by Naomi Joy
The crowd stirs, eyes shifting right and left, interest building.
‘All of the funds raised will go directly to Cancer Research in a hope that cures can be found and lives can be saved.’
‘I’ll give you five hundred pounds for it,’ a gruff voice from the back of the room says, the crowd erupting in laughter at the rock bottom bid for such a special piece. That was a joke, right? I blush all the same.
‘Hoooold your horses,’ the auctioneer calls, running towards me from the back of the stage and taking the microphone. ‘I’m starting the bidding at five thousand pounds,’ he says, winking at me then smiling, inviting me to leave the stage now my sales pitch is over. As I descend, glad my moment in the spotlight is done, I hear the first bids come in.
‘Eight thousand pounds,’ says a woman with white hair curled tight on top of her head.
‘Ten thousand pounds,’ calls another.
‘Twenty thousand pounds on the phone at the back!’
When I reach Lucy she smiles, her teeth gleaming. ‘You’re amazing, Emelia. Thank you so much.’
The necklace eventually sells over the phone to a non-present bidder for nearly sixty grand. Magnificent. I smile, pleased with myself for bringing the house down. But things can definitely get better. I want Anthony to pay the price. I want him caught. A thief, abusing his position to steal treasure that doesn’t belong to him. What else has he taken? In some cultures they’d amputate his hands for it.
Revenge revenge revenge.
Blog Entry
20th January, 12.09 p.m.
I navigate my way through Notting Hill’s bustling Portobello Market. It is one of those strangely warm winter days and it feels almost blasphemous to this sacred time of year to be walking round in a light jacket and jeans, wondering if I should put some SPF on my face. The market stalls are all themed – food, clothes, tat – and I shuffle in and out of large groups of people crowding from stall to stall. Looking round I see couples, families, best friends, sisters, siblings, colleagues and I feel for a moment as though I’m the only person on my own. I shrink my head into my shoulders, desperate not to draw attention to myself and the way I look.
I’ve been trying to find a present for Lucy, to thank her for the wonderful auction and all the money we raised on the night. My own donations platform is close to ten thousand pounds – a truly life changing sum. I’ve looked in bookstores; at bracelets, necklaces; have witnessed time pass on multiple watch faces in multiple jewellers. But nothing has been quite right. What do you buy for someone who’s dying?
What would I want?
I turn the corner away from the worst of the crowds and start the walk home. Grey clouds roll overhead, covering the sun, and a gust of wind brushes against my arms.
That’s when I see her, just as I look up to dodge a pushchair in front of me.
A beautiful necklace hangs heavily round her neck. Its diamond floods my eyes, the recognition, the realisation that she must have been the phone bidder becoming clear. And then I look closer, as she turns to the side, her belly extended, round, curved, expectant.
And a man, behind her, coming into view.
Something alien grabs at my throat and an other worldly sound flies out of me. I extend an arm to steady myself, my nails scratching against stone as they try to find some grip. I sense somebody nearby rushing towards me, but there’s nothing they can do to dim the earthquake shaking me apart, a seemingly endless chain of tremors that make me certain this moment is what’s going to kill me, not the cancer, after all. I blink rapidly, trying to make her disappear, but I’ve read that the body shuts down when pain gets too much to bear and, sure enough, I lose my legs beneath me and fall to the ground. She’s protected from my screams by a pane of glass, unaware of her impact on me, turning the necklace in her hand. He was the bidder. And she told him about the auction, because she knew all about the support group. She was the one who convinced me to go in the first place.
I hear someone talking to me whilst I lie on the dirty ground, my head in a stranger’s lap. There’s nothing I can do now. The only solution is to stop living. You often hear about the courage of cancer patients, and I agree, we have to show so much resilience every day just to get up and keep going, but what I can see before me now would take the courage of fifty of us to overcome. I’ve experienced pain that many will never know in a lifetime, have been told everything was fine, then, weeks later, that I have months, not years, left to live; I have been prodded, poked and probed in the name of treatment, but never before in this journey have I felt so close to the end.
It’s Mishti. Pregnant. Anthony is by her side, his arm gripping her waist, protective, loving, her hand wrapped underneath the gentle curve of her stomach. It was her, all along, my best friend, my only friend. No wonder she didn’t believe me, no wonder she visited me in hospital as much as Anthony did, they were probably there together.
He’s going to kill her baby.
I black out, unsure what will happen next, my mind telling me to get up and go home, my heart cut into new quarters as I stagger along the pavements. Severed. Failing.
*
Back at my studio, hazy shapes spin in front of my eyes and I wake, flustered, crust gluing the lids together, dried and hard. I try to pull them open but they refuse and I stumble, blind, the twitchy back and forth of my pupils all I can see. Red shapes move before me and I feel along the walls, up and down for the entrance, then along the surfaces, the glass housing my toothbrush toppling as I knock it over. I reach for the tap, twisting, plug the sink, let it fill, then soak my face in it, teasing the gunge from my lashes, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
You’re OK, I say to myself, even though I know I’m anything but. I’m weak. I shuffle around the bathroom, my joints clicking like a pendulum tick as I walk, swollen yet brittle.
