What had she dreamt exactly? She’d spent almost the whole day without any hint of the dream, and now that a new night was coming, as she was fixing up her face before going out, she caught a whiff of a memory of a dream that felt old, but that not too long ago was being projected in the corridors of her mind. All she could remember was a feeling of sadness, of the kind you feel when you go on holiday and you’re fed up before it’s even half over.
*
No, she told the guy from BetEasy, what the hell was his name? Steve? Simon? S-something. And no, she repeated as she felt the skin along her spine chafing against the rock behind the Dragonara Hotel and two fingers pushing her panties aside and caressing the loose skin inside them. No, and with her hand she tried to remove his hand from between her legs and was surprised that she was quite wet and was confused by this incongruity between her brain and her cunt. And when he immediately put his hand back, she did not try to remove it again.
I want you, you know, you can’t imagine how much I want you, you know how hard I’m going to fuck you? Feel this. Look how hard you made me. Are you going to go home frustrated tonight when you could be taking this trunk inside you? D’you know what the last girl I slept with called me? The Isthmus! Do you know what an isthmus is? A narrow piece of land that leads from one place to another, but she used it in an allegorical way, because I took her to another place, to another level where she’d never been. Do you know what an allegory is?
Why an isthmus and not, say, a bridge, or for that matter a bus or a scooter, or any piece of land that is not a cul-de-sac?
I think because she was Greek, this girl. And that’s where it comes from, isthmus. Isn’t it a beautiful word? Also phallic, isn’t it, the image of an isthmus? And phallic comes from the Greek as well.
She felt his hard penis pressing on her and, as she touched it, her mind quickly ran a statistical analysis based on the thirty-five men she’d fucked these last six years, or since she’d realised that actually she wasn’t such a dog, or at least, that even if she was, there were still men who wanted to fuck her, and in the blink of an eye she came to the conclusion that, though slightly bigger than average for his ethnicity, a trunk it was not. Maybe a sizable branch. She felt his face, flushed and greasy and hot and unshaven, rubbing against hers, and felt herself in a sort of vice, pressured and pressured until no became yes, and you know, some wise person once said that a hundred nos and one yes make a yes. With a yes there’s a good chance that inside an hour she’d be back in her place under the sheets. Alone.
The Isthmus did not get her anywhere in particular. At one point she almost laughed, feeling him bouncing like a rabbit and squeezing himself into her, whining in her ear with a certain sense of urgency and with that particular accent. I’m feeling you, I’m feeling you, I’m feeling you.
Indeed, forty-five minutes later—as she was cleaning herself and hiding her creamy panties under her mattress—she remembered his name. Alastair.
*
Do you know who Ali la Pointe is?
Obviously I know who Ali la Pointe is, who knows how many eulogies I’ve heard about him since I was a little kid. Somewhat justified praise, let’s be honest, the man had balls if you’ll excuse the expression, but in the end, the fact remains that he was ignorant and illiterate and a criminal. Violence never solves anything.
I think it’s more the French that were violent.
But violence has to be fought with violence, don’t you think? The French aren’t violent people, are they? And I know what I’m talking about, because I live and work with them. How do you know about Ali la Pointe?
From that old movie.
The Battle of Algiers? They showed it to us about a hundred times at school. Parts of it were shot outside my grandfather’s house.
Does your grandfather remember the battle?
Yes, of course, my grandmother too, they were still young, they’d just got married. But they weren’t involved in that whole mess, maybe they were too busy, you know, getting involved with each other. He laughed. They had ten children in all . . . This lager’s not bad but I’d prefer a Stella, do they have Stella?
I doubt it, she replied, a little disappointed at the lack of interest in Ali la Pointe. And as if to spite him she decided not to continue trying, and for a few minutes they continued to drink their Cisk in the silence between them and in the noise around them, on the stairs of Ġugar, while she was thinking that she could have made better use of her day off. Sleeping. Washing the car. Answering that message from her friend Abby from about two months ago. As she got to the bottom of her glass, she was going to say goodnight and start walking to her car, but from her mouth came the proposal of going for a walk. And she took him to the breakwater, and the sea was calm and it was quiet because school was starting the next day and all the families had gone home. And when they sat on the rocks she said to herself not tonight, she’d keep her legs closed, she was still a little sore, and anyway this guy wasn’t exactly a delight. And she was working all day tomorrow.
