Читать книгу Eat My Heart Out - Zoe Pilger - Страница 8

TWO

I NEVER SAID that Allegra could come into my room, but she came in anyway.

Her gift to me was a box of postfeminist cupcakes decorated with tiny gold balls. I had been listening to an Amy Winehouse lament, writing an essay on Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. The sweetness of those cupcakes was harrowing. The sponge collapsed in my mouth like a cloud. And she would claim later that I was the witch.

That was three years ago, during freshman orientation, before I got thrown out for calling one of the guards a cunt. The college was supposed to be proud of its all-girls tradition, owner of the second-largest feminist art collection in the world. We ate dinner under a portrait of an Iranian woman wearing a hijab, aiming a Kalashnikov.

“Oh, I can’t tell you,” Allegra had babbled. “I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have found someone who I can really relate to. Someone who makes me feel real.” She produced a bottle of cheap red wine, rinsed out two cups, and toasted to our newfound sistahood.

One wall of my dorm room was taken up by a huge window that let in a lot of light. It looked out on to the college lawn, the sign saying “Keep off the lawn,” and the red star of the Texaco gas station across the road. I was living for Sebastian’s weekend visits, when we would lie together all day and night in my single bed. But he wasn’t there that day. It was a Tuesday.

Allegra told me that she was studying law under the duress of her family, that she wanted to be a performance artist, that she was heavily influenced by the Theater of Cruelty, that she felt she couldn’t create anything unless she, you know, really forcibly broke some eggs. She feared that the eggs that she would have to break were her family.

I stared at her liquid-black hair, her chalk-white skin.

“Except my brother Samuel,” she went on. “He’s a chess champion at Eton and simply too good-natured.” She said that she had waited all her life to meet a great man who would really wreck her youth and break her heart and make her feel something. “Anything would do.” She looked at me with her gray eyes.

And then she went completely mad.

She grabbed the saltshaker and the packet of coffee and the sugar and started chucking them around the room. Then she grabbed the remaining cupcakes and smeared them over the exposed brick walls, along the ridges of the radiator, over the lightbulb. She seemed to like the sensation of burning her fingers. She mashed the coffee into the sponge on the wall, forming a brown paste. She made abstract expressionist gestures.

I sat on the bed, impassive. I watched her fuck the place up.

Soon she sank, exhausted, beside me. She smiled.

Then she passed out.

I was thinking about Allegra as I journeyed back to Clapham after my night with Vic the war criminal. I was never more than five minutes away from thinking about her; my thoughts looped and returned always to the same point: she had ruined my life.

On Clapham High Street, I stared at the glistening kidneys in the window of the organic butcher for a while, the strung-up pheasants, the stags. Stephanie Haight’s face was enlarged on a poster in the window of the bookstore. She had drooping eyes and scraggly blonde hair. Her lips were petulant. She must have been about sixty but the years had been injected out of her face. She wore jeans and a tartan shirt that recalled Generation X, to which she was too old to belong.

I went into the shop.

The bell rang and the man with the ponytail behind the counter looked up and smiled. “Hello there!” he said. “And how is your young man?”

“He’s fine, thanks. Don’t know where he is actually.”

“He came in here just last week and was telling me all about how you two are thinking about getting engaged.”

“Did he?”

“He wanted to order a special edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. For his uncle.”

“Oh, you mean Freddie. Freddie’s fucking nuts.”

I stared intently at the Mind, Body, and Spirit section, hoping that the man would stop talking to me. There was one other customer in the shop. A tiny dog was poking out of her handbag. I moved over to Gender Studies. The man’s questions were incessant. Yes, I was glad that that awful psychotic phase had ended. Yes, the standardization of education was to blame for the fact that I’d totally lost my fucking marbles.

“The only thing to do is claw them back,” he said.

I found Stephanie’s book. Falling Out of Fate was printed in pale blue letters above an image of a woman falling out of a cage made of hearts. She was plummeting through an empty blue sky to her death.

“Going like hotcakes,” he said.

