Tell Me I'm Worthless(34)

“Alice,” says Ila, “do you think about it?”

“About what?”

“The room.”

Of course she does. “I think about it every night.”

“So do I. And every day. It’s like these past three years have been… just endless fallout. I thought I had made progress, started to free myself of it, of the voices and the memories and the nightmares, but it’s back again, worse than before. It’s the same with you, isn’t it?”

“It never left with me. But yes, things have been worse lately. I thought I had burned it all away, but here you are, I guess. I can’t live without you.”

Today, Alice displays the cunt scar cut into her forehead proudly, for the first time ever. She rubs at it lightly, feeling like the Harry Potter of transphobic hate crime victims. “I’ve been thinking about getting some kind of surgery to cover this cunt up.”

“I thought,” says Ila snidely, “that you wanted surgery to get one.” Alice ignores the comment.

“Every time I take off my clothes I see what you did.” Under Ila’s dress, the words throb, like they’re fresh.

“Ila.” Alice still isn’t looking at her. She can’t. “I didn’t do it.”

“Fuck you,” Ila says, quietly. “You’re fucking… trying to gaslight me, or whatever. Just like Joyce is trying to do. Trying to turn my own history against me. I know what happened. I know what happened to me. The fact that you’re wearing a fucking dress can’t change that, can it? You’re racist, and you’re a rapist.”

“Then why did you repeat it, Ila, to that girl? Why did you do the same to her? I mean, you didn’t cut her forehead, but I’m sure you wanted to. Why even text me if you’re going to be like this, fuck off. I don’t know why I came.”

Alice stands up, turning away from Ila. The tears are hot as they stream from her eyes and grow freezing cold the longer they drip down her cheeks. Ila’s crying as well. Still sitting, she reaches out her hand to Alice and grabs her arm.

“Fuck off!” Alice says, and shrugs her away.

“You don’t understand,” calls Ila as Alice tries to leave. “Come back, please. I can end this.”

Alice stops and turns around.

“What?”

“We have to.” It’s hard for her to speak through the tears. “We have to go back to the House, Alice. That’s why I asked you to come here.”

“You’re fucking insane.”

“It’s still there. The bones of it. They knocked down parts of it, it sat there for years. They were trying to convert it into flats, but the flats still have the same shape as the old house. It’s on the same foundations. I looked it up. I looked at it, from far away. I felt it. I felt it waiting for us.”

The House was still there, but it had been hurt during the attempts to convert it. How much of the internal structure of the house had been knocked away? She knew that it still lived. There was enough of it there to still have power over her. The construction of the flats had stalled a while back now. It stood there, the old House, gutted and bare, open to the elements. It stood there where the House had always stood, surrounded by trees. There had been plans to tear them down as well, but they had never come to fruition. But all the time, the possibility of someone trying again was growing. The city was expanding. It would eat up the surroundings. Soon there would be no greenery left in England’s fair and pleasant land, apart from on the tops of high-rise buildings, where they put gardens to remind you of what you have lost, of what this beast of concrete and metal has consumed.

“If we just go along as we are,” says Ila passionately, saying the things she thinks she has to, “then we won’t ever get over it. I’ll keep saying you raped me, and you’ll keep saying I raped you, and we’ll both keep getting too fucked up to think until one of us dies.”

Alice shrugs. “So what?”

“If we go back now, we can try and… I don’t know. Break the cycle.”

“Why would I do that? Why would I go back there with you?”

“Whatever happened,” Ila says, “it’s just a fucking old house. It’s not really haunted.” She knows that isn’t true. “Literally all that will happen is we’ll go in, see what we remember, talk through our feelings or whatever, cry and hug it out if you want to. Look, if you come, I will never ever say you raped me again. You can take this as an opportunity to prove it to me, if you like. To prove that I did what you say. Otherwise…”

“You know something else, don’t you?” Alice sits back down on the bench, looking into her eyes. “You’re scared. And not just about the cancellation. Scared about what you’re capable of.”

“Something is happening,” she says, very, very quietly. “Something is happening to this country, Alice.”

Alice has felt it too. The tension in the air. She’s seen the growing number of flags. She feels unsafe walking alone, more than she ever did before. She says that she knows.

There is a storm building here. In the hills and the cities and the towns and the villages and the red wall and the red wall inside you.

Alice and Ila sit on the bench looking at the dead tree, smoking until their throats are dry. Ila puts her hand, without thinking, on Alice’s.