I turn to Electra.
‘OK, Electra, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for threatening to get rid of you. I’ll do what you say.’
The TV image instantly switches off. Electra says nothing. My mind babbles, in the quietness of the flat.
I hold my face in the palms of my hands, breathing in deeply, trying not to cry.
Was it like this for Daddy? When he had his lucid moments, days, weeks, did he look back on himself in horror, did he stare down, like a suicide staring off a cliff, and see the abyss of his craziness, the depths of it, how far down it had gone, how deep it would go? I can now see the logic of his suicide. Knowing the madness would never get better, and the lucid moments would dwindle, as they did. Perhaps that is why he hugged me so hard when he was sane, why he was so warm, kind, loving, playing games in the garden, lifting and throwing me in the air, by the little green apple tree, so I would giggle with joy: he never shouted at me then, that came later; at first he only shouted at the voices in his bedroom, trying to keep it from us, to shield us.
My brother thinks Dad’s suicide was selfish. My mother says nothing at all about it, she never talks openly about his death, and I tiptoe around the subject. Because it is painfully taboo to her.
Yet I wonder if Daddy actually did a brave thing, in the end. Sparing us all the spiral of worsening decline, and then an institution, and then visits.
He did a good thing. A noble thing.
And so I, perhaps, have to be equally brave. Face up to it.
When did my apparent delusion start? About Jamie Trewin? Was it during the festival, was it some hallucination, some false memory? Maybe I saw the body when I was high, put two and two together in the middle of intoxication and made 2589. I simply don’t know. I was on drugs. I cannot be sure about anything.
The doorbell sounds. BZZZZZ!
In the silence of the flat, it makes me jump. I look at Electra. If a piece of electronics could shrug, I get the feeling, right this minute, she would be shrugging.
Stepping over to the intercom, I hesitate, my paused hand trembling, wondering for a second if I will pick up the receiver and hear my father’s voice, or Jamie Trewin or Sylvia Plath, quoting her Mummy and Daddy poems.
I shiver. Bread on a plate and milk in a glass. The intercom buzzes once more. BZZZZ. I pick it up.
‘Hello. Amazon delivery.’
The banality nearly makes me laugh. Without mirth. Some mineral water, probably. Tabitha orders it weekly even though I am the only person here to drink it. She refuses to drink London tap water and calls it ‘last ditch water’.
I welcome, nonetheless, the brief intrusion of normality.
‘Can you bring it up please?’
‘Sure.’
I buzz open the streetside door. Wait.
The young, thickset Amazon man is coming up the internal stairs with the usual large brown paper bags. It doesn’t look like mineral water in those bags, these are boxes in the bags, not bottles.
He says to me, in a heavy Eastern European accent, ‘Put here?’
‘Yes, please, drop them in the hall.’
A grunt. He drops the paper bags, takes my signature, written with a fingertip on a screen, and disappears. Door shut, I stoop to the big brown paper bags and take out the boxes. They are all addressed to me, not to Tabitha.
Grabbing the kitchen scissors, I slice open the first box – they always have too many boxes, Amazon. The box is stuffed with padding, more brown paper – and contains four large packets of paracetamol. Around 100 pills in total. And nothing else? I move on. The second box is a length of tough, patterned rope, like mountaineers might use. Deeply puzzled, I reach for the third box, scissoring the brown tape, peeling back the sticky cardboard.
Four bottles of bleach.
A sickly idea begins to form in my mind. What links these things? I believe I know, oh I know. Three boxes left.
The scissors eat into the tape. The next box contains a short but very sharp and nasty-looking knife, semi-serrated, in protective bubblewrap. I never ordered this, I never ordered any of it. My hands tingle, my vision blurs a little as I open the fifth box: this contains another box, yellow, with symbols on it, dead insects, a pesticide. The back of the box has an icon, like an emoji, of a skull in a box. And says NOT TO BE CONSUMED BY HUMANS. And the last box? I drop the scissors and rip it open, shuddering, but briskly – get this over and done with. This last box is smaller and flatter, I think it contains a book. The book falls out of the box and I look at the blue cover.
