The Helen 100 Read online

  This started when a man on the XXX app, to which I’d been attached since download, asked me, ‘Do you love pussy?’ Of course, this is a great improvement on ‘r u Lesbian?’, but one that hit me in the wrong instant.

  Did I love pussy? I wasn’t sure at all if this remained the case. Perhaps I now feared it.

  Once, before I met Eleven, a shelter tabby of undocumented charm, I visited a sale of Scottish Fold cats with the intention to purchase. I saw a queen in heat. Her vulva was enormous, terrifying and a little bit comic. It looked as if a cheap props department on a Z-grade monster movie had taken a deflated inner tube from a bicycle, twisted it into a pretzel and spray-painted it pink in readiness for attack by a plastic sword.

  The queen backed her vulva-prop into everything, including me, her litter box, and the wall, yowling a sex-starved lament. Fuck me. Fuck ME. FUCK ME. This, I think, is pretty much how I would have seemed that day to any human—which was most every human, including the barbecue chicken man—who provoked my desire. A huge pink reeking hole so comically needy, it goaded only laughter and fear.

  As I am certain you will understand, checking my own hole for evidence of fangs etc. was necessary at this point. And so, I took several pictures for personal use.

  A photograph may seem silly to you, but it was practical in my case as I am legally blind. I had tried investigation by hand mirror and found that it revealed little; just something that looked like a nimbus of fairy floss with fresh bite marks in it. It was a family-friendly anime vagina. I knew my dolphin couldn’t be that delightful, so I took a digital picture and zoomed in.

  The clear view of my organ troubled me no more than the cloudy one. I was not shocked. I have not been shocked for many years by the HD lens of late pornography, which takes, as you may know, a very anatomical view of muff.

  I was never truly shocked by her vagina. I was not shocked by my vagina, and many of the other real-life and represented vaginas I have seen in the past were not at all troubling. But I suppose this is because I had always worked up to the anxiety of vaginas slowly, including the one I looked at now.

  One does not simply enter a vagina. We prepare with a brief prayer to ourselves. We transform the horror of this otherwise banished thing into a source of good. It’s a bit like Communion in reverse.

  Like the chaps I met on the internet, even those who claim to adore ‘horny bitches’ but in fact fear them, I found bold female desire, in this case my own, to be quite monstrous. Not just by me, I decided, but by everyone. I shared these thoughts as soon as I had them with persons of the XXX community.

  After a fairly good look at my dolphin, to I_Heart_Pussy, I replied,

  MuffDiva: Do I love pussy? Well, both absolutely yes and absolutely no. I desire it, yet I loathe it. But isn’t this true of all desired things? I have come in recent minutes to believe that desire is intrinsically repulsive, even the apparently gingham sort experienced by Renée Zellweger in the film Jerry Maguire. ‘You complete me’ is a horrifying thing to say, if you think about it. You complete me. You fill my bloody void.

  I_Heart_Pussy: lol, wut?

  MuffDiva: Perhaps in order to feel the damage of pleasure, we must all be prepared to be broken. That we all must break ourselves. What do you think?

  I_Heart_Pussy: Are you into bondage?

  MuffDiva: Well, probably, but that’s not my point. My point is, I think all people are probably all as horrible as me. Even the nice ones. Don’t you agree? I am lying on the floor with my hair full of chicken and my hands down my pants, and I think about those well-dressed divorced ladies who are feeling what I’m feeling and how they go to Tuscany on tours. Imagine them sitting in a luxury coach trying not to think about golden showers or of slicing off a priest’s todger and ramming it down the several throats of pigeons in an ancient public square while shrieking, ‘Eat daddy, dirty bird.’ Perhaps as they brought themselves to violent anal climax with a votive.

  I_Heart_Pussy: Right. So you’re just divorced. I know what that’s like, mate. I’ve been there.

  It wasn’t the intention of I_Heart_Pussy to break me with these words, but he did.

  Public Service Announcement: Psychologists, even quite bad ones, are valuable to the newly dumped.

