Narcissism for Beginners

by Martine McDonagh

  Someone’s calling my name and for one second I entertain the irrational hope that it might be Ruth come to rescue me but it’s only the waitress with our drinks. I wave her over. Marsha chunters (new word, thank you, Roger and Paul) on.

  ‘A work colleague suggested I take in a lodger or two to relieve the loneliness. I was still only in my forties, too young to be a reclusive widow, so I called the university and offered comfortable lodgings at a low price to a well-behaved and deserving student and they suggested a young man by the name of Robin Agelaste-Bim. I was worried he might be a foreigner, but in those days you couldn’t ask a question like that without being labelled a racist so I took reassurance from his first name being English and the likelihood of him being only half foreign.’

  Jeez, she’s worse than I remember.

  ‘He arrived in a taxi the following Saturday. It’s not so unusual nowadays for a young man to not drive, but then it was almost unheard of. Do you drive?’

  I shake my head, wave her on.

  ‘Oh, anyway, it was one of those warm, sunny early June days that take you by surprise after a miserable wet May. He found my penchant for leaving windows open unnerving. I always do, except in the most inclement weather. I like a through breeze. What’s the point in living yards from the sea if you shut out all the ozone? I also like to keep doors unlocked, especially the front door, which obviously I keep closed to put the opportunists off, but never locked. I expect it’s because I’ve seen in A&E what can happen to people in those few seconds it takes the Fire Brigade to break down a locked door. For ages after your father’s arrival I had terrible trouble remembering to lock the bathroom door when taking a bath or using the toilet.’

  Gross.

  ‘Anyway, a few days after he moved in he asked to have a lock fitted on his door. It seemed like a fair compromise as long as I got to keep a key in case of emergency.

  ‘He didn’t have much in the way of belongings, one suitcase and a couple of heavy boxes, which I supposed were full of books. Despite the warm weather he wore a heavy woollen sweater in a deep shade of blue and a white tasselled scarf wound several times around his neck, which set off his clear, dark eyes beautifully. Such a charming, striking young man. Carried himself like a lord despite his deprived background. He’d just completed his first year of Religious Studies. He was soft-spoken and quiet as you’d expect someone with those interests to be, but he wasn’t shy. By the time we sat down for our first cup of tea together, I knew he had been orphaned as a babby –’ that’s no typo, she actually uses the word babby ‘– and that he didn’t have a girlfriend.

  ‘We sat down at the kitchen table and he said, “I may as well tell you now, I’m an abecedarian.” Well, I had no idea what he meant; I had to look it up in the dictionary after he’d gone up to his room.’

  I also looked this up after Mrs C told me about it. He was misusing the word. An abecedarian is a novice, a beginner, not someone who alphabeticises people.

  ‘Because I’d only just met him and I thought he might be one of those deadpan jokers, I said, “Does that mean you only eat Alphabetti Spaghetti?”’

  Hilarious, right?

  ‘He gave me that look of his and said, “No, it means that from now on I will call you Mrs F.” He was so intense – the way he stared at you, always so deadly serious. Well naturally I wanted to know immediately who Mrs A, B, C, D and E were, but he wouldn’t say at first. Eventually I wheedled some of it out of him. He’d lost his virginity to Mrs D, and Mrs E was another girlfriend. He’d met them both at the university, but I don’t think either of them were students because he told me he preferred older women.

  ‘He had one living relative, an elderly aunt living down in Devon. I never met her; I suppose she’s dead now. The first Sunday of every month he would leave early in the morning to catch the train to visit her. Always took a gift. It looked like the same thing every time, probably a box of cheap chocolates or her favourite biscuits, and it broke my heart that he always went to such effort. His wrapping skills were appalling, but he refused to let me help. It’s the thought, not the price tag that counts.’

  She says this directly to me, like she was expecting me to bring her a gift. What is it with women who can’t say what they mean? Scared of the answer, I guess, and in this case rightly so.

