In the end, the pizza experience was extremely disappointing. The man simply thrust a big box into my hand and took the envelope, which he then rudely ripped open right in front of me. I heard him mutter fuck’s sake under his breath as he counted the coins. I had been collecting fifty-pence pieces in a little ceramic dish, and this had seemed the perfect opportunity to use them up. I’d popped an extra one in for him, but received no thanks for it. Rude.
The pizza was excessively greasy and the dough was flabby and tasteless. I decided immediately that I would never eat delivered pizza again, and definitely not with the musician. If we ever found ourselves in need of pizza and too far from a Tesco Metro, one of two things would happen. One: we would take a black cab into town and dine at a lovely Italian restaurant. Two: he would make pizza for us both, from scratch. He’d mix the dough, stretching and kneading it with those long, tapered fingers, stroking it until it did what he wanted. He’d stand at the cooker, simmering tomatoes with fresh herbs, reducing them to a rich sauce, slick and slippery with a sheen of olive oil.
He’d be wearing his oldest, most comfortable jeans, a pair that sat snugly on his slim hips, bare feet tapping as he sang softly to himself in his delicious voice and stirred. When he’d assembled the pizza, topping it with artichokes and fennel shavings, he’d put it in the oven and come and find me, take me by the hand and lead me into the kitchen. He’d have set the table, a dish of gardenias in the center, tea lights flickering through colored glass. He’d slowly ease the cork from a bottle of Barolo with a long, satisfying pop and place it on the table, then pull out my chair for me. Before I could sit, he’d take me in his arms and kiss me, his hands around my waist, pulling me so close that I could feel the pulse of blood in him, smell the sweet spiciness of his skin and the warm sugar of his breath.
I’d finished eating my poor-quality pizza and was jumping up and down on the box, trying to crush it small enough to fit into the bin, when I remembered the brandy. Mummy always said that brandy is good for shocks and I’d bought some, several years ago, just in case. I’d put it in the bathroom cabinet, with all the other emergency items. I went to check and there it was, behind the rolled-up bandages and the wrist supports—a bottle of Rémy Martin, full and unopened. I unscrewed the cap and took a drink. It wasn’t as nice as vodka, but it wasn’t bad.
I was very apprehensive about the laptop, never having set up a new computer before, but it was actually pretty easy. The mobile Internet thing was straightforward too. I took the brandy and the laptop to the kitchen table, typed his name into Google and hit return, then put my hands over my eyes. Seconds later I peeped through my fingers. There were hundreds of results! It seemed that this was going to be quite easy, so I decided to ration the pages; after all, I had the entire weekend, so there was no point in rushing.
The first link took me to his own web page, which was entirely taken up with photographs of him and his band. I moved closer to the screen until my nose was almost touching it. I had neither imagined him, nor overestimated the extent of his beauty. The next link took me to his Twitter page. I allowed myself the pleasure of reading the three latest messages, two of which were wry and witty, the third utterly charming. In it, he was professing his professional admiration for another musician. Gracious of him.
Next, his Instagram page. He had posted almost fifty photos. I clicked on one at random, a head shot in close-up, candid and relaxed. He had a Roman nose, perfectly straight, classically proportioned. His ears were also perfect, exactly the right size, the whorls of skin and cartilage flawlessly symmetrical. His eyes were light brown. They were light brown in the way that a rose is red, or that the sky is blue. They defined what it meant to be light brown.
There were rows and rows of photographs on the page and my brain forced my finger to press the button and return to the search engine. I scanned the rest of the sites that Google had found. There were video clips of performances on YouTube. There were articles and reviews. This was only the first page of the search results. I would read every piece of information that I could find about him, get to know him properly—after all, I’m very good at research, and at problem solving. I don’t mean to boast; I’m merely stating the facts. Finding out more about him was the right thing to do, the sensible approach, if it turned out that he was going to be the love of my life. I picked up the brandy, a new notebook and a fine-tipped pen that I’d borrowed from the office, and went over to the sofa, ready to make a start on my plan of action. The brandy was both warming and soothing, and I kept sipping.
When I awoke, it was just after 3 a.m., and the pen and notebook were lying on the floor. Slowly, I recalled getting sidetracked, starting to daydream as the brandy slipped down. The backs of my hands were tattooed with black ink, his name written there over and over, inscribed inside love hearts, so that barely an inch of skin remained unsullied. A mouthful of brandy remained in the bottle. I downed it and went to bed.
3
Why him? Why now? On Monday morning, waiting at the bus stop, I tried to work it out. It was a tricky one. Who can understand the workings of fate, after all? Far greater minds than mine had tried, and failed, to arrive at a conclusion. There he was, a gift from the gods—handsome, elegant and talented. I was fine, perfectly fine on my own, but I needed to keep Mummy happy, keep her calm so she would leave me in peace. A boyfriend—a husband?—might just do the trick. It wasn’t that I needed anyone. I was, as I previously stated, perfectly fine.
