by Corri Lee
Yes, I can.
No, you can’t. You’re going to fuck it all up right before your wedding and someone will figure out what you did to Natasha.
Nobody can prove what I did. Not even I can prove it.
There are people who can prove it, you dumb ho. Go up there and confess to a murder, and Henry is going to have an obligation to throw his money around to cover you. There’ll be an investigation. You had motive. Come the big day, you’ll be eating slop off a plastic tray in a prison for the mentally unstable.
Nobody will know about Natasha. I won’t even mention it.
Yes, you will. You’ll stumble over your words and give them something to latch on to. You can’t do it. You complain that your life is a circus act? Welcome to the big top, baby.
“Good evening.” I was up on the stage talking into the microphone before I even knew it. The whole building dipped into a sudden silence at my voice, hanging on my every word.
It was too late to turn back now. My bed was made and the covers thrown back ready for me to lay in it. My future depended on how well I gave this spur of the moment speech.
And I’d never given a speech in my life. Shit.
“On behalf of my family,” I started, voice cracking with nerves. “I’d like to thank everyone in attendance for being here tonight. I’m sure that when you all opened your invitations for the next Ivy Tudor event, you were expecting something a little more razzle dazzle. Honestly, so was I. This blood drive really goes above and beyond all expectations I had when I asked my mother to arrange an engagement party for myself and Blaze.”
There was a ripple of confusion and disturbance through the room, a shocking and shameful revelation of just how much of the spotlight my mother had stolen. Nobody in that room knew that we were going to be getting married in a matter of weeks. Not a single one.
Heads turned in Ivy Tudor’s direction for a reason other than awe for the first time in her life, and I let it happen. I stood there and stayed quiet for a moment to let her feel just some of the humiliation I’d felt walking through those doors.
And when I spoke again, I explained what she’d done to me. I explained what had happened to justify their disdain.
“What you see around you is a plea. This somewhat cryptic event is a testament to the lengths you will go to, to gauze your family when it falls apart. With no explanation whatsoever, some of you have donated blood that will save lives—other’s have donated money to what may seem like a random choice of charity. It’s not. My personal struggles as a teenager have hit the headlines in the past months, but it’s my battles today that have brought you here.”
“A few weeks ago, I tried to kill myself.” I raised my wrists to show my scars. “It wasn’t the first time and I can’t promise that it will be the last. I suffer from a short term form of schizophrenia called Schizophrenoform disorder and sometimes these things just seem like a good idea—the only idea. At the time, it was what I deemed best for the people I love. In reality, it’s caused nothing but pain for them and myself. By some miracle, my support network has remained mostly intact but the damage done to it may leave bruises further down under the skin than scars.”
“It’s a little known fact that all of my family share the same extremely rare blood group, and had my sister, Tallulah, not shown a lot of backbone and an impressive display of family unity, I might not be here to celebrate my fast approaching wedding to a wonderful man. I am incredibly grateful to her for giving blood on the spot to keep me on the road, no matter how bumpy that road may be.”
“And while I am disappointed to not be dancing under a glitter ball to eighties pop songs and bhangra remixes, I commend my mother for having the moxie to try pulling together an arrangement like this. Hold an open blood drive and you’re not likely to have many takers. She’s used the popularity of our family’s name to bring a crowd together for the greater good.”
Nice snipe, bitch.
Thanks, I thought so.
“But she’s also highlighted the fact that status doesn’t make you immune to misfortune. The Tudor’s work hard, play hard, but we also fall hard in love, in life and in tragedy. If you’ve arrived tonight and done your part, I commend you for contributing to the deeper, hidden significance. For those of you against, afraid or undecided, I look to you to reconsider. You never know if your family may be the next to fall on harder times.”
Brazen and unashamed, I took a step from the microphone and waited to be received.
Silence. Nothing but the deathly echo of a distraughtly duped audience.
Closing my eyes helped to block out the reality of the fact I’d just made a fool of myself, but didn’t prepare me in the slightest for the rush of chaotic din that charged at me like an army several moments later. Dazed, I opened my eyes to better understand what had caused such a sudden onslaught of what sounded remarkably like panic, but instead of looking around to see a room packed with pallid, dismayed faces, I saw the ceiling.
What happened?
We’re just two minds in the same body, dipshit. Your guess is as good as mine.
Voices around me hummed with muted concern, others seemed to be ringing out above all others to impose their way closer to the stage. In my desperation to figure out what was going on around me, I almost forgot that I was flat on my back.
“Call an ambulance, for fuck’s sake!”
“Blaze?”
“I’m here, cupcake. I’m here.” A warm hand brushed across my forehead. “Jesus, you’re burning up.”
“I don’t—”
“You collapsed. You started talking, went rigid and just hit the floor without warning. Thank God everyone was too mortified to get their cameras on you; there’s not enough money in the world to buy off this many people.”
“Hold up.” What he was saying—and so quickly he was barely coherent—made no sense at all. Confused and a little embarrassed, I fought to sit upright and surveyed the scene around me.
