by Bella Mackie
Nico is easier to listen to than Kelly, with a voice that doesn’t veer towards the nasal. She’s in here for something interesting too – she killed her mother’s abusive partner with a hammer last year. I’ve never asked her directly about it, I know better than to raise someone’s crime before they do, but she mentions it often. She talks with pride about how her mum is getting counselling and how she’s studying to be a counsellor too now. Nico calls her twice a week, and often cries quietly as she listens to her. I like Nico. I wouldn’t go near her on the outside, damaged and wild-eyed as she is, but I respect what she did for her mother. It wasn’t as well executed as my revenge plan, but the impulse must have called for speed over design. Unfortunately the lack of thought that went into her actions meant she was still standing next to him when the police turned up ten minutes later. Nico didn’t have a hope in hell of a credible alibi, and will be in here for another twelve years. Her mother is 60. By the time Nico gets out the woman will be 72. She’s given up her youth for a pensioner. It’s love. But it’s also patent stupidity.
Today, Nico and Kelly are discussing their boobs. Kelly has ambitious plans for a body revamp when she gets out of prison, and has read up on breast augmentation with all the focus of a research scientist working towards their first Nobel Prize. Turkey is the place to go apparently, half the price and you get a free holiday after the operation. Clint will pay. Or perhaps she’ll blackmail some poor fucker more successfully next time and they’ll stump up. Nico is worried about general anaesthesia and has heard of a treatment where you can get an extra cup size added on through injections alone. Kelly looks disdainful at this idea. ‘Injectables for the face, babe, the tits need a little more work.’
They both turn to look at me. ‘What would you get done, Grace?’ Nico asks me, as they both assess my face before lowering their eyes to my chest. I’ve never minded the idea of surgery. I don’t want any part of the modern puffed-up plastic face phenomenon, but in general, a few tiny tweaks don’t make me outraged. I don’t think its mutilation, or an affront to feminism. If you hate something that you have to live with every day, then change it. I like my tits actually. They’re small, which means I can wear whatever I like without looking like a school matron from the Fifties. I like most of myself. Not in a desperately empowering millennial way, where stretch marks are rebranded as ‘warrior stripes’ and cellulite is referred to as ‘celluLIT’, but I know I’m nice looking. One day I’ll be as rough and wrinkled as everyone else, but right now, I have a cosmetic advantage. I use it to full effect. People cut me slack that others don’t get, why would I not acknowledge that? Energy spent on examining my every inadequacy would have been such a waste of my time.
And yet having said all that, I hate my nose. It’s a good nose by anyone else’s standards. I’ve been complimented by other women for its straight and clean line. But it’s an Artemis nose and that’s all I can see in the mirror. Marie used to rub it with her thumb when I was being naughty and tell me I had my father’s will. The rest of my face is all from her. Sometimes, not long after she’d died, I used to sit in front of the bathroom mirror at Helene’s flat, hovering so that I could only see my eyes staring back at me. I felt like I could see my mother in those moments. I would look into them, remembering all the times I’d looked up at her and felt safe. When my legs started to wobble from being bent in a precarious position, I’d have to stand up straight and the rest of my face would hove into view. The little comfort would be snatched away.
Bryony had her mother’s nose. Cute, small, tweaked a little bit by a surgeon. Identikit. If I didn’t see Simon in the mirror, I’d be grateful for my strong profile, proud to have a nose which didn’t adhere so strictly to rigid beauty standards. But as it was, I would have it changed in a second. I’ve consulted top-class surgeons before, I’ve seen what I could look like with a few tiny swipes of a blade. Cut the Artemis out entirely. The only reason I haven’t done it yet is because I wanted my father to recognise me as I stood over him and told him who I was.
I look up from the mug of tea in front of me, Kelly and Nico having completed their assessment of my face and body and are now waiting to see how my answer lines up with their suggestions. ‘Nothing,’ I say, taking a swig of the tepid water. ‘I don’t agree with surgery really.’
