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

in drinking another shot to prove that I won’t be stopped by the judgement of some man I barely know.

At some point, the man with seven sick cats asks for my number. He texts me the next day, as I lie between unchanged sheets and vomit sits in the toilet bowl. We arrange to meet at the White Horse pub, the site of the Bumper Sticker Guy. Sober, out in the daylight, without the tones of Jarvis Cocker to pull us into each other’s orbit, we’re both skittish and awkward. It turns out the answer to my question on the dancefloor was: ‘A photographer. Well, not, you know, for money. I work in a camera shop, but I am a photographer too.’ I ask enough questions, demure in the face of his obvious talent, his confidence bubbling up inside his chest.

‘God, we used to get magazines like yours in,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t even bear to touch it.’ He shakes his head, rolls his tongue around in his mouth like he’s eaten something bad. Something he wishes he’d just spat out. I flinch, unprepared. ‘How can you live with yourself, really? Doing that for a living? It’s just so stupid and pointless.’

‘What?’

‘Well, I’m just saying.’

‘Well, don’t,’ I snap. I eye the door and consider leaving until he starts to pull us back towards safer ground. He’s talking about the club night we met at while I recalibrate.

‘… and you were flirting so outrageously with Jim.’

‘Sorry?’ I jerk my head up. ‘Who?’

He smiles, but his eyes are dark as he says, ‘The DJ. He’s married, you know. You were throwing yourself at him!’

His laugh has a steely edge. I look at him, bewildered. I barely remember the face of the man who I requested song after song from, desperate to trick my body and brain into believing I was home.

‘We were all talking about it afterwards. How obvious it was that you just wanted to sleep with him.’

Fury burns my chest.

‘Yeah, I’m leaving,’ I say, as I, with as much dignity as I can muster, which isn’t that much, walk out of the pub. I stand, swallowing the hot, toxic air into my lungs, feeling further away from home and happiness than ever.

Of course, this isn’t the last time I see him. He takes me to his apartment in Washington Heights. We get the subway all the way up to the George Washington Bridge and beyond. When we get off, his New York is not mine downtown. He turns the key in the door and the smell of cat piss is overwhelming. His apartment is largely empty. A kitchen with two handfuls of crockery, glasses and cutlery. Next to it, the lounge, which is just a sofa bed and an office chair pulled up to a high computer desk. There’s no TV. In the bedroom, he has a bed, a few books. The walls are bare and white-ish. His cats roam the rooms; they’re on chairs and beds and behind doors. He introduces each to me individually, using a funny, high voice to speak directly to them. One is deaf; two are blind. Or were two deaf and one blind? One has diabetes. As I lie, shrinking on his sheets, they slink and stalk towards me on the tips of their paws; sensing my repulsion, they come closer.

I only attract, am attracted to, men who are at best apathetic or at worst cruel and cold. Whose emotions remain far away from me, kept on ice for the woman who deserves it. The path to my heart was marked out by the boots of my dad – some of the men who walk it follow his lead, put their footsteps in his. They find permission in his grooves, the blueprint for how to treat me. And I lose my ability – if I ever had it – to tell pleasure and love from pain and hate. It all feels the same for me, the language recognisable under my fingertips. I love it when they hurt me and the hurt feels like love.

There are those who regard me as inessential to their life; they can smell, from both close and afar, the poverty, the shame, the trauma that has stuck to me from childhood. Women like me aren’t girlfriend material, never mind wife material. I drink too much, speak too plainly, swear too loudly, wear too much flesh and store too much below it. If I’m very lucky, they want to fuck me.

And I don’t want them to but need them to because the truth I can’t yet speak to anyone I know – only strangers who are blank pages for my confession – is that, after being completely sure that I never wanted marriage or kids in my twenties, I am now consumed with thoughts of both. ‘By the time you’re twenty-eight, ninety-eight per cent of your eggs have died,’ says another woman from my office, setting off a tsunami of panic in my chest. I’ve never been further away from finding someone to love, who I could love enough to join myself with in two ways of such profound permanence.

But it isn’t just a lack of a willing man. I’m still plagued by the horrors of my past, by thoughts of my own parents’ irresponsibility. The bone-deep fear that shakes my voice is this: that I’ll be a terrible mum. That I’m so scarred and twisted by my childhood that I’ll be unable to do anything but repeat it. And that I’ll not just be a bumbling, fumbling, doing-their-best new mum. But a bad mum. That the moment I have the seed of a baby in my belly, the very foundation of who I am will change. That the evil will flood my veins, overwhelm my brain. My eyes will blacken, my heart will stop beating and I will become a monster.

Now, however, the desire for a baby overwhelms my fear. I start to blurt it out to strangers at parties,