by Terri White
My wish is for death, and until I wish to live, nothing will change.
CHAPTER 30
Nothing gets better magically overnight. In fact, it gets worse. I’m back working sixteen hours a day – I’d been back at my desk the morning after my discharge – and drinking the rest of the hours away. At first, I think I have it under control, but it soon becomes clear it’s anything but.
Six weeks after I stepped foot outside the hospital, I sign a big-name Hollywood actress to guest-edit the magazine. It’s a coup and, as ever, I feel a chunk of me restored by managing to pull it off. My self-esteem, my fragile outline, is built around work, and when the call comes – an easy, ‘yes, she’d love to do it’ – the shape of me throbs in thick black, fat with fleeting happiness. It never stays, but for that moment, it’s everything.
I’m invited to meet her in the club she co-owns to discuss the details. Our meeting is not until nine p.m., which leaves a handful of lurking, dangerous hours in which to build my bravery out of booze. I have a couple of drinks before leaving my apartment in the East Village, tying and re-tying the headband that matches my dress. I take a cab uptown, jumping out two blocks away – a short walk to steady my ankles and my jangling, clanging nerves.
I descend the stairs of the club, shoulders back, a slash of red becoming a slapped-on bright smile. I’m there before The Hollywood Actress, but her team offer up drinks and more drinks. I order the strongest thing I can think of. It’ll help. The confidence and belief trickles down my throat and blooms warmly in the soil. I know I can do this now.
When she arrives at almost eleven p.m., she’s polite and kind and generous. I’m absolutely, beyond hammered. We talk about her club, the city, the magazine, about her kids, my hometown. The room fizzes and fuzzes and the heat and swaying is, I’m sure, just inside me.
Then: nothing.
Around noon, I wake up, check that everything is where it’s meant to be – both on my body and my person:
Passport? Check.
Coat? Oh, I wasn’t wearing one.
Credit card? Check.
Debit card? Check.
Keys? Check.
Make-up? Check.
Shoes? Hang on. Where are my shoes?
A frantic, frenzied search of the apartment yields nothing. I realise with a slow, cold, dawning horror that they’re not here. I quickly come up with a list of scenarios:
1) I left them in the club, walking out barefoot.
2) I took them off in the cab home and just got out without them, barefoot.
3) I took them off in the street, for the few steps from the cab to my apartment. And somehow left them there, by the bins.
It’s number two, I reason. I mean: I know I was drunk, but I would never just leave them there in the club, when I was surrounded by people. Right? But I’m terrified that’s exactly what I did and play the hypothetical scenario like a memory, over and over in my brain, like a broken tape, looping round and round.
Had The Hollywood Actress noticed how drunk I was? Had her team? I flash back to the frowning face of a designer who worked for her when we were at the bar. Was that a memory? Or had I imagined it? Was her frown at my drinking? At me? Had I said something, anything, that I shouldn’t? As ever, now it is just a waiting game. Let the days pass, pray nothing is mentioned to me. And it isn’t. The shoes become the latest in my funny stories: ‘And I woke up, without my shoes! I mean, who loses their shoes!’
The bodies mount up once more.
Meanwhile, I still think, dream, of the man I left in London. Every trip back to that city is spent looking for him, seeking him out: his words, his feelings, his skin, his bones, his breath. I walk the streets of Soho, down, down, down, the bricks marking time, my path, taking me to him.
We meet, cling to each other, to walls, to limbs and lies we’ll repeat over and over: I love you; I miss you; I can’t live without you; we’ll be together one day; it’ll be worth this pain, the wait, wait, wait. He tells me he likes the pain and I can’t tell him that the pain is still breaking me from the inside out, shattering my rib cage with a violent wind I can’t contain, blowing through, pulling me down.
Back at work, the successes mount alongside the bodies that fall at night. I, the magazine, win award after award at ceremonies held at hotels with chandeliers. I get promoted, a pay rise, trips to new cities, more responsibility, more hours, more dinners in restaurants I would never normally be able to afford.
One evening, my boss summons me to dinner in one of those restaurants with a restaurant guy making waves in Manhattan. We arrive at his place downtown and are shown to the best table in the restaurant: centre of the room, slightly to the left, close enough to the kitchen to see the action but not feel or hear it. It’s a fairly typical scene: half the room desperate to be noticed, the other half desperate not to notice.
Strong vodka and whiskey cocktails are ordered; wine is poured. The business guy joins our table, a provincial guy playing at being a Real New Yorker. His bright striped shirt is untucked. His suit jacket finishes half an inch from where the rounded edge of shoulder does. He reeks of money – several hundred dollars’ worth of cotton pulled tight across his chest. A fat ring on his thin finger. He buys things; he buys people. But he can’t buy cool. And that’s where we come in.
