That Summer Mouthwash by Jane Flett

It was the summer I started collecting succulents, the summer I made a promise to myself to go on one OkCupid date a week, the summer I started mixing peppermint liquor and soda water, calling it my drink, laughing my big bad girl laugh when people told me it tasted like mouthwash, and letting myself start earlier and earlier in the day.
I was trying to reform my personality, or at least I was trying to pick up enough affectations that I could fool people into thinking I had a personality, which worked out to about the same thing. I hadn’t learnt German yet, not even after three years in Berlin, but I had taken on snippets of the speech patterns, which made me feel worldly when speaking to strangers and start to wonder if I’d grown up at last:
It’s not like that though, or?
It’s fine, we’ll make a party.
The days were loose and spilled into one another like the half-assed edges of water colours, partly because of the mouthwash habit, partly because my apartment on the top floor would get so dumb-fuck hot, it was impossible to separate anything from anything else. But mainly because I wasn’t working. Not even on my projects. I’d promised myself come September, I’d start again, but for now my main concerns were painting my nails alternating in Tippex white and Blu-tac blue and making themed mixtapes about dogs, daddy complexes, and sex as a weapon.
See: Yoko Ono, Dogland; The Stooges, I Wanna Be Your Dog; Big Momma Thornton, Hound Dog.
See: Eartha Kitt, My Heart Belongs to Daddy; Marilyn Monroe, Everybody Needs a Da-da-daddy; The Raincoats, No One’s Little Girl.
See: Pat Benatar, Love is a Battlefield; Kiss, Love Gun…
Feel free to finish them on your own — I never did.
Anyway, I was allowed, not just because Rick had broken up with me, but because before he had broken up with me his mind had ground right on down like a wind-up marching band doll stomping slower and slower, like the voices on Walkmen tapes when the batteries are low, and he’d started looking for his soul behind mirrors and for his destiny in Amazon purchasing suggestions:
If you liked “Working With Wood”, perhaps you’d like “Leaving Your Girlfriend to Become a Travelling Eastern European Carpenter”?
and
After purchasing this item, most shoppers decided to quit trying to make an album and take up Project: Start a Family instead.
I blamed the silent meditation retreat that he’d been on — ten days of opening the wedged shut doors in his brain to see how it felt for the winds to rattle round those corridors. To anyone who’d listen, I’d say, “Those monks are arseholes,” while cursing Buddhism and refusing to read Chinese fortune cookies anymore.
I did keep the I Ching, but only because it had told me to break up with him sixteen times in the previous year, refusing to change its mind even when I started cheating and flipping the coins after they landed or drawing the hexagons upside down in an effort to trick fate.
I also blamed, in no particular order:
Myself, for suggesting we move to Germany in the first place.
Myself, for putting on weight and for cooking the meals that made him put on weight, so that we were forced to live out our lives as two slightly fatter people.
Myself, for asking him to slap me in the face when we had sex and then liking it when he did.
It was the summer people wouldn’t stop telling me, “You’re so strong,” until I wanted to grab them by the shoulders and vomit in their faces and wail and gnash my teeth, the way slighted women did in medieval times. I kept panning around for other options, new ways to prove everybody wrong.
I started giving things up and taking up better, faster, newer habits. I stopped showering and started jerking off for hours at a time, lying on a stained travel mattress on my balcony, reeking of armpit and crotch, delighting in my own gross.
I’d never quite come, or I’d get to the place that was just before coming, that felt almost like coming but quieter, and I’d stay there, balanced on the tightrope, hoping the neighbours would see me and know that I was breaking.
I gave up the soda water; it was slowing the mornings down.
On the first dates (they were all first dates), I stopped telling stories about myself and started playing Questions Bingo, seeing how many things I could get them to tell me about themselves before they cracked and asked me about me.
They almost never cracked.
One weekend, I decided to take the train out to the forest on the west outskirts of the city, the one with the old CIA listening post and the lake populated by elderly nudists and gay men.
