poetry////michelle

Rib

2003

Because God makes the decisions, Evie started her period the day she turned thirteen. She discovered this during lunch-break in the second floor toilets, while outside the sky threw down rain like shattered glass and the teachers smoked cigarettes. Locked in a cramped stall, Evie stared in dumb horror at the red on the cotton. For a moment she allowed herself to struggle with the wild hope that her eyes were tricking her, but when she touched her finger to the stain it came away bloody. She drew in a long, shuddering breath. The curse, as her mother always told it, began and ended with female shame. The red on the cotton, the bait on the hook.

For once she was grateful to be alone. The air in the girls’ bathroom was stale with yellow light and the smell of cheap body spray. Outside, in the corridors, masculine voices shouted out insults. Evie pulled a bunch of toilet paper from the industrial roll on the wall (“amandas a lesbian”/“U BITCH”) and blotted her underwear, both amazed and repulsed by her body’s efficiency. All at once she was a teenager and she could have a baby, and although the thought of becoming someone new entirely unwitnessed made her throat ache, she couldn’t ignore the symbolism of the timing.

As abruptly irrelevant as milk teeth, Evie’s childhood came loose at the roots.

* * *

Her mother was cold that night as she prayed for Evie to be forgiven, threading her rosary over and over through quick white fingers. The beads seemed to hiss at Evie like snakes. She knelt beside her mother on tender knees before the big wooden cross, Mom praying and praying in mumbled syllables that somehow strung together a language.

Wooden Jesus gazed up and away from them as if bored of tragedy. His rolled eyes seemed to say, I bled before you even knew how.

Serpent

2005

It didn’t take long to get used to the party. Dragged out by Diggy – Evie, it’s Saturday – she’d immediately shrunk to the fringes of the lawn where she sipped a sweating beer – you need to relax – and watched the other teenagers. Their smooth interactions baffled her. They moved through an alien world as if it were human, as if intricate systems of handshakes and hierarchies were in their DNA. Despite their shared genetics, Diggy was privy to this world. He stood at the centre of a fluid mass of friends that seemed to swallow people as meaninglessly as lose them. A thin girl dressed in velvet ducked under his arm and rubbed her fine blonde hair against his jaw. His hand, casual and tanned, strayed to her ass. Not for the first time in public Evie wished to be invisible or dead.

She started awkwardly as Diggy caught her eye and mouthed a query. Giving him a thumbs up she smiled, feeling guilty at his visible relief. He’d been looking out for her since her mother died, which was also when they’d first met. His mother, her mother’s sister, with her white-woman dreadlocks and children of vague paternity, was the family’s sole black sheep. Evie hadn’t even known she existed until she and Diggy arrived at the door on the day of the funeral, having missed the awful service and most of the even-more-awful reception, Diggy holding a basket of fruit and looking right at her with his ancient dark eyes.

For the past thirteen months she’d been mute and pliable, bowed by the shock of a finished life, parting like reeds for the crashing tide of her aunt and cousins. Quiet, well-behaved Evie: still reciting her mother’s prayers in a houseful of atheists, still brushing her teeth and doing her homework even though no one really cared what she did anymore. Her aunt was usually overseas (“following the sun” as her cousin Maddie dryly described it), and Diggy was the youngest of the siblings at seventeen, two years and entire planets apart from her. She’d learnt to hold her loneliness close, a stone in her lap to weigh her down so that she didn’t drift off to the same pale country as her mother.

Suddenly conscious that to anyone looking she’d been unengaged for too long, Evie started to make her way towards the sprawled crumbling house. She hoped for a bathroom with a door to shut out the noise and a mirror to rest her hot cheek against. The back door was wide open so she went in. Although the garden was teeming with people, the kitchen was empty. A white plastic bucket sat on the table surrounded by sticky abandoned cups and hovering flies. Punch. The kind made by kids like Diggy and his friends – alcohol bought without ID and mixed into a soup tart with fruit concentrate. She’d finished the beer Diggy’d handed her when they first walked in and she already felt tipsy or even drunk, tripping over her own feet in a way that was thrilling. A sudden burst of laughter outside decided her. She scooped a tooth-marked cup through the punch and brought it out dripping, licking the gummy trails from her wrist. It tasted awful, acrid and cloying, but she forced herself to down the entire cup. Coughing, she dipped into the bucket again and brought out a second one.

