Down Among the Fishes

The business with the Devil

THE BUSINESS WITH THE DEVILThere was a time when the Devil used to torment me terribly. He would track me down almost every day. I did have a few ways of driving him off, but he’s a really persistent object (there’s no way you can refer to the Devil as a person). Time and time again he would come and jump out at me whenever and wherever I least expected it. Bald, disgusting. Yuck… I was permanently stressed out. After all it was my immortal soul at stake, nothing more or less. Just imagine the horror of it — expecting to see a vision of hell under a saucepan lid, behind a mirror or beneath the surface of your bathwater. Anyone who’s ever had any dealings with the Devil will know what I’m talking about. Fear completely sapped all my strength. Yet all the same, and to my own astonishment, I managed to sort him out once and for all. I found a way of doing it. I can recommend it to anyone. Or, to be more precise, to any woman. As I recall, it happened one evening, after a heavy, sultry day. I dragged myself home from the city all sweaty and totally knackered. I pulled off my dress. My tights were stuck firmly to the soles of my feet, and I literally had to rip them off. The smell of exhaustion mixed with — yes, I couldn’t ignore it — an overweight woman’s body odour. Pulling off the blood-soaked bit of old bed sheet that I had been using in place of a sanitary towel, I headed for the bathroom to get under the shower. And here, in the dark corridor, the devil suddenly jumped out at me from round a corner. He had been relying on the element of surprise, but it was the very unexpectedness of it that led to his undoing. The shock of it caused me to lash out at him with the bloody rag (and at that time the blood was simply pouring out of me), hitting him across his bald pate so hard that dark red stains spattered all over the white wallpaper. I hit him again and again, and again. The first blow had been a kind of reflex action, but by now I was thumping him faster and faster, driven by all the loathing that had piled up inside me: ‘f**k off and die, you bastard, you piece of filth’. And he did. He squealed and disappeared. And never came back.

To this day I still don’t know — does menstrual blood have the power to ward off devils, or was he ashamed that a mere mortal had frightened him?

Either way I don’t really care, so long as he doesn’t come around me any more. And doesn’t stop me digging holes in time. For my part I never bought hygienic pads after that. It was, after all, a matter of considerable importance to me. A sanitary towel would not have been of as much help to me in driving the devil away as a blood-drenched torn piece of old sheet had been.

So physiology does bring some benefits after all, even to people like me.

And the smell of blood is something I can still sense in the air from time to time — even if I don’t know where it’s coming from.