Tell Me I'm Worthless(35)

“Do you want to go get something to drink at least?” She’s afraid of the answer either way.





“Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?”

Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”

“These days, if you say that you’re English, you get thrown in jail…”

Stewart Lee





   Part 2





Irreversible Damage





House


Before the House was built, it existed. The ground that they grew it on was all wrong. Far beneath the earth, corpses lay which were older than God, and so when they raised the House it was already there in a way, fully formed, ready, ravenous. No live organism can continue to exist compassionately under conditions of absolute fascism, even the birds in Italy under Mussolini were observed to take part in rallies and violence. Albion, not compassionate, not sane, stood ringed by a tangled forest, holding inside, however messily, its overpowering ideology; it had stood so for a hundred years but would only stand for one more before it entered into the long process of becoming something else, at the end of which it was hoped it would seem to all the world that it had always been that way. Within, floors crumbled, ceilings gaped open, vines choked the chimneys and the windows.

Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of the house, and whatever walked there marched on Rome.

Now, if three girls enter a house and only two leave, who is to blame?

And if both girls tell a different story, but you read online that you have to BELIEVE WOMEN, what do you? Do you decide one is a woman and one isn’t, so you can believe one of them but not the other? Do you take the side of the woman who is most like you? Or the most intersectional one? But one is rich, and white, and trans, and the other is rich, and Asian, and a lesbian, and cis (?), and fuck, who wins here? In the end it’s so hard to choose where your sympathies settle. So, you go online and find an ‘intersectionality score calculator’ on the internet. You use it to try to work out who is more oppressed. According to the calculator, Alice has an intersectionality score of 44, making her more privileged than 32% of others. Who these others are is unclear. Ila, meanwhile, has a score of 64. This should mean that you sympathise more with her, but you have seen inside her head, you know the way she thinks. You wonder where Hannah would score. She comes out with a score of 25. But despite this, she never left the House, whilst the others did leave; whilst they went back to their lives, she stayed there collecting dust. And anyway, you can’t trust the numbers anyway. Numbers have been known to lie. Numbers have been known to show bias, statistics often have racist undertones, for example. So, there’s just two girls leaving a house and maybe you don’t have to take a side, maybe you can empathise with them both and hope they get the therapy and help they need and can learn to forgive one another. No. You can’t do that. Are you a fucking idiot? Are you that fucking stupid that you genuinely think you can do that and that something like that is possible?

There is no electricity in the House. No generator that works, not now, not in the modern day. But even so, very occasionally, maybe once every few years, there is a faint light in one of the windows on the first floor. The light isn’t coming from that room. It is too faint for that. But that room’s door has been left open, and somewhere within the House, impossibly, there is a light that has been turned on. A faint, red light.

Here is a thing that happened in the House, back when England was still for the English: there was a man. Imagine him. He brought his wife with him to live there, in the House. When he purchased it, it was a corpse, as it is now, when Alice and Ila are sitting together considering the possibility of returning. He got it cheaply, but he had grand dreams of what he might turn it into, with his new wife at his side like a faithful spaniel.

The House has not read “Bluebeard”, nor had the story recounted to it. The House doesn’t read at all. It is not aware of the story’s long shadow, of the myriad interpretations of it, mostly famously Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” which transports the story into a violent feminist revenge story. The title is a simple pun, referring both to the room to which its heroine must not venture, and her pussy, bleeding after being fucked roughly by her new husband. The House doesn’t know that story. But it knows this one; the one about the man who purchased it, and the wife he brought to live there. And so now sit still, because the House will tell it to you as best it can...

The man’s name was Edmund. He appeared as a man named Edmund might – shorter than he wished, with his hair slicked down and a conspicuous lack of facial hair. Edmund had just returned from war and was awash with the glory of violence and victory. His father was a society man in London, and one of his father’s neighbours, a lady of some quality, had two rather beautiful daughters who were in desperate need of a husband, lest they grow wrinkled and saggy before anybody snatched them up. Edmund couldn’t believe anybody hadn’t proposed to either of them already (they were beautiful girls!) but Edmund’s father told him the reason why they remained unmarried: one of the girls’ virginity was not intact, and the other was overly wilful, with ideas far beyond the station that a young woman held. Still, Edmund’s father said he should consider them. The pairing of their families may be virtuous, even if the girls were not. So he met with both of them. The girl who was wilful was seventeen years old. She spent one afternoon with Edmund and vowed to never speak to him again, although when her mother asked why, she would only say that the young man was disquieting.