Let Me Die a Woman

by Alan Kelly

  18

  The Phantom Broadcaster

  It was only by chance that Jones heard the broadcast; a broadcast with a voice like crushed glass. Jones would sometimes lie awake late at night and let the voices from the radio soothe him. He’d never been a great sleeper. As a kid in Ballyfermot he had to share a room with his sister, Myra. She’d been dead for nearly twenty years now; ovarian cancer. He remembered the last time he had seen her, in the back room of his dead mother’s house, a twisted thing carved by an agonisingly slow disease.

  Sometimes he thought he could still smell her – the stale urine, and the meaty stench of her sweat – late at night when he was alone with only the voices floating in the air for company. This was when he heard the voice he came to describe as ‘The Phantom Broadcaster’. By chance he had heard this broadcast from a station, which didn’t identify itself; he thought it was a rogue pirate station. Some student with too much time on his hands who talked in a loop about things that, at first, seemed unrelated to each other. But, when Jones listened closely, he realised this Phantom somehow knew about Alice’s plans, or knew parts of them. Jones kept it from Alice. He didn’t exactly trust her and she barely disguised her contempt for him.

  From his bedroom window, his view of the sky hung low and red like a slashed throat. He decided he’d keep The Phantom Broadcaster to himself. He never was one to put all his cards on the table in one go and this way, if Alice did decide he was no longer useful, he’d have some ammunition against her. He lay in the dark and he listened and tried to discern the secrets between the words. Of course, this wasn’t the only card Jones had up his sleeves and, when he saw the lights of the van, he knew she had finally arrived.

  19

  The Sky is Full of Dead Worlds

  The fingers of the clown’s grip were steadfast and Fiend held the razorback inches from Bunny’s face. The razorback’s mouth was lined with two rows of translucent blue daggers and these nasty little diamond spikes were eager to sink into her face unless she did something quick. She kicked out and her foot met Fiend’s stomach knocking her onto her ass. Alice dropped the Bulb, which squirmed along the floor towards Bunny. Alice threw a stripe of violent red hair off her face, quickly regaining her footing. Despite the deadlock of the clown’s hands and the likelihood that Bunny was about to die, she smiled. A smile she’d occasionally used on Josh, smug and hilarious and infuriating.

  ‘That’s right’ she said to Alice, ‘I am a boy, and I hit like one too. So you can chew on a shit-filled cupcake for all I care, you worthless cunt.’

  Alice punched Bunny viciously in the face, snapping her head to the side. She stumbled. The clown’s grip loosened and she elbowed it with as much force as she could muster. The clown hit the floor and Bunny twisted herself round to the exit. The door was locked, the clown was behind her and Alice blocked her way. If Bunny had known earlier she was about to walk into an Asimov short story, she’d have paid someone else to burn the office down but, if she had to she’d take this cunt down with her.

  ‘So?’ Alice asked, eyebrow raised, arms folded, her turn to be smug.

  ‘I know I should of asked earlier…’ but before Bunny finished the sentence, the scream of a chainsaw cut through the air and the door behind Alice exploded into a billion pieces of wood. Bunny, taking her chance, grabbed the Unicorn device from Alice’s grasp.

  Kiffany Boston-Gifford kicked the remaining wood through. She smiled at Bunny. Alice didn’t dare take her eyes off Kiffany. Bunny calmly asked Alice again what she had been doing earlier.

  ‘So?’ asked Bunny, holding the Unicorn between her thumb and index finger, dangling it in front of her.

  Kiffany powered down the chainsaw.

  ‘It’s for a frequency. Seriously, you wouldn’t understand,’ Alice replied.

  ‘What kind of frequency sweet?’ asked Kiffany, standing a few feet behind them.

  ‘Was I speaking to you Kiffany?’ replied Alice.

  Confusion and the ache in her jaw stiffened Bunny’s face. How did they know each other? Kiffany took two steps towards Alice. She had her hand on the string and was ready to pull.

  ‘Wait Kiffany, what the fuck…’ Bunny shouted, stepping in between the two of them.

