Me on the Floor, Bleeding

by Jenny J

  ‘GO!’

  I backed out of the room, my eyes glued to her, to her grey-green eyes that seemed not to see me but a point immediately beside me. Those eyes that could be looked out of but not into.

  I backed out and tripped over the shelf, which fell to the floor with such a loud crash it echoed through the corridor. I staggered backwards but grabbed hold of the doorframe and hung on tight.

  I hung on tight.

  After a moment indefinitely frozen in time I regained my balance. I picked up the shelf. With infinite care I picked it up. I felt the sandpapered wood against my arm like a caress.

  And then I ran.

  Looking back it seems unreal,

  Was I even there?

  Was she?

  I Want to Be a Machine

  The tears blotted out the reality, obliterated the sharp contours, and made the lights shine in the shape of six-pointed stars. Here I was, running again. I ran through the corridors with the shelf clamped under one arm. I wanted to run fast enough to fly, I never wanted to come down again, but my heavy boots brought me pitilessly back to the ground. I swerved to avoid some people in white coats who were all walking in the same direction but not together.

  Why weren’t they walking together?

  I ran through the main doors and out, past the bus turning circle and on towards Gamla Övägen. The rain fell in hard drops and merged with my tears. I ran and ran and ran. I ran until I couldn’t run any more and still I kept running. The air I breathed in was cold and raw and tore at my lungs. I ignored the stabbing knife pain in my side and put one foot in front of the other, over and over and over again.

  I wanted to be a machine that never stopped running.

  I wanted to be a machine that couldn’t feel.

  I wanted to be a machine, like her.

  I ran past a car park, a cluster of trees, a roundabout. I ran on asphalt wet with rain, through grass ten centimetres high, over lethally spinning gravel and back onto asphalt again.

  Suddenly I lost my grip on the shelf and it fell to the ground with a noisy clatter. I ran on for a few steps before I was able to stop, like a runner who has just passed the finishing line. Slowly I walked back, my breathing laboured. I picked up the shelf and started to walk towards town again, but changed my mind. I shouted out loud, a high-pitched, unarticulated yell, took a firm grip on the shelf, and lifted it above my head before slamming it down onto the damp black asphalt. The impact was powerful and the wood creaked its objection, but the shelf stayed in one piece. It was solid workmanship: I had hammered as well as glued the joints together. I could feel my thumb throbbing but I didn’t perceive any pain.

  If your heart should break in two, make it whole with Karlsson’s glue.

  I picked up the shelf and smashed it down on the asphalt again.

  If your brain explodes, shrinks or erodes

  And once again.

  Do not fear, stand stiff or pale!

  And again.

  It can soon be mended with a five-inch nail!

  And then I stamped on the wood with my steel toe-capped boots; stamped on it, jumped on it, kicked it away from me in a shower of splinters.

  The adrenaline was pumping through my body, making it feverishly hot. I didn’t stop until all that was left of the wood was its original form, although more jagged at the edges. But the side pieces I had cut out with the saw were totally wrecked. You would never be able to tell they had once been in the shape of a flamingo.

  I shut my eyes, reached out to grab a lamp post but missed and fell headlong into a ditch. A shelf edge dug into my side, between two ribs, but it didn’t bother me.

  The grass was wet and cold but it didn’t bother me.

  Mum was locked in a psychiatric ward but it didn’t bother me.

  Mum didn’t want to know me but it didn’t bother me didn’t bother me didn’t bother me. Because I was a machine.

  My Bloodstained Heart in a Ditch

  I heard footsteps, heels against the asphalt. Regular, hard steps like the beat from a simple drum machine, one of those you get on a cheap synthesiser. I closed my eyes. It sounded like the introduction to New Order’s True Faith. Probably the best track I have ever heard, perhaps the best in the world. The rain was falling in fat, heavy drops. I moved my lips but no words came out. It was only in my own head that I heard it:

  I feel so extraordinary

  Something’s got a hold on me

  I get this feeling I’m in motion

  A sudden sense of liberty

  I don’t care cos I’m not there

  And I don’t care if I’m here tomorrow

  Again and again I’ve taken too much

  Of the thing that costs you too much

  Suddenly the beats stopped. I opened my eyes but couldn’t really focus. Directly in front of me someone was crouching, wearing black leather boots with killer heels. Someone I seemed to recognise but couldn’t place at all.

