White bedding. Always white. For purity, saintliness? Everything that she was not.
Music would be playing in the background, something classical, uplifting. Most often, she imagined that she would be listening to Handel’s ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ as she drifted into unconsciousness, because she had always wanted that to be played when she walked down the aisle at her wedding. But Roger had wanted something different and she had deferred to his choice. Pretending to be dutiful back then, at the beginning, before they were married. Playing the role.
She pictured herself putting on a floor-length white broderie anglaise nightgown and doing her make-up with extra care; not in the demure fashion she had been forced to adopt in court, but as if she was going somewhere special, for a night out: statement eyes, heavy mascara and pillar-box red lipstick that on her pale face would look startling, shocking, a slash of vermilion blood.
The picture-perfect cinematic moment.
The picture-perfect death.
She had thought that it would be a landmark event that she would need to prepare for. But now that the time had come, it wasn’t like that at all. It was just a normal September day, two days after the second anniversary of Zoe’s death, two days after Jodie Trigg’s.
Though she struggled to feel genuine love for others, she believed that she had felt it for Jodie Trigg. Love, and regret that the little girl was dead. Jodie had been clever, resourceful, determined, old for her years, everything that she herself had been as a girl. Everything that Zoe hadn’t been. She had given Jodie the necklace with the footprints of parent and child, the ‘Zoe present’ that Roger had given her. She’d seen a future with Jodie, a second chance at her own child. But, perhaps it was too late by then for her to have any more chances, just a pipe dream. She had already taken one child from her mother. God, fate, or whatever power was up there, pulling the strings, would never have let her take another, a good child this time, a deserving child.
She was tired, sad and lonely, and she’d had enough. Her body felt broken. Her brain felt broken. Her brain had felt broken for a long time now. Perhaps it had broken when she had felt that first seagull writhing in her hands, fighting vainly for its life. Perhaps it had been broken before that. Whatever, whenever, she knew that there was no chance it could ever be fixed. Even Jessie Flynn hadn’t been able to fix it, make her normal, content with her lot, hadn’t been able to scratch the surface.
She had never done what they had accused her of – she wasn’t the one who’d killed Zoe or Jodie – but she had done enough to bring this fate upon her. She had stolen a child from her mother purely because she had wanted her. She had beaten the old man and dumped his limp body in Jessie’s understairs cupboard. She didn’t care about them, but she did care about Jessie. Perhaps Jessie was dead; she hadn’t stayed to check, hadn’t wanted to know. Her baby, though, was certainly dead. She hadn’t known that Jessie was pregnant until she saw the blood. Would she have behaved differently if she’d known? No, probably not. Her behaviour, the attack, had been fuelled by intense anger and despair that she had been betrayed yet again by a so-called friend. She hadn’t been able to control herself.
She couldn’t cope with another trial, not after what she’d been through before, couldn’t cope with spending years imprisoned. She had grown up in a prison, and the only thing she had ever wanted was to be free, but now she realized that freedom was a myth. No one was ever truly free.
Finding a pad in the bedside-table drawer, she wrote an apologetic note. She wasn’t sure if Jessie would ever get to read it, but it felt right to write it anyway, as if she was doing the right thing for once.
In the bathroom, she stood in front of the huge wall-length mirror and stripped off the sky-blue dress, splattered in its owner’s blood, dropped it in the bath so that she wouldn’t dirty the spotless tiled floor or the fluffy white bath mat.
Purity, saintliness.
She was so thin that she fancied for a moment she could see the neon bathroom lights shining through her translucent skin. It was a ridiculous sight. She was ridiculous. Reaching for the light switch, she extinguished the lights so that she could no longer see herself. In the darkness, she showered and shaved her armpits and legs, sliding her fingers between her thighs to feel for the pubic hairs sprouting at the tops of her legs, shaving them off. She didn’t want the pathologist to think that she was dirty, disgusting, that she had let herself go.
Walking back into the bedroom, she extinguished the lights there also. The moon lit the room milky white and for a moment she stood at the foot of the bed and looked at the panorama of the sky above the darkened fields, the stars appearing to ramble away for miles above her head. Not big-sky country, but almost.
She felt completely calm now. She lay down on the bed, Jessie Flynn’s bed. She could smell Jessie’s scent on the pillow, but perhaps she was only imagining it. It was as close as she would ever get to her now, but still it made her happy.
Take one of your pills, Carolynn.
She emptied the bottle of pills into her
