The last ugly man

I got in a car with an ugly man once and never got back home. Never told that story before either. I don’t think it matters much. Nobody came looking and mum, rolled in her clammy carpets with pork-chop fingertips and yellow eyes, right where I left her, never noticed, I suppose.

My ugly man took me out on a highway built with rickety stilts, tall enough to look back at all the villages like mine twinkling the way puddles do at night.

The ugly man’s money haircut and crinkled shirt, rolled-up sleeves and hot-pink vape. He never looked at my missing leg, but he said, Jodie, do you want to run a marathon? And I said no, and he said, Good.

I said, Are we really going to London?

He said, London, Paris, Rome, wherever you want.

I said, What about Edinburgh? And he said, Hmm, you might need both legs for that one. Hills for miles. Then he laughed as if it was funny. Chlorine and beer on his breath. I didn’t mind.

We didn’t go straight back to his apartment (he didn’t call it a flat). We went to a cocktail bar near King’s Cross where they bring nuts for free, and he ordered for me without asking. I was wrapped in a sticky shirt, and my unwashed hair. My car-arse, and the pimples on my chin. These jagged, sharp mirrors all around where my chin sticks into my chest and my pointy bruised knees jutting into one another, like I can’t hold a pose. Can we go back to yours or something?

Of course, he says. We’re close, but let me show this first, it’s got real blood in it, my friend confirmed it and he works in Westminster.

I get drunk enough to smile, and I ask for some of his nuts, and well, then there’s the rest.

Three years later, I don’t eat anymore, it’s behind me. I’m pulling my earrings until they bleed and clutching diamonds in my pocket. I’m in Shadwell, I think, and it smells different from our old apartment in North London. My foot sticks to the pavement, and high-rise concrete blocks loom over you with all their little lights spotlighting and spilling. I’ve moved to a flat here, all by myself. This is where I live now.

I limp with my suitcase over sleeping addicts and scurry up concrete stairs in case they wake up. I sweat so much these days, even my elbows sweat.

These girls I’ve moved in with look sick: half-house dressing gowns, thick eye-bags and cigarettes. We sit around the table for ten minutes of silence before the messiest girl says, Welcome to the flat. I’m Elena. You’re Jodie, right?

I guess, I say.

Do you smoke weed, ‘Jodie I guess’?

I shrug.

We have a balcony for that, Elena says.

Do you do ket? I say.

I knew it. Do you sweat too? I’m like a pig, and it’s winter.

I quit, I say. I’m done. I’m clean two days, and the third time’s the charm so.

Are you sure? I’ve got a few grams upstairs.

Our hands spread out on the table and we embrace each other’s eyes.

When the next girl comes in, she comes with music. She bursts and sags and lights the room with four tote bags and hurls them onto the table. Then she sees me and flings her hands in the air. Oh my God! You must be Jodie right? I’m Joanne. We have the same name, almost. How cool is that? Elena calls me Joey, like a baby kangaroo. She says, I like your leg. Amazing. Don’t they cost a lot? Is it okay getting up the stairs and stuff?

A hollow tip-tap on my knee. She says, It feels so real, like plastic real, not flesh real. I want one.

Really?

Kind of. If it works, that’s all that matters, right? Have you ever been to Edinburgh? It must have been tough there, if you did. I think they do a marathon there too. Can you imagine?

Joanne doesn’t smoke weed either, Elena says. She just acts like she does. Then she turns to Joanne and says, Jodie’s on ket too.

Oh gosh, another one. Bad habit, Jo two. I’m kidding! I don’t mind. It’s the least harmful drug, right? Bar weed. Elena does ketamine too, but it just makes her relaxed for a change. Girls, when are we getting out of here? New flat warming?

Six hours later, on the way to the pub, freshly showered with clean clothes. I own. Both of the girls ask if I need a hand getting down the ‘druggy stairs.’ When I say no, they both say, Good.

Joanne says, I can barely carry myself, and Elena brushes her fingers on the small of my back anyway. I say I feel like getting drunk tonight, and we all touch heads and mesh up our hair.

Six months after moving in with Elena and Joanne, the ugly man who took me in the car and made me live with him for three years, he took a fist to the door, and he called out for Elena. All three of us dozed over the kitchen table, and I run my index finger through the line of dust like I was painting in sand. I tell them I’ll get it, then I go to the door to open it, and then I close it, and lock it.

I spin back to the table like a ballerina. I say, Girls, my ex is here.

Is he cute? Elena asks.

I dunno. He asked for you. Why don’t you go answer.

Your ex? Elena asks. She strains to her feet and yawns. Is he cute? She asks again.

You tell me.

