Day 21

Pila

I wake up from a doze in some downtown café, and begin to check myself over for missing money. In between showers, I stole out of the house and found myself painted into this corner when they began again ' the nearest point to hand en route to the nicer districts. Nothing is gone, thank goodness. I settle up and go.

Outside, darkness has fallen while I slept, and the blunt edges and eccentric nooks of the streets become daggers and ambushes. Just as I smooth down the last hair of paranoia, three figures step in front of me.

"Aright darling? Nice outfit.

Laughter like a bag of broken glass being shaken.

"You not like talking? We only want to talk to you. Come on, show us a smile.
"Hey, she looks like one of them Egyptian mummy things.
"Yeah. Come on, show us your face. You a God-botherer or something?

Kisskiss noises from puckered lips. I say nothing and hope that I can melt into dust, like the vampires in Victorian novels.

"Bet you she is. Fucking God-botherer and all. Pisses me off, these people. Think they can do anything.
"Hey, hey, don't walk away. S'rude, that.

I have manouvered myself around the group and begun to walk at a pace, my breath clattering through my lungs like an upset pile of tin cans. Leave me alone, I think, and vow not to leave the house again for a week. For a moment, I think they've gotten bored. Then I hear:

"OI, BITCH! and a hammering of heavy feet on the patchy tarmac. And I start to run.

What I hear as I flee is shaken in my head into a gut-churning cocktail. It replays over and over, a skipping record wired directly into my brain. Hell's Viewmaster clicks before my eyes, playing image after image of what is about to happen to me.

Tripped up. My money is taken. I am beaten for the pause in handing it over. Click.
A knife is pulled out, thrust into my chest. Click.
A gun is pulled out. I am made to fellate it. The trigger is pulled. Click.
Rape. Click.
My eyes are gouged out and gargled by one of the grinning figures. Click.
Laughing, lots of laughing. Three sets of fanged incisors. Click.
My sleeve catches on a stacked crate. My arm is ripped from its socket. Click.
They break. Every. Last. Finger. On my hands. Click.
Rape. Click.
Rape. Click.

"Get her scarves!
"Let's see what she fucking looks like!

No. No. They are probably too young to remember the face, but still.

"Please let me go. I have money, I wave my wallet, my spare hand jammed against my headscarf. As all the instruction manuals suggest, I fling it away from me. If it's that they're after, they will go to it, leaving me with time to escape.

"Ta, says one, scoops it up and is back before me in a blink. My heart sinks. "Now let's see what kind of fucking troll you are.

One on each side of me, as if I am doing monologue in the round, they ignore my screams, muffled by muslin, each take an end, and begin to unwrap me.

Now is the time, I think, as they pass over each other, back and forth before me, as if I am a warm, short maypole, now is the time when ideally I would hear a booming "Leave the lady alone, and everyone would freeze as a masked stranger in clothes the shade of clean ice strode forward.

Any minute now.

But of course, this being here and now and not Neverland, nobody comes, and I find after a few seconds I have stopped screaming.

The final scarf drops. Ta-da.

"Fuck me.
"Fucking hell.
Each takes a step back. They don't know what to do. It is as if my face transforms them, like everybody else, into toddlers.
"Hey ' she looks well familiar. Like that lass in that film. What's its name? Was on telly yesterday. Black and white.
"Don't be such a fucking moron. That's aaages old. She's got to be dead by now.
"Or well old.
"It's her! It looks just like her!
"It's prolly one of them nutters who goes around dressing like famous people for attention.
"Oh, I fucking heard about them! That's well weird.
"Wouldn't mind more birds dressing like Pucha Picha though.

I think back to my brief foray into internet porn (spectator, not participant) and picture a pixie in scraps of latex, rocking back and forth upon the face of a marginally more weathered female, the edges of silicon sachets visible beneath the stretched skin of her jiggling breasts.

"I say we dress this one up like Pucha Picha!
"Fuckin' YEAH!
"Where we gonna get shit like that from, you cretin?
"OK, well then we just get her to act like Pucha Picha!
"Fuckin' YEAH! Get some dildo action up her!
"Who's got some money? Go get one from that shop down there with the red sign!
"Just use a pole. Got to be a pole around here. Here's one!

But while they have been musing upon the various positions they can get me into and celebrating their find, I have run three streets away, and am crouched in a doorway, sobbing, full of racing blood. So this is karma.

After fifteen minutes, naked-faced, I begin the long walk home.

Casenotes

I worked from a magazine photo of you.
I think you were sixteen, although
it's hard to tell. You still
look fresher than the green
of a slit-throated sapling.
It took me months
to make this (hope
you like it) and the photo
is ragged at the edges now.
Vapour trails of fibrous tears
run lengthways, crossways,
lattice your face. You, though,
may you never fold, be folded,
crumple into pulp. There's a hole
in my portfolio
where my masterwork will lie,
and you are the finger to plug it.
Until you recline, pressed and preserved
in those pages, keep dancing. Keep
making me cut cardboard, glue together
replicas of the cars you drive
in "Shady Minx and "Born to Burn
and buy
the same eyeshadow to the shade.
Heartbreaker, I need you. Be me.