Tell Me I'm Worthless(53)

“What?” I ask. Ila pulls on my arm, trying to move me along.

“Nothing.” the man says, covering his face with his hat.

“I’m trans, you asshole. I’m glad I don’t have anything to give you, if you’re like that.”

He doesn’t say anything else, he just retracts into the darkness. I’m the worst person alive. I know.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” asks Ila, quietly.

“He… he was being transphobic. You saw that, right?”

“No he wasn’t.”

“You know. He looked at me.”

She stops holding my hand, then, and shoves both her fists deep into her coat’s pocket.

We keep walking in silence. The moon is visible from the beach, but here we’re too near the industrial estate to get a clear view of it. And the stars, well, they just aren’t visible at all. The light pollution rises up to the clouds and turns the night sky into a dark orange chemical spill, and there’s no sign that anything can live up there at all. I have put a piece of paper with an X on it in my back pocket, in the hopes that the energy of the room will be focused into this symbol, and will spend its time on that, rather than us. This is nonsense. I know it’s nonsense, please stop telling me that it is, I have to try something, or else I am sure we won’t survive the night. Trying to live only on the virtues of my stupid little rituals and sigils. Rituals completely unconnected to any sort of practise or craft, by the way. I just made them up in my head. But I check that the X is still there anyway, and it is. It helps me feel safer, even if it means nothing at all.

I wish this part, agonising as it is, stretched out forever. The long walk from Ila’s flat to the House is the last moment where I am sure of everything. I can see Ila’s breath in the air, I can feel her next to me, even if she doesn’t hold my hand anymore. I can hear my feet on the paving slabs. There are baby foxes playing in the road.

I stop. “What if we just don’t go?”

“God, don’t do this now. We’re nearly there.”

“Why? Why can’t we just turn around, and go back, and forget it and each other.”

“You want to forget Hannah, too?”

That stops me.

“She’s in there.”

Really, Ila? Is she?

“I thought you didn’t believe in that.”

“Maybe not literally.”

Ila is coming apart. I can tell. She believes so many things at once that her head is starting to hurt. She puts both of her hands on my shoulders and pleads, directly, to me.

“We can’t turn back. I have to know, Alice. Please.”

“And what if you find out something you don’t want to?”

“Then my entire fucking life for the past three years will have been built on a lie. And I’ll have to live with it. You should want this, you know. You might get to do what you all want to do, in the end.”

“Which is?”

She kisses me. I can feel her tears on my cheeks, trying to freeze in the cold. Ila pulls away slightly but stays close.

“You get to prove a TERF wrong.”

Ila once told me that horror should move on from relying on darkness as a symbol for the ‘evil’ or the unknown, because it advances racist thinking about blackness being evil and whiteness being good. I told her I thought that was stupid and we had an argument. I said that humans have always feared the dark and race has nothing to do with it, she said I was white, of course I’d say race had nothing to do with it, but race has everything to do with everything. Then we slept together, which has generally always been the pattern with us… argue, fuck, make up. Argue, fuck, make up. The arguing makes the fucking better. It fuelled it with a purpose. It felt like a game, each of us trying to win against the other, each of us vying to be on top.

The House is dark. Ila said we should bring a torch, but I told her that I couldn’t cope with it. So we’ll just have to feel our way through the darkness, hoping that we won’t trip. It’s dark, but as we stand there at the gate, our eyes adjust in a way they never did three years ago. The House wants us to look at it.

They tried to turn it into flats and failed. They tore away all the years of ivy which encased it, but, since it was abandoned again, the plants have regrown, creeping up its walls again like the repressed returning. The gates are still here, as they used to be, but the workmen must have torn down the old wall. In its stead there’s construction fencing twisting around the House’s perimeter. A cage. The House itself is still recognisable, but, if it was decaying before, now it has been fully cracked open. Beneath the ivy, much of its brickwork is gutted, open to the wind. Parts are wrapped in an old blue tarpaulin, and parts of that seem to have been snatched away by something.

Oh, what have they done to you? They tried to take you apart, didn’t they? Did it hurt?

Yes.

The voice doesn’t surprise me, really. It comes through the air into my skull like the words of an old friend. What did they do to you?

Men came and tried to turn me into something else with their tools and they tore at me until it hurt I bled all over them. I bled all over the earth. They didn’t care at all they just kept ripping through my insides.

And then?

And then I took one in my hands. I drew him deep into me. He came into my heart and he saw how bright it was.