Do Her No Harm

by Naomi Joy

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to get her in any trouble,’ I say, blushing, my teeth biting down on the orange surface before I have a chance to stop myself. It’s her word against mine.

  ‘You need to tell me what’s going on, Annabella.’

  My hands close in on Anya’s back, who’s about to find herself under a double-decker bus.

  I keep talking.

  ‘Anya denies it, but the patient says Anya cut her cheek open with a cannula. I’m sure it was an accident, but the patient left in pain, I think she fainted. I don’t know how it was dealt with afterwards – Anya kept it to herself – but obviously the patient’s decided to go public.’

  A sharp inhalation follows from the computer as Caroline noisily sucks in the air through her teeth.

  I sit, staring at the camera, my legs bouncing up and down as I shake underneath the table, desperate to rid myself of this build-up of nervous energy. It’s very possible my lie won’t stick, but I have to hope that it does.

  Caroline shakes her head, mutters, ‘Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable. Why didn’t you tell me as soon as this happened? We could have terminated Anya, got out in front of the bad reviews, stopped this from reaching LA.’

  Again, I’m forced to scramble. ‘I’d planned to sit down with Anya this evening to understand exactly what happened. Then I was going to talk to you about it. As it is, I didn’t get the chance and now, well…’

  ‘OK.’ I watch Caroline bring her palms either side of her face and bury her head in them. She breathes deeply again, clearly frustrated. ‘Right,’ she exclaims after a moment. ‘I’ll release a statement and explain the staff member involved has resigned from our practice following an internal investigation. You need to tell Anya we’re letting her go. We might need to rebrand. This might be the end of Pure You.’

  3

  I knock on the front door, my nail varnish chipped at the top, shaking slightly at the thought of what it is I have come to do.

  At least the location is nice. For the price, I’d expected worse.

  A pretty woman opens the door and smiles wide, greeting me. My hands sizzle and I am gripped by an urgent desire to flee.

  ‘Do you want to come through?’ she asks, beady pupils focused on me.

  I follow her into the room, jittery, able to step forwards because I’ve detached from my own body. I tell myself that I’m not here, that this isn’t me.

  The patient-chair is a kitchen stool and a bundle of needles sit in a Tupperware to its side, next to a bag of unpacked groceries and a bowl of cereal.

  ‘Take a seat,’ she tells me, so I do.

  I look around, the window blinds are pulled tight to the top of the frame, a little patch of rust in the corner, the cord bunched in an ugly mess at the side. I look away. If it weren’t for my nerves this place would probably look entirely normal, but I can’t stop staring at things and convincing myself they’re not right.

  I catch her looking at me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m a little nervous.’

  ‘Of course,’ she replies. ‘But there’s nothing to be worried about. Trust me.’

  I colour beneath my cheeks, falling silent.

  ‘What were you after today, then? Fillers?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘I’ve always hated my lips. And I want Botox. I just want to look different. Here,’ I tell her, pressing a photograph into her hands. ‘I want to look like her.’

  My hands itch at the thought of how different my life will be after this, how much better I will feel, and my mood begins to lift.

  She nods, runs her eyes over my face, cat-like, and I watch as her manicured fingers select a needle from the stash to my side. She selects a tube of dermal filler, then paces out of the room.

  Something’s not right.

  Maybe the needle’s too big, or the filler’s ingredients are in another language and she doesn’t understand it. My hands shake as I wait for her to come back. Should I leave?

  ‘Sorry about that, just had to dip into the overflow. I’ve had so many women like you over the last few days.’

  Knowing that calms me down and I smile in return.

  She snaps on a pair of latex gloves and the satisfying thwack of each being pulled into position signals the gunshot start of my procedure. She swipes her fingers across my face, then over my lips, checking for any natural lumps under the surface. I spot a drop of my saliva on her thumb as she pulls it away. She snaps off the gloves, selects a new pair.

  ‘I think we’ll start with the Botox,’ she says.

