How to Kill Your Family

by Bella Mackie

  ‘Don’t worry, Lara, I’m used to it. I’ll guide you through the journey.’ Ugh. Journey. It’s not a journey unless you’re going from physical place A to physical place B. Which I guess he is, in a way.

  He chooses to use a spot on his arm, underneath a tattoo of what looks suspiciously like a dream catcher. I guess be grateful it’s not a Chinese symbol? Matches are produced, and he lights two, holding them against the sole of my left foot. The sensation is hot but not painful – clearly a sign that I’m in need of a proper pedicure. Then he applies the liquid.

  ‘Lie down,’ he instructs. ‘Wait a few minutes and breathe.’ I gaze up at the night sky, watching him burn his own skin out of the corner of one eye. I hear him exhale and he lies down next to me. ‘If you need to be sick, just tell me and I’ll roll you over. Good thing there’s a lake.’ Then he laughs for what seems like an age, before falling silent. We stay there in the dark, and wait. I don’t know how long we’re lying there like that. I feel warmth creeping over me, a sense of comfort seeping through my body, as though I’m being embraced by my surroundings, held by the wind.

  ‘I feel it,’ I whisper, and turn towards him. Andrew has his eyes closed and he’s moaning softly. I decide I don’t want to move. I don’t want to stop the connection I feel to everything around me. The constant chatter in my head goes silent and only my heartbeat can be heard. I wonder if Andrew can hear it too. Slow and steady. Pulsing through my skin. I feel an animal brush past my fingers and look down. It’s his hand, linking with mine. Solidarity. A kind of kinship. And it feels nice.

  NO.

  I roll over and use the power of our entwined hands to push him into the water. His body is limp from relaxation and I barely have to apply force, which is handy because I feel woozy as hell. As he moves through the air, his body uncurling, our eyes lock onto each other and he comes out of his reverie for a second. His face twists into surprise and his mouth opens wide as if he’s about to cry out. But it isn’t enough. The wine and the frog juice have done their work and he falls head first into the pond. I sit up on the deck and kick my foot into the water, pushing his head down as I hold onto the edge of the wood to apply pressure. I can see my toenails glint in the moonlight. Though his own feet kick for a brief moment, there’s remarkably little splashing before he goes limp and the water becomes calm again. I don’t know how long it takes but it feels like I’m watching it from a distance so I bend over and stare down at the body in the water, looking for any sign of life. It’s probably not advisable to commit murder whilst under the influence of an untested amphibian drug. Sloppy really. But you work with what you have in this life.

  When I’m sure he isn’t going to burst out of the water, as is law in most horror movies, I lean into the pond and run my hand around his neck. I splash my face and then I stand up, put my shoes back on, pull a towel out of my bag and wipe down the deck, leaving the bottle and one vial of the serum. The rest of the detritus goes into a plastic bag. I grab his phone, which I’d seen him unlock with his code being his birthday (even hippies have iPhones), and delete our most recent messages. I’d been careful not to be specific about our plans over text, but he’d mentioned our meet-up and I don’t want any questions. I survey the scene, as Andrew floats behind me, using the torch device on my phone and I’m satisfied it all looks good. It looks accidental. It looks tragic but not suspicious, the perfect balance.

  I take my mug back to the kitchen, clumsily wash and dry it and put it back in the cupboard. Then I slip out of the centre, pull my hoodie over my head and walk purposefully towards the main road where an Uber is waiting for me. I stop for a second on the road and look round, with an eerie feeling that someone is behind me. But the drugs are making me sense things which might not be there, and I shake the feeling off. The car weaves through the quiet back streets before it hits the main roads full of Saturday-night revellers out in force, the figures spinning and blurring as we go. The whole way back, I breathe deeply out of the window to steady myself, and twist the beads on the necklace I’d removed from Andrew’s neck as he lay in the water. Another keepsake, I suppose. It was an affectation really, something taken from movies about serial killers. But they were mainly lonely men doing it for sexual kicks and I am doing this with an end in mind. And not one that ends with my mugshot flashed across a Channel 5 show about sexy murderers.

