by Ray Robinson
— Any change, chief?
Antony saw tar-coated teeth. Saw pupils pinned.
He suddenly felt very awake.
He wandered around a few of the charity shops and bought a dress, a pair of skanky heels, a slaggy skirt and a cheap brunette wig. He almost left his mother in M&S when he was looking for some sheer tights and then realised she was dead and that he was carrying her around the Arndale in a Tesco’s carrier bag.
On the way home, he received a call.
— Why was that woman at the unit yesterday?
— Hello Lizzie.
— Who the hell do you think you are?
— Kenneth won’t remember her visit. He doesn’t know who she is.
— That woman…
— Yet.
— She ruined our lives, you little bastard.
— You inviting Kenneth then?
— You’re going to regret this.
— Inviting him to your wedding?
— I’m coming down on you like a ton of bricks, boy.
* * *
The whistling in his ears. The world freezes and there’s a screaming in his head and it’s so loud and intense it becomes the sibilant sound he hates so much.
Only one way to stop the noise.
Only one way to stop the pain.
The loop rises up, just below his jaw. He places a towel between his neck and the ligature to protect vessels, to avoid that give-away the herringbone pattern, that V-shape at the point of apposition.
Paroxysm of asphyxiation. Paroxysm of orgasm.
From the age of twelve, he was a man trapped inside a child’s body, and he needed a different kind of love. But when you can’t fuck someone else you fuck yourself.
Sitting behind his desk at school, staring into the blankness of his head, hot and sweaty thinking about sex, how to do it and what it would feel like. The dull ache in the abdomen, the hot dizziness of testosterone, the constant churn. Watching girls bloom and blossom before his eyes, breast bulging, hips pushing against the too-tight uniforms. And the jealousy he felt, watching the sensuous sway of oestrogen. He wanted their blood. He hated the masculinization of his body. He wanted to be a little girly-boy forever.
He didn’t have a cool hairdo, didn’t wear the latest fashions, wasn’t into weight-lifting, didn’t knot his tie thinly, didn’t care how he looked, wasn’t into football or rugby, didn’t get the jokes, didn’t finger girls behind the swimming pool on Youth Club night, didn’t go on school holidays, didn’t call girls frigid or goers or fishy knickers. But by the time kids started congregating up the park on a Friday night, he was already drinking cider and beer and wine and sniffing glue on a daily basis. Scab moustache.
And he wore Cynthia Chester’s knickers to school under his uniform.
Living in a constantly altered state of consciousness, getting high, getting by, by whatever means. Glue, wanking, hanging, adrenalin and neuropeptides, all the same buzz and blur and numb and calm. Fighting back in his own way. All of his milk-round money spent in the hardware store. Tripping, he’d often find Jack sitting next to him on a branch in a tree, studying him slowly and shaking his head.
When he was fourteen, he brought her down off the moors and into town, walking the streets of the sleepy estate, scraping his heels along the footpaths, chewing chuddy like a little scrubber, wishing someone would catch him, expose him.
When his mother and Lou were at their bars, he’d closed his bedroom door and play Heavy Metal so loud the speakers would distort. Then he went through the whole routine of being beaten up and strangled, Val’s nylon tights pulled as high as they could go, securing them with a belt.
He killed himself at night. It was breathtaking.
* * *
He remembered searching the psych’s face for a stain of revulsion.
— For you the inevitable and ultimate exposure equals pleasure, does it not?
Antony felt like a blank page.
In a tiny voice he went, — Yes.
* * *
Spooner asked him if he could have a word in his office. He said he’d been pleased with what he’d seen of Antony’s work recently and that he’d been reading his file and CV and thought Antony was capable of a lot more.
— I’d like to promote you to Assistant Manager.
— Jesus.
— Is that a yes?
— What about the other staff? Equal ops and all that?
— I’m offering you first refusal.
— But my life’s very complicated.
— Really?
— I don’t think I could handle the pressure right now.
— It’ll mean less time-face with the clients.
— Time-face?
— Less hands-on.
— When could I start?
— There’s just one thing.
— Oh?
— Your involvement with Kenneth.
— I see.
— Lizzie’s been on to the Area Manager. We feel, well…
Antony stood up and showed his palms.
— Thanks. But no thanks.
* * *
She was in her mid- to late-thirties and wasn’t bad looking. Actually, she was quite fit. As Julia shook Antony’s hand, Kenneth raised a lewd eyebrow behind her.
Nurse Bog Breath appeared in the doorway.
— Kenneth, if you insist on smoking, please do it in the garden.
She unhooked Kenneth’s red anorak from the back of the door and took his arm.
— You must observe the House Rules. How many times?
— Mardy cow, Kenneth said, just loud enough for them all to hear.
Julia went to follow him but Antony stopped her.
— Can I have a word?
When Kenneth was out of earshot he went,
— He doesn’t remember you?
She deflated.