  She holds my face back and then struggles to find the right position, I can tell I’m too high up on the stool, so I shrink slightly, round my spine. In turn, she raises herself onto her tiptoes to get a better vantage point and, at that moment, I ask if she wants me to move to a different seat so she can get the best angle. She tells me no, that the light’s good right here and that she’ll just stand on a box. I look up, squinting into the overhead spot, the light illuminating my stretched features in bright-white radiance. This is all wrong.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she asks, her kitchen clock ticking towards nine o’clock.

  ‘First injection going in now,’ she says, and the thick needle punctures my skin. I feel her depress it, my mind’s eye imagining the fluid pumping into place, gathering in lumps, forming tumour-like mounds under the surface of my skin. My arms begin to shake, my nails digging into my skin.

  ‘And another,’ she says. I wince beneath the light, can feel the beginnings of a red-purple bruise emerging beneath my forehead. She pulls the needle out, but I can see only half of it has deployed, a lousy dribble landing on my top lip as it retracts. She wipes it away with a stack of shaking tissues.

  ‘And another,’ she repeats, but there’s an uncertainty to her voice and she’s working faster now. She’s scared, I can see it.

  I want to ask her if everything’s OK, because my vision has doubled, and my right eyelid feels as though it’s drooping down my cheek, but I’m scared to move while she’s injecting me in case I put her off. My skin feels tight, feels as though it isn’t reacting well to the injections. I bet it’s turning darker the more she tries to make it right, lumped and large and painful.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ I mumble when she finishes with the next needle, my heart fluttering in my chest, my breathing shallow. I imagine the scene in a few minutes time, as she hands me the mirror to take a look at the dream-face I’d imagined.

  I squeeze my eyes shut when she doesn’t answer my question, the room spinning. They blister with hot tears when she does. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘The injections, they’re…’

  I leap from the chair, unsteady on my feet, trembling fingers moving to my swollen features, and scream as I see my reflection in the reflective glass of the microwave.

  ‘What happened?’

  She doesn’t reply and, as I take a shaky step towards her, she points her needle out in front of her like a weapon. My eyes grow wide and fearful.

  I break into a staggered run, twist the front door handle beneath my grip, and race from her home, broken.

  Annabella

  Now

  I stop at a fruit stall on my way into work, the morning sky still dark, and buy a punnet of raspberries, impulse-buying a reduced six-pack of apples at the counter, feeling optimistic. I emailed Anya last night, told her that, on account of a few unhappy patients she’d seen recently, and the fact the clinic was losing customers on account of the Mail article, her role was now redundant. It wasn’t a million miles from the truth, Anya had lost a few regulars recently and I just had to hope she’d be too lazy to fight me on it. As long as I’d known her, she hadn’t seemed to particularly enjoy working at Pure You, so perhaps I was doing her a favour.

  At the surgery, I wash the ruby berries, tucking into their crevices with gloved fingers to wheedle out any mud remnants, my idea of washed and ready to eat predictably different to that of the average raspberry packer. Once I’m finished, the result is a
plate of flattened, water-logged fruit, but I eat them anyway, the pips lodging in the cracks between my back teeth, fruity aroma floating from my mouth. The sky, peeking through the window now, is similarly pink, the snowfall and cloud-cover of last night long-vanished. Today will be especially cold. I rotate the radiator dial to maximum in preparation.

  I check my phone for a message from Rick. I’d sent him a few more, apologising, asking how I could win back his trust, but they’d all gone unanswered. I have to give him time.

  I set about completing my morning checks and panic flutters in my chest, a nervous rush rising, when I look inside my cupboards and find that all of my things are gone. I push my hand within, as though my eyes are deceiving me and wave it around but touch only air. I leave the doors open, shaking now, and move to the next set – perhaps someone’s moved them? – but I’m greeted by a similar void. Where are my things? My heart thuds as I contemplate the chain of events that may have led to this, my fingers fidgety. ‘You’re overreacting,’ I say out loud and then shiver, because I know I’m not. Even though I can’t connect the dots, I know this is bad.

  Anya?

