‘I mean, it’s an oxymoron though, isn’t it, having a column in a feminist magazine.’
Mia stares at me. ‘Do you mean a column as in an erection? Are we still doing phallus chat? COME ON. Brand too strong for some punk-ass bear to stop this wave. Make it gain traction.’
I swallow. ‘I understand, Mia.’
I do not.
She starts to walk away and turns back to say: ‘The headline of this conversation is: don’t hold back. Explode everything about what living with other women is really like. Put a grenade up the arse of that female utopia.’
‘Got it.’
Simone follows Mia, giving me a hefty side-eye.
Vivienne walks to the kitchenette zone and starts wrenching at the coffee machine. ‘Why are you chewing your fingers?’ she asks me. ‘Anxiety?’
‘No, it’s because I think I’m fucking delicious.’
I check my likes once more (forty-two, I should really kill myself) and start to write.
I stop typing every two minutes or so and let my thumb and thoughts zip round in a fast, looping flight. This, this, this, this. Back to work for a few sentences. Back round again. This, this, this. My head teems.
This is how I think:
I am doing what I should be doing: writing. Oh that’s quite good. I can do a good sentence when I put my mind to it – no wait, it’s terrible, why am I so terrible? Am I so terrible because of that time I kissed my male friend even though I was in a relationship because I have no way of separating platonic heterosexual friendship from groundwork for a sexual encounter? Oh, there’s something about politics! I should know more about politics. I will like it so that people think I know about politics. Or am I so terrible because I once tweeted a line of my own poetry after I’d been up all night and someone replied: Pull your head out your ass once in a while, and it was the brother of someone I once dated. No I am terrible because someone once commented on a column – apropos of nothing – YOU HAVE NO INTEGRITY. I am obsessed with whoever wrote that. How dare they be so right about me. It was the top comment, too, so it lives forever as the first thing you see beneath the piece – I can’t believe it can’t be removed on legal grounds. Ugh, this woman with the self-care haikus is awful. Her podcast is no. 2 in the charts. I should do a podcast. But what would my podcast be about? Maybe politics. Maybe politics for people who know nothing about politics. Like me. I am A WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE. I just need to find the time. I don’t know how people find the time to do podcasts. I can’t even find the time to finish this senten—
My phone pings with a message. I pounce on it.
It’s one of my lodgers. Sid.
Hey have you seen the half avocado that was in the fridge? x
She sends me daily micro-aggressions like this.
I reply:
Yes I ate it for breakfast, thought it would be okay as you ate half my sourdough last week x
That wasn’t me, that was Jonah, as you know I am gluten free x
He was staying in your room for the night tho x
He is his own person, why am I accountable for his actions? x
Fine, I’ll buy you another avocado. A whole one x
Not much good to me right now is it? Not to worry! Thank you, I do appreciate you replacing it x
I keep telling myself this lodger situation is only for a while, but I don’t know how I’ll ever afford to live in that house on my own. I just probably need to work harder, somehow. I should be a slashy. Journalist/podcaster/politician. How hard can it be to be a politician anyway? They’re all floundering and resigning these days. I can flounder and resign! Especially for cash. I’ll give it some thought when I get some time. I have three lodgers at the moment: Sid, Frances and Moon. They’re all in their early twenties, which makes me feel great. Usually, when I get in, they’re colonising the lounge. The other day when I got in they’d been at an all-day festival at Victoria Park. Swathed across the sofa, bleached and feathered, they looked like a gang of crooked fairies. The evil fairies that kill babies. Those kind of fairies.
Mia comes over. She has a print-out of my column in her hand.
‘Well it’s not going to start the revolution,’ she says. ‘But it might light a few torches in some under-educated backwaters. Now, do you have any candid photos of these days?’
‘I’m sure I can root something out,’ I say.
‘Excellent. Keep it halal.’
I look at my nearest desk-neighbour, confused. My desk-neighbour whispers: ‘She’s trying to make it a thing. Like kosher.’
I nod at Mia. She gives me an empty fist bump and walks away.
I pull out my laptop and start to go through my scanned old photos, but I end up looking at photos of me and Art. I stall over a photo of my mother and Art in a bar. They have their arms around each other. I recall how my mother burst in that night – in stilettos – and shouted (she always shouts, to be fair – no no: she projects): ‘Get me a seat, would you? MY BALLS ARE KILLING ME.’ Everyone in the bar looked – which was what she wanted, of course. Art thought she was the most. Showboats, both of ’em.
‘Your wit’s hers,’ Art said, more than once.
However, one likes to think the apple fell a little further from the wit tree, rolled a good way across the field of wit, coming to rest at the foot of Wit Mountain.
Anyway – she was so nice to him that night. Too nice. She’d never been nice to anyone I’d introduced her to before. But she was all over Art from the get-go. When he went to the Gents, I said: ‘You seem … very eager to please him. Not like you.’
After all, she’d said it countless times: Darling, who needs a man when you have a detached house, a personal trainer and a Teasmade?
‘What do you mean, it’s not like me?’ She did innocent eyes.
I did cynical ones. ‘You’ve always been rude to my boyfriends.’
‘I like his energy. It complements yours. And mine.’
I sat back. ‘Are you making a play for him? Because if you are, this situation is veering horribly close to cliché.’
‘Pahaha! Making a play – what a notion.’
‘Because you actually described yourself earlier as a “gymslip mum”. You actually used those words.’
‘It’s as simple as this: I think he’s good for you.’
‘I’m good as I am. I don’t need anyone to make me better.’
‘I know that. But I also know—’
‘What?’
‘How it gets, sometimes.’
In my head I thought she might mean ‘lonely’, but I didn’t want to push it, and anyway Art was coming back. And how could she be lonely, this woman who professed to be constantly harangued and harassed by the voices of spirits, which invaded her thoughts like rampant toddlers, or so she said. I once asked her: How do you switch off? She winked and raised her gin glass to me.
She put her hand on my arm. ‘But you must comb through his teenage years with him. Don’t let him be evasive. Don’t let his own … toxic experiences stop him … experiencing things with you.’
‘Thanks, but I don’t need relationship advice from someone who hasn’t had a relationship since the nineties.’
‘Well what do you call this?’
‘What?’