Forget Yourself

by Redfern Jon Barrett

  “Did you bring them here?” I asked.

  “I did,” she replied.

  I’d had enough. I wanted to go back home, back to caring for Frederick. As I went to leave the words tumbled from her mouth.

  “I brought them here. You know me. I met you—I told you I didn’t know how to walk like a woman. I wasn’t sure about anything. Well I’m still not sure about anything, but I brought them here. I dragged them here—it wasn’t womanly, but then it seemed right for all the men to be in the same place. I couldn’t take them to their place, to the courtyard—where would we get water from? I had to bring them here, you see.

  “At first I just took whichever of the men were just lying around. I lay them side-by-side, but they were taking up too much room, so then I placed one atop the other. I went everywhere for them. Some were hidden in places you would never think to look—some I only found because the flies led me there. When those were done I went door-to-door for more. The other wives gave them up without a word. They didn’t know what to do with them. I do—I’m going to make a fire. I had a memory, about piles of bodies burning in a fire. I can’t write it in the book though—the book seems to have gone.

  “As for my own husband—he’s not in the pile. I’ve still not found him. He ran away when he was sick, with his hand over his mouth. I lost him in the dark. But I’ll find him. Eventually the flies will lead me to him. I’ll take yours too, when the time comes.”

  I nodded my thanks, but she never noticed—she was already trotting away, scouting for more husbands to add to the pile. I went home.

  I EXAMINED MY SICK HUSBAND. At first I used my eyes: his hair, dark and greasy, a tangle above his too-pale face. He wore an expression of empty pain, of thoughtless discomfort. His mouth had fallen a fingers-width open, teeth stained, jaw coated in black stubble, the trunks of dead trees poking through snow.

  I pulled back the covers, the skin of his shoulders snow-pale too, long strands of hair spread over them, spreading over his chest, surrounding the dark mounds of his nipples. Beads of sweat shone. His belly too as mass of dark hair and pale skin, but deflated, emptied of everything.

  I pulled the covers further still, revealing the limp sag of his cock and balls, slung over his thigh—on his thigh there was pale skin and brown streaks.

  I examined my sick husband. I used my hands—the clammy forehead, the delicate unopened eyelids, the furry cheeks and dry lips.

  Down, down, to the down of his shoulder hair, his chest hair—soft on cool wet skin. His nipples hardened, fleshy mounds into hard pebbles. His belly hollow.

  His limp cock, thick and heavy in my hand. This was Frederick’s. My husband’s cock was always pushing, always hard and ready for the attack. But Frederick’s was soft; unassuming and gentle. I pulled back the foreskin, purple head and creamy lines.

  I dipped a cloth into one of our water buckets and I washed him—away the clammy skin and dried oils, away the brown stains.

  I didn’t wash him as his wife. I washed him as Blondee. I was rough. Rough as I liked.

  Now he smelled better.

  I pressed my lips to his, cracked and dry, with the scent of stale sick. I poured water into my mouth and brought my lips back to his, flooding his mouth with it; mouth on mouth, water to water.

  If she and I had drowned together, what then?

  He didn’t wake up. The sun upped and downed and he had slept. The low rumble of his breath. The rise of his chest. I watched for these things. This wasn’t duty. This was love—grotesque and humiliating.

  Blood spurting over lino and forming claggy pools. We just can’t help ourselves.

  This is how we love the body—not through thrusting or the lust of licking. It’s the blood and the sweat and the shit.

  She pooled upon the lino and so I loved the pool. Her bones in the ground.

  I loved them both. Grotesque and humiliating.

  Soon I was having a feast. I had taken all the food from the shelves and boxes and had them spread before me, like my very own casino night. I was alive, I was here, and I would eat. There were oatcakes, hoi-sin duck flakes, sugar grains, the olives, cocoa-powder, sweet-scented sweets, rye bread, rice (which I hadn’t cooked), soya-butter, two types of cheese and three packets of ketchup, which I was saving for last. I was sat opposite the stone woman. She was looking at the food but she wouldn’t want any. Between us the rations were spread out on a beautiful off-white silken cloth, which I had taken from my clothes box.

