‘Ok that’s better,’ she said. ‘Now we can do foundation.’
She returned to the beige puddle – and dotted it over my face, methodically, delicately. And then with an ovoid tickling sponge, she blended this into a mask.
‘I want to do more,’ she said.
‘Some eyeliner?’ I suggested.
‘A subtle cat eye,’ she said. ‘Some mascara.’
She held back my forehead with her thumb and lined my lids with thin black wings.
‘Blink,’ she instructed, holding up a stick of mascara.
I closed my upper lashes over its brush, twice for each eye – and let her stroke the lower two until they too were dyed.
‘You’re ready.’
‘Thank you.’ I kissed her – but she quickly retracted, to admire further the new artifice of my face.
‘You can be the red queen, and I’ll be the white,’ she said.
‘Did you bring out the best in me?’
‘Check,’ she gave me a folded mirror.
I looked at myself. My skin glistened oddly in this consistency – my eyes seemed more devious in their darkening, and the bruising of the left one was well concealed.
‘You bring out… something in me,’ she said. ‘Not the best… but you bring out the me in me. What just happened was… I don’t know. But it’s worked. And this afternoon I was… it was refreshing, to be able to let it out, you know? And I can even say I liked last night, however fucked up it was for you to not tell me about you and Francis.’
‘How could I have told you? It had nothing to do with why I came back with you, or why I came to you now.’
‘You’re lying but I don’t mind. I’m going to let you play on. At least you’re committed to your role,’ she laughed, indicating my hip wound as its blood blotched her gown towards a sicklier red.
I tried to kiss her again but she stood up, taking out her phone.
‘The taxi’s here,’ she said. ‘And so you’re my date. The boy who stole my boyfriend. This makes no sense.’
‘I didn’t steal anyone. And things don’t need to make sense, they just need to be charming.’
‘I don’t know if I’m charmed, but I’m – still listening.’
She wrapped a cape of scarlet mink around my shoulders. I leaned against her as she escorted me into the lift and down into the waiting taxi.
We shared the back seat. I fell asleep in her lap as she played with my hair. The viola plucks bled together into a single note.
2.
I woke being poked in my stab wound.
‘Get up, cunt,’ said a stranger.
Mint nails were beckoning me out of the cab. I followed the sheen of a cream cocktail dress upwards to a throat bared beneath gaunt cheeks, green insolent eyes, and a bob of auburn hair. I rose as ordered. Eva stepped around this other woman to support me onto the curb.
‘How are you helping him?’ the stranger asked, unmoving as I tried to focus on the building behind her.
The wall spelled out ‘Impluct’ in tall letters above a crowd of smoking attendees. A poster beneath announced this as the vernissage of Lars Vasari’s ‘DREAM TRAUMA’ exhibition.
‘My opinions have changed,’ Eva said.
‘He ruined your relationship.’
‘Francis ruined our relationship.’
‘Eva, Francis cheated on you – with him,’ the stranger insisted.
‘And I cheated on Francis with him too.’
‘Good evening,’ I said with a bow, as though I’d been invited to introduce myself. ‘I presume you are… Iris?’
‘Just… it’s different to how I thought,’ Eva continued. ‘Not completely different… Francis still needs to answer for himself. But maybe earlier I expressed my anger in a… homophobic way. Or bi-phobic, whatever. But that’s not how I’m going to express my anger anymore. And I’m not angry with Leander, he needs… Let’s just go inside. We both need a bit of numbing.’
‘I can numb you,’ Iris said, though her stare was still hostile. ‘Do you need to be carried?’
‘Yes please,’ I said, pretending not to understand her sarcasm.
And so, my arms spread across the two women’s shoulders, I limped towards the gallery entrance. Iris was colder than Eva, perhaps having waited too long without a coat, and my skin in contrast seemed feverish.
The crowd watched us with a reverence that we didn’t warrant. I had expected curiosity, but not this fascination. Possibly this was the effect of Eva’s fame. The two bouncers at the door parted without speaking or referring to a list.