  ‘Darling! What are you doing here?’ she exclaimed.

  It was Debbie. I recognised her by that throaty, rasping, two-packs-of-ciggs-a-day-since-her-confirmation voice. She was wearing a leather jacket with chunky zips all over it. The jacket was so small it looked as if it belonged to a child. With it she was wearing jeans, which were so tight they seemed painted onto her body.

  ‘Hello Debbie,’ I said, and my voice was thick as if I had been crying, and of course I had been.

  She laughed.

  ‘I’m not called Debbie, love. My name’s Sarah.’

  And she pronounced it the English way and I wondered if she really was English or was only putting it on. But I couldn’t detect an Östgöta accent, so maybe she was.

  ‘Come on, I’ll help you up.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said feebly.

  She pulled my arm and while she was doing that I thought about the fact that Justin was not called Justin and Debbie was not called Debbie and Mum was not called Mum and it made me so indescribably tired that I was almost overcome by acute narcolepsy.

  I got back up on my feet and she told me to turn around so she could brush off the grass and the gravel and the splinters, and she didn’t ask me why I was lying in the ditch like a rough sleeper or a crack whore, and that was just as well because I didn’t have the strength to answer. When she had finished she fished a packet of cigarettes out of her shiny red handbag, lit one, and inspected me critically. She picked a brittle leaf from what was left of my bangs with her cigarette hand, the orange glow only two centimetres from my eye. She stroked my hair softly, just like the first time we had met, and I swallowed a sob. She asked:

  ‘Where are you going?’

  It sounded as if she meant not only geographically but also existentially. But perhaps I was reading too much into it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, answering both questions.

  She raised her eyebrows and started walking away, and I stood there, unable to decide what to do. For a brief moment I considered laying myself down in the ditch again, but I didn’t do it. She had put so much effort into brushing off the leaves and grass and I wasn’t the ungrateful type. Debbie whose name was Sarah pushed one hand into her jacket pocket – which sat so high up that it looked as if she was touching her own breast – and stamped her heels so hard in the asphalt that it sounded like pistol shots. She turned round, walked backwards for a couple of metres and nodded with her head on one side, indicating that she wanted me go with her. I obeyed like a homeless dog and caught up with her.

  I left my bloodstained heart in the ditch. It would survive the rain, I thought. I had varnished over it, after all.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘Only home. It feels as if I’ve been in Hades and been given one more chance to live.’

  ‘What’s … what’s happened?

  ‘Nothing’s happened. Nothing that doesn’t happen every day. I work on a geriatric ward, with old people, you know? It’s a bit better than residential care but you still have to wipe their arses.�
��

  I pictured her in a short, half-transparent white coat, unbuttoned lower than was respectable, bare legs, and red lips. If ever you were forced to have your backside wiped by anyone, you would choose her. She threw her cigarette butt into a puddle and immediately took out the packet again. This time she lit two cigarettes. She held the filters tight between her front teeth and as she searched for her lighter she curled her upper lip like a predatory animal ready to attack. Then she found it, drew on both cigarettes at the same time, and gave one of them to me. I didn’t protest but even so she said:

  ‘You need it, that’s why.’

  We walked in the direction of town, she in front, me half a metre behind, awkwardly smoking my cigarette. I didn’t inhale deeply because I didn’t want to cough. I would have liked to talk a bit to dispel some kind of cloud but I couldn’t come up with a single thing to say. As we came to the southern part of town Sarah said:

  ‘I live over there.’

  She pointed to a row of low-rise yellow brick flats. A bright yellow and apparently empty tram approached and obscured the flats for a second. The ground shook. We stopped and allowed it to pass.