  Would Anya have the patience to do something like this? The motivation? The desire for revenge? The crime doesn’t fit her persona and, thanks to spending so much time with Kay, I find her intuition rubbing off on me. It wasn’t Anya, this was too much work. I could imagine her going to the extent of planning it, bitching to the receptionist about the way I’d set her up, cackling at the thought of putting me off my game by messing up my space. Her parting blow. But she wouldn’t have had the fire to actually go through with it, the smallest thing would have distracted her: a comfortable position in her bed this morning, the fact that it was a bit too chilly, the thought that she might be walking to the tube later and wanted to save her energy.

  ‘Where are all my things?’ I hiss at the pumped face working the reception desk today.

  ‘Err, Annabella,’ she replies, not looking at me. ‘What are you doing here?’

  I stare back at her, blank. Then I hear a voice; I think I’m imagining it at first, because it’s Kay. ‘Tell us, in your own words, how the attack happened.’

  ‘It’s the Tabitha Rice podcast,’ the receptionist says, catching me looking. ‘You must have been listening to it. You knew her when she worked here, didn’t you? They’ve had to get Mandy Evans in for a special episode, the last one was cut short.’

  ‘Ah,’ I say, heat rising, knowing I have to get there soon, that I have to do the right thing.

  ‘But I thought Caroline spoke to you last night…’

  My mind grasps for an email I haven’t read, for some event I must have missed.

  ‘She knows it was you,’ she says solemnly. ‘You attacked that patient, not Anya. I told her the truth.’

  I wonder what it means for my career: the end, probably. I am one of those horror-nurses you’re warned about online, the ones who butcher instead of beautifying, the ones who should face criminal charges but walk away, often able to practise again, thanks to the unregulated nature of the industry, a graveyard of body parts behind them.

  She looks at me through guilty eyes – she snitched on me – and I loom closer, about to yell. I take another ferocious footstep towards her, my palm in the air, ready to plant it against the side of her face, but stop myself. The familiar feeling of my world being upended begins, consumed by the desire to transform into someone new.

  I grab my bag, the sky bruise-purple as I flee the surgery and jump into a taxi, directing the driver through the backstreets towards Kay’s house to avoid the traffic. I’ve lost my job, I’ve lost Rick, but I still have a chance to save Tabby’s story. To put the podcast right, to make sure Mandy isn’t able to infect it with her lies. Sleet splatters the windows as we drive, growing thicker, freezing on the glass. A question – what am I going to do when I get there? – rises and remains in my head, twisting around itself the longer I fail to answer it.

  I ram my headphones into my ears and listen to the broadcast, playing live. Kay’s speaking. She’s calm and measured and slow and I know I won’t be the only one who wants to hear what Mandy has to say. I wonder how many people are listening to this rubbish.

  ‘So, you see,’ rattles Mandy. ‘I was with Rick because I genuinely liked him.’ She coughs, clears her throat. ‘And I’m sure I’m not the first woman to be let down by her partner. I trusted him, I believed him and the abuse, you know, it was small at first and then… that night.’

  ‘Thank you for being so honest.’

  Sweat soaks my clothes and there are dark patches under my arms and across my waist where my arms have been tightly crossed. It’s freezing outside but I crack the window open beside me, the driver eyeing me with irritation from the front, an arctic breeze fanning the cold sweat on my forehead.

  ‘Here’s fine,’ I insist as we approach. The driver hits the brakes just as I open the door, spinning from inside to out before the car has come to a complete stop in my haste to reach her.

  Though I’d been hot inside the cab, suddenly I am chilled, the wind drying my sweat, turning my smooth skin bumpy. I press forward, clutching the sleeves of my cardigan beneath my coat. The sweet smell of incense and old bags of lavender breathe from Kay’s home. I raise my hand to knock at her front door.

  I hold up my hand, curl my fist, but, rather than knock, rather than interrupt the broadcast, I back away.

