After a screening on New Year’s Eve 2021
We travel home, in the back of the Addison Lee, in silence, our hands clasped together on the seat. As the lights came on, there had been applause from the journalists, smiles from Sheryl. Tom gave me a big hug and thumbs up and said: “You were great, really wonderful, really likeable, sympathetic.”
Of course, Tom would say this, but there was more positive feedback to be had.
A journalist and reviewer tells me, “Wow, I didn’t realise how much you had to go through, how much hate. You were so strong for carrying on with all that.”
I give my sincerest thanks.
“You really gave us such an interesting, humanising perspective on being an influencer. It was so real, so honest and modest,” another journalist says.
A familiar woman in a familiar quirky print silk shirt, with familiar red-painted lips, steps towards me, flanked by Tom. He introduces her to me.
“Paige, this is Emmeline Frithe, editor of the Sunday Times Style magazine.”
I gush. “Oh, wow,” I say, grasping her hand. “I’ve always been such a fan. I read the magazine when I was a little girl. It made me love fashion.”
Her hands are so soft, probably massaged over the years with essential-oil infused creams. She smells like sparkling sweet green tea. Emmeline’s peridot eyes sparkle and in her dazzling smile are two ever so slightly overlapping front teeth. It’s a quirk that makes her face all the more alive. I immediately feel like perfect Invisalign teeth are so passé. Her home counties accent is smooth as an undisturbed Lake District lake and it echoes generations of wealth and status Zanna had never touched.
“I love to hear from people who love the magazine,” she says, her deep yet breathy voice enchanting me. “I can’t wait to speak with you about your column.”
I fizz with delight, and clasp her hand tighter.
“I’ll email you,” she says, before she announces she must get home to her daughter, Pandora.
Shane holds me in his arms as we allow photographers to take pictures of us together. We go down a storm, if I may say so. Champagne and compliments are thrown around as liberally as condolences.
“I can only hope this helps others to be safe in this modern, digital age,” I say to a crowd of nodding press people.
“Yes, so important,” they murmur, “so important.”
Far fewer journalists are talking to Angela and Gianna, who scowl over at me, the picture of envy. I smile. They wanted so much to prove what they think they knew, but they couldn’t. I would always be multiple steps ahead of them, and now I’m so far out in front they couldn’t catch me if they tried. I even reach out for a hug with Gianna as she walks past me, in front of the cameras and watching journalists, for the sheer joy of forcing her to endure it. She stiffens against my touch, but she must grin and bear it. I would like to be perceived as the bigger woman, after what she said about me. I hug Angela too, and her pride forces her into cordiality. So much for those accusations, drunk or otherwise. Look at us all now, the best of buddies, unified under a greater cause.
It’s a real pleasure, to succeed where those who never wanted me around are forced to put up with it anyway, greeting me with these tortured false smiles under press camera lights. They have so much arrogance to think they see the reality behind Zanna’s death. They never even saw the real Zanna. It takes a really honest person to see everything for what it truly is. These people will only ever see their narrow lives through their narrow narratives. I choose whichever narrative I want, and that’s what has saved me over and over again.
Shane finally speaks, pulling me out of my reverie in shock.
“I think it’s going to be okay, then?”
He still looks to me, like a child, to sort it all out for him, for us. I turn to him and nod.
“Yeah, it’s okay,” I say. I put a hand out to stroke his face. He flinches, catches himself, and then lets me touch him. I put a finger to his lips and lean over, pressing my own lips against the finger. Then it slips away and we are joined together at the mouth. Sharing air, sharing saliva, sharing our life, our guilt, our crimes, our culpability. Joined — by a force with more authority than the law, more sanctity than the church — in unholy matrimony.
We first slept together after the funeral. It sounds macabre, but it is what it is. We needed each other in those difficult, stressful, dangerous times. Those five weeks between the murder and the funeral were painful, holed up in the flat, too afraid to contact Shane, hoping he wouldn’t contact me, hoping he had enough sense not to put in a message what he’d done, while also hoping to see him more than anything. My mind ran around in circles. Would Shane ever speak to me again? Would Shane confess? Would Shane and I have any chance of being together now? I followed news coverage of the case, all focusing on the shocking details of Zanna’s death as well as pictures of her as scantily dressed as possible. I prayed I’d see Shane again. And then I did, in a room full of peonies.
