Tuesday, 20 September 2016
What happens next?
If you want to know that, you'll need to read Incidents of Trespass in its final form as a novella, available here in paperback and here on Kindle! As well as the conclusion to the story, the novella features a new opening chapter and expanded entries from the blog. Check it out, then tell me what you think!
Wednesday, 7 September 2016
Saturday, 3 September 2016
Point of Balance
My face hurts, and I can’t
tell for sure yet if the spreading warmth that feels so wet around my nose and
mouth is blood or sweat, but there isn’t time for me to touch my face to check.
I try to roll away from her, more from instinct than anything else at this
point, but she gets on top of me and I think great, this is it, I held back from throwing myself under a Metro only
to be beaten to death by some white supremacist bitch, go me! I cross my
arms in front of my face, anticipating punches. Peering over my crossed arms, I
see a weird smile occurring on her face.
When I feel her hand on my
crotch my spine goes rigid and my arms turn useless. When I see the shock in
her eyes I start trying to push myself away from her, somehow, like I did with
Jeanette only this time I’m not trying to phase through the wall of a hotel
room but through this shitty concrete path. Surprise reveals never go well.
She looks down at me. It’s
hard to read her face. There’s the usual trans
panic bullshit going on there but there’s something else as well, disgust.
Disgust with me, yes – I mean that’s a given. But something else too. She
brings her right hand up. It hovers between us. For a moment it’s the thing
which both of us are focused on. She’s looking at it for who knows what reason;
I’m thinking that if I grab it quickly, aggressively, while she’s still
distracted – it’s a risk but I can maybe break her wrist and that might stop
her, slow her down at least, but I am still prone underneath her…
‘OI!’
Oh great, I think. Her mates
are here now. That’s it. But when I roll my head in the direction of the
shouting I see…Kizz?
‘Caz! Caz! It’s alright Caz,
I know her!’
‘Caz?’
She looks down at me. I can
tell from the look on her face that she’s racing to process this new
information.
‘Ruby! Ruby love, I’m sorry,
Caz has…it’s alright Caz! Ruby’s okay! I know her! You don’t have to…’
She trails off. Neither of us
responds with you won’t have to what. We
neither of us want to say what we were on the verge of. Caz looks back down at
me, grabs my wrists and holds them down, across my chest. She looks me in the
eyes and she says
‘Ruby.’
By now Kizz is stood beside
us. She makes no move to pull Caz off, which means she’s scared as well.
Whether more scared that I’ll get hurt or Caz will do something stupid, I don’t
know. Caz holds my gaze for a couple more beats, then turns to talk to Kizz. ‘She
fuckin’ started it!’
I laugh, involuntarily. It’s
such a schoolyard explanation. But she’s right, I guess, I moved first, though
I’d call that self-defence. Caz turns back round to look at me again and the
laugh dies on my lips. ‘Sorry,’ I squeak.
Kizz smiles lightly then
holds up her hands, palms out. ‘I know she did, love, I saw the whole thing,
right, but I’m sure it’s a mistake or something.’
‘A mistake.’
‘Isn’t it? Ruby, isn’t it a
mistake? You thought Caz was someone else, right?’
‘No. There’s no point lying.
I knew who she was.’
Kizz shoots me a look that
says work with us here, come on and
continues. ‘Okay, but I bet you didn’t expect it to end up like this, right?’
‘I won’t lie. It could have
gone better.’
This time, Caz laughs. Just
the tiniest intake of breath but I hear it. And I hope it means we can
de-escalate this thing.
‘What about you, Caz?’ Kizz
asks. ‘You didn’t want this to happen.’
Caz looks back down at me,
pushing hard on my arms. ‘I didn’t want a lot
of things to happen.’
So much for the healing power
of fucking laughter. Caz raises her right fist and is about to bring it down
when Kizz moves in and grabs her wrist.
She’s looking Caz directly in
the eye. I know she’s scared. The fear breathes around her, Caz and me, we
breathe it in. ‘I know that, love,’
she says, as gently as she can. ‘But you’re not the only one things happened
to.’
Caz looks back down at me. ‘What?
Her?’
Kizz nods. ‘Like you and
Mally, Caz.’
Caz looks briefly down at me,
then back to Kizz.
‘I don’t believe you.’ She
shrugs off Kizz’s grip, is about to bring her hand down again.
‘It’s true!’ Kizz screams. ‘Caz,
it’s true! She was raped by some bloke Caz, Ruby, come on,
fucking tell her…’
Her eyes flash pleading from
my own to Caz and back again. The fist is waiting. If I don’t say the right
thing now I’m fucking dead.
‘It wasn’t a man.’
Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.
Kizz looks on. Caz looks
down. Caz mouths what
and she lowers her arm.
Sunday, 28 August 2016
They Meet
If you happened to be standing in one of the fields
between Wansbeck Road Metro station and the roundabout at the bottom of
Broadway Avenue, looking south towards a set of six municipal benches, on a
particular morning in the summer of 2016, this is what you would have seen.
You would have seen two women, one blonde, one
brunette, enter the space between the six benches from opposite directions. The
brunette would arrive first, and busy herself taking photographs: walking
forward and back, probing the scene from different sides like a boxer trying to
find an opening in her opponent’s guard. So busy does she become, walking and
standing and kneeling, that she fails, at first, to notice the blonde, who very
clearly does see the brunette, and shouts something at her. You can’t quite
make out the words. They’re few, and sharp, and short: you can tell that much.
You see the brunette’s lips move, watch her shift from a kneel to a kind of
half-crouch. You can tell from the bounce of her knees, the size of her body,
the way the hand which doesn’t hold the phone is fingers spread in contact with
the ground, she won’t be able to hold this pose all that long.
