Work Text:
Malcolm’s thigh is itchy. He must have been sitting for over an hour by now. He runs a hand over his right pant leg and identifies the itchiness in raised, swollen ridges protruding from his flesh that he scratches without blinking. He feels scabs separating from closed wounds–he imagines blood seeping out of his leg and staining his dress pants. He doesn’t move.
Up front and onstage, a middle-aged woman whose face he has only seen twice before today is crying. She cries like a baby does, her mouth and facial lines contorting into new shapes with each sob. Malcolm imagines playdough and wants to look away. She is speaking through the tears.
“... and I don’t know ( hic ) what would have driven Elliot to do something like this, to decide that the world we live in wasn’t fit for her needs–I really don’t know ( hu-ugh-ugh ). Just a week ago she baked banana oat muffins with me and she was so happy and smiling and angelic. As a mother I swear to God that I loved her with all my heart. She was my world. She was my–( huughh ). I loved her so, so much. I just hope that wherever she is now can let her feel more loved than I did.”
Her dress is midnight black. It merges into the cloth room divider behind her, also black. The only distinctive surface is her haggard, amorphous face that looks as if it’s being sucked into a swirling black hole. Then she raises a gloved hand to wipe her eyes and everything is obscured. Malcolm watches her mouth gape open and shut like a fish. A tall ginger-haired man in the front row springs up out of his chair and wraps an arm around her shoulders as he leads her back into the audience.
Now the wizened flabby-faced priest who recited atonally for ten minutes at the beginning of the service, stepping up to the podium, his ivory papal robes dragging behind him: “Let us recognise the paying of respects. The procession can now begin.”
The sound of every chair in the venue scraping backwards at once is like the heraldic rumbling of thunder. Wordlessly, fifty-odd ebony-clothed people trickle into a line that begins at the far left end of the room divider and wraps around the edges of the room. Malcolm is closer to the back of the line than the front of it. He watches as a funeral attendant draws back a corner of thick draping to let Elliot’s mother at the front of the line duck through. The attendant lets go. The divider falls back into place.
Two people behind Malcolm, a flaxen-haired boy in an ill-fitting suit and what could be his body double in a dress, begin to whisper like they aren’t sure what the word means.
“ I feel like I’m dreaming ,” emerges from the girl’s mouth.
“ Want me to pinch you? ” The boy mumbles back.
Then a pained male yelp and the sound of expelled air. Malcolm wants to cover his ears. He just stares vaguely forwards.
“ You’re mean! ”
“ She seemed really happy. I loved the type of person she was. ”
No reply from the boy. There is the rustle of clothes against each other but nothing more. Malcolm’s thoughts feel crystal in a way that’s pale, empty. The wounds on his thigh are itchy so he scratches them.
Elliot’s mother draws back cloth at the other end of the room divider. Her hands are balled and she has tearmarks staining her blotched face. She leaves the venue with desperate, tottering strides, and Malcolm thinks to himself that he never saw Elliot walk like that.
A memory of Elliot floats into his head. He feels a bit frustrated because he wishes he could think of something more empathetic and, like, more hopeful. But the memory is of Elliot and him walking down by the park near her house, the one with a rolling verdant hillside and a treeline that pigeon flocks often banked over. Elliot walks somewhere off to the side of him; she never liked being touched, in life. They’re in that weird fizzled-out stage of a conversation where there is nothing to talk about and the only new topics they are able to manifest are utterly boring, but they still want to talk to each other. Suddenly Elliot snaps her fingers.
“Wanna play Truth or Dare?”
Malcolm shrugs, or maybe he’s too tired to. It’s hazy. “Okay. Truth.”
Elliot hums–she had this thing where she walked with a constant slight hunch but it was only when she was trying to think of something that she straightened up. Or else only when he tried to confront her about the hunch: “What? I don’t have a hunch, Malcolm.” He’d been annoyed by that, the constant lying.
“What’s the most hateful thing you’ve ever said to someone?”
Malcolm blinks. He hadn’t expected the question. “Probably, ‘I hate you.’”
Elliot makes one of her faces. She clicks her tongue, then clicks it again. “That’s a cop out answer. It is! Don’t look at me like that. Tell me something really juicy.”
So then silence on his end as he tries to think through the sun in his face and the wet brilliant green that shimmers all around him, before he opens his mouth and blurts out the first thing to come to mind: “Maybe, ‘kill yourself’.”
“Woah.”
“Ah–” Malcolm stutters. “Like, I mean, in grade school.”
“Oh!” The brunette nods her head. “Although that doesn't really count, then, right? You were a little kid. You didn’t really know what you were saying.”
“Yeah, but you asked for a ‘hateful’ thing.”
“Yeah… so?”
“I don’t know. I’d argue that as a kid you can still be hateful, even if you don’t really understand why.”
“Hmm.” Elliot taps her chin. “Okay! I’ll take it. Okay, give me a dare.”
There’s only one person left until it’s his turn to go behind the room divider. He notes the frequencies of time people spend with Elliot’s corpse; short durations are people who either look unperturbed or are very scared. Long durations usually involve tears. Middle-aged men spend about ten breaths of time, while middle-aged women seem to prolong their stays. Teenagers generally pass through quickly. The far right end of the room divider is pushed through by a black-suited man wearing a rose who walks straight-backed towards the exit with measured, solemn strides.
