Tell Me I'm Worthless(49)

“A glad day will come,” one of them said, but Hannah had no idea if she believed the words. We are all here now. We wait for you. Irreversibly damaged.





“The weeping child could not be heard, The weeping parents wept in vain: They stripped him to his little shirt, And bound him in an iron chain, And burned him in a holy place

Where many had been burned before; The weeping parents wept in vain.

Are such things done on Albion’s shore?”

William Blake, “A Little Boy Lost”





   Part 3





The Dance of Albion





House


Alice or Ila stumbled out into the light of day. Three girls had gone into the house believing in something, and now only two had left, believing in something else entirely. Or at least, that was how it seemed. It had always been there, hadn’t it? The potential within them. It just took the House to show them that.

Neither of them were ever questioned by the police. The police were, of course, linked to the House by a thin but unbreakable thread. Alice felt almost jealous of those who were questioned – they were Hannah’s closest friends, after all… but she was glad that she didn’t have to try and pretend that she knew nothing. Ila told nobody the full extent of it. She attempted suicide more than once, she went on and off her medications. Alice drank an obscene amount, took drugs until she felt like she wasn’t even there. She grew a second layer of harder skin, as a protective measure. It was around this time that Alice began to see the ghosts. At first, she wasn’t sure if they were hallucinations. But she decided that these ghosts must be connected to the House, and so she learned to live with them.

There were multiple suspects in Hannah’s disappearance, the primary one being Brandon, who had been her boyfriend when she vanished. Police found evidence that he had been seen outside of Hannah’s property on more than one occasion since her disappearance. He said he was grieving and confused. Sometimes he walked there, to her flat, fully believing she was waiting for him, only to remember. He claimed that there was no real evidence against him, and the police were enacting a racial bias against a young black man, assuming that he was responsible. He tried to tell the authorities to question Alice and Ila, but they seemed uninterested. He was never formally charged.

Hannah’s parents recorded three television messages and one radio message, pleading for her to come home, or at least contact somebody if she was able to.

Over time, Hannah’s suspended form began to sink into the wall behind her, leaving the perfect, vivid red paper irreparably stained.

The House stayed where it was. The room kept beating inside of it, the bloody heart of England staying still and strong until its new era dawned. It knew that the time would come soon. With every year, it ate more and more tabloid headlines, gorging itself sick on them. They tried to tear it apart. They tried to turn it into flats. It didn’t let them. Not yet, in any case.





Ila


They lay in Ila’s bed looking at the ceiling for half an hour after fucking, trying to clear their heads of the violent intrusive thoughts that had resurfaced, unbidden. The ceiling of Ila’s flat used to be riddled with cracks. Alice remembered how in the past they would trace them together, wondering if the whole building was about to collapse in on them.

Ila pulls herself out of the stupor. She is meant to pee, she always forgets that she is meant to pee after sex. She vanishes off to the bathroom. When she returns, she stands in the doorway, still naked. The two girls look at each other, saying nothing, both thinking the same thing: this was a mistake. Neither of them had orgasmed. Neither of them had even really enjoyed themselves. It just felt like they were supposed to fuck. It felt natural, but it was not something that either of them had really wanted. Alice had held out some vague hope that the years of hate between them might add an element of raw sexual energy to it, but it didn’t. It felt like an apathetic repetition of something they used to do back in days where things didn’t seem so complicated.

“Did you do this one?” asks Ila, pointing at the unreadable word on her leg, the word she thought might be panic but wasn’t.

Alice shrugs. “I didn’t do any of them.”

“Sure.”

Ila lay back down next to her. There was that unspoken gulf between them. They both remembered what had happened so differently. Memory is a difficult thing to navigate, especially traumatic memory. It splinters. You can cut yourself on the edges of it so easily.

Ila’s room seemed to be just as haunted as Alice’s own, but Ila claimed that she had never witnessed anything in here that was not directly something she could touch or explain. Out of the window, there was an abandoned office block visible. When one of the companies stationed there had folded, five of its employees had taken the lift up to the roof and tried to jump. None of them had done it. But the intent had been there. The urge to jump and let the ground rush up to you. This had been a long time before Ila lived there though. The old woman who lived upstairs had told her about it, she was a Romanian immigrant. Like Alice, she burned incense to smoke out the evil things, and they could even smell it down here lying on Ila’s bed. It smells heavy, like sleep, and covers up the funk of sex somewhat.

While Alice had been inside of Ila, Ila, on top, had wondered if she could choke Alice to death. She was choking her anyway, sexually, trying to kindle something. It hadn’t worked at all. But the compulsion had been there. It would have been so easy… but the red voice said no, don’t. Bring her back to the House and let it happen there. Let it tie itself up neatly in a bow. When riding the girl’s cock, every time Ila saw Alice’s face, she saw the cunt on her forehead dripping with sweat. It had seemed to be gaping open wide.