Precious You

by Helen Monks Takhar

  And now I have nothing.

  Because of you.

  I wanted to hate you from the start and now, finally, I really do. I never should have let you stop me with your smile, your fake interest in me, the friendship you manufactured when you saw how much I needed someone like you. You saw every fault in me, every void in my life, and you deliberately found a way to fill it. Then you fucked me and made it so my Iain is dead.

  I hate you and now I know what I have to do.

  I will follow you. I will track you along the route you made our taxi take, only a couple of months ago now, and I will make it so you don’t win in the end.

  I need you to die, Lily.

  I don’t care what happens to me after today.

  I’d like to have heard your version of the truth, so I could put you straight about what you think I may have done, but I have nothing now, and I care so little for tomorrow, I just want your shining life halted forever.

  I think of all those moments; the first time you said my name, the first time I let you off the hook, the first time you made me do something I didn’t want to, you cozying up to my Iain at The Brownswood, then straddling him at Greenings. As we edge up to De Beauvoir, along Kingsland Road, I think of Iain when I first shared my thoughts about you with him, how he’d let me down from the start. But then I remember how I’ll never feel his hands, his familiar weight on me again and my anger is replaced by pure, deadening grief.

  But I don’t cry. I never cry. I channel my sadness into rage. Strange, I think this is what you do too. I grip the wheel hard and worry about running out of road before I get to do what I need to do.

  Things are as black as it’s possible for them to be for me, but it’s such a bright morning, the light bouncing off buildings, all this glass in the City.

  Five cyclists have died on this junction. Five young lives, just like yours, lost right here where six major roads join in the middle of the City.

  Your back wheel fills my sight. I can almost smell your blood, running hot in you in the final moments before it gushes, cooling the moment it flows out onto the tarmac, before dripping into the waiting drains and down to an impassive Thames below.

  I know only when this happens can I really begin again. Just like when my mum died.

  The lights change to green. I slam my foot down hard on the accelerator.

  You turn. You’ve felt me there, behind you. You see me.

  You draw your breath in. Your eyes widen.

  “Katherine!”

  You say my name and it takes your whole face, from your cheeks, glowing with exertion in a vivid morning sun, to your shining black eyes. You believe I am going to kill you, just as I once lived in fear of you harming me.

  My dominance over you is total in this moment. You tried to unpick my life, but I could take yours off you entirely.

  I am above you.

  I am the most powerful person who has ever been in your world right now.

  I could wipe you out.

  Or, I could spare you.

  Because we’ve been through so much together.

  I can see it in your eyes; you see that too.

  No one else can understand us but each other.

  In a split second, it’s decided: I will use my power to allow you to live. Another chance for you. And me. We’re one and the same, aren’t we, Lily? That’s the problem. That’s the great thing about us. I’m in your head and you’re under my skin. The enjoyment of my victory would not outweigh the pleasure of allowing your life to continue. You won’t leave this earth yet. You won’t leave my life. It’s your lucky day.

  I channel my whole body weight onto the brakes and my car comes to a violent halt that makes my own neck snap over the wheel and back again. I manage to catch my breath enough to wind down the window to speak to you in the now-stationary traffic.

  “You,” you say, still afraid.

  “Yes, but you don’t need to—”

  And I notice the dump truck in the background. It seems larger than it should, filling the frame of the road scene behind you as it blunders through an amber light before the junction.

  It happens in slow motion.

  It’s as if you’re being rolled backward into some mangle. You’re being robbed from the road by the legs first. Then the rest of you disappears from my sight.

  I can’t look.

  I can’t breathe.

  I can’t move.

  A chorus of indignant horns. People who don’t know why they can’t push on through the rush hour and carry on the tracks of their normal lives; people who don’t realize the tear in the universe opening up in the road ahead of them. Then screams. People flow toward where you are, but I have to get away from you. I mustn’t be blamed for something I didn’t do.

  * * *

  —

  I GET BACK to my spot in the deliveries entrance off Stoke Newington Church Street. Shaking. My car won’t start again. I know that. I have no petrol and no money. All I can do now is hope my phone will somehow ring with news of you before it too runs out of power.

  Someone does call, Iain’s solicitor, now your guy. It’s clear he doesn’t know what’s happened to you yet.

  “It’s Mr. Okoh, Ms. Fretwell’s solicitor.”

  “Who?”

  “Ms. Lily Fretwell’s solicitor, in regard to the property at number thirty-two—”

  “I think I know my own address after more than twenty years.”

  “Would you—”

  I hang up and ignore his calls. My home isn’t my priority now.

  Because now I know your real name.

  It’s the skeleton key to your digital life and how quickly its locks yield now that I have it. I use the dying power of my phone to discover what had happened to your life before you came to my bus stop that morning.

  * * *

  —

  FRETWELL. UNUSUAL, but not posh like I’d imagined.

