How to Kill Your Family(28)

I got into a routine at the Latimers’. Sophie and John managed to treat me almost like a daughter, only sometimes triumphantly wheeling me out in front of friends, as though I were a refugee they’d heroically taken in. Although I suppose in a way, I was. This was the bargain, it emerged. I was cheerful, helpful, and made Jimmy happy, and the Latimers fed me, clothed me, showed me kindness and we both agreed to ignore any awkward questions we might have had about how long my membership of the family was good for. Despite my protests, they insisted on paying for me to see a therapist friend of theirs called Elsa, a dumpy woman who wore very large black-rimmed glasses and wooden beaded necklaces and who barely spoke at all. I repeatedly told her I was excited about the future and she signed me off after six weeks.

Within a year or two, I fully understood the wealth that the Latimers had. It was not the flashy loot of my father, it was unspoken but obvious in every way. Food came in huge deliveries from upmarket delis. Flowers were found on every table in the house, big bunches of artfully arranged stems you’d never see in the local supermarket. Sophie could spend hundreds of pounds on scatter cushions from the Iranian interiors shop in Crouch End and call them a bargain with absolutely no sarcasm. They talked about how important it was to live in ‘real London’, but they were insulated from anything remotely real. I didn’t even know what they meant by real. I don’t think they knew. The Artemis mansion was protected by enormous gates. The Latimers would have thought this awful, but they were no different really. I recognised how absurd their life was but it was hard not to enjoy it. Aged 15, I found myself using Sophie’s expensive face creams and seriously considering three different shades of green Farrow & Ball paint for my walls. I had never known I might have expensive tastes before. I’d never had the chance to know. But I was fast finding out.

The summer before sixth form started, Jimmy and I were allowed to go on holiday alone for the first time. We went to Greece with his friend Alex and his girlfriend Lucy, who went to private school in West London and delighted in exclaiming in shock whenever I admitted to not having experienced something. It was a CRIME that I had never been to Greece before, how could I not have had a Macchiato in my WHOLE LIFE, oh honestly it was TOO FUNNY that I’d never been swimming in the sea. It was a huge relief when she came down with food poisoning on day two of the trip and didn’t trouble us again until day six, just before we were due to return home. Well, I say food poisoning, but it was decidedly less random than that really. A few doses of Ipecac syrup given with breakfast (which I insisted on making for this very reason) did the trick. I don’t think anyone would blame me, there’s only so much time you can spend with someone who goes shooting on weekends and calls her mother ‘Mummy’ with a straight face. Alex seemed to perk up in her absence too, and the holiday was brilliant. Lucy was subdued on the flight home, and only gave a tiny shudder when I passed my hand over her leg to pick up my bag. Nobody else noticed. They broke up a few weeks later, which just felt best for everyone under the circumstances.

Back in London, I had chosen my A levels, settling on English, French, and Business Studies. Jimmy spent a lot of time going over university prospectuses with his parents, and discussing the merits of different Oxbridge colleges over dinner as Annabelle and I made a great performance of rolling our eyes and sighing loudly. I wasn’t going to uni, much to the dismay of John and Sophie, who seemed not to understand that there was any other option. In their eyes, finishing education at 18 would fast-track you towards a job packing boxes in warehouses, pregnant, on drugs, or possibly worse – it might mean you had to move out of London and live miles away from an artisanal cheese shop. But I wasn’t wasting three more years on rigid learning, getting into debt, and wasting time with other students, who I assumed would spend their free time talking earnestly about safe spaces and organising ineffective marches on rainy days. I had things to do.





CHAPTER SEVEN


Unsurprisingly, most prison activities are compulsory. Some of it is set up as though you might have a choice, ‘There’s a quiz night tonight in the TV room, we’ll need you ladies to pair up!’ but when you politely opt out, a guard will drop the forced smile and say, ‘Six p.m., Grace, I expect to see you there with a partner.’ And then Kelly will grab my hand and announce loudly that we’ll be playing together and I will unsuccessfully try to disassociate from my body. Today there is a non-optional lecture on how to be a boss. All morning, Kelly has been singing ‘Who run the world? GIRLS!’ at the top of her lungs as though the seminar will be the first step towards managing a FTSE 500 company and not an exercise in platitudes designed to tick a box on a government target form somewhere. ‘Empower these women,’ some young wonk in a short-sleeved shirt has said, ‘we need to encourage them to channel their specific skills into more mainstream work opportunities!’ As if Kelly and all the other women on my wing will be shown how to make their blackmail, theft, fraud, and other assorted crimes work in a more respectable way. To be fair to some of these girls, in another life they would have made great bankers. But even for bankers, a line in murder might be frowned upon. I have a few hours before the ghastly talk so I shall get back to writing.

When I left school and refused to go to university, so upsetting John and Sophie, I got work in the Sassy Girl shop in Camden. An obvious plotline for our heroine I hear you say, but I was 18, had to start somewhere and I naively imagined that working for one of Simon’s businesses would give me an advantage. I started in the stockroom, unboxing deliveries and affixing price tags, and graduated to the tills shortly after. The days were long and frantic. Stock flew off the shelves. The brand knew exactly how to appeal to teenagers back then, selling whatever had been on the hottest celebrity mere days ago. This process was a mystery to me – I remember imagining that the in-house designers must have had their finger so on the pulse that their clothes matched up with the latest couture completely. I later understood the reality: Artemis Holdings had grim-faced women in head office subtly altering said couture designs and running the amendments past the legal department. Once greenlit, the garments would be made up in any kind of synthetic fabric they had at the ready. The teenagers didn’t give a shit. Glittery jean shorts as seen on their favourite singer for ￡15, who cares that they smell faintly of rubber?