Tell Me I'm Worthless(3)

Do you know what was in there? Do you? Do you want to know? I know what you want to know and maybe what you want it to be, because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, trying to reconstruct the circumstances of a haunting in my mind, and you want it to be nothing in there. You want her to look through the keyhole and find it empty, and then open the door with the key. You want her to walk around the room but find nothing out of place or strange in there at all. You want her to go to each wall and place her hand on the red wallpaper and feel a throb inside. Maybe see shapes in the old stains on the wallpaper. In all honesty, I would also like that to be what happened in the story. I asked for stories about hauntings to feel less alone, to feel less like an outsider from everybody around me. But that isn’t what she found. Instead, she found a woman in there, who had been cleaning out her desk. This was her last day and she didn’t want to leave things looking like a mess. She apologised for any distress she may have caused.

It feels like an anecdote that was meant to describe something, a metaphor about late capitalism, hauntology, about how work turns us all into ghosts, repeating the same learned actions over and over again for eternity. For that person, the wonder and the possibility and the horror of a haunting was just, in the end, somebody else doing their job for them.

The other thing is that this anticlimactic event only explained that one particular instance of hearing the noise. It did not explain all the other times that there had been sounds of somebody else in the building. There can’t have been somebody moving out of those offices every single time she had a shift there, surely? She didn’t sleep well when she thought about that. The girl told me that, afterwards, she requested to be moved to clean somewhere else. Every time she entered that building and looked up at those stairs, she felt queasy.

I have to believe that other people have also experienced impossible, horrible things.

I have to know that there are people who would understand if I talked to them. I have to know. I have to believe that my trauma is relatable, if controversial, that there are people who would listen to me and go, it’s okay Alice, it’s completely okay. You are so fucking normal. Everything you’ve experienced is normal. But soberly I think that, really, the only person out there who could ever understand is Ila, and I can’t talk to her. I just can’t. We used to be so close, but I can barely think about her now without having an anxiety attack. It’s probably the same with her. I don’t know for sure, but going from the sort of things she says now, if she thinks about me at all it is to hate me. I tried to be brave. She was a guest, recently, on a program on BBC Radio 4, and I really did try to sit and listen, as a form of exposure therapy. I turned it off after five minutes. I’d heard enough, and I had to smoke a joint to stop myself from passing out. Ila probably wants me to die. That’s okay. I don’t want her to die. I hate her, yes, I despise her with all my soul, in ways that it is hard to put into words, but I don’t want her to die. I’m a good, forgiving person, I’m lovely. I live in this flat in this terrace house with all these hateful angles, and they remind me of another house, with other angles, angles that hate you more than it is even possible to comprehend, angles that crawl inside your brain and inside your body and move you around of their own accord, that make you see, think and feel things that nobody should ever have to see, think, feel, know, believe in. Angles that indicate the building you are in is not even really a building, that no human could have possibly thought of this when building it, that this house simply came into being from contact with the pure, violent terror that can only exist in the very worst examples of humanity. And that horror is transmitted through you, a little thing inside the heart of the place. It cuts its way into your body, or uses somebody else to cut its way into your body. I have a scar on my forehead to attest to that, and Ila has a scar on her stomach. And Hannah. Something happened to Hannah. The place, it worms into your brain and your heart. By the time I got out, I was different. The me who sits here right now in my room isn’t the same me that went to University, went to all those parties, met a girl called Ila.

Ruined her. Got ruined by her.

My room isn’t big. It’s just too large to not be cosy, but not large enough to be spacious, in Estate Agent terms. When I moved in, I found a mark in the paint of the wall opposite my bed that I could have sworn hadn’t been there when I viewed the flat. I took a picture of it and made sure to send it to the landlord, so he didn’t try to charge me for it later when I needed to move out. I couldn’t work out what the mark actually was, and it unsettled me, so I covered it up with a poster for a band that were popular a long time ago, before I was born. In the poster, four boys stand in front of a brick building. One of the boys is centred, the frontman of the band. The overwhelming personality, eclipsing the other three with ease. His hair sticks up, and he holds a branch in one hand sprouting white flowers. His heart aches. You broke his heart. He’s miserable, and he sings about how everything makes him miserable. The meat industry, it makes him miserable. I don’t know why I had the poster, honestly. I used to love the band… I still love the band. But I don’t remember where the poster came from, it was just there, amongst all my stuff when I moved in here. So I put it up on the wall, over the blemish in the paint, thinking that would solve everything.

This was a mistake. After living here for about a month, my sleep started to dry up. That was it, at first, but I could feel that something was coming, and there was nothing I could do. Then he started to appear. Sometimes, at night, in the dark, when I can’t know for sure if I am sleeping or lucid, the man, the one with the hair and the jawline, he crawls out from the poster, he stands over my bed, the flowers still in his hand, and he flickers in and out of focus. He pushes out from the past, away from his bandmates and into the now. He wants me. After this happened a couple of times, I blacked out his eyes with biro. Now, when he leaves the poster, he has no eyes, which looks terrifying but isn’t as terrifying as it was when he had eyes. Think about it – think about the man, the one you picture in your head, with eyes. Stop and think about that for a moment.