Come Let Us Sing Anyway

by Leone Ross

  ‘I think you’re very emotional,’ said the park attendant, and bared his teeth. He didn’t seem to see the bag. ‘Chin up, laddie,’ he said.

  *

  Charu Deol sat on his lumpy bed that night and examined the bagged and beautiful hymens. Surely, he thought, they belonged to virgins. But neither of these violated women were pure. Was this a strange sickness of city women that no one had thought to tell him? Certainly, he hadn’t known city women before, with so many ideas and so many of them about him. More than once, he’d found himself feeling sorry for them, even the ones who looked at him strangely on the 453 bus and moved their purses to the left when they saw him.

  *

  His Tuesday job was for a company that made industrial bleach. He liked it best there. Despite the smell of ammonia, his cart shone – and the teeth of his lady boss shone, and she looked into his face, not through the back of his head, and laughed loudly when he told her about the cracks in every one of his landlady’s china cups.

  ‘Is your country very beautiful, Charu?’

  He thought it very familiar of her to address him so. He could see she was made of the same stuff as his mother’s maid, very different from the finer skin of his father. She lifted the hair off her neck, which was something he thought she should only do near a man she knew well. Nevertheless, he nodded politely and when the boss lady left he went to the large unisex toilet and scrubbed yellow and brown stains out of the bowls, his rubber gloves rolled all the way up his wrists and forearms.

  When he backed out of the stall and turned around, there were three hymens on the floor. One of them was like a piece of thunder, singing a dark song and rolling back and forth – the hymen of a woman in her fifties who got something called a good backhander when she talked too much, and a pinch on the waist when her opinions sounded more clever than her husband’s. The second reminded him of a teardrop. When he lifted it to his face, it filled him with memories of a woman whose husband once ironed the inside of her left thigh like a shirt. The third one slipped him into the skin of a woman who had a happy life except she remembered walking home from school and the stranger who crept up behind her, put his hand up her skirt and clutched her vulva.

  Charu Deol was so startled by the sudden feeling of invasion that he dropped her hymen in the soap dish and had to fish it out again. Two more hung from the rolling towels, like wind chimes, twins: one raped, one not, but he knew the untouched sister stayed with the violated twin because she wished it had been her instead. He clutched the sink; he couldn’t see his reflection because there was a spray of crystalline hymens across the mirror, each smaller than the last. He bent closer and realised it was only one after all, exploded across the glass like a sneeze. The woman it belonged to had clouted her best friend’s fiancée when he’d tried to hold her down. He hit her so hard in return he made her deaf in one ear. She had never told her best friend, but she didn’t go to her house anymore and that had caused problems between them. The blood from her ear had tinged the hymen spray a shy blush-pink.

  Charu Deol set about gathering them all.

  *

  He thought them safe, slipped between the blue blankets, and so they were for a few days, but he had forgotten his landlady’s monthly clean-out, and returned that Friday to find her shining his floors with a coconut husk and changing the sheets on his bed, her fat, brown back unexpectedly familiar. The blue blankets were stacked on the floor, one plastic bag peeping out from a crevice. He was so frightened she might have thrown them away, or hurt them, that before he knew it he was speaking in his father’s baritone, demanding she respected his privacy, please and thank you, and if she couldn’t, she could find someone else to pay her every Sunday for this shithole. It was a city word and he felt powerful saying it to her.

  The landlady stared at him, as if he was a new and rare object.

  ‘Please yourself,’ she said, and shuffled away from the half-polished room. ‘Do someone a favour,’ he heard her muttering as he scooped up the plastic bags, ‘look what you get.’

  *

  He bought himself a long coat from a charity shop. The coat had many pockets and after his Sunday job, he sat on his bed and sewed more into the lining. His Sunday job was at a university, where he cleaned staff offices and found thirty-eight hymens. Some were like bright cherry-red fingernails; one s-shaped, glimmering wrought iron; he tapped it and heard a ting-ting sound like his mother’s bracelet on her kitchen pots. One reminded him of a cat’s paw; another smelled like fresh sea urchin. It surprised him to find that eleven of the hymens were from women abused by scholarly, well-respected men.