Is that him knocking?

I don’t know, I say.

The thuds on the door are loud enough to tremble the glasses in the sink. It’s a high-speed railway or an international flight. I take Joanne’s hand and squeeze it, and I tell her, If I was a bird, I’d be a sparrowhawk.

I always saw you as a flamingo.

Fuck you.

Fuck you too. Flamingos are beautiful, girl. The fuck is that noise?

That tiny noise, or maybe a huge one, I can hear blood maybe, if blood has a noise, I don’t know. I say, My ex does this sometimes, sorry.

Elena comes back into the kitchen and says, Girls, my ex is here.

She turns to me and says, Is that what you meant?

I get up and waddle to the kitchen door, and I turn the lights off, and then we all sag while he knocks. I say, Bitch, that’s my ex.

Elena says, Can we not for a second. Can you both sober up. Didn’t this guy fuck us both up?

I bury my head into the table sand and pull my hair into my mouth and gag on the words, Just like mine, I say! And I smack the table with my hand.

The banging on the door stops.

Elena says, What was his name?

I tell her Ugly Man’s name, and his shirt and his hair, and the way the hairs on his arms did what they did, and the way he smelled like a swimming pool, and she says, Stop. I say, He talked about what music I liked and how I should give Blondie a try, because he’s in touch with his feminine side and I’d love it.

I said stop.

He didn’t buy me clothes or anything. He told me who I should be until I couldn’t be anything for either of us.

Do we have the same ex?

All three of us go quiet, and there’s nothing.

Elena says he’d dated her while I lived at his place, in his place, dressed up all night and chewing polished wood all day, and all I can remember was the night before. I tell her about purple lines on the ceiling and how he breathed, like huh huh. I tell her about that one time, where I got all dressed up, and he looked at me like huh huh, and we didn’t ever go out.

I told Elena that he put on a tie for me, and she said he met her in one.

Huh huh, I say.

How long?

I say we just broke up, and she says, Motherfucker.

I look into the earthy table and draw a hole big enough to see a picture of a tiny neon pub in my own village and my yellow mother and small-town dates. I run my finger along the lines of each one slowly and deliberately, and I think of swimming. If I could pick one man who remembered my name, then they’re all stuck under my nails.

Elena says, Do you think he’s coming back?

Joanne drools on the table. I lean all the way over and wipe something from her face.

I guess he’s already here, I say.

Want to get rid of him?

Joanne says, into the table, What if he’s not so bad?

One week later, Joanne butts in on me and Elena wriggling fingers along the kitchen table. She says she used to be a star, and she never thought about her friends back home. But when she did, it made her want to be a star again. She says, I never told this to anybody, but I get so tired. I don’t know what to do, because everything is tiring. Maybe I can die instead, but I’m too tired to do it. Are you guys on drugs?

Elena wheezes so loud it makes me laugh, and Joanne stomps her foot and asks if she can have some.

I get so tired too, I say. It took me years to think about life, and then here’s life and when I think about it I want to close my eyes.

I close my eyes real tight.

Joanne says, Imagine how good life would be in this instance if you were sober and you appreciated what I’m telling you.

Maybe you wouldn’t tell us if we weren’t on drugs, Joanne says.

It’s around the same time Ugly Man comes back with wire cutters, or whatever the fuck people use to break locks or cars. I say wire cutters because that’s what Joanne yells after nobody answers the door.

Elena’s already got a knife, and she’s talking in whispers. She says, I swear if you guys ever got the fuck off drugs. She ducks by the oven and holds the knife out, prepared. I guess.

The door opens, and Ugly Man’s voice says, ‘Girls,’ and it’s so stupid, but my heart gets so fucking icy I swear I sobered up.

He walks past the kitchen, and I see the same sweaty shirt that drove me down the highway in a dream.

Is this real? Joanne says.

I don’t think it’s real.

He would have walked into the kitchen with a knife. He’d have waved it close to my neck, then Elena’s neck, and then Joanne’s neck. He’d have got on his knees and cried, snot on his neck and chin, and told us he meant everything. Then he’d have leapt up and thrust his knife towards us. He’d look at Elena and wail, then he’d turn and say, ‘You were the best thing that ever happened to me, because when I saw you I changed the way I think.’

He’d have lunged at me, and I’d have whacked him over the head with my false leg, and he’d lie there unconscious on the kitchen table as the sirens came. Us three, we’d hug and see him getting dragged off into whatever fate awaited him.

Imagine rich men could do this.

Maybe he never really came back at all, and it’s weird because when I think about that, I’m on this rickety motorway getting away from it all, and all I thought about was chlorine and beer and blood and maybe the rest of my life.