How to Kill Your Family(11)
‘Kathleen is dead, Jeremy, I’m so sorry. I don’t think you’re going to make it either, but you’re not alone. Do you recognise me? I’m Grace – your granddaughter. Simon’s daughter.’ He twitches ever so slightly. ‘Yes, Marie’s child. I’m so sorry that we never met before, well, this sad day. But then you made sure of that, didn’t you? You didn’t want me anywhere near your family. That’s all right, Jeremy, I don’t think we’d have got along really. But it wasn’t kind, was it? And so now you have to go, I’m afraid. Not for me, you see, but for my mother. Family first – I know you understand that. Oh, and it’s not just you and your wife, Jeremy. That’s the really good bit.’
Pulling out the perfume bottle, I turn his head towards me as gently as I can, and look into a single grey eye. ‘I’m going to kill your whole family.’ As I say it, I yank his tie towards me, and he slumps. I pull it from his collar, carefully roll it up and stuff it into my pocket. My little Spanish souvenir. Then I open the bottle, and strike a match.
CHAPTER TWO
The guards bang on our cells at 8 a.m., before handing over breakfast on a tray and departing. Obviously it’s not poached eggs and fresh coffee. We are given teabags, milk, and two slices of white bread made so cheaply that I held a slice back last month just to see what would happen to it. Nothing, as it turned out. It curled up at the corners slightly, but other than that was worryingly unaffected. It reminded me of a story we were told at school, about how the poor in the nineteenth century were sold bread which was made with chalk and other inedible substances to pack it out. Prisons, mostly now run by private companies with ridiculous made-up names designed to sound commanding, would probably admire such methods and rue the day food standards were imposed. I don’t have much of an appetite in here as it happens. The prison diet could surely be marketed to those vain Instagrammers who shill appetite suppressants and dubious vitamins. Just eat bland dough three times a day, and trade anything left over for cigarettes – your standard-issue tracksuit will be suitably loose in no time.
Kelly asks if I want to talk anything over, tilting her head in what I imagine she thinks is a sympathetic gesture. She knows my final appeal is due any day now, and her recent forays into group therapy seem to have convinced her that she has a bright future in counselling. I have to stifle the urge to explain that the best therapy that Harley Street has to offer wouldn’t help me much, so I doubt that Kelly’s offer of trying to contact my inner child will suddenly fix whatever she imagines might be wrong with me. Besides the fact that Kelly is an undeniable moron, I think talking is overrated. As my mum used to say ‘never complain, never explain’. Although she died inconsiderately early, and left me to rectify the wrongs done to her, which is why I’m here. A bit more complaining might not have been such a bad thing, on balance.
After Kelly takes the hint and wanders off to go and coach someone else, I settle down on my bunk to start writing down my story. I’ve not got long if I want to set it all out in full – the result of my appeal will be with me shortly, according to the long-faced solicitor I’ve engaged, who wears the most beautifully tailored suits when he visits, but spoils the entire look by pairing them with garish loafers. I imagine he thinks these add a touch of character but they tell me that actually he has none. Perhaps a younger second wife bought them in the hope of making him seem more youthful. I wish she hadn’t. Absurd vanity is not a trait I particularly wish to see in a lawyer attempting to get me out of a life sentence. Especially not if my hefty fees encourage him to buy more of the terrible things.
I was born twenty-eight years ago, at the Whittington hospital, the only daughter of Marie Bernard, a young Frenchwoman who had been living in London for three years before falling pregnant with me. After giving birth alone, she took me back to her studio flat in Holloway where I first experienced the boredom and claustrophobia of a confined space and all the limited joys of a toilet in the bedroom. Studio is such a misleading description when applied to property, conjuring images of an airy and large room where one is bound to be creative and perhaps hold chic gatherings where beautiful people hang over balconies to smoke. Our flat was on the fifth floor of a building which housed a chicken shop at ground level. The landlord, perhaps as part of a complicated social experiment to see how many people he could house in one old Victorian building meant for four, had divided up each floor to make three flats each. My mother and I lived in one room, with a small attic window which did not open (either because of an impressive accumulation of pigeon shit, or because said landlord didn’t want us to be tempted to yell at passersby to save us, we never did find out which). This sounds quaintly Dickensian, doesn’t it? It was not. Don’t forget the chicken shop. My mum slept on the pull-out sofa, and I had the single bed. I still get stabs of guilt when I think of how hard she worked, and how tired she was, and yet still always insisted that she liked the lumpy couch. As a selfish child, I didn’t think to offer her the bed. As a grown-up, I splashed out on a king-size memory foam job from John Lewis, but never stopped falling asleep thinking about her on that sofa. It rather ruined the extravagance, if I’m honest.
Marie had come to England because she’d been told she was pretty enough to be a model, and she was. My mother was strikingly beautiful, with olive skin, and shaggy brown hair which she clipped up in a bun no matter how many times I implored her to wear it down. She had that effortless French girl vibe, which every fashion influencer tries to copy now, to varying degrees of success. No bra, ever. Wide slacks and a long gold chain upon which hung a miniature portrait of an old man, his identity lost to time. Before I came along, she’d done a few small campaigns, modelling for high street stores that were long gone by the time I was born. Kookai, she insisted, was the coolest shop of its day, and she kept a rolled-up poster that she’d featured in, which had hung in their shop windows for an autumn campaign. In it, she’s crouched on the ground, a brown cardigan draped over her knees, covering a short dress and platform trainers, which I’ve seen making a regrettable return to high streets recently.