Trust No Bitch: Part 3

Gemma Akintola: Friday, 2nd January, 2016

Relief is a puzzling emotion. Better than happiness. In Gemma's opinion, anyway. No amount of alcohol, or weed, or anything else she'd ever tried compared to the pure euphoria she experienced waking up from a particularly vivid nightmare and realising that's all it was, that there was nothing trying to hurt her, and that she was not heading towards some inexorable doom. Where Gemma's dad was from, back in Jamaica, he told them dreams and their meaning were a huge part of the culture. Said that he didn't believe any of that kind of thing, considered himself something of a cynic but that didn't stop him from pointedly asking everybody how they'd slept the night before at the breakfast table, the morning of Sonny's verdict. Though, of course, he had no way of knowing that there was no point in worrying. It was perfervid relief Gemma had experienced as the judge read out the sentence, "6 months community service", and nothing more, their voice resonating around the court room, along with Gemma and her family's whooping. Her parents had hugged them all tightly and for a second, Gemma forgot that she was a 20 year old woman being blackmailed by an anonymous murderer, whose ultimate objective in life had just been decimated less than 48 hours before, like bloody Hiroshima on that fateful August morning. Every hour of her life she'd spent working towards it was gone, like those civilians, as if they'd never existed. It was a situation that she was unceremoniously reminded of by the sound of her ringing phone and her mother's abrupt removal of her arms from around her neck, obviously remembering that this was the same daughter she'd been (wrongly) told, days before, had been abusing anabolic steroids by some uppity athletics official.

Don't be dramatic, Gemma silently told herself, glancing down at her phone screen to see Lilly's name flashing across it. This is not fucking Hiroshima. Not even close.

But what could Lilly want? Gemma had told her, Clara and Alice when Sonny's hearing was. So if her excuse was that she was too busy thinking about Henry Cavill, Evan Peters, Tom Hiddleston, or whichever other vaguely attractive white male it was that she was into that day to listen to anything that had been said to her? Well, the fact that this was a woman who'd gone through a stillbirth less than a week before, and was most likely suffering desperately as a result of it, would be the only thing stopping Gemma from hurling a surfeit of mildly bitchy insults down the phone at her. Making her murmured apologies to the appalled looking judge, her family, and her brother's ridiculously suave American lawyer (courtesy of Alice's parents' bank account), Caitlin, Gemma tapped to answer the call and strode out of the courtroom, pressing the phone to her ear the second the doors had closed behind her.

"Fucking hell, Lilly!" She hissed. "I'm in court here! I did tell you all, didn't I?" But the silence Gemma got in reply quickly transmuted into guilt and so she asked, more kindly, "Are you okay?".

"No..." Lilly finally said. "No, I don't think so."

"Lilly, what's-"

"Look, I'm staying in a hotel right now but I've been wanting to call you all since New Year's Eve. My home's a crime scene."

"What? Why?" Gemma spluttered, pressing a finger down to her other ear as a clamorous pack of teenagers waltzed out of the courtroom opposite. "Why would your house be a crime scene?" She said quietly, turning away from the group.

"Because...Tess Rowe got her neck slit open by the Supplier right in front of me the other night. She's dead, Gemma...They...they murdered her....I suppose."

Tess Rowe, dead? Murdered? By the Supplier?

"Shit..." Gemma breathed, unadulterated shock contaminating her thought processes. Jesus, she hated the girl but that didn't stop unease from joining the shock, churning up everything she had eaten that morning in her stomach and attempting to send it back up. She felt sick. "When you say right in front of you, what do you mean? Why was she at your house anyway?"

"I think she was about to tell me who they were." Lilly replied thickly. "Out of fucking nowhere the Supplier rolls out from under my bed with this huge bloody knife and just pulls the thing through her neck. Gemma, it was horrible, there was blood squirting everywhere, I had no idea what to do...I...I know me and Tess haven't exactly been the best of pals for a while now but still-"

"And what about you? Did they hurt you?" Gemma questioned her. "And what about the police? They don't suspect you, do they?"

"Oh, no, no!" Said Lilly. "We have cameras in my hallway that show the Supplier coming in through the front door and going upstairs whilst me and Tess were in the kitchen."

"And when you say you thought she was going to tell you who the Supplier was, how did you even get onto that conversation? Since when were you two even talking?" Gemma persisted; she felt like she was participating in one of those exercises where you attempt to draw something with your back turned just by the other person describing it to you, that troublesome blend of uncertainty and forced nescience.

"Well, she was just saying about how somebody was paying her to kind of...know stuff about us. It came up because she knew about your New York plans, and also she knew about Jordan being bi or me being his goatee or whatever."

"I'm sorry..." Gemma interrupted, chuckling to herself in spite of the situation. "About you being Jordan's what?"

"Uh, I was his goatee. You know like when a gay man sees a woman so that people don't realise he's-"

"I think you mean a beard." Gemma told Lilly, the smile that first came about due to amusement quickly disappearing as the reality of it all sunk in, like a scorching hot branding iron being pushed into her skin. "When a gay man dates a woman to hide the fact that he's gay, it's called a beard." She explained flatly. "Though I think I like goatee better." Then, she frowned; wherever Lilly was, it sounded as if she was surrounded by people. "Where are you?"

"I'm at the rehearsals for that fashion show that they told me about when I was getting my headshots done." Lilly answered. "I did text you about it. You can still come, yeah?"

"Lilly..." Said Gemma dubiously, just as her mum, dad and brothers came out of the courtroom, her dad tapping her on the shoulder and gesturing towards the exit. "It's really soon...do you feel okay to do that? Are you sure you should be doing that right now?"

"I'm doing it, Gemma. I'm just...I'm doing it." And before Gemma had a chance to protest any further, Lilly spoke again. "I've got to go now because I still haven't told Alice, or Clara what's happened." She said. "And I need to speak to Naomi, Tess was, like, her only friend. She's going to be a bloody mess. So I'll see you at the show on Sunday, yeah? I know it's Clara's birthday and it's not her scene but she's still said she'll come. Oh and also, I'm going to invite Naomi so can you all look after her for me?"

"Wait, Lilly-"

"Bye, Gem." Lilly interrupted again, the line going dead less than a second later. Shaking her head and dropping her phone back into her bag, walking after her family into the car park, it was a true measure of how fucking absurd things had gotten that Gemma didn't, even for a moment, think it was worth mentioning to them that a peer of hers had been brutally murdered in the home of one of her closest friends. Desensitisation, that was what their professor had been explaining during the lecture that had been cut short by the discovery Cleo's body. And wasn't it interesting? How easily that emotional benumbing comes to humans. Almost like empathy itself is something quite unnatural to us. Because after all, Gemma thought, how different are we really from the lion that sinks its teeth into the gazelle without a second thought? Biologically, not so much. Some would say psychologically not so much either.

No, the situation wasn't Hiroshima.

Gemma was reconsidering that after earlier rebuking herself for thinking it. It was something incomparably better, though somehow even worse. Because what were they really missing? The bodies, they had them now. The destruction? All she had to do was look into Clara's, Lilly's, Alice's eyes, or sometimes even her own, to confirm they had that too. And the burning away? There had been plenty of that. Just not of flesh. Instead, of the classical, parabolic kind of hope that they speak about in children's books and fairytales, already so scarce to begin with.