Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

I didn’t bother with underwear but simply pulled on the nearest clothes from the bedroom floor – the outfit I’d been wearing on Tuesday night. I stuck my bare feet into my Velcro work shoes and found my old jerkin hanging in the hall cupboard. I didn’t know where the new coat was, I realized. My bag, however, needed to be located. I recalled that I had taken the new black handbag with me that night. It only had room for my purse and keys. The keys were on the shelf in the hall where I always put them. I found the bag in the hall too, eventually, dropped in a corner next to my shopper. My purse was empty of cash – I couldn’t recall how I’d got home or when I’d bought the vodka that I’d been drinking, but I assumed it must have been en route here from the city centre. Luckily, the purse still contained both of my bank cards. The concert ticket was in there too. I dropped it on the floor.

I walked down to the corner shop. It was daylight, cold, the sky ashen. When I entered, the electronic bleeper sounded and, behind the counter, Mr Dewan looked up. I saw his eyes widen, his mouth fall open slightly.

‘Miss Oliphant?’ he said. His voice was cautious, quiet.

‘Three litres of Glen’s, please,’ I said. My voice sounded strange – croaky and broken. I hadn’t used it for some time, I supposed, and then there was all that vomiting. He placed one before me, then seemed to hesitate.

‘Three, Miss Oliphant?’ he said. I nodded. Slowly, he put another two bottles on the counter, all of them now lined up like skittles that I’d need to knock over, knock back.

‘Anything else?’ he said. I briefly considered a loaf of bread or a tin of spaghetti, but I was not in the least bit hungry. I shook my head and offered him my debit card. My hand was shaking and I tried to control it, but failed. I punched in the numbers, and the wait for the receipt to be printed was interminable.

A pile of evening newspapers sat on the counter beside the till, and I saw that it was Friday. Mr Dewan had fixed a mirror on the wall to see into all the shop corners, and I caught sight of myself in it. I was grey-white, the colour of larvae, and my hair stood on end. My eyes were dark hollows, empty, dead. I noted all of this with complete indifference. Nothing could be less important than my appearance, absolutely nothing. Mr Dewan handed me the bottles in a blue plastic bag. The smell of it, the chemical reek of polymers, made my stomach churn even harder.

‘Take care of yourself, Miss Oliphant,’ he said, head tilted to one side, unsmiling.

‘Goodbye, Mr Dewan,’ I said.

It was only a ten-minute walk home but it took half an hour – the bottles in the bag, the weight in my legs. I didn’t see another living creature in the streets, not even a cat or a magpie. The light was opaque, rendering the world in grey and black, a bleak absence of tone that weighed heavily on me. I kicked the front door closed behind me and stepped out of my clothes, leaving them in the hallway where they fell. I noticed in passing that I smelt very bad – perspiration, vomit and a sweet staleness that must be metabolized alcohol. I took the blue carrier bag into the bedroom and pulled on my lemon nightgown. I crawled under the covers and reached blindly for a bottle.

I drank it with the focused, single-minded determination of a murderer, but my thoughts just could not, would not be drowned – like ugly, bloated corpses, they continued to float to the surface in all their pale, gas-filled ugliness. There was the horror of my own self-delusion, of course: him, me … what was I thinking? Worse, far worse than that, was the shame. I curled myself into a ball, tried to make myself occupy as small a space in the bed as possible. Despicable. I had made a fool of myself. I was an embarrassment, like Mummy had always told me. A sound escaped into the pillow, an animal whine. I couldn’t open my eyes. I did not want to see even a centimetre of my own skin.

I’d thought I could solve the problem of myself so easily, as if the things that were done all those years ago could actually be put right. I knew that people weren’t supposed to exist as I did, work and vodka and sleep in a constant, static cycle in which I spun around on myself, into myself, silent and alone. Going nowhere. On some level, I realized that this was wrong. I’d lifted my head up just high enough to see that, and, desperate to change, I’d clutched at a random straw, let myself get carried away, imagining some sort of … future.