Trust No Bitch: Part 3

Lilly Philipps

There's a certain tone of voice people always employ when it comes to pity. It's slightly higher in pitch, and usually comes with a creased forehead, an overly familiar hand that feels the need to caress peculiar parts of the body, the back, the forearm. Lilly had heard it enough times in the last 24 hours to write her entire dissertation on it. Then again, the tone was more like an old friend than an acquaintance. It was the only way anybody other than her dad had spoken to her for the 3 or so years that followed her mum's death and still, now and again, she heard it at the backs of people's throats like an incipient cold, descried it in their body language. It was less pronounced than it had been, but it was still there. But giving birth to her dead little girl, it seemed, had warranted a reversal back to the days of her mum's passing.

"Is that okay? Too tight?" The nurse cooed as she wrapped the blood pressure monitor around the top of Lilly's arm. Is that not the point? Lilly thought to herself, nodding wearily and turning her head to stare out the window. "I just want to take a measure of your blood pressure, weigh you quickly and then you're all okay to go home, sweetheart." The nurse added, staring expectantly at Lilly, who didn't reply, just letting the band clamp down tighter and tighter on her arm. Next, was the weighing. This was harder to pretend wasn't happening. After all, for the last 10 years of her life, Lilly had obsessed over her weight like most pre-teens obsessed over their favourite boyband member. As she predicted, her eyes betrayed the rest of her body, which did its best to remain unbothered, determinedly following the flickering hand of the scale.

139lb.

"Oh my God..." She murmured, stepping off the scales. If there was a time she'd been that heavy, she couldn't remember it. 139lb? Was that healthy?

She hoped not.

To be a healthy weight meant a different thing to Lilly than it did to most other people. It meant tacit complacency in the only area she succeeded. Her sole strength lay in avoiding that stretch of the arm which allowed her to reach for that bar of white chocolate, bag of crisps, the tub of Haagen Dazs.

"Something wrong, sweetheart?" The nurse simpered as Lilly grabbed her bag from the chair and made her way towards the door.

"No, no, I'm fine." Lilly lied, pulling down on the door handle.

"Well, wait a second, then." Said the nurse, walking towards Lilly and resting a hand on her arm. "I just have a few things to give you." She explained, producing a stack of leaflets with her other hand and holding them out for Lilly to take.

"Thanks." Lilly replied brusquely, shoving the leaflets into her bag and swinging the door open, her dad hovering around outside. "I'm just going to the toilet." She told him and then, without waiting for his response, strode off down the corridor. Fortunately, once she found it, there was no-one inside so she went straight in, immediately confronted by her reflection, a pale, blonde creature staring out of the wall mirror at her. A part of her couldn't wait to get out of that hospital gown; the languidness and the wide, glassy eyes, combined with the boxy blue number she had on, gave her the look of the archetypal 1950's asylum patient, on whom a lobotomy had recently been performed. Out of her bag she pulled the clothes her dad had brought to the hospital for her: her beloved pink blazer, the one she wore the night of Cleo's murder, a white chiffon top, and for the first time since the first trimester of her pregnancy, her denim skinny jeans. The first two garments were not a bad choice; Lilly slipped them on easily and the blazer matched the rosy pink lipstick that she would apply, the top her white heels. It was those jeans. They derided her. Almost clasping around her waist, but just missing, instead emphasising that pouch of unforgiving flab that sat at the base of her stomach, that had before protected her little girl and now, in her eyes, served no purpose except to remind her of her own debilitation.

It will go away. She told herself, reaching into her bag for her lipstick. You will make it go away.

"You will." She affirmed aloud, her mouth gaping open as she gazed into the mirror, daubing on the lipstick. It did improve things a little; at least she didn't look so whey-faced anymore. A few seconds before, she would forgive someone for mistaking her for a reanimated corpse, escaped from the hospital morgue. But any mild alleviation of Lilly's mood that came from looking more like herself was rapidly sapped by the glimpse of the contents of her bag that she got as she placed her lipstick back in there. A box of Codeine Phosphate, for the pain she had been told she would experience whilst her womb returned to its normal size, a leaflet on what she could expect after pregnancy, except the baby itself of course, a booklet on planning a funeral for the baby, and then the most awful one of all. Another leaflet: what to do when you lose your baby.

When you lose your baby. As if she'd put it down somewhere and forgotten to pick it back up.

The point of the wording, however, was clear.

It's your fault.

Lilly couldn't stop telling herself it again. Like the part of her brain that believed that was separate from herself, stood in front of her and howling it in her face.

It's your fault. It's your fault. It's your fault. It's your fucking fault.

And then, before she was fully aware of what she was doing she was grabbing the lipstick back out of her bag and scrawling those words all over the mirror, her face screwed up like a baby's in the middle of a tantrum, snot and tears smothered all over her reddening face. She could just see herself again. The failure, to be thin enough, to exercise her control, to be strong. The things she'd never said, never done that she should've done, and God, oh God, it was just too much. She was an insect on the floor and everything else, it was a human foot grinding her into the pavement. She could almost hear her bones crunching like autumn leaves under winter boots, as they collapsed under the weight of it all.

What are you going to do? She silently screamed at herself, raising her elbow backwards and driving her fist in to the mirror. It didn't crack.

"Try harder."

This time her thoughts slipped out into reality and she heard them come out of her mouth as a bitter whisper, driving her fist forwards again, blood running down her knuckles like narrow, crimson rivers.

"Don't be fucking weak."

Again, her bloody fist flew into the mirror. Only this time it worked. The mirror splintered and then shattered, Lilly falling to the floor in time with its shards, which clattered around her white, pristine heels. And so she sat with her head resting on her knees, in a mess of blood, glass and tears, until her dad began hammering on the door and she had to let him in. Let them all in. Let them rub her back and stroke her hair. Indulge her fragility.

It was repugnant.