  As the numbers increased, anxiety took him: the risk of forgetting even one precious story. To forget would be sacrilege. He stole two reams of recycled typing paper from his Sunday job and wrote the stories of the women down and read them at night, trying to commit them to memory. On Wednesday, he was fired from his Wednesday job, for refusing to take off his suspiciously bulging coat for the security guard. On Thursday, the landlady left a note from his Sunday job, to say he must not come back – their cameras had recorded his paper theft.

  At his Tuesday job, the boss who was overly familiar left her hymen on the edge of her computer desk.

  It was so pretty he mistook it for a small, white daisy. When he touched it, his head reeled with alcohol: cranberry vodka and alcopops. Last Friday she’d gone around the back of the pub with two men who seemed quite nice; she was sexually aroused but also frightened and when one of them said something lewd and dark, she wanted to run back into the pub, but the second one had a hand on her hip and she decided she might as well bite her lip because making a fuss might. Might. Might just.

  Hurt.

  She found Charu Deol weeping for her, his cheek hard against her computer screen and fired him for the way he looked at her, his face broken open. She said if he told anybody about unfair dismissal, she would say he tried to rape her.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ she said. ‘You don’t know.’

  *

  Charu Deol’s head is light and empty as he walks through the early morning sunshine. The coat full of hymens rubs his ankles; the satchel on his back is stuffed with scribbled paper. He is concerned about himself. He has taken to muttering in public places, to stopping men on the road to tell them about women. He needs help. He cannot witness these stories alone. If he could just explain, if he could just ask them, politely, not to hurt anyone; if he could just talk to enough of them, it might stem the tide. Most thrust him away, mistaking him for drunk.

  ‘It’s not true,’ say the few who listen when he tells them that it’s one in every three women he sees. ‘It’s complicated,’ say the men. ‘What can I do?’ they say.

  He doesn’t know.

  *

  His skin hurt. He feared it was transparent, exposing his internal organs. This was not a job for one man, not for a man who needed to pay rent, although he found himself less concerned with such banalities. He avoided speaking to women at all, worried he might hurt or offend them. He was practically servile with his landlady since his last harsh words, cleaning not just his own room, but the entire house, including her roof and digging her backyard until she yelled at him. He was relieved that she was among the unscathed, and marvelled at women on the streets for their luck or stoicism.

  One tall lady left a trail of hymen strands behind her like golden cobwebs, a story so long and fractured and dark that he bent over in the busy street and cried out his mother’s name. He wondered if he would ever see his mother again; if he could bear to take the risk, now that he was witness. He watched the golden cobweb woman laughing with a friend, swinging her bag, her heels clicking. How was she standing upright? How did they restrain themselves from screaming through the world, cleaving heads asunder, raking eyeballs? How did the universe not break into small pieces?

  He became convinced that the hymens in his coat were rotting. Despite their beauty they were pieces of flesh, after all. At other times, he imagined t
hem glass; feared he would trip and fall and shatter them, piercing his veins and tendons. Still, he walked every day and gathered more. They littered his room, piled under the bed and towards the ceiling.

  He bought a lock for his door.

  *

  On Monday, or perhaps it was Thursday, he took himself to the church that was a law office. The gravestones ached with the weight of early Spring daffodils. The rector found him bent over one of the graves, inserting his fingers into the damp earth, hands going from coat pocket to soil. When he said, ‘Son, can I help you?’ Charu Deol asked if this was blessed earth, and would it protect blessed things. He clutched the area around his heart, then the area around his neck, and whined like a dog when the rector tried to soothe him.

  ‘Can you not see them?’ Charu Deol said.

  ‘What, my son?’ asked the rector.

  Charu Deol grasped the man’s lapels and dragged himself upright. He was weeping, and frightening a holy man, but the hymens were thick on the ground like blossom, and the task was suddenly, ferociously beyond him. He dropped the rector and ran through the graveyard, past clinking, bleeding, surging, mumbling pieces of women.

