by Allyson Bird
In the green room, she chatted to fellow ushers sometimes but was content to make paper-doll men. She cut them out and held them up, staring intently at the way they held hands and were joined together.
The actors just smiled indulgently at her.
Everything seemed all right for a few months in her attempt to connect with people. She’d only got into trouble the once recently, when she had signed two drunken boys (drunken prawns, drunken boys—same difference) into the Press Club. One of the boys followed her into the ladies, threw her against the wall and tried to get her to have sex with him there and then. The bouncer had sorted that one out.
One evening she left the theatre and was making her way down to the Press Club, just off Deansgate, when she met another two lads in leather jackets who persuaded her that she would have a better time in Rock World; so she went. She dumped them just inside the entrance, when she felt the first rush of excitement as Nirvana pumped through the building.
She had the choice of Jilly’s downstairs or the main club above. The glam-rockers mixed with the bikers, the students mixed with the heavy metal gang; everyone was cool. No fights, no arguments, just people hanging around, dancing, boozing and having a great time. Elena had to wear black as an usher so she fitted in just fine there. She even removed her blouse in the club’s heat, to reveal a clinging black bodystocking underneath. Many girls were wearing tight, black corsets designed to reveal more than they concealed, so Elena felt suitably dressed. In the ladies she brushed up half her shoulder-length, brown hair in the style of Attila the Hun, and painted her eyes like Cleopatra. She didn’t care what others thought. Elena liked what she saw in the mirror and no other opinion mattered.
Now, this behaviour was fine for a while, but then as the weeks passed she became more adventurous. Elena became Marion, played by Solveig Dommartin from the film Wings of Desire. She imagined herself high above the sweating dancers, up on the trapeze, wearing a white leotard and the faded wings of a broken angel. Then, jolted from her reverie she would dance and wander the rooms on her own until the final half-hour when she would choose a boy.
No one gave one-night stands a second thought but Elena was looking for more, much more—which she never found. Not with that tall Swede, who looked at her in a funny sort of way and told her repeatedly that she was Irish; nor with the chef who was leaving soon to work his way around the U.S.; and certainly not with the Hell’s Angel, Steve, who said he cried when he watched On the Waterfront and claimed that he was an immense Brando fan but ironically disliked The Wild One. Actually, Steve also blubbed when he talked about It’s a Wonderful Life, his huge shoulders shook when he described James Stewart’s euphoria as he came running back home through the snow. Steve was way too sentimental for Elena. She also drew the line at going home with the kind, hunk of a man called Bob, who smelt like he cleared decayed remains from old houses.
And still she did not find what she was looking for.
The next week she coloured her hair blonde, to be Marilyn with bubble hair, and she drank beer through a straw in the bottle so as not to smudge her red lipstick. These little cameo roles went on for weeks. She became Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction and Kate Fuller in From Dusk Till Dawn. But still, nothing really pleased her.
The weeks flew by and she continued to take someone home on Thursday and Saturday nights. She never had them in her large double bed upstairs. The downstairs room had a sofa that converted into a floor bed.
On Fridays Elena was understandably tired and would pick up a baguette, some brie, queen olives, and a bottle of Merlot.
On Saturday afternoon she would go over to her mother’s flat and they would curl up with a video that Elena had chosen, perhaps a thriller with Ray Milland in it or a Fred Astaire movie. She adored her mother but could only spend a few hours at a time in her company because she had heard her mother’s memories so many times before, and although she had once enjoyed them, they didn’t hold the same resonance anymore. Elena was hungry for adventure and time alone, to wander around the city streets to see what kind of trouble she could get into.
One night she met someone, got very drunk and tried to bounce his phone off an auto showroom window. The man, naturally enough, decided that Elena wasn’t his type but had dropped her off in a gentlemanly manner on her own doorstep, at first—he then pushed her face into said doorstep, causing her all manner of confusion the next day about whether she had tripped or was pushed. She decided in the end that she had been pushed.
She went out with a fellow for two weeks once, a social worker. He was older than her, about thirty-five and wore his black hair in a ponytail. He dropped her relatively quickly during an Italian meal, declaring she was damaged goods. She had simply commented that perhaps he wasn’t cut out to be a social worker, as he was recovering from a nervous breakdown.
Her list of boys and men seemed endless. Sometimes she would chuck them—but mostly they would ditch her. Elena was attractive enough but she always picked the worst of the male species—the ones that were equally fucked-up as she.
She continued her pursuit of pleasure and love, changing her appearance subtly or drastically, to try anything, as long a she didn’t have to think about who she was—if she were anyone. Sometimes she would lose herself in her old haunt, The Press Club, to go home with Charlie, the singer. He was married but she loved his voice. Charlie, when he saw her enter the club, would stop singing and begin a special song for her, called Nature Boy, the one by Nat King Cole. Perhaps the boy in that song was who she was looking for; if he was, Elena never found him either and she suspected that he only existed in the lyrics.
