Green Girl (21 page)

I know, I know, listen to this. Ruth began to read:

The angel held a long golden dart in his hands. From time to time he plunged it in my heart and forced it into my entrails. When he withdrew the dart, and it left me all inflamed with love divine…I am certain that the pain penetrated my deepest entrails and it seemed as if they were torn when my spiritual spouse withdrew the arrow with which he had penetrated them.

The two of them giggled like schoolgirls.

Who is that? asked Agnes.

It’s St. Teresa.

What a whore.

Yeah, I know.

So this boy gave this to you?

Yeah.

He’s BIZ-arre, isn’t he? Sometimes they were over while Agnes was getting ready to leave for the night. Ruth could tell Agnes didn’t like Rhys.

A little.

And are you two finally fucking?

No, not yet.

Why not?

I don’t know. He respects me too much, I think. I think he’s afraid I’ll break.

Well, maybe you should read some of that stuff first. It’ll get you in the mood.

They both giggled again. Oh these green girls do they have reverence for anything except the fragility of their own pendulum of mood?

You but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she’s coming. There’s no doubt about it. What is she getting off on?

— Jacques Lacan

Aren’t I attractive? Aren’t you attracted to me?

She is being manipulative and cruel, she knows. She who lets boys into her bed unthinkingly, as a consolation prize.

Why won’t you just fuck me?

Ruth, Ruth. He stares into her eyes. Oh how they have hurt you Ruth. How they have hurt you.

She begs and pleads. She wrests his clothes away from him. He has a large penis flaring like a gray mushroom. A flesh tulip surrounded by a cloud of rust-colored hair. He lies there, skinny and vulnerable. She climbs on top of him. Begins to have sex with him. He lets her. He stares into her eyes helplessly. Then he begins to moan and moan and Ruth watches him writhe about. She watches him with curiosity.

Later he goes down on her, raising his wet face to stare into her eyes lovingly, his face glowing. She feels a shiver of revolt.

She did not desire to be loved and cherished and caressed. She desired a beast. Someone to destroy her. Her own Jack the Ripper. Her own serial killer. She did not want to make love. She wanted to be fucked—over and over again repeating her own disappearance.

When they have sex now she thinks of HIM instead.

The first time we ever had sex you hurt me so badly that I was convinced my appendix had burst. You grabbed at me and shook me like a rag doll, throwing my legs over your shoulders, poking at my womb, my anus, my mouth. I had only known adoration before. Not this hate mixed with semen and want. I wrenched away from you like some hurt animal while you simmered in disgust, your penis dangling like a raw, red, piece of meat.

Afterwards Rhys kisses her tenderly. I love you Ruth. Ruth feels detached. Maybe that’s why she did it. Because afterwards he is just someone else. Something happens and he is just like everybody else and then he can go. Then he can leave too.

I want to dance on your grave in my sparkly reds.

Soon afterwards she began to be cold and distant. She began to complain that Rhys was being too clingy, that he bored her. And why couldn’t he move out of his parents’ house? And why couldn’t he ever fuck her, really fuck her, just throw her against a wall and do vile things to her?

I can’t do that, he would say sorrowfully to Ruth, like a dog that’s been beaten. I’m in love with you. I love you too much.

To make sure it is really over Ruth knows what she has to do. She has to go and sleep with someone else. Start a clean slate. She goes to Ava Gardner’s leaving-do. A leaving-do, that’s what they call a going-away party. She was going on an extended holiday to Egypt or somewhere similarly glamorous and remote and wouldn’t be returning to Horrids.

At the pub Ruth spied a boy giving her the drunken eyes. She looked at him. He came over to talk to her. He was Canadian. He was studying here. Now he was studying her. He has touched her elbow twice. She cannot get over that almost detached curiosity of wondering what someone will look like, naked, suspended over her.

He was a filmmaker. That was what he is going to school for, anyway. I like film too she said. But then can’t think of any film she had ever seen. He listed off directors—Cassavetes, Scorcese. She nodded and sipped her drink. She had never seen
Taxi Driver
. A cardinal sin. He grunted in astonishment, began to lecture her on its significance in film history, world history. Standing there in the crowded noisy pub, their beer splashing against their wrists, she decided that he was arrogant. She decided that she couldn’t stand him. She decided that she will probably sleep with him anyway.