Clutching her drink Evie moved through the house on unfamiliar legs. A smile she didn’t expect cracked open for a couple in the passage. Their kissing was sweet: his hands on her face, their bodies turned to water. The house had the wooden floors and high ceilings of all old Maritzburg houses, and was even more of a mess than her aunt’s. She remembered the house she’d lived in with her mother, how everything was polished and sterile and orderly. Here, grey strings of spider web wafted from the ceiling and unframed paintings lined the skirting board all the way down the passage. Evie bent down to look. Oily licks of paint showed fat women with muscular arms and bare breasts, hard at work building wells and houses or bathing wriggling children. Some of the women wore intimidating scowls, but the ones Evie liked best beamed mouthfuls of sunshine.

The paintings led her to the bathroom, where she closed the door and gazed into the mirror. Her eyes glittered like a stranger’s. She tried to imagine how she looked to someone who hadn’t been her for the past fifteen years. With a decisive motion she freed her long brown hair from its ponytail. Not great, but better. The toilet seat was splattered with urine so she crouched above it with shaking thighs. A drop of blood, bright and accusing, marred the stretch of fabric between her legs. A women’s curse. She didn’t have a tampon and in her drunken state didn’t care, the shame of leaked blood an unfathomable threat in her new lawless world. She folded toilet paper into her underwear and flushed.

A fist pounded on the door and Evie hastily buttoned up her jeans. Two girls dressed all in black burst into the room. They possessed the small space immediately, the chubby redhead with the pierced lip pulling herself onto the counter and twisting on the tap.

“Sorry, she’s desperate,” she said, not sounding sorry at all, as her friend lifted her dress and crouched over the toilet like Evie had. She felt embarrassed about the pee on the seat but couldn’t think of anything to say.

“You’re Diggy’s friend,” said the girl on the toilet almost reproachfully. She had a pointed face and vivid green eyes, and on her exposed milky thigh a long black snake coiled and rippled. She saw Evie staring and smiled. “For Anton LaVey,” she explained, as if that made sense. She stretched out a hand and Evie took it. “Maddie,” she said, “and this is Jess.” Jess, her fingers splayed under the pouring water, seemed unimpressed by this extension of friendship and barely nodded her head.

“Same name as my cousin,” Evie offered, her first words to split the air.

“What, Jess?” the redhead sneered.

“You mean Maddie? Diggy’s older sister? You’re cousins!” said this Maddie, standing up and straightening her skirt. Diggy had that effect on people (what his mother called his cult of personality) and he used it shamelessly to get what he wanted. Somehow, though, his kindness made up for it. Evie nodded, flattered by the interest. Maddie was short like her with dainty limbs and cropped black hair. Her cheeks were pierced with silver studs. Evie imagined the conception of the idea, the pain of the execution, and marvelled.

“Come hang out with us,” Maddie breathed, glancing at Jess. “Everyone’s boring. We can introduce you to some guys.”

Tugging on Evie’s hand and followed by a sulky Jess, Maddie led them to the house’s main bedroom where three boys wearing band shirts passed around a limp joint. The guy in the Slipknot shirt was the obvious leader. He stood silently at the peak of the triangle and was over a head taller than the other two. Metallica was too fat and curly-haired to be menacing and was the only one to acknowledge the girls’ entrance (with a grin like upturned palms, which closed into fists when he saw Slipknot watching). Killswitch Engage spoke non-stop in a quiet toneless voice and didn’t seem to mind that no one was listening.

Years later Evie recognised the significance of this night, how it served as a dangerous fulcrum from which the rest of her life would revolve. All those possibilities ripe and tangible if only she’d realise them. She could’ve chosen to remain a wallflower, to eat up the corners so that no one else had to, to be good for her furious mother so hell-bent on fear she’d only loved God. But the rules, the heavy rules of Mother and Church, carried no weight in this room of smoke and teenage holiness.

