The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Read online

  “Why do you not leave him? Why do you let him do it to you, night after night after night?”

  Multiple red circles of equal sizes appeared over both her cheeks, indicating shame. “God will disown me if I break my marriage,” she said. “That’s what my mother said. And true enough, the one time I tried to leave, it got so ugly, I couldn’t leave the house for a week. I looked like a freak. So, I don’t have a choice. All I can do is show him love and wait for him to learn it too.”

  “So you still love him?”

  She sighed and turned a little bit blue. “Yes. He wasn’t this way when I married him. He was a good man. He became not a good man only after we moved to America. Back in Mexico, he wrote for magazines. He was happy, he had ambition and he wanted to give our family a better life. Then we got here and the only jobs he could get were those in the meat-packing businesses because he can’t write English so good. Meat-packing makes him sad. It makes me sad too. He used to write so beautifully. And he seldom drank.”

  She yawned and all of a sudden, appeared to be struggling to keep her eyes open. “Sometimes, I wish we never came here. I wish nobody…” She yawned again. “...said life in America would be so much better. I wish… sometimes… I wish he would die.”

  She sighed heavily and became quite still right after saying so.

  I counted to thirty, then removed the syringe I’d put into the pocket of my dress before going into Ariel’s room with that cup of dissolved Valium, stolen from Ethel’s extensive stash of course, the dosage of which would be sufficient to produce moderate sedation in a person Gigi’s size.

  After flicking the syringe and squeezing a drop of the liquid out to ensure all the air bubbles within had gone out, I injected its needle into the underside of her upper arm where neither she nor anybody would be likely to notice the dot of a scab that would result from me piercing a needle through her flesh.

  She stirred a little when the needle went in and opened her eyes briefly but that didn’t bother me. I knew the anaesthetic I was injecting into her would block her ability to retain a memory of the image she had seen. She would be flat out unconscious in three seconds and none the wiser later on. That was the beauty of modern medicine.

  Thirty seconds after all the contents of my syringe had gone into her arm, I checked on her extent of consciousness. “Gigi?” I said, loudly enough to wake the average sleeping person.

  No reaction.

  I then shook her body violently. “Gigi! There’s a fire! Wake up! Your bed is on fire, Gigi!”

  Still no reaction. Her rate of breathing barely even changed. It remained constant, calm, just the way I wanted it to be.

  Perfect. The anaesthesia was working.

  I went right for the buttons on the front of her pyjama dress I’d given her to wear and unbuttoned them. She wasn’t wearing a bra underneath and her pale breasts came into sight when I flipped open the sides of the dress, along with two greenish, purplish, yellowish splotches of bruises, slightly above her stomach.

  I ignored the bruises but took a second to observe her breasts. Doing so made me taste paper—my way of experiencing fascination. There was no soap in my mouth now that nobody was watching. Just... paper.

  Before Ethel, breasts were mere mounds of flesh to me. A feature of the females of our species. After Ethel, they seemed to be so much more. Every breast reminded me of Ethel’s and every thought of Ethel’s reminded me of all the sights, sounds and sensations I’d encountered when they’d been right in front of my face. I was becoming more like Lilly with every passing day at Northridge. How ironic.

  I curled my hands over Gigi’s sleeves and was about to yank her dress down her shoulders when, very suddenly—

  A doorbell rang.

  Baker’s doorbell. Ringing from the floor below.

  I buttoned the pyjama dress on Gigi all the way up to her neck at once.

  It was Ethel. Covered in pink and gold sparkles when she said ‘hi’, beaming from ear to ear and blushing like an overheated jogger too.

  “Hi?” I had not been expecting this. “What are you doing here? Who’s watching Daniel if you’re... standing here?”

  “He’s asleep, he’ll be fine. Can I stay with you tonight? I brought my toothbrush.” She held it up for me to see then pushed herself past me without waiting for my consent.