‘Can you come unlock the kitchen, please?’ Iris asked the one on the left.
‘Does your guest need help?’
‘Actually, can you take him?’
I was transferred to the studier grip of the guard. The women led us quickly into the foyer – and as our entrance rippled through the gallery-goers, they paused in their mingling to gaze at us, with a nervousness that suggested they desired to approach but dared not. The main exhibition began up three steps in a wide white room, but we instead walked down a side corridor, towards a dove-grey door. The guard shifted his support as he took a key from his pocket and unlocked it.
‘Thank you,’ Iris said, conclusively, and the guard understood this as a cue to leave.
I was lowered onto a chrome stool beside a chrome table and gladly slumped into it, my head filling with sediment – which looped in a figure of eight. With my eyes closed, I could only hear some of what the women were saying. But I gathered that water was being boiled in a saucepan, and Francis had arrived half an hour ago. I let my thoughts lull into incomprehension.
‘Leander!’ Eva said, with an odd urgency, as though afraid I would not wake. ‘Leander!’
I lifted my head. Iris placed a white plate on the table. At its centre was a circle of fluffy, whiter shards. The plate’s underside was steaming still, from resting on the saucepan. She crushed the cooked ketamine with an Oyster card and divided it into three thin lines.
With a twenty-pound note rolled up her nose, Eva bent daintily to the plate, and insufflated an outer line. As she jerked back up, she blinked tears towards the ceiling, and passed the note to Iris. Iris did the same and passed the note to me. I breathed out in preparation, securing the makeshift straw with trembling fingers, and snorted the remainder.
It cut at my sinus with an enticing specificity – reducing the rest of my body’s aches to vagueness. The bitterness mixed scent and taste into a string that dripped into the back of my throat, which my mind saw inwardly as having the feathery blue-green of a mallard’s head. I sniffed again, able to sit more upright, my sense of self dispersing.
‘Can I have more than that? I asked.
‘Not right now,’ Iris said, her voice less severe, distracted by the loaded blood crossing her brain. ‘This is pure. We need to be able to talk still – we just want to be a little wonky so we can deal with the pretentious fucks outside. It’s human ketamine, not for horses – it’s from a hospital.’
‘When do you get this in hospital?’ Eva asked.
‘When you’re giving birth.’
Eva laughed. ‘And so tonight you’re giving birth to —’
But I didn’t hear the rest. The slurry of melt-crystals behind my eyes slurred my vision, and a gossamer began to replace my skin.
‘What – and you’re giving birth to your… revenge?’ Iris smiled, entirely now in a lighter humour.
‘Yeah. And what are you giving birth to?’ Eva asked me.
I cricked my neck as my nerves flowered into levity. ‘I’m giving birth to a baby swan called Winter, who can see ghosts, but he’ll never find a mate.’
‘Lucky him,’ Eva said. ‘I think I need to leave… What’s your laptop password?’
‘There’s no password,’ Iris said. ‘Just ask the guy at the door to let you into the studio.’
‘What you doing?’ I asked, drifting my head against the wall, smiling at Eva in innocence.
‘
I’m going to edit a film,’ she said.
‘Of what?’
‘A video me and Francis made before he met you. You said the best revenge is erotic. So. I want to show it to everyone…’
‘What, like a sex tape?’ I asked. ‘You know they aren’t usually that embarrassing for the man.’
‘This one will be very special highlights.’
‘And then what?’ I asked. ‘How are you going to show it?’
‘Wait and see.’ Eva stood up, smiling.
She kissed Iris on both cheeks and kissed me on the forehead, stroking her finger under my chin until I lifted my lips towards hers and kissed her back. The feathery green-blue of the ketamine rose again in my mind, and fell back into a low note plucked on a cello.
‘I decided you’re a paradox,’ Eva said, her nose against mine. ‘It’s your opacity that’s attractive. You’re an act inside an act. What are your motivations?’
‘Motivations are for the artless,’ I said.
