I throw an impromptu party. As usual, the subtext is this: come if you’re heartbroken, come if you’re lonely, come if you want to drink until you cannot remember who you are. Come if you don’t want to be with people close to you, come if the people close to you have hurt you, come if there is no one who is close to you at all. Come if all you can think about is a dead girl named Naomi.
I welcome the misfits and the broken, the drunk and the debauched. I want no surnames and no platitudes. I don’t get token texts the next day about what a great time they had because they barely know where they have been. The whisky bottles are as empty as we are and we like it that way.
I do it deliberately, to get under Tom’s skin and cause him to itch. To punish him for turning me down, when I had needed him to fuck me. When I had needed him to fuck me to bury the thoughts of Naomi and Luke and what had really happened next running laps around my mind.
The door’s open, Tom, feel free to come in. That should help you to figure out what happened last time.
But he won’t, I know.
I had thought that there was a spark. I knew Tom and Lexie’s relationship was rocky. But he didn’t kiss me back and he couldn’t wait to leave my flat. I look at my too-tall, clunky shape in the mirror. Was that it? No physical attraction? Would he have liked me more if I had, say, Naomi’s body? A wave of nausea comes over me again. I think of Naomi, bodiless now. Is there a percentage, perhaps? A percentage of her death for which I am responsible? And will I ever know what it was? Is there a number I could live with, and one that would cross the line to too much to bear?
Perhaps Tom’s rejection was nothing to do with physical attraction. Maybe some men are just more loyal than Luke, with his multiple affairs, ever was? I kick the mirror, putting a small crack in the bottom.
I should have known: from the second Tom arrived at my flat, he had the aura of a man who had turned up for a job interview but known straight away that this wasn’t a place he wanted to work. He kept his jacket on, nervously turning the bottom of his sleeves up and down, over and over. He didn’t kiss me back, even for half a second.
It’s why I grasped at something else. Did he believe me that we had slept together? Did he believe he could have been drunk enough to even forget that?
He left my flat and I drank and drank and crashed down to the floor.
Because: after all of that. After all of my hard work. I slung a wine glass against their wall and hoped he’d hear. I didn’t bother picking up the glass, because who am I protecting from being hurt? It’s a bit late for me. Why, when I do this much for these men in my life, do I never get rewarded?
I sit in the corner of my party, alone, with a large amaretto and Coke. If Tom thinks that rejecting me means that I will bow out of his life, I think, he is wrong.
It’s addictive, bitterness.
It multiplies inside you so you begin by resenting the people who have it all, life’s lucky ones. And then you go further. You resent the guy in the shop who smiled and seemed okay. You feel hostile towards the people in the pub buying a bottle of wine to share slowly, not down alone. You detest your neighbour, who has a life you want and hears somebody say I love you.
And all of these people, they are characters in your mental play. The play in which you make them pay, and punish them, for having parents they speak to, and brothers who visit, and partners who stay with them. For not having an image of sweet Naomi who stumbled into this, unknowing, sitting in their mind. For not having to think about her orange toenails.
And sometimes, the play crosses over and you find that it’s not enough. And that you want to punish them for real.
If Tom thinks I will sit and listen to what I could have won through the wall, he is wrong.
If he thinks that I will leave them alone and let them be happy, he is wrong.
If he thinks that once again, I will work and work for something, only to be dropped, he is wrong.
If I learnt anything from what happened with Luke, it is that even if I can’t have him, I can still reach into the insides of his life and pull at its bones and tear it to shreds. I can still destroy them, even if they think I am no one.
At midnight, Chantal walks in.
‘Harriet!’ she says, kissing me on the cheek. ‘How are you?’
She has brought a man with her. She seems somewhere approaching moderate. I am disgusted.
‘You’re so sober!’ I shout at her, grimacing. ‘Have some shots. Do some dancing.’
She smiles at me.
‘I’ll definitely do some dancing,’ she says, calm, happy eyes, red hair loose and wavy around her face. ‘But I’m all right for shots. I’m actually trying to cut down.’
Then she glances at this man, who is looking around the room and taking in the fact that he is ten times more sober than any of us. He pushes his hair out of his eyes.
When I walk away I see him whisper to her and frown.
Half an hour later, she mimes ‘we’re leaving now’ across the room to me and heads off with her new boyfriend, holding hands and feeling loved. Even Chantal. I want her lying on the sofa weeping, clinging to my parties as the only bit of fun in her life. I can see the appeal of being a drug dealer sometimes: what a feeling, all that control.