Tell Me I'm Worthless(12)
Ila wants to scream. Nobody here gets it. They don’t get it at all. They don’t get what is going to happen to them, to everyone, to young women all over the country. They had listened to her talk on the radio, some of the people here had even recognised her and nodded with approval, but they didn’t understand. How could they?
She gets up to speak. The protest has gotten progressively louder, but the organisers have set up a microphone connected to an amp, so the speakers can be heard. She walks to the front of the room and holds the mic in her hand, shaking a little. The room stares at her. Faces upon faces, sitting, waiting expectantly.
“I’m Ila,” she says.
Absurdly, for a moment it feels to her like some kind of addicts anonymous meeting. She half expects everyone to nod and reply, hello Ila, but they don’t.
“I’m Ila, and three years ago I was raped by my best friend.”
They’re all quiet. The people outside might be loud and uncaring, but the ones in here were totally silent.
“She was, um. Well, I guess you wouldn’t call her she, would you? I just always knew her as a she, and I never unlearned that, even after… okay, well. Let me get back to the start. I was raped by my best friend. We were trying to squat in this old house, on the edge of town. I don’t even know why. It was a stupid thing. Stupid kids. You know.”
She takes a deep breath, and, silently, apologises to Hannah for omitting her entirely. Hannah complicates things too much. Ila is telling the truth, everything she is saying is totally real to her, but to mention Hannah… it would overwhelm the story. Untether it from reality. She needs them to believe her. She needs them to know.
“So, we broke into this house. It had been empty for decades and decades, we thought… I don’t know, we were trying to prove some kind of point. We poked around, looking for secrets. Now, my friend, she was – and is, I guess – a transwoman. A… trans-identified-male. Whatever you want to say, she’s that. I’d always supported her in everything she did. I loved her so, so much, just. We were the closest two people have ever been. It’s hard to explain how close, now, given what happened. But at the time it was, well, we came as a set. If you wanted one of us, you had to also have the other.”
A chuckle, to herself. She is rambling, letting the story get out in front of her.
“We were in this old house, and as we explored, we found a room, down the… it’s hard to describe. She found this room, and she lured me into it. I think she must have drugged me. I couldn’t move. She raped me, so hard I thought I was going to die. And then. Then she…”
Ila feels tears welling up. She hadn’t expected to really cry but trying to explain this to everyone in this room, with the shouting outside banging against the inside of her head, it’s overwhelming her emotionally. Her fingers start to toy with the bottom of her shirt. Then, she lifts it up, just a little. Just enough to show her midriff.
It was difficult for her to explain to sexual partners that she had a Jewish mother and a Pakistani father and that she never, not in a million years, would she have done this to herself. Self-harm had been her friend during teenagerhood, and then again in the first year or two after the events at the House, when Ila had regressed, in many ways, to the coping mechanisms she had indulged in as an eighteen-year-old. But she hadn’t done this. This hadn’t been there before they went into that fucking room. It was there afterwards. She saw, in her mind’s eye, Alice, standing over her with a blade in her hand. Bending down. Ila immobile on the floor. Bathed in red. Alice using the blade on her to make… to carve… in white, messy lines on the flesh between Ila’s belly button and her vulva, words had been carved: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work will set you free. She had ancestors who had died there, in the slow, choking, grim forever of that camp, and ever since the House it had been on her body, a constant reminder. She hadn’t gone to the police. How could she have gotten the police to arrest the only person she’d ever truly loved? But. Jesus.
Alice said that Ila raped her. Alice, too, had nightmarish memories. A scar to show for her time in the room. Ila didn’t like to consider that. The possibility that, just maybe, she’d done something too. Or even worse, that her memory was false, and there was something even more horrific beneath.
She drops the shirt down, covering up the words again, to stop everyone gawking at her more than they already are. There had been a hope that sharing the story in full graphic detail to such a large number of people might have been liberating in some way, but it isn’t. She just aches all over, and needs to sit down, which she does, slumped into her chair. Eyes from every corner of the room stare at her. Peeling away her clothes and her skin and her muscles and her bones.
After Alice and Ila had escaped the House, leaving whatever was left of Hannah there, Ila found herself slumped outside her parents’ front door. She lay there for at least an hour before her father found her. Horrified, he carried her inside carefully and laid her upon her bed. She was only semi-conscious, her eyes half shut, her mouth making shapes but unable to properly form words. Ila’s parents didn’t know if they should call an ambulance, let her rest, or try to feed her. They couldn’t see the wound on her stomach, which wasn’t deep, but which was still wet and ripe. After agonising about the right course of action, they let her rest, whilst her mother made soup downstairs, trying her best to not sob into the saucepan. Ila woke up in her childhood bed, still dressed in the same clothes she had been wearing in the House, which were tattered and worn like they had been ravaged by some force. She felt like she was in a dream. A beautiful, simple dream. One which smelled like her mother’s cooking, that aroma of particular ingredients wafting around her, nestling into her. She slipped out from underneath the sheets and padded, quietly, to the bathroom, leaning against the walls to make sure she didn’t fall. Her feet were unsteady. Downstairs she could hear her mum choking back tears, trying to ask her dad what they should do, and her dad, his voice filled with a quiet, masculine terror, insisting that they needed to let her rest. They needed to ask her what had happened. Ila stopped, and went back into her room. She quietly lifted her mattress and found what she was looking for – a pair of scissors that had been there since she was a teenager. They’d never found it, not when they thought they had taken every sharp object she had. These were her secret. Age had not dulled them. She walked back to the bathroom and locked the door.