Still Dead
by Darren Francis

Streets gush with rivers of rain. Nuclear trains rumble through the night. All is well. I sing for dead lovers, cleave woundings into my arm. Never alone, I surrender my hands, glory at the blood that runs down to pool at my palm, over life-lines and between fingers. Switch out. Resume reading my email. My path lies with the beasts.

‘You don’t feel real?’ Jill, a one-week stand, retorts. Heft-limbed, neatest of faces. ‘What could be more real than sex? Two bodies together? And working? And friends? Watching telly? Moaning about how crappy telly usually is? Going for a drink? Getting lost in music? What more do you need than that?’

    ‘What more do I need? How long have you got?’

    ‘Forget how long I’ve got. What do you see when you close your eyes?’

I met Louisa at a Nick Cave gig, and we lived together for three months. She was the first other cutter I knew. Angora and fake animal prints. Swallow tattoo on her left shoulder-blade.

    ‘I am a kitten,’ she said.

    ‘A sex kitten?’

    ‘No, just a kitten.’

Louisa had money. I sat watching the walls, her room scented with lemongrass, waited for her to come back from work. Picked my nails and smoked my cigarettes, stared with disregard at my body.

Our sex was violent. She’d prod and push me into whatever shapes and positions occurred to her, whichever best gave her game. My fingers tracing the whorls of her pubis, the tuck of her navel, the scimitars of her lips. She so arrogant when aroused, but I don’t think Louisa liked sex that much. She knew its possibilities, that it was or could be the perfect analogue of love, that whatever one held onto and approximated as love could be replicated as sex. Good or bad. Cloying or casual or tight as catgut, intoxicated or indifferent. My body there, and hers too, she utterly shaven and smooth with sweat and freckles.

    Louisa was the first other cutter I met. For her, it was a thing to be used. An affirmation that she was different. If she cut, she wanted people to know about it. Gone midnight once, she screaming ‘take all of it, take all of me, take me to pieces.’ But I could only watch her; she standing in a bath half-filled with soapy water, pale arms turning to tiger-stripes under the methodical slash of her blades. ‘Aren’t you going to do something?’ she screamed. But what could I do?

    ‘I sometimes worry that I’ll never feel any kind of intensity outside sex,’ she told me later, sat on the bathroom floor, the solitary shadeless bulb making blatant light of walls, bath, sink, her. Her clothes folded so precise on the toilet seat beside her, as if she’d taken them off before going to bed and left them ready for the following morning. All things she did - the way she carried her body, the way words parted her lips, the way she held a beer can or a coffee cup or a blade - carried with them an air of deliberation, as if her entire life had been a conscious build up to each sequential moment as it unfolded.

Ten years on from Louisa. I sit in my flat, arm a mess of bleeding, listen to Patsy Cline. Walking After Midnight. I smoke a cigarette. Stub the butt. Gulp down my anti-mad pill with a mouthful of beer, sugar of fermented hops masking its acrid taste. What shall I do, now and next? Squares of sunlight on walls and floor, squares of sunlight over me and fading. Bye bye squares of sunlight. When do I cut? Are the parameters of my cutting fixed? Perhaps. I cut when I miss the world that presses in around me. Know that affiliation or blithe attachment is decay. Move on, with diligence. Move on.

‘I don’t know how you can fancy me,’ Louisa said.

    ‘Why?’

    ‘Because I’m fat and ugly and my tits are too big. I’m a bloated psycho bitch.’

    She pulled her knees in tighter, stubbed out her cigarette. A roll of belly slipped out from her control. Sometimes Louisa bathed two or three times a day, as if her body would melt into water like sleep.

    ‘Do you want to fuck me again?’ she said, and smiled, put on a Pixies album.

I’ve been getting very forgetful of late. I might have mentioned that. It’s probably due to the pills. I wasn’t particularly forgetful before, and I recall reading that such symptoms can be side-effects of the medication. There’s a certain irony in the fact that the pills make me absent-minded, which means that sometimes I forget to take them.

Standing by the lean and filthy Thames. Sun making for the horizon. I stub out a cigarette, light another minutes later, in need of additional nicotine. World without end. Occult turn of tides and shivering leaves. Not proper trees, just city trees. Pigeons flapping grey and shitting. Sun still in my sky but in some other sky as well. Not my sky, not a sky I can claim as mine, the mine I can touch and suck into, through my pores and mingling with the cells of me. Not my sun. Somebody else’s sun.

    I make contracts with myself. Here’s an example: If I get home and Jill has left a message on my ansaphone, I’ll not cut tonight. If she hasn’t, I will cut. To cut, or not to cut, has nothing to do with her. ‘Do I cut tonight, or not?’ I ask myself, don’t think I’m in any fit state of mind to make that decision right now, don’t know what criteria I should employ to make the assessment. So I defer it elsewhere. Somebody or something else can make it for me. Future closing itself off from view. Beer, let’s have another.

5am once, I found Louisa on the kitchen floor, sweeping up broken glass, tears fat on her cheeks.

    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I broke your favourite glass. I didn’t mean it. I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve anything.’

    ‘What are you doing still up? I woke up, thought you were sleeping, hours ago.’

