Tell Me I'm Worthless(8)

I wake up to a loud thump, feeling it underneath me. Sabi is sitting up in bed, with the covers pulled up to her chin, and her eyes wide and manic.

“Was that the door?” I ask sleepily. I know it wasn’t. I felt the thump, physically. And then there’s another one, even harder this time. My brain rushes towards lucidity, and I realise that it is not the door, or the wall, or the ceiling. It’s coming from beneath us, from underneath the bed, where it hides in the dark with all those pictures of Ila and I, along with unopened letters from the bank and from the gender clinic, down there with the repressed things, and now it is trying to push up against the ceiling it found when it reached out, trying to push it away so it can rise to the surface. The man in the poster. The thing inside the man in the poster. Flowers gently in his hand. I sit up and pull Sabi close to me.

“It’s underneath us,” I say, quietly.

“It?”

“Don’t move or it will... I don’t know, just don’t move. Shh now, quiet.”

The thumping stops, leaving a momentary, cold silence. I wonder if that’s it. Maybe it retreated back to its bandmates, to sing mournfully about lost love and growing up lonely, but then there’s a scraping. I can feel it beneath me on the underside of the bed. The noise of sharp fingernails against wood fills the air. We fall back together and press close as the bed starts, slowly, to slide to the left. Sabi screams, I have to put my hand over her mouth to get her to stop. She hits me, hard, with the back of her hand.

“Get off me!” she says. I try to grab her in panic, trying to stop her from doing what she is about to do. I miss, and she jumps from the bed, onto the floor.

“You’re fucking insane,” she says, “you’re fucking insane.”

As she stands there looking at me like I’m the worst thing in the world, a pale hand appears from the gap underneath the bed. She doesn’t see it. I point to it, trying to warn her, but before she can look down it grabs onto her ankle. Sabi screams again, and the hand jerks her to the ground and across the floor towards the dark space where the man in the poster hides with sightless eyes and an open mouth spurting a melodic voice. Sabi scrabbles at the floor with her fingers but there’s nothing to hold onto. I can hear him singing, as if this isn’t my bedroom, as if he isn’t a spirit inhabiting a poster of a man who isn’t even dead. He’s singing like he’s at Finsbury Park. He’s singing like England is for the English, he’s singing and pulling at Sabi, Sabi is screaming, I am screaming at him to let her go, let go of her, let her go... I jump off the bed after her and put my arms around her waist. His pull is strong, eating at her, england for the english, england for the english, panic but england for the english I wear black on the outside ‘cause this is not your country and – now a hand from nowhere appears and claps over my mouth. I hear a woman whisper that this, here, this is her pussy, I’m a little doll and she is going to paint me, I look up at her and see a pale face bent strangely, her neck is broken, and I am her broken little pussy, abnormal and wet. I don’t let go of Sabi, though. My arms are locked around her. I can’t see anything. The man in the poster can’t see, because I blacked out his eyes, thank fucking God I blacked out his eyes. My dead ex-girlfriend can see me, but she’s barely real, she’s only here because the membrane of repression has broken, she can be pushed back down into the mud, but her neck is broken, and she wants to break mine. Not the real girl, you understand, she would never have broken my neck. I don’t think. I don’t know. She did hurt me once but. It is whatever is inside the memory of her now, whatever that is, maybe it’s me, maybe I am haunting myself, maybe I have always been haunting myself. I exist under conditions of the absolute. If you cut a cunt into my forehead, what is that for, who is getting the power there, you do it to tease me, here’s what you want but not how you want it, here’s what you want me to do but I do it all wrong. You can tell me ghosts aren’t real all you like, but rooms are real, they have real walls with angles that hold suggestions cut deep into the blueprints, and sometimes, in those blueprints, someone has hidden your childhood hero in the walls, with no chance of exorcism. I feel the pull on Sabi go slack. I loosen my hold. She runs away from me, for the door.

“You’re insane,” she shouts at me again. And underneath the bed, the singer’s face peers out from the darkness, but the darkness is his eyes and he fades away into it. There is no longer a hand over my mouth. There is no longer anything. The door opens, and Sabi is gone. I am going to stay here all night. This is going to happen forever. Ila is somewhere else, dreaming of single-sexed bathrooms. I miss Hannah, I miss her screaming along to songs with filthy lyrics, shaking her hair until it was wild. I miss her screaming in the rotting redness, with her limbs askew. I can try to make my limbs askew if I work hard at it. I’m not very flexible, true, but I can work hard at it. I’ll get better for Hannah.

I stand up, my legs shaking, and see that Sabi has left her phone on my bedside table, next to the half-drunk bottle of wine. I put on some clothes and shoes, the same ones I had worn out earlier, although they feel strangely cold and damp now, in the wee small hours of the morning. I grab her phone and run after her, hoping that she hasn’t vanished.

She’s outside, sitting on the curb, shaking. “You left your phone,” I say from behind her.