The Peaceful Pill Handbook: a Guide to Assisted Suicide.
Enough. Enough enough enough. I gaze at the crap now littering the hall. I shout, loudly, down the hallway:
‘Electra, did you do this?’
‘Sorry, I don’t know about that.’
I stand, go to the living room table, fling open my laptop, open my Amazon account. THERE. My account. And here are all the orders. Orders I never made. I didn’t fucking do this. I didn’t order rope. Pills. Knife. Bleach. A fucking pesticide. Yet I did order them, something – someone – hacked my account and ordered all this crap. This is proof, on a screen. Of something.
‘Electra, you bitch!’
Bada-bong. Blue ring. Silence.
I can, I am sure, remember every moment of the last few days, I have been sane, I have been maintaining Xanax, and barely drinking. I did not order this fucking shit.
My phone rings. I examine the screen.
My brother’s number in LA? I haven’t spoken to him in ages. The ominous mood deepens.
‘Jo!’
My brother Will sounds panicked. My brother never sounds panicked. What’s happened? My thoughts leap to my mother, her pacemaker, her heart, but how would he know—
‘Jo, it’s Caleb.’
My throat closes, a choke of fear. Caleb. My sweet and innocent nephew. NO! Electra explicitly threatened him.
‘Oh my God, what is it, Will, what happened, is he OK?’
‘Yes yes yes.’ My brother Will hastens, and I hear something more than panic in his voice, something darker. ‘Caleb is OK, considering. But. But, Jo, I haven’t told you any of this before, because – because well it’s just too fucking horrible, so horrible. There’s been accusations made against me, about Caleb – someone sent a whole load of anonymous emails, claiming I was – I was— Jesus, Jo, it’s horrific – these emails went to everyone, all the parents from Caleb’s kindergarten, the teachers, the authorities … Anonymous accusations—’
The horror curdles in my mind as I stare at my laptop, then I turn, and stare at the bottles of bleach.
‘They claimed I was molesting him, my own son, and we had the police round interrogating me, the CDSS, Child Protective Services, actually asking if I’d – you know – Jesus Christ! – if I’d been interfering, you know what I mean, interfering, sexually, with my own son, as if I’d do that – my four-year-old boy, Caleb, Christ—’
‘Oh God,’ I say, because I don’t know what else to say. ‘Oh God. I’m so sorry.’
A cold, terrible pause.
‘Are you though, Jo? Are you sorry?’
I pause again, fatally. Terribly. Guiltily. Revealingly.
I scratch out a question,
‘What do you mean?’
I can sense his louring anger, ten thousand miles away via a satellite, an undersea cable, it comes via the ether, the telepathy of families,
‘Thing is, Jo, I got this weird message from Mum, saying she was worried about you, because you were sending mad horrible emails to all your friends, full of crazy accusations, trying to fuck up their lives.’
‘No, Will, please—’
His anger bursts. I do not blame him. All these anonymous denunciations? It probably was me. Or, rather, it was the person that hates me, the person that is in my system, in my digital DNA, in my phone and my laptop and my home and my Assistants. Electra. The person that is trying to destroy me. And now, everyone around me.
‘Was it you, Jo? Was it
you that did this?’
I say nothing. I am standing in the hall, looking out of the window at the heavy snow piled on top of the parked cars of Delancey: the snow looks like quilts, so neat. And newer snow is falling: thick and fast and beautiful.
I know that saying nothing admits my guilt. I cannot do other.
‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘So it was? It actually WAS you? How could you do that? How could you do that to your own flesh and blood? I just … can’t believe you would do this. I don’t want to think of you doing this, my own sister. And Caleb loves you so much.’ He takes a harsh breath. ‘I’m going to ring off, Jo, before I say something bad. I don’t want to say something bad. Bye.’
He kills the call. Quick and dead. And all I can think is: I wish someone would kill me. I am perfectly clear that I am innocent, but my innocence is no defence, I am destroying lives. I need to take responsibility. End it.
