fic: hard liquor. [10/14] (spooks)

[delga]

hard liquor. (spooks)
Fiona, Adam, Tja; het./fem.
x. semantics and phonetics

(She will never understand how they got out. Will never ever understand how Tja came to survive except now, most days, she says a prayer of thanks).





And then comes fire. (He gives her enough food and water to keep her alive; little bits every few days). A cheap lighter, bought from a tobacconist. Candles and melted wax, dripping out slowly, falling on her skin, leaving red, hot blisters.

(O Jesu, make it stop!)¹

The splinters are still there, although most he relished withdrawing from her body, leaving behind an angry stippling. There are the ones still beneath her fingertips, the ones still in the palms of her hand. There are those hidden behind her ear and one or two along the right of her jaw line. There are the ones stuck into the cleft of her chest and the ones circling her hipbone (not to mention those lining her toes so that even if she were strong enough, her feet would let her down).

The wax spits at Tja. She must be dead, thinks Anouska.

(That’s eleven ways, so far, to bleed a whore).





(There are so many things wrong with what Adam says to her, she can’t even begin to number them).





Demitri, thinks Anouska, is the biggest whore of them all. Every time he finishes one trick, he moves onto the next and Tja is hung there like a doll he has painted. Her skin is pale and sickly, her eyes are dull. She does not react now, does not flinch at Demitri’s actions. (She does not scream in the middle of the night, nor does she do so in the day).

As for Demitri himself, Anouska cannot place him, cannot see what he gains from this endless nightmare. If this is revenge for his mother’s death, how does this please him? The initial triumph must, surely, have evaporated and he seems to have no more stories to tell. Instead, he has taken to reading the newspaper out aloud (“Three die in fire” and the rest of it) before standing in front of his captive and hitting her in the stomach. Tja is an idol of black and blue – she is a sack of bones, loose in her skin. There is no life there, surely.

He gets bored easily, his mood swings erratically (there is no comfort from pursuing this course but, or so she supposes, he knows not what else to do). It is this frustration that he beats out against her lover, this frustration that he scores into her scars.

And then, one day, he enters the room with Tja’s knife in his hand. Anouska can see the light in his eyes, recognises it from Tja’s own. She sees his eyes and shivers, cannot stop shaking. There is a flaw, she thinks, in her brain and in her body that betrays her when she most needs to be strong. His eyes speak the truth plainly.

It is time for this to end.





There was an occasion, once, in Prague when Anouska felt the cold metal of gunpoint thrust between her shoulder blades.

Tja broke the perpetrator’s hands but afterwards, when Anouska was still shaking from the shock, she took the girl in her arms and rocked her slowly to sleep.

(So when Anouska seeks comfort, it is this memory that she unearths).





“Tja?” (He draws the syllables out in his mouth, sharpening the ‘t’ and hollowing the ‘ya’ sound so far that Anouska could hear the thick set of a ‘d’ pressing against his teeth). “Tja, it’s time to wake up.”

Tja is swinging, still, from the ceiling. Her eyelids flicker. Demitri encompasses her vision.

“I’ve got you under my skin, I’ve got you deep in the heart of me…”

(Anouska knows that Tja’s eyes are on the blade).

“So deep in my heart that you’re really a part of me…”

Demitri tilts Tja’s head up to make sure that she is looking at him. Leans in, kisses her. Moves his lips close to her ear. “I’ve got you under my skin. ”

Tja bites him. Hard.





(There are a hundred ways for this to play out but only one triumphs in the end).





How many ways are there to bleed a whore?

The answer’s not important, the question is: it implies the number is finite; that at some point an end must come.





Demitri roars with pain, drops the knife. Tja’s knee rockets into his crotch. He falls to the floor.

(Somehow her feet are loose. No surprise, she has lost more weight than is ever healthy).

By some ingenuity, she catches the hilt of the blade, flicks it back up to her hands and then swings, kicking Demitri as he tries to stand.

(Anouska is not breathing. She must be dead. Or high. She can fathom no other reason for what she sees).

Tja is weak and tired and exsanguinating second by second. But she is free and she lives. That is all that matters.





She wants to tell him, I am not Fiona. She wants to shake him and scream at him, tell him that she was never the waif he presumed her to be. She wants to spit and scream out, I am Anouska, with pride and honour. (She wants to thicken her voice in the shape of the mother tongue, pushing down to deepen the stretched ‘o’ vowel to a diphthong and bringing the fricative of the ‘k’ fully into force).

She wants to order him not to order her; that if he asked instead of told (if he’d said “I trust you,” not “Trust me,”) then she would then at least begin to respect him, begin to feel something for him. She wants to let him know that she is not his wife nor his lover and that any way he spins it, she will never belong to him. She wants to tell him that Tja belongs to Anouska and that Fiona belongs to no-one, and that on top of everything she owns him and yet—

She says nothing.





“It’s a pity,” Tja whispers, “I never touched your mother.” She stands in front of him, panting, bleeding (dying); moves in close, looks him in the eye. “But if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have been so kind.”

Demitri howls. Tja stabs him (once, twice - unrelenting, unforgiving).

Then she drops the knife, releases Anouska and they leave; calmly, quietly, limping as fast as they can towards the light.





In the end, Fiona’s silence leaves them at stalemate and Adam walks out of the house.

She sits, still and quiet and then finally cleans up the mess before drifting to the bedroom and sinking into the mattress with an aching sigh and tries – desperately – to fall asleep.

(When Adam comes home, he sleeps on the couch).



end. [10/14]

[1] Siegfried Sassoon, Attack.

spooks and its associated characters and plots do not belong to me; I am merely borrowing them. tja and demetrius are original characters.