How to Kill Your Family(3)

Let me be clear here. I have no idea what I am doing. I’m 24, I’ve been thinking about how to best avenge my mother for many years now, and this is the biggest step I’ve taken so far. Mostly, I’ve been working my way up the career ladder, saving money, researching the family and trying to get myself into a position where I can get closer to them. It’s been helpful, but mundane. Of course, I’m willing to make these sacrifices in order to get nearer to my end goals, but my God it’s hard to pretend I care about customer surveys and participate in the optional (read mandatory) team-bonding drinks on Fridays. If I’d known I’d have to drink J?gerbombs with people who willingly work in marketing, I’d have given myself more time to research trepanation first. Maybe that’s why I’m rushing this big move, desperate to prove to myself that I’ve made inroads and can do what I’ve been saying I will since I was 13. And yet, I am woefully underprepared. I envisaged that by the time I got to Marbella, I’d have a firm plan in place, carefully plotted my route, the timings, and have invested in an incredible disguise. Instead, I am holed up in a flat which smells like your family hamster died underneath a wardrobe and your mother didn’t know what the smell was and has been going mad with the bleach for six months. I have a plan in my mind, but no idea whether I’ll be able to pull it off. I have a wig that I bought at a cosmetics shop in Finsbury Park, which looked convincing enough under the store strip lighting, but appears worryingly flammable in the Spanish sun. Despite this free-floating anxiety about my lack of preparation, excitement spreads through me. As I fix my wig and apply my makeup, I feel as though I’m getting ready for a brilliant date, and not at all like I’m on the way to kill my grandparents.

*

That was overly dramatic of course. I’m not going to kill them tonight, that would be foolish. I need to see them, listen to their conversation, see if they drop any hints about their plans this week. I need to drive the route to their villa a few times, and importantly, I need to pick up the promised car from Amir. That car is either a sign that I am stupidly chaotic and should postpone my plans, or it was a little gift from some unknown deity. Let’s see which!

I decided long ago that Kathleen and Jeremy Artemis would be the first to leave us. This was for several reasons really, the first being that they’re old so it doesn’t matter as much. Old people who do nothing but drain their pensions and stultify in their favourite armchairs isn’t a brilliant advertisement for humanity in my opinion. Great that we’ve worked out how to make people live longer with medical intervention and healthier lifestyles, unfortunately they will become useless bed blockers who get more and more mean-spirited until they are nothing more than bigoted beasts of burden living in the room you wanted to make a study.

Don’t be shocked, I know you think it too. Enjoy your life and shuffle off this coil around 70, only the very boring would want to live to be 100 – the only reward an impersonal and brief letter from the Queen. So really I’m doing everyone a favour. They are old and disposable, and they live staggeringly useless lives. Wine at lunch, naps, a trip to the boutiques in town to buy hideous jewellery and gaudy watches. He golfs, she spends a lot of her time getting things injected into her face, which has had the strange effect of making her look like a very old toddler. A waste of life, and that’s all before I tell you just how racist they are. Oh fuck it, you can imagine. They live in Marbella and yet they speak no Spanish, there you go. No more explanation needed.

Of course, I have skin in this game. I’m not Harold Shipman, merrily going around killing off as many geriatrics as I can. I only want to kill two of them, the rest are safe to keep watching Emmerdale and buying terrible presents for grandchildren who resent their boring visits. These people are technically my grandparents, though I’ve never met them and they have never bought me as much as a Toblerone. But they do know about me.

Let me explain. I wasn’t aware of this for many years, imagining that my father Simon had successfully kept me a secret, but my mother’s friend Helene was in London for a visit recently, and over a bottle of wine, she confessed that she’d paid them a visit shortly before she left for Paris all those years ago. She felt like she was letting my beautiful mother down by leaving me. Poor dead Marie. Helene did the only thing she could think to do to ameliorate the guilt. She looked them up online, and found their London address on Companies House. I was almost climbing across the table to hear what they’d said to her, to commit this new information to memory. I’d been to their house before many times of course, before they’d moved to Spain full-time. I’d spent hours outside, watching, waiting, occasionally following their chauffeur-driven car when they went out. But speaking to them was a whole new level, and I was half impressed with Helene, and half furious that she’d never told me about this meeting before.

She was clearly reluctant to tell me just how bad the encounter was, not meeting my eyes when she explained they initially slammed the door shut when she told them who she was. She didn’t leave though, and eventually they let her in and coldly disclosed that they knew all about me and my ‘ghastly’ mother. My ears started to buzz as I let that sink in, and I scratched at my neck, waiting for the lump in my throat I knew would appear any second. They knew about me from the start, Helene explained, when their ‘poor’ son turned up unexpectedly late one night and, pacing the living room, confessed that he’d got into some trouble. According to Jeremy, who did most of the talking while Kathleen sat rigidly on the sofa sipping a large gin and tonic, Simon had asked how he should tell his wife, Janine, and told his father that some financial provision would have to be made for me.