Tell Me I'm Worthless(29)

He nods. “Amazing.”

I can’t get out of the bedroom fast enough, or back through the violent, angry crowds fast enough. I don’t see Leon but I know he is somewhere amidst them, grinning to himself. I hope he found some coke. I retrieve my bag from under the chair where I left it, elbowing people to get to it, and then scramble for the stairs down to the door. When I get to the coat rack, mine has fallen off of the hook into a crumpled heap on the floor. People entering the party have stepped on it carelessly. So many people. Packed like animals in a battery farm. I put the coat on anyway. When I’m outside, in the cold air again, I start to dry heave into the gutter, and at the same time I cry. Both forces push their way up through my body and make it spasm, almost uncontrollably. I lean against the wall of the dead pub. What if he kills her? What if he kills her and I didn’t tell anyone? What if I tell someone and he kills me?

My phone buzzes.

Ila is there again.

I need to talk to you, she says. Can we please meet? In a public place? I really, really need to talk with you.





Ila


Ila usually likes to smoke on her balcony but it’s too cold today, so she’s put a sock over the fire alarm and is smoking while lying in bed, ashing into a cereal bowl, feeling like a boy. She scrolls through Twitter on her laptop, just for the action of scrolling, barely reading anything at all. Every tweet on her timeline is decrying Brexit, or this court case relating to Stonewall, or the horror of autogynephilia. After a while they all seem to blur into one. An echo chamber of the same outrage repeating for eternity in the white expanse of Online.

After doing this for long enough that the boredom starts to gnaw at her, she switches to another website, a forum which was originally meant to be used for women to discuss motherhood but which has now become the de facto internet meeting place of gender criticals. It feels weird, though, typing in the website’s name. She is nobody’s mother, and she never will be. There’s a thread called TRANS WIDOWS ESCAPE COMMITTEE PART 5 which she clicks on. There’s always something darkly hilarious about these ones. They’re for people who are married, or were married, to someone who came out as trans to air their grievances. So she reads, each little confession a snapshot of someone with a sadder life than her.

USER 1 (Unidentified): My husband began to insist on being referred to as a woman. He took over childcare roles and he cooked for me most nights. He would dress up in a dress and heels and makeup and clean the house and I could see he was getting off on that. I could see his dick was hard poking through the dress.

USER 2 (Unidentified): Mine dresses up but doesn’t seem interested in the labour aspect of womanhood, would prefer it if he did do all that really.

USER 1: No this is worse.

USER 3 (Unidentified): He forgot our anniversary. Says it was the hormones clouding his brain. Bulls###. He never remembered anything beforehand. I was always having to remind him of his own mother’s birthday. Oftentimes I brought her a present too and said it was from the two of us. And now he forgot our anniversary. He shaves and leaves the mess of the stubble in the sink.

(When Alice was still a teenager, and had just come out, she did this. She still lived at home, and her mum found the sink still covered in little bits of facial hair which she had shaved off. Her mum made her clean the sink and called her a boy.)

(When Ila was about sixteen, a girl in her maths class made fun of her for her darker facial hair. Ila cried when she got home, the girl had called her a man… she looked in the mirror and saw a man, in a kind fantasy, looking back at her. She took a shower and dreamed that she was a man, a penis pushing through her pussy lips, thick hairs pushing through her chest. She got out of the shower and tried to shave her face, but, because the mirror was misted-up, she cut her top lip with the razor. The blood dripped down and filled her mouth up with that metallic taste.)

Ila often wonders where Alice is now, what she is doing. Whenever she texts or emails late at night, she is particularly high or in a semi-dream state. Alice has a few social media accounts that Ila checks up on semi-regularly, but most of them are rarely updated. There’s a Twitter account under Alice’s name, and she looks at the likes tab but there are only very occasionally any new things there that she’s paid attention to. It seems likely that Alice has other accounts on other websites that she doesn’t know about. The Alice that Ila can see on the internet is a loose, faded impression. Like a ghost. Well, not really anything like a ghost at all. Ghosts are consistent. They appear at regular intervals, but Alice seems to appear at random. Ila only has one Twitter account. It is followed by three Guardian journalists, a well-known television writer, and a famous children’s author. She logs onto it and tweets a picture at a charity. The picture is of a transwoman holding a baseball bat coloured with the Trans Pride Flag. She tweets the picture at the charity, asking is this what you defend? Are these people really harmless to women? and gets retweets from people with names like JennyXX, but also replies from people telling her to shut up, shut the fuck up TERF go deal with your own dysphoria.

The last time Ila fucked a girl, she wore a strap-on – a big, realistic, black silicone cock with balls and veins – and black piece of ribbon tied around her abdomen to cover her scars. She fucked the girl from behind, and then flipped her over, bent her legs up to her shoulder, and went deeper with the cock. She felt at one with the strap-on, then. As the girl yelled “I love your cock!” it became the most natural thing in the world that yes, she had a cock, of course she did. It was part of her, and always had been, as natural as all of her fingers. The girl’s moans were the type to push themselves up through her entirely involuntary. She had no control. Ila had control.