‘Okay,’ Lucy replied and emailed him a list of brands.
‘I haven’t heard of half of these.’
She drew him a map to the luxury department store.
*
At the start of her second year, Lucy started seeing her first boyfriend, an amateur ventriloquist, majoring in business, who held her hand under tables and called her three times a day to be reassured he was good enough for her. At the weekends, she went out to his family home on the train, speeding past huge houses, glimpsing them sideways. The journey itself felt like an achievement. She bought an apron in the luxury department store to wear around the house. She bought it. His parents loved her like an orphan.The apron was a plastic material; every stain wiped right off.
His bedroom was the first place, within those four walls, lying on the soft carpet, she felt safe and her entire ugly history seemed to recede. She was becoming a new person. She fell asleep on top of a pile of stolen cardigans. She read novels and underlined passages that felt special to her in big streaks of red pen. These novels were about civilised women who holidayed in Europe, women whose lives weren’t rotten or shameful. Someday, she thought, someday. She would burn her own face off to become one of these women. She still had dreams at night, her boyfriend’s arm draped over her; gloomy houses with no exits.
‘I’m not good enough for you,’ her boyfriend whispered.
‘You are,’ she insisted.
‘I’m not,’ he cried and buried his face in the pillow.
She never told him about the pictures, her side-project which she was able to conduct with remarkable distance from herself. She sent picture after picture after picture. Only her body and face were real, the rest was artificial – the lighting, her make-up, her positions. She raised her prices. On every train journey, dressed in increasingly demure cardigans, she found herself falling more in love with her boyfriend. She didn’t know what time it was anymore: the digits flew by, clock hands spinning day to night, day to night.
Time moved differently inside the college. She followed the invisible rules closely. No vulgarity. No stupidity. No ugliness. She watched German films, the subtitles even more opaque than the French ones. She was using the cotton wool more and more frequently. On train platforms she felt impervious to the weather. She made fairy cakes in her apron, piping the icing carefully.
In his bedroom, looking up at the fake plastic stars affixed to his ceiling, she felt she was no longer a disgusting person but an ordinary person, or perhaps even an extraordinary person. Maybe love could transform you in that way. In the photographs, she arched her back like a cat. The glossy finishes looked like layers of plastic.
One night, after a dream about a dark, empty house, she woke up her boyfriend.
‘What if I die in college and nobody can identify my body?’
‘Lucy,’ he said.
‘I can’t remember what my parents look like.’
‘Call them.’
‘I don’t know their number anymore.’
‘Get the bus and go and see them then.’
‘I will never get another bus in my life,’ she said.
She spent more and more of her time in her boyfriend’s family home, abandoning her own tiny room in a student house. Her room was filling relentlessly with stuff, gifts from the professor and other customers. Soon the sight of the stuff disgusted her; it dimmed a light in her. She looked up at the plastic stars and told her boyfriend about houses she used to go to as a teenager, stairs she used to walk up, entering rooms made of different air. Nothing normal happened in these rooms.
She told him about how she had to leave her past behind, how she couldn’t let it reach her. She had dreams with disagreeable noises. She had dreams with sounds of loud, heavy machinery. She recited lines to keep herself sane. Her boyfriend told her he would protect her, save her. This was love. This was the best the world had to offer.
At night, she wandered her boyfriend’s studio, looking at the glassy eyes of the puppets. They were always awake. They never slept. She moved her mouth in time with theirs, as he planned and organised for his debut show. It was a big project, requiring integrity. He had to create a mood. Lucy drifted around the college, eating expensive salads, experiencing the new planet. During the day, she felt so content and serene, so full of love and potential, she thought it might kill her. The college encouraged her to think but she was too busy learning lines to think.
‘I haven’t done any thinking in three weeks,’ she said to her boyfriend. She was looking at the model for the set of his play, the small, vivid world pulled from his imagination. It was bare wooden slats with a light-box to reflect shadows ominously on the walls.
‘Thinking is not the thing,’ he said, ‘artistic impulse is the thing.’
The opening night of his play, in the student theatre, she sat, waiting, in the lobby, peeling an orange. She plopped bits of fruit into her mouth. The material of her dress was a fine silk. She savoured the juice of the fruit. She took her seat.
As soon as the female puppet appeared on stage, her eyes huge and innocent, as if she was just born in that moment, Lucy knew what was going to happen. She pulled her hair over her face. She rummaged urgently in her handbag for her cotton wool but before she got it in her ears, she heard the first line of the puppet’s monologue.
It was too late, too early, too late.
She sat in the dark of the theatre, and watched the action like it was a silent movie. The puppet didn’t scream but lay there, maggots crawling around her, shadows dancing on the walls baring their teeth and claws. Despite Lucy’s distress, she knew her entire life had been leading to this moment, watching it again except this time as a witness. She felt like it had never stopped happening, that somewhere it was always happening and here, finally, was the proof. She couldn’t hear the words onstage but she knew they were wrong. That’s not how it was, she wanted to say. She gripped the sides of her seat, tore into the armrests as if they were the skin of a fruit.
