Clean Plates

So I go to visit her, Tabby, I mean, in her cave, after I’ve been punished, after the punishment’s over, and she’s browner than I remember, her skin’s so brown, and she’s all shrivelled – she’s been shrivelled up – and she’s shuffling around in wooden clogs like someone’s chopped her feet off at the ankles.

“Who did this to you?” I gasp.

“What,” she mumbles in reply and then I realize: of course, she likes this, she is happy this way – she’s just like some fucking pepper-pot woman shuffling around wordlessly in the kitchen:

“I have to organize these plates,” she breathes.  “He’ll be back soon – it’s a test.  Look.  I have to put all the polluted plates in the polluted box – that’s this one here – and all the clean plates in the clean box.  Can you see?  The polluted box has a sad face on it and the clean box has a smiley face on it.”

“But all these plates look exactly the same,” I point out.

“Yes,” she says, smiling bravely, you know the kind of smile I mean: the defiantly meek smile of a domestic violence victim who knows you know she still comes from sex.

“They’re all white,” I say, and the thing is, they really are all white, gleamingly white, Fairy clean, you know, not just really clean but squeaky clean.

“That’s the test,” she says.

“What will happen if you fail?” I ask.

“Well, he comes in – and he goes mental – he goes fucking mental – starts smashing all the polluted plates up – he thinks he’s Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire or someone – and he smashes the plates into a thousand pieces.  And I pick each piece up – individually – place it in my mouth – and swallow it.”

“Don’t you get belly-ache?” I ask.

“What do you think?”

“I think,” I say slowly, turning my eyes to see her completely, “I think you deserve this.  I think this is what you want, and you want it so bad, you want it to happen so much, that you deserve it to happen.”

Her eyes open suddenly, she sees me for the first time.

“Are you from the future,” she says.

“Sure,” I answer.

She isn’t surprised – she knew I was coming.

“Tell me one thing,” she says.  “Is the baby gonna be born dead?”

I tut impatiently: the baby’s fine – but you, you’re just a slut, a stupid slut, just hopeless, useless, slut, slut, slut, slut, just a slut: and always will be.

I throw one of the squeaky clean fairy liquid gleaming white china plates onto the floor of the cave.

Don’t you get it?

All of these plates are fucking clean

Cockroaches

So one day I realized I needed an abortion and what I thought I would do, right, is go back in time a tiny bit, because the annoying thing about the near future is how they sterilize you afterwards.  And it wasn’t that I wanted to have a baby one day, or anything, it was just I liked having abortions so much.  They’re so relaxing somehow, you know, you wake up and you feel so clean and empty and pure:

So then afterwards – after it was all finished – I went to visit David.  The truth is I liked David kind of a lot.  He blinked like a newt, he blinked like a toad, and I liked that.  He was kind of like a skeleton, and he was kind of like a statue, you know, all noble, and a little bit perverted.  He made me lie down like I was four, he made me lie down like I was dead, and then he fucked me and hit me and fucked me and hit me and fucked me and hit me.

“Does it hurt?”  He asked.

“No,” I whispered, so he hit me harder.

“Does it hurt now?”  He was so skinny and polite about it, I felt like I had to be honest.

“No.”  I whispered.

“Now?” He asked, punching me harder.

“No,” I whispered.

He tutted impatiently, he was a German butcher who can’t find the right kind of ham.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.  “Don’t worry about it, it’ll be okay.”

“Shut up, you bitch,” he growled, like an Italian tycoon in a Mills and Boon novel, and went and stripped off his belt, and hit me with the metal bit, till I sobbed, dizzy with pain, begging him to stop, scared I might die soon.  And then I came, and then he came, and after I’d licked all his come from off the floor, he sat me in the corner and brought me porridge, but I had to drink it from the bowl, because all his spoons were dirty, and at some point I must have stopped crying – porridge is so comforting – and then he held me with his newt-like hands, robot newt-like hands, metal robot newt-like hands, and stroked me tenderly.  Well, you know.  For a robot.  And then he whispered: I had to do it, I had to do it, you beautiful little bitch, and I wriggled and giggled like a My Little Fucking Pony, all plastic and pink, and told him about p0rn from the near future and I could tell he was impressed.  He listened intently.  And then he said: the future sounds like a wonderful place – maybe I’ll be able to find some cockroaches in the cellar – but all he could find was a few moths so I ate those instead, and then I left him, grinning, his come on my face, my own blood in my hair, I think now that maybe it was one of the few moments in my life where I have felt genuinely happy.  I looked bad, though.  I looked like the witch from Simon and the Witch.  And plus I had really bad dandruff.

