Narcissism for Beginners

by Martine McDonagh

  Back at Ruth’s house, I sit like a zombie while Ruth makes us sandwiches, tuna no mayo for me, cheese with cucumber for her. Afterwards we wash the dishes together. She has a dishwasher but the activity is good for her hand muscles. Ruth washes. I dry.

  As we say goodbye at her door, Ruth pulls an envelope out of her bag that she forgot to give me earlier. It’s the card you sent her to congratulate her on her initiation. My envelophobia is so bad now I can’t even tell her. I shove it into my pocket. We already arranged to meet the next morning at the railroad station at the bottom of her street so I just walk away. Despite my earlier fears about my state of mind I am actually pleased to be alone at last. It’s been a really weird day and my feet are kind of aching but I keep on walking until I’m sure I’ll be too tired to think, just in case.

  Dinner is a basic margherita from room service and while I wait for it to arrive I keep myself busy, backing up the day’s recordings. Normally I would send Thomas the photo of me outside Cunningham House with my Cornetto wrapper but there is no normal any more.

  I open the envelope Ruth gave me and immediately start to freak. I’m only just coming to terms with the idea of you as a real person who really existed, exists even, so to hold a card in my hand that you’ve held in your hand, that you went into a store and paid for and then sat down to write in, is a bit of a mindfuck. But then I read it and right from the start it’s all such blissed-out nonsense that I have to stop. Sister Ruth? Welcome to the inner space of light and sound? If I’m not ready to accept that Thomas could murder someone in cold blood, I’m even less ready to believe that someone related to me could write the kind of shit you wrote in that card.

  I think about listening to a couple of my dad’s tapes because how bad could they be after that, right? And besides, they are taking up too much space in my bag. I even pull them and their special little player thing from the bottom of my backpack, but I don’t have the nerve to take the idea any further.

  The Grace of Guru Bim #1 & #2

  I’m awake at five-twenty a.m. Too early in any language. But later than yesterday so I am optimistic for tomorrow. It’s important to believe in progress, right? It’s too early for breakfast and the pool is closed until seven a.m. The tapes are still there at the side of my bed and I’m still dozy enough to think I can take it.

  It’s kind of fiddly getting the tape into the machine and I only think at the last second to check if it needs batteries, but Thomas the fixer was there before me, and everything works. Surprising really because these tapes must be, like, twenty years old. So here we go, Part One of the recorded autobiography of Robin Agelaste-Bim, aka Guru Bim. It’s short. My anxiety hardly has time to wake up and it’s already over.

  One two one two. I knew a girl at university who said she always listened carefully to what a man said about himself in the first ten minutes because that was the only time he would tell you the truth about himself. She was Mrs D. She never heard my first ten minutes. This is my first ten minutes. I am an abecedarian. I was a menopausal aberration. Sent by the Universe to upset the Apple(sham) cart. I was born… under a wandering star. No. I was born… between parties. To Mrs A-B, a son, a Robin. The little red-breasted thing on the window sill cocked a snook at my mama and she said that’ll do… Oof…

  It sounds like he’s shifting positions. One thing I remember about him now: one or other of his body parts was always hurting.

  … That’ll do. To Mrs C a dead baby daughter and two milky bags full. Their contents sold to the highest bidder. All worked out very nicely, thank you. For a mistake. For an aberration. Mrs A-B a beauty, Mrs C not. Mrs D, I remember only her words… her shiny hair… Mrs E not at all…

  A wheeze, possibly forced.

  … 1968, the when of it, England, the where. This is my first confession.

  The tape clunks off. I check to see if it broke but nope, that’s all there is. It’s weird to hear him speaking almost like a normal person and not in his preachy voice. To be honest, it could be anyone, except he knows the stuff Mrs C told me that nobody outside his family could know (playing kind of fast and loose with the word family, right?), that only Mrs C could’ve told him.

  I fumble around for the next tape, number two. Probably Thomas numbered them; that doesn’t seem like something my dad would have done himself. There weren’t many things my dad would do himself. Take a piss, maybe. And anyway, he would have lettered them, what with being an abecedarian and all.

