by Ray Cluley
“Hey, Rubes, guess who—what the hell?”
Ruby only glanced at her. “It was an accident,” she said. “I’m clearing it up, Mum, look.” She held up a piece of popcorn and placed it in the bowl with exaggerated deliberateness before realizing her mum was not looking at the mess on the floor. She was looking at the table. She was looking at Ruby’s knickers and Ruby’s bra on the table.
“What the fucking hell?”
“What? They’re not mine.” It was a terrible lie, her mum had seen them tons of times, washed them, hung them on the radiators. “They’re not!”
“Whose are they, then?” She grabbed them, shook them. “Mr. Browning’s?”
“I don’t know, do I?”
Phil returned. “What’s going on?”
“You tell me, you fucking pervert.”
“Mum!”
“You fuckin peedo.”
“Mum! They’re not mine!”
“Shut it!”
“I’m fucking wearing mine!” Ruby tore her blouse open, buttons flying to lie with the scattered popcorn. “Look!” She wanted her to see how grown up she was. She wanted her embarrassed. She wanted her to stop before everything was ruined.
“Christ, Rubes, what is that? Where did you get that? You’re too fucking young for something like that.”
“Steve gave it to me.” It was a lie she regretted immediately because she’d have to explain the name to Mr. Browning later.
“Those are mine,” he said, pointing to the other set. “Well, not mine. They belong to my girlfriend.” He tried to take the underwear but Ruby’s mother threw them at him. He avoided them. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Ruby’s mum wasn’t listening. She grabbed Ruby’s arm and yanked her out of the front room.
“Mum!”
“Come with me. Now. And cover yourself up.”
Ruby couldn’t. She was moving too fast.
“Mrs. Haze—”
“Miss.”
They were in the corridor.
“Mum, I didn’t do nothing!”
“Miss Haze, I don’t know—”
“Shut it!”
Ruby turned to signal an apology or to implore for help, she wasn’t sure which, but Mr. Browning’s door was already closing. She heard him hook the chain on and then she was shoved into their own flat.
“Don’t push me, Mum.”
“Get to your room.”
“Don’t tell me what—”
“Get to your fuckin room!”
Ruby was glad to. She slammed the door hard enough to knock a mask from her wall (a white one with flowers), and sat at her desk. The new mask was there, still cupped around its balloon, but she wasn’t in the mood to add to it, not now, so she snatched up a new balloon and inflated it with angry breaths. When it was full, she pinched it closed ready to tie and opened the drawer and said, “I hate her.”
The thing in the drawer had developed some sort of fungal scab, furred like a moist flannel, and a run of sporadic sores had formed a bumpy ridge like bubble wrap along one length. As she watched, one of the sores split and leaked a clear pus while another sank back into the membrane from which it had expanded. Ruby was always surprised at the lack of smell. It looked like it should stink, a pungent wet sweaty smell or the rancid whiff of something rotten.
Ruby leant closer.
Something dark and jellied moved inside the mass of flesh, a darker colour spreading and changing like the shape trapped in a lava lamp. The grains in the wood of the drawer had filled with red and black fibres, spreading out from the organic lump like veins. In one place the wood had split because of this growth and a downy line rose from it like spores of mould.
“He called me his girlfriend,” Ruby said. “But then Mum—”
She shoved the drawer shut just as the door to her room swung open.
“Don’t you slam your door young lady.”
It was a stupid thing to say now because the moment had passed while she’d been pouring herself a glass of something.
“Doing your arts and crafts? Old enough for slutty undies but not too old for glue and glitter? Maybe you should stuff those balloons down your top, eh? Give yourself some proper tits.”
Ruby stretched the balloon neck, twisted it around her finger, and said, “I’ve already got proper tits, Mum.”
The balloon was snatched from her hands before Ruby could tie it, but it spat out its air before Mum could do anything with it either and escaped, blowing itself around the room with a wet belch. Ruby’s mum grabbed for the masked balloon instead, quicker than Ruby could stop her. She squeezed before Ruby could wrestle it away, pushed her painted nails into the skin, and it burst.
Ruby stood up so quickly that her chair toppled. “You pissed-up fat old woman, I hate you! You’re pathetic, fuckin’ mutton.”
It sent her mother retreating with her hand up. “I can’t be bothered with you anymore,” she said, but that wasn’t what the hand meant, the hand meant stop, and Ruby couldn’t.
Ruby wouldn’t.
“You fucked things up with Dad and you’ve fucked things up with every man since, every single one of them, and there’s been a lot, Mum, hasn’t there?” She was following her out of the room now. “But never the one you want, which is basically just anyone who will have you.”
Still her mum retreated.
“That’s it, go and have another drink.”
The kitchen door slammed.
“There’s a secret bottle stashed under the sink!”
With that, Ruby returned to her own room and slammed the door a second time. She used both hands. “Bitch!” She righted the chair. She picked up the limp loose skin of the burst balloon, hating how dead it felt in her hands, and retrieved the other from the floor, inflating it again with breaths that failed to calm her.
