Tell Me I'm Worthless(24)

Listen to me now. Listen and do what I say. Come home Ila, whispers the House, your parents are not your home not at all you felt more at home inside me than you ever had within their walls I know what you want you want to take it out on her don’t you you know what she did and you hate her and you want to punish.

Ila screws her eyes shut tightly. The House circles her like a panther. It wants to kiss her, deep and wet, push its tongue between her lips.

The bus comes, and she thrusts her way onto it, nearly falling over in her rush. The driver is confused. She’s the only person getting on, and almost all of the seats are free. The words on her stomach pulsate. Alice once made them watch a film, all three of them, Alice, her, and Hannah, when they were drunk. She wouldn’t say what it was, and then the title card came up. It was Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. Alice had kissed her and called her Ila, She Wolf of the SS later on and Ila had screamed at her. Their first real fight. Their first real hate-fuck. The first line of many crossed. The words on her and in her make themselves known, and she itches at them, but inside the bus, the voice of the House seems to fade away, or give up. The longer she sits there leaning against the window, the vibration of the vehicle’s movement replaces the strange feeling that had come from within.





That night she smokes weed on her balcony, listening to seagulls whirling through the air above. They didn’t seem to take any kind of notice what time of day it was. Their screams were constant. You are by the sea, they said, even if you cannot see the sea from here.

Here is your custom video, says the email notification. It’s not to her main email account, but a side one, which doesn’t use her real name. She opens it, puts in her earphones, and clicks on the streaming link.

The video shows a transwoman. It isn’t Alice, but, for a moment, you could think that it was. They’re both white with curly brown hair and thick eyebrows. But this transwoman has blue eyes and higher cheekbones. It’s not Alice. That would be too far, she thinks, covertly paying Alice for something like this.

“Now listen to me,” says the transwoman in the video, fifty pounds up from the transaction. She thinks that Ila is a man called Harry, who dreams of being a sissy. Ila’s head is floating with the weed. Every word feels like a kiss. She isn’t sure if, to her disgust, she’s horny, or feels sick. Her hand goes between her legs anyway. “Now listen to me Harry,” says the transwoman on the little screen, “I know all about you. It’s okay. Breathe slowly. Do everything I say from now on, is that clear? Say yes, so I know.”

Without thinking, Ila says it aloud: “Yes.”





House


They built the House well, with the finest of materials, with the finest stone and timber that could be sourced. A good house, raised up against the elements, with the dark of the forest at its back and the new world approaching from the front. A house of progress, went the thought process. But something had gone wrong, there. It became sick. You made it sick, didn’t you? You, with your ideas, with your thoughts. You saw the House and called it fascist, and you did this enough that, eventually, it became one.

No. Of course that wasn’t how it happened. That isn’t how a fascist is made, only how people think a fascist is made.

The man who commissioned the House was named William Martin. He was a proud man with good blood pumping through his veins. His father was a politician, and so he became a politician too. He spared no expense when it came to the architects and the builders. William pored over the blueprints every time he got the chance, his eyes alight with dreams of this new house. This new house needed a name, but he couldn’t think of one. How to choose a name for a house? Choosing a name for a child was hard enough, but a house… a house would live longer than any person, and a name would construct its whole personality.

“Well, do you have any ideas?” he asked the young man. They were in a room in the upstairs of a building in Soho, with heavy black curtains on its windows. The room smelled of perfume which emanated from the bath water, from the candles, and from the young man himself. William liked to press his face close into him and take a deep breath of that sweet scent that came from his skin, and the young man would laugh.

“Well,” said the sweet-smelling boy. He was very young. Barely sixteen, no facial hair, no hair on his body apart from the black mass curling around his genitals. William would pick those hairs from his teeth with a smile. Their limbs were pressed together in the copper bath, the water still steaming. “You said that there is a forest near to the house?”

“Why, yes. Stretching up the hill, as far as the eye can see.”

“What are the types of trees that are in the forest?”

William thought. “I am not sure. Beech trees, I think. No, Beech House, that doesn’t sound right at all.”

“Then the village near. What do they call that?”

“I am not sure it is even a village, my boy. It’s so small. Just a collection of houses and fishing huts and one little inn, is all.”

“But what do they call it?”

“Well, you know, I think you have something there.”

He leaned over and kissed the young man long and deep on the mouth, and he moved one of the young man’s hands until it was touching his hard prick under the hot water.

So they called the House the name it still calls itself, but which time itself has forgotten. Even if everyone else only calls it the House, the House knows, and addresses itself as it would like to be addressed.