After a few beers—rather a lot actually—the depth of the Press Club, with its blue-green light, began to look like a vast cavern filled up to the ceiling with water, and on more than one occasion she felt herself gasp, and struggled to come up for air. After one late, summer night she walked home in the silent dawn. The rage in her head subsided for a time and she was delighted to actually smell pine trees and the various summer flowers in the gardens, before the cars would come along and leave their trails of smog.
The next Saturday she was out on the pull again. The outfit she chose that evening was a mid-thigh, backless sea-green dress over coal-black leggings. It indeed clung like seaweed on a rock. She changed out of her usher clothes and into her dancing rig after the theatre. As she flew down the stage door steps she knew she could do anything—She was ready again.
The first time she killed a man it was quite accidental.
It was the tall Swede. She had thought it a shame as she quite liked him. They were down by the canal bank and were fooling around. He didn’t have a condom, she didn’t either. He insisted on going ahead, but she refused. She didn’t mean to push him away so hard—she was trying to be coy. He stumbled backward into the canal. She couldn’t understand why he wasn’t moving and she peered into the darkness. He just seemed to be spread out over the water as if he were floating. Too stiff—too rigid. A cloud shifted from the full moon then she saw a metal rod protruding from his chest and a darker stain spreading upon the oily water. At that point she ran.
In the taxi home the orange glow of the street lights hurt her eyes, and she felt flush with excitement. She realised that, although an accident, she had caused his death, and it gave her a thrill.
Away from the front page morning news of an Uzi machine gun attack on five in Moss Side, the paper had the story way in the middle, under the heading:
FOREIGN STUDENT FOUND DEAD—IMPALED IN CANAL
Elena felt a little pissed off. For some strange reason she wanted it to be front page news—she wanted to be front page news. His death was something she had been involved in. Men—boys—always let her down. As a teenager she had read all about romance; she kept looking for love, but, always through sex. She always failed. Elena should have learnt something from her past experiences but she was being a dog, really a bitch, chasing her own tail and hadn’t learnt anything. Here she was now, afte
r weeks of different identities and still she couldn’t find what she was looking for.
Then along came Maurice.
It was her voices who told her about him. They whispered into her ear in the darkest part of the night, rising to the surface of her mind, as if survivors from some underwater wreck. They became bloated corpses—whose skin burst open, revealing an infestation of blind, white worms that slid back into the vacant eye sockets of their hosts. The corpses pinned her by her bleeding wrists to the bed until she promised that she would return with them—to the corners of her mind, where they would continue to corrupt her…and tell her what to do next.
Maurice appeared at Rock World. He was six foot tall, slender, with shoulder-length brown hair and grey eyes. He wore a blue, waist-length military style jacket and looked pretty good to Elena. She would go home with him. He lived on the north side of the city and shared a house with two other students. Naturally, they had formed their own band and shared this hobby, the rent, and they shared Elena. He told her that if she really loved him, she would do anything for him
After drinking too much alcohol, but not enough that she didn’t know what she was doing, Elena let each one of them have her; a simple and meaningless act. They told her to sit across them and do something but she simply shrugged and closed her eyes. All three boys laughed and joked but were slightly nervous about the whole thing. Through alcohol, Elena had numbed herself down so that she didn’t feel much of anything. It was as if she could let them do this to her but not participate in it. It was enough for them, as they silently slipped in and out of her in turn, like the slugs they were.
She drank more wine with them and pretended that she had meant it all to happen, which she hadn’t. Elena even warmed to one of them when he strummed his guitar and sang of the lost girl with the grey eyes.
Lost in time and space—that was her.
One of them took her home later in a taxi but when she refused to give head he pulled out a knife to frighten her into submission. Now she had a cross-stitch of knife wounds on her shoulders from his struggle to force her face into his lap. Elena was learning to hate. What she had done all those times before was of her own volition. This was different.
And learn to hate she did.
The other ushers noticed a change in her. She looked even more distracted than usual and rarely spoke now. She was polite to the theatre-goers, did the door opening and closings quietly with no sense of fun, and never went to the Press Club anymore. She preferred rock music and the dark corners of that club, which felt like the black corpse-ridden places in her mind. In those organic folds lay the creatures she had avoided for most of her life. Now? Elena spent most of her waking and sleeping time with them. The terrors of her mind were forming themselves into crimes against mankind. It wasn’t just smoke and mirrors anymore, for it was real to her now.
It wasn’t hard to get hold of the Rohypnol. She knew someone who knew someone…who knew someone…simple. She had the money to pay for it too. At one time it was colourless and tasteless but drug companies now added a blue dye. Still, most street stuff didn’t have the dye in. The boys were always eager to get into her, so she would have to work quickly, although she didn’t know whether to just drop a tablet in a drink or what; Elena had never used the drug before. She decided that she would grind all the tablets up into a powder with her oversized quartz ring, which she would wash carefully later.
