Shared Events
Marcus asked the group to picture their mind as an empty hill. Amy imagined her brain as a pillowy surface. No ridges carved by habitual thought. This morphed into a pockmarked block of cheese. Then to cheese trailed with mould. Then mould topped with her sister’s memoir which their mother referred to as the ‘bible of your sister’s money-making lies’.
After a silence, Marcus swung his mallet on a cowbell and spoke. ‘Please tell the group why you’ve arrived at my free from anxiety meeting, doing so with as much rawness as you can manage.’ The door opened and a woman walked into the boxy room with a tray of raw vegetables and a pungent dip.
‘My name’s Robbie. I’m recently divorced. Not gonna lie, I’m not the sharing type, but I’m here, doing something new. I’m also interested in neuroplasticity.’ Some of the group nodded in solidarity and a carrot snapped like a twig inside a mouth.
Being cynical of older men, Amy presumed Robbie was at the meeting as counter evidence to his ex-wife's claim he didn’t try new things. That as he stepped into the building, he was igniting latent neural pathways which would prove his ex-wife wrong.
Amy was unsure of what to disclose. She was conscious her problem was, relatively speaking, minor. London traffic bleating outside, she began, ‘I’m Amy. My sister has published a memoir and it’s brought up some things from the past.’
Marcus asked the memoir’s title. ‘Feral Moods,’ Amy replied,
He lifted his brows and shifted in his mustard yellow armchair. ‘That's on my Goodreads. It sounds good. Have you read it?’
‘Sorry, I’ve read it,’ Robbie said, his face clouded with pink, ‘It was fantastic. It helped me understand my dad. He was a military guy too.’
Marcus replied, ‘Yes, I’m going to read it after I finish the new one by that journalist on the water companies scandal.’
‘To answer your question, yeah I’ve read it too. I wouldn’t just be anxious because my sister’s written a book, it’s what she writes.’
Marcus stood, meandered to the window and placed his hands on either side of the glass. He parted his legs into a wide power stance. A fading tattoo on his bicep read: I Exist. The group stared mutely at a sweat patch growing at the base of his shirt. ‘Of course. Though the subconscious doesn’t follow such logical resolutions. There could be a number of reasons you’re anxious, Amy – the state of the world, your sister’s book as a deeper sign of its discontents, the confessional mode itself. Are you a private person? Was your family Catholic?’
Amy shook her head. ‘I am actually proud of my sister, like, I’m going to her event after this.’
Robbie’s face had turned completely red. ‘So am I. Your sister invited me.’
Despite her shock at this connection, Amy resisted asking questions. Instead, she opted for rudeness, choosing to pick at some lunch stuck behind her back molar, before turning to Marcus who now stood at the centre of the group with his eyes closed. He held a stick of raw celery in his hand, like a wand from which he planned to summon the demons of the group.
Soon, it was Amy’s turn to speak her formative childhood memory out loud. ‘We were on holiday as kids and our dad drove me and my sister to the supermarket. It was hot and the air in the car was humid. Our dad was driving really fast and really erratically. As we get to the turning for the carpark he doesn’t slow down but swerves into it like really fast. My sister and I are yelling. My dad is crying and he isn’t slowing down, it seems like he is speeding up towards a wall. My sister and I are screaming and he breaks really hard. I comfort my sister as our dad sobs in the front seat. He gets us ice-cream to say sorry before driving us back. Mango and Strawberry. It’s so weird I remember that. They melted on our hands. I really dislike ice cream now.’
Amy stopped. Though she felt the nauseating sense she could continue, that speaking only leads to more speaking, and association can always crack into shrapnel, she stayed quiet. Marcus tapped his mallet on the cowbell again, his voice was made flat by the acoustic panels lining the room. ‘That is truly terrifying. Does your sister write about that in the book, Amy?’
‘She does. I only remembered this car story after it was published. Tara just assumed I remembered it.’
‘So, Amy, it wasn’t really your formative memory per se. It was your sister’s?’
Amy was perturbed by Marcus’s use of her name. ‘Well yes, it is, because I was physically there. It happened to me, so I think it is mine.’ She reached into her bag underneath the plastic chair and pulled out the book in question, unsure why she needed to hold it. ‘I don’t think a memory isn’t mine just because I forgot,’ Amy added, scraping the pages with her nail.
She was feeling less free from anxiety as Amy descended the carpeted stairs, found the exit button amongst the matrix of buttons, and stepped into the street. Perhaps, it was one of those things where getting better meant getting worse. Though she wasn’t sure at what point the getting worse transformed into the better.
She wanted to rule out the possibility of walking the fifteen minutes to her sister’s event with Robbie. So Amy crouched at the edge of a large bin, inhaling the stocky, fruity vapours of hot rubbish. Robbie emerged from the building and took a left. They cut across Soho with speed, passing sex shops, a ramen place where Amy’s date once had a severe panic attack, and into China Town. She felt crazy and outrageous. Robbie passed a homeless encampment of tents and suitcases, skirted around multiple hen parties, bought what looked like a Triple Mango vape and strided across Piccadilly Circus.
