—10—
Although I have a painfully good memory, I cannot recall every detail of the next few minutes, though I was conscious through every moment.
My exact words, I don't remember.
My position: You try to turn your back, yank stiff, straight jeans up from around your ankles and over an impossible swell of thigh, and bend over and cover your body front and back with your arms, all at the same time. You might end as I did, knotted on the floor, a lump forming on your forehead from clonking your head on the hardwood—and your arse, if it is like mine, is pointing (a funny word in my case) high in the air, facing directly towards the doorway. Briefly, I tried to lift the thing that hurt so much that I wished it belonged to someone else—my head—so I could look towards the door, but trying to crane around only made me dizzy. My eyes jammed shut and my forehead kissed the floor again, not gently. Blood that I could hear wooshed between my ears, sounding like milk being shaken into butter in a goatskin, milk with shards of something sharp hitting the back of my eyeballs ... woosh, stab, woosh.
Brett said something. That was his voice, but I couldn't identify words. What I do remember clearly was the voice of Jim, saying 'Excuse me, Miss Lily. I'll just put these here.'
I remember yelling, but not the words. There mightn't have been any words as such.
And I remember being alone in my room, my head impossibly heavy, my thoughts a cloud, and me still folded over on the floor.
I remember the smell of roses, and ... shit, runny with piss.
~
I woke in a lake—slicking my arms, kissing my head. Jerking myself upright, I almost fell forward again, but balanced. Yet again in my life, this ingrate that I fed and clothed paid me in humiliation. I wanted, powerfully, to punish it, and I would have. I would have, if it wouldn't have hurt me. I tried to get up but my legs were asleep and my feet now woke with needle stabs too painful to touch. Instead, a rivulet ran down the side of my nose which identified, as if I wanted to know the details—flowers, fruit, filth—and my brain paraded Jim saying, 'Excuse me, Miss Lily. I'll just put these here.' In my brain's version, he was full-face centre of the picture, so my mind's eye watched what I know he must have been doing when he said those words. Smirk.
He had to be a champion smirker, for his paid smile was so good. So while I was unable to escape, my brain made me watch Jim enter and say those words, and smirk, and then delicately flare his nostrils and I watched his pupils contract, or would they dilate—I couldn't decide—but the smirk played clearly and with close-ups at least three times before my feet said I could move.
I rolled over in the muck and punched my legs till they obeyed me. Prying the jeans off, I ran with them and the shit-sodden shirt to my shower, where I rammed those taps to maximum downpour, then grabbed bottle after bottle and poured. Anything I could reach I used on me and the mess, stomping on the clothes so hard I could have drawn juice from stones. Eventually, I stopped, but I wasn't finished. My old jeans and shirt, I fished out of the trash and piled on the counter. The sodden lump of new clothes, I threw in the trash.
Using fresh towels and another armful of bottles, I scrubbed the floors, including each of my footsteps, and then pummelled those towels till they were rags and the only smells I could detect on them were dreadfully expensive. And then I stood under another downpour and used everything left on myself—purifying, scraping and polishing till an epidermal layer had whirled down the drain and my skin and hair jangled smells only of bottled scents.
Exhausted, but finished washing, I sniffed ... roses!
I tried to open my windows to dump those stinkers, but they were hermetically sealed. So I buried vase and all under the sopping clothes disasters, and dressed.
~
Brett did not understand my humiliation.
We were in the lounge, Brett up on his futon mountain, me in the chair that I'd dragged from my room. My hair was still wet. The eau de homeless person scent of my old clothes was already overwhelming my washed body. The roses in the entry hall insinuated the lounge's air, but I was too tired to bury them. Besides, I had higher priorities.
Brett did not see that he should have waited for my assent to enter.
I hadn't objected when he first dropped in on me at Kate's place, had I? And he had only bothered to knock here for the show of it, so the Restonia chap could deliver my flowers, which I had asked for with some degree of urgency, hadn't I? How was Brett to know I'd be naked?
He was a better self-excuser than I have ever been capable of. His faults he spun to be my shortcomings. 'And once the chap was there, and he'd already gotten an eyeful, what was I to do? Shove him away and compound the problem? Better to let him finish delivering the flowers and leave, and I wager you a tadpole to a muffin, the empty-headed varlet wouldn't have remembered the incident for a moment. Besides,' Brett reminded me . . and on and on he went, in a liturgy of not-to-worry.
If, he assured me, the Restonia lived up to its reputation to fulfil every desire, and if this hostel was of any venerance, the only outré aspect of my activity could be its bad taste—if clichés are judged that harshly. Why, the likes of that young blue-eye must have servanted dining tables in the person of my folded-up body, oh ever so many times, years ago. With candlesticks flaring from ...!
Oh, Brett could tell me of ... and he did.
So what was I worried about? What was there to be embarrassed about? It couldn't be the hired help. And certainly not Old Brett, eh?
~
Brett just didn't understand me. Actually, he was right about himself. If it had just been Brett at the door, it would have been a temporary shock, but when I thought about it—no more so than my surprise when I entered his room where his nakedness stared at me. And less of a shock than when I thought he'd been reading my journal over my shoulder. My shape, I was sure he didn't notice one way or the other, having seen so many he must have been bored stiff by any of us. And, besides, neither Andrew nor the luscious Simone had gotten a rise out of him. So that left the indescribable—my filthy shame right in front of his eyes—and that didn't bother me when I contextualized it for his culture. The worst part of it, the shit pouring out of my arse and running over the floor, was, when I pictured it from his point of view, just everyday-person stuff. In Art History, I'd seen many pictures of naked people in hell, in all kinds of embarrassing positions, often with things poking up their bums and surrounded by environmental conditions murky in the extreme. Brett couldn't regard filth with the same derisive horror as we. Maybe the gross failure of bodily functions didn't register with him as anything different than, say, a burp after eating. Nature.
But that still left Jim, who had called me then, for the first time, 'Miss Lily', and who I was absolutely positive, would have smirked. And Brett couldn't say for sure that he hadn't, because, although I hadn't actually seen Jim's face, Brett hadn't been looking at him, either.
Brett was blind to the absolute horribleness of this, the intolerableness, the impossibleness of my position, not only now, but in the future.
And the worst part was: Brett didn't see why anyone would want to know what. What was there precisely, he asked again and again, to know?
His ignorance made me feel silly, and I know it is silly that this snowballed into another feeling, but it did. Because I felt silly, and he didn't understand why, I felt petty to feel silly, and resented feeling petty, and felt angry that I felt petty—a little angry at Brett, which had no adequate outlet, but which made me feel everything all over again, and more so—which made everything so much harder, and impossible to explain.
I didn't get into the issue about my name—that he'd utterly ruined it, and I'd have to pick another—because he genuinely sounded like he was trying to understand. He just couldn't see what there was to be upset about on my part, given that I had forgiven him his honest mistake. Of course he'd take greater precautions in front of others, so as not to compromise my sensibilities, so now let's have a smile, and everything's hunky do?
I just couldn't pretend to be hunky do, whatever that was. Wearily, and tearily, I left him. I had no idea how to deal with tomorrow, but he could order his own dinner, or not, as he chose.
I dragged my chair back to my room, closed the door, took the packet of Tim Tams out of the fridge, climbed into bed, ate the lot—and for afters, cried myself to sleep.