THERE'S A MONSTER IN MY BEDROOM AND I CALL HIM STEVEN

There’s a monster in my bedroom. He’s eight feet tall and slender as a rake. His body is raven black and his hair even darker, reaching his waist. He has one small swinging plait in front of where his eyes should be, held in place by a little lime green plastic band. He has two thick and crooked horns protruding from the top of his head that curve in like a ram. His fingers are long like sharpened pencils, his toes too. His nails are sharp like talons on a bird of prey striking upon a field mouse for its supper but peculiarly well-manicured for a monster that lives in my bedroom. He wears a wide grin that stretches so far up his cheeks that they ooze a strange goo that’s not quite blood nor spit with two rows of fangs so battered and filed they look like a vandalised graveyard having no lips to hide behind. There are giant white rings in the place of his eye sockets, like a reversed racoon. It’s not that he doesn’t have eyes, he does, they’re just not right. They’re fluorescent yellow like body paint at an underground rave, though they turn gleaming white, similar to crying beams of a lighthouse when he blinks, — No, a lighthouse is too secure. They dazzle like car headlights zooming up the roads towards you as you drive home in the middle of the night after a particularly horrible day. He doesn’t possess pupils or eyelashes, just two grand voids of blinding light that suck you in the way black holes or vacuum cleaners do. 

His arms drag on the floor behind him when he walks. It scrapes off the not-flesh that covers his not-bones, leaving a trail of not-blood on my microfibre cotton rug. You can see every bony joint dislocate as they pop, click, crack and snap like the contortionist in the circus show you saw when you were 9 and your cousins came to town. He doesn’t have knees yet his legs bend and bow in the middle. He doesn’t wear clothes and he doesn’t have genitals. He has nipples but no breasts and the left one has a silver ring hanging from it. He doesn’t breathe. When he walks he is silent, as if floating. He lives behind the comfy chair, next to the broken sink. I call him Steven. 

I don’t remember when Steven moved in. He didn’t live in the old house, only the new one. Maybe we bought him too when my parents signed the deeds. I suppose he was here before me and I’m the intruder in his space. I should be paying him rent. Sorry, Steven. 

There are lots of monsters here in the new house. The faceless woman who wears a lacey, long white wedding dress and stands at the foot of my bed, slightly off-centre to the left. If she had a face maybe I could tell what she was feeling. She never removes her veil. I haven’t seen her in a while though. Maybe she finally got married. I call her Helen. That was my mother’s name. She always said I had an over-active imagination.

Then there’s the one that lives in Gram’s room that comes down to the kitchen with shaggy hair, dungarees and inhuman hands that are mangled and burned. He’s Barry. I don’t remember why I named him Barry. He’s scary. He’s the kind of entity you catch in a movie trailer whilst flipping through channels late at night as a child when the nightmares kept you awake. Maybe I named him Barry so he wouldn’t be so scary.

There’s a coiled-up, scaled and slithering jade snake who lives on top of my wardrobe next to the teapot I stole from my Gram’s old house. He’s cruel. I don’t like when he talks. He doesn’t get a proper name. He’s just Snake. He slithers across my wood chipped white ceiling, right above my head, threatening to fall on my face and throttle me around my neck. He dances in the dark like the ashes that fall from my best friend’s cigarettes when he smokes on the porch.

But Steven is my favourite. 

Steven didn’t talk at first. For the first few months, he stayed in his corner. He never came out during the day either. He’s nocturnal like me. The sunlight hurts his eyes. In the dark of my bedroom, late at night, he looks like a giant spider that’s just been sprayed with deodorant, missing half its legs as its body seizes and spasms. His body warps into the corner where my purple painted walls meet the woodchipped white ceiling. His left leg and left arm on the wall with the mirror decorated with my monochrome photos of Marilyn and Audrey. His back pushed against the ceiling. His right leg and right arm on the wall with my astrology chart and the poster of my favourite singer who hung himself two summers before we moved out here. Steven just stared. Never blinking, never looking away, never turning his head. Looking right at me as if he had something to say but not the words nor the courage to say it. As if he was the new kid on the first day of school who craved your friendship. Or a serial killer planning how he was going to get me alone and close enough to his SUV.

