Some days took more effort to wash off than others.
Today had left a layer of filth on her so thick she was sure she could see the grain of it ground into her skin, a greasy sheen which would take hours to soak and scrub off in her sanctuary.
It was the looks that did it, every sly side-eye or outright stare heavy with disgust, all those dirty thoughts they carried and laid on her, making her a repository for their hates and lusts and all the complicated, dangerous states in between.
You needed to purge yourself of other people.
While their thoughts lingered you would always only be partly yourself and partly what they decided you were. A freak, a creep, a pervert. If enough of them believed it, could it make you so?
No. She wouldn’t give in to that kind of thinking.
She had to remain vigilant.
Mindful.
She’d been reading a book about it. She needed to live in the moment, be thankful for what the universe had bestowed upon her. This safe haven, it was her happy place, the one she returned to when the looks and the insinuations got too much to bear, but sometimes being here in the flesh was less soothing than escaping to it in her mind.
Here, there was nowhere else to hide. No further escape from herself. Her sanctuary was taking on the dimensions of a prison cell. Worse, an isolation unit. Like she was infected with something so damaging she couldn’t be exposed to other people.
No, they were the contagious ones.
This was where they couldn’t touch her.
Be in the moment, she told herself. Retreat from that negativity. You were supposed to reframe it as a weak voice, one easily shouted down with the positives in your life.
What were they, though? What did she really have to feel thankful for?
She was still alive, but that gave her scant comfort. She had a future which held no promise and a present that existed only here and no matter how she tried to find some positives nothing worked to drown out that voice that taunted her.
Sunshine, flowers, the smell of freshly brewed coffee – was that enough to live for? She was supposed to take pleasure in the small things like that, be kind to herself, but the one kindness she could grant herself had been snatched away and it was the only thing she truly cared about.
Those mindfulness books were not written for people like her.
The tools they gave you weren’t designed for problems of this magnitude, were like trying to kill cancer with camomile tea.
Evelyn had brought this on.
She’d been fine. Coping, at least, until Evelyn called. Just checking in. Wanted to see if you needed to talk.
How many calls like that had she made today?
She fed off other people’s suffering. A psychic vampire.
It was obvious what she really wanted. Some problem to deal with, some drama to burrow into. Had she tried Corinne’s family and been refused entrance? Now she was looking for another victim.
Evelyn didn’t care who suffered, they were all just so much collateral damage in the war she was fighting – recognition not all of them wanted and equality most knew they could never achieve. She was no better than Corinne, just another rich bitch who’d sailed through her transition and come out the other side a powerful woman, carrying all the privileges of her masculinity into a feminine existence.
She started this.
Her and Corinne.
Getting murdered like that, drawing attention to herself, blowing the whole sorry problem wide open just as the wounds were finally healing. Corinne had brought the police back to her, with their questions and suspicions. They thought she held the key to finding Corinne’s killer and they wouldn’t respect her silence forever.
Could they compel her to talk?
If the policewoman came to where she worked that would be it. All the whispers and gossip verified at last, everyone would know what she was. Friends, family, everyone. Even if she refused to tell the police what they wanted to know their interest would be enough to give her away and no lie she could think of would save her.
If they looked closely, properly, like they hadn’t done when she was first attacked, they might find enough to make her talk. Because she knew once they had her she would break.
She wasn’t strong enough to go through that again.
Time had passed and the wounds had healed but she felt weaker than ever, so much effort invested in keeping going that there was nothing else left in her to fight them with.
She closed her eyes and tried to find a moment of calm but instead she found herself back there, with his breath against the back of her neck and the cobbles hard against her cheek, feeling the points of her broken teeth, tasting the blood in her mouth, and his hand, twisting in her hair before he drove her face down into the ground one last time.
There was nothing useful she could tell them.
Even if she wanted to.
She hadn’t seen his face. Didn’t know who he was, although she looked for him every time she left the house, sure she would somehow sense him and he would feel it too. Like fated lovers their eyes would meet and they would both just know.
They wouldn’t believe her, though. They would show her the faces of men just like him, books full of them, hundreds of violent, sadistic men and ask her was he among them.
He probably would be. She wasn’t his first, she guessed, and she won’t have been the last. Men like that, they did what they wanted, knowing women like her would be too scared to stop them.
She looked down at her body, seeing what she was and hating it. That was who she would always be, that was who would have to go to the police station and appear in court, admit the lies, the terrible shame she carried while people sniggered and pitied.
Sergeant Ferreira said she wouldn’t have to give evidence but she was a poor liar too, desperate and scared in her own way, driven by her own failures.
Only one of them could get what they needed out of this situation.
She tried to lose herself in the music, appreciate the beautiful melody and the sweetness of Karen Elson’s voice, but she had picked the wrong track again and it felt like the song had been written about her, too many painful points of similarity to bear.
She needed to go through and delete every stinging song, for the sake of her sanity, but they were all sad. Too many bad men and broken hearts and women suffering every indignity the world could throw at them. Who was this aimed at? – people so secure that they regarded another person’s pain as entertainment? Or was it women like her? Was she supposed to hear those words and know she wasn’t alone in her darkest moments, that others had been through bad times and survived, if not stronger then at least wiser?
Nobody survived, not really. She hadn’t. A shell remained and the shell could read books on mindfulness and do the stupid little exercises in it, enjoy the scent of the jasmine candles and the light they threw across the gold-flecked tiles, but underneath, deep down, she was broken, smashed as violently and completely as the mirror which no longer hung above the sink.
Half of her had died that night on the cobblestones.
And she’d known that for a long time, had been running from it, making excuses to herself and other people, none of them convincing. The facade she’d built was crumbling, undermined by forces outside her control, chipped at and eroded.
She was a person without reflection.
Half alive. Half real.
She was nothing.