2 July
Last night was the last show. Evie came along. When we got back to the boarding house, I slipped into her bed, hoping we could fuck since the last time had been just after our row, and that had felt disconnected. She felt far away again. The gratitude, the relief, have gone. I wonder if she feels like we’re just rehearsing now.
10 July, London
E is a blind person to be guided. No. She sees too much. She can’t screen out the distractions you need to ignore to make safe/efficient progress down a London street. Head in the air, looking up, around, never ahead. Or swivelling with each beautiful freak who walks past, ignoring her. Evie’s feeling free, giddy with it, no longer a freak of the first rank.
Now Jack has moved in with Tamara, I’ve moved us into his room. The best room, the attic, where I am now, Evie making supper in the kitchen, down in the basement, full of green light from the garden down there, feels like it runs on for miles, getting wilder. The attic covers the whole house. You come up through a hole in the floor. Like camping, Evie says, laughing, and it’s true, the room is tent-shaped and we’ve draped fabric on the wall behind our mattress which Evie has christened Bedouin. As in, Let’s go to Bedouin now.
Orange walls. Two huge dusty skylights at either end we’ve covered in chiffon scarves — one seaweed green, one red — underwater or perpetual sunset depending on which end of the room you’re in. It’s hot in here, but we can’t leave the skylights open or pigeons gatecrash. We hear them constantly. So loud and close it feels like we’re eavesdropping. Our first day we left the skylights open to air the place. We came back, via the florist’s with armfuls of lilies I stole from outside the shop, to find a pigeon sitting on Bedouin. A terrible thing to chase it out, flapping and shitting everywhere. Evie dropped a wastepaper bin over it. I slid an LP (Harvest — sorry, Neil) underneath. The bin was openwork raffia. We could see it panic, trying to peck us through the holes as we bundled it out of the skylight.
There’s a broken piano in a corner of the room. Evie tries to play it sometimes. In another a stack of half-finished canvases. Impossible to guess what they were meant to be. All that’s left of the original ideas are pencil marks and vague brushstrokes. The room encourages laziness. Mostly we lie on Bedouin in the stifling heat, smoking pot and fucking, the room like a hothouse, the lilies shedding mustard dust on the floorboards.
Feel a bit lost. I wanted that tour. His doing, of course.
12 July
E loves the squat. A house full of young people after that big old place on her own with a madman in the attic. Today, we all sat in the kitchen, shelling peas from the garden (eating them sweet and raw from the pod as we did). Evie told the joke about the statues in Hyde Park and everyone laughed. She looked so pleased I could have kissed her.
15 July
Last night at dinner we were talking about star signs, and the others found out it’s E’s birthday soon. Michael suggested a house birthday dinner. Evie, I thought, would hate the fuss. I’d planned on serving her a special meal in Bedouin, Birgitte already cast as waitress (her first role in months). But no, Evie puffed up like a pigeon at the idea. I found this too funny. I think we’re her first real friends.
20 July
We wake up, and Bedouin feels like a womb. Today we are born, I say. Let’s go out into the world. We spend the whole day out in the garden, sunbathing naked.
25 July
The Faulty. E lying in Bedouin, naked and sweating as though knocked out by some tropical disease, eyes closed. No, not closed, screwed shut, as if what little light there is in here pains her. I apply more chiffon scarves to the window, wipe her body with damp flannels.
I put a record on and she says, Take it off, like she is choking.
I make her pink lemonade. She waves it away. I ask her, What is it? What is it, Evie, dear? She shakes her head slowly as though it hurts to move. A small tear is squeezed out, like the last drops of juice from the lemons.
26 July
Day two of the Faulty and she is lying now with her back to the room, face to the wall, staring at it, though there is nothing to see, no interesting cracks or whorls in the paintwork that might be turned into new planets and escaped to.
So I take an old postcard I saw in a pile of books downstairs, one showing a snowstorm in an Egyptian city, and I pin it to the wall, just in front of her. I couldn’t bear for her to stare at nothing like that. But she does not blink or focus on it or acknowledge my presence. This devastates me. I cannot stand to be ignored.
28 July
E beginning to walk and talk again. She doesn’t say much, but at least she is able to read. After three days without attention, barely existing for her, I am jealous of her books, as I am jealous of her staring into nothing and of her silence and of her sleep and of her dreams and yes, even of her Faulty.
That is, jealous of any time she is removed from me. Perhaps not jealous. Fearful, maybe. I don’t know what I am without her attention.
Growing times. In knowing Evie, and learning how Evie is beginning to know me, I begin to know myself. And so I am beginning to realize the extent of my jealousy. What a bitch! My need to be noticed. In between shows, I barely exist. Keep thinking about that tour I’ve missed out on. And now that Evie has been accepted by the others, I feel I exist a little less. She’s no longer the freak who needs me. Not here, at least.
Michael and Birgitte upset tonight since Finn cooked lamb in the vegetarian casserole dish. Delicious!
30 July
I found Evie’s birthday present today. No, like the best presents, it found me.
This is how. I wake up, and she’s not there. I can smell something cooking so I lie waiting for my breakfast until I realize she isn’t coming up. Find her in the kitchen with Michael. Eating food I don’t recognize, something Michael has made. Look! Eyes shining, spearing what looks like a slice of fried banana on her fork. Plantain! I haven’t had plantain since I was a girl! Taste it.
Ashamed to say I pull a face. Say Yuk, as though it’s disgusting. It wasn’t. It wasn’t anything really. Just tasted of fried oil.
Michael says they’re celebrating. That cat has this habit of never giving you quite enough information, so that you have almost to ask for it, and he makes you feel you’ve begged it off him. So I don’t ask what they’re celebrating and leave them to it. I go looking for Evie’s birthday present. No money. And I don’t want to lift it. Go down Trafalgar Square — a couple of hours’ statue-ing. Walk up Charing Cross Road and into all the second-hand bookshops. I want something big and antique with beautiful engravings. I find an edition of Paul et Virginie! One lovely engraving of them both, the same one from the box of matches. Paul stripped to the waist, trousers rolled up to his knees. Standing on a rock in the middle of a swollen river, trying to cross it, Virginie on his back. But I hadn’t enough money. Too late to earn more, so I walked until I hit Bloomsbury. That dusty part of the city left me feeling thirsty so I walked up Rosebery Avenue to Angel, then all the way along Upper Street, heading, I realized when I got there, for the William Camden. Had half a bitter I lingered over, exchanging humid glances with the boy (all eyes and lips) behind the bar. He came out to collect empties and as he leaned over to wipe my table I told him to follow me out back. A good cock, thick and hard. Nice surprise and all the hotter from someone so slight and pretty. I sat on a bin and sucked him, not off though. Brought him close — brought me close — then stood up, hitched up my dress. He slid my panties down then stayed there, licking. The sweetest tongue. Then we fucked, kissing. I came quick on that cock, quicker than I wanted, he held off for as long as he could but I saw it in his eyes when he just couldn’t any longer, and it was during his sharp last reflexive shudders, almost piercing, that I saw it, in a cardboard box full of junk by the bins. The tape recorder. After we had finished and he’d gone back inside, I picked up the tape recorder and put it in my bag.