Bug Grrrl
We’ve only polished off one bottle of wine when I ask him where his bedroom is. He fumbles around in the kitchen before bringing me some orange squash in a glass stolen from the pub. We used to dunk dry biscuits into plastic cups of the stuff at church. The memory makes me want to conjure up the three-day-old carbonara I ate earlier.
I had met John, or James, or whatever his name is, on Tinder a few hours before. He has these dark, sunken eyes and long, spindly legs that make me think he’s escaped from a Tim Burton film. Men like this are either voracious lovers or otherwise riddled with anxiety.
He leads me to his room and the all-too-familiar single bed. No bedside table. No duvet covers. No fucking surprise. He positions his laptop on a chair and presses play on Peep Show . Great. That’s that one settled: he’s not the voracious type.
I lie flat on my back as he enters me. No foreplay. Never any foreplay. I dodge his kiss and make him burrow into my neck while I grip his hair. I fixate on the Trainspotting poster over his shoulder. ‘Choose life’. I make a note to myself to deface this with ‘choose communism’, just to fuck with his head. When he finishes, he commends himself for lasting the whole length of the adverts.
“How many times did you come?” He asks as he leans in for a kiss. I say nothing. He looks like I’ve just had a massive crap and tucked it up all neat in his bed. I wish I had.
“I’d get tested if I were you.”
Prick. As if he thinks he’s capable of giving me an STI.
As I dress, I make sure to kick the pint of orange squash all over his carpet. Shame it isn’t Vimto—that shit stains.
When I get home, I smoke a joint on the balcony with my cat, Egg. I contemplate how mangled my body would look hitting the street below. As I stamp out the roach, I remember something our Lord and saviour, Mark Corrigan of Peep Show , said.
Doing things you hate is the price you pay to avoid loneliness.
*
I wake up to Egg clawing at my eyeball, demanding to be fed. I scrape my hair back into a high ponytail—an antenna of sorts—so that when aliens descend onto Earth’s atmosphere, they abduct me first. I’m halfway through my wake-and-bake breakfast when I hear a rustling at the front door. Apple barges in holding about twelve bottles of bleach and enough kitchen roll to clean up a crime scene. I regret giving her the spare key.
“Make yourself at home, why don’t you?”
“I don’t know how you can live like this,” Apple says as she picks up a bottle of milk that’s growing mushrooms. I’ve been breeding them for months. But never mind. Go ahead. Throw away all my hard work.
She’s already cleaning my leftover cocaine from the table. “Aren’t you a bit old to be doing coke on a Tuesday?”
She could do with taking up cocaine herself. “I think twenty-seven is the perfect age to do coke. Especially on a Tuesday.”
Apple’s got an excess chubbiness to her face like an overgrown Cabbage Patch Kid. In college, she went through a phase of drawing on fake freckles that looked like she’d fallen down the loo. I called her bog baby for weeks. She loved it.
She’s come over to help make the place ‘presentable’ (her words) for Zak moving in (because I’m clearly not capable). I faff about pretending the vacuum cleaner doesn’t work while she scrubs every inch of the place as though it’s infested.
“You’re breathing in all this dust and mould. It can’t be good for you.” I imagine the spores slithering down my throat and filling up my lungs until I can no longer breathe.
She picks up a Victoria’s Secret thong from behind the bin that I’d pinged off a few weeks ago to see how far it could go.
“Wasn’t Victoria’s Secret connected to Epstein?” She asks. There we go again. Shitting on everything I love. “What’s their ‘secret’, anyway?” She uses air quotes. I picture myself punching her in the throat.
“All their underwear gives you thrush.” As usual, my joke doesn’t land.
Zak, my new flatmate, studies entomology and collects bugs. Bit weird if you ask me. Who the fuck keeps cockroaches as pets?
I bet he watches hentai.
*
Zak is already two weeks late on the rent. He says he’s waiting on his student loan, but I know he sells ketamine to kids from an ice cream van. He’s got scraggy blonde hair—the kind of botched box-dye job hairdressers warn you about—and reckons he looks like Kurt Cobain when he’s leaning more towards Jimmy Savile. He gets a bit touchy when I mention this. So, obviously, I mention it a lot. Overall, though, he’s not the worst flatmate.
At least he’s not a drum and bass DJ.
Apple’s been finding excuses to float around the flat more than usual since Zak moved in. She drops off some bread on her way home from work most nights, even though she’s the only person who eats it.
“I can’t have you two wasting away, can I?”
I can’t wait for the mould to form into patterns so I can trick her into doing a Rorschach test.
“It’s not like it’s a matter of loaf and death,” Zak jokes as he opens the lid of the cockroach container. They don’t smell like I thought they would. They’re almost tangy. Apple giggles and does that annoying hair-twirling that makes me hope chunks fall out in her hand. She’s chewing some gum and the sound of it snapping between her teeth grates on me. I wait until she blows a bubble that goes right up to her eyebrows before I stick my finger in to pop it. It clings to her fringe. She panics and runs off to the bathroom.
