Bean Head Has Blood Red

Triggers and warnings- Violence. Mental health. Swearing.

Bean Head Has A Blood Red

I started writing with my famous pen when I was thirteen. This is what I wrote in my journal then.

“Oh, I dare not put it down. It senses it. The slightest movement on my part causes it to wriggle and writhe, trying to twist out of my hand in violent protest. Even when I am perfectly still, I swear it is alive and panting for the chance to write its phrases of filthy black hatred; just gasping to stain the paper with thoughts I have not dared to think and share feelings that push me beyond the edge of sanity.”

Before I was thirteen, I was an obedient and quiet child with a wild imagination. My big sister Boo would scoop me up in her arms and say,

“And how did such big ideas come out of your little bean head, eh? Little Bean! Little Bean!” She would coo to me affectionately and kiss my little bean head all over her black silky curls tickling my face and nose. She would always listen to my fanciful stories and laugh at me and ask me questions. When I was very little, my mother told me, we would play and hide and seek. She would always make sure I saw her and then pretend to creep up on me and shout, Boo! And I would pretend to be scared. On the days she was at school I would walk around the house looking for her and wailing to Mum,

“Where Boo, where Boo?”

I should have told Boo about the pen as soon as I found it but the pen told me to keep its’ existence a secret. I feared it. I said nothing.

This pen has been in my possession for as long as I can remember. My first memory is of walking downstairs in my family house. I was aged six, enjoying the plum carpet plush between my bare toes, the sunlight streaking the dust with late afternoon golden tones. I heard the murmuring sound of my sister’s voice and felt the rush of gladness to soon see my beloved Boo.

But then, the awareness of a dread growing. A heavy lump rising in my chest to the front of my throat. In my thin cotton lemon dress, I reached in to my pocket and pulled out the oddly dense blood red pen. It wriggled and expanded outwards and in on itself. I shivered. How did this get to be in my pocket, I wondered? I ran back upstairs and hid it behind my chest of drawers. I did not want it to touch any of my personal things. I did not want to tell anyone about it either. I knew it had to be kept secret. I knew it was power

.

I did my best to forget about it for seven years. I played hopscotch with my Boo, who protected me from bullies at school and my father’s random angry outbursts. I roller skated in the back garden on the strip of concrete. I rode my bike with Boo. I walked to and from school with my Boo and we enjoyed my Mum's home cooking.

What I loved best of all was eating snacks and watching cheesy American comedies with my sister Boo. She would sometimes wake me up with a bowl full of cereal in the morning as I always found it hard to wake for school. I tried not to think about what was behind my chest of drawers. I felt that if I tried to get rid of it, I would be punished. So, I knew I would be forced to use it someday, in some way.

At school, I found a passion for writing my own fairy tales. They were nonsensical meandering messes created more for my amusement than for the eyes of someone else. But as my mother’s and sister's unimpressed faces began to grate on me, I tried even harder. I knew I was missing an important ingredient, a formula. I found out about big picture editing but lacked the imagination, or maybe courage, now I was older to up the stakes enough for any reader. I did not feel tuned into myself. I feared my shadows and pain were too deep and personal to share honestly.

I carried on writing my boring stories but stopped showing anyone. I was ashamed and spoke harsh words to myself. Too harsh for a little girl who was only just learning how to write. When I turned eleven, I found I was ready to grow up quickly. I noticed boys who rarely noticed me and wore thick glasses on my small bean head. I needed braces and the day I got them I burst into tears. My father was very confused. He did not know that in my own eyes, I looked like an ugly nerd and now no-one would ever notice me.

I did not dare write with the blood red pen until I was thirteen. The truths I dared not speak throughout my sunny childhood would be unleashed as soon as I set the pen to paper. I could feel it’s strange power growing. Within myself. Within...

It.

When I first took the pen lid off; I felt I was unsheathing a chaotic power that I had no idea how to wield. No teacher had honed my skill and no encouraging words were whispered in my ear. I savagely scrawled my ugly prejudices. My experiences poured forth without censor as I powerfully channelled with glee, heedless to the discomfort of those reading with horror.

