21 October 2012
“You have to go now,” I say, because the sight of him in my bed is making me want to screw up my eyes and say the word “safe” four times and one for luck. I resist because he’s looking up at me now. I’m standing next to the bed, with a towel round my body. I’ve already showered last night off me. He grins. He wants me to come back to bed with him but I say it again, to show him I mean it.
“Well, that’s me told,” he says sarcastically, throwing back the covers and huffing through his nose. I can’t believe I felt so different last night. It’s always the same. The night is exciting and passionate, sexy and coke-fuelled. The morning is horrible and dark and I feel wrong. Why do I do it? A fly brushes close to my face and I waft at it, then I turn away because now I have to screw my eyes up so tight they hurt and the black world behind my lids is filled with blotches of colour. Safe safe safe safe. And one for luck: safe.
I walk out of the bedroom. “Livie,” he calls after me, quite gently. I’m shamed that he remembers my name. I can’t remember his. He knows nothing else about me though. He doesn’t know I’m a fucking weirdo. I can hide it for a while, like when I’m out with my friends and I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine, like last night in the club. When he came over, I couldn’t look at him at first, but he thought that was because I’m shy. That’s what they always think. Boys seem to like that. I’m not shy though. It’s just that sometimes I can’t look at people because I’m afraid my eyes can hurt them, like give them cancer or something.
I scrunch my eyes up really tight again until the blotches come, to get rid of that horrible word, and then I go downstairs. Safe safe safe safe. Safe. The filth in the house makes me feel sick. There are just too many out-of-reach corners and surfaces in a big old place like this. That bloody fly seems to be following me. I hate flies, but they are always too quick to kill so I end up putting up with them. While no-one’s around, I take the opportunity to open my mouth really wide until it stretches at the sides and feels as if it’s going to tear and I can hear that rushing in my ears like when you yawn. I’ve been needing to do that for ages.
God, why can’t I just be normal? I know I don’t need to do these things. I know my eyes can’t give people cancer and I know the house isn’t filthy. But even though I know all that, I feel the opposite. And my feelings are stronger than my knowing. I can’t stop myself. As I reach the kitchen, I even have to do the one where I stretch my arms, legs and neck so that all my joints burn and I’m standing on tip-toe until my body feels cleansed. Then I relax, worried that he might have followed me downstairs and seen me doing that. I turn, he hasn’t. The cleansed feeling will only last for a few minutes and I’ll have to do it all over again. I can tell it’s going to be like that today. Probably because of what I did last night, on some sort of deep, psychological level that I’ve never managed to unpick.
I put the kettle on and stand in the middle of the kitchen with my arms folded and shoulders hunched up. I can’t quite bear to touch anything unless I have to. In my head, I’m re-living last night, in disjointed, non-chronological chunks: the sex, mostly, but also laughing in the pub with Lisa and Hannah. God knows what happened to them! I do manage to have a laugh sometimes, after a bit of self-medication. Sometimes I manage to forget the weird thoughts and obsessions which fill my head, and just get on and have a laugh, like normal people.
I see that fly sitting on the work-top. It must have found a crumb or something. I try not to think about its horrible mouth-parts, but I already know from my GCSE days that they are like enormous red lips on the end of a trunk-like tube, with grooves all the way up inside, lined with little serrated teeth, and as I watch they are puking bile onto the crumb and sucking it up as the crumb is reduced to a bubbling froth by the bile. They vomit in reverse: their bile digests the food before they eat it, then, when it’s all turned to sick, they suck it back up, relishing the taste of their own pre-digested dinner. It makes me want to shriek. I look around for a way to kill it, grab a tea-towel and take a swipe. The towel slaps the work-top but the fly escapes, and settles on the ceiling, looking down at me triumphantly. And now the tea-towel has got fly-puke-dinner on it so I’ll have to boil-wash it. In fact, I might never be able to bring myself to use it again. I might as well just keep it as a fly swat now. Safe safe safe safe. Safe. Eyes-scrunch. Mouth-stretch.