My mother was in tears while Henry fought to fend off the over-zealous nurses who wanted to tend to me rather than watch over their donor patients. Tallulah screeched angrily at journalistic vultures who’d made their way in from the street during a moment of lapsed security. Famous faces I knew—and some I didn’t—stared on at me like they were awkwardly viewing a corpse on display at an open-casket funeral. Dread festered in my stomach and furled outward into the rest of my body like an icy chill that froze my blood as it travelled.
Whatever had happened that night, it was clear that it was going to haunt me for many days to come.
That blood drive facade was the start of hell for me and everyone in my inner circle. It had taken some hardcore persuasion to extract the truth of what had happened to me on that stage from anyone who’d been there; I’d started talking, trailed off into silence and simply folded over into a heap on the floor, by all accounts.
With my recent neck injury, nobody had moved me from the stage, too scared to cause further damage. I was out cold for twenty minutes before I came to, and with the congestion so bad on the roads outside, no paramedics had made it to me while I was down.
Drama queen Ivy thought her actions had caused me to drop dead, Blaze thought I’d had another heart attack, and I suspected a few people thought I was faking it for attention.
What nobody ever found out, even after I was checked over by several nurses and two doctors, was why I’d collapsed in the first place, and I never knew how much of my speech had been heard or understood. I just knew it was enough to cause some real problems.
The golden rule of life is to never shit where you eat, and as far as the media were concerned, my family had taken a giant crap on me. The coverage I’d expected to label me as a nutcase was relatively tame in comparison to the teeth-grindingly bad press being thrown in their direction.
Trophy bride Ivy Tudor found her way onto a lot of shit lists for hijacking our engagement party and people started digging up dirt on her. Pathetic non-issues of tiny family squ
abbles while I was a teenager were escalated into news stories implying that my instability arose from a history of serious emotional neglect. Bullshit gossip magazines wrote unsubstantiated articles of how I was a victim and I’d been wronged by my parents. My leaving home was portrayed as an exile; they made it seem like I’d been forced out because I was the lesser loved younger daughter. Some even went as far as to compare Henry to the real Henry VIII, implying that I was a disappointment for my gender—that he’d wanted a son to inherit his fortune.
Worse than anything, my family started to take the bad publicity to heart and creep around me, though I couldn’t tell if the apologies were genuine or not. Was my mother sending me bouquets and the comic book collectables she’d refused to buy me before on the basis of them being too ‘boyish’ because she really felt like she’d damaged me, or to make herself look better? Did Henry keep the hotel under heavy guard to protect me, or to protect his reputation?
That was the paranoia talking again, and it was something I couldn’t solve. With the hotel surrounded by reporters around the clock, we were virtually confined to the suite unless leaving was essential. Not even absconding to Wales was an option thanks to Blaze’s constant meetings with his newest director—ironically, the situation had done wonders for his career. He was a saint for taking me on in sickness and lack-lustre mental health. That’s what they thought. And who could have blamed them?
Nobody could get through the hysteria to us and we couldn’t get out. That meant Dr. Downes couldn’t make it through the havoc to administer the anti-psychotics I so desperately wanted, and neither could any of her underdogs. The only occasion we tried to make it out to her, the stress of trying to force through a tight crowd and the hellish flashes of short-lens cameras made me throw up rather unceremoniously down the side of Henry’s Mercedes. Like things weren’t bad enough, the bastards saw vomit and heard the pitter-patter of tiny feet. Such an unhealthy heiress, such a rush to get married...
I was officially on baby-bump watch.
All I had for company was Blaze, who was distracted and well on his way to becoming a world class ninja, the occasional email from Daniel, and the voice inside my head which told me that it was safer to be locked away inside anyway. None of this equated to a good time.
Two weeks and one day before the wedding, the burden of leaving the supposed sanctity of my super-king sized bed was thrust at me along with the most gruesome of tasks: my penultimate dress fitting. Obviously unable to take Blaze with me, I allowed myself to be begrudgingly led to Caroline’s little fashion-shop of horrors in nightmare company.
While she’d been leaking to the press that she was designing my bridal gown, the charming seamstress had announced to the world that she was also responsible for the dresses of my bridesmaid and maid of honour. I hadn’t even known that I was having a bridesmaid and maid of honour, let alone what they’d be wearing, so to be bundled into one of Henry’s limousines next to my mother, Tallulah and Esme was as much as a surprise for me as it was for them to see the state of me.
My cheeks were sunken, eyes dull and hair lank. Segregation, isolation and the total violation of my privacy had paid it’s toll. My only view of the outside world came from trashy e-zines that were hard to read both on intellectual and spiritual levels, and the grim picture they painted hardly did wonders for my appetite or willingness to move.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten and kept it down, and I couldn’t tell if that was a psychological or physical rebellion acting out from within. I didn’t feel like I even knew my own mind anymore. Being locked up made me stir-crazy but I was so anxious about being out in public, I was verging on agoraphobic. Black-out blind covered windows blocked out any reporters crazy enough to try scaling the hotel guttering, but gave no clues as to the time of day. Endless minutes slipped together into one single, prolonged second of artificial light and darkness when I felt like it. Most of the time, I was so disoriented that I wasn’t really sure whether I was awake or dreaming some kind of monotonous reverie.