  ‘You hardly think that will stop me’ asked Alice, pointing at the chainsaw.

  ‘No,’ Kiffany said, ‘but it’ll slow you down if you’re not exactly, oh how should I say? In one piece.’

  ‘Enough alright’ Bunny screamed, shaking her hands either side of her.

  She turned and looked directly at Alice Fiend. The woman showed no signs of retaliating. She regarded Kiffany only with a weary contempt.

  ‘What is the frequency for, what does it do?’ Bunny asked, rubbing her swollen jaw.

  Alice walked to the window and stared at the sky.

  ‘You think the threat is from up there Ms Flask, but it isn’t. The Substrate is what the frequency will wake up.’

  Bunny leaned against the windowsill.

  ‘The Substrate?’ she asked, looking into the other woman’s face.

  Kiffany put her chainsaw on the floor and interrupted them.

  ‘Alice, tell Bunny about the ports.’

  Fiend turned to Kiffany and Bunny thought, for a second, she was about to vault right at her.

  ‘The ports are only islands, the surviving parts of my own world. We need the Unicorn key to open the gate and my sisters will fall. There is no point in trying to stop it. The Substrate is humanity.’

  Still confused Bunny said, ‘But won’t those aliens want to take over?’

  Alice smiled and then held her head in her hands.

  ‘Yes Ms Flask, my home world is dying so I need you people for food,’ Alice laughed and continued, ‘I’m not a cliché; you think I’m using the plot of a bad pulp novella as my master plan?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Bunny replied, feeling like a shitstick.

  ‘You,’ Alice said pointing at them both ‘are the aliens.’

  ‘What?’ Kiffany and Bunny asked together.

  Alice folded her arms again and said, ‘The Psyche is a feminine entity. Only the men will become obsolete my dears. It is they who are convinced aliens are up there, cowering in a sky full of dead worlds.’

  ‘I hear you,’ chirped Kiffany, kicking the clown in the ribs before it got back onto its feet.

  Bunny stayed quiet. After all, this woman had been trying to kill her when Kiffany conveniently showed up. She looked at Kiffany, who had the toe of her shoe on the clown’s throat, pinning him to the ground and then back at Fiend. Alice’s face was a mask she had no way of reading and a part of her was grateful for this.

  20

  Terminal Island

  The bulbs had been a crude route to the Substrate and, so far, Alice had nearly two hundred and seventy followers on this island alone. Bunny was sitting on the other side of the office, leaning back on a chair and wringing her hands. She still had the Unicorn key and Alice didn’t want to force it from her, unless she absolutely needed to. Looking at her, Alice could never have guessed her biological sex. Her birth sex didn’t matter. The Substrate would activate slowly with her, but it would activate. If she allied with these two, she’d no longer need Jones and this alone made her laugh inside.

  The males would be processed and filleted. She wondered though, what Kiffany and Bunny would say about that? They hadn’t agreed to an alliance yet and time was running out. She needed to open the ports soon. She approached Bunny and sat down beside her.

  ‘I was once like you’ she said quietly.

  ‘You had a cock?’ asked Bunny, sighing.

  Alice laughed. How had she come to this, Bunny wondered? All she wanted was for her existence to be one long John Waters style party.

  ‘No, but I did have my head held under water while the rest of the world flourished’

  ‘I don’t trust you Fiend. You took this, Blood Rag, away from me.’

  Bunny felt her voice about to break but reined it in just i
n time. Alice stared into the middle distance and said nothing for a long time.

  ‘That was Jones Bunny, not me,’ she replied eventually.

  ‘What about trying to kill me with that slug?’ asked Bunny.

  ‘It’s called a Bulb. That’s what they are before they cage and become Dolls.’

  Bunny rolled her eyes; this woman was a fucking nut. Bunny was sweating and she stank. The small office was boiling. Alice stood up and paced back and forth. It made Bunny uncomfortable.

  ‘You killed Dolly. Self preservation is paramount. Do you get that at all?’

  Sick of the cryptic shit this woman was saying, Bunny pushed her way past her. Kiffany had gone back to her car and the clown was back standing in the corner.

