Trust No Bitch: Part 3

Gemma Akintola

Comforting people came naturally to Gemma. Yes, her bluntness was probably quite unnerving to those who didn't know it well, and yes, she did, on a good day, know she was "the shit". But for all the air of menace those traits created around her, putting an arm around someone she loved and tugging them up from the ground, that was the foundation upon which the rest of her character was built. Of course, over the years, bricks had been knocked out of place, doors and windows knocked off their hinges, things had become a little crooked, but if Gemma were to pull everything down and start from the beginning, that was what would be there. She supposed that it came from having younger siblings; you get that vigilant streak in you that youngest and only children will never really be able to make sense of. After all, the youngest, like Clara, are the watched. They're the the artists, the animals, the breakers of all things frangible, because they've never known what it's like to be the one that cleans up afterwards. There are the only children, like Lilly, cleaned up after in a different way, cleaned up after so much that they fear they aren't capable of doing so themselves. Then there are the middle children, not the breakers, or the cleaners up, but both and also neither, all at once, their brains internal microcosms of the others. Get so used to cleaning up their personal mess, that they probably clean up others' with that same paucity of compassion they have for own. Gemma had always thought that Alice was a classic example. She took the same approach to comforting people as she took to most things. Trying to get it done as efficiently and swiftly as possible. Wanting desperately to make the other person, everything, good again. Not wanting to linger on the matter for too long because she didn't want to confront the fact that she didn't really feel anything at all. That's what Gemma had always privately thought, anyway. That being said, the pair of them loitering outside the police station, it admittedly hadn't felt quite like that; Gemma, for once, was not the project that had been procrastinated all weekend due in for the Monday morning. The matter, was however, of slightly more gravity than the usual Saturday night tribulation. As they lay down, side by side on Gemma's bed, Gemma's mother's wine on the bedside table next to them, Gemma went over it again: her stood outside the entrance of the police station, ready for it all to be over. She'd heard a car pull up behind her, someone walking over, assumed it to be Alice before she even heard her voice.

"I can't do this anymore." Gemma had muttered, blinking hard and rubbing at the warm tears that had nuzzled into her skin with the back of her hand. "I can't do it, Alice."

"Gemma...It's okay." Alice had mumbled in reply, turning Gemma round and pulling her head onto her own shoulder. "It's okay. Don't cry. Please, don't cry." She said softly, making that shushing noise in between her words, like it was the middle of the night and she was a tired mother trying to get her yowling baby back to sleep.

"I'm the one that's supposed to do this. Look after people!" Said Gemma roughly, pulling away. "It's just all so fucked up, Alice! I can't watch my brother, Lilly, you and Clara get put through all this shit when if I go in there right now and just give them the soundclip like the Supplier wants, it'll all be over. I can't do it. I'll go to prison, whatever. It's not worth it anymore. I can't-"

"But you don't have to!" Alice interrupted emphatically, holding Gemma by the shoulders, her eyes wide. "Not for much longer. We're going to find out who the Supplier is, Gemma-"

"And what are we going to do when we find them?" Gemma spluttered, shrugging Alice off and whirling back round to stride towards the entrance. "Politely ask them to go and confess to being a murderer and stop making our lives a living hell?" She called over her shoulder. "Somehow, I don't think that's going to work."

"Well," Alice ran after Gemma and grabbed her arm, dragging her backwards, "I'll get rid of them! Gemma! I will get rid of them."

"What do you mean, you'll get rid of them?"