I had to turn my night light back on to make sure he didn’t attack me. My nightlight had skulls on it, red roses too. The shrink said it was bad for me so I got a new one. It’s a snow globe in a seashell that glows red then blue then green then white then pink then purple then back to red. It makes a crackling noise like a freshly opened can of coke, while a mute firework is displayed on my white ceiling. It stands on a pile of books. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, a manual on how to align your chakras, a selection of fairytales from The Brothers Grimm, a Kurt Cobain biography I’ve started and never finished eight separate times and my scrawled and mauled copy of The Catcher In The Rye that secured me a 92 back in my college literature book report. The nightlight sits on the books and the books sit on a table amongst scattered unused sanitary pads, a broken vape charger, wired headphones, the rose-scented hand cream my Grandmother buys me every birthday and Christmas, an alarm clock that runs two minutes behind my mobile phone’s clock, a glasses case, a bowl of crystals, a portrait of David Bowie and a thick veil of hair and dust and other nasties.

As long as I could see him, he couldn’t hurt me. I went days without sleep. This was not unusual or especially difficult for me, I have always hated sleep. It’s too vulnerable, too dark, too hot and too cold, too loud yet silent. This gave me an excuse to be an insomniac. If he was going to watch me, I was going to watch him too, like some bizarre nature documentary shot through a two-way mirror.

After a year or so he started getting closer and closer with each new night, the way a scared child approached the lion’s enclosure at the zoo, or a man inching towards the edge of a psychotic break as he reached the end of his wits. Every few weeks he’d get one step closer. I believed that if he was going to hurt me then he would’ve done it already. I turned the light off and slept.

Eventually, he reached the head of my bed. He tried to hide behind the black and brown pin-badge kissed leather jackets hanging from my door but his legs poked out beneath. I said ‘Hi’ and he didn’t answer. Steven has terrible manners, or maybe he’s just not a people person. I’m not a people person either, that’s why I name the monsters that live in my bedroom.

One night he answered.

“Hi,” I said like I do every night as part of my routine when I see him standing there. Clean my teeth for three minutes, sort the laundry, apply anti-perspirant, change into underwear and a t-shirt, cleanse, tone and moisturise my skin, smear my lips in Vaseline, untuck my duvet from the end of my bed, say ‘Hi’ to Steven, stare at the woodchipped white ceiling for the next six hours whilst masturbating and humming the last song my playlist spat out before I turned my phone off. Repeat ad infinitum.

“Hello,” he finally said. His voice was low and grumbling but gentle, soothing even. Then he said my name. My full, legal name that not even my parents used. 

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“I’m not sure I have one.”

“Can I call you Steven?” I’d just watched a film with an actor called Steven. He played a serial killer.

“OK.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Nothing,”

We left it at that. I fell asleep and by the time daylight broke Steven had retreated into wherever he goes during the daytime. The shadows, a hole, a parallel universe where it’s night again, a doorway to Wonderland. I don’t know where Steven goes when I’m not looking. I told my friends at school and they looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. They asked me ‘Are you sure you’re alright?’ and I told them ‘Of course, why wouldn’t I be?’ and we never mentioned it again. We sat on the floor of the psychology classroom. I was eating salted popcorn and drinking strawberry milk from the canteen. That was about all I could stomach those days. They went back to their conversations of half-true sexual exploits and card games with no rules and how to roll joints. No one even gave me a second glance. There was a monster in my bedroom. A real, actual monster. If someone said that to me, the questions I would’ve asked. But no one seemed to care about Steven.

I didn’t see Steven for ages after that. I’d scared him off. I’d scared Him. Five foot Six, anorexically thin and the monster in my bedroom was afraid of me. At the arcades on the beach, I struggle to make 400 on the boxing machine, what could I do to Him?

