Tell Me I'm Worthless(58)

We don’t need to dream that the Nazis won world war two, the fascists are already here, on our streets, every day, can’t you see them? They’re the man next to you in the shop. The woman smoking outside the pub. They’re all around us. They’re in the government. They won.

Don’t you want to die as a girl?

Jacob doesn’t know why he dreams this. He creates a profile on a website under the name Alice, and pretends to be a twenty-six-year-old woman. He draws himself roughly as Alice, and he thinks he looks so much better there, and he would be so much happier if he was a twenty-six-year-old woman. His mother finds the picture and beats him again, sends him off to therapy. He doesn’t want to be a woman anymore.

The world Jacob lives in is much like yours. It has the same buildings and the same fields and the same men and the same woman but only men and women. When Jacob is eighteen he meets two other girls – a brown girl called Ila, and a young woman named Hannah. Hannah becomes his best friend and eventual wife. Ila is eventually vanished, I don’t know where. They send her back to her own country. She was born in the UK but they still send her back. Jacob and Hannah have lots of little babies, lots of little babies running free. We have to secure a future for our children, he tells himself. We have to secure a future for our children and our land. We have to secure a future for our children and our green and pleasant land, our Jerusalem, a picture of Powell on the wall of every classroom in England, yearly competitions to see who will get to read rivers of blood on Radio 4 this year, which is the highest of honours that can be bestowed to man (or woman! Let’s not be sexist here). A Northern comedian jokes about ‘pudding of colour’ because he ‘doesn’t know if it’s politically correct to say black’. I don’t know what he means by that, I don’t know what he says, but maybe he could identify as an attack helicopter, and maybe I identify as an attack helicopter over Iraq shooting down hellfire on villagers and little children; maybe that’s just my gender and you have to look at it and say yes however much it scares the living daylights out of you, because if you don’t I will firebomb your home, I will take your grandmother on a helicopter ride up to the top of the sky and drop her out like I’m Pinochet like this is Chile welcome to hell bitch welcome to this death flight you old bitch – heavy breathing, there is heavy breathing and the speaker struggles to say whatever they wanted to say next as they are overcome with passionate emotion and hatred towards your grandmother. It’s six o’clock. Do you know where your grandmother is?

My grandmother owned a glassware factory in pre-revolutionary Cuba, my grandmother was a member of a death squad, my grandmother killed your grandmother at least by the virtue of not trying to stop your Grandmother from dying or being killed, dropped into the water from a great, great height, dropped down from the top of a tower to fertilise the green and pleasant land.

Jacob reaches twenty-six years of age. He’s married with children. Ila is somewhere else, not here. Hannah stands at Jacob’s side, hugging him and kissing his neck softly. But one night, she walks into their bedroom, and he thought she was busy outside, see, she sees that he is dressed in her lingerie, wearing her makeup on his face, applied badly, he’s twenty-six when this happens remember, they both are. She sees this, and he screams at her, please, please, don’t tell anybody, please, you are my loving wife I order you not to tell anybody. But she calls the police. She says, my husband has been dressing up in my clothes, wearing my make up, I think he is a gay fag, she says. She’s scared, because if she now knows, others could know… he could be out fucking men in the bushes in the countryside, and people would think she is allowing this, and she’d end up going down with him. She doesn’t have time to think about whether she actually thinks it’s okay and that he can dress how he wants. She calls the police. My husband is a gay fag. He wears my stockings. Before she can finish the call, she’s crying, into the phone I mean, and before she can finish making the call, Jacob grabs a claw-hammer from the cupboard, walks through the house, into the kitchen where Hannah is on the phone, and smashes the hammer into the back of her head. She drops to the floor, and the phone hangs from its wire, swaying slightly. Hannah is on the floor twitching involuntarily. Jacob drops the hammer. What has he done… what he has done. He can’t believe it. She’s still alive, but only just. Her arms flail out towards him, so he goes to the knife rack. He takes the sharpest blade there is. He bends over her and brushes the hair from her eyes and coos at her that he loves her, that’s he’s sorry. But he isn’t a fag. He holds the blade tip to the skin on her arm. I am not a fag. Property of Jacob. Property of Jon. Every man who has ever hurt a woman crumples into his head, only to find that they don’t fit in here at all. It’s all wrong in here. The Society for Cutting Up Women leaves, grumbling about how it isn’t how it used to be.