It had a floating platform in the middle where, my friend had told me, she had once seen a day-glo suntanned pensioner yank himself up from the water, crotch looming right about eye-height where she lay, “Pretty Classy” tattooed in Gothic script across the juncture of hip, thigh, and stomach.
I liked to collect ridiculous tattoo concepts in lieu of ever getting one myself, and friends would call to update me on the best they had seen. I liked to sit behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses and stare at people’s bodies, losing myself in those folds of skin, flesh, and hair. Or hairlessness: there were so many shaved bodies, so much wet flesh tucked away beneath quiet skin. If you squinted, you could lose what part was what. A cunt would become the bend of a knee, the crease of an elbow. A tiny penis shirking in the folds of the sack.
Then there were those who went in another direction, like Pretty Classy, like the guy with the elaborate metal hardware that I’d pointed out to Rick on one trip, trying to distract him from his own uncomfortable nakedness: a tight silver cage for the shaft and balls that, I was sure, must grow blisteringly hot in the 38ºC sun.
It was fascinating — how some naked bodies were so very naked, while others barely looked naked at all.
The walk through the forest was long and hot, and by the time I reached the lake I was rotten with sweat and dizzy behind the eyes. I found a shady spot where there wasn’t too much shit on the ground and arranged my things.
I once drifted onto the Tripadvisor page for the lake, where reviewers kvetched about the piles of dog dirt everywhere, but it wasn’t true. I’d heard these forests were full of wild boar who came at the end of the day, once the naked bodies had slipped back into their city skins, to savage the picnic detritus, their phlegmy howls echoing amongst the trees.
I liked this fact, because somehow the shit of wild animals is a thousand times less disgusting than the shit of city dogs, and because it gave me some hope about the world: none of these people, at least, were directly responsible.
I spread my towel across the lumpy grass. I sat down. I took all of my clothes off and rested back on the heels of my hands, knees in the air. I’d been losing weight since Rick left, and it was strange coming back inside my own body. I didn’t want to care, and would hiss at anyone who commented too close, but secretly I was marvelling at the way my bones were re-emerging from my flesh like shipwrecks from a drained ocean. If I lay on my back and arched my body, my ribcage jutted into the air like the wings of some prehistoric bird.
There were dents beside the bones of my hips — where my tattoos would be, if I ever decided to get them.
The day passed in its own time. I tried not to feel too vulnerable when I left my things alone to go swimming; I tried not to judge myself too harshly that, for the last three months, my only reading material had been Agatha Christie paperbacks, each short enough to devour in a day. There was something intensely comforting about the structure:
A quiet society, shattered by terrible events.
The meticulous detective unearths the cause.
The source of discontent is apprehended.
It all goes back to normal, at last.
Still, it seemed impossible: I could bring the monks to their knees, have them confess everything they did wrong, and still I’d be no closer to normalcy. I tried apprehending myself instead — there were so many things that could have been my fault — but in the thick summer air, it was hard to be bothered.
When I swigged the Pfeffi, it was hot as tea from the plastic bottle, tea on the turn, tea brewed in the afternoon sun. It settled in my gums, and the day took on the pitch and hue of a dream.
It was the summer of the train strikes, and by eight most people had packed their things and were heading to the station to catch the last U-Bahn home. I knew that I should join them, but then again, inertia had settled in my shins and the thought of packing up my few small possessions and walking there was more than I could bear.
And then there were just a couple of groups — cyclists, maybe, or drivers — and then the sky started to twist towards dark, and then they were gone too.
I sat in the dirt by myself, listening to the forest keen and chatter. While the sun was setting, the air had been thick with bugs, but now that it was dark they had found somewhere else to go. My only memory of them was the angry red bumps that mottled my calves and shoulders, hard with pus and impossible not to scratch until they beaded tiny amber crystals.
