Innocents (25 page)

My own intricate web of rules was ripped to shreds. I had bled as I had never allowed my imagined victims to bleed, cried as they'd never been permitted to cry, been caused pain which went beyond the sexual; or which was more mundane than the sexual.

I wanted to die.

Like any teenager, I had considered suicide before. A year or two earlier, one of my morbid fantasies had dealt with my slit wrists, my pale body floating in a blood-red, lukewarm bath. I was the Lady of Shalott, in a suburban bathroom. That imagined death had seemed fitting, grittily romantic. Now, your disposable razor by the sink, which awoke the possibility of a real end—here, soon—was not darkly poetic. It was plastic. It was bright yellow. It evoked nothing but an hysterical, chaotic passage from pain into oblivion. Death is a trauma, not a catharsis.

‘Baby!’ Your voice was high, frantic.

To staunch my fears I thrust my wrist into my mouth. I bit down hard upon that round flesh.

In the mirror, I saw myself, all painted with the body's out-pourings.

I saw myself befouled.

Where I'd held my wrist against my face, there gleamed, visceral in the artificial light, a foul cascade of bodily waters—your ejaculate, my vomit, and my spittle.

I thought: Death always comes this way. It stalks us as a shadow, an idea. It floats above our lives, like an equation. Then it descends, and it is of the body. Blood and spit and spew belong to death. It is a dirty business.

Compare the ideal with the battle. Compare the cause with the fight. I saw noble pennants flutter in the wind. I saw corpses sprayed with blood, their faces muddied.

Like my subjugated creatures, I was beaten. But where my acts on them had been like logic, abstract, this act on me was concrete. It dribbled down my face and ran between my thighs—fluid, and certain.

This mess was the reality. It was punishment for my cleanly conceived thoughts.

‘Baby?’ you called, scratching on the door like an anxious pet.

I opened it, just a crack. But I didn't let you in.

I wasn't angry with you. I was like an octopus, instinctively squirting ink when provoked. Everything went black.

‘Fuck off,’ I said. I didn't even look at you. I blurred my eyes deliberately. ‘Just leave me alone.’

You stood still for a few seconds. And then you moved away and disappeared and I heard the door slam downstairs.

Standing in the bathroom, bleeding, my arms empty, I began really to feel old.

T

The first time I found one of those slim envelopes on the doormat and realised you'd been in the house, I thought it was a letter. I cried when I found the wad of fifty-dollar notes.

I haven't spent much of it, apart from the rent, of course. I'm keeping the rest for you, in a biscuit tin.

Then it was hard when I realised you were coming every Tuesday. I wanted to stay home from school when I knew you'd be coming, and look at you through the curtains. But I couldn't. The very thought reminded me of my horrible, destructive voyeurism, and I just couldn't.

Living alone and despairing like this, I have come to a terrifying awareness of the tragedy of the simple and the practical. Each morning, for example, I must wash my face. After dinner, I must brush my teeth. I do these things because I must—but each action has about it the worthlessness of finality, like the futile last meal a condemned prisoner eats before having his life snatched away. The basic, life-sustaining actions—the fork stabbing the potato, the chewing and the swallowing—are all about to be swept away before huge concerns, the soft embrace of the noose or the deadly current that runs through the chair; and yet, when the moment is appropriate, they must be performed, in full, stark awareness of their futility, the damnable smallness and forgettableness of them.

My actions—plaiting my hair, making a sandwich, pulling the covers over myself when I lay my body down in bed—are worse. Instead of the enormity of death they stand dwarfed before the enormity of human time. They are defiled by routine. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow are bad enough. The thought of the insufferable future freezes my mind, makes me close my eyes with an insidious,
still
terror. But
today
! Today, and today, and today, this eternity the present, make my heart beat fast with disgust and with fear.

I feel as though my brain is running to fat, or is puffy and misted with tears, like my eyes.

The house looks pretty bad. I can't be bothered doing the washing up. I leave the plates where they stand, with the forks still in them.

You aren't here to finish the painting. I haven't done any more. I don't know how. The wall in the hall outside our bedroom is half tobacco-stained off-white and half pastel-cream. There's a wavering line between the old coat and the new. It looks pitiful, like the hurriedly abandoned homes of evacuees.

I find myself flicking through your scribbled notes. It's not that I want to read the subject matter. I just like looking at your handwriting.

I don't know if I quite believe all this stuff I've read about handwriting experts, who claim that the formations of letters on the page represent a kind of emotional contour map. Yet I've spent so much of the afternoon looking at these curly lines, that the bright sun has all leaked away and I've had to turn the light on.

Your lower-case n's are straight on the left and dip down sharply on the right. They remind me of the movement of your hips when we made love, that carnal spasm of your lower body which sometimes so embarrassed you in your dignity and sophistication. ‘Any dog can do this,’ you said once in disgust. Poor angel.

Your o's are bigger than they need to be; sensuously oversized. They make me think of a time when we sat topless, kissing, on this exact couch. I fiddled with your belt and you pushed my hand away, saying, ‘No … no, just let me touch you,’ moving your hands in sweeping gentle circles over my skin.