Their lips are still moving: the blonde is snapping,
curt, the brunette is talking steady, talking slow, trying to keep the scene
calm. But the blonde is moving first to one side then the other. Circling,
trying to find the exact point from which she can move in and close the space
before the brunette can react. The situation is combustible: you know with
certainty it will tip into violence. It does.
The blonde and the brunette both spring at about the
same time. This means they almost miss each other, but not quite. The brunette’s
shoulder hits the stomach of the blonde, whose right hand grabs the brunette’s
ponytail as they fall skittering to the ground. It’s harder now to tell what’s
happening at this remove, but neither one will see you stepping closer. The
brunette is somewhere between kneeling down and on her back, grabbing at the
blonde’s clothes for leverage, trying to reach for her hair. The blonde gets
both hands on the ponytail and pushes backward with the muscles of her thighs, pulling
the brunette forward, over the edge of her balance, ragdolling her head left
and right, half-circles, putting pressure on the neck, wearing her out, making
her dizzy. The brunette reaches up with one hand and half-claws, half-pushes
the blonde’s face.
When something’s on your face it’s hard to fight the
urge to pull it off. When the blonde removes her right arm from the brunette’s
ponytail the move is reflex, but she masters herself in almost the same second.
The first punch she throws into the brunette’s face is tentative, a faltering
feint which chances on its mark. The second is more sure, and the third shocks
the fight out of the brunette long enough for the blonde to get back to her feet
and begin driving stomping, step-through kicks into the brunette’s side. The
woman on the ground attempts to roll away instinctively, but the blonde follows
with the speed of a fighter who knows what her opponent’s next move will be,
and mounts the brunette before she can react.
At this point, you can tell that it’s all over,
mismatched from the start. This is what happens when someone who sees violence
so rarely they view it as play encounters one for whom it is a life. The
question now is just how much of a beating she will take. Or, at least, that’s
how it is until the blonde feels something which makes her suck in her stomach,
a shock which has offended, unanticipated, unvoiced insult, and she shuffles
back and, with her left hand holding the brunette’s t-shirt for control as she
pads her hand back to a point just below the waist of the brunette’s
sweatpants, until it comes to rest between her legs and the brunette’s
increasingly useless attempts to fight back stop in mid-thrash as she, too,
feels an unanticipated threat take hold.
There is a moment in a fight like this, a moment when
something merely violent becomes something darker still, when what was quarrel
shifts inexorably into enormity. This fight is paused, is poised on such a
moment. One wrong move now results in death, results in murder, bodies hidden,
absence noted, questions asked. The fights that end in death: the people
watching say they didn’t see it happen. But they lie. There is a tipping point,
beyond which nightmares lie. There is a point, in fights that end in death,
when only willful blindness means the fatal outcome can’t be seen.
And it is only at this point that you decide to
intervene.
Thursday, 25 August 2016
Ruby, Suicide
Why do I still
write? I resigned from the mag. I’m sick of sharing hot takes with the world.
So why can’t I stop? Why do I drag myself to the computer every morning, batter
the keys until I’ve written enough to fill three pages of eleven-point
single-spaced Georgia?
But that’s
bullshit. I know why.
It was maybe,
what, a week before Orlando? Maybe a week and a half. I remember that I had
just started to get over the whole trying-to-kill-myself thing when the news
about Orlando began coming in. Then I was just getting over that when Jo Cox
was stabbed. Then after that we had the Referendum result, and we discovered
that not only could you get murdered in Britain in 2016 for not agreeing with
the Mail and the Express, we found that we were surrounded by people happy to vote
alongside her killer.
It's been a
fucking cavalcade of shit, is what I’m saying, basically, a real rollercoaster
ride of faecal action. I joke that I feel like a character in a novel whose
author is trying to draw a heavy-handed parallel between my personal
disintegration and that of the nation but I’m not even half-joking. Nothing
feels real. Sometimes that’s hilarious. Sometimes it’s terrifiying. It’s always
absurd. And absurd if you want to deliberately live your life existentially
challenging convention is one thing, but absurd when all you want to do is keep
food on the table, transition as soon as you can and maybe write a few things
people like is a different thing entirely. It’s tiring.
I was tired when I
signed in to our platform a few weeks ago. I hadn’t had time to wash or brush
my hair that morning but it didn’t really matter, usually. The benefits of
working from home, right? Still, it was feeling pretty matted, so when I got to
my desk I ran the brush through my hair a few times to work the kinks out. That’s
when Diane Skyped me.
Diane was my
editor. She could see I was online. I didn’t want to talk to anybody, but I had
to take the call. Her face appeared on my screen, as mine did on
hers. If I had only clicked voice call instead of video...
‘Jesus Ruby! What
the fuck happened to your eyebrows?’
Working from home
meant no-one noticed it when I was ripping clumps of my eyebrow hair out with
my own hands. When I ripped out so much I had no brows left, effectively, and
had to start drawing them on even though I, personally, find painted-on brows trashy.
This is the first
thing I had to explain to Diane. Not that I find it trashy, that every time I
paint my brows on I’m reminded of why I have to. It isn’t something I like
sharing with her. I get the sense that Diane, who goes on and on about how much
she loves the gays, doesn’t extend
the same courtesy to trans women, but then fag hags always regard us as a
threat. We don’t fit into their weird pseudomasochism, their world of GBFs and
going out but never having sex. Fucking weirdos.
I had been planning
the jump before this but that pushed me over the edge. I might have let my intentions
slip because Diane told me that she was ‘concerned’. Of course she is. She decided
to try and do the whole building bridges thing by telling me her son is trans.
