Teen Lite (1996)

She looks just like a supermodel; like a thin, sick junkie. Her lips speak of mystery and sex without even moving.

He is a lowlife muppet with a noisy moped. An attractive eighteen-year-old runaway living temporarily with a gang of vicious Jesusfreak bikers.

Her cheap wig is askew when she collects the brick-shaped package he’s been asked to deliver to a child’s swing in the park. As she goes she is smiling and her body is ort of floating backwards and forwards as if all the parts of it are only loosely connected and she isn’t really walking on the ground.

She likes him for the dense, percussive excitement he provides. Her likes her because she’s so well spoken and has a collection of frightening Klaus Barbie dolls and ominous Action Mengeles.

One of his home-recorded compilation tapes (‘Techno Various’) has inexplicably been altered, replaced in some parts by sound resembling Morse code. He has played the tape before on countless occasions. One side of the tape is pure dance music. The other side now contains both techno and essential but indecipherable information in cipher.

Her new telephone re-Oedipalises her. She calls her daddy every day. He is an architect and will not answer, but a demonic voice leaves complex messages on her answerphone. Sophisticated analysis of the microtape later reveals that most of the messages begin with the words I HATE YOU. She wills him to pick up pick up pick up as she twists the spiral umbilicus around her fingers. But he never does.

The party is a dull and pointless exercise in content free social exchanges. She is bored and takes quite a few pills. Valium or Ecstasy, Temazepam or Mogadon, she forgets which. Right then, he takes her arms and leads her off into a corner of the room. A man in a bathing suit and his fashionable Japanese girlfriend move aside and there, on the PC monitor, is his face. She tries to close his mouth by dragging the cursor to life his jaw. Her movements are too uncontrolled, and she makes his lower lip sail up, penetrating his nose, making a disgusting but not entirely unfamiliar gurn.

The next day she grinds her teeth a lot and sits in the living room feeling totally crazed and frightened.

Saturday they watch television and read supermarket novels. Sunday he buries her up to her neck in his back garden, making her feel:

a)     stupid

b)     erotic

and

c)     claustrophobic.

Wednesday she sees five enormous things resembling pterodactyls, with leathery bodies and wings, wheeling over the house like hungry vultures. The two of them stay up all night drinking and bullshitting one another. It all begins to feel so significant.

They have long and unflinching discussions about (amongst other things):

Chaos theory and chaos practice

Viruses and decay

Today’s global politico-corporate power structures

What happens when your sexual impulses spin out of control

How one would go about making a citizen’s arrest (and whether one can do so without getting one’s face kicked in)

How much it costs to die

The true nature of love

Can you really drink your own pee?

They systematically listen to each other’s vinyl. She tells him how she never liked ambient music until somebody told her that ambienté is Mexican slang for gay.

A large quantity of cash and personal items go missing from her flat. For several days afterwards lights are seen when she is out, and a shadowy figure moves around as she tries to sleep. Yet each time the police are called, no one is found. They live together for two weeks, then the haunting stops.

— I don’t even know what Shiatsu is. Will a medium vigorous vibration do, babe?

— You’re all glitter on the edges, with profound stupidity in the middle.

(Pause.)

— Did you make that one up yourself?

He reassures himself that he doesn’t need the very best. He is perfectly happy with something that is reasonably adequate. She has been dabbling in pornography. He discovers an out-of-focus Hi-8 stag film featuring her and an arcane sect of Satanists. It bears a sticker saying YOU MUST BE 18 YEARS OLD TO PURCHASE THIS OR YOU WILL GROW UP TO BE A DEPRAVED SEX MURDERER.

She anticipates the incriminations and recriminations by writing crude insults on her arms in felt-tip pen. Her intention is to seem ironic, but instead she gives the impression of someone hanging on by her acrylic fingernails. He desperately hopes that her bizarre behaviour is a cry for help. It isn’t.

—My God. The world’s insane. We’re contemplating madness.

(Apropos of nothing.)

He reacts like your mum reading a book, when you show her your drawing and her X-ray vision enables her to appraise your picture without looking up from what she’s reading.

— Our relationship is too intellectual. Too abstract. Too contained. Too noisy. I find it difficult to see how anyone could have been fooled by this dwarfed, desiccated pastiche of a relationship. But we were fooled. I’ve had it up to here with this entropy business.

— Explain yourself, woman.

— I am ranting and you don’t explain rants.

They float away from each other like a double helix broken into two single strands of nucleotides. They become something new by accumulating all the things they can no longer be.

He keeps on calling her, even though she’s told him on several occasions to please be finished with her. His grammar is often bad; he uses (for example) “obsolete” as a verb. He suggests deviant sexual conduct in a violent and non-consensual context. After these scenes they are both trembly and smoke cigarettes.

Rollups for her, Silk Cut 100s for him.

He waits outside her flat one night. A small handheld sprayer— similar to a pepper or mace canister— unloads a 70lb blast of bright green foam dye into his face. His Kermit-like face helps no end when she has to pick him out of a police line-up a week later. Crying, she tells herself, doesn’t make any sense in an age of instantaneous global communications and babies whelped in Petri dishes. And call me Winston Smith if you like, she thinks, but the idea of wiring up the whole world isn’t something that comforts me.

He dies under strange circumstances. Somebody tells her that he was in a fight over a rent boy. His neighbour says that he was discovered as a pile of ashes in the shower cubicle, his skull shrunken to the size of a honeydew melon. He came into her world as a question mark, and is delivered in a bin bag to the morgue with a question mark. A Post-It note is found on his fridge, requesting that he be sewn into a canvas shroud with the last stitch piercing the gristle between his nostrils, and committed to the deep. This being impractical in most cases, and impossible in his, he is cremated. Like he needs it.

With hindsight she realises that she had always seen the zipper up the back of her monster guy. And she thought she had killed all the Space Invaders. She grew up, bought her own television set and forgot all about them. But they faxed her the scary news about herself from the past.

She puts on some ambienté music and shakes rhythmically all night.

© Alistair Gentry 1996. First published in 'Fission'.
Also available in 'Uncanny Valley: Collected Short Stories'.