How to Kill Your Family(79)
Perhaps I should’ve got to know her better. Some people might wonder why I judged her almost entirely on her online presence, when it’s pretty universally understood that nobody is their true selves on the internet. This murder, more than the others, might make one feel increasingly uneasy. ‘I understand killing the rotten old grandparents but this girl is so young, they probably have more in common than that which divides them.’ But this is not a story about reconnecting with family. This is not a tale where anyone finds out that they have a whole bunch of relatives waiting to embrace them. And I am not a damaged bird, who desperately wants such shelter. What I want is these people gone. With apologies to Elizabeth I, I have no interest at all in making windows into these people’s souls. Or exploring the lack of them.
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Bryony still lived at home. I guess when you live in a house that has sixteen bedrooms and two staircases you can pretend to yourself that you’re living alone in some way – I assume she occupied a floor, or a wing, if the Artemis McMansion has such pretensions. But still. She lived at home, as an adult. Since she had done a jewellery design course in London and turned down the experience of a true uni life, she never moved out. Not once. Her parents bought her a Chelsea mews house when she turned 21, but she never spent more than a couple of nights there. Instead, she held parties there for the young and beautiful, but always returned to the family enclave. Does that say anything about her character to you? Again, maybe I’m looking for meaning where there is none, but rejecting all the potential that the adult world offers seems like a waste. And staying near your parents when your parents are Janine and Simon Artemis seems like a real personality red flag.
Bryony did not have a partner, or at least, not one that she talked about. I took this to mean she was single, since her previous love interests were featured heavily on her social media and also in the society pages. She referred to herself as pansexual but only seemed to have dated men. Sure.
There was a small dog which featured heavily in her life at one point and then, well, didn’t. Much was made of this, and the hashtag #WHEREISFENDI trended for a while on Twitter, forcing her to admit that she’d given the dog to her personal trainer because of unforeseen anger issues (the dog’s, not hers).
She had a million friends but no friends. There were photographs of her out on the town with other rich, nothing-eyed women – cheek to cheek but never actually touching – but most of her images were of her alone, looking in the mirror, pretending to react to an imaginary photographer.
Bryony didn’t have a job. Sure, she’d dabbled in modelling (I don’t mean high fashion, I mean one season being a brand ambassador for an old British design house grown fusty and desperately looking to get a profile boost on the society pages. The other ambassadors included the son of an ageing rock star and a minor royal – one minor enough not to look anything like Prince Andrew) but she never did a job that would surprise you. That daughter of a multi-millionaire? Oh, she works in her local estate agent, really knuckling down trying to work her way up. No. Of course not. She had a singular low moment when it was announced that she was going to design an exclusive range of embellished headbands for Sassy Girl, and someone in the PR department, clearly desperate not to get fired, took the bold step of describing her as a ‘gemstone artiste’ in the promo material. Do you blame the newspapers for digging up her brief stint (read six weeks) on a jewellery design course and christening her ‘Daddy’s diamanté’?
Still, Bryony is nothing if not completely immune to criticism. You cannot keep an overly privileged white girl down. She might not need a full-time job, but in a world where women are constantly exhorted to be a ‘girl boss’, she had to do something to justify her life of handbags and back to back exercise classes (she briefly went to a members-only studio in Mayfair called The SS Collective, which stood for ‘the slim, strong collective’ but really served to show us all that history is not adequately taught in our schools). So Bryony did what any less than self-respecting person does in the modern age – she became an influencer.
A lot of people might not know what that is. There’s no reason to be smugly proud about such a lack of knowledge. The only thing worse than someone who enthusiastically devours all pop culture and spews it up (wearing a T-shirt that says ‘We should all be feminists’ while queuing up for forty-five minutes to buy the latest trainers made by women in a sweatshop) is someone who takes pride in not understanding new trends. You’re not better than that. You don’t get points for deliberately trying to avoid learning about what’s happening around you. And you’ve almost certainly looked at the Mail Online in the past month, so cut the smug. An influencer is someone who has a large social media presence and uses that to endorse brands for money. No different from the heady days of the Nineties when big name actors would hawk toothpastes in other countries for mega bucks. Well, except that this new group isn’t famous for anything but their influencing. There is no talent that lies behind it, no singing or art or writing that gave them a springboard to start flogging stuff. It’s usually just thin white women (or bulky white men) who have preternaturally bright smiles and unnervingly beige homes (all the better to photograph tat in) and who try to convince the minions that they possess a lifestyle that others should desperately try to emulate. Usually the influencer also bangs on about gratitude, or living in the moment, and pretends they’ve suffered from mild anxiety or struggle with some unspecified hardship in order to present as more relatable. The platitudes that gush from these people could overpower the Thames barrier. Watching some of this stuff will make you wish that it would.