Octavia

Possession

She woke up, dry cottonwool mouth, scum coating her tongue and creepsticking over her teeth, to perfect, pert-rounded D cups. Inching her fingers under the bandages, not even the lemon juice sting of the stitches (where they'd snipped off her nipples to move them higher) could stop her from smiling. 'Mine,' she cooed, as she drifted back into a post-anaesthetic sleep in which her bed curtains came alive and swayed like Greta Garbo, 'All mine.'

But not quite all hers, since her boyfriend, all designer suits and bad hotel bars, had bought them for her: and he fully intended to enjoy his investment. 'Swollen,' he said appreciatively, the first dinner out afterwards. 'And that's a new dress too' (strutting chaffinch proud of his observation). 'It's nice. Different.'

It was different, and in the weeks that followed, as the scars faded to vicious, eyegouge red, she bought more and more clothes, in styles and colours and - is that FRINGING? - that she never would have chosen before.

Then one night after he came he leant over her to flick on the radio before curling an arm predatorily around her as Dolly Parton sang of a voice as soft as summer rain - and suddenly yelped back.

'What the fuck's the matter with you?' he flinched.

Many answers available, but she didn't understand.

'You're panting like a bitch on heat' he stated, in tones disgusted.

'What? No, not at all.'

She knelt beside him, smiled silly sweet love, and breathed slow steady against his neck. When he fell into a petulant wounded sleep, she lay on the floor, and watched her tits hammer hard up and down, triple, four times as fast as her heart. She put her hands on the nipples, and felt nothing.

Two days later, getting dressed, she scurried to the bathroom for her hairbrush, quietly so as not to wake him, and didn't recognise the rhinestone-encased tits in the mirror. She decided to ignore them.

Two weeks on, her eyes dead pigeons, she sat opposite her surgeon.

'Please - please - I want, I need to know. Where did the implants come from?'

Flipping through the file and then he smacked it down on the desk and 'Ms X, you were offered counselling..'

'Please.' she said, desperation etched through her voice. 'I - I don't know me any more.' She looked down helpless at the malevolent mounds, today bound in a stonewash denim cut-off gilet. 'He doesn't - no one talks to me any more. No one sees... They - they OWN me.'

'They're beautiful,' he said possessively, softening as he hardened. 'Any girl would be proud of them' and was leaning forward in his chair when a nurse burst in and he was hauled out to a truncated rhinoplasty emergency.

Left alone, she snatched viper quick at the file, eyes flicking through her history, and then on to the history of the silicone sacs. Her tits heaved angrily, defiantly perky. Country and western starlet... young... eyes of emerald green...stabbed to death by her boyfriend at a Dolly Parton concert...

The papers slipped from her hands as she fell forward onto her knees. Torn between the need for a priest and a sports bra, she began to cry, as she beat feebly at herself with flailing clockwork arms. 

Her tits didn't budge an inch.

Outlet

She didn't have a nickname at school; 

Which says it all about her time there, I think.

But now she's the Black Widow of Kent. 

My dad you see sends me clips 

From the Gazette that 

He thinks will interest me

(He's wrong - I hate thinking outside Zone 2).

The first time she married, it was a surprise; 

A dying patient, she the nurse;

May-November wedding, a Barbara Cartland special.

I piled up my memories of her -

Beige -

And moved on.

The second wedding, and again

An older man, cancer, she

The Florence Nightingale, his

First family disapproving;

Made me go back, look up all

Her entries in my memory index.

A flash of her crying once behind the toilets;

And her eager, freckled face.

Marriage three, again and again

And my dad reported murmurings at the post office.

I facebooked a school friend, still in Kent,

Fat with babies and bloated hope

And she was vitriolic, vicious in a way

That reminded me how at school she'd slashed at her own arms

With a burning cigarette.

"That murderous bitch', she typed:

"Preying on old dying men, who

Should know better. PS Pregnant again."

I couldn't (could never) let it lie.

The conflict between those pudgy white cheeks

And this Joan Collins, Anna Nicole bit hard; and so

I contacted her direct.

Back in the faded grey of my home town

That has never recovered from Nazi bombs

We met for coffee

(I was surprised that they even HAD coffee shops there

Times Have Changed).

She was pasty still; the same

Nervous smile. Husband five had just died;

Black suited her.

We talked, she chattered, the time was up;

Now or never - 'What happens?' I asked.

She looked at me helpless. And then, as I left

"It's so good to actually have something to feel sad about"

She said. 

For I have sinned

There are some secrets that shouldn’t be blurted out in times new roman and be published now, recorded forever on the web. There are some that are soft and muffled, that should be whispered into powdery earth gleaming with earthworms, or scratched with lilac ink on yellowed parchment and buried in the eaves of an abandoned house, bricked up against the air.

Sometimes I read blogs and then the related blogs and the comments and it’s like being hit in the face with a left hook of rape and a right of child abuse and a jabbing cut of divorce and I am bruised and battered yet reel on my feet and suck on half an orange for more. Ambulance chasing from the comfort of my room and I think, I would never do that, never share that saphenous vein. I don’t even go to the gym, all those people sweating in front of strangers is unseemly to me. In the palace in Copenhagen I once wandered the exercise room of a long-dead princess, where she would dance physical jerks every morning, using strange rubber bands that now dangle like thick 50s stockings on the line; and no one, not the smallest scullery mouse, was allowed to see her until she had bathed and powdered.

 

I see the need for confession: I converted from nothing to Catholicism a few years ago, and maybe that's why, to escape the harsh blue lighting of a life with no priests and no wise women and fading family ties. But the web isn’t the answer. If you confess to the web it responds, it files, it shares - and all this after it forces you to tell all in clean spaces and staggered words and thought and rigidity. Even PostSecret is a forum, an art. 298 million hits! I don’t want 298 million people to know my secret. I just want to be able to whisper it into air, to set it free from within my heart and get it – out.  

 

Teenage babysitting and I used to confess to get them to sleep, whispering about how I hated Helen Grant at school in words they didn't understand while Disney blared. But the addiction started on hospital visiting, when my dad waved me away so he could hold his own dad as they cried, and me stumbling away and there he was, the most beautiful young man, carcrash coma. And I pressed my cheek against his and told him everything.

 

And now, now there is you.

 

The silver of blunt HB pencils

I tell lies.

I tell lies about the most impalpable things.

I don't tell lies about:

my weight your weight how long I've been waiting

have you ever been turned down for a loan

how many men have you fucked

(up? Oh, HUNDREDS, dear!)

do you have the necessary experience

have you been drinking.

And yet I've never answered, truly,

What my favourite colour is.