Tell Me I'm Worthless(25)

I am Albion, says the House, proudly. And Albion is within me.

But before Albion could exist, it stalled. It was built, mostly, by this time. But as they were filling out the insides with all sorts of wonderful trinkets, a letter came to the builders to say that there would be no need to continue. William Martin had been arrested for buggery, and was in prison, starving. He was refusing to eat anything at all. He had been part of a ring of men who would pass boys between them. One of those boys had been paid by a rival politician to tell the police about this, and they had caught him, quite literally red handed. William Martin was the only man prosecuted for the affair. He starved to death before he could be sentenced to anything. His wife was distraught. Her own husband. She got a carriage to the shell of Albion, abandoned now, the place which was to be her wedded paradise. Now her husband was skin and bones, and all of society knew her as the wife of a deviant. The House, Albion, looked down at her as she left the carriage and walked between its gates. The place was silent. The workmen had gone and taken anything of use that they could retrieve. She pushed open its door, which hadn’t even been locked. Inside, it was half built. The stairs were rudimentary, and the roof was open to the elements. Birds nested at the top of the walls. There were no portraits or treasures, of course. They would have been moved in just before her and William. The House was an abortion, and she hated it with every fibre of herself. The House hated her back. It hated her and her deviant husband. It had sat there during his hearings, stewing with resentment at its un-being. It blamed the woman, too.

How could you not know?

“Of course I didn’t know,” said the woman, looking at the House’s empty insides.

My body is half formed a halfformedthing, said the House, but climb up my insides onto my first floor.

“Why?”

I have something that I would like to show you.

She did so. The stairs that existed there were dangerous, and she thought she was going to fall. But the House wanted her to go up them, and so up them she went. Onto the first floor.

“And now where?”

There is only one corridor which they have finished building. Many of the rooms down it are open to the air. One is not. It will be easy to find.

It was obvious which corridor the House meant. It was to her right. Outside, it started to rain, and rain dripped through the roof, making the wood swell sickly. Mrs Martin walked down the dark corridor. There were doorways on each side, but the rooms were empty, many without windows or with holes in the roof. None of them were the room at the heart of Albion.

She knew it when she saw it. A door at the end of the corridor, the only door down the length of the whole thing. She walked up to it, and then found herself hesitating.

Push open the door, and you will find the answers to your husband’s condition. You will know everything you need to. You will, if you try hard enough, be able to bring him back, cured of his… ills.

“What you are saying,” she said, “is impossible.”

I am so much more than you will ever be. I can do so much more. I am the terror at the heart of this country, and I can tell this country what to do. I have been built new from the blood and guts of endless sin and now I sit upon this pile of misshapen skulls and I laugh at my newfound land.

It took a long time for anyone to find her. She was hanging in one of the empty rooms that came off of that corridor, one of the ones with a roof open to the sky. By that time her body had rotted. Her stomach was open to the elements, and things were within it, nesting. Bits of her had dropped to the ground and been chewed at by animals. They took her away and buried her. The House remained. More would come to it, and soon. It was good real estate. People would buy it, or the land it was built upon. It would live.

I am Albion.

Albion is all that is within me.

And within me is all of Albion.





Alice


The beach is cold, so I shuffle even closer to the fire, close enough that it threatens to singe my clothes but I stay there anyway, letting it warm me. In my pocket my phone is buzzing – Jon’s asking me come on Alice when are you coming over but I don’t open the message. I have to do this first. The sky is dark already. Nobody comes down to the beach out of season at night. In the heat of summer, after the Pride Parade has dispersed, people come down here and swim, and sit on the hot pebbles long into the night, sometimes staying until the sun comes up back up again. I did that with Ila and Hannah, once. We built a fire and stocked up on bottles of Buckfast. The Pride Parade was exhausting every year but that year, the last one we had together, it had been boiling hot. We marched, although we weren’t really allowed. Not just the three of us, a whole group, protesting something or other, some bank’s involvement in the parade. There were enough of us that when security came and tried to pull one of us out, the rest of us closed around like a shield. We were hot, passionate, and kept each other as safe as we could. Burning under the sun, shouting the first Pride was a riot, first Pride was a riot, where’s a brick when you need it? first pride was a riot.

But afterwards we slipped down here. We ordered pizza to the beach and, to our delight, it was actually delivered. We built a fire, bigger than the one I made tonight, and watched as groups all along to the left and to the right built them too. It got dark. The fire burned bright, making Ila look so astoundingly beautiful. The flames flickered, reflecting in her eyes. I sat opposite her, the fire in between us, Hannah off to the side, toasting marshmallows. Ila was looking at her, talking about something I don’t remember. Her look for Pride was glitter covering her face and her cleavage. It sparkled, now, sparkled a deep orange. She smiled, and then looked at me. She knew I’d been looking.