Then the gangly girl in front of him with thick glasses scurries through the curtain as it’s pulled back–Malcolm peers at the attendant. He’s a swarthy bearded man with dark carbuncular patterns scattered over his cheeks. Suddenly he makes eye contact with Malcolm, and in his amber pupils there’s a placid warmth that Malcolm finds profoundly stomach-churning. The boy looks away.
And now the gangly girl jittering out the other side, towards the exit. The attendant nods at him. The cloth is pulled back. Malcolm exhales and makes his way towards where Elliot is stored.
The half of the venue that holds Elliot is brightly lit, two massive bay windows at the far end of the room letting the sun sweep over the walls and floors and ceiling like a sentinel, guarding. Malcolm wonders at the type of architectural symbolism of the part of the room with no windows and only cold LED illumination being the part that most of the service is held in. He hears the whump of cloth falling back against a hard surface behind him. More details: the sun today is resplendent enough for hard bladed beams of light to dance over the varnished walnut tiling. A huge portrait of Jesus Christ petting a lamb stares out from the left side of the room.
And there in the room’s center is a casket, encroached on all sides by plasticine and chromatic bouquets, long open cards in cursive and framed photographs and Christian-themed jewellery. Malcolm thinks that she would have loved the jewellery but vehemently protested against flowers. He shakes his head and approaches.
The body through the casket’s diaphanous glass top looks more like Elliot than Elliot did. For some reason he’d imagined that they’d cake her with makeup, so that she’d be some kind of ghoulish Russian doll; they haven’t. The mole on the left side of her bottom lip is still visible, and so are the dull acne scars that stretched when she smiled too widely. She’s clad in a platinum white dress that has no patterning but is spun out of some kind of gossamer silk. It occurs to Malcolm that her favourite colour was always white. Her hands are clasped together on her stomach. They’ve arranged her mouth so that it looks like she’s smiling softly.
It isn’t enough. He hunches forward so he can peer directly down at Elliot, his eyes dissecting every part of her. Finally he sees it: he can’t see the undersides of her wrists, where he’s been told the lethal wound lies, but there are two criss-crossing pale lines on her bicep that are too perfect to be anything but man-made. The dress obscures her thighs, her stomach, her breasts. He wonders how many cuts litter her bare flesh that he’ll never get to see. He wonders if that’s perverted to think. Malcolm’s thigh is itchy.
“You lied to me,” he says. It feels good to hear aloud.
He continues. He feels his ears burning and thinks half-heartedly that Elliot can’t hear him. “I was always the one who was depressed. I never told you about my cuts but you knew about my parents, the beatings, the homophobia, the gaslighting. You knew about my old house that I dreamt about every week. I was always too scared to vent to you because I didn’t want to push you away but I’d always imply some kind of fucked up thing in our conversations in the hope that you’d impart some of your precious sympathy. And you did. I’d bask in your comfort like a baby with a milk dropper.”
Elliot is just lying there. Her eyes are closed and she’s smiling. Malcolm begins pacing clockwise around the casket, scratching at ridged lumps on his left wrist with his right hand, trying to form full thoughts out of the perfect emptiness in his head.
“I’ve had a plan since months ago,” is what he arrives at. “I spent weeks thinking about it. Prior to it I’d already cut down to my wrist veins and felt the way parts of my hand would grow numb and it’d feel like my nerves were stabbing themselves. I’d already tasted the blood that came from that part of me. My logic was that now I knew the pain of cutting through a vein, and it wasn’t anything special, and I was ready to move onto my artery. I’d catch a train at midnight to your suburb with only my razor and my phone and sit within the grove by the park near your house. Then I’d do the deed. Three vertical cuts down my wrist, more if possible, and I’d feel the blood pumping out of me and spray it onto my face and my teeth and my clothes. Then I’d text you: can I call you. it’s urgent. You’d say okay and I’d video cam you and in my phone’s light you’d see my face all bloody and the wild look in my eyes and I’d say that I’m about to die. You wouldn’t be able to identify the trees because it’d be so dark. The blood and me would be everything. You’d say call 000, I’d say I don’t think I can. Then I’d hang up and shut down my phone before quietly bleeding to death.”
Malcolm’s face is completely flushed. It’s too bright. He considers taking off his suit but knows it’d be a stupid thing to do.
“You never told me anything. I never knew. You don’t know what it felt like for my mother to call me awake at four-in-the-morning and say that it was Elliot’s mother, for me, and for me to hear your mother wailing over the phone that you’d slit your wrists and died. It was like I’d turned you into a voodoo doll, like all of my incessant ideation had manifested into a fucked up warlock Gnosticism that’d caused you to just fucking keel over, dead. It was like you’d stolen my future. You never told me and now I’ll never know why. You lied to me, all this time. I thought you were the happy one.”
He paces more metres then realises he can’t think of anything else to say and tries to turn and pace back counterclockwise but then stops himself when he realises what a stupid notion that is. He shakes his head violently. He bangs his fist against his chest. He stuffs his fingers into his mouth and tries to pull out a tooth; he fails.
Malcolm turns his back to the coffin.
“Liar!” He snarls at empty air.