"Adam..."
He gets up. "I'm sorry for barging in here. This isn't the right place for me."
He's right. I fuck old men and become obsessed with curses and rare books. He needs someone more sensible than me to talk to. I look at his old clothes and messed-up hair and imagine his dark, strong forearms. I wonder if he's ever even been to bed with anyone?
I take a deep breath. Why am I always the wrong person?
And, without either of us seeming to do anything, we're now pressing against each other, kissing as though it's midnight at the party at the end of the world. I feel his cock get hard, and I push myself against him. This feels different. There's something real about this that I thought I'd forgotten.
"I'm sorry," he says after about twenty seconds, pulling away. "I can't do this."
"I don't know what happened there," I say, acting as if I agree that this is a bad idea. I can't catch his eye. I turn towards the stove, as if I've got something important to cook. Can you have a disappointment cake? A rejection cake? An unhappy birthday cake?
"I'm sorry," says Adam, behind me. "I'm ... I shouldn't drink. I'm not used to it."
By the time I say sorry, he's gone. I'm a fucking idiot. Or am I? When attractive young guys offer me something, they always take it away again pretty soon afterwards, so it's probably best that this never happened. What's a man like Adam going to get from me, anyway? If you're someone like Adam, you can sleep with anyone. If he had a shower and put on a suit or something, well, I can't imagine any woman turning him down. With someone like Adam, it doesn't matter about my iPod, or my smooth neck, or my tits that have not (yet) sagged. I don't have cellulite, and men over the age of fifty therefore feel lucky to sleep with me. What have I got that Adam could possibly want? In the sexual economy, I've got millions in the offshore account called "Older Men," but I think I'd get turned down for an account anywhere else.
I used to have a black marker pen, but I don't know where it went. It was a big, phallic, chemical-smelling thing, and I used it to write the number of this flat on one of the bins in Luigi's backyard. But that was, what, a year and a half ago? It's not in the kitchen drawer, and it isn't in the cup of pens on the shelf. Damn. The closest thing I can find is a black Biro. I do have a white piece of cardboard, however. It's the backing from a cheap pair of fishnet tights I bought from the market last spring, and it's been lying on my chest of drawers since then. So I draw the black circle on the card: It takes five minutes just to color it in.
I also have a black mark on my arm; the place where I dug the pen in experimentally to see what it would feel like; to see if it would be like it used to be.
The holy water looks murky in the glass vial. I get the page from The End of Mr. Y and lay it on the kitchen counter to check the instructions. OK, so I have to mix the Carbo-veg into the holy water and succuss the mixture several times. That's just shaking, surely? I seem to remember from the homoeopathy books that it is. As I reach up to the cupboard to get the Carbo-veg out of the sugar tin, the single page from Lumas's book floats onto the floor. I pick it up and note that the edge is now slightly damp. I remember seeing some Sellotape in the kitchen drawer, so I get that out and spend the next few minutes carefully repairing the book, matching up the jagged tear in the page with the jagged tear left behind between pages 130 and 133. You can see the join, obviously, but the page is now part of the book again.
I remember that you're not supposed to touch homoeopathic medicines, so I tip one of the pills onto a metal spoon. It makes a tiny clinking sound. Then I unplug the cork from the vial and put the pill inside. It bobs on the surface for a second and then sinks, the water becoming cloudier as it begins to dissolve. My heart's a little rubber ball bouncing against my rib cage. I don't know why I'm nervous: All I'm doing is adding a little sugar pill to some water. Still, I stand there shaking the mixture for several minutes and then, remembering something I read earlier on, I give the vial a couple of little taps on a tea towel folded up on the work surface. I look, and see that the pill has completely dissolved into the water. So now I'm going to drink it.
Am I? Is holy water sterile, or even hygienic? How many people's fingers have been in it? Probably not that many. Come on, Ariel. But ... Does the priest put it out at night, or in the morning? This is stupid. Cross with myself for caring about anything as banal as how many people's fingers have been in the water, I uncork the vial and force myself to drink a large mouthful. There. Now I don't have to think about it anymore. I take the piece of cardboard and lie down on the sofa, drunk and tired and now feeling a little sick.
Black dot, black dot. A smear. And then I'm asleep.
I dream of mice. I dream of a mouse-world, bigger than this one, with a faint voice saying to me You have choice, or something like that, all night long.
I don't wake up until gone ten o'clock, shivering in my jeans and jumper on the sofa, with hard winter light glaring at me through the kitchen window. I must have dropped the piece of cardboard as I fell asleep, because it's on my stomach now. In daylight it looks pathetic: a scribble on a cheap, floppy bit of off-white card. I should have done better, really, but I was quite drunk. So it didn't work. Or it didn't work because I messed it up. How long do you keep trying, though, before you realize that you've been fooled by fiction (again) and it's the familiar, disappointing world that is real? You have choice. I have the choice to stop obsessing about being cursed. I have the choice to stop drinking concoctions suggested by rare books. I could try to sell the book, presumably, even though it is damaged? But even as I think this I know that nothing would make me give it up. So I'll keep the book, but go back to normal. I'll write something about curses for the magazine. I'll get on with my Ph.D. A chapter on Lumas about the blurring between fiction and nonfiction, and the thought experiment that becomes a physical experiment. A trick that makes you see the world anew...
Except I don't feel like I'm seeing the world anew. I feel like I haven't even been to sleep. And my stomach hurts, like period pain but slightly higher up. That water must have been contaminated. Maybe I should eat something. Maybe that will help.
There's still some soya milk in the fridge, so I put porridge on the stove, and coffee. As I go to the bedroom for a different jumper I realize how cold and tired I really am. I think I need a scarf as well. As I pull the thick black sweater over my head and wrap a long black woollen scarf around my neck, I look out of the window. There are little icicles hanging off the inside window frame: the kind of detail you vow to recall for people at some point in the future when your life is sorted out and you want to tell an anecdote about how poor you were that winter, and how dismal your flat was. But every day I grow less and less confident in that future. I'm not sure I want it, anyway. Ha ha, when I was poor. Ha, ha, have you seen that play? Ha ha, I know this is really bad, but I've actually been thinking lately that it might make sense to vote Conservative. I want to swerve to avoid that life at all costs. Maybe I'll just live like this forever. So I'm not that interested in the meaning of the icicles. There are icicles. I smile briefly, even though no one's looking, and wrap the scarf around my neck one more time.