Kiss Me First Page 6

  I thought about suicide all the time. I thought it was the answer – literally. I used to sit in my room and imagine I had this calculator and I would type in all these details of my life and then I would press the ‘equals’ button and the word SUICIDE would appear in the panel, in those red LED letters. I tried once at college, storing up all the pills I could get my hands on and then went into a hospital and locked myself in the staff toilet and took them, my thinking being that no one would be shocked by dead bodies there, and it would be easy to dispose of me. But of course, I didn’t think that if they found me, they’d have all the equipment they needed to pump my stomach, and that’s what happened. Logic has never been my strong suit.

  After that my parents came and took me home and they were totally confused and upset by this creature they had created. Well, dad was confused but as dopey and nice as ever, but mum freaked out. Like she was disgusted. She could barely touch me, all she could talk about was how I needed a haircut, or some new fucking lapis lazuli supplier she had found in Thailand, or anything that wasn’t about what I had just done. It wasn’t that she was upset about it, couldn’t bear it – she was angry. That’s when I realized she was toxic. It was this sudden realization, and all my past came into focus. It was like, if I behaved myself and was pretty and nice and agreed with her, then everything was OK, it fitted into her image. But now I was ill it was like I was damaged goods, and she kept saying that it wasn’t her fault, I didn’t get it from her side of the family, her perfect Chilean aristocratic family. I remember once she told me I was wasting my youth on being fucked up, that when she was my age she had been married twice and had two children. I told her that it wasn’t my life’s ambition to get married and knocked up at seventeen, leave the poor guy when he turned out to be less successful than I’d hoped, travel to London and find a nice, dopey rich guy to take me and my toddler son on, and spend the rest of my life dominating him and spending his money and flouncing around like some cut price Frieda Kahlo. With the moustache but without the talent. As you can imagine that didn’t go down very well.

  I had counselling, which was fucking useless – no offence – and various combinations of drugs. The pills zombied me out, made me into this numb person who didn’t really feel anything, sadness or happiness or anything. On pills, I’m not a person, I’m, like, a log. There was a sort of novelty at first in having this ‘normal’ life, going to the pub, watching TV, being able to sleep for eight hours like the rest of the world. But I missed the mania. It was fun, you know? And it was a big part of me. Without it, it was like I was an impoverished aristo living in a huge pile where most of the rooms were shut up and covered in dustsheets, whilst I was confined to a chilly parlour. I was just existing, not living.

  Then the medication stopped being as effective, and I started to slide back, and then they tried other combinations and it went on for months, for years, trying these drugs, getting bad side effects or just missing the high and going off them, getting into trouble, having these amazing nights, these crushing lows. I’d get jobs, lose them, have boyfriends, fuck them up, move into places, have to move on. It was all so fucking repetitive.

  Around then I realized something – that whatever anyone said to me, whatever pills I took, whatever therapy I had, the best it could do was mask the problem. Whatever this thing was in my head, it would be there for ever. Therapy’s bullshit, labels are bullshit. The other day you were saying something about ‘beating’ manic depression, like it’s a dragon to be slain or something, but I don’t feel like that. It’s this thing that is part of me, ingrained into my character, and I will have to live with it until I die. There’s no way out. This is it. I read this quote once from this woman which was ‘No hope of a cure, ever, for being me’, and that’s exactly how I feel.

  Every day, when I wake up, I have to make the decision whether or not I can bear to live with that. The thing is, now I know the script. I know what happens to me. When I’m drugged I might feel on an even keel but I’m only half alive. I’m just existing. All my fire and creativity goes. And then when I’m in a manic phase I’m too alive. But as I get older the manic phases are decreasing and the depressive ones are becoming more frequent.

  I haven’t got a career to speak of – nice middle-class girl, all that money on education, all those possibilities. I’ve squandered it entirely, as my mum would say.

