Three Sharp Knocks

The Caesar Thumb

 This shirt’s too tight. Job search websites cause obesity; even when I can muster the energy to get the train to a shopping centre, nobody takes my CV. ‘Its all done on the internet now.’
I got the call this morning. My dusty eyes and muscle memory managed to pick my phone up from the other side of the bed, and after a few monotone responses I was booked into the interview. On the train I re-read the follow-up email. The company is Menard & Valery, established in 1857. Its unclear what they do. I’ve applied for twenty jobs in the last fortnight, as evidenced by my Jobseekers’ pamphlet. Though my CV says otherwise, the pamphlet implies I’m a jack of all trades.
Reviewing Menard & Valery’s website, the position I’m interviewing for becomes more oblique. Pictures of luxury hotel rooms slide along the top of the screen, but the bottom is made up of smiling women wearing telemarketing headsets. In between is some aspirational nonsense, comparing their services to ancient decadences.
The train pulls into the station. A smell of ozone and wet leaves knocks me into full consciousness. Pulling a map up on my phone I begin the short walk to M&V.

Prior to heading in I smoke a cigarette. I chew gum quickly until I can’t taste it any more, after a few sneezes from the overpowering mint. I fix my hair in a car window then ring the buzzer.
Inside, a warm smell of coffee is thick in the air, as though every particle of the room’s oxygen has been replaced by caffeine. I’m anxious, but approach the reception desk willing my hands to stay rooted to my sides.
‘Hi, I’m here for an interview?’
The receptionist stares at me over her glasses. She says nothing, and for a moment doesn’t begin any process.
‘Walk through the double doors and take a seat, you’ll be called when they’re ready for you.’ She doesn’t look at me. I feel like she has predicted that my interview is doomed and won’t bother committing my face to memory.

Opening the doors I find fifteen other men in their early twenties sitting on one side of the corridor. The row of chairs goes on for an absurd distance. The whole tone of the corridor, from the blue-grey carpet to the sheer length of it, reminds me of an Escher painting. The walk to the first free seat takes me two minutes, and as I walk I realise that every other person sitting here has more than a passing resemblance to myself. We share the same face, with features only differing by millimetres. They stare straight ahead. When I reach my seat I do the same.
My name is called out. The doppelgangers turn their heads to look at me in synchronicity. From my position I can’t see who called my name, but as I progress down the corridor I see a tall man dressed in casual black clothes holding a clipboard.
‘Come in, they’re waiting,’ he tells me.
I hold the door open, and am shocked to find that what looks like dense oak feels cold and metallic to the touch.

Inside the room sits a panel of men and women. Five of them sit there. As I approach the bench they each pull a latex glove on to their right hand before offering it for a handshake. Around twenty cameras surround the room, which would be pitch black if not for the videocamera torches.
I take a seat about ten metres from the panel. Their faces are indecipherable, my eyes unable to adapt to the glare of torches that seem to shine directly into my face. A man sitting on the left coughs. It triggers laughter from the woman sitting next to him, at which point the laugh passes through each other panel member. Involuntarily I cross my arms. The communal laugh develops whenever I do something against interview etiquette. I put my hands in my pockets, I stare at the floor. I do everything possible to feel comfortable as the laughter rises; rises to almost deafening levels. I look at my phone, which has stopped displaying time. The audio quality of the laughter starts decaying. After several lifetimes it becomes pure white noise. It’s radio static that affects my internal organs; my lungs feel as though they’re shaking, hot acid rises in my throat. And suddenly, silence. The panel members speak in unison.
‘Thank you Mr. Burn. We’ll let you know.’

Sleepless in Seattle

I am in my 74^th hour. Rats can go 32 days without sleep before they die. Talk about hell on earth. And I’ve tried everything – drugs (both legal and otherwise), masturbating until I’m raw, exercise, even fucking warm milk. L-tryptophan is the thing in milk they say makes you sleep, but you’d have to drink something like 35 cups to get enough to knock you out. There’s one more cure, but I hope it doesn’t come to that.

