Story time II.
Cait stared at the dial by her feet with a black passion that boarded on violence. How dare it? How dare such a prosaic lump of springs and metal make her feel so shitty? How dare the world condition her to care? ...And how dare she go along with it?
She closed her eyes and pressed her lips together in a narrow line, trying to will herself into a better mood. Her eyes opened and she stared - slightly shocked - at the plain, pallid oval face framed with dull, dyed-black hair. She wanted to cry. Whose idea was it to put a fucking mirror there anyway? She risked another glance, trying to like what she saw, trying to detach herself from her life. Murky blue eyes stared pleadingly back at her. It was no good. She was still bitterly adverse to the contours of flesh that made up her face and body - it was like living in a rack of spoilt meat.
She left the bathroom and climbed the stairs to her room, feeling gravity press heavily upon her. She shouldn’t have gone to check. She should have left the scales well alone. It was bad enough imagining she was heavier than she wished, standing on the scales and having it confirmed was not what she had hoped for. It had been a risky gamble - and she had lost.
She sighed. Vain bitch, she accused herself, hoping to spark a fire that would thaw her out of her misery. Her derision only sunk her further. She tried reason as a last resort. Look, she told herself sternly. Lots of people think you look nice...
Lots of people think Barbie is pretty too - although admittedly probably not the same people...
Lots of people are idiots!
I rest my case.
She fumed. Stop being so difficult - what’s wrong with being eight stone?
What’s right with it?
I’m sure a lot of people would be overjoyed to weigh as little as that, she coaxed.
Not me! her heart howled.
Why not?! But she knew damn well why not. Because all those who would be grovellingly grateful and ecstatically happy with eight stone had never longed to see six stone straight. Never longed for the body to waste away until it became unfeminine, ethereal, inhuman - goddamn skeletal for all she cared so long as she didn’t have to - so long as - so long as he never... fuck.
She sank down on the edge of the bed, rubbing at her forehead in an attempt to stem the neurotic storm that was already boiling happily inside her. Had it always been like this? She didn’t think so, but couldn’t swear to it; she doubted it had been this bad before. Cinderella had it easy - all she wanted was a new dress - no one ever had to ask a faery godmother for a new body.
She stood, her movements sudden, unable to find peace. She paced, picking things up and dropping them again with a snarl. She didn’t care about her weight - had never cared about her weight. She only cared now because it was something to focus on - something to control in a body she felt betrayed by. It was all a grand exercise in transference, she knew, and it wasn’t doing her any favours. At this rate she’d become as vanity obsessed as the fucking Barbies - and twice as screwed up to boot, thrice if one was being literal... That thought brought her up short.
She was being ridiculous. If she was going to be unreasonable at least she could be sensible about it. Logically, her problems stemmed from a lack of control and an inability to change. So... She snatched up a pair of dress-maker’s scissors from her desk and spun towards the middle of the room, catching sight of herself in the mirror.
She stared back at her reflection with vicious loathing, her lips twitching into a shaky smile before failing and twitching again. She held the scissors in one hand and pulled at her hair with the other. She knew she could never be Morpheus, nor Todd, Holmes, Holliday, Hamlet, Mercutio, Bramwell or whatever other unstable hero had her attention at the time. She knew that cutting her hair did nothing; it didn’t change her one single iota, it would simply give her shorter hair. But still the hope held: if the face in the mirror looked different then perhaps she would be different, could ditch her own shortcomings, her own life. If she could wear the clothes, find the look, speak the language then perhaps she could become someone else...
It hadn’t escaped her notice that everyone she wanted to be was male. She couldn’t manage male, of course, but dress a girl as a boy and to an extent she became A-sexual. A-sexual was supremely attractive right now...
The pale lips twitched again into a singularly sarcastic and unpleasant smile. Fuck it. Justification didn’t matter; all that mattered was she lasted out the night. That was all that ever mattered.
She drew her fingers into a fist; the metal blade-lengths rasped slickly against one another, and a dark hank of hair fell to the floor.
=====
Elektra walked in her usual idiot-savant daze along the route to school. She’d had no coffee and the road, one seen hundreds upon hundreds of times, was incapable of holding her interest. Her own thoughts kept her company and her eyes ignored everything save on-coming traffic and the strictly unusual.