Not tonight, she told him when he put his arm around her shoulders and with his thumb began to caress the upper part of her chest.
Why not? I’m off in four days, I go back to France.
I didn’t bring a condom.
We don’t have to have sex, you know, we can also just make out a little. And darling, if you didn’t want to mess around a little you wouldn’t have brought me here, would you? Or maybe you like to tease?
And he took her hand and brought it to his lips and kissed it, then he placed it on the hardness between his thighs, and he saw her eyebrows arching with surprise, and he told her that he’d sent his spit to Ancestry.com and it came back thirty per cent Algerian, forty per cent Berber, fifteen per cent French and fifteen per cent Nigerian. I think those fifteen per cent are concentrated in one place, he told her with a laugh, and she laughed too and carried on with him and continued to caress him. Because what’s the point of saying no if she knows she’ll say yes later?
And as he was banging away inside her, with a cock that was frankly too big to give her pleasure, and ramming her against the rocks of Marsamxett, chafing corners that had been spared by the Isthmus, as she was worrying that she was ruining her jumper which was nearly brand new, as in her mind echoed the mantra how-the-fuck-did-I-get-here-how-I-wish-I’d-never-been-born, it crossed her mind that if this guy knocked her up, she’d call the baby Ali, after Ali la Pointe. That would teach him!
The following day, after she’d taken some blood and she had a rare quiet moment, she found a message from him on Tinder. I enjoyed meeting you yesterday lol, at first you were annoying me, you and your Ali la Pointe lol, but I’m glad I put up with it lol :)
*
Tinder doesn’t work for me, Mindy.
Mindy was a new junior doctor on the ward. She was helping her insert a cannula into an old woman who was fast asleep. Mindy had a sternum piercing and sometimes when she was leaning forward doing something and her uniform top fell forward, it was visible, glittering between a pair of small tits.
You should try FetLife.
Mindy! Do you really think I’ve put on that much weight?
FetLife, silly! Fetish Life. There are some okay men. Women too, depends what you’re into, like. Don’t let them get too comfortable. But it’s better than Tinder, there aren’t so many idiots. Or idiots in a different way.
Choose your fetishes. And she spent a minute staring at the screen of her phone wondering if she had any fetish. To please the other person even if all she felt like was doing nothing, as if to spite herself, was that a fetish? From the drop-down menu she chose submission.
And it is indeed true what they say that for every yin there’s a yang, because practically every man on the app identified as dominant and messages started pouring in. Hello, do you like getting tied up? What size shoes do you wear? Hey gorgeous, would you let me spit in your mouth? Will you come down to Gozo so we can have some fun, I’ll pay for the ferry? Do you want to meet me and my sub, have a drink and then we’ll see?
She’d never been part of a threesome, much less one with a dom/sub dynamic, and why not? Why at all, if it came to that? Because she was almost thirty years old and she’d never been in a threesome, and how could she say she’d lived if she’d never been in a threesome? I’m Louis Theroux, I’m making a documentary about liminal people. I’m Louis Theroux, I will spend so much time with them that I will grow to love them and empathise with them, and I won’t regret the time and attention I’ll give them, and they’ll say this girl is really empathetic and knows how to get along with people.
Seated between Don and Amelia at the Happy Horse in Gżira, she tried to order a beer, but they told her it was happy hour for cocktails, two-for-one, join us.
I’m Louis Theroux. What would Louis Theroux do? Louis Theroux would order a two-for-one cocktail. Purple Rain please, she told the waiter.
Are you working tomorrow?
Yeah, I’m working, you?
Yeah, I’m working. I’m in the army.
Ouch!
Ouch what?
Ouch I hope you’re not like those two soldiers who killed that man.
Ah, you’re one of those people who like blacks?
She normally avoided confrontation like the plague. Amelia was playing with her phone, then she seemed to decide to save her and said, Come on Don, stop pretending you’re KKK when in fact you work on the rescue ship.
