The brain, p.7
Follow Her, page 7
‘Hey Zo,’ came a muffled voice and I opened my eyes to see Frida next to me. I dug my elbows down and pushed my torso up and my legs were bright red. It took me a second to realise ‘Zo’ was me.
She bent down and put her fingers underneath my chin, proprietorially, as if assessing the worth of a small object.
‘The sun moved and you’re sunburnt,’ she said.
She helped me back into the house. Elena tutted when she saw me and ran a cold bath upstairs. Elena gave Moth and Grace instructions for some concoction to be brewed downstairs while she helped peel my sweaty t-shirt off my body. I felt like a lobster in a pot.
‘Let’s put some apple cider vinegar in the bath,’ Elena said, with Frida standing in the doorway. I could hear my blood pumping and the water lapping at the porcelain tub. A line of ants crawled up the tiled walls into a rotten hole in the far corner of the avocado-tiled bathroom. I didn’t want Frida to see me naked.
One time when I went on holiday to Malta with mum aged thirteen or so, I’d got so sunburnt on the first day that I spent the majority of the holiday in the hotel room. I remembered waking up in the night once and realising I hadn’t seen her since the previous morning. She’d met some guy.
Frida’s blue eyes looked grey in this light. Her smell was intense. I looked at the veins of her wrists, slightly upturned. Purple lines beating blood under her skin.
A tap dripped. I closed my eyes.
Frida put her hands over me like I’d seen her doing to the others during yoga. I didn’t feel anything except a strong desire for them all to go away so I could go to my bag and take another Klonopin.
Everyone used to think Mum was my nanny, growing up, partly because she was young but also because we have totally different colouring. Mum was seventeen when she got pregnant. She said it was a one-night thing and she didn’t realise she was pregnant until six months after, by which point she had no idea how to contact him. She didn’t realise she was pregnant till ‘too late’ – like missing an eBay auction by a few minutes. She’d felt sick on and off but thought she had food poisoning. She did not feel my heart knit together inside her, the tumble and flutter of toenails and eyelashes forming under her skin. She’d thought she had indigestion, and nobody guessed because she didn’t put on an ounce of weight until the end. My mum had the sort of beauty – the bone structure, the lost expression, the gaiety at the back of her eyes – that meant she got seated at the windows of restaurants, and EasyJet employees let her get away with excess baggage. I was born in a hallway in the Royal Free, where Mum abruptly pulled down her leggings and got on all fours to push while the nurses told her she had to wait for a bed to become available, and she told them to fuck off. I fell out of her apparently, the cord still wrapped around my puckered neck for a moment till the nurses could scramble into position. She did not write a father’s name down on my birth certificate because she could not remember it.
If I were to guess, and obviously I did a fair bit of guessing growing up, my father was of Asian heritage, with bad eyesight and a less-than-ideal metabolism. I certainly didn’t inherit any of these things from my slim blonde mother with 20/20 vision.
‘You have rage coiled inside you, Zo,’ Frida said to me. ‘This knot of despair and loneliness that is escaping in panic attacks and depression but urgently needs to be dealt with, otherwise it will turn into aches and cancers and more bad decisions. You need to address this or you are going to implode.’
‘Maybe later,’ I said, trying and failing to be funny. ‘I have pretty bad sunburn right now and I’m naked in a cold bath with a fake internet psychic staring at me.’
‘If you let me, I can heal you.’
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m busy. I need to get back to London actually, it was dumb to come here. I have a job and I need to find a place to live. You guys are kind of weird.’
‘You need help,’ Frida said. ‘I don’t know how you got like this but whatever you’re going back to in London is not helping you.’
‘Can you leave so I can get out the bath on my own?’ I said to them.
They left and I got up and reached for the pills in the back pocket of my shorts, but – again – the packet wasn’t where I had left it. Back in my room I looked in drawers, under the bed, under the mattress, anywhere I might have put the packet. My blood started to pump fast as I pulled my t-shirt and knickers on and walked into Moth and Grace’s room.
I dragged the sheets off their bed and opened all his drawers, then lifted up the mattress to look underneath. There was dust and sweet wrappers and mouse droppings but no pills. I could hear the sound of my blood and it felt as if the edges were unravelling around me now. One of Moth’s sketchbooks fell to the floor on a drawing of Frida’s face. Then the door opened behind me and I jumped.
‘Where are my pills?’ I said, turning as Moth appeared there. ‘I don’t care that you took them but I need them. I can’t breathe.’