  I felt the desperation return. Like carbon dioxide bubbles full of fizzing reluctance they filled my insides. I had kept it at bay while we were walking, as long as my legs were moving, as long as I heard the beat of True Faith over and over again, but now it was back, spreading from my stomach and out into my arms, my legs, my head. An aggressive, furious desperation.

  I looked at her and suddenly flung out of me, vomited out of me:

  ‘Sarah. Can I come home with you?’

  My voice was steady but I was shaking inside. I hated asking people for things. I never wanted to risk being turned down, rejected.

  It wasn’t worth it. The split second before she answered felt like an eternity and I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for the worst.

  ‘Sure,’ said Sarah, and spat out the chewing gum I hadn’t seen her chewing. ‘I’ve got to work an extra shift in a few hours, but no problem.’

  I lay on Sarah’s unmade bed, on the duvet that smelled of musk and sweat. She was having a shower. I heard the water splashing against the tiles, splashing against her body. She was singing, something low-key, sensitive.

  The bandage on my thumb was soaked through and indescribably filthy. I was reminded yet again of the follow-up appointment I had managed to suppress. The dressing should have been changed days ago. Without really thinking about it, I began to unwind the bandage slowly, unbelievably slowly. It was a long bandage, over a metre. The skin underneath was spongy and white. The tip of my thumb was dark pink but unexpectedly smooth under the stitches. Six stitches there were, in all: six small black stitches very close together. I compared my two thumbs. The left one was missing perhaps half a centimetre, precisely as Dr Levin had said, but strangely enough the end of the thumb that was now flat rather than rounded looked quite natural. On the other hand, the black thread against the red flesh did look macabre. I briefly pressed the sawn-off nail and felt the blood rush to it in orgasm-like pulses, minus the gratification. And here it was again, the phantom pain. In the sawn-off part, which wasn’t there, which was thin air.

  Sarah came out of the bathroom in a yellow robe without a belt, drying her hair on a threadbare towel. Before I had the consideration to look away I glimpsed a pair of small breasts with pale pink nipples and, lower down, curly reddish-blond pubic hair. I felt a warm blush spread over my cheeks.

  ‘Can I see?’ she said, and pulled my hand towards her.

  She held my hand in hers, studying it with her head tilted back a little, her eyes squinting as if she needed glasses.

  ‘It actually looks okay . . . it’s closed up well. Healed well. I can help you with the stitches if you like.’

  ‘They’re not supposed to be taken out until Monday.’

  ‘Thursday, Monday, big difference. You do what you like.’

  She let go of my hand and sat on a chair.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Are you going to tell me?’

  ‘What?’ I said, but that was stupid because she knew that I knew that she knew.

  What was wrong.

  She rolled her eyes and tried to blow the hair from her forehead. It didn’t work because it was wet and stuck fast and was too short as well, although not quite as non-existent as mine. She looked so different without make-up, her face naked, almost childlike, despite the tiny fine lines around her mouth. Her eyes did not look quite so slanted and predatory.

  ‘Sweetie, either you want to or you don’t. Makes no odds to me. If you want to then I will listen whole-heartedly. If you don’t want to then we’ll chat about something else, about violence or the weather. Or wiping old people’s backsides. That’s not as monotonous as you’d expect. You can’t imagine how many different types of backsides there are. The point is: you decide. But don’t talk a lot of crap about nothing being wrong. No one bloody well hangs about in a ditch on bloody Thursdays at three o’clock in the afternoon. In a pile of broken planks. You’re not some bloody park bench alkie.’

  I told her.

  I actually did.

  There was something about her unsentimental attitude that made me. I knew she wouldn’t humiliate me by throwing her hand to her mouth in wide-eyed horror. She wouldn’t feel sorry for me or pity me with sickly-sweet words.