This is the second longest stretch without sleep I’ve had. I once did 78, but that sleep was pulled over my frame by the hallucinations. Claws in every shadow, and a constant feeling of a hand on my shoulder. I’m in the midst of them now, staring into the white of my computer screen so that it fills every inch of my vision. In the past I’ve found this kills the claws, and the hallucinations are little more than swirls in the dirt on the screen.

For every day that you don’t sleep, your body temperature drops one degree. I’m three degrees down, shivering in the blaring sun. I leave the flat to smoke cigarettes and the slightest breeze feels like snow pelting down on me. Its everything I can do to write in sentences. I don’t hear the whispers when I’m concentrating on grammar. They don’t bother with grammar. They pierce me with their imagery. A blink triggers a freeze frame full of blood and guts. I don’t look in mirrors for fear of anomalies.

After two days without sleep, you aren’t in control. You’re not dangerous – every fibre of your existence is too tired to be dangerous. You float along, nudged in different directions by the slightest stimuli. When I’m thirsty, I don’t drink. I wait until some other need takes me near the sink, and then pour a glass of water. Things have to mount up before any of them get done.

The whispers are leaving me alone. They’re getting louder but less clear, like a half-tuned radio with an erratic volume dial. Its when they get clear again, at this volume, that I’ll have to resort to the most drastic cure. The swirls in the computer screen have merged at the top, and slowly drip down, chasing my words faster than I can type. A see-through red, although I realise now I might have burst a blood vessel in my eye from rubbing them so often.

Still not looking in a mirror.

And here come the knocks. In my 78 hour marathon, the knocks were a prelude to the damning whispers. The knocks, they can come from anywhere. At first its limited to the walls, floors, ceilings. But pretty soon you’re hearing knocks in mid-air. Knocks next to your ear.

Knocks and coughs. Simultaneous, they scatter through the flat. And there’s a rumble now. A bass tone coming from nowhere. I can feel it forcing my chair to vibrate, but I know it doesn’t exist. Every noise, every visual, they’re entirely my own creation. It’d be impressive if it wasn’t such a fucking struggle.

The whisper. The broadcast is tuning up. Two syllables, like short scratches on a chalkboard. Its time for the only solution I haven’t yet tried. If this doesn’t kill me, the whispers certainly would have. It is worth the risk.

I pull the yellow bag out from under my bed, and sit against the wall. Rubber tubing, to help me find a vein. The whispers sharpening now, doubling in frequency. ‘Shuck-shuck’ is how they sound. ‘Shuck-shuck’, from all directions.

I plunge the hypodermic into a thick blue vein in my elbow, I can feel my eyes widen with the pain. ‘Shuck-shuck.’ I pull the plunger back, pulling the blood from my system. Eight syringes will hold a few pints of blood. The needle comes out of my body, and I rest it on the plastic bag. The next one.

I use the same hole, straight into the vein. Its quicker this time. Easier.

‘Shuck-shuck.’ I think I heard the phrase that time. They’re getting clearer with every second. The next syringe, the next syringe, the next syringe. I plug my ears with cotton wool from the bag, but its pointless. The whispers are in my head.
I’m starting to feel the blood loss. This is how they said it’d be. The whispers drop an octave. Slow motion. But they’re just as clear as ever.

‘Shuck-shuck.’
I know what they’re saying. 
Next syringe.
My blood seems to sparkle now, in those six needles. The next one, the penultimate one, I don’t have the strength to pull it from my arm. This is what sleep felt like when I was a child. Before it happened. My eyes slowly close, I fall back on the bed, and the needle still in my vein feels like a new limb.

‘Shuck-shuck.’

On Thorn Road

I put the phone down, grab my coat and keys. I know she’ll be waiting in that dusty porch, with the yellowed lightbulb shining down. In amongst all the muddy wellington boots and damaged skateboards is where I’ll find her, as usual.
Michelle. She is intelligent, beautiful, funny and kind, and somehow still his. He who, at 23, shouts requests to his mother without leaving his room. He who in a group of friends will explain to GCSE level the biology behind fucking Michelle on her period. He who on occasion has tried to slip his hand up my skirt.