  ‘I wouldn’t say he was domesticated. All those years at boarding school and a year in halls eating pizza out of a box, I could forgive him for not knowing how to load a dishwasher. He was hopeless. For an extra five pounds a week on his rent I agreed to provide him with a cooked meal every day, either lunch or dinner depending on my shift. He got into the habit of telling me what he thought of each meal, like one of those chefs on Bake Off –’ (I have no idea) ‘– so I started leaving my recipes out on the counter for him to mark out of ten and write his comments. I’ll show you when you come to the house.’

  Woohoo.

  ‘He insisted on doing his own laundry, until I found out how much he was paying for service washes and for taxis back and forth to the launderette and gave him such a telling-off that he finally gave in. Wouldn’t let me clean his room, though. He enjoyed his privacy, spent a lot of time studying, trying out new disciplines connected to his studies: yoga, tai chi, astrology, Buddhist chanting. The conventional religions weren’t for him – too old-fashioned and conservative. “Spirituality is a voyage of discovery,” he used to say, “which requires an open mind.” He was so intense and so intelligent, I loved to hear him talk about the interesting things he’d read, or heard on the radio.’

  She’s expecting me to agree. I say nothing.

  ‘I told him he was welcome to invite whoever he liked round to the house – the more the merrier, I always say – he never did. He lived like a monk and I began to wonder if he was agoraphobic as well as abecedarian! It was a relief when my friend Sue said she’d seen him coming out of the cinema one afternoon, although when I asked him what he’d seen he said he hadn’t been out.

  ‘One day he came down for dinner, I’d made lasagne, and he said he’d given up eating meat and dairy. “Bad for my aura,” he said. “I’m eating nothing dead, as of today.” Well, I pretended to be cross that he hadn’t told me earlier, but secretly I enjoyed his little enigmas. So I followed his example and became a vegan too, although we both carried on wearing wool and leather and what have you. I’d always been one of those women who is continually dieting, lifetime membership of Weightshrinkers. My husband once threatened to leave me if I didn’t start serving meals with fat in them, said that if it came to divorce he’d cite malnourishment as one of the grounds. There was I, compromising my diet to keep him at home and all the time he had another woman anyway. Long story short, your father and his veganism were a blessing. I started to lose weight without even trying.

  ‘All this talk about food – I’m ready for a slice of cake, can I get you one?’

  I press pause and say nothing for me thanks and she goes downstairs to choose. Man am I glad to have a break from her voice. But it only gets worse. She comes back with two cakes anyway and winds up eating them both, groaning with ecstasy every time she shoves a lump of the chocolatey dough into her mouth, eating and talking simultaneously. Seriously? Would it really be so wrong to punch her in the face and throw her plate through the closed window? Let’s just get this over.

  ‘He never said so but I could tell he liked me to look after him, especially when he was unwell. I think he had a tiny touch of hypochondria. You see that a lot as a nurse. You only have to mention what you do for a living and people start listing their ailments. When I’m feeling mischievous I pull this face and tell them they should see their GP as soon as possible.’

  She shows me the face; it’s kind of Blue Steel, if you know what I mean. From Zoolander. You’ve seen Zoolander, right? Blue Steel with chocolate.

  ‘You should see their reaction.’

  This is hilarious, apparently. I excuse myself to go shut myself in the restroom while she laughs it o
ut with herself. When I get back she’s talking to this hipster kid, all beard and tattoos, telling him I’m visiting her from Los Angeles. I see her through his eyes: the pink, the make-up, the dress with all the crap dangling off it, the huge blob of chocolate cake that’s trapped in the corner of her mouth. She tells him I’m interviewing her and apologises for having to get back to it. The guy’s devastated.