  I get out of the cab a good ten minutes away from my flat and dump the bag with the towels and gloves in a bin. I pause and hold my breath for a second, feeling like I can’t get enough air in my lungs, before deciding that I’d allow myself the rest of the walk back to feel sad. For precisely nine minutes I let tears stream down my face, and endure the regret which floods my thoughts. As I turn the key in my door, I rub my eyes with my sleeve and shake my head. Enough. A glass of wine and two episodes of Golden Girls later, I feel as if the drug has subsided enough for me to be able to sleep. The regret I’d felt on my walk home passes through my system in a considerately hasty fashion, and my last thought before I sleep is not about my sweet cousin, now face down in a muddy pond. As I tuck the bottom of the duvet under my feet and prop a pillow under one thigh at a very specific angle in order to get comfy, my second to last thought is that I’d take myself out for a nice brunch the next day. I drop off deciding whether I’d follow that with a pedicure, just to get rid of any frog paste remnants. Self-care is the latest consumerist trend pushed at women wrapped up as empowerment. But that doesn’t mean it’s not nice. And after all, it’s important to look after yourself after a hard week at work.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The worst thing about prison isn’t the hours of waiting around in your cell, or the food, or the austerity cuts and privatisation which have led to incompetent fools in cheap uniforms put in charge of serious criminals. It’s not the old, freezing buildings where rats are as prevalent as I assume they were in the Marshalsea. I honestly could stick all of these things out, with the hope that one day I’ll be freed and never forced to sleep below a woman who dots her i’s with hearts. The worst thing about prison is that, on occasion, a governor or a politician will decide that we captives need something to enrich our souls, to better ourselves, to stop being quite so rough and terrifying. From that sudden thought, a plan will emerge. This usually involves some lefty sap (you never get a Tory wanting to show us how ceramics can quash our rage problems) volunteering to run a class (which is always compulsory) where we’re encouraged to paint our feelings or some such nonsense.

  They invariably only come for one class, and then either they’re too overwhelmed to come back, or they feel like they’ve done enough to virtue-signal about it for the rest of the year. If they’re really enterprising, they write a piece for the Guardian about how prisoners just need respect and education, as though they’ve been working in jails for four years rather than for one hour in a quiet work period.

  Today we all filed down to the classroom wing, where we suffered through an hour-long class on spoon making. Truly, even one murder wouldn’t warrant such a punishment. The only highlight was getting my hands on a proper knife for the first time in a while. It’s a pity they count them back in so carefully. Kelly is extremely jealous that I was part of the group forced into such nonsense, and gushes over the wooden spoon I produced. She would’ve loved today’s class, she says, when I bump into her afterwards, and ‘What a fab Christmas present that spoon would make for your mum.’ I look at her blankly, wondering how long it’ll take her to remember that my mother is dead, but there is no such realisation. So instead, I toss her the spoon, and tell her to pretend she made it and to give to her own mum. She’s delighted, and I wonder, not for the first time, what kind of woman Kelly’s mother is. To be thrilled with a wonky spoon made in a jail by your grown-up convict daughter, you must have some uniquely low expectations. Her mother can add it to the cross-stitched bird she got at Easter, and the dismal sugar bowl made out of something akin to playdough she was gifted on her birthday. The only difference with the spoon
is that it has some special marks on it. They look a bit like hieroglyphics, but they’re actually the initials of every person I murdered, though nobody would look that closely. Not a particularly sophisticated move, but I was finished whittling long before the other idiots in the class, and I didn’t want to waste my time with the blade. I wonder if Kelly’s mum will appreciate them?

  Back in my cell, I take out the paper and pen from inside a pair of rolled-up socks. There is no privacy here, especially with a cellmate like mine. Everyone here tries to get hold of everyone else’s possessions, tries to gain their secrets as leverage, wants to know their stories. Kelly doesn’t even bother to hide her diary – that woman would tell you everything about her life if you were stupid or bored enough to ask. Once you ask Kelly a question, you’d likely never make the mistake of doing it again. Did I mention why she’s in here? Not for violence or theft, like some of us. Kelly was a blackmailer. She had a nice line in getting married men to send her photos, photos which their wives might not like too much. She started small, on dating apps, and got bolder when she discovered Twitter and targeted men with higher profiles. She’s attractive, is Kelly. Big pouty lips, which I suspect are the results of cheap filler but look all right from a distance, and lots of red hair. Sadly, her limited intelligence meant she was easy to find when a man finally plucked up the courage to stop sending her money and contacted the police. She’d had the money sent to her boyfriend’s account, the stupid cow, and has wound up doing an eighteen-month stretch as a result. Not an elegant crime, I grant you, but I have no sympathy for her victims either. If you are delusional enough to believe that anyone wants to see a grainy iPhone picture of your flaccid little friend, you deserve to get bled for it.

