Born in the 1980s Read online

  The dates went by and I didn’t see the temper, but I was ready for it.

  *

  ‘I want you,’ I whisper. ‘Oh, please don’t move an inch…’

  *

  So this doesn’t surprise me much, that he’s decided to freak out over a little thing like a lost garage ticket. Yeah, it’s $20, but either of us could afford it and we were at the club almost long enough for that anyway, at the hourly rate. I’m watching him punch the wall, and I’m really tired. My calves hurt from my stilettos, my head aches, and this is so stupid.

  My mother’s voice comes into my head, suddenly, telling me to walk away from this. You deserve better. Think of your father. My father, right. She used to say that to remind me about the mistakes she’d made, not to shame me. I never knew my dad, and I’m not sure she even remembers his name. Some shrink books say that means that if I have the kid, and decide not to tell it who its dad is, or let him even know or care, I have some kind of self-approval for it because that’s the way I was raised.

  I remember Mom swatting me away from the stove, or other dangerous places, yelling ‘What are you, stupid?’ But I’m not stupid. Just fucked.

  *

  ‘You like that?’ he mutters, with that greasy I’m-getting-laid undertone in his voice, and starts to move his hips more, because he’s feeling like Shaft, because I’m moaning in his ear.

  *

  I tried to stay away from the stove even after I got older, but danger always beckons me. I have a respectable job and a respectable apartment, and I still go to places like the Down Under Bar (not named for the Outback) and meet guys like this. It’s because I do these things, because I’m fucked, that I end up in situations like this, standing here with a cigarette in my hand (shouldn’t smoke, I think, but I can’t let on), watching him punch the wall next to the recycling dumpster and wishing I was just at home with a James Patterson novel and maybe, like, a Meg Ryan movie. I hate chick flicks, usually, but here I am with a guy who’s punching the goddamn wall.

  He’s never hit me. I’ve never dated a man who hit me. That’s a stove that even I can see is too hot without touching it. Still, somehow I was almost waiting for it from this guy. I could just see a black eye spreading bruisy fingers across my cheekbone because I talked back to him. I didn’t know why I was with him, because I could always run back to Charlie, but Charlie cared about me, Charlie was nice, Charlie’s apartment had vintage Dylan posters on the walls. This guy here, punching the wall, was exciting. Right?

  I knew that we couldn’t stay there forever with him yelling about the stupid ticket, and besides I was bored. So I did what I had to do, you know – I used what I’ve got to relax him. When he took a minute to rub his knuckles in hard-breathing silence, I passed my hand across his shoulder and drew near him. Murmuring some bullshit to him about calming down, it’s so much better if you just relax, baby, I started kissing his neck and running my hands over him. He, like a child, stubbornly refused at first to be interested, but then I felt his hands on my ass and I knew I was starting to win.

  *

  ‘Yes,’ I say, my breath quickening. ‘Yessssssss.’

  *

  The only time I ever felt like I wasn’t getting cheated out of sex was with Charlie. Charlie wasn’t one of those guys I met – picked up – at a bar. He saw me in a coffee shop and made a joke about soy milk, and at first I still hit the bars after he dropped me off at home. Took him months to tell me he wanted to have sex.

  But I couldn’t hang on to it. I realised he cared for me on that last night, and I was too afraid. We were doing it, and I started to think, so very hard, about how many pills I had accidentally skipped that week, and I started getting panicked and shaking, and Charlie was getting near the finish line, and I told him to stop, and I was crying over and over, I don’t want to have a baby, I don’t want to have a baby. He stopped. I couldn’t believe it, but he stopped.

  The next night I went to the Down Under and I picked up Mr Wall-Puncher. That was rough and tough and good stuff, and in my head I was screaming for Charlie the entire time.

  But if Charlie had found something wrong with me, years down the line, I’d be on my ass all over again, and it wouldn’t be my doing. That’d hurt. The phone call from Charlie the next week hurt like that: he told me he understood what I was like (I’m fucked, I know it), but that he wanted me to come back to him if something changed. I believed him, but it was too damned simple to stay with him, he was too perfect.

  This guy’s easy. He’s not Charlie; he’d never stop if I told him I was worried about a baby. A baby would be my problem, and so it is. Still, it’s easier to be with someone who can’t hurt you. When they say no thanks, you just shrug your shoulders and move on to the next in line.

  So here I am and we’re starting to really make out now, and he’s moving me into the corner between the two walls, which I suppose was what I wanted in the first place but now that it’s happening I’m upset at him for being so crude. He pushes me against the wall and I’m really stuck now, really pushed into doing this thing, next to a recycling bin. And if this were Charlie we’d be smiling wickedly at each other and I’d blush whenever I thought of it, but it’s not Charlie.

  *

  ‘Oh God,’ he starts to say, breathing like a horse. ‘Oh Jesus God.’

  *

  But then everything flips, like it usually does, and I stop thinking about how this guy’s about to fuck me and I start thinking about how I’m about to have sex with this guy, and that even though it’s him it’s still sex in a public place. One more story to tell my friends. They seem to like hearing about this shit.

