Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

I’m not sure how many. Tears start to run down my face as I try to stay completely still, completely quiet.

Then, whoosh, the bathroom door opens and light floods the room once more. I take my hands from over my ears, open my eyes, stand up, straighten my skirt, pull two sheets of tissue from the dispenser and wipe my face before walking out, face contorted into something approaching, if not a smile, then a non-grimace. I go back to my desk and it continues.

CHAPTER 15

Two weeks later, on what is, I’ll come to learn, a typical New York summer’s day, I move into my first proper apartment.

In the ninety-plus-degree Manhattan heat, the sun roasts the foul rubbish that has been heaped out on the sidewalk and kicked around: scraps of meat cooking for the second time, now moist and sticking underfoot. Horns scream, steam charges, sweat runs into the cracks of cement between the bricks that make the buildings that hold the sky that puts a lid on the madness bubbling and bursting out down below.

The advert describes a large studio with charming period features: an enviable location in the famous, infamous Greenwich Village, on Christopher Street. The place where all of the artists and weirdos and outsiders and beautiful freaks I carry inside me had lived, had walked, before my feet brought me here in the shadow of theirs.

Up the stairs, the stairs, the stairs, the stairs, the stairs, past the sticky off-white walls, over rough grey carpets, there is a chipped grey door. Inside the door: one room, two windows on the farthest wall that look out onto more windows, more bricks. A tree looms, the shadows of its branches lying across the bed, casting a stain across the body that lies there, never moving.

The kitchen has no windows, no light, save for the harsh yellow bulb in the ceiling that glints off the chef’s knives lining the wall as they wait, waiting for me and my gasping, thirsty skin. A couch and an old TV are the only landmarks between them and the bed. A thin rectangular room is tucked behind a door holding a burnt orange bathroom, a toilet that will block often and an exposed pipe connected to a makeshift shower.

Across the hall, two grey doors identical to mine, just with different numbers. One is vibrating, pulsating, shuddering under the sound of the shrieking, moaning, screaming women of the violent porn being played on a loop inside by a man whose face I will never see, not once, in the year to come. I think of him often, I think of the women on his screen, who need me, who need rescuing from him.

I pay $2,500 for a shoebox, surrounded by other people existing in their own shoeboxes. The ten-feet by thirty-feet rectangles holding us all inside our own stories, our own dreams, our own nightmares. The sounds, smells, tastes slipping underneath the doors and out into the world we keep at bay, the small clues to what is really happening in every apartment, in every room, in every building, on every street, in every neighbourhood, higher and tighter and more and more until the breath is taken from us and we stand tall, sucking the few inches of air above our heads.

I email a friend:

‘So here I am in New York. Here I am, alone. All alone.’

I didn’t know then what alone truly means. It’s more than being a new arrival in a city, without familiar colleagues, without friends, without people to call your own, people who call you theirs. I will learn though.

I’ve cut off my British phone – deliberately, so that I can’t be reached by who and what I’ve left behind. My ex-boyfriend who, just a handful of months before had told me, in an email, about his new girlfriend, their new home and then just weeks later, a follow-up about their new baby. His news had me dry-heaving and spitting into the office toilet as another woman pissed long and hard in the cubicle next to me.

Their new family – formed just days after I arrive in the city, with their son’s birth – couldn’t reach me if I didn’t have a phone to receive pictures and updates from concerned friends who just want to check if I have seen the pictures on the internet and if I haven’t I shouldn’t, absolutely under any circumstances, go looking for them.

For three weeks the only place I have internet or telephone access is at work and I feel protected, hardened by the isolation, the complete absence of life, or any kind of love, that I recognise.

My birthday comes around; I turn thirty-three alone on my knees on the floor of my apartment. The splinters burrow into my scarred kneecaps as I kneel. I cry, beg, claw the walls, the floors. I’m bleeding as my hands face each other and come together.

That first summer, I dye my hair fire-engine red. I cut my fringe into a hard, high line. I’ll soon dye it dark brown. And then I’ll dye it black. I can’t remember what I used to look like, what she used to look like just a handful of weeks before. I look at pictures from before and see the woman I was, smiling, the light almost reaching her eyes, feel her between my fingers and in my mind. Her hair is yellow and her eyes are blue and she looks happy and free and light as air and I touch her, touch her almost-happiness. It bubbles and bites. I pull back. I’m too far away now.

I go to places with other people in them, in search of her. I look for her yellow, brittle strands, the bursting bright blue. In the places where men buy me drinks because I’m alone reading Jay McInerney. In the bar in the French restaurant half a block away where no one buys the glass after glass I drink. Before