Having perused at length the available photographic evidence over the course of the weekend, I had concluded that there was something particularly mesmerizing about his eyes. My own are a similar shade, although they’re nowhere near as beautiful, of course, containing no such shimmering copper depths. Looking at all those photographs, I was reminded of someone. It was only a half memory, like a face under ice or blurred by smoke, indistinct. Eyes just like mine, eyes set in a little face, wide and vulnerable, full of tears.
Ridiculous, Eleanor. It was disappointing that I had allowed myself, even for a moment, to indulge in sentimentality. Plenty of people in the world had light brown eyes like mine, after all—that was a scientific fact. It was statistically inevitable that some of them would have made eye contact with me during the course of a routine social interaction.
Something else was troubling me, though. All the studies show that people tend to take a partner who is roughly as attractive as they are; like attracts like, that is the norm.
I was under no illusions. In terms of looks, he was a ten and I am . . . I don’t know what I am. Not a ten, certainly. Of course, I hoped he would see beyond superficialities, look a bit deeper, but that said, I knew that his profession would require him to have a partner who was at least presentable. The music business, show business, is all about image, and he couldn’t be seen with a woman whose appearance would be perceived by simpletons as inappropriate. I was well aware of that. I’d have to try my best to look the part.
He’d posted some new photos online, two head shots, close profiles, right and left. He was perfect in both, and they were identical—objectively, literally, he did not have a bad side. Of course, a defining characteristic of beauty is symmetry, that’s another thing all the studies agree on. I wondered what gene pool had created such handsome progeny. Did he have brothers or sisters, perhaps? If we ever got together, I might even be able to meet them. I didn’t know much about parents in general, or siblings in particular, having had quite an . . . unconventional upbringing myself.
I feel sorry for beautiful people. Beauty, from the moment you possess it, is already slipping away, ephemeral. That must be difficult. Always having to prove that there’s more to you, wanting people to see beneath the surface, to be loved for yourself, and not your stunning body, sparkling eyes or thick, lustrous hair.
In most professions, getting older means getting better at your job, earning respect because of your seniority and experience. If your job depends
on your looks, the opposite is true—how depressing. Suffering other people’s unkindness must be difficult too; all those bitter, less attractive people, jealous and resentful of your beauty. That’s incredibly unfair of them. After all, beautiful people didn’t ask to be born that way. It’s as unfair to dislike someone because they’re attractive as it is to dislike someone because of a deformity.
It doesn’t bother me at all when people react to my face, to the ridged, white contours of scar tissue that slither across my right cheek, starting at my temple and running all the way down to my chin. I am stared at, whispered about; I turn heads. It was reassuring to think that he would understand, being something of a head-turner himself, albeit for very different reasons.
I eschewed the Telegraph today in favor of alternative reading matter. I had spent an obscene amount of money on a small selection of women’s magazines, flimsy and lurid ones, thick, glossy ones, all of them promising a range of wonders, simple but life-enhancing changes. I had never purchased such items before, although I had, of course, leafed through a few in hospital waiting rooms and other institutional settings. I noted that, disappointingly, none of them had a cryptic crossword; indeed, one contained a “soapstar word search” that would insult the intelligence of a seven-year-old. I could have bought three bottles of wine or a liter of premium-brand vodka for the price of that little pile. Nevertheless, after careful consideration, I’d worked out that they were the most reliable and accessible source of the information that I needed.
These magazines could tell me which clothes and shoes to wear, how to have my hair styled in order to fit in. They could show me the right kind of makeup to buy and how to apply it. This way, I would disappear into everywoman acceptability. I would not be stared at. The goal, ultimately, was successful camouflage as a human woman.
Mummy has always told me that I am ugly, freakish, vile. She’s done so from my earliest years, even before I acquired my scars. So I felt very happy about making these changes. Excited. I was a blank canvas.
At home that evening, I looked into the mirror above the washbasin while I washed my damaged hands. There I was: Eleanor Oliphant. Long, straight, light brown hair that runs all the way down to my waist, pale skin, my face a scarred palimpsest of fire. A nose that’s too small and eyes that are too big. Ears: unexceptional. Around average height, approximately average weight. I aspire to average . . . I’ve been the focus of far too much attention in my time. Pass me over, move along please, nothing to see here.
I don’t often look in the mirror, as a rule. This has absolutely nothing to do with my scars. It is because of the unsettling gene mix that looks back at me. I see far too much of Mummy’s face there. I cannot distinguish any of my father’s features, because I have never met him and, to the best of my knowledge, no photographic records exist. Mummy almost never mentioned him, and on the rare occasions when he came up, she referred to him only as “the gametes donor.” Once I’d looked up this term in her New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (from the Greek γαμἐτηϛ, “husband”—did this juvenile etymological adventuring spark my love of classics?), I spent several years wondering about this strange set of circumstances. Even at that tender age, I understood that assisted conception was the antithesis of careless, spontaneous or unplanned parenthood, that it was the most deliberate of decisions, undertaken only by women who were serious and dedicated in their quest to be mothers. I simply could not believe, given the evidence and my own experience, that Mummy had ever been such a woman, could ever have wished for a child so intensely. As it transpired, I was right.