She didn’t answer, but shook her hair in a tremor of pleasure, and left. As the door shut behind her, Iris stood – and fetched a bottle of water from the fridge.
‘I still can’t be nice to you,’ she said. ‘I know about you.’
‘What do you know about me?’ I asked, delighted.
‘You can’t seduce me. I refuse to be seduced.’
‘I can seduce you. I’ll be so honest that you’ll become invested in me against your will.’
‘Is that your usual method?’
‘No. But I know that’s the method that will work.’
I was surrounded by the scent of thunder, and the scents that come after summer rain – of bracken fronds releasing cyanide into the air, and the odours of wood and soaked flowers.
‘How?’ she asked.
‘You are already intrigued,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t have said “you can’t seduce me”, unless it was a challenge.’
‘Was it?’
‘Let’s make it one.’
‘Ok, then tell me the truth –’ Iris blinked as the dissociative drug fanned through her reflexes. ‘What are you doing? Why did you turn up at Eva’s door half beaten to death?’
‘Because I knew that by appearing so vulnerable before her she would forgive me.’
‘Ok, that’s quite a strong start.’ She sipped from the water bottle.
‘Honesty can be thrilling.’
‘So you used being beaten up as an advantage?’
‘I weaponised my suffering,’ I said. ‘I positioned her in the empowered role, so that she couldn’t feel like my victim anymore – she was the healer, I was the victim. Making people help you makes them care about you – or even makes them love you. Putting my health in her hands was a way of accelerating our intimacy, in the same way that being this honest with you accelerates our intimacy.’
‘Why did you want her to forgive you?’
‘She might be useful.’
‘Then why not just befriend her? Why steal her boyfriend? Why the mind-fuck first?’
‘I didn’t steal anything,’ I said. ‘And the mind-fuck is the befriending. How else can she know me properly unless I hurt her? And then come to her, having myself been hurt.’
‘So, what – the proper you is hurting people?’
‘Being hurt can be thrilling.’
‘Did you get beaten up on purpose?’
‘I’d have to really love being in this much pain to do that.’
‘Has the ketamine helped?’
I smiled. ‘I’m nearly ready to give birth.’
We stood up. She took my arm. But her touch had too many premises in it – like mist over a pond at sunrise – and I saw a flotilla of lotus leaves, leaving the shore of the living, each burning a different stack of incense – cypress and cassia and styrax and myrrh, and so on – until I seemed inside a mayhem of futures. The aroma was too strong – and, quickly, I kissed her. She let me.
‘But I’m still not seduced,’ she said.
I balanced on her as she opened the door. My movements had regained little focus.
‘I’m not finished yet,’ I said. ‘I have to seduce you with cruelty as well.’
We quit the chrome kitchen arm in arm, and glided down the corridor.
‘How will being cruel to me seduce me?’ she asked.
‘Not to you, to someone you’re attracted to. Francis.’
She didn’t reply.
‘I guessed in you a proprietary jealousy,’ I said, ‘that differed from simple sympathy for Eva.’
‘Am I supposed to be impressed by that? Most of the girls here have a crush on Francis. That wasn’t a hard guess.’
‘But still you want to see him hurt, because he’s not attracted back.’
‘I don’t think that’s true,’ she said.
‘Well Eva obviously has some kind of revenge planned, and you seem to be happy enough to enable it. I’m just going to take everything a little further; my methods can dovetail with hers – I’ll capitalise upon whatever damage she manages to inflict and add some of my own, until Francis is broken.’
I couldn’t say – because Francis doesn’t love me enough yet. Because I need the love of a broken man, a man who has no power over me.
3.
We climbed the three steps into the first wide white room of the exhibition. Astronomical facts and phenomena were rising to the front of my mind, and so were the fancies of old astrologies – as the ketamine conducted my synaesthesia towards another understanding of the room, as a planetarium. And this was a planetarium so immersive that its walls were soon the surface of an actual planet and the space between them, inverted somehow, was the planet’s atmosphere.
