Tell Me I'm Worthless(13)
Her dad had to kick the door in. He found her in the empty bath, covered in blood, the scissors had dropped to the bathroom floor. That was what had alerted them that something was wrong. The noise of the scissors hitting the tiles. Her mother began to slowly repeat no, no, no, no, no, wringing her hands, no, no, no, God no not this. Her dad called an ambulance, and later the doctor said if they had been a minute slower, Ila would have died. As it was, she spent a week slipping in and out of consciousness. She dreamt of walls. Whenever she came to, she would grab the arm of whoever was at her bedside (if there was anybody there) and try to speak to them, but whatever she was trying to say was completely unintelligible, it simply came out as babbling and spit-flecked, like a baby trying to imitate the radio. She remained a high-risk patient for a month. She told the doctors that she had been raped. Her mum asked her who had raped her, but she said she couldn’t remember. The painkillers made everything seem fluid, the world was smeared all over with Vaseline. The room she was in was white. The sun shone in through the window and made a yellow box in the middle of the floor. In the years since this moment, Ila would relapse, of course she would, but it is important to know that then, looking at the yellow patch of sun on the vinyl flooring of the hospital room, she decided that she would do her best to live.
The pub is a short while from where the meeting was held, and Ila is settling back with more wine, her nerves feeling calmed. The woman with the spiky black hair – Joyce – had bought it for her, and hugged her. “You were astoundingly brave,” she told her. All Ila could do was shrug. “It was just what happened.”
There were a couple of the people from the meeting here, sitting loosely in one corner of the pub. It wasn’t an official continuation or anything, just a casual debrief, in Joyce’s words. Joyce had a string of impressive credentials to her name, articles in all manner of newspapers and publications like the Guardian and the New Statesman. She was wearing a red suit with a black shirt and had bright orange frames for her glasses that made her look more eccentric than she really was. She had a precise, considered way of talking, and, drinking wine that Joyce had bought for her, Ila felt suddenly warm under her attentive, genuine gaze. The woman didn’t seem interested in chatting to the others. Her focus was on Ila, and it made her blush, just a little bit, to have this older woman pay serious consideration to the things she thought and said.
“So, Ila,” says Joyce. There was a particular way that she pronounced Ila’s name, ee-la, that was technically incorrect, but she couldn’t be bothered to properly correct it. “I heard you, you know. On the radio. I thought you were very astute. And then, today, you were passionate, a real burning ball of fury. Wonderful, both times. But I was wondering what you do when you aren’t… you know… doing all of this?” She gestures at nothing, but Ila knows that she meant the wider debate, the TERF war, whatever you wanted to call it.
“I’m not so sure I do anything, really. I don’t have a career. I have a little flat, and, well, I’ll admit that my parents pay most of my rent for me.” She felt embarrassed, admitting to that. “Sometimes I write freelance articles, and that brings in a bit, but nothing much.”
“But what are your passions?” Joyce asks, leaning forwards.
Ila considers the question. “Well, books. I love books. I have a degree in literature, but I haven’t, like, done anything with it. I’ve pitched reviews to some publications, but they never seem to want me.”
“What books?” The woman was swigging at her wine like it was water.
“I love, um, this trend recently of feminist reworkings of fairy tales. Okay I know it’s not a recent trend, I know Carter did it ages ago, but there’s been an uptick in it recently. I found it fascinating, taking these patriarchal things that we ingrain into the minds of every little girl alive, and twisting them around.”
Joyce looked excited. There was a childlike glee in her green eyes. Ila wanted to make her happy. Joyce asked if Ila had read this or that book, the book with that story with the woman growing strange teeth, the one with the story about the women unravelling. Ila had read both.
“She’s one of us,” Joyce says with a conspiratorial grin, referring to one of the authors she mentioned, and Ila wasn’t sure if she had meant that the author was gender critical or a lesbian, or, possibly, both.
“Excuse me,” says Ila. “I, um, have to pee.”
Joyce chuckles. “Go ahead, go ahead,” she says, waving her hands in the general direction of the women’s toilets.
Ila had been worrying, just a little, that some of the TRAs, the trans activists that had been protesting earlier, might come to this pub. But none of them seemed to be here. She, of course, didn’t know this, but the reason was that Gemma hadn’t found out which pub they were going to. Gemma had gone off to join the protestors at a bar, brimming with anxious energy after the day she’d had.
Ila went into the toilets and found that the floor was a little wet. Her footsteps made gross splashes as she walked towards a decaying stall, nothing like the space age ones at the meeting earlier, and emptied her bladder slightly clumsily. How much had she drunk? When she came out of the stall, Joyce was there, between her and the sinks.
“Hi,” slurs Ila.
“You’re very pretty,” says Joyce. “Just, a startlingly pretty young woman. I couldn’t believe what that man did to you.” It felt weird to hear Alice be called a man, even if Ila thought that she was.