Bonding, page 7
Despite the intense pleasure she gave me during those months, it wasn’t only about sex. There were moments of real tenderness between us. They often happened when we were doing nothing, or ‘power-dossing’ as she called it.
‘Half of London thinks they’re a fucking artist,’ she said one day while we were rambling around town. She was having a hard time at college and had decided that she hated her degree. Aesthetics, she told me, were just a form of manners and required a social hierarchy, something that couldn’t be maintained in an online world, no matter how much people tried to force it. And anyway, she was against hierarchy, so she didn’t care what they thought of her.
That night, as she lay beside me in her underwear, I watched her leafing through the book A Thousand Plateaus by the French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. She turned to face me.
‘It doesn’t work,’ she said.
‘What doesn’t?’
‘Art – it’s all bullshit isn’t it? It doesn’t achieve anything, it’s just a load of empty ambition. Let’s face it, it’s more important to act on things than it is to make art about them. The world’s fucked and it’s up to us to fix it. And that means working with technology because it’s the only thing that ever changes.’
‘What do you actually want to do?’ I said, although I’d started to hate these conversations. I’d already noticed her language changing. She’d started talking more and more in universals. Her thinking revolved around abstractions like rights, principles and freedoms. If it wasn’t a big idea, she wasn’t interested. Maybe this was what education was all about but it got on my nerves after a while. I remember wondering how long it would be before I could touch her mouth again. I wanted to kiss her, I could feel the warmth of her body against mine but I held back this time.
‘Come on, what do you want to change so much?’ I pushed her.
‘Inequality, unfairness.’
‘In what way?’
‘In every way.’
‘Be specific,’ I said, deciding to press her all the way for once. ‘Do you mean economically? Under the law?’
‘Both.’ She put her book down. ‘And in everyday life.’
‘But how?’
‘By any means necessary. It shouldn’t take this long.’
‘But how would you make it happen?’
‘Like I said, I’d do whatever it takes.’
‘But there would have to be so many rules.’
‘But there are rules already, aren’t there? They’re just set up to favour the wrong people.’
‘You hate rules, though.’
‘I don’t hate rules,’ she got up, exasperated, and disappeared into the kitchen. When she came back, she leant against the doorway holding a tub of ice cream, which she ate straight from the container. The semi-transparent fabric of her bra was extremely distracting.
‘By any means necessary?’ I said. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Why not?’
•
For her final exhibition, Lara made a film called ‘Doing What You Love’. She’d filmed the two of us doing what we did almost every day, which was wandering around the city aimlessly. The video tracked me as I rose up the escalators at Canary Wharf, wandered through the crowds at Churchill Place and then crossed the bridge at West India Quay. The film was supported by a social media campaign in which she’d tried to crowdfund our efforts. ‘Support Us Doing What We Love,’ she’d written on her GoFundMe account, which had raised almost eighteen pounds. ‘It’s about the desire to love your work,’ Lara told Dr Manning. ‘It’s about the fantasy of labour as a means of self-expression.’ I watched supportively as she spoke. ‘And finally,’ she concluded, ‘it’s about the possibility of a world in which all work is meaningful.’ The film seemed to go down well. There was a long discussion afterwards about ‘the marketization of the culture’ and ‘the cul-de-sac of aesthetics as resistance under the conditions of late Capitalism’. When I met her at the party afterwards, she was in a weird mood.
‘Listen,’ she said, pulling me aside, ‘I’ve been meaning to say this for a while. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve started seeing someone else.’
I was so shocked, I left right then. I thought she’d call me afterwards but she didn’t. I kept tabs on her from a distance but weeks passed without any communication. The silence almost killed me. I couldn’t stand it. I barely slept that summer and when I did pass out, I dreamt about her. I cried alone at night for weeks. I poured thousands of words into an exercise book that, when I read it back, was mostly obsessive drafts of letters I wanted to send her explaining that she’d made a mistake, that I loved her, that she must have misunderstood. I never sent her any of these letters – I was too proud and also I knew I couldn’t take it if she still didn’t care. I wanted her back but, if I was honest with myself, it was the rejection itself that annihilated me, because it confirmed what I’d always secretly felt: that someone like her was out of reach for someone like me. There’s nothing like being shown a glimpse of an infinitely more beautiful world and then having the door slammed in your face. I felt paralysed. It went beyond anything I’d experienced before. I didn’t think I’d ever get over her. For the first time in my life, I almost failed my exams.
I went through months of this dysthymia and then a very long, drawn-out flu. It must have been almost spring the following year by the time I finally woke up one morning and realized to my surprise, that I was probably going to survive her.
We didn’t speak again until our final year. This time things were different. I saw her far more clearly. It put us on a different footing. And in a strange way, we became friends. Or at least, something like friends.