  The hymens were a sea in his landlady’s front yard. He crushed them underfoot, howling and spitting and weeping, feeling them splinter, break, snap, squelch under his heels like pieces of liver. He tried his key, once, twice, again, wrenched it to the left, and pushed inside. The place was quiet, the usually dull and lugubrious walls mercifully blank, his bed cool against his face.

  The landlady knocked and entered. ‘Lawks lad,’ she said, ‘I’m worried about you. It can’t be all that bad, now.’ She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him.

  He remembered a son she’d once mentioned; he’d never taken the time to listen.

  ‘Tell me of your son,’ he said.

  She did, saying that she knew young men. All they needed was a firm hand and a loving heart. The two of them, they’d got off to a bad start, but now she saw he was in need of help. Would he like a cup of tea? He was too handsome a lad to get on so. Charu Deol sniffed, tried to smile, inched forward, put his head on the soft knee. She patted him awkwardly, and he felt a mother’s touch in the fingers, and a fatigued kind of hope. He crawled further up her knee, put his face into her hipbone. She smelled familiar. His teeth felt sharp, his fingers sweaty. He could hear flesh outside, beating on the door, crawling up the windowpanes.

  He didn’t see the hymen inching down her thigh, like a rubied snail, like torn underwear.

  LOVE LETTERS

  0

  He fed her milk in an old, clean bottle after her mother’s nipples bled. Held her wrong so long his arm ached. Wrote a poem the night she was born. Noted she was an Aries moon. Shushed the nurses’ gossip so she could sleep.

  10

  Blonded boy: there was dirt on his left cheek and he got his spellings right. He had a twin who looked nothing like him.

  ‘No,’ he said, when she proposed. She sucked a pencil. ‘I’m ten,’ he said. ‘And so are you!’

  ‘Kiss me then,’ she said. ‘Under the lime tree. French or something.’

  ‘I don’t know how.’ He squirmed.

  She sighed and put her hands on her hips. ‘Don’t you ever watch movies?’

  ‘We could climb the tree,’ he said.

  16

  Dogs humped outside. They gazed between her thighs, he and she, both befuddled. He kept his socks on. She was a virgin, but didn’t bleed. She stared at the ceiling when it began. Condom, soft sheets, candles, wine: boring as fuck.

  Serves me right, she thought; she hardly knew him.

  21

  ‘Come back to me,’ begged the stupid man. It was sad; they’d been together forever. She gave him a wonderful novel to read: slices of her heart between the pages, like pickled plum.

  ‘I will if you read it,’ she said.

  ‘God, no,’ he said.

  22

  News Headline:

  Young & Pregnant, Raised Feminist, Won’t Let The Side Down

  27

  Hardly her first girl, but she’d never kissed lips so soft. The sex felt unfinished, but suggesting a strap-on seemed premature. Her lover danced the samba and worked as a dental hygienist. ‘Dentist, do you mean?’ ‘No, they’re not the same thing,’ her lover pouted – she talked even less than a man, which was unexpected, but there were multisyllabic words when she felt like being charming, and veggie dinners.

  30s

  Cat lady: that’s what she’d be. A crack-selling, fire-juggling explorer. Run for parliament. Darn socks for orphans or maybe sell astrology charts. Be a cheap tart. Run away to somewhere hot; be a waitress. Or not. Catch nits, syphilis, flu in a strange country. ART. Smile her way through Europe, not Slovakia, though. Do Flaubert, Monte Cristo, Gaudi. Wear a cape and a cheap g-string. Give lectures in a whisper or a boom, depending on the day. Seduce allll the students. Straddle a broomstick. Do mash-ups of Alanis Morisette and Tracey Chapman. Stare through the library window, sighing deeply. Meet royalty and be bored. Wear a huge hat and a sagging polka-dot bikini. BLEACH BLONDE. Shave everything. Be spoiled.

  After she left him. Then, that’s when.

  37

  He forgave her all of it: the hormonal moustache; the mad schedule; the broken heart that poked him in bed at night; her molten rages; chocolate at 4 am; the ‘no, don’t do it that way, do it this way’; up too late watching Judge Judy; too fat; maybe Thatcher wasn’t so bad; ‘I can only do toast and peach melba, which do you want?’ She hated tea, and coffee; no, no children, yet love please.