*
I have spent the past twenty-four hours re-living the moment I saw Mishti’s bump in a continuous PTSD-style loop. I feel broken, more than ever, and when I look at myself in the greasy, over-sink mirror I am struck by my deteriorating appearance. My eyes worry me the most; so watery, white and wide – as though they’re made of glass – and I’m preoccupied with the thought that maybe they are, because how else could I have missed all the things that had been right in front of them?
I spent yesterday evening with my laptop on my knees, blue light illuminating my glassy eyes, searching through Mishti’s social media accounts. The first thing that had struck me as odd was that I could only see a handful of her pictures and a splattering of personal information on Facebook. I was sure when we’d first connected her profile had been fairly active. I decided to dig a little deeper and, to find out for sure whether I was on a blocked list, I created a fake profile: Alice Pollard, a sensible mum with mousy hair and freckles who claimed to have kids at the same nursery as Eva. I lifted Alice’s photo from a website offering architectural services in South Carolina. The real name that belonged to that face was Kaycee, but Mishti would remember a name like Kaycee, so I had to reinvent her. She looked a lot more like an Alice than a Kaycee, anyway. So, last night, Alice had sent Mishti a friend request and at some point today Mishti, ever the optimist, had accepted, and now, sitting on the toilet lid in my dusty bathroom, I have both the pleasure and the pain of scrolling through Mishti’s full profile in all of its unabridged glory.
I’d been right: Emelia is only privy to about five per cent of what Mishti posts, yet unverified Alice has been given the green light for everything. She should really be more careful.
I scroll and skim over the online life Mishti hid from me and, though I want to save her and her baby from Anthony, I cannot help but be floored by her betrayal. She and Anthony are thick as thieves. They went to a play together the other day – which Mishti gave four stars – had sipped mulled wine in the interval, then posed for a photo together that Mishti had posted for their online audiences to enjoy. Fourteen likes. In fact, as I look further down I notice she posts lots of pho
tos of them together: at yoga (twenty-two likes), out for dinner (ten), out on wintry walks with her buggy and baby (nine).
As I travel back in time, I unearth a number of coy statuses that make bruising references to Anthony:
Love is complicated.
What’s wrong? Everything OK hun? Thirty likes.
Is it wrong to follow your heart even though your head is telling you no?
Follow your heart! Everything OK hun? Thirty-five likes.
Mykonos tomorrow! Sun here I come!
Have a great time! Who you heading away with hun? Fifty likes.
I can see her typing these sentences, her flawless face tilted to one side, chin rested in her palm.
A conversation I’d had with Anthony plays loud in my memory: ‘Are you going away with her?’
‘No.’
Another lie.
A rush of hot jealousy streaks through me as I flick through her profile pictures. She is prettier than me, no doubt about it. I am balding and pale and diseased. My veins are blue and bulbous and snake down the backs of my hands like fat tubes. No matter how much I eat, it seems impossible to add weight to my skin-and-bone frame and all I’ve achieved so far is a flat roll under my chin and another round my saggy middle. She, on the other hand, is toned, her skin is flawless, her hair is long and dark and beautiful. To put it simply, she is healthy, and glowing, life is literally growing inside this woman in the same place where my body is starting to die.
I stare at her face, struggling to shake off the HD images rushing to my mind’s eye of what their baby might look like: dark brown hair, coppery skin tone, long eyelashes, plump little lips, chubby cheeks… I grip my abdomen, my reproductive organs shrieking in pain.
Though I do not love Anthony, I loved Mishti, and her betrayal feels like the final straw.
Blog Entry
22nd January, 7 p.m.
Mum keeps telling me to ‘pull myself together’ as if there are bits of me left to pull back together. When she says it, each word harsh and scolding, I can see right through her. She still thinks my relationship is salvageable, or rather, she hopes my relationship is still salvageable, because she can’t bear the thought of her house going unrenovated. He only just started! A kitchen, a car, sure, but what about the rest?
‘I’m just disappointed, Emelia, that you pushed him away. All your talk of poison and paranoia. You did this, not him, but there’s still a chance you can save it.’
So, yes. I am back at home. I came back yesterday, wretched. I couldn’t stand to be in my studio any more, anywhere else was better, so I caught the train and went through the motions in front of mum and dad’s wide eyes. Anthony and I have broken up. He was cheating on me, he went away for Christmas and left me to go to my first chemo and support sessions alone – Mum, stop interrupting me, I didn’t call you because I wasn’t ready to tell you. I wasn’t ready for you to come with me instead. Anyway, I recently found out he’s cheating with my best friend and now I am broken and completely incapable of looking after myself, let alone ‘pulling myself together’, in fact, the more you tell me to do so the more of me seems to fall apart.
I feel like the one-eyed teddy bear bursting at its ancient seams that sits forlornly in my childhood bedroom.
My parents had forced me into the car this morning and driven me in frosty silence to my check-up. Mum had brought the doctor an assortment of muffins – which the doctor would later decline – and had been trying to inject some positivity into our waiting room stint when, mercifully, I was called through before she could convince me that emailing Anthony’s mother was a good idea. You never know, there could be something she can do to stop this! I have grown tired of her attempts to revive me and Anthony. Doesn’t she see that I do not care any more? That I have absolutely nothing to live for? Do not resuscitate, Mother. I thought I had made that clear, but perhaps I need to tattoo it across my forehead for you to understand. There is nothing left for me to do but die alone. And I’d like it to happen quickly.
