Tell Me I'm Worthless(33)
Ila exits the bathroom like a ghost and picks up her phone. I need to talk to you, she types. Can we please meet? In a public place? I really, really need to talk with you.
When Ila was little, she wanted to be an archivist when she grew up. But now she’s grown and the only archive she keeps is one of all the traumatic experiences she has faced, all the racist abuse on the street, all the sexual harassment and violence, carefully filed away in the back of her head.
To her surprise, Alice replies. Okay. Meet me at Queen Park, near the dead tree.
It’s easy to forget that they really did love each other. They were thrown together by accident – Ila just happened to sit down next to Alice in a lecture, and Alice had leant over to her halfway through the lecture and, out of nowhere, commented that the lecturer looked like Steve Buscemi. Ila had started to chuckle, and found that she was completely incapable of hiding the laughter. The more her laughter echoed around the (silent) lecture hall, the harder she laughed. Alice couldn’t help it either. It made no sense – it wasn’t particularly funny that the lecturer looked like Steve Buscemi. And yet there they were, both girls close to tears with laughter, every eye in the cavernous room glaring at them, which only made it funnier. That was how they met, with everyone else in the room hating them. After that, they got coffee, and that was it. They fell into each other’s orbit and became inseparable, and Hannah, Ila’s housemate at the time, completed the trio soon after, although she never fully fit into the equation. And that was that, for quite a while. Until…
They both slept badly. When dreams came, they were jagged things, pressing themselves close until they came away bloody.
The sun is too bright for Alice, who sits on the bench she arranged to meet Ila at. It is a winter sun that blinds but doesn’t warm anything at all. There’s a chill wind blowing at her, nipping at her exposed skin. She’s smoking her second cigarette within ten minutes and looking at two pigeons fight over a single crumb when Ila appears, ten minutes late almost exactly. They nod to each other, and Ila sits on the bench next to her, but at the furthest end, as far as she can get whilst still being on the same bench. This is the first time she’s seen Alice outside of a picture or a video in three years. Alice has put on weight. Her jawline is less defined now. She looks less hot than she used to, Ila thinks, and smirks, but just as she entertains the cruel idea Alice speaks.
“How’s the cancellation going?”
“I haven’t been online since last night. I don’t know.”
“Ah, well, that TV writer is defending you, so that’s something.” Alice blows smoke out into the cold air.
The park they are sitting in is haunted. Specifically, there is a tree which some people call the dead tree. The strange thing about the dead tree is that it isn’t actually dead at all. They can both see it from where they’re sitting, it’s directly opposite the bench, on the other side of a green expanse. People call it the dead tree because it looks dead, at first. It rarely produces any foliage, and yet it is still, by all accounts, a living tree. The park rangers considered cutting it down, but there was no real reason they could find to actually do that, so the tree stayed. That was lucky. If they had felled it, they would have had some sort of curse placed upon them for doing so. They would all have died in their beds, with sticks shoved deep down their throats to choke them.
A drunk died beneath the tree one night when he tried to sleep there. He was tired and a long way from home, so he settled beneath its branches, not realising where he was. Thinking himself to be safe. He awoke in the cool dark night to see something terrible in the shape of a woman framed against the moon. At first he thought it was truly a woman, and called out to it, hey love, what’re you doing, or something along those lines. The thing was entirely silent, though. It shuffled towards him, getting closer and closer, blocking out the black sky and the few visible stars not blotted out with light pollution. He couldn’t move, he was too drunk still, too sick and desperate. The thing that wasn’t a woman was close enough to touch him, and then it did. It touched him, and it touched him hard. So hard that he died. It isn’t clear how anybody knows about what the man saw. He died without telling anybody. He was completely alone in the park when the incident occurred. But people know that the tree is haunted.
People will often flock to the same places to kill themselves, the same bridges, the same woods, the same bathrooms of the same motorway service stations. Once someone kills themself in a place, it becomes hungry for more suicides. And so this was the case with the dead tree. Over its history lots of women, jilted by lovers, facing financial ruin, high on heroin, have climbed its branches and hung themselves. Or been hanged. Perhaps strung up by something, or someone. People have seen a spectre... of an elderly woman trying to cut her own throat with a straight razor, screaming silently. The ghosts in this exterior space are silent… silent women. Silent dead women. It’s possible that what killed the homeless man was a spectre of one of these many female suicides, that its twisted shape was the result of a broken neck caused by hanging. It’s also possible that the man simply died of a heart attack. Though that does not explain how sometimes men, standing underneath this tree, are reminded of how much of a bitch their mother was to them during their childhood, or how much they despise their ex-wives.
And the birds shun it. Right now, there are no birds at all resting on the tree’s branches. Alice stares at the tree whilst talking to Ila.