Angela’s Nose

by Ingrid Marie Jensen

It really wasn’t much of a bump. Hardly enough to notice, much less complain about. Angela hated it, with a passion usually reserved for spots that refused to heal, or pores that refused to stay cleanly invisible. Her hand would creep up to the bridge of her nose and seek the slight jut of bone. Sometimes her fingertips wouldn’t find it on their own, and she’d take her phone out of her black clutch and examine her face in the camera until she found the bump. She’d frown, pull a few faces, sigh, and return to whatever she had happened to be involved in before she remembered her imperfection. It was a big problem, the infinitesimal bump on Angela’s Grecian nose.

I was at home a lot, back when Angela still had the nose she was born with. Caught in the grim wasteland between graduating university and being offered a job, I spent countless hours alone in my room, wrapped in a comforter that reeked of Walker’s prawn cocktail crisp dust, watching LiveLeak. Beheadings, mostly. It was a year of beheadings.

One afternoon in late summer, two months after I graduated with a degree in finance, I was lying in bed, watching a woman being stoned to death by a crowd in Iraq on LiveLeak. Her body was slowly being pummeled to pulp by a constant hail of stones thrown by a jeering mob of men. If I had eaten that I day, I would have been sick in my mouth and forced myself to swallow the acidic mess again, like a man. I hadn’t eaten, so I was merely lying there feeling ill, when suddenly, with a bang of the door and the slap of boot-heels on parquet, Angela was in my room, her silvery bleach-fried hair tumbling over her black jacket. She was ridiculously overdressed for summer, wrapped up like a mummy in a black turtleneck, black blazer, and pants. I slammed my laptop shut and sat up, pulling the comforter over myself.

“Rex says you have his charger. We’re going up to Norwich, he’s got to measure some stones in a castle for class or some shit.” (Rex was my little brother, studying architecture at UCL.)

 I tossed her the charger without emerging from the blankets. She caught it by the plug and began spinning the cord around like a lasso, slowly. She wasn’t in a hurry. She was, in fact, taking her time to examine the inside of my room: the dying Christmas cactus on the windowsill; empty crisps bags floating about like jellyfish; textbooks which I had yet to haul down to the school bookshop to resell, stacked in piles on the dusty rug, and above it all, three Sandman posters looming down as they had since I was thirteen. Her eyes traveled over all this and me with no small amount of amusement.

She wrinkled her nose, and her hand reached up reflexively to finger the bump. “Christ, you smell like sick. It’s August, graduation was fucking months ago, have you not washed since? Dirty pig… Rex says you’re really crushed mentally by the whole not-getting-an-instant-juicy-job-offer thing.” I sat up straighter to defend myself, but she wasn’t done. “I didn’t even go to school,” she boasted. “But I can pay my rent. You went through three more years of misery than I did, and see? What difference has it made?” I opened my mouth to protest, and my jaw clicked over the single word “but,”—but she had ducked out of the room and was gone.

Rex messaged me later: “Annjjellaa fancies you.” He was in a habit of texting words, especially names, in the way that they were pronounced, and it drove everyone mad but me. Annjjellaa. A name that insinuated angels, given to a girl who clearly would have responded well to being tattooed with pentagrams or Marilyn Manson lyrics on her coccyx in gothic script. The inherent hypocrisy made me smile.

She turned up again the next day, with a needle and some ink. She brushed past Rex in the hall with hardly a nod and barged into my room, where she gave me a stick and poke tattoo of a flaming textbook. I made her put it on the back of my left arm, directly above my elbow. “Oh, a true leftist,” she said, with great cynicism, as she jabbed the needle in and out of my flesh.

But I was still dreaming of a tenth-floor office job with an investment firm in Canary Wharf. The pinstriped sleeve of my Savile Row suit would hide Angela’s handiwork.

