Tell Me I'm Worthless(22)

Look upon me once again into my eye hello my love.

Shivers run across her skin. The voice is like the voice of an old friend or lover, something speaking from out of her past. She had let it fade from her but now, looking at it across the city, there it came again. Just like it had never left. Just like she had never left its walls.

You miss me don’t you?

Does she? No. Of course she doesn’t miss it. That’s what she tells herself. How could she miss something so horrible? How could she yearn for that still?

You miss me, don’t you?

It asks again. The words are silken.

You miss me.

“Ila?” The trance was broken. Her mum had opened the door and found her there, standing on the pavement outside their house, staring off into the distance. “Ila!” she says, and opens up her arms to embrace her daughter. “Come here!”

She runs to her mother and hugs her deeply, pressing her face into the woman’s shoulder. Her shawl is soft on her face, and Ila worries that she might cry.

Their home is warm, filled with the aroma of spices. She lets the rich smell fill her up and calm her head, which still spins from seeing… talking to… being talked to by the House. If that had even been what had happened. The words had not come from within. They had come from the exterior, yet a house cannot speak, it has no voicebox. But it speaks anyway, doesn’t it? Your house. It speaks to you. Stop and listen and hear it, the heating, the creaking of the pipes. The house settling is also a way of saying goodnight.

Alice used to call Ila’s mum a MILF, and she had to admit that she was objectively quite attractive. She was short, like Ila, with long black hair and tits which Ila, thankfully, hadn’t inherited. When Ila’s mother embraced her, she felt a small, Oedipian impulse to nestle into her mum’s breasts and stay there for as long as she could. She felt that then, in the long warming hug, before her mum let go.

Her dad is in the kitchen, sitting at the table on his laptop. “Hello darling,” he says, looking up from his screen. “You look a little pale.” She rolls her eyes. “I heard you on the radio the other day.” He had the clipped BBC English of somebody who had been to Oxford University. Crisp, and perfectly assimilated into white society.

“Oh God… I haven’t been able to listen to it. I can’t stand hearing my voice.”

“No, no, don’t be silly!”

He stands up to give her a hug as well. It isn’t as long or as warm as the one her mother gave her, but it is a good hug still.

“It was great,” he says. “Very… impassioned. I’d love to talk to you about it.”

She hopes he will forget to do that. She just wants to be with them, and not have to think about penises for a couple of hours.





While they cook she looks upstairs, saying that she needs to use the loo but actually she just wants to see her childhood bedroom. The parents of missing kids preserve their lost little ones’ rooms in the chance that they may, one day, come home. They do this for years, past the point where, if the child had lived, they would have still needed a bedroom at their parents’ house, especially not one still covered in all their juvenile interests. Ila’s parents have turned her bedroom into an office for her dad. She feels no betrayal at this – they had asked her, after all, if it was okay to do. Yes, she said. I don’t mind at all. But it’s still surreal to look into the room and see a desk there where her bed used to be. Her father often sits and works now in the same geographic space where she cried herself to sleep as a teenager, or where she cut open her wrists. She once got blood all over her sheets and said that her period had come. They didn’t believe her.

The bathroom, too, has changed. It has been repainted in the three years since she attempted suicide, transformed from a baby blue to a burgundy. The bath is a white coffin still speckled with droplets of water from somebody’s shower, and she steps into it, fully dressed. Ila lies down in the bath. The slight dampness soaks through her clothes. It is strange to lie in the same point in space where she tried to die. The colour of the walls gets lighter. In the delusion, which she knows is just that: just a delusion, Alice appears, faint in the white hotness of the overhead lightning. Alice there, the red walls behind her, looks towards Ila and becomes Joyce, still gazing upon her body, and Joyce becomes others still. Countless men through her university years that prodded at her, held her against bus stops and kissed her hard until a friend called her name. Men whose hands found their way up her dress in the drunk sweaty closeness of a bar. And beyond that, at school. Older boys making up rumours about her. You know what they say about Jewish girls? They’re great at deepthroating. Shall we test that out?

The bath could fill up with every drop of her blood. The blood could splatter over the walls and repaint them red. Like a womb, wet and red, and her, small, pale, lifeless inside of it, curled up at its centre.

Come into me Ila I miss you come sit in my heart for a while beating drink of my lifeblood I miss you you imperfect with your body you hate with my words on you the words I put there and the words I didn’t.

Ila’s dad knocks on the door.

“Ah, sorry! Won’t be long,” she says.

“No problem. Just needed to. Um.”

She can hear him get embarrassed through the door. When she gets to her feet, they feel weak, but she stands and leans on the wall for a moment to get her balance back. Her arms are fine. The scars on them are faded, the ones which are words almost entirely unreadable. The one on her stomach is legible. She couldn’t imagine how it was for her parents when they saw those words there, in scabbed dried blood. Generational trauma carved over her fertility. It must have made them scream with horror. But she had no memory of that. Her body sometimes feels unreal. It surprises her to see it in the mirror.