Nothing is inflammable, p.18
Nothing Is Inflammable, page 18
The camera frames her hand caressing the left-hand side of her stomach, fingers spread around the puckered scar tissue where the bullet had entered.
“Where did you get that?” I ask instinctively. It’s like as long as the camera is rolling I have to be asking questions, discovering.
“I can’t remember the name of the town. Some little place back east,” she says.
She is either unaware or unconcerned that she is standing before me practically naked as she traces the leathery edges of the wound.
“I meant how did it happen?”
“It was an accident.”
“Raoul?” I’m slowly moving in on the wound.
“He took me to a doctor straight afterwards. Not a real doctor—well, not anymore. But he fixed me up.”
She draws the gown away from her hip and turns, exposing her buttocks to me. “Look,” she says, her hand sweeping across the small of her back. “No exit wound. It never came out. The bullet is still inside me.”
She is whispering to it, her little metal child, telling it not to be afraid, when Raoul opens the door and enters.
“Come on, we’re leaving,” he says.
It never ends, from one city to the next to the next to the same again and never, never ends. I ask her how long this has been going on, when the glittery, champagne-fuelled parades became broken and distorted as they were now. But she just watches the world flash past the windscreen, reflections of birds, an eagle, a wild rabbit sliding across the glass.
We are somewhere into the third week I’ve been with them and we’ve been driving all night across bumpy roads that have taken us further and further from the skylines of cities and the lifeline of the main highways. I feel drained from the events of the past week or so, beginning to regret taking the job.
Trailer parks litter the sides of dirt tracks, ragged little children playing chicken in front of the trucks and Raoul not bothering to slow down as they come within an inch of their tiny lives.
Now he pulls the truck in between two burnt-out mobile homes that have been tilted back and leaned against each other by some vandal-artist so that they form the gated entrance to this new venue. The scab-kneed children chase after the truck, howling at it as they scramble across garbage bags and discarded satellite dishes then suddenly vanishing as the truck skids to a halt and spews dust back at them.
They get out and are greeted by a woman in a threadbare dressing gown and military boots three sizes too big for her. She wears her straggly hair in a pony tail and a T-shirt that says John Lennon Died For Me and her arms are crossed tight. She speaks to Raoul who heads off to another trailer.
“You look thirsty, honey,” the woman says to the Beauty Queen through the open window of the back seat. The Queen doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. The woman looks at me as if in search of an explanation as to the silence. I feel the Queen waiting for Clarity to speak for her but he was left behind at the last stop and I desperately want to tell her that was she thinks happened didn’t. The woman holds out a hand until the Beauty Queen gets out of the car, unsteady on legs slowly wasting away.
She regards me warily as I climb out after them, eight-millimeter in hand, but she doesn’t say anything. I assume Raoul has explained the situation to her beforehand.
We follow the woman into a trailer choked with trinkets and stained clothing, the walls adorned with torn old movie posters, discolored Polaroids and sashes. She sits the Beauty Queen down and returns moments later with a glass of the kind of water that should come with a label just to reassure you of what it was.
“You rest here just now,” the woman says, then flinches at the rising sound of dogs barking. “You’ll be okay. I know you got the strength cause you sure as hell got the looks. My name’s Cheryl”.
I begin shooting as the Queen takes a sip of the water, keeping her pinkie finger extended as Clarity had taught her to. She fights back the grimace of pain that shoots through her mouth as the cold liquid passes over her worn enamel.
Cheryl lights a cigarette and places it in a holder. Her eyes narrow as she takes a drag. “So how far along are you? Only a couple of months, I think?”
The Beauty Queen looks worriedly at her, then at me, but doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t realize I already know. She doesn’t realize just how much I know.
“It’s okay, honey, I won’t tell anyone.”
Some of the guys who have been doing this for a while told me that long ago people didn’t know how to act in front of a camera. They’d become shy or outgoing or adopt strange accents as if there was a set way a TV person should be. But all I’d ever seen is people so used to the sight of a lens that it failed to even register most of the time. People that see no difference between telling a camera something and telling a person something—see their own faces reflected in the lens and think they are talking to themselves as they reveal things they never normally would to even their closest friends.
“I can just sense these things. It wasn’t long after my last title that my first came along. That one didn’t make it but I kept the ultrasound they took before it died.” She takes another drag. “You want to see?”
The Beauty Queen shakes her head. The dogs’ barking is getting louder, meaner, more frenzied. I know she is wishing Clarity was back with her and I have to fight to keep filming. The smoke from the woman’s cigarette peels upwards, scattering like the jagged pain of a knife wound.
“Well you make sure you take care of that little thing inside you cause it might one day be all you have.”
“It’s going to save me,” the Beauty Queen says, her voice soft and raspy from lack of use. She glances at the camera and I think she is telling me, not Cheryl. “That’s why it’s here.”
The woman laughs a little, takes a final drag on the cigarette. “I think it might take more than that to save girls like us . . . but it’s a start, right?”
