VENUS IN KILBURN

BEFORE TEN P.M. 

Fingernails sharpened. White powder. Red lips. 

The mascara pops out of its tube with a click like that of a tongue. Outside, an ambulance’s red-blue screech streaks through the street, a whine turned groan as it fades. There’s a chill thrumming in the air. 

“What are you supposed to be?” 

I look up from my hands at the mirror with a sigh. “Vampire.” 

Tsz Shan swings her feet against the edge of my bed, the blush pink duvet cupping around her waist like a frilled tutu. “Why a vampire? We could’ve been a princess.” “Monica’s doing that already.” 

“So?” Bristles through my lashes as I listen to her huff. “Just because someone else gets to be princess doesn’t mean we can’t.” 

I lean away from the mirror. Though the room’s dark, the fairy lights vining through the metal of my headboard light her up from the back and crown a halo. 

“Look,” I say, “this was last minute. I wasn’t invited until this morning—I had to improvise.” 

She frowns. “You look scary.” 

I look down at myself. Mourning veil atop my head and an old black dress that I cared little for now torn at the hem, strips dyed crimson with hair dye. Tight heeled boots, dark glossy pretend-leather, courtesy of Monica. All an awkward fit. I’ll make it fit. 

“I think it looks good.” 

“Who’s Sarah anyway?” 

“Nobody, really. One of Monica’s friends.”

“Monica,” she grumbles. 

“Naomi?” 

I look towards my door. “Yeah?” 

“You ready?” 

“Two seconds.” 

Tsz Shan shields her sullen face with a downward tilt as I approach. “Look,” I tell her, “I won’t be gone for long. Just a few hours there and back. You should sleep.”

“You said we would watch scary movies together.” 

I crouch down and sigh. “And we will. On Halloween night proper, okay? But it’s the weekend, and everybody’s doing it this weekend…” 

“You’ll forget.” 

“I won’t,” I whisper. “I’ll spend time with you, I promise.” 

She lifts her eyes. I know that look of mixed distrust and hope. “Promise?” She raises her pinky towards me, and my expression softens. We link our fingers together, hers small and rounded and mine a glossy black claw. 

૯

Monica looks straight out of a royal portrait somewhere in Buckingham Palace, velvet red sweetheart dress and a gemmed tiara atop her perfectly curled hair. She’s fixing the corner of her painted lips as I shut the door behind me. 

“You ready?” she asks. Spares not a glance. 

I suck in a breath. Force it out. “Yeah.”

Keys, cards, smokes, lipstick. A bottle of wine and three shitty Tesco cocktails in a can stuffed in a Student Union tote. Armoury’s stocked. My soles begin to fill the too-large heels, the arch of my feet swelling to the ceiling of the shoes. I grow myself taller, back straighter. 

By the time we leave the flat, I am at Monica’s height. There’s a creaking in my bones, like wood bearing pressure, or something too heavy to be held up for long. 

૯

TEN P.M. 

Rumble. Jolt. Shudder. 

An eel of floating windows slithers past ruddy bricked council houses, passenger faces a smear of light and shadow. Open roads and thin stalks of street lamps disappearing into a thick kind of evening. 

On the Overground, Monica doesn’t talk much. I keep myself company well enough. Off of Highbury and Islington, we take the Mildmay west toward Brondesbury—

  (these English names. The winter before last, they were letters on a

yellowed page. Roman-à-clef, you’d assume, until you sit in the ventricles of the

old London Underground and you look at the maps above your head and see St.

John’s Wood and Cockfosters.)

(Chapter 4 of 1984, Winston is pushing slips of untruths down pneumatic

tubes and down they go the esophagus into the belly of an uncaring city. I can

never escape this paper thin feeling of my limbs flit-fluttering against the screech

of the Tube like some paper lie myself.)

A group of drunk nuns and devils talk a high pitched laughter next to masked men breaking beer bottles on plastic seat handles. A woman protects her young Spider-Batman-Thor from the carousing. 

“Mind the gap.” 

My stomach clenches. Feels like a sunken stone, can’t tell if it’s nerves or hunger. Then the doors shut and my teeth clicks shut, bones rumble jolt shudder— 

૯

We dip off Kilburn High Road and into an offshoot street, muted in darkness, deserted. Beside us are drawn gates, dull metal made vivid with sprayed paint and rust. One looks like it was once a pizzeria but it now has a large ‘FOR SALE’ sign tapped over the remnants of a posted menu that was too stubborn to be peeled clean. An ElfBar box crushed damp with street runoff peels from my skewering heel as I storm past. Monica walks even faster. 

A beat pulses above us. Too distant to be music, it feels like the shudder that precedes a cough. 

