Tell Me I'm Worthless

PROLOGUE

THE FACE IN THE WALL

Long after the House is gone, it’s there.

The boy and his parents moved into the new flat around a year ago. It was a new flat, but it didn’t feel new, it was damp, and cold, and it had felt hostile to them the moment they hauled their stuff inside. The boy’s mother knew, in that moment, that they had made a terrible mistake, but by that point it was too late. They lived here. They could not afford to live somewhere else.

The boy’s mother and father have been worrying. His grades have never been anything special, but now they seem to have slipped even further downward. He doesn’t have any friends, and, even worse, he is utterly uninterested in making any. When they ask him if he wants to join any after-school clubs or sports teams, he just shrugs. They wonder if he’s autistic, but his dad scoffs at the idea. His dad is the kind of man who thinks having an autistic son would mean there was something wrong with him. His dad, a big man with a red face, sits on the sofa in front of the TV ranting loudly about how fucking immigrants are keeping him from finding work. The boy can hear this, through his bedroom door. He spends a lot of time in his bedroom. It’s small and dark. His mum tried to get him to put up some posters, but to put up posters you have to like things and he isn’t sure he likes anything. He knows that there are things he should like – football, rappers, action movies. Boys like things like that. But he cannot bring himself to feel anything towards them beyond a mild, passing curiosity.

In his bedroom, the light hanging from the ceiling flickers, the bulb threatening to burst. Damp creeps through the wallpaper above his bed. He looks at the damp stain sometimes and thinks that he sees shapes in it. Eyes, a wide gaping mouth, opening up to swallow him whole. He is twelve now and thinks he should be over seeing monsters in his wallpaper, but even so, he asks his mum to try and sort it out. She gets his dad to re-paper the room, and for some time it works, the stains, and the shapes that hide within the stains, are gone. But two months later they are back, and, although it doesn’t seem possible, larger than they had been. He can still see the shapes. He can still see the damp forming wide white eyes, and a twisted screaming mouth, and in that mouth the impression of a tongue and of teeth. It keeps him up at night. In his dreams, the shape becomes clearer, becomes a woman, and the screaming woman, her limbs all bent at strange angles around her, pushes out through the brick, through the paper, tearing it away to reach out into his bedroom and grab him. When she grabs him, he wakes up crying. At first, his mum comes into his room and hugs him until he goes back to sleep. After a while, she gives up. I mean, what’s the use. He does this most nights. His dad says maybe she coddles him too much, if she keeps hugging him until he stops crying then he’ll be a poof and he won’t have a fucking poof for a son.

The boy begins to Google some of the things that his dad says, on the old computer which he has at his desk. He was given it for school, but he barely uses it for school. Instead he mostly uses it to search for those phrases his dad repeats under his breath when he drinks too much. My dad’s right, he thinks. About these things. About the immigrants and the gays and the feminists and BLM tearing down statues, historic statues, iconic parts of our heritage, and actually his dad doesn’t go far enough … The boy discovers forums where other people, older boys and men, mostly, tell him about the way the world really is: a vast conspiracy, of mass immigration, of Jews in the media, of feminists, of ahistorical cultural Marxism telling lies about the past. Manipulating the youth. They’re in the schools. In his school, too. They’re diversity hires, they’re teachers asking for pupils’ pronouns. Sometimes, one of the older men asks him for pictures of himself. It seems wrong, but he sends them, anyway, pictures of him naked in the grainy camera of his webcam, sent to anonymous accounts.

Mostly, though, they all want to stay hidden. They write out strings of slurs. They say they are going to do something. Something’s coming, they tell the boy. Get ready for the storm, and make sure you’re on the right side. The boy thinks, well, I have to make sure I’m on the right side. I have to do something. The face in the wall twists further, the mouth gets wider, the eyes get more frantic. But he doesn’t have nightmares about it anymore. He doesn’t wake up at night screaming. His mum and his dad are happy about that, at least. Maybe their strange little boy is going to be okay. They did a good job with him, right? They’re doing a good job with him. Given the circumstances. Given the lack of money, and the shitty flat. And the government, and the state of the world. And the way things seem to be going. They did a good job, they tell themselves, we did a good job, we’re raising a good kid, we’ve brought up a good son, over and over and over, insisting this to themselves and to anyone who will listen, repeating it until it makes them sick.

PART 1

THE DECLINE OF WESTERN WOMANHOOD

ALICE

It makes you sick.

This room, it makes you sick. It makes me sick. It’s all angular and wrong, and the angles join in conversation with each other. They become hateful. They begin to tell you that they hate you and that they want you to die, somehow, that maybe they’ll be the ones to kill you, or maybe they will convince you to kill yourself, with words, economic manipulation, gentrification, every weapon at their disposal. Because you didn’t deserve to live, at least not here, in this room, in this building, in this part of the city. You should go somewhere else. You make us sick, the angles and the walls say, you’d be better off far from here, or dead, or both.

