Mrs Monroe

I slept. I don’t know how long I slept for. Days, maybe, perhaps even years. Dreamed a thousand dreams. Dreamed I was Jeremy off Peep Show, and realised I was too was him, some self-inflated loser sitting around in pyjamas living off my good looks and smarts and others. Dreamed I was some pissed-up old man watching war movies and making model tanks and staring forlornly at an unringing phone. Dreamed I was a young girl crying in a bowling alley toilet with an aching vagina and a noseful of happy candy. Dreamed I was an ostrich, an otter, a sackload of sand longing for the beach I’d been robbed from but lacking the legs to get there. Just waiting for the millennia to pass, to be scooped up again by clouds or storks and winded home to one day rejoin my brothers, in the meantime crying as part of a portion of cement on an inner-city patio. A temporary city, a temporary patio; and me the sand waiting and waiting till the trees sprouted through the cracks and the house was crumbled into dust and the oceans swapped places with the land.

The trees, the trees…

I looked up into the sky. Trees towering above me, stretching long and tall into the heavens. Spots of blue in between the branches and the leaves. The sun falling down gently and quietly in warm kisses on my face.

I was in a bed. The sheets felt clean and new. A lovely duvet and lovely pillows. The mattress thick and deep. A baseboard of old oak.

“Question two,” said a voice; a woman’s voice. “Have you ever been in love?”

“Huh?” I said.

“Did you not hear me?”

I turned my head. Mrs Monroe, my old drama teacher. Funnily enough, my first love. I sent her a valentine’s card when I was fourteen. Then she was plain old lovely Miss Weiss. She got married and broke my heart.

“Wow,” I said, “you got old. I used to think you were like…so pretty. But I guess I was just young.”

She looked down at her clipboard. Pushed her glasses up her nose. Pursed her lips.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I just meant that…this is just a dream, right? We’re not really here?”

“We’re really here Rory. What makes you think it’s just a dream? You’ve been dreaming a long time. Now you’re awake. Welcome to the real world.”

“The real world? Man, why does everyone keep saying that?”

“You can answer the question,” she said, “or am I going to have to use some other method of getting these answers out of you?”

She seemed faintly menacing when she said that. A couple of thorns sprouted momentarily out of her face. Maybe she was planning to stick something up my bum.

“You’re not Mrs Monroe,” I said, “you’re Chamone.”

“Chamone?” she said, “Chamone doesn’t exist. You made him. With your head. But we haven’t got time for this.” She reached down under her chair and pulled out a large syringe. She squirted it so that a clear liquid arced up into the air and splattered across my chest.

“No, wait,” I said, “we don’t need that. What is that? Some kind of truth serum? Honestly, you couldn’t find a truer guy than me.” I smiled at her. The twenty years worth of changes in her appearance had integrated themselves into my brain. No short, sharp shock. Now she was what she was, updated and, you know what, actually quite saucy.

Naughty Miss Weiss. She could stick me with whatever she wanted.

She stuck me.

“Ow,” I said, and then I giggled. “You stuck me, you naughty little monkey. Stuck me in my bottom with your…”

The trees. The sun. The woods. The peace. I recognised it. The woodland in Canterbury where I lived my first year of uni in a caravan. We were under the grand sequoias; the ones that felt so mothering (in a good way).

“What year is this?” I said.

“No year,” she said. “Now, question two, have you ever been in love?”

“Love,” I said. I leaned back into my pillows. I looked up at the sky, the leaves. “Ah,” I said. Everything was beautiful. Everything shimmered, like gay little fairies. Everything wanted to sigh and smile and relax.

“Love,” I said, “what is love? Psychologists make out it’s just some sort of disease, a regression to infantile fantasy, trying to cobble together the emotions we never got from our parents by seeking them in others that don’t even have them. The holes and pain in me the driving force. What I think of as love really just a panicked urge to grab onto some person I’m convinced can heal me. Infatuation. Lust. Fear of being alone. Yes, yes; I have been in love. Been in love a thousand times, with a million different women. Some men too – but, again, just men that represented something I wanted, something I wanted to be. Strong, together, sensible men. Men’s men. The kind of men that hold down jobs and wear shoes and look good in them. Drive their fancy cars. Know how to treat their women. Happy people. People I wanted to be. But is that love? Or just wanting something? What is love? Isn’t love something you give, not get?”

