Narcissism for Beginners

by Martine McDonagh

  ‘I had a dictaphone, a little tape machine that I sometimes used at home to record dictated letters or notes for my secretary at work, the same as we’re doing here with your phone. It wasn’t my intention to trap him; I just wanted to record what he said in order to be clear that he was really saying what I thought he was saying. Nonetheless, I didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing and was terrified someone might see the little red recording light shining through my pocket. In any case there was a strong chance it wouldn’t pick up his voice over all the background noise. But somehow it did.’

  She’s talking so quietly now I can hardly hear what she’s saying, so I move my phone closer to make sure it picks up every word.

  ‘I asked him to explain in more practical terms how he could help me and he came right out with it. He had a prescription for me, which he slid out from under the sheet. A plastic bag containing one syringe and a vial. He said the vial contained a fatal dose of insulin that would send me into a painless coma. It would look like suicide. As soon as I was ready, if I needed their help, he or Marsha would come to my house and administer it for me. He emphasised that this service would be free of charge. He’d drawn up an astrological chart to identify a selection of auspicious dates, all within the following month, which he’d thoughtfully written down on a sheet of paper for me, to help me decide when to do it.’

  Ruth stops and sighs and looks at me to see how I’m taking it. I nod to let her know I’m fine. She’s sitting right there in front of me, so I know he didn’t go through with it.

  ‘I felt that if I didn’t get out into the fresh air immediately I would die right there and then. People were saying their goodbyes so it was easy for me to slip out unnoticed – at least no one tried to stop me. I supposed that if Marsha was in on it, it probably meant Suki was too. I walked as quickly as I could away from the house to go and sit on the beach to try to organise my thoughts. There was no way I could cope with the train journey home to London, and anyway the thought of going back to that big, empty house was suddenly terrifying. I took a taxi to the Avalon and luckily they had a room available.

  ‘I don’t remember all of what happened that night, but no matter how hard I tried I could not get off to sleep. I didn’t need to listen to the recording; his voice was there in my head repeating over and over how my depression was getting worse and my condition was deteriorating. I had so often imagined a far worse future for myself than has transpired in reality that his predictions chimed only too easily with my own fears.

  ‘Muddled in with all this was the increasing belief that Suki wanted me gone too. One thing led to another and the next thing I knew I had unwrapped the vial and thrown its contents into my throat, like a Turkish man with his morning coffee. The doctor explained later that it wouldn’t have killed me because my digestive juices would have taken the sting out of it, but it did make me ill enough for Paul at the Avalon to insist on calling an ambulance.

  ‘The police came to the hospital. They wanted to know all about Bim, where he lived, how long I had known him, if that was his real name, and so on. And about me, my occupation, my illness, how I came to meet him etcetera. They took my dictaphone. I didn’t understand how they knew about your father’s involvement but it turned out the insulin had been prescribed in his name; the evidence was right there on the vial.

  ‘I supposed they would issue Bim with a warning and was worried he might retaliate. They advised me to go home to London and said an officer would pop in every day to check I was okay.

  ‘A couple of days after I got home, Suki called me. I was screening my calls so I just listened while she left a message. Bim had disappeared. At first I assumed he had told her to call, to pull me back in, but she seemed so genuinely upset that I called her back. Either she didn’t know what had happened or was pretending, but she apologised for having been so distant and explained that, the very day Bim had so proudly announced her pregnancy, she had caught him having sex in the summerhouse with one of the Tuesday group women. She said she knew I disapproved of him so had been too ashamed to tell me, but now she was convinced he’d run away because he was terrified of his impending fatherhood. She’d got herself into such a muddle, made it all her own fault, wanted me to find him and tell him it would be okay. She was heartbroken.

  ‘In the end I believed her of course but I refused to go to Brighton, told her I was unwell, which wasn’t a complete lie. If the police had interviewed Bim about the insulin and that had caused him to run away, Suki would soon find out and I didn’t want to be around when she did. So I said that a man like him would see a child as an extension of himself and was unlikely to just give it up, I was sure he’d be back soon, and I said that Andrew and Marsha would look after her. It broke my heart to push her away like that, but I didn’t know who I could trust any more.

