I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

She has a nice bum, not a flat white girl bum and that disappoints me. She is also very strong. I’ve deep dived and gone to the recesses of her Instagram and see she can do back bends and crow pose, things I cannot do. The man I want to be with told me he would like to pull my legs over my head but I’d have to be flexible and wonder if he said it to me, thinking of her.

I don’t know who he loves more, does he even love me. He tells me he came inside her with complete abandon. He very carefully and deliberately keeps our bodies apart.

The reality is, I am part of a chaste harem, a supply of crazed female attention he likes to disturb when he’s bored but it hurts to admit this to myself so I put it out of my mind and pretend it is only the two of us and pretend he actually desperately wants to be with me and pretend he finds the situation between us as unbearable as I do and pretend he wants to resolve the situation because if I believe this then my chasing has a purpose.

It’s clear he doesn’t view women he is romantically interested in as people and we treat each other the same way. I wonder how so many intelligent women who claim to be for women’s stories and promoting women’s lives and women’s independence, can be this cut-throat and possessive over a man. In public we would all decry this behaviour, we would shout, dump him! to our friends. It’s so archaic and humiliating to realise nothing has changed despite all the rhetoric suggesting it has. We will still turn on each other. What we should have done is unionise but instead we splinter.

The comments under this post all express urgent, alarmed concern for the sacrificed dishcloth and I think white people are wild for how they will have an acute empathy for anything bar actual melanated human beings.

Her regenerative organic food is grown to a level of purity by which she can sneer at the quality in Whole Foods. Her food is grown by farmers she knows by first name and arranged in beautiful, handmade, one-off pottery. Her food can be traced back to the seed, whereas mine is bought through a complex line of anonymised, automated, industrialist networks. Every object she owns is of heirloom quality, made by one person and has an individual personality. They often come from makers who have disclaimers like due to the handmade nature of these items some of them will differentiate in tone, or texture or colour, but we think it adds to their specialness.

The unattainability of what she chooses to surround herself with seemingly rubs off on her. It further alludes to qualities she has that are innately hers by birthright and it creates a kind of frenzy around her from others.

‘England’ (she says England in this very deliberate way, not mongrel ‘Britain’ or the ‘UK’, but England as if she has extracted the native character of the country that is mine).

The company that sells the top have this frolicky white girl cottage core aesthetic. In June 2020 they post a black square and from then on, they post frolicky Black women in the company’s cottage core aesthetic and say they acknowledge they have to do better.

see it all as one system, this self-congratulatory circle of back-patting and unaccountability, a circle of whiteness that commends their open-mindedness but the kind of open-mindedness that looks just like them, a hall of mirrors in a closed room.

and maybe the man I want to be with will want me and won’t throw me away like he does so dismissively. I will be something of note and care. I will be something to show off owning.

I have to position myself as the friend because it seems it is the only spot open. It is romantic elsewhere. He wants a platonic place to time-out so I decide this is what I’ll be.

It seems like the only real thing this man gives me is her.

I notice they are not listening to one another. The woman with the popular YouTube channel says, mmmmmmmmmmmmmm, very loudly and the woman I am obsessed with ploughs on regardless of the questions that are asked.

It takes me a long time to realise that when the man I want to be with tells me he likes being seen with me in public what he means is, he enjoys what my skin colour says about him to other people.

What kind of person are you to be intimately invested in acquiring antique Welsh stick chairs to accent a room, or to deliberately curate an association between said chairs and your personhood to other people, to be the kind of person who other people say of you when you’re not there, oh they have such good taste. Who decides these things?

What does it say about your femininity if you know how to make a room pleasing? Knowing how to make a home is the ultimate wreath to crown your femininity.

We do not have sex for connection, we have sex for release. My mind cannot retain the memory of our meetings but the fact that I can barely walk afterwards or open my mouth because I was so deliciously sore means my body retained the memory of the physical act even if my mind could not. I don’t come with him. He is not interested in making me come as he feels it is my responsibility to make this happen for myself.

What I enjoy is having the full glare of his attention on me uninterrupted for four hours, which is why I want to keep doing it.

