Pongo #56

Miffy

They're gone. I boil the kettle, barely registering when the steam scalds my hand as it rests on the spout. I think I say fuck. Or maybe I should say fuck and I don't.

I can't form sentences, least of all any that could have helped at that point. I couldn't then and I still can't. When I realised and they smiled, delighted that I appreciated their efforts, anything I could have said, no matter how many clauses, however grainy with punctuation, however many swearwords and threats and backchannel sounds I churned out, anything at that point would have been just this fucking noise.

Those utterances I managed to squeeze out were mainly questions. Not ones I expected answered as such. Hardly even questions, but for the intonation. I knew why, but I still asked. I asked how they had found me again, what exactly they had done to Ms Q, why. I can't remember if they answered most of them, but something that came up again and again was revenge. Not in the words, but in the inflection.

They asked me if I wasn't angry about what the company had done to me. I said of course I was, fuckmittit. I told them that. I could have had a normal life, grown up, had a white fence, swingset, shit-hot body etc. But maybe I'd still have gone into the industry. Maybe I'd have done a whole lot of things different, but what's to say I wouldn't have ended up in the same spot?

A hail of information, fragments of which have lodged in my brain. The expulsion, aversion therapy, rats, hormones, kidnap, addicts, mothers. Mainly mothers. I ask who mine was, if they know what she was like. They say they don't know. They forgot to ask when they had the knife at Ms Q's flabless throat. I wonder if she gave me up just the same as you two, I say aloud. Maybe she regretted it. Wonder whether she was careless or didn't give two shits what happened to me. Perhaps I was better where I landed.

I said Boys, I'm sorry for what was - was done to you. Whatever happened, it was pretty - wasn't good and it wasn't right. But I don't know how to make this more concrete than by yelling it in your faces: you've fucking KILLED someone ' it's - maybe two people, I don't know. You don't even know. You were definitely prepared to kill people. Don't you see? This is how they win with their little monster factory, all of those ' I don't even know WHO they are ' they WIN if you actually become those creatures, because then you can be labelled as such in foot high fucking letters and dispatching you becomes somehow easier, becomes an action for the common good, which feeds into their masterplan to make you disposable. That's pretty fucked-up, you matching limb for limb their little blueprint. I mean ' Danver, he ' Marty - was my friend, and ' my FRIEND, he was my best friend '

My chest hurts. Not just the ghosts of cigarettes past, but sandpaper sobs.

I said to them that we were bust, but that didn't mean we could't mend ourselves, tape it up, plug the leak without guilting the world into doing it for us. Boys, I said. Boys, I hate to say it but we have to grow up. We have to grow up.

There's a song I think I spooned to once ' someone other than Marty and off-camera: Lover lover lover lover lover lover lover lover come back to me. Sometimes that's all you can do ' say it over and over in the hope that what you wish for will either come true or that the words themselves, rolling off the factory line and piling up on the slagheap, will lose all meaning and become the wet bang of tongue on tooth.

The police banged at the door, and I opened it. I spread an arm like a theatre curtain and revealed them: two lost boys. My brothers. When the uniforms cuffed them up roughly, I made no soppy noble heroine moves. I didn't say "spare them! or "take me! or "THEY'RE the victims! Let them go, you monster! I just watched, or rather I watched something in the distance: a lash on the lens.

In turn they didn't struggle as they were snicked and led out. Danver didn't even look at me as he mooched silently past, arm in arm with a female officer. But Fembs, always the younger and skinnier kid, this submissive little mouse, he looked at me in this wide-eyed, absorbent way, and I think we reached an understanding. Epiphany In The Arms of a Cop ' that would be Fembs's movie, his life story spread-eagled on film. I think he was sorry in both a penitent and a funeral-speak sense. When the door closed, I cried like a little girl.

And now I am making dark, Borneo coffee. Because sometimes that's all I can do.