As I pull up to the kerb I wonder what it was this time and hope it’ll be the last, though my belief has wilted over the past six months. She sees me arrive and runs down to the car. Her face is grey and red from wiping the running make-up too hard. As she opens the door I see that her t-shirt is being held together by badges pulled off of her satchel. There’s a nick in her bra strap.
And she’s detailing it to me in machine gun bursts between sobs. It seems like every fifth line is ‘but he didn’t hit me’, as the contents of my stomach reach up into the lower half of my throat. She calms down after I hand her the usual flask of vodka and push the car’s cigarette lighter in.
‘He’s never been like that,’ she says as she takes a drag of the cigarette. She stumbles over the words, obviously knowing they’re not true. I keep quiet, giving monotone grunts of reassurance. I put the radio on and turn the volume down. I don’t want to be seen as interfering.

She’s got her thighs pressed together, leaning towards me with her knees touching the gearstick. Her eyes burn through me as I keep mine on the road. My cheek’s becoming flushed where Michelle is staring at me, and I don’t know why she’s doing it. I’ve never understood why she does it. She didn’t when we first met. I was thirteen, and my housewife mother was making me take ballet lessons to shake me out of my ‘wearing black and hating everything’ stage. Michelle was there of her own volition, but perseverance in the face of inability was endearing. She smiled at my limp gestures and sulking face, still coated in dribbling eyeliner but mostly obscured by my uneven fringe.
We would talk for hours on the phone; her about boys and me about horror films from the 1950s. Occasionally she’d get angry that I wasn’t listening to her droning about the latest Steve or Dan or Paul after hearing me laugh at some ridiculous Vincent Price set piece. She never really stayed angry for long. I think she knew as well as I did that those relationships were frivolous and ineffectual. ‘Let’s drive down Thorn Road,’ Michelle says, as she sniffs. She seems to have regained composure and is now smiling, trying to catch my eye. I agree and smile back at her.

Every town has a Thorn Road. The reputedly haunted street with no streetlights that people drive down when they get their licence with a car full of friends. Apparently a homeless guy got run over, and then smashed in with a jack when he wasn’t quite dead, by a fearful driver. Previous drives had ended in fits of laughter at the feeling of the air conditioning being on, or a watch winding itself back to midnight. It was probably an electromagnetic anomaly but it was still fun to pretend.
We get to the middle, where the strange stuff happens, and Michelle leans over, wraps both her arms  around my left. A lump rises in my throat, and a shiver runs down my spine. I wish I could blame a haunting.
‘Ooh I’m scared,’ she clowns. I let out a short giggle. Every bone in my body is frozen still, and I’m suddenly conscious of the saliva in my mouth and how often I’m blinking. She shakes my arm.
‘Ooh I’m possessed! Hahaha!’
I look at her and our faces are too close. The second lasts forever, I feel a wave of sweat run down my forehead and as she blinks Michelle pulls away. Silence. We get three quarters of the way down the road before either of us says anything.

‘Don’t look in the rearview mirror remember,’ Michelle says. Her voice is understated, monotone, cautious. Part of the myth is that the homeless man sits on your backseat, staring at you in the rearview. I do feel like I’m being watched. My cheek is burning again.
‘Which way’s quicker back to yours?’ I ask her, and she signals across the roundabout. It’s about five minutes from here. Michelle’s phone rings and, after checking the screen, she throws it back in her bag. I smile at her. Her reply is one of resignation.
I start a conversation about how good the weekend’ll be; Vanessa’s throwing a party on Saturday, her parents are away and everyone’s going. Michelle replies in monotone confirmations, and when I ask what she’s going to do about drink she dismisses it with a simple ‘I don’t know.’

We pull up outside her house, and she unfastens her seatbelt. I turn to face her, smiling to suggest everything’ll be okay. Michelle bites her lip, and her eyes dart down and to the left. She breathes in as if to say something, but then lets it out in a sigh.
‘Thanks for picking me up. You’re a good friend.’
‘Any time; don’t get down about it. He’s a dick.’
‘Yeah. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow or something. Maybe talk later.’ With this she gets out, without the usual hug.