We tell him: your food is great; the restaurant is fabulous; the crowd are wonderful; the drinks are divine. In truth, the drinks are simply strong enough. As always, my one-meal-a-day diet means I drink more than I eat. With each new round of drinks, one of our table bows out. They don’t have my fortitude. There’s four of us. Then there’s three and then there’s two. His wedding ring flashes and winks when it catches the light.
He wants to know what I think. I tell him. Liquor splashes; he orders more. The restaurant empties and closes around us. He doesn’t want to go home. He mentions a hotel nearby, getting another drink, but then he’s getting a room and I’m walking down a corridor that gets thinner and longer the more I walk. We’re in a room; it’s small and beige and the bed nearly touches both walls. I’m in the bathroom, orange and kitsch and like nowhere I’d ever want to be. I feel trapped. I’m in a hotel room with a man who’s married and don’t know how to get out, or how I got in.
I’m bleeding between my legs, but he doesn’t notice, or he pretends not to, and as the beige bleeds inside my eyes, he’s on top of me and I’m elsewhere, somewhere else, nowhere else.
‘Stay,’ he says, he asks, afterwards. I’m gagging, my mouth is filling with water and I can’t. I say I need to leave; I need to be gone. I feel dirty and rotten and evil and excuse myself with one sorry and a second sorry until I’m in the hall and clutching my body, horrified at what it’s done to me, how it’s betrayed me.
I’m clinging onto the walls, hard under my hands, as I heave and slap my mouth shut. The receptionist’s mouth is moving as I walk past but I can’t hear what she’s saying. I am spat out onto the streets of downtown, my back against the wall as I begin to mourn who I thought I was. Above me, a man who should be at home lies down in an empty hotel room, preparing to lie again to his wife. When I get home, I take a long, scalding shower, my tears of disgust and self-pity running into the water.
There isn’t one specific extraordinarily dark moment that compels me to leave New York. There isn’t a third-act epiphany. Though there are moments over the months that follow that are both better and worse. I delete the dating apps, retreat from male touch. I descend back into isolation, sitting in the darkness. When I’m offered a job back in London, the choice is clear: to try to live afresh, anew, or to stay here in my sadness, my silence, harden my edges, straighten out the curves of me to be able to survive in a city that I fear wants to crush me under its weight.
I feel myself start to curdle at New York’s touch. I scream at a truck that nearly ploughs into me, when I don’t have right of way. A woman in a business suit and sculpted hair calls me a ‘cunt’ at 7.30 a.m. for not refilling my subway pass fast enough
and I don’t flinch. I’m sharper, shorter, angrier, less patient, more irritated. I always believed that I would shape New York around me: I was incontrovertibly me and this would be the case wherever I lived. Even in a city as brutal and averse to bargaining as New York. But in the end, of all my complicated affairs, my one with New York is in so many respects the most complicated of all.
When the lust, the longing, the belief that I could be reborn there starts to fade – if it has ever truly been there – the city is hard and cruel. It is the boyfriend from the days before you knew better, who’s hotter than you and makes you work your arse off to keep him, suffering a raft of indignities and humiliations along the way. The mornings on your back, the nights on your knees. He might be the love of your life, but you’re certainly not his. In fact, he, it, doesn’t give a fuck.
The moments are still there. The flashes of cinema and poetry. When I’m hurtling along in a yellow cab as the city lights flash by; when I’m watching a movie under the Brooklyn Bridge as the sun dips slowly behind it; when I’m walking through Times Square, all lit up like a Christmas tree, at three a.m. in July; when I’m nursing a beer on a roof while the skyline dances in the distance. Then, for a few seconds, it feels like pure magic. I rub my eyes and blink hard, convinced that when I open them again it will have disappeared. And yet, in these moments, I feel unreal. The city feels unreal. What do you do when life is a series of beautifully crafted moments but those moments aren’t enough to make up a life? And certainly not a life that you can sink back into feeling safe and secure and loved. And enough. It’s certainly not the city to seek refuge in from the bombs dropping in your head. To fill your gaps, your holes, seal the fractures shut.
On the surface, I am not beautiful enough, pretty enough. I am not thin enough for New York. My hair isn’t thick enough. I am not rich enough. My clothes are not expensive enough. But really, it’s that I’m too needy for New York. Too raw, too exposed and brittle.