  ‘I thought I should let the police know she had called so I phoned them, and that’s when I found out Bim was in custody, charged under the 1961 Suicide Act. Apparently, when they questioned him he didn’t even try to deny what he’d done, and when they charged him he told them that if he ever saw me again he would finish me off, which I don’t suppose garnered him too much favour. I didn’t leave London again until the trial.

  ‘I was surprised to see Suki at the court. She was heavily pregnant by then. Marsha was there too, sobbing in the witness box and denying all knowledge of Bim’s threat, which was probably the truth, but given that she had fiddled the prescription for him she wasn’t completely blameless and the prosecutor scared her enough to stop the tears.

  ‘Bim put on something of a performance in his turquoise suit with his hands together in namaste, describing me to the court as a negative forcefield who had a detrimental influence on everyone I came into contact with. He said my life was miserable and that he had been doing me, and everyone who knew me, a favour by offering to help me remove myself from it.

  ‘Poor Suki was called as a character witness and he clearly expected her to support his argument. Instead, she held her nerve and called him a manipulative charlatan. She said there was no room for him in God’s kingdom, which made him laugh out loud. The judge sentenced him to eight years. When it was all over Suki came and gave me a big hug. She told me she was moving to Scotland with Andrew to have the baby and invited me to visit once you’d been born.

  ‘I knew Bim was too much of a coward to do anything himself, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried he might send someone to come after me while he was in prison. All those criminals to exercise his powers of manipulation on… well, it would have been entirely feasible for me to meet with a nasty accident. And while nothing actually happened it took years to push the possibility to the back of my mind. With hindsight he probably really did believe I was about to die a horrible death or that Karma would deal me a suitable punishment for what he imagined I’d done to him. It’s safe to say his grasp on reality was somewhat warped.

  ‘Suki and I were never as close again as we had been, but I was happy to think of her settled with Andrew. I went up to Scotland once, when you were a year or so old and just walking. You lived in the middle of nowhere, about half a mile or so outside a tiny village called Drongnock, quite isolated. Andrew had taken you on as if you were his own and you seemed to adore him in return. You were a confident little chap. I’d intended to stay a whole week, but it was clear Suki wasn’t comfortable with me around – too many reminders of the past, I suppose – and after a couple of days Andrew asked me, on her behalf, to leave. By then I’d been without her long enough to construe her rejection of me as a positive sign, that she’d moved into a happier phase of her life.

  ‘After that, communication dwindled to almost nothing: the occasional card, usually written by Andrew, with a photograph or two tucked inside.’

  She searches through the crap in her bag to hide the fact that she has tears in her eyes. Pulls out another envelope.

  Seriously?

  ‘I’ve brought you a few photographs – I don’
t know if you’ve seen them before – you are welcome to keep them. One of them is the official photo we were given of your parents together after the announcement of Suki’s pregnancy.’

  Okay, so how did I go from living in a village in Scotland with you and Andrew to a weird commune in Brazil with my dad? And where are you now?

  Ruth looks at me and shakes her head as if I’ve spoken out loud. ‘That’s all I can tell you, Sonny. I’m sure Andrew will be able to fill in more of the detail. I’m sorry,’ she says.

  We’re riding the bus back to Ruth’s house, both lost in our separate daydreams, when she says, ‘Oh, by the way, I searched on my tablet last night for information about the Winchester pub. It’s not there any more. It’s been converted into flats, so it’s probably not worth your while to go all that way across London to see it.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘Will you go and see Andrew?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Please send him my love. And you will stay with me when you come back to London, won’t you? I want to know more about your life in California.’

  ‘Okay.’ And I smile to let her know I mean it.