  If I’m not on pills, then I’m crazy and I hurt people and I want to die. And if I am on pills, then I lack my fire, and I don’t feel things deeply, I’m just shuffling through life like everyone else, using up resources, eating food and shitting it out. They make me not think properly about things – I have the same opinions as the newspapers, take the line of least resistance. The other day in the pub my friends were having an argument about whether you should tip in restaurants even if the service is crap, and I couldn’t be bothered to take a position. I used to be a waitress, it’s a subject I should feel strongly about, but I just don’t have the will and energy to engage any more. I’m living a mundane life, just for the sake of it. And what’s the point of that?

  And when I look at the future, I can only see more of this same old shit, but with me older. When I look at my face in the mirror now, I can see the beginnings of major lines – you know, the ones old women have, like mum would have if she hadn’t had so much surgery – and the future is just there, laid out in front of me. I’ve probably got a few years left in me before my face starts to fall, and I become middle-aged. Men’s eyes have already started to slide over me. I imagine my face as the subject of a time-lapse film, those lines rapidly getting deeper, mouth turning down into a frown, gums receding, white hairs sprouting. And then finally crumbling into dust. No, how could I forget – before that, senility. All that life and experience and memories turned to mush, and ending up pulling down my trousers in the newsagent, like dad. I’m going to be buried alive by my body and I don’t want it.

  You asked me the other day about children. I’m not going to have them, I wouldn’t trust myself with them. I can’t look after myself, how could I have children?

  And you know what, I’ve had my fun. For all the shittiness, for all the people I’ve hurt and time I’ve wasted, all the nights in stinking Soho clubs, the mistakes I’ve made, at least I’ve lived, which is more than you can say for lots of people. But now, I know what it’s like and I don’t want to do it any more. I don’t see it as a sad thing, particularly. I just don’t see the point in repeating the same things over and over again, becoming more and more invisible, going to sleep and waking up, always doubting my own instincts, feeling either half alive or out of control. I just don’t want to do it any more.

  It finished there. After a moment, I opened a new document on my computer. I had noticed an inconsistency in her account. In the CV she had called the band she managed Grievous Mary, whilst in the biography it was Godless Mary. I made a note to ascertain from her which name was correct. Then I emailed back to acknowledge receipt of the documents, and tell her we could proceed.

  Friday, 19th August 2011

  Two things happened this afternoon. A couple who seem relatively sane said they might remember Tess, and I got online.

  My day got off to a better start. To avoid repetition of the unpleasant awakening the morning before, I had gone to sleep with the tent flaps open, lying on my back with my head positioned half outside and my eye mask around my neck. When the brightness of the sun woke me I slithered out of the tent and repositioned my mattress under the shade of the tree whereupon I put on my eye mask and immediately went back to sleep. It was a minimal disruption, and I awoke again at 2 p.m. feeling quite rested.

  After three biscuits and a quick wash with my Wet Wipes I took Tess’s photo and did a round of the site. Some new arrivals were setting up camp near the main clearing. It wasn’t immediately clear which of the couple was the male and which the female; both had long, limp dark hair and were skinny, the girl with not much in the bust department. The man had big b
lack plugs in his earlobes, the size of a one-euro coin.

  I asked them whether they had been here the previous summer. They said yes, so I showed them the photo. They consulted each other in a foreign language, and finally the man said that they did remember an English woman on her own who looked similar, but her hair was longer and they were pretty sure that her name wasn’t Tess. Something longer, beginning with S.

  Of course, I had anticipated that Tess might have used a different name when she was out here. I asked them to remember any more details of her clothes or what she had said. They couldn’t but said they would tell me if anything came back to them. I won’t get too excited, though. More evidence is needed.

  Afterwards, I went back to my mattress under the tree, and had just dozed off when I felt a little tug on my hand. It was Milo. He said, ‘Annie says, do you want to come with us?’ Over at the van, Annie had slid the back door shut and was in the driver’s seat. She said she was going into the main town to go to the bank, and thought I might like to come along and get some food.

  ‘A woman can’t live on biscuits alone,’ she said.