The girls sat down on the floor in a semi-circle, sharing a wet-tipped cigarette and a joint produced from Maddie’s pocket. A low peace swelled in Evie’s chest. This was a room her mother had never sat in, sweet smoke she’d never inhaled. A baptism of full lungs and burning eyes instead of water. She watched Metallica play a frenzied air guitar solo and then pack into yelping laughter while Slipknot smiled slowly and blinked like a lizard. Killswitch Engage talked and talked. Evie copied how the other girls behaved – puffing out smoke with a pout like Maddie and leaning back on her hands like Jess.

Soon, drunk and stoned, Maddie whispering in her ear, Evie allowed Metallica to approach. She’d noticed him glancing at her since they’d first sat down, and it didn’t matter that he was overweight and childish: he’d smiled at her, and she felt so warm beneath his gaze that it didn’t even occur to her that she could reject him. His clammy palm on her thigh seemed inevitable. Jess’d disappeared with the other two to get punch so it was just the three of them, Evie’s fingers laced with Maddie’s, her jeans pulled down gently by Metallica.

“Go for it,” Maddie grinned wickedly.

“You gonna watch?” he asked nervously, his hand fondling Evie’s thigh, squeezing and kneading her hungrily.

Maddie rolled her eyes. “She’s a virgin, by the way,” she said, “watch your step.” She got up to leave, ignoring the bewildered look Evie gave her. “Bye,” she called breezily, and left the room. Evie drew her legs towards her body protectively, slurring at the boy to stop. He jerked back from her as if he’d been shocked.

“Shit man, I’m sorry,” he said, his voice high with alarm. “I’m not gonna hurt you. I thought you were into it.” Face burning he stood up and glanced down at her curled on the floor. “Hey, I think you have your period,” he said, his eyes flitting uncomfortably from her crotch. He stared at her a beat longer as if she’d said something obscene and then walked out through the open door. She sat up and looked at the streak of fresh blood on her panties, the toilet paper a failure. Too out of it to feel the full extent of her humiliation yet, Evie pulled her jeans back on and sat on the edge of the bed. Why had Maddie left her? Why’d she allowed those rough hands on her skin? You know why, her mother’s voice hissed. The red on the cotton, the bait on the hook. She sat there a while, covering her mouth with her hand.

A girl laughed shrilly in the passage beyond and then there was another voice, urgent and familiar. Diggy. He appeared in the doorway’s shaft of light, his face set with concern.

“I’ve been looking everywhere,” he said, and she knew from the way he said it that Metallica’d already shared his story, and that Diggy was feeling the old dreary tug that kept him bound to her. He sat down on the bed and his weight on the mattress forced her body up against his. She pushed her wet face into his neck like the girl in velvet, losing herself in his sweetness while he whispered I’m so sorry, Evie into her ear.

Forty minutes later, finally home, Evie locked the bathroom door and ran a deep bath. Diggy’d gone out again after dropping her off, but she didn’t want to risk being disturbed — not that night with her thoughts as thick as honey. She lay soaking in the water alive to her bones. It was wrong to love Diggy, she knew that, and she knew that he’d never love her back even if they weren’t cousins. But she was drawn to kindness the way everyone is drawn to whatever it is they lack most, and she realised at that moment that she no longer cared about God’s opinion. What did he know? He was neither human nor female, and as far as she could tell felt little sympathy for his creations. Didn’t her mother pray and pray, and die anyway? She wouldn’t let God take everything from her. She’d let herself dream about Diggy. Small pleasures are necessary, sometimes, to bear this life.

Floating gently in the water she dozed off, seeing only Diggy as if through a tunnel. She dreamt of them together: his long brown hair tangling with hers, his hands pulling her jeans down like Metallica had – but this time the surprise in his eyes wasn’t her period but the perfect fit of them together, his hands on her hips, his mouth tasting of apples…she woke up to a crashing orgasm, shuddering out her pain, already the guilt clamping in.

When she opened her eyes and her brain had time to sort reality from dream, it still took Evie a few moments to understand what she saw. The unfamiliar thighs curving smoothly from the water, the slim tanned hands clasping the sides of the tub. They weren’t hers, this body wasn’t hers, and the face she saw as she lunged out of the bath to the mirror, almost slipping in her panic, wasn’t her face.

