been Minnie, but I had actually read the book that I was holding, so I wasn’t bullshitting about that. I’d read it some years ago, but I’d topped up with a bit of an audio recording before my arrival. As I listened I was struck by how much Tolstoy had improved in the twenty years I’d left him on his own. It had finally become a great book. Good work, Leo.

  Perhaps owing to my recent revival of interest in Marx, Anna had become a pre-revolutionary Russian tale. I was surprised that I had always thought of it as the exquisitely written love story of two insufferable fuckwits. This time, and from the outset, I could tell that all the princes and princesses sniffed the imminent loss of their comforts. You can sense it in the movement of the Moscow trains. Vronsky and Anna seemed to matter a lot less this time. The railway worker that Anna sees crushed to death in the moment she meets the Count is as important to the text as she is.

  While I was cribbing, I saw that Trotsky had eulogised Tolstoy in 1910. ‘Tolstoy did not know or show the way out of the hell of bourgeois culture,’ wrote Leon, but he had depicted it with irresistible force. Trotsky then went on to write that he happened to know the way out of bourgeois hell and, no, it did not involve painting the doors of Moscow a rustic orange. The answer was ‘scientific socialism’.

  I would try not to mention this. I would try not to screw myself.

  Actually, it didn’t seem as though I could screw myself that evening. When Cruella de Book rang the bell to signal the first two-minute Speed Dating conversation, hardly anyone but me was speaking at all.

  Being capable of emitting any kind of full sentence about anything at all, even socialism, gave me a head start. Perhaps the people who attend five-dollar Literary Speed Dating at local libraries are the kinds of people even more socially anxious than me. I guess that means I can unenthusiastically propose that the just-dumped dater try it.

  I found myself, for the first time in some time, to be the life of the party, and I don’t mind telling you that it felt rather fine. Right up to the point that I realised that shy people are most comfortable with other shy people.

  On my right, there was a young woman with a handsome, heavy brow. She had liquorice hair, big tits and a tiny body. She had the sort of complexion you just knew had never been touched by make-up and we probably shouldn’t be surprised that she was holding Twilight. The chap who sat before her was a good twenty years her senior, which put him at about my age. He was holding something that looked a bit sword- and-sorcery and the two were getting along as famously as people who find it painful to speak can. I could see their mutual May–September interest and instantly disapproved of it and of him in particular, until I remembered that I’d slid up and down a finger of someone younger than Bella just a week ago.

  To my left, a sci-fi man was blushing at a sweet-looking lass of, I’d say, thirty-two. I saw he had Neuromancer, which I’d actually read and even liked. She had Jodi Picoult. The one about cancer I’d stolen from the fat-farm, I think.

  Gragan, the chap with horn-rimmed glasses who first sat in front of me, wasn’t much younger than me, but I sensed he needed to believe that he was. ‘If you show me yours, et cetera!’ I said, presenting my book like a game show model and offering the nicest kind of smile that I could.

  ‘Um, you’ve probably never heard of it.’

  ‘You’ve probably never heard of it’ is the maxim of hipsters. I do not like hipsters. They are a group of wilfully heedless tits that hold fast to the fiction that they got first to wherever it is they think that they’re at. Which is the place that you are, necessarily, not. Hipsters tend to define themselves by imaging the stupidity of others.

  It’s not that I mind a little arrogance, a little battle-of-the-snobs. Actually, I love it, and I have for all my life challenged people to prove that they know more or less than I do. But I don’t go about pretending that the world has no memory or history—‘you’ve probably never heard of it’ should never be one’s first assumption. Hipsters, I have found, are criminally ahistorical. You can see this in the way that they dress: beat poet with some sort of fifties-inspired normcore with a hint of a Socialist Alternative activist c. 1984.

  Horn-rim’s book, by the by, was A Confederacy of Dunces. I’d heard of it, but politely pretended that I never had. I was super nice to Gragan, which I find is always easy when you dislike someone that much at first sight.

  I used all of the skills acquired in a professional life of interviewing, and I flattered him for two minutes with my interest. ‘What do you think?’, ‘What’s your opinion?’, ‘How do you feel about that?’ Basically, all the crap you learn working in advertising media: use the second-person pronoun a lot. Pretend that you really fucking care.

  He asked me nothing about myself, or my Tolstoy book, which was fine by me. I could never be honest with someone likely to say ‘you’ve probably never heard of it’. I could never touch someone frightened of their age, which was the same as my age; someone so frightened of history.

  I met three Catch 22s, four sci-fi/fantasy books whose details did not compute, Neuromancer, who was sure to get cosy with another Anna, one Franzen, one Crichton and a Hunger Games.

  Toward the end, a handsome chap in a Breton shirt plopped, quite impatiently, before me and said, ‘Look, this really isn’t going well.’

  Thank goodness.

  He was called Javeer. He looked, maybe, West Asian. He had a big nose, which I like a great deal, but not half as much as I like the posture of a man who has just emptied himself of hope.

  ‘No, Javeer. It’s not going well. It’s a terrible sham and I haven’t read this book for twenty years.’

