Octavia

Fascinations of my flesh

'My girlfriend's legs are famous,' he always says, his tone sluttishly kissing both sneer and leer. 

'They're in that advert for tights. You know, brand sounds like a parrot. These things' - as his hand scorpion-scuttles up my thighs, angry - 'have been put up in lights, 34 feet high. Piccadilly Circus.'

The addressee, my boy'friend', me, the whole world looks silently at my thighs. 

It was ever thus: the rest of me may be slackbeige nothing, but my thighs, oh they're world beaters. In the school locker room all would stillstiffen like children playing musical statues, cans of Impulse perilously poised, netball skirts akimbo, as cherry chapsticks gaped. And now, frenetic changing rooms shudder to a slow pulse of fascination, and I have to push past mesmerised women, picking my way through their propped-up, half-dressed, devoured battlefield bodies.

No one ever notices my kind, terrified eyes. 

Eve of Saint Valentine

We are a tangle in your sheets.
You a whisper in my hair:
Me a finger in your heart.

Release (it wasn't anything you said)

Happily and in good cheer, I spend my days swollen with yeast-bitter tears. I have retched back so many of these that sadness swills around inside me in the fashion of those pints of water scarfed back after a night out, which slosh uneasily on top of the 2bottlesofwine3ginsandadarkrumandcoke and sway lump heavy like a carrier bag full of vomit.

Resolutely and through necessity I smile on through the worst of things, through death and betrayal and the Thing I Can't Talk About and disease: but my belly strains evermore with this slopping pus. It hurts and I cannot put it down.

And so, when someone addresses to me a comment that has been even airkissed by criticism, I grasp the opportunity to use this as an excuse to sink my nails into my sides, to slash at them with kitty cat claws just so a spurt, a dribble of this sadness can be released and the pressure can drop.

And this, my love, is why I cried when you asked me to wear less of the perfume that sets off your asthma.

Betrayal

Scanning their blog love and my mouth tastes like chew swallowing on my own lungs.

"The lungs of mammals have a spongy texture and are honeycombed with epithelium having a much larger surface area in total than the outer surface area of the lung itself."

And don't tell me just to stop reading. You try it. You try knowing the heartplungtwist is coming and yet looking away in vague disinterest, wondering what's on the telly.

How I thawed

I was walking home after a late shift at the pub. It was cold, snow on the ground and lager breath in my hair. I am too tall for icy pathways, my centre of gravity too high, my movements too tentative; the tips of my fingers were cold froze to the inside of my gloves.

I skithered past the university, shut up with all the students home for Christmas. Turned left towards the library and right at the corner and there was a man knelt weeping in the snow. I stopped. He was yes young and yes goodlooking and yes well-dressed; but his skin was cracked with snot and his tear tracks were frozen slug trails down his blotched face.

Hesitate headlines of murder and rape as I stood hovering beside him.

‘Are you [fading inflection at the futility of the question] okay?’

He looked up myxomatosis-eyed and he was so ripped in pain that I doglegged my gaze. Now I saw flowers shrouded in snow. An avalanched teddy bear. Gift cards slush sunk, with the odd wordphrase bobbing to the surface: ‘never forget’; ‘too young’; ‘rest in peace’.

Three in the car that hit the library wall in the first week of December. The driver over the limit, Malibu-marinated. Her friends not wearing seatbelts. All killed instantly. The Nottingham Post heavy with school photos and tearful quotes of bright futures and blah blah blah.

From down by my feet: 'I can't live without her.'

Compassion realised in a crashtide and I sank down beside him, the cold wet eating through my jeans.

'You knew one of them?' in hushed museum tones.

His eyes snap-focused on mine and guilt fury acid burn.

'I love her. And she's [spat out] left me. She's gone back to [hawking] him. And she's alive, she's not even, even...' One hand conducted shakily over the roadside shrine before his words drowned again.

I took him home, leading him by the hand as if he were a small boy, crunch sliding through the cold biting air. In the flat we warmed our hands on ikea glasses of cheap red wine; he had stopped crying, stopped everything, and when I declared it time to sleep he stepped out of his clothes and curled on his side. We aligned shoulders hips feet, warming each other, and slid into sideways dreams.

It was still cold dark when I felt his cock twitch against my back; his body clutched and his mouth crashed angrily for mine, so my teeth knocked into my lip and bled warm onto our faces. He gut screamed 'Bitch' as he came and the afterward was his hot tears in my hair and his heart hammering against my spine.

When I woke up, he had gone. And the snow had melted.

Absent, I'll follow you with dark fires (alternative ending)

He has left me.

I am good at being broken. I weep. I am hugged by my friends. I dissect his then my then bitch her star signs (I don't believe in horoscopes). My heart drips pus. Berebescu.

And then, the lowest of the low, the most shameful, most out of character: I ask Dear Aunty Internet for advice.

Suggestions and soapy web warmth are immediate. I must talk to my friends. Start an evening class. Take up a hobby! Take up drugs and overdose on his doorstep. And then, a comment by a name I recognise, one of the bosom-clutching 'you guys are so sweet' chthonic purveyors of my excruciation: I must get rid of everything that reminds me of him.

Everything that reminds me of you.

The dustbin lorry comes every Thursday morning, at an hour painful to the hungover. Its grumble rumble stop grumble rumble stop alice-in-wonderlands me, so I hear again my dad proclaiming in theatrical tones 'the DUSTBIN DRAGON is here' as he crouched with me to peer through the letter box at the monster tearing apart the rubbish bags. My Thursday dragon still has the same strong teeth, which clamp and empty the 52-gallon wheelie bins - I read somewhere that 'dustman' charts in the top 10 of jobs earning amputated limbs: the monster gets peckish. Such jaws are surely strong enough to crunch through the things that remind me of you. I plan my destruction. I tell all my friends. They approve: this is healthy.

On the Wednesday night I ceremoniously parade forthback from my flat to the bin by the broken-down fence in the front garden, heaping up the history of us. A half-finished packet of fags (you only smoke when you're drunk). The underwear in which you loved me best: blue silk, and I have to belly bend and throw up at the lustflash of the first time you saw me in it, your softsharp intake of breath, how your eyes fucked me, as you plucked a loose strand and put it in your pocket, 'to analyse later, like in a crime scene'. One of your pens (you always use the same kind). The sheets in which we slept cat-curled and silk stroken. The chart you scrawled me to prove that man really did land on the moon.

I sit on the broken fence and survey the pile. Small; insubstantial; meaningless. Everything every thing an echo. It is cold but I stay sitting, one shoe kicked off, black clothes hanging loose, waiting.

As dawn blots (late, it is winter) I pack everything in the bin, carefully compacting and pushing everything down until something plastic snaps. I swing the lid shut. All our love measures little more than six inches high: there is still plenty of room in the bin.

I hear the brumble of the lorry and it turns the corner in the half dark, stopping outside the big house. Shadows push a bin funereally forward; the dragon's mouth gapes; it clamps pig hard on the plastic and gulps back its contents into the grinding depths. I hear crunched metal masticated as it spits the bin back to earth.

I think of you, of us. I see the way you looked at me. I smell the side of your neck, and taste it on my tongue's tip. I feel your fingers stroketracing the curve of my waist. I think of every thing.

Then I open the bin and climb inside. There is plenty of room. I pull the lid shut over me and wait.