Tell Me I'm Worthless(59)

You know who he is, yeh?

Not much of a crime, really.

It was, I dunno, 2005, maybe 2006

he was on his bike

going down the Charing Cross Road and me, I was on foot, of course.

Anyway, there was a bus behind him and I took my chance. I pushed him under the bus went over and then he was dead.

Noone saw me. Noone stopped me.

Everything that’s happened since has been a dream. A deep and horrible dream.

Wake up. For the sake of us all, wake up.”

I have to believe that was reality. I have to believe that is reality, and that this world is just a parody, a parody, a red room, a metaphor for a worse world. I keep trying to wake up but I can’t. My friends are all breaking their faces, committing grievous self-harm just for the chance to live. I say ‘my friends’ – I’m doing that, too. I’m cutting myself up. I feel like any real woman knows how to do this, to completely unstitch herself to reveal the true form, a form that the entity in the room will be satisfied with. Many women are doing this! Women from all over England are pulling themselves apart and crawling, like new, wet, bloody, sickly babies, screaming for milk, crawling out from their old husks of bodies, into the new day. Luckily many do this over breakfast, and milk is easy to come by at breakfast, because everybody in England drinks milk with their breakfast food, in tea or coffee or just a nice refreshing glass of white pure milk for baby. I know women who have done this. And their new forms are so beautiful, so raw and genuine and honest and brave, new forms which are able to get books published, or get opinion pieces in various newspapers. These new forms log onto Twitter and get effortlessly popular on there. I know this to be true. And I sometimes think that what I want is really misogynistic. Sometimes in the worst moments I ask if the TERFs are right and me wanting a cunt and tits and nice hair is because I’m a self-centred male monster and I want to be in bathrooms and changing rooms and I want to win women’s sports competitions and laugh because they can’t say anything and I want to win the Women’s Fiction Prize and they’ll say but look that’s not a woman and the thought police will come for them for thinking that but in actual fact they’ll probably just get an OBE for it and get a book deal and then what will I be? I want to be a woman. I am a woman. I want a cunt because lots of women have cunts. It is not violent to myself or to others. It is a good thing. It is a positive for the world to have more women, with or without cunts. I remember a story I read once, that said real women all do this, they all pull themselves apart, they all have real selves beneath, so I try to do the same. Ila tries to watch, but I make her turn around to look at the wall. I can’t stop Hannah from looking at me of course… but is she even a person these days, no, she might not be a person. I try to do it, I pull at my belly button, I find a nerve ending which comes undone, I unravel and scream in pain as blood begins to burst out of me and splatter over the floor. I slip on my own blood and fall down onto my back, still pulling myself apart for the art, screaming, hey look at me, I can do this too, I can be like you strong brave clever honest women, look! Look! Look! And Ila turns around and sees that I have disemboweled myself. Oh baby, she says, no baby no, that isn’t how this is done. You can’t do this. This knowledge is available to women and women alone, and you are not a woman, you wish you were but you aren’t, so in trying to reveal your true form you have simply mutilated yourself horribly, and now you are going to bleed to death. You poor thing. You poor delusional man.

Ila’s new true form has a nose which is unbroken, a little cute button nose, and she has bleached her skin. She is utterly false and utterly honest. The room is happy with her, and it will release her, out onto the streets. Her skin sears with immense pain from the bleach. It bubbles, it burns, it scars, she will never be the same again. She will never be happy. But she will have survived fascism, which is something, surely, she will have lived.

Alice is entirely undone, but she tries to lift herself up, her insides sliding out around her. Look at me, she says. This is the most honest I have ever been with anybody. This. My body. My insides. I’m bearing it all. I did this for you, Ila. Not for Hannah. I don’t care about Hannah anymore. She was a victim of this ideology that corrodes our lives. I’m talking about me and you, Ila, you and I, we were best friends, we loved each other, and now we hate each other, and I did this because I do still care about you, because I want you to like me. Look at me! Alice is crying, trying to hold in all of her internal organs in her arms. Ila is crying too. But, Ila says, but why. I don’t want this! I don’t want you to hurt yourself! I always told you, don’t get the operation Alice! You’ll regret it! Alice laughs, oh this isn’t like that operation, though, this isn’t a vaginoplasty, it’s what you think a vaginoplasty is, it’s what you wish it was actually. Ila cries harder because Alice is right. She wanted this. Vaginoplasty is a safe procedure, it is not anything like self-mutilation. And Alice cries looking at Ila, skin peeling away, nose all wrong, because she wanted that, too. They wanted the best for each other, or thought they did. And look where it has gotten them. They’re so focused on each other that Hannah has gone, turned to dust, and maybe she was never there in the first place, maybe she just died from a drug overdose and they buried her out in the forest behind the house and nobody ever thought that was a possibility. Alice, guts trailing across the floor, shuffles towards her friend. They embrace, covered in each other’s insides. I love you, says Ila. I love you, says Alice. And the world comes crashing down around them. Maybe they’ll be okay. Do you think they’ll be okay, in the end? I think they will be. I have to think they will be.