Do Her No Harm

by Naomi Joy

  Kay depresses the button on her device, stopping the recording, and I step forward.

  ‘We know you’re lying, Mandy,’ I say.

  ‘What?’ she asks, feigning ignorance. ‘I’m not,’ she insists. ‘What’s he told you? What lie has he spun this time?’ she squawks. She’s panicking, now, that she’s too late, that she’s going to lose Hollywood if this doesn’t come off.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Mandy; what we don’t need is any more of them.’

  I turn to Kay and consider that now is as good a time as any to fill her in. ‘I met with Rick yesterday. He hired Mandy six months after Tabby went missing to play the role of his partner. He did it with the intention of calming the media storm and public scrutiny against him.’ I watch Kay’s eyes bulge. ‘And it worked, as soon as he and Mandy were in a stable relationship, the pressure on him eased. He’s been paying her to play the role ever since, but Mandy wants to end things, she’s lost acting work because of their association and she wants compensation. I’m guessing what we heard today was something of an audition. A new career direction.’.’

  Mandy wiggles her nose. ‘I really don’t understand why you’re saying all of this… it’s, it’s just, it’s crazy. I thought you brought me here with good intentions, not to tear me down.’ Guilty tears brim her eyes.

  I set my jaw, determination and drive locking it in place. ‘We’re not going to air this, Mandy. I understand that Rick’s put you in an impossible position but that’s no reason to lie to the world about the kind of man he is.’

  Kay clears her throat. ‘AB,’ she says. ‘I should have told you, sorry.’

  My chin curls round to face her.

  ‘We were live.’

  Tabby

  Ten Years Ago – 2010

  My eyes were stinging when I woke up, and I rubbed at them with clenched fists. I must have looked like a bad actor playing at crying and, as the image struck me, I wondered if it was prophetic. Rick was already up, inevitably, the shower in our ensuite sending steam under the door. If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d end up living in a place like this I wouldn’t have believed you. Rick had really lived up to his promise. He’d made a good life for us here, a world away from where we both came from.

  Downstairs, I could hear bustling in the kitchen, the faintest smell of coffee in the air and bread charring in the toaster. Today was the second day in a row my new colleague had stayed over. Her name was Annabella and she’d recently started working at Pure You; she was young, about my age, and, from the moment we met, we clicked. She liked to make breakfast when she stayed here, she’d always unload the dishwasher and clean the countertops, I once found her wiping down the inside of our fridge. ‘There was a mouldy lemon,’ she’d told me. ‘At the back.’ Her expression had been deadly serious, as though a mouldy lemon called for a hazmat suit and urgent action rather than simply throwing it in the bin. ‘Mouldy,’ she’d repeated. My lips had twitched at the corner and she’d started to protest, laughing in between telling me why mould was a serious business, the apple of her cheeks flushing pink. I really liked Bella. She made me laugh, even when she didn’t mean to.

  I pushed myself to seated, slid my slippers onto my feet and worked my toes into the wool. As I stood, the sound of Rick singing in the shower whistled through the bathroom door and I walked over, opening it a crack, ‘Mr Brightside’ in full swing from within. Our song. It had blared in the club the night we met, recited by a live band to accompany our first dance. I thought back to our perfect wedding day, to the way Rick’s bow-tie had restricted his breathing during the ceremony and I’d thought he was really nervous, about to leave me at the altar, the reality becoming clear as soon as we’d walked down the aisle and he’d ripped at the material, begged me to loosen it. Who did it up? I asked. I did! he puffed. I thought it was supposed to be tight! I close the door, smiling, as he serenades himself, It was only a kiss, It was only a kiss!

  Amazing, really, that Rick and I made it here. To this house, to this life. For the first time I can truly say that I’m happy.

  Annabella

  Now

  ‘What?’ I say, teeth bared, firing on all cylinders. Mandy had been ejected from the shed, sent on her way so Kay and I can have it out.