Sometimes love is the ultimate anti-climax. If you really got what you wanted, you probably wouldn’t know what to do with it. I hope that’s the case here, as I watch Michelle walk up her driveway, pulling her phone out of her bag.

Dawdling

Her apron was filthy. I guessed it had been for days; the hardened stains had fallen apart where it had been scrunched up several times. Patterns seemed to emerge in the lines absent from them. It was half four, so she must’ve been working all day, but her composure implied she had never worked a day in her life. She had her hair tied back into a low ponytail, with a fringe running free that covered her right eyebrow. When I’d ordered my coffee she had seemed like another attractive coffee shop girl amongst thousands of attractive coffee shop girls, but the more I looked at her the less I could look away.

And I was overly aware that I was staring, too aware to explain it as being ‘miles away’ when I was inevitably caught. But I wasn’t caught yet, so I went back to sipping my coffee and glancing at newspapers whenever it looked like I was directly in her line of vision. She was attractive in a way that I only find women when I’m sober. I was affected by the sight of her, and dreamt of knowing why she would touch the centre of her eyebrows every time she opened the cash register. ‘Sabine’ read the name tag, although I know I’d never seen her here before and new workers are always given fake name tags until theirs is made up. Equally she could have illegible handwriting; she could be Sabrina, Sadie or even Nadine if she really couldn’t write. She looked like she could write though. She looked like she had some grand scheme to make everything perfect.

I imagined the house she lived in. Probably still with her parents; I guessed she was about 20, that this was only part time work. You had to walk a little way up to the house through a wooden gate, and the garden was perfectly trimmed. The whole house was white; the doorbell set into a black plastic casing. Inside, the floors were all wooden, and the walls a pristine white. When you looked around, there was a door to each side of you; the one on the right was open, revealing a black leather sofa set against the wall in front of a huge television. This is where her dad watched football on lazy Sundays, drinking a beer with crisps in a bowl on the glass coffee table. On the left, a dining room that went to the back of the house, where a conservatory sat for her mum to paint and listen to Radio 4 in.

If you walked forward, there was the newly fitted kitchen, but to the left, a spiral staircase lead upstairs. Up here was carpeted in shining white. You weren’t allowed to wear shoes up here. Turning left brought you to the parent’s bedroom, through double doors, and if you followed the wall down the corridor you’d reach the bathroom, with its shower made for two and jacuzzi bathtub. But on the right was her room.

Her room was covered in pictures of her friends and posters of adverts from the 50s. A poster of Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie sat at the head of her double bed, covered in overly decorative cushions. On her desk sat a few books; some chick lit, some philosophy. A lined notepad and a sketchbook aligned with the wall.

I took another look at her, making sure she wasn’t likely to catch me, using my peripheral vision. She was still touching the middle of her eyebrows whenever the register opened, as if she was going to do the Catholic crossing of herself but got tired. Maybe this was an in-joke with her friends, or even better, herself.

I could see her on a night out. She was dressed well. No outward signs of sex, but by no means unattractive. Her friends weren’t glamorous or judgmental, they were just out to get drunk and laugh. They walked down streets arm in arm insulting each other and drinking from a bottle of rosé wine. The bars they went to were poorly lit, smoky establishments that softly played blues in the background. They sat in the corner and drank a bottle of wine each before heading to one of their houses. They talked about films and their shitty boyfriends. Sabine didn’t have a boyfriend. I could tell.

As I stared at her again, this time for what seemed like a straight minute, she seemed to exude a bizarre kind of purity. The more she touched the gap between her eyebrows the more naïve and sweet she seemed to me. As if she’d never been kissed or hurt, or hurt anyone for that matter. Her eyes were a strong shade of blue.

I looked away again and stared at my phone for a while. Nothing had changed. Nobody had got in contact with me. There was nothing to expect, but it still felt like a shame. I wanted people to think of me as much as I thought of them. I started to think of names of people I wish would give me a call, or an e-mail, just to let me know they were doing okay; the people who got lost in the desert of post-teenage while I stutteringly went to university.

