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‘Only fucked-up people are truly great in this world,’ Michael said. ‘Genet was a fucked-up, masturbating genius.’
I told Michael that the part I liked best in Our Lady was when one of the characters kills his girlfriend by banging her head against the brass bed, then just looks out the window and thinks the sun is malevolent. I didn’t know how Genet did that, made me follow that exact train of thought: ‘To love a murderer,’ he wrote. ‘I want to sing murder, for I love murderers!’
I started an Our Lady game with Michael. The next time he came to John’s and we were all drinking, I stared at him, really seriously, and quoted from the book. ‘Your dead man is inside you,’ I said. ‘Mingled with your blood. He flows in your veins, oozes out through your pores, and your heart lives on him, as cemetery flowers sprout from corpses … ’
‘Yeah, that’s good,’ Michael laughed. ‘You’re smarter than I thought, Mira.’
‘It’s the part that reminded me of you.’
John looked hurt.
I rolled my eyes. ‘It reminds me of all of us, John. Our Lady of the Flowers is going to vomit out all our carcasses!’
Michael smirked, so I continued quoting from the book. I knew it was kind of dramatic: ‘The night, which has come on, does not bring terror. The room smells of whore. Stinks and smells fragrant. To escape from horror, as we have said, bury yourself in it.’
I don’t know why that passage made me and Michael crack up. I think because we both knew that John didn’t really get it, I mean that him and Michael held their dead men inside them and I was the stinky fragrant whore!
Our game happened a few more times. Michael quoted something to me about me from the book and I quoted something back to him about him. But then I didn’t see him for a while, a few weeks, and the next time he came over, it was strange, it was like we’d never even had the Our Lady game, or the inside joke that we were both smarter than John.
If I asked John where Michael was when he wasn’t around, John would get mad. He’d say: ‘Mikey’s a businessman, Mira. He can’t always come over and educate you.’
I missed Michael though. Being with John was boring without him.
But Michael never came over alone again. He brought some big weird guy once who drank beer with us. I felt nervous because Michael was acting like a completely different person. He didn’t say anything smart or talk about books. He just kept drinking and smoking and scratching his arms.
The only thing he said to me was: ‘You’re always making Johnny jealous, Mira.’
I didn’t get why Michael and John were acting like they were friends with this disgusting new guy. They were all flicking their bottle caps into the middle of the table, cheering when they hit each other.
I was pissed off that Michael was acting so stupid. As the night went on I kept waiting for him to change. But he didn’t change, he just got more drunk.
It was three in the morning when he finally told John to set up the camera. ‘Take Joel with you, Johnny, show him how it’s done.’ Then Michael leaned over the table to me and said, ‘Joel likes you. He wants to do it with you.’
‘Why are you so into this dirty-video thing?’ I asked.
Michael stared at me with his heavy pink eyes. Then he spoke very slowly: ‘Because I am a bum. If you do this tonight, I will not be.’
That big Joel guy had thick yellow hands. I made myself fall from his crooked lap before anything happened. I started screaming at John to turn the camera off. He didn’t do it right away. That guy was disgusting. I didn’t have my underwear on.
‘Turn it off! Please! Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off!’
‘Fuck, Johnny, she’s freaking out,’ I heard Michael say nervously. I looked at the screen. My vicious red face. My cunt was a monkey’s ass hanging behind me.
‘Turn it off! Turn it off!’
‘Okay, shhh, it’s okay. It’s off, baby, look, it’s off.’
My palms were nailed to the ground. John came down quick, crouching around me. ‘I’m sorry, Mira, baby, I love you, come on.’ John’s arms were tight around my shoulders. ‘Guys, I think you should go … ’
Hurting black fluid was filling my nose. John’s arms were sweltering. I couldn’t stop crying. I realized that Michael didn’t give two shits about me.
But he did quote me back from Our Lady of the Flowers. After another month away, he gave John a note to give to me. His handwriting was slanted and bunched-up like some psychotic person’s scrawl.
‘Her life stopped,’ the note said. ‘But around her life continued to flow. She felt as if she was going backward in time, and wild with fright at the idea of it – the rapidity of it – reaching the beginning, the Cause, she finally released a gesture that very quickly set her heart beating again.’
Adi wasn’t in her room when I banged on the door. I went downstairs to the change rooms to ask the girls if they had seen her. It was six o’clock in the evening. We had to work in a few hours and I’d slept most of the day. Lani was down there, smoking and looking fucked up on coke or something.
‘Looking for your girlfriend, Meeeera?’