  I could spare the food. It wouldn’t be long until the next rations anyway. I placed an olive and a piece of cheese into my mouth, my tongue curling with the flavours.

  “You have to help them, Blondee.”

  I was going to help them. There would be something in the book. I was going to find it, no matter what Pilsner said. He would be back at the courtyard most of the time, dispensing wisdom to people who didn’t want to fucking hear it, and then I could go get it. There would be something. Besides, I had already started helping. So far I had found three wives, each wandering in a daze, and I had told them: water, water, water. Keep getting water and keep giving it to the sick. The first had been pleased to be told what to do, to have help. The other two had nodded, their faces grey, their bodies slouched.

  I covered the oatcakes in the butter and coated the result in cocoa powder.

  There had been no recipes in days. There had been no anything. It would take a long time to get everything back together, to get everything back to normal, but it would happen. Eventually it would happen. The book had been taken away too quickly and we still needed it. When we had the book back we’d have the world back.

  There was a woman, down by the newsagents: she was on the ground, mumbling to herself, milk to one side and a newspaper to the other. She was beautiful—long dark hair and big eyes, a t-shirt with ketamine emblazoned over it. I said hello.

  She held the newspaper aloft, high above her pretty head.

  “It’s too expensive and it never says anything interesting,” she said. She let the pages fly through the air.

  She was crazy. Who could blame her? The world is a fucked up place. I went home. I went to my room and looked at myself in the small mirror on the desk. I didn’t look crazy. I looked normal, good even. I have a firm jawline and tanned skin—I always have a tan, even during months of rain. My friends called me Tan, though it’s not my real name. It helped me when I needed to sell my body, to sweaty older guys with fat fingers. I always kept my mouth closed, hiding my one grey tooth. They always enjoyed themselves.

  Now they buy boys full-time, in handcuffs from Russia. They wouldn’t hire the locals any more, there was no need.

  I took whatever I could get—those my age, we have no choice. No jobs, no money, no future. I wouldn’t mind the first, but they demand the second or else we freeze and starve. Then there’s no third. The bank had called me that very morning, demanding that I pay them more money, but there is no more money, don’t they know that? What can I do? They left us with nothing.

  Worse than nothing. They took what little we had and gave it to those in opulent mansions and smart penthouses, then had those same people threaten us for yet more money. They say the welfare state is dead but it’s worse than that—the welfare state is twisted, undead, devouring those it was supposed to protect.

  Bankers attacking homes. Governments holding you down while they raid your pockets.

  I had to do something. I had to find money.

  But my rage, my rage that had built over months and years, it got in the way—it fogged up my eyes and made my hands tremble. The rage—the powerlessness, the impotence—I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t control it. All I could do was scream, alone, in a room by myself.

  That’s what I did.

  The neighbour thumped on his floor. I got a broom and thumped back: thud thud thud.

  I couldn’t go stay with friends, my friends are all in jail. Imprisoned for protesting, for carrying signs and shouting that we had nothing left
to give. Leave us alone.

  They were wrong, though. We do have something left to give—they found something more that we had, and something they wanted. Something that all the penthouses and luxury vehicles in the world couldn’t bring. The very core of us—they wanted the very core of us.

  I screamed.

  I had to calm down. I drank a bit of whatever was left in the cup on my desk and opened the drawer. I had a collection of old photographs, ones of naked people. You might say I collected them. I liked pictures people took of themselves, pictures which were honest. There wasn’t anyone telling them how to pose, how to act: they just did what they felt like. The pictures were old—from a happier time. They helped me forget myself.

