How to Kill Your Family

by Bella Mackie

  TURN IT UP, I message Pete. All the way. The bitch deserves it.

  God you really hate her huh? That story was mad, makes my stepmom sound like a fucking angel. Cranking now.

  Janine is trying to finish the R. Her perfectly coiffed hair is stuck to her face, which is mottled, parts turning a weird purpley blue. I sit there in the sun, one hand clenched around the phone, the other holding my neck so hard I can feel my eyes bulging. And then, as I watch, her finger slips down the glass, her head disappears from sight and there’s a loud thump. Silence. I down a glass of water. No movement.

  My phone beeps. That was DRAMATIC. I think she’s fainted now. Want me to release the doors?

  I signal to the waiter to bring me another glass of wine. Let’s do it.

  That thump wasn’t just her body falling to the floor. It was too loud. She’d hit her head. I check my watch, Lacey isn’t due back for another two hours. Enough time for her to suffer irreversible damage, if she wasn’t already dead. The door to the sauna opens, and steam pours out, obscuring the view for a minute. As the waiter brings me a fresh glass, I can see the bathroom slowly come back into focus. Janine’s feet are lying by the door to the sauna, her body slightly out of sight, inert and small. The shaky G was already fading away into nothing.

  Henry has slept through the whole thing. Truly, we don’t deserve dogs.

  * * *

  Well she died. The heat and the shock and the burns would have got to her, even if she hadn’t had a mild heart complaint. I guess no heart complaint is mild when you’re stuck in a furnace. God bless Lacey, who never asked a single question of me when I waited outside the promenade the next day. Did she suspect anything? Hard to say. I feigned shock and sympathy at the news. But Lacey seemed completely untroubled by the scene of horror that had greeted her. If anything, she was walking taller, no longer in her uniform but in jeans and a T-shirt, with gold flip flops showing off remarkably jazzy orange toenails. She picked up Henry and stroked his silky little ears.

  ‘I’m going to give you some money, Lacey, it’s the least I can do during this difficult time,’ I said, looking concerned. ‘Will you be going home now? Or will the family keep you on?’

  ‘Mr Artemis has given me a month’s pay and told me I can stay for a week, but it’s OK. Madame Janine’s best friend Susan called last night to ask me to come and work for her. She has a much bigger house up in the hills and she’s offering me more money. She told me she’s been planning to ask me to leave for a while.’ She smiled brightly. ‘And she’s not a bitch like the dead lady. And I’m taking Henry. Nobody will stop me.’ I waved her off, marvelling at the incredible chutzpah of Susan, a woman who hired her best friend’s housekeeper less than twenty-four hours after she had died. In another life we might have been friends.

  * * *

  Pete was a slightly trickier task. He didn’t go to pieces and panic about what we’d done as I worried might happen. Instead he was euphoric, wanting to go over and over the day’s events, sending me memes about barbecues and asking who we could target next.

  This could be a business baby, he texted me a week later, as I was drinking a glass of wine and contemplating what colour to paint my toenails. The hormones of a teenage boy are not to be messed with so I didn’t throw the phone in a river and disconnect from him entirely. The boy was infatuated and I didn’t want to test his tech limits so I handled it delicately. Mainly by finding God. A sudden flurry of bible passages every time he messaged me something flirtatious really slowed down the frequency of his contact. Nothing like a bit of smiting to get rid of a horny teenager’s spontaneous erection. But three months later and he wasn’t giving up entirely. He was still getting a trace high off the fumes of our adventure together and wouldn’t leave me be completely. So I took a rougher route. I pretended to have catfished him. I mean, I had catfished him, but I doubled down. Aware that a reverse image search would be easy for him, I joined an online chat forum where you could video chat with anyone on the planet and I clicked through until I found the gnarliest bloke who spoke basic English. I endured five minutes of his company, which mostly consisted of him gesturing at me to show him my breasts. I asked him to send me a selfie first, saved it to my phone and then deleted my account. With the resulting photo, which showed a bald man-mountain grinning and waving, I waited for the next suggestive (read – masturbating) video message from Pete. As sure as the sun rises, there was a wanking video within time. Immediately, I sent back the photo.

