Little Cat (22 page)

‘I can feel every cock that has ever been inside me.’

Buildings grew up ahead. We were back in the city, back near the club.

‘When she promised to never again defile herself,’ Gio said, in his normal voice, ‘Mary was finally let into the church. Mary was ready to be led to salvation. The voice of the Mother of God came to her and said, “Cross the river Jordan and there you will find rest.”’

‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

‘When I met her, Mira, Adi had already been wandering for years. She was a naked girl with no hair on her vagina who had not eaten for years.’

I was swallowing, fighting the vomit back down. I closed my eyes to shut up my throat.

Gio’s whole body was shaking strangely. I wanted to curl far away from him. I had the bloody pillow behind my back. I took it and hugged it:
Mommy’s special pillow.

God, get me out of this fucking white car. Get me to a toilet quick.

‘Jesus said that we must bring forth what is within us or else it will destroy us.’

‘But I’ve welcomed every cock, every dirty, hot and cursed one.’

‘We must bring forth what is inside us … ’

I felt myself smiling, my lips shut with shame.

‘We must bring forth what is inside us, Mira … ’

‘We must bring forth what is inside us, Mira … ’ I mimicked.

‘Or else it will destroy us.’

‘Or else it will destroy us.’

Stopped at some tracks with my eyes flashing red, I took Adi’s pillow and opened the car door. Gio didn’t stop me. I stepped out bleeding and slammed the fucking door hard. Gio waited for the lights to turn green. He drove over the tracks. I walked on water.

VIGOUR

I
spat on the gravel. I was limping, bloody, heading toward the park, thinking what made me be with a strange older guy for my very first time and then never say a word? I spit on the gravel. What made me be some freakish escapee like Mary, Gio’s twelve-year-old whore? I lurched toward the lights. I could still hear his white car squealing away. Gio had flipped some kind of switch in my chest that made me horny for him while he hated me! I worshipped his body without my consent.

Fuck, what made me think that I could handle grown men, fucked-up ones like Gio and John, and then just reject them, X them out of my life? Why didn’t I call the police?

I could not handle a man or a woman. I could not be trusted with anything.

I had actually seen John again – he’d come to the club one night about a month ago with Michael, just before Adi left. I was totally freaked out when I saw them at first because it had been almost four years and I had no fucking idea how they knew I was there. I mean, they didn’t know I was there, but I was scared when they saw me they might want me back. I wanted to get high when I saw them, fucked up and high. Adi told me, though, to go over and surprise them.
Fuck them
, she said.
Fuck what happened, past is past. Go, Mira, go be a mirror to them!

Adi was braver than me, she was always braver than me.

From the black-lit side of the room, I could see that Michael was sick. I mean, he was green, and his clothes were practically falling off him. I thought:
He has
AIDS
.
John looked like some kind of gorilla beside him.

They were drinking beer and chain-smoking. John was overexcited, eyeing all the writhing things.

‘So, it’s fifty a song, big boy,’ I said, leaning on their table, my tits in John’s face. I felt like a businessman mirror.

John immediately pulled away like he was scared of me. I started laughing at the expression on his face. I couldn’t help it. He looked like someone had just sliced off his fingertip or something. He was swallowing and swallowing, pushing his chin into his throat.

Michael started laughing like me. ‘You still watch the Mira tapes every week, don’t you, Johnny?’

It was like John couldn’t take the sight of me so close to him. He kept retreating his head like a turtle does. I had on my pink cut-off T-shirt, the one that was so short you could see the bottoms of my tits. I was standing above John with my hands on my hips.

Me and Michael seriously couldn’t stop laughing. Michael’s eyes were the same, but everything else on his skull was shrunken.

‘What’s going on with you?’ I asked.

Michael coughed so hard he had to put out his cigarette.

‘Nothing,’ he finally got out.

‘You look like a ghost,’ I said. Then quickly added, ‘Sorry.’

‘No, Mira, it’s you that looks like shit.’ John was angry. He lit another cigarette.

‘Shut up, Johnny,’ Michael snapped. ‘Mira looks hot. You look a fuck of a lot hotter as a lady, Mirabella.’

‘Just get rid of those tapes already, will you?’ I yelled at John, feeling half-embarrassed, half-proud from what Michael had just said. ‘I’m not your fucking eternal release.’

John nodded. He closed his eyes. Michael crack-toothed smiled at me. Lights flashed over his face, red and green.

