The Terrible

by Yrsa Daley-Ward

you’re part of it. So why complain?

  Let’s not argue again, says Peter, glaring at me. It’s the worst he’s ever looked.

  Later, after the sex, when he shows me the film he made of it, I can’t look. It’s like watching someone punch me, again and again, in the stomach.

  I have learned that I put myself in another place sometimes. Is that where the girls go when they dance in that awful pub? I hope I see them in another dimension sometime. We can chat about the animals. There are far too many of them to us

  and mostly, they rule the world.

  18.0

  David and Mum

  fight then make up,

  fight then make up again.

  Little Roo starts a chess club at high school.

  He is razor sharp and almost fourteen,

  beats everyone, even adults. He’ll have your queen while you’re still trying to protect your little pieces. He has an analytical and creative brain, says Peter. He could go far, if he wanted.

  Peter tells you he wants to be with you every day.

  Peter

  phones you up six times while you’re out shopping to “see how you are.”

  Peter seems to think he’s protecting

  you from the world, and men.

  Peter says you flirt too much,

  reel it in.

  David suspects

  something. David is angry. Says

  “Is there something I ought to be jealous about?”

  in that creepy way of his.

  Mum sees everything, asks nothing. Carries on going to work and coming home and sleeping and going to work and coming home and not getting enough sleep. David keeps sweet things locked up in drawers—

  chocolate-chip muffins, biscuits, Jammie Dodgers, rows and rows of Jaffa Cakes—

  and will not let anybody at them. He acts more and more bizarrely,

  buying comics, cakes and CDs and more cakes

  on Marcia’s credit card. Hundreds and hundreds of

  pounds’ worth of shit

  locked up in cupboards.

  You

  reduce food to 1,200 calories

  reduce food to 1,000 calories

  don’t tell anyone what’s happening with Peter.

  He wants to get engaged. Oh God.

  He says, “You’re losing too much weight.

  Eat. Please eat.”

  But your hip bones feel more real than anything:

  two trophies

  flanking you, holding you upright,

  telling you thank you thank you; we love your hard work

  and anyway,

  you’re sorry for Peter

  but you want out.

  You need something, but you don’t know what.

  You find that there are internet sites you can

  go to and chat with other frustrated people

  in the world.

  Peter says, “You can do all that, but only if I’m involved.”

  From lycos.com

  you meet

  AISHA, who is tall,

  Persian

  long haired

  so beautiful you can barely stand to look at her.

  “That’s your boyfriend?” she says, gesturing toward Peter. You nod,

  but you don’t want it to be true.

  You write a book

  about four middle-class white women

  with long, shiny hair and ordinary families

  dealing with marital and career problems

  and mild lesbianism.

  You call it Swinging Roundabouts, and all the publishers say, “Good effort, but it’s not what we’re looking for.”

  You write songs

  record them

  nothing works

  nothing works

  You’re probably a lesbian.

  You think about women

  all the time. ALL OF THE TIME.

  From alt.com

  you meet

  CARYN

  “You know, I’m going to castrate him,” she says of her boyfriend (who is waiting for her in a minivan in the car park outside).

  “Yeah, it’s all arranged. He doesn’t mind. We’re working our way up to it.”

  You laugh. But her face is straight.

  “No, I’m serious,” she says. “Absolutely serious. We’ve been planning this for a really long time. There are lots of people doing the same, online and stuff. It’s a thing we’re doing to illustrate my complete control in the relationship and Martin’s submission. I can’t wait. It’s going to be really exciting for us. A kind of pinnacle. It will vastly improve our dynamic, you know?”

  “We’d love you to join us,” she says. “Have some fun one night. Martin doesn’t need to watch or participate. He can listen from another room, if you’d prefer. That’d mess with his head,

  haha.

  He’d be into that.”

  Oh, I got you this, she says, getting a package out of her rucksack.

  You open it. It’s a toe ring.

  The next time you speak online, she says,

  “I’m in love with you. Really, I am.”

  18.5

  You move in with Peter.

  Marcia comes round to visit and sighs a lot,

  saying nothing at all to you except

  “Grandma and Granddad think you’re ruining your life”

  and

  “David’s a pain in the arse”

  and

  “It’s nice what you’ve done with the place; it’s so tidy.”

  You clean your new house from top to bottom, often.

  You remember Linford’s kitchen floor and shudder. You make your own rules and you have your own house,

  things can be exactly as you want. No red home. No terrible teeth. No oily mustaches. Just you and disinfectant and counting calories and fucking. Just you and cleaning, and household bleach,

  and Peter.

  And all you can do is break.

  break.

  Tell Peter you’re leaving

  one night when he comes home drunk.