  ‘I haven’t read mine at all,’ said Javeer.

  He had a library copy of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, which, as I told him, was a chic decision.

  ‘I pulled it off a shelf, said Javeer. ‘Complete accident. I wish I could say the same for my presence, but obviously I was hardly brought here at gunpoint. Anyhow, you’ve got thirty seconds. Then I’ll have thirty seconds. In that time, we’ll say the most potentially alienating things about ourselves that we possibly can. Let’s not repeat the mistakes of history. You know what they say, first as tragedy, then as farce. It’ll save time and unnecessary optimism. All our faults. Go. Go!’

  ‘Um. Right. I. Am. I. I am newly dumped from a same-sex relationship whose dreary background of infidelity and illness is something I fear I shan’t escape for years. I am a boring, not very scholarly communist who often gets basic communist things wrong. Thanks for the Marx quote, incidentally. I recently went down on a young gay man after a twelve-step meeting. I swallowed. It was by a bin and I can still smell the garbage on my jeans because I’m so depressed these days I can’t do my laundry. I quit my job. I’m broke. I believe my cat to be the only being I have ever truly loved. I possibly like being beaten.’

  ‘Well done,’ said Javeer. ‘I am Zoroastrian, which probably sounds so exotic to you and I can tell you’re the sort who would just love that. I can hear you now, you pretentious sow, “Oh, yes. My new boyfriend Javeer. He’s Zoroastrian, you know.” I’m also qui
te brown, which I feel needs to be said out loud in these ultra-white conditions. I, too, have dabbled in the homosexualist arts. As recently as this morning, in fact. I actually quite like women, but I don’t think I could ever love one meaningfully. I do, however, have a passionate attachment to my emotionally violent mother who would probably rather eat glass than see me remain unmarried. There’s about ten Parsi women in Australia, so she has learned not to care if the wife is white. Neither do I. I am looking for a possibly white wife respectable enough to match my high income, Minnie.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘There’s another thing. When I was giving the ring mistress my name, I started to say the one I use for my internet sex chat. But it came out as Minnie. My name is Helen. My name is Helen, and I’m an internet sex addict.’

  ‘Well. My name is Javeer and I have Grindr active this minute. Where I may go by the username The Arse Whisperer. What is your nickname, incidentally?’

  ‘Oh, look, I thought MidLifeISIS would be funny at the time.’

  It was pretty good, he said, and we agreed that we would leave arm-in-arm as soon as the event was done and not wait about for the post-match niceties. We would only separate when we were a safe distance from the library and let Snitty McWhip believe that she had heard the painful blow from cupid’s dart. After that, he said he’d attend to Grindr business. I said sure, and that I’d return home to masturbate to old messages from John.

  We exited together after the last bell.

  ‘I like you,’ I said. ‘I think we should stay in touch.’

  ‘I like you, too,’ he said. ‘But, sweetie, I’m a time-poor arse whisperer looking for a convenient beard. Preferably one with a job and a hairdo of which my mother would approve. And you’re such a divorced, unemployed fuck-up, you’re not even fake marriage material. Next!’

  That was another, what, twelve? Oh, fuck it. Let’s call it fifteen. Thirty dates down. Just another seventy humiliations to follow.

  21

  Three, maybe four weeks, another decalitre of tears

  For some time I considered Javeer’s remarks. He was right. I was a mess, and not an appealing madcap sexy one at all. Of course, if his critique had not been delivered at the irresistible speed of camp, I would never have listened. But classical Gay has a knack for transforming even the mortal insult into a greeting, which is the opposite of the violence done to words by the Scottish tongue.

  One late summer weeknight, I met a Scot who made ‘Pleased to meet you’ sound like a threat of death. She was a funny Glaswegian butch I’d met on the internet.

  On the app, this lady had described herself as a ‘chapstick lesbian’, which I thought was good. Her username was Anne_Thrax, which was also rather good. When I met her in a tapas joint, I said that her gruff messages were the best I’d found on the Sapphic internet. She replied, ‘Och. We Caledonians do make a good fist of it. If you catch my brackish drift from the River Tay, lassie.’

  I hoped this handsome woman would do me. I enjoyed her comedy and her butch Scottish theatrics, and I was almost a femme.

  Until I remembered that I was also such a divorced, unemployed near-femme fuck-up, and a girl-on-girl fisting could well be the sort of thing that would send me to the emergency room. I was possibly too fragile for rough sex, and certainly too familiar with the local hospital to flirt with the possibility of a return. They knew me there only as a brave and tearful wife. If I could, I would prefer to live in the memories of the medical staff as a sensitive and devoted partner, not remembered in hospital records as ‘reckless whore with bleeding muff inexplicably tied up in tartan’.

  Not, mind, that I ended up with a choice to be brutalised. After just two dishes, Anne_Thrax put her finger through a garlic squid ring and said, ‘Aye, you’re not my type.’

  Thirty-one down. Sweet 69 to go.

  Back home, I asked Eleven what I might do. He advised that I lay in one place and cry quietly for a week, just as soon as I’d filled his bowl with sashimi-grade salmon. ‘No, Prince Puffy Pantaloons,’ I said. Instead, I brushed his pelt for a bit and admired the spots on his tummy.

