Tell Me I'm Worthless(26)

But later, Hannah fell asleep next to the fire, which had dimmed down to just embers. We lay there with her, not wanting to wake her but not wanting to leave her either. We pressed together to stay warm. We were always drunk when we fucked, and that time was no different, of course. Out in the open air, the rawness of it was astounding. Hannah snoring next to us. Hundreds of people on the beach doing the same, engaging in their most basic queer lust. Ila’s mouth tickled my neck and down my chest as she pulled the buttons on my dress open and wormed her hands inside. Her fingers cold. My thighs warm. The Buckfast in our heads making the world spin. Hannah didn’t wake up, she never knew. I wonder if it was bad. She didn’t consent to being there with us.

I grip a picture of the three of us together from that day. In the photo we are close and smiling, our skin going red after all that sun. On the beach the moon is full above my head, ready to burst in a bright shower of scolding hot liquid silver. It is the time for the destruction of old things, and the manifestation of the new. I hold the picture close enough to the flames for it to catch. Immediately, all of my senses are telling me to drop it, but I don’t. I raise it up, letting the fire shoot up from the photograph as long as I dare until the heat begins to burn. Then I let go. The picture loops up through the air, crests, then begins to fall. When it tumbles down, it does so further out, over the sea now. Its light flickers until it reaches the water, where it vanishes.

I have more pictures. Every picture of the three of us, in fact. All the ones which hid beneath my bed. Now the poster is gone, I can push things away, cleanse myself and my space. The pictures are a bundle, with a rubber band holding them together. That first one I afforded a dramatic send off, but these I just drop into the fire. It eats them there in front of my eyes.

It’s a pleasure to burn.

There’s only one last thing here, at the bottom of my bag: a book of Adrienne Rich’s Selected Poems. On the title page, Ila wrote: to Alice, my instrument in the shape of a woman. It was a birthday gift. A week before this we had fucked for the first time, and neither of us knew what we wanted from it. Were we friends who fucked, or girlfriends? When she gave the book to me, I thanked her and kissed her cheek, but later, out in the smoking area of the pub we were in, I asked her what she’d meant by giving me that book, of all the possible books she could have gifted.

“What do you mean? I didn’t mean anything.” She was tipsy, defensive.

“Come on,” I said, “you really don’t know?”

“No!” Ila seemed offended.

I sighed. “She was sort of a TERF. Like, an early one. She was friends with Janice Raymond, who wrote The Transsexual Empire.”

TERF wasn’t quite as widely used when we had this conversation, it has ballooned in the past few years, as a term, as a front of the culture war, but Ila knew what it meant. Back then, of course, she would never have dreamed of thinking of herself as one. In The Transsexual Empire, Raymond quotes Rich decrying transsexuals as “men who have given up the supposed ultimate possession of manhood in a patriarchal society by self-castration.” And she thinks this is, I suppose, a bad thing. Which is strange, because in that quote it can almost seem like a positive. That trans women are radical for literally cutting the manhood away from them to be free of violent patriarchy. But no. I guess not. I guess it couldn’t be, not to her.

“Fuck, really?” Ila looked upset. “God, no, I didn’t realise. Sorry. Sorry, I promise it was an accident.”

I shrugged. “I like her poetry, though. It was a lovely gift. Really.”

Now, I throw the book, with Rich’s face in black and white on the cover, into the flames. She burns too, and the words inside it, and the note Ila wrote in biro.

The sea is approaching, and, before long, it will wash over the fire and take away the ash that remains of the memories. I stand up and walk back up the beach with my back to it all.





Jon and Sasha are having people over. He’s been texting me, asking me when I’m going to come, for the past two hours, and finally I respond that I’m free now and on my way. Their place isn’t far from the beach, but, to be fair, most places in the city aren’t far from each other. It is small and dense. But there are outskirts, little places that were once separate villages but have been swallowed up. They are further, scattered around between small pockets of countryside. Between small pockets of trees, and then there, at the very edge, the forest.

It doesn’t take me long to get to Jon and Sasha’s. I haven’t seen them since the party where I picked up Sabi, and have, to be honest, been neglecting our friendship. When I respond to their messages I offer short, closed-off responses that don’t leave space for further talk. I’ve been isolated since the Sabi thing. And alone, in my room, now the poster is gone and the only face I have to look at is Hannah’s face in the stains, which I keep telling myself I should call my landlord about, say hey, there’s damp on the wall shaped like the face of a girl I knew who died, can you come and get rid of it?

People don’t seem to remember Hannah anymore. I do, of course. But the world at large… no one ever asks about her. There was, of course, a search. But it faded.

As soon as the house ate her, it began to eat the memory of her, too. I wonder if her family think about her much at all. They did broadcasts telling her to come home, but she had already gone home. Dead or missing girls, especially early twenties white girls, are dime a dozen and always popular fodder for mystery podcasts or Netflix documentaries. But in Hannah’s case there’s been nothing.