Can we change the subject, please, it’s Sunday, and I don’t feel like talking about blacks and boats.
Wow. It’s quite admirable work, and it takes balls, no matter what you think.
Balls, until we come across a dead man and I throw up over the side of the ship.
And they laughed, then the cocktails arrived, two each, and they sat there drinking and talking about frivolous things. The Purple Rain was the colour of floor disinfectant and tasted of cough syrup. As she was finishing the first one she started to feel light-headed, and the words started to come out of her mouth faster, and she felt Don’s hand on her thighs and it slowly went under her skirt and she remembered that she wasn’t wearing panties because that’s what he’d told her to do, and Amelia laughed and told him to behave, and she realized that he was doing the same to her, and maybe it was the Purple Rain, but she felt comfortable with these two, even if they were different from her, but there you go, it had happened to her, just like Louis Theroux, these two had stolen her heart, before today she’d never have guessed she’d be mixed up with people like them, he a soldier, she an auditor, and yet she ended up in the Land Rover between them, like she was riding a tank, he fingering her from one side (when he wasn’t changing gears) and Amelia stroking her thighs from the other, then in Don the dom soldier’s apartment, where they continued to drink, and then threw themselves on a bed with black sheets, kissing each other and dropping their clothes to the floor, and Don went down to kiss Amelia, then he pulled her to make her taste Amelia too, and she’d never tasted a cunt, and it was a beautiful cunt, smooth and pink like a porn star’s, and the taste didn’t bother her as she fucked Amelia with her tongue, and while she was at it, Don took her from behind, and before she remembered to tell him to pull out, she felt him unload himself into her with a grunt that you’d expect to hear on a farm rather than in a maisonette in Fgura, and Amelia also started to moan and arch her back, then Don folded on top of her from behind like a cloth, and she threw herself between Amelia’s legs, her face against her thighs, damp with secretions, saliva and sweat.
Thank you, this one never lets me come inside her, he told her, as he stood up from on top of her and threw himself on his back next to Amelia.
The pill doesn’t agree with me, Amelia said in a slightly defensive tone.
You’re such a fucking princess, he told her, and kissed her slowly on her forehead, and she curled up her lips, caught in a smile between his neck and his chin. They looked so sweet she felt slightly nauseous with envy.
*
She was supposed to get it two weeks ago. Maybe it was playing up. As she held her hand and the test’s handle away from the rest of her body, so that the piss that had inevitably ended up on her hand didn’t drip onto her thighs, she saw a red line forming out of nothing under the test’s small window, then another line next to it.
She raised her eyebrows. Because even though she’d been expecting it, she still felt a little surprised at this confirmation that her body was fertile.
One pregnancy out of five ends in miscarriage, often in the first trimester, she remembered an obstetrics lecturer telling them. Not with her luck, though.
Where are you from? From Afghanistan to Guadalupe, to Saint Lucia and back to Mali. Malta.
Do you have an unwanted pregnancy? Yes.
Do you wish to do an abortion with the help of Women Help Women? Yes.
If you accept, we will send you the medicine by post, and we will provide help and support through emails. Yes, I accept.
When was the first day of your last menstruation? The fifth of September.
Are you sure you want to have an abortion? You have no idea.
Do you feel this is your decision? It is important that the decision is yours and you do not feel forced to terminate the pregnancy against your will. DIDN’T YOU ALREADY ASK ME THIS? YES!
Do you suffer from . . . I don’t suffer from anything, it’s amazing actually. No one is less problematic than me.
If you wish, give the reason why you have decided to abort. Skip.
She submitted the form and the wait began. She tried not to think about it, but with each passing day, her anxiety grew a little more. She felt a knot in her stomach that ruined her appetite, and she didn’t know if it came from the embryo or the worry that if the package didn’t arrive she’d be screwed, harder than she’d ever been screwed. On the seventh day of waiting the package arrived she’ll be screwed, harder than she’s ever been screwed. On the seventh day of waiting the package arrives (her mum: what did you receive? Graziella: a pair of earrings; her mother: you’re always buying rubbish, you should be saving up), and with it, maybe coincidentally or maybe not, came the nausea, from early in the morning, nausea that persisted throughout the day.