My solicitor comes to see me this afternoon, which is a rare chance to see someone other than Kelly or the stodgy, unsmiling guards who, honestly, I’m glad work here and not in one of the caring professions. Some of these women, I imagine, had a fork in the road where they might’ve become nurses, teachers, or therapists. Given their reaction when faced with mental illness, physical ailments, and even just scared young girls wanting a moment of reassurance, I can only say that they chose well to avoid those areas of expertise. At 11 a.m., I am led into the visitors’ room where George Thorpe is already waiting for me. His suit today is typically beautiful. A light navy wool, befitting the recent warmer days, and just a flash of a dull terracotta lining as he stands up. I do not look at his shoes. I, by contrast, am wearing a grey tracksuit. I wonder whether a stranger who walked into this room would pick me out as different, whether my demeanour or my posture would speak of a life so different to that of the other women in here. I have always recognised wealth in others, education in strangers, refinement in deportment. It’s a particularly British thing to know exactly where someone falls in the class system without a word being spoken, isn’t it? Some people claim not to notice, but they’re the same tiresome people who claim not to see race, and that’s almost always because they’re white and don’t ever have cause to. But the grey tracksuit is a great leveller. It’s hard to signal that you’re not like these others in an outfit made from flammable material that will be rotting in landfill for a hundred years. Even the earth doesn’t want it.
Despite George Thorpe being fully aware of my background, and despite the enormous fee I pay him by the hour, I still feel the ridiculous desire to show him that I am not like these other prisoners. That I am better. And I learnt how to do this very easily while working my way up the Artemis ladder. The only way to do it is to treat him like shit.
He stands up to greet me and extends his hand. I ignore it and sit down. ‘I know we’re already on the clock, George, so why don’t you catch me up with what’s happening.’
Good manners are drilled into men like George Thorpe. Public school, Oxbridge, their nannies who raise them and leave them with mother complexes that they take out on their wives – all of these structures hammer home the need for politeness, etiquette, and the right way of doing things. I have disturbed the order. He stumbles slightly as he sits, and I make a point of looking impatient as he opens his briefcase and pulls out some notes.
‘Right well, um, so …’ he trails off as he puts his glasses on and I wonder, not for the first time, whether this man is a shark. I want a shark. I need a shark. When this shit show started to play out, I researched lawyers obsessively and I was told by almost everyone I cared to ask that he was the real deal, with the added benefit of looking like several members of his family ran the British empire at some point. He’s won too many cases to list, he’s got people off on appeal (bad people, people who really should be locked up for life and they walk free because he works every technicality, every weakness in an overworked, tired police officer’s statement, every wavering jury member who is scared of having to live with putting someone in jail). So he’s the best. But this sharkier part of him? Well, he’s doing a good job of hiding it and I need for him to taste blood.
George Thorpe goes through the appeal process with me again, reassuring me that we’re on track for the final decision next week. There is a reason that those true crime documentaries eke out the crime part and fade away when it comes to the resulting legal process – it’s complex, boring, demoralising, and mainly consists of waiting around for months. We filed an appeal on day three of my sentence. We filed for bail pending appeal and that went nowhere, I suspect because of the pu
blicity surrounding my case. So now I’ve been in this place for over a year, waiting and festering. There wouldn’t be much tension for the reader picturing me lying on this bed, desperately trying to avoid more group therapy classes where one person tearfully talks about horrific sexual abuse and then three other women accuse her of taking up all the attention.
I haven’t told you much about why I’m in here, have I? That’s because I resent having to. It’s not the injustice of it that holds me back – it’d be fairly moronic to spend my time railing at the unfairness of it all when what I’ve got away with is so much worse – no, it’s the utter banality of it. The motive ascribed to me was pathetic. The act I allegedly committed is one I’d have had to carry out in a fit of rage, with a lack of planning I’d have hated. I’m not Nico. But you can’t use that as a defence, can you? ‘Sorry, m’lud, but when I murder people, I do it with a little more precision, you see.’ Instead I have had to grit my teeth and get through an entire legal process, dragged out for months and months – at great expense. What’s that saying? You make plans and God laughs. I made plans to murder seven people and ended up in jail for the death of someone I didn’t even touch. God would be having a hernia.