  My paper uncurled, I settle down to write for a bit before dinner. I didn’t know whether I’d enjoy revisiting my past, but it turns out I’m quite happy to go over it all again. If anything, writing it down makes me feel proud. I remember the urgency of my youthful emotions, and the strong need to right a wrong. In the years since, I’ve not felt much of anything really, the task in hand demanded too much discipline.

  To a casual observer, not much happened between the death of my mother and the moment I put my plan into action. A person who ran into me in that decade or so would’ve come away thinking that I was a fairly mediocre millennial. In some ways, I was. I lived on with Helene for a year or so, which was good, since she was away a lot and I had loads of time to myself. It was testament to her fundamental unsuitability at being a guardian that she thought it was OK to leave a recently bereaved teenager alone so often, but I never complained. I like being by myself, other people so often enrage or annoy with their inane small talk and fumbled attempts at meaningful connection. When I was 14, Helene told me that she’d been offered a job in Paris and felt like it was time to go home. She held my hand and insisted that she would stay if I wanted her to, but that Jimmy’s parents had offered me a room and were delighted to have me. She looked genuinely distressed, and I felt it would be unseemly to jump at the chance and start packing up my stuff then and there, so I squeezed out a tear and looked at the floor while I told her that she must take the job. I would miss her, I said, but I couldn’t live with the guilt if I stopped her from a new opportunity. In truth, Helene was a nice enough lady, and I cherished the link she gave me to my mother, but I was itching to get on with life and start working towards my plan, and Helene, with her limited connections and resources, would not be able to assist me in any meaningful way. Jimmy’s parents, for all their discomfort with their own privilege, lived in a world where doors could open if you knew the right people. I felt confident that they could help me in some way. I had nothing to lose at least, knowing nobody of any importance and having no advantages of my own.

  A month later and my bags were packed. The fish and I took a taxi over to Jimmy’s house. Helene was in the midst of packing up her life for the move back to France and fairly frantic, so I took the opportunity to grab the box she’d hidden under the bed. I assumed she wouldn’t miss it, but I wasn’t too concerned if she did. The files were about me and my family, and I doubted she’d want to cause a scene – by the time she realised, she’d be across the Channel and immersed in a new life. Jimmy and Sophie welcomed me at the door, their dog Angus nearly knocking RIP out of my hands as he jumped up to lick my face.

  ‘We’ve made you a welcome dinner, Grace. Vegetable lasagne, and Annabelle has made dessert.’ Jimmy rolled his eyes at his mother.

  ‘Can she at least see her room before she’s made to sit down and eat that mess of a cake?’ He grabbed my bags and leapt the stairs, two at a time, as I thanked Sophie and waved at Annabelle, busy in the kitchen with a piping bag. His little sister was a spindly and nervy 11-year-old. I hadn’t seen her recently, but Jimmy had informed me that she was already in analysis. Sophie was very keen on juvenile therapy, unsurprisingly. I sincerely hoped she wasn’t going to suggest it to me, and made a note to pretend that the school was already providing a counsellor if she did.

  My bedroom was on the top floor, under the eaves and across from Annabelle. Jimmy was on the floor below (this was the first place I had lived with floors and the climb from the kitchen to the bedroom already seemed tiresome), which he explained was no accident. Annabelle and he had swapped rooms the week before after Sophie and John had panicked about Jimmy and me sleeping on the same floor. Although nothing was said explicitly, I could imagine them getting in a lather over a bottle of red wine one night, discussing things like consent and hormones and whether their home would be a comfortable environment for a vulnerable girl. They needn’t have worried, though I thought Jimmy was a nice boy and valued his friendship immensely, I’d always thought he looked a bit like a potato from some angles (the root vegetable likeness mostly dissipated later in life, thankfully). And anyway, normal teenage distractions like sex and alcohol didn’t appeal to me. I wasn’t going to be one of those skunk smoking layabouts who dithered about university and went backpacking to delay having to deal with adult choices. I wanted to get on with it all.