I flipped to “About the Author:”

Stephanie Haight was born in Bermondsey and educated at her local secondary modern before winning a scholarship to St Anne’s College, Oxford. She completed her PhD on romantic masochism in the work of Simone de Beauvoir at Harvard University in 1980. She has written widely for titles including the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. Her books include Master or Slave? How Submission is Reversed and Other Tales from the Women’s Movement, and a novel, Abreaction. After many years of living in New York, she has recently returned to London.

The man was talking to the dog woman.

I put the book down the front of my tights and exited the shop.

I got halfway across the road before I felt a hand on my arm. The light was about to turn green.

“I saw you,” snarled the dog woman. Her face was expensive. Her coat was vintage tweed, like mine. I wanted to ask her if she got it from Beyond Retro.

“I’m not a corporation.” The ponytail man was shaking his head. His lone dangly earring swung from side to side. It was a Native American dream catcher.

“Have you spent a lot of time in the States?” I asked him.

Dog Woman had perched on the edge of the desk. “Will you take this seriously?” she barked. “It’s a serious offense. We could call the police.”

“Please do,” I said. “Be my guest. I’ve got nothing to live for anyway. The man I love doesn’t love me. I thought it was Sebastian who was the love of my life but now it transpires it’s Vic.”

“What about Freddie?” said the man.

“Actually my great-great-great-grandmother was a thief too,” I told him. “She was a prostitute in Whitechapel. And she got deported for beating the shit out of this gentleman. My mother’s got the prison records on the wall.”

His face reddened; he flapped his arms.

“What have you got to say for yourself that’s serious?” said the woman.

“I don’t want to be free,” I said, with passion. “Sometimes I feel free but most of the time I feel trapped anyway, in all this freedom.” I gestured to Stephanie’s book on the desk. “That’s why I’m interested in her. She seems to know what she’s talking about.”

“That’s not the point,” said the man.

“Call the police,” said Dog Woman. “She’s not even sorry.”

“I thought you were against the system?” I said to the man.

“Not when I am the system,” he said. “It’s my shop.” He trod around the office.

Piles of unsellable books were stacked everywhere.

“I don’t have any money,” I said. “It’s Freddie with all the money. We live in his uncle’s apartment, rent-free. That’s the only way we can afford to live in such a yuppie area.” I looked at Dog Woman.

She bared her teeth; they were perfect.

“We don’t belong here,” I said. “I don’t belong anywhere near here.”

The man didn’t look convinced.

“I’m crazy, remember?” I said. “Cambridge made me crazy.”

I could see him begin to waiver, but then Dog Woman shouted at him: “Can I talk to you in the shop?”

Alone, I turned to the first chapter of Stephanie’s book. It was called “Falling.”

To fall is a woman’s destiny; it is the culmination of her destiny.

Eve fell because she ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Since that first biblical Fall, any woman with a sexual appetite, any woman who fucks outside of marriage, has been deemed “fallen.” The woman who fucked for love, lust, or money “fell” pregnant and was shamed by the community.

Bridget Jones—that blueprint for a free generation—fell all over the place. Her slapstick naïveté meant that she could rarely stand up without falling flat on her face and demonstrating her incompetence and the incompetence of women in general for the sake of a few laughs.

While the fallen woman was once a figure of damnation and moral outrage, now we are all fallen. We are encouraged to fall. Because falling endears us. It ameliorates our strength.

We fall in love.

Following the sexual revolution and the second wave women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s, in which I played a key role, the values that kept women in her place—albeit in a second, inferior place—seem to have dissolved. In fact, they have merely changed form.

Power metamorphoses.

Culture is an atmosphere.

It is not simply men who do not want to give up their position of dominance over women. The whole cultural atmosphere is tuned to keep women falling.

This atmosphere is what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the Symbolic.

The Symbolic is everywhere, it is everything.

The Symbolic is what the authorities tell you to do, but, more generally, it is what the world tells you to do. And here’s the twist: the world doesn’t have to tell you to do it.

Women obey without knowing they are obeying. The choice is always already made.

“We’re going to let you go,” said the man. He looked devastated. “Because I was young once.”

“I was young once too,” I said. “I can’t quite remember. I think I was happy.”