The masks on her wall watched—flowered ones, sparkly ones, stars, butterflies, stripes, fangs, some with bunched wool for hair, some with fringes of macaroni—and Ruby looked back, stretching the neck of the balloon into an open slit so that the air came out in a long thin scream.
She dropped the empty balloon and swept the masks from the wall with a scream of her own. A dozen faces looked up at her from the floor, most of them smiling, so she stomped them flat. She imagined each was her mother’s face and smiled back at them as they disintegrated under her feet.
S
Ruby woke in the night to a quiet voice in her room. There was a figure sitting at her desk. She couldn’t see if the drawer was open, but for a moment she thought the thing inside had grown into this new shape, that it was her whispered secrets distorted into massive proportions. But the ember glow of a cigarette came up out of the dark and flared its red circle, casting shadows away from a face that was a grotesque mess of make-up. Dark streaks ran from her mother’s eyes, and her lipstick was smeared across one cheek where she’d wiped her mouth. Her face was a hideous mask, but one that showed everything instead of hiding it.
“And that’s not even the worst part,” she said softly.
Ruby wondered how much she’d missed, and whether her mother knew she was awake. She closed her eyes and pretended not to be.
“I could have done things. I could have gone places. And I’m not stupid, I could have gone to college.” The gentle clink of a bottle against a glass in the dark marked a pause. “Could have got married, too, if you hadn’t come along.”
Ruby heard her swallow.
“You know, when you were born you had a layer of skin all over your face. A cowl or a caul or something. All shiny with blood. You really really fucking hurt to get out, but there you were. My precious little thing. My bloody red jewel.”
She poured another drink.
“You weren’t breathing at first. I don’t know if it was that thing
on your face or because you were so small because, you know, you were early. I thought you were dead, that I’d crushed you dead with all the tight clothes I wore to keep you secret. Because I had to hide it, didn’t I? The lump I was carrying around. Knowing I was pregnant would’ve killed her, and then she would have killed me. You think I’m a bitch? You should’ve met your grandma. I thought if you were dead then she’d never have to know. But you weren’t dead.”
There was a pause for cigarette smoke to be sucked in. Puffed out.
“Sometimes I wish you were.”
Ruby turned the noise she’d made into a murmur and fidgeted a little as if dreaming. She bit down on the inside of her cheek.
“I didn’t get rid of you or nothing, didn’t get an abortion or get you adopted, even though I could have, and I thought maybe you not breathing was my reward for not doing those things.”
Ruby clenched her eyes shut tighter and made tiny fists under the covers.
“And now you give me shit all the time about how great your dad was and how I chased him off and all that bollocks and none of that’s true, Rubes. I never told your dad about you. He would have cared even less than I did. You hear me?”
Ruby held her breath.
“I know you’re awake.”
Ruby said nothing.
“I’m sick of all your bullshit. Danny was a good dad, I’ll give you that, but he wasn’t your dad. So there you go. The dad I “chased off” was just some bloke who looked after you for a while.”
Ruby reached out for the lamp at her bedside and turned it on. She stared at her mother for a moment before finally saying, “That’s a lie.”
Her mum brought the cigarette down on the desktop suddenly, two, three times, crushed it out against the wood, and said, “Fine. It’s a lie. Whatever you say, sweetheart.”
“Get out of my room.”
“Good night, Ruby.”
“Get out!”
The door opened and a slice of light came in from the hall. Ruby’s mother left without looking back and without looking at the papier-mâché masks she stepped on to leave. Ruby had to get up to close the door so she was in the dark once more.
S
The next day, as she tidied the ruined faces away, Ruby shared her plans with the open drawer. She spoke quietly.
“. . . doesn’t matter where, as long as it isn’t here,” she said. “With her. I could work in a club, like Kelly’s sister, or get a job down the market. And in a couple of years me and Mr. Browning, me and Phil, can get married.”
She dumped the last of the papier-mâché in the bin. For a moment she liked how the different fragments lay against each other, a new face of varied parts, and she contemplated, briefly, assembling a massive monstrosity of them for her wall. But she had decided she was too old for such things. She would finish the one she was working on but that was all, and even that she would hide in the drawer.
It lay on the desk, half formed. At the moment it was just a dry curved crust of dirty paper and sex, but she would add facial features over the next few weeks. She’d mould a nose, the ridge of a brow, open lips, and then she’d paint it.
She pulled the drawer open wider to hide the mask and only then did she see the mess inside.
“Oh...”
The end wedged in the corner of the drawer was still fat with what it hadn’t managed to expel but the rest of it lay flat in a dried pool of tar-like fluid, mottled red and black and brown. It was a wrinkled skin that had curled open so that folds of its flesh lay exposed, as if some internal organ had been suddenly turned inside out. There were lumps in it, knots of sticky red mucus like clotted blood, and splatters against the opposite edges of the drawer. Edges she had hoped to see it reach one day.
“No . . .”
She reached in as if to pick it up before remembering the soggy pencil ends, the way they rotted.
“Why?”