  He slams the door, nearly taking it off its hinges. You move out.

  THREE

  Roo can play any instrument you give him,

  gifted like that. Pure talent. Loves to drum but can’t sit still at school. Lacks focus.

  Isn’t checked in, they say. Fell in with bad company, they say.

  Or perhaps he is the bad company, they say.

  Either way it needs to stop.

  Mum calls. Roo stopped his piano lessons to go and hang out on street corners.

  Says Mum,

  “I can smell it on him. The outside.”

  Mum calls. Mum says Roo put a hole in the living room door with a cricket bat.

  Mum is nearly crying. “It’s drugs, I think,”

  she says.

  “It’s messing him up. He’s changing. He’s not going to school anymore.”

  Mum calls.

  “A GUN,”

  she says

  “I just threw a 9mm in the bin!

  Come and get your brother. I swear I’m going to kill him or kick him out.

  I can’t do this. I’m exhausted. I don’t feel well at all.”

  Instead you

  head to Manchester,

  which is delightful and grim,

  move into a bedsit in Salford. Fifty pounds a week, shared bathroom.

  Drink a bottle of red most days. Hear through the vine that Peter is drinking his days away.

  Love

  Manchester. By day

  temp in an office in a glass-fronted tower,

  by night

  go out, on the pills.

  the ninety-eight blues

  It�
��s a coldasfuck night out there

  and there are no stars in the sky as far as you can see

  but that’s no problem, you can make your own. There is a track in the house charts with those exact words. You’ll be dancing to it later. You smile at your reflection in the long wall mirror mounted behind your door. Tonight you are kitted out from top to toe in brand-new clothes,

  a short, figure-hugging purple dress

  and black high heels. The person staring back at you looks pretty good. If you weren’t her you might very well want to be. As you switch off the TV your stomach is nervous. You lock up, go down the dreadful pink corridor and brown-carpeted stairs out into the night. You live at the nicer end of Salford. The higher end, near the football grounds, just before Salford becomes Prestwich, where the mock-Tudor houses mark the end of the street.

  There’s a thin layer of new ice on the ground, so you’ll want to be treading carefully on those heels. Your breath forms wispy tendrils in the dark blue air. The double-decker bus that runs through Salford comes in less than fifteen minutes, a godsend in weather like this. Still singing away to yourself, you climb to the top row of the bus to view the streets from up above. It’s one straight road into Manchester city center, past the school fields and the high-rise estates at either side. There’s always some violent dispute going on between the groups from both estates, the inhabitants of which proudly hail from one tower or the other. It’s never out of the newspaper. All that separates the two towers is the main road, the newsagent’s, the bookies and two high strips of barbed wire at either side.

  After you pass the museum

  and the Apollo concert hall

  across from the parklands of icy grass, the new police station and the vacant lots, another bus pulls up at the lights beside yours

  and a boy who is sitting with his friends on the top tier blows you a kiss. You wipe away the condensation with a gloved finger so you can see him more clearly. You give them all a wave.

  You start to come up

  you start to roll

  about two minutes from the town center by Deansgate Locks.

  You feel the rush inside, the

  stirrings

  the hot joy drips

  things soften in focus.

  You need something to chew.

  Leaning forward, you pop some strawberry gum loudly in your mouth and ask the man on the double seat opposite you if he doesn’t think the overhead view of the colored lights reflected in the water isn’t one of the most beautiful things that he has ever seen. He doesn’t reply. The lady beside you

  pretends she hasn’t heard you either. You don’t care. You’re starting to feel

  superstar brilliant.

  By the time you reach the Locks and you get into the bar, your new friend Paulette is already there. After all, this is her local, the very place where the two of you met, just two months ago. Every single time you’re here the music gets better.

  You are electric. Your head is swimming

  you sweat

  the beat reaches your bones.

  You stir

  from your head to your fingertips,

  you can feel it,

  you can feel it in your heels,

  even the soles of your feet are happy. You can’t see your other friends

  but feel sure they must be safe;

  you’ll see them soon enough. The place is full of people waiting to be discovered.

  When you connect with everyone again it is time to get into the club. Paulette is laughing at you

  because you clearly dropped a pill already.

  “Let’s do another,” she says. “While it’s empty in here.”

  The beat is like a pulse;

  everything inside you is liquid precious. There is so much to say. You tell Paulette how much you love her and that things will work out fine with the divorce and custody of her little boy. She’s giggling,

  she says you’re off your head. You can’t argue with that. You find your new friend Carl talking to a group of people. You kiss him. You two don’t like each other like that at all, not really, but tonight,

  but tonight

  his tongue tastes of bourbon and Coke.

