devotion can lead to loss of self, and this loss of self has nothing to do with love any more, only with auto-aggression. Can you tell how you’re transcending right now?’
‘I hate you.’
‘You’re a victim, just like all the others. It’s so easy to create a victim out of someone. All they did was lock you in a dark room, and your suffering began, your agonies were intensified methodically and, cold as ice, you went through various stages of consciousness, and after a while it’s perfectly natural for an all-encompassing trauma to develop in such an awful situation. The tiniest touch makes you perceive things that only exist in your imagination. What do you see? Insects, cockroaches, beetles crawling all over your body?’
‘Erm.’
‘You’d rather chop off your own arm than put up with it, wouldn’t you?’
‘Do you know who you look like right now, Alice?’
‘This planet is made in such a way that there’s only room left for victims. People have forgotten how to suffer.’
‘Like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
when she says, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.”’
* * *
You know, I just want to apologize to myself for the fact that all the promises I made to my later self have just been ripped to shreds by some numb wind. That’s why I started this whole diary crap in the first place. To be honest I think I’m trying to prove something to myself.
Success is like a timid deer, everything has to be just right: the stars, the . . . Oh, I don’t know.
(Franz Beckenbauer)
Annika asks, ‘How old is Ophelia anyway?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘Woah, OK. But she’s still, like, “Hey, let’s go out raving!”’
‘Yeah, totally.’
22:35. Text from Ophelia in a state of total instability: ‘I feel so harried right now, no time to relax. It distracts me so much from myself that I don’t even feel time passing and everything just rushes past me in a totally overpowering way. As if I was standing at the side of a motorway and can’t cross over. And I can’t go back either, because of course I’m standing on the central reservation. A little accident to throw the world out of kilter wouldn’t be bad right now.’
23:23. ‘I’ve just realized that “totally overpowering” is one of your phrases. I almost never use it. You do, though. I’ll just come round to see you.’
When Ophelia enters our flat with a spaghetti-topped pizza, Annika eyes her like someone who’s superior to me, with her pearly-smooth skin, her elegance, her perfect hair.
Despite last night it’s no longer all about me, but mainly about the hopeless situation I’ve got myself into. Something pretty grave has got bottled up inside my body, a mixture of proteolytic watery solutions and allocations of guilt. Quite a lot has gone off the rails. I see streets that want to eat me alive, stuffed penguins talk to me, saying things like, ‘But animal testing’s terrible too!’ My surroundings are literally beginning to crack.
I’m lying next to Ophelia on a mattress squashed on to the balcony, a MacBook Pro resting on my raised legs just for a change.
The way you always tag ‘so to speak’ on to the end of your sentences, in fact the whole trick of making intellectual sentences confusing and breathless with those little filler words – impressive, Mifti!
We watch television clips about Belgian penguin freaks and a trailer for a film in which an eight-year-old boy gets fucked up the arse so incredibly overpoweringly that he has to go to hospital.
‘Oh, Jesus, it sounds really bad, right, but that really turns me on.’
Whereupon of course I nod, totally head-fucked, and of course I ask, ‘How d’you mean?’
‘It’s just like that disgusting sex scene with the fat-arse trucker in that awful film
Butterfly Kiss
. That’s one of my top twenty masturbation turn-ons, I swear.’
Then we snog out of pure boredom.
‘We’re both so gender-confused, honey.’
* * *
‘She just plays
Donald Luskin, Andrew Greta