Читать книгу Adults - Emma Jane Unsworth - Страница 13

you should never look at the comments. That to go ‘below the line’ is to open the portal to death and damnation. BTL = the Gateway to Hell. I say, that kind of self-control is one for the healthy of mind and heart. Meanwhile, you’ll find me shrieking and wallowing in the lake of digital hellfire with all the worst people on the internet. Waving, drowning, backstroke, who knows what I’m doing – but I’m not for being saved. Come on in! The water’s … excruciating.

My column goes up around 4 p.m., for bored souls on the homeward commute. In that way, you could say it’s asking for trouble. I sit at my desk and refresh the comments over and over. Nice, nice, nice, nice – my brain trips over these like they’re just air, like they’re nothing, like they’re fuck you what are you trying to do be my friend? – then – Ah!

A mean one.

I read it over and over, savouring it.

OVERPRIVILEGED VANITY PUFF PIECE – DOUBT MUCH OF THIS IS ACTUALLY TRUE

I feel the words like holy fire. I am vanquished, but also victorious. They are right! This person understands me completely! (Maybe they’re the secret love of my life??) I knew I was heinous and here is the proof! Let me burn! Let the flaming be righteous! I deserve it. I deserve it all. Moar!

Three times you mention your weight in one article. Seek help.

MOARRRRRR.

I hope you die

Oooh! Old school. Satisfying on a basic level.

Another, somewhat on theme:

Maybe you should start writing something more appropriate like obituaries

I ponder this. I do like thinking about death, so it’s not a terrible idea. I think about my own death approximately once a day. I don’t think about the actual moment of dying; I think about my own autopsy. Or I think about the person, or people, who’ll discover my body. I hope they will be beautiful, and weep tenderly. I think beautiful people weeping tenderly over your dead body is one of the very loveliest thoughts a human can have.

A little way down the thread, I see a comment from Sid. She has written:

How could you do this?? Do I get financial recompense for this exposure of details from my private life? Great piece tho babe! X

I panic. What if Mia sees the comment and deduces that I am no longer living with Art and in actual fact living with AT LEAST ONE WOMAN? My palms sweat. Could I go over to the tech woman and ask her to delete the comment? Or would that make things too obvious? I should have access to my own comments, surely! I’m wide open here. It’s not right.

I call the lift, but when it arrives there are a few people in there, so I smile politely and walk away because the last thing I want is a conversation. As soon as I am on the stairs I am on my phone again.

I sit on the Tube, scrolling – harried, fraught and febrile.

Nicolette is waiting for me outside the Yoga Shed, sucking on her vape. Nicolette looks like a Russian supermodel: rail-thin with puce-tipped hair. She always smells of applemint. She is a new friend, even though I swore off those when I hit thirty-five. We met at a fancy dress party a few months ago – a friend-of-a-friend’s thirtieth. The theme was 1988. I went as Garfield and Nicolette was Jessica Rabbit. My costume was sweltering and I’d just had a Brazilian so was doing neat, dry, rasping farts. I was timing them admirably with the music. I saw a woman who looked like she was concentrating, too. What secrets did she have in her pants? I moved towards her in stages, casual, doing a humble smile when she caught my eye. I stood next to her and it was like slotting into a puzzle I’d been trying to finish for a while. I asked her how she knew the birthday boy and she said: Oh, I’m just staying here taking coke until I despise myself sufficiently to leave. I knew then that this was a person I could really learn from. Not least because the times I have taken drugs I’ve immediately lost my cool. I have no discretion. I get too agitated. One time when I was with a group of people in a pub awaiting a delivery of pills, when the man with the baggie arrived, I shouted ‘PILL!’ across the pub, instead of his name, Chris. Like I said, super cool. You all want to go to Ibiza with me.

The night we met, Nicolette instantly started following me on everything, even Pinterest. She didn’t slide into my DMs; she galloped. Talk about chutzpah. ‘Reply All’ should really be an adjective, and Nicolette is very Reply All. I’d had a few drinks and liked her energy so I didn’t even do the wait-an-hour-to-look-casual thing (the equivalent of waiting three days after a date before you contact them): I went Full Fast Follow Back. I wanted her to see how fast I could love her, too. She was mine and I was hers and we both sensed it. We’ve had to talk, though, about the way we heat up and cool off on each other’s needs when we’ve been in physical proximity, because sometimes it does get intense, like we’re trying to bridge some sort of divide we didn’t feel when we were actually together.

Nicolette used to write for lefty rags but now she writes interior-design features mostly. I guess it’s true: we all get more right wing as we age. Over the past few months, our friendship has worked its way past desperate cordiality to a place of real assault. She’s wearing an antique wedding dress festooned with lace, teamed with tracksuit bottoms and leather boots. It’s a look that screams Sporty Loyal Cossack. We hug. ‘You look crackerjack.’

‘I was unsure when I left the house, but you know when you want positive affirmation on the things you’re wearing? Go to the old girls.’

‘Define old?’

‘Sixty or seventy yah. If I get a wink or a nod off an old girl on the street, I know I’m doing it right. And I got about six on the way here, so.’

Nicolette lines up the angles of her face with the outside of the building. ‘Come in,’ she says, beckoning me towards her without moving. ‘Come in with me.’

‘I’m not looking so hot.’

‘Black and white makes it all all right.’

