Гейл Ханимен - Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

I was a thirty-year-old woman with a juvenile crush on a man whom I didn’t know, and would never know. I had convinced myself that he was the one, that he would help to make me normal, fix the things that were wrong with my life. Someone to help me deal with Mummy, block out her voice when she whispered in my ear, telling me I was bad, I was wrong, I wasn’t good enough. Why had I thought that?

He wouldn’t be drawn to a woman like me. He was, objectively, a very attractive man, and could therefore select from a wide range of potential partners. He would choose an equally attractive woman a few years younger than himself. Of course he would. I was standing in a basement on a Tuesday night, alone, surrounded by strangers, listening to music I didn’t like, because I had a crush on a man who didn’t know, and would never know, that I existed. I realized I had stopped hearing the music.

There he was on stage, pressing guitar pedals and saying something trite about touring as he tuned. Who was this stranger, and why had I chosen him, of all the men in this city, this country, the world, to be my saviour? I thought about a news story I’d read the previous day, some young fans holding a tearful vigil outside a singer’s house because he’d cut his hair. I’d laughed at the time, but wasn’t I behaving like them, acting like a lovestruck teenager who writes fan letters in purple ink and etches his name on her schoolbag?

I didn’t know the man on stage before me, didn’t know the first thing about him. It was all just fantasy. Could anything be more pathetic — me, a grown woman? I’d told myself a sad little fairy tale, thinking that I could fix everything, undo the past, that he and I would live happily ever after and Mummy wouldn’t be angry any more. I was Eleanor, sad little Eleanor Oliphant, with my pathetic job, my vodka and my dinners for one, and I always would be. Nothing and no one — and certainly not this singer, who was now checking his hair in his phone during a bandmate’s guitar solo — could change that. There was no hope, things couldn’t be put right. I couldn’t be put right. The past could neither be escaped nor undone. After all these weeks of delusion, I recognized, breathless, the pure, brutal truth of it. I felt despair and nausea mingled inside me, and then that familiar black, black mood came down fast.

I slept again. When I woke, my head was empty, finally, of all thoughts except physical ones: I am cold, I am shaking . Decision time. I decided on more vodka.

When I got to my feet, slow as evolution, I saw the mess on the floor and nodded to myself — this was a good sign. Perhaps I might actually die before I needed to choose one of the methods laid out on the table. I took a tea towel from the hook — A Present from Hadrian’s Wall , it said. It had a centurion and an SPQR sigil on it. My favourite. I used it to wipe my face and then dropped it on the kitchen floor.

I didn’t bother with underwear but simply pulled on the nearest clothes from the bedroom floor — the outfit I’d been wearing on Tuesday night. I stuck my bare feet into my Velcro work shoes and found my old jerkin hanging in the hall cupboard. I didn’t know where the new coat was, I realized. My bag, however, needed to be located. I recalled that I had taken the new black handbag with me that night. It only had room for my purse and keys. The keys were on the shelf in the hall where I always put them. I found the bag in the hall too, eventually, dropped in a corner next to my shopper. My purse was empty of cash — I couldn’t recall how I’d got home or when I’d bought the vodka that I’d been drinking, but I assumed it must have been en route here from the city centre. Luckily, the purse still contained both of my bank cards. The concert ticket was in there too. I dropped it on the floor.

I walked down to the corner shop. It was daylight, cold, the sky ashen. When I entered, the electronic bleeper sounded and, behind the counter, Mr Dewan looked up. I saw his eyes widen, his mouth fall open slightly.

‘Miss Oliphant?’ he said. His voice was cautious, quiet.

‘Three litres of Glen’s, please,’ I said. My voice sounded strange — croaky and broken. I hadn’t used it for some time, I supposed, and then there was all that vomiting. He placed one before me, then seemed to hesitate.

‘Three, Miss Oliphant?’ he said. I nodded. Slowly, he put another two bottles on the counter, all of them now lined up like skittles that I’d need to knock over, knock back.

‘Anything else?’ he said. I briefly considered a loaf of bread or a tin of spaghetti, but I was not in the least bit hungry. I shook my head and offered him my debit card. My hand was shaking and I tried to control it, but failed. I punched in the numbers, and the wait for the receipt to be printed was interminable.

A pile of evening newspapers sat on the counter beside the till, and I saw that it was Friday. Mr Dewan had fixed a mirror on the wall to see into all the shop corners, and I caught sight of myself in it. I was grey-white, the colour of larvae, and my hair stood on end. My eyes were dark hollows, empty, dead. I noted all of this with complete indifference. Nothing could be less important than my appearance, absolutely nothing. Mr Dewan handed me the bottles in a blue plastic bag. The smell of it, the chemical reek of polymers, made my stomach churn even harder.

‘Take care of yourself, Miss Oliphant,’ he said, head tilted to one side, unsmiling.

‘Goodbye, Mr Dewan,’ I said.

It was only a ten-minute walk home but it took half an hour — the bottles in the bag, the weight in my legs. I didn’t see another living creature in the streets, not even a cat or a magpie. The light was opaque, rendering the world in grey and black, a bleak absence of tone that weighed heavily on me. I kicked the front door closed behind me and stepped out of my clothes, leaving them in the hallway where they fell. I noticed in passing that I smelt very bad — perspiration, vomit and a sweet staleness that must be metabolized alcohol. I took the blue carrier bag into the bedroom and pulled on my lemon nightgown. I crawled under the covers and reached blindly for a bottle.

I drank it with the focused, single-minded determination of a murderer, but my thoughts just could not, would not be drowned — like ugly, bloated corpses, they continued to float to the surface in all their pale, gas-filled ugliness. There was the horror of my own self-delusion, of course: him, me … what was I thinking? Worse, far worse than that, was the shame. I curled myself into a ball, tried to make myself occupy as small a space in the bed as possible. Despicable. I had made a fool of myself. I was an embarrassment, like Mummy had always told me. A sound escaped into the pillow, an animal whine. I couldn’t open my eyes. I did not want to see even a centimetre of my own skin.

I’d thought I could solve the problem of myself so easily, as if the things that were done all those years ago could actually be put right. I knew that people weren’t supposed to exist as I did, work and vodka and sleep in a constant, static cycle in which I spun around on myself, into myself, silent and alone. Going nowhere. On some level, I realized that this was wrong. I’d lifted my head up just high enough to see that, and, desperate to change, I’d clutched at a random straw, let myself get carried away, imagining some sort of … future.

I cringed. No, that’s wrong. Cringe denotes embarrassment, fleeting shame. This was my soul curling into whiteness, an existential blank where a person had once been. Why did I start to allow myself to think I could live a normal life, a happy life, the kind other people had? Why did I think that the singer could be part of that, help bring it about? The answer stabs at me: Mummy. I wanted Mummy to love me. I’d been alone for so long. I needed someone by my side to help me manage Mummy. Why wasn’t there someone, anyone, to help me manage Mummy?