Trust No Bitch: Part 1

Lilly Philipps

Anyone would tell you that wandering aimlessly around a forest, alone, past twilight, was not a good idea. Lilly knew that was basic horror movie 101 shit. Yet, there she was, shaking from head to toe, stravaiging about the overgrowth, at quarter to 11 at night. She had left the cove and ventured into the surrounding hilly woodland. Much to her chagrin, her Kurt Geiger's were sinking into the mud and her hair was snagging on the branches as she felt her way through the trees. To make matters worse, she was terrified. Uncontrollable shivers, the kind that are so intense that your muscles begin to ache, that kind of terrified. Terrified of what she was about to do. It was a long story, and it started with Luca Stone. Luca was Lilly's most awful friend's boyfriend. That's how she rationalised it. But to put it plainly, Luca was also one of Lilly's closest friend's boyfriends, regardless how much of an utter bitch said friend was. Said friend being Cleo King, of course, the most infamously, and also inexplicably fawned over arsehole on St.Edmund's property. That's why what had happened between Lilly and Luca was just that little bit closer to inexpiable than your run-of-the-mill affair. But it wasn't like Lilly had done it to spite anyone. She was in love with Luca. Like the fairytale, let's go and run off together and never come back, kind of love. Luca didn't live in her building; that wasn't how she had gotten to know him. It wasn't exactly what Lilly would normally consider a classy love story. After all, he was working in the kebab shop down the road from the Reiss that Lilly worked in. They had their breaks at the same time and Lilly (in an unusually stealthy fashion) would sit in the corner of the coffee shop and peer over her laptop, on which she was supposed to be going over lecture notes, just to watch him smoking outside the kebab place across the street. They had first been formally introduced at a party, similar to the one she was attending at that moment, and Lilly had been instantly attracted to him.

"Girls, this is Luca. He does business." Cleo had told them, as he wound his arm around her waist, licking his lips, his chin in the air. It had been that first grin in Lilly's direction that had really started it all; she had beamed back at him, twiddling a strand of hair round her finger like a bored little schoolgirl sat cross legged on their classroom carpet.

"Hi Luca." She had giggled.

"Lilly, is it?"

"Yeah. It's Lilly." She replied, dazed. He wasn't conventionally attractive, but there was definitely something about him, she privately confirmed after leaving work one day to find him leaning against the red brick wall outside, smoking in tight jeans and a bomber jacket.

"I saw that you worked here when I came by earlier. You're mates with Cleo, aren't you? I wondered if you needed a lift back to the grounds?" He asked her, exhaling the smoke. "Do you want one?" He said, holding out a cigarette, "A fag, I mean.".

"No, thanks. I don't smoke." She said warily, looking around her to see if Cleo was watching from down the street, carrying out some kind of appraisal of Lilly's loyalty from afar.

"Why not?" Luca asked. Because my mum died of cancer, you utter prick, would've been Lilly's immediate inner reaction to anybody but this boy. This boy with the sleepy eyes and the tight jeans and light freckles which brought to mind the phrase "angel kisses". Towards him, she felt no irritation whatsoever.

"Cancer." She replied, simply. And such a monosyllabic response was by no means abnormal; her dad always told her she had been a particularly loquacious little girl, except when it came to her mum's condition. Her lack of explanation, of weeping, of providing the expected emotional response often seemed to denigrate the seriousness of the situation. This wasn't the case; her mum's prolonged demise was demeaning and it was degrading and although that was pretty much all Lilly could remember about it, it was enough trauma to last her a lifetime. The grief she experienced was so strong it had broken the mechanisms that stored it, and so from thereafter it had clogged up inside of her, spilling out at all the wrong moments. Telling people about her mum's cancer was just stringing together a sentence, stating a fact, no different from reading out her address or date of birth and dead was just a four letter word but still, Lilly would sob at the sight of fireworks or the Notting Hill Carnival. It was all that happiness and excitement in one place, she supposed. Back when she had first gone through chemotherapy, Lilly's mum had joked. When she lost her hair, she told Lilly that she felt "like an egg" and "who would've believed" she'd have "gone bald before your dad, Lil". When she had her mastectomy, she told Lilly she couldn't "miss something" she "never had". When she threw up she said "better out than in". At first, anyway. As time passed, her eyes didn't crinkle as she said it, they looked right through Lilly as if she were made of glass. And eventually, when she realised Lilly would cry either way, she stopped trying. Towards the end, she couldn't laugh anymore, only wheeze and groan; if pain had a leitmotif, Lilly was sure she had heard it those last few days in the hospital. The wail of the heart rate monitor followed by an almighty silence was practically euphonious; the suffering had finally abated. Lilly had always felt too shit to say it aloud, but it'd gotten to a point where she had just wished that the cancer would finish her mum off and stop playing with its food. But that changed once her mum was really gone; Lilly would take a rotting carcass over nothing at all. Nothing was what she had, and would have for the rest of her life. She'd see her mother only as pixels on a computer screen or ink on a piece of photo paper, never again as flesh and bones.