Adults

JENNY: Wow.

CARMEN: Look. I’ve worked a long day after a long night and I’m off to work again as soon as Aunty Bev gets here and I’m trying to make precious time for my daughter and she could not care less.

JENNY: I was listening.

CARMEN: You weren’t! You couldn’t give a monkey’s. Here I am, giving it my all. TO THE WALL.

JENNY [quietly]: You’re overdoing it.

CARMEN: What did you say?

JENNY: Again.

CARMEN [huffing]: It’s drama, darling. It requires voices.

JENNY: It’s Roald Dahl.

Carmen throws down the book and storms out of the room.

Jenny sighs, rolls over, switches her lamp off and goes to sleep.

IN THE WINGS

We were at the Mind Body Spirit show at the Birmingham NEC. I stood behind the partition wall, watching her doing her thing on stage – plucking people from the audience and giving them messages from beyond. I was drinking a cup of lemonade. She was grandstanding. She was majestic.

She says she’ll see you for the dancing, pet, can you accept that?

She said you were there by her side the whole time, and your love let her know she could go. Can you accept that, my love? You can. Thank you. Bless you …

When she’d finished, the applause was deafening. The crowd demanded an encore. At one point she looked to the side and winked at me and I got a thrill so electrifying it made me judder. I blew bubbles into my lemonade. Lemonade spilled over the rim of my cup, onto the grey top of the temporary stage block. The stage manager told me off and sent someone for a cloth, but I didn’t care, I was too busy watching my mother, in mid-flow, bowing and smiling and saying thank you, soaking it all up. I wanted to capture that sight of her, preserve it forever, that scene. I remember thinking that sentence to myself: You are mine, all mine.

When she got off stage, we walked around the festival together. It was a goblin market. We stopped at a stall called ‘The Horned Goddess’ selling dream-catchers, angel cards and gemstones. It stank of joss sticks. My mother was wearing her full regalia. A child jumped away from her. ‘Mummy, that lady’s scaring me!’

My mother affected a look of horror. ‘I’m not a lady!’

We stopped by a small gypsy caravan. MADAME AURACLE: AURA READINGS AND MORE it said on the side.

‘Do you want your aura reading?’ my mother asked.

‘If it’s all right I’d rather have a jacket potato with coleslaw,’ I said.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘After this.’

In the caravan there was a photo studio of sorts set up in the lounge: a Polaroid camera on a tripod. A sectioned-off area under a curtain.

The madame was sitting on a tasselled stool. She was as wide as she was high, and dripping in turquoise. ‘I am Madame Auracle,’ she said.

I sat in the electric chair, awaiting my execution. The assistant was wearing a baggy olive-green T-shirt. She instructed me to place my hands on the metal plates either side of the chair. I obeyed her because she looked like Christina Ricci, and I would have done anything for Christina Ricci. She stood in front of me with the camera. ‘Smile!’ I obliged.

A few seconds later, the photo chugged out of the camera. I peered at the picture. I looked startled and stern, like a constipated headmistress in an Adidas T-shirt who had farted a rainbow.

‘Now for the reading.’ Madame Auracle took the photo in her hand and raised her eyebrows. ‘Lots of red … You are an enthusiastic and energetic individual, forever on the lookout for new adventures. You are quick to anger and can lose your temper over the smallest thing. You are generous with your time and energy when called upon for help. You are easily bored.’

‘She won’t even sit still to watch a film,’ my mother said.

Madame Auracle continued. ‘And so now we come to the other side of your personality – we have lots of yellow here. The yellow part of your aura represents the highly critical part of you. But those who have high standards, that exacting voice inside that is so harsh on the world and others, that same voice is even harsher when it turns on you, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ my mother said, ‘definitely. She has VERY high standards.’

I nodded.

‘And if you were easier on yourself, then you might find it easier to allow others to love you for who you are.’

‘Too true,’ my mother said.

Madame Auracle nodded sagely. ‘Your main fault is that you can be overly analytical. And this creates a fear that makes you unable to communicate openly and freely.’

I said, ‘Sounds like a lot of people I know, to be honest.’

Madame coughed. ‘That concludes the reading. Most auras stretch three feet around the physical body; however, if you’re a trauma survivor your aura stretches fifty feet around you – which means people around you on the bus will be sitting in it. Your mother will be sitting in it. We’ll all be sitting in it, right now. Your aura mess. I can clean it up for you for an extra £5.99.’

I shook my head.

‘You should have a quick clean,’ my mother said.

‘I’m not traumatised.’

THEY SAY

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.

I POST

a video of my feet going through the leaves.

No sooner has it gone up than Nicolette likes it and comments with a line of hearts.

I message her:

You are doing that thing we told each other to be aware of and promised to tell each other about

What thing?