  Here we go, then, Part Two of the recorded autobiography of Guru Bim. He’s singing, real slow and croony:

  Suki take it off again, Suki take it off again, Suki take it off…

  Yeah, I switch it off immediately. That’s the song Ruth sang. I have enough of a clue to know where it’s going and I sure as fuck don’t want to hear it. Damn straight.

  May as well be the first man down for breakfast, hit the bacon before it shrivels. I unpause SOTD and find the scenes at Cunningham House to play while I pull on a T-shirt and jeans, to bring me back to the present. To remind me I was just there. Site-specific viewing, man, that is the shit!

  Ruth of the Living #3

  I get to the station early, and Ruth’s already there. She’s checked out the trains, bought the tickets, everything, and I feel bad because she probably thinks I have no money. Even I still think I have no money most of the time. I try to imagine a more regular experience that’s as hard to get a grip on as being suddenly super-rich, that you forget about until, right bang out of the blue, you’re reminded of it and it knocks you sideways. All I can think of is death, my mind’s favourite topic. Or discovering that the person you relied on most in your life is a murderer. Those lottery-winner guys get special counselling, right? Strategies? That’s what I need.

  When I try to give her the money for my ticket she says, ‘It’s your turn to buy the ice-creams, and this time you have to eat all of it.’

  She has more crap for me. ‘I brought you this,’ she says, and gives me a flyer with a picture of purple flowers in one corner and the branch of a tree in the other. I recognise it by its genre; there are a million of these things in cafés and stores all over California. Thomas loves them. When we go hiking up at Topanga, he stands outside the General Store laughing at the notices for angel readings and aura predictions and all that crap, while I go buy us snacks and water. I kind of know what this one’s going to say, but as Ruth’s made the effort to find it for me, and as she’s standing right there in front of me with an expectant look on her face, I force myself to read.

  In these challenging times it takes courage to live in the light and avoid the shadows. Release your individual luminosity through shaking to the rhythm of your own beating heart.

  Agelaste Bim is our spiritual Master, who tells us: ‘In these troubling times we are all as fragile as leaves, trembling to the rhythm of an external power. By relinquishing control of our own trembling we rediscover our individual power and reclaim it from those who have wrenched it from us.’

  Shaking with Trembling Leaves is meditation in movement and is the only effective catalyst for healing, creativity and true change in our lives.

  Classes cost £5 and begin Tuesday 30 July at 6.30 p.m. Bring loose clothing, a beating heart and a desire for magical change, to the Summerhouse, 19 Westbourne Avenue, Hove.

  ‘I can’t believe people actually go along with this kind of crap,’ I say as I try to give it back. Ruth doesn’t want it either and looks at me all Great-Dudini-wants-a-treat. I guess she’s kept it for me when she really would have liked to burn it, so I fold it up and toss in the trash as we get on the train.

  ‘I think your parents wrote it together,’ she says, as if that makes any difference.

  And yes, it does. It makes it way worse.

  Our first train ride takes no more than two minutes. We’ve hardly sat down before we get up again to switch. As soon as we’re on the second train I remind Ruth where she got up to with her story and we start recording again.

  �
��One Thursday, I sensed something was up. Suki was pale and red-eyed and seemed upset, and at first I thought something had happened to her parents because she started the meeting with a short discourse on families. “When we shake together,” she said, “we share an intimacy greater than any family bond. In our dysfunctional genetic families there is often little care or respect –”’

  No shit, right?

  ‘“– but among chosen family members, such as we are, there can exist true intimacy, true empathy and understanding and true support. Listen to your heart.” Listen to your heart had become the Trembling Leaves catchphrase – every discourse started and ended with it, and it replaced hello and goodbye in our dealings with one another. I think it makes people feel special to use language that so-called unspiritual beings don’t.’

  I agree. All those a-holes who say reach out instead of talk to and share instead of, well, talk to. What are they? They are a-holes.