  ‘We are a collective. We have your pathetic videos and we have proof of what you did. Unless you want these files sent to your family you will cease contact and go back to your normal life. And be grateful every day that we allow this.’ He called twenty-two times that evening, but I did not pick up, sending the message again with a FINAL WARNING addendum. He replied saying that he would never tell a soul and begging me not to send his dad the videos. I guess for all his braggadocio, the kid couldn’t bear the idea of his dad thinking he had sent a twenty-stone middle-aged man jerk-off clips. He might have helped kill a stranger, but some things never change. The idea of a parent finding out you have a sex life was still much worse. And that was the last time I ever heard from ColdStoner17. That’s how teenage relationships should be. They burn short, but boy do they burn bright.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Kelly has a phone. She has been crowing about this for weeks now but only to me, the first time she’s been able to keep something quiet in her entire life I would imagine. Rightly, since if the other women here knew they’d do anything to get their hands on it. Kelly guards it fiercely, like a terrier with a bone. She hunches over it and types constantly, her long nails clacking away and the glow of the little screen just visible from under the covers. I don’t ask where or how she got it. I imagine the gormless Clint managed to get it to her somehow, but I can’t think what they have to say to each other that would require quite so much back and forth. I fervently hope it’s not sexual. I cannot stomach sharing a tiny space with someone having text sex with a man who gels his fringe. Normally Kelly is quite generous with her things but she hasn’t offered to let me borrow her new prized possession once. I wouldn’t ask even if I had anyone to call. You don’t want to be in hock to someone like Kelly. She might be a prize fluff-head but she wouldn’t hesitate to call in a favour. I try to block out the sound with a pillow over my head, wishing fervently that I could do the same to her.

  * * *

  Do you want to hear something funny? The first time I met my sister was in a nail salon. There was no planning, no carefully orchestrated scheme conjured up so that I could bump into her in an unsuspicious way. It was a completely random encounter, if such a thing exists. I don’t believe in fate, it’s not weird that two women of roughly the same age would cross paths in central London. Chance meetings don’t mean anything – there’s nothing intrinsically interesting to them, despite what your mate Sarah who’s really into horoscopes and tarot might insist. But it was funny. It was nice to have the work done for me for once. She belonged to a family who travelled in chauffeured cars and private planes, who had security gates and security dogs and a security detail. They lived ten feet above the rest of us. Unable to colonise another planet quite yet, the ultra-rich might be forced to inhabit the same vicinity as everyone else, but they are never quite within our grasp. They might be on the same street as you (only if that street is the Kings Road) but they are not experiencing it in the same way. Shop doors silently spring open for them in nanoseconds, pavements are merely a runway towards waiting cars, restaurants reveal private rooms, museums open at any time. The way you see a place is not the way they do. They are already moving on to the next thing by the time you’ve shaken the rain off your umbrella and begged the maître d’ for a table. You cannot touch them. And yet here she was, sitting next to me, asking for a gel manicure. Not saying please.

  Bryony Artemis has one of those faces you’ve seen before. I don’t mean that she looks like a girl you know – s
he absolutely doesn’t – but she’s got a look that social media has made ubiquitous. Pillowy lips, a bundle of glossy, wavy hair, a body encased in athleisure wear – far too thin, but one that the owner would go out of their way to say was strong, emphasising their biceps, their ‘booty’. The kind of skinny that some women profess not to think about as if it’s not all they think about. Women like Bryony look startlingly beautiful in photos but a bit ‘uncanny valley’ in real life. I love that description – the roboticist Masahiro Mori coined it in 1970 to describe our revulsion towards robots or computer-generated images that look almost like human beings … but not quite. The Bryonys of the world are flawless, their features plumped and filled and smoothed. In photos it works. In real life it’s deadening. It makes me long for the days of wonky breast implants and terrible facelifts when at least the insecurities that made women mutilate themselves were visible in their appearance. You could laugh at the Bride of Wildenstein or be sad that she did that to herself. This tribe can’t show anything with their faces, nothing that would drive you to feel empathy, pity, or even derision.