  I walk to the side of Kay’s house, looking for a window, but don’t find any, the mural – the ruby-red face of a woman and her child – takes up the entire side-wall of the house, the windows here bricked in, an eighteenth-century feature you still see all over London. I pad a few steps further. Kay’s back garden is marked off from the road by a run of wooden fencing, rotten holes eating into it, waist high weeds growing through the cracks. I stalk its perimeter, moving insistently, until I find a gate. I grab it, rattle it, my eyes falling to a padlock on the door, jingling against the cheap metal bar it’s looped around. I take stock of my situation for a moment, my hand curling around the wooden slat that holds the padlock in place, knowing it’s so decrepit it won’t take much force to pull it free. My paranoia is on overdrive after what happened at the clinic and, before I know it, I’m breaking into Kay’s garden.

  I pull two of the ancient slats away, cobwebs dragging behind, a cluster of dazed woodlice racing down the planks, eager to find the dark again. The smell of wood parts my nostrils as I push my body through the gap, and a strand of my hair catches on an old nail as I thrust myself into the overgrown garden, waist-high shoots swishing my legs. To the right of the gate, an old gravel path winds towards the back door and down towards the shed, another, much bigger overgrown patch at the far end of the space. I steady my feet and trace the little-walked path towards the back door, raising my arms above the grass-line to my left, my legs brushing against the weeds encroaching on the path. Overhead, the sky is draining itself of colour, the purples turning grey, blues turning black, and I realise I’m talking to myself. Everything’s going to be OK, you can wash all of this away, the germs on your hands can be dealt with as soon as you are you are done here, you are not going to die.

  Obsessive.

  The bricks of Kay’s house are within touching distance now and I fall to my hands and knees to crawl the rest of the way. Dew coats my knees and my palms as I move and I am starkly reminded of breaking into Rick and Mandy’s home not so long ago, the feeling of sneaking up on my target, lioness-like through the grass, rushing back to me in anxious ripples. This is my story, my friend, it’s not fair that two people who didn’t even know her are claiming her as their own.

  Possessive.

  When I reach the house, I press my left side firmly into the bricks and crawl towards the voices, hovering under the kitchen window. An empty packet of crisps, colours long faded, is stuck in the weeds to my side. I wonder how long it’s been there. I wonder how long it will stay. If I fail to find out the truth about what happened to Tabby
, if Rick ends up going down for it, I won’t know what to do. I’ll have no one, nothing, there’ll be nothing left to live for.

  Manic-depressive.

  I hear their voices rise again – they’re recording in Kay’s kitchen – and I sit back against the wall, lower myself to the floor, flattening the grass around me.

  ‘That’s OK,’ I catch Mandy saying. ‘I just want to get everything out in the open.’ She inhales. ‘Plus, I have a theory: I think I know what happened to Tabby.’

  There’s a small beat of silence before Mandy begins talking again. ‘Before she went missing, Tabitha Rice was in communication with a doctor – someone in Turkey who she hoped would change the course of her life.’

  I crunch my fist. She’s saying it as though it’s a revelation but then I realise, actually, for the listeners, that’s exactly what it is. Kay and I didn’t want to spin a thread about a doctor we’d never be able to find.

  ‘Rick spoke to me about it – Tabby’s messages with this doctor – and I saw the photos she was sending him. But they weren’t of her, they were all of Annabella, her colleague.’

  ‘You’re saying Tabitha took her colleague’s photos and shared them with an online suitor, pretending they were her own?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Mandy agrees, her voice more confident than I’ve ever heard it. ‘She took Annabella’s photos, went to meet the doctor, and then, I think, when the doctor realised he’d been short-changed, he rejected her.’

  I can almost feel the delight in Kay’s voice as she oohs and ahhs through Mandy’s aero display of half-truths and full-lies, the twists of this episode coming thick and fast.

  ‘At the time, Tabitha was at her lowest ebb. She and Rick were in trouble, both of them were having affairs, Tabby was desperate to run away from it all, but the doctor let her down. I think she flew into a jealous rage, killed Annabella, then assumed her identity. I think she went to plastic surgeons she knew and trusted and went through a variety of procedures, using Annabella’s money, to look more like her.’