We Know What You Need

‘Come on, come on.’

                Madam Kroll hung over, her face a head away from Felicity’s. She was a dark smear across the copper light draining in from the hallway, her eyes were like slits, perusing Felicity up and down like a hunter observing its sprung trap.

                ‘Open wide, it’s okay.’

                Felicity found her lips being screwed open by Kroll’s fingers, followed by a gulp of awful, thick mush.

                ‘What is it?’ Felicity tried to ask, but what came out was closer to ‘wuh-ess-et’.

                ‘It’s exactly what you need, my little birdy. Breakfast. The most important meal of the day, I’m sure you’ve been told.’

                She recalled this but thought little of it. What she wanted to know, was this: ‘wuh ess et?’

                ‘Think of it like…’ another spoonful found itself into her clenched lips. ‘All the health and energy you need, minus the pleasure of an actual meal.’ She smiled.

                ‘Wuh�"’

                ‘It’s fine, not much left. Trust me, its good for you. It won’t fix you up, but it’ll give your body iron, vitamins and whatever else. Don’t ask me, I didn’t make it.’

                ‘Harold?’ it sounded more like ‘Hah-wuh’ mid-chew.

                ‘Yes, exactly. Now, chew.’

                Felicity tried to chew, it was sticky and tiring. Kroll raised her free hand and brought it to Felicity’s chin. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’

                Did she mean, ‘that’s it, almost done’? did she mean, ‘That’s it, get a load of the most awful s**t you can eat without it being considered inedible’? Felicity realised in chewing this horrific mush that anything even slightly tougher would have puller her teeth straightfrom her gums. Her teeth were loose, in pain and as if to wobble on every chew.

                Kroll released her hand from Felicity’s chin and brought with it a line of red drool. ‘Still bleeding, huh? It’s best we gave those teeth a rest. You’re doing well, my little birdy.’

                Kroll’s face was cold, long and sullen. Her cheekbones were cutting, and her eyes were coins, always observant, always maddening. Her hair was cut short, a fringe hung at the bridge of her brow and sometimes slicked into a Dracula’s lock down the centre. To Felicity she was a wobbling smear of darkness presenting her with cold, bitter vomit that she had to eat, there was no choice, it was entering her whether she liked it or not.

                ‘Now, I have a whole plethora of tasks to suit me the day, as for you I doubt you’ll be up to much. But that’s okay, you focus on rest and healing. I have a job in Jacobi Creek, a nice couple-,’ she paused to present a wide spoonful. Her voice was droning and quiet, somewhat soothing. ‘They have a little one on the way, isn’t that sweet?’ Felicity wasn’t sure whether to nod or ignore. ‘The ideas they have are wonderful. Completely impossible, but rather whimsical. I’ll make them something to be proud of, don’t you think?’ to be on the safe side, Felicity nodded.

                ‘What is it you do?’ Felicity asked.Wuh-ess-etoo-do?

                ‘Well, I’m an architect. I didn’t inherit this place, as much as you think I’m incapable I’m actually very good at what I do. I understand that you’re not from around here, but have you heard of the Akapura residential district?’

                Felicity nodded lightly. It was a gated community just outside Redoak but within the jurisdiction, costing more than the average life’s earnings. It was on the northmost tip of a district famous for the Jakob family murders in 1971 and the hauntings thereafter.

                ‘You’ll find my autograph on that one. A dream project, I must say. Not one I’ll have the luxury of exercising again any time soon, but I’m working up to one. I’m eyeing spaces across the state but ambition…’ she was trying to scrape the final scrags of nutrition from the pot, ‘…does not stop…’, she stuffed the spoon into Felicity’s closed mouth, ‘there!’

                ‘You’re a real success,’ Felicity moaned, almost gagging. Yuwwah-wee-lucssess

                ‘Don’t be flattering me, honey I hardly need it after all this time,’ She was smiling widely. She was, to Felicity’s denial, quite attractive. Even when clad in a thin housecoat that may have been too big for her to an unflattering degree around the waist. ‘Well, to your luck that’s the pot. I hope you enjoyed that, there’s plenty more where it came from. I hope you appreciate that I’m visiting you in the flesh this morning,’

                Felicity nodded.

                ‘I just worry about my little…’ she ruffled Felicity’s dying yard of broken hair, ‘Pets! I apologise, I’m excitable. Don’t you mind me, I will be leaving you. You get some more rest, try not to move. There’ll be time for that when it comes. I will be seeing you shortly, Felicity Dahmer.’

                ‘Wait,’ Felicity tried to say. Her mouth was folding with strands of tough goo.

                ‘Yes?’ Kroll replied.

                ‘I need… would like something to help with the pain, please, if that’s okay, madam.’

                She stopped moving, and began to skulk. Yes, that was the appropriate word. She was skulking like an upset, recently awoken predator eyeing a sleeping family of rabbits. These rabbits were together on a chair, wincing for drugs. Hard and bad.

                ‘Excuse me?’ she snarled. Her eyes fell and darknened, her back faced the window, she was a shadowed crack along the rooms height.

                ‘I’m sorry I just wondered if I could have some medication for the pain, it’s a lot and I don’t know how much�"’

                ‘Don’t you recall, my darling?’

                ‘Recal?’

                ‘Do you even know who I am?’

                She wasn’t making sense, but she wasn’t incomprehensible. Was this the insane ramblings of a psychopath? Was she serious? What would the Voice say? Probably something useless, like “how did you get here?”

                A sheen of sweat developed quickly across Felicity’s forhead and singed in the pulsing breeze from the half open window.

                ‘Madam Kroll, of course I know who you are.’

                ‘No, no. Who am I to you?’

                Felicity grinded to silence, cold distressed silence.

                ‘Let me remind you.’

