Supper club, p.7
Supper Club, page 7
I watched both the conscious and subconscious reshifting of his expression, from surprise through to pity, hovering around distaste, landing eventually at a light curiosity.
“Ah,” he said. “So you know what’s good.”
“The beef,” I dryly offered. “The beef with green peppers.”
“Then that’s what I’ll have.”
He reached over and ate a dumpling from my plate. The invasion of my space, the presumption of entitlement to my food, was thrilling—alluring, actually. I crossed my legs and wondered if I could excuse myself to the bathroom to put on makeup. I briefly imagined pinning myself to him like a pentangle, the scratch of his stubble on my face. He ordered us some beers.
“So . . . what?” he said. “You just eat here alone?”
I instinctively giggled, tried not to feel panicked or embarrassed by my weird, private behavior, my unstoppable hunger. I suddenly noticed his wrist, a tiny cross semiobscured by the sleeve of his sweater.
“What’s that?” I asked, railroading the conversation.
“Oh, this?” he said. “It’s stupid. I got it on my last birthday. I wanted to articulate my faith or something. I wish I hadn’t done it.”
He tugged his sleeve over his hand, the sinews and solidity of his arm now annoyingly unavailable.
“It’s not stupid,” I said. “Let me see it.”
He placed his hand palm upward on the table, and we studied his arm together. The gesture seemed uncharacteristically submissive: here are my veins, this is my religion. A Christian, I thought. Huh. I punctured a strip of chicken with my fork. Took a moment to consider his face. His narrow nose. His square mouth and jaw.
“So what do you do here alone?” he asked.
“I sit. Eat food. Read.” I nodded at my magazine, ignoring the swell of tears rising unannounced, as happened from time to time. I felt my cheeks flush and full. I held my breath.
“Reading, eh? Well, you’re doing better than me. I know you from Contemporary American Fiction, right?”
“You do.”
“So how come you always sit alone? Like, deliberately on the opposite side of the room?”
I shrugged my shoulders, splayed and pinned. I thought it was impolite to interrogate a person’s obvious insecurities. “I dunno,” I replied. And I didn’t. I didn’t know.
Our drinks arrived. We clinked glasses.
“I’m Michael,” he said.
“I’m Roberta.”
After Hunan Restaurant we went to a bar that had long shared tables and drank wine from globular glasses. I realized I was drunk for the first time in what must have been a while, sloppy and sentimental, pink-faced and slow, with a bright mania just behind my eyes. Languishing ecstatically in his full attention.
He was from Wolverhampton, where he lived with his dad and sisters. He was funny, with a dry but not unpleasant laugh. His parents were divorced. He was studying English and film, but he wanted to be a programmer. He liked pizza, graphic novels, eighties action films, and Suede. He had a small crease between his eyes and a pit on his left cheek, which made him look unusually weathered for such an otherwise clean boy.
At some point it was determined he lived not far away from me, and before parting ways we would swing by his place to watch Annie Hall.
His accommodation was much nicer than mine; it looked like an exceptionally plush youth hostel, with lots of pale green and orange papering, wood furnishings and breakout areas.
Walking through the atrium, we passed a bunch of students hammering away at the small computer lab to the side of the entrance door.
“Conscientious,” I commented.
“Facebook and porn,” he dismissed. “C’mon. I’m on the seventh floor.”
As the lift doors shut, he suddenly pressed himself against me. We kissed but couldn’t quite reach a groove, working at different rhythms, different angles. It had been over a year since I’d kissed anyone. The bristle of facial hair against my cheeks and the slightly soured smell of his body were attractive but also dissonant, giving me the strange sense of the whole thing happening to someone else, as if I were very far away. We fumbled hopelessly for no more than a few seconds. As the lift door opened, the mood dissipated and the notion seemed somewhat absurd.
His room was tidy, a pile of balled socks from where he’d been folding laundry to the left of his desk, upon which everything was carefully arranged and ordered. A small stack of paperbacks rested on his bedside table, and the white walls displayed a restrained selection of posters: Shogun Assassin and Brett Anderson, Kylie Minogue over the bed, wearing a baby-doll dress, holding on to a lolly.
