Saturday 11 April 2020

V


Episode Five
Guilt


When we got to A&E, we told the doctors that he’d been in a fight. Standard Friday night shit. We sat in the waiting room for maybe two hours before someone saw us, and since there were plenty of others sitting around us, I was anxious about discussing the ‘moment’ that had occurred a half hour before. Maz was hungry for answers, though.
‘You did that shit, didn’t you?’
‘Let’s not talk about it here,’ I whispered to him.
‘You did something, though, right?’
I was pissed off that he was pressing me so hard, like I had something to answer for. Like I hadn’t just stopped him from getting his head smashed to bits. I swallowed and nodded slowly.
We avoided looking at each other. Maz touched his face gently and seethed. Eventually he asked: ‘How’d it happen?’
I shrugged. My lip was quivering slightly. It took every bit of self-control I had to keep from shaking too hard. I felt like I had a flock of frightened birds trapped in my chest.
‘You dunno?’ Maz asked.
‘It’s… hard to say.’
Another stretch of bored fear went by. There was a bunch of lads laughing and squabbling with similar fight-marks across their faces. Trolleys with grim-faced strangers lined up down the corridors. There was the occasional echo of suffering from someone down the hall. People were coming and going. It was a nervous place to be. I felt like I was going to be sick.
‘Who was that guy, anyway?’ I whispered to Maz. ‘Why’d he go for you like that? He was gonna kill you, y’know.’
‘He wasn’t gonna kill me,’ Maz said dismissively, which boiled me up as I looked at his blood-drenched, swollen face and the gaps in his mouth where his teeth used to be.
‘You fucked him over?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I did. He’s an idiot.’
‘Well, you must’ve done something.’
Maz grunted with pain. ‘Yeah, I killed his dog.’
‘What?’
He nodded. ‘He pissed me off, so I killed his mutt.’
I felt disgusted. ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’
‘I dunno!’ Maz said, like a defensive child. ‘I dunno. He’d been talking shit about me, acting the hardest, bein a total dickhead when I seen him out. We fought n that. Him and his boys beat me down at Laura’s barbecue. So, y’know, I wanted to get him back, innit. Seemed like the best thing to do. He loved that fuckin dog.’
‘Fucking hell,’ I said. ‘You’re a fucking psychopath!’
‘Well he made an idiot out of me,’ he said. ‘I wanted to fuck him up.’
‘You are an idiot, Maz,’ I said. ‘God, you’re a total fucking moron.’
‘Yeah, well, I didn’t know he was gonna come beat me down. Or, y’know, that it was gonna end with one us turnin to fuckin… giblets!’
‘Shut up,’ I seethed.
I was paranoid, but nobody was looking at us anyway. Most people had their own shit to be dealing with. I kept staring hopefully at every nurse who went by, hoping that Maz could get sorted out so that we’d get out of there and head somewhere I could relax and try to get a grip on everything.
‘This is mad,’ Maz muttered, after a while. ‘What’re we gonna do?’
‘God knows what we’re gonna do,’ I said.
‘You think anyone saw us?’
‘I don’t know,’ I sighed, holding my wrist to try and stop the nervous shaking. ‘I really don’t know.’
I nearly went out of my mind waiting for him to get sorted out. We barely spoke to each other. There was only one thing worth talking about and we couldn’t do it in public. Just in case. Finally a doctor came over and took Maz away for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. He came back with a couple of stitches. His face was all kinds of bruised, but he looked a whole lot better with the blood washed off.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, then he walked off before I even stood up.
Outside was shimmering, soaking wet, but the rain had stopped. We walked down away from the hospital, not knowing where to go, not knowing what to do. So we just carried on walking, and discussed what needed to be discussed.
‘This happens sometimes,’ I said to Maz as we passed the graveyard.
‘What does?’
‘Stuff like this,’ I said. ‘Sometimes crazy shit happens around me and I don’t know why. It just sorta happens.’
‘You kill people?’
My stomach clenched like a fist. ‘No! No. This hasn’t happened before, ever. Never.’
‘Well, what the fuck, Eva?’
‘Can you stop talking to me like, like… like I’ve done something wrong?’
‘It’s fucked up, Eva! He’s fuckin dead. Something is definitely, seriously, wrong!’
‘Yeah, but I… but I… I…’
‘What bout when someone finds him? What if people… what if they figure out he wanted to do me in? What then? Fuck! Jesus!’
All of a sudden an invisible claw wrapped itself tight around my throat and a piano dropped in my chest. I froze and grabbed my heart. I rose and fell with trembling, agonising breath.
‘Fuckin hell, Evz,’ Maz’s tone suddenly fell soft, ‘you alright? You okay?’
Everything swelled. The universe wrapped around me. The voices in my head shrieked and wailed, screamed at me. It’s over, they said. There’s no going back. Everything is ruined. It’s over. It’s over. It’s over and there’s nothing I can do. I sat on the pavement in a black, fiery hole as Maz’s weak voice tried and failed to calm me down.


