Tell Me I'm Worthless(61)

They are still marching along the street. The sides of the road are lined with people, bus stops, benches. And under one of those benches, the boy, who stands close but not too close, has stuffed his rucksack. He watches, waiting.

Them

says a voice. It doesn’t scare him. It feels comforting, like the words of a loving parent, but it makes him feel far safer than either of his parents’ voices made him feel.

That group there you see them don’t you how do they make you feel?

They make me feel angry, he thought.

Why do they make you feel angry?

They are hedonists, they are degenerates, they are part of the plague that tears this country down into the dirt.

This is a parade full of people like that but you hate them more don’t you why do you hate them more?

Because they scream.

Yes.

They scream hysterically. It hurts my head. It hurts my ears.

They scream like Heidegger as a woman yes so do it then

says the voice

do it then come home, come home.

They march up the street, and he watches them as just another random onlooker. They get closer. Their voices grow louder. The tall tranny with the loudspeaker is shouting nonsense to the sky. He waits, until the group is in line with the bench, and then he calls the number. His heart is thumping. What if it doesn’t work? He might have fucked up the whole thing. What if it doesn’t work, and he’s just another liar posting on the forum, claiming he’s going to be the one to do it when in reality he’s too much of a fucking idiot to do anything at all. But then it comes. The elation. The euphoric burst of light that shoots through him, golden, and he feels like he could fly as the bomb goes off, shooting parts of the bench high above everyone’s heads. The force of the explosion knocks everyone down, even him. He thought he was standing far enough away, but no, he falls, into the pile of degenerates around him, crushed beneath their bodies, spluttering for air. He pushes through them and pulls himself up into his brave new world, above his lessers who are still crawling in the dirt beneath him. He can see them, the group. They were knocked down, and parts of the bench smashed into them. They are scattered around, bodies over bodies, blood pooling underneath them. He looks down upon them and knows that he will be a legend. Soon there will be sirens. He leaves before they can get to him, but they will. They’ll come to his flat, and pull him from his room, the eyes in the wall oozing tears. The policemen will arrest him, peacefully. Maybe they will take him to McDonald’s first, before they go to the station. As he eats his burger, the policeman will look at him and ask, oh son, why did you do this? And the boy will take another bite. I have to believe my life has meaning, he thinks. I have to believe that I have worth.

But for now he leaves, as if he was never there. Amongst the rubble, Harry lies, feeling the dead weight of others on top of him. He splutters. There’s no sound at all. He wonders why it’s silent, before realising that the explosion has destroyed his hearing. There are limbs all around him. Most of them are connected to bodies. Most of them are moving. Some are not. He crawls through the bodies, and the rubble. The sunlight feels brighter than it did before. Alice is lying close to him, her eyes open. At first he panics, but then her head turns towards him. She mouths something, but he can’t hear. She mouths it again, and he understands. He goes to her, on his hands and knees, rubble and blood and bodies all around them. The police, the ambulance, the news crews. They are coming. Photographers are taking pictures of them, and they will put these pictures on the front pages of newspapers, and the picture will be with them forever, they won’t ever escape it, two trans people covered in blood and embracing amidst the carnage. The photographer who gets the image wins a prize for it. They don’t know that yet. They only know this: Harry crawls towards Alice with the last of his strength, his arms outstretched and reaching. The rain will come. When it does it will be bloody. The future will be red-tinted and unknowable, but they will be together. Come to me now, mouths Alice. Hold me.





Acknowledgements


Thank you to Callie Gardner. I will miss you terribly. Thank you to the Devils Dyke Network.

Jenn and Ellis from Cipher have provided me with a valuable platform that I never expected to get. It feels so surreal to me every day that this book is a thing. Thank you so, so much, for taking a chance on an extremely wild and gross book that I was certain was unpublishable. And thank you to Wolf and to Wolf’s wife, too, for the brilliant cover.

During the initial drafting process, some people were kind enough to read this book. Mimi, Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver, Constance Savage, Francine Toon, Harry Josephine Giles: thank you all so much, without your helpful comments and feedback I would probably have given up on it.

Thank you to Kat Sinclair, Nehaal Bajwa and James Garwood Cole, for your nights and days of friendship. May we chill out together again soon.

I started writing this book at the urging of Jess Burgess, and read them the opening in their living room whilst drinking hot tea that they brought to me. They said they liked it. They later read a first draft and cried at the ending, which made me feel powerful.

Julia Armfield and Rosalie Bower thank you for keeping my head from melting, and for hyping this book up. Thank you to Eliza Clark in this regard as well.

Christie – Princess Prosecco is going to fuck the world up.

This novel is indebted to the grand tradition of queer horror, from Shirley Jackson and Daphne Du Maurier to Helen Oyeyemi and Clive Barker. There are more writers that I love than I can name here, but their work is folded into every sentence of what I write.