“Aye you Sarah’s friends?” 

I crane my neck back to look in the direction of the voice. Above the corpse of the pizzeria, a terrace appears, its shadows marrying the edges of the man who shouted down. “Yeah!” Monica calls up. 

“Bell’s broken, I’ll come get ya!” 

He disappears from the edge and soon after, there’s a creak of a metal gate. “And what are you supposed to be?” Monica prods with a smile as the man lets us up.

He shrugs and looks down on himself. A stain of something greasy sits at the hem of his shirt. “Dunno. Myself, I guess.” 

Rusted steps protest against our weight as we enter the lion’s den. An undulating mass of people roils uncontainable inside the home and spills indiscriminately onto the terrace. The bass thrums underneath my heels, rattling my ankles like loose change. What soaks the air is that distinctly rotten, earthy stench of weed and cigs.  

We slip through the left open door into the house. The first dark hallway is pierced through with blue lavender magenta lights. Through it and into the living room. A study desk now a DJ set-up is shoved to the corner and the most frat-boy frat boy mans the station with a headphone half held up to his head. Am I dreaming up this cliche? Dining table’s already a graveyard of every kind of liquor and cider in the city. The floor’s sticky. A crate of Coronas is holding the door open to the room; less and less effective with every bottle stolen by a drunk. 

“You made it!” Jessica, a friend of friend and now a slutty panther, comes to hug us, sharpened acrylic nails arched up to avoid a scratch. 

“You can put your stuff in my room, it’s upstairs,” and now Sarah is beside us, a leopard with drawn-on black whiskers, and she leads us back through the hallway, up the narrow stairs, up, up… 

Then a woman passes us. 

She 

 —smooth skin, 

 —sequins and pearls, vines 

 —a perfume stinking sweet, just like a 

—Fuck. I know her name. What is it?

I look back. She’s a crown of petals and lipstick made black in shadow before she disappears ‘round the bend and I think of something deep in the belly of a jungle, frail body rooted but petal jaws open, waiting for prey. Nature that devours you sweet. She’s devastating. 

“Naomi?” 

A tug on the frayed hem of my dress. When I look down, it’s pink mesh and ballet ribbons. Fuck. 

Guilt and hunger bite with incisors from the same mould. 

“Yeah, coming.” 

૯ 

MIDNIGHT. 

Swallowed up, or passed around; body. Maybe too much already, stash’s all done and dried and Monica’s nowhere to be found. I’m nursing a bottle in my hand. Leaving it to someone else to try to keep the door open. 

Girl in front of me, she’s got that South London accent. My accent has no home. ‘Oh what was that?’ she asks. ‘You said that weird—are you Irish?’ ‘My ex was Irish,’ I tell her. ‘Bad habit.’ ‘You’ve got that lilt.’ ‘It gets in you. You know.’ By the time she drifts away, I’ve got her accent swishing in my mouth like Listerine. 

Then it’s ‘oh where you from?’ from another. ‘You’ve got that South London thing, but you look Korean.’ And yeah, sure, I’ll be Korean for her. ‘Nice meeting you, Natasha.’ Sure, I’ll be Natasha. Not one bit less legitimate than the name I chose. My mother’s daughter’s name dresses the passport like an obituary.

Whole time, my gaze floats. The room’s small but there are so many faces to comb through. I know the woman’s nowhere here, no sign of ivies or pearls, just a sea of drawn-on whiskers and paint-on blood. 

Then someone else and I’m on the couch. He’s telling me how he was gunning to be a baseball player when he was younger and I don’t tell him that I was in ballet school ‘til I was thirteen and then I grew up. The guy fixes up his baseball cap. He’s supposed to be some famous baseball player. Tells me he’s a chem eng student now. Something good and impressive. There’s pity in his eyes when I tell him ‘bout the English lit. degree. 

He pats my shoulder. “You on anything?” 

“Huh? No.” 

He pats me again and I look. A baggie in front of me. 

“It’s ket,” he says. 

Old friend. 

“Expensive habit,” I say. 

“Mm, no, doesn’t have to be. Bag’s not mine.” 

Friends are hard to come by. 

Don’t know if it’s for my propriety or his. Baseball Cap pulls me out of the living room and dips past the first door he sees into the kitchen. There’s someone fixing a drink against the counter, sterile white light above him. Another person raids the cabinets for something with urgency. 

In the corner with me, Cap’s key is out, scooping. He bumps it easy and then hands the bag to me. I tap it up to the second tooth of the key. This is like getting served dim sum by a Brit. “You know Ket’s real popular where I’m from?”

“Mm, really?” 