  ‘Will there be an Internet cafe there?’ I asked.

  ‘Should think so,’ she said. ‘It’s a big tourist dump by the sea.’

  I sat in the front with Milo; the baby was in the back. I’d been in a van before, when we moved mum’s furniture to the storage centre, but this was different. For a start it was ancient and the air inside was hot and unsavoury, like plastic, milk and old socks baking in an oven. The floor was thick with books, leaflets and CDs, and the windows were plastered with tatty, bright stickers. There was a strange furry thing dangling from the mirror, and when Milo saw me inspecting it he told me it was the foot of his pet rabbit.

  ‘It was a natural death,’ said Annie, as she wrenched the steering wheel with what seemed like a huge amount of effort. The van made worrying noises from deep inside, like the sound of mum clearing her throat in the morning.

  As we began crawling down the bumpy path, Annie said, ‘So, what’s the deal with this friend you’re looking for?’

  I had already given Annie the story once, of course, when I had shown her Tess’s photo on the first day, but started reciting again how I was looking for an old friend who I believed was still in the area. She cut me off.

  ‘No, I know that you’re looking for her. But why?’ She glanced over at me with a sly little smile. ‘Do you love her?’

  When I didn’t answer, she said, ‘It’s OK if you do, you know.’

  I thought it best not to dignify her question with a response, so I said nothing and looked out of the window. It worked, and she changed the subject, offering up information about herself. Although I wasn’t particularly interested, when I realized I didn’t have to say anything back I relaxed a bit, and there was something quite soothing about looking at the scenery and the lilt of her voice as we drove along.

  Her American accent reminded me of Adrian, and when I closed my eyes I was taken back to his podcasts; although, of course, what Annie was saying was not nearly as interesting. She talked about her life back in Connecticut, where she had a small business making handmade wooden furniture and shared a house with another single mother, and about Milo’s father. She had ‘given him the heave-ho’ when Milo was two, but he saw his son sporadically.

  ‘Bet you’re wondering about the little one, huh?’ she said, gesturing to the baby strapped to a seat in the back, although I hadn’t been. She said that she had wanted another baby but didn’t want the hassle of a man, so had had a ‘well-timed screw’ with a stranger. She confided that she sometimes worried about whether the children would be damaged by not having a father figure in their lives.

  ‘I don’t think fathers are that important,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, really?’ she said.

  I told her that I had never known my father, that he had disappeared when my mum was still pregnant and it hadn’t done me any harm at all. Annie made a ‘hmm’ noise, and then said, ‘Did your mum mind not having a partner?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘We had each other. She always said she didn’t need anything else as long as she had me.’

  Annie asked me about my father, and I told her what I knew: that he used to work in Ireland selling cars, that his dream was to own a racehorse and that he had elegant hands, like mine.

  As we drove, I noticed the landscape changing. Now we were out of the hilly area and onto level ground, the trees had been replaced by large low tents made out of tatty white plastic, one following on from another so that they seemed to form one never-ending structure. I asked Annie what they were, and she said they were greenhouses, growing salad for supermarkets.

  ‘It’s where your tomatoes come from,’ she said. I could have told her that I didn’t eat tomatoes, but I didn’t.

  When Annie stopped the van for Milo to have a pee I got a closer look at the greenhouses. The plastic was opaque but you could see shadows inside, and in places the sheets were torn or had come away from the structure so you could glimpse behind. I saw endless rows of leaves and shapes of black men, stooped amongst the greenery. It must have been unbearably hot in there. What was especially noticeable was the silence. The manual labour sites I’ve passed before are always quite noisy, but there I could hear no sounds of voices or music, just the soft hiss of the water sprinklers. Annie had told me that there was a drought in the area – the river near the commune had almost dried up – so it seemed odd that these greenhouses were using up so much water. Immoral, almost.

