How to Kill Your Family

by Bella Mackie

  * * *

  For all that I found killing Lee to be the most painstaking of the lot, the aftermath was delightful. If the waiting around in posh bars and enduring the sight of naked strangers degrading themselves was a trial, the newspaper coverage of his death more than made up for it. News broke on Monday morning, just as I headed into work. ‘Tycoon’s brother dies in sex game gone wrong’ splashed the Daily Mail. ‘Kinky Artemis found dead in sex dungeon’ was the Mirror’s preferred angle. Even the Guardian couldn’t resist, though their headline needed work. ‘Businessman’s brother dies in accident’ buried the lede a little I thought. Still, I appreciated the word accident, which all the papers seemed to emphasise. Quick work from the Artemis family PR there, calling it a tragic accident and vainly attempting to muddy the waters as to why this billionaire’s brother was found dead at a sex club in Mile End. ‘It’s so inexplicable,’ said one unnamed family friend, ‘Lee was a happily married man and loved nothing more than weekends in the countryside with close friends. I can only imagine that he was still grieving the devastating death of his son Andrew. We can never know what such a loss can do to a person.’ Nicely done, I thought. You can’t say anything too critical once someone has invoked a dead kid, can you?

  The media coverage trundled on for a few days, but the family machine was in gear, shutting down anyone likely to speak, and the coroner’s report didn’t give them much else to go on. I did feel a pang of regret for not dressing up the scene a little more. An orange in the mouth, or a choice pair of stilettos would’ve given the press a few more inches of coverage, but I’d let sense prevail on balance. No need to get cocky with it. I wanted him dead, and I wanted him dead in a way that would be hastily glossed over. I found myself thinking of Lara a lot over the next few weeks. I wondered whether she was secretly, or perhaps not so secretly, relieved. The loss of her son would have been immense. But the loss of a philandering manchild husband who treated her callously for decades probably felt like a gift. Perhaps now she could detach herself fully from the Artemis family and fulfil the potential she had before she came into contact with them all. I was imagining a future for her, which was strange for me, given that she was still on my list. But the more I turned it over in my mind, the more I lost any heart for it. In many ways, she seemed like as much of a victim as my mother, her life swallowed up by a selfish and thoughtless man who cared little for her happiness if it didn’t involve his own. And more practically, there would doubtless be an iron-clad prenup involved, exempting her from any claim to Simon’s fortune, which meant that I wouldn’t have to worry too much about losing out on my final bonus.

  My decision was made on the day of the funeral, a private affair which ended up being a total free-for-all, with minor celebrities, a few fashion faces, and a host of burly businessmen all turning up to the Church of St Peter in Kensington to be seen paying their respects. I don’t know how much respect there actually was in the congregation, but that wasn’t the point for these people. I’d read about it in the morning paper, had taken a long lunch break – saying I had a dentist appointment – and hopped on the Tube to see whether I’d be able to get in. It was too easy really, the silent men in black polo-necks standing outside with earpieces didn’t question a young woman smartly dressed in black who walked in with purpose behind a woman wearing a full fur coat and diamonds that even Joan Collins would’ve found gaudy.

  I sat at the back, of course, and studied the programme with my head bowed as the guests poured in. From time to time I looked around, spotting Janine and Bryony at the front. Bryony was looking at her phone as surreptitiously as possible, while Janine talked to a grey-haired man wearing a blue pinstripe suit to her left. When she turned around and saw what her daughter was doing, she grabbed the phone off her and put it in her bag, saying something to Bryony, her mouth pursed hard. Janine was magnificent. Her hair was blow-dried so perfectly that it barely moved as she turned her head, the glossy caramel highlights tucked behind ears which held enormous emerald gobstoppers. She was wearing a cream silk blouse, which I couldn’t see enough of to judge, and her nails were painted a deep red. The money she spent was on full display, in a way that she evidently thought was subtle yet unmissable. But her clothes only told one part of the story. Even from the back of the church, I could see the work of the surgeon’s knife all over her face. The nose-job was OK, a procedure done many years ago when the gold standard was to remove any suggestion of character and leave just a girlish tip. But there was nothing else subtle here, her skin was pulled taut over the cheekbones, which made her eyes look small and angry. Her mouth had been puffed up so that it was always slightly open. And her skin had a waxy sheen, as though she were wearing a mask of her face over her face. The whole effect was to make her look grotesque. A face which only looked normal if everyone else you knew also looked like that. So I guess living in Monaco worked well for Janine. But under the light streaming in through the lovely ancient windows in the church, she just looked faintly frightening.

