Forget Yourself (2 page)

I stood up, showering my warm feet and the cold lino with hair. I almost hit my head on the shard of mirror which hung from a string.

“I’m not done,” she squawked.

“I am.”

“You’re still thinking of him. Aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“He’s dead. He’s dead and you’re still wasting your thoughts on him. You’re with me, Blondee. You’re with me.”

“You’re so young, Ketamine.”

That did it. We had argued before, but not like we did that night. All night. She told me I didn’t love her. I said that her gossiping had given me a reputation: no-one trusted me. She countered that she had only told the truth. What could be wrong with the truth?

When it ends you have break-up sex once.

This entry comes later. I don’t know who remembered it, but they wrote it down in the book in coloured crayon smudges.

My eyes were still wet and my throat still swollen and raw as Ketamine ran trembling fingers over my breast, pressing her face into my stomach with desperate trails of snot and tears. Short black hair tickled the spaces between my fingers so I used my hand to brush at the humiliating tears, first on my face then on hers. We had tried to make it work just to avoid this, to keep ourselves behind private glass, where other people’s memories were irrelevant.

“Ket—” it wasn’t my voice, really it belonged elsewhere. Ketamine moved her face a nose from mine, wordless and crumpled, dripping onto my collarbone.

No kissing, no kissing, went written words, a bullet-point below the proverb. No kissing. Break-up sex is pleasure, not love.

When it ends you never see each other again.

Really, this is the most impractical of rules. The world is only twenty minutes long one way and sixteen minutes the other. Ketamine and I would see each other again, as did everyone who broke up. But the book reminds us how things are done outside the compound. We have to try and act normally, even if really, we can’t. If we saw each other we’d avert our eyes or whisper ‘good morning’ at most. Eventually it would become normal. That was how everyone on the outside must have done it.

The triangle hut was mine. She moved out.

I didn’t remember anything about love so I had nothing to add on it to the book.

You keep something of each other.

This is the nicest of the love proverbs. I had no idea who had remembered it, but I truly wished I did. I wished I had been there when they wrote it, so I could gently kiss them on the ear as they pressed blunt pencil to rough paper.

I got the t-shirt, cold and wet. She got some of my hair—the only blonde hair in the tiny world shared by a hundred of us.

And so goes the code of love.

THE SUN FELL HEAVY UPON
my face, grimy and uninvited. The ‘Ketamine’ t-shirt was too small for me but I was wearing it anyway, hidden beneath a thick blue woollen jumper which frayed at the edges. The t-shirt was damp and squeezed me. I was perched on a small pile of bricks outside my home, watching the eleven houses around mine: each house in this section was as small as any other, but each was unique, made up of loose timber and old car doors, or maybe metal grilles and plastic tubes. It was too hot—everyone was indoors, sleeping over soft and dirty mats. All I could hear was the glistening hiss of the heat.

Ketamine had taken her few belongings and they had been replaced by a void. It filled my home, a void somehow larger than hut, eight steps long and three steps wide. I had tried to fill the space with clutter but it was swallowed up as soon as I turned my back. So I watched the world instead. There was no danger of seeing her in this corner.

“Get me away,” she’d spat. She’d asked to live far away, amongst the moderates, and they’d allowed her. Something about her was special. She was newest and prettiest. She was belligerent and...

I needed to stop thinking about her. I would go for a walk.

I lived in the corner for those whose crimes were ‘minor’. Around our corner are walls. The walls are yellowish grey, high and rounded. My triangle was in almost the very corner of our corner. I walked along by the wall, running my fingers down its length, swerving ‘round to avoid the occasional house, propped against the perimeter like mine. The air was soaked in heat but the wall, the wall was always cool. There was never any clue what lay beyond it—forests or fields—perhaps we were on a platform in the ocean, or in the very middle of a city, sound-dampeners hiding the rush of waves or people on their way to work. Whatever, it didn’t matter.

At the start of the world, apparently, people threw things over the wall, but it made no difference. They didn’t know much at the start of the world.

More huts, one had ornaments outside—

A tidy garden means a tidy mind.

Though not many even in that corner could afford such luxury—what items we had generally went indoors, where we could enjoy them. Outside was too unpredictable, when days of snow could follow the hottest evenings.

I came to a hut made of bookshelves, piled atop one another and roughly-bound with sealant. It would be cool in there, a windowless box of bare wood. I ran my fingers over the dark grooves and varnish-coated contours which were warm and sticky beneath my fingertips.