Headphones dead, Amy had nothing to do but observe Robbie’s gait, which was, actually, appealing. As she followed him, she found him increasingly attractive and imagined his muscular broadness contained a swirling, soft-moving individual. She tried to picture him making a coffee, going for a shit, or having extremely intimate sex, and she didn’t realise they’d arrived until she was inside the air-conned shop herself.
A poster of her sister’s profile hung in the middle of the space. Tara was smiling wistfully, eyes surrounded by delicate, regal crows feet. Underneath her jawline was a quote from a newspaper: ‘A dazzling portrait of the altitudes of a complex family in a complex time.’ And another: ‘All fathers with issues should read this.’ And yet another: ‘I wept, a sibling relationship never hit so hard.’
On the top floor of the shop, Robbie took a seat at the front. Amy was a few rows back. She felt unsettled. Her family had plenty of encounters inside Tara’s memoir, but not many meetings outside of it. This state of removal felt natural after years of distance. But the spectre of connection, a drink with her sister, dinner, talking on the phone, texting, emailing, tagging, all of it loomed as this glistening absence.
Her sister entered to applause. Tara looked into the audience, in the way she does, defiant yet innately likeable. To Amy’s shock, Robbie whistled. Tara grinned and touched his hand before walking to the podium. A surge of energy went through Amy and she found herself standing. Tara’s head flicked up and she saw her; Tara’s smile held in place. Amy perceived her sister’s face draining of its warmth, but she couldn’t be sure.
As Tara began talking, Amy imagined how she could derail the event. She could put up her hand and plead with the audience, ‘I’m the sister, Tara invented all of this!’ Amy could actually ruin Tara’s career, or at least, cause a major blip. Of course, Amy didn’t want to do that. But, if she did, she could create social media accounts claiming Tara bullied her, scapegoated her, or Tara has a major victim complex. Amy could counter Tara’s version of events, with AI images of their dad in Spain. Images of a dad who carved wooden spoons or had a routine that made him seem profoundly settled and safe, in the way routine can look like on some men.
A dad that never stepped into a void of terrifying illogic, only to return needing more love than before. That’s how precarious this whole memoir business is, Amy thought.
After the event, the sisters, and Robbie, went to a wine bar that could only be accessed by a lift. As the trio ascended to the tenth floor, Amy watched on stoically as Robbie’s fingers searched for helpings of Tara, a strand of her hair, the corner of her bag, her elbow.
At the table, Amy held out her book for Tara to sign. Tara laughed. ‘Is this some kind of ironic gesture or are you being truly serious?’
‘No, I don’t really know what it is, but I’m happy for you.’ Reluctantly, Tara signed the book. Amy put it in her bag. ‘You know, I’m surprised you included some things.’
Tara peered into her glass and took a long sip of orange wine. Robbie squeezed Tara’s knee and looked at her worriedly, like she was a beloved pet refusing food for untenable reasons. Amy felt jealous her sister had a defender in this encounter, one clearly swept up in the beginnings of early love. One greedily coursing with a complex mix of chemicals such as Dopamine and Noradrenaline that cause so much positive bias, it's perverse and unfair. Amy felt exposed.
‘It’s crazy I met Robbie today in our meeting for freaks. You’re together then? You know he’s divorced, Tara?’
Tara rolled her eyes.
Robbie raised his palms, ‘I’ve been divorced for about five months. No arguments, it’s been damn expensive though.’
‘You’re a bit older than Tara?’
‘Ten years. But the age gap really doesn’t matter when people grow up.’ Robbie glanced at Tara again. She tilted the burnt orange sediments around her glass, swung back the last drop and held the liquid in her mouth. She was all verticality and composure. Hair pulled into a seamless bun, face like a taught balloon, two shining eyes.
‘Amy, I didn’t want to get angry if I saw you. But, I can’t tolerate this pseudo-innocence, I did try to speak to you when I was drafting the book, it was quite painful that I couldn’t.’
Amy looked at the surface of her stupid Whiskey Sour. ‘I never received any contact from you.’
The foam was disintegrating and the maraschino cherry was sinking. Amy gripped her hand around the glass. She tried to picture her mind as an empty hill, tried to imagine the ice streaming up the channels of her arm, like a drip to induce complete nonchalance.
‘My editor and I literally had you in CC for the duration of me composing it. Amy, you’re lying, or you have a worryingly tenuous connection to reality. You haven’t responded to a single email. You’ve had the same email for your entire life? I texted you, called you.’
Amy pulled out Feral Moods. Robbie and Tara stared mutely as she opened the book, pressed its sides apart, splitting the spine. She was self-aware enough to know the action she was about to take was insane. But the decision had been made somewhere else, somewhere free from anxiety. She didn’t want to consider what Tara was saying, her tentative myriad truths and connections to reality. Amy picked up the Whiskey sour, sloshed the ice around, and tipped the cubes onto the pages of the book.
Cover image: Ghost III, 2019, graphite and pencil on paper, Brendton Steele. Courtesy of artist.