    ‘I couldn’t sleep and was thirsty and went for some water and dropped the glass. Then I wanted to use the glass to cut myself up because I’d broken your favourite and I don’t deserve you.’

    ‘Why don’t you deserve me? Of course you deserve me.’

    ‘You say that so easily. So fucking easily. It doesn’t work like that, though,’ she sputtered, pacing the room and looking for things to throw. And I couldn’t help but see sexy in the tension of her limbs. Two days before, she’d found a piece of paper which read, in my handwriting, ‘She loves me to the point of suffocation.’ ‘Is this about me?’ she asked. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m just your fucking abortion,’ she said, and we fought then, too. Her mouth squeezed into a hard pink line. She hit me and I hit her back, she shouted ‘misogynist, woman-hater’, ran to the bathroom. She'd have loved a bruise on her face, I thought after, so she could say to her friends ‘there, see, see what he does.’ I, too, had no bruise. Hug, not fight, I always worried, and besides there seemed little else I could do with her. She back from the bathroom and my arms around her, into the bedroom and we lay on the bed; there, in the pool of her defenses, of her sadness. My body such clay as I reached out to the bookshelf, took down a volume and we turned the pages together; An Encyclopedia Of Things That Never Were. She loved that book.

‘It’s so cool to be on antidepressants these days,’ my friend Matilda says, ‘everybody’s doing it. Even my mum and my kid sister. Most of the people I went to Uni with are on them. And the doctors don’t care, they’ll dish them out to anybody who asks. But maybe they understand it more than I’m giving them credit for. The doctors, I mean. They know it’s a fashion thing. A lifestyle choice.’

    As it was for me, as I try to explain to her, before giving up and copping off with somebody instead. Probably Jill. The lifestyle I choose is simple, its fashions direct and to the point. I want to be able to get up for work in the morning, go to work, come home, eat, pass the evening, go to bed, and repeat. I want to be able to function.

I once made Louisa stand in front of the bathroom mirror. She bruised like a messed up thing. Big body making shivers. Limbs of scabs and hairline scars.

    ‘Look at yourself,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’

    ‘I can’t do this. It feels bad.’

    Looking in the mirror too, me her lover. I ran a finger up the torso she held tight in fucking, the arms she used for hugging, the lips she thrilled at in kissing. Could never shave without missing some. Felt more like a shaky child than anything approaching adult.

    ‘I’m getting cold,’ she said. ‘Throw me that tee-shirt.’

    ‘Just a minute.’

    ‘Look, I’m getting goosebumps.’

    And she pulled a tee-shirt over herself; mine, Swans, black and baggy to her thighs, then walked out of the room. I wanted her to tell me all the things that ever hurt her; instead we opened some beers and discussed favourite serial killers, a trick my father taught me. Wanted to open my veins, a way of being open for her, wanted to stand her in front of the mirror every day until she accepted that big women are sexy, too.

I admire my blades. I respect their power. Not a power they have over me, more a power that is latent within them. A part of me says that I shouldn’t need to cut. I know that. I‘m not stupid. Another part of me says that there’s no reason why I shouldn’t cut. I oscillate in the dichotomy. Words are only thoughts, caught in the process of movement. Much can be yielded in the veneration of a leaf, of a second, of a blade.

I didn’t cut when I was with Louisa, alone or in her company; faced with the frankness with which she approached it, her blatancy, I couldn’t bring myself to.

‘I was on Prozac for over a year,’ my friend Jess says. ‘At first I couldn’t think bad thoughts. After a while I couldn’t think at all.’

Louisa was sectioned. I got home one evening to our stale rooms, and to a message on my ansaphone. She’d named me as next of kin, which I found a bit odd, since I’d dumped her, mad at her madness, and hadn’t seen her in two weeks. Perhaps she just wanted me to know of her latest escapade; here I am, it‘s cool and bloody, where is my mind, you’d like it here. I know I‘d have done the same for her, if she’d not scared me so.

    But, she was sectioned. What facts are there? Apparently she’d been to see her doctor for one thing or another, something banal, a smear or some such, she’d got tired of sitting around and tried to set light to the waiting room before slicing herself up in the presence of an almost full reception.

    Louisa, go for it.

    I went home, stared at the thread-bare laces of my boots, didn’t know what to do. Looking back at the rooms through which we’d moved, it seemed I could barely have been there. It could have been anybody, that comforted and hugged and strove to love Louisa. Did we love? I think so, but don’t know if I feel the evidence.

    City adrift under a smooth blur of rain. I catnapped in order to dream. Woke up late with only a few hours of daylight left. Masturbated to nothing in particular. Wondered where our bodies end. Ransacked my mind for anything. Rubbed my sleep-rimmed eyes. Spent five minutes trying to remember what I intended doing. The rain-soaked window distorted the view outside. Buildings became grotesque shapes, streetlights balls of fire. I smashed a glass, drew knives of glass down my arms. The blood and the bleeding left me clean. I could sleep then, slept the sleep of one utterly at peace with all creation. Didn‘t worry for Louisa. The tucks and folds and curves of her, the form I held and caressed and entered and held briefly as holy, but which she only despised. Rain making nails on the window. Blood quickening on my arms. Silence a long way off. There are always other lovers, other bodies; to conquer, and fuck, and forget in. I don’t know where Louisa is now. I logically assume that she’s dead.