Cold with disbelief, Evie stared at blue eyes, a small doll-like nose. Thick blonde hair, enormous fake breasts. The girl in the mirror wasn’t Evie, no matter how she turned her head, no matter how dark her terror. It was the girl from the poster on Diggy’s bedroom wall, the sex kitten as Maddie called her, Evie’s aunt too disengaged to care that her son worshipped stereotypes. Evie knew it was the girl from the poster because she’d examined her before from the safety of the doorway, wondering how her own experience of being female had strayed so far outside the margins. She braced the taut body against the basin with a moan and vomited up a sour wash of alcohol. Someone else’s ribs heaved. The girl in the mirror stayed stuck to the floor.

Original Sin

2009

When it was over she inspected herself carefully in the mirror. She looked the same: the naked stretch of her as skinny and pale as in her earliest dreams. There was the mole on her stomach, there were the scars ridging her arms like worms.

Frowning with something worse than disappointment, she tapped a long column of ash to the carpet. It was too hot to wear clothes for someone living alone, especially someone on the third floor with a neglected audience, and so as she moved to open the window she left her dress curled on the floor like an outgrown skin. The window (caked with grime too disgusting or historical to remove) faced straight into her landlord’s kitchen in the neighbouring block. After a week of distraction, Evie owed him a glimpse. That was their deal – thirty percent less on the rent in exchange for snatches of a last-ditch fantasy more about consistency than sex. She stretched an arm through the rotting burglar guards as if summoning him and let the night breeze tongue at her skin.

A shadow shifted in Elton’s flat and the record player went quiet.

Friday night and nothing felt real, because she was exhausted and perhaps still drunk, and because a few hours ago she’d been so luminously, solidly real that she would’ve loved anyone. Poor Jacob. The thought of him brought on a nauseating rush of guilt. Tall, grey-haired Jacob, dressed in clothes too stylish to be interesting, who wanted almost the same thing she did. She’d first seen him at a pub, dressed in her usual innocuous jeans and t-shirt, the kind of place she went to when she was broke for its modest but guaranteed bounty. Men in collared shirts with nearly-expensive watches drank Perroni and showed too much tooth when they laughed. Jacob had stood out as the most obvious target: not just because he was the best looking in the crowd, but because of how easy he was to read. At a glance she had known he’d want red – the soft-edged red of human warmth and violence. A mid-thigh skirt. Neither too little nor too much. So the night before, seated at the far end of the bar where the smoke lay thinner, the dress covering her brown skin was blood-coloured. She’d only had to walk past him once before he’d arrived at her side bearing whisky, a drink she hated. But she’d been pleased by his arrogance in assuming she’d like what he liked, and by his cool dry hand on her neck.

Something flipped over in her stomach like a muscular fish. It wasn’t the sex that was making her so edgy. She’d stopped listing their names after number five, already aware after those miserable fumblings that she’d loaded some unstoppable but necessary gun. It wasn’t the money, either – she’d peeled a mere seven notes off a blue wad too thick to fold that she’d found in his jacket pocket, and she would’ve taken more if he hadn’t been so quick in the bathroom. It was stupid, anyway, to walk around with money like that. Maybe he was up to something white-collar. It wouldn’t make him any more interesting. As Evie fell back on the bed, her mother’s rosary caught her eye from where it lay wound around the bedpost, its black beads counting her sins.

The reason she felt so guilty was the body — the sacred brown body that’d blistered her fingers when she touched it, that’d so comfortably housed her soul. How in love she’d been with herself for the very first time. She’d opened her eyes to a river of dark hair, an ample stomach, beautiful legs.

On Thursday evening, full of a strange confidence that she’d find him at the same pub, Evie had hung her new dress over the cupboard door and then stretched out across the bed. It was always exhilarating to imagine who she’d become, although more often than not she was disappointed to find herself yet another wasp-waisted blonde. But that night had felt secretive and hopeful, the air tasted sweet and her fingers felt perfect, stroking over the thin skin of her panties in time to the fan’s clunking beat. Evie had forced herself to want him piece by piece, and finally she’d come, the pleasure tossing like waves between widened hips.

