Chapter 21

When Martin pulled me outside, I did that thing where you decide to become a different person. It's something I could do whenever I felt like it. Doesn't everybody, when they feel themselves getting out of control? You know: you say to yourself, OK, I'm a booky person, so then you go and get some books from the library and carry them around for a while. Or, OK, I'm a druggy person, and smoke a lot of weed. Whatever. And it makes you feel different. If you borrow someone else's clothes or their interests or their words, what they say, then it can give you a bit of a rest from yourself, I find.

It was time to feel different. I don't know why I said that stuff to Maureen; I don't know why I say half the things I say. I knew I'd overstepped the mark, but I couldn't stop myself. I get angry, and when it starts it's like being sick. I puke and puke over someone and I can't stop until I'm empty. I'm glad Martin pulled me outside. I needed stopping. I need stopping a lot. So I told myself that from that point on I was going to be more a person out of the olden days kind of thing. I swore not to swear, ha ha, or to spit; I swore not to ask harmless old ladies who are clearly more or less virgins whether they shagged doggy style.

Martin went spare at me, told me I was a bitch, and an idiot, and asked me what Maureen had ever done to me. And I just said, Yes, sir, and, No, sir, and, Very sorry, sir, and I looked at the pavement, not at him, just to show him I really was sorry. And then I curtsied, which I thought was a nice touch. And he said, What the fuck's this, now? What's the yes sir no sir business? So I told him that I was going to stop being me, and that no one would ever see the old me again, and he didn't know what to say to that. I didn't want them to get sick of me. People do get sick of me, I've noticed. Chas got sick of me, for example. And I really need that not to happen any more, otherwise I'll be left with nobody. With Chas, I think everything was just too much; I came on too strong too quickly, and he got scared. Like that thing in the Tate Modern? That was definitely a mistake. Because the vibe in there… OK, some of the stuff is all weird and intense and so on, but just because the stuff is all weird and intense, that shouldn't have meant that I went all weird and intense. That was inappropriate behaviour, as Jen would have said. I should have waited until we'd got outside and finished looking at the pictures and installations before I went off on one. I think Jen got sick of me, too.

Also, the business in the cinema, which looking back on it might have been the final straw. That was inappropriate behaviour, too. Or maybe the behaviour wasn't inappropriate, because we had to have that conversation some time, but the place (the Holloway Odeon) wasn't right, and nor was the time (halfway through the film) or the volume (loud). One of the points Chas made that night was that I wasn't really mature enough to be a mother, and I can see now that by yelling my head off about having a baby halfway through Moulin Rouge I sort of proved it for him.

So anyway. Martin went mental at me for a while, and then he just seemed to shrink, as if he was a balloon and he'd been punctured. 'What's wrong, kind sir?' I said, but he just shook his head, and I could understand enough from that. What I understood was that it was the middle of the night and he was standing outside a party full of people he didn't know, shouting at someone else he didn't know, a couple of hours after sitting on a roof thinking about killing himself. Oh yeah, and his wife and children hated him. In any other situation I would have said that he'd suddenly lost the will to live. I went over and put my hand on his shoulder, and he looked at me as if I were a person rather than an irritation and we almost had a Moment of some description - not a romantic Ross-and-Rachel-type moment (as if), but a Moment of Shared Understanding. But then we were interrupted, and the Moment passed.