As the puppet swallowed the abortion pills, fake blood pooling around its body, her face broke apart, the planes separating. The blood was made out of a lumpy, carpet-like substance and appeared when her boyfriend pulled a string. When the puppet was finished, its body slumped on a chair, the lights down, Lucy covered her ears with her hands. She knew people wouldn’t clap for that. Nobody would clap for that.
Around her, people got to their feet and put their hands together, and she felt a long trail of urine move down her leg. How could you have done it? How could you? It was exactly like the first time, the illusion was gone, she knew again what the world was capable of. She could no longer be the person she had been.
Outside the theatre, a woman asked Lucy if she was alright.
‘That was brave, politically,’ the woman said, shaking her curls. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m cold,’ Lucy said, ‘I’m very cold. Was it always this cold?’
‘Sweetheart, you’re not wearing a coat. It’s October.’
Lucy laughed. ‘I haven’t worn a coat in months.’ She paused. ‘Can I have yours?’
‘My coat?’
‘Yes, I need it.’
The woman slowly slipped off her green wool coat.
Lucy took it and started to run.
‘Where are you going?’ the woman shouted.
When she got to the computer house it was as if she had been running for miles.
She sent an email to the professor.
‘Put a large sum of money in my account,’ she instructed him, ‘and I will make it worth your while when I get back.’
She watched the screen flicker and change in front of her, vaguely registering that it too was a brand. She felt no compulsion to steal it. Outside the computer house she heard a noise, a gentle tap-tap. When she looked around, she saw a girl throwing pebbles at the glass. At first, Lucy thought the girl was trying to get someone’s attention inside but then she realised she was directing all her anger at the computer house. The girl
stood still, glaring at the computer house for a few more seconds before she disappeared into the night.
‘Who was that person?’ Lucy asked the boy on the monitor next to her.
‘Oh,’ he answered, rolling his eyes. ‘That’s Natasha. I’m not even sure she knows that she comes here. She’s a sort of a strange, angry person.’
‘So am I.’ Lucy stared at the blank screen. ‘Well, I’m going now.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going on holidays.’
*
She got a taxi to the airport. At the desk she asked for a ticket to any cheap, sunny place.
‘Miss, your card has been declined.’
She offered them another card.
‘This has also been declined.’
She offered them her final card.
‘That worked.’
Her ticket said ‘Spain.’ In the duty-free she shoplifted a pair of sunglasses. She made a note of the brand in her notebook, and then threw her notebook in the bin. She shoplifted a leopard-print bikini, slipped off her silk dress and piss-soaked knickers and flushed them down the toilet. She climbed into the bikini, closed the respectable wool coat over it and laced up her boots over her bare legs. She reapplied her eye make-up so no one would know that she had been crying. She took a picture, a final picture, in the fluorescent bathroom light. Leaning against the cubicle doors, she rang her boyfriend. He answered after three rings. She could hear his hesitation.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell your story because I love you.’
‘You think that’s love? That’s not love.’
She hung up and turned her phone off. She took a plastic knife from a coffee shop and jammed it in the back of her phone. She sat in the departure lounge and dismantled her phone piece by piece. She dropped the pieces in the bin. This pleased her greatly. She placed her sunglasses over her eyes and the lounge looked unnatural. Around her everyone sat, waiting for life to begin again. Under her sunglasses, the seats turned orange.
‘I’m going on holidays,’ she informed the businesslike woman sitting opposite her, engrossed in her screen.
‘That’s nice,’ the woman smiled at her. ‘You’re free.’
‘I’m free.’
On the flight she had a gin and tonic with lime. She squashed the lime up and put it in her pocket as if she might need it for later. As they flew above her country, she watched it become a green dot and imagined squashing it up and putting it in her pocket. On the flight, it felt like the plane might separate – metal springing into the sky – and she would be scooped up into the air. She could take the plane apart with a plastic knife. Her feet landed on tarmac, a flat open plain, a prairie.
She found the worst hotel. She walked right in and asked the man at the reception desk, ‘Are there a lot of lost souls in this hotel?’ The receptionist said there definitely were. The place was made entirely of concrete, a tower of grey tracing the sky with a half glimpse of the sea available from every room. She threw down her remaining credit card. She was giving herself a week. It was a cement shithole and she felt at home.
In the corridor and in the lift to her room, she saw some of the other lost souls; their faces creased, their lives out of control. They all carried the same look of exhaustion. The women wore bikinis as uniform. She saluted them and their secrets, their hidden illnesses, their scars, the strings that disappeared into their flesh, every decision that led them here, paying for rooms by the hour, by the day, by the week, unable to plan any further. She would keep their secrets. She would shower in the same bathrooms, sleep in the same beds.
The hotel had its own invisible set of rules. No questions. No promises. No bullshit. She lay on her bed and watched the fan, its propellers slicing through the ceiling, cutting the love out of her with every single turn. On her balcony she heard screams of joy. She looked at the sea beyond. She considered the possibility, because of the hotel, that it could be full of sewage. She ran down onto the beach, threw off her coat and jumped in anyway. She took a mouthful of salt water. It was the clearest water she’d ever swam in.
