How to Kill Your Family(37)

At that moment, Lee’s other mate barrelled towards us, spilling his drink and bumping into a group of people standing nearby.

‘Oh Christ, that’s Benj done for the night,’ said Lee. ‘Nice to meet you, love, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’ I swallowed down the need to visibly wince and waved goodbye with one hand as he took command of his friend and steered him out of the bar.

I gave it five more minutes to be sure that they’d gone, finished my horrible wine, and made an exit, giving a wide berth to the nervous couple who were now arguing by the door, mascara pooling below the wife’s eyes. The girls in reception gave me a cheery wave as I left, not surprised by how short my stay was. Perhaps a lot of people nip in to sex parties?

I spent my cab ride home with all sorts of interesting ideas forming. What a generous man my uncle was. In just twenty minutes, he’d given me a free drink, and a lead on how to kill him. Who says the ultra-rich don’t help the needy?

*

I fell asleep during my massage, despite the harsh pressure the therapist applied, and then had a long bath, re-reading my battered old copy of The Second Sex before shaving my legs and giving my hair a deep condition. I began reading feminist literature aged 16, when Jimmy’s mum became concerned at how much time I was spending with Jimmy and his mates. I think she thought that a lack of female role models might lead me down a path where I would be completely unprepared to deal with the disadvantages that my sex would throw up. This was typically well intentioned of Sophie, but it also showed just how privileged she was. A wealthy white woman, insulated from actual discrimination in just about every way possible but very keen to talk about it in general outraged terms. The Latimers and their friends were masters of this – shaking their heads about the local corner shop closing, when they always sailed past it to go to the next-door deli, talking loudly about giving their cleaner sick pay at a dinner party but getting rid of her when she could no longer work Wednesdays. ‘Very disappointing, she’s been with us for ten years and Tuesday just doesn’t work as well for us.’

Did she think that I had no understanding of the way the world treated women? I understood how the system was stacked against women long before I ever knew the words to describe how we are marginalised, discarded, belittled. I saw it chip away at my mother day by day. Brought up by strict parents who had rigid views about how girls should behave (who spurned her when she decided to live her life a different way), prized for her looks until one day she wasn’t, used by a man for fun until he got bored. Working hard in a series of low-paid jobs where she was never appreciated. Raising a child alone without it counting for a thing.

But the feminist literature introduction was a revelation, and I’ll always be grateful to Sophie for it. Perhaps I was spending too much time with boys, adapting my behaviour to fit in with them. Without a crash course in the works of Wollstonecraft, De Beauvoir, and Plath, I might have quashed the early flickers of rage I felt, tried to live small, as women are wordlessly taught to do from birth. But reading about other angry women made me bolder, allowed me to nurture my anger, see it as a worthy and righteous thing. Of course, I do not mean to make these women shoulder any small part of my eventual deeds, though I’m sure that the tabloids would salivate over constructing a ‘vicious feminist’ narrative should my story ever become public.

There was one book that made me see wicked vengeance in a more positive light though: The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. This wasn’t a book given to me by Sophie, but one I came across in a bookshop in Soho on a rainy autumn afternoon just after my seventeenth birthday, when I’d spent the day in town on my own. Its cover jumped out at me from a pile, the swirls of black and red seemed to complement what was going on in my teenage head. I scanned the blurb quickly, took it to the till and read it in one go at a dingy tourist café off Tottenham Court Road. Her dark fairy tales, where women plot and deceive, opened a door in my mind. I saw that, just as we did not have to be small and quiet and weak, women did not have to be good or strong, virtuous but ultimately sacrificed. We could be underhanded, out for ourselves, led by desires we dared not voice. I finished the book, and walked out onto the street with a sense of new possibility. I gave Annabelle a copy the next Christmas, thinking that the nervy kid could use a shot in the arm, but Sophie pursed her lips as she watched her daughter unwrap the book, and took me aside after lunch to tell me that Annabelle was far too sensitive for such gory stories.

‘Honestly, Grace, I know you’re a tough girl, but Belle suffers horribly with her worries and I really think you could have thought about that. She looks up to you and obviously now she’ll be dying to read this book. I’ll have to be the one to put her off until she’s a bit older. Could you exchange it for Primo Levi? She’ll be studying the Second World War next term.’ I just stared at her until she hurried off to stir the gravy. I replaced a book of fairy tales with a real-life scream of pain about the worst thing that humanity has ever done. Annabelle had nightmares for three days after she’d finished reading If This Is a Man. Sophie was full of pride for how empathetic her daughter was.

When my bath went cold, I carefully dried my hair, loosely curling it so that it rolled down my back in soft ropes. I painted my nails bright orange and carefully inched new tights up my legs so as not to ladder them immediately. The dress I selected to wear that night was a short black one, with long sleeves and a high ruffle neck. It made me look stern but enjoyably so. After my first brief foray into the world of sex clubs, where my uncle so generously planted the idea for his murder, I went online and did my research. There are dozens in the capital, traversing a sliding scale between ‘a masked ball full of models’ to ‘expect a slick of sadness and bring suitable antibacterial wipes’. But it was easy to figure out which ones to avoid – ‘the venue is a three-minute walk from the drive-thru McDonald’s’ or ‘bring your own booze, no tins’ get ticked off immediately. Lee was hardly likely to frequent a sex party held on a ring road somewhere near Wembley. And I was happy to do research, but not anywhere near an industrial estate. I’ve had enough sadness in my life already.