The Slideshow
She had become addicted to the buzz of the cancelled plan. It was a small and fleeting high and no one would ever look back fondly at all the times they’d managed to get out of something, but for the moment no words were sweeter to Marnie than ‘I’m sorry, I can’t make it.’ It was like being let off an exam that she expected to fail.
Ideally, the other person would cancel first, but she was quite prepared to take the initiative. Like an actor in an emotional scene, it helped if she could draw on some personal truth, so that when she woke on the morning of New Year’s Eve – most terrible day – with a tingle at the back of her throat, her first thought was ‘I can use this.’ Her friend Cleo, the deputy head of a secondary school in York, had invited her to a party but it would be irresponsible to travel – she’d be no fun, it was a long way, she was going to stay in, sweat it out. She lay on the sofa to give a bed-bound quality to the voice, the sticky croak of a child possessed by demons, and made the call.
‘I knew this would happen,’ said Cleo. ‘I knew it.’
‘You knew I’d get ill?’
‘We can all do the voice, Marnie.’
‘I have a temperature!’
‘A normal temperature.’
‘I’m shivering, I’m … Why would you want me if I’m not going to be fun?’
‘We don’t invite you because you’re fun.’
‘Oh.’
‘We invite you because we love you and it’s important to see people. You spend too much time alone.’
‘It’s not my fault if—’
‘Sat there like … Eleanor fucking Rigby.’
‘Cleo!’
‘Sorry, but I really wanted to see you. Anthony too.’ Anthony was Marnie’s godson, someone else she’d neglected.
‘I want to see him too, and you. I just want to be at my best.’
‘You don’t have to be at your best. No one’s interested in you being at your best. We want you exactly as you are.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Isn’t it? I might throw up.’
‘Me too,’ said Marnie. ‘And that’s why I can’t come.’
‘All right. Happy New Year, I suppose.’ She was gone, and now the room seemed very quiet. She loved Cleo, a good and constant friend, fiercely loyal but also fierce, and while it was humiliating to be told off, she knew this feeling would pass, replaced by immense relief. She ran a bath and opened wine. She drafted several humorous posts about her wild-night-in for social media, but she’d found in the past that the jokes she made online led to messages asking if she was okay. Instead, she lurked and read her feed and felt as if she was looking up at a party from beneath a lamppost.
So deep was her commitment to the fake illness that it soon turned into the real thing, a feeling that the back of her throat was somehow chipped, a sweetly metallic taste, a whole-body ache. The pleasure of cancelled plans depended on the belief that she was having a better time than the fools who’d made an effort, and that was no longer the case. She toasted herself with a pint of water, swallowed two Paracetamol and a sleeping pill and, at ten fifteen p.m., squeezed beneath the weighted blanket that turned her bed into a giant flower-press.
At midnight, all the fireworks of London came punching through her sleep and the first hours of the new year were spent in a fevered haze, imagining where she might be if she’d chosen yes over another no. In a branching timeline, she imagined herself in the corner of Cleo’s kitchen, being animated and funny with a nice-looking man, his dark eyes crinkling, his teeth less than perfect and all the better for it. Shall we step outside? he’d say. It’s too bright,and maybe they’d scrounge a cigarette, share it in some corny way. What time’s your train tomorrow? he’d ask. I don’t have to rush back, she’d say (although it was an advance ticket, not a flexible one, and even in the fantasy, she worried about the cost). So, she’d ask, how do you become a tree surgeon? and here he’d lean in to kiss her.
The trouble with alternative timelines was that they really were full of the most mortifying nonsense. Back in the universe she’d chosen for herself, the alarm clock read two fifteen and she chiselled her feverish body into the cool side of the bed. In a documentary on the emergency services, she’d heard the story of an old man who had died with the electric blanket on, simmering gently over the course of several days. What might her weighted blanket do over time? Press her flat, splayed like an Archaeopteryx? Would a fireman roll her up, like her yoga mat, carry her out beneath his arm?
On New Year’s Day, shivering on the sofa, she turned on the TV to find that her streaming device had compiled a sarcastic slideshow of her photographs, entitled What A Year!: her oven light-bulb, a recipe for hearty lentil soup, a close-up of an ingrowing hair, her National Insurance number, the flapping sole of a faulty shoe, the mole on her shoulder, a gas-meter reading, a dry-cleaning receipt, the shard of green glass she’d found in a salad, then back to the oven light-bulb, all accompanied Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend’.
A resolution. This year the photographs would be different. There’d be no more self-willed illness, no more cosiness, no candles sucking the oxygen from the room, no more relentless self-care. Instead she’d care for others, revive her friendships and make new ones, engage in the messy, confusing business of other people.
Resolutions fade with time but this one lingered, and when Cleo phoned with a new invitation Marnie hesitated, suspended between the desire for change and the need for everything to stay the same. Three days of walking with strangers. It was the kind of potentially awful experience she needed and, in her mind, she decided to give it some thought. In the real world, out slipped ‘Yes.’