She floated for a long time until the stars appeared, as if being blasted out by a hidden hand. It felt like they should have been accompanied by noise. She wanted noise. She put on her coat and went to a club, a dark purple place where she danced and sweated and spoke to no one. She drank vodka slushies, watermelon, strawberry. She let the ice numb her mouth, dribble onto her body. Hands found her in the dark. She awoke in the morning on her bathroom floor, the green coat stretched over her body like a heavy sheet of seaweed.
Over the next few days, on white deckchairs, sunglasses still fixed to her face, she read books that had been left behind by the other lost souls; books with bad language, with themes of adventure, sticky from the sun. She was sticky from the sun. She rubbed aloe vera into her sunburn. She turned over onto her side. She ate hotdogs, ketchup oozing out, cocktail umbrellas swept up in her wet hair. She threw her body over inflatable animals and let them carry her through the sea. One day she happened upon a funfair – deserted, unsafe. She went on a machine that spun her in convoluted circles on a leather seat. She felt sick with chaos. She thought her head might fall off. When she stepped off, she threw up.
‘I would like to go again,’ she told the man operating the machine and put down coins.
Every night, she went to a different club, each one a whole new solar system. She did complicated dancing. The music was loud, harsh and she knew it as the music from her past – music of abandoned houses, no parental supervision, reckless parties. She threw back electric colour after electric colour. The stamps of the clubs remained on her wrists all week, unwashed by the seawater. She re-adjusted her bikini in the dark. It was nylon. One night, she met a stag party and, without knowing why, stayed with them for hours. They cut up lines and shared them with her.
‘I’m in exile,’ she shouted over the music.
They nodded as if this was profound.
She woke up that morning, the Wednesday, in a heap on her balcony. She was really, despite the sun, attached to the green coat, especially now it came with extra layers of dirt.
On her fifth day, she went to the hotel buffet. She had her first taste of a fizzy drink that was close to champagne. ‘This,’ she announced seriously to an empty room, ‘is all I will ever drink now.’ That morning she woke up on the cement of her bed beside a man she had no recollection of meeting.
‘Are you having a good holiday?’ she asked.
‘I work here.’
It was the receptionist. He took her out in his beat-up car. She pushed the seat back and stuck her head out the window. She watched the sun set, sitting on a rock.
‘It’s so beautiful on earth,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen much of the outside world.’
‘Have you been in prison?’
‘Sort of.’
She waded out into the water. It was clearer even than the water outside the hotel. ‘I’m trying to figure out who I am,’ she shouted back at the receptionist.
The receptionist thought for a while. Lucy could see him thinking on the rock. ‘I have to get back to the desk now,’ he said.
That night, her second last, she walked home from the club through the crowds and rubbish-filled streets. All the apartments looked broken down; the town was angry and tense. It looked like a mouth with teeth removed. She went for a burger. She chose an option from the menu above her head, laid out in flat illustration. She spent a long time at the till. When she sat down an older man caught her eye. His face said, ‘I just want to talk to you. What’s wrong with that?’
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘I’m on holidays.’
‘What are you really doing here?’
Lucy put down her food. ‘I’m letting my life fall apart.’
There was something demonic about him. He had shimmied out of a dark corner somewhere. His reflection seemed to move around the restaurant.
‘That’s more like it,’ he said.
Outside on the street, amid the giggles and the shrieks and the dull noise, she bent over with stomach cramps. She bought a bottle of vodka, opened all the doors and windows in her hotel room and listened to the other lost souls, pounding away above and below her. The lift moved up and down, letting people in and out. She thought about waking up beside her ex. Even when she wasn’t thinking about him, she was thinking about him. She thought about waking up alone. She thought about not waking up at all. She passed out as the voices continued to float up to her room.
Her last night she went to the hotel buffet. She spread a napkin across her lap. She asked the receptionist for paper and a pen. She stayed in and sat on the wire chair on her balcony. The heat was immovable; it was a wall. There was a storm starting. She could feel it in the heat. Reality was thinner in heat like this. The light reflected different shapes on the concrete. On every floor people moved around, fleeing or preparing to return to their mangled lives. On the top of the first sheet of hotel paper she wrote, ‘My life is my own.’ She remembered the model-box, the world pulled from her boyfriend’s imagination. She knew she could keep doing this, or some version of this for the rest of her life, but it wouldn’t be freedom and she wanted freedom. If you wanted a place that was lawless, you had to invent it yourself.
She was making her mind up in a way she had never done before. She was leaving a part of herself behind. She knew if she was going to do it, she would have to do it all. That night, on the hotel stationery, she started her first play. It would be about suffering; it would be about survival. It would be proof that she was alive. It would star two girls. It would be called: Abortion, A Love Story.
PUTTING ON A SHOW
‘Can I start over?’
Lucy was auditioning for a play and Natasha sat three rows from the back, watching her. Her chest was tight. Onstage Lucy was doing some approximation of walking, but the floor wasn’t responding to her touch. The floor was against her. Natasha wondered how all Lucy’s gifts had vanished. She looked like she was contemplating a problem up there and that problem was herself. She was the worst actress Natasha had ever seen. It was distressing to witness this performance.
Show Them a Good Time Page 8