Trust No Bitch: Part 2

Alice Jenkins

Alice had written her eulogy the day she'd received the funeral invitation, picked out her dress the same day, and then spent all night committing it to her memory as if she were back in 6th form going over her Spanish vocabulary prior to a speaking exam. Always being prepared, industrious, was a principle that she applied to every feasible area of her life. And yet despite the readiness in a technical sense, pre-funeral anxieties were running around the back of Alice's mind throughout the night. Whereas Tim Robbins' benignant expression and mellifluous voice would've usually had a dulcifying effect on her, over their morning coffee together all she could notice beneath his mousy thatch of hair were his dark circles and his drawn face. She kept wanting to ask if he was sick, but then began to worry about that too, and then worry about whether she was projecting her own concerns onto him, and then about what exactly those concerns were, and then whether it was even appropriate to be thinking about one's own problems on the day of another's funeral and so on. All she could do was sip her coffee quietly as Tim spoke, offering the occasional nod or burst of laughter.

"So..." He said, his arm stretched out across the table. "Your eulogy. What's it like?" Alice, preoccupied by her thoughts, realised he was asking her a question just in time to provide an answer that was prompt and coherent enough to avoid provoking an inquiry into her state of mind.

"It's glowing." She said, slightly sourly.

"Glowing..." He nodded, seemingly impressed. "I get the sense it's not the eulogy you wanted to write."

"Oh, believe me, it's not." She said. "Imagine writing a speech about Cersei Lannister as if she were Princess Shireen Baratheon. That sums up my eulogy."

"Did you just make a Game of Thrones analogy?" Tim asked, grinning.

"I think so."

"Cersei Lannister. That's quite a...Yeah, wow. She was that bad?"

"She could be. But her mum won't want to hear that and whichever way you look at it, she's still lost her daughter. Whatever makes it easier for the family, you know. I might mix it up a little bit, try and take out some of the more sugary elements. To say that she was a lovely person...I think that would just be an insult to her memory."

"You called her lovely? You're lucky Sasha isn't here. She would jump you." Tim murmured, Alice raising her eyebrows in a silent, lugubrious agreement as she drunk her coffee. She was resigned to the fact that Tim was probably right; Sasha really hated any kind of glorification of Cleo even if it was just to please her grieving family. It was part of the reason that Alice had asked Tim to meet her alone. "Didn't the pair of you have some kind of angry feminists club?"

"I wouldn't call it a club and even if it was, I wouldn't call her a member. Cleo was a feminist apart from when she was attempting to decimate every woman that she saw as a threat and calling every other woman within a five mile radius a slut, which honestly was happening more often than it wasn't."

"Ah, selective feminism. The worst."

"Also, anger is a secondary emotion, Tim. Maybe if women and everything associated with the feminine in general wasn't regarded in the majority of societies as being supposedly inferior, we wouldn't need feminism. Besides, we're not angry. We're just impassioned supporters of equality." Tim tried to squeak an apology but Alice, after putting her coffee down on the coffee with much gusto, gave him a small, deprecatory smile. "Sorry. I get a little bit overzealous sometimes." She explained and so Tim carried on.

"Why does Sasha hate Cleo so much, though? I mean it's not like Cleo ever really did anything specifically to her, is it?" He asked.

"I'm not quite sure. Sasha hates a lot of people though so I wouldn't give it much weight. Egotistical, arrogant, vain, bitchy, selfish, slutty...those are the things that tend to come up the most."