I hate living here. The rent is okay, I suppose, but the heating doesn’t reach the top floor, where I am. On cold days I can see my breath in the air. And the inside of the windows fills with condensation, the corners of the room with creeping mould. I emailed the landlord about this, during winter, with my duvet wrapped close around me, and he responded telling me I needed to air the flat out by opening up the windows. But that’s not really why I hate living here. This flat, and my bedroom in particular, reminds me of another place, another room in another part of the city. It doesn’t look much like that place. It looks like a normal flat. Messy. Too messy. It’s not really in how the place looks, but it feels the same, I can feel the air pressing in all around me, eyes watching me. Maybe that’s why I moved in. This flat doesn’t hate me, not really. Its hate is only a pale imitation of real, true hate. This room is not passionate. It still hates, but it only hates because, well, what else is it going to do. How else is it supposed to feel about me? Rooms sit and stew. They take in the things you do in them. Their walls soak up every action you take between them, and those actions become part of the bricks and the plaster. Maybe I made it hate me. I can be hateful, to myself and to others. I try not to be. I try to be better. I have to believe that everything I do has a destination to it, that everything I do means I have control, over my environment, my relationships, my life. My job, if I had one.

I move flats a lot. I don’t feel comfortable staying in the same place for long, and in every house or flat that I’ve been in for the past five years, there has been a room where the house or the flat is concentrated to an absurd degree. In that room, the air grows thick and the spirit of the building becomes near-physical. The less rooms you have in your flat, the more concentrated this is. The less income you generate, the less rooms you can have in your flat, the thicker the air, the more hateful the atmosphere. I don’t know if this is how it really works but it is what I tell myself.

I don’t have many friends, but last year I began to ask whoever I could about hauntings, in the vague hope that somebody would understand what I meant when I said ‘hauntings’. Most people have a ghost story of some kind, even if they don’t believe in ghosts. Maybe their Great-grandma came to sit at the end of their bed for a month after she died, or they heard footsteps from the attic where there couldn’t have been anyone to make them. I’d try to ask casually, at bars or on the internet, have you ever experienced a haunting? I made sure to phrase it like that. Not have you ever seen a ghost? I wanted to know about hauntings, specifically. One common thread which interested me was that many of the people who answered said that their places of work were haunted. This was actually more common than peoples’ houses being haunted, which I thought was strange, but then again, Bly Manor from The Turn of the Screw was a place of work for the Governess and every big imposing house in the country has people working in it, cleaning, cooking and these days, now nobody lives in them, giving tours, maybe acting out scenes for tourists.

One girl told me that she worked as a cleaner for some offices which were housed in this absurdly tall old townhouse. She had to clean a few of the rooms, kitchens, toilets, but mostly the stairs, which wound up and up in sharp lines like a tower. But, after a couple of shifts, something strange started to happen. When she cleaned the lower landings and stairs, she could hear somebody doing the same above her. Moving about. Opening and closing doors. Vacuuming the floors. She could hear their footsteps on the hard wood of the steps, echoing down from above. She thought this was strange – she had been told she would be working alone, and the sheet in the downstairs reception had said that everybody who worked here had signed out. When she ascended the stairs to work on the offices up there, and see who it was that was cleaning, everything was deserted, and still dirty. She stopped and listened then, and heard somebody below, cleaning the floors that she had just done. This happened every time she cleaned at that place. She wrote an email to the manager of her cleaning firm about it, but the only answer he had was that, well, maybe it was just noises from the building next door. That was probably it … these old buildings have funny echoes. But one time, she said, she heard the person above, she could hear their feet on the floor clear as anything, and it was too much. She’d had enough. The girl ran up the stairs to catch them, because she had to know, desperately, what was happening to her. They were still making noise as she ascended the stairs, growing louder and louder until she got to the top floor. The noise was coming from a room at the end of the landing. The door to that room was shut. She called, is anybody there?, and nobody answered, of course. She walked down the landing, shaking, just a little bit. The door was locked, but she had a set of keys, one for every door in the building, or so she’d been told. There was still noise coming from inside the room. A long, agonising scrape as some item of furniture was pulled across the wooden floor. An unidentifiable thumping, and footsteps moving back and forth. At one point, she heard those footsteps get closer and closer to the door, and she looked down at her hands to see that they were shaking uncontrollably, before the steps moved away again, over to the other side of the room. She had cleaned this room in the past. She knew that one of these keys worked, but she couldn’t remember exactly which one. There were small silver keys on the ring, and big, bronze-coloured ones, strange little ones that opened the bins out at the back of the building. Keys of every type. She wished she had made a note of which one worked for this, the last door, but she hadn’t. That could have been it. The girl could have left the noise a mystery. But … when she told me this story, I asked that. Why open the door? Why did you need to see what was in there? She shrugged, and said she wasn’t really sure, beyond the fact that this was her workplace, she felt unsafe, and she had to know why. So, the girl tried every key on the set, and, of course, they all stuck in the lock. Sometimes they stuck fast, and she had to pull hard to get them out again. This happened every time, until she came to the last one, which was big, golden. She put it in the lock, her breath rattling in and out. Then, at the last moment before she turned the key, she pulled it back out. She couldn’t do this. She wasn’t strong enough. But she still wanted to see … she bent down, so that her face was at the height of the keyhole, and peered through.