I perched on the edge of the mattress while he switched on his computer, positioned it on his bedside table, arranged his pillows vertically against the wall. He sat back on the bed, and I moved in beside him. Sometime into the film, he began creeping his arm behind my back. “Don’t knock masturbation,” Woody Allen told Diane Keaton. “It’s sex with somebody I love.” Michael rested his hand against my shoulder, gently stroking my biceps in a soft circular motion. It wasn’t a charged gesture, more comforting: I felt cool waves of relaxation flow through my body, which, coupled with the soupy red-wine lull I was coasting, made me sleepy. I rested my head against him. I thought how magical it was, how truly enchanting to be lying there, happily exhausted, half watching a film with a boy who seemed to like me. I closed my eyes, the dialogue of the film tuning in and out.
I woke up scared, but I didn’t know why. It was not a wild terror or panic, more a low-key fear, the sick knowledge that something bad was happening. I registered the heft of a body on top of my own. The absence of my underwear. Something moving in and out of my vagina. I am having sex, I thought. Oh God, I am having sex. His hand pushed up my shirt and forced itself beneath my bra, squeezing my breast and crushing my nipple. This is it, I thought. This is the one. I wondered whether I should be making a sound, some husky moan or breathy gasp, some indication of desire, but I didn’t have any. I don’t want this, I thought, or rather the thought emerged. I don’t want this.
The not-wanting presented itself as an objective idea, something to be viewed from all angles. I walked around it as I might a sculpture in a gallery. Getting up close and then moving farther away. No matter how hard I stared at it, it would not change shape, only becoming more insistent under observation. I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.
It occurred to me I could scream. I am going to scream, I thought. I am going to scream now. But when I imagined myself doing it, it seemed daft and histrionic. I tried pushing him, not hard but enough. When he went to kiss me, I turned my head like a reluctant child at dinnertime. I was aware of my extraordinary lack of physical strength. He was industrious. He was a man on a mission. Moving in and out of me urgently, like he was doing push-ups. I started to wriggle. I wasn’t strong, I couldn’t overpower him, but I could wriggle. “Hold still,” he said, clasping his hand around my throat. The room was dark and smelled of the cigarettes I’d smoked earlier. His hand on my throat formed a line, my brain separate from my body. Below the hand was something I had no control over, but above the hand was still mine. Lack of oxygen started making me foggy. I coughed, feeling little specks of saliva land around my lips. “Stop it,” he said. I coughed more, coughing deliberately. It was the smallest gesture of control, this last space of my own: my breath. I could cough and splutter. I could rip open my insides and spill out the terrible things inside me. I coughed myself hoarse. His penis inside my vagina. My phlegm on his neck. This is the worst thing, I thought. This is the worst thing, and this is still happening. I wriggled again, coughing and wriggling at the same time. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and butted his head against my lip. I felt blood trickle into my mouth. I was an extraterrestrial thing. I was white bone and slime, a high-pitched scream. Beyond that I felt rude. I was offending him. I sobbed as he pulled out and came on my stomach, rolling onto his side. I stared at the wall, naked from the waist down. He leaned over and pulled a roll of tissue from his bedside table and began wiping himself clean. He put on his clothes and went to the bathroom. I could hear the stuttering sound of him pissing.
I remained there half naked. I didn’t want to put on my underwear. It would have been a full stop on the encounter, and I was still inside the moment. I looked over at the computer; the film had finished, and the screen was on standby, a tiny red dot of light letting me know it was still on. I studied the insistent little nubs of my hip bones, flat beaks or the snouts of rodents, pressing against my skin. I knocked one with my fist. Since I’d lost weight, my tummy was unrecognizably flat, my skin and belly button pulled taut across it. His ejaculate had left a slick sheen below my waist that, even when I rubbed with tissues, still would not go. I reached down to my brutalized vagina. It was wet. I wondered whether that was from him or from me. Later, when I went to the toilet, I would find small spots of blood on the tissue paper, which made sense. I was a virgin. I wondered whether all sex felt this horrible. As I heard him switch on the shower I counted to twenty, then I got dressed.
