How to Kill Men and Get Away With It(56)

She looks at me for a long time. I can’t figure out the expression on her face. Eventually she slides nearer to where I’m sat and puts her arms around me.

‘Oh, Kits,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry. What a horrible thing for you to go through.’ She kisses my head and pulls me close again. ‘Worst holiday ever.’

We light the little fire pit I have there for chilly nights. It’s anything but chilly at the moment, the weather still not having broken while we were away, but we drop the dress and blazer into it and watch them burn.

‘Lucky we’re not New Look girls,’ Tor says. ‘Or they would’ve gone off like a polyester firework.’

I smile and she hugs me. But then a look of something flickers across her face so quickly, I can’t work out what it is. She stares at me for a long moment as the smoke blows out into the London afternoon.

‘Thank you,’ she whispers, so quietly I could have imagined it.

As full(ish) disclosure seems to be where we’re at, I should probably take this moment to confess something. The drunk bar creep wasn’t the first man I’ve killed. I’ve always known that there was something dark inside of me, but for the most part I’d been able to push it deep down, like when you try to get the jack-in-the-box back in the box when you’re a kid. I first noticed it the night I caught my father with Hen’s mother. Even though I didn’t totally understand what was going on, I knew it was bad.

It was a few years after that when I first saw my father hit my mum. He’d come home from work in a disgusting mood and immediately locked himself away with a bottle of whisky.

‘Stay out of your father’s way today,’ she warned me. ‘He’s having a hard time at the moment.’

‘What’s going on?’ I asked, thirteen and thinking I was basically a grown-up.

My mother smiled at me and tapped me on the nose. ‘Nothing for you to worry your beautiful and clever head about, my darling. Now, why don’t you go and do your homework so you don’t have to spend all weekend doing it. If you get it finished maybe we can do something fun together at the weekend. Just us.’

I loved the idea, hugged her and raced up to my room, determined to work my way through the horrible maths assignments we’d been given.

At 5pm one of the housekeepers brought a tray up to my room with my supper on it.

‘Your parents have asked that you stay up here, doll. They’re having a grown-up discussion. I’m off home now so mind you do what they’ve asked.’ She gave me a sad look and squeezed my shoulder gently. I think her name was Moira, but I can’t really remember. I recall her eyes though, big, brown and sad. And I wondered what had happened in her life to cause such sadness. I had no idea at the time that it was me.

I ate my supper and battled on with my homework but I was distracted by noises from downstairs. Raised voices. The sound of something smashing. A bang. A scream. Even though I’d learned not to sneak around spying on people, the scream scared me. I raced down the stairs to the main living room. My mother was cowering in a corner.

‘Please, Robert, it’s not my fault.’

They hadn’t seen me so had no idea that I saw my father draw back his right hand, curl it into a fist and slam it into my mother’s face. Again and again and again. These weren’t even slaps, which still couldn’t be forgiven, but full-scale punches, the kind I’d seen on TV shows I wasn’t supposed to watch but did anyway. My mother’s face began to look like a bruised piece of fruit, but one eye was still open enough to catch me staring, horrified. I could sense the fear in that look and without words, she told me to go.

Go or he’ll come after you too.





48


THE PHENE, CHELSEA

Sunday roast at The Phene has been one of our traditions since we’ve been legally old enough to drink alcohol. We used to think we were proper adults then. I think back to being eighteen. I’d not met Adam yet. The press interest in my missing father had all but disappeared. I was a lot calmer inside back then. Not always. I remember Hen having to stop me from heading to the offices of a particular loathsome lad’s mag, armed with an axe I’d stolen from one of the meat houses. Their crime? They’d put a countdown ticker on their equally disgusting website.

The first was bad enough: ‘XX days until you can legally give meat heiress your meat’.

The second one made me see red: ‘XX days until you can legally get meat heiress so smashed, she’ll be begging for your meat’.

‘It’s basically encouraging men to get me pissed and rape me,’ I remember screaming at Hen, who was the only person brave enough to come near me while I was brandishing an axe.

‘Kits, it’s just a website, darling,’ my mother said, attempting to soothe me. ‘We’ll put in a complaint and make them take it down.’

‘It’s not just a fucking website though, is it?’ I was seething. ‘And it’s not just me. It’s this fucking disgusting culture that is telling men that it’s okay to get girls drunk so they will have sex with them.’

I raged and ranted and swung the axe around so much that my mother gave me two pills from her special stash. When I finally calmed down, she and Hen sat with me.

‘I’m already so tired of it,’ I’d said. ‘It’s disgusting.’