“You’re so small I could pick you up,” he said.
He grabbed me by my hair, swung me hard against the wall, shoved his fingers between my legs. When he went to unzip his pants, I ran.
“Scurry, scurry, little yellow rat,” he called after me. “Let’s see you run!”
Lying in the coffin in the afternoon, I’m talking about myself in the third person. I read once on a psychology blog that it helps with performance.
“Rioko had no one,” I say. “But she had grit, and that’s what counted.”
Someone is knocking at the door.
“What would Rioko do? Rioko would see who’s there.”
It’s the old lady landlord. She serves me with a termination notice. Says I’m fourteen days late with the rent.
“But Rioko only got the reminder the other day.”
“That was eleven days ago.”
The notice says I have two weeks to move out unless I pay what I owe, or agree on a repayment plan.
“Rioko doesn’t have any money,” I say. “She had to buy the coffin.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s the paparazzi, isn’t it? They want you to lure Rioko into the open.”
“If you can’t pay, you’ll have to be out by the end of June.”
“Rioko will get you that cash,” I say. “She’s on the edge of glory.”
When the old lady leaves, I do five sets of star jumps and some of Cathy’s classic Zumba moves. No more time for sleep. My eye is on the prize. I’m going to get that hundred grand and that KELLERMAN cover shot. I’m going to take what I deserve. Little landlady will grovel at my feet — beg me to live in her fugly flat in her nowhere suburb — and I’ll tell her, It’s too late, lady, you should’ve been nice to me before I made it big, I own a million-pound converted graveyard in the English countryside now.
The fashion stakes have never been higher. Every vein in my body is electric. I take my scissors to the linen and cut, cut, cut.
At night, I try out white makeup paste on Mugzy’s face, to see how it looks. But even though I’m the one making him into a god, he’s still hung up on Cathy. He says he’s saving himself for her.
He wants a break. He goes downstairs to wank alone, looking up at the flat.
I follow him down and stand next to him.
“I’m trying to get back to the root of the purity of my love,” he says.
He pants and his hand gets fast and furious, and I look up with him at the flat. Then I put my fingers down my underwear and touch myself. I look at him and he looks at me, and I pull my fingers out and bring them to my lips and lick them.
“Fuck you,” he says.
He pushes me down onto the concrete on all fours and slides in quick, and while he’s fucking me in the driveway like a dog, he says, “I want a nice Cathy the other guys want. A nice Cathy with nice friends. A nice Cathy who goes to the gym every morning, and salsa every week.”
We fuck again upstairs on Cathy’s red couch. He pees on my chest. I sit on his face and say, “Fuck Cathy. All the pretty Cathys in the world don’t want us. Nobody’s gonna run back for us through the streets, telling us they’ve made a mistake.”
“Speak for yourself,” says Mugzy, when it’s over. “Nobody wants you. And why would a guy like me want you if no one else does?”
I’ve got Mugzy into the cape and shroud, and now his entire face is caked with white. I look at him in the full-length mirror, surrounded by burning incense, and he really is a god. The TV crew is already filming the final episode. They’re watching us prep for the runway show and get preliminary feedback from the judges.
Ava Rodriguez is there on the red couch. My grandfather sits next to her, a goldfish suffocating in his hand. He shakes his head at me.
“You’re from Nara,” he says. “Why do you need this lady to tell you what’s good?”
I ignore him. He’s only here because he knows I’m about to win. I’ll thank him for nothing on the runway.
I tell Ava that my theme is “Ritual and Sacrifice.”
“Is it too ‘warrior prince’?” Ava says. “Is it too literal, screaming ‘the Orient’? Is it fashion-forward enough, or editorial enough? These are the questions I and the other judges have to ask. Do you really have what it takes, Rioko? What if you really are just a patternmaker, and not a real couturier? What happened to Cathy, your original model? Why have you got this dropkick instead?”
“Cathy didn’t understand my vision. Cathy was disloyal.”
“What?” says Mugzy. “What happened to Cathy?”
“Look out the window,” I say. “Behind the laundry. There’s your beloved, under the dirt.”
He turns and looks where I’m pointing.
“You want to know what happened to Cathy? I’ll show you what happened to Cathy.”
He’s still looking out when I pick up the iron and swing it at the back of his head. I think about Nara, about Cathy deserting me, about that Post-it and how I didn’t grab the kitchen knife, I got the iron and flung it at her, then I picked up my scissors and stabbed her to make sure. No more pink Post-its, just like that. I think about how I took her phone and texted her friends to say she was going overseas for a funeral. I texted her salsafucking man, telling him it was time to break up. It’s not you, I typed, it’s me.
“What?” says Mugzy. He’s standing still, staring at himself in the mirror. The back of his head has caved in, but he can’t see it.
He drops forward.
I light a cigarette and smoke it. I stroll around the studio. I look at him sprawled on the carpet. I wash the iron in the kitchen sink. I watch red run off steel. I think, Well, it was the best I could do under the time pressure. The styling leaves a bit to be desired, but I can still win this whole competition.
Ava Rodriguez says from the couch, “He would look better in the coffin, Rioko, not on the carpet. Remember, it needs to be a complete look.”
“You’re so right,” I say.
I grab Mugzy by the ankles and drag him to the coffin. He’s heavy but I lift him in part by part.
“Hngh,” he says, all hoarse. “Hnnngh.”
I light another cigarette. I hold the orange tip to the collar of the cape. The straw starts to burn. Mugzy panics and squirms. I put my face close to his face, close like the way I look at my pores in the mirror, and I say, “So now you know. Cathy’s got no forwarding address.”
He whimpers. “Who the fuck ever cared about Cathy? The pickup book was wrong.”
Everything smells like blood and incense. I think to myself, His face shouldn’t look like this, what is all this red leaking onto the white? What was the makeup team thinking? And while I’m pondering the question, Mugzy grabs the ends of my tape measure and twists them tight around my throat. I fight for air. I collapse on him, chest to chest. The little flames lick his shroud, and his hair and my hair, and his face and my face, and then someone taps me on the shoulder and I hear Ava Rodriguez saying, “Congratulations, Rioko, your show was a triumph. You are the winner of Real Couturier.”
As I relax into black, I hear Mugzy too.
“First time I touched you, little rat,” he says, “I knew you were the one.”
Toxic Nostalgia
by Peter Polites
Bankstown
1
The city can give you AIDS but the suburbs can make you crazy. I wish I knew this back in the day, when two pin-sized peepers were looking through me, like my twentysomething-year-old body was translucent.