Red Wine For Breakfast

One night what I was doing was, I was sitting at my living room
table, having a drink. It was very late and there was very little else
to do. The tumbler on my right was almost full with this banana liqueur
I once bought on holiday, so long ago I don't even remember where. It
was the only alcohol I had left in my apartment though and I wanted a
drink, so I forced my way through it.

Spread out in front of me, in this big messy pile, were a bunch of old
letters, still in their envelopes. They all had various dates on them,
right back to about two years ago, and they were all addressed to me.
It was strange because at the time it felt like I'd never seen them
before and they weren't anything to do with me, despite the fact I'd
looked at them God knows how many times and I knew their contents
implicitly.

The addresses on the back were all written in looping, girly letters.
Man, men and women are so different, even down to something as simple
as handwriting. You can just tell, usually, if an address has been
written by a man or a woman - even at a glance. I've always found that
to be quite unusual.

Anyway, I wasn't looking at the letters really, just sort of sifting
through the envelopes, holding the tatty, flaking paper in my hands one
by one. A lot of the ink had faded over time so that parts of the words
were missing completely. I was arranging the envelopes in a kind of
haphazard fan shape, taking a drink of the banana gloop every time I
forgot how bad it tasted. As I did all this, I got thinking about a
girl I used to know, years back - back when I was a kid who didn't know
anything about anything.

I didn't really know her all that well at first, although I came to be
acquainted with her properly because she was very attracted to a friend
of mine. He barely noticed her though, which probably made her half in
love with him most of the time. So, because he didn't talk to her,
she'd talk to me instead, and we became pretty friendly, after a
fashion. She was quite intelligent all in all, although she did have a
big thing for Jane Austen which kind of detracted from that.

She got a big kick out of imagining herself as this Jane Austen-type
heroine. We argued about her sometimes, Jane Austen I mean. Well, we
more debated than argued, I suppose, but it was quite intellectually
stimulating in a layman's language kind of way. We usually only saw
each other in the bars around town, so it's not like our discussions
were going to trouble the literary world or anything. They passed the
time though, and were even quite fun, when she wasn't being all
affected and Elizabeth Bennett on me.

She always used to dress up on nights out. Not short skirts and tiny
see-through tops like the rest of the girls, but classy dress up. She'd
wear tight corset type tops, like you see in period dramas, which drew
attention to her already considerable bust. Plus, she'd obviously spent
a lot of time curling her eyelashes, you could tell, so that her eyes
looked enormous and feminine and even I could imagine her in an Austen
novel. It was all very pretentious and it did make me kind of nauseous
when I thought about it properly, although she was pretty attractive,
despite the fa?ade.

Most of the time we spent together she'd spend going on and on about
how great Jane Austen was and I'd say that I didn't see what the big
deal was, and we'd buy each other drinks while my friend ignored her,
and then at the end of the night we'd have a couple of dances together
before going home. I once went back to her house with her, though there
was never any funny business.

Her father was a photographer and she wanted to show me some of his
work. She was very proud of having an arty father, I suppose she
thought it would make her look like she had art in her genes and that
gave her an excuse to gush over Victorian novels. The photographs her
father took were pretty good, from what I remember, although I was
usually fairly far gone by that time of night and, thinking back, he
could have been taking photographs of toilets for all I knew.

This one night I remember really vividly though. We were standing
together, this girl and me, at the bar as usual, me with a Harvey
Wallbanger and her with a glass of red wine. We were pretty drunk, the
pair of us, and she was getting quite affectionate towards me, so I was
getting quite touchy towards her too. I don't know whether we did this
because we were too scared or apathetic to look for anyone else, anyone
real, or whether there was something somewhere bubbling under the
surface that we chose deliberately to ignore, but it often happened, us
getting affectionate towards each other, I mean.

She was saying, "Oh Julian," in her quite affected way, "oh Julian, I
wonder if I'll ever find my Mr Darcy."

I must've been in the mood to humour her, because I said, "Of course
you will, Elizabeth my dear."

It sounds too corny to be true, right? But you wanted to see the way
she reacted to that - me calling her Elizabeth. Her name wasn't
Elizabeth at all, I was just playing along for once, but she went so
gooey you'd think I'd just written her a sonnet. She started gushing
all over the place, fluttering those huge, curled eyelashes, saying how
wonderful it was I'd called her Elizabeth, that no one had said
anything as romantic to her in her whole life. I had to play along a
little bit now, I couldn't drop her good mood since it was my fault
she'd gotten into it, so I started saying how she'd make a wonderful
Elizabeth, and she started saying how I'd make a wonderful Mr
Darcy.

It was quite romantic at the time, when I let myself go for a minute
and not really think about what we were saying or doing. We were
getting quite into it, looking into each other's eyes, holding each
other's hands, all that stuff, and saying how much we thought of each
other. I know the idea of a guy and a girl in a modern day, run down
eighties disco talking like we were slap bang in the middle of Pride
and Prejudice would probably make most people want to puke, but at the
time it seemed like the most amorous thing ever.

There wasn't any real romance underneath it all, we were just goofing
around, but for those few moments I saw in her eyes the way she looked
at my friend and it felt amazing. She was so in love with the ideas I'd
put into her head, she was almost in love with me. For those few
minutes I don't even think there was a maybe in it - she was in love
with me, I'm sure of it.

Then she said, "I think it would be wonderful to live like they did in
Jane Austen's time. I'd love to dress up in those dresses they used to
wear and live in a big countryside estate with carriages and butlers
taking me everywhere. I'd be so vicarious. I'd drink red wine for
breakfast." And as she said it she took another drink.

I can't sleep tonight. That's the problem. I can't sleep most nights. I
wake up anytime between three and four am and sit at my little fold out
wooden living room table, switch on my orange, half globe lamp, have a
drink and try to see past my reflection in the window into the street
outside. Sometimes, like that night about a month ago, I look at my old
envelopes and think about that girl.

Red wine for breakfast. It sounded so glamorous when she said it, so
wild and reckless. I can still remember the look on her face, the tone
of her voice and the fact that, whether it was the booze or our general
mood, I fell for her right then and there; the vision of her sitting
gracefully in a beautiful countryside garden, sipping red wine for
breakfast at a wonderfully ornate cast iron table. I wanted us to do it
together, to be wild and reckless and live vicariously. I moved away
shortly afterwards. Soon after college I got a job overseas and packed
up.

Everything feels different at this time in the morning. Everything.
Thoughts go off in different directions, pain comes from usually
untapped sources. Hunger is not lunchtime hunger, it's hunger that
doesn't go away even after you've eaten. It feels like hunger, but it's
more of a stomachache; a throbbing, gnawing that comes from deep
inside.

It's been a month since I opened it and I've still not even made it
halfway down the bottle of banana liqueur. I can't seem to make myself
drink more than half a glass at any one sitting. Wine or whisky usually
helps to take the ache away, or at least reduce it to a dull ebb, but
this banana stuff is having very little effect. I often sit here and
wonder if my mother had the same pains and whether they went away with
the liquor she drank for breakfast, or if it gnawed her insides any
harder. My sister's letters never told me, even when I did read more
than my address on the envelopes.