Tell Me I'm Worthless(23)

Ila lets her dad into the toilet and then walks down the stairs, two at a time, suddenly remarkably energetic. She nearly trips over herself as she reaches the bottom, but doesn’t fall.





The food is good, a rich chickpea curry with home baked naan, bigger than a plate. Her mum watches her eat with encouraging eyes. Ila knows she’s waiting for her to smile and exclaim how delicious it is, which she does, because it is, but also because her mum needs to see that to make her feel like the meal was worth it.

“Have you been busy?” her dad asks, sipping his post-dinner coffee.

Ila stifles a shrug. She worries he would think it was rude in some way, so she just makes a noncommittal noise and says, “Oh, not really. I’ve been writing a bit I guess.”

“Seeing anyone?” her mum asks.

Sigh. Does being nearly-raped by a woman in some pub toilets count as seeing someone? Probably not.

“I’m not really in a place for that right now.”

Because every time she fucks anyone it feels wrong, and she sees herself from the outside like a voyeur looking through a hole drilled in the wall.

Because most people she matches with on Her turn out to be fucking TRAs.

“I read that piece you wrote,” her dad says, as if he could tell exactly why she isn’t in the place to be dating right now.

“Which piece?”

“The, um…” she can see that he’s searching for a way to phrase it. “The piece on the, genre of pornography.”

“Sissification?” she says. There’s an embarrassment and a thrill in saying something like that in front of her parents.

“Yes that’s the one,” he says, “you know I have a colleague who is actually a scholar of pornography throughout history. Very underrepresented field, very interesting, actually.”

Her mum says nothing. She doesn’t even look at either of them, just stares down at her empty plate, and her coffee.

“I, I’m not sure about that. Because I don’t agree with the whole thing. Pornography. I think it exploits women.”

Her dad nodded. “Yes, I read that bit, at the end. From Dworkin. But I just don’t really understand what the point of these videos is.”

The thrill of talking about such an illicit subject in front of her parents has now faded to complete embarrassment. Now she just hopes that he leaves it alone. But she knows her father too well to really believe that he will.

“What’s the point of them, Ila?”

“I’m… are you sure I should say that at the dinner table?”

“We’re not puritanical, babe, don’t be silly. We don’t mind at all, do we?”

Ila’s mum doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then realises she missed her cue. She looks up and smiles, saying of course they don’t mind, no, of course they aren’t puritanical at all.

“Well basically,” Ila is treading carefully through the conversation, finding that it is practically forged from barbed wire. “The whole deal with it is that these men look at these videos, and, well, the videos are all about trying to hypnotise them into thinking, or realising, that they’re women. Does that make sense?”

“But they’re not women?” Her dad asks.

“No. No, they’re not.”

“Okay, let me be a... a sort of devil’s advocate here. There’s a trans woman who teaches at my work. She’s a brilliant scholar, and she was given a prize for being the best female scholar of the year. But you would think that she shouldn’t have gotten that?”

“No, not at all. Give her a prize for being a trans scholar or something. But giving her that prize now means that one woman is locked out, of the money and the prestige that she could have gotten from that.”

“But she is a woman,” says her dad. “That’s the thing I don’t get, I mean. She is a woman.”

“I don’t think we should talk about this anymore.” Ila says it abruptly, and a silence descends on the dining room table. The evening ends on a sour note. Ila doesn’t stay for much longer; she has to write a lot tomorrow; she has to pitch articles and things like that. She should get some rest.

Her mother gives her one last deep hug at the door, before she steps out into the cold. Things have gotten dark now. The city glimmers with a hundred thousand yellow points of light. She can feel the pull from the left to turn her head and look down at the spot where no light shines, but she keeps her eyes firmly away, anywhere but there.

Your father is wrong.

She starts to walk down the road towards the bus stop, looking at her feet as they hit the pavement.

Your father is wrong of course you know he is wrong I know you know that I understand.

The bus stop has a little digital sign, saying that her bus will be there in ten minutes. She stands beneath it. Cars spin past, some blaring rap out of their windows, one or two blaring out classical music. Fuck, she should have brought headphones. Why didn’t she bring headphones?

Tell me about why your father is wrong, Ila.

The House isn’t even visible from here. She has crested the hill and gone over. It isn’t a voice in her head. She has heard voices in her head, long ago when she was about fifteen. This isn’t that; this voice belongs only to the House. At first, outside her parents’ house, she thought it sounded like a lover, but now it makes her think of a lecturer she used to have at university, who spoke so beautifully that she could barely understand anything the woman was saying, she was so enrapt in the way it was said.