  Sorry, Ruth is sharing, I mean talking.

  ‘Anyway, that Thursday, as we sat waiting for Suki to lead the shaking I assumed Bim was behind his screen as usual, but then the summerhouse door opened and in he floated, like a spectre in his white linens. It was the first time I’d seen him in weeks. He was thinner than ever, his hair was down to his shoulders and his beard was an unkempt bush. He crept towards us, placing each foot carefully on the floor as if we were playing What’s the Time, Mr Wolf? and it was his turn to be wolf. Except he made sure all eyes were on him. All eyes except Suki’s, I noticed, although it was clear to me she knew exactly where he was.

  ‘He took her hand and pulled her to her feet and they stood side by side at the edge of the circle. He placed a hand on Suki’s belly and whispered, “We have been blessed. In two hundred and fourteen days from now, Suki will give birth to my first child.”

  ‘I did my best to disguise my horror. The rest of the group were all whooping and clapping and clasping their hands to their hearts. Alison had tears in her eyes. Suki was smiling – but not beaming, I noticed – at her feet.’

  Not beaming? That was me in there, right?

  ‘When Bim crept away again to do whatever he did behind his screen, Suki asked us to keep the news secret until she’d had her scan, and I sensed a tone of annoyance in her voice that we had been told at all.’

  We have to get off the train again here and find the bus to Crouch End, where Shaun and Ed’s house is, but Ruth is on a roll now, keeps going. I don’t get all of it; I fill in the gaps the best I can.

  ‘Suki didn’t shake with the group any more after that, and that evening as she watched us, her strange non-genetic dysfunctional family, I wondered what was going through her mind. When Marsha got to her feet even before the last man – it was always Alan – had dropped to the floor, declaring it was time for celebratory tea and cake, I knew. Prior to that evening Marsha would have waited for Suki to give her the nod, and in that small aberration I recognised a subtle shift of power, a loss of status, as if conception had forced Suki into a process of reverse metamorphosis so that she had become the tiny speck of life in her belly, a being to be cherished and protected, but without autonomy. She had become the burglar-proof casing around a precious jewel in a museum, transparent almost to the point of invisibility. She smiled across at me, and, when her smile went unreturned, came and sat close to me, so that our arms touched, her way of extending her own vast perceived good fortune and privilege to a poor, sick, courageous woman. I found her pity repulsive. I couldn’t speak to her; all I could think about was Bim sitting there behind his screen, gloating over his victory.

  ‘At the end of that meeting there was a universal clamour for appointments with him the following week. I was the only member of the group not interested in speaking to him, not desperate to offer my congratulations. So, when I got home, it didn’t come as too much of a surprise to find a message from Marsha on my answering machine, summoning me to a private “audience” with Bim the following Thursday. I assumed he was going to kick me out of the group and considered saving him the trouble by just leaving. But I wasn’t ready to abandon Suki, my attachment to her was too strong, and instinct told me she was going to need my help.’

  She takes a deep breath. ‘I think we should stop for now,’ she says. ‘We’re almost there.’

  Yay! We’re on Weston Park, the street where Shaun, Ed and Pete live in the movie. The IMDb trivia page says Simon Pegg lives here in real life but I doubt that. Just because a movie star owns a house, it doesn’t mean he lives in it. Cool if he did, though, right?

  The bus stops right outside Nelson’s store, and not one of the zombies on the bus even turns their head to look. The driver couldn’t give a shit either. Everyone makes such a big deal of anything movie-related in LA, but I suppose that’s all we got, right? When you have Big Ben and Buckingham Palace and rain and a river with water in it and buildings in the shape of giant dicks all over downtown, who gives a flying banana about some dumbass movie? Me. I do. And Ruth does, and the damn bus driver should realise that when there are new faces on the bus they are probably on a SOTD sightseeing trip and make an announcement just for them. Us. A simple That store right there appears in Shaun of the Dead, one of the greatest Brit movies ever made would suffice. How would that hurt?