Beauty is nothing without love, and at first, I thought of Angela as less than nothing: blonde hair stuck on a body tended to and maintained with the care of an artist, a sharp mind focused on nothing in particular. I realized later that she was full of love, but for all the wrong things. It was unfortunate. It couldn’t be helped. She was loath to smoke a cigarette by herself, passing a Marlboro back and forth between us and Rex and once offering it to my dad, who recoiled as though she’d stuck a used tampon under his nose. She smoked gently, like she was nibbling on a sweet, sometimes barely inhaling, in stark contrast to the vapes Rex and I sucked on like vampires, watery inhalations that sounded horribly like congested coughs. She was loath to do anything by herself, though she maintained that her chief goal in life was to live alone with her cat, Susie, in a corner apartment with windows and a view of Clapham Common.

I doubted Angela’s dreams would come true. She rarely finished what she started. This was especially noticeable with food; she would chew up a handful of chocolate covered cherries, a look of orgasmic pleasure on her face, then spit them out into a wad of loo roll and flush it. Rex protested that he’d bought the cherries specifically for her, and that she was wasting them, to which she responded: “Your credit card can take it, but my tits can’t. When I gain weight, it goes to my tits. Oh, looks like period blood, that does. The black bits—uterine lining.”

Rex winced. I laughed; I was getting used to being disgusted. Angela was shock-proofing me, as though I were a horse that spooked easily, leading me across blue tarps and clapping in my face.

She took me shopping in Fortnum’s once, when I’d gotten a cheque from my nan to help out with my first month’s rent, whenever I should get my own flat: “You’ll be living with your mam for ages yet, it’s not like you really need it.” I spent the entire check on a bottle of wine. She clapped and let me wear her knock-off Gucci sunglasses on our way out of the store. We drank it on the bus home, passing the bottle back and forth and then, when Angela decided that wasn’t animalistic enough, from our cupped hands, slopping wine onto the drab grey seats, licking every precious drop from our palms along with sweat and grime.

She took me to shows in cramped pubs where the Guinness came with a disgusting two inches of head and music played at such volume that my ears rang for hours afterwards. One night she led me into a tiny club where a band was playing to group of a dozen moshing teenagers. They were singing about such outrageous topics—public executions, the culinary preparation of roadkill--that I asked Angela whether or not they were joking. It was suddenly very important to me, to know if I was in a den of baby fascists or a den of anarchists with a strange and terrible sense of humor. I had horrifying visions of my future employers finding CCTV footage of me being tongued by a gurning seventeen-year-old as Angela looked on in peroxide glory and smiled approval, the Guinness that had slopped from her glass while moshing glistening obscenely on her fingers. Bile curdled in my stomach and my knees weakened. I saw my future dissolving like paracetamol after a swallow of mineral water.

 “I don’t care if it isn’t a joke,” Angela yelled over the din. “They’re marvelous. This is the best exorcism I’ve had in months.” She looked at the man-child at the center of the stage with adoration in her shiny black eyes. He was surrounded by the rest of the band, a scruffy, thin, group, swaying and stumbling under the effects of psilocybin and cheap speed. He looked at her and took his left hand off the guitar frets to flex his long fingers into a gun, cocking and pulling an imaginary trigger against his temple, and then pointing it her and mouthing “bang,” under the singer’s anguished, writhing screams. Angela was delighted. She shot back, putting her hands together as though in prayer and then forming them into the semblance of a revolver, holding it steadily in front of her and pulling the trigger, not over the boy’s heart or against his skull, but hovering over his belly. A painful, dragging death. She whispered, “bang,” in a little Marilyn Monroe warble and blew smoke from the muzzle of the imaginary gun. The smoke was real; she had been holding it in her mouth. He smiled, delighted. My repeated whispers that he was a probably a psychopath didn’t prevent her from going home with him. I was left holding her cigarette.

It was a joke, all of it: the band, my friendship with Angela, spending three years studying how to take care of other people’s money. Televised beheadings played on a loop in my brain, interspersed with images of Angela smiling and pointing finger guns, the bile and bubblegum flavored saliva of the girl in the mosh pit. I was sick in the street on the way home, under the harsh glow of neon light and the black, starless sky.