• • •


I told Maz to go home and said that we’d talk about it later. ‘Go home and pray,’ I think I actually said. There wasn’t much else we could do, and besides, I wanted to get away from him. It was strange, but in the wake of that incident off the road, and after him telling me killed a guy’s dog, he began grating on me; being around him agonised me. I had to get away from him. So we both went our separate ways and I walked back alone. I just wanted to get back to my room.
I got in and the place was deathly quiet. Murder must’ve been passed out, if she even came home at all. I decided to get back to my room and take a couple of valium to try and knock myself out. I lay on my bed and stared into the ceiling. The silence felt strange, what with the storm blowing through the intangible space inside my head. The place was so still, and the night outside was so black; it was like I’d disappeared somewhere else, outside of everything, and that the only place that existed was within those four walls. I imagined that this was the case, pretended it was true, and it helped, at least a little bit. After a few moments of soft, silent tears and frightened thoughts, I somehow managed to drop into sleep.
I woke up hours later, mid-afternoon maybe, depressed at how my dreamless sleep made it seem like only a few seconds had passed. I was back in the real world. The memory of last night was as fresh as ever; if I closed my eyes, I could see it happening again, as if I was still there, watching the entrails as they soared.
I stayed in bed for a while, not wanting to step out of my safe fantasy of non -existence. I could hear Murder pottering about the flat, listening to music, cooking, muttering loudly to herself. I stayed under the covers, in comfortable darkness, overhearing the sounds of normalcy from next door. After a while my stomach felt filled with needles, and I realised how long it’d been since I last ate. This finally compelled me to get out of bed.
Murder was sat on her bed with the door open, smoking a joint and reading a comic or something. 90s Madonna was playing at hangover-friendly volume from her speakers. Her room was a cluttered mess of beer cans, bras and kitschy occult miscellany. The curtains were shut tight. She looked up at me and flinched.
‘Fuck, Eva, don’t just appear like that, you scared the pants off me.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, all sceptical, ‘I don’t know how else I was meant to do that.’
‘It’s fine,’ she said, then she flipped her smouldering zoot to an upright position. ‘Bun?’
I sat on the edge of the bed and took a deep, thankful toke. Murder stretched and rolled about her bed like a cat, groaning with sickness.
‘Did I do something dumb last night?’ she said with her face in the sheets.
‘You don’t remember?’
Murder rubbed her head and whined. ‘Nope. Nothin. I remember we went to go meet someone at Unwich Green – maybe. Then nothin. I must’ve done something stupid, though. I can tell.’
‘How can you tell?’
Murder rolled onto her back. ‘Bad feelings,’ she said.
‘Well, you attacked Shena’s boyfriend,’ I said. ‘You remember that?’
‘Shena has a boyfriend?’
‘Well, boyfriend, temporary fuck partner, I don’t know. Anyway, they came over to talk to us and you started going crazy at him and abusing him, then when they walked away you tripped him over and kicked him a bunch.’
She let out a rough, guttural giggle. ‘Oh, shit.’
‘It was pretty embarrassing.’
‘He must’ve been acting a cunt, though, right?’
I passed the joint back. ‘Not really. It was out of nowhere and awkward and then you just had a go at me and pissed off home.’
‘Yeah, well, I’ve had a lot on my mind recently,’ she said in the most casual voice imaginable, as if she was joking.
‘Right, yeah,’ I said. I scratched an imaginary itch on my wrist. I blinked and for a second I saw the popping of his brain, the splitting of his ribcage. The look on his face just before his skull blew apart. Should I tell her? The less people who know the better. But then, of course, she already knows.
‘I need to tell you something,’ I said.
‘Oh, yeah?’ A huge grin split across her face. ‘They’re the words I love to hear more than anything.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Go on, then,’ she said. ‘What is it? What’ve you done?’
Okay, here we go, I thought. Just say the words. Don’t think about what they mean, just say them.
‘I killed someone last night.’
Murder snorted with laughter and fell backwards, arms across her face. ‘You did not,’ she said, patronisingly.
I turned to look her in the eyes, feeling the anxiety begin to bubble up inside me again. ‘I did,’ I told her.
Murder smiled at me from beneath her wrists, but eventually, her smile dropped, and she understood. Immediately, she pulled herself upright and sat next to me, her casualness instantly evaporating and her eyes trembling with serious fascination.
‘No way,’ she said. ‘You mean… you mean what I think you mean?’
I nodded. Once again, I had to face the gravity of the strange and dismal situation. My nerves were shredded.
‘Oh, shit,’ Murder said. ‘Oh, shit. What happened?’
I wasn’t prepared to have to walk through that moment yet another time, but it was too late now. I told her what happened, trying my hardest to detach myself from it, telling the story like it’d happened to someone else, or as if it’d happened in a dream.
Murder stared at me with glassy eyes and fumbled for something to say. ‘Fuck.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I know.’
And then I burst into tears. I didn’t even feel them coming. In one whip-crack second I was back in the hole, back at the bottom of the black pit with no possible escape. All my thoughts and beliefs about the world came crumbling down. After all, I was a killer. I’d ended a life. And that fact was never going to change.
I’d expected Murder would try to calm me down, give me a hug, something like that. Maybe that was a stupid thing to think. Instead she sat there watching me cry, before asking, all blasé:
‘You sure he’s dead?’
Yes!’ I yelled through clenched teeth. ‘Yes, he’s definitely fucking dead.’
‘Alright, alright!’
‘He exploded. More or less. He was ripped to bits in an instant.’
Murder hummed agreeably. ‘Not a bad way to go, I spose.’
I carried on crying. I heard Murder re-light the joint and carry on smoking it. I cried so much it poured in streams down my arms.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said, shaking. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Well, don’t take this wrong way or anything, Eva,’ Murder said, ‘but there isn’t really anything you can do, now.’
‘Oh, god!’ I wailed, before weeping twice as hard.
‘Hey, hey, hey! Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mean like that. I just meant that there isn’t anything you should be doing, y’know? Like, I mean… what’s done is done, right?’
I sobbed. ‘That guy’s dead because of me.’
Murder sighed, and the smoke floated with a sting into my eyes. ‘So what?’ she said.
I pulled my head out of my hands and looked at Murder, who was leaning back with a completely nonplussed expression on her face. ‘So what?’
‘Yeah, so what?’
‘I… killed him, Murder! I ended him! snuffed him out! He’s never gonna wake up again! His existence is now totally, definitely, one-hundred-percent over! That guy is gone! Forever! He’s dead!’
‘Alright, keep it down, mate,’ Murder said.
‘I killed someone, M,’ I said. ‘I killed someone.’
‘Yeah, but you didn’t mean to, did you? Like, if he’s gonna come over to you lot and get violent n nasty, he shouldn’t expect that nothing bad was gonna happen to him. Even if it was… magical, or whatever.’
‘It’s fucked up!’ I said.
‘Oh, yeah, it’s pretty fucked up,’ Murder said. ‘I didn’t say it weren’t fucked up. But how were you to know that shit was gonna happen? It was an accident, right?’
‘What if they catch me, M?’ I asked, feeling my nerves buzz like electric wire. ‘What if they find out… find out we were there or something? Find out it was us?’
‘Well, how they gonna do that? Find the weapon? Ask the witnesses? Did anyone see you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’ I was still shivering with fear, but the crying began to die down, and soon I could string a sentence together without sobbing or whining.
‘Look, Eva, I know this’s probably got you pretty rattled, blowin up a dude or whatever, but to be honest with you, it’s not such a big deal.’
‘Really?’ I said, unconvinced. ‘I mean, really? This isn’t a big deal?’
‘Well, okay, it’s a deal,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you that. It’s notable. It probably in’t something you’ll be wantin to do again. But, what, this guy comes out of nowhere, starts whackin the shit outta Maz? Like, what would’ve happened if he didn’t get exploded, huh? What if Maz was dead right now and you’d just watched it happen?’
‘Yeah, but, like…’ I sniffed and wiped my nose on my sleeve. ‘Killing him?’
‘Alright, regrettable, sure,’ Murder said, ‘but he sounded like a dickhead anyway, right? I mean, a serious dickhead. One of them dickheads who just cause shit for other people. He didn’t even flinch before beating on Maz, right? That’s a casual fuckin bloodthirsty dickhead right there.’
‘I don’t know!’ I said. ‘I don’t know who he was, I don’t know anything about him. He might’ve been a nice guy in a weird situation or something. God knows. He just showed up and now he’s dead. And, like… I made it happen.’ I started sobbing again, softly.
‘Oh, c’mon, Evz, you don’t even know it was you.’
‘Oh, yeah, just like we don’t know it was me with that Max guy? Or even fucking… Rick’s girlfriend? It’s fucked, Murder. What the hell’s wrong with me? Why does this keep happening? Why am I causing so much shit? I’m a danger to people, innit. I’m a serious fucking danger. I’m just making peoples’ lives a misery. And now I’ve… I’ve… I’ve taken a fucking life.’
‘Meh,’ Murder said, nonchalantly. ‘I wouldn’t say you “took” a life. More like you accidentally caused a life to end.’
‘How are you so calm about this?’ I said. ‘How are you not freaking out? This is huge. This is unbelievable.’
‘It’s not so bad, Eva, jesus. So there was a scrap and someone died. Yeah, rough for him, I know, but you gotta remember, Evz – people die all the time! Completely by accident, out of the blue. People are gone whenever, wherever, for all sorts of bullshit reasons that we can’t get our heads around. Life in’t some solid, unmoving, definite thing. Y’know. We’re not invincible. Shit happens.’
‘What are you on about?’ I said. ‘The fuck kind of reasoning is that? That doesn’t make me feel any better.’
‘All I’m sayin is – it’s not something to feel guilty about. Really. In the big, super-grand scheme of things. Like, all we know is that shit went down, and a guy got ripped in two or whatever, right? We dunno how, we dunno why. Now he’s dead, yeah, sure, how sad. But don’t make this about you, Eva, y’know? Don’t burden yourself. You in’t killed anybody. That whole thing, like, it was just the wrong place n the wrong time.’
I shook my head and sighed. Murder’s words rang about as true as a bell made of dried human shit.
‘So if it’s not killing someone,’ I said, ‘what would you call it?’
Murder took one last drag of the spliff, then passed it back to me. My head was ringing from all the weed and crying.
‘I dunno,’ she said with a calm smile. ‘Just fuckin… chaos, innit?’


• • •


There are footprints at the scene. CCTV footage. Blood and bone fragments hidden in the fibres of my jacket. Statements from the hospital staff. Dental records. There are witnesses, both of Maz and Darren’s altercation, and those willing to testify to the details of their well-known beef. I’m considered by everyone to be noticeably shaken in the days following the incident. It isn’t long before Maz is questioned and, to save himself, he tells the authorities about my mysterious ‘trait’.
I’m arrested in the middle of the day. I’m halfway through brushing my teeth when the police break down the door and hold me to the ground. I scream and wail as the handcuffs bite into my wrists. One of the coppers drops his knee on my neck; I hear the mirror shatter above me, and watch as the fragments hit the ground. The cops gasp. One of them shouts ‘Get her out of here!’, and they pull me up and drag me out the flat. Murder just sits at the counter, shaking her head sadly.
I’m brought back for interrogation. They ask me what happened out in the woods, and how exactly I managed to eviscerate that guy without even touching him. They also asked me about what happened to Max. And to Rick’s girlfriend’s legs. And about the hole that appeared in the Nine Nuns’ car park. I answer in nothing but hysterical crying. They throw me into a cell and I sit in the dark for maybe a day. A faceless man sits beside me, bleeding gently from a cut that runs vertically down the centre of his body.
I’m in the court and the jury of shadows find me guilty of involuntary manslaughter. My parents are weeping uncontrollably. I’m shouting for mercy but nobody can hear me. The judge sentences me to life imprisonment, a punishment he describes as appropriate for the ‘protection of society’. When I get to the prison, Darren isn’t there when I’m locked in my cell. His absence affects me even more than his apparition.
One night, the door opens and the guards run in. They restrain me and strap some kind of mechanical halo to my head. Then they drag me out into a van and drive me away from the prison and out into the nowhere countryside. We arrive at some kind of industrial facility; sheet metal and rust. I’m stripped completely naked and thrown into another cell – smaller, more claustrophobic. I sit shivering against the concrete walls, stained by an endless stream of tears.
They take me out into some darkly-lit warehouse and start manhandling me. I’m strapped to a gurney and poked, prodded, molested, injected. Cut into, opened up. Peered at and inspected. They scan me, they take my temperature, they measure my blood pressure, they shave my hair and pull open my mouth. I’m dissected as I lay there, silently screaming. They attach burning electrodes to my scalp. They want to know everything about me. One of the surgeons holds his fingers up to me and asks me to count them. I feel their gloved hands turn me round, flip me over and stretch me out. I feel the metal halo searing into my flesh.
I woke up, terrified, to Murder shaking me by the foot. ‘What?’ I think I asked amongst the mumblings of my return to consciousness. I was on the sofa; it’d somehow turned into night-time. Murder was pointing her cig at the TV.
‘I couldn’t sit and watch this while you were asleep,’ she said. ‘Think you might wanna see.’
On TV was the local news – Kevin Emerson in his navy-blue suit, speaking solemnly above a red band with ‘BODY DISCOVERED’ emblazoned in white letters.
‘…the heavily mutilated body was discovered earlier today by workers at a nearby garage. Although no form of I.D. was discovered, a grey BMW was found abandoned close to the scene, and police are currently cross-referencing with the missing persons database in order to ascertain the identity of the victim.’
I could still feel the violating fingers of the men in my dreams.
‘The discovery of the body comes weeks after an escaped bear was shot by a local man at the perimeter of the Dunskills woodlands, and it was revealed by witnesses that there was extensive damage to the body that was similar to that found on the corpses of wildlife within the woods in the days before the bear’s capture. However, Ranford police refused to comment as to whether the body showed signs of an animal attack, although they did say that they were treating the death as suspicious.’
‘You hear that?’ Murder leaned into view and stared at me intensely. ‘Fuckin good news.’
‘How’s that good news?’ I asked. A cold sweat was blossoming across my skin.
‘Mate, did you listen to him? They think a fuckin bear did it! Cos of that shit in the woods like a month or two back. That shit.’
‘Locals are advised to report any suspicious activity or signs of irregular wildlife to the authorities.’
No way, I thought. Sure, I was surprised to see that the press were immediately jumping back to the ‘beasts of the Dunskills’ story that smothered the local papers back when we found the bear, but I didn’t think that it was going to hold up this time, seeing as someone had actually died, and this time there was no bear. As far as I knew. Suspicious. That was the word I focused on. Their suspicion had been aroused. The police were looking for answers. I could still taste the rubber of the fingertips as they dug through my teeth and into my throat.
The lamb korma I’d eaten earlier ejected itself out onto the coffee table. I whimpered and wiped my lips. Murder let out an irritated yell.
‘Oh, fuck me, man,’ she said as she got up to get something wipey, ‘that’s the last time I try to do you a favour, you ungrateful bitch.’