  “But Gigi’s here. Recovering.”

  “I’ll be real quiet, I promise.” She winked and promptly removed her dress, exposing her very naked body to my eyes.

  I shut the door behind us at once. I knew the neighbours would be able to see us from their windows and I could only pray they hadn’t been loo—

  Ethel rammed her mouth into mine and began pulling at the zipper at the back of my dress.

  “I haven’t showered yet—”

  “Since when have I ever minded?” She yanked down my dress and began sucking on me in a way that made apples and orangish fog appear around me all over again.

  It felt one hundred percent fabulous but I pushed Ethel off me all the same. “I need a shower first. Please. I won’t feel like doing more unless I take it.”

  Ethel immediately placed a palm on my forehead. “Are you not feeling well?” Brown squiggles appeared over her eyes as she spoke. I guess she never saw that coming.

  “I’m fine. I’ll be right back. In the meantime...”

  I went to a drawer at the end of the living room and pulled out the bunch of clothes Baker told me to mend a week ago. They were shirts, trousers and t-shirts he destroyed in the course of work or hiking that were now my responsibility to make good again. “Help me with these?” I got out the sewing kit and handed it all to Ethel too. “I’ll reward you very well later on if you do.”

  “Oh really? Then I guess I better do a very, very good job.”

  “You better.” I took her in my arms, gave her the long, wet type of kiss I knew she adored, then sat her down on the sofa. “And get all the windows and curtains closed too. You know why.”

  “Can’t wait,” she said, looking a little like a lamb with the mound of damaged clothing covering the middle of her skinny, naked body.

  I agreed, then ran all the way up to Ariel’s bedroom, locked the door behind me and raced to finish what I started, silently.

  Chapter 27

  21 July 1975, Monday

  An hour later, I was done. And showered. I went back down the stairs in my bathrobe, with a towel draped around my damp hair like a scarf would be and found Ethel still on the sofa I’d left her on, humming while putting thread into the waistband of one of Baker’s shorts, looking every bit like the perfect housewife as she did so.

  She had turned Baker’s six-speaker hi-fi radio on and coming from it was a song I’d never heard before—a sweet, young-sounding woman singing about love being only meant for beauty queens.

  “I didn’t know they allowed queer women on the radio,” I said as I sat myself down next to her. Now that I’d finished everything I needed to do with Gigi, I was feeling a great deal more relaxed and was even starting to taste whisky again.

  “Why is she queer?” Ethel asked, with her eyes still on the pair of shorts she was mending. She looked as if she had grown to enjoy sewing and wasn’t ready to stop anytime soon. “She’s singing about not being loved by boys, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  When I looked at the radio, I could see pink and gold sparkles on it but also many red circles of equal sizes on both its sides. The aura of love tinged with an aura of shame was obviously there, and only people wanting some form of forbidden relationship ever spoke of love with an aura of shame.

  “Gut feeling,” I told her.

  “Okay... and what does your gut tell you about me then?”

  I observed her staring at me and saw the exact same colours and patterns I could see on the radio. Love, yes, but also shame. Always shame. I felt myself sigh. “My gut tells me you’ve forgotten all about Violet.” />
  A huge beige rectangle joined the party of colours on Ethel’s face. “Hm,” was all she said though. “How is it you seem to know everything about me just by looking at me? Are you psychic?”

  I smiled and tasted whisky. “No.”

  “Gifted? In any way?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you?”

  I shrugged. “Normal. Just like everybody else.”

  I could see she didn’t quite believe me.

  Minutes later, we were both naked on the shag carpet under the sofa, squirming in silence. Ethel was kneeling over me with her thighs touching both sides of my stomach while I had my back flat against the floor with my hand in her and her tongue in my ears. We moved to the rhythm of the high tempo pop song that replaced the pensive song on the radio.

  “I love you, Helen,” she whispered. “I love you, I love you, I love you... I love you!”