I know I must seem humourless. I can't remember the last time I found anything funny. I suppose it's because, for a thing to seem funny, it must disturb the order of things. That's why movie audiences laugh at businessmen falling over. But everything whirls so impossibly around for me. I haven't any set of standards to judge funniness against. Nothing seems ridiculous. Everything's uncertain.

Often I'm just sort of
knowing
—in the same way that the sky is just sort of
up there
—that of course I am just a creature that suffers and suffers.

But, at times, I find myself spreading butter on my toast. I find myself lying on my back in the bath, hair spread out in the water, shaking out the shampoo with my fingers. And these little actions are utterly painless.

I wonder what I'd say to you. If I heard your key in the lock, at this moment. If I heard you jogging on your toes up the stairs to this room. If you sauntered in and, sitting on the edge of the bed, smiled and said, ‘All is forgiven.’

Speaking to you, I would be spitting out the splinters of teeth and the mess of blood that are all that remains of my chewed-up mind. I wouldn't plead unmitigable sorrow, endless suffering. I wouldn't display my despair proudly, as an acknowledgement of guilt and proof of redemption.

I'd say: ‘Tell me something.’ I'd say: ‘I don't know what to
think
.’

Mr Harrison knows; or he guesses. I've shown him, somehow. According to some deeper will, I've acted moments of stress, of abandonment. I've closed my eyes in pain when it looked as though I thought no-one was looking. I knew his eyes were on me.

I've awakened his curiosity, almost deliberately. When I walk past him, all my powers coalesce and he can't help but watch me.

He asked me to stay back after class yesterday. Everyone glanced at me, casually curious, as they scooped up books and papers and left.

I sat. I was frozen. I thought about momentary lapses of concentration, spinning wheels, twisted metal. It seemed incongruous.

Palms down on the desk in front of me, he balanced on straight arms, and raised one eyebrow.

He was closer to me than he'd ever been before. That unfamiliar smell, a cocktail of medicines and cheap shampoo, wafted over me. I didn't move. The strangeness of him cut into me.

‘Is everything all right?’

I couldn't tell him the truth. I didn't have time to formulate a lie. ‘Yeah.’ I leaned backwards slightly. I had to get away from that smell.

He misjudged my action and stepped back, embarrassed. I realised, a second too late, that he thought I was telling him he was too close for comfort.

‘Sure?’ He half-shrugged, arms extended, in apology.

I said nothing. The hairs on his arm were all swept against the grain. I wanted vaguely to brush them back the right way.

His upturned palm seemed to be waiting for something to land on it from above.

He took a breath, preparing to speak. Then his hand closed on empty air, and he turned away.

It was an anticlimax.

I was almost disappointed.

I fantasise about absolution.

I close my eyes, and give myself cancer. I lie in a hospital bed, a living skeleton, skin stretched tight over riddling malignancies.

There are two versions of this fantasy.

In the first, which I have usually in the mornings, you never come to see me. I lie there, waiting and waiting, thinning and thinning, coughing and coughing, but you don't come.

The Catholic priest drops by. He's fat and well meaning. He leaves prayer cards and pamphlets in a pile by my bed. I get sicker as the pile gets higher. One day, the priest asks me if I would like him to give me confession. I say that you are the only person I would possibly want to confess anything to. Half-forgotten snippets of church monologues float through my mind: ‘… in my thoughts and in my deeds … in what I have done and in what I have failed to do …’ Sixteen years old and hopelessly alone, I stare at the ceiling, waiting to slide into that unknowable blackness. It seems only fair.

In the second version, which tends to hit me late at night, when midnight melodrama seizes my tired mind, you come rushing in at almost the last moment. You take my limp, clammy fingers and press them to your lips. You're crying. I tell you not to. I say, ‘It's only fair.’

I'm getting a bit self-indulgent now.

I've told you my story. I've communicated my apologies. I've found an envelope and written your name on the front. I'm just delaying the moment when I'll have to seal all this away and give it to you.

I don't want to. I think about how much safer and more satisfying it would be to let you go on bearing the great weight of guilt for what has happened. I know that guilt. I know it's mine. But it crushes me, do you understand? It presses me down and empties me all out. I wish there was some way I could let you keep it, just keep it away from me. But I can't. Not without it destroying you, and I can't let that happen.

I will have destroyed myself, with this letter. Or at least, I will have destroyed the image of myself I'd created in your mind. It's hard to let it go. It's all I have.

P

I
knew
you were going to hate me for this.

I
knew
you'd be furious. I
knew
you'd feel foolish and deceived.

Tuesday has come again, and this morning I left it on the front mat where you'd be sure to see it when you came to give me the money. I could hardly bear to put it down. My hand sweated, gripping it, and the ink in your name started to run.

When I came home from school and saw it was gone, I felt sick. Really darkly nauseous, as though I had food poisoning.

I was nervous, too. It was like being a child again. I knew I'd been bad and I knew I was going to get in trouble and I just had to sit there, swallowing my fear, and wait.

I couldn't speak when you came inside. I just stood at the bottom of the stairs, holding the polished banister-head.