  She was wearing the kind of expensive trainers that have never seen the inside of a gym, skin-tight leggings with electric blue stripes down the side, and her tiny top half was swaddled in an enormous puffer jacket, not zipped up but wrapped around her and held in place by a giant cross-body bag. She looked like every other girl on Instagram. Except that the bag was Chanel, and she’d embellished the look with gold rings, diamond studs, and a small Rolex. The markers which show you that you’ll never be able to ‘shop the look’ because the look costs more than you earn in a year. The look costs more than your parents paid for their house. The look costs more than you’ll ever scrape together to buy your own house. I’m kidding, you won’t ever be able to buy a house.

  I knew it was her in seconds. I didn’t spend years watching her grow up online without knowing innately what she looked like from every angle. What a depressing waste of brain space. ‘What did you spend your twenties doing, Grace?’ ‘Well I watched an entitled airhead make vlogs about lip balm and I learnt all about her top five sunglasses shapes.’ Maybe I should off myself too.

  She was looking down and typing intently on her phone, with one hand stretched out in front of the manicurist as though she were giving her a gift. I wonder what the women who work in salons like this say about their clients at the end of the day. Do they rage about the rude customers who never make eye contact? Do they laugh at them? Or do they become so numb to it that it barely gets mentioned?

  I leant over and asked to borrow the varnish colour wheel, and she handed it over without looking up. One headphone dangled from her ear, signalling that she wasn’t available for conversation, a tactic I won’t judge since I use it myself. God bless the man (I’m guessing) who designed headphones not imagining that women the world over would use them to signal that they were unavailable to men who would try to engage us. The salon was buzzy in the way that women-only spaces always are, but I blocked it out and focused entirely on her. Watching Bryony was easy, she was like a dog who slows down for every passing stranger they meet, expecting that they will want to pet them. She was used to people looking admiringly at her, expected it, welcomed it. To be ignored would have been more disconcerting, I imagine. That didn’t mean she would look back of course. It simply meant that I had carte blanche to observe without being noticed. The adrenaline was whooshing around my body at this opportunity. I felt like I was wasting every second, I had to make something happen. Soon she’d glide out of the salon and hop straight into a warm car, while I sat here waiting for my nails to dry.

  This was my half-sister! What is meeting your long-lost sibling supposed to be like? I imagine you might examine each other nervously, make some stupid joke, tentatively reach for a hand. All preamble until you can eventually fall into each other’s arms – allowing yourself to acknowledge that this person’s existence was the missing piece of your life’s puzzle finally slotting into place.

  ‘OUCH!’ Bryony angrily pulled her hand away from the manicurist, looking down at her cuticle and rubbing it. ‘You’ve cut me, FFS. Can you be careful?’ The lady lowered her head and said sorry, though I couldn’t see any sign of blood. Bryony sighed and stretched out her hand again, as another lady hurried over from the reception desk. This woman, who I assume was the manager, bent over and looked at her fingers, examining the damage. ‘Sorry, miss, so sorry. I’ll get you some water, yes?’