I knotted my forehead, stared at a passing cloud. Maybe the cloud knew the answer? Maybe if the cloud could speak it could give me an inkling.

But it just slowly moved across me and faded into the sky.

“So many theories of love,” I said, “that infantile regression – even the weird urge to put my lips on someone is starting to feel…well, like a weird urge. Kissing? What’s that? Isn’t that something monkeys do? Not even a universal human activity. I mean, humans have always fucked but they haven’t always kissed. Not Eskimos. Not the Finns or Africans or tons of people over the ages. Hard to imagine – yet I’m beginning to see why it wouldn’t occur to them. Cowboys told me horses put their lips on you as a sign of disrespect or ownership. Something like that. Maybe that’s what kissing is. Saying, ‘I own you. I transferred saliva onto your face and now you’re mine.’ It’s always so unappealing when you see it in others. Slurping away. The young. Or those sad stupid desperate guys forever pecking at their subtly pulling away women on trains and on buses. Pecking. Making that stupid noise. Saying, ‘I own you, I’m desperate, I’ll die without you around.’ Pathetic. I’ve lost the belief.”

“U-uh,” Mrs Monroe said – except, when I looked, she wasn’t Mrs Monroe, she was Kelly, the girl I was secretly in love with from like fourteen to sixteen to eighteen to twenty-six.

“Oh Jesus,” I said, “but not you. The time we kissed was awesome.”

She looked at me over the top of her glasses. But Kelly doesn’t wear glasses. They were Mrs Monroe’s glasses. She had Mrs Monroe’s voice too.

Of course, I thought, none of this is real. I’m still in the room. I’ve been injected. But even that was just a dream. Chamone’s bloody nuts!

I’m bloody nuts. The dream Chamone (dressed up as a woman) just told me that Chamone didn’t exist. And here I am in a bed in a forest when ten minutes ago I was…

“But what was awesome about it Rory?” she said.

“The way it felt,” I said. “But more than that, it was…getting to do it, finally, after all those years. All those declarations of love – but I suppose all I really wanted was for you to see me, to want me, to…my God! It really was just ownership! All the things I thought I wanted – a relationship, marriage, your babies – but it was all gone once you gave yourself to me. That’s what it was. I wanted you…to want me. And once I got that, everything changed. I moved on. To the next person. To another piece of…”

“That’s terrible,” I said, shaking my head, not wanting to accept. “Is that all I’m doing?” I furrowed my forehead. Almost wanted to cry. “In Rocky Horror…Columbia tells Frank N. Furter that’s what he does, chews people up and spits them out…and when I look at myself…I see someone I want – someone I think is better than me – and I work so hard to win them. And then I win them. And then I work my way up to their level. And then, after some time, I come to look down on them, realise I don’t want them anymore. It’s like I’m some evil cartoon baddy who feeds off other people’s energy. They’ve got something I don’t have and after spending a certain period of time with them I integrate the thing I want – soak it up, like some energy forcefield sponge – and then when they’re used and empty – or I’ve grown bigger than them, having taken in their essence – I toss them aside. Isn’t that why people seem so amazing at first, and then so dull? Why I inititally look up to them, and then feel like their equal, and then their superior? Why they lose their appeal? And isn’t that just maybe how life works? Taking inspiration, growing, and then moving on? But what room for love in any of this? What does love even mean?”

I shook my head again, utterly confused. Mrs Monroe was back, staring intently at the clipboard, writing like mad.

“Mother Meera says people should get married and have families, that the most important thing is harmony. I dig that. I can’t stand all those constantly bickering couples. Although I do see the value in a good, get-it-all-out-in-the-open argument. And yet…well, science says that married people live longer, suffer less depression, and are generally healthier than the single – but among the least healthy of all are women who describe their marriage as ‘harmonious’. So what does that mean? Actually, the closest couple I know bicker pretty much all the time. I couldn’t stand it for five minutes, but they sure do seem to love each other. Then again, they drink too much and are a little bit mad. I can’t work any of this out.”