She misgendered him repeatedly as ‘her’ during the discussion. I pity Diane’s
son.
Anyway this all
led to me breaking down and explaining my plan. On a walk to Longbenton Metro station
the night before I’d noticed that the Metros come in a lot faster than they do
at South Gosforth. I couldn’t really tell if they were fast enough to kill me
but it seemed that way and I was prepared to risk it. So my plan that day was
to finish filing what I had to file, then go to that station and do it. Make
the jump. Just a step, really. One step, then impact, then BANG! No more
problems, assuming I managed to do it right and didn’t just end up crippling
myself.
Diane said she
wanted me to go and see my doctor, see the crisis team, anything. I told her
that I would. It seemed easier. She let me go. I didn’t talk about Jeanette.
Longbenton Metro
is beautiful. A neoclassical station built originally as part of the Loop, the
precursor to the modern Metro, even the usual Blairite additions haven’t fucked
it up that much. It’s a nice thing to look at while preparing to jump. The
first Metro came in too soon for me to make it, but that was fine, another
would be along in seven minutes, the digital display informed me. Fair enough.
There was a
message from TJ, my flatmate, on my phone:
Could you talk to Valerie please? She seems
worried about you.
I’d put a note on
Facebook. People were reacting. Additionally I’d texted Valerie asking her not
to follow me in taking this action. A friend of ours had died just a fortnight
ago (yeah, yet another fucking hammer blow) and at that point we still all
thought it was suicide. I love Valerie and I would hate to think my death would
send her over that cliff too.
There wasn’t
another train for five minutes.
I phoned her.
I don’t really
remember what she said. Well, a few things. Don’t do it I guess would have been
one of them. I told her there wasn’t any point, that people were going to vote
Leave and fuck everything up and then many more people would die, so really I
was leaving early to avoid the rush. It’s a Terry Pratchett reference. We both
got it. Neither of us laughed.
‘Are you going to
give Richard fucking Littlejohn the satisfaction of seeing another trans woman
die? Valerie asked.
Let’s say it was
that which persuaded me. The actual truth is less cinematic. I missed another
Metro because I was talking to Valerie and by this point I guess someone had
alerted the station authorities because a dude in a Hi-Viz jacket was inching
his way up the platform, probably to restrain me in case I did decide to jump.
Two trains late as always. Metro apologises.
So I got on the
next train instead of going under it. The woman in the seat opposite me asked
why I was crying, if there was anything she could do to help. A Kodak moment,
sure, but I shook my head. At that point, I needed to just get it cried out.
I had just tried
to kill myself.
Everything after
this point, I realised, would be bookended as everything that happened after I tried to kill myself.
That’s a tricky
thing to get your head around. I’m still having problems doing that now, to be
honest. Even writing this. Like, what the fuck do you do?
Maybe I should
talk to Emma about that. She tried it, too. More hardcore than me though, she
used a knife. Didn’t outsource the act of attempted self-murder to a public
transport worker. I respect that.
The woman who
asked if I was alright got off at Shiremoor. There are fields out there,
interspersing the housing, as the train loops its way to the coast. They’re not
picturesque. They’re not Vaughan Williams. But they’re there. And I swear that I
saw a lone fox, bounding through those fields, from the window of the train. A thing
you’d roll your eyes at in a movie, but I swear I really saw it.
I followed the
loop round to Monument, changed for South Gosforth, walked home and got my weed
and a change of underwear, then took an Uber to Valerie’s, where I drank cider,
smoked, and helped Val and Brianna pave part of their garden and set up a
firepit. Afterwards, we sat around the fire with Jean, made ‘smores and roasted
hot dogs. It was a nice night, in the end, I guess. Except for the fact that,
hours before, I’d tried to kill myself.
And then, as I
say, Orlando and all the rest of it. I don’t know what can go right now, I know
that I don’t want to. Something needs to, though. Something needs to.
Something
needs to happen.
Tuesday, 16 August 2016
Caz's Story
Mally wasn’t like
that, to begin with. We met in 2004. We were working for Littlewoods then,
selling credit cards to people already buying on tick. Paying our own debts off
by getting other people further into debt. Is it worth it, a bicycle on the boy’s
birthday? It wasn’t something that we questioned. It was money.
Mally had ideas
then, better ones, ones that weren’t just about who got everything while people
like us got the shaft. He wanted to study psychology, took a course at the
college, got into university, he was so proud. I was too. He loved the
buildings, by the river. Said it was beautiful. Took me there once. The canteen
smelled funny and I wasn’t impressed with the food. The bogs were a sauna. He
took me to the library. The reading room. Just us.
‘It’s so quiet,’ I
remember telling him. Whispering.
He nodded. ‘This
is what they’ve had all their lives,’ he said. ‘Toffs. Oxford. Eton. To us,
this is amazing. They think it’s normal. Think about that.’
He was always
thinking, Mally. That was the problem.
He got on with the
Africans, at first. I remember him sitting in the Littlewood’s canteen,
laughing with Raymond from Ghana about King
of Queens. I said I liked the woman in that show and it was true, I did.
She had the cutest face but she was spikey and aggressive.
‘Ah aye?’ He
smiled. ‘Bit of a Carrie, are ya?’ Then him and Raymond laughed.
We got talking
after that, coffees at break, found out what he was doing with himself.
It was only when I
got to know him better that I realised that he wasn’t doing well.
He’d come back
home on Monday complaining that it was all numbers.
‘It’s all fucking maths,’ he’d spit. ‘Graphs an’
statistics an’ shite. I wanna know how people think, not how to put dots on a fucking graph!’
