Killer Queen: A Painted Faces Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

fault.
It was my own broken mind that turned them grey.
    At the bar I joined
Dave, and we did our best to put a dent in two bottles of top-notch whiskey.
The next morning I found myself lying face down on somebody’s carpet, my hand
around a bottle of beer and stinking of cigarette smoke and sex. My nose stung a
little, a result of the two lines of cocaine I’d snorted off the back of a
toilet seat. Classy. I’d taken a little onto the tip of my tongue, then went
down on the sexy but completely vacuous brunette I’d picked up.
    I was at her place now,
and there had obviously been some sort of a hootenanny, because the apartment
looked like a bomb had hit it. I’d blacked out after the cocaine-enhanced
cunnilingus, so I couldn’t tell you for sure what exactly occurred following
that. Dragging myself up off the floor, I made sure I had my wallet and my
phone on me, and swiftly made my exit. There were half-dressed people
everywhere.
    Images of fucking the
brunette while high as a kite were resurfacing in my head, bringing forth a
feeling of nausea. I should have stuck with Karla, the redhead. At least she
was nice. I couldn’t even remember the brunette’s name, but she definitely was
not nice. There was a lack of animation in her eyes that I had been attracted
to because I knew the sex would be entirely emotionless. Still, I hoped never
to possess that lack of animation myself.
    The world might have
been grey to me, but there was still a flickering of life that I tried my
hardest to hold onto. I wasn’t completely empty yet. When I arrived back at the
small open-plan studio apartment I was renting, I studiously counted how much
alcohol I had in my cupboards and tried to calculate how long it would last me.
Without even realising it, I was preparing to go into hermit mode.
    I wanted the world to
go away.
    I estimated I had
enough to get me through at least a couple of days. I had hardly any food, but
it would be easy enough to order in. Firing up the old VCR player that I
brought with me to each new dwelling I inhabited, I selected one of my mother’s
old videotapes and put it on. Stripping down to my boxers, I got into bed with
a bottle of wine and pressed “play.”
    Her pretty face, which
possessed so many features similar to my own, came on the screen. She was
onstage at the venue she used to perform in. Whoever had been filming this video
wasn’t so great at working a camera, because they’d zoomed in way too close.
Although I kind of liked how close it was. It helped me recall exactly what she
looked like. Every line, freckle, and pore.
    Sometimes, when sitting
in my dressing room, fully immersed in my Vivica Blue persona, I would spot
myself in the mirror out of the corner of my eye and almost believe I was
staring at Mum.
    Fucked up, yes. But
what was even more fucked up was how happy it made me to know how much I
resembled her. One of the driving forces behind my career as a drag performer
was a deeply seated need to emulate my mother.
    She represented a time
before my life got dark. A time before Kelvin. She also represented the epitome
of femininity, and Kelvin never wanted the feminine side of me. He wanted the
boy. Every time I became a woman, I was desperately trying to erase what I was
with him. Every time I fucked a woman, I was rubbing out the stains he’d left
behind.
    I lay there in my bed,
watching her sing into the microphone, and wondered, as I so often did, if she
had survived, would Kelvin ever have gotten his claws into me? A solitary tear
ran down my cheek. It was ridiculous. It had been a decade since I’d left his
abuse behind me, and yet the pain was still so fresh, the anger so visceral.
Swallowing a long gulp of wine, I settled in, closed my eyes, and listened to
her voice.
    If I tried really hard,
I could almost believe she was in the room, singing just for me.

 
    June
6th, 2012.
    Soundtrack: “Feeling Good” by Muse (note
my sarcasm)
     
    It had been almost a week since I’d