I was travelling across two planes of reality, then: an art gallery, and a solar system. Or perhaps more than two – since this second plane seemed to be both a solar system and a representation of a solar system – and so I was travelling towards real storms and videos of storms, belts of rock and libraries of myths.
‘So you don’t really like Francis?’ Iris asked, disrupting the hallucination. ‘It sounds like he loves you. Eva showed me the messages you sent each other – I’m guessing you meant her to find them? But what are you going to do to him?’
‘He’s more powerful than me here,’ I said. ‘He’s surrounded by admirers and photographs of himself – but I’m going treat him like a burdensome add-on and ignore him in a way that makes him obsessive.’
‘How can you ignore someone in a special way?’
‘Evasions can be more powerful than confrontations. I’ll ignore him by talking to you.’
She laughed. ‘Why would I help you?’
‘Because you want to see if I can break him like I say I can. But first he needs to know I’m here. Where is he?’
A wing of fire detached from her shoulder, flew to the ceiling, and gathered itself into a phoenix – but before the phoenix could be fully formed, it ungathered again – into a cyclone of dust that harassed the room towards summer – until I was an imperial guard on a road of blood – and the dust smeared into a flat Martian red and the phoenix pretended to be dead.
‘He was in the last room,’ she said, pointing to the doorway on the right. ‘The gallery is five rooms in a circle. But we can cut to the end.’
We steered each other towards the doorway, joined at the neck, our arms intertwined. The throng parted for us – and again, a few guests seemed as though they wished to engage us in conversation, but were dissuaded by our expressions of intent, and by my diagonal posture.
‘What’s the point of this, by the way?’ she asked.
‘The point is the ending. I love binning people. Leaving someone for no reason is my favourite game. Perhaps it’s a way of getting back at the abandonments of my past.’
‘That’s rather self-defeating.’
‘All pleasure is self-defeating.’
She had no reply. Francis stood tall in the middle of the room, dazzled by himself and the worship of the women around hi
m. I tugged Iris towards him, and the floor lurched sideways – and I almost fell over, but no one else noticed.
‘Do not engage in eye contact,’ I said, gesticulating to attract attention. ‘Look slightly above everyone else’s eye-line to make them feel unconsciously subordinate. We need to edge into his view, while engaged in such stimulating conversation that we have no awareness of anyone around us. He’ll expect us to approach him – as the social superior here – so it will be a while until his frustration makes him approach us. And then we greet him like a distant acquaintance.’
‘So when are we going to start this stimulating conversation?’
I laughed unnecessarily loudly – and a few feet away, Francis turned his head in recognition.
‘He’s seen us,’ I said.
She laughed sincerely, excited by the game, glancing at him and then back at me.
‘Now that he knows we’re here,’ I said, ‘we need to look like he’s the furthest thing from our minds.’
She screeched in response, slapping me on the shoulder.
‘Not that much,’ I said. ‘Controlled over-acting is a subtle art. We need to keep moving, but as though we’re not aware of it, and then he’ll worry we could walk away without noticing him.’
‘How did you even… get him in the first place?’ she asked. ‘He seemed so close to Eva. He was so… straight.’
‘Being straight is so embarrassing. There’s no such thing anyway. But still – I am many men’s exception.’
‘How?’
‘Because I’m beautiful and damaged. The classic combination. Plus, I’ve mastered the art of seducing bi-curious straight boys.’
‘Can you give me some tips? Pretend I’m a man.’
‘I can give you the full psychopath’s seven-step seduction guide. Though, of course, telling you these seduction steps will be my way of seducing you.’
‘Of course.’
‘Exactly!’ I shouted – as though we’d achieved some rare agreement in a completely different conversation, causing people nearby to turn around.
And as I watched, soot rose around their ankles like the aftermath of a fire – spreading towards the corners – and lightning, thrown by Francis, rutted through it – forcing the soot to bind into clumps that bound even harder into diamonds – which swirled like they swirled on Saturn, into a bullet-swift hail that rattled through us – until we too were diamonds.
Carnivore Page 7