  Yours is a very modern downfall tale. Funny, I think I actually read about your case in the Daily Mail or somewhere like it. An unambiguously bright life royally screwed by a youthful folly that would have been consigned to microfiche in an out-of-town library had it happened “in my day.” But the day is now yours and people like you leave a dirty digital trail behind you wherever you go.

  You were writing an article for some college rag. Once I’d read the trial coverage, I found the original piece: “Getting away with it: women and the art of negging.”

  The strategy of deploying a backhanded compliment or kicking off an interaction with a low-rent insult, then following up with a higher-grade compliment has been long deployed by male pickup artists (PUAs). Remarks are pitched to undermine confidence and to gain the victim’s approval with the ultimate goal being to have sex with the negging victim. Could reporter Lily Fretwell bag a male beauty using the method? There was only one way to find out…

  Then a sorry escapade. You’d singled out a rugger bugger type, some nice but dim fullback, and rolled out some questions designed to bewitch and undermine in equal measure. Sounds familiar. Must have felt like the perfect assignment for you. I recognized your modus operandi: build me up, knock me down, throw me a crumb of your attention. How easily I’d fallen. But it was clear you had a skill here.

  I wonder whether you’d pitched the negging article idea, or if your arm shot up at the features conference when your editor asked for a volunteer. Whichever way it was, I could see this was your perfect assignment: getting inside someone’s insecurities, homing in on who they wanted to be, who they needed you to be, then weaponizing all this against them. The coverage suggests you really fucked with the guy before you’d even laid hands on him. Your solicitor argued the physical assault happened because your (male) editor told you the splash was yours if you managed to get in his pants, literally, as people your age say all th
e time when they don’t literally mean it.

  It got to the end of your “date,” and he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going. You’ve “got inside his head.” You go to kiss him good night and you grab his cock. The trial coverage says he claims he told you “No.” He told you to stop repeatedly. He was upset, confused. Whatever secrets you’d got him to divulge mixed him up pretty bad and you’d hoped that had made him pliable. You’d just left him bewildered. But you didn’t give up. You wanted to win your story, so you touched him again, attempting some kind of dry hand job, probably because you weren’t capable of believing anyone when they told you “No.” It was likely incomprehensible to you that someone would stand up to your demands, however warped they were.

  The boy eventually got away from you. He tells his housemates what you did to him. They convince him to speak to the university, who throw you out immediately once they’ve spoken to you and you apparently reveal “a telling attitude to consent and the nature of manipulation.” He goes to the police and it reaches court, his housemates testifying to the distress and psychological damage you wreaked on their friend. I bet you didn’t see that coming, did you? Someone calling you out, so publicly not doing your bidding, not falling into line, not being made complicit in their own undoing by you?

  You didn’t graduate. You holed up with your “successful businesswoman” aunt as you awaited sentencing. You were guilty of sexual assault, but you escaped custody. You presented remorse, though I do wonder how much of that involved batting your eyelids at the judge. There was a lack of previous convictions and, apparently, they accepted your “unsettled” childhood as a mitigating factor. But they still made you do ninety hours of community service and the whole sordid episode took your life off its tracks and exposed who you really were.

  There’s a comment under one of the news stories.

  Just wanna say, this does not surprise me whatsoeva. I was at school with LF and she used 2 pull this sh*t all the time. She did some proper mental gaslighting on my mate. Made her want to kill herself. I heard she moved on 2 making some boy lose himself over some dick pics. School got rid in the end, but she’s been getting away with this sh*t for 2 long. She’s been let off lightly IMHO. She shud get banged-up for things she dun.

  Gemma, the first morning, when I saw you in her office, her fingers gripping your shoulders, trying to force you to look into her eyes. She was telling you to behave yourself; be your best self. Leadership: your fresh start but also your final chance.

  It takes only a cursory search to find this: It is an offense for those convicted of a sexual offense to change their name or address without permission.

  Gemma and your mother flank you in the pictures of you leaving court, but you look so broken. Though in the picture your hair seems darker than today, your being so obviously alone means you’ve never looked more like me when I was younger. Seeing your image is like looking through a window, not into the recent past, but one long gone and buried deep.

  I want to dig up the truth of who you are and why you did what you did to me.

  But first, I want money.

  * * *

  —

  IT’S THE MORNING after the accident and I wonder if Gemma will show for work today. Then, a truly maddening thought. Are you already dead? Are they now “making arrangements” for you? Will the universe cheat me out of you giving me what I want, what I deserve? You shouldn’t be allowed to take your secrets to your grave without me alone knowing them.

  But you can’t be dead because I see Gemma plodding up Borough High Street. I hide in the alley next to St. George’s, only emerging at the last second when she has no chance of dodging me.

  “Gemma.”

  She staggers back, her palm spread under her neck in shock.

  “What do you want?”

