I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

I stalk a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as I am. Sometimes when I am too quick to look at her stories, I block her temporarily so she doesn’t know I absent-mindedly refresh her page fifteen times a minute while Netflix plays in the background on my laptop, my stomach flipping sick with delight when her profile picture is ringed red.

Would I tell her that I know who her ex-husband is, I’ve seen his new family and he seems happy now, happier than the photos I’ve seen of the two of them, would I tell her I know who all her friends are and I watch their stories too, would I tell her I screenshot the photos she takes of herself and study her face so intently sometimes I fear I’ve picked up some facial expressions or tonal inflections from her because I listen to her speaking with her father on YouTube over and over before I go to sleep. Would I move in closer to smell her and feel what he felt when he felt her—would I taste the inside of your mouth to find out what was so compelling, would I press into you, I want to know exactly how your body moves when you are turned on—to know for myself why he cancelled fucking me to fuck you.

I know the woman I am obsessed with has many of these tastemaker friends, where the acquisition of beauty seems to fuel them as much as food.

I fit into spaces which already exist and contort myself to fit a shape which has been allocated for me. I don’t own anything.

The uniqueness of her business is that she is a daughter of someone who is famous for being aesthetically rigorous and if you part with a minimum of $500 you might be able to buy into this upbringing too. I think—this is my chance.

It’s the kind of street where there are no ‘for sale’ signs because everyone here knows they have a good thing, the kind of street where each door is painted the same tone of a different colour, to tell you—there’s community here, we talk to our neighbours and think about things like the aesthetics of front doors.

My childlessness and my endlessly empty hours mean I work around them, learn not to take it personally, the silence, the vague dates to meet up that go by or the missed appointments to call, and instead shrug them off. They have families and serious lives.

I thought time stretched out forever, I thought I had the rest of my life to make this decision but I realise I am on a clock and it runs differently for me.

I am female. There was never much time and I’ve wasted so much already.

have an English degree yet when faced with the task of writing, I am almost adrift. I rely on autobiographical detail, I masticate my life, spit it out and decorate it on the page. No one can dispute my experience even if they might rail against the way I communicate that experience and this becomes my first line of defence—this actually happened to me can fight any accusation of the rough and amateur way I use the tools. What is the line between being vulnerable and prostrating yourself for a system that won’t recognise you?

He tells me he doesn’t believe the way I want to have sex is who I truly am. I instantly lose my confidence and submit myself to what he thinks I should be. I’m not sure if what I want is what I want. I am convinced he knows me best, better than I know myself and because I have resigned the power of my decision making to him, he must be right, I don’t want to be treated like a whore, he’s right, it isn’t me. I

an endless overlap of images and sound mimicking the way we take in stories on Instagram where you cut between dozens of peoples’ days within a minute, keeping up with the narrative of the way their lives are presented—this one has come out as non-binary, this one is moving in with their partner now, this one went on a date, is looking for love, puts up screenshots from Hinge for their six hundred followers and makes self-deprecating jokes about themselves, embarrassed about their search in this automated time where an algorithm has to get to know you before a human being can—where the algorithm gets to know you more intimately through the hundreds of false start conversations you have about what your favourite colour is and how many siblings you have—this one puts up a video of their progress in pole and then shows you the move they can do now so effortlessly with text laid on the clip saying time is everything! growth! You hear people you don’t know, in living rooms you’ll never be invited into, preparing meals you’ll never eat. The pace of Syms’ video is erratic, jerky, disorienting but familiar. We’re used to video being presented this way.

My boyfriend is with me because next to my erratic behaviour he can look like the wise, steady one even though he has no direction to his life.

He is cruel and cold, and then warm and close with frightening changeability. I give his cold side a nickname and say his split personality is like Jekyll and Hyde. Minute to minute I never know who I am going to get with him. Minute to minute neither does my boyfriend with me.

She says she has five jobs but when my dad had to work a second job at KFC to pay the mortgage, he didn’t tell us or anyone because there was no pride in having two jobs so why can she say she has five, unless she has none?

I crave his validation but then will disregard it when I have it because I have to force it out of him.

The man I want to be with texts and he says he understands if I don’t want to carry on with this after everything he has told me. I text back straightaway and say, I do.

Like a fan.

While I am on top of him in a first-floor hotel room in Kings Cross, I have a vision of being alone, underwater, surrounded by black and blue knotted nets.