Simone
Howell: The Mean Reds
By way of introduction
If I’m going to be punished for anything then it should for Dad and Renee. They weren’t my first kill (or my last) but at least with them I had some say in the matter. Pre-meditated is the word I’m reaching for. I always had a strong imagination. As a child I lived in a comic-book world where I was the master of my universe. But after the first blossom of blood in my gusset I realised I had about as much control as a pinball. Whoever was thumbing the flippers wanted me smacking around taking out as many points before the inevitable happened. I don’t care what the papers say. I’m not a serial killer. I didn’t do it in installments. So I say in my own defense, Dad and Renee aside, I only did it when I was bleeding. When I was not myself.
Cutting off the umbilical cord
I remember thinking that the murder weapon should be symbolic so I used the pizza cutter. At $39, it was the cheapest item on the happy couple’s gift registry. It was still in its box in the stiff-doored kitchen cupboard. Renee used the David Jones registry to make a statement about her non-existent homemaking skills to offset the child-bride jokes. At 20, she was too young to care about learning to prepare a pizza. And at 49, Dad was too old to start learning to eat them. She needn’t have worried. Dad thought with his crotch and ate from tins. No reminders of mortality were tolerated. They were going to pack me off to boarding school. I wouldn’t be missed. Mum was already safely locked away in sheltered housing – singing nursery rhymes to herself or whatever it is that crazy people do. I’m not allowed to visit her anymore. Which is just as well. Who wants to see their future when it looks like that?
Blood rituals
When my best friend Janine got her first period her mother slapped her on the face. Hard. It’s an old Jewish tradition but Janine’s an atheist so she slapped her right back. And later she said her mother was trying to shame her because she was becoming a woman. Like she was trying to slap sense into me or something. Maybe all mothers are crazy. But the shame thing stuck because I remember in high school Janine used to keep her ‘emergency’ sanitary pad wrapped in al-foil so if anyone saw it she could pass it off as a salad roll. Of course, this was back in the eighties – now they have Ultra-thins with the dry-lock core, and black panty-liners – like that makes a difference.
Me Vinoa visitar mi prima communista
I was fascinated by all the euphemisms. Janine’s mother used to call it her monthly visitor, or Aunty Ruby. The girls at school called it their rags or red river or riding the crimson wave. I had a Spanish pen pal who used a phrase that roughly translated as my communist cousin is coming to visit. The rags trade was exciting to me. Once a month women were talking in code. I understood that periods were supposed to be kept a secret because there were pads called Whisper and Discreet. I couldn’t wait to get mine. Janine called hers the mean reds after Breakfast at Tiffanys. And I adopted the term because of what happened to Tyson and for all the kills that followed.
Synchrony
I don’t know if you’ve read that stuff in the papers about me being anti-social from an early age, but it’s all bullshit. There was nothing wrong with my childhood. And I loved my brother even if he was a pain in the arse. I don’t really like to think about it, but if you spend enough time in a four-foot cell, you can’t really avoid thinking, so there you go. He was 7 and I was 13. It was a momentous day. I’d felt something stirring downstairs in Home Ec and finished the school day locked in a cubicle, daks down, gazing at the mark of my first menses. But as I walked home my initial feeling of jubilation gave way to a strange kind of fear. I felt like I was losing more than just blood. I felt like I was losing myself. When I got home Dad was still at work and Mum was just leaving for the supermarket. I lay on the beanbag in the rumpus room and tried to concentrate on The Goodies, but Tyson kept switching the channel and I just wanted to pound him. We used to have fights like that all the time but usually I knew when to stop. This time I couldn’t. I had him on the floor and he was biting my leg and I was seeing red, red, red. I shoved him aside to get to the TV and he smashed his head on the corner of the coffee table Mum had made in her mosaic class. A little line of blood leaked out from his temple and became a scarlet river that ran along the grouts between the mirrored tiles.
The curse
Did you know that before the twentieth century, women used to make their own pads out of rags or else they’d just bleed into their clothes? Maybe that was what the Government was thinking of when they put a tax on tampons. Or maybe it was supposed to be a form of punishment. Men used to say that meat would turn rancid if touched by the hand of a menstruating woman. A lot of bloody women were burned at the stake. My first boyfriend had this great joke, I can’t remember it all but the punch line was something like, how can you trust something that bleeds every month and doesn’t die? I don’t have to tell you what happened to him.
Periodicals
I was reading a womens’ magazine the other week and it had an article with famous women talking about their periods. And one very glamorous actress was saying that she loved getting her periods and that for her it was all about feeling like a woman. I wish they’d interviewed me because I would have told them that was just a crock. My periods were hell. I mean, aside from the murderous impulses, I used to get full-blown acne, paralyzing cramps, and occasional memory lapses.
After what happened with Tyson, I was sentenced to a shrink for anger-management. He put me on the contraceptive pill and gave me a combination of pacifying drugs that seemed to do the trick. The mean reds would come on and I’d feel my hands twitching, but if I put them in my pockets the urge to maim would eventually dissipate. I spent my first few teenage years de-sensitized, and in a state of arrested development. So when Mum started going off the rails, I was able to totally distance myself from it. And when Dad took up with Renee I watched it like I’d watch the Bold and the Beautiful. I could leave it for six weeks safe in the knowledge that when I switched back on Ridge would still be perched on an emotional precipice and Stephanie would still be saying then Mister you’ve got another thing coming.