I stand next to her and smile, lips no teeth because that’s how I feel. I look at Nicolette’s fingertips gripping the phone – her grown-out gel manicure is pleasantly prostitute-y. She takes the shot and posts it. I wonder whether to do one too, but my hesitation – as always – costs me momentum. Nicolette and I have discussed social media – being, as it is, a major obsession within both our lives. We have categorised users, ourselves included: likers, non-likers (stealth users), tactical likers, and the Truly Sound of Mind. I am more honest with Nicolette than I am with anyone else, even Kelly – which is strange for someone I have known a relatively short amount of time. I suppose it’s a different kind of honest. I just let my mouth run. In my lighter moments, it is because I adore her. In my darker, it is because I know that I have nothing to lose by her disapproval.

‘Gimme a mo,’ Nicolette says. She dabs at her phone.

My own phone pings. I look at it. Kelly.

Hey, can you chat?

Nicolette looks up from her phone. ‘Did you cut your hair?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean that literally, babe. Did YOU cut your hair?’

‘Actually, I did. But then I got it professionally tweaked.’

‘Are you having a breakdown?’

‘No! I don’t think so.’

‘It’s not a criticism. Maybe psycho is the way to go. I almost rugby tackled a charity hijacker to the ground earlier. Do you know what he said to me? Mate, you just dropped your smile. I wanted to end him. More than I wanted to end cancer.’

‘You should have. I hate those harassers. I hate the way they try and teach you how to be a good human. The guilt trip of it, you know? Like they’re responsible for the fabric of society.’

‘Yah. I don’t have time for it, either. I’ve not stopped since 5 a.m. I ate a sandwich on the toilet at work, to save time. Then I remembered that was how Elvis died.’

‘We’d better go in.’

‘I suppose.’

In the studio, we take our positions on our mats.

‘Be non-judgmental with your breathing,’ Natalie the yoga teacher says.

I try to not judge my breath. Hey, breath, just do your thing. Lately, I’ve been focusing a lot on stabilising the water in my inner bowl. Natalie said to think of my pelvis as a bowl full of water and to keep my tailbone tucked in and my pelvic floor engaged to keep the water steady. I knew Natalie was a good person the first time I walked into her class. She’s small and nervy, which I find reassuring in a yoga context. It lets you know she’s been through it – spiritually, I mean. She says my Warrior Two is really coming on and I could be as fierce as the goddess Durga if I put my mind to it, so whenever I’m standing anywhere I try and be mindful of my inner water. I am aware I sometimes look a bit odd at the bus stop.

The inner water would be a lot easier to manage without the memories that invade as soon as I take my eye off the present. A door opens in my mind, and in they surge: a procession of people who don’t like me; people I have wronged in some way, Banquo after bastard Banquo – that friend I kissed, that woman who shouted at me on the cycle path, the YOU HAVE NO INTEGRITY man (who in my mind looks like my old French teacher, who I had a crush on). Another spasm at the thought of a meeting with three PRs the other day where I used the word ‘groovy’. Which all takes me back to the croissant, its pathetic tally, my fundamental unlikeability—

‘Move your arms in time with your breathing, Jenny,’ says Natalie.

‘I am.’

‘You’re breathing that fast?’

At the end of the class Natalie asks us to imagine we are trees, rooted into the ground down our backs, but all I can think of is The Human Centipede, which makes me feel hurlsome. That film cannot be unseen. Once I start thinking about it, it’s like there’s literally a rod up my arse. Or a Rod up my arse, depending on who the scientist might have abducted.

‘Concentrate on your breath, Jenny,’ Natalie says. ‘There is nothing but your breath.’ Is she giving me more advice than anyone else in the class? Surely I’m not the worst in the class. Dear sweet Christ, just when your day can’t get any worse. I breathe in and out and try and listen, but it sounds like a ventilator in a hospital, like someone being kept alive, possibly against their will. It’s not a tranquil thought. I’m not sure I’ve ever been good at being tranquil though, in all honesty. I’ve never seen a hammock and thought, that looks relaxing. I just think, that’s going to tip up, with me in it. Kelly bought me a session in a sensory-deprivation pod for my birthday last year and I got out after five minutes. It was so dark in there! The woman giving me the induction told me there was a button on one side for the lights and an alarm on the other side in case I got into trouble. But once the lights were off and I was floating, I couldn’t tell whether I’d spun right round and so I didn’t know which button was the lights and which was the alarm, so I didn’t press anything out of fear. She also told me I’d know my hour session was up because five minutes before the end, a ‘small wave’ would ripple through the tank, emerging from the top of the pod, behind my head. Well, I was on tenterhooks anticipating that small wave. How small is a small wave? Would it flip me over? I got out after five minutes because the tension was so unbearable. I told Kelly it was great, and I really fucking hope she doesn’t buy me another.

After class, Nicolette and I walk together to the end of the street. We pass a skinny woman walking her Italian greyhound.

‘You know that thing about looking like your dog?’ I say to Nicolette. ‘Do you think it could work the other way around? So you get a dog you want to look like and you become as one, shape-wise? Or is it that you’re attracted to things that look like you, in a cloning sort of way?’

‘I don’t think anyone would want to look like an actual dog, would they?’

‘I wouldn’t mind the physique of a Staffie. I might try it. I might get one. Maybe it makes you morph like any relationship, except physically not psychologically.’

My phone pings. Kelly again.

Hey – did you get my last message? Could do with a chat x

I’m thinking of what to reply and start scrolling before I know it and then Nicolette says bye and I put my phone back in my pocket and try to find my bank card and what was I doing? And how is it already dark? I zip up my jacket and hurry on. The street is littered with leaves, like the remains of a parade I’ve missed.