  Perhaps owing to his tendency of popping out midway through a consultation to smoke, Cheap Gerard was very cheap. But he had a reasonable reputation; particularly for smoking cessation. When I asked him during the emergency post-dump session that second day, ‘How do I live now?’, I was pretty sure he’d have a good solution.

  First, he asked me to sign something called a ‘no-harm agreement’. This basically meant that I promised not to top myself and he promised to talk to me, should I feel it were needed, in person, any time. In a smoking environment, obviously.

  Then he talked about the separation as an ‘opportunity for growth’. Naturally, I told him to get fucked. He toyed with his cigarette lighter. Then I asked him what ‘growth’, of which I’d recently heard so fucking much, meant and how it might be achieved. He spoke vaguely for ten minutes about nothing, then he took me outside and offered me a cigarette.

  ‘I don’t smoke, Gerard,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s really positive. I’m glad you quit.’

  ‘I quit years ago—well before I first came to see you for advice about my problem with online Scrabble, Gerard. An addiction, by the way, I am yet to overcome. Of course, now I click on the dicks of a XXX app instead of triple-word scores, but this is beside the point. I just want to know how to live now.’

  ‘I don’t fucking know,’ said Gerard. ‘I’m not over my divorce yet. Nobody is. You never get over it. You’ve just got to do something different, I suppose. Do something different, and pretend that is growing.’

  Gerard told me to return home and contact three people to whom I was close for a suggestion on what different thing I should do to help me grow.

  I called my mother. She told me to come and live at her place. This was generous, but unfeasible, as my mother and I have not only lived in separate states for more than twenty years, but have had cause to call for intervention during several of those holidays in which we found ourselves reunited. When I reminded her of the Christmas of ’04 and her appeal for help to local police, she told me to travel, like that lady from Eat, Pray, Love.

  ‘I’ve seen her on the television,’ said my mother. ‘I think she mentioned this “growing” you’re so keen on.’

  I considered travel from the place where things had ‘been bad for a while’. I thought about the sexual encounter with the Tuscan youth, the spiritual encounter with the elderly yogi, the consumer encounter with the Laotian tailor who’d knock me out a new closet of clothes for the price of a First-World sandwich.

  I considered the possibility that I would return home changed and full of wisdom. I considered the possibility that I would bore the blind shit out of all with stories about my Astounding Personal Growth.

  ‘Everyone is so at peace in India! They have so little but are so wise and happy!’

  I looked into this future and saw that I had not ‘found’ myself but had completely lost my marbles. I had left them at an orientalist bargain sale filled with a people so impoverished I felt able to buy back my dignity at cost. I had not cured my misery by holidaying in somebody else’s. I had just outsourced my hope.

  Poor mad, boring Helen, they would say. Travel has not broadened her mind. It has flattened her conversation.

  ‘I learned so much about honouring the human spirit in Uttar Pradesh!’ I said, over-enunciating Uttar Pradesh so that every sensible person I knew would make plans to be busy the next time I called.

  I couldn’t trust my custody of this travel wisdom; I would only come off like a whirring racist who’d taken a theme-park walk in someone else’s cut-price shoes. I’d sound as though I believed these divorce-travel nations existed purely to provide me with a therapeutic path. I’d sound as though I numbly thought these ‘colourful’ places were built
chiefly for the cure of my grief. My First-World grief cut fresh from sudden separation. Or, rotten from gradual separation as was apparently the case because, you know, ‘things had been bad for a while’.

  But I did not want to travel and, in fact, could not travel for several reasons. First, I didn’t have the money. Second, I couldn’t find my passport because this house was a loveless mess. Third, I believed that leaving my home in order to find myself was a deeply flawed idea. I was right there, somewhere, and I knew that I needed to look.

  Public Service Announcement: When you are lost, you should remain in one place. This is good advice not only for newly dumped persons but for hikers, and for those who have taken hallucinogenic drugs and found them disagreeable.