“My God, Emmy,” Ivy declared as soon as the limo door shut behind me and we’d merged into a thick vein of brunch-time traffic. “Is Blaze not looking after you?”
“He’s... Blaze is...” Unable to form a coherent sentence, I simply nodded his defence and scrambled gracelessly across the soft leather bench towards a mini fridge in search of water. My mouth was so arid, so thickly coated with the film left from a diet of intense coffee abuse.
“You look awful. Are you anorexic again, love? You haven’t hurt yourself, have you? I wouldn’t know what to do if you had, I couldn’t take it.”
“Maybe it’s not about you.” I glared out across the packed roads, feeling motion sick and half-drunk. “Maybe it’s never been about you. How about that? How about my mental state has never had a damn thing to do with you or what you think and how you feel. Maybe I’m just selfish. Maybe you borne a bitch—a fundamentally narcissistic, all encompassing, grade A cunt-stick little bitch of a daughter.”
“I know you’re still angry with me but I never brought you up to use such vulgar language.”
“That’s because you brought me up without a backbone. You brought me up to believe that my life would only mean something if I had the social acceptance of a bunch of stuck up Z-listers who incessantly called me ‘Emily’, and became one of their league of asinine Stepford wives.”
There was no normal water in the fridge, just snooty glass bottles of sparkling fizzy crap that had the refreshment value of drinking tar.
“Are we so uptight that we’ve demoted Evian to the lower classes now?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Emmeline. Give it a rest.” I turned in surprise to see my mother with her arms folded and brow knit into a scowl so deep and severe nobody could have possibly expected her collagen fillers to allow it. “You had a good solid upbringing and however cruel you feel life is, you should be used to this. This is the hand you were dealt at birth—you’re no stranger to finer food and public scandal. Anyone who lives this ‘simpler life’ you so crave will very quickly tell you that there’s nothing simple about it. There is no immunity to strife but for God’s sake, there are people out there who look at Perrier and wish they could afford it. Show a little gratitude.”
“I... uh... Huh.” Taken aback by the long overdue rebuff from a mother who could discipline as well as she could tap dance, I sank down into the bench and tried to make myself look as small as I felt.
Why could she have not been a little firmer with me when I was young? Surely trying to instil some humility into me then instead of letting me find it myself would have stopped me from feeling like I was only as valued and successful as the man I married. I wanted for nothing but the boy I couldn’t have, but money would have bought a replacement or close alternative. I didn’t have to be happy as long as I was rich—that was the society I was brought up in.
I learned the cost of living a modest life on my own, by refusing handouts that would have made me ‘privileged’. Bills, rent, food; I learned to manage expense on my own.
But at heart, was I really just a brat because it was how I’d been raised? Looking back at my life, I’d never truly been satisfied with what I had on offer. I always wanted more or less than I had. Why even now, with popularity, money and a perfect partner—the lifestyle revered and exalted by most—did I still pick fault and look for areas to improve?
“You don’t look well, Emmy.” Speaking to me for the first time since my lecture in the hospital, Esme pulled a bottle of water from her handbag and haplessly tossed it onto the bench next to me. Despite the vast space available, she sat so closely to my mother she may as well have been sitting on her lap.
“I’m fine,” I lied, training my gaze over her shoulder to look out of the window opposite. The stretch of road leading up to Caroline’s boutique was surprisingly clear, almost eerily so. Large sections of tarmac were bordered off by plastic barricades and edged by temporary traffic lights, though not a w
orkman in sight. A clever ruse, and one that stank of Henry Tudor. “Let’s just get this nip and tuck over with, and then go about our days as normal.”
Whatever the hell ‘normal’ was.
Even with the measures in place to keep the street as quiet as possible, we were taken straight to a back room in Caroline’s shop to stay out of sight; a studio or workshop of some sort which was clearly her operation central.
Tall wraps of fabric hung from what looked like giant toilet roll holders, taking most of the wall space on two sides of the room. Others stood upright, supported by floor-fastened spikes close to a massive well-lit workbench that looked much like the light box table in my own studio. A needlessly extensive collection of sewing machines were lined up idly on a shelf underneath a large arched window overlooking nothing worth noting, while one single Singer machine clattered loudly through what was surprisingly a generally cluttered and disorganised work area.
“Oh, you’re here.” Caroline didn’t stand to greet us. Those three words were all the acknowledgement we received before her assistant came swooping in. Whatever she said to us didn’t hit home, my mind too caught up in watching the mistress stitch up fabric at a furious rate. She was skilled, there was no denying that.
Shame she’s a massive bitch.
Did... did you just initiate a conversation with me?
... No.
Yeah, you did! Watch out people, she’s about to crack!