Mally struggled
with the statistics part of the course. Even the computer program they used to
make it easier was hard for him. So he got me to help. I’ve always liked
numbers, maths, equations. They’re clean, they’re balanced, they’re evenly
matched. They prove things. I would take him through the equations used for the
test, explaining how they worked, as much as I could, as much as I could make
him see. I would explain how the program allowed him to shortcut, to save on
his labour. I got him through and he just scraped a pass in that module.
Looking back, this
was maybe the first sign of what he’d become. He would say little things, snap.
I could tell that he found it humiliating, him at uni and me with a handful of
GCSEs having to help him. Being better at running the numbers than he was. When
he got his mark back for the module he looked at it and said Thank fuck that’s over. That isn’t fuckin’
psychology.
There were other
signs too. He began to feel the lecturers didn’t like him. The statistics
lecturer predictably came in for stick. Patronising
yank dyke bitch, he’d call her, coming back from lectures, telling stories
of classroom humiliation. It didn’t seem fair to me. I met her, when he took me
to the canteen. She seemed alright. I don’t know if she was a dyke. She was
warmer to me than to him but she would be, I think. We were both numbers
people. Mal wasn’t. And I liked that she came from Charlotte, North Carolina,
because that made me think of Ric Flair.
Once, one
afternoon, I was alone in the house and he was off in the library, the reading
room, I looked at his statistics book and worked out one of the tests by hand,
on paper, doing the sums in my head. It took me three hours and four cups of
coffee but I did it. It made me feel clean. Clean and safe. Numbers, balanced
and matched. Like a spell, like a Tarot card spread.
He came back with another
complaint about class. Not the fucking
dyke bitch this time but the bearded
lefty wanker, the older lecturer who dressed like a geography teacher and
quoted people called Popper and Hegel. He’d been talking about patterns in
science or some shite like that, and Mal mentioned something he’d read in a
business book he’d bought a year ago, NLP bollocks.
‘The guy fucking
laughs at us,’ Mally said. ‘Smiles and says while
I understand the popularity of that idea I’m afraid I have to say it’s just not
even wrong. But that shows that you’re reading around this! That’s great! Just
think a little bit more critically and then moves on. Practically patted my
head. Fucking cunt.’
Needless to say
the dyke and the bearded wanker were now both recruits in the conspiracy
against him.
After 7/7 he
really began going wrong. He came home from work that day crying. ‘You see what
they’ve done?’ he said, nodding his head at the news. He’d began reading stuff
about atheism, watching videos online. It didn’t help that there were Asian
students on his course, doing better than he was.
‘You know how much
they get?’ He’d say. ‘The University? For taking foreign students? More than
they get paid for taking me. Now what do you think that means, huh? It means we’re
educating foreigners instead of British students. Diabolical.’
I wanted to point
out those students were probably paying for him, but I knew he wouldn’t listen.
He’d started snapping more now, coming home drunk, bitching about other
students. He hadn’t hit me yet, but I was starting to think that he might. I
got myself a separate bank account, a new one, unknown to him. I applied for
one of our credit cards at staff rates, never used it, kept it hidden. I
thought about mum, and dad, and how she’d got away. You need fuck-off money, she’d tell me. In case you have to get away. I dismissed them at first, all her
warnings. They start out nice, they start
out smiles and love, she said, but
you see how they are in the end. Fucking men.
Kizz and my mum
would get on, I think. She began to bring home women about a year after dad
left. She said they wouldn’t hurt her.
She was wrong
about that.
Mally knew about
my mum. That put an extra little sting in it, every time he mentioned his dyke lecturer. Even before he’d been
funny about it. They say it runs in
families, jokes about threesomes. It annoyed me but I used to let it by.
He began saying he
was an infidel. He stopped talking to Raymond from Ghana.
‘It’s not a race,
it’s a religion,’ he would say, ‘but you have to know who you can trust.’ That
meant people like him. White British. The
box on the form nobody even wants to tick they’re so ashamed, he’d
say. Bought a badge with a flag on it.
‘You ought to get
involved too,’ he told me. ‘You’ve seen what they do to people like your mum.
And you.’
He got himself
thrown off the course, for swearing at a lecturer, but that wasn’t really what
it was about, in his head. ‘When they can’t disprove you then they look for an
excuse,’ he spat. ‘I wouldn’t toe the line. I wouldn’t jump through hoops.’
When I asked him
what line he was toeing, what hoops he wouldn’t jump through, he explained. ‘Black
blokes. They have more mental health problems. You’re supposed to say it’s
society’s fault, but what if it’s genetic? I was only asking. But that’s what
you get.
’
Only asking. By this point I knew how he’d have been only asking. Only asking again and
again, in a different way each time, probing, provoking. Only asking about women I was friends with, about mum. Only asking why I wouldn’t go to
protests with him, against mosques. Only
asking where Obama had been born.
Why did I stay
with him? We didn’t have kids. Partly it was to spite mum. Partly because I thought
he’d see the light eventually. He didn’t. Instead, I slowly joined him in the
darkness.
‘We need women,’
he’d say. This was after he’d fully signed up to it, got the tattoos, put a
flag in his window. ‘People just dismiss this if it comes out of male mouths.
And women get less aggro. And the camera loves them, Cazzy, even you! You
should do more.’ At first I humoured him, went to the protests but kept a low
profile. Then he began getting fired, getting his picture on blogs. He would
laugh and call the antifa his fan club, but it meant we were drifting away,
into a self-contained world. He got work through some self-employed mates, cash
in hand, company names changed so often, personal accounts used to bank the
coin and skip the charges, wages in an envelope on Friday. Hi-viz jackets. Working with my hands, he’d tell me, man’s work, not selling some bitch tracksuit
bottoms. Got away with this for years, until the crash, until the firms
began to fold, until the owners went to prison. He tried going it alone but he
just couldn’t deal with the figures. He would shout at me to help, then grumble
all the time while I worked it all out, twice, to show I wasn’t wrong. He
started going to the pub after our money talks. And hitting me when he got
back.