There was a giggle inside. My hand snapped back, my fingertips brushing the scratchy fabric of my pullover. I moved my hand between myself and the hut, hovering between the two, before pressing my palm flat onto the exposed wood once again.

A giggle again: longer. I eased my palm away, feeling my face ache into a smile. Once more—once more I would touch it. I gripped the shelf, my fingers turning white, the sealant cracking slightly, a small cloud of dust spat toward my torso.

“What the—”, a voice, soft and startled.

“Is someone there?” Another voice, this one rough and battle-ready.

Saliva filled my mouth and choked my throat. I walked on, quickly, not daring to run. A few feet away was the bush, an expansive shrub which served as the only foliage in our corner. I hid beneath it. I slid in and down toward the dusty grass. The bush boasted tiny dark-green and deep-red leaves woven together, jostling against one another with the slightest breeze. Sometimes, when it was cold, the red leaves would all flutter to the floor. Sometimes, when it was too warm, the green leaves would turn brown.

I was almost at the border, where our lives ended and the lives of those whose crimes were ‘least’ began, with their fine houses and tremendous luxury. Between us was the courtyard, beyond that the land of those whose crimes were ‘moderate’, who had stolen from children, say, or sent an old woman to hospital. Of course our crimes weren’t that detailed but those were the clearest memories we had been left with—of violence and anarchy and deviance.

There’s something important about our memories here—fact and theory become lost in one another, entwined, meshed together like berries and bruised vegetables.

Take plagues. I have an idea of a plague, of suffering and blackened skin and crosses-on-doors. Whether one has ever really happened, or if only the possibility remains, I don’t know. The same is true of war—I can see soldiers, in smart-rough uniforms above heavy-booted feet, but whether soldiers have ever fought one another, well, I couldn’t say. Take earthquakes that crumple cities, take acts of bravery, take extraordinary kindness, take mass celebration—if these are facts or ideas, in truth, is a pointless line of thought.

We’ve been left with small acts of unkindness, of suffering that we must have caused, that we’ve known from the beginning, of crimes which turn the stomach and hide those who must have been guilty of the worst—the very worst—to the far corner, away from us, at a distance that can eventually become bearable.

People are punished for their crimes.

The first page. But there are variants on it in every single section of the book.

People who inflict suffering are removed from society.

Lifestyle. Page 69.

Criminals are confined.

Bodies. Page 84.

Criminals don’t get the pleasures most do.

Food. 99.

It was Tie who had first explained my crime to me—poor fat Tie, bulky and heaving and sweating. I was shallow: my skin prickled in horror at the sight of him. Even so I had to ask: why was I ‘minor-theft’? ‘Minor-theft’, ‘minor-fucking-theft’. What did that mean?

Tie had told me that it meant I wasn’t the best, but not the worst either.

I asked him what that fucking meant.

Tie had told me that everyone here committed a crime. My crime was minor—it did someone, somewhere some harm, but they’ll have recovered.

I asked him who the worst were.

He took a moment before replying, gazing at me through small sad eyes, and told me that the worst were the ‘severes’, but that I wouldn’t see much of them. Then the moderates. Then the minors, such as myself. Then the least, like himself. Least meant that whatever they did can’t have been too bad.

He went on to tell me that I was a minor-theft. That meant I stole something, something which was probably important to someone and the theft of which will have hurt them.

His eyes rested on my fingers.

I have the memory of theft. Not my own, but of children crying for lost toys, of men and women teary-eyed and forever-lost items. My body ached with what I still had to grow used to. My body ached with guilt.

I asked him what his crime was.

He told me his was least-sexual.

I asked him what that meant.

He stared at his own chubby hands.

Was it like rape? For moments after asking the question my own guilt ebbed away.

He told me it was nothing like that: he was one of the least. His face turned so red it look as though it would blister and he wrapped his hands heavily over one another. There was a pause, a pause which lasted and lasted.

My breathing was steady and he was calm. I had to ask: when do we get to leave?

A SINGLE SHADOW SLICED THE
courtyard in two. Above it stood Pilsner, leaning on the water tap. Pilsner never slept in the day and never liked being alone. He was the earliest here who was still alive. He was one of the least.

“Blondee.”

“Pilsner.”

He slowly shifted his gaze over me, running his eyes up and down, seeing through the tattered jumper. “It’s been a difficult time for you.”