She doesn’t know how she got there. In that moment, all she thinks she’s lost is time.
She sits up and tries to swallow, but without enough saliva the movement hurts her throat. She feels around the sore edges of her mouth with a dry tongue. Next an aching pressure down the length of her spine – the way she had been sleeping, perhaps. Bolsters herself with both hands, legs out straight. For a moment she feels little and young, like a child in ballet class doing the exercise with toes pointed up, toes pointed down – good toes, naughty toes, good toes, naughty toes.
It is then that she feels something warm escape from between her thighs. She looks under the pink coverlet, too dark to see though. She feels afraid and ashamed at the thought that perhaps she has wet herself or, worse, is spilling dark menstrual blood onto their beautiful covers. She thinks this is the worst she will feel, she does, so appalled at the thought of soiling other people’s things she tears pillowslip from pillow and rams it between her legs, eyes filling with tears at the thought of a parent’s reaction to such damage. Injury, accident or stupidity?
She gets out of the bed and staggers stiff-legged past the walk-in wardrobe where she had spent half the night with Scott. He was fun. That was nice. Now she feels like shit. She goes into the bathroom: towels rippled in piles on the floor, bottles knocked over.
Faced with a full-length mirror now, a ceiling light illuminating her naked white legs, she stands pale in her pink cotton pants and T-shirt. She doesn’t remember undressing. She doesn’t remember leaving the wardrobe. There is an angry smear of blood down her thigh almost to her knee, some dark, some fresh, it has moved like a slow and quiet river out of her. She swallows, digesting this violent image of blood against skin where previously there had only been sun cream and chlorine.
Her thoughts snag and begin sifting back through time. It hadn’t been that long since her last period, a week or so at most. A family lunch, old friends, she’d played Happy Families with the child closest her age, then visited the toilet. How silly she’d been not to bring sanitary towels, couldn’t find anything in the cupboards, had to make do with a rolled bunch of rough recycled toilet paper. And now her body is bleeding again and there is obviously something wrong with her stupid body that it is bleeding again so quickly.
Then she sees a red mark across her ribs like a cat has clawed at her, and she has to step forward to examine herself closer in the mirror just to check it isn’t crayon or pen. It doesn’t wipe away and she wonders why. Part of a game with Scott, perhaps.
She drinks water from the tap and then sits on the toilet to have a wee. She feels too bad to care that there’s no lock on the door. The house is quiet anyway. It feels like early morning. If people are awake, they’re downstairs. The loud music has gone.
Knickers round her knees, she wonders why the seams of her blood-stained pants are wrong. They’re facing outwards. The label at the back is hanging into space behind the waistband of her soft pink cotton knickers. Why has she done this? Was she so drunk that she took them off to wee and put them back on the wrong way round?
She stands and takes off her pants, then nearly trips in the leg holes. She starts turning them back the right way but even with her eyes half-closed, focusing on trying not to be sick, she notices that something is not right. There is a whiteness mixed in with the blood in the crotch area.
She cannot believe it. It cannot be right.
She crouches a little and pushes a finger into her vagina, which feels sore, then examines it. Amidst the blood smell of iron is the chlorinous smell of semen. It’s not new to her. She had given Dave Lowden a hand-job at the Spring Ball and afterwards wiped away the rest of it in a toilet cubicle and, curious and unwatched, smelt it, just so she knew.
But how is that here?
She throws up. She vomits green bile and pale liquid onto the tiled floor, then retches and retches.
Where is Scott and did he do this to her?
She does not remember anyone doing anything to her and this is the moment she knows she did not dress inside out.
She would never choose to turn herself inside out.
She holds the pants, still half inside out – at a distance, as if they are someone else’s entrails.
She lowers herself to the floor, cowers, curls into a ball, hiding herself from the reflection in the mirror, afraid to see how much of her has been lost, taken.
And then she loses more: over and over, vomiting onto the bathroom floor. She is all the colours of the rainbow, what with the pearlescent-white semen and rose-red blood and infected green bile and girly pink scraped skin. All the colours of the rainbow, and yet none of them.
Her skin hurts like the ripples at the start of skin peeling from flesh and frame. She puts palms to ribcage and feels upward to where her heart is, then down and across to the place where her lungs lie, side by side. Feels where her stomach sits,
