The day had not augured well from the start. Polly the plant had died that morning. I’m fully aware of how ridiculous that sounds. That plant, though, was the only living link with my childhood, the only constant between life before and after the fire, the only thing, apart from me, that had survived. I’d thought it was indestructible, assumed it would just go on and on, leaves falling off, new ones growing to replace them. I’d neglected my duties these last few weeks, too busy with hospitals and funerals and Facebook to water her regularly. Yet another living thing that I’d failed to look after. I wasn’t fit to care for anyone, anything. Too numb to cry, I dropped the plant into the bin, pot, soil and all, and saw that, throughout all these years, it had been clinging on to life only by the slenderest, frailest of roots.
Life was so very precarious. I already knew that, of course. No one knew it better than me. I know, I know how ridiculous this is, how pathetic, but on some days, the very darkest days, knowing that the plant would die if I didn’t water it was the only thing that forced me up out of bed.
Still, later that day, I’d come home from work, put the rubbish out, dressed up, made myself go out to the concert. I went alone. When I met the musician, I needed it to be just me and him, no distractions, no complications. I needed to make something happen, anything. I couldn’t keep passing through life, over it, under it, around it. I couldn’t go on haunting the world like a wraith. And things did happen that night. The first thing was the realization that the musician simply didn’t know I was there. Why on earth had I ever thought that he would? Stupidity, self-delusion, a feeble connection to reality? Take your pick.
The shame. I had stood right at the front, ridiculously trussed up in new clothes, clownish makeup, tottering on heels. When he came onstage, I was close enough to see the double knot he’d tied in his shoelaces, the strand of hair that flopped over his eyes. His hands on the guitar, fingernails carefully manicured. The lights were bright on him, and I was in darkness. But he would see me, nonetheless. If it was meant to be, and surely it was, then he would see me, the way I’d seen him, all those weeks ago. I stood still and looked up at him. The band started to play and he opened his mouth to sing. I could see his teeth, the soft pinkness of his palate. The song finished, and another began. He spoke to the crowd but he did not speak to me. I stood and waited, waited throughout another song. And another. But still he didn’t see me. And gradually, as I stood there under the lights, the music beating off my body without getting in and the crowd unable to permeate the layer of aloneness that encased me, encases me, I began to realize the truth. I blinked, again and again, as though my eyes were trying to clear the view before them, and it crystallized.
I was a thirty-year-old woman with a juvenile crush on a man whom I didn’t know, and would never know. I had convinced myself that he was the one, that he would help to make me normal, fix the things that were wrong with my life. Someone to help me deal with Mummy, block out her voice when she whispered in my ear, telling me I was bad, I was wrong, I wasn’t good enough. Why had I thought that?
He wouldn’t be drawn to a woman like me. He was, objectively, a very attractive man, and could therefore select from a wide range of potential partners. He would choose an equally attractive woman a few years younger than himself. Of course he would. I was standing in a basement on a Tuesday night, alone, surrounded by strangers, listening to music I didn’t like, because I had a crush on a man who didn’t know, and would never know, that I existed. I realized I had stopped hearing the music.
There he was onstage, pressing guitar pedals and saying something trite about touring as he tuned. Who was this stranger, and why had I chosen him, of all the men in this city, this country, the world, to be my savior? I thought about a news story I’d read the previous day, some young fans holding a tearful vigil outside a singer’s house because he’d cut his hair. I’d laughed at the time, but wasn’t I behaving like them, acting like a love-struck teenager who writes fan letters in purple ink and etches his name on her schoolbag?
I didn’t know the man onstage before me, didn’t know the first thing about him. It was all just fantasy. Could anything be more pathetic—me, a grown woman? I’d told myself a sad little fairy tale, thinking that I could fix everything, undo the past, that he and I would live happily ever after and Mummy wouldn’t be angry anymore. I was Eleanor, sad little Eleanor Oliphant, with my pathetic job, my vodka and my dinners for one, and I always would be. Nothing and no one—and certainly not this singer, who was now checking his hair in his phone during a bandmate’s guitar solo—could change that. There was no hope, things couldn’t be put right. I couldn’t be put right. The past could neither be escaped nor undone. After all these weeks of delusion, I recognized, breathless, the pure, brutal truth of it. I felt despair and nausea mingled inside me, and then that familiar black, black mood came down fast.
I slept again. When I woke, my head was empty, finally, of all thoughts except physical ones: I am cold, I am shaking. Decision time. I decided on more vodka.
When I got to my feet, slow as evolution, I saw the mess on the floor and nodded to myself—this was a good sign. Perhaps I might actually die before I needed to choose one of the methods laid out on the table. I took a tea towel from the hook—A Present from Hadrian’s Wall, it said. It had a centurion and an SPQR sigil on it. My favorite. I used it to wipe my face and then dropped it on the kitchen floor.
I didn’t bother with underwear but simply pulled on the nearest clothes from the bedroom floor—the outfit I’d been wearing on Tuesday night. I stuck my bare feet into my Velcro work shoes and found my old jerkin hanging in the hall cupboard. I didn’t know where the new coat was, I realized. My bag, however, needed to be located. I recalled that I had taken the new black handbag with me that night. It only had room for my purse and keys. The keys were on the shelf in the hall where I always put them. I found the bag in the hall too, eventually, dropped in a corner next to my shopper. My purse was empty of cash—I couldn’t recall how I’d got home or when I’d bought the vodka that I’d been drinking, but I assumed it must have been en route here from the city center. Luckily, the purse still contained both of my bank cards. The concert ticket was in there too. I dropped it on the floor.
I walked down to the corner shop. It was daylight, cold, the sky ashen. When I entered, the electronic bleeper sounded and, behind the counter, Mr. Dewan looked up. I saw his eyes widen, his mouth fall open slightly.
“Miss Oliphant?” he said. His voice was cautious, quiet.
“Three liters of Glen’s, please,” I said. My voice sounded strange—croaky and broken. I hadn’t used it for some time, I supposed, and then there was all that vomiting. He placed one before me, then seemed to hesitate.
“Three, Miss Oliphant?” he said. I nodded. Slowly, he put another two bottles on the counter, all of them now lined up like skittles that I’d need to knock over, knock back.