| 50ft Queenie
Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Fascination Street
Posts: 8,876
| Fiction: I Don't Dream About Anyone Except Myself
I wake without realising, so I’m unable to tell whether or not I’m really awake. But had I really slept? Who knew. I felt I’d simply materialised in the few minutes I’d been aware of my surroundings: an amnesiac in a cold bed in the middle of the night.
It was the cold that had woken me. Huge blankets shroud me, but I know I can never sleep in such arctic temperatures. Something knocks against the wall in the next room as I slide into my old slippers and sail out of the room: my movement impossibly graceful, laced with irrational vertigo. Am I dreaming? Had I been?
I seem to hover inches above the ground although my sleepy brain and bleary eyes tell me my feet are firmly planted on the creaking floorboards. Glacial air blasts through the door next to that of my bedroom; it’s standing ajar. With trembling fingers, I push it open.
A thin, ethereal light seeps in from the open window but every corner and crevice is clotted with blackness. Ghostly pale light drenches the white net curtains: they echo my shivers as I pad into the room armed only with my eyes.
You can’t feel pain in your dreams.
I reach the window and spasm violently as I catch sight of myself in the forgotten mirror: a girl bleached white, wide-eyed and slack-jawed as fluid shadows swim across her face. With underwater sluggishness, she tips me a wink.
Gasping, I’m dragged from the depths of a dream as it collapses around me. Not a shadow from it remains in my head, only an invasive sense of horror with an inexplicable undercurrent of shame. I can tell it’s going to take more than a strong cup of coffee to shake this one off.
I despise dreaming, and am sure the wee fairies who control the art are forever wreaking revenge for such disloyalty by dealing out bad ones to me tenfold. All too often I find myself latched to some black nightmare as it hurtles towards its terrible conclusion. All too often I awake to a pillow soggy with tears.
Showering washes some of the feeling away from me, and I spend a ridiculous amount of time twiddling with the temperature knob in a doomed attempt to get it just right. The razor with which I shave my legs is one of those slick, cushioned ones that make it virtually impossible to cut yourself; but somehow, in my haste, I manage it. I’m reluctant to press the immaculate white towel against the slash, so I crush my palm against it and hop over the side of the bath with some difficulty. Most of the mirror is wreathed in steam, so only a single, sullen eye stares back at me. I raise my stained hand to the glass to obliterate it with a bloody smear.
I throw on some clothes (nothing special, I’m hoping I won’t run into anyone important) in preparation to meet my boyfriend. Soon to be ex-boyfriend. Gareth is a brash character: so keen on leaving the greasy handprint of his personality on my life that I eventually ceased listening. Not that I’m entirely blameless, of course. My friends are quick to dismiss Gareth as a narcissist but I beg to differ. Everyone in our generation is tangled up in some sordid love affair with themselves, even if it manifests itself as something else. Self disgust is self-obsession, honey. Self-loathing is tantamount to sheer egoism.
With these cheery thoughts dancing around my head, I bang out the flat and head towards the local McDonalds. I’d like to think there’s a kitsch kind of irony in the fact that this is the setting for the majority of our romantic liaisons, but I’m only fooling myself. The trees are donning their yellowed veils with a muted dignity: it’s lovely but I’m startled out of my thoughts when I catch sight of myself in a shop window. I look…strange.
Mirrors lie. They say you can measure a person’s attractiveness based on how symmetrical their face is, but for the asymmetrical among us, mirrors can be intensely misleading. It was only when I juggled two against each other that I finally saw my true face, and I barely recognised myself. I’d grown accustomed to the lopsided slant of my smile, and the differing shapes of my eyes, but seeing my features in reverse made these faults glaringly obvious.
“You look exactly the same,” many have assured me. They’re either lying, or simply inobservant.
I arrive at Maccy D’s and make my way towards the gargantuan lump ploughing his way through a Big Mac. Love of my life, apple of my eye. I’m sure Gareth bears a terrible grudge against Morgan Spurlock for his success in the anti-supersizing campaign.