She took the first pill. In the evening she met up with Mindy and they went for pizza in Valletta because both of them happened to be off work, and she opened her heart to her when she ran out of things to say, and Mindy told her to be careful because when she was on rotation in the emergency department a woman came in after taking miso and luckily the consultant turned a blind eye. Because the idiot panicked and blabbed, she said, you tell them that this is very much a wanted pregnancy, like. Graziella’s eyes were focused on a rope of mozzarella stretching between Mindy’s mouth and a slice of pizza, refusing to break. Tell them you just bought the paint for the baby’s room, like, yellow or green or whatever you want, but not pink or blue, because you’ll be caught out. Wear a wedding ring, your mother’s or whatever. The rope of mozzarella finally broke and hung down her chin, her neck, down to the metal rod between her tits. Graziella felt disgust with every bite entering her mouth.
Text me if you go to emergency, Graz, really, I hope not, obviously, but I’d come and sit with you if it’s quiet. And she promised her she wouldn’t end up in the emergency department, but if it came to that she’d text her. She took the bus because she’d lent her car to her mother (where are you going, ma? where do you think I’m going? I don’t know, ma, that’s why I’m asking) and with each bump she felt her stomach heave and she made an effort to swallow and felt vomit rising gradually in her throat, and she went on like this, swallowing her spit and hoping to reach the pjazza, but still, as soon as they passed the cemetery at Ħal Lija, she felt her mouth producing an alarming quantity of saliva and she very quickly rang the bell and synchronously her mouth filled with bits of slightly digested pizza, and she managed to store everything in her mouth until they stopped and the door opened at the bus stop, then she immediately emptied herself by the side of a lily-yellow bench, with the people on the bus no doubt staring at her, probably thinking she was shit-faced.
The next day she was working the day shift. As she was going from one patient to another, whenever she was about to forget, the nausea in her stomach would remind her. I’m not scared, this is an adventure, I am Louis Theroux, she tried to tell herself. But Louis Theroux does not have a uterus, and so he will never have to have an abortion by himself.
Better by myself.
It would be nice to have someone with me, but better by myself than with someone stressing me out. After all, this whole mess is mea culpa mea culpa, no? And the culpa of the isthmus-lapointe-soldier, but what, tell them? And then what? What would they do? Would this three-headed monster come to hold her hand, fuss over her and fill up her hot water bottle?
Better by herself, she could fill up her hot water bottle herself. She had hands.
In the evening she went back home, drank the broth her mother had made and chatted with her about this and that, and then she went up to her room and from the small transparent plastic package that she’d hidden in the wooden box where she kept her earrings, she took out the four pills, and placed them between her lower gum and lip, two on either side. She stuffed a pad into her panties, then climbed onto the bed and got under the sheets. While she was waiting for the pills to dissolve, she absent-mindedly scrolled through Instagram. A photo of Ali la Pointe, drinking a cocktail from a glass/pineapple-dug-out-to-become-a-vessel in Kemmuna, a memory of the best part of the holiday. Asshole. Unfollow.
When the pills had almost disintegrated, she started to feel a fever rising, as the directions had informed her, and she took out a couple of Panadol tablets from her bedside table and downed them in a gulp of water. She remembered the hot water bottle. As she was searching through her winter clothes, she felt a great nausea in her stomach and went running to the loo, which thank god was right by her bedroom, and she threw up everything, bits of carrot and beef, celery and Panadol.