  She began to gasp and moan aloud so, despite tasting whisky again, I had to put my free hand over her mouth to dampen the noise. A full hour had passed since I injected Gigi with anaesthetic. It meant the anaesthesia would be wearing off and the risk of Gigi noticing and remembering us in this state was present again. As much as I liked Gigi, I didn’t trust her. It wasn’t personal. I just didn’t trust anybody. Life had taught me not to.

  “Shh. These walls were built real thin...” I took in a deep breath of air to quell my own urge to moan too.

  “I know,” she mumbled under my palm. “We can hear you from our bedroom. And see you too. I watched you... I watched Violet... Ohh!”

  Blood-red fireworks exploded around her again, coming out the depths of her mouth. I knew if I kept on increasing the rate at which I stimulated her pelvic, hypogastric and pudendal nerves via her genitals, those red fireworks would thicken into splotches within three minutes and explode in five. Based on the thickness of the blood-red orange fog in front of me, I estimated I too might be able to reach orgasm in the next six minutes if I stroked myself while working on her, especially if I increased the rate at which I touched myself while her splotches began exploding.

  It sounded like apples to me so I commenced doing so.

  The fog around Baker’s living room got thicker and more red and my breaths became shorter and deeper. I began to sweat and taste sweet apples, but then—

  Sour lemons joined the apples in my mouth.

  Someone was watching! On the left! I turned in the direction of where the taste was most intense in my mouth and saw, to my horror—

  One of Baker’s floral curtains flapping ever so slightly with wind coming through the open window behind it. And behind that window was also—

  A humanoid figure. One I couldn’t quite see the features of because it was too dark out. All I could see was it vanishing two seconds after my eyes landed on it, which told me it moved at the speed of light.

  “Why did you stop? Keep going! Please just keep going!”

  “You missed a window!” I tried to get my hand out of her but she put both hands on my wrist and stopped me from pulling it out.

  “It was hot! Can we please just talk later? I’m so close! Don’t stop now!”

  “Someone was watching us! Through that window you left open!”

  Ethel arched her neck backwards to get a glimpse. “I don’t see anyone. All I see is my own living room and it’s empty.”

  “There was a humanoid figure right outside the window, Ethel! I need to go check it out!” I tried to remove my wrist from her hands but again she wouldn’t let me.

  “It’ll only take a minute! Please! Do it now! Please!”

  Her eyes were all shiny and the splotches in front of her face were at that thickness they would be right before exploding. She was right. She would need only another sixty seconds to reach orgasm if I just kept on going, minutes faster than I would take to verbally convince her to let me go. I decided to consent.

  The moment I started up again, Ethel began gasping. On the sixtieth second afterward, she was shouting in whisper, “Yes... yes… yes! Yesss!” The splotches in front of her face exploded into a zillion tiny little pieces. Bright glowing golden beams came out of her mouth and bright pink and gold sparkles celebrated by exploding around the sides of her head. Ethel shook violently, arched her back backwards and suddenly became extremely silent.

  Once that was done, I pulled my fist out of her and wiped it against my thigh. I went to the open window right away and stuck my head through its silent black square.

  The thin strip of neatly-manicured lawn that separated Baker’s house from Charlie’s was as it always was at night. There was no one on it. No one, no thing. Around it was simply darkness, stillness, general soundlessness and the smell of grass under a cloudy night sky.

  “I love you,” Ethel said behind me.

  “I know.”

  I pulled my head back in and shut both the window and the curtains in front of it securely. From the bunch of clothing I’d given to Ethel to mend, I pulled out a large, crumpled men’s white shirt and wore it over my naked body. The shirt went on the wrong way and its label stuck out the back of my neck but I didn’t bother flipping it over. There was no time!

  “Stay here,” I said to Ethel, as I grabbed a torch from a drawer and went out the front door.