You can only fight
so long before you go under. I began to give in, to really hate the people that
he hated, to accept his explanations for the way things were fucked up. To
laugh with him when he came back from the callcentre, where he got a job after
his tree surgery folded, joking about their diversity training. ‘The pink
fucking pound!’ He’d sneer. ‘Be nice if we had some of that, huh? Where are you
hiding all that pink money from your mum, eh? Or is that just for faggots, not
for dykes?’
I started to go on
the demos and heckle the antifa, got off on the cheers from our lines, the
cries of ‘stick it to ‘em, Caz!’ when I would try to break the standoff, get
bundled away by the bizzies. Got tattooed. Became an Angel, at least to the
boys in the pubs which had flags in their windows. It wasn’t so much that I
believed as that it meant I fit in somewhere. And when Mally and I were on
demos he wasn’t hitting me. And I could put my anger somewhere else, at least a
little.
Eventually one of
the guys at the pub asked about that. Said it wasn’t right, he shouldn’t do it.
Said the lads had had a word with Mally and advised him to lay off. He came
home that night and apologised, said he hadn’t treated me the way he should.
Said he would be better and he was, at least for a while. And for a while I
felt closer to those radgies than I ever had, I started siding with them in my
heart. Believing? Doesn’t matter. It was us v them now. The people who’d
stopped Mally beating me versus smug lefty bitches calling me worse than shite?
I’d picked my side.
It didn’t last, of
course. The bank began having recorded meetings with him. Points were raised.
Some customers complained. He was careful at work, never used the words, told
them that, but they said it was more than
just words it was values, and Mally was stressed.
He started hitting me
again.
This time I didn’t
take it. I withdrew the money from the fuck off bank account, saved over twelve
years, still less than I liked, but what I would need. After a demo I excused
myself from Mally, said I needed to get tampons, bought those and a
pay-as-you-go. Threw the box for the phone in the toilet, kept it switched off
in my pocket ‘til I needed it.
And then I emailed
Mally’s work.
Saturday, 13 August 2016
art brut
I love your body’s
sense of being ashlar and marshmallow,
your musclefat,
your ripple and your meat;
your tender brawn,
the size-up of your squint:
your attitude,
your fluency in aggro.
I love the fact
your hands can cover mine,
the way you twist
my arm behind my back,
the torque with
which your muscles wrench my neck;
the way that you,
divinely, take your time
before releasing:
how your sweat can shine.
I love the way
your eyes flash when we fight,
the enormities you
whisper in my ear:
dyke, bitch, she-male, faggot, tranny,
queer;
the way you bring
my vulnerabilities to light,
the capacity your
thighs and concrete share,
of standing mute
and dramatizing fear.
I love your
violent vertu, your brute art:
the way you have
me beaten from the start.
Thursday, 11 August 2016
Roundabout, roundabout
Usually when my
phone flashes it just means one of my girls needs more weed. Usually they’re a
little embarrassed, apologetic, so when I get Caz’s message I can tell
something’s up:
KIZZ I NEED U HERE
QUICK PLZ CUM
I’m meant to be
dropping off at Ruby’s place, I’m nearly there, but something about this
message seems urgent. I pull into one of the streets by the church.
WHAT’S UP HUN U OK
XX
NO TIME PLZ GET
HERE HAVE ½ HR MAYBE
WOT U TALKIN BOUT
BABE X
I’m already
getting ready to drive to Caz’s place. Ruby’s addiction is going to have to
wait.
HE HIT ME AGAIN
KIZZ IM LEAVIN HIM
‘About fucking
time,’ I mutter as I get the car in gear and head off down the High Street. It’s
the middle of the day so it isn’t busy; even if it were rush hour the traffic
would be mostly the other direction. I go as fast as I legally can, watching
out for the cameras – half an hour isn’t a lot of time to get there, but if I
get arrested it’s too long.
I speed past Blue
House roundabout, the Town Moor, thread the needle through the web of
underpasses when you get to town, over the Tyne Bridge, through Gateshead, the
Felling bypass, then the road to Washington, roundabouts, roundabouts,
roundabouts. Heard from Val that Ruby says this place was built back in the
sixties. They had ideas then. No traffic lights was one of them. Roundabouts
would keep the cars in order. Pedestrians and cars would never meet. They
called it a New Town, though bits of it are old as death.
Roundabout. The
big one that crosses the A1 motorway heading to Shields. The sign for that
place Terry calls Titty Twisters, the quarry, now a business park. No business
though. It’s empty, just about. How we live these days. Little glass and brick
deserts, burger vans for the damned. A Little Chef lunch on the Friday. Past
the field where they have the Kite Festival.
I met Caz at
Pride, couple of years back. The women’s tent, the Drag King Elvis competition,
she was laughing but she seemed a little sad. I figured she could use some
help. I introduced myself. She looked around and said sorry, I can’t talk. She looked over to the door and I could see
him. Looking in, trying to decide what to do, fuming. Is he, I asked her, and she nodded.
Roundabout. One
way, the school they turned into a college; the other way to one of the industrial
estates, probably a business park too these days. Another big idea: a town made
of villages, artificial ones, each one with an industrial estate where the
people would work. The idea never did.
I was about to
tell her to move out the back, get her away from him, when the bastard comes
in. Not all aggro: calm and pleasant. Aye, I know his fucking type. Slimy. Sly.