  *

  ‘I am too dead inside to travel,’ I told my mother. When someone you have long loved leaves, it does feel a bit like a death. Or, if not death (which, however unpleasant, probably comes, even to the atheist, with a hope for a slide into glory), then it feels still. Absolutely still.

  It’s as though the weather itself has ceased to exist; the force and the context in which you’d lived is gone. There is no longer a sun to lift your mood or a storm that will ruin your plans. There’s just no weather. My single, airless ambition was to find the weather again.

  Some dumped people are sure they can feel the weather again if only they travel to find it. Perhaps they can. Perhaps they will find it in the dappled sun of a Tuscan cock-forest. And best of luck to these people. Buona fortuna! If I felt for a minute that I could have that shimmering future, I would find the means and will to travel. I would visit Signor Marco and his blazing jizz-torch and warm myself with the young fires, I am told, that still burn for women of my age in southern Europe. But, I knew I couldn’t personally expect to find the weather in any climate zone. For me, there just wasn’t any more weather.

  Instead, I elected to stay in my own nation and find my own storms. I would not travel to Italy. Or India. Or, for the moment, anywhere further than the lavatory.

  I wouldn’t travel and I wouldn’t have my consciousness lit up, either. I just wanted it dimmed, and thoughts of spiritual growth and foreign penises and new dresses were exhausting. ‘Be free!’ ‘Love fully!’ ‘Dress like a queen at paupers’ prices!’ These conclusions and the road to their international encounter could all fuck right off.

  I would find a new way to feel the old sun and rain on my skin. I really would.

  *

  I texted Celine:

  Helen: My psychologist says I need to ask three people what I should do to ‘grow’. Notwithstanding my reasonable fear that you will answer me with something absurd, I am asking you to be one of these persons.

  Celine: I am sending you my limited Whore edition of The Secret.

  Helen: Whore.

  Next I called my friend Ameera. She offered to help me to convert to Islam should I care to. This was, in fact, fairly tempting, as (a) I had developed an aversion to alcohol some time back due to life with a hard-drinkin’ woman, and (b) this new faith could give real heft to the arguments I was having in the XXX app about US military interventions. But, as I know I’m no great shakes as a joiner, and even less as a scholar of virtue, I declined.

  ‘That’s probably good for me, Helen. We Muslims have such a bad reputation already; you’ll only make things worse.’ She then told me to read Karl Marx, of whom she knew me to be an erratic fan.

  Ameera, who had taught Classical Marxism at university, said I should resume my political interest to a point where it became so consuming I overlooked the matter of my private pain entirely in favour of the public sort.

  A topic as large as the means of production and a book as big as Capital can make a girl shrink down to almost nothing. The ideology. The superstructure. The base. These things can become a humbling Holy Trinity before which we are comfortably nothing. Or, at least, no more than an effect of history.

  Revolutionary communism seemed like the most reasonable way to ‘grow’, until I received a text:

  Celine: Look, you KNOW I am just trying to troll you out of suicidal thinking, you dumb whore. And you KNOW I have respect for the counselling process. I’ve been a fan for years. So, I’ve been thinking about it and I think you should just ‘grow’ in the way that I know you want to, which is by getting properly nailed.

  Helen: You mean, nailed like the rotten wooden harlot that I am?

  Celine: Ya, Schmoopy. Just go on a lot of dates.

  I would go on a lot of dates—and this is that account. And I am sorry in advance, but I have no better means to describe the interior of a broken heart than this. All I have is a very rough map that shows one dodgy way out of it. Please consult your physician before attempting any part of this dreadful program.

  6

  Fortyish hours, one bad cinematic metaphor and thirty-seven deleted Facebook posts since she left

  Perhaps you have seen the film The Shawshank Redemption. If so, one of its best-known scenes will dispose you to an understanding of my attitude on this, the second terrible morning.

