Trust No Bitch: Part 1

Clara Wright

It wasn't often that Clara Wright listened to Azealia Banks; she had always been into her alternative rock, sometimes a bit of metal core here and there. Rap, EDM, all that "pop shit" that everybody else listened to had never really been her thing. She always excused her pretentiousness by claiming it was congenital; the moment something became popular, she began to go off it, just like a food she'd had too much of. That day, however, Clara was paying little attention to whatever it was that was being blasted through her earphones, intending them to be more of a visible indication that she wasn't in the mood for talking. It had worked so far. As she sat pressed up against the car door of her mum's grey 4 by 4, she was allowed to stare silently out of the window at the luscious greens of the countryside which were beginning to dissolve around her, quickly replaced by the red bricks and grey pavements that she knew so well, without passing comment on how much she'd missed it all like her mother and brother were doing. Biting her fingernails as she reacquainted herself with the surroundings, she recognised the people and places to which she hadn't spared a thought to in the months they'd been away. Clara had just arrived back from a 4 month trip to South Africa with her mum and brother, staying with family friends, and it couldn't have been planned for a better time. According to her mother, who had spoken with Clara's friends on her behalf, gossip spread like a fever back home and since Cleo's disappearance it had been smothering her like one too. Even where they were staying, her mum's friends wanted to know all about it. All the vacuous smiles and simpering apologies in the world couldn't mask the curiosity in their eyes, betraying how desperate they were for the grisly details. They were like lions ravenous for meat, and about as good at concealing their hunger too. Whereas the people that had never really known Cleo had loved to talk about the mystery surrounding her disappearance, Clara's stomach lurched every time she heard her name; the thought that Cleo may remain in Clara's life only as a conversation piece rather than the effervescent, enigmatic human being that she had known so well was not one that bode well with Clara. She still refused to accept she was gone. And Cleo waltzing down the street, with her trainers, dresses that skimmed her the tops of her thighs, and masses of golden hair was all Clara could picture as the world outside passed her by. She could see her friend right there, skipping alongside the car, twirling round as she spoke, a faithful cigarette poised between her fingers. But Clara knew what would happen once she looked away. The memory of Cleo would diffuse into the wind like the smoke that was floating from the end of her cigarette. She had slept a lot whilst she was in South Africa. Sleep, for her, had helped provide the absence of thought; exactly what she'd needed. And she wanted it again. But as hard as she tried, sitting there in the back, she couldn't get it. She was too distracted by the places in which she had created so many memories with Cleo, Cleo the person with whom she guessed she would probably never make any more. Her older brother, Charlie, seeing her face reached out to the back seat and took her hand. She smiled at him solemnly and he held it between his and squeezed tightly. Not without hesitation over their spell finally being broken, Clara removed her earphones, the look in her brother's eyes she knew so well to be a cue that he was about to ask something she'd rather not answer.

"You okay?" He said and she did the best she could to nod back. "Is it hard being back?" He pressed on, age old concern lingering on his youthful face. Clara repressed the urge to tell him to fuck off and smiled again. 

"It'll get easier." She said quietly, with a shrug. She could tell Charlie was waiting for her to continue, so she avoided the gaze of his piercing, pale blue eyes, which were so unlike her own. Hers, like her mother's, complimented her baby face, pointed chin and small cupid's bow lips, and were large and doll-like, a deep shade of chestnut brown. They sharply contrasted the almost translucent colour of Charlie's. She had always guessed Charlie gotten them from their dad as she had almost forgotten the colour of his eyes; he'd left a long time ago. The roundness in Clara's face didn't extend to the rest of her body (apart from her height, Clara was of average build whereas her mother was rotund) but both her and her mum stood at under 5"3. Again, Charlie towered over them at 6"2. He also possessed a slight scar above his right eyebrow, from a fight that had left him hospitalised a few years previously whilst Clara had only a nose piercing. The only thing that Charlie and their mother shared were the creamy complexion, which Clara had; thick, arched eyebrows, which Clara did not; and the dark hair, which was the common denominator between all 3 of them. In recent years, however, Clara had taken to dying hers, which fell in waves just past her shoulders, a gleaming mahogany red to set her apart. Ever since she started at uni, she'd had the red hair and for most, that was how they identified her. But Cleo, she knew Clara far better than those people. The 2 had gone to primary school, secondary school, and college together and by the time they came to choose where they would find themselves next, to Clara, the choice was clear: they would attend the same university. Unlike the rest of her friends, it had been a struggle for Clara's mum to pay for it. Despite the trips to South Africa and the beautiful house, since Clara's dad left, money had been sparse. Lilly's dad was the owner of some suave London-based computer graphics company and he always seemed to be jetting Lilly off to Antigua, Bali or Dubai every time she went home for the holidays. She was often adorned in head to toe designer ensembles and received facials, manicures and waxes regularly, which Clara had always supposed was a perk of being your daddy's little princess. Lilly's dad paid her rent, of course, meaning that all the money she made at work could be spent on whatever she wanted. Then there was Alice's family, who were even wealthier than Lilly's, though as Clara had come to understand the Jenkins family dynamic, her resentment for their supposedly stable nuclear family had diminished. Alice's mother worked for a well known record label as a PR specialist, and spent most of her time in the states, and Alice's father, Howard, was a human rights lawyer, and was constantly travelling. Whilst Alice's relationship with her mum had always seemed non-existent to Clara, she was known to occasionally meet Howard for dinners every few months when he could fit her in, not that Alice seemed to particularly enjoy them. More often than not, she would arrive back in a distinctly worse mood than she had been when she had left, after receiving what she deemed a never ending game of 20 questions based around the latest piece of coursework and its content. Alice's parents guidelines for her future, Clara believed, were simple but unwavering: go to uni, come out with a first, join a law firm. In the summer, she would go to their villa in Crete, their lodge in Finland in the winter, and then return to their family home in Kensington in the rest of the holidays, but her parents were usually absent. As Clara understood it, it was just Alice and her younger brother, George. Gemma's family, Clara had always thought, seemed to be the happiest of the lot. Her dad had moved from Jamaica years ago and met Gemma's mum, a secondary school maths teacher, at a pub in Newcastle. The pair had married, moved to London together, and then had Gemma and her 4 brothers, Isaac, Sonny, Zack and Ryan. It was all quite idyllic, really. Well, aside from Gemma's oldest brother, Isaac, being in prison. Clara's mother, Fiona, had told her about that too; of late, Clara found out more about the lives of her friends through her mother than she did through the friends themselves. She couldn't blame them. Her mum had been the human barrier she had erected in order to keep normality away over the Summer. Clara wanted to make time stop for a while, until she was used to the idea of Cleo being gone. Whilst she didn't want sympathy, she didn't want anything that remotely resembled the conversations she'd had before; no scurrilous quips, no meaningless gossip, and definitely nothing about Lilly's boyfriend, whatever the gormless fucker was called. When Clara got back to uni, she didn't plan on speaking to them. She'd speak to whoever she could, but not to those 3. She had forgotten how to. There were, however, other punches in the gut from normality to take before Clara would even see Gemma, Lilly and Alice, the first being just arriving back at their house, Cleo's family's place still sitting there over the road, directly opposite.