Marionette

Her heart hammers out a muffled rhythm, and her breath catches in ragged gasps. She listens, rapt and white knuckled at her bedroom door, for the scrapes and slams of her mother’s nightly routine. Crouching in lofty platforms, she shifts her weight uncomfortably, picks at the blades of mascara itching her eyes. Pulls down her top. She winces at snatches of bad rap music from cars on the street, jumps at the sigh of some resigned rodent in the roof.
And, then, the audible click, the trail of infirm, shuffling footfalls that she’s after. Elderly creaking, and a passive groan.

Halfway down the hall, and she’s doing that walk she’s perfected in those shoes. She’s nearly silent. Lifts up her feet twice as high as normal, like some bizarre pale marsh bird in the dark, rigid and gauche.

Tentatively now, in the kitchen.
Touches the crumpled, grubby twenty in her bra. Rolls up her skirt once more.

She winces, tries to ignore the carer’s voice in her head, the guilty, whinging one telling her not to, telling her to stay.

Eases the handle into a well rehearsed and greased embrace with the key. Coaxes the click and swing out of it.
That exasperated puff of cold air spreads tingles across her cheeks, cajoles her pyretic, fevered blood to pirouette under her skin.
He is pacing the other side of her street. He concentrates on placing his feet evenly in front of each other, in sets of 3 paces. He’s careful not to step on the cracks. The light from the street lamp is harsh, and casts a stark black profile on his face. He sees her emerge from her front door, and ducks behind a few bins.

A panicked, leggy skitter down gritty steps, tonged hair whirling around her bare shoulders, resting in the white hollows of her collar bones. Stamping down the pavement, heels clacking, heart still thudding, faint whooshes at her ears, hotness clamouring and pressing the inside of her skull, a cacophony of hormones gushing from every clogged pore, pheromones chattering into the night.

Gutter punks on gritty ice in desperate, shivering throngs leer up at her, their male camaraderie one of perversion and carnal aspirations. She wiggles her bum a bit more, feeling their gaze track up her. Her teeth flash a smile in the murk.

She’s waiting outside the club, now. Curls of smoke blossom and reach from the door. Bass lines pummel her ears. Strobes glare, alarmed. Her eyes are glazed orbs, her eyelids a thin, glittery membrane. The lights wink off them.
“On you go, love” the doorman says.

Four people after her, he enters.
The lights flare and dance on her skin, and the smoke makes her lungs tense. Her limbs cast, pitch, hurl violently with the rhythm. Her face grows feral, her eyes wide and pupils tiny, pulsating. Muscles lunging, taut to slack, back again,
whorls of her hair wreathing, wild. Her feet stamp the tacky floor, thumping out the disconcerting rhythm of youth.

Gone is the apathetic lacquer in her eyes – replaced with a terrible, savage blaze. Gone is the desolate and barren expression that heavied her features, turned them to tidy, bunched pieces of well-rolled dough. She’s alive, tumultuous storms painting delirium across her face. She utters a deranged laugh. It’s more of a bark, really. Frenzied impulses play under those glittered eyelids, reflections of crackling currents, pulsing from synapse to synapse in her head. She spins, tousled and turbulent, to the bar. Downs three shots, the glasses mirrored black ice. The alcohol burns its way down to her belly, knots there.
She goes back, for something with a bit less kick, perches herself on a stool. Crosses her ankles. She notices that one of her earrings is missing from her left earlobe – glances down at the floor.

He drops it in, watches it slide down the side of the glass. Fizz. Dissolve. Gone.

She finds her earring on the strap of her top. Replaces it. Downs the rest of her drink. Chokes a little on the bubbles.
Promptly the air around her begins to stir and agitate, shadows cast rock and shatter, lines of red and yellow perpetuate in mad circles. Pale flowers bloom behind her eyes, and she careens from side to side, bumping cold walls, faltering.
She’s out, now, reeling, gulping and adrift in a shroud of misconception.
On the ground. Its frigid; numbingly cold.

A hand is offered. Under the harsh light of the streetlight, she sees droplets of sweat nestled in moist folds. Well scrubbed fingernails, quite long. Pallid, spidery thin fingers. She accepts his gesture, and is hoisted up by surprising strength. For a moment, she feels weightless, like a wisp of cotton candy blown away at a carnival – floating on that distinctive smell of frying dough, vinegar, sugar, with a faint exotic undertone of animal shit. She giggles. He is puzzled by this girlish outburst. Excited at her unpredictability.

He’s speaking to her, kindly, reassuringly. She’s nodding, her eyes muzzy, pupils darting randomly, contracting painfully fast.
Soaring domes of crisscrossed beams of shattered colour veil her vision. She keeps nodding. That regular, cleansing tempo helps to shrink the boundless fog in her head.