• • •


I carried on through the next couple of days in a sort of trance. It wasn’t the underwatery feeling I got on the days when I lay around not washing and not eating, and it wasn’t that fiery, suffocating, sky-collapsing sort of feeling that came with the sads every now and again. It was another feeling. I was indescribably disconnected from everything around me. Everything felt like a movie set. Everything people said sounded completely unreal, like they were putting on act, reciting things that’d been written for them, that sort of thing. It was weird, and it was miserable.
Life went past as usual, like nothing had happened. Meanwhile, every other second reminded me of what I’d done.
I followed the investigation into that guy’s death religiously, or obsessively, if that means anything different. The worst night was when they announced his name – Darren Grant – and uploaded a picture of his nugget-skulled profile, staring joylessly at me from my laptop screen, shimmering with judgement. That was a hard couple of hours to get through. As the weeks went by, I kept up to speed, expecting the worst, preparing myself to watch the murder investigation unfold and complicate until the moment I’d hear a knock at the door.
This didn’t seem to happen. Time went by and I watched as it fell out of the news. I couldn’t understand why. Wasn’t it a unique and unusual crime? Was it not mysterious enough? Didn’t the guy’s family want answers relating to his death? Didn’t anyone care? I became strangled by two knotted strands of feeling; not wanting to anyone to find out, and yet feeling confused that no one was even trying to find out. It didn’t make any sense.
I hadn’t spoken to Maz the entire time since. I was paranoid that our digital communications could be mined by the police or something. He rang me a few times, but I ignored every call. And text. And Facebook message. Every time, I just didn’t want to speak to him; something repulsed me.
I stayed locked up in my room, lying in wait for something bad to happen, like that guy who sat under that sword or whatever. But as time went on, the smoke cleared, and the fear died away. The memory of the guy splitting in front of me lost its lustre, and began feeling more like the memory of some nightmare. It got to the point where I could lie to myself, convincingly, that the whole thing was just a bad dream. It’d never happened. It was a dip in my sanity, a momentary illusion, that sort of thing, and the truth was actually that everything was going to be okay. I finally gathered the strength to leave the house, with a pained smile on my face, the kind that happy people wear.
I’d become weirdly electrified. I don’t know what had happened; the desperation must’ve sent me a bit manic. I was dead-set on going out that weekend, even though none of the thousand people I’d texted were interested. Even Murder wasn’t too bothered, and in fact seemed pretty blue, probably due to the behind-the-scenes family drama that was going on. She was getting blazed with Abby and watching Hunger Games when I left. Heading out without Murder was strange and made me feel all vulnerable, like I’d stepped out without any shoes on.
The only thing I could find to do was go to some gig at the Nine Nuns that Beth Dicks’ brother was playing. It didn’t sound thrilling, but I needed to get out of the house. Me and Beth had agreed to go halves on a gram, which was stupid of me, really, what with my recent lack of employment, but y’know, c’est la vie. When I got there, there was a concrete circle in the car park outside where the hole used to be; I took it as a positive metaphor.
Ian Dicks was guitarist/singer/figurehead of an ethereal guitar band made of three other pretty boys who looked just like him. They called themselves ‘Cruel Production’. I’d arrived pretty early, so there was maybe an hour of me and Beth sniffing coke and chatting shit before anything really happened. Her brother was busy talking to some immaculately-styled younger girl. There were seven or eight other bored-looking hipsters sitting around us.
‘Theresa not coming?’ I asked Beth. She was leaning on her elbows, drinking her vodka-coke through a straw. She looked bummed out.
‘She’s doing some other shit down in London with her real mates,’ she said.
‘Getting fucked up?’ I tweaked.
‘Think she’s probably getting some work done, actually. But yeah, basically, I guess.’
‘Ohh,’ I said, ‘she’s hanging out with all her sculpture buddies?’
Beth’s eyes stayed flat and uninterested. ‘If you can call them that.’
‘So what does she do?’ I asked. ‘Does she make statues? Like big stone sorta statues?’
‘Nah, course not,’ she said. ‘It’s all fibreglass tubes and iron rings and that kind of stuff.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘Piles of rubbish, basically,’ Beth said. ‘Big piles of crap, with a title attached. That’s what art is, apparently.’
‘So I hear,’ I said.
Beth carried on slurping the dregs of her glass even after she’d finished it. She kept staring intently at something across the room, like she was concentrating intensely on something I couldn’t see myself, or maybe locking eyes with someone.
‘So are they any good?’ I asked her, cracking through her trance.
‘Huh?’
‘This band your brother’s in.’
Beth bobbed her head from side to side, thoughtfully, which was the moment I realised she’d gone from nought to pissed in about twenty minutes. ‘They’re alright.’
A couple of the other hair-straightened kids in Ian’s band walked out of the toilets and passed us by. One of them gave me a confident smile as he walked past, which I didn’t know how to respond to, since he didn’t look a day over twelve.
‘Well, I’m glad he’s found something to spend his time with,’ I lied. ‘He’s not drinking as much anymore, is he?’
‘Sometimes,’ Beth said. ‘He keeps saying he wants to quit, but he won’t. Not while mum and dad let him get away with murder.’
Red fountain in moonlight.
‘People die all the time,’ Murder said.
‘It’s so unfair how him and Theresa are treated like fucking royalty,’ Beth carried on, snapping me out of it. ‘Meanwhile I have to scrap to get them to help me out with anything. Literally anything. They act like I don’t exist, and when I try to get them to have any momentary interest in my life, they treat me like I’m a massive pain in their arses.’
‘You’re probably imagining it,’ I told her.
‘Am I fuck! Whenever they’ve got friends round, all they can talk about is Tess and Ian. Tess the successful, cool, calm, charismatic superhuman they’ve invested heaps of cash in so she can swan off to London being an arty bitch, and Ian the little sensitive baby who has his nose wiped for him if he so much as thinks about it. And then me. You know, the girl who works at the chip shop.’
It surprised me how much I didn’t want to listen to this. I think my characteristic kindness and tolerance must’ve been overridden by the cheap coke. ‘I’m sure it’s not like that,’ I said, hoping she’d take it as my final thought on the matter.
Beth shook her head. ‘They hate me,’ she said. ‘They think I’m a waste of space. Just cos I’m not as good at everything as the others are.’ A tear rolled down her cheek; she wiped her face without her expression breaking. ‘Bastards.’
‘You alright, Beth?’ I said, a little bit condescendingly.
She stood up. ‘I’m getting another drink,’ she said, and breezed over to the bar.
Christ, I thought, that’s the last time I’m letting anyone invite me into their mangled family gatherings. So much for a bit of escapism.
Beth got drunker as the time went by, but luckily she had one of those drunk personalities I was always jealous of, the kind that actually drank away their sorrows and became a jolly, wobbly mess. She was cackling away to herself while leaning up against the wall after we’d come out shamefully from our fifth or sixth toilet visit.
She told me she was remembering the time me and her used to hang out with Scott Speedcore, some way older boy who used to feed us shit weed and base every now and again. He used to punch himself in the head at parties and strangle himself half to death in order to get a ‘buzz’. We all found it hilarious at the time, we used to cheer him on and shit, but being reminded of it just then made me realise how sorta dark it was. It was still funny, though.
‘Whatever happened to him?’ I asked.
‘God knows,’ she said. ‘Can’t have been good, though.’
That made me sad.
The first group to play were some D.I.Y. dance-punk duo, a boy and a girl. They were pretty decent, actually, even though the guy sung like a bit of a twat. The coke had me dancing about like an idiot.
Ian’s band played after, and the atmosphere suddenly dipped, as the four of them were chasing a vibe that was obviously less about having fun, and more about seriousness and emotions and all that. I felt a bit talked down to, to tell the truth. They were okay, there was a lot of passionate strumming of powerchords and whining of Ian’s voice when the songs reached their climaxes. Overall, it was pretty tryhard, though. And there wasn’t nearly enough dancing going on. All the kids around us were well into it, though, so whatever. Guess we’ve all got to start somewhere when it comes to feeling something.
‘Harmony is the sound of stillness,’ he sang,
‘taint the world with violent thoughts.
Understand the choice of living,
and live like you’ve not done before.’
A bit wank.
We went to chat with Ian after he’d finished, even though the ungrateful little shit was trying his hardest to look embarrassed that his sister had shown up. There were a couple of girls nearby who were too young to have even got their head around makeup yet, it looked like. Ian was acting like his own PR and talking like a general ballbag. He was a bit of a loser when he was a teeny child, but now he’d made it into the heart of puberty he’d gotten completely unbearable. I pulled at Beth like a needy child and convinced her to duck into the toilets for another slug.
‘Are we doing anything after this?’ I asked her while flicking my nostril.
‘I dunno, you wanna go out or something?’ Beth said before hoovering up some grade-F gak.
‘Well I thought that was the idea.’
Beth wiped the face of her phone with her fingers and rubbed the residue on her gums. She made a sort of thoughtful grunt. ‘We could get a couple of wines and go sit on the Stretch?’
‘Yeah, real original,’ I said.
We stepped back out into the main room, which had thinned out even more since Ian played, but I froze as soon as I looked over at the bar. Two coppers had come in; they were walking around, talking to people, asking questions. Almost as if they were looking for someone. A pistol fired in my head and, without thinking, I ran round the side of the room and out the door.
And I kept running. I didn’t know what I was doing. Something just gripped me, switched my brain off and got me out of there. I came to in some narrow alley nearby, hiding behind a dumpster and exhausted from that rare burst of exercise. I snapped back into myself. What just happened? What the hell were the police doing there? What’s going on?
I shuddered with so much fear that I fell back on my arse and sat, shaking, on the cobbled ground. They’re coming for me, I thought. Oh god! It’s been less than a week, and they’ve already figured it out. I’m such an idiot for thinking that it’d all be fine. What the fuck am I gonna do?
I paced up and down the street, feeling white electricity pull me back and forth like a puppet, biting the meat of my fingers and scratching the back of my neck. These were the things that happened when I felt trapped, and I was trapped, as far as I was concerned. Completely, utterly trapped. It was like the sky was coming down and about to crush me slowly until I burst.
I got myself as far away from the Nuns as possible. Beth rang me, and at first I ignored it. But the calls kept coming, one after the other, and through some digital-age compulsion of the brain, I answered it.
‘Evz, where you at mate?’ Beth said. ‘What the fuck happened? Why’d you bolt?’
I realised that I had to say something. I just cut to the chase.
‘Oi, what were the police doing there?’ I said.
Beth sounded genuinely confused, which made me feel slightly better. ‘What?’
‘I saw two filth talking to people and shit,’ I said. ‘You know what they wanted or, like, anything?’
I must’ve sounded like the most suspicious cunt in the universe.
‘What they wanted?’ Beth sounded like she was smiling. ‘Some car got nicked outside, I think. Thought it might’ve been someone at the gig but there’s no chance. Why?’
The clouds dissolved above me. ‘No reason,’ I said.
‘Are you pranging out, girl?’ she said.
I sniffed. ‘A little bit, yeah.’