A strange phenomenon was birthed that day of my first reader; my beloved sister Boo. She had entered her sixteenth year and for a few months now had regarded me and my childish interests coldly and kept her distance, preferring to listen to Steve Vai and Skid Row in her bedroom. She was a self-professed Goth and gloomily mooched about in eyeliner and black clothes. But after she read my first story written in that pen, she insisted I write another one straight away. She followed me around closely until I did so.

So insistent was she, and so bothersome in my space that I feared her. I had written a second story which she had gobbled up with her now gleaming, black lined eyes and immediately demanded another. My locked bedroom door was not enough to keep her away; she kicked it down with her huge black steel capped boots easily. I had to confess to my mother when she arrived home from work that day; that I was deathly afraid of my beloved Boo. She saw it for herself that very tea time when my now cruel and strange sister marched up to me and grabbed me by both my ears to pull me into the study and write.

Shocked by this uncharacteristically unusual and wretched behaviour my mother drew Boo aside and scolded her mercilessly. Later that night Boo, undeterred, came into my room and sat on my bed forcing me to write another story. When I complained that my hand hurt, she laughed and slapped me hard around the face. After less than two weeks of this strange behaviour our family doctor conceded that Boo was having some sort of psychopathic breakdown. He sent Boo away to a facility to heal for an indefinite length of time.

I was relieved but grieved for the sister who had kissed my bean head and laughed at comedies with me. I put her strange behaviour down to the new music and identity she had embraced. Of course, I knew the truth. But I simply could not wait to write with my special blood red pen again. I wrote a book of six fairy tales, six poems and six songs in one night and took them into school the next day, handing out prints to whomever wished to read them.

I had hoped desperately they would be liked but did not guess at their sudden savage popularity. Yes, the readers were repulsed by my strange and twisted truths and half- truths I choked up, but something kept them coming back. They were addicted to the uncanny nature of the words I wrote. And when I could not produce quickly enough, the readers would follow me around. Hands outstretched. Eyes pleading. Waists thinning. They would rather starve rather than be without the nourishment of my pen's foul words.

I was not allowed to bring the pen to school nor use it for homework. Teachers avoided my eyes and pretended not to follow me around school and the playground but they too had read the ink I had written in my books and could not, would not stay away. My former friends did not understand my growing popularity. No-one explained it to them. I thought it was none of their business.

I carried on writing. The teachers I deemed as meddlesome at the time warned my mother about the pen I had and she pleaded with me to throw it away or give it to her to get rid of. She seemed to be the only one immune to my powerful writing. She dragged me to a church in the hopes of saving my soul. The priest took one look at me and warned my mother to never darken his church’s door again with my presence. He shuddered and made the sign of the cross over my mother and himself but did not look at me again.

 She took me to a gurdwara, mosque and Hindu temple and the answer was the same.

“We are sorry for your troubles but the curse runs too deep. She must get rid of it herself.”

I begged my mother to read my latest story, hoping for her approval at last. It was my biggest desire and last hope now that I was condemned as a cursed child. But she gave me that same unimpressed glance as she did when I was small and I clenched my hands to stop myself from slapping her hard. I remember thinking,

“What the hell is happening to me?”

I dragged myself back in to humiliated writing as an ignored creature of hell on earth. I unleashed my early teenage sorrow in to an epic medley of songs that caused my mother to weep. She peered in to the depths of my limitless melancholia with disbelief and pain. I paid her no mind.

All this time I had mistakenly thought it was my incredible skill and talent alongside the pen's strange power that contained the remarkable magnetic power. More and more the blood red pen had its own influence over my writing. Undulating with sensuous pleasure when I gave the enemy an unusually vicious name and spilling its black ink fatter and faster when my scribing took a spiteful turn. It both scared and thrilled me. Like any manic depressive I was fearful of my creative cycles.

We wrote on with a unified, unquenchable thirst. Bands rallied around my house wanting me to write songs for them. I asked for extortionate, disproportionate fees and racked up millions. Their rise to fame was steep and hard as their fanatics could not get enough of buying and hearing the songs I wrote. With the pen. My Pen.

The paparazzi settled around my house but they could not satisfy me. I wanted only to write. My parents begged me to look in the mirror. To look in their eyes. To go and visit Boo. I only had eyes for words written in a black ink with a blood red pen. My beloved Pen.

