A screening on New Year’s Eve 2021
I’m in the holiday apartment we rented. I know I need to find Zanna. My heart is racing, I can’t breathe. I want to shout but I can’t. I can’t muster the breath. I try to scream out, but my chest is feeble. There is a sound, a phone. It’s pinging over and over again, aggressively.
I move quickly from the hall to the bedroom, but my feet hover above the floor, it’s like the room moves around me. I’m trying to find the source of the noise, the phone. It’s Shane calling, I think. He’s found something. He’s angry. I feel afraid. It’s dark outside. Wind howling. The pillows, duvet, even the fitted sheet, have been strewn around the floor. My body aches. The balcony windows are open. The white curtains are being pulled nearly off their fixings by the weather, a storm raging on a sea outside the window, miles away beyond the lights. Nothing but blackness outside. The wind screams in pain.
The door bangs. I turn around. I can’t make out the voice behind the door. Who is that? I look back at the bed. It’s stained bright red. Blood? No. Someone’s knocked a wine bottle over and it’s pouring out onto the sheets. I turn. It’s Zanna. It was her in the doorway all along. She begins to scream at me, her mouth wide open, a terrible angry scream.
I know it’s a dream before I wake. Relieved, I leave the bedroom behind me and head to the kitchen, like I usually do. As my eyes adjust, the dark corner of the kitchen created by dark cabinets isn’t so empty. A shape is moving, a dark shape. A grey hoodie, a sullen face. She screams, raises a knife. The world around me begins to crack. Reality fracturing, terrifying voids where the atmosphere breaks apart, defying physics. My knife flashes in Talia’s hand as she screams an angry, metallic, multidimensional scream.
I wake again. This time it’s real. I’m comforted by Shane’s heavy body on the mattress beside me, but I know I won’t be sleeping again.
My blind hand reaches out in the dark, fumbling to pull open a drawer. I tentatively search through different packets of pills, like reading braille. The little many bumps of the contraceptive pill, large bubbly Nurofen. Then I find them: a number of packets held together with an elastic band. In the living room I stand with my hot head leaving an oily patch against the cool glass. Across the river, the lights of London glimmer like they did in Ibiza.
Today’s the day.
*
We settle down in a cinema theatre in the basement of a private members’ club in Soho. The seats are plush, blood red velvet, with little tables for your drinks. Matching velvet curtains hang around the screen too. Not old, but meant to look so. This is the premiere. What we’ve all been waiting for. The streaming service has opted for a more respectful occasion than attendees shivering on a red carpet. This is boutique and quiet. After all, this subject matter is serious. Death is serious. My situation is serious. Talia’s threats hang in my ears.
How’s it going to look when they print that you had another girl die, linked to you? They won’t be paying you to post pictures of shit then.
But this circus, these kisses on cheeks, these champagne flutes, this midnight blue dress I’m wearing, they’re not serious at all. Everyone tells me how stunning I am because I’ve lost a stone I didn’t need to lose, whittled to my bones by anxiety. It’s amazing how this sign of suffering is a success, at least when it’s women who lose their body mass. Since visiting Talia, my dreams have been full again of other memories, more deeply repressed. Ones I’d never returned to since leaving those suburbs.
Sophia was a girl in my class. She and Talia were joined at the hip, after Talia abandoned me. We had been friends on and off during primary school, and for a few weeks at the beginning of secondary school, until Talia found a better option. Sophia set her sights on my friend, took her by the hand. Took her away. It happened gradually. We were a crowd of three, for a while, until the crowd thinned out on my end. Sophia didn’t understand, or didn’t care, that I wanted to be her friend. Instead, she took Talia’s hand and ran — literally, sometimes. That hurt.
I tried to resist the robbery of my best friend. I attempted to speak to Talia on the school bus. I brought in her favourite sweets to share. I will admit, it became a little unhealthy. When fury, rejection and love meet, people take strange actions. I stole little things of Sophia’s and Talia’s. Pens, scrunchies, whatever I found. I was never caught, but the girls knew. So Sophia called me a stalker, she called me a psycho, a lesbian, spitting out the last word, as though it would be such a terrible thing. Soon, everyone else did too. I sank into a deep depression. Home and school, both torture. Reading, again, my only solace, where I retreated, and learned to write. Write stories, narratives. A skill that has come in useful for me.
For years, they laughed at me. Every day I attended that grey block of a comprehensive school, imposing, with its small windows, full of sadness and violence. Relentless. Can you imagine how that makes a person feel? Merciless cruelty. Water poured over my books, my work smeared before hand-ins. Compliments on my shoes, backpack, new hair clips, were all lies dangled like bait before me. After giving me a kind word, they’d wait, like barracudas, for me to smile a feeble acknowledgement — what else was I supposed to do, encourage them with anger? Then they’d reveal sharp demon teeth and laugh. Laugh, laugh, laugh. People who act this way should be careful. When you’re laughing, you’re too busy to watch your back. But I push those memories down, away. It’s in the past. It’s going to stay there. I’ll do whatever it takes to ensure that.
