LITMIR.BIZ

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is an atmosphere.

      It is not simply men who do not want to give up their position of dominance over women. The whole cultural atmosphere is tuned to keep women falling.

      This atmosphere is what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the Symbolic.

      The Symbolic is everywhere, it is everything.

      The Symbolic is what the authorities tell you to do, but, more generally, it is what the world tells you to do. And here’s the twist: the world doesn’t have to tell you to do it.

      Women obey without knowing they are obeying. The choice is always already made.

      “We’re going to let you go,” said the man. He looked devastated. “Because I was young once.”

      “I was young once too,” I said. “I can’t quite remember. I think I was happy.”

THREE

       Dear Vic,

       Last night was truly extraordinary. Thank you.

       Plato said that we were all born with two heads and four arms and four legs. I didn’t have a Hellenistic education because I went to a comprehensive school. I’m the only one of all my friends who went to a comprehensive school—apart from Sebastian, who isn’t my friend or my boyfriend anymore. He comes from a decadent, progressive family in Islington. He is one of six siblings who all look intersex, but they are all excellent at a musical instrument. I never did that either. Nietzsche would say I suffer from ressentiment.

       Sebastian looks a bit like a Nietzschean blond beast. He started off at an exclusive left-wing boarding school, but then he got expelled at the age of twelve for fighting. He had to fight at my school too. The rude boys hated him because he was upper-middle class. I remember this one time when we were thirteen. We were in the hall between lessons. It was packed with people screaming and fighting and the teachers couldn’t control it. Sebastian pretended that he was pushed too close to me and held my hand by accident but I knew he did it on purpose. So I bent his hand backward. He was in a lot of pain but he wouldn’t scream for mercy. Instead he grabbed my hair and got me in a headlock. I bit his stomach. He wouldn’t let go and I wouldn’t let go. Neither one of us would ever let go.

       We walked to the next lesson like that—a two-headed monster. It took the teacher at least half an hour to separate us. There was a circle of red marks on his white shirt—it was his blood, but it was my teeth.

       Soon after that we fell in love.

       Plato said that Zeus got angry and ripped all the hermaphrodites in half and made them into normal humans with only one head, two arms, and two legs. But they were doomed by an overwhelming sense of what they had lost. They were doomed to spend the rest of their lives searching for the half that they lost.

       That’s how I’ve felt since I left your terraced house this morning. I spoke to the operators in the kitchen. They seemed really nice. What’s the name of their blog again?

       With love,

       Ann-Marie X

      Back at the apartment, I lay on my bed for about three hours, watching Beyoncé’s “Deja Vu” video again and again and again. I watched her shimmy across the screen in a colonial-style grass skirt against a fake backdrop of dry earth and deep sky. She waved her beautiful arms around dementedly and kicked up the dust and then collapsed on the floor at the song’s crescendo, screaming about seeing her lover everywhere she went.

      I pulled on my red silk kimono. The bathroom door was closed. I could hear Freddie running a bath and the squeal of an American cartoon.

      “I’m coming to jump in there with you in just about ten minutes!” I shouted.

      I had a look in the living room; it was fucked. Freddie’s portrait of me had been taken down from the wall and lay on the coffee table, covered in white dust and a rolled note. He painted it last summer on the roof at Hammerton Hall, the stately home where his father keeps all his art but never visits. Maxine, the housekeeper, had decked the roof out in fairy lights and candles because I think she wanted to turn Freddie straight. I had lain on blue velvet with my clothes off while he pretended to be seized by inspiration: a cigarette clenched between his teeth, splattered with paint the approximate shade of my skin. He had insisted that I wear a sapphire necklace that belonged to his mother. The result was a hybrid of Francis Bacon and soft-focus 70s porn. My mouth was a yawning black chasm and there were boxing gloves on my feet, but my lips and nipples were painted a tender pink. Maxine said that the portrait made me look about ten times more beautiful than I am in real life. Freddie loathed it; he couldn’t even accept it as self-consciously derivative. He said that it revealed him in a light that he didn’t want to be revealed in. I said that I thought the portrait was supposed to be of me? He said no—he had exposed himself as sentimental, as sentimental as a dirty old flasher in the park. I asked him: “How is a flasher sentimental?” And he said: “A flasher is just a romantic at heart. He just wants to be naked under the trees.” Freddie decided to give up painting altogether and invest his creative potency in video art. Now he only works in 8 mm.

      Next to the chaise longue, there was a bust of Freddie’s uncle, Professor Timothy Frank, an esteemed anthropologist. The bust was commissioned by Freddie’s father who hated Freddie’s uncle. It looked like a remnant of an exploded car factory. The face was more or less a steering wheel embedded in a tire.

      There was a lot of tribal hunting equipment too: scythes and axes, charged with a preternatural energy. They were full of wrath. They didn’t want to be estranged from their country of origin. There was a taxidermied peacock with fanned feathers.

      In the kitchen, I ate some chicken livers and stale bread, checking my phone constantly. Vic hadn’t called or texted.

      I went back upstairs.

      Now the bathroom door was ajar. Disney’s The Little Mermaid was playing on our old mini TV, which stood on a marble plinth at the end of the bath. I watched the screen as I got my tights off in the hall.

      “Keep singing!” barked Ursula the sea witch, reaching her phantom fingers down Ariel’s throat and usurping her voice.

      Ariel spasmed; her tail turned into legs.

      “This bit is, like, so romantic,” came a voice. It wasn’t Freddie’s voice.

      I pushed the door open.

      There was a boy in the bath. He wasn’t Freddie.

      “Who the fuck are you?” I said.

      The boy turned his freckled, crying face toward me.

      I knew who he was; he was Samuel, Allegra’s younger brother. I hadn’t seen him since the day after the night of the crème de menthe—that was nearly two years ago. He used to be a preppy little bastard, but now he had transformed into a hipster of some description.

      “Get out,” I said.

      His hair was ginger, not black like hers. His body was thin and white, but not exactly alabaster like hers. His eyes were not gray like hers, but hazel. He had the same high domed forehead as her and I hated him violently.

      I attempted to haul the TV into the bathwater.

      He leaped out.

      The cord strained. The TV rocked on the edge.

      It didn’t go in.

      Now Ariel was scrabbling on the shore, trying to figure out how to walk.

      Samuel clung to me, wet and ludicrous. I pushed him off. He was almost as tall as Vic. With shaking hands, he returned the TV to its plinth. He got back in the water.

      A moronic smile appeared on his face. “Look.” He pointed to the screen.

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