  Then he hit her so hard she had to use a tub of rum raisin Haagen Daaz for the busted lip.

  44

  Over drinks with best friend, beaming:

  FUCK, HE’S NOTHING LIKE I THOUGHT HE’D BE LIKE.

  He listens to Death Metal.

  He’s so tender, I can barely breathe.

  It’s like picking up the dot on this ‘i’ right here and blowing it away.

  WHAT HE IS

  What a load of rubbish, she thinks. She’s passing through the oven-baked detritus of Deptford market, dangling her wrists and tiptoeing. Old kettles. Garden furniture, chipped like the mouth of a roaring vendor. The sun is hot on the face of a man wobbling past on his bike, another in a wrecked wheelchair. Why don’t they get out of her way? A spread of beige and fake gold jewellery: five for a tenner. She snorts and decides the earrings are unclean. A nearby pot of chickpea curry bubbles like diarrhoea. She realises she’s come to a stark stop in this florid, bird-flecked place and hurries forward again. She still feels new to London, new in this place her Auntie Peggy said she should never move to, but Des, he’d said he wanted to be near to his people, his bredrin, he said, and she’d complied. She felt like a butterfly in her capitulation: sexy, somehow, genuflecting before him. He’d used her; she knows that now. A hard lesson, learned. How his sister laughed when he left her, and laughed again when she called at the family home at Christmas, hoping for a kindness or the sound of his voice in the background.

  Mind your foot, lady, a vendor snaps, and she is suddenly free of the market perimeter, tripping badly over a pile of ragged boxes, staggering, hands flung out to stop herself from falling, thick rage in her throat.

  How dare he leave her? She, what she is, and he what he is, fucking –

  She stops. Gulps the smell of patties and hot pepper.

  The empty eye of a black doll looks back at her.

  FIX

  Things I forgot to say, before today:

  1. We thought you loved us. How could we think anything else? Your music distracted us. It touches us, even now.

  2. I got you food, Mum. Wednesday, March 3rd, 2035. My parents’ generation had the Twin Towers attack; for us it was that sentence, out of one small, homeless girl, standing in Trafalgar Square, her face spread across the live screens around her, offering her mother food after a long day out panhandling. I got you food, Mum, she said, and offered the slice of meat,
charred on one side, raw on the other and we saw the blooded bandage on her arm.

  3. I am part of Generation App. A child of the ones who tried to bring down Wall Street and died and failed, the ones who watched the Middle East implode and then be taken again by men just as greedy for money and power as the so-called West.

  4. There are apples in my fridge. I keep meaning to eat them, but they’re too pretty and I don’t trust them.

  5. We beamed that kid and her carved arm out to millions. Her little face, trying to smile, strands of her blonde hair still in the piece of flesh, cooked over a piecemeal stove, in good British air. This wasn’t Africa, where people had been dying so long that caring wouldn’t have made a difference, or even Brixton, where things, as my half-Jamaican grandmother would say, had gone much too far to fix. This kid was white and you could see from the state of her mother’s cuticles that she hadn’t been homeless for long. But the cannibalism isn’t the point. That isn’t what frightened me so much that I stopped being frightened anymore. People talked. How dreadful, they said and there were marches and riots. I watched them all, not live – who watches anything live anymore? – but I watched the coverage.

  It was the thousands of people, calling for change and not a thing behind their eyes.

  6. When did we truly run out compassion? How did we do it? They said it was too much TV, they talked about desensitisation, too many sins dressed up as entertainment and not enough books at bedtime, the soullessness of capitalism, plastic surgery, body dysmorphia and the growing incidence of rape victims feeling nothing at all, and the mercilessness of people starving starving starving, but none of that ever explained it for me and that was only part of the world anyway.

  7. Gone too far to fix. That was what Grandma said when faced with life’s utter madness: a neighbour splitting his wife’s head open, all for the sake of his ego or yet another banker bitching about his five million pound bonus.

  Gone too far to fix, my love, oh Lord.