He comes up and says hi. His name is
Malcolm, but everybody calls him fucking Mally. Aye, I think, I bet they
fucking do. He turns to Caz, says aren’t
you going to introduce me to your friend?
Roundabout, overpass,
roundabout. The big one, passing under the Highway. Turn off here and reach the
A19, Middlesbrough, York if you carry on long enough. I’m going straight. Past
trees planted to baffle the sounds of the traffic, seeing the Monument for the
first time, a black version of those temples down in Greece. That thing gives
me the creeps. It was built by some rich bloke, owned all of the mines. And
they say you could see it from all of
the mines. Fucking creepy weirdo.
Caz is gaping like
a trout here because she doesn’t know
my name, is worried this Malcolm will think she’s coming on to me, I’m coming
on to her, I can see this ending badly, so I make the only move I can. Look, I say, just tell me if I’m being out of order but it’s a hot day and somethin’
about your missus suggested to me she might need something to chill her out,
that’s all. I open my jacket, pull out some tinfoil, a ten-spot of green.
You could get in trouble for that, he says.
Roundabout. One
way to the Village, one way loops back to the Highway. The joke is nobody can
find their way in Washington because the roundabout signs all just say the
District Numbers for each Village, which no-one outside of town knows, but
no-one who lives here knows either, because
they just use the names. This joke is over ten years out of date but they still
make it. People like to laugh at ideas from the 60s. ‘Cause we’re so much
better. So more modern. With our empty business parks.
I look him in the
eye. Probably, I say, but you’ll pay a better price for my stuff
than the booze they rip you off for here. He smiles. But if you don’t want any...
Mally? She asks, making puppy dog eyes at him, can I have some, and I watch the smile insinuate its way onto his
face. I can see he’s about to ask how
much, know he’ll use this as an excuse to barter down, so I change the
game. Here, have it, I say, putting
the wrap in his hand, pulling a pen from my pocket as quick as I can, sleight
of hand, and he fumbles to hide it from view. They always do.
Roundabout. A
smaller one, either way leads to old houses. Then the smallest yet, only two
exits, the one to the left which leads to the river, the one straight ahead,
where I’m going.
And if you need more and I grab hold of her hand, write my
number, if you ever need anything and I look her in the eyes
when I say anything. He gets the
stuff into the pocket of his jeans, well
nice to meet you and they’re off. I leave the site by the back entrance,
get out of the park quick as I can, lucky
I didn’t bring the car, walk zigzag and chaotic through the park, across
the road, down to West Jesmond where I take the Metro home.
Roundabout: here.
This is the place where I’m turning.
I knew that it’d
be him who would text, him who’d come out to pick stuff up from me, but I’d
know where they lived. Over time I relaxed him, he’d let her come out, always
there, always watching, but she would emerge.
I park outside her
house, keep the car running, text her HERE X and she runs out, in a hoodie and
trackers, carrying a single holdall. No black eye, no sign of grab marks on her
wrist. I know better than to start by asking questions. We drive off.
‘I thought you
said he hit ya?’ I have to ask.
‘He’s been hittin us,’ she tells me. ‘But he
isn’t like the others, he doesn’t storm off after that. This is my chance Kizz,
my window. But if I told you that I didn’t know you’d come.’
‘Jesus babe, you
didn’t have to say he’d hit you, y’know – ’
‘I know. Kizz, thanks for coming and I know
I was probably being stupid but I had to get you here. I’m glad you are.’ She
reaches for my knee.
‘You don’t have to
do that to show me you’re grateful,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not fucking him.’ My hands are tight, white-knuckle,
gripping the steering wheel. That fucking shitehawk.
Things go quiet
for a while. Roundabout, roundabout.
‘So how’d you have
a window?’ I ask her.
She smiles. ‘I
shopped him to his work.’
‘You what?’
‘Relax, he doesn’t
know it’s me. The stupid bastard leaves his Facebook open all the time. I took
shots of his posts, in the Infidels group and the EDL pages, all that. I sent
an email from the college, on a break from my employability course.’ She
smiles. ‘First time that’s ever come in useful.’
‘Jesus, Caz.’
She looks over at
me again, and her smile’s going manic. ‘He fucking phones me from work. Hey doll I’m gonna be late,’ she says,
miming a phone by her ear. ‘Work found out about my posts and they’ve only
called the fuckin’ bizzies.’ She
laughs. ‘The fucking police!’
‘Aye well I’m not
surprised babe. Some of that stuff that he writes is fucking vile.’ I follow him on Facebook, though
he doesn’t know it’s me. I keep an eye.
Truth is, I wish I’d
thought of doing this. ‘Did you expect the police to come?’
She shakes her
head. ‘I thought he’d get in trouble, they’d maybe keep him back or something,
suspend him.’
‘Wouldn’t that
mean he’d be around more?’
‘He would at first
but I know what he’s like. He’d stew for a week, then start hitting up pubs
with the rest of those cunts. I’ve been planning. I knew I’d have a chance to
leave sometime. I just didn’t think
it’d be today.’
She unzips the bag
she’s carrying and shows me what’s inside. Some pants and tampons. An old
Nokia. And money.
‘I saved and I
saved. I bought this with cash, pay as you go. It’s a burner. I smashed up my
old phone just after I texted you, threw the SIM card down the drain. And the
rest is for expenses. Some’s for you.’
‘Ah now, bollocks –
’
‘No, I need
somewhere to stay and I want to crash at yours, at least for the first couple
of days. I can pay you back…’
I shake my head. ‘Keep
your money for someone you have to
pay. You can crash at mine regardless. I’m just glad you’re safe.’