  Seagulls circled in the sky outside like psychotic marionettes. Pools of tired rain made shapes like small islands on the panes of glass. Like terminal islands, thought Bunny. She turned back to Alice. What if Bunny decided to play along? At least until she found she had some more information, some leverage.

  ‘You willing to come along then?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Well maybe I will and maybe I won’t’ Bunny replied, doing her best impersonation of the drag queen from Vegas in Space.

  Alice’s face softened, she picked up the transmitter before she said, ‘You’ll change, you need to know that.’

  Bunny already knew all there was to know about the arduous, painful process of reinvention; or at least that was what she believed right then.

  21

  Angels are Devils

  Here was a woman offering Bunny her hand and yet she was reluctant. The entire situation was more surreal than The League of Gentlemen, Monty Python, Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp put together. Who was Alice Fiend? Or rather what was she? Bunny felt inexorably drawn to this person even though, only hours earlier, she had tried to kill her. There was a witchy sort of otherness about her. She was an outsider, a deviant, a freak.

  Bunny had been born mutilated by her own masculinity; this woman had been mutilated in her own special way. This woman was like her. Both of them wanted to transcend their own skins, punch, kick and cut their way through the membranous flesh of the chrysalis.

  What happens then? Earlier Alice had said something about how men would become obsolete, did they face extinction? Could she stand by Alice and watch her herd the cattle? Had anyone stopped and helped when two teenagers on her own estate beat her so badly that she had to have her jaw wired? Had anyone stopped her mother doing what she did or stopped Bunny fucking men for money when she was 14 and still at school? Nobody had come to her rescue. Why should she help others? Bunny was like oil to other people; they slid away from her one way or another if they spent enough time hanging around her.

  She’d only come here tonight to burn the office down, doing damage because she’d made this magazine, and instead, she’d found a strange kind of angel in Alice. But, Bunny realised, sometimes angels are devils. It wasn’t just a few men Alice was talking about, it was every man. It was genocide.

  Another thing that troubled Bunny was that Alice and Kiffany knew one another. Something too big to just slip Kiffany’s mind. Kiffany knew more than she was letting on and Bunny would need to talk to her without raising suspicion. She didn’t want to have all smoking guns turn in her direction. A question nagged Bunny though: could Kiffany Boston-Gifford be trusted?

  Before she went any further she took Fiend’s arm. Fiend looked at her, puzzled.

  ‘What about Jones?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll leave that to you,’ Alice scowled.

  They made their way down to the street to where Kiffany leaned over the bonnet of her souped up car, chainsaw at her feet.

  ‘About ready I see,’ muttered Kiffany, getting in the car and not giving them a second glance.

  22

  Trauma

  Sunglasses Steve had been keeping a check on Blood Rag since spotting the woman, who called herself Alice Fiend, in a soulless advertorial a month before. The advertorial was about a radio programme Alice was working on and Blood Rag had given out free gifts with Alice’s introduction. He had known a girl a few years ago, went by the name Jessica Spark, that’d vanished. There was a terrorist attack in a small village – at least that was what the tabloids screamed - and he had been one of the only survivors, but her body was never found.

  Sunglasses Steve knew that Alice and Jessica were the same person. He also knew that there had been no terrorist attack that day. He had seen the scarecrows. Seen the slaughter. Sunglasses had also witnessed what happened to Jessica at the barn. He had hidden for a whole day and snuck in when the scarecrows were preoccupied. She had been chained up, her body suspended so far in the air he couldn’t reach to help. Now Steve could remember little more of what happened after that. He did remember it was a scalding summer and he remembered the screaming and the rancid air. This unsettled him more than the memory of staring into the dead eyes of the butchered.

  It was like he had had one of those dreams. One too incomprehensible, too horrific, for a person to look at head on. It was always just a mocking, hectoring spectre stalking at the edge of awareness. So his mind created a veil and it never returned fully formed. It was a place always within him, but always outside of his reach. Whenever he left the house, which was rarely these days, Death wore the faces of everyone he saw; strangers he passed in the street, family, even his fuck buddy Danny was different somehow.