As if Zak wants to fuck her anyway.
Since he moved in, the living room has been lined with glass enclosures and Tupperware boxes filled with different types of bugs. Apple returns and pretends to be fascinated.
“It looks like an erotic pet shop in here.”
“Do you mean exotic?” Zak asks.
“Same thing,” she laughs.
I might fuck him myself just to piss her off.
“What’s the crack with bugs anyway?” She asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Were you abused as a child or something?” I ask. Apple slaps me on the arm and her hand lingers there for longer than it should. I look at her with a devilish smile.
“Oh my God, you can’t just ask people that…”
I turn to Zak. “Were you, though?”
She’s way too excited by this.
“No, my dad kept stick insects when I was growing up, so it just became our thing. We’d go to Bugtopia together.”
“Oh, that’s sweet. Is he dead?” I ask.
“No, he just lives in Wigan now.”
“He’s as good as dead, then,” Apple says. Zak laughs.
I step on her foot with the excuse of passing over the cockroach tub. We’re organising the living room to make space for the new praying mantises. The roaches start making a weird hissing sound and I almost drop them. “What the fuck is that noise?”
“Is it a mating call?” She’s like a dog in heat.
“These are my Madagascar hissing cockroaches. It’s to ward off predators.”
“Aww, does it think I’m its predator?” She asks.
He takes one out of the box and holds it up for us to see. It’s greasy, almost like a piece of polished wood, and it hisses like a rattlesnake.
“It looks like a dick that’s been sliced up,” I say. Apple gives me the death stare.
“Only you would think that.” She’s probably right. Life hasn’t been the same since I googled The Cannibal Café.
*
A few days later, I find myself straddling a guy who’s wearing a jacket printed to look like imitation leather complete with flaming skulls and a pair of Primark jeggings that should’ve been left on the shelf back in 2010. Some poor child was put through slavery for him to wear this polyester prison.
It’s broad daylight and we’re in the middle of the forest behind the big Tesco. I lost my virginity here so it feels almost romantic to be back. He did ask to come to my place as his wife is at home, but there’s no chance I’d ever let a man into my bed.
He rolls his pathetic jeans down to his ankles and flops his dick out like it’s my reward. I get down on my knees, gagging at the smell of the aftershave he’s smothered himself in. The mud squelches beneath me and I watch a family of beetles scarper out from under the log he’s sitting on. I picture them scuttling over and impaling his ball sack with their horns. Zak told me some beetles use them to fight off other males when they’re mating.
Why am I thinking about Zak mid blow job?
Why am I thinking about bugs mid blow job?
I wish I’d brought him to a swamp so I could sink down until I suffocate.
I can hear screams in the distance and a couple with a pram comes into view. I look up and watch him watching them. He doesn’t stop watching them. I hope he’s not fixating on the baby. I wonder if he’s got kids of his own. He tells me not to stop.
“Where do you want me to come?”
I hate when they ask this. They think they’re being considerate but fuck me . Be a man. Make a fucking decision. I can’t say this to him—there’s a cock in my mouth—so I just look up at him with my big doe eyes so he knows he can come in my throat. It takes me by surprise that it tastes musty, and I forget how to swallow. He’s holding my head down and my cheeks are covered with black smudges. Whoever invented Better Than Sex mascara is painfully vanilla.
I dig my nails into his thighs and push back so hard I could easily dismember him. I turn to the side and spit. It lands on a leaf, narrowly missing the beetles.
“Do you think I could fuck you next time?”
“There’s not going to be a next time.”
He puffs his chest out and looks down at me. He must think he’s intimidating. I should be scared. After all, I’m a poor defenceless woman alone with a strange man in the woods. I’ve seen it in true crime documentaries— they’ll probably find my body in a bin. So, I do what I do best and I tell him to fuck off. Men love it when you treat them like shit.
*
Apple is swooning over Zak in the kitchen like a moth to a flame and I’m watching TV in the living room. He’s making us ‘goopy carbonara’ from The Sims cookbook I bought her for Christmas. I was hoping she’d show me her save file on the game but she gets really funny when I bring it up. I wouldn’t put it past her to have the sex mods installed so she can finger me in the hot tub without it being censored.
It's my night to pick something for us to watch while Apple is supposed to be cleaning up after him, but there isn’t a clear surface in sight. What if we had an actual cockroach infestation? It’d be like an episode of Takeshi’s Castle , parkouring about with their creepy little insect legs.
Zak and Apple walk in holding what look like plates of nuclear waste. I take mine from him, apprehensively, and they both sink onto the sofa with me. I let Apple sit in the middle for once. As we eat, I picture all three of our corpses, discovered after days, fused to the couch, marinating in our own flesh and faeces.