  The ceremony started very late, perhaps fitting for a man who never needed to be anywhere on time. The last people to come in were Lara, Simon, and a man I didn’t recognise, who took Lara’s arm when she stepped into the church and rubbed her shoulder reassuringly. Simon frowned slightly, and walked behind them as they made their way to the front where a surprisingly young vicar awaited them.

  Lara looked nothing like the broken woman that Lee had made her out to be. She walked with her back straight, in a burgundy trouser suit and bright pink shoes which, on any other day, I’d have been tempted to ask her the origins of. The man who accompanied her towards the altar was almost the opposite of her husband. Tall, slim, wearing a well-cut but slightly crumpled charcoal suit and good shoes. He had brown hair flecked with grey and wore small, rimmed glasses. He wouldn’t have stood out anywhere else, but in here the contrast was striking. He looked like a professor in a room full of wheeler-dealers.

  The service was boring, traditional, hymns and readings, blah blah. The casket sat at the front, draped in a gold silk scarf, and people stood by it to talk about how Lee was a true character, the life and soul of any party. It was all platitudes, there was nothing said that spoke to his real qualities as a person. When the last hymn was done, the vicar stood up to give a final address, but he faltered and I craned my neck to see what was happening. Lara had stood up, said something to him and walked over to the casket. The vicar sat back down and there was a moment of silence while the congregation waited for Lara to speak. She stood there for a second, and smoothed down her trousers with her hands, looking slightly ill at ease. I began to realise that this wasn’t planned, and checked the programme again for any mention of the grieving widow. Nothing. Oh boy.

  ‘Thank you all for coming,’ she said quietly. ‘My husband would’ve enjoyed being told how fantastic he was by so many people.’ There was muted laughter. ‘But he wasn’t really though, was he? Sure he was up for a night out. Many nights out actually. Any. But he wasn’t a decent human being by anyone’s definition. You liked him because he paid the bill at the end of the night, or because he invested in your companies, brought you on holidays, maybe even just because he might do one of those things. But I lived with him, and dealt with his selfishness and his disrespect. Daily. It was daily. For years.’ She looked down at the coffin at her side. ‘I was young when we met, too young really. And he was charming, but you all know how charming he could be, don’t you? How easy it was to ignore his worst instincts. But unchecked, they grew and grew, didn’t they? When our daughter died, Lee’s reaction was to go on a three-day bender, eventually coming home – high – with a 19-year-old Latvian girl wearing hot pants and asking our housekeeper to make them breakfast. I put it down to grief, stupid as it sounds. But when our son died years later, he did something similar. You’ve got to give him credit for consistency. It turns out he was a cruel and heartless person with a good front. But I was worse in a way. Because I stayed with him and enabled his behaviour.
And now he’s dead, by his own hand. Dead through the constant pursuit of his own pleasure. And I can’t stand here and listen to his life being totally rewritten. You can’t get anything out of him now, so stop. Just stop.’

  Lara shook slightly, with adrenaline I thought, not sadness. People were bowing their heads and biting their lips. The awkwardness was all-encompassing. It was wonderful. The tall man in glasses stood up and took her hand, and together they walked down the aisle and out of the church. If I could’ve clapped, I would have. Instead, I followed them out as the vicar stood up and desperately attempted to regroup. Outside, Lara and the professor type were locked in a tight hug. I heard him shower her with praise, stroking her hair and kissing her cheek. She looked up and gave a small watery smile before they walked down the steps together and got into a waiting Mercedes. I knew then, as I watched the car pull out and drive off, that I would let her be. Enough had been taken from her, by Lee, by me. The women who managed to get themselves ensnared by this family weren’t my main target. My own mother was one of them, after all. She might never know it, but Lara saved her own life that day.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Oscar Wilde wrote De Profundis in the last three months of his two-year jail stint. It’s much lauded – a love letter (of sorts) to Lord Alfred Douglas in which he alternately rails against and embraces his subject. It’s Oscar Wilde, so I daresay it has its merits (his supposed deathbed line, ‘This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do,’ is undeniably good), but he was also an educated white man, so the bar for genius isn’t set impossibly high here.