  I had one in my hand: a man and a woman posing together, and he looked bored. I found myself getting hard. That’s what I liked, honest looks like that. He looked bored. He wasn’t looking at her, and she looked interested, kind of excited. Perhaps it was her first time, the first time she’d taken her clothes off for the camera, and he’d done it so many times he was bored, his cock half-limp half-hard. He was half there. She was smiling, her nostrils flared, and I gripped myself. Maybe, maybe it was the other way round. Yes, it was his first time, and he wasn’t bored, not really, he was covering his anxiety. He looked bored because he was scared. She knew that, deep down, and it excited her, it turned her on, and I came. It was quicker than I expected.

  I stumbled into the hallway, looking for a towel. I still had the picture in my hand. Do it, the man said.

  But what would I have left? It was the very core of me.

  The adverts were everywhere. Sell your memories. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s painless—so they say. That was it, that was the one way I could make money. They were desperate for them: the rich wanted a vicarious thrill, to live the life of another. They even have testimonials from other people who sold theirs: there’s plenty of time to make new ones. The adverts say that as well. If I applied for a trial, if I sold some of them, just a few, I could pay my rent. I could pay for any insurance money could buy: health, life, fire, police. Anything could happen to me and I’d be invincible.

  Make some money now! Make someone happy! Do your part. Quick and easy.

  I drifted in the dark between the worlds. The worlds that didn’t fit together. Worlds of order, worlds of plague.

  He was once my friend. Had each of us come from a different world? Had we met here, between these walls, at the centre of them all?

  Fiction, stories: books and films and radio broadcasts. Would it matter?

  A bright flash of colours as Frederick’s hut swam back into view. I clutched at the chair, but my hands were sweaty and slid right off. Each time the worlds grew bigger, and each time it all made less sense. There was no time for any of it, I had to fix this world, whilst I still knew which one I was in. I was still Blondee, I wasn’t a tubby post-woman or a spy across the street, or a fat man pretending to be a woman in the midst of a plague. I had shown the world marriage, I had shown them what it meant to be a man and a woman, and they had gone in pairs to die. But I would fix it. I would gather everyone at the courtyard, or go to each hut in turn if need be, book in hand, ready to help. I didn’t need any more time to think.

  I would just go; right then and there. I was making the decision as I pulled on a thick jumper, scratchy but warm. I put the stone woman in my pocket—she was so heavy she almost pulled my skirt down. I put my copper ring on Frederick’s finger.

  Outside it was cold and dull; as though the sun had shrunk into a tiny ball, pathetic and small and unable to warm anything. The ground was slippery and the slush about my feet was crusted like snot. The tickle of flies hit me in the face and I batted them away, only for more to try and land on my cheeks and chin and chalk-make-up skin. My face would be covered in black dots and I could feel them in my hair. I couldn’t see anyone outside, there was nobody about.

  The courtyard was empty. Water was frozen in little pools. It didn’t matter. I would still go. I would still try. I told it to myself over and over, I would still go, I would still try. I said the words until I was at Pilsner’s door, ready to knock. I peered in through the window instead. There was no-one there.

  I could even see the book, in the middle of the hut, on a multi-tiled table.

  It was warm inside his hut. There was a strong smell of berries. The book was in front of me, under my fingers, then pressed to them, dry against my hands. I pulled open the front cover. I could hear my breath.

  And there was the page.

  Not the ill-fit reproduction, not a rough-scrawled copy.

  The real page.

  The one I had stolen, smeared with soil.

  And a finger prodded my back.

  “Blondee.”

  “Pilsner.” I didn’t even turn around.

  “You’re in trouble, Blondee. You’re in the shit, Blondee.”

  “The page is here.” And what else was I to say?

  “I found it by your hut.”

  “My—”

  “Your old hut. Three feet away from where her body was found.”

  “Her—” The hut blurred, the world blurred.

  “We were happier to say it was her. She was dead anyway.”

  “It wasn’t her.” Where was I going?

  “I know. We know.”

  “I just want to help. I need to help.”

  “Put it down.”

  So I did. I put the blue fuzz of a shape down to where the table once was.