  “I heard the news about Lily.”

  “Then you’ll know what a testing time this is.”

  She tries to step past me. I block her, my upper body sliding into the air in front of her. “Is she all right?”

  “She’s very badly injured. We don’t even know if she’s out of the woods yet. Look, this is inappropriate.”

  “Well, at least she’s not dead. I was fretting.”

  “Now, if you’ll just get out of my way.” The heel of Gemma’s hand finally reaches a pane on the revolving door of the building.

  “I was fretting. Well into the night.”

  She stops without turning back to me. “What did you say?”

  “Fret…Well.”

  She lets her hand drop to her side and takes one step back to face me. “I don’t know what you think you know.”

  “Everything. I know everything. Every lie you and she told me. No. Don’t talk. You need to listen. I was wondering, what price would you put on maintaining the illusion of the perfect family business?”

  Gemma grabs the underside of my arm and pulls me back into the alley, before checking behind her. “Blackmail?” she says through gritted teeth. “This is pathetic. You can’t be serious.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re going to try your luck now? While she’s lying in pieces in a hospital bed. What kind of monster are you?”

  “What kind of monster are you? Between the pair of you, you’ve left me with no money, no home, no partner. I haven’t showered for a week. Your niece’s little move with Iain means I’ve been sleeping in my fucking car for a month.”

  “You can’t blame any of that on me. At best you’ve been treading water at work, and there must have been problems at home already. You can’t blame Lily for your partner’s choices. Or his death.”

  “Can’t I? You don’t need reminding. She is a criminal. I know the dark things she’s done in her past. What else is she capable of? And who else knew what I did with my weekends? Asif? No. Her? Yes. She’s been trying to sabotage me from day one.”

  “Your failures as a writer and a human being aren’t down to her, they are your responsibility. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can move on.”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  “Go on. Go fix yourself, Katherine. You are not my family’s problem.” She walks around me and is near clean out of the alley.

  “Your niece committed a serious assault, then changed her name and you let her. You helped her hide her past so you could create your little publishing dynasty, enjoying another adventure in checkbook parenting by playing magazines together. I wonder what your board would think of that. Let alone the media. I know a good few old hacks from back in the day who’d love to run with this, the downfall of the Savior of Leadership. And what, I wonder, might the police make of it?”

  “What…what do you want?” She watches the pavement below her.

  “Twenty years I’ve given as editor. I want twenty-five grand for every one of them.”

  “Come off it, I can’t just give you half a million. The magazine’s on the edge as it is. You took it there, remember?”

  “You expect me to care now?”

  “What about Lily? Isn’t she suffering enough? What happens if we don’t pay? You really want to punish her, for trying to get her life back on track and me for helping her?”

  “As you said, Gemma, your family is not my problem.”

  A pause. A forced softening. “Look, Katherine. I think we should probably just go for a coffee. Right now. Come on, let’s go. Let’s discuss how we can help you.”

  “Going to bring your little box of Kleenex and representatives from ‘Talent’ and Legal? No. I don’t think so.”

  Another pause, the biting of the upper lip with the lower set. “I’d like you to understand a few things. You know Lily hasn’t had the easiest life. Yes, she’s made mistakes, she’s gone too far in the past. She needed another chance and I needed an opportunity to make things up to her for the mistakes her mother
made, and maybe I made too. Do I need to remind you it’s down to her you still had a magazine to work for, and down to her we kept you on, even though you’d taken Leadership to the floor? She deserves another chance. Just like you did. Never slipped up in your life?”

  “Plenty of times, but that’s not the point.”

  “Katherine, the business cannot and will not pay you what you want. I would never get it through under any guise, so you’re just going to have to find some other way of earning money. Another job, perhaps? But with your wild theories about Lily setting out to destroy you, if I was your doctor, I’d be profoundly concerned. Would you say you were quite well, Katherine?”

  “I don’t know.” I take a step nearer. “Do you really want to find out?”

  I’m close to her now. Her face is inches from mine. “Your money then. I won’t report Lily Fretwell or you if you personally get £500,000 into my account pronto. This is the only way this ends well for you. Find it. Get it done.”

  “You know you’ll be committing a criminal offense.”

  “Well, then we’ll be equal, so you’ve got yourself a solid deal.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Gemma, as Lily would say, I, like, have literally nothing to lose.”

  * * *

  —

  THE FUNDS CLEAR at midnight.

  As soon as I can, I get myself over to the Town Hall. I get my boots polished, sleep deeply, and enjoy a hearty breakfast before calling work. I get through to a new intern. I pretend to be a concerned reader who’d heard you had been involved in an accident.

  They tell me where you are.

  You can’t hide from me anymore.

  “I’m Katherine Fretwell, Lily’s aunt. I believe she’s in the high dependency unit?”

  And I’m in. It’s time to play my upper hand.