• • •


I wake up feeling strangely bloated, like there’s a thick bubble in my stomach that keeps growing and growing, and it hurts. I wonder if I’m pregnant. The first thing I do is ask Murder if she knows what the problem is, but obviously she’s as clueless as I am. She suggests drinking a beer to ‘burst it out’, so I take one from the fridge, but I can’t get it open, so I decide to leave it.
We’re in town, going somewhere, I’m not sure where, but the sky is pink so it must be late. I’m still carrying around the heavy feeling like a bowling ball in my guts. Murder tells me I should buy a yoghurt or something. We’re walking up this hill when Shena, Sophie and Beth Dicks meet us halfway. I’m not sure where they’re going either. We get talking, or at least those four talk to each other and I stand there saying nothing, clutching my stomach, feeling like my appendix is about to burst, or an alien baby is about to eat its way out. The pain is unbearable.
I look up to the others; they must’ve walked ahead of me or something, as they’re further up the hill than they were a second ago. I follow them, staggering as the expanding feeling pulsates within me, and call out their names. They don’t hear me. They seem to be preoccupied somehow; they’re all standing the same distance apart, and they don’t look like they’re talking to each other anymore. I drag myself further up the hill. The girls turn around. The streetlights are turned on.
‘What’s wrong?’ I find myself saying. ‘Didn’t I do enough?’ Their faces are all pained and miserable, they’re looking at me like something’s wrong, like they’re crying on the inside. I’ve never seen any of them look like this. ‘What is it?’ I ask.
Their horrified faces distort until they come apart. Slowly, they break into pieces. Pieces of skin, muscle, bone, hair, teeth, eye, entrail, vein and all kinds of other disgusting viscera float gently out into the open air on clouds of scarlet mist. There’s no sound. It just happens. Murder’s skull travels slowly through the air with her face still loosely attached, her eyes gone and her mouth agape.
I scream, I think. I must do. I can hear them crying, even though they’re no longer there. After a few seconds, some invisible force from behind me roars past, blowing the broken pieces of my dead friends away and out of sight, leaving four red streaks of blood on the tarmac, stretching out towards somewhere endless.
I woke up drenched in piss.


• • •


I couldn’t get the image of Murder’s dismembered face out of my mind. I was caught staring at her on the bus out to the Dunskills. She whipped her head round and said ‘Are you in love with me, Eva?’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘If you are, just say. Now or never. You don’t have to keep it bottled up, I’d rather know. Clear the air.’
‘I was thinking about shit.’
‘Well, do that when it’s just you and your fingers, yeah?’ she said. ‘It’s making me feel weird. Not good weird.’
We were going deep into the woods, supposedly, to ‘practice’. Murder insisted. She’d noticed how rattled I’d been since the whole fiasco, especially after I came back from the gig all dejected, and she’d been trying to cheer me up constantly since then, with mixed results. Getting drunk together didn’t work. Getting stoned together didn’t work. Complaining about minor annoyances in her own life, in that over-the-top way that usually made me crease up, didn’t work. She must’ve really racked her brain to come up with something before she burst into my room at one point and said:
‘Let’s go. C’mon. Let’s get out of here. Get dressed.’
Then she slammed the door. It took me a while to get up to speed, but when I asked her what she wanted to do, she lay it down.
‘I’ve got a plan. You’re freakin out bout all this shit, yeah? Cos we don’t know what it is, how it works, how you control it, blah, blah, blah. So I was thinking we should go down, like, somewhere in the Dunskills, where no-one’s gonna find us, and do a bit of practice.’
‘Practice?’
Murder lifted a bottle out of her rucksack. ‘And gin!’
So we went down there. I was sceptical, but guessed that it was a decent idea, in its way. I realised, on the bus, that this was probably just a way for Murder to get out of the house. Or to go and get drunk somewhere that wasn’t the living room. Or maybe she had no ulterior motive whatsoever. I had no idea.
Murder pulled a thick plastic vacuum-sealed bag out of her rucksack. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘step one.’
‘What the fuck is that?’ I said. ‘Is that a blood pack?’
‘Course not!’ Murder said. ‘If I could get my hands on a blood pack, you think I’d be wasting it on this bullshit? It’s just fake blood. I’d have gone to the butcher’s for a carcass or summat, but it freaked me out, and I’m not sure I wanna patronise their industry, y’know what I mean?’
‘What’re you talking about?’
‘We’re practicing, Evz, like I said,’ Murder slurred. ‘I’ll put this here,’ she placed it on a flat tree stump, ‘and you scrunch your face up or focus your photon beam or whatever the fuck and we’ll see what happens, yeah?’
‘Why does it have to be a bag of fake blood, though?’ I asked.
‘Well, it’s realistic, innit? Effective.’
‘I don’t want it to be realistic, M! For fuck’s sake, that’s messed up! Can’t we just use a log or something?’
Murder frowned, but relented. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘You better smash it to fuck, though.’
She replaced the bag with an upright slice of wood, then took a step back behind me. ‘Go for it,’ she said.
I stared at the log, and felt nothing. I didn’t even know where to begin. I didn’t know what the mechanics were. These things just happened, mercilessly, without me even thinking about it, or even realising. I couldn’t remember even feeling anything when they happened. They just happened.
‘You sure this is safe?’ I said. ‘I mean, we don’t even know how it works. You cool standing there?’
Murder was rolling a cigarette. ‘I trust you, man,’ she said. ‘Just take it easy.’
So I concentrated. I held my breath. I clenched my fists. I did all sorts of things. I stared, I focused, I frowned, I pushed, I pulled. I tilted my head, I got on one knee. I imagined the log splitting in two, like an axe blow. I imagined a beam of light emanating from my forehead. I imagined that I was furious with the log, and that I wished for its instant destruction. Nothing. Murder kept throwing me meaningless suggestions, like ‘Put all your mind in one place,’ and ‘Find the energy and zone in on that shit,’ but absolutely nothing happened. The log sat there, as still as the ground we stood on.
‘It’s not happening, Murder,’ I told her. ‘This is pointless.’
‘Well, try something different. Maybe pinch your wrists a little bit, get the pain goin, maybe the adrenaline’ll help.’
‘We’ve been doing this for like, half an hour now,’ I said. I walked over and took the gin from Murder’s hand. ‘I’m giving up.’
‘Don’t you wanna know the extent of your powers, though?’
‘“Powers”? This isn’t fucking…’ I struggled to think, ‘Harry Potter or whatever. Don’t call them that.’
‘Alright, alright. Chill,’ she said. ‘I mean, it is a little bit Harry Potter, but, like, okay. Whatever they are. Your thing. Don’t you wanna give em a bit of practice? Then maybe you’ll stop killin people.’
I looked at her with thunder in my chest.
‘Just throwin it out there,’ she said.
I sighed and took a huge swig of gin, which burnt my throat with a sweet, lavender flush.
‘I don’t even want to have this shit,’ I said.
We stayed there drinking for a couple of hours. It was dumb, but it did really feel good to get out into the countryside. No cars, no people, no sirens, no music. Just distant birdsong and the leaves fluttering and all that. No people. I think that was the main thing. Not a single person for miles. It felt like freedom. It was escape.
‘What’s gonna happen to me, d’you think?’ I said, after a long while of enjoying the ambience.
‘Huh?’ Murder said, lying on her back in the dirt and smoking a spliff.
‘What you think’s gonna happen with me? And this?’
Murder turned her head and raised her sunglasses. ‘The thing?’
I nodded.
Murder took a few drags before she sat up. Her combat jacket was covered in dirt, and there was dirt in her unwashed hair. She took her sunglasses off, folded them and put them in her pocket. Then she took another puff and let out a quick sigh.
‘Look, Eva,’ she said, ‘I’ve always had faith in you. You’ve probably noticed that. And I know your brain’s been a bit fuckin Fallujah lately, and it hasn’t been easy, I bet. But, frankly, Eva, this is some cool fucking shit you’ve got going for you at the moment.’
‘It fucking isn’t,’ I said.
‘Nah but, like… okay, it’s been rough, sure. Everything chaotic and powerful can be a bit, I dunno, graceless every now and then. But you’re not a bad person, Eva, just cos you accidentally killed a dude and made a bit of a mess here and there. You’ve just got a gift, some kind of crazy fuckin gift I’ve never seen before. It’s mental. But, like… you want me to be honest about it? I’m fuckin unbelievably pleased that you’re carrying around this batshit insane superpower. Seriously. I think it’s amazing.’
‘I bet you do,’ I said.
‘No, like, you don’t get it,’ she said. ‘I’m saying, y’know… personally, like, I couldn’t think of anyone I know who I’d rather have earth-shattering magical abilities that fuck people up than you, Carrot.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I mean, for example, if you didn’t have this shit goin on when we went to that party at Freedland’s and that cunt started getting rough with you, what would’ve happened then, huh?’
‘He didn’t deserve that, though,’ I said.
‘Fuck off didn’t he!’ Murder spat. ‘Okay, whatever, I can tell you’re doing that shit you do where you ask a question then deflect every fuckin answer, like, y’know, you wanna be miserable or summat, but I’m just gonna tell you this. This… thing or whatever, it’s some seriously unique shit. It’s a gift. It’s a slice of divinity. And it’s yours, Eva, y’know? It’s a part of you that has no time for bein fucked with! It’s a part of you that can do amazing, impossible things. I mean, it’s incredible. It’s fuckin incredible, for real. And, like, you might’ve caused a bit of mayhem in the past couple of months, but, I dunno, maybe one day you’ll do something unbelievably amazing with it. Maybe you’ll do something beautiful.’
‘Pfft.’ I smiled. It was all bullshit, but I enjoyed watching how into this Murder was getting. ‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘You think so?’
‘Yeah, man, I do think so!’ she said. ‘I fuckin do! Cos you’re beautiful, Eva, you gorgeous sack of horse shit. You’re one of the few people I actually believe in round here. I think you’ve got the capability to pull some goodness out of your arse on this one. I actually reckon you can take this neck-breaking, pavement-wrecking abomination of God and make something fantastic happen. I do.’
I was still smiling. I couldn’t help it. I felt pathetic. I didn’t even know what to say. I didn’t believe her, not in the slightest. It was nice for her to say that there was a silver lining to any of this, but we both knew that there wasn’t. Nonetheless, I was happy that she tried.
‘Thanks,’ I said, grinning.
‘I’m bein serious, Eva,’ she said.
‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
Murder blew two jets of smoke out her nose. ‘Anytime, bitch,’ she said.


