Brainwyrms, p.1
Brainwyrms, page 1
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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Brainwyrms is a novel about the situation in which we find ourselves in the UK. When my first novel, Tell Me I’m Worthless, came out, some people noted that I included a content warning at the beginning. This is a content warning too.
Brainwyrms features (very) taboo sex that many would consider unsafe or unsanitary, as well as sexual violence and child abuse.
INTRODUCTION
My name is Alison Rumfitt and I am a cisgender woman. That’s what I’ve decided. You can make that decision for yourself; it is perfectly possible. I’ve always been cisgender. I was born this way and I’ll die this way. I don’t write books about transness, nothing of the sort. My books, such as they are, aren’t even about queerness (whatever that might mean). I don’t write books about myself or things I’ve experienced. Any resemblance between characters in things I’ve written and real people is purely coincidental. I write horror and I write satire. I write purely for the entertainment of myself and others. Let me state it clearly: I am not subversive. I am a cisgender woman. I say this last part over and over to myself. I repeat it many times each day. My girlfriend wrote it down for me and she now helps me practise this affirmation, this plea. No … let’s start again. Let’s not mention that I have a girlfriend. They aren’t rounding up the dykes yet but with the way things are going I give it, what, ten years before they are. The other day in a café I heard a cis woman say to another cis woman in a hushed and serious tone, “Doesn’t it scare you, Claire, doesn’t it just feel like The Handmaid’s Tale is coming true.”
I’m writing this right now in 2030, and if you’re reading it then that’s a bad sign. You shouldn’t be reading this. It might mean I’m dead I suppose … If I am, burn my shit. My partner might still be alive, and I don’t want her to face persecution should these words fall into the wrong hands. If you, dear reader, are the wrong hands, then go fuck yourself. I hope you die. Kill yourself, etc. I’m sure that worked, so if you’re still reading this it means you’re not the wrong hands. Keep reading if you want to.
This country is a grey country. It has been grey as long as I’ve lived. Even on the hottest summer days it is grey, and in recent years two things have become certain: it’s getting hotter and it’s getting greyer. I’m writing this on 5 September, which, if you are reading this, I want you to note as an historic date. The UK government just put out a decree banning transgenderism. This doesn’t personally affect me because, as I said, I’m a cisgender woman, but it affects a lot of people. It’s scary. I’m scared. It’s not really clear how they plan on enforcing this ban: perhaps, as some people on Newsnight claim, the ban is only theoretical. How a ban can be theoretical they never seem to say. Perhaps the ban is only there to discourage and not to literally ban, which is something I’d believe more if it wasn’t a literal ban.
I’ve just been thinking a lot. About this mess and how we got here. I came out when I was twelve but even then, the Tavistock was basically a fucking traffic jam, each and every kid stuck but not suspended. With every passing day their bodies changed in the wrong direction … okay, it was less like a traffic jam and more like a group of people stuck standing on an escalator moving down when they’re trying to move up. I’m not really a cis woman, but let’s keep that our little secret, dear reader. I got so used to coming out that I know I’ll miss it, so let me do it one last time: I am transgender and I am a lesbian and I’m scared. I came out at twelve and finally transitioned at fifteen. I screamed at my Mother, saying that irreparable damage had already been done. What was the point. I’d always look like a fucking boy. And my Mum held me close and said that just wasn’t true, the world was getting better. They were making progress every day. Even the Conservative Party just pledged to try and reform the process to make it easier for trans kids! That was then, and this is now: that future my Mother promised me never came to pass. I got my tits and my cunt, thank God. The Tavistock was bombed by a terrorist. The rest of the GICs were defunded little by little, year after year, until they barely had the money to treat the patients they already had, let alone take on more. Society in the UK – and worldwide, too – became obsessed with the spectre of the transsexual: the aberrant, abject societal glitch, the perversion, the rapid-onset virus praying on poor, defenceless kids. I knew that people didn’t like trans people, but when I was a child that was sort of a background static buzz. During my transition, that background static buzz grew into an all-consuming scream. Loud enough to make your ears bleed. It spread from person to person like wildfire. It started with a couple of Guardian journalists and a sitcom writer, but soon their brain-eating transphobic parasitic mindvirus had washed across half of Britain’s media landscape. Children’s authors, news anchors, entire papers and magazines, musicians and directors. People who thought of themselves as well-meaning liberals were utterly consumed. Soon, they could only think of things in relation to trans people. Everything was linked to us: Putin and China, COVID and abortion bans, declining literacy rates. I don’t know exactly why they became so obsessed with us. I just wanted to have a nice life and write my little extreme horror novels in peace. I guess I ended up writing in response to it, though, and I’ll never know what sort of writer I would have been if I didn’t live in this fucking world that forces me to write about transphobia. Maybe I’d write cool horror stories about vampires raping werewolves, ones with no subtext at all. I’m sure I wouldn’t have seen the success I was lucky enough to have. I never advertised that I was a transgender woman, but I also never advertised that I