How to Kill Your Family(74)

I decide not to watch Janine take her bath, feeling as though she’s allowed a little privacy in her last moments. But Pete has no such qualms, narrating her ablutions and laughing at the way she sings Celine Dion songs as she lies back and soaks. Some people love to linger in baths, calling it self-care and pretending it’s got nothing to do with wanting to escape your family for a precious hour or so. Janine is one of them, despite having nobody to escape, unless you count the arsehole of a dog. She spends nearly an hour in the tub, topping up the hot water and adding various oils. While I wait, I find I’m becoming jittery from the coffee so I order a glass of rosé to offset the caffeine.

Eventually, Pete alerts me that she’s getting out of the bath, and he makes a crude joke about her breasts which nearly makes me shoot back a choice comment about his dick pic, but I refrain. Pete makes me want to stick up for Janine, a sign that they both need to get out of my life pronto.

The sauna will be baking hot now. I take a deep breath and tell Pete to turn the lights on. I watch the camera footage, and see the sauna suddenly clear in the frame. Janine hasn’t noticed. She’s wrapped in a towel and is cleaning her face with a cloth over the sink.

Make them flicker, I type. The lights duly turn on and off in rapid succession. Janine stops cleaning and frowns. She walks towards the sauna with a look of annoyance on her face. Be ready to shut the door, Pete, please be ready.

I am, jeez, I’m the king of this place babe, comes the reply.

She walks into the sauna, and I hold my breath and scratch at my neck. The door closes silently behind her. At first, she doesn’t appear to notice. I can see the top of her head as she reaches to turn off the lights, fanning herself as she realises that the heat is on full blast. I watch as she pulls the door, the glass wobbling slightly but not giving way.

LOL, she’s realising she’s stuck, messages Pete, but I ignore him, transfixed by an increasingly panicked Janine, who is now pressing a button repeatedly. That’s the alarm huh, says Pete. I’ve deactivated it obviously. Nobody can hear you scream, lady.

Janine has sat down now, and hidden by an angle I can no longer see her, but she’s banging on the glass, and Henry runs into the bathroom, alerted by the noise. She can hear him, and stands up, her eyes peering over the frosted strip on the door. She tells him to get help, an absurd order which shows me that she’s getting frantic now. Henry looks up at her, his ears pinned back and his little body quivering with excitement. Then he tilts his head, turns around and walks out of the bathroom. I flick images, and see him lie down in his little bed in the hallway and promptly fall asleep. Perhaps Henry is a better judge of character than I’d thought.

I check the time on my phone. She’s been in the sauna for fifteen minutes. What’s the temp in there? I ask Pete.

Lemme check. He comes back two minutes later. Sorry I had to convert it into your weird degrees. It’s 110 degrees. Want it higher? She might pass out.

I consider. We don’t have hours to let her sit and slowly cook to death. But I’m reluctant to let it get to a point where she gets badly burnt – a sign that might suggest she wasn’t able to get out. Crank it up a little, I don’t care if she faints. Would do the cow some good.

I sip my wine and savour the breeze anew, knowing that Janine’s entire body will be crying out for it. I distract Pete from watching the CCTV too closely by talking about a potential trip to Iowa, and he rises to the bait immediately, telling me how cool it would be to hang out in real life. We go back and forth on what we’d do together, him getting increasingly flirtatious and me suggesting wholesome activities that his church leader would have approved of.

All the while, I keep an eye on Janine, stuck in that little hot cupboard. There’s no movement that I can see, and I realise that if I want to talk to her, I’d have to do it now. I tell Pete to patch me in, aware that what I was about to say would throw up some questions later.

There’s a short pause and then Pete tells me I can speak. I take a sip of wine and look around to make sure that nobody is within earshot. I lift the phone to my chin and speak quietly but clearly.

‘You’re probably not in the mood for a big heart-to-heart right now.’ Her head shoots up above the frosted glass and she wipes the steam away with one hand. ‘But I just wanted you to know why this is happening to you. It’s not an accident. You’ve probably realised that by now. But I’m not a criminal mastermind who wants to steal your diamonds. There’s nothing you can give me that will stop this.’

She starts to yell something, frantically banging on the glass door.

‘Be quiet. You don’t have the energy for a fuss. Your husband left my mother with a baby. He abandoned her. He rejected me. And your family have lived a life of complete pleasure and comfort ever since. Is that fair? It didn’t seem so to me, watching my mother take a series of shit jobs and get weaker and weaker with every day she worked. Is it fair that your daughter had everything she could ever have wanted and that I was raised by people who only did it so that they could feel good about themselves?’

She looks wild now, one hand clawing at her neck.

‘It’s getting harder and harder to breathe, huh? Well it won’t be a problem much longer so do try to keep calm, it’s worse if you panic, I imagine. I’ll be honest, I considered not explaining any of this, but I wanted you to know the backstory as a courtesy more than anything. My father. Your husband. That’s why you’re in there. It’s good to know who to blame, isn’t it?’