The Deadline
She stood looking up at the house. At the blank grey walls, the shuttered windows with empty boxes on the concrete sills, the stern front door. The house said nothing about what it was or what took place inside, it was unassuming and nondescript and uninviting. She’d come here several times before, but never got the courage to go in. Now, there was no choice. The deadline was today, no last chance of a reprieve or change of heart. If she was going to do it, it had to be now. She shivered, chill from the sudden drop in temperature now the light was fading, or from excitement or from fear, she didn’t know. Also, the sense of possibility that, by pressing this suburban doorbell, her life could – would – alter for good. But still she lingered on the unwashed step, picking at a thread of wool come loose from her glove, caught between the girl she was and the woman she might be. A deadline she never thought she would face…
(Introduction by Kate Mosse)
She walked up stone steps into a long corridor. A bare light bulb flickered and spluttered. Sporadically it popped bright; a burst of white light showed up damp stains on the walls, like the slick shell of a snail, speckled black and brown. The place reminded her of a fairground haunted house. Mushrooms had sprouted from the edges of cornices; delicate grey heads curled out of the wood, bursting from a tangle of slim white stalks. The wallpaper was shredded in places, and strips fell away like origami swan wings. Black and white photographs, chewed and mouldering, hung crookedly here and there. She felt eyes and claws, beaks and noses, straggling out of the frames.
They reminded her of walking along the streets of the city. The reason why the deadline pressed upon her. There was something smarmy that followed her in the crowd, as people jostled for pavement space. It was an insidious filth that crept into the lining and wound around the stitches of her clothes; hot dust that settled on her skin and crystals of dirt that rubbed under her fingernails. Faces became evil and whorish, they snapped at her with tigerish grins. The desire to be lifted up was too much. Tomorrow she would be twenty-four, and her life would be an empty smoke dream: all those listless nights numbed with wine and puffed up with chips sodden in vinegar. She lay catatonic in the darkness, tangled in stale sheets, the distance that yawned between her and the person next to her growing wider. Every day when she came home she rubbed herself raw with little bars of yellow soap, but it was never enough. After a few moments she felt people crawl and clamour at her again, and her skin itched right down to the bone. She wanted her body to be carved away to a neat sample size, her eyebrows to flick into perfect arches, and an eternal red bow to paint over her lips. She had made a call, and fixed an appointment.
The glare of the bulb in the corridor had faded as she reached the doorknob at the far end; the light contracted to two glowing red filaments. As she blindly entered the room beyond, her head filled with an infernal whizzing and whirring: she felt the bones of her skull jarred by the sound of some inscrutable machine. Furniture glowered in the corners; in the gloom she could just make out tables that held some kind of industrial apparatus. As she approached them she saw greasy coils of wire, and test tubes that dripped with a treacly sludge.
‘Hello?’ she called out, wondering where he was.
‘Are you ready?’ a voice replied.
She was led by him to a battered old sofa, where he sat her down and slipped the heels from her feet. He talked her through the different stages once again, all the while unbuttoning and unzipping her clothes. He held her hands as she stepped out of her underskirt, speaking softly:
‘The fifth stage of the process will be signalled by a sound, like the chiming of bells…’
‘And after that?’ she murmured.
‘There will be no more fear, hesitation, or messiness. You will never be ugly or clumsy again!’
‘I’m so glad.’
When she was ready to start he held out a preparation for her to drink. It tasted like a milkshake that had been left out in the sun, thick and powdery, with a slimy translucent film on top. The noise of the room became muffled, as if she had been pushed underwater, and she found it difficult to focus on the objects around her. He guided her up a curving staircase to a small room with a dentist’s chair in the centre. He talked quietly about how things were going to go smoothly and how there would be nothing to worry about anymore. As metal cuffs clinked around her wrists and ankles, she became aware of a sound like the running of a finger round the rim of a water glass. It grew and grew; a pressure inside her head that splintered her thoughts. A sticky drop of blood ran down from her nose to her lip. There was a voice calling in the distance, and then a sensation of cold water slithering down her throat, as if there was a hand reaching deep inside her. Electric lights whizzed and spat in her eyes. Thoughts spun and danced away, until she no longer cared to know them.
After what felt like a long time she awoke to a dark room. She was flawless, he told her. He had scythed away silky layers of fat beneath skin, and cauterized the dimples from her thighs. Bone and leather were fissured into the exoskeleton of a thoroughly modern woman; her stocking seams, tracing down her legs like exposed nerves, would be forever straight. The zip of a pillar-box red skirt crackled, little metal teeth nipped her flesh.
‘Carving out your identity, and your place in the world, is so much easier when your inner self is bound up in ropes and gagged with scarves,’ he laughed as he led her out. He smiled, glanced over the new mask, and checked the stitches one last time. He handed her the manual, which he assured was only for emergencies. The door shut, and she was left alone in the corridor.
No comments:
Post a Comment