  Wilde slept in a tiny cell on a bed with no mattress. He was given an hour out of his cell to exercise each day and was permanently hungry. By all accounts prison nearly broke him. He died three years after his release.

  I know it’s easy to envisage me lying on a comfy bunk, seeing a games console that the tabloids seem to insist every prisoner receives immediately upon entering jail. Picturing me in a cosy sweatshirt, watching Netflix on a flatscreen, eating the Mars bar that I bought from the tuck shop with my weekly allowance. So many people imagine themselves to be liberal, open-minded, progressive. The type who might even argue across a dinner table about the merits of not punishing prisoners but instead educating them out of crime, who vaguely mentions the Nordic model without knowing what that means. But inside, in the part of their mind that they won’t admit to, they still think that those of us who end up behind bars are scum, even if that word makes them shudder when said out loud. They do. It’s the same part of a person that feels secretly sorry for women in hijabs and makes them swerve when they see a staffie in the park. Donate to Amnesty and never tell anyone that they’re glad that prison walls are solid and high, or that they executed a tiny, righteous nod when they read that the Tory government voted to extend prison sentences for first-time offenders.

  And the worst part of it is, they’re not entirely wrong. Prisoners are scum. Well, from my experience of this place they are. These women are missing a few layers of the varnish of civilisation. They have bad teeth, wild eyes, a habit of yelling aggressively, despite the time. Given half the chance, they would ignore every structure put in place by the ruling classes and live by unspoken rules that you do not know. It’s fascinating to watch, but I’ll be beefing up my home security once I’m released.

  Now that I’ve conceded on this, let me go back to the games consoles and comfort. There the liberal hypocrite would be wrong. Oscar Wilde’s cell, despite its lack of mattress, looks pretty similar to mine all these years later. Yes, I have a thin lumpy roll of polyester to lie on, but there’s no TV, there’s no vending machine and I still have to endure the horror of Wednesday afternoons. Like clockwork, three hours after Kelly has chowed down on the chilli con carne that gets served up on a Wednesday lunchtime (every week in prison you get served the same rota of meals, much like at school only without proper cutlery since the fork stabbing incident of 1996 that still gets talked about), she is to be found on the toilet in our tiny cell, moaning and wheezing for up to half an hour. She does not consider that perhaps chilli con carne does not agree with her. She does not consider that this traumatic performance does not agree with me.

  As with Wilde, we too get one official hour for exercise each day. Most of the women here don’t bother. I use it. I need it. I set my entire day by it. In my normal life, i.e., the one where I lived in a flat filled with natural light, stocked with good wine you can’t buy at Tesco, and stuffed with books that aren’t recommended by women’s magazines, I ran every day. I ran to get rid of rage, to zone out my constant thoughts, to batter any dark moods and, let’s be honest, to stay thin. The women in here aren’t too fussed by that last point, as proved by their inexplicable eagerness for chilli con carne, and they seem to think that their rage gives them character, as shown by the regular 5 p.m. scuffles. That seems to be the exact time every day when my compadres realise that they are incarcerated. As though they were doing some mundane 9–5 and readying to go home and slump in front of the telly and then it hits them that there is no going home. That Groundhog Day moment happens every day, with nobody ever learning from experience. It’s when the walls really close in here.

