Girl/Monster – by Simmone Howell
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Feminine adolescence, like the uncanny, is an experience of being…perpetually on the border between the once inhabited self, and the erasure of that self.
- Deborah Martin [i]
Once, after I’d grown pubic hair, I slathered Mum’s Nair all over it. This was in the early 1980s. I don’t know how it is now, but back then Nair smelled like nothing else. The results were unsatisfactory: only some of the hair came off and what was left looked like splinters. Looking down at the mess, I can remember feeling estranged from my body. I wanted to go back to a time when I wasn’t so obviously disgusting, but of course this was impossible.
*
I’m in high school and I don’t like it. My uniform is piss yellow and moss green. I have clompy shoes that I can’t run in, shiny as beetles flipped on their backs. I have a bra (beige, no underwire) and I have shaved my legs. The shaving took ages and left me with nicks. Mum says it will grow back thicker. I will be a wildebeest, plaiting my leg hairs on the bus, growling at anyone who dares approach. But who would dare approach?
Pimples congregate on my forehead, my cheeks, my chin and in my nostril nooks. If I squeeze the pus first thing then more collects and I have to visit the hideous concrete toilets for emergency surgery and then wait for the redness to go down. Cathy is so covered in zits her face looks like a Michael Myers mask. But sometimes I think it would be better to be covered than have these random recurring constellations, to be permanently monstrous and not just teetering on the edges.
I never know what to do at lunchtime. I drift around. I try to look like I’m doing an important government project that demands my solitude. I am ‘acquaintances’ with Sarah and Beth, but I don’t know how to upgrade to friendship. They went to the same primary school. They have a history and a shorthand. They have lore but I am lore-less. The most popular girls are Felicity, Melinda and Cat. The rest of us are like pound dogs, heaving and scrapping and pleading, climbing on top of each other. When dogs are scared, they get whale eye – only the white shows. I don’t know if I’m scared, but I’m definitely not comfortable. I make it through to Easter and enjoy a brief reprieve, but then I’m back on the bus, with my face and my pain. And there will be five more years of this.
Sharon has pads in her locker. She doesn’t even try to hide them. I get one out and wave it around. I slap her with it. Her shoulder. Her face. I tease Sharon because she goes red easily. She doesn’t try to be anything other than who she is which makes me jealous, which makes me mean. I live for the second when I get to her. For the longest time she will put up with my attacks but then I’ll see it, hurt in her eye, a glassy look like the surface of the pool seconds before a big kid bombs it.
My period is heavy and painful. I bleed through clothes. I bleed through sheets. I put my hand on my abdomen and push as hard as I can. I want to push my girl parts out, have them plop on the ground so I can kick them aside and get on with things. In Sex Ed they show a slide of a uterus, and it looks like one of the symbols on the inner sleeve of Led Zeppelin IV. It looks sinister. When they turn the lights back on, we all have our arms folded. We are smirking. We are dying. We are already dead.
*
I am drawn back to my old primary school. Like Weena in the movie The Time Machine – only not like Weena, because she was Yvette Mimieux and she was beautiful – something sounds internally and I zombie forth. I go after school and on weekends when there’s nothing else to do. I patrol the grounds. I hang upside down on the monkey bars and sway. I play tennis with myself against the beige brick wall, letting out performative grunts to no one. I give myself nostalgia jolts, remembering the time I walked into a pole and concussed myself, and woke up in sick bay, and was given a chocolate Paddle Pop. The one time I went to the sick bay in high school I was left in a dark room with an older girl who stopped her ferocious sobbing only to tell me I’d better fuck off or else.
I am not the only returner. Justin comes too, riding over on his BMX, executing dramatic skids in the chip-bark. We do not discuss high school. Primary school after hours is like a secondary world we have created from our sadness. Justin is short and baby-faced and keen to impress with facts from the Guiness Book of Records. His parents are strict. Somehow, I know this. He’s younger than me. Somehow, I know this too. Our conversations have an element of rehearsal. We test out words overheard about sex and psycho killers. When I’m around Justin I feel better about myself. I feel like he looks up to me. I could be his leader. He could be my henchman. All the top dogs at school have flinty eyed henches. Would it be so weird if Justin was mine? I find I like shocking him. I like it when confusion tinged with fear lights on his face. It makes me feel powerful.
One day in the Easter holidays, we’re mucking around when I suddenly lunge at Justin, and grab his glasses right off his nose. I hold the specs above his head and command him to jump, and he does, more than once, his chubby cheeks wobbling as he lands. I put his glasses on my nose and tell him they’re mine now. Glasses are expensive. I know this because my sister is always polishing hers with a special shammy. She does this with a smug look on her face that taunts of four-eyes can’t shake.
As I wave Justin’s glasses in the air I try for this smug look myself, and it takes me a while to realise that he’s not laughing. In fact, he’s gone still, and he looks like he’s about to have an asthma attack. He’s crying. His eyelashes are sticky with tears, and his mouth flops open and wet. He picks up his BMX, and my heart starts to pound. Only joking, I say quickly. Then I add something I’ve been told and remembered. Settle, petal. I give him back his glasses, expecting him to stick around, but he won’t even look at me as he rides away. It is only after he’s gone that I feel really alone. I have crossed a line into some unnamed land, some nowhere place. It’s like I can’t be at primary school, but I can’t be at high school either. I have accidentally revealed my monster self. Justin has seen the prickles pop from my skin. He will never unsee it. I hang upside down. I consider the sky. I want a wild eagle to swoop down and scoop me up and fly me away, on great flapping wings. To anywhere. ▼
[i] Martin, Deborah. Feminine Adolescence as Uncanny: Masculinity, Haunting and Self-Estrangement Forum for Modern Language Studies
Image: Kelsi Barr - Flickr
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