I      Fan of a Fan

So I lived in one of those modern houses in one of those left-wing cities where everyone worked in arts or a government department or for some humanitarian social justice NGO type thing and we all had to buy fair trade coffee but for some reason people didn’t seem to care so much about fair trade chocolate and sometimes they’d buy fair trade clothes if they were available or those vegan shoes that are made without animal glue but the rest of the time everyone bought the sweatshop made by children working for less than a dollar a day in Thailand/Philippines/Vietnam/China shoes like Chuck Taylor’s or Keds or Vans or something else that was fashionable but cheap and we’d say, ‘Oh well, you’ve got to pick your battles, you know, you can’t fight all of them, you have to know what’s worth it, because the time and money I spend looking for all of these obscure products, I could be putting into really doing something useful like campaigning or advocating,’ and then we wouldn’t campaign or advocate, we’d watch, say, a documentary about a 70s porn star and then discuss how the anarchists are dealing with the issue of rape in their community or we’d write fake fan letters to the authors of really bad fan-fictions where geisha!Harry Potter is sleeping with good!Darth Vader in 17th-century Japan during a tribble-outbreak ruled by evil nymphomaniac overlords the Olsen Twins, egging the authors on, commending them for their mastery of dialogue, character development, plot and literary craft, encouraging them to get a real publishing contract, that sort of thing, or we’d unpack our courier-delivered vege box and complain about whatever locally grown organic fruit and vegetables were currently in season or we’d drink a lot of red wine and then spend hours coming up with new names for Tyler’s Sims.

II      Depends on How You Look At It

That kind of house. That kind of city. You know what I mean. I lived in one of those houses with a couple of homos who worked in one of those pricey middle-to-upper-market stores specialising in manbags and cologne, one of them a Muslim (of course, it depends on how you look at it), and also with a feminist sculptor (although, again, it depends on how you look at it) whose proposal to work as a hooker in a high-class brothel where they preferred the term ‘courtesan’ (like everything else in that city, even the sex industry had gone all pretentious on our asses) as some kind of tactile exploration of inter-gender power dynamics or blah blah blah had won a big art commission although who knows what that was supposed to finance seeing as she was getting paid more than any other hooker in town, and then there was me, a sort of off-white mongrel of dubious Jewish ancestry (yes, it depends on how you look at it).

III      None Here

Len always joked that when the next war came we’d all have to live in the attic and only Tyler (whose real name was Becks) would be allowed to go down. She’d fling open the door in her bathrobe, letting it slip a little and say, ‘Nope, no gays, Jews or Muslims here!’

But I’d say, ‘No, that would never work. They’d gang-rape her, then shoot her. Then they’d search the attic.’

So then we decided that I’d go down and Tyler could stay in the attic and I’d fling open the door, dressed in a corporate outfit, about to go to work as a medical receptionist and I’d say, ‘Nope, no gays, Jews, prozzies or Muslims here!’

Or Tyler could go down dressed as her normal Becks and say the same thing. Or something, and one of those things eventually would definitely work and we’d all survive the war. But I found it really hard to imagine, in today’s political climate, what kind of war that would be, where someone was trying to shoot, rape or incinerate all those people groups in this particular country.

What kind of ideology would such an army have to have? Who page 111 would be trying to shoot us? The rationalists? The atheists? The humanists who are currently trying to find a cure for death? What for? To eliminate people with brains small enough to believe in God from the enlightened planet so that only people with large brains can live forever? I know atheists can be really angry sometimes but they’re only about 2% of the entire world, aren’t they? How did they get in charge? Who would be trying to kill gays and Muslims and possibly-Jews and prostitutes?

IV      Abstract Concerns about the Consumption of Halal Gelatine

I worried that, being stuck in the attic for so long, my main concern would not be lack of privacy, lack of stimulation, it would be things like, ‘Oh, Becks has bought us Fresh’n’Fruity yoghurt again!’

‘What’s wrong with Fresh’n’Fruity?’