  After I’d dumped my bags and caught up with Jimmy, we went down to eat. John had just got home, and was pouring a glass of red wine with one hand and absent-mindedly pulling off his tie with the other. He turned to greet me, kissing me on the forehead and rubbing my shoulder before Sophie handed him a stack of plates for the table. The embrace left me feeling slightly odd. Jimmy’s family were so affectionate with each other, his mum and dad were always hugging, or holding hands, and nobody seemed to find it invasive or annoying. There was always someone around in this house, something cooking, the constant noise of daily life. I didn’t mind John’s embrace, in fact it felt nice, warm, gentle. But it niggled, perhaps because I realised that I’d missed out on this stuff. That thought angered me. Normal – I wasn’t used to normal, however much Marie had tried to give me some semblance of it. I wondered if this family set-up was something I’d learn to love, whether I too would hug and kiss without a thought, whether I’d forget the time I spent with my mother and lean into this new life. The idea had appeal, but I’d have to guard against going soft. The Latimers are lovely people, and I was glad to be living there, but if I embraced their way of life too enthusiastically I’d risk ending up reading the Guardian, working in the arts, and buying people organic British wine for Christmas. A lovely warm bath of a life, apart from the embedded guilt and the glaring hypocrisy that Sophie exhibits so well, but totally pointless.

  Despite being fearful of letting myself relax too much, I settled into life with the Latimers quickly. Sophie spent a lot of time trying to make me comfortable.

  ‘Sit anywhere you like, darling girl. Please eat whatever you fancy.’

  The constant emphasis on making me feel like part of the family served to show me that I wasn’t, but I understood that this was the only way Sophie knew how to Be A Good Person. I returned to my old school, and worked towards my GCSEs, eventually getting straight As and earning a commendation fro
m the head teacher for my success ‘in the face of particular hardship’. The head tilt of sympathy I got from her as she presented me with a sad piece of paper with my name written in badly done calligraphy was only mildly aggravating. I still threw the certificate in the bin on the way home from school.

  Jimmy and I spent nearly all of our free time together. I got on with the other kids at school, but wasn’t concerned with having a clique, spending my life joined at the hip with girls who enjoyed spending hours forensically examining what a boy’s greeting meant really. Jimmy had always had a group of boys he’d hung about with since primary school – they played football in the local park and had game nights on weekends – but when I moved in, these mates were demoted to bit-part players. Sophie worried about this, I could tell. She would suggest a game of tennis, or offer to host a pizza night for ‘all our friends’, which really just meant Jimmy’s friends. But he’d just roll his eyes and tell her maybe another time. I couldn’t share her anxiety. Jimmy’s friends were monosyllabic, unless they were taking the piss out of each other, and not one of them would make eye contact with me when spoken to, as though making eye contact with someone of the opposite sex would signify a serious commitment of some sort and they’d be forced to hand over their Xbox in the inevitable break-up. Besides, Jimmy and I got on – we didn’t really need anyone else. We enjoyed talking for hours, lounging around in silence, and even doing our homework together. Jimmy never pushed me on my grief, but I knew he understood it when he looked at me. No head tilts necessary.

  I got into a routine at the Latimers’. Sophie and John managed to treat me almost like a daughter, only sometimes triumphantly wheeling me out in front of friends, as though I were a refugee they’d heroically taken in. Although I suppose in a way, I was. This was the bargain, it emerged. I was cheerful, helpful, and made Jimmy happy, and the Latimers fed me, clothed me, showed me kindness and we both agreed to ignore any awkward questions we might have had about how long my membership of the family was good for. Despite my protests, they insisted on paying for me to see a therapist friend of theirs called Elsa, a dumpy woman who wore very large black-rimmed glasses and wooden beaded necklaces and who barely spoke at all. I repeatedly told her I was excited about the future and she signed me off after six weeks.