Tell Me I'm Worthless
Alison Rumfitt
Prologue:
The Face in the Wall
Long after the House is gone, it’s there.
The boy and his parents moved into the new flat around a year ago. It was a new flat, but it didn’t feel new, it was damp, and cold, and it had felt hostile to them the moment they hauled their stuff inside. The boy’s mother knew, in that moment, that they had made a terrible mistake, but by that point it was too late. They lived here. They could not afford to live somewhere else.
The boy’s mother and father have been worrying. His grades have never been anything special, but now they seem to have slipped even further downward. He doesn’t have any friends, and, even worse, he is utterly uninterested in making any. When they ask him if he wants to join any after-school clubs or sports teams, he just shrugs. They wonder if he’s autistic, but his dad scoffs at the idea. His dad is the kind of man who thinks having an autistic son would mean there was something wrong with him. His dad, a big man with a red face, sits on the sofa in front of the TV ranting loudly about how fucking immigrants are keeping him from finding work. The boy can hear this, through his bedroom door. He spends a lot of time in his bedroom. It’s small and dark. His mum tried to get him to put up some posters, but to put up posters you have to like things and he isn’t sure he likes anything. He knows that there are things he should like – football, rappers, action movies. Boys like things like that. But he cannot bring himself to feel anything towards them beyond a mild, passing curiosity.
In his bedroom, the light hanging from the ceiling flickers, the bulb threatening to burst. Damp creeps through the wallpaper above his bed. He looks at the damp stain sometimes and thinks that he sees shapes in it. Eyes, a wide gaping mouth, opening up to swallow him whole. He is twelve now and thinks he should be over seeing monsters in his wallpaper, but even so, he asks his mum to try and sort it out. She gets his dad to re-paper the room, and for some time it works, the stains, and the shapes that hide within the stains, are gone. But two months later they are back, and, although it doesn’t seem possible, larger than they had been. He can still see the shapes. He can still see the damp forming wide white eyes, and a twisted screaming mouth, and in that mouth the impression of a tongue and of teeth. It keeps him up at night. In his dreams, the shape becomes clearer, becomes a woman, and the screaming woman, her limbs all bent at strange angles around her, pushes out through the brick, through the paper, tearing it away to reach out into his bedroom and grab him. When she grabs him, he wakes up crying. At first, his mum comes into his room and hugs him until he goes back to sleep. After a while, she gives up. I mean, what’s the use. He does this most nights. His dad says maybe she coddles him too much, if she keeps hugging him until he stops crying then he’ll be a poof and he won’t have a fucking poof for a son.
The boy begins to Google some of the things that his dad says, on the old computer which he has at his desk. He was given it for school, but he barely uses it for school. Instead he mostly uses it to search for those phrases his dad repeats under his breath when he drinks too much. My dad’s right, he thinks. About these things. About the immigrants and the gays and the feminists and BLM tearing down statues, historic statues, iconic parts of our heritage, and actually his dad doesn’t go far enough… The boy discovers forums where other people, older boys and men, mostly, tell him about the way the world really is: a vast conspiracy, of mass immigration, of Jews in the media, of feminists, of ahistorical cultural Marxism telling lies about the past. Manipulating the youth. They’re in the schools. In his school, too. They’re diversity hires, they’re teachers asking for pupils’ pronouns. Sometimes, one of the older men asks him for pictures of himself. It seems wrong, but he sends them, anyway, pictures of him naked in the grainy camera of his webcam, sent to anonymous accounts.
Mostly, though, they all want to stay hidden. They write out strings of slurs. They say they are going to do something. Something’s coming, they tell the boy. Get ready for the storm, and make sure you’re on the right side. The boy thinks, well, I have to make sure I’m on the right side. I have to do something. The face in the wall twists further, the mouth gets wider, the eyes get more frantic. But he doesn’t have nightmares about it anymore. He doesn’t wake up at night screaming. His mum and his dad are happy about that, at least. Maybe their strange little boy is going to be okay. They did a good job with him, right? They’re doing a good job with him. Given the circumstances. Given the lack of money, and the shitty flat. And the government, and the state of the world. And the way things seem to be going. They did a good job, they tell themselves, we did a good job, we’re raising a good kid, we’ve brought up a good son, over and over and over, insisting this to themselves and to anyone who will listen, repeating it until it makes them sick.
Part 1
The Decline of Western Womanhood
Alice
It makes you sick.
This room, it makes you sick. It makes me sick. It’s all angular and wrong, and the angles join in conversation with each other. They become hateful. They begin to tell you that they hate you and that they want you to die, somehow, that maybe they’ll be the ones to kill you, or maybe they will convince you to kill yourself, with words, economic manipulation, gentrification, every weapon at their disposal. Because you didn’t deserve to live, at least not here, in this room, in this building, in this part of the city. You should go somewhere else. You make us sick, the angles and the walls say, you’d be better off far from here, or dead, or both.