  I guess you’ve deduced by now that I’m not big on talking. That is, I don’t like to talk about myself, and I find people who report every inane detail about every mundane minute of their life tedious as hell. Consider Ruth and me. We just spent three days together. If you gave each of us a questionnaire and told us to mark as true or false ten statements about how the other lives their life, what they do day to day, we would have no clue, we’d have to guess because we haven’t discussed that shit. But we know what kind of people we are. Spend a little time with someone and the human brain can work it out, that’s all I’m saying.

  Listen to Your Heart, Right? #1

  I weigh it up, who to visit next. Marsha Ray or Andrew Harrison? Get the worst out of the way now, or delay it a while longer? I toss a fifty-pence coin and the coin says Marsha Ray, aka Mrs F, aka The Worst. So, I take the tube across London to Victoria station.

  There’s a couple kissing noisily at the other end of the car; this is my first bad omen. I switch cars at Oxford Circus but they get off there anyway. And no kidding, EVERY person on the Brighton train is crunching potato chips, and there’s no first-class car to escape to. I’m on my way to hell.

  Mrs F – Marsha Ray – is still a pain in the ass. Even hearing her voice on the phone makes my skin creep. She wants to come meet me at the station. I don’t want her to come meet me at the station. She wants me to stay at her house, I don’t want to. With Mrs C it was easy: she didn’t offer and I sure as hell didn’t want me to. Ruth is awesome; I’d stay with her any time. No way would I ever stay with Marsha Ray, not for all the fish in the ocean, or whatever the saying is, but she won’t take no for an answer, like she thinks she has some kind of ownership over me, and the more she insists, the more I don’t want to. Even telling her I already booked a place to stay isn’t enough to throw her off; I could cancel it and sleep in the room my dad used to sleep in, she says. Like that’s going to swing the argument her way.

  In the end I lie, make up a bunch of crap about staying with a girlfriend from school. I tell her my imaginary girlfriend is meeting me at Brighton station. Well, that gets her real excited and she wants to know all about the girl, asks for names in case she knows her family. I tell her I have to go find my train and that I’ll call her tomorrow soon as I’m settled. She says she’ll come pick me up from wherever I’m staying. I say I’ll call her. Some women will do anything to be somebody’s slave.

  The Avalon, the B&B where Ruth nearly died, is still owned by Roger and Paul, a sweet gay couple. I call and tell them Ruth sent me, and it kind of pays off. They say I can book myself in for a week and cancel if I want to leave sooner and when I get there they make a big fuss of me and give me their best room, the one they save for honeymooning gay couples. It has a four-poster bed and flouncy pink drapes. I’m no homophobe, but I don’t want to think about what’s happened in the bed I’m about to sleep in.

  I last saw Marsha Ray, Mrs F, whoever, like twelve years ago, in Brazil. She stayed behind after Thomas and I left. I don’t remember her physically so much as how I felt about her, which, if you didn’t already pick up on it, is not positive. But I want to know what happened there and how my dad died and she’s the only one who knows. Plus, there’s a small chance that maybe you’re still in touch with her.

  I want to meet in Starbucks. She says Brighton people don’t go there, which I soon discover is a lie, when I pass by on my way to meet her and it’s as busy as all the other coffee shops. Obviously she means she doesn’t go there, out of some kind of high-minded, self-righteous principle to do with American Imperialism or Oligarchic Capitalism. I heard it all in school, but you know what? In a free society, if people want to drink shit coffee, you have to let them. Still, as my overall aim is to avoid going to her house and suffering the guided tour of where my father slept and where he did a crap every day etc etc, it’s a small sacrifice on my part to meet any place she wants that isn’t there.

  First observation. Brighton has shopping zombies and bike path zombies like you’ve never seen. I always thought they were the special preserve of Redondo and the Beach Cities – great name for a band, right? – but not so. It also has street drinkers, and homeless people begging for money, which you don’t see so much of in RB. There’s a noticeable lack of people of colour.

