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

people I barely know at work. ‘Just go and sleep with any guy and don’t use protection,’ says one. Another sends me a link to an article on egg freezing. One night in Harlem, a gay couple, friends of a friend, offer me $10,000 to give them my eggs. I say no, but not as quickly as I’d have imagined.

CHAPTER 19

Summer 2013, after more than a full year in the apartment filled with darkness, I hit my limit: I can’t squat in the darkness any longer, my skin being stripped off like bark. I wipe the knives clean, pack my bags and find a new place on Craigslist. For the first time in eight years, I won’t be living alone, but I will be living in a room in an apartment where all of the light is kept: a straight-from-the-movies loft in SoHo. The bathroom is white and black-tiled, with a traditional claw tub. The living room is about six times the size of my old apartment – there are comfy sofas, a dining table for ten and big windows. This is the New York I came for.

I arrange a viewing with the live-in landlady, whose body constantly twitches, never still. She offers me a drink, talks manically, spits on me, and I see, feel, know, she’s like me. My major concern about finding a new apartment, about living with another person – that my drinking would be too visible, that the state in which I came home most nights would be too visible – dissolves within seconds. I relax with relief. Most people wouldn’t, couldn’t live like that. But it seems we’re kindred spirits. She clearly could and would.

The pop of a cork and she pours wine like it’s water; her words follow – quick and clipped, ricocheting around the room before you can fully catch them. I recognise her, like her immediately.

‘So?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’d love to live with you.’ We clink our glasses in celebration. The kindling is stacked.

Soon, she will crackle and break and leak in front of my eyes. I won’t be far behind her. She’s high on Adderall and weed and booze and possibly some other kind of unidentified, uppers and her whirling body and spiralling mind serve to distract me from mine. I’m taking Xanax and sleeping pills. They balance out the diet pills given to me by a personal trainer I know, after being smuggled in from Mexico. I’ve decided to take control: of my body if not my mind. To take a different kind of axe to my skin, to the fat below it. Breakfast is coffee, strong and hot; lunch is a small polystyrene carton of watery, tasteless vending-machine noodles; dinner is martinis, by the large icy glass. I want to starve my body, make myself disappear into the steam that shoots out of the deepest part of the city. When the voice saying stop, don’t, I’m hungry gets too loud, I take another diet pill. They buzz through me, speeding up my body and brain and mouth. Then I don’t want to eat. I want to talk; I want to write; I want to walk up and down Broadway for hours, criss-crossing the perfect grid of streets and avenues that makes up Manhattan.

My intense mania is only matched by hers and it hurtles towards me as I laugh and duck, caught in its slipstream. I spend hours looking at the windows of the penthouse apartments across from ours that look like the places normal, nice, sane people live. I imagine – sometimes dream of – their lives, the love, the families that sit inside. The happiness they enjoy.

The landlady turns up in my room – a square twelve-by-ten-foot purpose-built unit next to the living room – most mornings at six a.m., rearranging the two other pieces of furniture over and over again while I stir. She opens my door at midnight and puts her dog in bed with me, under the covers, while I sleep. She cleans with bleach all night long, talking to herself as she works her way through the whole apartment.

But some days and nights are worse than others.

It’s five a.m. on a Monday morning. My alarm is set for 6.15 a.m.

Boom, boom, boom, boom. Smash. Clatter. Crack.

The noise of chair legs crashing and wine stems breaking and voices and bodies bouncing off into each other. The boom-tish-boom from the stereo is rattling the apartment walls and floors.

I pull the pillow over my head as the door to my room bursts wide. As my eyes open, she’s already beneath the covers, a hand trying to find my hip, maybe something else. There’s a man next to her I don’t recognise and she’s saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, the three of us,’ as I pull my knees up to my chest and lock my body tight, as I know how.

‘No, no!’

She stops.

‘Come onnnn!’

‘I have to get up in an hour – can you leave?’ Silence.

‘What are you doing?!’

They pause, roll their eyes, laugh at my rejection as they walk back through the door they barrelled through just seconds before.

I pull the pillow back over my head. A few minutes later, her head pops through the crack, as she asks: ‘How about just him?’

I say no once more.

A few weeks later I wake up and my weave is missing. It’s a vital friend. I’d started backcombing my hair a couple of years before, but knew that to get the hair, the height, the protection, I needed more. More than I had. So I’d developed a towering construction of socks and pads and extensions. Each morning I backcombed and pinned and sprayed until my hair was at a perfect ninety-degree angle. The more I fractured, the harder the sadness fell – the harder I fell – the higher, the tighter my hair became. I felt seen and invisible at the same time – I craved, needed both equally.

But now it’s missing.

It was there when