CHAPTER TEN
When we were 26, Jimmy met a girl. He’d had girlfriends before, nice, quiet, carried jute bags that had independent book shop logos on them, worked for charities, NGOs, small publishing companies – you know the kind of girl I mean. Glasses, small silver hoop earrings, likes a cup of tea intensely. They were all fine. Fine fine fine. But Jim is so laidback, so kind and well-meaning himself, that these relationships had no real drive to them. There was Louise, who obsessively kept an allotment but never showed a similar passion for anything else and faded away within a year. There was Harriet, who made more progress, sharing a house with Jim and some uni friends in Balham for a while. Their break-up was so painless it was barely noted (by me). I’d been working all hours when she moved out, and by the time we caught up for a drink it seemed like he was completely over it and I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to spend my precious free evening consoling him over a woman whose face I could no longer quite picture.
His next girlfriend was Simone, and I thought she might have been the one. She was a gallery curator and wore interesting (interesting just means angular) jewellery and brogues in a variety of colours. She was a serious person, they all were. But she liked my sense of humour and was very relaxed about the long and sometimes blurry friendship I shared with her boyfriend. Importantly, she seemed to really like Jimmy, and talked about their future together with none of those embarrassing caveats some women use in order not to scare a man away. They went on weekends away to Norfolk, and adopted a cat. There was talk of buying a flat together. And I got used to Simone, sharing Jimmy with her was no compromise for me. I might have even watched them grow old together with a sense of satisfaction. But Simone had more ambition than I’d guessed at, and she was offered a curating job at some newly opened gallery in New York just as they’d started viewing flats. I think she’d assumed that Jim would pack up his life and move to Brooklyn no questions asked, but he wavered. He’d just started at the Guardian, and couldn’t bear to give up a precious staff job at a paper where he’d always wanted to work. He wouldn’t be able to work at the same level, he’d protested. He’d flounder around as a freelancer, in a city full of them. Simone listened patiently, she countered his worries with options and emphasised how much this move would mean to her, but he grew more and more mulish. Within a week, he was barely communicating with her at all. They carried on in a muted facsimile of their previous lives while she sorted out her visa, sold her furniture and had a leaving party. Jimmy still hadn’t given her a firm no, and I imagine that she thought he might be wavering, just waiting for her absence to become a real, firm thing in his mind before he gave in and followed her to New York. Instead, she flew out on a Saturday, and he sent her a brief email the following Tuesday saying that he couldn’t do it, that he loved her, that he was so sorry. I know this because he sent it to me minutes later, with the subject heading ‘I hate myself’.
The problem with Jimmy is that he’s too comfortable and it’s made him a coward. His parents are nice, his family life was stable, loving and safe. He grew up knowing smart people, influential people who made him feel like he would be able to do anything he wanted in the world. He had amazing holidays, speaks fluent German and plays two instruments. All of this equipped him to go out and be king of whatever world he wanted. But it also made him scared to go anywhere else, because where else in the world could he be as confident and established? All of those advantages, all of that privilege and all Jimmy wants to do is live two roads away from his mum and dad and live exactly as they did. And yet, I am tied to him. His familiarity, his smell, his arms which have just enough strength to make me feel safe. It’s ridiculous and clichéd and I hate that I feel it. But I do. I’ve not known anyone as long as I’ve known Jim. I’ve not tolerated anyone else like I’ve tolerated him. And because he’s patient and kind, I let myself rely on him, let him know me (most of me), and draw on that old bond which has remained constant. I’ve never told him about who my father really is, preferring to keep the sides of my life completely separate. But apart from that, he knows me in a way that nobody else ever has nor ever will. And if he doesn’t want to be some kind of king of the world, then I’ll surge forward myself and learn to be content just to let him be by my side as I go. He used to stroke my arm as I fell asleep, knowing I would get anxious when the day came to an end. He’d lie by my side and trace the freckles on my arm. ‘You’re so smooth, Gray. Smoooo-oothe!’ he’d sing, to the tune of a song we loved. Then I’d be able to sleep.