I looked back up at her, hoping I could once again lose myself in some grand delusional vision of her lifestyle. She opened the cash register, but didn’t touch the middle of her eyebrows. I wondered why. There seemed to be no pattern. For the customer after, she didn’t again, and so on from then. It seemed strange to me – every single person before that that she had taken money from had signified a need to touch the centre of her eyebrows, but they didn’t any more.

I ran out of coffee so gathered my stuff and queued up. I wasn’t finished with sitting around. She had served me before but she didn’t mean anything to me then. I’d invented a world around Sabine without her knowing. The queue was about five people deep, which gave me time to compose myself before I had to order anything.

The queue was moving quicker than before, I could feel it, and I forgot how you order black coffee at one of these places, where you can’t even order a ‘small’, ‘medium’ or ‘large.’ There must be some special phrase I’d used in the past but it escaped me now.
I got to the till and she smiled up at me from behind her fringe. She had thick black eyeliner on that I hadn’t noticed before. I asked for a black coffee, smiling, and she set to making it.

While she did it she started talking to another of the employees. She glanced back at me and, still smiling, I acted like it was nothing. I thought that maybe after this cup I would give her my phone number or something, it had been so long since I’d gone out on a limb with a girl like that and it usually felt good for at least an hour, before the crippling embarrassment kicked in.
But it bothered me that she wasn’t touching the point between her eyebrows any more. I couldn’t say why. As she stood there smiling with her co-worker, she looked at me again, and this time let out a filthy laugh, a cackle that seemed aimed at me. What was there about me to laugh at? I was wearing a purple t-shirt with a black cardigan, and as I checked my reflection in the floor-to-ceiling windows my hair was exactly as it should be. My shoes were clean. My grey jeans were tight but not revealing anything. She brought me my coffee and I walked back to my seat.

As I sat down, I looked at her again. The eyeliner around her eyes seemed even thicker now, and her serene smile had turned into one of malice. Her eyebrows seemed pointed downwards. The teeth she showed in that vicious smile were points, and her hair seemed to have been affected by static. I thought again of her house.

She lived in a bedsit above a takeaway restaurant, someone had died in it and so she paid less rent. She didn’t know where her parents went at weekends, and in the week they never contacted her.

When she went out with friends she went out to bring any man in a polo shirt home with her. She drank vodka from the bottle, walking alone and pissing behind industrial bins. She talked to her friends about the cocks of men they’d met the weekend before, and how drunk they’d been. She wore dresses that were level with her vagina, and sometimes her arse fell out, of which there were tens of photos on various websites. There was a video of her pissing filmed on her friend’s cameraphone as she smoked a cigarette and told her to fuck off, cackling. She sent nude pictures of herself to near-perfect strangers in the hopes of seducing them, whether they had a partner or not. She was everything I hated and I refused to drink her coffee. I stood up, and I saw her touch the space between her eyebrows for the last time. Her foundation was so caked on that she had realised it had cracked at this point, and was trying to get it flat again. She looked at me leaving, and as she bared those yellowing, ragged teeth at me in a smile, I kept my head down.

Juliet

Juliet creeps into my room while I make sure the front door is locked. It’s been a boozy night, and so I can’t remember how she knows which room is mine. I find it a bit strange that she would know which door it is, as we haven’t done this for months, and the last time was the first time.
I take a few seconds at the mirror in the hallway before following her in. My face looks fake, too dry and angular to be human. I stare into my eyes but that scares me even more, the pupils dilating and constricting at differing times and the icy blue iris looks like a colour from what was the future in the seventies. I straighten my hair and clear my throat. My voice has a habit of getting stuck in a high pitch if I don’t, and it unsettles me that I can sound so entirely unlike myself.

