Eat My Heart Out by Zoe Pilger

said. ‘I was born above a sweet shop that later turned into a hardware shop.’ She laughed. ‘DIY shop. That comes from years of living in the States.’
    I waited.
    â€˜My family were poor. White trash, they’d be called over there. It was just me, my mother, my father, and brother in two rooms. Man, it was tough. That’s why I ate. Yes. I used to be a fatty.’
    There was a pause, and then we both laughed.
    â€˜I ate and ate and ate because I was depressed,’ she said. ‘Because I was smart. Clever. And I was a girl .’ She tutted. ‘Not a good combination. You must have read Gatsby .’
    â€˜A long time ago.’
    She fetched a Tiffany ashtray. ‘You know when Daisy has a baby and she finds out it’s a girl? She says – Well then she’d better be a perfect little fool .’
    My heart was thrashing.
    â€˜I wasn’t a fool,’ said Stephanie.
    We were in her study.
    Stephanie had asked me to type falling into YouTube. She was leaning over my shoulder and I was sitting in a teak swivel chair, overlooking the garden.
    â€˜Now see what we get,’ she said. ‘Songs about falling in love. A song called ‘Falling’ by Florence and the Machine. There!’ She pointed to a video titled Beautiful Girls Falling .
    We watched a procession of models with stick-legs attempt to make it down the catwalk. Their shoes towered. Each one tripped, stumbled, fell onto her fragile knees. The shot replayed: trip, stumble, fall.
    â€˜Precipices.’ She reached over me. I could smell her perfume: dead oranges on a hot day. It was too tart. ‘Here.’ She found a clip of the glamorous Tallulah Bankhead reading an excerpt from Dorothy Parker’s short story ‘A Telephone Call’. We listened to the incantation, the gravelly voice, the rising delirium of a woman who simply waits. She waits by the phone for her lover to call. She waits because she can only wait, because for a woman to be active and just pick up the goddamn phone and call the man herself at the time that Parker wrote the story – 1928 – was to be deemed a predator.
    â€˜Or worse,’ said Stephanie. She turned the computer off. ‘I’ve had that all my life.’ She stood behind me. ‘I can see it in your eyes that you’re going through the same pain that I went through.’
    â€˜I’m not fat,’ I said.
    â€˜No,’ she said, irritably. ‘I mean when I was older. After I’d graduated. I was thin by then.’
    I could see her looming in the reflection of the blank screen.
    â€˜There was a reason that you came to this house,’ she said. ‘There was a reason that you found me.’
    â€˜What was the reason?’
    â€˜Can’t you see?’ Stephanie laughed joyfully. ‘Can’t you see?’
    After a moment, I laughed along with her. Then I said: ‘See what?’
    â€˜ This is the call. This is the call you’ve been waiting for.’
    We were in the bedroom. It was lined with books. The curtains were red velvet, brand new. The walls were a stark, unforgiving white. A rich red rug was spread on the wooden floorboards.
    â€˜I wanted a red room,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t have the courage to go all the way.’
    â€˜Like Christian’s Red Room of Pain in Fifty Shades ?’
    â€˜Have you read it?’
    â€˜Yes – well, only because Madeline, the head waitress, left it lying around reception. I read it during my shifts. I would never have read it otherwise.’
    â€˜Did you like it?’
    â€˜No?’ I watched her face to see if this was the right answer. ‘It gave me nightmares. The violence. I hated Anastasia’s – submissiveness?’
    â€˜Quite.’ Now she looked angry. ‘That book is poison. Pure toxic poison. It is fortuitous that Falling Out of Fate coincided more or less with that … trash.’ Her face became