On the bus that morning she had unhappily witnessed a couple all but devour one another in a frenzied passion. She’d been disgusted at the public display yet fascinated also; did they have nowhere else to go? How did they summon the energy that early in the morning? Was there something so irresistibly erotic about London Transport they were unable to help themselves?
She would have to ask Kaya if the Bakerloo or Hammersmith and City Line was as full of sexual deviants at rush-hour... She passed the bench at the end of Illfey Road and barely clocked the skinny boy who sat smoking there.
“Hey,” the voice from the bench was ragged, almost apologetic.
She turned. Her first impression was of a too-young WWI officer with an Eton haircut, a muddy jacket, hollow eyes and a cigarette. She blinked, forcing her brain and eyes to pay attention.
Caitlin’s narrow mouth tugged into something like a smile around her smoke and she stuck her thumbs into the pockets of her grey skinny jeans. The jacket she wore was the one she’d picked up at a costume sale; no one else had bought it because it was artfully drizzled with a mix of red and muddy stains that made it seem the wearer had lain dead in a trench for a week - Cait had snapped it up immediately.
“Bloody hell, love!” She grabbed her friend’s shoulder, pushed her first one way and then the other to better take in this newly crafted persona. “What brought this on? You look...”
“A mess.”
“Not entirely,” she chided. “You look... shell shocked,” she admitted with a half frown. “Are you planning a particularly distressing revival of some Evelyn Waugh book?”
One dark brow raised.
“You look like the sort of young rake who falls in love with someone unsuitable - usually of the same sex - and then goes off to war to die. Not,” Elektra continued, “that given your present state and dress I’m entirely certain whether you’re supposed to have a doomed passion for a girl or a boy.”
A drag on the cigarette and surprisingly savage smile. “Good.”
Elektra took the cigarette from her companion with the gentle grace of one pulling out a splinter. “Aren’t you taking this a bit far?”
Smokey blue eyes regarded her, suddenly glacier-cold. “What?”
A sly look. “I assume this is all for Stamford’s ‘Gender in Shakespeare’ project?” Her tone was light and easy, making it clarion-clear she assumed nothing of the sort but was giving her friend a verbal out should she need it. “So. Was Mercutio a girl or was Ophelia a boy?”
A force of animation lit in Caitlin’s face as she considered the question and momentarily left her own tired troubles behind: how would the plays have read differently - been performed differently - had various gender roles been reversed?
“Hamlet perhaps?” Elektra nudged, subbing out the dog-end under her heel.
The light of creativity became a blazing flame. “Something was rotten in the state of Denmark,” Caitlin declaimed, “That’s what the nobles said, And between a love affair and wasted Dad, Hamlet was out of her head. She couldn’t take the angst any more, Bitch mother an’ her father’s killer All rutting and plotting in cold Elsinore...”
Grinning, Elektra chimed in, barely missing a beat. “She had the hots for a cool court girl They fucked that night, drugged heads in a swirl. Ophelia showed Hamlet how to chase the dragon’s tail ‘Twas a pity it was a bad batch and they both went off the rails...”
Caitlin considered for a moment, her eyes cast inwards to scan lines of verse as they wrote themselves on the walls of her skull. “Ophelia drowned herself in a quarry, The water washing half eaten flowers and puke from her body. ‘A sweet virgin child’ they said as they laid her to rest in the abbey.”
Elektra fidgeted, the lines not coming fast enough and the change of pace having briefly thrown her. “Ah… damn… Ah! Out of frustration and sport and at her uncle’s behest, Hamlet and Laertes had a dueling contest. Cracked though she was, heady Hamlet was smart, Feigning derangement she stabbed her uncle at the start.” She scowled briefly - too many syllables. “Now with royal blood on her hands... Now with royal blood on her hands, mad or no her best bet was suicide - She planned to overdose...”
“Taking the dragon for one last ride,” Cait finished quickly. “But Fortinbras of Poland invaded, And hitched the cool twisted chick for his bride!”
They looked at one another in something like ecstatic shock, neither able to quite believe they had just spun such words out of nothing but car fumes and nicotine. Elektra’s eyes shone, darkest amber and mottled with panic. “Satan’s cock - get a pen!” she shrieked. “Where’s a pen - write it down - fuck - write it down!”