BEX
It’s good for her to see if she can manage by herself, I tell myself, as I walk off across the Heath. What do they say – sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind? Jen really had it coming to her though. What a fucking cheek she had to accuse me of stalking her when I was only doing my best to protect her. Who knows what could have happened in that isolated woodland if I hadn’t turned up when I did. Jen believed that the boy – what was he called? Steven? – was harmless, but who knows? I left her knowing that she wasn’t in any real danger – I had seen him run off. But it was important to teach her a lesson.
As I walk I realise that perhaps it’s time to get on with my own life. I’m due back at work at Camden Council soon. I’ve my own friends and interests that have nothing to do with Jen. But as soon as I start to make plans I feel a terrible sense of sadness and guilt. I’m so bound up with Jen that we’re like sisters. And, like sisters, although we have our occasional rows and nasty spats, we will always return to each other.
I take out my phone to see if she’s sent a message or a text, but there’s nothing. I’m not going to ring her, I tell myself. Let her sweat. Then she’ll learn to appreciate me and everything I’ve done for her.
I replay the scene on the Heath in my head, hardly noticing the route I take towards Kentish Town. At the flat, I try to fall back into my normal routine – I had some washing to do, some work emails to check, a spot of cleaning – but I can’t get Jen out of my mind. She haunts me like a ghost, a shimmering mirage just out of reach. I go for a walk, but she’s still there, temporarily inhabiting the bodies of passing strangers. She’s around every corner, at the bottom of each street, glimpsed in windows, on passing buses, her blonde hair a beacon of light in a grey, lifeless world.
At night, I take a couple of pills and wash them down with some white wine. But as I gulp down the cold, golden liquid even that reminds me of her. I sleep fitfully, my dreams saturated by distorted images of her. Jen on the Heath, desperate and lost, her clothes torn, her arms scratched by brambles. She is calling my name. She says she can’t live without me. She walks down to the ponds and looks into the water, her reflection beckoning her in. She steps forwards and disappears into the murky depths. But this then morphs into a vision of Jen at university, seeing her for the first time that day in halls. The awkward little thing desperate for someone to take her under their wing. She looks terrible. Her skin is a mass of acne. Her hair is a lank mess. Her breath smells. Help me, she says. I need you.
She begins to tell me how she’s suffered. She talks about the tragic death of her parents in that car accident. I see her in the car with them, but she’s driving. She’s smiling as she presses her foot on the accelerator, a mad look on her face. Her mum and dad are screaming at her to slow down, but as the car speeds through a network of deserted country lanes Jen laughs like someone unhinged. There is a manic look in her eyes. She wants them to die. As the car turns a bend she takes her hands off the steering wheel and the vehicle crashes into a tree. Her parents are catapulted through the windscreen – the glass tears their skin into shreds, the force of the collision bends their heads backwards, almost decapitating them – but Jen just sits there, serene and unhurt, a smile of accomplishment on her face. It wasn’t an accident, I realise. She had it all planned. She wanted them dead.
I wake up sweating. I get up to go to the bathroom, switch the light on and splash some cold water on my face. I look at myself in the mirror. I don’t have brown hair, but blonde. The shape of my nose is not right, the contours of my cheeks are different. My eyes are not my eyes. For a moment, I see not my face but Jen’s staring back at me. I gasp in fear – this can’t be happening to me, I think – but the noise in my throat wakes me up. I’m still in bed, still clammy with sweat, still dreaming of Jen.