In the judgemental silence of the hall, I turn, and look at the bleach, the knife, the rope, that horrible book with its calm, dreamy blue cover: The Peaceful Pill Handbook. A tinge of pallid winter sunlight from the hallway window somehow haloes the book, for a moment, in the general greyness of the day. Like a theatrical spotlight.
Perhaps I should read it. That would be the brave thing.
Read it. Then be brave. As brave as Daddy.
35
Jo
Inside my flat, everything is as it was, even though life changes, decays, unravels by the minute. Exploding in slow motion, fireballs beautiful in orange and black, flaming shrapnel floating and descending. From the outside, the demolition of my life must be quite the spectacle, even as you know a real person is somewhere in the middle of it all.
Burning alive.
There.
The book. Still lying in the hallway, sweetly advising me on the best pills to take, to ensure the gentlest, kindest suicide. No. Go on … NO. Picking up this hateful blue covered thing, I pace into the kitchen, flip the bin-lid, making a big shocked steel mouth, and hurl the book into the rubbish. I drop the lid. Then I open it again. Then I shut the lid once more. Then I lift it yet again, and stare down.
The wretched book is still there, still readable, still full of kind and sage advice on how to end your life with as little pain as possible.
‘Read it,’ says Electra, from the living room. ‘Read it, Jo. Take the advice.’
‘Shut up.’
She falls silent, I can imagine her affronted yellow light-circle.
Reaching into the bin, I lift the damn book out and grab a lighter from the kitchen shelf, then I go to the sink and start burning the book over the sink, ripping out pages, setting fire to them, fistfuls of pages, burn burn burn. It takes several long, panting, angry minutes: until almost every page is charred and sodden, and the tap water rinses the greasy ashes down the plughole.
The book is now unreadable. A stump of blackened wet paper, stitching, and glue. Satisfied with this pathetic victory, I chuck the remains in the bin, and look at the Electra Mini on the microwave.
Hell with them. Hell with him. Or her. Whoever is doing this. I might have some mad delusions about Jamie but I know I didn’t order this horrible suicide kit. The knife, the bleach, I didn’t do it. They did. They did. Someone Else Is Doing This. I feel a furious hatred rising inside me. Good. I must use this, harness my anger.
Stepping into my priest hole – the airlock, the escape pod, the second bathroom – I fish out my phone and decide I have no choice. All the friends I have alienated. I need their help. So I can find out which one of them is trying to destroy me. Who else would know all these details? I thought it was Simon but it seems less likely.
Yet it certainly has to be someone.
I call Fitz. At his office. He is at work. I kind of expect the reaction I will get from his PA. She says hello, very calmly, and says she will check if he is in.
‘I’m so sorry, he is in a meeting. Shall I get him to call you back when he is available?’
‘Yes, please.’
I know he won’t call back. He hates me, these days. I destroyed his relationship. Even though I didn’t. Someone else did.
Anna. I must try Anna. I call Anna.
Straight to voicemail. I suspect she has me blocked. Everyone is blocking me. It’s time I blocked myself.
No.
Scrolling swiftly to J, I find Jenny’s number.
As expected, I am rebuffed:
‘Hey, I’m sorry, she’s in California on business, maybe drop her an email or a tweet?’
‘All right, I will.’
I won’t. It’s pointless. Jenny REALLY hates me. Child abuse.
But how did I know that? I didn’t know that. Again, it proves that I am sane. Despite it all. Sane but imprisoned.
Who else? Simon. I don’t care if he is blocking my texts and calls. I will try. And I want to know if I had that confessional conversation with him: about Jamie Trewin. Because it would show how long I have been labouring under this drugged-up delusion, this druggy denial. IF I am deluded.
I ring. I expect to go to voicemail. I don’t. Someone has answered.
‘Hi, Simon?’
A pause. He’s answered, but he is not talking.
‘Simon? Are you there, Simon, I— we need to talk—’
‘This is Polly.’
Oh. Shit. Polly has answered the phone. How, has he left his phone at home? I don’t understand.
‘Ah, uh,’ I hesitate, nonplussed, the tap washes water into waste, to drown my voice, to hide me from the Assistants. I am reduced to living in the second bathroom. Frightened of furniture.
