‘Where exactly are you?’

At home I was learning how to self-massage and was feeling pretty fulfilled. I had no interest in my job anymore but I tried. My concentrating face required more effort than genuine concentration. The organisation of the face, the setting up of the features, was exhausting. Afterwards, I often lay down on the cold tiles of the office bathroom floor and didn’t move for hours. On normal days I did my job correctly, I counted and pointed and made pleasant popping noises with my mouth, but now there were no normal days. My boss suggested time off. To grieve.

He said I was a brilliant assistant but my father’s death had affected me deeply. Take a holiday, he said. I muttered something about the restorative properties of the sea and went home to my sitting-room with its battered, springless couch. Before I left, Paula gave me one of those insincere half hugs. I smiled, thinking of the polite phrasing of the email that was probably sent around informing everyone of my departure.

Without work, I had hours and hours to fill. I performed difficult bending exercises. There was a futility and pointlessness to the whole procedure that I found particularly moving. These exercises had a sighing soundtrack I provided. I skimmed over articles on graceful posture: Pretend to be brimming with self-confidence. Pretend to be a movie star. Pretend to be a human being. At night, I tried to forget about it. I stayed out, alone. On the way home, drunk, I took bits of songs I heard in taxis and applied them to my own life. For the first time ever, I was meeting people. Full of my own brazen ugliness, I was just walking out into the night and finding them.

I considered myself pretty tolerant of people and open to new experiences and ideas. I didn’t often seek out experiences but when they were presented to me I usually liked them. I took the new people out to meet college friends, beautiful sad girls who dressed like widows and claimed the world had crushed them, cruelly, like ‘matchboxes’. Most of the new people were shy in their company. The men, usually men, often older, never joined in. They just looked at me like that was what they were supposed to do. It was unnerving. They smelled like crackers, sometimes crackers and cheese, sometimes crackers and another substance, but there was always a distinctive cracker smell in the air. My friends had their jackets on before they finished their drinks. I felt I was being thought of as ‘inappropriate’ and, in response, dug out dry skin from my scalp and discarded it on the floor beneath me. The men sat still and silent as dummies.

‘What do you want from all this?’ the girls asked. I didn’t know. I was never a big dreamer. Maybe someone to wave at who feebly waves back? These women thought of me as typical: not tragic enough, but still capable of pulling stunts that lowered the calibre of their beauty. I counted the number of times I had touched them all, appraised their imperfections, cheered at their hickeys and sex bruises. It occurred to me that I could never ask any of these women to pour aromatherapy oils over my back, gently and without judgement. They would never rub their hands along my spine and check for signs of roundness whilst making soft reassurances. They were there for me in the ways they should be, at the funeral they formed a neat cluster and discreetly cried, but that was where it stopped. I wanted them to say: ‘Thank you, thank you so much for everything you have done for us and our self-esteem.’ I wanted them to cheer the fuck up. They didn’t cheer up though and they didn’t express gratitude. They just wafted out of the building and I straightened my back at them. The men continued to stare at me like I was an item of significant interest.