  It’s a heady stomach, this euphoria. You laugh at each other. His face is contorting and yours must be too, because you can feel the front row of your teeth clamping down onto your lower lip. It’s going to hurt tomorrow. People around you are gyrating to

  “We can make our own stars.” To the left of you, Paulette is dancing in a pool of light.

  You want to call Roo and tell him,

  Pack up your things and move to Manchester. Away from Mum and David. Let’s share a bedsit and write films or something. Something like that.

  Mid-conversation with a stranger, you forget, momentarily, what exactly it is that they are talking about.

  Sorry, what’s that you were saying?

  and then they laugh and say,

  You were talking, not me.

  This happens. It does.

  This happens, you say. Oh, it happens. Sometimes but not often.

  Or not always, but often.

  Shit, they say. You sound like a poem.

  What drugs are you on tonight, poet?

  It is that time already.

  Freezing air rushes through the sweatbox

  and everyone is making their way out. It is a rude interruption and everyone is worrying about where to go next.

  You can’t go home high and alone. The people around you decide to continue the party at the place of a friend of a friend of a friend

  (tenuous)

  but then there is the desperation.

  You get the address that somebody has scrawled down on a drinks receipt and most of you make it to the disclosed location.

  The after-party is in a new build where the apartments overlook the entire city. It is one of those painfully modern apartments with hardwood flooring, sharp edges and new chrome appliances. The living room is open plan and everything is so white, so sterile, that you wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was a bloody operating table or dentist’s chair in the middle. You say this out loud but make some slip of the tongue and somebody sniggers. You feel a tiny bit sick but then someone else offers you another, pink and love-heart-shaped. Paulette’s favorite pills.

  Where is she?

  Two hours and

  you would do anything to stop it getting lighter outside. This time always comes far too soon. Sunday is a horrible thought. Somebody else must be thinking the same thing as you, because he tries to close up the gap in the curtains where a trickle of daylight threatens everything. Things are wearing off and you feel yourself dropping back into the here and now

  the terrible here and now.

  Your new friend gets stuck into a bottle of vodka in the kitchen, so you join him halfheartedly,

  but after a quarter of a bottle he rushes home

  to pick up his kids from his mother’s, he says. What a reason to break up a party.

  You,

  still drinking and drinking,

  feel strangely alert, horribly sober,

  and no longer recognize anyone. Where did everyone go?

  The stereo is pumping out Trance. You can’t get into Trance. Not now.

  Two people are sitting, awake but motionless. One of them is curled up into a tight ball underneath the dining table. Nobody is taking any notice.

  The vodka is keeping you calm. The euphoria has long slipped away. There’s a new numb feeling. The heavy. It must be the drink; you can’t feel anything much. Still, this is better than what you have been feeling in Real Life recently.

  You cry much too often these days.

  Example:

  earlier on in the week when you were walking home from the supermarket with all o
f your bags and they were cutting into your arm, you suddenly noticed the red of the berries on the holly bushes

  and became conscious at once that we see the world through filters

  and they are all askew.

  Something Bad Is Here.

  People from the party are piling into taxis to go home.

  You jump into a car going your way. You’re only going as far as the high street.

  In the car, nobody speaks. The man who was under the table earlier is sitting in the passenger seat with his head in his hands.

  Your throat is dry and the inside of your mouth is tingling,

  sore.

  You can’t think straight

  but you just have to get on the bus home and soon enough, things will be okay. People are going on with their lives oh so calmly and the futility of it all is killing your head.

  This time tomorrow you will already be back into pretending to yourself and everyone else that you’re on top of things, standing by the photocopier on the twenty-third floor of the highest glass-fronted tower building in Manchester, back to looking down at icy blue air and snow-topped buildings and the busy roads outside,

  back to longing to escape. You will be drinking lots of black coffee/brown sugar to try to prevent the slump and wishing time away again.

  You tell them,

  Drop me at the lights, I’ll bus it from here.

  You board the 98

  You board the 98 bus

  You board the 98 bus shaky

  You board the 98 bus shakily and take a seat. A small blond-haired woman climbs and sits ahead of you with two small children. They are making too much noise, it is all too much.

  Breathe slow. Breathe slower, but don’t over-breathe or you’re done for. Do not collapse. The lady turns around, gives you a look up and down and draws the children closer to her. You’re not sure what she’s looking at. Wasn’t she young once? At least you’re not riding the number 98 judging people.

  You could really do with a shower. You hope there’s hot water left in the bathroom. You wish you were going home to something or someone instead of an old studio flat with not a lot of light, and a bathroom shared between six. But at fifty pounds a week you get what you pay for.