Trust No Bitch: Part 3

Gemma Akintola

The grief; it felt like a stab wound in Gemma's chest that the nurses hadn't bothered to sew back up. That just kept bleeding, and bleeding, and bleeding. She was drained, for the first time aware of her body as this mass she had to tug along with her wherever she went. Walking from Lilly's car up to her flat, after leaving the hospital, even the sun behind a cloud was refulgent, too bright for Gemma's eyes. Following her brother's murder, for the majority of the time, she had felt plastered to her bed like a dead fly under windshield wipers, unable to open her curtains; for days on end, her room had stayed dark and dusky. On the few occasions she did leave her bed, it was mostly to gather up old photos of her and her brother, flick through them, chest heaving with a grief so intense it physically pained her. She'd never experienced a heart attack and she hoped not to for a long time, but she imagined that it was not so different from the way she felt as she doubled over onto her bed because she was crying so hard. And then, back into the bed she went, leaving it again in a couple of days before venturing out again, to recover one of Isaac's old tops, maybe, or a jumper. She would pull it on over her head and breathe in his scent, not wanting to tug the top down onto her body because once she did, with the material no longer obscuring her eyes, the illusion that he was close enough to smell would be ruined. That was, if her parents' raucous voices coming from downstairs, bickering over who was to blame didn't ruin it first.

"If we had just supported him earlier on, maybe he would have been happier there and found it easier to get on with people! And then, there wouldn't be people there that wanted to bash his head in!" Gemma's dad would yell, his outburst followed by her mother's lachrymose reply.

"It's not about that! He was never safe in that prison to begin with! You should have never let him have those awful boys round our house in the first place, encouraged that friendship! They were a bunch of thugs, bad news from the moment they walked through our bloody front door! Was it any surprise to you that he got caught up in their drug smuggling?"

"Oh, well maybe it's my fault then. It's all my fault, right? Just for wanting our son to have friends-"

"That's not what I'm saying! And you're right, I shouldn't have encouraged us both to isolate him so much but I can't help how angry I felt about the whole thing! And you can't blame that all on me! You were perfectly capable of going to see him by yourself so-"

"Shut up! Both of you just shut the fuck up!" Gemma had screamed at one point over the bannister, hearing her youngest brother's snivels through his bedroom door. Then, she had again retired to her bed, which she had from then onwards only left sparingly, that day solely to see Clara as she felt was her duty to do. Once out of her house, however, full of her youngest brother's bawling and her middle brother's punching of the walls, she felt lighter, almost. Marginally so. Not enough to truly be able to function but enough to register her surroundings, reply to her friends' exclamations over Dylan King's outburst and subsequent storming out of the ward. Naomi kept quiet throughout the car journey back from the hospital, urged by Lilly to pretend she had no idea what was going on so as not to alert Alice to the fact that she'd been told about the Supplier, leaving them at St.Edmunds with a subdued wave and a smile. From there, they then headed over to Lilly's, who said that Gemma could stay and chill out for as long as she wished, eat, watch movies and just sleep, if that was what she wanted to do. And it was, though she knew she couldn't keep doing that. Because when she woke up, her brother was still dead, her parents were still screaming, and the Supplier was still out there, waiting for her to crumble again.

"What if Charlie goes to the police about the text from the Supplier?" Lilly was asking as they walked through the front door to her building, turning left and then striding down the corridor to her flat on the end.