It was starting to be cold outside at night. Cold and gray, always gray. Ruth sometimes needed the realization of her embodied air, that blow of frigid smoke, to remember that she was still breathing. Ruth kept one hand in her pocket, since she had lost one glove, gloves that she had bought at Horrids with her discount, nice inky cashmere gloves. It made her upset to even think about that lost glove hiding in some dark alley, cold and alone, without its twin. Agnes wore a vintage orange belted coat that exactly matched her hair, with a shaggy cream fur collar and identical shaggy fur earmuffs, her hands hanging raw and pink. Black chipped nail polish.
They sit and wait. They warm the backs of bar stools. What are they waiting around for? They are waiting around to be discovered. In the meantime they order drinks or have drinks bought for them. They start getting drunk. If she drank too much then Ruth would wake up and the only pain she felt would be the indeterminate pang to her head, comforting in its constancy, evicting all other thoughts that dared to enter except the banal necessities of the present. And when Ruth drinks then Ruth can be brave can escape outside of herself.
They put on a show. The show that green girls know so well. Posing for the invisible eye. They wait for their photos still wet touch don’t touch Ruth is laughing in every frame drunk drunkener than drunk drunk Agnes is serious poised she knows how to pose for her picture she knows her good side.
They are at a karaoke bar. Agnes has dragged a limp Ruth onstage. Agnes wants them to sing Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” (Right.) As Agnes writhes about on stage, on her knees, Ruth stands in the back and giggles, swinging back and forth, back and forth, a drunken metronome. Agnes is front and center and Ruth is off in the corner she is just laughing laughing laughing her throat open, head thrown back she is laughing so much she can’t stop she can’t stop stop stop. (But later lying in bed that’s not how it works out. Ruth is the star moaning into the microphone she is the seductive kitten and HE is standing in the back, behind the crowd, watching her. HE only has eyes for her.)
They are at a club on the East End. The sweaty masses. Agnes has on her fetish-gear, purchased at one of the sex shops in Soho. She is Charlotte Rampling in
The Night Porter
. Ruth wears a blue wig. She teeters around on knee-high stripper boots purchased on the high street. Eyes lined extra thickly for protection. They sneak out to the bathroom and insert a magical powder of bravery up their nose. Ruth can now be SexxxyRuth. The world’s just the two of them. They are on display and everyone else is watching. They are dancing what they think is erotically. Men are watching so it must be working. They strike poses. They are cock teases. They press themselves against each other. At this moment there is no one Ruth loved more than Agnes, and no one Agnes loved more than Ruth, they were the same, they were two for one, a package deal. They purr and writhe. The camera snaps. They sloppy girl-kiss for the finale. They are lesbians just for the night.
Sometimes Agnes gets lucky lucky with someone else someone who can better fill her void and then she abandons Ruth a cast-off lover. This is the goal, isn’t it? Ruth is supposed to be happy for her but usually she’s just annoyed. If they are near their neighborhood Ruth has to walk, head bent down, arms crossed, praying with each step that no one jumps out from the shadows. If in central London she takes the train home alone, heart beating around the darkness of Soho until she finds her way to the mainland of Oxford Street, emptied of its daily inhabitants, their ghosts twirling around litter of Coke cans and yesterday’s headlines on the abandoned street.
And the next day her gigantic dark glasses must shield her from the world’s harsh reality. She stumbles through the city, dry and shaky. It is too much outside. The studies and the stares. Pale underneath her sunglasses. Reflecting the masses of people outside, the feeding frenzy. Her protective lenses. Her protective film she wears over herself. My actress and her protective film. Her careful body of lace edges.
Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I “haunt”.
— André Breton,
Nadja
Liverpool Station was like a giant cathedral devoted to those in transit, filled with light and masses of travelers. Everyone there had somewhere they needed to go. A crowd gathers before the rail schedules, eyes pointing up at the flickering times. Gazing up at the heavens of when and where.
Ruth loved the fruit man at the station, who set up shop just outside the metal arms of the exit. Straight out of
Mary Poppins
. He was white-haired, wizened. She buys grapes from him. Three quid, miss. He shakingly places the grapes in a white paper bag, which he holds in his mouth as he holds out his palm to collect the steady drop of three pound coins. Sometimes other people worked that stand, like the man in the lumberjack shirt, and then Ruth would miss the old man’s gentle spasms.
She now has a long distance to walk from the train station to her flat, but she measures out each step of her journey. Sometimes she smokes a cigarette, to keep time, for something to do, the cold pink hand in one pocket. She rounds the corner to the dark stretch that led to Spitalfields market. She eats the grapes unwashed while walking home.
The Spitalfields church looms through the distance with its gray outline. Like a ghost that jumped out of the corner.
I haunt your haunts. You hide in dark corners while I pass.
Can you please spare 40p? A wild-eyed scarecrow of a man, dressed in rags, storms at her from the opposite direction. Ruth shakes her head, and veers out of his path. He sputters in disgust and charges up to someone else. Again, futile. He throws his hands up in the air and walks away, with wide paces. He always demanded the same amount. The please was always choked out with a sort of vitriolic frustration. He had a curious approach, a strangely aggressive tactic, one of purposeful antagonism, terrorizing the inhabitants of the street. He had a frustrated air of defeat even before asking. He didn’t even try to be polite. Why should I give you money? she once heard a woman snap back at him. He stomped away, glaring.
