wondered whether she was humiliating me on purpose – in the same way she’d had me whipped on purpose – as part of some wider ploy to empower herself in a coming negotiation.
‘You’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘You got to go in the deep end. We’re big thinkers now, sweetheart. Take a sip of this –’ she lifted the bottle to my lips and I obediently sipped its lukewarm wine. ‘We’re going Wandsworth – go down there.’ She waved vaguely to our left. ‘Get over the river.’
‘Why?’ I moved into the lane she’d indicated.
‘Not telling you.’
‘So is this car stolen?’
Her face deflated into a sneer. ‘Don’t be such a fucking fun sponge.’ She punched me on the arm. ‘You think I know how to steal a fucking car? No. This car was an act of love. I’m in love now and I’ve got a man that’s in love with me.’
‘Who – that new guy? Is he rich?’
She laughed and drank again, shaking her head. ‘You know who he is, bitch – Kimber’s the man of my dreams, the love of my life! – I met him down the Rockway the same night you ran off sulking – cos you was jealous of him, weren’t you sweetheart? Ah my sweet sulking little gremlin, you got jealous, didn’t you?’
She lifted up her hand and waved it in front of my face until I noticed the silver band around her ring finger.
‘Is that an engagement ring?’
She cackled. ‘No, not telling you. My story needs to build. Talk to me about something else first. How you going to spend your money?’
‘I dunno… I need to buy a better edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems. I don’t want any editing. She had her own type of dash, and —’
‘You’re really talking to me about dashes? No. Sweetheart, we’re in a brand new car, we got champagne, we’re in the Royal Fucking Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Sweetheart, no. You got to think bigger now.’ She turned the radio on again and baroque orchestral music began shaking the metal beneath our feet. ‘You’re going to buy something stupid what won’t last. You’re going to buy expensive olives and expensive wine – cos we’ve got a new place to live! We’re out of the hostel forever – it’s done, we can’t go back – all our worldly possessions are in the boot of this car, and we’re moving in today.’
‘What?’ I braked in surprise. Car horns honked behind us. ‘Shit, what?’ I released the brake. ‘How?’
‘I know! Ah, but you’ve made me feel bad now – don’t feel bad about the dashes, sweetheart – I should be more supporting, sorry, sorry. Course you can buy your poems, tell me about them, I’m listening.’
‘What? Stop changing the subject.’
She laughed, tapping the side of the bottle in applause at her own performance. ‘This is how you build tension! But really babe, tell me why Emily should get your money. What’s her best line?’
‘I like “soundless as dots on a disk of snow”,’ I said, choosing to play along. ‘It’s about civilisation collapsing. She has a perfect verse about snow as well:
“This is the Hour of Lead —”’
‘Ok shut the fuck up, you win. No more poems, no dashes, I’ll tell you everything.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t last.’
‘Alright, have a drink first,’ she said, lifting the bottle up to my mouth. ‘But keep your eyes on the road. Oi! Breathe through your fucking nose you amateur. How many shit blowjobs you given with that technique? What the fuck? Breathe through your nose – there you go – I’m not taking this away till you drink all of it –’ I tried to lean my head back, groaning in protest. ‘No, drink it all,’ she laughed, and kept it there until I choked.
The alcohol could provide a little relief, perhaps – for the welts across my back – but these competed with the deeper pain a decade old – of my myalgia – which no alcohol could help. That pain needed harder drugs than the ones allowed by shops or doctors – it needed the heroin Dawn had promised me – and doctors had failed me long ago, anyway, as they had failed everyone else with my illness.
I coughed up Dawn’s wine until the taste wove into the sound and scent of sycamore trees brushing each other’s branches – and she settled back into her chair, preparing her story.
In her silence, I wondered whether I belonged to an invisible epidemic – the greatest epidemic of the twenty-first century, perhaps – since my disease afflicted tens of millions of people, but most of them hadn’t even heard of it – a multi-system sickness of pain and exhaustion and immune dysfunction, a metabolic crisis – that left no signs on the body, yet depleted its victims more severely than late-stage cancer, and lasted for decades – and yet made no appearances in films or books, received almost no funding or research, and had no known cause and no known cure, and no fixed name – a sickness that afflicted colder countries more, and northern Europe and America the most, like it was somehow the repressed remorse of imperialism, or the rest of the world’s revenge…
I moved the car into a lane towards Wandsworth Bridge.
‘So,’ she said. ‘I get home last Tuesday – you’re still gone, so I’m still heartbroken – and the bitch with the ADHD kid has stole all our pasta so there’s nothing to eat except fucking instant coffee and I’m about to have a full-on breakdown – and then Sandra comes in and she says I’ve got some post, and its an envelope just saying ‘For Dawn’ on it – with a key inside. It’s a car key. And Sandra’s being so fucking nosey but she’s saying she can give me some rice so I’m humouring her and I’m chatting to her about Kimber and about how I met him down the Rockway a week earlier, and I’m saying you’re sulking cos I’ve met a new man – and how he’s very attentive to me – and how I fell asleep at his flat and that’s what made you jealous, weren’t it? But what I didn’t tell you was that his flat is fucking fancy so I knew he’s got money – and I didn’t even fuck him, and the next day I see him again after you’re gone and then the next day again and then I’m seeing him every day like we’re teenagers. I was saying to her, I was saying it was overwhelming, but it was something that he needed and that I needed, and it felt like very child-like, it was just nice, you know? Until there’s a night when he has to go to work, so I come back and you’re still gone, and then here’s this car key in our kitchen, and I’m thinking this can’t be him, but who else’s it going to be? So I just go into the street and Sandra’s behind me and I press the car-key button and this fucking white beauty flashes at us across the road. And it’s got petrol! And there’s this phone inside with a text from him saying ‘happy new year’, even though it’s autumn. Like, what the fuck?’
‘He sounds like a serial killer,’ I said. ‘What does he expect in return?’
‘Don’t you get bored being this cynical? It’s a gift. It’s love. He knows we’re stuck in a hostel – I told him I got a son, and I gave you a fucking five-star review sweetheart, even though you’re a little shit – and he speaks fancier than you and he’s attracted to me, so fuck you. Life is about to happen to us!’
‘Why do you keep saying that? You sound like a televangelist.’
Sunlight flashed from the Thames as we crossed it. Ahead of us rose the advert sculpture of Wandsworth Bridge roundabout – a model atom with electron paths of white steel and four billboards for a nucleus – a microcosm of all London now, perhaps – the nucleus sold for the sign.
‘So fucking what?’ she said. ‘It’s my motto now. And it’s true. You’re torturing me with this negativity! It’s not civilised!’
I imagined swerving into an oncoming car so that it crashed into Dawn’s door. Our soundtrack climaxed in a fanfare. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.
‘Everyone knows civilisation comes from torture,’