When I was 12 there was an after-school writing club that got to use these laptops with a display that showed a whole two lines at the top of a keyboard. Enamoured, I wrote a story that I enjoyed, printed it off and decided that it was a bit... private. So I never showed anyone and hid it in my wardrobe. At some point between then and going to University the story was lost. Naturally, this year, I resurrected it and am attempting to rewrite it.
Here's the first foray.
Something was definitely not right: in
fact I would go so far as to suggest that the feeling suggests something was,
in fact, very wrong. Much as a logical inconsistency throws me out of a dream
no matter how asleep so it is that I was aware enough of something having
changed that I wake and take a quick stock. Before my eyes are open I know this
is unfamiliar, I can feel my heartrate quickening, my breathing is shallower,
faster, standard feelings of fight or flight are swinging into motion – but that’s
the rub. It feels off, wrong, false, unfamiliar. The air sucking in through my
open mouth is moving differently, the sound of it is higher; my heart beats
differently, maybe faster and harder but dulled somehow, as though from far
away. Before my hands are moving I know they are wrong.
Eyes open, take in the light from the
wrong direction: right time of day, morning, but it comes from my right rather
than my left. The sound of my nails against the bedclothes different,
sensations implying… what? Hair on my face, over my forehead, catches my
eyelash – alarm bells ringing in the distance in my mind – and my legs feel… “What?”
Not as loud as I want, groggy, and that’s not my voice, it’s not what I sound
like.
“Honey?” There’s a knock on a door
nearby, the voice is muffled and male. Older, concerned but hurried. “It’s time
to get up, we’ve got a long journey, I know I heard your alarm.”
A hem? On my thighs? Worse, I feel
a dull ache, my stomach roils over itself, and an unusually urgent sense that I
need to be a bathroom now asserts itself. “Uh…” Not my voice, but
definitely my syllable. I said that, I thought it and I said it. It is imbues
with my confusion, my hesitation. So not a dream, not a nightmare. At least,
not like that.
“Just- Bathroom’s free, get yourself
dressed and I’ll see you downstairs for breakfast. Okay?”
Not my bed. Not my sheets. Not my room.
Not my hair falls across not my face as I sit up on not my mattress and look
around. Small box room, light pink colour motif, thin curtains, a white desk by
a chimney breast, a white painted wooden door behind which the voice’s owner
clearly waits. “Breakfast, yeah.” Not my voice carries my words: repetition
working. I hear someone walk away from the door. I’m dressed in a light
coloured fabr- no. My eyes take in the body I see. So, bear with me,
this is a cliché that even I know is a tawdry one and I like a
good cliché. This is not a good cliché.
I stand, there’s a mirror on the back of
the door obscured by a hanging white dressing gown. White is a bad colour for a
dressing gown, I can practically hear my mother saying in my mind, it picks up
all the dirt and grime. “It would need washing far too often,” she said, and I
had to yield to that logic. I didn’t want to be cold between washes. But this
one is clean and almost shining in the morning sun. I take it from the hook,
push my arms through the relevant holes and tie it at the waist, which is too
high, to face the mirror properly.
Looking back is a girl. She’s shorter
than I am expecting against the door and I am remarkably bad at estimation of
measurements. I guess five foot tall. She has brown hair, mostly straight with
evidence of having been tied back I suppose, that falls past her shoulders.
Beneath the white dressing gown, a little too big for her frame, she’s wearing
a nightgown in green with small pink printed flowers in little clusters in a
repeating pattern. She’s got a fringe over her forehead and her hands are
playing nervously with one another at her waist. Barefoot, I can see some
slippers by the bed behind her, and with a pained expression. Maybe she feels
the same warning cramp I do.
She moves her head when I look around,
her brown eyes matching where I’m looking as they dart. She raises her hand to
her face when I do and, yes, that’s what I mean about it being a bad cliché. It
is clear that she is me and I am her. And that cramping. For the avoidance of
doubt this is not what I expected to see in the mirror because it’s not
what I look like in a mirror. I mean, okay, it is now but it’s not…
whatever. I have a choice: dwell on all the myriad sensations (I have a decent
vocabulary, I’ve read a lot of books) or deal with the immediacies. I choose
the latter.
Stepping back, the girl dons the slippers;
one hand holds her stomach as it cramps again, the other reaches for the door.
