ALISON THERESA GIBSON
CW – periods
Quit your bellyaching
The flat is on the sixth floor of an ugly building and the buzzer is broken. I bang on the front door. Chips of paint stick to my fist.
‘Yeah?’ It’s Makk, yelling from the sixth-floor window. She squints into the darkness.
‘It’s me, Ainslie,’ I shout back, hands cupped around my mouth like it might make a difference.
‘Great! Come on up!’
I’m not the first to arrive, four other people are here already. Perfect. Small enough that I can meet them all, establish my personality for the evening, and be a welcoming and gracious guest when new people arrive. I know what to do at parties in my new city.
(I can still call the city ‘new’ because of the tier of unpacked boxes in my flat, that’s the rule. The fact that I’ve received half a dozen payslips since I moved is beside the point.)
The windows are open to the night sky and the clouds have crept back in. The rain has started and the city’s lights are smudges of moving colour.
Makk hugs me and I panic that my pre-party egg-and-cress sandwich has made me smell, until I realise she’s holding a vol-au-vent. There’s a blob of orange yolk staring at me from between the curve of half-eaten crust. She laughs.
‘Isn’t it a riot? Paolo brought them. Welcome back to the seventies, babe!’
I laugh, because that’s what you do when something is a riot. I get distracted wondering when the word riot stopped meaning a violent demonstration fuelled by anger and frustration and became a word for laughing. But then I stop thinking about that because it’s not in the party spirit.
‘Rum?’ Paolo asks, pressing a cup into my hand. We chink plastic and I wonder when the conversation about the earth dying will start. Maybe when all the plastic has crinkled under our fingers from too many refills.
Paolo and Makk turn to greet new arrivals and I shuffle to the prime location near the fireplace. I realise too late that the women standing there are squeezing in a deeply personal conversation before the party gets going. I stop, as if I can’t hear their discussion of a break-up from a metre away, and drink my rum. This, I remember, is what happened last night. I was caught without a conversation and used the endless gin to convince myself I was having fun. Or, more accurately, my belly ached so much that normal words for a normal conversation were out of reach so I drank until the gin made the ache dissolve and by then I was convinced I was having fun. It was a riot.
A belly ache is normal and allowed and nothing to be ashamed of.
A belly ache is not something you need to tell anyone about, even though the fact of not telling makes it obvious that here, in this new city, you have no one to tell.
The women finish their personal conversation and one of them catches my eye. She has red hair, and I’m jealous, but when I sidle closer to say hello I realise that it’s fake. Wisps of dull brown sit at her temples.
‘Is that one of Paolo’s?’ She gestures to my drink and I say yes and laugh. I think I’m laughing too much. ‘Careful, they’re toxic.’ She holds a bottle of mineral water with the label facing me.
When did we start referring to drinks as toxic? Toxic should have a skull and bones on it. Toxic should be pirate poison.
It’s a toxic riot, right here.
‘Oh well, I should probably stay away from gin after last night.’ But she doesn’t know about last night. She doesn’t know that a tote bag hangs from my shoulder because my handbag – the one with creeping ferns on the leather – smells like vomit.
Her two friends have shuffled away from us and she can’t rejoin them without being rude. She’s stuck with me. I win!
‘Are you okay?’ she asks. Her mineral water is almost empty. ‘Do you feel okay?’
I take my hand off my stomach.
‘Yeah, fine.’
‘Period pain?’
So, she’s one of those women who talks about periods in public like the fact that they’re natural means they’re not foul.
‘Something like that.’ I realise too late that she knows what that means, that we share the secret language. I laugh again, but she is not fooled.
She reaches out and for a second I think she’s going to touch my belly and I’m going to have to tell her to fuck off. Instead, she takes my hand. Her fingers are cold from her bottle of mineral water with the fancy label, and her skin slips over mine. I can feel her tendons. I can feel her history.
She doesn’t say anything, so neither do I, and we stand like that, two strangers holding hands.
‘Drugs or surgical?’ she says, her voice quiet, or maybe the party has grown louder since I last looked away from her face.
‘Drugs.’
‘Better,’ she says, and smiles, and I hate that I love the validation in that word. I made an excellent choice, bravo! But then her face creases, and she says, ‘Did you say you were drinking gin last night?’
‘Oh, yeah. A bit.’
Her fingers squeeze mine and I worry that words of caution are going to follow. She thinks that this special period pain layered with slick liquor can mean only one thing. Regret. And I’ll have to tell her that that’s not it. The oddest feeling is just sitting deep inside me now. Like my body isn’t my own anymore. It’s flapping about on its own, like an injured bird surrounded by spectators, while I just shake my head and think, get yourself together. My mound of flesh is out of my control. Flapping and flailing and getting impregnated without my permission.
The rain has eased, the clouds are finding their way towards the next city. The lights around us grow clearer, sharper, like the focus on our communal camera has been adjusted.
My rum is finished and Paolo refills my plastic cup. This I can control. I will control exactly how much to pour through my innards until I feel like me again, until this slipperiness has completely and utterly left my body and my flesh is once again mine.
‘You know, I’ll have one too,’ my red-headed friend says, and Paolo grins at me.
‘You got her to let go, brilliant!’
Me and her, we share a look, because we know this isn’t letting go. We are tightening our grip on ourselves, our real selves, and saying a grateful goodbye to that other, clumsy, failing body.
‘Cheers,’ I say, and we laugh, but it’s not weird. It’s not a riot. It just is. A few people shuffle over. They are laughing too. We have become the fun centre of the party, but me and her, our fingers are still entwined, the tendons holding us together. Our shared histories bump shoulders amidst a group of new friends. Someone in the city knows one of my stories now.
Alison Theresa Gibson grew up in Canberra, the illusive capital of Australia, and currently lives in Birmingham, UK. She has words in a number of publications, including Spelk, Litro, Crack the Spine, Meanjin, Sunlight Press, and Every Day Fiction. She was nominated for Best Small Fictions in 2020 and Best of the Net in 2019. She is currently completing her MA in Creative Writing at University of Birmingham. Find her @byAlisonTheresa and alisontheresa.com.