Bloody lifts. The patterned steel doors have opened into the basement and it is not where I want to be. I know I have been called down into Hell.
Grey concrete, unpainted, a stencilled B in red on the wall opposite. Grimy blue concrete floor and a smell of petrol and piss. I don’t want to be here and the buttons are not working. The place is rank, the light is vile and there is rubbish piled up around the doorway. Broken glass, takeaway boxes, chip papers. Oh, how I have been here before.
And I can hear rummaging, I can here muttering… I don’t like it. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to see, smell or know any of this. One hand on my keys, splayed through my fingers, so I can scratch your eyes out because I know exactly who you are and what you are doing down here.
These are the office block bins that you rummage through, squealing, giggling and whooping in the dark. Your iPhone casting a ghastly ghostly light into the huge and filthy steel container. You hang over the edge of the bin, legs waving as you dig deeper and then a cry of victory and you jump down and shove something into your trouser crotch.
You are in the bin for the retouching suite, scavenging the photoshop bin.
It is Hell in there: shards of inner thighs, slices of bellies too round to be acceptable, parts of rib cages, spots, pores, pieces of inner labia, folds of armpits, jowls, laughter lines….
The huge bin overflows with all that is deemed gross and disgusting about us, me, my body, my daughters body. Every part that must be smoothed, rendered, removed, rejected…. The computers flush these remnants away each night and you and your ghoulish friends come to play, to hoard, collect and there to sell on, the shards, peelings and slices of womanhood that does not cut the proverbial.
I see you, at midnight, down by Clerkenwell station, huge coat wide open with women’s photoshopped body parts hanging for sale in layers. Your iPhone again, casting a constantly roving and eery glow over the forbidden, the human, the real and all of it is contraband.
Crowds of tall, withered, bow-legged men battling for position, haggling for the youngest parts, the fattest, then scuttling away…. To do what? Eat them, to masturbate over them, to lick, to laugh, gleefully at how little progress we 52% have made in these last decades.
And you walk away with your pockets dripping, leaking, oozing £50 notes as a thank you for having the nous to know where to find the spoils.