She seems the same age as me, maybe younger? It’s hard to tell and there are no
context clues leaping out from the wall and no time to look more closely. The
carpet is soft and thick pile, easily better quality than the one at home, and
the slippers feel barely used. Certainly they don’t have the worn moulding to the
girl’s feet that comes from extended wear. And, okay, I’m describing my
thoughts so I’ll stop pussy-footing around: I really need the toilet. As she
walks out onto the landing it occurs that I have no idea where that is. But the
landing is small. A room off to the right, a second door almost immediately
afterward and, then, almost immediately opposite and with the stairs to the
left, a final door. This is white, like all the rest (the walls are a soft
yellow), but looks older and less detailed – a bathroom door if ever I saw one.
Pushing through, it is the bathroom and I
feel immense relief, I spin round and pull the dressing gown out of the way to
sit as I lift the seat cover with my other hand. Oh, the night gown isn’t
trousers, I can’t pull it down. I hitch it out of the way, it’s not
thought-through, I’m in a hurry, and I let the bladder do its thing. I don’t
quite know what I am expecting, but the feeling is not it. I mean, sure, it
feels good to let a full bladder empty, but there’s something else there as
well. Now, I paid attention in my sex education lessons in Science back in Year
7, so I have some inkling that certain things happen as well as a list of
possible symptoms. Not that I ever expected to feel them, in this case quite
literally, in the flesh but here I am and so, huh. I get it. It hurts. And the
feeling, well, down there, is like nothing I have ever known. I simply
don’t know how to put it into words, because I have no point of reference. Oh,
I think, great.
So, to recap: I appear to have woken up
in not my body in not my house living not my life and that body is having a
period. Great, just peachy. Again, I paid attention. I’m not that kind
of 13 year old and I like to think of myself as practical: pads or the other
one. The one that goes in. My mother uses the latter and she stores them in her
bedroom, I know because she’s had me go fetch them for her once or twice in the
past. Little plastic wrapped bullet things, impossibly small, with the same
sort of opening that her cigarette packets have where you grab the red bit and
pull. Behind me is the boiler, there’s a bath by the wall to my left, opposite
the door, and a frosted window there. A shower and some tiling fills the bit
where the boiler cupboard is by the side of the bath, and there’s a sink opposite
me with a medicine cabinet above it, small mirrored door, standard issue.
My business completes, but that other
feeling remains and there’s another cramp. The hissing noise I make through the
teeth and mouth is louder than I intend and sounds almost self-pitying. Maybe
this girl is the same? I don’t know, I don’t recall ever noticing girls being
self-pitying. Hey, I do my best to pay attention and I’m hard pushed to recall
a time any girl I know has been obviously on a period. Like, I assume they talk
to one another about it, but no one talks to me.
I check, it feels really odd, but a quick
wipe (again, I pay attention, I know which way you go to avoid infection) seems
to work for now. The noise of the toilet flush mercifully covers me rifling
through the cabinet over the sink, that girl’s face is flushed now and I’m
certain I can detect an air of panic from the redness in her cheeks and the
ways her eyes are moving. I don’t find any plastic wrapped white bullets, for which
I’m grateful in one sense, and I retreat back to the room I started off in.
Under the window there’s some shelves, mainly books and a couple of teddies; by
the desk there’s a wardrobe in pink and white wood, above the bed there’s some
shelves with doors on them like cupboards but clearly a DIY job.
Where would a girl keep things? She seems to have a room that is far too tidy for my tastes, it’s not right that the floor is clear, that the desk seems unused, that the tape racks are tidy or the books look neatly placed. On the plus side, she’s not a barbarian, none of the spines have been abused but I think she’s maybe taken refinement too far. The wardrobe seems curiously uncluttered, very few clothes on the left side with the coat rack and the shelves on the right seem strangely empty. Midway down, in a small drawer, I find what I’m looking for. I think. Cardboard box, already opened, white folded things inside. There’s a bit with backing paper and a bit without. I can work it out, and I already found underwear. It’s over mercifully quickly. It does nothing to deal with that very odd feeling but it does seem to deal with the immediate problem of making sure this body isn’t leaking fluids everywhere. A sudden thought and I check beneath the duvet – there’s a pair of knickers there with a pad inside, scrunched up and near the wall. Ah, I think I see now, well, at least there’s no laundry just… clearing this up. And I am going to describe that in no further detail. In fact, forgive me, but I’m going to skip ahead to breakfast!