Revenge

THE BEGINNING OF revenge is the childhood body, its milk white parting. Marcus and I sit at either end of the office, with one childhood each. It seems a fair distribution.

I nearly like my new girl’s body, whose sweat doesn’t smell anymore. I might as well use it. I take it with me into the LoveWagon’s office and sit it in a chair. I put my hands under my thighs to keep myself from fidgeting and I resist the urge to blow bubbles with my spittle, pull my skirt over my face or ask her for money. She is banging her remote control on the desk. If she turns it on me I might just disappear.

The television breaks into life. She has been watching the audition tape. Stephen looks out of the screen at us, frozen. A frame bar scrolls upwards across his face, rewriting him each time.

‘So what are you saying?’ says the LoveWagon. It is a good question. What I am saying is as big as the room. What I am saying is all around me so I can only say it one piece at a time.

‘It’s not fair!’ That is what I am saying. She looks at me.

‘Fair,’ she says softly, nostalgic for the thing itself. ‘Fair’ as if it were a word she hadn’t heard in years like cack, or poo, though the people around her were always talking shite.

‘I’m saying that I can toe the line. All right?’ What did I say?

‘Nothing lasts for ever, Grace.’

‘Nothing lasts for ever, and when it comes to the crunch I can toe the line.’

‘By the time you see the crunch, it has usually come and gone.’

Her hands are very mannered, very careful. She is presenting the news for the deaf in slow motion. Behind them, Stephen has, not inappropriately, started to laugh. ‘Huh’ he says.

‘You could have told me.’

‘I told you they were serious. I was blue in the face telling you.’

‘But not so I knew what you were talking about.’

‘Aw,’ says Stephen, stopping and lapsing again. ‘Aw. Aww. Awww. Hhwawh.’

‘I named this show,’ I say. ‘I made the difference. Tell me something on the show that I didn’t do, that Marcus did.’

‘No-one doubts you.’

‘Awh. Uh Hwuh.’ It is crawling out of his face like an exorcism.

‘What are you talking about?’ she says. ‘What do you want?’

How can I say what I want? I just don’t want to be left behind, while Marcus goes out to buy six new shirts or she floats upstairs like Mary Poppins on her non-stick backside.

‘Hujhhawarrrr,’ says Stephen.

‘It’s only a rumour anyway’, she says.

‘You told Marcus it was all decided.’

‘They have decided it may happen.’

‘Wuh. Huh,’ says Stephen on the screen.

‘It depends on us. It depends on you.’

‘Hwuawrghh. Huh.’

‘What do you want? You can get anything you like around here. If you don’t let the uncertainty get you down. Seriously. Work with the confusion. Not against it.’

‘Anything’, said her hands, ‘you want.’

She does not know what I want. She does not know the meaning of the word ‘confusion’. With all her this-or-that, her either-or-and-both. When I was a child I wanted other girls’ bald-and-hairy fathers for my own. But I didn’t get them either.

‘I want the Dating Show.’

‘And? Any ideas?’

Why should I give her my ideas? She knows better how to use them than to have them. Still, I lean over to the VCR and make it work with the touch of a few buttons, like a child.

‘Here’s my presenter, for a start.’

‘Oh,’ says the LoveWagon while Stephen, released, slips into his laugh of celestial gaiety.

I leave her looking at the tape. Stopping it, rewinding, playing the laugh again. Stop. Rewind. Laugh. Stop. Rewind. Laugh. Stop.

At the door I remind her that Marcus might know about humiliation but he can’t handle sex.

‘He’s very good at the games,’ I say and we both smile, though who is to say what she finds funny? I go to the toilet and piss her out. I piss out Stephen’s stop and start. I piss myself, with my new child’s bladder, urgently, easily, back into the flow of time.