When he finally emerged, he was clothed, random splotches of damp disturbing the pattern of his T-shirt, rubbing his head with a towel.
“Now,” he said. “Shall I walk you home?”
I heard myself say, “Yes please.”
The Spaces Between Things
In the run-up to a Supper Club, we’d need to go dumpster-diving most nights for a week. Sometimes we’d go as a group—taking a few cars, visiting different supermarkets, delis, and grocery stores. Otherwise we’d go out separately, sharing our haul on the group chat.
The first time I went I felt wild. Erin and Stevie advised me to wear thick gloves and waterproof trousers, which I tucked into my socks. There was certainly something subversive about the act, lifting the lid of a filthy and unwanted space, rifling around inside. We started with the giant Asda just outside town. The dumpsters were around the back, about forty of them all lined up, floodlit but unguarded. There was a gap in the fencing we could dip through. I felt a thrilling audacity, striding beneath the bright lights and making for the bins.
Stevie and Erin went straight in, while I sort of lingered behind, watching them. They lifted the lids and reached in, tossing aside bin liners and large pieces of cardboard. Stevie lifted her gloved hand, covered in gloop.
“Gross,” she said.
“It’s just egg yolk,” Erin replied. “Get over it.”
Erin showed me which bin bags to watch out for, the ones that looked vaguely clean and plump with goods. She prodded them with the litter picker she’d bought off eBay.
“You sort of get an instinct for it,” she explained. She poked a liner filled with boxy shapes. “Like this one. This is going to be a good one.”
She tore open the bag, and inside were boxes of Double-Stuf Oreos and white-chocolate fingers. The bag was a little damp, but the biscuits were dry. We pulled them out and put them aside.
“Vegetables!” Stevie called from a dumpster a few rows down. She lifted a head of broccoli still wrapped in its plastic and a couple packets of spinach. I rifled through a few more bins, gingerly at first, though it quickly became normalized. The smell and the dirt, which I found disheartening initially, actually spurred me on, and I was giddy with my capacity to get arm-deep in waste, to be hoisted fully into a bin, ignoring the squelch of long-gone bananas or torn-apart tubs of yogurt. I managed to find only one bag of pretzel crisps and a packet of cooked ham, but Erin insisted we’d chosen a bad night and should come back at the weekend.
After Asda we visited a smaller Tesco and a fancy foodie store. At the Tesco we found a few tins of tomatoes and some frozen green beans. At the fancy foodie place, we found four packs of really good feta. It wasn’t a bad night.
At home we lined up all our found food on the kitchen floor, industriously treating and processing it. Some of it wouldn’t last until Supper Club, but most of it would. We’d need to make a few more trips. After Stevie had gone to bed, I looked at our fridge, ripe with unwanted food, and started imagining all the things I might cook. Feta baked with oregano and tomatoes. Sautéed green beans and ham. Oreo chocolate concrete. And suddenly I was overwhelmed by a sense of the porousness of the world, its gaps and chinks. These meals that would never have existed, like secret passageways beneath the city.
In later months that sensation only grew. I’d see a chair abandoned on the side of the street and think, I’ll have that. We’d drive past a river or lake, and I’d think, I can swim in that. Everything felt a little more liquid. I became aware of the rank fabrication of things, these strange rules to follow.
* * *
Erin first went dumpster-diving while squatting with straight-edge anarchists in Madrid. She moved to the city to be with her then girlfriend, Valeria; up until that point their relationship had been conducted mostly online. They’d met at a Kathleen Hanna concert in London, bonding over their shared hate of global capitalism, their shared hate of the meat and dairy industry, their shared hate of commercial visual art. Erin did not think it possible to fall in love with a person online, and yet she would gaze at her computer screen after having read one of Valeria’s composed attacks on toxic masculinity or European neoliberalism with the sort of dopey expression she had seen only on American sitcoms. They would visit each other every few months, and afterward she would feel every cell in her body singing. She moved to Madrid a year later.