The kettle clicks off, the water bubbling inside it like fly-bile on a crumb, and footsteps on the stairs make me turn my head. “Great place,” he says. “I hardly noticed it last night!” The place is actually pretty odd: an old chapel with lots of open-plan spaces and mezzanine floors. Very modern, in an ironic sort of way. In fact, the ironic thing is it was modernised in the early 90s and it’s all looking a bit shabby now. He’s only wearing his boxers, and he’s breathing his breath into the air I have to breathe. He’s grinning laconically, as if we have a shared appreciation for last night’s naughtiness, and I am suddenly frozen by the thought that he might try to kiss me. He’s coming towards me, swaggering as if he’s proud of what he achieved last night, and then the cat-flap clatters and in comes that little tabby cat that seems to think it lives here. I can barely bring myself to touch it, but it gives me a chance to duck away from the encroaching kiss, and I grab the cat, turn it round and shove it straight back out of the flap. I move the bin in front of it so the cat can’t get back in. I feel guilty now, because sometimes I welcome the creature in, and let it sit on my lap while I watch Hollyoaks. I even stroke it sometimes. But I can’t do that today.
Now I’ve got cat-lick all over my hands, so I push past the human intruder and run the hot tap. Over my shoulder I say, “I have to go out soon, so you’ll have to go. I’ve got to get ready.” But he comes right up behind me and puts his hands on my waist. He dips his head towards my neck, moving my hair out of the way with his stubbly chin. All I can think about is his skin-cells detaching themselves from his face and losing themselves in my wet hair. I don’t care that the towel I’ve got around me isn’t long enough to cover my cellulite, and his hands are on the fat around my hips. I just care about the air coming out of his lungs, through that mouth and round those teeth that haven’t been cleaned, and the skin-cells he’s shedding onto me. I’ve got cat-lick on my hands and I’m about to have his dirty mouth on my neck and I want to swat him away with the tea-towel. I twist so he can’t quite reach me with his lips, and I start to wash my hands, even though the water isn’t properly hot yet. The water has to be scolding hot, otherwise it won’t kill the germs. He thinks I’m joking though. He can’t believe I can be acting like this when I was so into him last night, but he doesn’t know me. I am fickle in the extreme. I’m scrubbing my hands and he’s trying to kiss my neck and I’m twisting away from him and I’m scrubbing hard even though the bloody water refuses to heat up and he refuses to give up until I elbow him sharply in the ribs. He gasps and backs right off.
“What the fuck?” he says. “What was that for?” Still rubbing my hands together, the water finally getting hot and painful, I say to him, “Like I said, I’ve got to go. Sorry.”
“Christ, what did I do?” he says as I scrub. He’s still standing there and I can smell his morning breath, and I see it in the air like a yellow gas and I hold my breath for as long as I can. Finally, only breathing out, not in, I manage to say, “Nothing. It’s just me.” I dry my hands on the towel I’m wearing, and walk out of range of his breathing. I open a window, then think about the fly and imagine others coming in to join it. Why is it that flies are only ever capable of flying in through a window, not out? I close it again, and hold my breath. I feel as if I’m going to scream at him if he doesn’t go, and I wish to God I could remember his name, but I can’t. I’m desperate to do the eye-scrunch mouth-stretch thing, and I’m saying safe safe safe safe under my breath, but I can’t do any of it properly because he’s looking at me. He has very pretty, dark eyes. If I wasn’t trapped in this OCD bubble I’d find him very attractive. I did last night. But he’s started to tell I’m a bit mental and he seems reluctant to delve. At least he’s realised we’re probably not going back to bed today. Maybe he’ll go now. Funny, I’d thought he was kind. He does look it. Thank goodness he isn’t. The kind ones always want to make me look at them in the morning even though I can’t, and think they can make me feel better by saying something gentle. They think I’m being shy and embarrassed, when what I’m really thinking is I wish they’d fuck off out of my house. This one though, he seems to realise he’s not wanted, and he doesn’t seem to care that much. He got what he came for, and now he’s going.
He smiles one last wry and cheeky smile, then heads back upstairs. I take in a very long breath. I notice the cat is sitting on the windowsill now, looking into the kitchen. I’ve not lived here long, and I think the lady who lived here before me used to feed it. I wonder if the cat even realises I’m not her. Last week it brought a dead mouse in! It left it in the hallway. I was having one of my bad days and when I saw the mouse I couldn’t bring myself to go near it. I couldn’t leave the lounge. All I could think about was rodent-juice seeping from decaying flesh and running into the gullies between the terracotta tiles, and rodent-gas rising into the air. I ended up having t
Fly • Opuss № I