She follows him.
Soon they’re at his place. He says he doesn’t share with anyone. “Room mates, eh? Who needs them?”
She smiles tightly. His living room is normal. IKEA furniture, cheap laminate, and the kind of lurid, abstract rug that is considered modern. Andy Warhol print on the wall. Limp sofa, a few mugs, coffee rings dried, warping the paper of a few magazines, arranged in an artful masquerade of casual.
“Anyway. Do you want to get cleaned up? The bathroom is the first left. Careful though, the roll top bath’s a bit tricky,” he chuckles nervously, glancing up at her.
She looks down at herself, the caked vomit on her clothes, in her hair. The dank smell of sweat and kitsch body spray.
Staggers into the bathroom, kicks her heels off. Steadies herself on the sink.
He cracks open the door, hears the muscular gurking sound of her gagging. Sees a hot jet of brown vomit belch from her mouth, and she crumples into it, her hair dragging in it, like tree roots dabbling in a bog. The ceiling cracks and swims, and her limbs shudder, breaths coming in rapid, rasping spasms.

She grasps for the tap. Water flecked with granules of rust gushes into the tub. She starts to breathe in time to the ceramic thundering.
She shifts and wriggles her skirt to her ankles, yanks her top over her head, arms shuddering and slick with sweat.

She’s in the bath now. A regal, enamel affair, a roll top. Cast iron, taloned feet.
She tips her head back into the water, soaks her hair. Her makeup starts to run, black streaks of sludge tracking down her wet sloping cheeks. Watching, he finds it sluttish and exciting.

He takes his shoes off, pads to the kitchen.

Comes back.
His teeth lean forward in an ominous grey smile, like tombstones.
The belt buckle hits the floor with a hard smack, and she dimly realises his vision, faded nail marks on pale thighs. He’s on top of her, awkwardly inside her, tearing her. She grimaces with every tight impact, winces and grips at nothing. His hands are all over. Not rough, but nervous, flittering and light touches, never in one place for very long. Slender fingers, long strokes. A crimson flower buds and wells, petals of red scattered by his ripples.

She is floating nearby. Her mind buoys erratically, detached from her, held on by thin and tender threads, thoughts of small personal treasures.

His hands are firm now, tendons standing out, clenching under skin like steel cables. His body is rigid, unrelenting. Holds her head under the lapping water. Her nose bumps the bottom of the bath, a fleshy jolt. Lungs are strained and aching bulbs. Small bubbles murmur under the surface. Great pockets of air flare and rise from her nostrils, hitch and stir on the top.

He keeps a constant grip on the back of her head. Counts the seconds, internally. Her white body gives a final spasm. He lets go, and she bobs back up again.

He pulls out the knife. Plays a little with it, the darting glare of the light on the blade glinting off his eyes. They’re a curious inky, desolate black.

He traces the curve of her collarbone, the shaded hollows, the soft peaks of her shoulders, with the tip. Her bones are porcelain, her ribs sealing beams. He watches with a cruel fascination and a crooked smirk daubed across his face. He likes the way the skin parts under the knife, how the crimson wells up, spills. He outlines the shallow cut with one fingertip.

Blood scuds over the water, cracked continents of red.

He’s finished cleaning up now. Listens to the hollow chugging of the water down the pipes. He carefully extracts a few of her hairs from the drain. He flicks them into the bin with a jerk of his wrist. They splatter a few drops of dilute blood on the tiles.

She’s a marionette without strings.
He laughs and laughs, far into the night, into the flaxen dawn, until pearly pink diamonds glisten through shutters, and cars begin to rush by again. His laugh is a sinister crackle in the air, marring the innocent morning with its sick static.
The girl in the flat downstairs shivers unconsciously. The girl in the flat wonders, as the room isn’t cold.

Only a few miles away, a woman stirs in bed. Her bed clothes and sheets are in a sweated tangle from the previous night. Trembling fingers wipe clean bleary eyes, crusted over with the stiff remnants of a troubled sleep. Light leaches in through the cheap blind, and ices the side table with a grey light, the colour of Europe.
The woman’s unsteady hand knocks a brown bottle onto the floor, scattering the contents, tiny blue pills. They agitate and bounce, the beads of a prescribed rosary, torn from some chemical throat.
She shuts her paper-thin eyelids in frustration, lacks the strength to cry out.
She calls out a girls name, once, twice.
Smiles to herself, thinking she’s slept in. Won’t do her any harm, she thinks. She deserves a lie in, she thinks.
The woman falls into another fitful sleep, for a few hours, wakes in a panic.
Calls the girls name again.
And again, edged with a choked note of anxiety.

The mother’s voice, calling out her daughter’s name, is on a loop, echoing thinly. Around and around the same plasterboard walls, interrupted only by the faint wail of sirens; only a few miles away.