Here we are, a low-key premiere, moments to go. I’ve done interviews with Grazia, the Guardian, the Independent in the run-up to it all. Thoughtful think pieces about male-on-female violence, stalking, the dangers of social media, the state of the world. I’ve sat on the white sofa and poured my heart out, offering my tears, my memories. I’ve carefully curated my social media to lead to this, I’ve watched every word, every action in the press interviews. I’ve done my part to make it perfect. I’ve endured the negative comments whipped up by the press. I’ve been harassed and blackmailed. I’ve been waiting, desperately as time went on, all for the moment when this is finally over and my problems are solved — money, exposure, debt. And now, the darkest part of my life — a part I thought long dead — has come home to roost.
It all hangs in the balance now, and the next forty-eight hours will dictate how those scales land. Doom or triumph. Victor or villain. All of it.
I’m already thinking about the hole paying Talia off will burn in my pocket, and the incriminating nature of it. But I think I have a better way to deal with the issue. I glace over at Jessica, and she flashes me a trusting smile. She could believe I was a victim of another malicious rumour. Perhaps she might caution Talia for me, stick up for me if any questions are asked.
I’d pacified Talia’s threats for now, with promises of money once I’d been paid for the documentary. Five thousand pounds, more than any paper would give her for her bullshit. Her threats will be less worrisome to me when the documentary comes out. The absolute worst scenario would be for the documentary to be delayed. I can’t have that. I need the money, I need the exposure.
Shane is with me tonight, of course, close by my side. His palms are sweating like mine. The whiskey he drank before we arrived is on his breath. I’ve taken half a diazepam. I need my wits about me. We were both nervous in the silent Uber ride over. There’s a lot on the line.
The place is decked out with advertisements for the documentary. I stand face-to-face with Zanna’s flat visage on a poster. She judges like once again she’s not satisfied with my outfit. Sheryl is in the front row, where Angela and the two sisters are sat. Santiago is nowhere to be seen, despite taking part in the documentary. He never went in for any of it, really, Zanna and her mother’s aspirational semi-showbiz dreams. Now he and Angela are no more, I hear he’s living back in Portugal. It’s tragic, he’s estranged from his daughter even in death. I wonder if he feels guilty.
Gianna is here, sitting at the very front. She is showing, pregnant for a second time, and she’s got that superior look to go with it. Pregnancy really deludes some women into thinking they are goddesses incarnate, rather than any old breeding sow with leaking teats. In a printed silk dress, she’s like a sofa, especially next to razor-thin Sara in her “oh so high fashion” all black. Maggie, who wears a pink jumper, waves at me. Trying to fan the flames of a friendship she considers recently rekindled. I smile and wave back, if only because it annoys Gianna, who scowls. Angela pretends not to see me; perhaps she is embarrassed after that outburst at the gala. Well, she really ought to be. Gianna whispers into Sara’s ear. Sticks and stones, bitch, sticks and stones.
I sit with Shane at the very back. He’s been quickly quaffing the champagne offered out on trays, one after another. I silently will him to slow down.
“Thank you for coming,” Sheryl says, standing at the front of the room and holding her hands together in front of her. I spy a flicker of humanising nerves.
The lights go down and a Maroon 5 song starts playing. On the nose, if you ask me. Pictures roll down the screen in a fake Instagram interface, the pretend “like” button pinging, hearts flying around the screen. It’s the real pictures of me and Zanna I sent over to Sheryl scrolling down the screen, one big WeTransfer containing the sum of my precious memories with my old friend. There’s Zanna posing with a bottle of prosecco, a fag dangling out of her mouth. Angela shifts in her seat. Hah, I’d hoped Sheryl would pick this one for that very reason. Not so perfect now, is she? I remember that night. Zanna spiked our drinks with MDMA. I didn’t get to sleep till 7 a.m. and I ground my teeth so hard I carved little notches on the front two. They’re fixed now by a private dentist who did composite bonding, free in exchange for an Instagram post. But that’s not the point. Zanna never even asked before she put the mandy in my drink and she never offered to pay to have the grooves fixed, even though she pointed them out enough times.
A re-enactment shows two girls on a bus holding boxes with our names on. This didn’t happen; we didn’t move on a bus, Shane drove us in his friend’s van. Creative licence, though. I understand that, I’ve given myself a huge proportion of it. Then, there’s my voice. I wince with every hint of the regional accent I’ve run from. I close my eyes, a little dizzy. I breathe and count to ten. When I open my eyes the text on screen reads “Life of Zanna”. What comes next lays out the tale, as the public knows it, of the life and death of Zanna.