I think I am very sophisticated for how calmly I accept all of this. I think it’s very French of me to have a lover who has lovers, to be able to use the word lover. It’s very grown up of me to appear to be cool and detached

I fantasise and fall in love with a version of him I’m not sure exists outside of my imagination. He is constantly failing in comparison to this person I know he could be. If he could only stop being exactly who he is, we could be happy.

I want to protect her and hurt her just as I want to protect him and hurt him. I’m not sure what I actually feel towards her anymore, all I know is I want to possess her in some way, even possess her absence.

I wonder if I will have enough cultural capital to keep her awake at night.

He picks up the phone when anxiety attacks mug me in the street of all my decision-making processes and calms me so I can carry on with my day. I love his dad and get on really well with his mum.

Our home is a refuge for our friends,

We are the mum and dad of our group, the head of the family, all my friends are his friends, and our life is inextricably linked.

Hobbies you are obsessive about when you are on your own. When staying in seems like a kind of accusation.

I want to gain immortality because of my brain and not because of the potential of my womb.

The desire to be an artist is something that burns inside of me all of my life but I can’t get it out, I just don’t know how to make anything,

Wanting to be an artist and being one are different. Perhaps I am just like everyone else and my disappointment is desiring to be special but not being special at all.

He is breathing access to the type of social mobility I want and can provide instant generational wealth. I could be threaded firmly into the backbone of Britain. If I have him then I don’t need to try so hard on my own, I am saved from doing any real labour.

It seems whimsical and twee and I hate that all of these white men could go to the Middle East or to countries in Africa, take from the cultures and steal the light and bring it back to the West and then somehow reinvent what was already there through the filter of the white imagination so that it is now Othered and distanced and beige-ified, so that their people could understand it all from some vantage of safety. Why do they take, why can’t they give or just get out of the way?

It was here I had my first kiss, by which I mean I stuck my tongue out and hoped for the best because I just wanted to be kissed, I just wanted something adult to happen to me.

I am used to sex being out of reach, something out there, not regular but the only site of rebellion available to me because my parents didn’t want me to do it, so I obviously end up wanting to do it in order to have some bodily autonomy.

how can they not know of the Trojan Horse-like plans you make but instead of Troy, you’re invading some shit club in Wembley.

then hiding parts of myself from my family who didn’t like the parts of me that loved drugs and techno and staying out all night and sex and cocks and cunts and come and booze and freedom. I am used to living inside of shame, I am used to being on the outside breathing mist up on the glass begging to be let in. I am absolutely primed for this affair. It is toxic and familiar.

I wonder if he tolerates the fights because, in my remorse, I am gentle with him. I wait for him to come back to me.

you don’t want to end up like me. I couldn’t live without your dad but I’m not in love with him.

it’ll be safe but it’ll be stale.

I tell her, we don’t sleep together, my boyfriend and I, we don’t have sex. I feel like an old person, sex is something other people have not me.

He says he was cunt struck.

We give away our two bedside drawers which were given to us by a woman who said they had served her family home for ten years and she hoped they might bring us happiness as they had brought her and her home happiness.

Neither of us are able to say goodbye and when he eventually says, right, and opens the door to get his bags, he mouths I love you as he walks on the pavement and I pull away, tears obscuring everything.

A cousin texts and says, I think you made a mistake you should stay with your boyfriend, the implication being, you’re too old to be single.

I am hyper and fraught but I think I’m being normal and sexy.

I am performing all the time, performing being myself, what is myself, who is me.

I keep standing, waiting for a command which doesn’t come.

It leads me to believe with dizzying certainty that when there is a man involved, and a rich one at that—especially with a dick like his—there is no such thing as a sisterhood. It’s every female for herself.

Society told me, anything a man can do I can do, but it turns out it is not true. Our experience of time is markedly different. What they say about women having a shelf life, everything they said was true, all the women who I scorned for inhaling the patriarchal ideas of a sell-by date, the ‘ripeness’ of women, the ‘freshness’, my mother who told me to pick carefully, they were right and now I have to make a concerted effort to stem the tsunami of fear at being imprisoned by my gender—which now means not having any control over the meaning of myself.

Men are perceived as steady, reliable capitalistic servants. They are almost machines, able to reproduce at any age, three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. Men’s bodies are a part of the workforce their whole lives as they never need breaks for menstruation, maternity or menopause. Men’s time is believed to be limitless. There is no shelf life for the man I want to be with like there is for me,