She looks out the
window. ‘Well I’m not safe, not quite, not yet. But I tell you what,’ she looks
at me. ‘I’m going to be.’
Roundabout,
roundabout.
Wednesday, 10 August 2016
Incident by the Six Benches
This summer is
ridiculous. This year. I can’t sleep. Again. At Valerie’s, on her goddam
leather sofa which sticks to my back and my butt and literally fucking sucks. It isn’t her fault and in winter it’s fine
but in this heat it’s just intolerable. Take your clothes off to cool down and
you stick to the furniture. Put clothes on to stop yourself sticking, sweat
your ass off all the more. An unwinnable battle. A double-bind.
Only way out of a
double-bind is to say fuck it, so I
pull on my clothes, check my make-up. It isn’t on point – whose is, at 4am? –
but all it needs is a touch more mascara, a top-up of the brows, and fresh
lipstick…after a drag on the pipe, of course. I don’t want to stain it.
The smart thing to
do is head home. But I’m bored with that walk, by the cemetery, over the bridge
with its cold war suggestions, down to the flats. I feel like taking a
different route.
Out to the Co-Op?
It’s risky. The shop won’t be open at this hour -though nowhere else will, save
the garages – and that way you’re headed to Kenton. Rough country. I don’t know
the local patterns. Here, nobody’s out at 4am, except the early shift workers
and the truly masochistic joggers. Up Wansbeck Road way might be different. But
even when I lived in Scotswood this was quiet time. And I’d get to see St Hugh’s,
and the No Golfing sign, and those
beautiful flats with the weird orange detailing.
I leave the house
and take a rightward turn. A straight shoot from here and sooner or later you’re
not in Newcastle no more: and the border starts early. Walking to Valerie’s on
Ladies’ Day, scanning the crowd at the Three Mile Inn, the grain of roadside
concrete, thinking this is where
Northumberland begins. The girl I once got off with, who lived in filth and
kept a copy of the Bristol Stool Chart on her wall, who told me her family were
Border Country royalty. Her father announced he was gay, and started looking
for love in the Telegraph personals.
Her disgust: ‘everybody knows you use the Guardian
for that’. How the other half cruises.
Catch a bus here
and you can make for Morpeth, Alnwick, via Acklington Prison where the mood on
the bus really changes depending on what side of visiting you’re riding. A girl
I know is in there, detransitioned for her safety. I’d visit, but I only knew
her vaguely and I think maybe getting visits from a tranny would be bad for her
in-prison rep.
Maybe I’m a bad
person.
I’m not going
straight today. At the roundabout I turn left, past the postwar houses with
their porticos, the nautical curves in their window bays, the new(ish) build
flats on the right. This is not a long walk but, being mostly tout droit, it seems longer.
It reminds me of
Nunhead station, part of this walk. The part by Wansbeck Road. Passing under the
bridge. Meeting Leon there, and Billy Monster. The walk past the pub, over
Telegraph Hill. Up Kitto Road and round the corner to the Big Queer House,
where we drank and smoked until God knows what hour in the garden. This is the
London I miss: not the tourist areas but the places people live. The bust of
Olaudah Equiano in the park. The house off Pepys Road with books stacked to the
top of the window, spines facing in, skyscrapers of paper. You could see Canary
Wharf’s pyramid, light flashing, if you leaned out of Leon’s attic skylight.
The sign says NO
GOLFING. Valerie and I both took photos. She wants to come back, borrow a golf
glove from someone – or maybe just buy one, there’s a golf shop up the road,
under the Indian restaurant whose curry Brianna finds too sweet – and take a
photo of a hand wearing it, flipping off the sign. Golf or die, man!
It feels rural to
me, this path by the Rugby Club. Nothing but fields in one direction. Val
disagrees. Kansas City rural’s on a bigger scale than ours. She describes it as
suburban but it’s more than that, out here. Rothbury Avenue, moving to Regent’s
Farm Road: that’s suburban. This place…that field could keep going. All the way
to the border. Like Christina’s World.
In the Co-Op up
the road, they display the Scottish Sunday
Post as prominently as the Newcastle
Evening Chronicle. They know that we’re in the borderlands, even if the
maps pretend they’re far away. ‘Every time something happens there are all
these cries to move the border.’ A liminal place. Something could happen.
It’s a liminal
time, too. There is no such thing as dawn. There are two kinds of twilight,
morning and evening, and three types in each: civil. Nautical. And
astronomical. BMNT: begin morning
nautical twilight. Military coinages. Fortified language. A killing ground
between the night and day.
That French film
that Valerie raves about, the Queens of Night and Day. This is a film about magick,
she says to me, and I hear her sounding the k.
Valerie’s occult enthusiasms, witchcraft as a way out of the white girl
trap of cultural embezzlement. I gave her a copy of Hutton, told her that stuff’s
all made up. I suspect she won’t read it.
That film is
pretty damn good though.
I walk past the
topiarised hedges, three houses in a row with greenery so straight you could
rule margins with it. I don’t know why just these three houses: I would like to
think they’re council in a sea of right-to-buy, that Nick Forbes is sending a
man out to shear these things straight, but realistically that isn’t very
likely. The new opening times for the Library, an A4 sheet stuck to the back of
the door. On Tuesdays and Thursdays the Team Mystic kids who have the place
held down must wait outside to troll the gym. Or hit the Quaker Meeting House
instead.
What’s more likely
is one of the people here just likes his hedge straight, and does his
neighbours’ so it isn’t out of place. The Big Society extends as far as next
door’s garden. And no golfing.
I come to my
favourite bit of the walk: the Six Benches. Municipal, black iron and wood,
left right left, a De Chirico promenade, empty each time I’ve seen them. An
invitation to musical chairs.