‘I haven’t taken your pills,’ he said, picking up the sketchbook and putting it away.
‘I flushed them this time,’ Frida said from the corridor.
‘They’re prescribed. I have an anxiety condition.’
‘You are conditioned to have anxiety,’ she said. ‘You don’t need chemicals. They don’t even stop you from having panic attacks. You wanted me to do this for you. It’s why you’re here. Because you are broken and need fixing, but you can’t do it on your own. Your mother should be doing this but she’s not, so we are. You asked me to do this.’
‘I absolutely did not.’
‘People always say what they need, if you know how to read between the lines. You were expecting me to take your pills, and you were disappointed when I didn’t.’
‘That’s ridiculous. Give them back,’ I tried to say, but the words caught in my mouth and I knew the panic attack was about to start. It rose like a creature was going to force itself out of my throat. ‘Fuck off,’ I managed, but quietly, scared now, as my chest tightened and my heart gained pace.
‘You think the pills are solving your fears but they’re just masking them. The fears are growing inside you every day, spilling over in strange ways. You need to face your fears. You need to be strong but you don’t need to do it alone. We are here for you.’
My hands were shaking, skin sweating, the world was spinning apart like pixels dropping out of a computer image. I was falling into a familiar terror. The terror led down into a spiral of breathless panic that had become almost like a physical place to me over the years. I heard wings flapping, a clawing like mice feet under the floorboards, and blood in my ears. It was the panic of your mother leaving you in the darkness as a baby; of quicksand, endings and disconnection.
I woke up in the dark later. My skin and muscles hurt in odd places. Post-panic attack is a particular type of exhaustion.
It was extravagant weather. Hedgehogs bustled across the garden, foxes tiptoed in the busy darkness. Thump, thump, thump went the beat of Jackson’s breathing machine.
I fell back to sleep quickly but slept fitfully. I woke up often, sweaty. Or dreamed of waking up. Sticky dreams of Frida standing over me with her hands near but not touching me. Frida didn’t ask me to leave.
The next morning I sat up in bed and pressed my thumb into my knees, stretched the skin of my inner thighs in the rising sunlight. I walked to the frosted-edge mirror and looked at my tanned, unblistered skin. I raised my arms and my breasts lifted up. I have a mole on my right armpit. I have another on my pubic line. I have the scar on my right eyebrow that Frida noticed the first day. On my left pinkie toe there’s one from a smashed bottle, shiny white in the shape of a hook.
I wasn’t sunburnt anymore. My hands were shaking. I threw up in the sink and then crawled back into bed.
‘The sea gives and the sea takes away,’ she said on AuraLine as I watched on my phone in bed. We were in the same house, yet the screen seemed more intimate. ‘The first time I drowned I was just four years old, on the cusp between babyhood and childhood. Our worlds are layered and we are all connected. I will save you all.’
Chapter Four
I sit in that hot library for hours after talking to Oliver, too jittery to go home. I reread the article Oliver showed me, but no others have come out about the girls. I look at Frida’s socials. Her Instagram profile photo is a professional headshot of her in her white t-shirt. Her face is symmetrical, her teeth white, hair glossy, eyes sparkling.
‘Being well adjusted to a depraved society is not a marker of sanity,’ Frida says on the library computer, and I lean in to listen so nobody else needs to hear. A homeless man comes and sits at the computer opposite me, smelling of beer. Frida wears a Shanghai Tang-branded collared white t-shirt. A Lancaster watch, Bulgari earrings. I know this because the brands are all tagged. ‘Maybe hysteria makes the most sense, in this burning world?’
There are thousands of comments underneath, full of fire emojis and adoration. I start to flick through the pages of her grid: photos of her standing in water with groups of attractive women all wearing white (#bali #selflove #gogirls). Bikini photos. Dancing photos. Waterfall photos. Meditation photos. Videos of the new sauna at the LA retreat, and inspirational text over photographs of Frida looking hot. Five signs of burnout. How to embody your feminine power. The importance of ritual in a secular world.
It looks inviting. There are free online courses in accessing your magic, and finding authenticity, along with competitions to win access to her online and in-person events. On her website there is no mention of money at all, just a photo of her meditating on a beach. ‘Join us at one of our three retreats, or on one of our online seminars, to begin your journey and awaken your inner light.’ There are also posts about GreenProject, and GoFundMe links.
