I STILL LOVE YOU, BUT...

CHAPTER 5

IRIS

I DID IT.

I WON.

Colin is here, with me, in our apartment. The apartment that he rented two weeks ago for me.

He came back from her, his face devastated. I wanted to crow in triumph, but I had to hold it in. It was easy; I have been doing it all my life, keeping my feelings close to my chest. I murmured appropriate words of sympathy and comfort; I hugged him, I rubbed his back. I acted like the kind, accommodating mistress, a role I slipped into easily. I am, after all, an actress; I have been playing a role my whole life.

Looking at me, you would not believe that I am a fighter. A survivor. I crawled my way to the top of the dung hill through sheer grit and determination. I got my hands dirty on the way. I have done everything I could to make sure I would not be like my mother, that pathetic, wretched creature who got herself involved with a married man with kids, who later dumped her when he found that she was pregnant with me. She was eighteen. My mother had lost both of her parents early in an accident, and had been brought up by a strict and overbearing grandfather. She told the old man that she had been knocked up by a married man, and was promptly booted out of the house. My mother skulked away with her tail between her legs, and got a job waitressing. She rented a cheap room in a shady part of town, and later moved to a tiny, two-room flat two blocks away in the same rough neighbourhood, which became home to me, growing up. My mother became a slut to survive, and her endless parade of boyfriends became one of the earliest memories of my miserable childhood. "Milk them dry, she would say to me. Men are worthless. They use you and they discard you. So you," she croaked, dragging a long, deep breath on her cigarette, and blowing smoke rings into the air, "you use them, my girl. You use them and then you discard them. Just don't let them know. Treat them like kings, and squeeze every penny you can from them. Play smart, think with this," she tapped her nicotine-stained fingernails at her blonde head, "and never, ever let them know what's going on inside your mind. Men are fools and they want to be worshipped. So you give them what they want, use them, and once you're done with them, once you've got all you want from them, throw them away, and move on to the next best man."

I looked at her, wide-eyed. We were sitting on a bench in the park. It was one of the rare nights she wasn't out, or locked in her bedroom with some strange man she had picked up at work. The stars were twinkling in the sky. Mama lit up another cigarette. I wished she wouldn't smoke so much. The smell of stale smoke clung everywhere --- it seeped from her clothes and mine, slid between the seams of our ratty couch, wove into the fraying cotton sheets on our narrow beds.

"But, Mama, what about love?"

"Love?" she laughed harshly. "There's no such thing, baby girl. I used to think there was, with your dad, but look where it got me. He didn't want me, and he didn't want you. He threw me out, went back to his white picket fence and his ugly wife and three kids. There's no such thing as love, and you'd best put it out of your mind, my girl. There's only lust, and that's fine. Lust will get you all the money you want. Lust will make you strong."

I was ten years old and I spent a lot of time in the school library. I only owned one book, and it was Little Women. It wasn't really mine, I had stolen it from the school library, tucking it into my knickers on the way out one afternoon. I didn't really like it; it made me envious. The girls were so happy living together with their loving mama and a loving, though absent, papa and it didn't seem fair to me that they should have so much while I had so little. I liked Amy the most, mainly because she was very pretty and smart. I didn't like Jo; she was my least favourite character, because she was so brash. I didn't like that she was so loud and honest with her opinions. Even at ten, I had realised how important it was to be subtle and silent. To be the observer and not the observed. You learnt a lot more that way. Lawrence, or Laurie, was the boy in the book. I quite liked him, though I found him a little dull.