In the dream, on the night she’d first seen him, days before he’d fed her dripping strips of steak and wrenched her hair, Mom (five years dead) had appeared as a mouth at the foot of her bed – a grease-painted mouth snarling open to a tongue that grew its own teeth and warned her of serpents.

Elton still hadn’t changed the record. Evie fell asleep with the bare bulb in the centre of the ceiling blazing a halo.

* * *

Across the dank vegetative space between his flat and hers, across the sticky space between man and woman and the stickier space between coloured and white, Elton felt the pulse of Evie’s guilt like a full-blown hangover. Nothing about this was unusual in itself – he’d been witness to all her dramas since she’d moved into her flat a year ago and guilt featured regularly (Evie being, to the extent of his logic, a prostitute). But its richness tonight was suffocating. And he’d hoped to sleep, to get thick-tongued from beer and melt into dreams that lasted twelve hours, and from which he awoke to the warmth of his wife even as she faded again.

It was rare to experience another person so powerfully even for a man with his gifts, and it was for this reason alone that he’d leased room 217 to Evie-no-surname. In this stale armpit of the city, where the snakes gathered like sweat and old men dreamed only of peace, renting to a white girl the size of a bird was a stupid idea. If he hadn’t been a man of gifts he’d have turned her away without conscience. But because the stars decided it, as he’d approached the front door that day to answer its pealing he’d been swarmed by her thoughts, so sudden and black that his lungs were sucked dry. The wings had only stopped beating when she rang the bell again. Remembering that first encounter, he cleared his throat and spat tobacco-stained phlegm into the neck of the sink.

Having pocketed a roll of hundreds to serve as a deposit, Elton’d led the girl to her new room, surprised by her lack of distaste at its squalor. The bedroom and en suite bathroom made up the flat, which seemed to grow smaller the longer you spent inside it. It was like being in a womb with its pink walls and close, breathless air.

In Elton’s opinion, the old folktale about the rivalry between a soul’s two wolves was less about which wolf was fed than whether or not there were two to begin with. Most of the people he’d met in his lifetime were barely one wolf, ground to the nub by a world in which moral complexity was a luxury. Two wolves raged inside Evie, and the one she’d been feeding was the one to starve. Even as he cursed his good nature, Elton knew he had to help her. So when he handed her the keys he pressed down on her thumb with his, kind old uncle, and offered her a deal. It didn’t bother him that she thought he was a pervert. Stereotypes make life easier and at least it gave her something to depend on. A balding neighbour with a penchant for lost souls, having suffered in so many of their thoughts.

Put frankly he was on suicide watch. In the year since he’d seen her dreams: a smooth inky snake, the wrong face in the mirror. And tonight, burning thoughts of a tall man and a ladder stretching into space, its rungs draped with a rosary. Elton closed his eyes and leaned against the humming fridge. Although the man (middle-aged, nondescript) was central to the impression, he seemed somehow immaterial.

The last thought he managed to catch was a spill of hot oil in his skull: a golden-skinned goddess who writhed like a serpent and looked nothing like Evie. Longing at the memory of strong thighs and long dark hair swam through his belly.

Temptation

2007

Guilt taught Evie amazing things. It taught her to be kind to anyone suffering, who in the humid mess of Durban city – ice-cream-coloured art deco sandwiched between graffitied bricks, chicken bones strewn voodoo-style across pavements, the swelling threat of ocean – were easy to find. Lia was a black girl of about seven with a funny scar snagging her lip and burn marks shining her scalp. She lived on the ground floor of Evie’s block of flats, more brick than ice cream, with the ironically grandiose name of Magnolia Place. Instead of flowers, the place reeked of cheap cleaning fluids and cheaper liquor, most of the latter spilt or vomited by Lia’s one-eyed daddy with the two fists. Sometimes Evie left a loaf of bread or litre of milk at their doorstep, and it was always gone by the time she returned home during morning’s acidic hours, financially triumphant and crawling with loneliness. Once, alerted by the newspaper to an imminent super moon, she’d attached a note to the bread packet: HI LIA. LOOK FOR THE MOON TONIGHT. It wasn’t so hard to get dressed the next day.