I paid for her new nose the next week. I didn’t want her to forget about me. I thought that if she was forcibly reminded of me each time she looked in the mirror, that would do it. Even if the job was botched, she would carry around the memory of me, as an indelible mark on her person.

It was a minor operation as plastic work goes, but still Angela’s face was black and blue and her eyes red. I saw her three days after it had been done; she was sitting in a corner booth of a bar we both frequented, in the midst of a group of people. Her nose was plastered in white bandages that extended across her cheeks.

She had informed me, preceding the surgery, that she would refuse all pain killers in the form of pills. Her mam had been addicted to Slumbrex and Euriditoxin and a smattering of other, equally worrisome drugs. Angela bragged about her own addictive personality like it was a sort of badge, the requisite crowning glory of an enfant déprimé riche, which, despite her bouts of poverty, she insisted she was. She had instead been knocking back shots of tequila and glasses of beer as though that were somehow the high road of health. She was on  her third stout, the empty foam-streaked glasses arranged before her like prizes, but I could see from the way she held her shoulders, the way she crossed her black jacketed arms over the stomach of her black velvet Topshop dress and laughed with her teeth shut, that she was in considerable pain. She saw me and raised her glass in a toast. I gestured back with a mineral water. We did not speak.

In the weeks before her nose job, Angela had put me on her close friends’ stories on Instagram, which she posted on five or six times a day; since the surgery, she had stopped posting on her close friends’, which I knew meant she had taken me off the list. A signal that she owned me nothing, least of all intimacy.

I had gotten a job. I did not yet have my own office, and my suit had been bought at a discount, but I was commuting to Canary Wharf and that satisfied me. New associations pushed older ones from my mind. It was spring and the beginning of a new decade, when all hell broke loose in the form of a germ. I began to think of her again, in the captive, solitary weeks that followed. I couldn’t see Angela sitting at home learning to bake banana bread or binge-watching Netflix. I couldn’t see Angela willingly covering her bleached smile under a mask.

I was out for a run one morning, after the first lockdown had lifted. I passed Angela. She was wearing a black rayon slip under the eternal black blazer, and canvas sneakers on her feet, a purse that looked like it had cost hundreds of pounds swinging from her padded shoulder, her bleach-fried hair floating around her shoulders like cotton batting. She was sweating, gently: the slip sticking to sternum, her temples beaded with moisture. She saw me and made a noise like a pony being let out to pasture, a brazen, excited whinny. She was on the opposite side of the street.

“Pure waste of money, my nose job,” she yelled from behind her black silk facemask, which had a fringe of safety pins hanging from the ear straps. “No one’s even seen my face besides my bathroom mirror and Susie in eight fucking days! You should have kept your money, babe. What a world! If you’re not dead when this horror’s over, message me. I should think of everyone out there, you and I, we have the right constitution to survive a cull.”

“Is that what you call a pandemic? A cull?”

“It is what it is, my sweet. The earth’s angry. Homo sapiens have fucked up one time too many. We’ve gotta go.”

“You seem to be doing all right.”

“Yeah! I’ve been day drinking. I’ve wanted to be completely dissolute all my life, and now I’ve been given the perfect excuse: the apocalypse. I’ve got to go. The shops are opening. I’ll see you when we’ve got the PM trussed up like a turkey, dangling over the Thames from a crane. Viva la revolucion!”

I watched her walk away, with the funny hitch in her gate, the rolling junkie stumble, that she assumed whenever she knew anyone was watching her. I wanted to ask her how she was managing, if she still had a job or saw the finger-gun psychopath or had managed to rent a flat in Clapham. But she was already in the queue at Aldi and I’d only clocked a mile into my workout. I figured I’d save it for another day, and since I never saw her again, it has never mattered.

BIO: Ingrid Marie Jensen is 24 years old. She was born and raised in Louisiana, where she worked variously as an editor, a music journalist, a farm hand, and a dishwasher. Her writing has been published in Welter, Collision, the Westchester Journal, the Delta Journal, the Foundationalist, the Ignatian Review, and more. She lives in England.