• • •


I’m in the woods, heading down a path that winds crookedly through the trees, with both my parents at my side. I’m small; I must still be a tiny child, maybe a toddler. I’m small enough to be lifted up off the ground, my dad gripping one hand and my mum holding the other. I think the three of us are having fun. We’re ambling through the undergrowth when finally we reach a clearing. Smack-bang in the centre of the clearing is a perfect mound rising towards the sky, and hovering imposingly in the sky is what looks like a gigantic black wheel, spinning endlessly above the mound.
I feel enthralled. I’m overcome with a childish sense of wonder and curiosity. I excitedly turn to my parents to point out the wheel, as kids tend to do, but my parents have disappeared, and I’m alone at the edge of the thicket, feeling slightly betrayed and dejected. I quickly shake the feeling off and run towards the hill. As I clamber up it, I become older and older, until I reach the top, and I’ve made it to eighteen. The wheel above me is about the size of a stadium, and spins dizzyingly fast.
Down in the valley on the other side of the hill is a town, which I can tell is Ranford from the clock tower and the cathedral. There are people milling around the high street, smoking, ambling, rushing to get their shopping done, but from the hill they look almost like ants. It’s just another day, I guess. The clouds cast huge swathes of shadow over the town and the countryside. I notice that there’s no shadow cast by the huge black wheel.
I’m standing at the very top of the hill, looking down at my distant hometown, when a pair of jet-black wings sprout from my back and grow into two towering, L-shaped feathered sails three times the size of myself. I don’t freak out about this or anything; in fact, it feels fantastic. It’s breathtaking. Without hesitation, I leap from the hill and take to the skies, soaring over the world, looking down on the pathetic stretch of concrete that is Ranford and smirking. I release a pair of fireballs from my nostrils, which circle each other as they fall to the centre of the town and burst into a firestorm which totally engulfs it.
The sky melts into a putrid purple colour and storm clouds crack the horizon with lightning. I glide through the air at a ridiculous speed, able to tear across the scene and look down on the burning town. Ranford is broken to pieces. Its citizens are eradicated, burnt to cinders. The buildings have collapsed and crumbled to ruins. All signs of life and vegetation are incinerated.


• • •


Months fell away and disappeared. Three months felt like three weeks. My perception of time must’ve been starting to rev up out of the eternity of childhood and preparing to drive head-on at 200mph towards the unavoidable brick wall sat at the end of my life. It depressed me a shitload. Supposedly, I was nearly at the point of becoming a bona fide adult. I’d found myself another job at a flower shop, which was tedious but manageable, and that was what took up most of my time. There hadn’t been a decent party in ages. I still hadn’t come up with a concrete plan for the rest of my life, either. I was too busy being frightened by how quickly time had slipped away from me.
Nothing came out of what happened with me, Maz and that guy over in Parkington. The hype just died down. For a while I still wanted to know everything about him, who he was, whether he had a family, who came to his funeral, whether anyone cared about him or not. But I convinced myself to leave it alone, to distance myself as much as possible and remain unsuspicious for as long as nobody talked about it. The only real change it made to my life, aside from the sleepless nights, was that me and Maz barely spoke to each other anymore. We went out of our way to purposefully avoid each other, even on the rare times we turned up at the same place. We had this unspoken agreement going on. I think the two of us just wanted to forget what happened. Not that I did, completely. I had nightmares every single night.
It was Friday when I got back from another totally forgettable shift and heard a low sobbing coming from Murder’s room. I remembered all that weird shit she’d told me about how her mum’d agreed to move to Denmark with her sister, which must’ve been happening round about then. I thought it was a bit of a fucked-up thing for her mum to do, seeing as she was pretty much abandoning her, but I’d met her before, and she was majorly starry-eyed to say the least.
I wanted to go in Murder’s room and comfort her, but I knew that’d probably be pointless, if not dangerous, so I just waited in the living room and smoked a weak little joint, ready and willing to lend a shoulder to cry on if she wanted it.
I was watching Eastenders when Murder’s door burst open. She came out with a cig in her hand and a big, beamish grin on her face. She sat herself next to me on the sofa and said ‘Alright?’ without looking at me. She was sniffing deeply, and I wondered if she’d been hoofing coke. I could never tell since her eyes were always big, black and intense no matter what she’d been taking.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Are you alright?’
‘Yep,’ she said, bluntly. ‘Goin to Phil’s party tomorrow?’
‘Uhhh, yeah?’ I said. ‘Didn’t even know that was happening.’
‘It’s happening,’ Murder said, cracking open a beer. ‘Don’t you check Facebook anymore?’
‘It depresses me too much,’ I told her.
‘Everything depresses you too much.’
‘I know.’
‘Stop making everything not fun.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘You better be up for partying tomorrow, though, for serious,’ Murder said, clearly charged on something or other. ‘I mean really partying. I want you off the walls tomorrow, girl. I want you to fuckin… put your brain on kamikaze mode. Like, running with open arms towards permanent brain failure, yeah? You up for that?’
‘Meh, sure,’ I said, eyes on the TV.
‘I’m well up for that,’ she said.
‘I don’t doubt it.’
I wondered if I should talk to her, ask her what was up like I felt I should’ve, indicate that she could talk to me whenever she liked about whatever was on her mind, and that she didn’t have to hide her feelings from me for us to chill together. I didn’t do any of this, though. We just got high and talked about Eastenders.
‘You think the characters of Eastenders know they’re in Eastenders?’ Murder said.
‘Course not,’ I said, eating a soggy bacon sandwich. ‘If they did, they wouldn’t keep walking about, doing what they’re doing. They’d actually try to leave the square like in Truman Show.’
‘That’s a pretty shit existence, innit?’
‘Yeah’ I said. ‘Good thing it’s not actually anyone’s existence, then.’
‘It’s their existence.’
‘They’re fictional people, Murder.’
‘Well that don’t mean they don’t exist.’
I frowned at Murder, all condescension, and paused for effect. ‘Are you trolling me right now? Is this a thing? Are you doing a thing right now?’
‘Calm down, mate,’ she said. ‘I’m just sayin that they obviously do exist, or we wouldn’t be talkin bout them.’
‘Well, we’re talking about people who don’t exist, aren’t we?’
‘But they do, though,’ she said. ‘See, I’m lookin at em right now. That’s Phil Mitchell, innit.’
‘That’s not them though, is it? That’s an actor,’ I said. ‘In fact, it’s not even an actor. It’s a combination of artificial light made to resemble the actor.’
‘Well, I’m not thinkin of that when I’m watchin it, am I? I’m not thinkin I’m lookin at a bunch of lights made to look like an actor. As far as I’m concerned, I’m lookin at Phil Mitchell. Phil Mitchell is in the room right now. I’m watchin him talk shit with his mum in the pub.’
‘That’s not existing, though,’ I said. ‘That’s what I’m saying. Not like you and me.’
‘How do we know that?’ Murder asked with a smug half-smile on her face.
I put the remains of my sandwich down, leaned back, and sighed. ‘I’m too fucking stoned for this.’