  The outside was exactly as I had seen from the window. Quiet, motionless, deserted. No sign of any living thing running about or within houses. I could hear faint television and radio sounds in the distance but there was no indication any of our neighbours had seen what I had.

  No one was screaming. No one was calling for another person to call the police.

  The suburb I stood on looked exactly like a normal working-class one.

  Even though I knew it was everything but.

  Chapter 28

  22 July 1975, Tuesday

  A piercing scream woke me.

  I found myself in Baker’s living room, face-down on his sofa with the bunch of clothes I’d given Ethel to mend under my face like a pillow would have been. The room was rather dark but there was light sneaking in through the thick, closed curtains around the living room so I knew the sun had already come out.

  I was alone, with one eye half-closed because half my brain hadn’t woken up yet. That struck me as weird because, despite being only half-awake, I could distinctly remember Ethel having been in my arms right before I’d fallen asleep hours before.

  Footsteps reverberated behind me. Someone was running down the stairs. I turned and saw Gigi, still in that pyjama dress I’d given her to wear, looking all bedraggled and just about as confused as I was feeling.

  “It sounds like Mrs Ashlock,” were the first words she said to me that morning.

  Those words woke my brain up properly. All at once, everything I needed to know to understand the scream outside Baker’s house came back to me.

  The unseeable humanoid figure. The quiet night. Possible danger. Ethel. Ethel!

  I jumped up, tightened the bathrobe I was wearing and ran all the way to Charlie’s house with Gigi hot on my heels.

  Ethel hadn’t locked her front door so we got in effortlessly. No surprise there; we were in a safe neighbourhood. Most of the neighbours hadn’t locked their doors in years, nor had they been given any reason to.

  Any human being, normal or otherwise, would have been able to get into Charlie’s as easily as we did.

  We searched the house. Ethel wasn’t in the living room or kitchen so we went up to the second floor, jumping up two steps at a time to get there quicker. Her bedroom was the first room I went for because I truly expected to find her there, sucking on a pill or a bottle, but she wasn’t. Her bed was empty. Made and not slept in, though there was steam coming out the bathroom next to it and dark, wet patches on the carpet right outside it that suggested someone had only just taken a shower and walked out barefoot without properly drying off.

  I followed the trail of wet patches all the way out the door and found
droplets of water on the wooden floor of the landing leading to the stairs. Those droplets continued for some length along the landing and ended right outside another bedroom on the second floor—the one with the colourful wooden alphabets on the front of its door spelling out the word ‘Daniel’.

  I had passed that bedroom on the way to Ethel’s room without even thinking of taking a look inside because I seldom saw Ethel in there and presumed she wouldn’t be.

  Yet it was there we found her, standing right in front of Daniel’s cot, white as a sheet, making me hear a techno beat of drums. She had one hand over her mouth, as if to mute herself, and wasn’t looking into his cot but at the bottom of it, some distance away from her feet.

  What I saw there, I do not want to recall.

  All I will say about it is that it was no longer Daniel. The vessel he used to inhabit was there but it was obvious he was no longer within it.

  I didn’t taste marshmallows looking at it. I expected I would taste faecal matter or sauerkraut but I didn’t either. Saliva was the only taste in my mouth so I understood I wasn’t feeling very much at all. Logically, I understood what was happening but it seemed my emotions hadn’t gotten to reacting towards it yet.

  Gigi screamed next. As shrill and loud a scream as the one that had woken us up. She pushed Ethel aside and went to pick up the vessel from the floor but froze and became silent when she saw the shape of it in her arms and felt its temperature in contrast to her own.

  “What happened?” I asked Ethel who was like a statue of ice that had been carved to depict fear.

  Ethel didn’t say. She couldn’t seem to talk and looked as if she was having difficulty breathing and blinking properly. I heard only thumping drumbeats when looking at her. Nothing else.

  “I think Danny’s neck’s broken,” Gigi said as she turned into the deepest of blues. “His neck’s broken, Mrs Baker!”