“This tastes like baby sick,” I say.
Zak glowers at me as I spit a mouthful of yellow gloop back onto the plate.
“How do you know what—actually, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.”
“Honestly, there are starving children in the world. Don’t be so ungrateful,” Apple snaps. I can feel her pushing her legs furiously against mine.
“Give it to them, then. Even they’d send it back.”
She scoffs at me and tries to hide the fact she’s choking on a piece of pasta. I pity her poor gag reflex.
“If I were a cockroach I wouldn’t even touch this, and they eat their own sick,” I say.
“That’s flies, you twat,” Zak says. “Don’t listen to her, Apple. She’s just trying to get a reaction. As usual.” He shovels his pasta down while Apple pushes hers around the plate with her fork like there isn’t a cost of living crisis.
When we’re finished, I walk into the kitchen and look around for somewhere to put our dirty plates but there’s still no space on the worktops. I place them on the floor instead.
When Zak leaves to play Grand Theft Auto (or whatever the fuck boys do these days), Apple turns to face me. “What were you playing at tonight?”
“What do you mean?”
“Seriously, you were being a bitch.” How is she only just noticing this now?
“Just because you can’t be honest doesn’t mean I can’t.”
“You know, sometimes I wish you’d just suck it up and pretend to be nice for once.”
I link my arm through hers and rest my head on her shoulder. She usually loves it when I do this, but this time she pulls away.
“It’s only some bloody pasta, Apple. It’s not the end of the world.”
“It’s not about the pasta! Look, Zak and I were talking and—”
“Oh, you and Zak? Your new best mate?”
Her eyes knife me. Egg weaves in between us both, whipping her tail against my mouth in a desperate attempt to either shut me up or deep throat me. I throw her favourite catnip toy across the floor to distract her. Drugs always work that way. Like mother, like daughter.
“We just—I think that, you know…” She’s chewing at her lips. I imagine tearing them off her face, blood pouring down her chin.
“No, I don’t know.” I cross my arms. “Go on. Enlighten me.”
“Well, we just think that… that you’re a bit much, sometimes.” She’s shaking. I bet she rehearsed this. “Like he said, you’re just trying to get a reaction, and it’s not really, like, warranted? You always take things too far…” Her voice trails off. She’s still talking, but my brain can’t process it. It’s only like this when men talk to me. All I can focus on is the scurrying of the cockroaches. I think they’re fucking. I count ten piled on top of one another in their filthy bug orgy.
“Apple, you were shoving into me like you were trying to make me leave.”
“I wasn’t doing that at all—”
“Yes, you were. You just want Zak all to yourself.” I scowl.
“That’s not what was happening!”
“And let me tell you this for free. He. Doesn’t. Fucking. Want. You. So why don’t you just fuck off out of my flat?”
She’s going to make my Sim catch crabs for saying that.
One of the cockroaches stands to attention, its antennae darting from side to side as though it’s engrossed in a soap opera. Apple storms off and I can hear her crying in Zak’s room. There’s more chance of David Attenborough being outed as a furry than him comforting her. She can’t even look at me when she passes by my bedroom door later to get some tissues from the bathroom. She looks like pure shit. Good. Who the fuck does she think she is? Come to think of it, I didn’t hear her leave.
*
I’m so pissed off that I don’t even check Tinder. I think about all the other girls Apple must’ve befriended in nightclub toilets, teaching each other how to kiss and dishing out advice on how to find the G-spot. I bet cockroaches don’t have these problems. All they have to worry about is staying alive.
I wonder how many drugs I’ll have to snort before I feel bugs crawling under my skin. I make it my new life goal. I go into the living room to get a bag of coke but I’m distracted once again by the cockroaches. Standing in front of their enclosure, I look at their barbed legs and then down at my own prickly shins. My heart is pounding.
I take the lid off and scoop one out, holding it between my thumb and forefinger. Its antennae sway, like it’s dancing just for me, like it has never been so happy in all its life until now. Right here. With me. My entire body tingles as I watch it crawl up my arm, darting through my thick black hair, climbing my tits like mountains until it begins to traverse towards my stomach. The tingles ripple through me like a surge of electricity and I’ve never felt so alive. This must be what it feels like to inject heroin. I forget that I’m completely sober.
I position myself lying down on the sofa while my hand fumbles underneath the waistband of my shorts. The roach sits on my stomach facing me as I touch myself, and in that moment, we are in symbiosis with one another. I need them as much as they need me. I’m trembling and twitching as if I’m having a seizure and it’s like there’s an infestation of butterflies inside me with their wings expanding and contracting, the feeling rising and falling and rising deeper and deeper again until finally—
I don’t know how to describe it. It’s kind of like scratching a mosquito bite that covers your entire body. Or like when a volcano erupts molten hot lava. All I know is that it’s never happened to me before. Or anyone else, for that matter. Wait—have I just invented something?