After we’ve seen each other in real life, remember? You don’t need to prove our closeness to anyone else on there or the ongoing elevation of your feelings towards me. No cord has been cut. Same way if we haven’t seen each other or spoken for a while you don’t have to NOT like anything I put on there to make me notice you like you’re withholding affection from a lover

I am not doing that! I felt those hearts

Nicolette I know a real line of hearts and you know a fake line of hearts and that was a fake line of hearts

Okay

As soon as I’ve finished messaging, I go and see what Suzy Brambles has been up to. Not much. Which is rather remiss of her, I think.

I catch the Overground to Dalston Kingsland, and from there walk to Stoke Newington. I like the walk down Kingsland Road, past the meat market and cocktail parlours. Old locals sip bitter outside the last few traditional boozers. Unhinged newspapers scud across the street into coffee cups and cigarette ends.

When I get to the house I open the front door and shuffle in past the day’s pizza leaflets and taxi cards. This hallway is getting darker, and it’s not just the year; it’s the clutter. It used to feel spacious in here. Just after I moved in, Kelly came round and ran down the hall in her boots shouting: Is this your house? Is THIS your HOUSE? I said it was, for now. We have a plan, you see, Kelly and I. A plan that has withstood years, relationships, jobs, everything. We envisage spending our dotage together as an elderly couple in a manor house somewhere on the moors. ‘The Commune’, we call it. When we’re in the Commune … we say:

We’ll drink martinis at 9 a.m.

We’ll try all the drugs we were scared of taking when we were younger, like crack and smack

We’ll Whac-a-Mole each other’s haemorrhoids

We’ll have the highest quality mattresses money can buy*

*And employ a person specifically to put duvet covers on

We’ll go out in each other’s arms, freebasing – with Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill on repeat

For now, alas, me and this dark hallway must find some way to coexist.

I walk through to the lounge. Sid and Moon are in there, encrusted on the sofa, drinking Sid’s homemade probiotics.

Fuck. I forgot to buy an avocado.

Frances must be in her room. She’s the only one I can really endure for more than five seconds.

Sid has artist’s hands, scabby and ink-covered. She works as a receptionist at a recruitment agency and spends most of her time doodling. Moon works in PR and is rocking neon knitwear and an erupting beehive. They are having a conversation about intestinal flora.

‘There’s a convincing argument that we are composite organisms rather than individuals,’ says Sid. ‘I don’t know which way round I work sometimes – whether my brain leads my stomach or my stomach leads my brain. If it’s the latter, that means I am ruled by billions of bacteria.’

‘I know what you mean,’ says Moon. ‘I’ve often wondered whether I have a personality or whether everything I’ve ever said or done has been a response to eating or not eating bread.’

‘So true,’ says Sid. ‘Sometimes I think the word “gluten” sets off a chain reaction in my body. I think it’s only a matter of time before they ban the word, too. And quite right …’

‘Listen,’ I say, ‘would you guys mind tidying up in here if you get time tonight? Just, you know … the footbath and the bagel slicer.’

They stare at me. ‘I don’t suppose you remembered the avocado?’ says Sid.

I shake my head. ‘I’ll get you one tomorrow.’

‘No avo and calling me “Stephanie” in your column. It’s practically abusive. Lol!’

‘I changed your name out of respect for your privacy.’

‘And then you wrote about our personal habits.’

‘It was for other women to learn from.’

‘What’s to learn? There was no conclusion in the piece. Nothing in it was of any consequence whatsoever.’

‘The conclusion is if you honestly share then you feel less alone.’

Moon snorts into her ginger ale. ‘You said it was twenty years ago. That’s not very honest.’

‘Again, protecting you.’

‘I think talking about your friends’ bodies in public is a pretty garbage thing to do.’

‘It’s an online feminist magazine. And you’re my lodgers.’

‘Well,’ says Sid, ‘that’s put us in our place.’

My cheeks are hot. I turn and walk out of the room.

I am thirty-five, I am thirty-five, I chant as I walk to my room. I pass Frances’s door – the door to what should have been a different room altogether. I can hear her practising her latest one-woman monologue. ‘Call me, Adolf!’ she’s screaming. ‘Call me! CALL ME!’

She gets funding for this shit. It’s all a bit much.

THEY SAY

screens at bedtime are bad for your brain, but the sensation of holding a phone is, I find, therapeutic. I find the shape of it reassuring. Soothing. I press it to my chest like a bible. Every few minutes I lift it up and look to see what has changed in the world. I feel the weight of my thumb. My heart pounds. My veins thrum. I am in every way alive and progressing. My brain is lit up like the Earth from space at night.

I have a couple more likes for the croissant. I think it’s reasonable to conclude now that it wasn’t worth it. I squandered an entire morning on that. I can’t keep building these cathedrals out of crumbs.

I scroll.

A friend of mine, a semi-famous scriptwriter, has posted a picture of herself in a lift. She isn’t smiling. She looks like she’s in a perfume ad. Like she’s thinking: Look at me, don’t look at me, who are you, I don’t trust you … It is very effective and confusing. I comment: