My Kitchen, early in the morning

Becoming Alice, either in wonderland or through the looking glass.

Estella is sitting on the rug, pouring miniature ice chips into a tiny, plastic cup. She has a mania, fuelled by YouTube, for these toys that come in round surprise balls, full of plastic and horrific for the environment but good for me, since the both the prospect and arrival of one guarantees a couple of hours of being left alone long enough to work. The in-year admissions process in this country is slow, four weeks since the children have been in school. Days beginning to feel like the loose ones between Christmas and New Year. I am not a fan of holidays or downtime. So I buy her these balls and she sits, engrossed as she assembles small simulacrums of food stuff she will later give to her Barbies in their giant, plastic, pink house, and I will berate myself for doing nothing at all about the state of the planet while knowing full well if she did not have the giant dreamhouse, some other child would.

I stir the porridge cooking on the stove and watch her. She is utterly absorbed by her task. I love watching people concentrate. I love watching people do something well. The appeal perhaps of tennis, or of sitting perched at a bar, as bar staff mix cocktails. The concentration it demands. Something beautiful about that and about her this morning, as her tongue pokes between her front teeth, and she holds the tweezers in her hands to grab the parts and I suddenly am reminded of an afternoon in early autumn with a friend when we are eating afternoon tea in Fortnum’s, which is not an activity I am ever given to partaking in, unless with her, and then it is hilarious.

Every few months we sit with miniature cakes and shrunken versions of sandwiches delicately cut into fingers so we do not have to indelicately open our mouths too wide, we have tea and champagne on the side, although this afternoon I have forgone champagne in favour of hard liquor since only hours before I was on an operating table, being minutely observed. 1cm across, they said, something so tiny, potentially so lethal. Anaesthetic leaves me strange; and this afternoon has an air of strangeness already as I battle though Americans in the food hall, enraptured with the Britishness of it all, into the tiniest lift, made smaller by being lined with dark, oppressive wood which likely some designer thought at some time screamed opulence, and up to the fourth floor, where they sit me down and with a flourish the waiter puts a large napkin over my knee, until I am little again and my grandmother is doing the same with similar starched linen.

Here, everything is done for you. Even the selection process, you only order afternoon tea, vegetarian afternoon tea, and there’s another option I don’t even check; the specifics of it, decided by someone else. There is something that happens to me when I’m in places like this, immediately I want to misbehave. Take me to a dive bar, and I’ll be just fine; an expensive hotel, and I just want to be bad. But it’s ok. I’m there with my friend who is long legged, gorgeous, and very very naughty. She’s a BDSM model and very good at it. She also happened to grow up as a Jehovah’s Witness and has written a book about it. We have things then, in common. Largely, when we sit in these opulent surroundings we talk about sex and coming to understand what our own morality looks like; the freedom, the terror. But today, maybe something to do with the anaesthetic or the negroni, we become fascinated by the size and colour of the cakes. Everything is tiny. Everything is pink. The walls too, and the rims of the plates, and the cups, painted with pink flowers. It is all made to please, not grown women, but little girls. For as long as we are here, we are six again, the food toys to push around our plates, to nibble delicately on. The music entertains us too, orchestral cover versions of Coldplay and U2. As the afternoon progresses, it becomes more surreal. I am reminded of Baudrillard’s disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe the rest is real.

Only this is presented as real. In the order of six year old girls and nice women, we are not meant to question this. We are to eat up and pay up. We are not meant to laugh at it. It is supposed to represent a pinnacle of our desire. Between the savoury carb course and the sweeter carb course serving as a precursor to the almost inedibly sweet final course, the waiter serves us rose sorbet, cleverly disguised as a macaroon. By this time, I am Alice, either through the looking glass or in wonderland, difficult to tell which. Of course it is served on a tiny tiny plate with a tiny tiny spoon. I worry he might offer to feed me.

On the BDSM acronym, my friend is an S. I am fascinated by the willpower required to submit. I am bad at submitting to anything. I think this is what this room is trying to make me do. In transporting us back to some imagined childhood it allows us to become the adults we are imagined to be, and if we are the version of grown women we are meant to be, we will continue to consume the fiction in an orderly way. We must eat sugar and dairy and carbs to make us sweeter and slower and fatter and in turn, we will become more desire flesh.

Only we are not consuming anything in an orderly way. For my friend, submission is reclamation. Our whole childhoods we were told to submit to God and not the desires of the flesh. She has swiftly unended that commandment. I spent years eating very little apart from myself. Between us, we know about flesh. The cakes don’t trick us.

We decline when the waiter offers to photograph us as he’s doing to most of the tourists. we laugh too loudly, we talk too loudly. We kiss goodbye, promising to do it again, soon, as we do each time before months elapse. It is so deeply strange to be made to behave in ways I refused to behave even when I was six, that I leave and run immediately to my favourite basement bar to drink tequila with my favourite reprobates, because having spent the morning in the company of doctors, the real and present threat that this other miniature thing, only visible under the ultrasound, could grow fast enough and strong enough to annihilate all of this, the real, the imaginary, the observed, the recorded, all of it, over. We pick our fictions as much as the truth, which is maybe why now I am writing it down, shrinking days into manageable chunks, making the real unreal in the tyrannical order of story making.