“Who have you been in love with?” Mrs Monroe said. Except she was now Sophie. Great.

“You,” I said. I didn’t want to say it but I couldn’t stop myself. Everything was falling out of me, like puke or shit. Like the floodgates had been opened and I was going to shit and puke my entire inner body out onto the forest floor – organs and bones and all.

“I mean, I really fuckin’ wanted you. And you sure made me feel weird. Like a tool. Like a spaz. Like I had to change myself loads to get you. That’s what love feels like, right? And then I got you. And I got you to like me. And I got you to love me too, and made you cry, and made you want to marry me. And then I got bored, and wanted to move on. Felt trapped and henpecked. Wished you would talk less – or at least only say things that were interesting. Not that I only say interesting things. But they’re interesting to me.”

“Then there was that – oh, you’re here.”

Grace. Sure, it was about time she put in an appearance. Thirteen years is a long time to remain a phantom.

She smiled at me.

“Hi,” I said, “you can’t imagine all the things I’ve wanted to say to you all these years. Like…what the fuck? Do you know how mad that was? That I wanted to fuckin’ marry you and I didn’t even know the first thing about you?”

“You were mad,” she said, reaching down to hold my hand, stroking it tenderly. “Totally off your tree. You’d just done three days of White Tantric Yoga. Everybody wants to marry everybody after that. You were so wide open…man, you were a danger to yourself. I was just the angel dressed in a girl’s body who came to screw you up and try and get you back to Earth. Nothing like a bit of heartache and tears for reminding someone they’re still human, not some disembodied bucket floating high above the ocean of emotional experience.”

“But I am a bucket!” I whimpered. “I do float above it all just dipping in when I feel like it. Sorrow and pain and all that stuff are just coats I try on from time to time, for a laugh – but the floating bucket remains. That’s the real me. The ocean doesn’t touch me up there. But I can touch it. It’s just pretend. Even when I get right down into it and get a real good bucketful – it’s just pretend: just me pretending that I forgot I’m a floating bucket. Sometimes it’s fun.”

“But you’re not a bucket, are you Rory? You don’t float, you just like to think you do. It’s more a case of emotional disassociation and coldness than true detachment and transcendence. Aloofness, not awareness. Where compassion? Where empathy?”

“They’re not my bag. It doesn’t work like that for me. I’ve gone beyond those things.”

“Really?” she said, still stroking my hand. She was so tender and gentle – but so to the point. Like a calmly reassuring doctor as he cuts out my liver to sell to the Turks.

“Yeah, maybe…”

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“I’m not sure of anything. How can I be? Who is? None of this makes any sense.”

I bashed my head into the pillows and shut my eyes.

“Good,” he said, “there’s some wisdom in there. But…”

He said? He who?

I turned to look. It was Harry back.

“I won’t be long,” he said, “I’m just your subconscious.”

“Right,” I said, “I don’t mind. Everything’s fine. You win. Whatever you want, I’ll do. I have no love, no compassion, no understanding. I only thought I did. I really am just some loser, just – ”

“Now there’s no need to be so hard on yourself.”

“You’re right,” I said, “I’m awesome. And the rest of the world are just a bunch of lunatic shitters. Nobody knows anything – but at least I know a bit more than them. And I’m gorgeous. And I’m good at squash. And I can write insane monstrous piles of shit that no one can understand and nobody likes but at least it’s better than the monstrous piles of shit that they do like. Anybody can write that. And it’s only because they can’t understand it that they don’t like it. Over their goddamn heads. You’re right. I am brilliant.”

“Well I didn’t say that,” said Harry.

“No, you didn’t,” I said. “Jesus, Harry,” I said, “why am I such a loon?”

“Everyone is,” he said, “just that you’re the one who knows it.”

“Really?” I said, “is that true?”

“Probably not,” he said, “but it’s what you want to be true, right?”

“Fuck,” I said, “this is just getting worse all the time.”