  We cross the street to 83 Nelson Road. It’s just a normal house and they didn’t even shoot the interior scenes there, but even so I am just about pissing my pants with excitement and Ruth is grinning like a letterbox (new Brit simile). I expected to see crowds of other kids there, zombie-walking in the street, paying homage, slouching back and forth between house and store with a Cornetto and a can of soda, tripping over the sidewalk. But it’s just Ruth and me. Seriously, what is up with these people?

  I say, ‘I know it’s only ten a.m. but I’ve been up since five and I am really ready to eat ice-cream.’

  Ruth says, ‘Me too. Let’s go for it.’

  I fake-trip up the sidewalk to make her laugh and I can’t believe she remembers that detail when she’s only seen the movie once. She’s not the kind of woman who would normally laugh at someone falling in the street. Not a schadenfreude kinda gal.

  We take photos of each other outside the store with the storekeeper, Cornettos raised, then cross to number 83 for more photos without the storekeeper, then we head off down the street in search of a quiet spot to record some more.

  As we walk, Ruth tells me that she always suspected my dad’s name was made up, so one day she checked out the etymology. After that she was convinced it was, because it’s unbelievable how perfectly his name fit his personality. In Ancient Greece an agelast was a man with no sense of humour. If you told my dad a joke he would just stare at you. Bim is from 13th-century English and means balm, which is more how my dad thought of himself than how he actually was. I tell her my grandparents had the same name, but who’s to say they didn’t fabricate it to add to their own enigma?

  We go into a café for a cup of tea. I guess Ruth must still be tired from yesterday’s hills but she doesn’t complain. It’s pretty dark inside and we’re the only customers but Ruth wants to sit way in the back of the room so I get the feeling she wants whatever she’s going to tell me next to be as private as possible. I go order our beverages at the counter and when I come back to the table Ruth has written a quote on her napkin that she found in a book and never forgot: Lors de son passage dans l’espace cosmique, l’âme du veritable agélaste ne saura pénétrer en paradis.

  She translates: ‘The soul of a true agelast, travelling through space, would not know how to pass into heaven. Rabelais,’ she says.

  Kind of cool. And kind of ironic, right?

  A sip of tea and Ruth’s ready to go again. For an old lady with Parkinson’s, she is unstoppable.

  ‘I went behind the screen and there he was, sitting cross-legged with a blue sheet draped over himself, like a statue under a dust cover. “Who is this?” he said. Either he had forgotten or was pretending to have forgotten that he’d called me in. I r
eminded him. It was pretty noisy back there with all the chatter and shuffling around on the other side of the screen and I had to listen quite hard to hear him. I don’t remember word for word what he said, but you’ll get the gist.’

  She shuts her eyes, goes into the zone. ‘“I have been observing you in my meditation,” he said. “By taking control of your inner trembling and releasing it through daily practice, you are challenging the power of those negative internal forces that have made you sick, but your spirit is too weak for you to make significant progress. You are becoming more and more depressed.” Which admittedly I was, but not because of my illness. “The path ahead of you is narrowing and your symptoms will worsen considerably in the coming months. Spiritual progress is no longer possible for you. The time is fast approaching for you to escape the pain of your deficient physicality and move beyond the constraints of your mental and physical disease. If you wait much longer you will find yourself without the power to help yourself. When you are ready, come to me and I will help you. That is all. Meditate on what I have said and come back to me next week if you have any questions. Listen to your heart.”

  ‘It wasn’t until I got home and really thought about what he’d said that I let myself acknowledge the subtext. Of course he’d been canny enough to leave his meaning open to interpretation, to imply just enough threat to be disconcerting. What was doubly upsetting was that I couldn’t discuss it with Suki; I knew she would deny any negative interpretation. He had succeeded in ruling by division, the preferred modus operandi of the narcissist. I didn’t sleep for a week worrying about it, swinging between conviction that I was hearing a threat where none was intended, and fearing for my life. I decided to go back and ask him some direct questions.