Do you know what was in there? Do you? Do you want to know? I know what you want to know and maybe what you want it to be, because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, trying to reconstruct the circumstances of a haunting in my mind, and you want it to be nothing in there. You want her to look through the keyhole and find it empty, and then open the door with the key. You want her to walk around the room but find nothing out of place or strange in there at all. You want her to go to each wall and place her hand on the red wallpaper and feel a throb inside. Maybe see shapes in the old stains on the wallpaper. In all honesty, I would also like that to be what happened in the story. I asked for stories about hauntings to feel less alone, to feel less like an outsider from everybody around me. But that isn’t what she found. Instead, she found a woman in there, who had been cleaning out her desk. This was her last day and she didn’t want to leave things looking like a mess. She apologised for any distress she may have caused.

It feels like an anecdote that was meant to describe something, a metaphor about late capitalism, hauntology, about how work turns us all into ghosts, repeating the same learned actions over and over again for eternity. For that person, the wonder and the possibility and the horror of a haunting was just, in the end, somebody else doing their job for them.

The other thing is that this anticlimactic event only explained that one particular instance of hearing the noise. It did not explain all the other times that there had been sounds of somebody else in the building. There can’t have been somebody moving out of those offices every single time she had a shift there, surely? She didn’t sleep well when she thought about that. The girl told me that, afterwards, she requested to be moved to clean somewhere else. Every time she entered that building and looked up at those stairs, she felt queasy.

I have to believe that other people have also experienced impossible, horrible things.

I have to know that there are people who would understand if I talked to them. I have to know. I have to believe that my trauma is relatable, if controversial, that there are people who would listen to me and go, it’s okay Alice, it’s completely okay. You are so fucking normal. Everything you’ve experienced is normal. But soberly I think that, really, the only person out there who could ever understand is Ila, and I can’t talk to her. I just can’t. We used to be so close, but I can barely think about her now without having an anxiety attack. It’s probably the same with her. I don’t know for sure, but going from the sort of things she says now, if she thinks about me at all it is to hate me. I tried to be brave. She was a guest, recently, on a program on BBC Radio 4, and I really did try to sit and listen, as a form of exposure therapy. I turned it off after five minutes. I’d heard enough, and I had to smoke a joint to stop myself from passing out. Ila probably wants me to die. That’s okay. I don’t want her to die. I hate her, yes, I despise her with all my soul, in ways that it is hard to put into words, but I don’t want her to die. I’m a good, forgiving person, I’m lovely. I live in this flat in this terrace house with all these hateful angles, and they remind me of another house, with other angles, angles that hate you more than it is even possible to comprehend, angles that crawl inside your brain and inside your body and move you around of their own accord, that make you see, think and feel things that nobody should ever have to see, think, feel, know, believe in. Angles that indicate the building you are in is not even really a building, that no human could have possibly thought of this when building it, that this house simply came into being from contact with the pure, violent terror that can only exist in the very worst examples of humanity. And that horror is transmitted through you, a little thing inside the heart of the place. It cuts its way into your body, or uses somebody else to cut its way into your body. I have a scar on my forehead to attest to that, and Ila has a scar on her stomach. And Hannah. Something happened to Hannah. The place, it worms into your brain and your heart. By the time I got out, I was different. The me who sits here right now in my room isn’t the same me that went to University, went to all those parties, met a girl called Ila.

Ruined her. Got ruined by her.

My room isn’t big. It’s just too large to not be cosy, but not large enough to be spacious, in Estate Agent terms. When I moved in, I found a mark in the paint of the wall opposite my bed that I could have sworn hadn’t been there when I viewed the flat. I took a picture of it and made sure to send it to the landlord, so he didn’t try to charge me for it later when I needed to move out. I couldn’t work out what the mark actually was, and it unsettled me, so I covered it up with a poster for a band that were popular a long time ago, before I was born. In the poster, four boys stand in front of a brick building. One of the boys is centred, the frontman of the band. The overwhelming personality, eclipsing the other three with ease. His hair sticks up, and he holds a branch in one hand sprouting white flowers. His heart aches. You broke his heart. He’s miserable, and he sings about how everything makes him miserable. The meat industry, it makes him miserable. I don’t know why I had the poster, honestly. I used to love the band … I still love the band. But I don’t remember where the poster came from, it was just there, amongst all my stuff when I moved in here. So I put it up on the wall, over the blemish in the paint, thinking that would solve