  ‘Then he discovered meditation. Or rather I discovered that he’d discovered it. One day he didn’t come down for lunch, even after I called him, so I thought he must be feeling unwell. I took his tray up to his room, and the door pushed open when I knocked so I poked my head round. The curtains were shut and he had lit one of the little tea-light candles that I used to keep for cosy winter evenings. My first thought was that the flame would catch on the curtains and burn the whole house down, but then I saw this ghostly shape hovering above his bed. Well, naturally I screamed and switched on the light. The ghostly shape was Robin, sitting under a sheet. He thrashed around a bit until his head popped up, his hair all tousled and his voice all woozy as if he’d woken from a deep sleep. “What on earth are you doing?” he said. “I’m trying to meditate.’’ ’

  This is actually pretty funny, but I don’t let on.

  ‘Even then he wouldn’t tell me anything about it, said it was too powerful a tool to be bandied around. If I was interested, I needed to find a meditation group, as he had done. Which made it fairly clear he didn’t want me going to the same place as him, and that was the first time I had any inkling there might be a girl involved. I tried not to be offended.’

  Blue Steel.

  ‘In spring he started meditating out in the garden. He didn’t mind that I could hear him muttering and chanting through the open windows because that wasn’t his real meditation, just part of his yoga practice; the real thing could only be done behind closed doors, not out in the open air where the pollutants in the atmosphere would damage his aura. He had become more and more sensitive to everything: certain foods, certain drinks – just drinking a cup of decaf could keep him awake all night – car exhaust fumes, cigarette smoke. He was allergic to the pollen of non-indigenous plants, I had to dig up my beautiful Chinese lilac and replant it in Sue’s garden because it upset his meditation. Sue said I should throw him out, not the lilac.

  ‘That’s when I got the idea to renovate the summerhouse. I’d been thinking about tarting it up for years; fantasised about sitting out there on the verandah of a summer evening with a glass of white wine after a long day’s gardening, admiring my handiwork and listening to the birds. I thought in the warm weather he could do his proper meditation out there too instead of being always cooped up in his dark room.’ An unexplainable sigh.

  It’s me who should be sighing, right?

  ‘It took a couple of months to knock it into shape: the floor needed sanding and revarnishing, everything needed repainting. My aim was to have it finished in time for a little midsummer’s party, but when your father saw what a beautiful job I’d done he said he wouldn’t be able to meditate in it if people had been drinking and smoking there, it would damage his aura. So the party idea was ditched, as was my “wine on the verandah” fantasy. I’d planned to paint the walls seaside colours, different shades of aquamarine and olive, but he insisted on white to aid reflection. I had free rein with choosing the floor cushions though as long as there was a red one that only he would use. Sitting on red stimulates your sex chakra, which was why he wore red underpants.’

  You hand-washed them, right? I don’t say that.

  ‘I put up little shelves with tea-lights on them and decorated a corner for him with flowers and crystals as a kind of shrine. He was absolutely delighted. So delighted that I couldn’t get near it and had to make do with spending my evenings over on the patio as I’d always done, with the radio turned right down so it didn’t disturb him over in the summerhouse. I didn’t mind though.’

  She needs a bathroom break and thank God because I can’t stand the sound of her voice another second. I say I want her to tell me about my mom when she comes back. She says she will, but evidently she pees the promise away.

  ‘When he finished his degree and his grant ran out, he said he’d have to move out if he couldn’t find a summer job so I told him he could stay rent-free until he found one. I offered to ask about a job portering at the hospital, but it would have been bad for his aura to be around sick people. In the end he claimed housing benefit so he could afford to keep paying at least something.

  ‘It was around that time he started slipping your mother’s name into every conversation.’

  Finally.

  ‘It was Soo-Kee this and Soo-Kee that for weeks, maybe even months, before I finally got to meet her. Instinctively I knew that this Soo-Kee was something to do with his meditation group. Then one afternoon I came home early from work and bumped into them coming out of the side gate. That same evening he was singing “Polly Put the Kettle On” as he made himself a cup of herbal tea, or at least the “Suki Take It Off Again” bit.’

  Again with the Blue Steel. Please, make it stop.

  ‘Obviously there was more going on between them than just meditation.’