My final week in the city. I’m on the subway; it’s a normal Wednesday morning. At Eighth Avenue, a woman gets on, homeless and clearly mentally distressed. She’s wearing a dirty vest and jogging bottoms, her hair and eyes wild. She jumps onto the train, shouting as the commuters around her flee up the carriage. As she continues to shout, she starts to tug at her trousers, pulling them down before squatting. We all know in that instant what she’s going to do. The carriage splits: those who roll their eyes and sit further away or get off the train entirely and those who laugh, hard, hands shaking while they line up the camera on their phone to get her shitting on the subway train floor in HD. That the subway cars are populated by the homeless, the mentally ill – who aren’t medicated, don’t even have a doctor or medical insurance – isn’t news in New York. Everyone knows it; no one talks about it. They ignore it, they laugh about it.
It’s part of the schizophrenic stitching of a city that has two faces. The dance parties on street corners just above the trains speeding through mud and rain puddles, carrying the city’s sickest people.
None of this makes it easy to decide to leave the city that everyone tells you will make your dreams manifest. Fear snakes around my guts as the question flashes across my mind: who decides to leave New York? I sit on the kerb near my office, debating whether I should stay or go, and a friend poses the question that cuts through all of the noise.
‘Why do you want to stay?’ he asks.
‘Well, what would people say if I didn’t?’ I shoot back. ‘They’d think I was mad.’ I know even before the words have travelled through the air that this couldn’t, shouldn’t be enough to keep me here.
I want more than an envied life. More than an idea of a life, a dream you’re sold without looking at the small print. I want somewhere to live, something to love, and I want it to be real.
I want to lay the ghosts to rest, bury their human bodies under the soil once more. This time never to be resurrected.
I want to feel something other than pain and oblivion, fear and dread. I don’t want to feel death following me around, the shadow on my back. I want to shake him loose once and for all. Tell him it’s different now, I’m different now.
I could even, I think, see over the brow of the hill marked death. Spy what it would look like, be like. Feel enough life stir within me to stay alive. Start to believe that I might look back, over my shoulder, to the barren brown land where I’d just stood. And maybe I’d feel sorry for the person I left behind, when she’s both everything and nothing to me.
She is the person I leave far behind on the September day I finally leave New York. As the cab speeds towards JFK, she stays, stuck in the shadows of the city. It was either her or me. And it had to be me.
Sixteen hours later, I wake up in a flat in an ex-council block in Bethnal Green. There is woodchip wallpaper, painted white. No furniture other than a bed, one set of drawers and a sofa. As the sun charges in through the branches that tap against the bedroom window, I feel it hit my face. I smile.
Some nights, in my dreams, I stand stock-still in tight city streets. The buildings, the avenues, the windows are black. Silence surrounds me. I’m screaming at the sky but no noise leaves my mouth; the vapours that leave me collect amongst the clouds, filling the lid over my head. I open my eyes. It was just a dream. And now it’s over.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The process of writing this book, of revisiting the very worst of times, was long and often bruising and something I had to undertake entirely alone. Thank you, Daniel, for providing the space, safety and love for me to do so. I’m sorry for all the times I didn’t make it to the pub.
I will always be grateful to New York for gifting me you, Lindsey. You helped me save myself, more than once. Thank God for us (but mainly, thank God for you).
To Phil and Karen for the flowers and every single moment of unconditional support and friendship in the kitchen and beyond. To Mandy and Charli, who kept the faith for the best part of two decades, even when they’d have been entirely forgiven for not doing so.
I can’t fully express my gratitude for my agent Anna Pallai – the smartest, funniest and most patient ally I could have hoped for. Without you, there likely wouldn’t be a book. And certainly not the exact one I wanted and needed to write.
To the entire big-hearted Canongate family but particularly Anna Frame, Leila Cruickshank and my wonderful editor Hannah Knowles for treating my story with such care and consideration. I’ve been in the very best of hands.
Pamela and Bob – for a house that was so often a refuge, unfettered access to brilliant bookshelves when I needed them the most and for telling me twenty-four years ago that one day I’d write a book.
To my very good pals Ted and Sali for endless encouragement and telling me just to write the bloody thing.
To Rachael for the scribbled receipt that kept me going.
Dave, I’m still so sorry about your party. Thank you for being such a generous, beautiful human being.
To Katie, Simps, Joely, Caz, Wiggy, Ellie, Chris, Scar, Matt G, Matt W, Dor and Annie – architects of the good times and navigators of the bad.
To my Empire family – you guys complete me.
And my actual family: Nana, for making me the woman I am today. I hope you’d be proud. Sue, for being so supportive. But lastly and mostly to Roxanne and Graham, who taught me the meaning of family and love. Who were my reason to get better, to be better.
‘Extremely affecting . . . caring, inquisitive’
Scotsman
‘Unusually brave . . . sublime’
The Times
‘An exhilarating memoir’
Cathy Rentzenbrink
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
&n
bsp; Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Acknowledgements