He hangs himself from the light fixture, using the tie he wore to their wedding. The police find them there. His body is still wearing Hannah’s underclothes. His kids are still asleep upstairs. My Mummy killed my Mummy, my Daddy killed my Mummy, my, my, Hannah’s red lipstick is smeared across his face. They arrest his body and put it on trial for being a gay fag, and also, they suppose, for being a murderer, which is second to being a gay fag really, most gay fags are also murderers. Once you have broken one social norm, well, what comes next really, oh, what comes next… if Jacob survives then Jacob is forcibly sterilised, cut open and turned inside out right, the smell’s fucking awful maybe the eventuality where he dies is better, because now he’s a hollow shell of a woman walking down a polluted riverbank, drinking in the dark fumes of the satanic mills and wishing that he had killed his wife and then himself, and wishing that he was in a red room in the heart of a nameless city in England. Because now I am alone and when I wake up tomorrow maybe something will have gone wrong and here I am, inside this world. Here I am. My name is Jacob or Alice and I am pulled out of my house by masked men and kept inside a box until then they pull me out. They say, wear a dress. I don’t want to wear a dress. I only wear dresses when I feel comfortable wearing dresses. I do not feel comfortable right now. But no matter. I have to wear the dress. And then I am here, on the floor, with all Ila standing over me dressed in latex. Ila standing over me in black latex. Ila She Wolf of the SS stands over me kicks me in the stomach I scrabble at her but she knows she’s won. They didn’t vanish her, she assimilated, she became part of the system just to survive, you understand, she had to do this to survive. She reaches down her latex skirt and pulls out her bloody tampon and shoves it into my mouth and I choke but I do not choke to death and Albion watches and Ila is so worried because he knows he might be next, they might work out how it feels when he dreams of a world where he is a boy called Jacob or Xander or Harry, she thinks he thinks maybe Albion can see inside, Albion says, yes, kill this shitty pig, and all the people watching at home, all the wives cooking dinner, the husbands home from work, the little kids home from school squealing in delight. And the wives cooking dinner are emancipated. The producers of the show are the BBC. They ask commentators to discuss the events happening to the shitty transvestite pigs. Those commentators are generally feminists who self-describe as gender critical and often appear on Newsnight or Women’s Hour, and this happens God is a self-described feminist and so are the latex babes so is Ila queen of the latex babes she-wolf and so am I. So are all shitty transvestite pigs. Now do you see? Sigmund Freud was killed years ago as a shitty transvestite pig. In front of living cameras, in front of a live audience, they say, don’t you have the self-control to not be like this, don’t you have the self-control to either be a woman or man, not to be this transvestite pig, this it, this it-pronounced pig, pig with it-pronouns, they throw me into a garbage truck, amongst all humanity’s shit, I am screaming, God is laughing, all my friends are laughing, some touch themselves, am I a girl? Am I just a shitty pig? Sick the union now down to the bottom of your own building the great open wide sky, the skylight, the top of the building, the ledge, I’m on a ledge, I felt. I feel somebody opening up to me. I think I heard somebody opening up to me. No you can’t. No you can’t. I will take you home. Open up. Open up. Open up. The door in the corner of the room which has always been locked opens up and what comes out… No. This computer terminal has become infected with a disease, it is swelled, it is all wrong, can’t you see, can’t you see, the computer’s flesh has swelled it is filled with pus, it is seeping disgusting pus. The pus is dripping down the computer into a bowl. Every five hours a man enters the room. His face is not visible. He enters the room wearing a boiler suit and he removes the bowl, filled with pus, and replaces it with an empty bowl. He takes the bowl away. We do not see where. You have no identity. When you are stopped by the pigs they ask for your ID but you have to say you are not a person, you are a pig like them, you are a shitty pig, I will slaughter you round the neck with a knife or a bolt in your shitty pig brain, squeal!!!!!!!!!!! Squeal! oink oink baby. Baby. Fucking r____ baby. Fucking baby with no brain you stupid slutty r____ tranny baby. I will take everything you have. On the computer screen is the Latex Babe TV Show. This is your favourite TV show. It is on TV every night and you watch it every night. You have to. You sing the theme song in your sleep. I felt ashamed but I didn’t do anything. You talk to your union and vote for a small snail shell as the new boss. You vote for a tiny baby rabbit as the boss. But Ila comes from the dark and takes your union leader and he is now the guest on the Latex Babe TV Show, he is a little snail, he is a tiny little rabbit, the Ila crushes your Union Leader with her heels. This building. This grey building. Disappeared inside yourself, disappeared by her own discomfort, called a r____ by a woman wearing a latex dress, that’s not an ok word to say, that’s not an ok word to say, not hers to reclaim, I wasn’t saying it to reclaim it, she says, I was saying it to hurt you, it is a word meant to hurt, does your cum have blood in it? Are you a tiny pig hanging from the slaughterhouse ceiling of outsourced work? Crushing device. By the colour of smog I open up your house, I am in your house, I am being tortured on your diseased computer screen, with no religious recourse, with no safety net, the nanny state has bad teeth that are all inside out, they are fleshy, they hurt, long live the new state, long live the new flesh and drink this dry, drink this dry, am I girl, am I just a pig?, am I a girl, am I just a pig?, am I a shitty girl, am I just a shitty pig?, will I be thrown out with the garbage like all the other pigs?, anti-socialist press flat against the metal crushing device, now don’t tell me you want to repent your shitty pig ways now, now don’t tell me: you don’t like this dream and you would like another? Jacob by the Thames thinks this. Alice in the room thinks this. Ila in the room thinks this. England thinks this. England is the only place. England eats every other place. England eats people, too. Look at the Thames, choked with the bodies of migrant workers pushed in there by drunken Prime Ministers, and the Prime Minister fucking sex workers who he has asked to say oh aren’t you a bad boy aren’t you, aren’t you a bad boy. There is a poem by the late Sean Bonney which goes like this: “So anyway, I killed Boris Johnson.