I felt like a tree full of sap — furious sap that skittered beneath my surface. Though scratching them didn’t help, not really. When the little golden scabs stuck beneath my fingernails, the bites only burned more.
I got up, desperately trying to still my fingers, and walked towards the lake. It was strange walking naked, alone in the darkness. Somehow, I felt more exposed than when the others had been all around me. But of course, that wasn’t right.
The air was still warm and I couldn’t really tell where my body ended and the night began. Not even when I ran my hands over myself, trying to find the boundaries. Not even the flats of my palms against my nipples — not even when they were sudden and hard.
I didn’t gasp when I slipped into the quiet water. It opened like an envelope and I pushed myself inside.
Beneath the surface, I was powerful. I frog-kicked, streaming tiny bubbles from my nose and mouth, leaving a trail that crackled. I swam for a long way under the water: kick, pull, kick again. Drift. Don’t listen to the lungs when they start to burn.
When I surfaced, I was halfway to the platform, and I closed the distance swiftly. I hoisted myself up on the rusting metal ladder and collapsed onto my back and panted, my chest rising and collapsing, my breath slowing, my hand drifting between my thighs.
I couldn’t tell what was me, warm and wet, and what was the lake water, what was the bites and what was the terrible frustration in my own skin, what were the noises from the forest and what were the cries from my own throat, until it was over and the platform rocked and splashed with my currents, and I could.
The moment I was done, I felt ridiculous. I stood up briskly; I put my feet together and stretched my arms above my head, drew them back like wings, and leapt. I swam back to the shore as quietly as I had swam here. I walked out of the water, rubbing my hands against my arms. I froze.
The boar dragged a hoof across the dirt twice, and stared back at me.
It was impossible. It was breathing in and out, its body covered in wiry black hairs. The remains of a tomato smashed against its snout. Beady yellow eyes looking, looking all over my naked body.
I took a step backwards into the water and the splash was as loud as a gunshot. The boar did not leave. It nuzzled at the ground, then raised its head again.
It looked me in the eye. Took a step forward.
“Go away,” I hissed. I had visions, terrible visions, of wrestling this boar in the water, of chokeholds and wiry hair and dull yellow teeth. “Stop it.”
The boar paused and looked around, checking for an audience. They would be on its side, I was sure of it. When the wrestling started, they would whoop and cheer its name, and when it snouted me to the ground their laughter would echo in the trees.
It wasn’t fair. I wasn’t supposed to be here, itchy and frightened and far from my clothes and alone and drunk and —
“Fuck off,” I shouted, a thousand wild rages rising up in my throat. “You’re not welcome here — go away, get out. Just go.”
And the boar turned around and trotted off, pausing for a moment to sniff at something, then disappeared into the forest, leaving me to gather my things and start the long walk home.
The succulents didn’t last until autumn. I got it wrong; I thought that because they came from the desert, they were things that needed nothing. That last hot weekend, the one I spent at the lake, was, I think, the one that killed them. Or maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe it was an accumulation of all the times I wasn’t paying attention.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t see the signs. In the mornings, when I mixed drinks in the kitchen, I noticed them getting loose and slack as old skin under the baking window. I kept thinking, I’ll deal with you tomorrow. I was busy: pressing my palms against the wall, stretching a calf muscle, waiting for the energy to crackle back into my legs.
It didn’t matter. I bagged them up and threw everything away before my sensible voice could tell me to save the soil and the pots. It didn’t matter: I could always buy new ones. It would be September soon. I could do whatever I liked.
Jane Flett is a philosopher, cellist, and seamstress of most fetching stories. Her writing features in the Best British Poetry 2012 and has been commissioned for BBC Radio and performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She is one half of the riot grrl band Razor Cunts, the poetry editor for Leopardskin & Limes and a founder of Queer Stories Berlin. Jane is also the recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award, and was voted Berlin’s best English-language writer in 2015 by Indieberlin.
http://janeflett.com