She lay down in bed again and wrapped herself up in the bedding to hold back the chills that had come with the fever. The discomfort in her stomach began to spread to the rest of her body, until it reached her uterus and its surroundings, and there it began to change into pain, subtle at first, but then it started to get stronger. She compacted herself more in the bedding, as if to smother this pain that had nailed her to the mattress, like an incubus sitting on her cunt. She closed her eyes hoping that she’d doze off, and she started to feel a rumbling in her intestines but further down, and instinctively she ran out to the bathroom, sat down on the loo and felt torrents coming out of her, and she looked down and saw the white of the ceramic stained with dark and rancid blood, and the loo water becoming a dark red. She felt her muscles tightening of their own accord and then something like a small marble slipping out of her and falling with a little splash into the water, and by the time she’d looked down it had sunk into the water thick with blood. She got the urge to fish around in the loo water to search for what might have come out of her and look at it, to count its fingers and toes if it had them, with a scientific interest, with the interest of a woman who could have been a mother. And to tell it I love you. Forgive me. I forgive you. It’s better this way. Believe me. She flushed, and the redness was baptised with clear water until it went away completely.
The fever had begun to subside, but the pain and the nausea persisted. She got into bed again. When she’d found a comfortable position, wrapped up like a mummy, she heard her phone vibrating.
Hey, how are you gorgeous?
The Isthmus. Where she’d normally leave days, if not weeks and months, to answer a message, she answered this one immediately. Maybe to distract herself from the pain, maybe because she wanted him to feel a bit of the discomfort that she was feeling.
Well, I’ve had better days.
Oh, what’s wrong?
Should she tell him? She told him.
Seriously?
Yes.
But are you done?
I think so.
I don’t know what to say. When did you find out?
Some weeks ago.
And you didn’t tell me? She felt this guy’s panic, and she told him what’s done is done and there’s nothing to worry about, these things happen.
After a minute of seeing +4476954629442 is typing . . . appear and disappear and appear again and disappear again, he asked her if she thought it could be his.
Could be, but you weren’t the only one to be honest.
Were they before me or after me? Just so I get an idea. Come on why didn’t you tell me?
I didn’t want the extra drama to be honest. And what would you have done from the BetEasy office?
How do you feel, better? She lied that she was feeling better.
I’m sorry but I can’t stop thinking about the possibility that it could be mine.
Maybe, maybe not, who knows? Why, would you have wanted to keep it in that case?
Not necessarily, but it’s a strange feeling. But do you, in your heart of hearts, do you think it was mine? In her heart of hearts it made absolutely no difference whose it was.
Can you give me some more details please, like when you had your last period and when you slept with the other men?
Is this guy serious? Is he going to go all Poirot on me? And she lied that when they’d done it her period had just stopped, so there wasn’t much of a chance. And he seemed relieved, and he told her that he wished she’d feel better soon, and she thanked him, and she reassured him again like she reassured patients who asked her if they were going to die, and she told him that she was tired and she was going to bed, and they said good night. And the night, though not good, was not too bad because she fell asleep immediately.
That night she had one of those dreams that simply wouldn’t end, that all the men she had ever slept with were all in one place, an empty place without characteristics, call it some kind of limbo if you will, and she was inspecting them, but they could not see her. Some of them she recognised. She saw Paul, who was the first one she’d done it with, when she was drunk at a New Year’s Eve party. Jamie, the first one who fucked her in the arse, by mistake because in the dark he’d confused holes, he said. Alan, who’d sneakily taken off his condom halfway through a shag. Omar, who fucked her to paradise for a night and a day, and then disappeared. There were others she didn’t know, but this inconsistency did not wake her. At first they seemed a little confused, these men, then they started trying to guess what had brought them all together, what they had in common, and some of them were getting on and forming smaller groups, and they started chatting about all sorts of things, and no one mentioned Graziella. Then the background changed and instead of being in a void, they were all standing in a line next to each other at the edge of a cliff, with their hands and feet tied to each other’s, forming a chain of bodies. They were all wearing briefs, some white, some black, some tight, some not. They were calm, heads lowered, like ISIS hostages before they’re beheaded. She wanted them to panic more, she wished they’d ask her to let them go, because now she’s facing them and they could see her. A little behind her there’s her mother, who asked her a little angrily are you going to push them in again? And further back there’s Louis Theroux with a serious face looking at the scene before him, holding his chin with two fingers. Now she had a long cane or a broomstick in her right hand, and she knew that all she had to do was push one of the men in front of her and they would all fall one after the other, like in a Mexican wave, into the rough sea under the cliff.