•
Whenever I came to a critical moment in my life, I had a habit of switching off completely. It happened automatically but I liked to think of it as something I’d chosen, a sort of spiritual practice, similar to how footballers say you’ll get the goal when you stop focusing on it. It happened later that week as I made the journey to Plum Valley in Soho. It was a dim sum place that we’d once considered ‘our thing’ in that clannish way that teenage girls do. Although, looking back, I sometimes wondered if she’d planted that one strategically. She was good at making things ‘a thing’ so you felt as if you shared a secret language, something intimate that no one else understood. I sometimes thought it was a skill she’d picked up from moving around so much, having to start new schools, make friends, reel people in. Or maybe I was being too hard on her, maybe we’d just liked dim sum. Plum’s had started in the early days, before the first time she’d discarded me. I sometimes caught myself fighting her spectre in my head, probably because despite everything, I still felt a certain way about her. It was a combination of trepidation and the immortal charge of teenage lust. I never knew what she was going to do next, she seemed completely free of inhibition; and although I didn’t trust her in the slightest, I got a weird high from being around her. There was a vicarious and painful thrill in it. It was like pressing on a bruise.
As I descended into the Tube I thought about her many teenage philosophies. The one that came to mind was built on a single concept from which she’d developed a complicated universe of sub-theories, all of them logically compatible as long as you bought into the basic premise, which was this: no one should inflict themselves on anyone else unless they were happy on their own. The ‘happy’ part was ill-defined but it basically meant that you couldn’t need them. You were supposed to be independent, whatever that meant. I thought about it as I boarded the train. Most people would have thought of me as independent, in the sense that I made an OK living. On the other hand, I was introverted, I didn’t go out much and I hated selling myself online. As a result, I spent a lot of time alone. I looked at the other women in the carriage. We were all doing our best to hold our lives together, all of us sitting there in our cheap clothes, our bags full of gadgets – gadgets that weren’t so cheap, each of them silently imposing on us. We did our jobs, we paid our bills, we called our parents now and then. Our social profiles were well-maintained, our CVs up to date. Here at least, I supposed, was a tangible measure of our worth.
The problem, as far as I could see, was that the situation wasn’t sustainable. None of it was enough on its own. Our salaries weren’t enough, our jobs weren’t enough and the people in our ‘networks’ weren’t enough. It all seemed OK at first, it was even fun up to a point – let’s say around my age. Beyond that, life began to bite. Independence was expensive – or to put it another way, freedom came only at a cost. And then there was the loss of all the other things we’d always taken for granted – the expectations with which we’d been raised – of a home, of family, of what used to be called a life. All of these had become harder to achieve. They’d morphed from unremarkable norms into terrifying spectres of a world that wasn’t there. Even friendship became a struggle over time. Lives diverged. Things fell apart, slowly at first and then with gathering speed. And the truth was, despite the fighting talk, it wasn’t at all clear what was supposed to take their place.
The journey clarified my thoughts, although I missed my stop and had to circle back at Bond Street where I got caught in the rush-hour crowds. Underlying all of it, I realized, was the hard problem of attraction. The thing was, as you got older, it became more difficult to feel it. Or at least to feel it for anyone who might actually want you back. Things deteriorated fast as time went on. Looking at the mass of humanity around me, it was difficult not to feel a little nauseated. I tried to move away from the old guy whose hand was brushing unnecessarily against my skirt. It didn’t help that porn had pervaded everything. It made normal bodies seem disgusting. As a result, whole industries were now dedicated to servicing people’s needs, pumping out cheap and fast alternative routes to orgasm. They spared us all the humiliation of having to deal with one another. As Lara would say, they gave us ‘independence’. Or rather, instead of depending on each other, we now depended on things we had to buy. A life built exclusively on the whims of venture capital.
Lara was already there when I arrived. She was wearing a black silk shirt that I recognized immediately as Saint Laurent. I’d been there when she’d bought it – she’d acquired it on a power doss in Kilburn. Even second-hand, it had cost more than I’d been paying in rent at the time. Although the rent had gone up since then. It had risen faster than the cost of clothes. Clothes down, rent up, I thought, like the good data manager that I was. Lara’s stock had risen in the past few years. I wondered if she thought mine had fallen.
This time she stood to kiss me on the cheek. I let her do it, although I wasn’t sure. I noticed she still smelt the same. She didn’t wear perfume but the scent of her pulsed through my chest.
Plum’s looked different now. The old wooden chairs had gone. There were now black leather banquettes that divided the space into booths. We sat near the back in a dark corner where the brickwork had been painted green. We made small talk for a while. She showed me a photo of her flat. In the lounge was an antique leaning mirror and an old de Sede leather sofa.
I wondered how much money she was making. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said not much. Not in terms of salary anyway, the company was still too young. On the other hand, its valuation had risen, I’d seen the stats earlier that week. I wondered if you could expense things like sofas.
‘I know I haven’t been around much lately,’ she said, cautiously.
‘It’s been a while.’ I played along.
‘Things have been crazy.’
‘We’re all busy,’ I lied.