  If you haven’t seen this movie, I apologise for the spoiler. If you have seen it, I apologise for spoiling any good memory of it that you may have. Either way, if you do not wish to associate the vision of a man crawling through a sewage pipe with break-ups, perhaps just skip ahead.

  This is what happens in the movie: Tim Robbins, a wrongly accused murderer, surfaces to freedom after years of confinement utterly covered in shit. Well, that’s how a dumped and cheated-on person feels. Obviously, we don’t crawl through a pipe full of actual poop, but a break-up is a pipe filled with reeking betrayal. Which I imagine is nearly as bad as shit.

  It may be clear to cinemagoers that my analogy doesn’t last beyond the poop scene. Tim has a shower and adjusts quickly to the freedom he’s been planning for years. I, fresh from the foul tunnel and with no plans, could do nothing but cause offence.

  Written records of this second morning recall my stink. I did what I earnestly recommend that no one newly released from love does: I hinted at my deep, so terribly deep, pain all over Facebook.

  Helen Razer: 6.45 a.m. I am alone.

  Helen Razer: 6.45 a.m. There is nothing for me now but death.

  Helen Razer: 6.46 a.m. WHY?!

  These were among my many sorry status updates, which I had blocked the ex from viewing but kept conspicuously available to everybody else.

  Public Service Announcement: If you have been newly dumped, try not to speak much, and write even less. And get the fuck off social media.

  I had long despised the tendency in others to VagueBook and rarely was I more tempted to un-friend than when I read something cryptic like ‘I forgive you, but I can never trust you again’, or ‘Please hold our family in your thoughts’ with no further explanation.

  I had thought of these persons as self-involved time-wasters. If you have some terrible news to give, give it, I would say to the screen. Don’t leave me to wonder if you’re about to kill yourself, perish of cancer or otherwise fall off your perch. I had supposed that if someone was emotionally strong enough to court this kind of public sympathy, then they really didn’t require it at all.

  Well, the morning after the morning after she left me, I reconsidered. Not all of these people are devious, I thought. While there certainly are those in the habit of soliciting anxiety, there are many more who are just sick of crying alone. Sometimes we need to cry with someone else.

  So I posted dozens of bad haikus to sorrow. Even at one point, I believe, a Metallica lyric remembered from my youth. Then I deleted what copyright violation I had posted, leaving those users who had seen an urgent flicker of distress even more muddled than they would have been by a more enduring call for help.

  I regret to report that I also uploaded several chiaroscuro self-portraits of my half-naked self on the floor in tears.

  Public Service Announcement: Get off Facebook.

  These received a creditable volume of ‘likes’, w
hich I attribute not to pity alone but in part to my instant post-separation weight loss. Which is common, nearly always becoming and, if we don’t count full custody of a cat named Eleven, really the only good part of getting dumped.

  Posts like mine have now become quite commonplace. Private grief has been largely lost in our era and replaced by conspicuous tantrums. Our best feelings fall into silence and the worst just won’t shut up. It’s not great that we make such a racket these days, but it can be useful. I crowd-sourced the closest compassion. For me, Facebook became like Uber, but for sympathy.

  I wanted to cry in front of someone. Digital innovation brought me a helper named Maddie.

  Maddie had seen some of my public rubbish and petitioned me to pick through it by private message. I told her I was ‘fucking desperate’, which was accurate. She said she’d be right ’round.

  I didn’t know that much about Maddie at all. I did know she was an occasional writer and awfully keen on feminist statistics.

  I had only met Maddie in real life twice. On the first occasion, which was at an art exhibition, she had recited the average depressing ratio of male to female painters hung in the great European galleries. We saw each other again at a meeting for the journalists’ union where she recited the average depressing ratio of male to female bylines on the front pages of newspapers. I considered reminding her that no one purchased newspapers anymore, and that art galleries were often places where old ideas went to die, and I couldn’t imagine why our gender would want to claim lifeless territory, etc. But she was a sweet girl whose wardrobe of ironic sheath dresses and go-go boots had lifted my spirits, so I said nothing at all.