Another of her ghosts was an old man with a head injury who begged at the Main Road robots. His skull had been dented into a grotesque dish in a long-forgotten accident, squashing what was left of his brain into a puddle. A few times after dates Evie had given him her leftovers, the man she was with inevitably wowed by her altruism and tight/fat ass (depending on preference) as she bent down to hand over the takeaway box. The beggar now wore an expensive fleece jacket even on the hottest days, in an unfortunate wimpish baby blue, swiped from the cupboard of a lawyer whose sexual and economic fecundity had ensnared Evie for an entire weekend. The Monday following that particular experience had been grubby with conscience, but the watch she’d pocketed from his bedside table had earned her enough cash from the pawn shop to eat crayfish that night, greedy for something only just slaughtered.

Evie knew the edges of guilt’s most intimate parts, its precise weight in the pit of her belly like a vicious pregnancy. She swallowed it with coffee, slept with it pillowing her head, scrubbed it from her thighs with filched soap. Thou shalt not. Guilt stalked her at night through the clubs and bars, peering over stall doors as she emptied her bladder. It wore dozens of faces and spoke in different accents: some young, few attractive, all male. All a little worse off for having met her.

One night she’d almost seen Diggy. It wasn’t him of course – the real Diggy either dead from wildness or as far-gone as his mother – but the hair, the shoulders, the height, all brought back a salty flood of memories deep enough to drown in. Three months after she’d been faced with the girl in the mirror, Diggy’d up and left without saying goodbye. It was almost impossible not to equate his disappearance with that first terrifying transition, although of course he never knew about it – Evie never spoke of it to anyone. What had happened in the bathtub felt evil in a rapturous, swollen way. It felt greedier than theft.

When she’d come face to face with her cousin’s doppelgänger, she’d almost laughed his features were so different. Instead of Diggy’s wide nose and brown eyes, the man had cool neat features, with pink peeling skin from hours spent surfing. It was clear from the first conversation that he didn’t have money but Evie’d persisted, emerging from the bathroom a half hour later in the same denim shorts but bright blonde and covered in freckles. He’d made love to her like Diggy would’ve: broad hands holding her face together as though she might disintegrate. She’d sobbed hard for Diggy the next day, and for the softer, smaller her he’d left behind.

Rise

2009

She hasn’t lived a good life. There it is, put simply. It doesn’t sadden her (sadness being the reserve of dead mothers), but it does give her a tight, cramped feeling. What a waste of all that time.

It’s 7.33 and about 30 degrees Celsius, and the sun’s still lemon sour even though the sky’s darkened. She’s kept the curtains drawn all day, not in the mood to be a body for someone else’s protagonist, or to know anything but her own dense smell. A whole week after Jacob and she’s still in crisis mode. Not eating much, not sleeping much, but wired enough to spark cities. Every thought she has seems to emerge from some deep well – bulbs in her brain starting to root after a long dry era. It’d be a beautiful feeling if she wasn’t so suspicious of disaster, and if the sharp eyes of the rosary weren’t stuck to her skin.

But she’s started to think in maybes. Maybe it’s time to live past her mother, even if the person she becomes is less pure than a thief. What’s the use of purity anyway in a world still governed by man? Rather be condemned than milked to death; rather blood than all of that whiteness. Her mother gave birth to her but broke every bone that grew; Diggy helped her to grow up and then left. Maybe this body is her chance to escape, to surrender to the fire, to exist for herself. She prays, and for once it’s not an apology and it’s not to any god – she prays to a goddess, a Greek or Roman goddess, sculpted and unearthly. Or better, an African deity with a name like stones in a river. Mary Magdalene for the hell she wreaked.

Having a small voice never helped anyone.

Evie slips her hand between her legs and braces herself for the full shock of skin against skin. It’s easy to come when you’re being born again and nothing is sordid or even spiritual. A river of dark hair, an ample stomach, beautiful legs. She falls back into herself and sees heavy golden breasts, and laughs with her head thrown back.

In the flat parallel, Elton smiles and sets down a record.

poetry////michelle

Astralbody

Lady Macbeth

Made a woman