“Hey, Garth.”
The name Gareth is only beautiful when spoken with those lovely lilting Welsh inflections, but the first time I tried it he accused me of racism. Now I just call him Garth. It hits the nerve that sets his eyeballs twitching, and I attempt to disguise my glee.
He makes a big show of folding up his newspaper (a hefty broadsheet, naturally) before sliding his Damon Albarn glasses down his piggy little nose and peering at me. “Good morning, petal.”
Our rendezvous is (as expected) an unmitigated disaster: we just grind each other down. I find it hard not to be bored to tears by this stupid man who’s clearly built his character around the fact that he’s morbidly obese. His struggle for acceptance. His desire to be more than a man. (“Yeah, it’s easy to transcend the rest of the world when you can’t fit into a single aeroplane seat.”) The frequent moans about not being able to see his penis. Yawn. Exasperated, I eventually tell him to channel his energy into something creative: painting or writing or making music. He grudgingly agrees to get himself a Livejournal.
Sufficiently drained, I step outside to find the air’s gone all electric, as if something beautiful or apocalyptic (or both) is going to happen. I know from experience that it won’t. Nursing a smug feeling of martyrdom for putting up with Gareth, I skulk towards work.
When I reach the call centre, I’m greeted at the door by Katie, one of the few employees who opt out of the invisible “ignore your workmates” clause in the contract. She’s a peculiar girl: pretty but asexual, perfectly nice but entirely unappealing. The current office gossip is that she was robbed by some chancer she invited back to her flat: the biggest insult being that he left mid-seduction when she’d been desperate for sex. Strange how some people just have an air of desolation about them. The beautiful young woman who spends too much time and money on her nails. The middle-aged man who buys plenty of cheese-and-onion crisps to accompany his Daily Star. It’s difficult to pinpoint, but there’s something inherently tragic about such people, and I think it’s a quality that develops as opposed to one you’re born with. I suppose it can happen to anyone.
Katie greets me with a Vaseline smile, asking me if I’d enjoyed my night out. What the fuck…? Further investigation reveals that she’d stopped in the street for small-talk with a girl she’d believed was me; with hindsight she admits it could’ve just been a stranger happy to humour her.
“Easy mistake to make, I was beyond wasted,” she excuses herself, but it unnerves me nonetheless. If someone looked like me, and talked like me, would anyone even know the difference? Am I enough of a character to stop said person taking over my identity, my life? For when you strip away all the superficial shit like intelligence and taste and ethnicity, what are we really left with in terms of personality? It all gets a bit Goth so I totter back to my own seat and collapse.
We’ve all had those nights when we’ve drunk ourselves into forgetfulness, and only learn of our actions second-hand. I always get an inexplicable feeling of vertigo when I hear of it; the idea that what I said and did lies only in the inaccessible memory of the person I once was makes me sick to my stomach. Violated, almost.
I eventually start work, since the call centre’s one of those places that fires almost everybody within a few weeks, and the idea of getting sacked makes me feel nauseous. Three women in a row scream at me, then I get three kindly men explaining that they’re widowed. I wonder if I should take it as a sign.
On my break, I barge into the bathroom and am shocked by own reflection for the second time in a day. My skin looks pale and wet like an old piece of dough; my eyes those of a startled rabbit. Despite this, I look like I’m mildly amused. I tug the corners of my mouth downward in an attempt to rectify it. To no avail. I make a variety of faces in the mirror, but still my reflection twinkles back at me as if I’m hilarious. It’s downright creepy. I begin to sob and so does she, but she’s still laughing with it. I collapse cowering in a corner; the mirror reflection a gross caricature of my misery.
The panic attack ends, rather conveniently, as the shrill voice of the manager screeches for us to get back to work. I’m just happy to get the hell out of that bathroom.