The Beauty Queen nods as the sound of the dogs fills her ears, rises, overlaid on three audio tracks, rises again and we cut to another stage, this time in a barn with chickens running loose around her and the men behind a chalk line that has been drawn on the concrete flooring as they cheer for her.
Poise.
Elegance.
The dogs are snapping at her and the other girls, their spittle slapping against her calves and she stares straight ahead, breathing calmly, a wide smile on her face. The books they all had tried to keep on their heads have fallen but it doesn’t stop them. They huddle together somewhat, backs to each other protectively as the dogs strain their leashes to the maximum. She can hear the leather stretching to breaking point.
Raoul shouts at her angrily, then laughs with one of the men just as one of the other women shrieks. The girls instinctively jump away from the sound and are immediately cat-called, the Beauty Queen turning just enough to see that one of the lobotomy blondes has been caught by a dog that has her by the ankle.
Someone turns the music that is playing up louder, a crackly old 45 rattling out 20s show tunes. One of the girls struggles for a moment as she almost slips off the stage, her smile carved on her face even as she dangles before the dogs, but no one helps her because it would be unladylike to bend to grab her. She manages to struggle back up again and it is then that the Beauty Queen sees the other lobotomy blonde pinned to one corner of the stage, blankly watching as her sister/partner/doppelganger is mauled by the dogs.
“POISE!” Raoul shouts at the Queen and she feels the pressure of tears behind her eyes, flinching as the spotlights of one of the other cameras focuses on her face in agony from smiling for so long, her legs weak and her mouth stinging from stomach acids.
There’s the music and the dogs and the screams and laughter and it all swirls together like a nosebleed into a stream of water and away from her, away . . .
She tells me that she has a fantasy of her skin being like that of a panther.
She tells me that she imagines herself standing beneath the moonlight, turning for Clarity who smiles admiringly at the way she gleams as she moves, her black fur revealing patterns of halos for a split-second before they vanish once more.
She tells me how the new skin wraps around the back of her neck and behind her ears, leaving her face and hair free, replacing all the scars and bruises with a clean, smooth makeover. And the skin is hers, not stolen from some other creature.
She says that now when she imagines this scene she fantasizes about running a hand over her delicately swollen belly. Clouds cross the sky, illuminated by the moon.
“Pretty,” Clarity says as she stalks towards her, runs his hand across her skin.
Raoul is on top of him, standing over him and pulling him by the hair upwards, exposing his neck. There are two others, both armed with knives. Everything is blurry, the colors bleeding into one another because I haven’t bothered to switch the auto-focus on.
The shot wobbles furiously as the men shout but Clarity, Clarity is silent.
“You fucking dirty cunt,” Raoul shouts at him, tugging on his hair and you can see all the bruises, even without focus.
It’s a men’s room, it’s dark. Every shout echoes across the cracked porcelain.
“I didn’t . . . ” Clarity says once more. It’s all he says in this take.
One of the men slam an elbow down onto Clarity’s neck and he collapses, choking.
The camera suddenly moves from him to the ground and you can see my feet.
“I told you not to fucking move!” Raoul shouts. “Keep filming! I’m paying you to film!”
I re-frame instinctively but it’s no easier to look at what’s happening through a lens than it is my naked eyes.
They just keep hitting him.
“I told you never to touch her!” he screams and the sentence is punctuated by another blow.
Why doesn’t he fight back?
I’m aching to turn and leave.
The sequence continues but it will never make it into the final cut.
It’s 4am according to the digital clock next to her bed. She’s been watching it count forwards, endlessly performing that single task, all night. The swellings have gone down thanks to the cold water Cheryl applied after the parade had finished but the noise still rings in the Beauty Queen’s ears. She touches her neck where Raoul had been strangling her with her sash. Nothing less than first place was acceptable, she knew that. She had known that as her legs had finally given way and she had fallen to the ground, crumpling like a flower, and she had known that as Raoul had helped her to her feet and away from the stage.
There was no such thing as the second most beautiful person in the world—only yet another ugly one.
She is hurting and she is cold but she is less dejected than she has been in a long time.
There are the sounds of Cheryl snoring in the trailer’s only bedroom as she looks to the window again, to the electronic waste and old tires. Every now and again people will pass, mostly men laughing and drinking or scraggly children wandering aimlessly by themselves. A light rain falls.
The low light means the shot is grainy, constantly adjusting itself.
“I’ll do better next time,” she says softly, more to herself than to me. “There’s no such thing as second most beautiful, you know.”
I’m too tired to ask her any questions but I know I must.
“Whose is it?”
She frowns. “It’s mine.”
“I mean, who’s the father?”
She seems to struggle with the question, eventually reverting to, “It’s mine.”
The way she looks, so lost and tiny, I feel a maternal pull towards her. I wonder how many men there have been and imagine the Moreau type of creation that could be nestling inside her, the combination of a hundred types of sperm and distantly think about what Raoul is currently organizing for her. Maybe it will be better this way.
Regardless, I am certain that none of the sperm would be Clarity’s as Raoul suspected.
“Thank you for what you did tonight,” she says suddenly.
It surprises me because I didn’t think she would be aware of me having done anything to help her, so drowned in her own terrible world was she. It makes me wonder what else she is aware of.
The cassette, if it is ever to be played back, will end just as they bring the dog up behind her. It will show the same scene as previously, the barn, the makeshift lighting equipment, the boom box, but the crowds have fallen to the exclusive numbers allowed access to this very special performance.
Previously, she has won and in return received her prize.
And, like that night, she has been defeated and subsequently punished.
I see no difference.
If that cassette is ever viewed, you will see how my hand shakes as it grips the camera and as I fight myself. There’s another side to these kind of jobs and that’s not that you can handle the extremity of them but that you have the lack of morals necessary to go through with them.
If that cassette is ever viewed, you will be all too aware of what is going to happen as the stage is cleared and the women chosen as winners or losers or whatever are quickly washed of blood and dirt and then put up on the platform again. The dogs have calmed again by this point, thankfully, their temperaments now required for a wholly different reason. You can hear my gasp if you listen closely, as the men rub the undersides of the dogs.
The remaining lobotomy blondes have already been and gone, played their part before I was quickly retrieved by Raoul, excited at being able to work up this deal even though the Queen lost.
The Beauty Queen is curled almost into a ball on the stage, dress raised, and it is then that the camera swings to the ground and everything goes blank as the lens cap clicks shut. You can hear me, if this tape were to be viewed, tell Raoul to stop because there’s something wrong with the camera. You can hear him argue with me but I tell him, plainly, it’s not working. As he shouts, the event organizers grow impatient with him, reminding him they were only letting him do this as a favor, the winners had already had their glory.
“God damn it, woman, shoot it.”
I tell him again, the camera isn’t working, must be dirt or sand in the mechanisms. I can get it working again but not tonight.
It’s then I flicked the power switch off just in case and this particular little segment ends.
Give it ten seconds of silence, fading out the sounds of the dogs low growls and yelps, then back in with the squeaking of the bed that the Queen lies on.
“Do you think he’ll come back?” she asks me, still watching the clock count onwards.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I hope he’ll be okay. Do you think he’ll be okay, Elisabeth?”
I say nothing this time.
“I think he’ll be fine. He can go anywhere he wants, whenever he wants, now.” A pause. “I’ll miss him, though.”
I feel as if someone has shoved a bowling ball into my chest I’m so heavy and choked. There’s no reason to tell her. As much as it might hurt her to think he has abandoned her I couldn’t bring her the truth.
I manage to say, “He said he would miss you too.”
Let him continue in her mind.
“Really? He said that?” It amazes me she seems surprised.
“Anyway, now I have someone else in my life,” she says and touches her stomach.
And the bowling ball has just caught fire.
It is a little before seven am and I’ve turned the camera on myself.
The Queen is asleep, having finally drifted off a couple of hours ago. I’ve plugged up AV cables to the black and white TV set in the corner of the trailer and watch myself in it.
I want to tell her to run. Fuck I want to run.
This is going to have to end soon. I can feel myself crumbling from the inside out.
I have four days editing time when this is done but I don’t think I’ll be able to look at the footage again.
In the TV, I look haggard and utterly exhausted. My eye make-up is smeared, strands of my hair hanging out of the pins they’re supposed to be held back by. I must have lost fifteen pounds. And there, in that moment, having spent almost a month being dragged along by Raoul, feeling utterly devoid inside, I realize why Clarity didn’t fight back as he was beaten to death and why the Beauty Queen lets this go on and on.
“Can’t sleep?” a voice says and I look up to see Cheryl, cigarette in hand.
I shake my head, flick the camera off. She comes and sits next to me quietly, tilting her head and smiling as she looks at the Queen. “He’s going to take it away from her, isn’t he?” she whispers.
“Yes.”
“He told you that?
“It’s what his type do.”
I can see in Cheryl’s eyes the Queen’s pain, compressed over the years into a piece of cold stone.
“There’ll be others,” she says. “And one day he’ll let her keep one.”
“Maybe she’d be better off without it,” I offer. I can hear people beginning to move around outside, the kids kicking beer bottles from the night before between each other. “Maybe it would be better off.”
I wait for a response then look at Cheryl after a few moments and hesitate.
There are tears running down her cheeks.
Cut to noon, the sun blazing overhead, and it’s an ugly day, I can just feel it.
Supplies are being packed into the truck and the Beauty Queen stands politely to one side as the men load it. She is wearing the wristband Clarity made for her and a light dress that is frayed at the edges. She has done her best to apply her makeup to cover the bruising but she does not have Clarity’s talent.
I watch as Raoul comes out of the trailer he has been in, smiling broadly, rolling a coin between his teeth as he stalks over to the Beauty Queen. I watch them for a few moments then suddenly she jumps into the air and hugs the man, her arms barely long enough to wrap around him and I feel sick seeing her so close to him, knowing that she has probably been a lot closer. When she finally lets go she seems lighter than air, the sun now radiating off of her as she hurries around the truck.