I think it was winter, or perhaps I was just shaking. Snake was nasty with his taunts. For hours now I’d been sitting crossed-legged on my bed under the black and white sheets without a thought in my head. My eyes, absent and wandering faded in and out then in again staring straight ahead at the little fireplace all sealed over with thick, black duct tape to keep the spiders out. There was blood under my nails. My blood. I didn’t know how it got there. It stained my fingers and my legs. The single blade I use to shave my top lip laid limp on my hair-dye stained, frayed cream carpet. My lungs couldn’t find the air they needed and I could feel my ribcage imploding with every breath. I don’t ever cry. Dad doesn’t like it. He says little girls cry, not women. But that night I wept. Silently and without noise I wept all night. I was exhausted but my body wouldn’t let me sleep. I saw Steven out of the corner of my eye and like some kind of spectre, or a guardian angel in the body of a beast, he walked through the comfy chair and sat on the edge of my bed. I felt the bedsprings collapse under his weight. I could feel his scrawny, thorny, icy hand on my shoulder but I couldn’t look him in the face. 

“Did you hurt yourself?” he asked, saying my name again as if it were punctuation.

“Yes.”

“Why do you hurt yourself?” He looked at me with the eyes of a child. Morbid yet curious.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you sad?”

“Yes.”

“Are you always sad?”

“Yes.”

“That’s sad.”

I didn’t give it much thought. It was not as extraordinary to me as it must have been to him.  “I suppose.”

“Were you always sad?”

“Not always.”

“What happened to make you sad?”

I blinked softly and realised I didn’t know. “Sometimes people are just sad.”

“That’s sad.”

“I suppose.”

“When did you first get sad?”

I realised I couldn’t remember. The last time I was happy, I didn’t remember. I had been sad for so long that my brain was a cullender and all the happy memories had drained away down the sink like starch water after peeling potatoes. My entire childhood was fading like bonfire smoke. That little girl became a stranger to me the same way some old film star fizzles out and you don’t hear their name again until you read their obituary, except I was living my obituary, writing my own eulogy like it was homework. Each day a new word; ‘young’, ‘beautiful’, ‘kind’, ‘tragic’, ‘troubled’, ‘daughter’, ‘sister’, ‘granddaughter’.

“Do you get sad?” I asked Steven.

“I don’t think I can.”

“Don’t monsters get sad?”

“I don’t know. What does being sad feel like?”

Like a weight, like a ball and chain that drags behind you so you can never move forward, like your feet are clad in cement. Like a bungee cord around your waist that springs you back against the wall when you try to run away and like cheap pottery your spine shatters. Like suffocating on poison gas and feeling your lungs blister and bleed so you choke on all the feelings you’ve been keeping locked away in your chest like a canary in a gilded cage. Like drowning in a vast, black and raging ocean; your head only bobbing up for brief moments of air before you go back under once again and there’s no lighthouse to save you this time. Like sitting in a padded cell, praying to a God you no longer have any reason to believe in, that during your sleep that night He will take you away from this place that no longer feels like a home planet. You’re an alien. A bug-eyed, foreign, bulging, off-colour alien who speaks in gobbledygook and comes in peace but wants nothing more than to float like dust in the air towards the spotlights of a mothership it knows well.

“It’s when your heart hurts,” I told him.

“I don’t have a heart. I wish I did so then I could feel sad too. Maybe then we wouldn’t be afraid of one another.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“How come?”

I stared at him. Fangs, claws, beastliness. “I don’t know. I’m just not.”

“Then I shan’t be afraid of you.”

“Everyone else is afraid of me.”

“How come?”

“Because I talk to the monsters in my bedroom like they’re real.”

“Am I not real?” His voice shifted. That child-like wonder, the desire to know, had returned.

“No, Steven, I don’t think you are.”

“Being real sounds much too hard.”

“You feel real though.”

“And that is good enough.”

“I don’t want to feel sad anymore,” I confessed to Steven, finally looking up into his big, blazing, bleeding face. He wasn’t so monstrous. Or maybe I was just tired and a little delirious from the blood loss and the starvation and the sleep deprivation.

“Lay back, get comfortable, hold your teddy bear, turn off the night light, play the white noise, and close your eyes. I will do the rest.”

I did as he said. His clawed, long, damp hand rested on my forehead like a cold, wet flannel on a wailing infant’s fevered brow.