  Jessica had mutated into some sort of chrysalis, skin like glass while something else formed underneath. Steve had somehow survived until the scarecrows left. But they’d been careless and left something behind. It was a peculiar device, like a mobile phone from 1998. Sunglasses Steve had called the ‘Gemini’ because, carved on both the front and the back, were images of two strange creatures. It took him a further two years to learn how to work it. Once he did, he discovered a series of recordings. With this device Sunglasses had become ‘The Phantom Broadcaster’ Jones had heard.

  With the ‘Gemini’ he had learned of plans for the construction of underground facilities; a haven for the selected to hibernate on the day The Sisters fell from the sky. Sunglasses also knew that the only way to prevent this was to go to Mount Kippure, where the owner of Blood Rag Mick Jones resides, and wipe that Blood Rag bitch, and whatever cronies she’d accumulated, off the face of the earth. And he didn’t give a fiddlers fuck about dirtying the face of his own humanity by doing so.

  23

  Meeting Death Along the Way

  The car burned as it tore its way up the dirt path to Mount Kippure. Bunny sat in the back seat holding onto the Unicorn key while Alice sat with the transmitter on her lap. Every now and then she looked back at Bunny and smiled. They drove under a canopy in the forest, which made Bunny feel claustrophobic and the darkness in the mini made her queasy. Bunny thought of the last time she’d seen her mother before her death and what exactly she would do once she met Jones.

  ‘Are you OK sweet?’ Kiffany asked after they’d been driving for a good forty-five minutes.

  ‘I will be, once we get there, Kiffany.’

  Worry fell fleetingly across Kiffany’s face with Bunny’s words and she said no more after that.

  Alice watched Bunny in the rear-view mirror. She was clinging on to the Unicorn. She wondered if the girl had it in her to kill Jones; she’d find a way to make sure she did it. For now she needed to save face and not take the Unicorn by force, but she was running out of time. The body she was in was failing her and she needed to open the ports and release The Sisters before she went to dust.

  Kiffany screamed when the lights appeared from out of the dark; two beams of light, which cut bright like blade’s through treacle. A Jeep was hurtling down the lane at a Holy Fucking Jesus speed, coming right at them. The lane was too narrow and there was no way they could avoid it.

  Alice turned to the two of them and said, ‘Laters’ before she kicked open the passenger door and threw herself from the mini. There were no doo
rs in the back. Bunny was trapped. Before impact Kiffany decided to take her chances and, with a yank of the wheel, the car twisted violently to the right. The mini plummeted deep down into the dark mouth of a chasm in the forest. Bunny closed her eyes and all she could remember hearing was Kiffany scream, every pane of glass splintering and then coming down hard on her head. Her last thought before she was swallowed by pain and the night was see you soon mother.

  24

  Kissing the Wolf Goodbye

  Before she took the name Bunny Flask after seeing a midnight screening of Bunny Lake is Missing in Portobello, Bunny Flask was a boy who went by the name, Adam Wolf. After leaving the morgue on the day of her mother’s death, she noticed that the night had become just that little bit darker and she could still taste the strangers piss on her lips from the woods that day. Bunny had cut her mother off when she’d called the night before. She wanted to know where Adam Wolf was, why the Rivotril she hid under the sink was missing, who Bunny was with, what she was doing and with whom she was doing it.

  His father had beaten Bunny that morning. The violence was nothing new; it had become a part of her over the years. She discovered there was nothing special or remarkable about it; it was something she had always carried inside her. She sought it out wherever she could find it. It was always available, if you knew where to look. Bunny always found bruising was fine but bleeding really impressed her and, from an early age, she had become accustomed to the reliability of pain.

  So, she found it in the diseased cocks of strangers, in classified ads; she played the part of willing victim to perfection and was even something of a cliché. She kept razor blades in a shoebox under her bed.

  When they found the remains of her mother, there was very little of the woman she knew left but this was a fact she’d grown accustomed to before her mother burned. They said she fell asleep while smoking in bed, which Bunny knew was a lie. The fumes of petrol lingered for weeks in that back room. Bunny knew her mother had carried it herself.