  ‘I heard you, you stopped recording immediately after Mandy said she was attacked by him, that he was paying to keep her quiet. Why did you do that? Why did you put it out live? You had no idea if she was going to tell the truth – and she didn’t – you know she didn’t! You have to erase it, Kay, you have to get rid of it!’

  ‘I can’t do that, AB,’ she says calmly. ‘For your own good. I’m protecting you, no one can know what happened that night. We’re both implicated and, listen, isn’t this the objective? You want to catch Rick, don’t you? Who cares if Mandy’s caressing the details into place, we’re all striving for the same goal here, AB, the same outcome… aren’t we?’

  ‘My goal was the truth, Kay, not a show-trial.’

  ‘You told me you were willing to do anything to put him away. Well, here we are. This is it: this is the anything.’

  I hold her stare. ‘I can’t believe it,’ I rage. ‘I thought you were a good person.’ The condensation on my breath looks more like steam. ‘Screw you and your fake show,’ I growl. ‘I’m done.’

  *

  Adrenaline loops my body as I pull out my phone on my way back home. Two new messages. The first is from the surgery, from Anya.

  Annabella, can you come in this afternoon? There’s a… situation. The woman you saw yesterday, the one who left in a hurry, she’s written a terrible review online. It’s been getting some attention.

  The second, from Rick, is much harder to swallow.

  Don’t you think I had the right to know you were investigating me as well as dating me?

  My heart thumps. Mandy must have got to him already. I open the message fully, the weight of what I’ve done pulling me down so far that I sink into the pavement, dirt on my hands.

  You’ve been playing me from day one.

  PART 4

  1

  What do you think when you look at yourself in the mirror? Which emotions stir? Whose voice do you hear? Is it yours?

  Mirror, mirror on the wall.

  I hate you, want to change it all.

  I touch my hand to my cheek and pull it back, stretching the skin so the line that traces my nose to my lip disappears. I do the same on the other side. The lower half of my face would look better if my skin were tighter, I decide. My jaw would look stronger. I could do with lifting some of the skin from beneath it, too. A nip here, a tuck there.

  I hold my make-up brush firmly and paint furious shades on either side of my nose. Light down the middle and dark at the sides. I create a shape that’s not there and hold my face at an angle for the camera that’s completely unnatural. My make-up looks good, but my face is still not right. My nose ruins it; even with the shading it looks too big.

  My brain concocts an insult before I have the chance to stop it. Witch.

  I touch up my lips, draw bigger strokes of lipstick over the skin around them. I make them look passable, but the reality is they sit, skinny, on top of each other like a lost section of railway track. They don’t curve when I smile. They don’t bounce when I laugh. They aren’t sensual, they aren’t kissable, they aren’t good enough.

  I am sick of my own reflection.

  I don’t want to look like me anymore.

  Annabella

  Now

  There’s something wrong with me, something wrong with the way my head’s been put together. Lobotomise me and I’m sure doctors would find something abnormal among the coils and curls of my brain matter, black red and beating, dripping blood onto the surgery floor. This dark part of me, though I try to suppress it, infects everything: when I am low, everyday tasks become intricate, obsessive rituals; when I fall in love, I love so deeply that I suffocate those I am with; when I am manic, I am reckless with it, changed.
r />   A psychotherapist once wrote three scribbled words across the top of her page after an hour’s analysis of me: obsessive, possessive, manic-depressive.

  And she was right, but sixteen-year-old me wasn’t interested in having my personality defined by labels or being seen as something to be fixed. I am who I am, I’d told her and, in response, she’d been careful with me, kind, and, when I’d stopped attending her sessions, she didn’t force me back, but let me go.

  Without a professional to ground me, I quickly developed my own coping mechanisms and constructed the parameters that still make me feel safe today. At school, I cut off my hair and starved my young body when exam-pressure consumed me, invented a new personality to provide a layer between my old self and my new: if I failed it wouldn’t be me failing. My reinvention was written off as teenage exploration and, when I got fantastic grades – that was all that mattered – and went off to university to study nursing, nobody would have thought there was anything wrong with me. I certainly didn’t.