• • •


Phil lived in a black terraced house with a red door that gave off strong Dracula vibes. We showed up late after spending most of our time getting ready and peppering that time with numerous ‘one more’ lines, and the place seemed at its peak. It was a winding, claustrophobic sort of house; small rooms but lots of them. Drum n bass thundered out of the pitch-black living room and bled through the rest of the house. The place was completely rammed with strangers, which put me a little on edge.
We finally ran into Phil on the top floor, in his bedroom. Him, Joe and Chen were racking up to psytrance with a bunch of randomers.
‘Yo, yo, yooooo!’ he gurgled as he hugged us both with each arm. ‘How’ve you been? Ain’t seen you in long.’
‘Easy, mate,’ Murder smiled.
‘What you been doin?’ he asked, then he turned to me: ‘You got a job yet?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Flower shop on North Road.’
‘Ah, yeah, I know the one,’ he smiled. ‘I’ll swing by sometime, buy some petunias.’
‘You won’t.’
‘Yeah, I probably won’t. I’m a busy guy, though, innI?’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘You’ve done a decent job on the party, Hollander,’ Murder said. ‘Or should I call you Gatsby?’
He held his beer up and pointed a finger. ‘I saw that the other day, actually,’ he said. ‘Pure shite.’
‘Too highbrow, was it?’ she asked.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Just thought it were gay.’
‘Who the fuck are all these people, anyway?’ I asked him in a hushed voice to avoid insulting the randomers in the room. ‘There’s a whole house of kids down there I’ve never seen before in my life.’
‘Yeah, don’t take this the wrong way, mate,’ Murder said, ‘but I didn’t think you had this many friends.’
‘Are they paid actors or something?’ I said.
Phil made a hollow laugh. ‘I dunno, they’re mostly Kerridge Town, I think. Friends of friends, innit.’
‘Are they sound?’
‘Fuck knows,’ he said.
We hovered around Phil’s bedroom to chat with the others before we went downstairs. Chen was talking to, or maybe being talked at, by some older-looking bloke who was completely charged. Joe was on the bed, macking on some girl I’d never seen before, which me and Murder felt sadistically pleased to interrupt.
‘I like your dress, M,’ he said, referring to how Murder was dressed like a girl for once. In black, obviously.
‘Aw, cheers, sweetheart,’ she said, curtseying. ‘That makes it all worthwhile.’
‘How you doing, Evz? Haven’t seen you in a while, you been hiding?’
‘What?’ I said, twitchily.
‘You been avoiding us or something?’
Relief. I struggled to think of a way to respond. ‘I’ve just been doing my own thing,’ was the very twattish response that I ended up with.
‘Fair play,’ he said.
‘And what’s your name?’ Murder said, creepily bending down to address the girl in the thick-rimmed glasses sitting awkwardly next to Joe.
‘Cheryl,’ she said. ‘Hi there. What’re yours?’ She had a voice like smooth marble, like a radio presenter.
‘Murder,’ she said. ‘This is Eva. We usually come in a single unit, you get me?’
‘Why?’ Cheryl said. ‘Are you two… together?’
‘Me and her are tied at the souls,’ Murder said, smiling. ‘If that’s what you’re asking.’
‘We’re not together,’ I said, my insecurities forcing me to make this abundantly clear.
‘Not yet, anyway,’ Murder said.
‘Sorry, what did you say your name was?’ Cheryl asked. ‘Irma?’
‘Nah, mate. I’m called Murder,’ she said. ‘As in, like, “thou shalt not”.’
Rrrrright,’ she said, making eyes at Joe, who was smiling and looking intentionally awkward. They weren’t talking, but their body language spoke the same thing: ‘What a loser.’
‘So,’ Murder continued, acting oblivious, ‘you from Ranford?’
‘Kerridge,’ she said. ‘But I go to the college here.’
‘Lucky girl,’ Murder said. ‘What you studyin, hairdressing?’
‘Health and social care, actually.’
‘Ah nice one,’ she said. ‘You must really give a shit about people.’
‘Murder works at the leisure centre cleaning up peoples’ piss,’ Joe said, smiling like a rat.
Cheryl fixed her hair back behind her ear. ‘Oh, really?’ she said, all condescending.
A look of irritation flickered across Murder’s face, but I watched as she tried to snap herself back into blasé mode.
‘Yeah, the public are pricks,’ she said.
‘So I’ve noticed,’ Cheryl said, then she turned to Joe: ‘Where’s the, uh, toilet in here?’
‘Downstairs and it’s right in front of you,’ Joe said cheerfully.
‘Cheers.’
She got up and got as far as the door when Murder turned around and said ‘Don’t purge yourself too much, yeah?’ Cheryl heard, but ignored it. When she’d vanished, Murder muttered to herself: ‘Poser bitch.’
Joe pulled a straight out and chuckled to himself. ‘You’re being pretty hostile there, M, mate.’
‘She’s dogshit, that’s why.’
‘You don’t even know her,’ he said.
‘Trust me, mate, I’ve met her a million times,’ Murder said.
‘Can’t you just pretend to be nice? It’d make things a lot easier whenever you meet all the other people I know.’
‘Tough shit, mate,’ she said. ‘I’m not so strong on my bullshit game these days.’
‘I thought you were all bullshit, Murder,’ Joe said.


• • •


Twenty minutes later we were certifiably shitfaced. We were dancing like idiots in the living room to dark, loud DnB when for the first time since the unspeakable thing that happened a few months before, I was feeling pretty relaxed. Or as relaxed as I could be with a river of medium-grade coke washing through my blood. More importantly, I’d forgotten about the unspeakable thing. There wasn’t a big granite block pressing down on me anymore. I was having fun.
Apart from Joe, Phil and Chen, the only other people we knew there were Sophie and Rod, who turned up shortly after we did. As usual, Sophie was softly munted, only as fucked as she felt she needed to be, while Rod had sniffed a good g of ket and was a staggering mess when we met him in the hallway. It took a good second or two for him to realise who we were. I watched his face snap into consciousness and give me a friendly smile while his shuttered eyes looked straight through me.
‘How’s it going, Rod?’ I said. ‘Enjoying yourself?’
Rod tried his hardest to pull the words out, and eventually the only English he could manage was: ‘Battered.’
He could barely stand up. Me and Murder found it hilarious, despite or maybe partly because Sophie was not so delighted. He wandered aimlessly into the living room and nearly knocked a few people over dancing his way to the middle.
Sophie turned to us and said ‘He’s gone overboard,’ which we both agreed with in snorts of laughter. ‘He’s had the lot. Vodka, whiskey, gram of coke, gram of ket, 2C-I. Bit of base. He’s fucked. Seriously.’
‘Christ,’ I said.
‘I thought we were just gonna split some mandy between us, then I get round is and he’s just, like, obliterated. Now I have to be his caretaker. Fucking hell.’
‘Ah, you don’t have to worry bout him,’ Murder said. ‘Just come party with us. Leave him to stew.’
‘Of course I’ve gotta worry about him,’ she replied. ‘No one else is gonna do it.’
Neither of us had an answer to that.
‘Where’s Skidder and that?’ I asked. ‘They not coming?’
‘Nah,’ Sophie said. ‘They bailed on him.’ Then she winced, as if she was about to say something but thought better of it, only to finally look me in the eyes and say: ‘He lied to me. About how many drugs he’d done. I had to get it out of Mike. The ket and the 2C, I mean. He didn’t tell me about that. He just said he was drunk and based.’
‘So?’ Murder said.
‘Well, why would he do that? And why didn’t he tell me he was getting all that shit in? It’s like he’s not even bothered about me coming.’
‘He just wants to get fucked up, innit,’ Murder said. ‘How he wants. He probably just thought tellin you how much shit he’d taken would make you worry bout him.’
‘It’s worrying me,’ I said, probably unhelpfully.
‘I think you’re takin it too personally, maybe,’ Murder said.
‘You think?’
‘Yeah, totally,’ I said, unconvinced.
Sophie groaned. ‘Well, either way, he’s just gonna be a pain in the backside for the rest of my night.’
‘Fuck him, then,’ Murder said. ‘It’s his own mess, you should let him roll in it. You want some coke?’
Sophie nodded enthusiastically. ‘Fuck yes I would like some coke.’
We sat in the kitchen and had few lines, cigs and fucked conversations about nothing in particular. Sophie and Murder were soon drawn into a back-and-forth between Sophie’s various moans about her life, job, boyfriend and so on, and Murder basically telling Sophie to stop giving so much of a shit about her problems.
I saw no need to get involved. I just sat on the counter, chain-smoked and ran my eyes across the other kids in the room. At first glance, there were a couple of decent guys around, though the abundance of drunker, friendlier, smilier girls kept them too distracted to even notice me. I just sat and drank my wine in peace, overhearing the conversation of two other girls by the sink on my left.
‘I’ve stopped doing it at the wrist cos everyone notices, now. I dunno why I even did it on the wrists in the first place, it’s fuckin bait as shit.’
‘Oh, yeah, I don’t even do it up the arm anymore. No point. Means I can’t wear a whole bunch of tops after.’
‘Yeah, like, it was fine back when I was thirteen, I guess cos that’s where I saw to do it in, like, films n shit.’
‘Cig burns are the way. Much easier to explain, innit.’
‘Yeah, that’s like my fall-back when I’m out and there’s no blade.’
‘Tell me about it, I’m getting the urge big-time. This party’s so claustro and intense; it’s giving me the fantods.’
‘I’m alright. You just gotta drink more.’
One of them caught me looking over and sent me such a defensive glare that I thought she was gonna confront me, but she lost interest and the two of them carried on talking, furthering my theory that unless anyone was talking to me, I was completely invisible.
‘Oi,’ Murder said as she jabbed me in the ribs. ‘Aryan Ross is here, reckon I can squeeze some crack outta him?’
It took me a moment for my drunk brain to reconfigure. ‘You want crack? You want “some” crack?’
‘Yeah, just a little go,’ she said. ‘Don’t moralise. I only asked in case you want any. He’s a weed, I reckon we could get a fucktonne of hits off of him.’
‘I’m good for crack tonight, M.’
She grinned and dropped herself from the counter. ‘Suit yourself,’ she said. Then, without a seeya later or anything, she torpedoed over towards Aryan Ross’ golden locks and latched onto him fiendishly. Sophie must’ve disappeared a few minutes previous, probably to go and try to get some sense out of Rod. I was left by myself, swigging from my bottle out of boredom and uninterested in doing anything but watching the roomful of strangers like I was at the window of a human zoo.


