Tell Me I'm Worthless(56)

House


The House spreads. Its arteries run throughout the country. Its lifeblood flows into Westminster, into Scotland Yard, into every village and every city. It flows into you, and into your mother. It keeps you alive. It makes you feel safe. Those same arteries tangle you up at night and make it hard for you to breathe. But come morning, you thank it for what it has done for you, and you sip from its golden cup, and kiss its perfect feet, and you know that all will be right in this godforsaken world as long as it is there to watch over you.

You, too, are implicated in its presence. Don’t forget that. You, me. Those you love. The man who you watch walking his little dog along your road from your bedroom window. Your housemate and your lover and your Queen. Your MP and your favourite author. The shows you see on TV, and the films you see at the cinema. The streaming services and the producers of those streaming services and the city planners and the councils and the theatres and Banksy and the journalists and the people who pay them, the investors, the bankers, the internet users, the bitcoin miners, the electric car salesmen, the drones and the drone pilots and the video gamers who play as drones shooting at villages, the architects, the schoolboys, the poet laureate and the bricks that built the houses and the headmasters, the University Vice Chancellors, the church ministers, your grandparents, that band you like, so on and so on forever until I can’t speak anymore, until my words become one long eternal howl.

In Italy, a huge painting named “The Apotheosis of Fascism” still stands. When Italy was making a bid for the 2024 Olympics in 2014, their Prime Minister stood in front of that very painting. It depicts Mussolini as a God. You can go to it, on your next holiday, and you can kneel down at its feet, and you can pray.





Ila and Alice


The room is as small and dull as it always was. And it is bright, brilliant, dazzling. On the far wall, where Hannah once hung, there is a brown stain. Alice recognises it. It’s the same stain that waited beneath the poster in her room. From the ceiling, the lightbulb shines its light onto all the walls, and the walls shine their light back onto the girls, bathing them in their colour. The desk is still there. The floorboards are still bare beneath their feet. It is unchanged by the three years between the last time they saw it. It is exactly as it was in their nightmares. The stain that is Hannah spreads across the wallpaper opposite them, and as they step within the stain begins to coalesce into a clearer impression of Hannah’s swastika shaped body. Alice can see it. Ila can see it. When Alice puts her ear to the wall, she can hear a high-pitched noise echoing within. Hannah is a blossoming flower of evil. Pluck it. Pluck it and give it to your darling lover. Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will devour you with kisses, that I have kept the form and the divine essence of my decomposed love! The room contracts in. A noise fills the air, a whining, quiet at first but climbing in volume, louder until it becomes painful to hear. On the wall, the shape begins to move, darken. It gains clarity. The two girls press close together as they watch her push herself out of the vague other place beyond and into the room. The whine isn’t a whine. It’s a scream, and it comes from Hannah’s open tortured mouth. Hannah is still screaming as she pushes herself free, through the wallpaper and into the world with them. They are nearly knocked down by the smell of her, the thick stench of years of shit and piss, which is smeared across her skin. When she moves, she moves with a wet, sticky sound. The last time they saw her, even twisted and broken, she still had perfect skin, somehow maintaining beauty and poise through the violence but… the three years have eaten at her. She is covered in her own filth, and her skin is as red as the wallpaper she crawled through. Her body is still bent into its crooked shape, but her hands are in motion, grasping, and finally she’s free of the wall and falls onto the floor. Whatever held her strings has cut them. She shuffles forwards towards them, moving like a spider but every twitch of her limbs brings a grunt of pain. One of Hannah’s limbs – it isn’t clear if it is a foot or a hand, they are so distorted, reaches out to Ila, grasping at the air.

“We came back for you,” says Ila.

She isn’t sure if Hannah can even understand what she says. The girl’s eyes, peering through a face riddled with aberrations, are clouded with a thick fog.

“Why?” she asks. Her voice is old. It sounds like it hasn’t been used in years.

“Because we had to,” Alice says.

“No, you didn’t. No, no. God. You came back. You came back here.” She lifts herself up, just slightly. With the movement, there comes a cacophony of tiny cracks from inside her. Her hair was once so gorgeous, but now it is slick with filth, stuck in strands to her skull. “You can’t get me out of here. I gave myself to him, completely.”

Ila bends down towards her, and offers a hand to her face, gently cradling it. Her skin feels like paper beneath her fingertips.

“Who did you give yourself to?” She talks to Hannah like she is talking to a small child, or an animal who is ill.

“Don’t talk down to me you bitch.”

She tries to shove Ila off of her, but it only succeeds in seeming pathetic. Her limbs, bent and fused, have lost all strength. But she had enough bile within her to growl at Ila.

“I worshipped at his alter,” she spat, “I supplicated myself to Albion, and I wished for a day that he would rise from the ground and stand over this land. I did that, and I watched you hurt one another, and I knew what I had done was terrible, but you came back, you came back, you came back.”