was a cis woman, back then at least. People tended to assume that I was trans because I knew enough about the intimacies of trans life. My first book, TELL ME I’M WORTHLESS, was an unsubtle book but it got the job done: it was a haunted house story about a house called Brighthelm in Brighton that was haunted by the spirit of a Victorian eugenicist and his wife. It concerned a group who were called there to prove whether the house was really haunted, like the group in Richard Matheson’s THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE. I thought it was pretty good back then, and I still do. It sold pretty well for a book that extreme (who can forget the moment where poor hapless Geri is sexually assaulted by her own reflection?), and I made a name for myself. My next book was titled EVERY MONTH THERE SHOULD BE BLOOD and was about a trans woman on the run from an abusive relationship who took shelter in a women’s refuge. She never discloses that she is trans, which I suppose was an autobiographical element. Unfortunately, another girl appears who happens to be fleeing a vampiric stalker who has bitten her. Cue violence. It did just as well as my first book, and some critics said it was a little more subtle. I think they took TELL ME I’M WORTHLESS’s habit of hitting the reader over the head with theme to be a negative, and maybe it was. But it was deliberate. I never wanted to write a subtle ghost story. Subtle ghost stories were all the rage back then. Most of them ended on a note of ambiguity. Mine ended on the ghosts being revealed to be real and all the characters that made it to the end burning alive, which was much more fun. I saw less backlash for the first from the growing transphobia industrial complex than I expected, but the response to the second more than made up for that. I guess that was when it really struck me, and now, looking back, that’s when I should have gotten out. I didn’t, and now it’s too late. The borders are closed. The union flag is waving from the top of every tower, and every tower is burning.
The other day on TV I happened to catch a rerun of an old British sitcom from the early 2000s. I must have watched it at some point as a child, but I’m surprised I didn’t remember it beforehand. I’ve tried to copy it down as best as I can below. The writer of this show went on to go noticeably insane about trans people on Twitter. He was one of the first to do so, in fact. A lot of his colleagues in the media were disturbed by it at the time, but, over the years, they all started to join him, every last one. In the episode, one character has an affair with a trans woman. When he tries to break things off with her – not for her transness, for different reasons entirely – she reacts violently. But it’s before that violent comedic reaction that the most telling lines are uttered.
TRANS WOMAN: You don’t think of me as a woman, do you?
MAN: What? Of course I do.
TRANS WOMAN: It bothers you that I used to be a man!
MAN: No! I love that you used to be a man – it’s your thing. I love thinking about that operation you had.
I love thinking about that operation you had. There it is. Nearly two decades of this bullshit. Longer than that, of course. But this past two decades in particular have been bad. Things have been deteriorating. I could have left before, but I was scared, I thought I might be a coward if I did. I’m a cis woman, I am in love, I’m scared, and they love thinking about that operation I had.
When you have cut down all the trees and mined all the mountains, when you have analysed all your dreams, there will be nothing left for you to break. The earth then will be a rubbish dump, a vast trans body dismembered and devoured. The bodies of the colonists and your bodies, esteemed psychoanalysts, will be buried with the trans organs you have taken from us. But the organs that we do not have can never be buried. Our utopian organs will live on eternally. They will be the warriors storming the borders.
Paul B Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, translated by Frank Wynne
I was born with a dick in my brain.
Eminem, ‘Insane’
The sea, if it was the sea, was the consistency of spit. It bubbled and it foamed as the waves lapped against the shore. Gently. Disconcertingly gentle all the way up the shoreline ahead. Calm as far out as the eye could see, too. It would have been easier to cope with this hell if it had been violent, like the paintings in a Catholic church. This serenity was the real torture. Just being here was adverse to their nature – it hurt, though the pain was not the sort they had ever felt before, certainly not of the type they usually enjoyed. But this strange country that they now traversed didn’t care how they felt, they knew that. They could feel it. So they walked, both of them. Two lonely figures walking apart from one another down the beach. They didn’t know where they were headed. There were hills in the distance, but Vanya couldn’t look at the strange landscape for too long. When they did, they felt like they might vomit.
It was all wrong. So completely, utterly abject. The rolling hills that inflated and deflated like the external lungs of some great hidden beast. Tall rocks … were they natural? Or were they the towers of some civilisation, hopefully long extinct but perhaps watching them through telescopes even now as they made their walk of shame and despair. There had been no sign of any intelligent life so far, which was good, possibly. In actual fact, neither Vanya nor Frankie had seen much life at all beyond the worms that sometimes wriggled across the tundra. The same sort of worm that was inside Vanya’s head. When they saw one, they gave it a wide berth, although the worms did not seem interested in either of the travellers. They went about their own business. They followed their own peculiar pathways.
Behind Vanya, Frankie stumbled. Vanya heard the sound and turned to see her on her knees on the hard ground. They stopped. They didn’t move to help her, but they did at least stop. They weren’t that cruel.