‘Our Lady,’ Michael said, suddenly sitting up tall and looking around the club. ‘If I were to put on a play in which women had roles, I would insist that these roles be performed by adolescent boys and I would so inform the audience by means of a placard, which would remain nailed to the right or left of the sets throughout the performance.’

I leaned down toward Michael and put my lips on his temple.

‘Our Lady,’ I whispered. Michael’s blood beat visibly there. He nodded and chewed on his bottom lip. ‘It’s really okay,’ I said. ‘Our good wishes are furtive and whispered, as, among others, those of proud servants and lepers must be.’

I turned to John, but he still wouldn’t look at me. He was sucking so hard on his cigarette that the filter got wrinkled.

Michael grabbed on to my wrist and dug his fingers in. It reminded me of Nadia grabbing my arm at the bar with Adi, so long ago.

Michael said my name desperately. ‘Mira, let’s read together, okay?’

I tried to smile. ‘I have to work,’ I said.

Then I went straight over to Adi, who welcomed me into her humping. I knew John would take a good look at me now. Me and Adi were fearsome, a tower, me pulling my shirt up, tits bare and jiggling, her squeezing me on top of a guy. I felt myself as pure sex power – hard and soft and completely plugged in. Adi’s rules of engagement had worked: I’d been a mirror with them, finally hard-edged and
clear
.

The next time I looked over, John and Michael were gone.

I climbed the rotting wooden stairs to the field where I’d been with Lani and Coco. I took off my shoes. Blood had run into them. I needed a patch wet with muddiness or dew. I got down on my knees and I dug through the grass. I got past the gravelly part until I struck mud, raking bugs, wrecking ant holes. I dug the ditch until I could feel up to my wrists, then my elbows, and I dug to my shoulder. Until I could’ve fallen in. I dropped Adi’s pillow in there.
Mommy’s special pillow.
I threw the ant-holed mud-wrecked earth on top. It was Adi who told me that all girls are whores. But only those who stay whores die.

I knew Michael lived in one of those massive high-rise buildings downtown. I’d gone with John to visit him once on the twenty-second floor. I remembered how his place had a mustard-coloured shag carpet and cubic glass fixtures from the seventies. It had smelled like John’s at Michael’s place, too, that one time we’d been: burnt vegetable oil and smoke on top of smoke.

I found Michael’s name on the directory, but it didn’t say the number of his place. I waited until a woman came out from the lobby. It was late but there was no security guard.

I took the elevator to the twenty-second floor. It smelled like pepperoni in the hallway. I heard an electronic beat, so many
TV
s.

I didn’t remember which door was his. The floor was a maze of brown and gold doors. I walked into dead ends, then retraced my steps. I passed the elevators at least three times.

When Gio had stopped the car in the middle of the road, before he pulled me out and after he’d yelled, it felt like this time with my father when I was twelve, when he’d picked me up from a sleepover at Nadia’s aunt’s place up north. I’d called him to get me because I felt so stressed out from the night that I just needed to be at home. But when we’d arrived, I wouldn’t get out of the car. It was early in the morning on a Sunday and I’d made it through the night, but I remember how my father yelled at me when I wouldn’t get out of the car; he used the same voice that he used with the dog. He was this strange man in our driveway yelling for my mother: ‘She won’t get out of the car! She won’t get out of the bloody car!’ My father’s dull body with his face full of hair, hair around his lips and a voice full of spite. He was a person with skin red from yelling. That was what I knew inside the car, with my legs squeezed together, with my mother running out in her bathrobe, at the car, leaning in: ‘What’s wrong with you, Mira?’

My mother spoke to my father with hoarseness in her throat. She said, ‘Go in the house. Everything’s fine.’

My mother told my father I was fine.

With my mother’s head poking back into the car, her coffee breath, it was easy enough to get out.

‘What is it, Mira?’ She said something like that. ‘What is wrong with you?’ Sighing. ‘I’m sure there’s a reason for this.’

My mother put her arm around me even though I felt too old for hugs. We walked slowly to the house. We walked slowly up the stairs. It was all too gloomy between my mother and me, when I should have laughed, I was on the verge.

Nadia’s aunt and boyfriend had been having sex through the walls all night. Her aunt was an alcoholic who had given me and Nadia our first beers. There was this choked sound or a pop. I’d never heard sounds like the sounds that she made that night, all night, and I thought she could’ve been dead and I wanted to wake Nadia up but I was too scared. I wanted to go home, I just wanted my home.