  With hindsight, though, I can piece it together. Pinpoint the exact moment my preoccupation with reinvention began, then took hold. At university, when my roommate kissed my boyfriend, I gained four stone and stopped colouring my hair, swore off relationships, decided I’d be a career woman instead, started calling myself Annie, then Annika. I specialised in cosmetic nursing after my degree, used my connections in the industry to create a different look and, with each new procedure, came a new face to meet: Ann, then Anna, Bella, then Belle… But, like the stubs that sit beneath my veneers, I have created only the illusion of perfection – not that most people seem to mind. My shiny, seemingly perfect coat still compels passers-by to stop me in the street. They always say the same thing, eager to let me know that the light of my eyes and the dark of my skin is striking – beautiful, even – as though my reflection might come as a surprise that day if they don’t warn me about it first. I look at myself now. My lips are bee-stung, the bones of my face carved to perfect symmetry, my once-embarrassing E-cups lopped to perky Bs.

  But what lies beneath remains unchanged: an unstable teenager with trust-issues, a pocket-faced little girl with obsessive tendencies and manic outbursts. So, when Tabby went missing and I wasn’t able to help her, my coping mechanisms kicked in once more, and the obsessive little girl in me resurfaced. Now, though, I am running into problems: with each new mistake I make, with each new layer of protection I create, I move further away from the person I was at the beginning. Now, rather than take a leap away from the person I was, I am struggling to recall who she was in the first place. The girl I want to protect is missing.

  I try to remember; but her face is blank.

  *

  I angle the last of my implements in line, go through the cupboards beneath my work desk, check the mirror for handprints, then make sure everything’s in its correct position; the very thought of not being able to perform these tasks breaking me out in a sweat. Even though I am here, now, doing it, I am consumed with the thought that I might not have been able to. I can’t stop thinking about Rick, about how many people I’ve let down, about how disordered everything is.

  Anya – one of the other nurses – comes in to talk to me. Her spindly frame is drowned by her baggy uniform – even her bra gapes at the cups – and her hair’s tied loosely behind her head, her ponytail crimped and streaked with red highlights. She looks at me, her eyes big and bland, the colour a depressing Coke-brown, no longer fizzy but left to go flat on the countertop. She puffs her cheeks as she settles on a white stool across from me and scratches her chin. I picture her moping about at home, falling into the settee every night, clawing her laptop from the space between the cushions and writing irritating updates, sadfishing for sympathy. Why are my Tuesdays always so awful? Crying face emoji. Her voice drips out of her in the same way, all wet and wearied.

  ‘Annabella,’ she begins, then pauses with the effort. ‘I hate to bring you in on your day off… but, like I said, we have a situation.’

  The window in the corner of the room is open and winter fans a much-needed breeze into the space, the attached blind ruffling in it.

  ‘We have a troll,’ she explains, her voice slow.

  Anya’s the type to turn a molehill into a mountain, but in this instance – to some extent – she’s not wrong.

  I bite the inside of my cheek. My problem has gone public.

  Anya clicks into the review section of our website and reads out loud. ‘One of Pure You’s barbaric practitioners cut me open last week. She scarred me for life.’ Though the sentences are enough to pound my heart into my stomach, it is a relief that she doesn’t name me. ‘Watch out for this place. Their techniques are more medieval than medical. Zero stars if I could.’ A gruesome picture accompanies the article and even I’m surprised by how bad she looks.

  ‘What do you suggest?’ I ask Anya.

  ‘Oh,’ she noises, her lips parting. ‘Sorry.’ She sits up.

  I raise my eyebrows. Something the matter?

  ‘It’s just,’ she puffs, wrinkling her nose. ‘I was rather under the impression that you were running this place now that Caroline’s gone to LA – not me – so it’s kind of your problem to figure out. Plus, it happened in your appointment, not mine.’