 

***

 

The dry, iron taste of whatever she had been force-fed and the lacing of her own bloodied gums remained with Felicity long after Kroll had left with the door closed and locked. The window was still half opened and was still letting in a cool draft that still pricked her stump. She looked down at herself, for the first time since her dream. She saw her own abandoned torso, clothed with a loose, baggy flannel shirt. Her legs were bare until a sack tied around her thighs, reminiscent of a burlap skirt. Her left thigh was strapped down still.

                She knew that if she wanted to, she could move. Well, wanted wasn’t the right word. She could, if she found it within herself to clench and ignore the pain. She could perform laps of the room in her chair, look out the window, fall out and splat across gravel like a Victorian bucket of liquid s**t. Alas, she was still numb, and the pills had taken a beating to her head. Her thoughts were tiring and painful to think, lights were too light, and shadows had an eerie comfort. She tried twitching her arm, she did, but it was tiring and numb. Scum of dried blood smeared along her bare forearm. She was always prone to migraines, which was less than ideal working under hot studio lighting for most of her childhood.

                There were footsteps outside. No, stomps. Most likely male staff. They were scattered and descended across the manor like cruising hunters. Cutlery was clattering below her in a way that was infuriating to her buzzing headache. What she found, in observing the 6x6 block she was granted, was that escape was futile. The walls were thick, the locks made mechanical shunk noises, and going by the weakness she felt she doubted she could unlock it from the other side. But, then there was the half open window. The sky was clear and cloudless. The Oaktree was scrambling its tangled branches in the loose wind. If Kroll had any reason to suspect that escape via window was possible, it would have been locked.

                But escape by suicide?

                She brushed the thought away, and began to wonder why she still, after what felt like days was still lingering in the same corner. She hadn’t bothered to lumber her free chair across the space she was granted, not even to the best chance of escape. Escape by suicide?

                No, never. It was nonsense and fled her mind like a vapid grammatical error.

                ‘How did you get here?’ asked the Voice.

                Footsteps barraged across the hall and the ground shook. The cutlery was jingling louder, and the curtains were warping a pale tunnel across the room. She could hardly feel her arms now, which was step up from when she simply couldn’t feel them. Her mind was fierce and warping like a renegade gun between several distinct thoughts. She thought about the turtle. The lines of its shell, the scar cutting through its body. The turtle she lost to the furnace.

                ‘Tattoos are for big girls who make big girl choices.’

                Jessy Jane was a tattoo artist from Indonesia, contracted by Fiona Wilshaw to needle a moth into a thigh in the late 90s, 97’? Probably 98’. Felicity joined in the back of her brother Danny’s band truck and in a group they got stripped and wiped down before facing Jessy’s needle.

                ‘Why a turtle, Fee?’

                The age old question. Why a turtle? Well, why a moth? Why a sword, why your mum’s birthday? It didn’t matter what was there, only that it was there. What was really important, was where?

                Well, there was the upper arm, which apparently was less painful but would stop her beingable to wear swimsuits and tanktops- no-go. There was her chest, and when the inevitable nudie picture is leaked by Devon the turtle bears all with her and the world knows of the dreaded turtle. So- her legs. But where? She was prone to wearing the shorter than short skirt, but perhaps if it was tucked away where the jean pocket would overlap. And that’s where the turtle found its home, tucked away from the world. A quiet symbol of her youth. Yes, a turtle.

                The real problem wasn’t the monthly instalments paid to Jessy Jane through money laundered via lunch money trades at Georgian, it wasn’t the selophane wrapped wound grinding on denim every moment until the stubborn son of a b***h finally healed, it was mother.

                God, damn her.

                The prissy white b***h Shannon Fellcross with the upturned glasses and curtain streak hair. The face too ugly for her own business. Her face was a stain on Felicity’s mind the moment she recalled her. God, how could she forget. The tombstone teeth with a gap in the centre. The upturned collar with the crimson necktie. The eyes of a feral animal. Felicity had the turtle hidden from mother like recreational drugs under the matress. A dark, filthy secret.

                What if someone sees you? You want to become a tacky tabloid w***e? She was the child star, the pretty face with the fair hair. Felicity Dahmer the voice of prissy white b*****s, lowlifes and commuters. A face for the masses.

                Where was the turtle now? Well, probably in the litter heap. Maybe its hung up in a fucked up trophy hall of limbs and teeth. Maybe it’s being converted into a lampshade. The tutle was at the will of Madam Kroll. Her stump hurt bad and itched like hell. She couldn’t touch it, she couldn’t look at it. When the wind whistled through the window it struck the greasy mound as a painful, constant reminder. She needed… needed….

                ‘What is it you need?’ the Voice asked.

                ‘I need my f*****g drugs’, she said aloud. She didn’t half care if staff heard, although she doubted that they could. She surveyed the surroundings nonetheless, listening for a bang or a scrape, or a ‘Okay, darling, I’ll be right there!’ from Kroll.

                Un-f*****g-likely.

                ‘God, look at you.’ The Voice was bitter.

                ‘Oh would you f**k�"’ she stopped herself and bit her tongue so far as her tolerance would allow.

                ‘You’re startng to remember,’ the Voice contined. This was true, the numbing of the drugs was withering. Her mind was less clouded, she could see through it, but could make little sense of what she saw. As if looking at polaroid clues of a lost lifetime. ‘I want you to try, for me, to remember how you got here.’

                I don’t need to, what’s the point?

                ‘No, what you need is drugs, no?’

                She couldn’t argue, and didn’t. There’s no way out of this.

                ‘You don’t know why you’re here. you don’t know the point. Maybe if you did…’

                Do I want to know?

                The Voice fell silent and Felicity tried to sleep, and didn’t.