Tell Me I'm Worthless(50)

Now they were done. Back on the bed, Ila drinks from an open can of beer, which has just started to flatten. “Thanks,” she says. “For the sex, I mean.”

“When was the last time you fucked someone?” Alice pulls herself up to a sitting position.

Ila shrugs. “I think it was the one I got cancelled for.”

“Joyce?”

“No, no, I never fucked her. She came onto me in the bathroom, the old creep. Nearly did it, too. She’s just bitter now that she didn’t get to. I mean the other one, the one who said I called her…”

“A tranny?”

“Mhmm.” There is a silence. “What about you? When was the last time you got some?”

“I brought someone home from a party, but she got scared off by a ghost.”

Ila is not sure if she’s being serious or not, but then again, she never has been, even back when they were friends, Alice would say things which seemed like jokes, but there was truth to them.

There is nothing left of the singer now, wherever he is.

“You know,” says Ila, looking at the beer in her hand, “whatever happened, I missed you.”

Alice tries to catch her eyes. “You went on Radio Four and said that the government should ban people like me from being in public.”

“I did not, I was making an argument about the importance of spaces for women—”

“And I’m not a woman?” Alice asked. The sad tenderness which had seeped into the room was now gone. Everything was sharp.

“I didn’t say that, did I, you fucking idiot. This is your problem, Alice,—” she tries to finish her beer but realises that there’s basically none left, so she crumples the can and throws it against the wall “—you just decide to automatically read what people say as the worst possible outcome, you take public safety as a personal attack on you! It isn’t about you! No one cares what you think!”

“No one cares what you think either.” Alice gets out of the bed. “You’re a fucking sell out, and you know they only care about you because you make them look less white. Half of their shit is antisemitic conspiracies, and you’re a Jew happily peddling them.” Alice tries to put on her shirt, but she puts it on backwards, so she has to take it off again to put it on properly.

“Since when did you care about antisemitism?” Ila snarls.

Alice doesn’t answer.

“Don’t you fucking ignore me. You can’t walk out of this, remember, we’re going to the House, we’re going to exorcise this, I’m sure you’ll want to be there so you can rape me half to death again in front of our friend’s corpse…”

She grabs Alice’s hand hard, and Alice tries to tear herself away but finds herself being pulled back onto the bed. They look into each other’s eyes.

“Fuck you,” says Alice.

“Fuck you,” says Ila.

And they fuck again. This time, it isn’t quite so boring. Alice lets Ila fuck her in the ass with the strap-on, and she feels something like peace. When Ila is inside her, Alice, with her legs up in the air, looks into her friend’s eyes.

“Call me it, please,” she says.

“Call you what?”

“You know. You know you want to, as well.”

She hesitates for a moment. But Alice is right. She does want to.

“You fucking tranny,” Ila moans.

“God. Fuck. Please.” The pleasure is nearly unbearable for Alice. “Do it again. Tell me what you think of me, what you really think of me. Tell me I’m nothing. Tell me I’m worthless.”

“You,” Ila grabs Alice’s hair, “are a fucking worthless tranny.”

“Yes.”

“You are a fucking plague on this country. You convert helpless young girls into your sick cult. You make them mutilate their bodies, bind and cut off their breasts, until they are so gaslit into the trans ideology that they think they are happy. You are just a man, and even if you had a cunt between your legs, it wouldn’t be real, it would just be an open wound that your body rejects.” She slaps Alice in the face whilst fucking her. It leaves a scarlet mark on her cheek. “You’re a threat to women. Everybody sees you and thinks you’re disgusting. Everybody sees you and thinks, who the fuck is that man in a dress and makeup, trying to hide his bulge. Who the fuck does he think he is? Your dick’s too big to hide. Your bulge when you wear a skirt looks so gross.”

“Yes!” Alice is writhing beneath her.

“You aren’t a woman, you’re a deviant, you aren’t a fucking woman!”

“What are you going to do to me?”

Ila leans down close and spits the words out. “I’m going to eradicate you.”

Alice screams, “yes”, she screams yes and she cums properly for the first time in months. She imagines that there is a pair of eyes frozen in space watching her cum, watching from within the walls of Ila’s flat.

And then they are lying in each other’s grasp drifting in and out of consciousness. For a moment the world reverts to an alternative, where events took a different course; where they loved each other and felt less ashamed of each other’s difference, because even before she posted about it online, Ila was uncomfortable with Alice, they were best friends, they fucked once a week when drunk or high, but she felt sick afterwards when she thought about her body and what their bodies had done together, and Alice couldn’t forget Ila’s immigrant family and wondered if they had taken British workers’ jobs, even though she knew that was a horrible thing to think about, she thought that there was maybe actually possibly a left-wing case for border control when you looked at it, not that she really agreed but like – the implications of mass immigration to the UK – I mean, the average white worker too was anti-immigration, surely you had to think of him, surely you had to listen to what he thought, his thoughts were as valid as anyone else’s right? And, she thought, she thinks, if you looked at it, the billionaire class actually wants immigration, they want it, they want wide movements of workers, and obviously this is a disgusting way to think but it is how she thinks, she’s nothing if not honest, and, and… Ila always hated going into public bathrooms with Alice, even though they’d fucked many times, it was more that she thought other women would see her with Alice and think that she, Ila, also had a dick, and judge her for that.