Glass Cages

This skinny Spanish kid said he’d show me round the city and the first thing I noticed was the girls in glass cages, all naked and round, no nipples, pink and fluffy skin, hairless, bouncy.  Who are these women: I asked him.  Oh, they were invented to eradicate misogyny, he said, shrugging airily.  To eradicate misogyny, I asked, hoping I sounded polite. Uh-huh, he said: you swipe your card and you go right in and you do whatever you want, fuck her or kill her even, if you have to.  If you have to, I repeated, looking at one girl, golden and silent.  And fucking beautiful.

“Why don’t they have nipples?” I asked.

He grinned.  “I dunno,” he said.  “The ones in America don’t have belly buttons.  No belly buttons, no pubes.”

“Americans,” I said peevishly, “can be real prudish sometimes.”

“Tell me about it,” he said.

“Do you think they have eradicated misogyny?” I asked.

He shrugged again.  “A bit, I guess.”

“But just because a girl’s in a cage, it doesn’t mean she’s not human…”

He laughed.  “But they’re not human.”  He said.  “They’re pigs.  They’ve been genetically engineered to look like women, that’s all.”

I bit my lip thoughtfully.

“That’s how come you’re allowed to kill them afterwards.”  The Spanish kid said. “Nothing wrong with slaughtering a pig – is there?”

You can’t complain, I thought: you’re not a vegetarian, and he knows, he watched you eating that cheeseburger.

“Have you ever killed one,” I asked, only it wasn’t a question:

“I was in Romania once,” he began, but then he stopped to snigger, and I felt a bit sick.  “In Romania they still grunt like pigs.  It’s fucking hilarious.  So I was in Romania, and then I got really drunk one night and I fucked one – she was just lovely – and then afterwards I cut her up, sliced her up, sliced into her pink flesh like it was Blu-tack, man, she was beautiful.  They make them extra-easy to kill and that makes you feel extra-manly and powerful, you know.”

“I think they should give them nipples,” I said.

“Why?”  He asked.

“So you can cut them off,” I answered, and walked on ahead.  I was a bit bored of the conversation.

N oel’s House Party

So, back in the late 20th Century, the first time around, when I was just a girl, I accused my dad of rape.  Not to his face – that would’ve been a bit embarrassing – but to my CDT teacher, who I really fancied.  I wanted his attention, right, but obviously he didn’t believe me, I mean, you should have seen me as a teenager, wishful thinking to think anyone would have bothered raping me, let alone my dad.  I looked like an orange hamster, a squashed one.  Plus I had really bad acne.

So here I am being punished.  And it’s not as bad as you’d think, the judge is quite humane about it.  All it is is I have to, like, stand naked in a glass cubicle and get coated with come.  It’s like a car-wash, it comes from all sides, I squint and splutter, and then it’s over for a moment, and then it starts again.  It’s like in Noel’s House Party or something.  Only it’s not for charity, it’s a punishment.

The cubicle doors swing open and I stand naked on the stage, before a live studio audience.  Noel Edmonds comes and asks me if I’m sorry and I say yes automatically but we all know I’m not really, and then it’s the next girl, and the next girl, and the next girl, and then the next, and so on and so forth, millions of girls like me, well-meaning orange hamsters who accused our fathers of rape, because we wanted it to be true, because we wanted to be loved.

In the queue for the showers I see Cordelia.

“Life is so meaningless, now I have money,” she says, sighing melodramatically.

“Oh, fuck off Cordelia,” I say.

“You know what they say, don’t you,” she says, lighting a cigarette. “They say that a girl who is tired of rape is tired of life.”

“Cordelia, you stupid bitch,” I snarl.  “They don’t say that at all.  No-one ever said that.”

“Well, they would have done,” she says, “if they’d have thought of it.”