“That wasn’t music, that was . . . oh, I don’t know. The horror, Raymond! The horror!”
Raymond started to laugh, proper belly laughs (for which he was very well equipped), until he was actually bent over and struggling to breathe.
“Oh, Eleanor,” he said, wheezing. “I knew you weren’t a fan of grindcore! What the fuck were you thinking?” He started giggling again.
“I just wanted to see the venue, listen to a band,” I said. “That such sounds could exist—it’s beyond human imagining.”
Raymond had recovered himself.
“Aye, well—what is it that they say?—try everything once, except incest and morris dancing. Maybe we should add death metal to the list, eh?”
I shook my head.
“I have literally no idea what you are talking about—none of those words make any sense,” I said. I took several deep breaths, until I felt almost calm again.
“Let us retire to an inn or public house, Raymond—a quiet one—and please, allow me to buy you some beer in recompense for this wasted evening.”
“Oh, it wasn’t wasted, Eleanor,” he said, shaking his head. “Your face! This is one of the best nights out I’ve had in ages.”
He started to laugh again, and, much to my surprise, I found myself joining in. It was amusing that I had so comprehensively misunderstood the genre of music being performed. I had a lot to learn about music, I realized, and it would be important to do so in order to interact appropriately with the musician.
“Have you heard of Johnnie Lomond and the Pilgrim Pioneers?” I asked him. He shook his head. “Why?” he said. I took out my phone and navigated to the singer’s web page. Raymond scrolled down for a few moments, reading the text, then popped in his earphones and listened for a minute or two.
“Sounds shit,” he said dismissively, handing me back my phone. This from a man in a skull sweatshirt!
“Really?” I said.
“He’s got a standard-issue beard, an expensive guitar he doesn’t know how to play and a fake American accent. Trying to make out he’s from the South . . . aye, right, South Lanarkshire,” Raymond said, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth with a smirk. I wasn’t sufficiently well informed to be able to agree or disagree, so I kept quiet. Either way, I needed to know at least a few salient facts about popular music, and, recent aberrant opinions aside, I suspected that Raymond was my best source.
“Do you know much about music, then?” I asked, as we walked toward a pub which Raymond assured me was quiet—“A proper old man’s pub,” he said, whatever that was.
“Eh, aye, I guess,” he said.
“Wonderful,” I said. “Now please: tell me everything.”
25
It was the day of the concert. Everything was ready. I looked the part. I felt the part. I would speed up time if I could, to get to tonight more quickly. I’d found a way to help me move forward at last. A way to replace a loss with a gain.
The musician. It was luck that he’d come along at precisely the right time. It was fate that, after tonight, my Eleanor pieces would finally start to fit together.
How exquisite the anticipation—a pain, a churning pain inside me. I did not know how to assuage it—I felt, instinctively, that vodka would not work. I would simply have to bear it until we met, and that was the nature of this peculiar, blissful burden. Only a little longer to wait now, a matter of hours. Tonight, I was going to meet the man whose love would change my life.
I was ready to rise from the ashes and be reborn.
Bad Days
26
I am naked, lying on the floor, looking at the underside of the table. The pale wood is unvarnished, and there is a faded stamp bearing the imprint “Made in Taiwan.” Some important items are lined up on the tabletop—I can’t see them, but I can sense them above me. This hideous table, blue melamine top, rickety legs, the varnish scraped off in places by decades of careless use. How many kitchens has this table been in, before it found its way to me?
I imagine a hierarchy of happiness; first purchased in the 1970s, a couple would sit here, dining on meals cooked from brand-new recipe books, eating and drinking from wedding china like proper grown-ups. They’d move to the suburbs after a couple of years; the table, too small to accommodate their growing family, passes on to a cousin newly graduated and furnishing his first flat on a budget. After a few years, he moves in with his partner and rents the place out. For a decade, tenants eat here, a whole procession of them, young people mainly, sad and happy, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, lovers. They’d serve fast food here to fill a gap, or five stylish courses to seduce, carbohydrates before a run and chocolate pudding for broken hearts. Eventually, the cousin sells up and the house clearance people take the table away. It languishes in a warehouse, spiders spinning silk inside its unfashionable rounded corners, bluebottles laying eggs in the rough splinters. It’s given to another charity. They gave it to me, unloved, unwanted, irreparably damaged. Also the table.
The things are all laid out. Painkillers (twelve packets of twenty-four tablets, prescribed and carefully hoarded); bread knife (hardly used, shark’s teeth ready to bite); drain cleaner (“cuts through all blockages, even hair and grease”—also flesh and internal organs). This table, this table where I have never sat with another person and shared a bottle of wine. This kitchen, where I have never cooked for anyone but myself. Lying here on the floor, corpse-like, I can feel spiky crumbs sticking to the bare backs of my arms, my buttocks, my thighs, my heels. It is cold. I wish I were a corpse. Not long, not long now.
All of the empty vodka bottles are in my sight line, dropped on the floor when they were finished. I ought to feel ashamed that someone will find the place in this state, but I feel nothing. Eventually my body will be removed and industrial cleaners will be dispatched, I suppose. The flat will be re-let. I hope the new tenants will be happy here, leave some traces of love in the walls and the floors and the gaps around the windows for the next inhabitants. I have left nothing. I was never here.
I don’t know how long I have been lying like this. I don’t recall how I ended up on the floor of the kitchen, or why I am naked. I reach for the bottle beside me, anxious about how much remains, instantly relieved at its heaviness. This is the last one, however. When this bottle is done, I have two choices: get off this floor, get dressed and go and buy more; or kill myself. Actually, either way, I’m going to kill myself. It’s simply a case of how much vodka I drink before I do it. I take another big mouthful and wait for the pain to be released.
When I wake up again, I am in the same place. Ten minutes have passed, or ten hours—I have no idea. I move into a fetal position. If I can’t be a corpse, then I wish that I was a baby, curled up in some other woman’s womb, pure and longed for. I move slightly, turn my face toward the floor and vomit. It is, I notice, clear and streaked yellowish green—alcohol and bile. I haven’t eaten for some time.
There are so many liquids and substances inside me, and I try to list them all as I lie here. There is earwax. The yellow pus that festers inside spots. Blood, mucus, urine, feces, chyme, bile, saliva, tears. I am a butcher’s shop window of organs, large and small, pink, gray, red. All of this jumbled inside bones, encased in skin, then covered with fine hair. The skin bag is flawed, speckled with moles, freckles, little broken veins. And scars, of course. I think of a pathologist examining this carcass, noting every detail, weighing each organ. Meat inspection. Fail.
It is incomprehensible to me now that I could ever have thought that anyone would love this ambulant bag of blood and bones. Beyond understanding. I think of that night—when was it, three days ago, four?—and reach for the vodka bottle. I retch again, remembering.