Call. Call. Call. After a while, everyone starts to sound the same. It’s like I’m calling someone with no short-term memory, over and over again. The end of the shift finally arrives, but Katie materialises beside me as I attempt to escape. It’s easy to picture her sprawled out on her bed, sucking on a vodka bottle in her left hand while masturbating dejectedly with her right. Waiting in vain for a man who was at that moment ransacking her grandmother’s jewellery box. The thought depresses me. I make my excuses and cram it up the road.
The street’s pretty busy, and I get a horrible sensation when people blundering past stare into my face with open curiosity. I don’t like people looking at me.
When I was nine, I was convinced that my house was laced with an intricate network of hidden cameras, while some unseen predator squatted in an office, tracking my every move. At the time—pressing wads of toilet paper into every unassuming screw in the bathroom, before I undressed for a shower—I found it unsettling, but now I long for the sweet naiveté that had me convinced someone cared that much. I’ll bet a fair percentage of religious folk in this world can trace their faith back to a simple quirk afflicting most of the world: the desire to be watched.
A couple of years later, I found myself growing increasingly jealous of victims of stalkers. The squeaky clean pre-teen magazines and fluffy pseudo-horror novels from which I gleaned my information never featured any serious attacks—no rapes or murders—only tale after tale of dark shadows and darker obsessions. It sounded amazing. And yet, back then I still didn’t like people looking at me. Oh, what paradoxical lives we lead.
Back home, I run myself a bubble bath and soak in there for hours. I come out so relaxed and comfortable that I’m sure I’ll see only myself in the steamed-up mirror, but it’s her again. My doppelganger. The me without the essence of me. I scurry off before she has time to freak me out again.
I remember little of my dreams that night, although I have a feeling they were black.
I’m shocked out of a watery nightmare by a phone call informing me Gareth is dead. Heart attack, during the night as I slept. It’s not a huge shock—perhaps because he so often gloated of how he could keel over at any second, perhaps because death is such a staple in stories like these—but I spend a few moments in a vague sort of mourning. In actuality I’m mostly just relieved for myself. Since reading true stories of the husbands who strangled their wives while both of them slept, I’ve lived in terror of committing the same crime. One was an ex-soldier having a nightmare about wrestling with a Viet Cong enemy; the other just a regular guy. Waking up to Gareth’s corpse would surely have sent me over the edge.
I remember how I’d torture him at the height of our relationship, prodding at my own waist and moaning about how I needed to lose weight. Sooking a KitKat, he’d throw me a splinteringly icy look. “Do it then, you fat cow.” I’d interpreted that as a victory.
I don’t bother avoiding the mirror this time. I feel like having it out with that bitch.
She’s just taking the piss now: elaborate earrings glint from beneath my hair although I’m wearing nothing of the sort. When I give her a sickly grin, she bares a horrible jumble of blood-caked teeth in response. She’s so uncouth, and I’m so very tired of this.
I’m on the verge of turning away when I feel something clutch the tendrils of my hair, and I’ve barely time to think before my head is slammed into the surface of the glass. The mirror groans a weak protest as it happens again and again, and the world begins to splinter around me.
I think of the Russian Wedding Dress killer.
I think of the poor ex-soldier who strangled his wife whilst locked in that terrible dream.
I think of that young Asian victim of Jeffrey Dahmer: sent to his death by indifferent policemen.
A far cry from my life flashing before my eyes; all I’m getting here is a slideshow of other people’s gory misfortune. Second-hand pain.
I realise then that, for all the obscene horror of my dreams, the thing I really fear in this world is loneliness: the pure and harrowing kind that can only stem from complete isolation. Blood runs thick and fast into my eyes, and I glimpse her triumphant smile through a veil of liquid scarlet. Then feathery shadows start to dance in my peripheral vision, and I’m vaulted into a blackness glittering with a million freezing diamonds.
The following day, nobody noticed the change in her: the fact that the trio of freckles were on her right arm instead of her left, the way her smile drooped on the wrong side. Apparently her reflection hadn’t looked so different after all.
Last edited by Woolies; 19th May 2006 at 4:48pm.
Reason: image tag swapped to header
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