Tell Me I'm Worthless(32)

You want to know what happened, don’t you?

What do you mean? The House was all around her. It crawled up behind her reflection in the mirror and pushed itself into the self that looked back at her through the glass. Made its eyes flicker red and its mouth twist and bubble. Is that who I am? she thought. Then again, what do you mean?

In the room. The root of everything. The heart of everything the heart of why you can’t be okay. You want to know what happened to you, don’t you?

I know what happened to me, she said. Alice raped me. Whatever anyone else says, I know that’s true. You know that, right? You were there. We were inside you.

Yes. And Alice is out there, in the world. Carrying on.

Has she done it again?

Ila put her hand against the glass, and then brought it back and slapped it open-palmed.

Has she done it again? Has she done it to other girls? Tell me. Tell me.

The House did not answer. She removed her hand from the glass, still looking at her reflection. Then, she slapped herself on the side of the head. It was painful. Not as painful as if somebody else had done it. Your body stops you from hitting yourself that hard, but it was hard enough to hurt, hard enough to make a noise.

Come to me.

No.

Bring her to me. Come with her together arm in arm and come into my body and walk into my heart again of your own free will as you once did.

Why should I? The last time she had gone in there she had nearly died.

Because you want to move on, don’t you? You want to wreak your violence on her for what she did.

I do.

You want to be okay. Think of it as a therapy. Think of it as radical.

How can I trust you?

You cannot trust a House any more than you can trust a person but think about what just became of your life, Ila, what are you going to do now, where are you going to go? They all hate you, they all think you’re sick. If you stay on as you are you’ll be dead in a month. By your own hand, I think. Come. Bring her. Bring yourself. Arms entwined. There is a storm coming that will swallow this country whole and all the filth within it will be drowned and washed down over the white cliffs and you don’t want to be one of them do you Ila my sweet my love you want to live so come back into me bring her come back soon I miss you so much.

She looks at herself in the mirror. When the House speaks, it comes from no mouth. The voice is just there, in the absence suddenly, and then it is gone again. In the mirror Ila can see that she is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her traumas sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. I can see you there. I know you are inside. Turning over and over like a manic ballerina. On the tops of your toes until they snap audibly. I can see you, you with the nose you hate, that they used to poke with their fingernails, the other girls, the white ones, big nosed bitch, the skin you hate and that you slowly watched all the girls appropriate by colouring themselves in dark with the sun on their summer holidays, looking like plastic doll versions of you, I see you, the words all white over your skin, forming complete sentences. Panicking and screaming for help. Panicking and screaming for redemption and release.

Albion welcomes you says the House Albion understands you although it does not, it hates her too of course, but she’s too fucked up to realise what the House really wants from her. She’s desperate for something, and so this is it, that something. A cord which she can hold onto and pull on now she’s drowning. Help me.

Albion is hungry and it hasn’t eaten in so, so very long, and now its two girls are so ripe and fat with the red juice of potential hate. It tugs on their lifelines, and they are pulled back.

Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.

More than anything, and this is painful to admit but it is the truest thing: Ila misses Alice. She hates her, but she misses her. This whirl of confusion makes her miss her even more, the rock-hard sureness of holding onto her shoulders. In Ila’s head Alice is sometimes barely even a person, no more than a cock in a badly fitting dress. Sometimes she is a full being, however, one with thoughts, wants, ideals, and reasons for conducting herself in the manner that she has done. Ila presses her palm into the words on her stomach, then moves it to the vague word on her thighs, panic, or whatever it said. She has lots of hidden meanings inscribed into her. Some kind of… government experiment, a woman covered in triggers, triggering violence and deep state decay every time she strips down, triggering sleeper cells on the beach in summer when they look with desire. A man looks at this scarred woman idly sunbathing, and suddenly he goes blank. Leaves his family there. Takes the train to London, where he hunts down an anti-racism activist and chokes her to death. It happens. You would be surprised to know how much things like that happen. The girl Ila called a tranny, the one who ran from her, hasn’t felt the same since, and she didn’t even focus properly on those words. That girl didn’t even see the stomach scar, as it was covered by black ribbon. However, despite never seeing it, the scar often appears in her dreams, the words carved into the inside of her eyelids. And in the next general election, without even really knowing why, she votes for UKIP. She is a young, left-liberal woman. But… she wants to be able to get a good job as a nurse, and immigration means that there are less jobs to go around, especially for young working-class white women who are well-educated. Is it clear how all of this works? How easy it is to slip, unthinking, into ways that the House wants you to be? Ila is a political being, with a political body, in a political situation, in a political house on a political street, in the middle of a political city, and this political city has a political history, it used to house the headquarters of the British Union of Fascists, the political city is in a political country in a political world where the bombs are always five minutes to midnight and, did you know that there are still ghettos? People still live in ghettos, not far from here. You could drive to your nearest ghetto a short while. How fucking horrifying is that. Just because Biden won in America, that doesn’t mean all will be right. It’s worse now than ever. Now it is time to panic.