Eat My Heart Out
Zoe Pilger
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1558618856
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
each other’s names!’ I said with a laugh. I let my eyelids droop, seductively. ‘Are you sleepy, dear?’ I opened my eyes as wide as possible. ‘No.’ ‘James.’ He extended his hand. It was warm and soft. ‘I’m Camille.’ ‘How erotic.’ ‘Yeah. My mother named me after my father’s courtesan. She was a chorus girl at the Moulin Rouge. She could kick her legs up extremely high.’ ‘And what does your mother do?’ ‘She … bakes croissants. But she was like photographed by Man Ray and all the surrealists
She prayed to the moon that Simon would love her back. She devised superstitions, wishing for particular patterns of numbers to occur. Soon, she became a slave to those patterns. They ruled her with a logic that she herself had created. The moon’s face remained impassive outside her bedroom window. Simon continued to appear in flickering black and white on the screen, and sometimes in the form of a jingle on the radio. Sometimes she doubted that Simon was real at all. On the upside, she
sake. ‘So anyway I just always had this mad passion for Japan,’ he said. ‘Like the goddamn horn for the place.’ ‘Oh dear.’ ‘What?’ ‘It’s just that expression – it’s quite distasteful. Some of the things you come out with are a bit not up my street.’ ‘What is up your street then?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Go on.’ ‘So I went travelling there – Japan – for like six months.’ ‘Did you discover your Zen?’ ‘Yeah.’ He put down his chopsticks. ‘Yeah. Totally. There was this one festival in a place called
best. We carried on long distance. I was twentyfive. I wrote him every week, great, massive outpourings of love. And he wrote me, the best he could. Not so poetic. But I didn’t care. I used to get so excited by his letters.’ She looked at me. ‘They were mostly about Maple Leaf strategy, league tables, chances. The letters got shorter. And then no letter arrived. I kept writing. I wrote for six weeks. I can’t tell you the anxiety I went through. I became superstitious, again. Eventually, I went up
not Australia because of the flag stitched onto his bum bag. ‘Yeah, it’s a chocolate soda with a scoop of chocolate ice cream in it!’ I said, excitedly. ‘You wouldn’t be allowed to call it that in Auckland,’ he said. ‘It’s from Minneapolis!!’ ‘Where are you from?’ he asked me. I looked around at this desecrated, white death sentence of a city and said: ‘I’m from here.’ Two hours later, Emma the manager stomped towards me in her All the Way bomber jacket, which was white. She looked like the