  I sense her working up to more detail, such as how it was obvious, and I really do not need that much information. When Ruth talked about you and him, it was like being told a fairytale, at first anyway, but with Marsha Ray and her face, and her voice, it feels like the truth is she’d been spying on you through the window, watching you doing whatever you were doing, and, although she’d never admit to that part, she’s desperate to ‘share’ what she saw.

  So I jump right in and ask her to move it along a bit.

  ‘Okay, well, one day I get home from a late shift and he’s waiting for me in the kitchen, all excited and fidgety. I’m so exhausted I can hardly stand, but he insists I make myself a cup of Rooibos and sit down to listen. You know how he was. Well, during his meditation that morning, he’d had a message from the Universe telling him that he was a natural teacher and that to attain enlightenment he needed to follow his true calling and help others along the path. So, he’d decided to hold meditation classes in the summerhouse, and he wanted me to be a part of it. He insisted on teaching me to meditate right away; wouldn’t even let me finish my tea.’

  Prolonged Blue Steel moment.

  ‘We went out to the summerhouse. It was a beautiful midsummer night, just like last night, hardly dark at all and the scent of orange blossom and jasmine all over the garden. He’d lit the tea-lights and incense was burning on the shrine. I think it was the single most wonderful experience of my life, I will never forget that night as long as I live.’

  Excruciating pause for fake reverie.

  ‘We got it all up and running very quickly. Robin wrote a paragraph explaining what the group was about and I found a photograph I’d taken of the clematis in the garden and took it all to the printers to make into leaflets. Robin complained it looked like he was offering gardening classes, but it was too late to change it and it didn’t seem to stop people coming along. Suki and a couple of others came from his old meditation group, and because she was as experienced as him at the meditation Suki became his assistant. My job was to look after the room and the refreshments. When things started to go well he asked me to bring staff uniforms from the hospital – he’d noticed them once up at A&E when I’d taken him in with suspected meningitis; he had such a retentive memory – just simple tops and trousers, white for him and Suki and blue for the rest of us. I paid for them, of course; I don’t want you thinking I stole them.

  ‘The classes were amazing: he taught us all how to shake in this special way. I had my suspicions about some of the group right from the start, though, Ruth Williams in particular. She’d been close to Suki and I think her nose was put out of joint when she realised how inseparable Suki and Robin and I had become. Robin let slip one day that she was jealous. It was my opinion that Suki had seduced Robin. We were all supposed to be celibate, which
was not especially difficult for the likes of me and Ruth Williams, but harder for the younger ones. It hadn’t occurred to us that the more enlightened among us might not need to follow the same rules. But the bottom line was that we were all delighted that Guru Bim, as we called him, was going to be a father. He told us that the baby – you – would belong to us all, and encouraged us to speak to you and meditate with you in the womb. But then he disappeared and the whole thing fell apart.’

  She reaches over and touches my hand. ‘I hope this isn’t too much for you?’

  I pull my hand away and wave her on. Please. Kill me now.

  ‘Suki turned up at the house, all red-eyed and upset, claiming he’d run away. It was only two days since she’d seen him and personally I thought she was overreacting. It was completely normal for me to not see him for a couple of days, especially if I was working lates and our mealtimes didn’t overlap, and we were living in the same house! I put it down to hormones. I tried to calm her down and said he was probably up in his room meditating. There was no putting her off, though, and in the end I gave in. At least I knew he wasn’t dead up there; in my line of work you come to know the signs. So I fetched the key to his room and she followed me up the stairs. She’d never been in his room before and even I felt uneasy going in there without his permission. I gave a little knock on the door before opening it, just in case.

  ‘The curtains were closed as usual so I put on the light. The bedding was all topsy-turvy as if he’d just climbed out of it. His spiritual books lying open and face-down all over the place – in the bed, on the floor, on top of a pile on the bedside table. Odds and ends strewn across the floor, odd socks, used tissues – he was always blowing his nose because of his allergies – cups and plates, vitamin pill bottles, a pile of his Vegan magazines. And a holdall I’d never seen before. “Is it always this messy?” said Suki, and even I had to admit it was a bit shocking.