  ‘Right,’ I reply curtly, realising then that Anya’s not to be trusted, that she’s after my job.

  She peels herself from the stool laboriously, a sarcastic You’re welcome sounding behind her.

  I wait for the surgery door to click shut then bring up the review It’s attracted dozens of retweets on Twitter, and I know I have to take control and shut it down. I make a set of extreme decisions: I create a fake profile, Sharon White, who inserts herself into the discussion and accuses the reviewer of being bogus, that she’s out for revenge because she works for a nearby competitor and isn’t a genuine customer. Don’t believe this woman! I write. She’d rather post negative reviews about her competitors than concentrate on improving her own salon. Bitter, bitter, bitter.

  After it’s done, I breathe deeply and hope that Sharon’s fake story is enough to change the tide. More lies, I think to myself. How easy it is to get caught in them. My thoughts turn to Rick. How am I going to make amends? How can I explain? It’s impossible. But I must try. I have to try. I unlock my phone and type a message.

  I’m sorry. I can explain everything. But you can’t trust Mandy; listen to the latest podcast episode, she’s lying to the world about you, Rick, but I know you’re telling the truth and I want to help. I will help.

  I turn my attention back to Twitter, Sharon’s tweet gaining traction. This will blow over, I tell myself. We’ll ask every satisfied customer who comes through the door to post us a positive review and, before we know it, this incident will be confined to a blip in the clinic’s history.

  2

  I hold my nose in a straight line to even out the crook. Someone online offered to break it for me to get rid of the bump. Said a good punch to my ugly face would do it.

  It’s not a bad idea.

  I am not beautiful, I’m not pretty, I’m not even average. Even as a girl I was aware of it. I’d spend hours in front of the mirror, comparing myself to the women I saw online, trying to work out why I’d got so unlucky.

  A thin waist, big boobs, chiselled features and thick lips: that’s what I need. That’s what I want. That is beautiful. That is what people want to see. Everyone would call me it – beautiful – if I changed. And wouldn’t that be wonderful? To be adored and admired?

  ‘You don’t get self-esteem from a scalpel,’ my mother snaps at me.

  But she’s wrong.

  Annabella

  Now

  I’m a blur, a dizzy punch-drunk version of myself, as I stare at the home page of the Mail Online, refusing to believe what I can see. My mistake is the top story and, when I click on the headline, a long article appears about the unregulated nature of the cosmetic industry, complete with multiple mentions of Pure You, accompanied with a
veritable gallery of hideous images of my former patient.

  I click back to Twitter; our profile is being bombarded with noisy demands for compensation and watchdogs and I just wish I could make it all go away. Don’t these people have anything better to do with their lives than wait around all day for a negative internet wave to catch?

  Just when I think today couldn’t end soon enough, a notification arrives from Zoom. Caroline Mahler is calling you. What am I going to say? Everything’s wrong, everything’s a mess, everything’s –

  ‘Annabella,’ Caroline announces as the call connects, her voice bouncing off the walls. ‘Can you hear me?’

  I fix a smile across my face. ‘Yes.’

  Caroline comes into view, her eyes darting from side to side when it becomes clear she can’t, however, hear or see me in return.

  ‘Hello?’ I call, turning up the microphone and restarting my webcam.

  ‘There you are,’ she says, my face filling her screen.

  ‘OK,’ she tells me, solemn, a worried finger heading to her lip, picking at a flake of dry skin. ‘What the fuck’s going on over there? I’m seeing this story and I’m telling people – you know – that it’s not real but… what happened? Is this something to do with Anya? I heard she lost a few regulars last week?’

  I look at the floor and for a drawn out and agonising minute, try hard to avoid the bait, to ignore the great big carrot Caroline is dangling before me. I love my job and I do not want to lose it. More than that, I can’t lose it. I crave ritual and routine; the very thought of having to start again somewhere new, of having to organise a new space, navigate the intricacies of a new company… it’s unthinkable. My heart beats faster with the thought.