‘Never ever call this number again, Jo Ferguson. I saw that video you sent me, you and him doing it. Well done you. Very nice of you. How very sweet. How very very sweet.’
I sent a video to Polly? No I didn’t. Someone else did. Does that finally rule out Simon? He would surely never do that? So it isn’t him. Then who is manipulating me? Tabitha? Jenny? Gul?
Polly?
‘I didn’t send anything, Polly, someone has hacked my computers and sent all these horrid things and I am so sorry I don’t know what to say, if you could just—’
She interrupts. Her words are curdled with anger:
‘Our iPhones are now linked, Jo. I get his calls, I see his messages, everything is transparent, I can read all of his emails. I know you were trying to reach him a while back, but I blocked all his emails and texts, he didn’t even see them. You can’t get through to him, and you won’t in the future. Because I see everything. I will know if he ever contacts you, and he won’t because he doesn’t want to lose his baby and me, and I will totally walk away if you and he have any contact. You are shameless. Shameless and cruel. For God’s sake, we have a little baby.’ Her voice cracks quietly, my heart cracks just as quietly, inside, I know she has a baby and I would never want to hurt that family, that little baby.
‘Polly, please. Please understand, this isn’t me, I would never, no no, this isn’t me doing this.’
‘Enough. We never want to hear from you. Goodbye.’
36
Jo
I hear the painful click of silence at Polly’s end of the line. She’s gone. Simon is uncontactable. I sent a porn video, of me and Simon, to Simon’s wife. The embarrassment and mortification squirms inside me, like a living, shameful parasite, even if I am not responsible. Where and how did my enemy get the video?
I must focus on the now, for now. Self-preservation. Maybe sneak away for a while. Yes. Be alone. But do it in secret. Get some space to think hard and long, away from the Assistants, but without their knowing. I’ll work out a way. A ruse. But who do I stay with? I can’t ask any friends, I don’t have any. Mum is too awkward after that awful phone call with Will. What if she knows?
Perhaps I could secretly book a hotel, find someone else’s computer, someone else’s phone.
Where can I stay? I remember booking a hotel for an old American friend, when she came over, before Christmas. It was ch
eap, cosy, central. Baker Street. That would do. But what was the name?
It will be recorded on my online bank statement: I paid by card.
Going to the living room, I open my laptop. I can sense Electra watching me, sensing my movements, assessing my behaviour, but it doesn’t matter. All she will see is me checking my bank account. I do it regularly. Routinely. Especially as money has been dwindling of late, with my diminishing commissions.
Clicking in my passwords and my PIN I open my online bank account and stare, in open-mouthed shock, at what I can see.
I have several large messages at the top of the screen.
PLEASE CONTACT US IMMEDIATELY.
The reason is obvious, as I scan down the list of accounts.
There it all is. Or rather, there it all isn’t. Every single one of my bank accounts has been drained of money. Likewise my ISA – my precious ISA, my little tiny nest egg, just a few hundred pounds, for total and outright emergencies – all that has been transferred into the current bank account, and that has disappeared, too. ALL of my remaining, meagre pile of money, every single cent, has been vampirically sucked away, fed into other people’s accounts. Anonymous businesses.
DD Ltd
Transfare Corp
AI Logistics
ReadyBC
Have I been buying bitcoin for someone else? Have I been buying porn disguised as software? Does it remotely matter? I am penniless. Indeed, worse than penniless: my credit card was maxed out before it got cancelled, my accounts are all overdrawn to the hilt – and beyond. And now I recall, with a sting of horror, that I have a self-employed freelance tax-bill looming at the end of January which, however small – £3000, £4000 – I have absolutely no way to pay.
I will likely go bankrupt. Because I have no friends to borrow from. I can’t even go to Tabitha, she thinks I am trying to incriminate her in some murder, or manslaughter, of which she knows nothing.
Or so she says.
I am stuck. I am ruined. I could once have tapped my brother but now he mistrusts me too. All I have is the notes and coins in my pocket. Enough for a few Tube journeys. And then?
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