  My sister didn’t look up again, but nodded in assent. She was scrolling through her Instagram feed, hitting like on several photos of blonde girls standing on leather banquettes in darkened nightclubs. Then she opened up the camera app, raised it towards her face and arranged her features into an expression of composed disdain. I watched as she took photo after photo, before finally appearing to settle on one, her slim fingers quickly flicking and swiping. Bryony sighed again, and set her phone down. She didn’t stop though, using her free hand to refresh the app again and again. I pulled my own phone out and opened up my own Instagram app. I use a pseudonym on it, a generic photo of a youngish mum with two small boys. My bio reads, ‘Wifey of one big fella and mum of two small terrors, living in Hertfordshire and always up for a (insert banal wine emoji here).’ I was fairly proud of the base level I got to here. Nobody will ever notice Jane Field watching their live videos more than once. Nobody will ever want to follow her back. I click on Bryony’s Instagram stories and it loads to reveal the photo I just watched her take – eyebrow raised in disgust, lip curled, heavily filtered to make her skin look almost shimmery. The message written over the top of the image reads, when you go for a much-needed relaxing manicure and the clumsy woman nearly slices your finger off. #badservice #moron.

  I tell you this just so it’s more obvious why the falling into each other’s arms reunion scenario was never going to be likely. I didn’t have any feelings towards her other than a complete, but detached, fascination. Would I have been like her had I grown up within the monied bosom of her family? Probably. How many fantastically rich people do you know that you admire? I mean the ones born into it, not Oprah. I don’t kid myself that I’d have done anything differently. Her cousin tried, bless him, but he wasn’t really carving out his own life with those frogs. He was just rejecting the life that he was given, a life that was powerful and all encompassing – one that he’d have had to battle to stave off for the rest of his life. And that fight would have been exhausting. One day, when he was tired of living in a series of grim flat-shares and helping hideous animals that showed him no thanks, his father would have asked him for dinner. And worn down, he’d have revealed a chink in the armour he’d developed to protect him from the evils of his previous life. A little help would’ve been offered – nothing too much you understand – his family would have known how far they could push it. Perhaps just covering the rent that month, for example. And he’d have taken it, wrestling with it but just wanting a break. From there, the door would have been opened. The Artemis family would have pulled him back in – his chosen path was an affront to theirs after all – and he’d have given up his resistance. Maybe he wouldn’t have sworn at staff and dated a succession of younger and younger models – he’d developed some moral compass despite his background – but he’d have ended up running an arm of the company, perhaps throwing regular charity fundraisers to make the process less crushing.

  Andrew couldn’t fully escape it and Bryony had fully embraced it. I’m sure I’d have ended up somewhere in between.

  The manicurist painted my nails a deep red, the same colour my sister was having applied. There’s nothing frivolous about these small rituals that women all around the world indulge in – they’re a brief escape from the labour we take on. A tiny respite from a society which forces us to carry the emotional labour and carve out a professional path, while showing that we’re not too emotional. Nail varnish is not vapid. It’s a lacquer, a protective layer.

  I was being useless. I wasn’t g
aining anything from this chance encounter. I was just sitting there like a lump, dumbly watching Bryony focus on her phone, occasionally sigh, and constantly smooth down her hair. But then I realised that maybe the problem was not with me, perhaps there was just nothing really to learn about this girl. Maybe it’s like when women drive themselves insane wondering why a man they’re dating hasn’t called, ascribing reason after reason until they land upon something completely labyrinthian like, ‘He likes you so much but after losing his father at an early age he’s got complex issues with emotional intimacy and not calling is a sign that he’s actually falling in love with you and probably just needs space but not too much space – you should send him a gift of your own hair,’ when actually, he’s just completely forgotten all about you.

  I guess I didn’t really need to learn anything about her. With some of the family, I’ve sought to understand them better in order to get near enough to kill them. With Bryony, her entire life is lived online. I can see it all, there’s just not much to it. Normally the wealthiest people, I have learnt, don’t want to be on any annual rich lists. They don’t want to live in a spotlight where normal people know what they have and where they go. If the Artemis clan were like that my job would have been infinitely harder. That awful phrase ‘money talks, wealth whispers’ comes to mind. Happily, Bryony doesn’t just want to talk, she wants to scream. Specifically, on Instagram, all the time. Those dreary predictions everyone makes as though it’s original and not just an episode of some dystopian Netflix series about the bleak future where we’re all just existing through our phones? That’s actually Bryony’s life.