I turn the hallway light off and walk into my room; a mess of clothes and empty cans surround the two islands that are the bed and the desk. Juliet sits on the bed, leaning on her forearms in a sickly seductive manner. Her smile is managing to reach from ear to ear without showing any teeth, and the only light source is a desk-lamp that lights her from the side, accentuating a shadow the bridge of her nose casts over one eye. She pats the bed beside her as if this is romantic and clichés can be overlooked. She’s still holding the smile and I tell her I’ll come over in a second.
I open up my laptop to put some music on but the only songs that really grab me are things that don’t set any of the right moods. I really want to listen to Adam Green or The Birthday Party but I know she won’t get it, so I put on the last LCD Soundsystem album. She stills asks what it is, so I just tell her and don’t go into it. I really wish she would leave. I am already tired of this dance.
I sit on the bed next to her, and she starts playing with my hand. She’s sucking my fingers and looking up at me from where she’s lying. This is all about as sexy as a car crash it’s so blunt, and I sort of hate myself for liking it on a physical level. I go to get some drinks, remembering I have a bottle of wine that’ll hopefully put her over the edge. She doesn’t let go of my hand until the last moment, and I have to make a smile that suggests this is what I want.
Now I’m in the kitchen with two clean cups and half a bottle of white wine and I’m annoyed that this is not what I want. I know I should, she’s sort of beautiful in the right light, if her fringe covers the scar on her forehead. I left the nightclub to the smiling faces of men I don’t know who seemed happy for me so why do I feel like this? I shake it off. I’m going back in there with a positive attitude, and after a couple of mouthfuls of wine in the kitchen I head back in. She’s sort of beautiful I repeat in my head. She’s sort of beautiful.
I walk in with the two mugs of white wine and I don’t spot her at first because she’s under the duvet. I take a swig and ask what she’s doing, in a light-hearted way. She just smiles. I don’t know what to do so I hand her one of the mugs and go to sit at the desk. Staring at the floor to avoid the day-to-day shrapnel I spot her black dress, her blue cardigan, pink pieces of underwear. My stomach jumps a little bit, but that might be from the wine. The stomach jump is not an entirely unpleasant thing.
‘Lock the door,’ she whispers.
‘I’m going to have a cigarette and sort out some music, okay?’
‘Okay. But then get in.’
I search the song titles I’m scrolling through for an answer to this situation, but the only one I see is ‘Frozen In Time’ and that doesn’t help at all. I realise we aren’t talking much at all and she’s interpreting that as sexual tension, so I ask what she wants to listen to. She says ‘something upbeat’ and winks which is probably the most disgusting thing I’ve seen a woman do that wasn’t on the internet. It’s probably about two years since I had romantic sex, and while I didn’t expect it from Juliet I did think she would want it. I may have read too much into it, but the combination of ‘something upbeat’ and a wink means this is going to be filthy, treating each other’s bodies as climbing frames. I just put the computer on shuffle and hope nothing too depressing comes on.
I take off my shoes and cardigan and climb under the sheets, the sickly pallor of her naked body sparkling in the low lighting. It’s a single bed so we lie too close for comfort and she goes for my belt. She giggles, saying that it’s unfair how dressed I am compared to her. I push her hands away, smiling so she isn’t offended and pour us both some more wine. I drain half the mug in one move.