‘Nothing, nothing, I love it, it’s my favourite,’ I’d mumble, shuffling round the attic sideways, and of course, bent in half on account of the low ceiling.

It would be things like the yoghurt containing halal gelatine, and so I’d start carrying on this dialogue in my head that went, but why should I care about halal gelatine? I can’t eat that, I’m Jewish. But I’m not actually Jewish. Well, it depends on how you look at it. But I’m not religious. But I don’t want to eat it. And I’m a vegetarian. But I eat gelatine anyway. Yes, but not halal gelatine. But I shouldn’t care if it’s halal or not. But gelatine’s not an ingredient of yoghurt to start with! The real ingredient is cream! They’re just trying to sell us that fake Greek yoghurt without the Greek yoghurt fat content! All this proves is that it’s cheap yoghurt! But why should we have to get this stuff? Because there’s a war on, we’ve got no money. If I want to go out there in the street and get myself shot for being an almost-Jew when there’s a war on and I want some yoghurt, go ahead, be my guest. Okay, maybe I will. But why do we always have to buy the halal yoghurt? Because Hakim’s a Muslim. Be more culturally sensitive. But he’s not a real Muslim. He was born a Muslim! He can’t change that. But Hakim’s GAY! He was born gay! He can’t change that. So we have to buy halal yoghurt now because this gay Muslim who doesn’t go to page 112 mosque still won’t eat non-halal? I don’t even eat kosher! But I’m not even Jewish! But why do we have to buy yoghurt with gelatine in it anyway?

And on and on until I started completely flipping out and going all schizo on Len and Hakim, and I wouldn’t be able to own up to either of them that actually, as a secular, erudite, pinnacle of left-wing education, 21st-century, multilingual, emancipated technophile, I didn’t want to eat halal gelatine just for no damn good reason except it made me feel uncomfortable, especially when outside a war between the whole country and the 2% of the world’s population that were the true rationalists and atheists was raging, so I’d have to make up an excuse and I would have to say that I didn’t want to eat this yoghurt because gelatine isn’t a real yoghurt ingredient, and I disapprove on points of health and traditional yoghurt-making and vegetarianism and they would all remark, see, see, see what culinary snobbery our cushioned western lives have brought us to. That’s what started this whole war. Oh, I am feeling foolish about this already and the war hasn’t even begun.

V      The Pre-War Influence in Contemporary Literature

That, when I was living in that house with all those joes, johns, girls, whatever, was when I began writing in the genre I termed ‘pre-war’. I got sick of everyone saying, ‘Oh, you’re a playwright/poet? What kind of plays/poetry do you write?’ and me snarkily retorting, ‘I don’t know, what kinds of plays/poetry are there?’ and them stumbling and fumbling and saying, ‘Um, I don’t know, I mean, I thought . . . um, I don’t know what I thought.’

So then the new conversation would go, ‘Oh, you’re a . . . whatever? What kind of whatevers do you make?’

‘I’m a pre-war whatever and I make pre-war whatevers.’

‘Pre-war? Pre-war?’

‘Yeah, you’ve heard of post-war, right? Post-war art?’

‘Sure, but . . . which war?’

And then dark and ominously, ‘The next one.’

VI      The Next War

And I’d also keep reading about the Middle East all the time and feeling worried a lot. I couldn’t help thinking every time Len and Tyler were drunkenly frying up onions and again joking about the attic, burning incense or shisha to cover the smell of mould, damp, weed and small black anonymous things smouldering beneath the elements on the stove, while Hakim kept interjecting from over on the corner computer where he was reading celebrity and fashion blogs, ‘Oh my go-od! Oh my GOD! What is she wearing? Why? Why would she do that?’, I couldn’t help thinking that in the next war, whatever that is or looks like, the next big one, probably the gays and Muslims will be fine. Probably no one will want to kill them. Probably no one will want to send Chinese people back home or anything like that. Probably the Czechs or Slovaks will forget all about sterilising their Gypsies and the Lao will stop trying to wipe out the Hmong and instead something vastly more terrible will happen, like who knows what.