They go to his place. They sit on the couch. He is continuing the conversation. It is a one-way conversation. But later he will want it two-ways, and (if he’s lucky) three.

And there is Ruth. See Ruth. She finds herself in situations, suddenly, on strange couches of strange men, pretending to listen.

He is still talking about himself. She is bored. He never asks about her. He puts on a record and starts talking about the band playing but she has never heard of them. He is dumbstruck. He begins to lecture her on the band’s significance in music history, world history. She pretends to listen. She stares at her empty wineglass. She catches herself looming above her. She is her own ghost.

She has made herself very small on the scratchy sofa. It is that moment. She can feel it. He stops talking. He moves in towards her. His face scrapes against hers, leaving raised welts. His tongue tastes of beer and cigarettes. He is vaguely nauseating.

They go to his bedroom. He shows her something on his fancy Apple computer. He touches it longingly, with more care and feeling than he will later touch her. He shows her the film he has been making. He makes porn videos you can download on the Internet. Ruth stares at these girls, twisting and turning. They are green and ghostly. They writhe about on the floor. They do not know what to do. In those eyes, the sick of nervousness. Off-camera. A voice. That’s right. Sexy. Ooh yeah baby. So so sexy.

Ruth looks about the bedroom. Is she being filmed? But she cannot locate any green flashing light.

And it begins. They begin to fool around. She is the fool. Her clothes fall off. His clothes fall off. Sometimes, gazing up at the ceiling tiles, hazy in her fog of consciousness, she thinks: Why? What am I doing this for? But she forgets and pretends to enjoy it. She makes all the appropriate moaning sounds. She digs her nails into his back, which he interprets as her being hot for him, more, more, when really she is steeling herself as he continues to pound away, while she looks at the green glow of the alarm clock, wondering how much time has elapsed.

It’s getting out of control. I just wish I were a lot older or a lot younger.

— Jean Seberg in Otto Preminger’s
Bonjour, Tristesse

After the sale there was not much to do at work except try to look busy organizing cleaning wiping something whenever the horrible head appeared.

I see Ruth bored behind the counter, waiting until her shift ended. In that moment she reminds me of that painting by Degas, of the salesgirl at the hat shop. She is dressed in drab green, fingering one of the pastel dream creations, as if daydreaming of a life in which she would be the wearer.

Doors opening.

Mind the gap.

40p man had disappeared. Ruth hadn’t seen him for an eternity. Had he picked a new walk to haunt?

She needed to go to Royal Mail to pick up a package her father had sent her. She walks up Brick Lane to Whitechapel, past the whine and drumbeat of Bollywood soundtracks, mixed with the hip-hop emanating from cars. Past men in shawls and caps, who stand outside their storefronts, conversing with the rush. Women in veils silently processing down the street. Little children in knee socks run past. Past a large pack of pigeons pecking on the ground banging their heads against the ground looking looking for what?

Across the street, after the large mosque, is the massive London Royal Hospital. People here do not go to the hospital. They go to hospital, like it’s a state of being. A warm day. Almost spring. Patients in robes and various states of undress, bruised arms pulling on their IV bags, sitting in their wheelchairs, on the steps, having a cigarette or talking on their mobile phones. Others, flanked by attendants in hospital scrubs, stand on the steps, staring, staring into the street. She hands the attendant the slip through the hole in the glass. The attendant returns with an envelope. The postmark from Chicago. Ruth rips it open. It is money, in sterling. Enough to get by for the next few weeks. A belated Christmas present. No note.

She pushes through the Whitechapel markets. They are packing up for the day, sad pieces of fruit, a table of fake watches, cell-phone covers. Past a shop for school uniforms, disembodied plaid jumpers and navy blue shorts, a shop with saris on similarly headless mannequins, past a shop for dress dummies, arranged in sexual positions. She turns onto Brick Lane. It starts to rain softly, slippery on the cobblestones.

The men waiting outside her landlord’s restaurant smile at her. They now know that she is not hungry. Or if she was hungry, that she could not would not dine there tonight. They recognize her by now. She wondered what they saw when they looked at her, head down, blonde bulb dirtying with the quickening rain. She wondered what they saw in her.

She puts in her notice at Horrids. It is awkward running into Rhys all the time who stares at her like a wounded puppy. (They are both puppies, puppies I feel an urge to drown just to put them out of their misery. The euthanasia of youth.)