Finally, I summoned the courage to inquire directly as to the circumstances of my creation, and to seek any available information about the mythical donor of spermatozoan, my father. As any child would in such circumstances—possibly even more so, in my particular circumstances—I had been harboring a small but intense fantasy about the character and appearance of my absent parent. She laughed and laughed.
“Donor? Did I really say that? It was simply a metaphor, darling,” she said.
Another word I’d have to look up.
“I was actually trying to spare your feelings. It was more of a . . . compulsory donation, shall we say. I had no choice in the matter. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
I said that I did, but I was fibbing.
“Where does he live, Mummy?” I asked, feeling brave. “What does he look like, what does he do?”
“I can’t remember what he looked like,” she said, her tone dismissive, bored. “He smelled like high game and liquefied Roquefort, if that’s any help.” I must have looked puzzled. She leaned forward, showed me her teeth. “That’s rotting flesh and stinking, moldy cheese to you, darling.” She paused, regained her equanimity.
“I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, Eleanor,” she said. “If he’s alive, he’s probably very rich by dubious, unethical means. If he’s dead—and I sincerely hope that he is—then I imagine he’s languishing in the outer ring of the seventh circle of hell, immersed in a river of boiling blood and fire, taunted by centaurs.”
I realized at that point that it probably wasn’t worth asking if she had kept any photos.
4
It was Wednesday evening. Mummy time. However much I might wish it were otherwise, she always managed to get through to me in the end. I sighed and turned off the radio, knowing I would have to wait until Sunday’s omnibus now to find out whether Eddie Grundy’s cider had fermented successfully. I felt a flash of desperate optimism. What if I didn’t have to talk to her? What if I could talk to someone else, anyone else?
“Hello?” I said.
“Oh, hiya, hen, it’s just me. Some weather the day, eh?”
It was hardly surprising that my mother had become institutionalized—that, one assumed, was a given, considering the nature of her crime—but she had gone far, far further than necessary by occasionally adopting the accent and argot of the places where she has been detained. I assumed this helped her ingratiate herself with her fellow residents, or, perhaps, with the staff. It may simply have been to amuse herself. She’s very good at accents, but then she’s a woman with a broad range of gifts. I was poised, en garde, for this conversation, as one always had to be with her. She was a formidable adversary. Perhaps it was foolhardy, but I made the first move.
“It’s only been a week, I know, but it feels like an age since we last spoke, Mummy. I’ve been so busy with work, and—”
She cut across me, nice as pie on this occasion, switching her accent to match mine. That voice; I remembered it from childhood, heard it still in my nightmares.
“I know what you mean, darling,” she said. She spoke quickly. “Look, I can’t talk for long. Tell me about your week. What have you been doing?”
I told her that I had attended a concert, mentioned the leaving do at work. I told her absolutely nothing else. As soon as I heard her voice, I felt that familiar, creeping dread. I’d been so looking forward to sharing my news, dropping it at her feet like a dog retrieving a game bird peppered with shot. Now I couldn’t shake the thought that she would pick it up and, with brutal calm, simply tear it to shreds.
“Oh a concert, that sounds marvelous—I’ve always been fond of music. We’re treated to the occasional performance here, you know; a few of the residents will have a singsong in the recreation room if the mood takes them. It really is . . . quite something.”
She paused, and then I heard her snarl at someone.
“Will ah fuck, Jodi—ahm talkin tae ma lassie here, and ahm no gonnae curtail ma conversation for a wee skank like you.” There was a pause. “No. Now fuck off.” She cleared her throat.
“Sorry about that, darling. She’s what’s known as a ‘junkie’—she and her similarly addicted friends were caught purloining perfume from Boots. Midnight Heat by Beyoncé, would you believe.” She lowered her voice again. “We’re not exactly talking criminal master
minds in here, darling—I think Professor Moriarty can rest easy for now.”
She laughed, a cocktail party tinkle—the light, bright sound of a Noel Coward character enjoying an amusing exchange of bon mots on a wisteria-clad terrace. I tried to move the conversation forward.
“So . . . how are you, Mummy?”
“Fabulous darling, just fabulous. I’ve been ‘crafting’—some nice, well-meaning ladies have been teaching me how to embroider cushions. Sweet of them to volunteer their time, no?” I thought of Mummy in possession of a long, sharp needle, and an icy current ran up and down my spine.
“But enough of me,” she said, the jagged edge in her voice hardening. “I want to hear about you. What are your plans for the weekend? Are you going out dancing, perhaps? Has an admirer asked you on a date?”
Such venom. I tried to ignore it.
“I’m doing some research, Mummy, for a project.” Her breathing quickened.
“Is that right? What kind of research? Research into a thing, or research into a person?”
I couldn’t help myself. I told her.
“A person, Mummy,” I said.
She whispered so softly that I could hardly hear her.
“Ah, so the game’s afoot, is it? Do tell . . .” she said. “I’m all ears, darling.”
“There’s really nothing to tell yet, Mummy,” I said, looking at my watch. “I simply came across someone . . . nice . . . and I want to find out a bit more about . . . that someone.” I needed to polish and perfect things before I plucked up the courage to share my shiny new jewel with her, set it before her for her approval. In the meantime, let me get away, let this end, please.