Tell Me I'm Worthless(4)

When I moved in, I burned sage (after turning off the fire alarms), I made pieces of paper with my own private inventions drawn upon them and put one under each piece of furniture. Underneath my bed I placed a sheet with five black ink intersecting circles, which represented the boundaries of the room, the building, my physical body, the astral plane and my soul, which now must be saved. Inside the circle for my soul was an italicised a which represented my attempts at repressing my own trauma. This is a sort of private spell; not a legitimate charm of any kind, but one which I invented to control my own hauntings, or at least to try and control them. Maybe it does nothing at all. But it’s good to feel in control of your environment. Of course, sometimes the singer still exits the poster and stands there, without sight, shifting. If I lay very, very still I know he will not come near me. I don’t know what would happen if he came near me, but I know that I don’t want to find out. The closest he has come is there at the end of my bed. I think maybe, if he did approach me, he would try to black out my eyes. With a pen, if he could find one. Maybe he would try to do it even without a pen, maybe he would do it with his fingers, pushing them into my eyes, singing the whole time, not singing properly, opening his mouth and having the songs come out without him moving his lips for the words, like there is a speaker inserted into his throat that plays when he opens his mouth, pushing his thumbs into my eyes, last truly British people, and when he is done with my eyes he would grab my mouth to put his words into it, panic on the-, whilst images of imagined atrocities that he has made up play in my head. A van, swerving sharply into a crowd of police officers, crushing their bones beneath its wheels. A man suddenly rising up on the tube, swaying a little with the motion of movement before running down the length of the train, swinging a sword along a row of commuters. A man, anonymous, shooting at a pushchair. A teenage boy walking to the front of the class and cutting his teacher’s throat with a knife. Two trans people walking together bold and defiant but then a bomb explodes next to them and their brains and their limbs scatter over the streets like snow. These images grow bloodier and bloodier until they are pure red and there are no figures in them at all, just dripping, wet redness. I become overwhelmed and throw up, realising that I cannot see, and cannot speak words that are not his, or think thoughts that are not his. This is what might happen if he comes to me. I have been careful to ensure that he can’t get that close. I know how to protect myself. He can crawl out of the poster but he cannot come near me, because I know to lay very, very still, because I have placed the right sigils in the right places, which stop him from getting to my eyes and my mouth. Lay still. Hold your breath. Don’t look at him directly. Let him retreat back into the picture.

I put on makeup for the first time in what must be a month. When it’s not in use, the mirror on my desk is covered up with a flannel, and now I see how dirty the glass is, blotched with spots of sticky residue which have been gathering dust. I try to wash it, but only make it smeared. Through the blurriness, my face almost looks okay. I’ve shaved. I put on a turtleneck to hide my Adam’s Apple. It’s hard to get the symmetry of eyeliner right in the dirty glass; that’s a job that requires a precision that, even with a clear mirror, I can’t quite manage with the tremor that runs through my hands, so I opt to avoid eyeliner, cake my eyes in red powder, put a shiny lipstick on my lips that matches. Tie my hair – too long, scraggly – back into some semblance of neat femininity. I’m clockable, but that’s okay.

It’s alright if you don’t pass, a voice in me says. No one cares. The only people that care are people you don’t want to be around anyway. But another part of me, a vicious little creature that claws at my head, calls me a fucking brick sissy whispers everyone can see your stubble everyone is creeped out by you in the toilets. I tell it to shut up, try to suppress it. It’s the same part of me that looks at girls nervously sharing their selfies on Trans Day of Visibility and wants to spit bile through the screen. You’re sharing that picture of yourself? Everyone can see you’re not a woman. Everyone knows. A pale, nasty jealousy at their apparent unselfconsciousness. I don’t ever vocalise this side of me, of course. These thoughts are intrusive. I do my best to suppress them.

There’s a party which, against all odds, I’ve been invited to. There are a couple of people that I call friends, although I’m not really close with any of them, not in the way I was close with Ila and, to a lesser extent, Hannah. Ila and I had the kind of friendship where the frictions between two people soften enough that your boundaries blur. We couldn’t have been more different, looking at us, but seminar leaders would still get us mixed up, to our delight. It’s the opposite of when people think I’m some other brown girl, Ila used to say, or when they say you look like that model, despite the fact that you totally don’t, like at all. The friends who invited me to the party, a quick text at midday today, aren’t like that with me. But they’re fine. I’ve been basically a shut-in for ages now, so it’s good to go to places with people that don’t completely hate your guts.

I get the bus across town to the address Jon texted to me – with a note saying to get there at about ten because things will be really happening by then. The air outside is cold and the foxes are out at the bins at the end of my road, tearing at black plastic bags, barking their strange, human screams. I steer clear of them, and wait for the bus, which, when it arrives, is busier than I expected. Full of other people, going to other parties, some of them already drunk. I’m not drunk yet, I had a couple of glasses of red wine sat on my bed listening intently to Darkthrone and trying to calm my nerves, but it hasn’t hit me. Not with the same force that pre-drinks have hit a lot of the partygoers on the bus. When I go to sit down I realise that the seat is wet with something, vomit, splattered across the fabric and down onto the floor. A boy sat at the back of the bus lights a cigarette and fills the inside with smoke. The driver stops the bus, and says, over the intercom, that whoever is smoking has to put it out right now or he’ll call the police. The boy throws the fag out of the bus window, and on we go. The boy loudly calls the driver a word that makes me wince, and I wonder if I should say something. Hey, you. Don’t say that. Is it worth exposing myself to violence for the easing of my own white guilt? It’s not like I’m safe. If he realises what I am, he might turn his attention to me. It’s safety, pure and simple, that’s all. You have to look out for yourself. The whole bus smells like vomit and alcohol and smoke, encasing my brain in the stench. Welcome back to the real world. There are no singers pushing out from posters to haunt you here, but there is piss and vomit and men talking too loudly, enough to make your nerves tight.