Helena Aeberli
Reflection
She had once read dozens of books a week, now she occasionally leafed through the Waterstones pick of the month, lying on her stomach and dog-earring pages. She was gaining weight in a way she never had before, and wondered whether baby fat was always something one lost. The skirt she had bought two months ago to celebrate her graduation no longer fitted. Or rather it did fit but she bulged over it. It gave her shape, she thought, like her mother would say, but in all the wrong places. Her bum remained flat whilst her stomach blossomed, a bit like an old man with a drinking problem, languishing in a motorway service station KFC.
She felt desultory about paperbacks. She did not like the feel of the covers, which reminded her of being picked to clean the whiteboards long ago at school, nor the glossy photos and glowing bios of the authors on the back pages, or sometimes, were they suitably prolific, on the front. She imagined a job writing bios for authors, and said, out loud — What a sad life. It was something a uni friend had always said, when confronted with someone less cool than her, less interesting, like the freshers who flocked sheeplike to the same three clubs on rotation, on specific days of the week, as if determined by Papal bull or Act of Parliament. Or the lecturer who sipped surreptitiously from a hip flask between sweaty diatribes on Jean Jacques Rousseau – What a sad life.
She felt bloated at the ankles and wrists, she could no longer fit the latter between her finger and thumb. Rousseau had hated women, but women had loved him. She imagined plump little girls, thirsting for their tutors. Already, much of her learning had slipped away, and she wondered what the point was. Aristotle thought women were natural slaves. Plato hated poets. He had good reason. Poets hated Plato. She wondered if she was pregnant. Counted back the days and decided she probably wasn’t, just sedentary and fond of cheesecake. She thought about her ex-boyfriend, who’d broken up with her just after graduation, having had to down several glasses of Prosecco to pluck up his courage (afterwards she had allowed herself the cruel pleasure of making several jokes about getting it up). Already, she was forgetting what they had talked about, all those long hours in bed or in the smoking area out the back of the library. Liberty, equality, truth and beauty. The meaning of art. He had told her she was boring, during the breakup, and she reminded him that he picked her, out of an endless line up of first year girls who had all thought he was cooler, because he was five months older. Something something about perception, about all her imperfections being a reflection upon his. Narcissus. Which in hindsight made her Echo, and annoying. He had been called Felix. He was, as far as she was aware, still called Felix. She pinched her stomach, sighed down at her half empty glass of ginger ale. University was full of boys called Felix, or Oscar, or Teddy, names that seemed to have fallen out of a Victorian novel. They all had floppy hair, and easy grins, and a fathomless capacity of cruelty which they somehow made feel gentle. Boys like that didn’t exist in the real world, she thought, stubbing out her cigarette in the ginger ale.
There was a crash from downstairs. She indulged, very briefly, in wondering whether it could be a burglar, a burly thief or a lithe young man who’d slide up the pipes through her window. She wondered if they’d rape her. If they’d even want to. Then hated herself for wondering it, it made her feel uneasy, like staring at her father’s bald patch. The cigarette stub smoked half-heartedly, and then went out. It probably wasn’t, anyway. Her parents had embarked on a home renovation project, they were getting into DIY. Her father called it a three-quarter life crisis and thought he was funny. Her mother confessed after two gin and tonics that they’d never thought she’d move back home, after uni, and she’d ruined their plans of buying a little one bedroom cottage in the Cotswolds, so now they were stuck with this place, and the renovation was compensation or perhaps she’d said compromise. Either way there were dusty nails sticking out of the landing floorboards and once a builder walked in on her languishing in happy baby pose with her arse in the air but there was also this shiny new mirror in the bathroom, it’s presence offensively bright and cheery. It was a Smart Mirror, her father had said proudly, placing too much emphasis on Smart the way only a person in their seventies confronted with a new piece of tech could, equal parts admiration and wariness, a sense of being superseded. It could tell her how long she’d brushed her teeth for or whether the shades of black in her outfit clashed. It could sync up to her phone and on days she woke up with hormonal acne peppering her jawline and neck her feeds would subtly push advertisements for La Roche Posay blemish cream and various dubious looking peels.
She found it hard not to stare at herself in the mirror, and though she’d first thought of breaking it (her mother – Seven years bad luck!) she now accepted it as a malign presence in her room and her life. With the bathroom door open, she couldn’t escape its glare, so she always kept it shut, except when she felt particularly filled with self loathing, and wanted to indulge, like in the cigarette, or the family size Co-Op cheesecake she bought and picked at every week, starting from the middle, cutting out a perfectly round orifice with a spoon before working outwards to the crust. This action provided her with a perfect if momentary sense of purpose, like a mole tunnelling, or sex. What a sad life.