When I opened my eyes, it was almost lunchtime. My hands were washed off the gore and my aching thighs were bandaged and cleaned. I ran out into the corridor and told my brother what I’d seen. He looked horrified and then he laughed and told me ‘Don’t be so silly, it was just a dream’. Before returning to his video game sending virtual bullets flying through the faces of other boys he had never met. His friends were all voices trickling obscenities through a headset and yet they’re more real than Steven in his mind.

I ran downstairs and told Dad. He didn’t listen to a word I said, too busy tip tapping away at his keyboard balancing accounts or whatever the fuck he does all day. Then I finished the story and he turned to me and asked: ‘Do I need to call the hospital’? I told him ‘No, no’. I said, ‘Steven is real and Steven is my friend’. ‘Do you need to talk to a Doctor again’? ‘No, no, Steven is real and Steven is my friend’. ‘We can call the counsellor but you can’t lie this time’. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Steven is real and Steven is my friend. He is the monster that lives in my bedroom and he is all I have left’. I ran back up to my room after that, slammed the door so hard, my filthy, toothpaste splodged mirror rattled. I sank onto the hair-dye stained, frayed cream carpet, and stayed there.

Steven went away again after that. He was mad at me for sharing our secret with Dad. I started to sleep in the comfy chair, hoping he would show up so I could apologise.

They all went away. Helen, Barry, Snake. I tried to pretend that this was a good thing, that this meant I was getting better or that I had at least put my foot on the first rung of the ladder. But loneliness is even lonelier when not even your imaginary friends find your company enlightening.

It was Christmas last year, a few weeks before. The Doctor man said I’m still crazy. That my head is betraying my body and there was nothing he could do for me. I was at the pharmacy the next day turning the white and teal box over in my hands. He told me they would help me sleep. They did for a while. I’d sleep more than half the day and still have the need for a nap in the afternoon. They burnt my throat with their powdery coating and migraines pummelled the mushy ridges of my brain.

But they brought Steven back.

He did not speak. He did not even smile. He was scarier when he didn’t smile. Like spilt paint, his face of gloom and murk was an oil puddle. But he would sit on the edge of my bed or stand by my head and he’d hold my hand and pull the vomit-stained blanket of my infancy up over my foetal-curled body. He would stand guard like a loyal dog by the door. We may not have been friends anymore, but he still cared, at least more than anyone else did.

I told the Doctor man with glee, ‘the monsters are back’ and he took the pills away. He said no amount of sleep was worth frazzling my brain and we never spoke of it again. Steven went away too.

I see him every so often, on the really bad nights. I still say ‘Hi’ but he doesn’t say it back. Some nights he doesn’t look at me and I just watch his silhouette looking the other way.

The Doctor man says the pain is in my head and if we fix my broken mind, the body in time shall mend. I don’t like his solution. I cannot sleep and all food tastes like brown. I’ve no appetite and I’m losing weight. I forgot the date, my name, the Prime Minister, what I was meant to do or not do that day. I tell the same story to the same person eight times in an hour. The headaches never stop and my ears fizz when sound hits them, and my eyes dilate and dry up in the sunlight like an ancient vampyre. I no longer feel sad for I no longer feel. There are no highs nor lows. I cannot cry nor laugh. My mind is on ice, my brain plucked through my eye like some 21st century lobotomy, yet my lithium-induced housewife hysteria is uncured. I get tremors and twitches in my hands and I can’t masturbate. My head is flat, room temperature lemonade or TV static when the reruns end late in the night. Like a snowglobe.

But I have hope. If I stay this way. If my brain remains in the purgatory of unfeeling. Maybe, just maybe, one night I will turn to the comfy chair by the broken sink and see my friend Steven, smiling at me. And he’ll say ‘Hello’ and I’ll say ‘Hello’ and he’ll read me a story, Shakespeare or Sallinger or something and sing me to sleep with the words of a lullaby in a language I can’t speak but a tune that soothes as if my own mother sang it, no, like she wrote it.

There’s a monster in my bedroom and I call him Steven. He may not be real, or he may be. He may have a heart or he may not. There’s a monster in my bedroom and I call him Steven. And maybe or maybe not, Steven’s all that I’ve still got.