He’s feigning interest, but these words aren’t for him. “First drug I ever learned about. It was always on TV. They called it K-仔, which is…” 

No way of explaining honorifics right now, why they shouldn’t have named it that if they didn’t want us to hear it and think friend. I bump it and it stings like a fucker, nasty high school reunion. 

Two cartoon characters come on screen, accompanied by loud synths and wearing powder blue space suits and ridiculous swooping hairdos. Standing posed and proud, they fist bump in front of a bright, sunny, cartoon sky. 

「企硬唔take嘢.」 

Easy for them to say that. They don’t got the mouth or nose to snort. 

I look up as he pats my shoulder. “Want more, come find me. Gotta get rid of this shit before the morning.” 

Then Cap’s gone quick, and it’s just me and this guy, still searching the cupboards for something. Rustle. Shift. Scrape. 

I slip out the kitchen and feel my way out the unlit hallway-foyer, bass rippling through the air like water. It’s not until I step out that I notice my vision’s all seasick and I almost miss a step coming out onto the terrace. And this is just the drinks. 

Whole roof smells like pot, stewed in conversation, but I wrap my arms around my sheer dress and get up to the parapets away from the smoke circles and the carousing men. Look up far far away from the rocking boat. 

And I’ve never seen it before. 

A fog, thick and swallowing, rolls down Kilburn High Street and leaves only impressions behind, like something out of Eliot’s Unreal City. Ghosts. 

Is this how you know? I press my face against concrete and feel it melt into the grain. Maybe London never stops being just a story on a page. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Dickens. Somehow I’m between black serif now and the ket’s gonna drip, drip, drip… 

૯

THREE A.M. 

Fingernail sharp. White powder. 

I’m so hungry. 

Cap keeps to the key but my claws have sharpened and by the time he hands the baggie back, there’s only so much left and I’m too sobered up. My teeth’s pushing out the gums so I rub what remains against the red and aching tissue. He pulls me onto the bed and into his lap and I don’t resist. Maybe I was the one who pulled him in first. 

“You said you came with who?” 

“No one.” 

“No one? Can’t be right, pretty girl.” 

He’s tracing his finger down my neck. I check my phone. No messages from Monica. “A quick one?” 

“No.” 

“No?” 

“I shouldn’t.”

“You smell sweet, you know that?” 

His cologne stinks. Makes my stomach hurt. Growl. 

“I’m hungry,” I whisper. “You wanna go get food?” 

“Shit’s all closed now. No one but us.” 

“Maybe later then.” 

“Don’t be a tease.” 

His lips worm against my jaw. 

“Yeah?” I murmur. “What’s my name?” 

“Shh.” 

“I have a name, you know.” 

“Mhm.” 

“You don’t got the tongue for it.” 

“Tongue? I got use for that. I’ll show you.” 

He licks up my jaw and I shiver. Stomach growls again, gnashing, and it’s clawing up my throat, the sound threatening to swallow my voice. My bones feel sharp and angular at the joints. Would it be safer? 

To let it happen. 

To be. Become. 

Yes. 

It would be. 

When I swipe my tongue across my teeth, I taste salt and iron and names and accents and colognes and acrid retching. 

I’m so hungry.

૯ 

FOUR A.M. 

Snaps of gnashing teeth and guttural groans. Fabric caught and tearing rivulets. Beside the bed, a mirror stands: a door left open. 

When I look, I don’t see myself. 

A man is caged on the bed, limbs splayed like a beetle on its back. His expression is a peeled fig, fleshed and ripe. 

A woman—the woman—is just slithering shapes and shadow and pearlescent bones. Her body has lost its beginning and his is without end like jam spread on already flushed lips. When I tighten my grip on the frayed edges of his shirt, the woman’s vines snake and tighten treacherously. Our lips are slick with a sheen of drool and ichor. 

My eyes rake over her beautiful form. Her ribs splinter out from the stem of her spine to butterfly out jagged wings. Waxy leaves with black clawed pincers to cage him in her hold. His throat is a punctured wet mince. Dissolving and writhing beneath her, and spasms that pulse slower and slower. 

She is devastating. Something out of myth and divinity, her name coats my tongue like resin. Like it’s mine. Like Venus always belonged in this wretched body. 

૯ 

FIVE A.M.

Sweat on skin vitiligo with rust bricks and footsteps like the rumble of the Overground. Breath like October winds. Something returns home. 

Tsz Shan is asleep on the bed. Heavy and stumbling, a sated goddess slumps beside her, the stench of deliquescing men and city making the child stir. 

She looks down upon herself, an unrecognisable, mangled mass of flesh and roads. The child’s hand threads through the gore-stained hair and brings the duvet up to her torn shoulders. I don’t come home.