I’ve photographed
them once already, put the shots through Pixlr and Prisma, all possible
filters, but haven’t quite got it. There’s an angle that I haven’t shot from
yet. I have to find it. Magic hour’s coming. If I work, then I can make this
really good.
I stand at a
distance, walk closer, step back. I hold my cracked phone on its side, hold it
up, try Dutch angles. I walk behind the benches, meet them from the other side,
I cross the road and shoot from there. I kneel on one knee until it aches, then
on the other. It’s taking a while but I feel like I’ve got it.
‘Here!’
Damn. Got so
caught up taking the shot I stopped paying attention. Where the Hell is hypervigilance
when I actually need it?’
‘Here! Yee!’
Still kneeling,
flicking the camera to video in case I need evidence, I look up.
‘I knaa yee!’
By the benches
in the morning’s
civil twilight
I see her again
Monday, 8 August 2016
Badge of Honour
‘Wait,’ I ask her,
‘this is with women? Cis women?’
She shakes her
head. ‘Rarely. Usually it’s crossdressers, drag people, guys with a fetish for
spandex and fishnets.’
‘Right.’
‘I mean a couple
of cis women, but sort of as favours? There was a dominatrix I knew and…’
‘What was that like?’
‘Pretty good, but
she was going for pins, not submissions. She facesat me in a weird way though.’
‘Weird how?’
‘Face down. I had
her big thighs either side of my head and my nose and mouth shoved up against
this dusty dungeon floor.’
‘Ugh.’
‘It was great. I loved it.’
‘Jesus, Ruby.’
She holds her
lighter to the bowl of her pipe and inhales, then passes it to me. Under the
first of the ash the powdered buds glow like coal.
‘And Rachel.’
‘Bloody Hell! Wasn’t
that when - ?’
‘I was presenting as male then, yeah. She’d dress me in her clothes and make my face up, then kick my ass.’
I raise an
eyebrow. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah yeah I know,
file under obvious clues.’
I pass the pipe
back to her. This is a weird conversation.
‘How did that come
about?’
‘I came out to
her. About liking…this.’ She gestures to the floor around us, Valerie’s
mattress, our clothes scattered over the floor, ripped tights and stretched
knickers. Her belly still red where I punched it, her breasts still showing the
marks from my fingers.
‘And she was okay
with it?’
‘Hmmm. She didn’t
take much convincing. It’s a seductive thing, to be told you’re admired for
your strength.’
‘You cower before
them so invitingly.’
‘Huh?’
‘Nothing. Song
lyric. So why on Earth did you and Rachel split up then? I mean if she was
willing to indulge your wrestling fetish…’
‘Well, that didn’t
last the whole of the marriage.’
‘Why?’
‘Because, dear
Emma, if you had ever been in a long-term monogamous relationship instead of
standing at the still point of a polyamorous tornado, you’d know that the
sexual side of it becomes less…prominent after a while?’
‘Ah. Lesbian bed
death.’
‘I guess so, in a
way. And also, um, I knocked her out.’
‘Holy SHIT Ruby!
How the fuck – ’
‘It was an
accident, okay? She was on top of me, I pushed her back – I mean I was
struggling but not really struggling,
you know? I was enjoying being held down, anyway, I pushed her back a little but
I hadn’t clocked the table was above us and…she hit it. Spark out. I had to
move to the side to avoid being trapped underneath her.’
‘Jesus!’
‘I was shitting
myself. I thought I’d fucking killed her.
I was doing the whole movie thing, oh fuck, trying to remember how to do CBT…’
‘How would that help?’
She nods her head
from side to side, retracing her steps. ‘CPR.
Don’t you die on me, all that…’
‘Did you actually say don’t you die on me?’
‘Just about.
Anyway, she wasn’t out long. I don’t know if you’ve ever been knocked out before…’
‘I have not,
thankfully.’
‘I haven’t either.
I’d really like to be knocked out
some day though, that’d be awesome.’
‘You are a very special person.’
‘Ha ha. Anyway,
being knocked out does not actually last that long. It’s a few seconds, a
minute, not huge amounts of time. She came round pretty quickly.’
‘How did she feel
about that?’
‘I think she felt
kind of excited about it, actually. She wanted to go again.’
‘Did you?’
She looks at me
like I’ve asked her to buttfuck the Pope in full Rangers kit. ‘No! For all I
knew she might have had concussion. I told her that was enough for the night
and we stopped. And we didn’t do it again, actually.’
‘You were worried
you’d hurt her?’
‘Yeah. People don’t
realise how dangerous the average living room is as a fighting environment. I
mean even here you have to watch out for the desk and the radiator, the shelves
at the end, but there isn’t a coffee table. The coffee table is the first thing
you get rid of, if you’re going to do this stuff.’
‘Duly noted. So
how were things afterwards?’
‘Like I say, she
seemed kind of excited. It was a story she’d return to sometimes. Remember that time you knocked me out? It
was like a badge of honour, a memory of adventure, taking risks. Like my mum
telling the story about my uncle nearly killing her with an axe.’
‘Christ, Ruby,
what the fuck is your family?’
‘It’s not actually
as crazy as it sounds. I just mean that…I think women don’t get sanction as
adventurers, you know? It’s getting better, but especially in the past…I just…I
don’t know. She had a quiet life. She was a teacher! She didn’t have many
memories of her body being strong, of snapping back, of being tough. Sometimes
I think I took that away from her, because I was frightened.’
‘Hmmm. Ruby Ross,
you are one weird fucking lady.’
‘Look who’s
talking.’
I flip her off and
roll up on my knees. ‘Wanna go again?’
She smiles.
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