Dotted in the spaces between the round tables and still filing in were bloggers, friends and acquaintances of Zanna’s. I recognised PRs and photographers, various influencers with whom we’d taken press trips to France, or Portugal, or the Cotswolds, the kind of trips where bloggers and their photographers line up in front of the sunset to get “the shot”.Chanel, Gucci and Stella McCartney shoulder bags bumped gently against hips as people shifted into little groups and around each other, murmuring. Noise reverberated around the tall-ceilinged room and guests spoke in hushed tones that entangled together like the hum of bees to create a vaguely menacing sound, far away and also close by. The sound of glasses clinking accidentally against one another amid air kisses is elevated above the buzz.
The glamorous guests nodded at me, smiled sad smiles, lips still together. People stepped around me, fell back as I walked past.
There was no “She lived a long and happy life” or “She’s in a better place now”.
I felt unmoored until I saw him in the crowd. I found my way to him, grabbed his hand, pulled him away. We bustled into a darkish corner of the funeral reception space and he pulled out a hip flask, half full. I unscrewed the cap and held it to my nose.
“It’s whiskey,” he said as the fuel-like fumes hit my nose, in the bottle and on his breath. He was drunk. It was the first time I had ever seen him like that. I wrapped my lips awkwardly around the nozzle on the small metal bottle. I fought back any involuntary reaction of my body to the alcohol, but my eyes watered. Shane smiled at me, a wonky drunk smile. I couldn’t tell if the warmth in my stomach derived from the neat alcohol or disturbed butterflies. I looked after him, gave him water and those small sandwiches that get served at funerals, held him upright and took him home when he was too drunk to sober up. Back at the flat like old times, Shane kissed me. Our mouths rhythmically connected, his hand rested on my left breast and massaged it. I moved my hands down to his trousers, undid them and slid my hand inside. I couldn’t have been wetter. He grasped tightly to me.
The next day he had his wobble. Bolting upright in bed, a cold sweat.
“We can’t do this,” he said, staggering over to his black suit trousers, trying to pull them on. I talked him down.
“Shane, Shane, come on, calm down. It’s okay.”
“It’s wrong,” he said, his hands shaking. He sank to the floor. “I can’t do this.”
I held him as she sobbed.
“I’m scared.”
I draped my body over his, tried to comfort him, pulled him up, wiped his face.
“Shane,” I said. “You don’t have to be alone. I’m the only person who knows the truth, and I’ll protect you. You love me, right?”
Tears pooled in his deep eyes, again. He wrapped his arms around his knees, buried his face in them and nodded.
“I love you too,” I said, stroking his back. “And as long as we stick together, no one ever has to know what happened.”
Shane was so lucky to have someone like me be the one who saved him. And now, the one who would always be there for him. Someone who would never let him down, and never let him go. Who doesn’t dream of that?
He essentially never left the flat after that. It made so much sense to stay there, and stay together, for both of us. We had too much to lose to flee. The lifestyle, the money, our social media profiles kept us tied to our old lives. I thought about leaving the country forever, escaping to New York, to Bali, or somewhere. But what would I do? Start again? I had poured too much into Life of Zanna to leave now, I had put too much on the line to leave it.
We needed to heal. It was better to do that together. We understood what the other had been through — we protected one another with our complicity. Who’s going to protect you better than someone whose fate is so implicitly tied with yours? Of course, it was hard. You can’t see a therapist to deal with something like the circumstances of Zanna’s death. Perhaps we leaned on each other too much, but there was no one else.
I was diagnosed, formally, with anxiety disorder for the first time, prescribed the first packet of diazepam for my PTSD, to help with the bad dreams and panic attacks. I know I take them too much, but any port in a storm. Shane drinks. We cope in the ways we have available to us.
We hid our relationship for a year, before finally going public on Instagram. Shane was keen to keep it to ourselves. I would have done it earlier. Eventually, though, Shane knew he had to capitulate. To compromise. Compromise really is key to making things work in a relationship. Shane has learned this, particularly. He knows he needs me.
“Shane,” I say as the city lights swoop past us.
“Hmm?”
“I want to get married.”
He swallows, gazes out the window with squinting eyes. He takes a moment. Breathes, and says, “Okay.”
He’ll come around to the idea. He always comes around to my ideas.