Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

by Gail Honeyman

The exhibition of newly discovered Roman trove had been tremendous; the journey to Edinburgh, far less so. The train interior had been more like a bus than the Orient Express, replete with hard-wearing fabrics in stain-concealing colors and gray plastic fittings. The worst thing, apart from the other travelers—my goodness, the hoi polloi do get about these days, and they eat and drink in public with very few inhibitions—was the incessant noise from the loudspeakers. It seemed there was an announcement every five minutes from the mythical conductor, imparting sagacious gems such as large items should be placed in the overhead luggage racks, or that passengers should report any unattended items to the train crew as soon as possible. I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea and found himself on the Glasgow–Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon?

Me, currently

“Who’s this ‘he’”? “He’s a musician, Mummy.” I didn’t want to tell her his name quite yet—there is a power in naming things, and I wasn’t quite ready to cede it to her yet, to hear those precious syllables rolled in her mouth, for her to spit them out again.

Remember how you got them, Eleanor. Was it worth it? For her? Oh, there’s room on your other cheek for a bit more hurt, isn’t there? Turn the other cheek for Mummy, Eleanor, there’s a good girl.”

Creepy

“Thank you very much indeed for your assistance, Claire,”

my eyes were heavily rimmed and ringed with charcoal, reminding me of a program I’d watched recently about lemurs. My lips were painted the color of Earl Haig poppies. “Well,” she said, “what do you think?” “I look like a small Madagascan primate, or perhaps a North American raccoon,” I said. “It’s charming!”

Tonight was simply not meant to be. The card would remain undelivered in my shopper for the time being. I assuaged my disappointment with the consoling thought that, when it did finally happen, the encounter would be perfect, and not some short notice, ad hoc meeting in a music club.

Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that there’s something very liberating about it; once you realize that you don’t need anyone, you can take care of yourself. That’s the thing: it’s best just to take care of yourself. You can’t protect other people, however hard you try. You try, and you fail, and your world collapses around you, burns down to ashes.

And, really, I was fine, fine, fine.

“Eleanor,” he said, “honestly, don’t stress about it. When people say seven o’clock, they mean, like, seven thirty, earliest. We’ll probably be the first people there!” I was thrown by this. “But why?” I said. “Why on earth would you state one time whilst meaning something completely different, and how are people supposed to know?”

Girl

“Come in,” she said, smiling at Raymond. “Dad’ll be pleased to see you.” She didn’t smile at me, which is the normal state of affairs in most encounters I have with other people.

Normally, I wasn’t at all interested in my hair and I hadn’t had it cut since I was thirteen years old. It ran down to my waist, straight and light brown—just hair, nothing more, nothing less. I barely noticed it, in truth. I knew, though, that for the singer to fall in love with me, I’d need to make much more of an effort.

two garishly decorated paper cups sporting cartoon rodents on skateboards. “Rastamouse,”

“You’ve made me shiny, Laura,” I said. I tried to stop it, but a little tear ran down the side of my nose. I wiped it away with the back of my hand before it could dampen the ends of my new hair. “Thank you for making me shiny.”

I still resented all the monetary payments I’d been forced to make over the years to have a terrible time in a terrible place with terrible people on the last Friday before the twenty-fifth of December.

people did seem to sing about umbrellas and fire-starting and Emily Brontë novels, so, I supposed, why not a gender- and faith-based youth organization?

“No thank you,” I said. “I don’t want to accept a drink from you, because then I would be obliged to purchase one for you in return, and I’m afraid I’m simply not interested in spending two drinks’ worth of time with you.” “Eh?” he said, cupping his hand around his ear. Clearly he had tinnitus or some other hearing impairment. I communicated via mime, simply shaking my head and waving my index finger, while mouthing NO.

“You’re a bit mental, aren’t you?” she said, not in the least aggressively, but slurring her words somewhat. It was hardly the first time I’d heard this. “Yes,” I said, “yes, I suppose I am.” She nodded, like I had confirmed a long-held suspicion. We didn’t talk after that.

smoke. I had a lot to tell him, about the dancing, about the queue lady, and I was looking forward to doing so.

And there, in the middle, was Raymond, dancing with Laura. He was speaking into her ear, close enough to be able to smell her perfume. She was laughing.

On this occasion, I’d purchased the multiple products and tools required to re-create the same face at home. The total cost exceeded my monthly council tax bill by some margin, but I was in such a strange mood that this did not deter me.

Although it’s good to try new things and to keep an open mind, it’s also extremely important to stay true to who you really are. I read that in a magazine at the hairdressers.

It was true that, since the time when I’d first seen the musician, my interest and therefore my progress had been subsumed by more pressing matters over the last few weeks. There were so many other things to be getting on with—Raymond, the new job, Sammy and his family . .

“Oh wait, Mummy—hang on a second. You said there were two things—what was the second thing you were thinking about?” “Oh yes,” she said, and I heard her dismissive sideways hiss of cigarette smoke. “It was just that I wanted to tell you that you’re a pointless waste of human tissue. That was all. Bye then, darling!” she said, bright as a knife. Silence.

Omg?

Her tone was breezy, cheerful—it had a borderline manic quality that I recognized.

The lump in my throat was burning, burning like fire, no please, not fire . . .

spotted a telltale platform heel poking out from behind a swagged curtain. There was a window seat recess, in which Laura was sitting in the lap of a man who, it soon became apparent, was Raymond,

and the music from the stereo system was both unfeasibly loud and unspeakably terrible.

“Cider?” I shouted, over the din. “But, Raymond. I don’t drink cider!” “What do you think Magners is, you daft bint?” he said, nudging me gently with his elbow.

It languishes in a warehouse, spiders spinning silk inside its unfashionable rounded corners, bluebottles laying eggs in the rough splinters. It’s given to another charity. They gave it to me, unloved, unwanted, irreparably damaged. Also the table.

It is incomprehensible to me now that I could ever have thought that anyone would love this ambulant bag of blood and bones. Beyond understanding. I think of that night—when was it, three days ago, four?—and reach for the vodka bottle. I retch again, remembering.

The day had not augured well from the start. Polly the plant had died that morning. I’m fully aware of how ridiculous that sounds. That plant, though, was the only living link with my childhood, the only constant between life before and after the fire, the only thing, apart from me, that had survived.

Life was so very precarious. I already knew that, of course. No one knew it better than me. I know, I know how ridiculous this is, how pathetic, but on some days, the very darkest days, knowing that the plant would die if I didn’t water it was the only thing that forced me up out of bed.

I needed to make something happen, anything. I couldn’t keep passing through life, over it, under it, around it. I couldn’t go on haunting the world like a wraith.

the musician simply didn’t know I was there. Why on earth had I ever thought that he would? Stupidity, self-delusion, a feeble connection to reality? Take your pick.

I was standing in a basement on a Tuesday night, alone, surrounded by strangers, listening to music I didn’t like, because I had a crush on a man who didn’t know, and would never know, that I existed. I realized I had stopped hearing the music.

After all these weeks of delusion, I recognized, breathless, the pure, brutal truth of it. I felt despair and nausea mingled inside me, and then that familiar black, black mood came down fast.

I was gray white, the color of larvae, and my hair stood on end. My eyes were dark hollows, empty, dead. I noted all of this with complete indifference.

crawled under the covers and reached blindly for a bottle. I drank it with the focused, single-minded determination of a murderer,

Why did I start to allow myself to think I could live a normal life, a happy life, the kind other people had? Why did I think that the singer could be part of that, help bring it about? The answer stabs at me: Mummy. I wanted Mummy to love me. I’d been alone for so long. I needed someone by my side to help me manage Mummy. Why wasn’t there someone, anyone, to help me manage Mummy?

Is she mummy?

“Right then, here’s something to keep you entertained, ladies!” he said, then turned his back, undid his belt, dropped his jeans and wiggled his pale white buttocks at us.

meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.

She is completely fine. Title

These days, loneliness is the new cancer—a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.

Was I alive? I hoped so, but only because if this was the location of the afterlife, I’d be lodging an appeal immediately.

“Get some rest now,” he said softly, closing the curtains and turning out the light. Sleep came like a sledgehammer.

I wasn’t supposed to live like this. No one was supposed to live like this. The problem was that I simply didn’t know how to make it right. Mummy’s way was wrong, I knew that. But no one had ever shown me the right way to live a life, and although I’d tried my best over the years, I simply didn’t know how to make things better. I could not solve the puzzle of me.

“Hello, Raymond,” I said. “How are you?” he asked again, sounding strained. “Fine, thanks,” I said. This was, I knew, the correct answer. “For fuck’s sake, Eleanor. Fine. Christ!” he said. “I’ll be round in an hour, OK?”

Fine!

It was surprising that he should bother with me, especially given the unpleasant circumstances in which he’d found me after the concert. Whenever I’d been sad or upset before, the relevant people in my life would simply call my social worker and I’d be moved somewhere else. Raymond hadn’t phoned anyone or asked an outside agency to intervene. He’d elected to look after me himself. I’d been pondering this, and concluded that there must be some people for whom difficult behavior wasn’t a reason to end their relationship with you. If they liked you—and, I remembered, Raymond and I had agreed that we were pals now—then, it seemed, they were prepared to maintain contact, even if you were sad, or upset, or behaving in very challenging ways. This was something of a revelation.

“To be clear,” I said, “I’m not some sort of . . . stalker. I merely found out where he lives, and I copied out a poem for him, which I didn’t even send. And I tweeted him once, but that’s all. That’s not a crime. All of the information I needed was in the public domain. I didn’t break any laws or anything like that.”

“Here’s a scenario. I’ll run it by you and you can see what you think. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, Eleanor, that you had developed a crush on this man. These sorts of feelings are generally a sort of emotional ‘trial run’ for a real relationship. They’re very intense. Does that sound reasonable, plausible so far?” I stared at her. “So,” she went on, “there you were, quite enjoying your crush, feeling the feelings.

Can you tell me why you don’t feel comfortable talking about your mother?” “I . . . she wouldn’t want me to,” I said. That was true. I remembered the last—and only—time I’d done it, with a teacher. It wasn’t a mistake you made twice.