  I cannot run, since I refuse to do tiny laps in the sports yard like a pathetic hamster, so I do burpees, squats, star jumps, weights – anything to get my heart pumping. Anything to exhaust me enough that I’ll sleep through Kelly’s snoring. One hour of exercise a day is not enough for me in here. I must do two more in order to stay sane. I continue my regimen back in my cell when Kelly goes out to do one of her classes. Oscar Wilde doesn’t strike me as a man who spent much of his time inside wondering how to obtain a six-pack, but I’m not ashamed of my hunger for exercise in here. My arms, once sinewy and lightly toned by the yoga I did to supplement my running, are now gaining bulk. My legs, previously lean from running but without too much strength, now feel heavy and leaden – there’s no wobble anymore. The womanly softness is melting away. And I like it. This is none of that Instagram bollocks about ‘strong not skinny’ which really just hides an eating disorder in an obsessive exercise regimen – a Russian nesting doll of neuroses – I have this growing sensation of hardness, of armour, of being able to physically hurt someone with only my body and not just my wits. Men must feel this from birth. If I’d known how to use my physicality to take out my family, would I have gone a different way? Would it have been easier or more rewarding?

  Other than that, I go to the mandated therapy sessions. I endure Kelly and her cohort as best I can. And these last few days, I write. We might not get battered by the guards, or starved half to death (though I would argue that the canteen offerings make deliberate starvation seem like a valid option), but I’m not sure that Oscar Wilde suffered more than he would have now, with Kelly as a cellmate, forced to do pottery workshops, talk about trauma with a group of crying women wearing rubber sandals, and sit in our cells for hours every day while those around us scream and moan because government cuts mean that there aren’t enough guards to supervise us.

  Mainly, despite the popularity of TV shows about prison in recent years which seem to suggest that every minute is action packed, my stay has been dull. There are lesbian trysts, of course, there are occasional blow-up fights, but mostly it’s hours of lying down alone, counting the time in ten-minute increments, crawling towards another week, or month, or in some cases, years. I imagine you could stop counting at some point. But I cannot. To stop marking time would be to allow the possibility that I would be staying here for more of it.

  Despite all of this, nobody will compare my work to De Profundis. I am not a man for a start, and I’m certainly not delusional enough to think I’m an intellectual. I write no foolish love letters from my cell. I learn no big truths from being stuck in here. But neither will I emerge half broken. I will go on living, thriving, and this period of my life will not mark me.

  More than all of this, I believe I hold one further advantage over
Wilde. For all that Wilde’s writing about prison is held up as the most profound example of the genre, he spends much of it wallowing in despair about a man who has wronged him. Lord Douglas was said to be spoilt, entitled, careless with the feelings of others. He left Wilde’s love letters in clothing he gave to male prostitutes. He rejected their relationship and condemned Wilde after his death. Douglas sounds just like my father. Charming, arrogant, centre of the universe. Men who turn their lights full beam on you for a few seconds and leave you chasing that artificial warmth for the rest of your life. It wrecks you and doesn’t leave a mark on them. But I learnt that early. Wilde never did. Perhaps then, he could have learnt something from me. Never yearn for the light that some men will shine on you for the briefest of moments. Snuff it out instead.

  * * *

  Today I ate breakfast, cleaned the kitchens and then went to meet up with Kelly and her friend Nico. I didn’t want to, but Kelly had promised to buy me cigarettes from the weekly canteen service and smoking is the best thing you can do in here. In the outside world, it’s almost entirely frowned upon now but here, fags are an effective way to make friends, curry favours, and cut through the boredom of prison. So I sat with them as we drank our tepid tea. Nico offered up something she promised was cake. Everything on offer is stodge, stodge, stodge with a side of jam. Everything is brown. It’s strange feeling my brain disengage with big picture stuff and obsessively focus on thoughts of meals I’d like to eat, clothes I’d like to wear. I want a bowl of pasta from La Bandita and I want to wear breathable fabric which ripples down my body rather than makes me worry about being anywhere near a naked flame. I think about baths at least ten times a day and I feel panic rising – my fingers scratching my collarbones – even as I try not to let this stuff overwhelm me. That’s leaning into it and I can’t let myself do that – I can’t get out of here and blink as I emerge into the light. I can’t spend time readjusting. I want to hit the ground running, not trying to get my brain back up to speed.