In a way, the mirror was more a part of this house than she was. After all, her parents had chosen the mirror. Had gone together and picked it out, thinking of when they could turn her room into a second guest room, with fluffy towels rolled on the sheets and goose feather pillows and a Jo Malone candle. They hadn’t picked her, as they were fond of reminding her, her father jokingly and her mother with an edge which said look at you, who ruined my figure and my career, who at least could have been a friend to your older brother as we hoped rather than a gnat in his shadow. Her brother, six years older with a high paying job in asset management, still had his childhood room fully intact, football players and Britney Spears staring sultrily down from the walls above his plaid print bedsheets. The last time she’d been exiled from the dinner table was after she’d asked him which provided better wank fodder, Britney or Man U. That had been the Christmas after her first term at uni, when she’d been filled with mocking mirth and critical theory. Engels on the bourgeois family, Shulamith Firestone. That had been before sex, and she wondered occasionally if being a virgin meant you knew less or more about the world, though she only wondered this after sex had happened to her, by which point the opportunity to answer the question had vanished.
Whenever they slept together Felix would come ritually on her stomach, and then apologise, as if it was his fault. She didn’t mind either way, and thought it said something about his psyche, a peculiarly Puritan mindset, that fear of spilt seed. The psychoanalysts had had strong feelings about impotence and virility, she remembered that, as they had in the Renaissance. They’d blamed witches, who stole dicks and hung them on trees, she’d learnt that reading Bodin. Later, they blamed masturbation. She felt that food was a sort of female impotence. She knew her mother had never orgasmed, you could see it in her face.
All these facts hung about in her like extra ovaries.
Some months ago she’d heard about a male birth control tested in the noughties, which had near perfect efficacy but the sort of symptoms men might want to avoid – lowered libido, weight gain, bloating, etcetera – and had never reached production. When she’d mentioned it to Felix one night after class, her head resting on his naked shoulder, he’d frowned and been silent for a moment – But don’t you like not getting your period? Every month she spotted black gunk into a tissue and thought about the guillotine. She thought about coming off the Pill, but decided better not. Men appeared when she least expected them and she didn’t intend to go looking. Her mother felt differently, and had told her one forgotten Valentines Not to settle, with a pointed look at her father, snoozing beneath The Guardian. It was the closest they’d come to girl talk since she’d grown breasts.
Had that been the beginning of the end for the relationship? Maybe. She’d opened up cans of worms Felix and perhaps her had rather keep covered. She fingered the cigarette butt, wished she could finish the dirty ginger ale. Nobody IDs me anymore. Something her parents had said, as a kid, when she acted moody or bratty. Nobody Loves Me Everybody Hates Me Think I’ll Go And Eat Worms. It was strange how quickly her sense of purpose had vanished, it was as if part of her had died and no one come to the funeral. She felt closer to the girl of seventeen who’d rotted in this bed, writing morbid poems and skiving school, out of place in her lanky body, than the one of nineteen with her head full of thoughts and her arms full of hardbacks, their leather covers rough and warm as animal coats. She sighed into the coverlet, which smelt of stale smoke and her mother’s laundry powder. Rousseau, with his mummy issues and his distant father, calling his lover maman. A boy she’d slept with before Felix had suckled her breast, his hand possessive on her belly, and she hadn’t known what to do. Who did he want her to be? She’d never seen porn, and felt if she started now she’d be too much of a stereotype, effectively unemployed in her parents’ attic. There was a part of her that was going to rot and she didn’t know how to care for it, a self was like a houseplant that way, and her houseplants had fungus gnats. That was a sad life, if you thought about it, tiny little parasites which came from nothing and went nowhere.
There was a knocking from below, on her bedroom floor, like someone trying to get in, or maybe out. She had knocked over the ginger ale. It was spilt on the book, discarded, yellowing the slick white pages before she’d even touched them. She left it lying there. It made it feel lived in. The mirror winked from the bathroom. She had the sense that everything she did was for an audience, but that at some point everyone had stopped watching her.
Helena Aeberli
Helena Aeberli is a writer from London. She holds a BA in History and Politics and an MA in Early Modern History from the University of Oxford, with a research focus on gender and medicine in the seventeenth century. She writes the Substack Twenty-First Century Demoniac, which aims to take a closer look at what we’re missing when we get stuck in a doomscroll. Her short fiction can be found in Lunate Journal and the Oxford Review of Books, among others. She procrastinates @helenarambles on Twitter.