Last night. It must have been last night. She hadn’t looked in the drawer this morning, but last night she had watched it writhe and fidget as it filled with each new secret. And then . . .
Mum had come in. Ruby had yelled. She’d said things aloud, things she’d once whispered as secrets, but it wasn’t her fault. If her mother hadn’t come in . . .
And she’d come in twice. In the middle of the night she’d crept in to whisper her lies, and some of them must have seeped into the drawer. Yeah, that was it.
The bitch.
“I’ll kill her,” Ruby said. “I’ll fucking turn her inside out.”
The remains glistened with a fresh wetness, but even as Ruby swore more oaths and wept her secret pain, the flaps of skin merely fluttered in the breeze of her words. Part of it puckered open and closed but that was all, and eventually even that stopped.
S
Mr. Browning moved away.
Ruby spent a long time giving her tears to the drawer, but except for a few sticky red smears in the wood, there was nothing left of the thing inside to take them. Instead, the drawer held the mask she’d made. And beneath that . . .
“Mum made him go,” Ruby said. “I know she did.”
They’d never mentioned the underwear. Ruby thought her mum had forgotten it, like she forgot lots of things when she was drunk, but when she didn’t go to Bingo the next week and then Mr. Browning moved away, Ruby knew something had happened.
She lifted the mask out of the drawer, kissed it, and put it to one side. There was a box underneath it. Just a small box, but it was her biggest secret ever. She didn’t need to check inside—her blood had stopped, and that told her all she needed to know—but she checked again anyway.
“It’s just for a little while,” she said.
The mask on her desk stared at the ceiling. She’d threaded string through its ears; it would never hear her. It didn’t matter. She was speaking to the little plastic stick in her hand.
“He’ll come back for us.”
She put it back in the box, trying to be just as positive.
S
“You want me to put this on?”
Steve turned the mask over in his hands. Ruby had painted it with pale pinks and browns, suitable flesh colours. She’d even added freckles in the right places, but Steve wouldn’t know that. She knew he’d wear it; his tracksuit bottoms were sticking out around his erection.
Ruby nodded. Sitting on the bed, all she had to do was open her legs a little to encourage him. Just enough that her skirt hitched up.
“What about your mum?”
“You can do her too, if you want, I don’t care.”
Steve laughed.
“She’s got a cleaning job once a week,” Ruby said. “She’s not in. And she thinks I’m at school.”
“You can’t say nothing,” Steve said. “I’m going with Tracy now.”
Tracy was a slutty townie, but Ruby didn’t care. She pulled her knickers off. Steve put the mask to his face and approached her.
“Put it on properly,” she said.
“It smells funny.”
But he did as he was told and as he pulled the strings tight she pulled at his waist band and by the time he said, “Condom,” he was already inside her.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said.
“You can’t say nothing,” he said again. His voice was flat behind the papier-mâché mask. “You kinky little bitch,” he said. “Our secret, yeah?”
Mr. Browning looked down at her with Steve’s eyes but sometimes he closed them and it was okay.
“Yeah,” Ruby said. “Yeah.”
S
That night, Ruby crept into her mother’s room. She was slumped on the bed, fully dressed, smelling of sweat and booze and cheap perfume. There was a half-empty cup of wine on the bedside table.
“No clean glasses
, eh Mum?” Ruby said. “Must be too tired to wash them after one whole day of work.”
Her mother made no reply.
Ruby sat beside her and leaned close.
“I had sex with Mr. Browning,” she whispered.
A little drool escaped her mother’s mouth, but that was all. Ruby imagined her secret wriggling inside somewhere, finding a place to settle.
She tucked her mother’s hair aside to expose more of her ear and said, “I’m pregnant.”
Her mother murmured, fidgeted, and was still.
“I’m keeping it,” Ruby said.
“I’m going to tell Steve it’s his,” Ruby said.
She stroked her mother’s hair, soothing her as she whispered all her secrets. She quietly dropped them into her mother’s ear, pausing between each one so that whatever held them had a chance to grow. She imagined something dark and wet expanding inside, festering in its new habitat, and knew that all she had to do was admit the truth of what she’d done one day to make it burst.
Ruby spoke until her throat was dry, pausing only to take a sip from her mother’s cup before starting all over again.
At Night, When
the Demons Come
You’ll notice these records have no dates. I don’t think anyone really knows what the year is these days anyway. The last one I remember is 2020. Everyone remembers 2020, but my point is I didn’t keep track after. Why bother? I only write this because of what happened recently, because someone taught me that others might learn if only I provided the opportunity.
There were four of us when Cassie came and she made six because she didn’t come alone and naturally we counted her last. She was female, next to useless, and a little girl at that, so totally useless. But the man she was with, he was worth having around. We had a couple of guys on our college football team, back when things like that mattered, who were as big as this man. A couple, as in put them together and you had the right size. Fuck knows where he got his clothes. If he wasn’t on your side your side was going to lose, and I’m not talking football any more. His name was Frances, can you believe that? Jones called him a walking Johnny Cash song. I was never a fan, but I knew what he meant.