  Little kid Sonny found Mrs F huge and overbearing, and let’s just say some things don’t change. If you were to pin me down about the detail, to list exactly what it is I don’t like about her, I could say it’s the horrible simpering voice emanating from the oversized body, but it’s more than that, it’s beyond physical. There’s this gut feeling that stirs even at the mention of her name(s), and that feeling has a name of its own: suspicion. In real life – putting physical size and emotional expectations (hers) to one side – I’m sure she’s a decent enough human being. I just don’t like, respect or trust her. End of.

  The café she’s chosen is actually pretty cool and I guess the idea is for me to think that she’s pretty cool too for knowing it even exists. The couple cool places in RB? This beats them both. It has a store mannequin’s hand for a door handle, nail polish and all. It’s a little grubby, though. All I can think about is how many people walk right out of the restroom without washing up and reach for the door hand.

  Marsha Ray is waiting for me right inside. I step back to avoid the inevitable hug-lunge and the door hand jabs me in the kidneys.

  Immediately the bombardment begins. Did I eat breakfast? Did I eat lunch? Would I like a slice of chocolate cake? And it hits me right away, the reason I never liked Marsha Ray, Mrs F, call her what you will. She behaved like she thought she was my mother. She still behaves like she thinks she’s my mother. And not a nice mother – a controlling, overbearing one. If I had to pick a woman who isn’t my mother to be my mother, it wouldn’t be her. My ideal mother does not have that voice. However, the cake looks delicious. But since it’s been sitting uncovered right there on the counter until three in the afternoon, being invisibly spat on by customers making their orders – what sssssppppecialsssssss do you have? – I say no, thanks.

  ‘You haven’t changed one bit,’ she says.

  And of course I have, it’s just that she needs to say that to reinforce that she knew me when I was small. And if I haven’t changed it’s because she still only knows me as well as she imagined she did back then. She’s waiting for me to say the same back to her. I don’t oblige.

  The cafe’s actually pretty busy but we find a couple old, mismatched, battered easy chairs, one leather, one sweaty green velveteen, in the back of the upstairs room. I take the leather chair, figuring the bacteria count will be lower, and don’t give her any opportunity to start chit-chatting, tell her right off what I need her to do. Hold the phone and talk directly into it like it’s a microphone.

  The café is way noisier than I
expected. One always expects the British to converse so much more quietly than one’s American cousins.

  Marsha Ray sits up straight, wiggles her shoulders, and fakes a prissy little smile, like she thinks she’s being interviewed for the London Times or whatever it’s called. Man, she’s so into herself. I remind myself that, however bad it is to be in a public place with her, being alone with her at her house would be way worse.

  And off she goes.

  ‘I met my husband up at the private hospital where I was a nurse and he was a heart surgeon – there weren’t too many of them around in those days; now they’re ten a penny, of course. He was nineteen years older than me, had never married and had a lot of money. He said right from the start he didn’t want children, which suited me fine, I was twenty-five and after my nursing training was only too aware of everything that can go wrong with the little darlings. At that age, anyway, you believe that if you change your mind later you’ll be able to change theirs too. And I’d never even read a Mills & Boon! Never mind, I don’t suppose you know what that is. Anyway when he decided, at the age of fifty-odd, that he did want a child after all, he also decided to have it with a twenty-two-year-old who worked behind the bar at the golf club. Muggins here knows nothing about it until he dies and the solicitor calls me in to say I have to share the estate with this other woman and her teenage son! There was plenty of money for all of us though and they were nice enough people, so it all worked out in the end. I got to keep my beautiful home. You must come and see it.’

  And this has what to do with me?

  ‘We shared the cost of the funeral and it ended up being quite a jolly do with all those other people I’d never met before. Well, I went back to work after that. For the companionship mostly; I didn’t need the money. I hadn’t worked since we’d married. I had thought about it a few times, but it’s a difficult decision when you’ve been living the life of Riley for as long as I had, down the beach every day in the summer, up to London once a week with a friend for dinner and a bit of culture, nice clothes, dishwasher, all the trimmings. But you soon start to notice how big a house is with just one person rattling around in it.’