  “It was you. It was you. You’re the thief, and we should have known.” He paused for a moment. “I was just by your hut, as you came to mine. I’ve seen him. I’ve seen him, Blondee. Frederick—”

  His throat seized up. Then he lost control. I sat on the table, blinking to make it all right, to see everything properly, and words were shouted, word by word: bitch; cunt; fucking bitch; fuck; fuck you; fuck everything you’ve done; you fucking; fucking cunt. Over and over and over and soon they had no meaning, washing over me, a wreck of sounds, smashed to smithereens.

  Pilsner looked afraid: his face white, his white eyes large, white all around his pupils.

  “Blondee. You’re in trouble.”

  And there they were, Casio, and some of the others.

  “What will happen?”

  “You’ll go back to the hut, for now.”

  And I even knew which one they meant.

  THE HUT WAS COLD. There was no food. There were no blankets, save for the brown-black wallpaper which had peeled from the wall and which lay on the ground like bedsheets. I was glad I had brought the heavy bulk of jumper with me, and at night I chose to use it as a pillow, until the painful prickle of my skin forced me to put it back on. Even at night I could see, I could see the shadow that was waiting outside the window of the triangle hut. Sometimes the shadow changed a little in shape, but it was there to make sure that I wouldn’t leave. It would make sure I stayed there, in the hut, where I couldn’t do any more damage. I couldn’t blame them.

  “Can’t you, Blondee?”

  “No, Tie.”

  I did have water. They made sure I had that, though it tasted a bit funny and I knew they probably done something to it. What did it matter? I drank from the bucket even when I wasn’t thirsty. They just poked it back through the cloth-door, freshly filled every time. I drank and drank until my bladder would burst. I pissed into the corner, hoping it would mask the smell that covered the world. It did, quite well, and I was pleased by it.

  The stone woman kept watch.

  I slept across a dark brown stain: a pool left by Burberry. The last of her body. I slept on top of her, and she under me.

  By day I watched from the window, but there weren’t many people past the glass. I stared, waiting for the gentle gamble of the minors. There were so very few of them. Once or twice I saw my neighbour—Fluffed—sloping this way or that, and I made certain to wave. He never looked in my direction. He was alive. He hadn’t spewed or shitted away his life.
>
  “Tie. How many do you think have gone?” I pressed my fingers to the bare glass. It was filthy, and a slick layer of grey coated my skin.

  “Who can say, Blondee?”

  “Try, Tie.”

  “Try, Tie?” I could hear from his voice he thought he was being funny. I was silent until he spoke again. “Well, a lot of the least are alive, you know that much. How many died? Some, some of them will have, my dear. Less of them though. We’re a naturally better breed, less guilt. We have more of a reason to live.”

  “That didn’t stop you—”

  “Quite, Blondee. And quiet. There are more women than men now. Perhaps now people will marry whoever they like, as many as they like. But not likely. That’s not how you shaped the world is it? Perhaps the women who lost their husbands will pine and mourn and live and die alone, watching from the outside. You don’t want to hear about that? Well no, it’s depressing.

  “Then there are the moderates. They’re all dead, near as fuck it. Don’t look like that, you look as though it’s your fault. I wouldn’t go peering into those huts nowadays. The smell alone would knock you backwards. Do you know what happened to me when I died? My belly filled, absolutely filled with gas, and it eventually exploded. It wasn’t a sight for a lady, but then you’re better than me at saying what is best for women. Are you crossing your legs properly right now?”

  I deliberately uncrossed them.

  “And you can see the minors for yourself. It’s quieter than it was, that’s certainly for sure. Especially for a day like this, not too hot or too cold. It’s too dry for me though, I didn’t like going out when it was dry. You knew this area, this was all you ever knew. I used to worry, leaving you alone with this bunch.”

  Tie laughed. I never heard him laugh much before.

  “I should have worried for their sake.”

  “I thought you said—”

  “I’m rambling, I know. I’ll stop.”

  And he did stop, for a while. But I needed company. I asked him a question, the one I’d always wanted to ask.