  I lay on her bed with my eyes fixed on the ceiling, looking at the cracks where the emulsion was flaking off and hanging down like a child’s outstretched hands, and I told her about Mum and Dad, and about me. And when I bent the truth, as I had learned to do, I told her that I was bending it, and the reason I did it was so Sarah wouldn’t think my mother was too weird. So Sarah would understand her and sympathise with her.

  Sometimes I turned towards Sarah and met her gaze, seeing those eyes narrowed in concentration. Sometimes she got up, fetched a cigarette, or some clothes to put on – a small pale pink camisole top with turquoise lace, a pair of dark blue ridiculously tight jeans – all items one or two sizes too small so that they squeezed her body and gave it bulges, even though she was as thin as a heroin addict. At those times she held up a finger and I stopped talking, paused, breathed, until she came back with her concentrated attention, a warm spotlight focused on me. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was telling her something painful I would have enjoyed it, enjoyed that undivided attention from someone I presumably admired.

  It got to four p.m., then five and then six, and then at seven my phone rang and I got up and looked at the display, and of course it was Dad, Dad who had realised I wasn’t at home. I couldn’t bring myself to answer, because what would I say? What would he say, and what would we say to each other? So I switched it to silent and put it back in my bag.

  ‘That’s it, I think,’ I said, suddenly embarrassed that I had taken up so much time, that I had been given so much of that coveted attention. I felt hot, almost as if I had a high temperature, as I sat down on the bed again and the duvet was warm, too, where I had been lying.

  ‘Was that it?’ she asked. ‘Was that all of it?’

  ‘Yes … or no. I don’t know. I think so,’ I said and then I don’t remember any more.

  I must have fallen asleep from exhaustion.

  FRIDAY, 20 APRIL

  The Brain as an Accessory

  I slept and slept and slept. I slept for twelve hours and in that time Sarah left, worked her extra shift, and came home again. I woke up when the door slammed and she dropped her bag noisily onto the hall floor.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ she said. ‘It’s like having a little pet. A little lazy cat. Are you still sleeping?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said weakly, trying to prop myself up on my elbows. ‘Or I mean no, of course,’ I added quickly.

  My head felt heavy and I thought that this is what it must feel like to be drugged. Sarah went into the kitchen without taking off her shoes, her heels tapping on the wooden floor. She filled a large glass with water that she drank in one go, standi
ng up. I was overcome by a sudden need to pee and had to hurl myself out of bed and run to the toilet.

  ‘You phone’s buzzing again,’ called Sarah. ‘Do you want it?’

  ‘Yes … okay,’ I said, and heard her run into the hall and root around in my bag. After a while she stuck the mobile through the door I hadn’t had time to close.

  Dad.

  I just missed the call and that was lucky because it meant I didn’t have to decide whether to answer or not. The display lit up. I had twenty missed calls. I went into the calls list: eighteen from Dad and two from an unknown number. Oh God.

  There were seven messages on my voicemail, all from Dad, in which he sounded alternately angry or worried about where I was. His last message, which I had missed by only a few minutes, told me that he had reported me to the police as missing. I texted a guilty “dont worry home soon” and was immediately assaulted by a call from his mobile that I cut off.

  Sarah’s heels came closer and stopped right outside the door.

  ‘Cat, have you got stuck in there?’

  ‘No, I’m coming.’

  I tore off a piece of loo paper and it got caught in the stitches at the tip of my thumb. I grimaced. The painkillers had worn off and the pain was immediate and intense.

  When I came out she was sitting on the kitchen table, still wearing her outdoor clothes. She was about to say something when I interrupted her.

  ‘Can you take out the stitches after all? They kind of like catch in everything I touch.’

  ‘Sure, cat.’

  She sterilised a small pair of pliars absolutely not meant for the purpose but for something else entirely – cables, maybe – and gesticulated that I was to sit at the table. She took a firm hold of my thumb and then she clipped off the stitches one by one, drawing out the thread with her nails, and using tweezers where they were too difficult and had grown into my skin. It hurt and I grunted primitively with every stitch. When she had finished she picked up the bits of black thread and put them in a flower pot. Lighting a cigarette she said: