The screams Ava hears are coming from beyond the walls, the poor Scottish girl. The man’s voice talks down to her like she’s his baby, other times it’s too damn awful to even think about. A big voice bellowing unutterable things, piercing words with evil intentions. He would kick her right in and say: “shut your ugly little bobbing head”. Ava had called the police many times, but when they arrived the arguments were so silent, their lives were hard to trace. The police made their discrete notes and left.
Ava found it difficult to live in a world where people’s hearts were disembodied from their smiles. More than humans she loved animals, to her they were truer, straighter if only others were like this she thought.
Some days the voices were like a memory that she couldn’t access, an arc from the tip of her tongue. One day she followed them out of her flat, down the hallway, through the back of the building to a newly painted, white Victorian wall. They had gotten louder as she left, then they were sucked out of this realm.
Ava spoke to Jesus directly about the poor Scottish girl, asking him for the young girl’s life to be saved. Sometimes she found it hard to distinguish her own voice begging Jesus, and the Scottish girl pleading for her life. When she couldn't make sense of all the voices, she would start to repeat the words in a made-up language, that nobody but herself and Jesus could decipher.
She tried to sleep with earplugs because the murderous rows and crashes at night were the worst. When she wore them the sounds often turned up a notch; the girl’s cries piercing through her drums, making her eyes grow wider and wilder. Some nights she realised she’d been lying in bed for hours listening to the Scottish girl screaming. And with no way of sleeping to all this, she would simply have to go down there. When she got closer to where it sounded like their door could be, he’d stop yanking her hair across the floor. Ava felt like there was some kind of conspiracy, maybe they had cameras on her, they knew.
Why did the Scottish girl never leave? Ava knew why. He held her prisoner. He had drilled holes in her two hands and feet and had chained her to the bath plug. That is a very thin chain, yes, why did she just not yank it off? Ava had answers to all these questions because Ava had been hearing their voices for twelve years. There was no way they could leave because they were trapped within the walls. Ava had been trying to find the door, or window to their exit for many years, but it’s not easy to access.
One day when Ava was soaking in the bath and the screams were particularly bad, she yanked the plug chain off her own bath and for five minutes a silence fell. Ava had freed her! After all this time, it was that simple? Hahaha - she was laughing so hard with relief, she wished she’d put bubbles in to celebrate.
The creases in Ava’s forehead that had deterred helpful faces her whole life, melting in an instant, like a cosmic shot of botox. And in her mind's eye, she sees herself as a small child running through the daisies with her dog. Smiling she leans back into the bath, she has never felt so relaxed. She’s picturing herself with her dog Bennie, and the sun is shining...until...oh...no...a dark familiar voice calls out and a cold shivery scream runs right through her. “Leave me and Bennie alone, go away, we're ok here…here in the sun”! Her eye sockets start to tense up, and out of nowhere she hears a thunderous man’s voice: “you dirty stench, with your mash-up face, get your little-wet one out, I’m going to dice you up from the insides”. Ava’s eyes daze, like a child lost at a train station, looking up into an abyss of faceless strangers. Now the noises are coming back up, through the walls.
Ava gets up quickly from the bath, water dripping from her. For a moment she forgets where she is and that she’s living in a sixty two-year-old’s body, and puts her two sodden feet on the tiles and starts running. She loses her footing on her stroke side, slips and her legs go flying out in front of her. She’s running away from all the voices, her arm tries to break her fall, but it’s too late her head smashes against the cold enamel.
In slow-motion she sees two greying, over-coated men setting down stone slabs.
She can feel a warm sensation running through her mind, pulsating to the sounds of the voices in the walls. She cannot move and the bath is over-flowing, or is that coming from within her own head? The monster in the walls now sounds like he’s subterranean, he’s trying to torture the poor Scottish girl from underwater. He’s become a comical frogman, he’s gurgling and gushing, he is not so menacing anymore. Ava laughs feebly at him, and as she does part of her brain becomes warmer, she wishes he could see how red her words are right now. She feels less stiff and rheumatic, admittedly she had a sharp pain where she smashed her head against the enamel, and can no longer open her eye, but it’s ok.
The poor young Scottish girl sounds better too, giggling even. Well, things are looking brighter, Ava may even try to attempt to stand, she gets the sudden urge to call her brother to let him know that the poor Scottish girl might be alright after all. It’s more difficult than she thought, a thick sticky gloop has congealed all around her. Ah damn, maybe the monster is in the house, and this is the poor girl’s blood. She needs to move! But she slips again on the side of her squashed head, something is not right, black dots dance in front of her.
She raises her limp hand to the back of her pumping head, it’s worse than she thought, half of its caved in, and blood is pouring out at an incomprehensible rate, and she only had her hair done yesterday. Is this it? Is this where all the strings have been leading - to some spongy raw mass on the bathroom floor?
Her brother has now become a faraway thought in what’s left of her brain, he seems like the relative of a distant friend, in a yet to be created land. Ah but wait, the voices have completely stopped, in fact, the walls have crumbled to her feet, she manages to squint a little and everything’s a violent purple…..what is beyond those walls? She tries to pry her better eye open but soon realises - like most of her head, it has become part of the sodden red pulp amassing all around her.
Burying her face, she’s shivering now, her wrinkly skin amok in blackish red.
She tries to summon her friend Jesus, but he seems so pitiful in all this: perhaps the most present and vivid scene of her life. She cannot grasp him as a concept, like a novelty toy that’s never to be unwrapped; pointless and how do you even open it? What was his name again? She couldn’t even remember that. She had prayed for all her life and this is where he had left her. Haha, as she laughs she feels a hot heat pouring out, and down, into her remaining eye and open mouth, it tastes like warm peanuts.
All her emotions are draining out of her, and now she’s in a half haze. She hears the ogres voice shouting: “Don’t worry dear, out here He is waiting” and her body turns glacial, she wants this to be true, but how can it be coming from the man beyond the walls himself? All the voices are becoming jumbled around her now, and she doesn’t trust any of them anymore. She unfurls them deep within her, unhooking them from her inner core; they slide away, disentangling themselves from her in the shape of a smoky S. Slippery snakes that they are. Ava feels warm within, and for once she trusts her being, there are no longer any distracting flickers. All of the voices have become quashed echoes, she’s flowing out like a silver swimmer. She closes her eyes, well what’s left of them physically. And just lays there. All words, concepts and curiosities fall wide away, and finally, she feels the desert she’d been searching for in ordinary times. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t ever move again; luckily she was never the type to get up in the middle of the night for a glass of water.