  Maybe all of this does have something to do with my father, whoever he was. Trying to fill up that hole. Not that I believe in Freud so much, but that him not existing for me left a gap. I don’t want to fuck my dad, but I want to fuck to fill up the hole. My own hole, I guess, it’s all one big hole to men.

  Charlie was the only one who didn’t seem interested in my body, but myself. He wanted to hear about how I felt. He wanted to talk for hours in his bed, sheets puddled around us. I think he wanted to look at me and talk to me as much as he wanted to grope and fuck me. If he even wanted to do those things. Sometimes I thought he didn’t, but avoiding them would have conflicted with what sex is, mechanically. I don’t know, it’s really strange, I mean all men are the same, right? They’re all gropers and fuckers at the core. Charlie might not have seemed like one but he probably was. My father. A long line, these years of men in dark beds with neon flashing against the sheets. And I’m against this wall, and my skirt is starting to be indiscreetly high around my hips.

  It’s funny that even with the baby I want this. I don’t know if it’s Charlie’s or his, and I know that either way it’s not going to matter. Charlie won’t want it. No man wants a baby like this, with someone like me. But I feel weird, like I have a secret that has to do with the secret we’re about to share when he gets his dick out of his pants. And it has something to do with sex, but the way men understand it, there’s some kind of locker-room connection between having sex and a baby (like the locker-room connection between sex and love), and the way we understand it is somehow different.

  But I don’t know. This secret here, between my legs, is the only one he’s interested in for the time being. And I’m starting to get interested too, even though thoughts of Charlie keep interrupting me.

  *

  He slows down briefly. ‘Are you still on the pill?’ he says. I am so wrapped up in it that I mutter ‘Doesn’t matter’ before I even think about it. This still doesn’t stop him, but his motion gets somehow distracted. ‘What do you mean?’ he breathes, panting a little. I know that I have made a catastrophic error but I feel so good, the anonymity and the spontaneity of the situation are starting to catch on to my pleasure centres, and I say, I say, ‘I’m pregnant.’

  He stops cold.

  *

  But God, I didn’t know this would happen. I thought that b
efore it came to this I’d get beyond myself somehow, get beyond the hole I had to fill up, learn to live, even if I had to live with this child that I wasn’t sure I wanted.

  *

  ‘You’re what?’ he shouts, right into my ear. He pulls back and looks at me, not stunned but fucking angry. I start to get scared, a little, and I say it again. ‘I don’t know if it’s yours, it might still be Charlie’s but –’

  WHAP.

  He’s done it. He hit me. And then he starts fucking me again, but this time it’s not about excitement and not about garages, it’s about fucking me. ‘I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you! How could you be so irresponsible?’

  Now this was really not fair because he had sex with me twice before he even knew I was on the pill. I start to say something but he grabs my face with one hand while he’s fumbling around in his back pockets somewhere with the other hand. I see red rage in oh-God-those-eyes, and I’m suddenly really, really cold.

  *

  My mother tried to tell me to find a nice boy, but she didn’t explain how she’d failed at it. When I was little I dreamed about princes who would caress my face, knights who would kiss me on the forehead. I never had a boyfriend like that until Charlie – they all just wanted what was in my panties. After a few years I started to wonder more about my father, and wonder if my mom had marched in and out of bedrooms until she had me, just like I was doing now. Was it genetic?

  I shouldn’t have gone back to the hot stove at the Down Under that night. It burned to have sex with someone else. I should have called Charlie back after the message he left on my voicemail, the one about understanding, and ‘come on back when you need to’. I was thinking too much about the baby, because I’d started to wonder about it already, and I thought that would run Charlie right out of my life. But I’m starting to realise that he actually would have wanted this baby, because…because he actually would have wanted it with me.

  *

  From behind his back he gets a switchblade. Really. I’m standing there being fucked, still, and I’m looking at this knife, and I’m thinking, oh, come on, this isn’t really happening, someone come and tell me I’ve been Punk’d. But my insides seem to know that’s not going to happen, and I’m starting to feel like I’m going to throw up.

  But there’s no time for that, because what happens is he comes, explosively, and yells out, and slices me open across the line of my pelvis below my belly button. Blood pours out onto his jeans and drips down my skirt, and all I can feel is a flaring whiplash of pain somewhere below my waist. He pulls out of me, zips up his fly, and stands over me, because of course I’ve fallen down. He puts his face close to mine with the knife between them and says, ‘Wanna lose the baby?’ ‘No,’ I whisper. Maybe he’s struck by the awfulness of what he’s just done, or maybe he sees that I’m a person, or maybe he’s just tired of the whole thing, because he walks away.

  *

  I guess the only thing you can do to stay sane in a situation like this is not to think about how you got there. I don’t believe that women should be punished for the bad things they do, but I do believe that there are things I should have done not to end up like this, so I’m not going to think about them. I’m not going to think about how I could have listened better to what my mother told me (and what she didn’t tell me). I’m going to think about how to get out of this one, because it’s really not so different from what’s been happening all along. By knife or by cock, it comes to the same thing a lot of the time. It’s hate that keeps them running to the next one and the next one, and it’s hate turned inward that keeps you running to them.