Back at home, though, when I was twelve, when my father yelled for my mother because I wouldn’t get out of the car, I knew for certain that something was wrong. Something was fucked between women and men. I knew it because of the way that Nadia’s aunt acted like nothing was wrong in the morning light. I knew it when Nadia joked with her aunt. I knew because of how my mother looked at me after she told my father that everything was fine. I knew that both of them believed now that something wasn’t fine but neither of them knew exactly what it was. Or exactly how to talk to me ever again.

The problem with my father yelling and the problem with my mother’s gloom and the fucked-up problem between men and women, between me and Ezrah and every man I’d ever known, was that I knew right now – the problem was mine.

I slid away like a snake from my home. Because what my parents thought about me was true. What your parents think about you is true! What your father thinks, what your mother thinks, all of it is perfectly true. Your body is helpless so far from the ground as you grow. You’re see-through and flimsy and if you don’t slide away, slither, then you’ll stay and you’ll lie and have your head filled with their shit.

When a girl’s body is just starting to be formed, people teach her to ignore the men in the street. Just ignore and ignore and all will be fine. If there’s a buzzing in your pants, don’t say a word. Even if something cracks loudly in your head, some rotting fence about to fall over, don’t say a word, because everything’s fine.

But sometimes some things need to be said!

All great whores become pure
, Gio said.

I knocked on Michael’s brown painted door with key scratches in the centre. I had to knock ten times, loud, because of the drum noise pounding.

‘Mirabella,’ the skeleton smiled.

Michael shivered under his stained robe. He had long grey hairs growing out of his chin. An unlit cigarette stuck to his lip.

‘Hi,’ I said. Then I started to cry.

Michael turned away from me and lurched headfirst into the noise. I locked the door behind me. It sounded like
AC/DC
or something. There was a chemical stink that mixed with the smell of my blood. Michael’s place was a mess of teacups and blankets in tents on the floor, bottles on their sides and books off the shelves – split open and stuck in the shape of brooms.

I didn’t want to sit and I didn’t want to stand.

Michael teetered and dropped down on his black couch, moaning as he dropped.

‘Stop crying, Mirabella. I want to watch you dance.’

‘Why?’ I screamed, trying to stop myself from more crying when he was the one sick. ‘I can’t move to this!’

‘It’s Swedish – Dead Korinthians,’ Michael said. He didn’t have to scream. ‘I can’t read anymore.’

I stood there in front of him, pooling blood. I couldn’t move. The sound was male howling.

‘Dance, Mira!’ the skeleton said. He raised his purple-knuckled fist in the air.

I started moving my hips in tiny circles on top of my legs. The music ramped up and Michael fisted along. His hand turned into a V sign, then back to a fist.

I gyrated and spun. Me and Michael entered the obliteration of open men’s throats. The backs of my legs started spasming in pain, the way they had in Gio’s car.

I heard Michael chanting. I let my head hang. I let my arms hang. I realized that all I’d really done in the past year for exercise or anything else was dance at the club, dance in high heels. My legs felt dead. I hung my head down to that sound. Almost all of my body had turned into static. I felt blood in my eyes. I started to get used to the hanging, this feeling of trying to feel through the numbness.

I looked through my hair at Michael. He was smiling at me, perfect in midnight light.

This near-dead man wanted the truth out of me.

Between my head and the carpet, I felt hot little beats. I wrapped my arms around my legs, hugged my chest to my thighs. It felt so good to have my stomach in a fold. My whole body spiralled in on itself.

Michael’s face seemed thicker, suddenly pink. The song finished so abruptly that the silence rang in my ears. I stood up, unsteady. I rubbed my hands on my face.

‘You dance like a warrior woman now. How’d that happen, Mirabella?’

I felt proud and then embarrassed.

‘Uh, there was this guy that I was seeing at the club and he said that the first time he saw me dancing he felt ashamed for me. He said I was up there because of men’s longings. Like, that all men wanted me to be their whore. And that reminded me of you and John, like how I grew up with you guys or something. But Gio said he didn’t know if I could handle that yet. He said he didn’t know if I knew how to soothe a man yet. How to let all these strange men love me for their own release. Gio said that the other girls forgot what they did – grabbing on to men’s cocks for a living. Gio said I was different. All the great whores become pure, Gio said.’

I felt pins and needles all over my body.