• • •


Murder was gone for a while. Occasionally I saw her on her way from some part of the house to another, looking progressively more smashed, and heard her cackle echoing through the walls above the rest of the chatter. I’d have followed her around a bit if she wasn’t hanging out with Ross and his unfunny mates. That was more her sort of scene than mine. I tracked down the other guys instead, and found myself sitting on the sofa with Chen, who was gurning to himself with a bottle of brandy in his hand.
‘I can’t dance like I used to,’ he said. ‘Get a key of MD in me and I’d be a headcase all night. Now I can’t even find the energy to bob my head. Just doesn’t happen.’
‘Can’t you just get drunk?’ I said.
‘Same difference,’ he said. ‘Makes me wonder what else I rely on drugs to get me through.’
‘Every aspect of life?’
‘I hope not,’ he said, not laughing. ‘It feels that way sometimes.’
I sat my face in my hand. ‘You alright, Chen?’
Suddenly he sat up, as if he was trying to convince me everything was fine. ‘Nah, I’m good, I’m good. Sorry. I was just… speaking my mind. Talking shit, really.’
‘It’s cool,’ I said.
‘Life is just so… boring sometimes.’
‘Most of the time.’
‘Yeah, most of the time,’ he said. ‘I just think sometimes that I wish I was somewhere better, and I had this kind of life that was just, like, exciting and interesting.’
‘Yeah…’ I said.
‘Everyone thinks that, I guess,’ he said.
‘Yeah, probably. Besides, maybe you will have that kind of life someday, y’know?’
Chen made a weird scoffing sound as he tried to regain control of his face. ‘Fucking fat chance. How many people actually do?’
I shrugged. ‘I dunno. People find excitement in all sorts of places.’
Chen smiled. ‘Sure, mate. Sure they do.’
I took a sip of my wine and realised that I’d finished the bottle. I dropped it next to the sofa and fell back with a sigh. I watched the dancing of the strangers in front of us while enjoying the circulation of poison through my system.
‘How you doing, anyway, Eva?’ Chen asked. ‘It’s been a while. Shena tells me you ain’t been out much. Everything okay?’
Me and Chen always used to have heart-to-hearts, when we were younger and stupider and the sads came out in more obvious ways. He was one of the few guys who, when he asked an everyday question like that, I actually felt like I should answer with more than just bullshit and platitudes.
‘I’ve been… alright, really. Had a bit of a difficult patch recently, to be honest.’
‘Shit, really?’
‘Yeah. It’s been… like, uh,’ I struggled to think. ‘It’s a problem with this guy.’
‘You been seeing someone?’ Chen said, annoyingly surprised.
‘Well, uh, yeah. Sort of,’ I said. ‘It’s over now, though. It’s definitely over.’
I wondered what the fuck I was talking about.
‘What happened?’
‘I kinda, sorta, like, hurt him. A lot. Really a lot. I don’t even know how, I didn’t, like, realise. I just did it and it’s done. And I feel really bad about it.’
‘Shit, man,’ Chen said. ‘To be honest, I can’t even imagine you hurting anyone.’
‘Yeah, innit,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think I was… capable of it.’
‘But you did?’
I nodded.
‘How’d that happen?’ he asked.
‘I… dunno,’ I said. ‘Things got sorta hectic, and, like, next thing I know I did something I shouldn’t.’
‘What, like, said something proper out of line?’
I started rolling a cigarette. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sort of. The point is, I did something really bad. Really, really bad. Seriously fucking bad. The kind of shit you don’t do, ever. To anyone. I didn’t even mean to. It’s fucked.’
‘Well, what’d you do?’ Chen asked.
I started scratching an invisible itch at the back of my neck. ‘Ugh, whatever. It doesn’t…’ sigh, ‘doesn’t matter.’
Chen gave me a gentle rub on the shoulder. ‘You shouldn’t beat yourself up about shit like that. Relationships are complicated. I’m sure you’re feeling more guilty about this than you deserve to.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, feeling defeated. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ I finished the cig and lit it. ‘Fuck.’
Chen’s leg was tweaking. I could tell he was clutching at straws for a nice thing to say. I didn’t give him much to work with, after all.
‘How’s the sleepwalking?’ he said, finally.
I ran my fingers through the chop of hair on my head. ‘I walked all the way to Truhaven the other day,’ I said. ‘Shena had to come get me. It was well embarrassing.’
‘Where’s Truhaven?’
‘Fucking miles away,’ I said. ‘It was weird. Weirdest one yet.’
‘You said you were gonna see someone about that, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Obviously haven’t, though.’
‘What d’you think that shit’s all about?’ he asked.
‘God knows,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’m just trying to get out of this shithole.’
Chen laughed. ‘I guess so.’
The coke kept the thoughts spilling out of my head. ‘All this weird shit going on in my life, fuck. Making things so complicated. It gets me down, man. I just wanna live a simple life, y’know? Get paid, chill out, get fucked whenever possible. Do that forever.’
‘You wanna do that forever?’
‘Yeah, why not?’
Chen leaned back with his hand under his head. ‘Nothing lasts forever, y’know,’ he said. ‘You’ll be an adult soon.’
‘Fuck that shit,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Fuck. That.’
We sat in a comfortable silence for a little while. I thought about getting up to dance. I thought about using my stimulated confidence to try and mingle. I thought about going upstairs to find Murder and having a hit on the crack pipe. I wondered if there was anything else I should’ve been doing at the first party I’d been to in months. But the mood just wasn’t there. And that was fine. I was happy just sitting there, being with people. I liked the moment. It was a good moment.
We were sat facing the front windows of the house. The crowd of dancers had thinned out. I was staring into nothingness when something caught my eye beyond one of the windows. It looked like someone was up against the glass, staring in, pale from the light seeping out from the living room. A figure. A shape. I couldn’t quite make it out; I thought it might’ve been a hallucination. But it didn’t disappear.
I sat forward to try and make out what it was through the dancing silhouettes. Was it a person? For a second I thought I could see a face. I thought it was looking directly at me.
Chen leaned forward, too. ‘What you looking at?’ he said.
I turned to look at him, as he sort of broke the spell. Naturally, when I looked back at the window, there was nothing. Just an empty space of dark.