My later personal songs were as cutting and honest as a machete, slicing through my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with precision and handing it out to every audience member with ghoulish disregard. Never mind that no-one gave a shit about my sociopathic ex-boyfriend. The darkness of my Pen’s ink had drawn him to me. I wrote him out of my life as my Pen got envious and would slip and stab at my already bloodied fingers if I tried to write about him. So, I made the listeners listen to the aftermath of pain instead. It did not feel cruel. Even when their ears bled. My Pen needed to be fed.

If my Pen would seize me as it did with the song writing I did not know if I could ever come back from it. I started trying to hide from my Pen though I could never put it away in the drawer. It was on my writing desk which was painted a pale and elegant apple green precisely for the purpose of calming my greedy Pen's' hunger.

To my increasing revulsion and delight I found my Pen was uncovering my shadow side. I felt like I was being psychologically profiled by a sociopath. It reminded me of a possessed hospital blanket slowly and tortuously inched back to reveal the blackening pustule of a wound. I wrote porn that left me with a sickly leer for days. Repulsively violent and vengeful scenes that would have shamed Tarantino himself scrawled themselves on the back of letters, receipts, anything that was to hand. To Pen. Wriggling with pleasure, my Pen would tempt me further, further than even I wanted to go. It left me sweating and scared to read back on my guilty words.

My Pen had its hold on me for months, maybe years. I would find plates of food outside of my door that my mother had left for me in vain. My hand was in a state of constant cramp. I would be writing in my dreams and then wake and find myself at the apple green table writing, writing and writing. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and marvelled at my hollowed cheeks and emerging ribs. I was being written away. Most certainly written off. As my hand grew skinnier and weaker my Pen got heavier. Never did the ink need refilling. I could feel it cursing me and laughing at me simultaneously though it needed my use and adoration.

A question started growing in my mind like a searing laser etched behind my eyes, why me? What had primed me for this evil Fate?

My Pen did not like me having these thoughts. It squirmed out of my hand when I tried to write these musings down. It wanted my pain too much. I forced my hand to go back with a different pen and edit and re-edit the sick scenes that I had written. They were still violently passionate, not indulgently destructive though. They now had structure and meaning. It took seven years. My sister was still at the mental health facility.

On my twentieth birthday I went to visit her with yellow roses, hoping she would forgive me. She did not wear black anymore laughingly saying she was done with all of that. When I asked for her forgiveness, she asked me if I had wrecked that damned pen. I hung my head.

“It will be too hard for me to forgive you until you’ve destroyed it, Little Bean.”

I wept at the old affectionate nickname and begged her. She shook her head slowly and sorrowfully. Kissing my scarred hands with her black curls falling gently on them as she did so.

I went home and wrote with the pen forcing it to feel my resentment and sorrow at the years I lost with my sister. The ink started running out. I threw it on the floor and then went to get my sisters black steel capped boots that she was not allowed to take with her. When I came back the pen had rolled itself under the bed as if it knew what I wanted to do.

“Oh no, you don’t,” I snarled and grabbed it firmly by the tail. Without a second to lose I brought the heavy boot down and smashed the pen under the heavy heel causing it to splinter and wriggle meatily. I stamped again even harder and a woman’s deep scream came from deep within the cartridge well. Out of the pen’s pieces rose an image of a black shadow, a tall woman clutching her head in anguish. I rushed to the window and told the shadow,

“My life is mine now,

Off you go,

 I am glad that I experienced you so,

But now you have made my life a hell,

And I am sick of feeling,

Like a shell,

So off you fuck and off you go,

Never return,

Go down below.”

And it did! Just like that. It wafted away out of the window and floated on the breeze until it was completely out of sight. I cut out the piece of carpet with the ink stain on and burned it. It smelled of rotting meat and bum holes. I apologised profusely to my mother and father for my crazy years. They forgave me but much damage had been done.

My father had been forced to give up work to protect the house from the paparazzi as we could not afford security. I had selfishly kept all my money but had spent it on nothing and no-one. Eventually feeling so incredibly guilty for the pain and hardship I had caused I bought them a lovely house just a few doors down that they had always coveted. I used the millions I earned from my horrid songwriting. The talentless bands sunk back into oblivion and became irrelevant after I refused to write any more songs for them.

My beloved sister Boo returned and we resumed roller skating again. We watched comedies and ate snacks. I wrote award winning stories but I returned to being an invisible nerd. It was excellent.

Written by Amrita Bhattacharjee