The squat was an abandoned bookstore, littered with old bikes, white men who wore their hair in dreadlocks, and cats who belonged to no one but who were apparently taken care of. Valeria and Erin shared a room containing a lumpy mattress without a frame, a vintage gramophone that no longer worked, and a steel rail on which they hung their clothes. The cats wove in and out of the different rooms, and Erin enjoyed waking up late in the morning to find one of them invariably curled at the bottom of the bed. The squat was home to between twenty and thirty people at any given time, and they mostly did things as a group: they went to protest heteropatriarchy as a group, they went dancing to dubstep in fecund fields as a group, they went dumpster-diving around all the local supermarkets as a group. It sometimes felt like they were a single multifaceted organism, something that existed at the bottom of the sea, beautiful and evolved. But very often it also felt suffocating, and sometimes Erin would spend a full hour sitting on the toilet in their dilapidated bathroom, just to be alone for a while.
They made very little money. Valeria led yoga in the old storeroom every weekend morning. Erin started teaching bass guitar to teenage girls who lived in the neighborhood. Most of their food was foraged from bins. They had no hot water. In the evenings Valeria would light candles and line them up around their mattress, and they would lie inside the loop, enshrined by fire. They would talk about all the things they hated. Erin had thought falling in love and moving to Spain might make her hate things less, but instead she found that her hatred for the world and its wretched systems was only getting more severe. Lying in bed, she imagined her hate as a sort of reverse radar, the line of detection moving inward, a circle looping tighter and tighter. It began in distant places all across the world—corrupt regimes in West Africa, the oppression of women in Iran. Then the circle would tighten a notch: the proliferation of far-right politics in Poland, rampant Islamophobia in France. It would tighten again: cuts to education spending in the city, a local library shut down. And again: Juan-from-upstairs’ insistence on calling her and Valeria “girls,” the way Jonno would slip dishes into the sink while Erin was doing the washing-up, the implication loud and clear. It tightened so much that Erin felt that the only expanse of space in which she didn’t feel a visceral, burning hatred for was within the circle of tea lights on their bedroom floor. It was no longer a romantic affectation but an absolute necessity: the only place where she could let herself breathe.
Stevie met Erin over Christmas. She had come home to visit her family—and had decided to stay. Stevie found her sitting alone at a photography preview, thumbing through the guide. She sat down next to her, hoping to have someone to talk to, and they chatted a little bit about the art. Then they talked about their lives, Erin launching into all the things she thought she despised and how, staying with her family over Christmas, she had realized she probably didn’t despise them after all—which was truly news to her. She said that she was thinking of staying in the country, finding somewhere to live, and that this meant she was staring down the barrel of ending a relationship with someone she was very much in love with via text. They went to a bar, and then she came back to our house and slept on the couch. In the morning I woke up to find an incredibly tanned stranger making coffee in the kitchen. Stevie appeared a few minutes later. The three of us sat in the living room, and I felt jealous—immediately, predictably—jealous of all the experiences Erin could talk about and draw from, the enormous red balloon of her life.
One evening not long after that, she came round to watch Flatliners and eat cauliflower cheese, and we told her about Supper Club. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be part of anything anymore, other than her family. But one evening she and Stevie went out without me, and in the morning Stevie told me Erin was going to join. I didn’t ask any questions. I knew Stevie could be convincing in a way I didn’t feel compelled to deconstruct.
* * *
We thought gold would make an appropriate theme, obscene and dripping gold.
We’d started giving each Supper Club a theme. Once the theme was literary heroines, and we all read passages from our favorite female writers, standing on the table as if it were a stage. Another time it was princesses, and everything was gauche and pink. A favorite was brides—Stevie and I found wedding dresses from charity shops, and Lina wore her actual wedding dress from her actual wedding, though she had to have it taken out because it no longer fit.