  I have seen no display more mesmerising than that of a wallowing tabby. A loving, fat and happy cat can rotate his breadth around a brush without appearing to act on the matter at all. I could never tell how he flopped so quickly from spotty recumbence onto his paws without a trace of internal strain. Of course, all of my questions to him about his feline biomechanics had remained unanswered for years. Tabbies never tell. I supposed these cat gymnastics had something to do with spinal torque. I knew that they were always mysteriously good.

  People who do not know cats well suspect they are inscrutable. People who do know cats well are certain of it. The more you love a cat, the better you learn that he is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a stripy coat. He is one of zoology’s puzzles and has never told the secrets of his movements or his purr. Or of his mystery love.

  Nearly every day, Eleven jumped up to lay on my desk. Between his naps, he would look at me as I worked. It’s a look rare to any species. I’d never seen it on any other face, and I doubted that I would.

  That was until Ameera, who is no particular confidante of cats, told me an Islamic folktale.

  I had been at the desk months ago when Ameera called, and then said that she couldn’t hear me properly. I said that Eleven was asleep on my mouse-operating arm, and that the poor sound was the likely result of my bungling lefty.

  ‘Well, move the cat and use your right hand for the phone,’ she said.

  ‘But he really looks so happy. I’m going to leave him there.’

  ‘Well, at least you have one thing in common with Mohammed,’ she said. ‘Peace be upon him.’

  The story goes that the Prophet was readying himself for the call to prayer. He saw that his cat, Muezza, was snoozing on the sleeve of his prayer robe. Rather than disturb the cat, Mohammed used a pair of scissors to cut away the fabric. He heeded the call sleeveless.

  There is a similar story, Ameera said, about a Sufi mystic. When asked why he would have done such a thing to his robe for a cat, he answered, ‘Nothing changed.’ Which is just the sort of enigmatic thing Sufis are wont to say.

  I am by no means the spiritual type, but I love this folktale. And I like that Islam, and other religions, can brook a little of the mystery that is not even explained by God. A secular life has just as many enduring mysteries as a religious one, but we atheists are in the habit of looking for answers nonetheless. Sometimes you should just let the cat ruin your holiest clothes. A pause for love is sometimes that important. Cut the robe. Respect the mystery. Don’t think science or God can explain it.

  When Ameera told me this story, which I have since learned devout cat ladies of the world already know by heart, I began to consider the terrible possibility that some people gazed at each other in the loving, mysterious way my cat and I did.

  This must have been what the story conveyed.

  I can’t imagine that a prophet or a mystic or anyone in the eternity business confines their earthly love to cats. The cat is clearly a metaphor. Old tales about animals don’t generally survive if they teach us only about animals. I supposed this was a story about the nature of love and a reminder that it is a mystery for which one makes mysterious sacrifice.

  Sacrifice, and you will be loved.

  There is probably some Hadith or other that explains the mystery of love. But as I have indicated, my reading had been limited for years. Just Karl Marx and marketing documents. More recently, it had been pamphlets prepared by the twelve-step community or genuinely perplexing offers of fake-rape from the internet.

  And text messages.

  John: We can only suppose that yours is a life of such organised empowerment as you have not been in touch. Oh, the Woman Who Has It All. How DOES she juggle the demands of the boardroom and the bedroom?! How DOES she Lean In while retaining Pilates posture? How DOES she find time to meet a male companion of mild productivity and only modest looks? No on
e knows how she does it, day after day. But, they know that she does. And will, at 7 p.m. tomorrow. Let’s meet at Richmond station.

  ‘Could he ever look at me like you do?’ I asked Eleven.

  He said it depended on the quality of the salmon.

  22

  Four weeks, I think, dangerous volume of poetry

  When I am with you, we stay up all night.

  When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.

  Praise God for those two insomnias!

  And the difference between them.

  This is from Rumi, the Sufi mystic we all know best. I do not know if he is the guy who honoured cats. I do think we can all agree he is much better than Coldplay.

  We can probably also agree that following a Rumi reference, this story will now be every bit as suspenseful to you as the matter of next week’s banking hours as upon meeting him, I became sleeplessly obsessed with John.

  To be fair, the prick was reasonably handsome. He was also reasonably tall. It was a warm night, so when I was close enough to him to shake his hand I could smell him. It wasn’t a bad smell—certainly, it was better than kitty litter. But it wasn’t a great one, either. It was not that he had not bathed—I believe he had. It was just that this particular smell coincided with my old idea of a working man.

  I would later describe his smell in my appalling blog as ‘butterscotch and tobacco’. Clearly, I was trying to get a job as a Starbucks copywriter that day. In actual fact, he smelled more like sausages cooking in a pub. Maybe some graphite as well. He smelled like working men had largely ceased to and I felt myself drawn to him not only because he was attached to a penis that was still sober at 7 p.m., despite my fears derived from his many drunk dispatches by text late at night. I probably wanted to be close to him so I could sniff some of the buried memories I had of men.