Page 30 of Glitterland
Once upon a time, I too dreamed different dreams. My horizon was bolder and grander and more beautiful than the threshold of my own fucking flat. And now I lived in a world so narrow and so colourless that getting out of bed in the morning was a victory. That not actively wanting to die was happiness.
Fuck it all, I was going shopping. I was going to buy carrots. And it was not going to be a big deal. That just left the salad problem.
I opened up Google and stared blankly at the search box. With nothing to lose, I typed in “how to make a very easy salad in order to impress a man you want to fuck.” It was unhelpful. The first hit was complete tat, the second was a list of fourteen things every guy should (apparently) know how to cook, but none of them were a salad, and the third was an article on how to tell if a man was gay. I was moderately certain Darian was gay. Fucking me had been a fairly subtle clue, but I was onto him. It seemed I’d found the one thing that wasn’t on the internet.
I rang Amy.
“I have to go shopping and make a salad.”
“My God, call the police.”
“No, but seriously.” (When did I say “no, but seriously”?) “How the fuck do you make a salad?”
“Oh, I know this one!” she said. “You go to Marks and Spencer, and they have them there in little plastic tubs. You buy as many as you need, take them home, put them in a bowl, and shoutta-daaa.”
That sounded almost doable except for the Marks and Spencer part. There was probably one nearby, because this was London, but it might involve the Tube. And I certainly wasn’t up for that at short notice.
“I can maybe get to a Sainsbury’s,” I offered.
She thought about it a moment. “Then you’re fucked.”
“Right.”
There was a pause.
“Ash,” she asked, “did you ring me because I’m the only person with a vagina you know?”
“Um…”
“Because, you know you don’t need a vagina to prepare a salad, right? In fact, I have it on good authority that there are salads prepared sans vaginas all the time.”
“Can you stop saying vagina over and over again? It’s scaring me.”
“It serves you right for being sexist. Vagina.”
Even in spite of Saladgate, I felt a smile threatening at the corner of my lips. “Isn’t it just possible,” I said, “that I rang you because you’re a brilliantly clever and generous person (who happens to be a woman) who I knew would be able to help me in my hour of need?”
“No.”
“You’re probably right.”
“But, you know,” she said. “You should try Max. He’s a kitchen ninja. He’d love to help.”
I flinched a bit. “I’ll work something out.”
“No, I mean it. Ring Max. This is totally his speciality.”
“Yes but…”
“Anyway, sweetheart, I have to dash. I’m late for a meeting. The next Martin Amis, you know how it is. Mwah.”
Ring Max, she said. As if it were simple. As if I could just pick up the phone and talk to him. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him other than as part of a larger group, or the last time we’d had anything like a conversation. Perhaps we’d been closer at university, but I’d lost so much of that time due to an extravagant combination of recreational drugs, mania, and electroconvulsive therapy. A title for my autobiography, possibly. Or an epitaph. The ECT had sort of worked, but it had fucked my memory inside-out and upside-down. Nearly everything had come back, in time, but it had left my life a jigsaw. I had the pieces but I didn’t know what the picture was supposed to be.
University and its immediate aftermath were little more than a sensory haze. A blur of gold and green, the scent of old books, the slide of a stranger’s body against mine. Rushes of chemical rapture. The heat of a nightclub, a sweep of lights, like a peacock’s tail, bodies and heartbeats and music. I was king of a glittering world, a splintering, falling, shattering world. But what of Max? What could I remember of Max?
Patrician good looks and a self-deprecating smile. Cricket whites for dreamy afternoons. Punting and a panama hat in the full golden gleam of summer. And, in winter, a wine-red scarf by an Italian designer so exclusive even I hadn’t heard of him. I think Max used to let me bury my hands in it on cold days. My skin, at least, remembered the softness. Like a kiss from a ghost.
It’s quite an accomplishment to out-privilege me, but Max, the youngest son of an American heiress and an English viscount, was the sort of person who had no right to exist outside of Sunday night costume dramas and the novels of Evelyn Waugh. If there was any justice in the world, he would be profoundly unlikeable (or at the very least ugly) but, somehow, he wasn’t. Imagine, if you would, the sincerity of an American coupled with the self-irony of the English, wrapped in the body of a Greek God. The bisexuality, we must assume, was simply a gift from the universe.