• • •


‘I say fuck nature. Nature is against us, innit. It fucks with us. Nature wants us dead. We got nothing to do with nature. We’re an anomaly. We’re here to tear the shit out of nature and build ourselves out of the mud. Y’know, that’s what I think.’
‘Yeah?’ I said, thinking of factories, oil fields and the ozone layer.
‘I think humanity chooses its own destiny,’ said the coked-up arty guy who’d been talking at me for the past ten minutes. ‘None of that religion bullshit, no hocus-pocus big plan or anything. I remind myself every day that we’ve got the power to make up our own minds, which means that we’ve got the potential for anything, y’know? It’s all out there. It’s all fucking out there. That’s what inspires me. It’s what keeps me getting up in the morning.’
‘Uh-huh?’ I said.
‘I wrote an article on that sort of thinking just the other day. You ever hear of NihilDawn?’
‘I haven’t,’ I said, taking another swig of the beer he gave me.
‘Well, I contribute to it a lot, there’s some really awe-inspiring ideas going on there. I think a lot of it could be right up your alley.’
‘You think so?’ I said.
‘Definitely. You seem like someone who, you know, likes to think about things. Someone interesting. I’d definitely like to get to know you better.’
‘Cool,’ I said. ‘I just have to go to the toilet real quick.’
I walked briskly from one of the bedrooms down into the kitchen to have another line. I saw Murder at the counter, making a drink and swaying on the spot. I was gonna go over to talk to her when I saw Cheryl, the girl from earlier, swoop over next to her with a venomous expression on her face.
Where did you get that vodka?’ I heard her seethe.
‘Fell out the sky,’ Murder said.
‘You gonna give it back?’
‘You gonna suck my cunt?’
Cheryl grabbed the bottle; Murder instantly yanked it out of her hands. ‘Oi!’ she said. ‘That’s mine, mate, piss off!’
‘You took it from my bag.’
‘Did I fuck. Bought it from the shop round the corner.’
‘Grapefruit flavour? Duty free?’
Murder picked her drink up and took a swig. ‘Switzerland. Just got back. Beautiful fuckin… mountains n that.’
‘Give it back,’ Cheryl said as firmly as her demure exterior would let her.
‘Make me, bitch,’ Murder said, vicious delight sparkling in her eyes.
Cheryl stood glaring at Murder, fidgeting with pent-up aggression. Murder just carried on smiling at her, swaying a little, looking beaten down by the booze but propped up by the coke. I was nervous about having to deal with more of Murder’s aimless bullshit again. I stayed watching at the sidelines, preparing for the worst.
Murder’s smile broke into a tooth-baring grin, and at that exact moment, Cheryl’s indecisiveness demanded action, and she slapped Murder’s drink to the ground. Murder looked taken aback; her smile dropped, and I thought she was about to launch into beast mode once her dulled reactions caught up with her. But she didn’t do anything. Both girls continued to stare each other down, both of them seeming unsure of what to do with themselves, Cheryl looking as confused as she did desperate to intimidate.
‘Alright,’ Murder said, in an accepting, let’s-do-this sort of way. Then she held the bottle of vodka out to Cheryl like an olive branch. Maybe she’s finally growing up, I thought. The second Cheryl went to take it, Murder’s fingers sprung open and the bottle dropped to the floor with a smash that cut through the kitchen and caused everybody to turn round. Cheryl was paralysed with shock and fury. I groaned internally.
‘You dick!’ Cheryl let out a cry of disgust. ‘Oh, you fucking dick!’
‘Sorry,’ Murder said monotonously. ‘It slipped.’
‘You are going to pay me back for that, you piece of shit!’
Murder made a brushing-off motion and started walking off. ‘Whatever,’ she said. Before she could get away, Cheryl grabbed her firmly by the arm and I thought things were about to kick off.
‘The fuck are you going?’ Cheryl said, sounding demented. ‘Huh?’
‘Let go of me you mentalist,’ Murder said.
‘You gonna pay me back, you little bitch?’
‘I said get the fuck off me.’
I felt compelled to step forward, even though I still didn’t have the slightest intention of getting involved. Cheryl was tall, but Murder still could’ve snapped her like a twig. She didn’t need any help, and besides, she didn’t deserve it.
Cheryl held Murder as she tried to break loose. People in the crowded kitchen were staring, mainly to figure out what the fuck was happening. The two of them struggled for a while, and at some point I noticed Murder had stopped yelling and looked as if she was wiping her face or something with her free hand, or maybe picking her teeth. Then I realised what it was she was doing, and instantly I began making my way out of the room, to try and avoid having to bear witness to what I could tell she was trying to do.
But it was too late. Murder pulled her finger out of her throat, snapped her head back in Cheryl’s direction, and let out a torrent of chunky, colourful, booze-tainted liquid that burst all over her. Flecks of orange slime were in her hair, across her glasses, and sprayed all over her shirt and bare shoulders. Cheryl’s confused face was slow to react. I watched in bullet-time as her mouth tore open and her eyes ballooned out in total, abject horror. I almost felt what she felt. She let out an animal scream.
‘What- wh- what- WHAT THE FUCK,’ she cried with a broken voice.
She let go of Murder and fell back in shock. People around us were looking on, astonished. Half were empathetic and disgusted, half were laughing and yelling, and were also disgusted. ‘I told you to let go,’ Murder said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
Cheryl let out a tirade of abuse, stuttering and stammering with outrage, screaming her head off, caught between wanting to tear Murder limb from limb and ripping off her own tainted flesh. Joe came in, looking perplexed, and before he could even finish asking what was happening, Cheryl turned to him and screamed ‘She threw up on me!! She fucking vomited on me!!’
‘What?’
‘Your stupid bitch-cunt fucking mentalist friend, she- she- she fucking threw up on me!’
‘Holy shit,’ Joe said, confused. ‘Let’s get upstairs. There’s no-one in the toilet, I just got em out. Go wash up. Go on. I’ll find you some clothes or something. God.’
Cheryl was shepherded out, trembling with rage. Murder leaned her drunk body against the wall and lit a cigarette. I walked up to her and said ‘Fuck, don’t you think that was a little harsh?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Maybe a bit. Oh, well. Done it now.’
Within a minute or two, Joe came back downstairs and marched straight up to Murder, clearly seething and willing to sucker-punch if societal gender differences didn’t forbid it.
‘What the fuck is the matter with you?’
‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ Murder replied.
‘Are you actually fucking insane? Why? Like, why? Why did you do that?’
Murder shrugged. ‘She pissed me off.’
‘How?’
‘I dunno.’ Murder had trouble accurately bringing the cigarette to her lips. ‘She got on my nerves, innit.’
‘Oh, god,’ Joe had his head in his hands for a second; it was like the frustration was actually burrowing out of his skull. ‘What is wrong with you? You’re such a fucking idiot, I mean fuck, you bitch. Fuck you! No, seriously, fuck you!’
‘Woah, steady on mate,’ Murder said, holding her hand up defensively. ‘There’s no need to lose it, Joe, just cos you wanted a dip, know what I mean?’
‘What, are you jealous or something?’
Murder snorted with genuine contempt. ‘As if.’
‘Really? Cos it sounds like you’re pretty jealous,’ Joe said. ‘You must have some chip on your shoulder, come on, what is it?’
‘Nothin, mate. She was a sket and she pissed me off. That’s it, innit.’
‘After you nicked her shit, you mean?’
‘I thought it was mine,’ Murder said, sounding as honest as a TV advert.
Joe stood staring at Murder with his arms folded and his eyes shining with anger. He looked as if he was sizing up the situation, thinking of what to do. Murder just stood there, smoking, drunk eyes flickering in various directions. I felt washed with awkwardness.
‘You think you’re hot shit, don’t you?’ Joe said. ‘Y’know, you think you’re better than everyone. You think you’re amazingly unique and crazy and interesting, just cos you dress weird and dye your hair and name yourself something edgy.’ His voice was rising, catching the attention of a few onlookers who were still following the miniature drama. ‘You think you’re the absolute fuckin tits.’
‘I am.’
‘You’re not, you’re a sadact,’ Joe said. ‘You’re a loser. You be a dick to people and you say all this bare fake shit, and you act like a tryhard to try and get people to pay attention to you, since that’s the best you can do what with no-one actually wanting to be your friend. It’s embarrassing.’
‘Calm down, mate.’
‘No, listen to me, alright?’ Joe said. ‘Cut it out. Cut it the fuck out, okay? I’ve had it. We’ve all had it. Lose it, yeah? Just, just drop it.’
‘Drop what?’ Murder asked.
‘This fuckin… wacky persona you’re putting on constantly. This made-up shite, all the acting hard, all the being weird for the sake of it. All that shit. Just stop it, okay? It’s pathetic, mate. It’s utterly, utterly pathetic. You are pathetic. Get a fuckin grip, yeah?’
Murder didn’t say anything back. She just bit her lip and scowled.
Joe walked off, shaking his head, probably heading back upstairs to check on Cheryl. The randomers around us were looking over and giggling to themselves, but they quickly lost interest and fell back into their own boring lives. I stepped in front of Murder to try and get her attention; she carried on smoking her cigarette without looking at me.
‘Well, you’ve made his chirpsing a shit-tonne more difficult,’ I said, forcing a snickering laugh.
Murder didn’t say anything. Her eyelids were heavy and flickering; she had a thorny scowl. She was staring into the empty air where Joe had just been standing.
‘You okay?’ I asked.
Murder was swaying back and forth, like she was caught in a trance. Finally, she looked at me, and her scowl deepened. ‘He’s a prick,’ she said.
‘Yeah, innit,’ I said, automatically taking her side.
‘Fuckin… god, fuckin… damn, shit,’ Murder muttered to herself like a crazy person. I noticed her hand trembling as she brought the cig to her lips. She stubbed it out aggressively on the kitchen counter.
‘I might go,’ Murder said.
I looked at her, surprised. ‘What?’
‘I think I might go home now,’ Murder said, flat and robotic, like someone else was saying it for her.
‘You wanna leave?’
She nodded. ‘You don’t have to come with me or nothin.’
I knew that. And I wanted to stay. Even though I was just as lost at that party as any other, I still kinda wanted to stay. Even if I wasn’t mixing, I liked being around people. I liked being fucked up.
‘Don’t you wanna stay a bit longer?’ I asked weakly.
Murder shook her head.
‘Is this cos of―’
Ughhhh,’ Murder groaned loudly, cutting me off and shutting me up. She started walking out the kitchen, heading towards the front door. I ran out and stopped her on the way.
Woah, wait, wait,’ I said. ‘How you gonna get back?’
‘It’s not far,’ Murder said. ‘I’ll chance it.’
‘I’ll call you a taxi,’ I said.
‘I’ll fuckin chance it,’ she repeated, and that was it. And she stepped out the door and walked back towards the other end of town. I watched her go, then shut the door and tried not to think about it. A tiny part of me was worried about her, but as soon as she was gone, the rest of me simmered with fury.
I was annoyed with her. I was frustrated with her. I told myself to forget about her weird selfishness, ignore how she’d pushed me away, and carry on having fun at the party without her. I walked back into the house of strangers and struggled to talk to people until I drank myself stupid and fell asleep on Chen’s shoulder, while the party died around me.

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