The check-up hadn’t gone to plan. The chemo isn’t working. They need to up my dose apparently, and you know what the worst part is? I don’t even care. The doctor told me my cancer was particularly aggressive. I didn’t even react, my thoughts only of Nick and his support group. ‘You can beat this, Emelia, use all your strength to fight it, you’re a survivor.’ I’d rolled my eyes. Bullshit. Anthony would be happy it’s progressing quickly. He always gets what he wants.
I’d told my parents the news in the car on the way home. Mum, predictably, pronounced it ‘unbearable’, then obsessed over the fact the doctor hadn’t accepted her store-bought muffins. ‘What did she think, that they were laced with arsenic or something? Do I look like a psychopath to you Emelia? Well, do I?’
Not everyone who poisons food looks like a psychopath.
She’d ranted and raved about political correctness and health and safety, proclaiming once and for all that she hated hospitals, hated these check-ups and appointments, hated modern medicine and the promises it made but couldn’t deliver. She just couldn’t do it any more, apparently.
You and me both.
Dad had tried to calm the atmosphere between us when we’d arrived home but his judgement is impaired when it comes to Mum. He’s a big believer in the archaic ‘happy wife, happy life’ mantra and, as such, he’s heavily biased in these types of discussions. We’d argued in a lopsided triangle in the kitchen, then Mum had stormed out and Dad had said. ‘Don’t be so hard on your mother, Emelia. She cares very deeply about you, she’s just hyper-emotional at the moment.’
‘Right, excuse me while I go and apologise for my terminal illness getting in the way of her desire to always be the victim…’
‘Oh, Emelia, you always twist my words into something they’re not! You’re impossible to reason with!’
I’ve decided I cannot stay another night in their house. Just as I cannot stay another night in my own.
So, with nothing left to live for, I steal what cash I can find and walk the hour and a half along the dark country roads to the train station. My brain is busy with thoughts of what’s next now I truly have no one and not long left to live.
*
I want you to know that all the money I’ve raised will go directly to Cancer Research and, though it’s too late for me, it’s comforting that together we may help to make a small difference to someone else.
E x x x
Blog Entry
31st January, 11.58 p.m.
I have never felt more alive than during these last few frantic and chaotic hours. It is as though I have finally discovered how to live in technicolour and that, up until now, I’d only ever experienced a bleak, black and white, existence.
This morning when I woke up, I realised I’d finally reached rock bottom and, for the first time, I realised what that meant. Rock bottom, it turns out, is bliss. Rock bottom, it turns out, spells nothing but freedom, because when you really, truly, have nothing left to live for, then, finally, you can escape. Then and only then can you know your freedom. Once I realised this I started living in a hyper-mode in which each second counts and everything is magnified, everything is extreme, everything is real and everything is brilliant and bright and meaningful.
I have made a plan for today. I am about to leave to carry it out.
It is dark grey and stormy outside so the trees will look dead and their faces will grimace in pain along the empty banks of the river as I walk towards the bridge. I will listen to it gushing past, crying, wailing. I will take it all in as I approach the spot.
My stomach will tense and relax as though I’m wringing it out. I will have to tell myself that I will not vomit now that I am here, but then I’ll take one step forward and it will fire from me, spraying over my trainers and the bricks of the pavement below. It will just be bile and water because I have not eaten since I left my parents’ house. My muscles will start to fit and my eyes will strain. Part of me will try to convince myself to turn back, another
part will say, One more step, that’s all it will take – that’s all.
I will do the calculations in my head, weigh up the chances of survival against death. Hitting the water should kill me, I’ll remind myself. I will look pale and exhausted and my arms will shake wildly as they grip the cold barrier behind, my heart beating double time as I take my final breath. I must remember not to hold it. I need to drown if I am not killed instantly.
Next, there will be a moment of delay. I will remember the time Anthony and I sailed down the Thames on a cruise for one of his networking parties. We floated along under a brilliant blue sky and the tops of my shoulders had blushed in the sun. I will have to force myself to forget that. I will change the memory now. Suddenly, I am gripping on to the side of the boat, clinging to it with both hands as Anthony towers over me. His face is calm at first then, when I don’t jump, angry. His expression tightens and he’s determined to prise my hands from the railing, wanting me to fall into the water, to be sucked under the boat’s propeller, my hair chopped in its blades, my body parts cut up then eaten by the tiny fish below, the parts of me that don’t float coming to rest in the scratchy sand on the rocky bottom beneath.
I will start to slip when I realise there is no other way.
I will search my brain for any hope that’s left and find it wanting.
I will take one last breath, then another, and then I will do it.
Then I will jump.
Part 4
New Thread
Subject: Emelia Thompson Suicide Attempt
What was with that last post? I keep commenting but I’m not getting any replies. Should we do something? Tell the police? Sounds like she’s really in trouble. Like she might do something awful.