Figs and George Michael

The light in the hall was harsh. It showed up the blue veins in my hands, which unsettled me, so I switched it off and clip-clopped through to the gentle glow of my bedroom. I’d made my bed that morning with snowy white sheets. Virginal – too virginal, I’d felt – so I’d unravelled my pink chiffon shawl speckled with embroidered figs and thrown it over the bottom half of the duvet.

            ‘Oh yeah, the fig thing. Nice. See, the thing about D.H. Lawrence—’ I’d imagined Seb saying, before I silenced him. Or – maybe – if he’d been nice, if he’d been actually quite funny, if he’d been the one, he’d have held the scarf up to the light mid-snog and said in his best Alan Partridge,

            ‘Figs. Is that a… uhh… euphemism?’

I’d left all the lights off except the pebble lamp I kept on my nightstand, which omitted a soft rosy luminescence. Everything else – laptop cables, stray knickers, magazines, had been shoved under the bed; so certain had I been that I would be sharing my room that night, so keen was I to turn it into one giant, pulsating female appendage. (Yes, Alan. It was a euphemism. Yes.)

I caught a glimpse of myself in my mirror. There was a feral, banshee look about me; my eyes were dark, a livid red blossom was climbing from my cleavage up my neck. I walked closer to my reflection, put my hands on my breasts, held them tight. With my long pinkie nail I drew a dark red line across my throat, dragging harder at the last moment so that tiny beads of blood came to the surface of my skin. I slapped my throat once, twice, and looked down at the fine trail of blood on my palm. Not enough. It’s never enough.

I snaked my hand down under the fine material of my skirt, formed a fist with my fingers and pressed it hard against my clitoris. I could tell immediately from its bad-tempered response that I would not be blessed with an orgasm tonight. The novel mystery of someone else’s touch, perhaps, could have coaxed one out. But not my own. Not now. I clenched my teeth and let out a low, animal growl.

‘There are two of her,’ I remember my mum saying to a nurse. There was a frightened look in her eye. ‘She’s… she changes.’

If I really was a banshee, I remember thinking, I’d transform myself into a bat-girl and smash out of my bedroom window, shrouded in a cloud of undulating black smoke. Up, up I’d fly, over the Sainsbury’s Local and through the city night, leaving a trail of shadowy sexual mischief in my wake. George Michael would wake from his slumber and provide a luxuriously forbidding, glittering version of ‘Fastlove’ just for me: my personal soundtrack. He’d know that my bat-self would perceive in full the profound loneliness of that song – not the upbeat disco number others took it for, but dark, so very dark.

In the absence of security, I made my way into the night.

(‘How could you be lonely if you were George Michael?’ one of his fans had asked in a documentary. ‘You’d be with George Michael all the time.’)

Eventually the haze of smoke around me would clear. My wings would carry me back through my bedroom window and I would curl up in my virginal white sheets, spent and peaceful – human again, and as whole as I could possibly be.

I was just sane enough in that moment to accept that supernatural banshee antics were not a workable Plan A. My most desired activities thus eliminated, I knew I had to find a way back to functional, sensible me that did not involve two bottles of red wine and nicking an artery.