Red river rising
At first Dad used to take me to visit Mum. She was in a low-security loony bin where she still got to wear her own clothes and watch Whoopi Goldberg movies. The first few visits she just sat in her chair and pretended we weren’t there. A year went by, then another year, then another year. My body was changing. When I looked in the mirror I saw my mother. This is when I adopted what the papers call my outsider dress code. You know, lots of black with cheap silver Indian jewelry. I used to white my face with zinc cream and slap on the kohl, and dark purple lipstick. All very gothic. But I still looked like Mum. Everybody saw the resemblance. It really affected Dad. He stopped looking me in the eye. He started leaving notes around the house. I was ex-communicated. Right after I read the note that said Renee and I are tying the knot! I went in to see Mum on my own. She looked fat and unhappy and her hair was a mess. Her body had given over to weird fits and tics but at least she was talking to me. She called me the devil’s daughter. She said that I had sacrificed Tyson. She said I can see his strength in you. I can see him in you. I thought she was talking about Tyson until she turned to the window and started muttering in Latin. And I was just standing there, mute, but I could feel this thing rising inside me, this wave of blackness that turned to red. I could feel my veins and arteries pumping and I was shaking so much when I looked at my hands I saw double. I put them in my pockets but they wouldn’t stay put. The whole time I was hitting her she never let up with the Latin shit. It took three orderlies to get me off her. They wouldn’t let me back after that. But I’d already decided she was dead to me. That was her power though, you know, it was enough to kick all the drugs into submission and let the mean reds take hold of the reins. The next week in school I got into a fight with a Year 10 slag. She wound up with a split lip and two broken ribs and I got expelled. So now it was just me and Dad and the child-bride in the house. And I think I knew that if I stayed on living there they’d end up dead. Maybe it was that kind of logic like; if I kill everyone I know then I can be free to become someone else. Does that make sense?
Heavy flow
Renee said she wanted to be like my big sister. But what she really wanted to be was my dietician, personal trainer and make-up artist. She wanted to get me out of my Goth garb and into lycra tit-tops and low-riding jeans with a peek-a-boo g-string carving up my arsecrack. Dad was making a lot of money now, and Renee was working really hard spending it. During their ‘special’ dinner before the wedding, I overheard Renee appealing to Dad to send me to a health spa.
How can hold your head up with her walking around looking like that?
Go easy on her. She’s had a lot of problems.
Well, I don’t want her at my wedding looking like a fat vampire.
Renee postponed the wedding for three months and put me on the Stairmaster. But most of the weight came off after I stopped taking my medication.
During the three months leading up to the wedding I made three kills. All strangers. All random. All because of the mean reds. I strangled a little girl I found playing in the dirt at the reserve. I stabbed a P-plating bogan who’d picked me up on the highway. And I beat an elderly gent with a brick in the Coles carpark. It was a heady time of reclamation. I was 16 and blooming.
Toxic Shock Syndrome
That guy from the reception? I don’t remember his name. He wasn’t a member of the wedding. He was one of the catering crew. He put up a fight. There was blood all over my personally fitted Marianna Hardwick gown. When I got home I felt heavy as lead. I had a pain in my guts from pigging out at the wedding. All I wanted to do was one great fart to let me feel light again. I sat on the toilet and started counting my kills on my fingers. I remember thinking that with all I’d been through I should have been feeling strong but all I felt was weak and lost and like a dumb-arse girl who couldn’t even shit straight. Then I started getting these images of Dad and Renee as honeymooners, snorkeling in Maui or drinking cocktails by the pool or feeding monkeys on the beach. And I thought about how their life seemed to be so full of Kodak moments while mine was like Weegee’s homicide scrapbook. The Celts believed that when women were on the rag they saw things with absolute clarity and I know I was thinking clearly when I decided to take out Dad and Renee.
Blood is thicker than water
When I think about it now, it’s like a movie. In fact, if they ever make a movie about me, I certainly hope I’ll be able to consult with the screenwriter. Picture this: It’s a soft summer night, and all is quiet in their stately home. Renee is having a bath. I’m creeping up the stairs and the pizza cutter is glinting in my hand. Steam wafts through the bathroom door. Renee is surrounded by aromatherapy bubbles and lit candles. She has her eyes closed and a peaceful smile on her face because she’s listening to Enya. I am silent as a thief. I am a thief. I’m going to steal her life. I stand over her and raise the pizza cutter in my right hand. I cut a curve in her throat along the shadow of her jaw line … and the first line of blood looked like lipstick. Then she had two smiles. Three if you count downstairs. I don’t why, but I thought the blood would sink to the bottom like sediment in cheap wine. But it spread like a watercolour and I watched her head sink until it was partially submerged and all that was left was her thick fringe streaked with highlights. Then I rinsed the Pizza cutter in the sink and waited downstairs for Dad to come home. In the film version they could probably draw out Dad’s death scene but in reality it was quick and brutal. I tripped him as he walked down the hall, and sliced him same as Renee. The stain-resistant thick-pile carpet soaked his blood up like a sponge. I went upstairs and looked in the mirror for the longest time and then I slowly started to take off my make-up. When I was done I looked like a different person.
Looking forward to the change
No one ever thinks they’re going to die from their period any more. But many people died from mine. You know, in Hawaii, bleeding women used to have to spend the duration of their menses in a Hale Pea – a menstrual hut. Shut off from their family and community to wait out the flow. During my wilderness years I tried to think of my car as my mobile menstrual hut but the mean reds were always there like a tint in the windscreen through which I viewed the world. I think I’m glad they caught up with me in the end. It takes it out of you – all that blood.
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