— He keeps calling me ‘nurse’. But I quite like the new Kenneth, despite the fact he’s oblivious.
— Ah, oblivion.
She gave him a dirty look.
— Has your daughter been?
— Kerry? No.
— Does she know?
She sat on Kenneth’s bed and ran a hand across his pillow.
Antony tried to imagine the two of them together.
— It’s terrible, she said. I’m such a bad, bad person.
Their clandestine electricity fizzing through the stuffy congregation.
— I considered telling her he died.
She looked at Antony with such sleepy eyes.
— I totally understand, he said.
— Lizzie told me I’d ruined her life. She called me an evil slut.
He took the picture frame apart and passed her the small Polaroid.
Her brow knotted. She turned it over and said,
— I gave it to him after Kerry was born.
She looked at him steadily.
— Is Kenneth playing games with us?
— Was Kerry a breach birth?
— Why?
— Was Kenneth there?
She nodded and went, — That’s when it all came out.
Antony thought he should have told her that Kenneth remembered.
A flashbulb.
She handed the Polaroid back.
— I’m sorry.
* * *
He stared out of his window at the city at night. He didn’t know how to look at it, how to read such an enormous urban blur. The layers of buildings melded into solid blocks of concrete and light, yet none of them touched. He suddenly felt very lost.
He spoke to the window, — What do I do?
All he got in response was TV laughter from the flat below.
He made the mistake of listening to the recording again.
The final meeting with the psych.
— In medical terms, the psych said, your breath play is known as asphyxiophilia, and I believe your cross-dressing may be mainly fetishistic.
Antony told himself his life would
not be changed.
— Labels, at this stage, give us a framework to work within.
The psych then spoke about Antony’s fantasies as a paraphilic script, and said his attraction to women’s clothes was suggestive of transvestophilia. He told Antony how asphyxiation, how obstruction of the carotid artery, could potentially be lethal.
— It’s OK, Antony heard himself saying. I’m always safe.
— Don’t do what your mother did, Antony.
— What that meant to mean?
— Don’t deny yourself the right to be happy.
This was the point where Antony had stood up and shouted,
— It’s my family that need therapy, not me. I’m the fucking normal one because I came for help, but I get labelled fucking mental. Well I don’t want to be shrunk any more. I wanted to understand this twist in me, but you’ve made me feel even smaller. I want to be a giant.
The psych had smiled compassionately and so Antony screamed,
— FUCK YOU!
Antony deleted all of the files on his Dictaphone, but as soon as he heard the chime sound-effect that indicated the files were well and truly gone, he regretted it.
* * *
He took a cab to his dealer’s down by the canal, and when he got back he did a few lines and took his clothes off and stood in front of the mirror. He was naked but he could see her staring back, and his fear spelled one thing:
T-R-A-N-N-Y
So he smashed the four standing mirrors and ran at the walls, attacking the drawings of Rebecca, ripping them into shreds and jumping on them, screaming till the pain in his chest made tears roll. Then he put his fist through the door and kicked the television over and shattered the screen with his ashtray and smashed the video recorder. Then he emptied his drawers and threw everything into the centre of the room: heels, skirts, CDs, books, duvet, pillows.
And then he tore the photographs of his mother and Jack to pieces.
He couldn’t breathe. He didn’t know what he was doing.
He went into the kitchen and pulled the bottles of vodka out of the freezer and listened to the dull thwack as they hit the concrete outside. Then he went into the bedroom and opened the window and lifted large armfuls of his stuff and threw it into the yard below. He emptied the suitcase out the window, his ligatures, his knots, and pushed his bed up against the wall and tried to pull the door off its hinges because he could feel it inside. Something.
He sat and heaved on the floor, looking into a broken shard of mirror, remembering the moment he felt her for the first time.
After a while none of the beatings came to matter. They happened to someone else. To the girl in the next room. The little girl his mother said she’d always wanted. But hers was the face he saw them beating. She took it for him. She took it all.
When he looked into the broken shard of mirror, he remembered that first time: pressing himself into the wall, listening to her sobbing in the room next room. But then she stopped. He heard the pad of her footsteps. The door to his room opened and he closed his eyes and curled up with fear. But she climbed onto the bed and he felt her.
That’s when she began interrupting his sleep; he’d wake and find her at the foot of his bed, her back to him. He’d beg her to turn around, fingers grasping at the bedroom air, but she’d always disappear. And so it spilled over into a desperate need. Of wanting. Of not wanting.
He went down to his scattered world in the yard outside and set fire to it all. His earthly possessions went up in a vodka whoosh. Darkness moved and shivered all around as he stood and watched the flames, remembering the church and his night up on Cloud Hill.
He ran back up to his room and opened another wrap and racked a few lines, inhaling, swallowing acrid snot. Feasting, feasting. He finished the first gram and opened another and pulled the carpets up and threw them out the window and cleaned the floors. Then he made a drugged out trip into the nuclear glare of Homebase. Cruising the aisles, feeling bullet proof, laughing to himself, the whole jerk-off Fuck You of a cocaine high.
