Irenosen Okojie - Butterfly Fish

“It’s nothing,” she said dismissively, folding the dress, her happy expression fading into the silken sea. “Just something I ordered from the catalogue. I’m going to order those dungarees you liked soon. Change that t-shirt, it has hair oil on it.”

“Can I see your dress on?” I asked. “It looks nice.”

“Later baby, I have to take care of a few things first. Please change that shirt!” she hollered before disappearing into the sitting room, the package tucked under her arm.

Later, I watched her try on the dress in her bedroom. It fit perfectly. We both stood inside our reflections before the finger printed mirror. Then I left her perched on the edge of the bed, unzipping. Her fingers skimmed the pulse on her neck as if contemplating throwing it to her mirror image. We didn’t talk about the half naked man whose deep laughter rumbled in the cracks of our house. I didn’t confide I’d told my teacher God was my father. And that he left ink footprints on creaky wooden floors and pale paper skies and could fly a model plane left-handed while the engine noise sputtered in his chest. We didn’t talk about the silence at our backs rising, catching secrets in its colourless, shapeless trap. We avoided discussing the white pills she took at night sometimes. To help make mummy sleep she’d said. We skirted around the debris in our beds, shoes, and the most random of places and the signs of her secret life; ticket stubs to a show, lace underwear, wine corks rolling off the glass table into the echoes of something passing.

The week Mrs Phillips sent a concerned letter about me home; I bought an orange yoyo using money I’d won from a dare. It had a long white string, flashed bits of red light unexpectedly, like a torch. A quirk I liked. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d sit at the top of the stairs flicking my yoyo, watching God creep into our photographs on the hallway walls, telling my mother lies, draping his arm around us lovingly, illuminated by the silent yoyo light.

In the following weeks, the gulls from Chesapeake made random appearances. One repeatedly smacked its beak against the jar of stones on the kitchen countertop till a crack like a small scar appeared in the glass. Another having lost its head in the doorways of the flat continued scuttling headless through rooms, in search of rising ripples. One more dangled from the living room ceiling, its white convex chest swelling and sinking as the sounds of traffic spilled from its beak; tires screeching, the bleep of lights turning green, the low grumble of an engine overheating. I knew it was Anon behind it all. She was building an army, showing me she could command whatever she wanted. She was preparing them for something, laughing mockingly as panic rose inside me. I knew something dark and sinister was breathing in the flat, her hands embedded inside it, her ventriloquist doll.

Sometimes, I stuck my head out of the bedroom window to breathe another air, escape the din, or I’d turned the radio up loudly to have the false company of others, hoping to lose her in some frequency I’d attracted turning the knobs or that she’d be sucked into the static, reduced to tiny grains sparking malevolently in an electric blue kingdom somewhere. But she began to talk through the radio, interrupting heated debates and news items: You are nothing. Nothing good will ever happen in your life. You ruin everything. Why do you even exist? The gulls became more twisted. One sported a mangled neck. The gull from the ceiling came down, the left side of its breast gone, only darkness spun there when they gathered at my feet. They listened to her talking on the radio, growing in stature from my misery.

It was after one am. The sound of the tap dripping in the kitchen seeped into my brain. Outside, a can tumbled on the road; tires left tracks in the mouths of the odd person wandering in the cold. Green light of the 7/11 shop sign across the street coloured my vision. I lay sprawled on my bedroom floor, clutching the neck of a bottle of rum. Anon had her arms around me, her mouth orange in the light. Her lips moved but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. My right eye throbbed. A small, rum sky in the bottle threatened to shatter the glass. Anon’s mouth kept moving silently. My limbs were too heavy to find the words she’d left imprinted on my skin, already dissipating in the feverish sweat on my forehead. I watched her moist, pink tongue moving in the dark, wondering about all the things it had collected.

I stood in the corner of my own peripheral vision, listening to footsteps crunching on branches scattered on a trail, the demented cry of a panicked bird in the sky, what sounded like a shovel sinking into the ground. A hole expanded, the earthy smell of recently damp soil lingered, mocking laughter rose, faint, accented voices waned. There was the rustle of clothes, a man grunting and the pain in his limbs becoming mine. Anon’s mouth was a burning sun. The tap’s steady drip had slowed to a stutter. I shut my right eye to rest it. The left continued to flicker above small things coming over the horizon. Somebody had taken the time to dig a hole for me somewhere, a deep hole wide and big enough to store all my tattered belongings.

All you have to do is fall. Anon instructed. Let go. It will be better for you .

Her hand tightened on my wrist. I sat in the hole, one glazed eye watching the bottle and the drunken gulls orbiting above.

Rangi and I spent the next few weeks in our own bubble, having debauched sex and numbing our bodies to the things we couldn’t talk about. We slipped into a routine of sorts. Some evenings, I’d turn up at his door with weed or skunk from a dealer I knew who sold drugs out of his ice cream van, sucking red ice-lollies during transactions. I knew the weed probably made me more paranoid but I couldn’t do without it for long spells. Once, I thought I was trapped in Rangi’s chest while we fucked on the staircase.

Another time, we did it on the small veranda off the bedroom. I was so high; I was convinced we’d fallen over the bars, tumbled down onto the kerb naked. Only I didn’t feel the drop or landing, just my hands in the turnings of silver alloy wheels, exhaust pipe smoke spilled from my mouth as I came, head lolling between road markings. Rangi liked to drink but if he was an alcoholic he was a functional one. There were bottles stashed everywhere in his flat, as if he didn’t want to have to go all the way to the kitchen if he started craving. Seductive bottles of gin, vodka, rum and wine were kept in the bottom tray of the bookshelf in the hallway, a bedroom drawer, the floor of his wardrobe. I’d sit in his minimal, faux black marble kitchen, blowing smoke into the air while he cooked. I was convinced he might have been slipping something into the meals he prepared but didn’t care enough to ask him.

His fast hands fascinated me, chopping meat or delicately deboning fish as though it were an art, fish eyes gleaming between us on the countertops. A shrunken spliff in the corner of my mouth, I felt comfortable watching him butcher things, the blade thumping loudly on the chopping board. Sometimes, he bought whole chickens, gutting their insides himself, their heads spinning in the blade. He’d dump their intestines inside jars of water, a secret smile on his face before depositing them in the fridge. He told me that once as a boy he’d gutted a pig; its last cries had haunted him through the following winter. Once or twice, he’d heard his parents repeating those cries at the dinner table and saw the pig trying to rear its head in their faces.

Now and again we ventured out. He took me to a screening of Harmony Korrine’s Mr Lonely in a dinky little pub slash cinema in Bow called The Hovel . The bar was upstairs and the cinema downstairs. It was properly kitschy. The confectionary seemed to have been doused in beer, cigarettes and stale confessions. The lighting was subdued. A scrawny, pockmarked ticket attendant with grey eyes and sallow skin handed us our tickets with sweating hands. The toilet seat had collapsed and it didn’t always flush. There was one small screening room with red velvet seats that snapped shut when you stood up. The din from the bar seemed contained yet uncomfortably close. As if people would fall through the ceiling and land in the aisles, mid conversation about their dog’s broken leg, the stubborn child they had or how the jukebox’s selection of songs was pretty limited.