Simone has her own gallery now. She married a well-known playwright and they have a Doberman, which feels like the height of arrogance when living in a city that really can only accommodate Chihuahuas. I know this because when Jimmy gets drunk he loads up her Instagram and thrusts his phone in my face, trying to show that he’s happy for her while also asking me whether the V-neck T-shirt her husband is wearing makes him look like a twat.
Six months after Simone left for New York and Jimmy moved around the corner from his parents, he met someone else. I’d like to say that he shook off some of his cowardice after the breakup and met her whilst on a three-day bender in some ungentrified corner of South London, but he didn’t, because he rarely leaves North London at all now except for the odd book launch. He met her at a supper party at his godfather’s house in Notting Hill. Horace is some kind of hotshot QC (he put me on to Thorpe, so I guess I’m just as guilty as Jimmy when it comes to celebrating the middle-class connections that his parents gave us) and holds monthly dinners where he invites ‘interesting young people’ to come and talk about world events. I have never been invited to one of these hideous sounding salons. I have squared this in my mind by reminding myself that Horace is a stuffy old snob and also by taking £50 out of his wallet the last time I saw him at the Latimers.
I didn’t see Jimmy for a few weeks after the dinner, because I had bigger things on my mind at that point. I’d just sent Bryony packing – more on this later – and was veering between exaltation at my progress and frustration at failing to come up with a workable way to get to Simon. The whole process had meant I’d not had much time for Jimmy. It was too hard to talk to my closest friend while I was in the middle of it all without being able to talk about even the smallest aspect of my activities. I should have known something was up though, because his texts had petered off until there had been radio silence for eight days. And then he turned up at my flat one Saturday morning unannounced with coffee and croissants. There is nothing that screams ‘I have news’ quite like ringing someone’s doorbell without texting first. It’s so self-absorbed that the only excuses would be to inform you of a terrible accident or to bang on about a new love affair. Since I knew from his face that his mother hadn’t died in a hideous jet-ski accident, the only real alternative was som
e new woman. As a result, I tortured him slightly by not asking anything and instead talking endlessly about plans I had for renovating my kitchen. I had no plans to renovate my kitchen. I lived in this flat precisely because it was completely serviceable, and thank God, because people who talk about remodelling plans are insufferable.
Eventually, just as I got going with a particularly monotonous soliloquy about drawer handles, he’d cracked and told me all about Caro. Caro Morton was a young barrister, working at Horace’s chambers. They’d been sat next to each other at the grim ideas dinner and Jimmy was, he insisted, set on her within minutes. They’d been on several dates in the weeks since, and discussed moving in together already. Caro, it emerged, was not a woman who played it cool and pretended that she wasn’t looking for commitment.
‘I want you to meet her, Gray,’ he said. ‘She’s met John and Sophie but she needs to pass your bar.’ I was shaken by this. Met his parents? Simone didn’t hit that milestone for months. But then, Caro was in the same circle, wasn’t she? An associate of Horace, a lawyer who doubtless went to Oxbridge and had a parent that the Latimers either knew or professed to know. Simone, as lovely as she might have been, was not. East London born, daughter of a nurse and a council worker, she never fitted in with Jimmy’s family with the ease that one of his own tribe would have. Sophie and John showered her with praise – Sophie once took her to the country house they rented in Oxfordshire for a bonding weekend where she forced them to make marmalade all day – but there would never be a true ease. I should know. Being embraced into that family is not the same as being truly accepted. Someone feeling smug for helping you is not the same as loving you.