She looked good. I’d made an effort this time, but I still felt lacklustre in her presence. She’d told me once that I was pretty ‘when I wanted to be’. She’d said it approvingly, as if she found beauty uninteresting, as if there was nothing more banal than being beholden to it. I wondered if she still thought that now. I’d read a post on her app about whether women should make the first move. It had discussed why so many didn’t, why they preferred pouring their efforts into their looks – even though waiting for male approval was out of step with the times. It said the risk of rejection was too forbidding, that it was about mitigating failure – although as a tactic, apparently, it made real rejection harder to take. Stock up, stock down.
‘So you’ve finally made it,’ I said.
‘Work’s going fine, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You can talk about it, if you want.’
For some reason, she seemed reluctant.
‘It’s going OK,’ she said noncommittally. ‘It seems to be the only thing that is.’
This was uncharacteristically reflective of her.
‘Work?’ I said. ‘As opposed to life?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I can’t believe that’s true.’
‘I’m not complaining.’
She ordered a bottle of wine and poured two small glasses. I drank mine immediately. She stabbed a dumpling and chewed on it, thoughtfully.
‘There’s not much else to say. I mean, I’ve already tried to hire you.’
‘Did you really think that was a good idea?’
‘Why not? I think you’re talented.’
‘I thought you said I was a soulless cog.’
‘Actually,’ she said, refilling my glass, ‘I think the phrase you’re looking for is “soulless interchangeable cog”.’
‘You said you found my face depressing.’
‘That party was dire,’ she said, stifling a smile. ‘In my defence, I might have been a little drunk because I was bored out of my fucking mind. I can’t believe you worked at that place.’
‘They sacked me.’
‘Thank God for that.’
She put her bowl down and then picked it up again, poking ambivalently at a second dumpling.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Am I the only girl you’ve ever been with?’
‘You know you are.’
‘I thought so.’
‘Why?’
‘No reason.’
‘You don’t have to look so smug.’
‘Come on!’
‘You put me off for life.’
She slid her bowl across the table and left it alone this time. Then she leaned back and watched my face as if she was assessing a complicated problem.
10
The next day was a Friday. I had an interview in Holborn. It was for an education start-up, something to do with ‘redefining knowledge’. They always had taglines that were grandiose but also bland, like ‘globalizing breathing’ or ‘exploding words’. It had a kind of poetry to it, I thought, as I made my way down Kingsway, like haiku but without either the heart or the intellect.
The inside of the building was full of unrelated groups of people, some of them hunched on little pouffes, others tapping on laptops on the long refectory tables. It was one of those amorphous offices that was supposed to allow for fluid working, but I couldn’t find whoever was meant to meet me. I’d already signed in at reception and was sitting on a blob-shaped sofa in the lobby. I must have been there for a long time because eventually I got a call from the recruiter. They wanted to know why I was late. I had no idea what was going on. I gave it another twenty minutes and left.
There didn’t seem much point in going home so I walked all the way up Oxford Street. I wandered into Selfridges and made my way through the fragrance hall. The scent of apricot overwhelmed me. It was coming from the Hermès stand, which centred on a huge pyramid of bottles arranged on an up-lit plastic plinth. There must have been thousands of products on the shelves, each one grouped by theme: the fresh ones, the classic ones, the modern ones and the stranger, more experimental offerings. It was a vast explosion of options that, on some level, were all suffused with romance. I picked up a bottle of Exotic Blossom by Michael Kors. ‘Flirtatious and optimistic,’ the description said, ‘the hypnotic aroma of juicy mango, smooth rose petals and musk transports you to a sensual oasis.’ The droplets clung to my wrist. The scent was sweeter than I’d expected, a cloud of fruit salad tinged with citrus. I wondered what the floor space must be worth to justify a business of this size. Markets had always been illusory in part but this one seemed to constitute a trade in almost nothing more than pure, unbridled romantic longing.
I’d made plans to meet Tom that night. I had nothing to do in the afternoon so I walked all the way home, took a shower and spent a couple of hours trying not to look like someone who had spent the day aimlessly wandering the streets. We’d made loose arrangements for dinner but he was running late so I met him at his office. The reception at Churchill Analytics was quiet, neutral, air-conditioned. Tom was on the phone when I arrived, leaning his head against the glass partition that divided his space from the bank of communal desks in the main area.
While I waited, I recognized Grace from the island. She was sitting in an almost identical glass cube, this one with a slightly larger desk on which were arranged some personal items – a colourful card, a water bottle and a framed photo of her and Niall with a small child, a dark-haired daughter. She came out and walked down the aisle towards me.
‘I remember you!’ she said. ‘He’s not making you wait, is he?’
‘He looks busy.’
‘He’s not that busy.’ She poked her head into his office. ‘Look who I’ve found.’
He waved helplessly. When he finally emerged, he was apologetic.
‘Don’t believe anything she tells you,’ he said.
‘There’s no dirt on him,’ Grace replied. ‘He’s the most boring man I’ve ever met.’
