Tell Me I'm Worthless(20)
Has the man in the poster ever tried to fuck me? If he could see me then there would have at least been an attempt. But… it’s like the end of Jane Eyre. Mr Rochester is blinded in the house fire, which means he no longer has power over Jane. The eyes are, in Freud, akin to the tesitcles, and him losing the eyes means he is castrated of masculinity. Jane looks after him. This eyeless ghost cannot and will not try to exert dominance over me. I know it is problematic for me, and for Freud, to use blindness here as a way of castrating men. It’s an easy shorthand, and I don’t think it is acceptable at all. I’m sure blind men are just as capable of violence as men who can see.
I open Ila’s message. We should talk. Maybe she didn’t mean to send it to me, although how she would accidentally have sent it is unclear. I don’t want to speak to her. I had a therapist last year. We struggled to find the root of my trauma. He didn’t believe me when I said I had been inside a haunted house, but he did believe that something had happened. I told him about the boys and their rusted nail, and I told him about how, months later, I found my father’s toolbox. I selected a nail and dangled it over my head, but it wasn’t the same. The nail was brand new, unblemished. It has to be rusted for it to work again.
“For what to work again? How did it feel, when those boys were doing that to you?”
“Doing what to me?”
“Touching you,” he said.
“They didn’t touch me,” I replied.
Poor Sabi. The man in the poster can come for me all he wants, but Sabi didn’t deserve that. He grabbed at her. He tried to pull her down into the shadows under my bed.
If I tear the poster down and throw it out, the haunting won’t be stopped. But, after last night, the thought of him coming out of it again, standing there above me, is too much. So, this time I actually do it. I pull it down, walk over to the open window, and drop it out into the air. The poster flutters down from the window of my flat. It drops low to the pavement and then is caught again by the wind and lifted up higher, looping through the air like a racist bird. A hand shoots up to catch it out of the air. A man pulls the poster down and looks at it. He smirks. Let’s call this man Kasim. This is something you may not be aware of, but the band in the poster have always been very popular within the South Asian immigrant communities in the UK. This might be surprising, given the singer’s frequent Islamophobic outbursts, but his feelings around Islam and immigration were not common knowledge at the height of their popularity. I suppose people often think that, back then, he wasn’t racist at all. But that seems unlikely. The moment he started a solo career, he danced on stage with women wearing Union Jacks. What seems more accurate would be to say that he was not open about his beliefs back then. Perhaps he didn’t even realise he had them. Bigotry can sit inside of you, hardening, turning into something painful before you even realise it is there. If you attend the meeting of a fascist political group, for example, you were not made fascist by that group, you were already a fascist, but one who did not have an outlet. Radicalisation is a complicated thing. I think often what it actually does is simply nurture an idea that was already there, inside of you. His solo career gave him the space, and the platform, to begin to express these ideas, away from the influence of other band members. I do not know how his ideas were nurtured. But he did not wake up one day and decide to be racist. But his songs actually spoke to young South Asian boys in some interesting ways, which he clearly did not intend. Kasim was one of these boys. Although he was now grown up, he remembers listening to those songs in his bedroom when he felt confused about who he was, about the fact that he was attracted to the white skinhead boy who lived down the road who hated him. Kasim wonders who this poster belonged to, and why they crossed out the eyes. He knows the singer of the band has said some bad things recently, but the strange chance of this poster flying through the air and into his hand feels like fate, so he folds it up and puts it into his laptop bag. By the time he gets home, though, he has completely forgotten about it. He leaves it in his bag. He cooks his boyfriend dinner. They talk about their days, and his boyfriend asks if anything special happened, but Kasim says that no, nothing happened really, nothing at all. And that night, when his boyfriend goes to get a glass of water from the sink in the kitchen, the man in the poster crawls out of the poster, weaker, transparent, flickering and cold. He stands in the middle of the kitchen, behind Kasim’s boyfriend. He has his back turned, filling up a glass from the tap over the kitchen sink. The singer tries to say something, but finds that not only is he eyeless, he is also now without the strength of a voice. Kasim’s boyfriend turns, then, and sees him. He drops the glass, yelling with shock at the sight of the transparent singer standing in his kitchen. The singer fades out of view. Kasim runs down from the bedroom to ask what’s wrong, but his boyfriend doesn’t know what to say. I thought I saw a man, he mutters. But… he vanished.
God knows what the fucking looney left will destroy next.
I don’t see it at first. I let the poster fall from the window and watch it go, fluttering away in the wind. Good riddance. I should have done that a long time ago. I only put you up to cover that mark on the wall.
The mark on the wall. I turn around to look at it, and there it is. Still present, but different now. Even since Sabi was here it’s grown, without my knowledge, in only a day. Spreading. Infecting the wallpaper around it. I walk closer, but I know what it is. I have thought about that face so much, my mind racked with guilt. I’d know it anywhere.