He got a taxi back with the tubs and brushes and sheets and began painting the floors and walls of his flat in brilliant white. He painted over the montage of women’s faces and placed white throws and bed sheets over everything and then he cut and shaved his hair off.
He went into bathroom and smudged the lipsticked words across the mirror. Then he positioned his armchair in the centre of the room and sat there, feeling like he never wanted to sleep again.
He repeated it to himself until the word became a mantra, a phonological blur.
— I am an asphyxiophiliac. I am an asphyxiophiliac. I am an asphyxiophiliac. I am an asphyxiophiliac….
Like he’d had a fucking stroke.
* * *
The unfamiliar tones of his doorbell shocked him.
Jade took one look at him.
— Your beautiful hair?
Then at the flat.
— What the fuck?
Antony rubbed the suede of his freshly shorn head.
Jade punched him in the chest.
— What the fuck’s wrong with you?
— Hit me again. Harder. Please.
She threw herself onto his bed.
— It’s a new start, Jade.
Her blood-flushed, livid face.
— But you’re a transvestite?
— It’s not as simple as that.
— You gay?
— I think, he said. Think about your naked body every minute of every day.
She got off the bed and paced around the room, rubbing wetness from her cheeks.
— Then why?
— I’m starting to feel happy. I think I’m starting to like myself.
— You’ve never liked yourself?
He didn’t see her move but she was all around him. The smell of her hair, the pressure of her arms. He heard himself say it,
— I love you.
She took a step back. She blinked once, lips opened, nose flaring.
— I don’t, she said. Don’t know who you really are.
— That makes two of us. But I’m making a start.
She went over to the window, pointing at the racked-up lines.
— You twisted?
She barked a laugh, peering down into the yard outside.
He looked around the white room. The only things left were his mother’s cremains, the address book, the black square of his laptop, and the framed photograph of him and Jade sitting in the centre of the mantelpiece.
And it was then that he noticed Jade’s footprints across the floor.
The cleat-marks of her trainers had made an upside-down question mark.
¿
A noose.
— Let’s get away from this fucking flat, she said. It’s freaking me out.
Neither of them moved.
— But I haven’t got a stitch to wear.
— I’m really worried about you, she said.
— I’m sorry about my reaction to the whole university business. I know it’s selfish, but I don’t want to lose you.
She frowned distantly. She seemed to disappear for a second.
— We can only ever be friends.
He heard her voice and said, — I’ve been telling you that all along.
* * *
He opened his window. The cool air came to him as did the increasing noise from their bedroom. He felt hollow then, but he knew that soon everything would be all right, because he would climb down the drainpipe and pedal away on his bike, out past the estate and into the darkness of the country lanes where he would let go of the handlebars, his arms steeply outstretched like the wings of a dove, and the wind slowly stroking his hair would be the delicate long fingers of Cynthia Chester. A sense of calm would pass over him then, and he would be screaming Wha-hooo all the way, weaving along the back lanes down to the dovecote. There, he would remove the spare key from under the brick and let himself in. He would make a bed for himself in the creaking wicker chair and read
his book, learning the Latin slanty words by torchlight.
Louder now. The shouting was getting much louder.
He climbed up onto the windowsill, rolled onto his stomach, and slowly slid out backwards. The drainpipe was just within reach.
He got a good foothold, and disappeared into the dark.
10.
— Sorry to hear about your mother, Jack said.
— Thanks.
— Christmas.
— What about it?
— I know it’s a couple of months away yet, but we were wondering.
— We?
— Your step-mum and me.
— …
— Would you like to come spend it here?
— You’re joking?
He stared at his reflection in the mirror. Saw his mother’s face.
— Antony?
— I’ll think about it.
* * *
He walked down the long winding driveway of dank woodland and found Jade’s halls at the very bottom, an attractive three-storey Georgian villa with small leaded windows—it formed a semicircle around a perfectly tended lawn, dotted with enormous ochre acacias. And seeing her in those new surroundings, seeing that brain of hers being put to some use, he felt so envious. He realised he’d let his own brain turn to mush and how much he missed being a student, the whole concentrated thrust of it.
She was lonely and tearful that first week and said she missed everyone, that Fresher’s Week should have been called Fucker’s Week and that the place was full of posh Southern wankers. She even spoke about chucking the course in, but by the third week she’d made friends with a girl from Newcastle and they were going out a lot. The whole shared experience of being Northerners. Antony pictured the two young women surrounded by well-shod, twattish young men.
* * *
According to her clock it had just gone 9:30 and they were sat drinking G&Ts in her bedroom listening to tunes. They were meant to be catching the firework display at the Cathedral, but he knew they’d never make it out of her room that night. He’d begun to talk. For once, he’d started to open up.