  Back in the van, Annie explained that the workers were African, mostly illegal immigrants. The coast on this part of Spain was almost the nearest part of Europe to Africa, she said, and the immigrants would get on boats and cross over secretly at night in search of a better life. Some would venture further into Europe but most stayed here, working in the greenhouses, because they had no papers.

  After an hour and fifteen minutes we reached the town. Annie parked crookedly by the road and said we should meet back there in an hour, and then she took the children off with her to the bank. I walked in what felt like the direction of the town centre. It was a sprawling, dusty place, with low-level buildings, and seemed oddly quiet and deserted. I found a sign with a picture of waves on it, which I took to be the sea, and followed it. Towards the beach the buildings grew in height, which seemed wrong to me, like tall people standing at the front of a crowd and blocking the view for everyone behind.

  The streets were busy nearer the seafront, full of holidaymakers. They couldn’t have looked more different from the people in the commune. Their clothes were normal, shorts and vests, and they were either very white, very pink, or overly tanned, but not in a way that made them look more attractive. People were sitting at tables outside cafes drinking beer, although it was only 4.30 p.m. Shops sold cheap plastic beach equipment and blared out pop music. One, oddly enough, was full of toasters and microwaves. All the signs on the shops and restaurants were in English, and the rows of newspapers outside the shops were English, too.

  I don’t know whether I was just relieved to be out of the commune, but I found it all quite pleasant. There was a breeze coming in from the sea, carrying on it a comforting blend of smells – chips, suntan lotion – and everyone looked familiar, like the people in Tesco Extra, only happier and more relaxed.

  After a few minutes wandering around, I found an Internet cafe. I paid two euros and logged on. At the terminal next to mine, a hugely fat woman with a breathing problem was looking at pictures of lawnmowers on eBay. First, I went to Facebook, but when I put in my details found that I had forgotten my password; it had been supplanted in my head by Tess’s. It took three tries to remember that it was mum’s second favourite TV programme, inspectormorse.

  Once in, the scroll of status updates on my page had so little meaning to me they might as well have been in Russian. Even the faces and the names of my ‘friends’ seemed unfamiliar; even when I used to see them in person at school I didn’
t really know them, and now they might as well have been total strangers. Tash, Emma, Karen – random names affixed to random silly young girls, all liking this, linking to that, getting excited about something or other.

  I logged out and checked my email. Fourteen messages, but they were all spam.

  After that, I just sat there, staring at the Google toolbar on the screen. I had spent days thinking about getting online, but now that I was, I couldn’t think what to do. I could hardly start a game of Warcraft; even if I remembered my login details after all this time, I only had forty-eight minutes before I had to meet Annie back at the van, barely enough time to get my avatar into his armour. I had a fanciful image of him being uncooperative and bolshie, hurt after all my months of neglect, refusing to put his arms into his chain-mail vest, letting the sword fall from his fingers when I placed it there.

  I logged off, with seventeen minutes still remaining on my time. Next to the Internet place was a small supermarket, and I went in. Inside it was freezing cold and goosebumps sprang up on my arms. It was a bit like a Londis, except half of the shop was taken up with alcohol. I was worried all the products would be in Spanish, or strange foreign food, but most were English, things I recognized, like Heinz Tomato Ketchup and Walkers Crisps. I bought three family sized bags of crisps and two packets of Hobnobs.

  After the shopping I still had almost half an hour to go before meeting Annie, so on impulse I decided to have a waffle in a cafe, attracted by the large colour photographs of the food displayed outside. The waitress spoke English. On the table next to me was an old man in a wheelchair, being fed what looked like a sausage sandwich by a woman of his age. It made me wonder whether mum and I should have made more of an effort to have a holiday in the final years. The subject had come up, but we decided that it would be too complicated, travelling with all the equipment and all the lifting. Seeing this couple beside me, however, made me think that it could have been possible. We wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere hot like Spain, because MS had made mum intolerant to heat, but perhaps we could have tried Cornwall. There was a series she liked that was filmed in a village there, and she had always wanted to visit it.