Frankie was panting like a dog, curled up. The surface she lay on, the same one they had spent however long walking over, couldn’t have been comfortable. It resembled thick black glass, and it was hot to touch. “Just like … five minutes. I just need five minutes.”
“We shouldn’t wait around.”
“Just five minutes, okay?”
Frankie managed to lift her head up to look at Vanya. The look in her eyes, ringed with red, took them by surprise. Her face was pale.
All Vanya could do was tell her that she looked sick, and they said it without much sympathy, if any. Frankie grimaced.
“I don’t feel good, Vanya. Can you just come here please? I need…”
“I’m fine where I am.”
Frankie groaned in pain. She thumped her fist against the ground.
“What the fuck did I ever do to deserve this?”
“You hurt me,” Vanya said. “You made me feel like shit.”
“So did you.”
Frankie was struggling to speak.
“You an-and your … fucking gang of rich freaks. You … dump me … leave me all alone … then you shove those things inside of me. This is all your fault!”
Vanya did step a little closer then. Just a little bit. Their knuckles were white. They could have punched the bitch and left her for dead. They probably should have.
“I was a fucking aimless kid when we met, Frankie. I was in an abusive housing situation, and you were my way out. You made me feel like the most important thing in the world. I didn’t notice how much you were controlling me. You’re a bad fucking person, and you’re lucky I saved you. I felt sorry for you because of how pathetic you looked. Now you’re saying that I hurt you? I should just leave you here, but I don’t want to be as shit as you.”
“Jesus Christ, Vanya … I’d never f-fucking leave you.”
“Well, maybe that’s your problem.”
She started to cry. Like a baby. Like a kid who just broke their favourite toy.
“I love you,” she said. “I love you … Sorry for how I was … I can do better I can be … Help me up, Vanya. Please. We c-can talk about this later.”
She looked so pathetic down there. Her naked body, once an object of worship for them, now just reminded them of a large, dead fish. Not a dead fish, thought the very cruel part of Vanya’s brain. A beached whale. They felt bad enough for thinking it that they gave in and walked over to help Frankie up. She didn’t even say thank you.
Frankie tried to straighten up but was bent forwards by a weight that hadn’t been there before. She looked down at her body and saw it. Vanya saw it too. As they looked at Frankie’s stomach, a noise came from the direction of the hills. The wind, perhaps. Or something howling.
“Frankie.”
They both stared, dumbfounded. Not believing her own eyes, Frankie put both of her hands on her abdomen. It was real. It was tangible. She had fantasised about this image, yes, she had fantasised about it often. The fantasy bore no relation to reality, however. She hadn’t ever actually expected to see it, so seeing it made no sense. She couldn’t even comprehend what she was seeing until she touched her swollen stomach, round and hard as the moon.
Inside her, something shifted. She felt whatever was in there press against her edges. Like when a baby kicked. Exactly like when a baby kicked, in fact.
“Jesus Christ, Frankie. You’re … pregnant?”
Vanya would never have believed it if they hadn’t been standing where they were, in this strange, impossible nightmare place.
“I … I know.”
Frankie spoke quietly. Even as she looked down at herself, her stomach seemed to grow larger. She hadn’t been pregnant a few minutes earlier, that was certain. And now here she was, nearly due to give birth.
“How?”
“The … It came inside me,” she said.
“But you don’t have a fucking womb. You’re a trans woman. You don’t have…”
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
And then her water broke, and she tumbled back down onto the glassy surface of the beach, screaming in pain. It was coming, whatever was inside of her. It was on its way. Vanya forgot how upset they’d been. They knelt beside her and clasped her hand tight in theirs. Frankie didn’t look at them. It’s a fucking miracle, she thought.
“It’s a fucking miracle,” Vanya said aloud, smiling. They realised what this meant. They knew what was going to happen and they couldn’t stop smiling. A fucking miracle.
PART ONE
HEARTWORMS
“It’s all a mess, isn’t it? The one out there … the one in here … the one that’s coming. Why is everyone so ready to think the worst is over?”
Suspiria, 2018, dir. Luca Guadagnino
1
GODLESS COCK
“Wanna get me pregnant?”
He was fucking her from behind when the question slipped out. Frankie hadn’t meant to ask it, but the feeling of the dick pushing all the way up her cunt, deeper and deeper, plus the sweat dripping down her brow, and the weakness in her legs … it had just all gotten too much. She temporarily lost her faculties, and the boundaries between thought and speech blurred. She had been fantasising that his cock would (could!) knock her up, and then, in the midst of the fantasy, she spoke it aloud. For a moment she thought he might not have heard, or, thick as he was, maybe he wouldn’t get what she was on about. But no. He was a himbo but not that much of a himbo. Oh well, she thought. If he really was as stupid as she expected, fucking him would probably have been breaking some kind of power-imbalance law. It might have somehow constituted statutory rape. His pounding slowed and stopped. She felt his dick soften a little in her cunt, and then he pulled himself out with a nice, wet sound. At least that was a satisfying noise. She always enjoyed hearing it.