  Most of them, anyway. Some of them really value what happens when it happens. And it’s somehow not an invasion all of a sudden, because they recognise what it is they’re doing to you, and that means that they’re not doing it to you anymore.

  Mostly I’m going to think about Charlie, and what he will do to this guy when he finds out what he did to me. At least I hope he will do those things. Most of all, I hope that my baby and me will be there to see them.

  The Grief Benches

  Chelsey Flood

  I pass the Grief Benches on my way to work. No one is on them today. Last night I saw a couple there, him wet eyed and her with her head down. She scrunched her eyes tight as I passed and I remember thinking she was a fraud. It’s alright if you don’t want to cry, I thought, there’s no point pretending for my benefit.

  Me and Jack christened the benches when we were walking home from work half drunk. Three benches on a slanted grassy verge with nothing nearby, facing out to sea, a kind of limbo: perfect for grieving. I look at them whenever I pass and wonder what it is about grief that makes people want to get out of their houses.

  All day at work ‘Too Much Too Young’ by the Specials keeps going round my head. Me and Jack heard it as we came out of Boots, after we had spent our last five pounds on a pregnancy test. It made us laugh, hearing it then, it was like we had our own soundtrack.

  Keep a generation – gap. Start. Wearing. A. Cap.

  Now it goes round and round inside my head, followed by that drum beat, which starts to sound more and more like circus music. It still makes me laugh, but it’s a different kind of laughter now, not very close to humour at all. Jack texts me to see how the test went and I can’t bring myself to text back.

  When the Wizened Man shuffles into work, the song disappears. I’m not going to hurt you, he says to my boss and she smiles at him in a way that makes it clear she doesn’t think he could.

  His skin looks hard all over, like cured meat, like the life has been sucked out of him. Like the head of a garlic prawn. As he asks Megan for a drink he looks so hopeful that I don’t know how she can resist. He glances at me, and I look away quickly, but not before Megan notices.

  At our last meeting, she said she thought I’d been encouraging the tramps of the town. She told me not to speak to them anymore while I was working. We need to observe a zero tolerance rule towards them. They must realise they cannot get alcohol from this restaurant. I just nodded, not really knowing what to say to someone who thought that this was what needed to happen.

  Jack loved it when he heard. It was his favourite story for weeks. He even made it into a toast.

  He’d say: Here’s to zero tolerance!

  And I’d say: And here’s to homelessness!

  It didn’t make any sense, but it made us feel original, and it made us laugh.

  I’m not a bad person you know, the Wizened Man is saying to Megan. His eyebrows lift earnestly, dragging the wrinkled face below up and over the old, old bones underneath. Megan lifts a manicured hand to her nose, as if she’s smelling herself to keep him out.

  I just drink too much, he tells her, I drink too much vodka, but I’d never hurt you. I just want a little bit of vodka. He goes as if to move towards her, lifts one foot, but then thinks better of it and places his foot back down.

  Megan takes this as her cue, and raises her voice slightly, tells the Wizened Man he has to leave now.

  I can’t stay out of it any longer. I put my hand on his coarse, fisherman’s jumper and link my arm through his, imagining he’s a well-turned-out old gent in an expensive hotel lobby.

  Allow me to escort you to the door, sir, I say, hoping he’s imagining the same thing and that my manoeuvre seems vaguely elegant.

  Megan stays by the bar, aghast.

  I just wanted to apologise to you two young ladies, he says to me on the way out and the sweet, fermented stink of alcohol fills my nostrils. I smile at him graciously like a well-trained hotel porter, discreetly letting go of his grubby elbow when we’re on the pavement.

  As he tells me about his broken arm and the lads that did it, I try to listen, but I can’t concentrate. I’m trying to understand that there’s a foetus growing inside me, that this foetus could actually become a person living in the world.

  The Wizened Man’s dry lizard lips are moving, saying things I’ve heard a thousand times before, a
nd I’m just thinking what chance has he got?

  I think about him, just born, somebody’s baby. I think about Megan, believing that saving money is more important than giving a thirsty man a little shot of vodka and I feel sad for her, like she’s fallen for a terrible trick. And then I feel sad for myself because I know she’s not the only one.

  I look past the Wizened Man’s head with his dry lips still moving and imagine all the people rushing by us are children. Their faces lift, become more expectant, like they’re waiting to see what will happen next.

  I look back at the Wizened Man, trying to see the bemusement in his eyes as wonder at the beauty of the world rather than surprise at its cruelty. But it’s impossible. As he peers at me, holding the left arm that no longer hangs properly with his filthy right hand, the magic is broken and the people in the street are the same aging, distracted adults they always were.

  I have to go back inside then, to get out of the way of the people on the street, to leave the Wizened Man behind. And I can’t bear the way he hovers by the doorway, saying goodbye louder and louder like he wants to carry on a conversation that we weren’t even really having.

  Megan shakes her head at me and tuts, opens her lipsticked mouth to say something but I walk straight past her to the toilets, lock the door. I grimace ferociously in the mirror, gnash my teeth at myself but I don’t feel any better.