After the theatre on Saturday night Elena went to the rock club. She drank with the boys again, and they were all for taking her back to their flat after the beer and dancing. The music gave her a headache and she didn’t want to get too drunk, so she only had three beers.
A few of her old one-night stands saw her leave with the boys. She didn’t care that she was seen with them. It didn’t matter to her. She was intent only on her plan. They flagged a taxi to the student digs. The rooms were just as untidy as always. It wasn’t difficult to get the stuff into their beer bottles; powder in one bottle when a boy was in the toilet; more in another when Maurice was rooting about in the fridge for something to eat; the last of it when the third lad went upstairs to throw all his junk off the bed onto the floor, in preparation for her.
Within ten minutes, and within seconds of one another—just as the boy with the dirty hands was entering her—they passed out. She pushed him out of her. Maurice slumped from the bed to the floor. The last boy tried to stand up, but his knees gave way beneath him, and he crumpled to the floor like a string puppet.
The first part of Elena’s plan was complete. The hardest part was trying to drag them all onto the bed in the right position, but she soon managed it. There they were, all in a row, like the paper-doll men she often cut, but the paper men had been all joined together….
One boy was naked from the waist down so she took off his shirt. One was completely naked already and Maurice was still dressed. When she had removed his clothes and they were sleeping like little butcher’s dogs—that is how she now saw them—she prepared to carry out the next part of her plan. She removed from her bag a large, black wrap-around pouch and placed it onto an old bedside table. From it she took out the sharper knives. As she withdrew the first, she wondered if it would be sharp enough. It was. With careful precision she cut across the abdomen of the first boy, not too deeply at the first attempt. He groaned a little and shivered on the bed.
Elena sat back on her heels, pursed her lips and shrugged.
She lunged forwards and drove the knife straight through his heart, then quickly through the hearts of the other two. She proceeded with her work carefully cutting and pulling the slippery, pink-grey guts out of each of them, arranging and rearranging them until they looked just right. They would be hers forever.
She stood up, smiled and admired her handiwork again. She used the bed sheets to wipe her red hands. Her new boys were perfect. All lined up in a row, like the paper-doll men she liked to make, and—all joined together.
Medium Strange
Lumbroyd Quaker Meeting and burial ground. Built 1763. Last meeting held 1847. Demolished 1859 Cubley, South Yorkshire.
Four children—missing. No bodies found. Four boys aged between five and seven, lost boys—disappeared without a trace with little hope of finding them again, and a sad trail of weeping relatives left behind.
Who would be next?
It came to me, as I was walking past the old Puritan Graveyard—I stopped to stare at an inscription on the stone plaque embedded in the wall; high up in the trees the rooks clung tentatively to the branches as the cold wind blew in from the moor—
My sister and I would work together again.
Our lives, at times had drifted into periods of no contact or very little. The death of our mother brought us closer now and my sister told me that I had been her rock in our moments of dark despair; I know that she had been mine. I glanced at my watch and worked out how long it would take me to get home. It was normal for me to walk for an hour, four times a week, up and down the lanes around my home, which lay on the edge of the South Yorkshire moorland, not far from the Woodhead Pass. Home was a solitary old farmhouse blasted by the howling wind, with a two-hundred-year-old withering oak for company.
Yes, we would work together again. She would do the medium bit and I, Abbie Marshall, would do the leg work. She would have the visions and I would hit the solid ground running, dragging myself out into the cold to track down the murderer and solve the mystery. Would she go for this case? I wondered. I was afraid to be around spirits—ghosts creep me out. I would much rather face-off the real-life criminals, embezzlers and such. The wife-beaters, the phoneys and the frauds; I was fine with them. It was real people I was used to, with their dirty lives, dirty thoughts and wishes. Give me something tactile and I could work with it. The only spirits I was interested in were the whisky and gin I drank to numb my swollen gums.
The Woodhead Pass claimed numerous lives each year as many drivers became impatient behind big trucks, and death by overtaking was commo
n. There was a memorial near an old stone bridge, for a young man who had come to a sticky end in a fast car on that road. A banner was tied to the fence at the spot where he died. It had his name, dates, and plastic flowers tied to it, even a racing trophy. Driving down that road one day I had wanted to stop and add to the banner, ‘Stupid Fuck,’ but my fear of outraged spirits wouldn’t let me.
Now, I had my mobile with me and I could walk and talk at the same time, if I could get a signal.
“Hi, Sylvia, I’ve been thinking. You said you would like to get involved with that boy’s disappearance but don’t like the limelight. The press don’t bother me. You could feed me the clues and I could act upon them—I know you don’t want to front it but I could. If you give me what you’ve got I’ll act upon it. It makes sense.” For a moment there was silence on the other end of the phone.