VII      How Old Men Kiss

The attic talks made me uneasy. Len would always try to band us together with this camaraderie of oppressed peoples throughout the ages, but none of us were being immediately oppressed right here, right now. I felt that Hakim could easily shrug off being openly gay and go to mosque every Friday if he needed to. Len could easily join an army, aren’t they all gay in the army anyway? It would be just like here. A prostitute, that’s not a race or a creed or a cultural thing, she was getting rich quick, or not rich because we ended up spending it all on booze and taxi fares, she wasn’t even a real prostitute (or was she?), she was just an artist developing dialogue and furthering discussion in the art world about the concept of selling out. Either that or completely destroying the way she viewed sexuality in everyone. Who knows. Prostitutes come out just fine after a war. She wouldn’t notice. Would she? And while artists could go and get shot or exiled for being degenerate, they could just as easily go off and paint things page 114 like Guernica or The Third of May and make megabucks, more even than high-class hookers do. So she should be fine eventually. Especially if she continued this project of discovering how old men kiss because there’s always a market for that in a war. (It’s like this: Gagleahhhegle-aglegah.)

VIII      Rat Stew

None of us were being oppressed right here, right now. Not even really us women. Of course there was still wage disparity and glass ceilings and lots of other stuff but I felt more equal to any guy in that country than anywhere else I’d been on the planet and sometimes I didn’t even want to be that equal! All that responsibility for your own life. Sometimes I just wanted to be told what to do so that when it all went to custard I could blame someone else and demand to be allowed to vote, say that if they’d let me vote to start with, none of this would ever have happened. So what the hell did we know about oppression and running for your life in abject terror? All I knew was what I’d read in books. All I knew was that we all sell everyone out at the end. That’s human nature and all that. Your mother, your most dearly beloved, your lifelong friend. Someone’ll say, ‘I smell a rat’; you’ll go, ‘Yep, that’s dinner, nah, just jokes, it’s me’; and promptly trade your sweetheart for a bowl of rodent stew or something nasty. If you haven’t already, you’ll sell your body, your children. Or eat them. We are all capable of the worst if pressed. If pressured. If in dire enough straits. That was all I knew. From books. And I didn’t even know if it was true.

IX      Miracles

But after a bit the oil prices came back down again. The price of a flat white kept going up and the price of dairy never came back down, but I stopped reading about the Middle East so much and got on with my life. It became easier to find work and then it got harder again and then easier and then harder and then I got a job as a medical receptionist for real instead of just talking about it. Or rather, I was a page 115 miracle reservationist which isn’t exactly the same but sounds similar. I got the job the same week I started using a hair straightener, so perhaps it wasn’t as miraculous as it seemed. And no, I didn’t work miracles, or reserve them, that was just how they’d advertised the job.

X      XXX

This is how the house fell apart: First Len got a really great boyfriend who worked in the skincare cosmetics section of a flash department store, they met each other’s families, decided they were in love, talked about getting married, all that bollixxx, or maybe they were scared of dying lonely like we all are once we get in our thirties and realise we’re still permanently single and don’t have any kids and aren’t likely to ever own a home. Then Hakim went back to Indonesia to see his folks for a holiday but I guess he joined a terrorist cell or married a nice girl who got down in hijab style because he never appeared in town or on Facebook ever again, and then Tyler went back to full-time Becks way, way, way after her commission and sculpture had ended and started working in the library, exactly the same job she used to do before she chucked it in to become a pro for the sake of art. She got sick of working nights, she said, but I think she got sick of trying to have a steady boyfriend whom she’d pretty soon have to dump because he’d want her to not be a hooker and she would have to get all feminist on those dudes and go down on him with the ‘You can’t change me, this is my life, you can’t own me, why do you have to possess me, why are you so jealous, you think love means you have to have me all to yourself and you don’t want to share me with anyone’ styles. Blah blah. So my hypothesis was that she figured if she stopped working as a hooker she could have a nice PhD candidate or archivist boyfriend without having to say that she’d given it up for a guy and then if she went out with a punk rocker she could probably still do burlesque dancing or pin-up girl modelling on the side with a name like Tyler Teaseme or Bubu LaBouche and he’d think that was cool and get a sketch of her tattooed on his arm, but then, that’s what the girls who want their kit off in public while guys go la-la-lum without actually doing it to them for real all do, so . . .

The real working girls weren’t so exhibitionist. Some of them wouldn’t even look me in the eye on the street, of course I am female so maybe there was just no point, but even when talking to me, they’d seem to be staring off to the side, or there were ones who, get them drunk enough and they’d forget they weren’t working and come on to everything in sight like it was their role as a citizen and a matter of public service. Then later on down their career path, or further up the career ladder, it depends on how you look at it, they’d end up kind of sloppy with how they flung their clothes on although they’d started out classy as fluff. Go to their day job in basically underwear dresses under a raincoat, like they couldn’t remember which uniform went with which job.

Maybe she’d be too jaded by now for a life like that, the cleaner Tyler Teaseme life with the feather boas and stripping behind peacock fans and a boyfriend with colourful tattoos and ear stretchers. Maybe she was really just going to be a librarian for real, read the daily Dilbert cartoon and date someone from MSD. I got the feeling maybe she wanted a long term someone too. I suppose we all did.

XI      Get a Haircut and Get a Real Bra

So that was how the pre-war house became disestablished, I was not anti its disestablishment, and that’s what we all did afterwards, and by the way, on paper it says our lease was forcibly terminated because we hadn’t maintained the property to sufficient standard and had therefore broken the stipulated terms of the tenancy agreement, or to put it in the words of other less kindly legal people, ‘evicted’, but our landlord, (you can say landlady if you like, but in this post-feminist country we consider that sexist), hadn’t dealt to even one sixteenth of the fixes on our repairs list so quite frankly, I was glad to be rid of that dump, in fact we were the ones who dumped it (and the landlord would have agreed with that but by an alternative definition of the verb ‘dumping’) and I was sick of being sick all year round even in summer from pneumonia and spores and dengue fever and everything else you can catch from a bad house. And I was glad the friends had come to an end because I was tired of the snide comments on my page 117 own non-existent sexlife and repressed middle-class side. I didn’t want to hear that if I ever go out with a circumcised man I’d better like a lot of the good old traditional shove it up missionary and no foreplay because there’s not much feeling left once all those nerves have been chopped off for anything else. I didn’t want to hear that not finding pleasure in blowing will clearly result in me voting to the right. I didn’t want to hear that most women wear the wrong bra size, I should go and get a professional sizing done and for god’s sake wear something that fits me (although after we all moved out, I did get a sizing done and surprisingly, my correct size turned out to be the same size I’d been wearing all along and later I told other women that most women are wearing the wrong bra size and they should go and get a fitting done too even though, and I never mentioned this, it had been pointless in my case but I did at least stop wearing the worn-out old bras I had been which had really been the problem to start with). I mean, I wanted to know that stuff, but from the internet, not my housemates. I didn’t want to know those things in person in real life.

XII      Fine Weather Continuing Till Lunch

So after the pre-war house and going our separate ways and never speaking to each other again (Len and Tyler had some real issues with each other at the end and they still say today it’s her/his fault, that manipulative, crazy, co-dependent whosit, as usual, that’s how those things always end), not even speaking to each other at the library, and all of us scared of loneliness and the advancing dark middle ages and wanting someone long term to shed a little more light on our situations, what about me? Well, me, I still do, want someone long-term that is, but at least I stopped writing about the war. Moved on to writing about writing about the war instead. And I found out there were a couple of actual Jews in our city, I hadn’t realised, and they were real ones, and I met them, and they turned out to be better writers than me too, so I also tried pretty hard to abandon the faux-persecution complex I’d adopted to give my life more meaning and just accept being a whitey. And then I moved away, and all of that seems to be working out just fine, for now, and hopefully continuing. Until the next war.