Ruth wonders to herself what exactly 40p would get 40p man. She had seen him on more than one occasion head into the bookie’s next to Tesco’s, so perhaps this is what kept him roaming up and down that same dark corridor, some sort of beggar’s purgatory. 40p man was the first real obstacle on her walk home.
Once she successfully scurried past him, head down, walking fast in the dark, anxious not to make eye contact, there were two other beggars that dotted the stretch past the market. They were part of the chain gang holding up copies of their charity rag. They approached you with the devoutness and humility of dirt-smudged saints, posed in various positions of submission, like a homeless
commedia dell’arte
. 40p man appeared to be their leader. She sometimes saw the trio of forgotten men heading to the corner newsagent on Old Street. Trading their money in for cigarettes.
Past the market, closed in the evenings, there were two pubs on Commercial Street filled with nine-to-fivers. On more moderate days they would be outside clutching their pint glasses of amber-colored liquid. On Commercial and Hanbury she would sometimes have to shuffle by thick throngs of Jack the Ripper tours congregating at stops where prostitutes met their death. Whenever Ruth thought about those prostitutes she had to hold her belly, imagining the burn of it being slashed. Then a thrill, a shiver, almost of delight. Once she turned on the cobblestones of Hanbury and walked past the vintage shop that had hundreds of high-heeled shoes hanging in its windows—sky blue and canary yellow and lipstick red—she then had to deal with the parade of those heading to the curry houses, especially on weekends, and the callers luring them.
A skinny teenager with a gelled flat-top, who stood outside of her landlord’s restaurant on the intersection of Brick Lane, took particular delight in harassing her. He yelled out to her as he saw her coming. C’mon, let me see your beautiful smile. When the older callers were there they would say something to him that would make him stop. But tonight no one is there, it is still too early. Ruth tries her best to look invisible, a timid smile plastered on her face, eyes downcast, hurrying hurrying past. She scavenges for her keys in her purse. This time her torturer keeps pace with her and stands between her and the doors, leaning on the painted white door dirtied with scuffmarks. The shiny-haired sadist couldn’t have been more than 17. His lids only half-open. Agnes had told her that many of the younger callers, a gang of boys who lived in council housing nearby, were heroin addicts. Now this one’s zeroing in on our heroine. Need some help with the bags, pretty lady? Ruth eyes him as meanly as she can. Excuse me, she warbles. Grinning, he moves aside so that she can pass, although he momentarily stands in the doorway, almost as if to prove that he can. Alright, alright, I was just trying to be friendly. I was just trying to be friendly. That’s what they all say. The feign of innocence. The pretense of Samaritan impulses. In her mind she spits in his face. She spits in all of the faces of the strange men on city streets who torture her with their stares. But on her face is that same, slight smile.
She walks upstairs in complete darkness, past the moan of her downstairs neighbors, a Spanish couple always going at it. The light bulb in the staircase has been out for weeks. No one has said anything to the landlord. Her creaking footsteps echo. No one’s home. She sits in the kitchen with its broken tiled floors, its windows creaking against the wind, and lights a candle, playing with the wax, feeling the warmth stiffen on her hands. There’s no one home. HOME. A meditation, a myth. She has forgotten what home ever was.
Her stomach cramps and rebels. Nausea. Ruth hurries to the toilet and surrenders to a quick sick. Groan. Knives. It is that time. Again. The red mixes in with the brown, a filthy paint.
The toilet will not flush. She pushes on the silver lever, up and down, up and down, a performance of futility. She sees her pale reflection in the silver, hovering, hovering over herself.
One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one’s inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.
— Émile Durkheim
On her day off she decides to get her nails done. The Horrids holiday party was coming up, and the temporaries were invited. This is now occupying her thoughts. She wanders into a place in Covent Garden past the billboard for
The Lion King
, the musical, past the cobblestoned street of cobblers kebobs fishandchip shops, near mannequins posed and doubled over in the windows of Zara’s and Marks and Spencer’s.
Pick a color. A casual order. Her choices are a garish pageant of metallic purples or reds, then a parade of Easter pastels. She thinks about asking for “Tiger Red” because she just saw
The Women
, but only Agnes would understand that joke. She can’t decide in time so settles on an innocuous enough clear varnish.
I’ll just take this.
The girl looks at her puzzled. A gold chain dangles in between her deeply tanned breasts. She is already cotton swabbing cold on each of Ruth’s fingers. Ruth’s nose pricks with nostril-flaring chemicals.
Ruth remembers accompanying her mother to the salon as a little girl, a warm place where she could run around slipping on wet curls blanketing the floor, her mother waving under a hot-air helmet. The feel of her gold wedding ring, a comforting heaviness, when she held Ruth’s hand, careful not to smudge her nails freshly painted coral, which Ruth would stare at transfixed. Sometimes the manicurists painted Ruth’s and her sister’s little nails, hard squares of chewing gum. Ruth always wanted the shiniest. Hot pink covered in rainbow glitter.