‘So how was your day?’ I ask, smiling slightly so she finds it cute rather than delaying.
‘Good….good.’ She goes for the belt again.
Earlier on we’d talked for about an hour, and that had been fine. I bought us drinks and we seemed to get along, so I don’t know why I’m now so against this. She just isn’t relationship material. I don’t know how I can explain why I know that, but I always did I think; even before the taxi journey back here. Now in my bed she’s proving it, having said roughly twenty words in the half hour we’ve been back. She couldn’t even suggest a band for fear that I wouldn’t like them, or wouldn’t have their music.
On top of this I have more than a slight suspicion that she’d describe me to her friends as ‘quirky’ or ‘weird.’ I think people use those words when they have such parochial attitudes that anyone who isn’t exactly like them is an oddball, and that’s unfair. What’s more unfair is me assuming this of her, I suddenly think.
‘What do you want from this?’ I ask, fairly terrified of any response.
‘You.’
‘No, I mean in the long term, like do you really think we suit each other?’
‘Yeah. I think so. My friends think you’re interesting.’
‘Which friends? Is ‘interesting’ another word for ‘weird’?’
I am careful not to show any annoyance. I can sense I’m being unreasonable, but it doesn’t make me want her.
‘It probably is, yeah. But why does it matter? They like you. I like you.’
I suddenly feel awful and realise that although it would be easier to go through with this, I can’t. She’s kind, and while I hate kindness as a virtue the same way I hate ‘nice’ as an adjective, another one-night stand with Juliet would be damning evidence towards me being hateful. I don’t have a clue why I’ve brought her back here. I’m really drunk now and I keep nearly falling out of the bed avoiding touching any intimate part of Juliet, but I’m determined not to give in.
‘This is what you want now Juliet but in the morning we’ll both feel awful.’ I sigh.
‘I don’t think so. Look, this is what I want to happen. I don’t know why you don’t. We’ve done it before so why not again?’
‘Because I know that I will never introduce you to my parents.’ I laugh a little, and quickly hush myself because I realise how mean that broken sentence is.
‘What do you mean?’ She’s quieter now, and stealing the covers, visibly realising she is naked in bed with a man who doesn’t want that.
‘I mean, nothing will happen. Nothing good will happen here. This is a disaster.’
She sits up unaware that she’s revealing her breasts, leans on her knees holding her head. The sight is kind of tragic. She looks really good naked but it can’t be about that, even when I’m this drunk.
‘Well let’s just sleep here tonight. Is that okay? I just want to sleep in this bed with you tonight.’
I kiss her on the cheek and say that’s fine. It’s strange but fine. She’s not angry enough for me to be comfortable. I go to turn the lamp off and finish her drink for her, followed by mine, and then I take my jeans off and climb in next to her. She pulls one of my arms over her and I hold her as I fall asleep, feeling sorry for her.
As I drift off she’s shaking, probably crying, but I’m too far under to wake myself up and comfort her. Even my dream is drunk, and a series of images precede anything resembling a storyline: a bike, Juliet naked in a park, some candles, a Catherine wheel. I’m on a swing, and Juliet is walking towards me naked, waving her finger as if saying ‘no no no.’ She’s wearing knee-high socks and I seem to get higher on the swing the closer she gets to me. I look down and I’m wearing shorts and a vest, a primary school P.E kit, and she’s still coming closer – so close now that I’m afraid I might kick her in the face. I can’t stop the swing and it’s getting higher and faster and she’s getting closer and just before my feet touch her face, I wake up.

I wake up, and through glued-shut eyes and warped physical awareness I realise that Juliet is now on top of me. She’s looking down at me straight-faced, and I’m kind of terrified but at the same time blasé. We’re holding eye contact as she pushes herself on and off of me, and I feel my face closing up. I have no idea what to do.
She really is sort of beautiful up there, I think. By now it’s the early morning, about half past four, and the sun is pushing through my thin curtains, casting her thin but feminine frame in monochrome. Am I being raped? Women usually say it is impossible to rape a man, because he has to want it to be able to penetrate. I disagree. Yet while I’m thinking about the legality of this unwanted act, it is carrying on and I am stuck for an answer.
‘Am I wearing a condom?’ is all I manage.
‘No.’
‘Are you on the pill or anything like that?’
‘No.’
At this I lift her from under the arms and put her down beside me, asking her what she was doing. For some reason my tongue refuses to be as angry as my mind is. She starts punching me in that way girls do, with the side of the fist rather than knuckles. She’s hitting me constantly, in a marching rhythm, switching arms when one lands itself somewhere on my anatomy.
‘What were you doing?’ I inquire after wrestling hold of her arms. She doesn’t reply. She spits at me, but it hits the pillow.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask with gaining disbelief at what I have awoken to. She kicks out at my torso, manages to kick me to the floor where I hit my head on one of the mugs and start to dream almost immediately.
The swing scenario has returned, and this time I realise that the rhythm of swinging is similar to the rhythm that Juliet crashed down and pushed up off and on me. I am aware that this dream is signalling me being fucked again, like when you experience pain from something in a dream and you wake up in a painful circumstance. This time I can’t wake up and I think that the mug must’ve killed me or knocked me unconscious and Juliet is fucking me as I lie there on the floor, helpless to do anything.

She is sort of beautiful.