In the first few years after leaving her, I used to look at her social media, watching her growth and her tactics. She was a drug. I’d give myself little rewards for not looking at her – for a day, a week, a year – but I would fail. I would find my fingers itching to open the little box into her world, aching to know what she was up to. I stopped properly when I met Ben and knew I had to cut away that part of myself entirely.
We think that we control what we look at on social media, but it controls us. These complex algorithms analyse our behaviour – the posts we interact with, share, or linger on – then predict what we’re most interested in. And it preys on the tired moments. The weak moments. It knows the subliminal version of our identities, not the version that we present to the world. It knows what we really want.
I shiver and look up. More people have turned up in the library while I’ve been sifting through all this online information. A teenager glances towards me, although he may be looking at the homeless guy who is now asleep on his arms at the computer. I slip down lower in my chair.
So Oliver wants me to go on record talking about that summer. And in return, what? He won’t use my name? My photo? Do I trust him?
The glass front of the library gives it a greenhouse effect, and people are sweating. A group of nannies and mothers walk through the door, bringing a smell of milk and nappies. Soon babies are clapping to the sound of a woman in dungarees playing the guitar. Three blind mice, three blind mice, see how they run! See how they run! Did you ever see such a sight in your life!
Then my phone pings, from an unknown number. The message says: ‘Aren’t you interested in how I found you? We didn’t even talk about that. I was actually going to ask you for an interview before Ava’s and Grace’s bodies were even found.’
I don’t reply, just stare at my screen.
Then a photo arrives and I scoop up the phone to look closer.
It is a photo of me and my two children walking into school. The photo was taken from a distance but my face is in profile and clear.
‘She’s having you followed. Why?’ he writes under the photo. ‘Are you scared? Should you be?’
It takes me a moment to decode the origins of the photo. It is a screenshot, taken from Frida’s account. No, it’s more complicated. It is actually a screenshot of a repost, meaning Frida didn’t take the photo or post it originally. She just shared it as a Story, a post that disappears automatically after twenty-four hours.
‘You should be scared,’ Oliver texts.
The photo is dated six months ago, posted to her two million followers. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
Oliver writes: ‘I reckon you two were more than a summer romance. But the question is, what are you risking in order to protect her? You need to tell your side of the story. Control the narrative, or she’ll be the one controlling it.’
On Instagram, I quickly skim through Frida’s grid with shaking hands, for photos of me. I can’t immediately see anything.
In the library, a teenage girl sits at one of the study tables, her head bent over a textbook and earphones visible under her long blonde hair. She is wearing a white hoodie but she does not look up at me. At another table an older man flips through a newspaper, glasses slipping down his nose.
I create an account on the public computer. I deleted mine years ago, and have never created a new one. The person who posted the original photo of me, the one Frida reposted, has the handle @fumblingjester. I find this account quickly – it has a profile photo of a jester hat just like the one in Oliver’s screenshot of me and the kids. The account is private so I can’t see other photos they’ve posted. It has forty-eight followers.
I shiver at the idea that this person – presumably one of her followers – has been following me in the real world. On Instagram, I change my profile photo to a stock-footage pretty girl and post a few random pictures of flowers and shoes, then follow @fumblingjester from this dummy account in the hope that they return the favour. This person might be right here in the library, watching me.
Another mum from Emma’s class drops my kids off for me at a café near the library. Emma and her friend play while Leo reads and the adults chat about school league tables and uniform sales. I linger, wanting to stay in this bubble of inane conversation but jumping whenever the milk frother hisses or the door jingles. The other mother thinks maybe I am coming down with a virus. Have I tried echinacea? The clink of mugs and swirl of conversation are too loud. I feel that same prickling sensation at the back of my neck – a lingering pressure.
Eventually Emma’s classmate has to go home so we pack up our bookbags and sunhats. The town centre is a mixture of Georgian and Victorian terraces, giving it an old-fashioned seaside feeling. I parked near a farm just outside of town after I left Oliver. So we walk for a bit, the kids moaning. A dilapidated guest house stares down at the end of a row of detached red-brick homes. There’s a mother pushing a pram, an old-age pensioner pushing a wheelie bag full of shopping, a man waiting for a bus. When we get to the car Leo sees some kittens at the neck of the dirt track leading to the farm, and we head over to stroke them. The air smells of manure and sheep wool and something thicker, like rot and blood.
I follow the smell with my eyes, away from the kittens. Over by the edge of the barn there is a dead sheep lying on its side with steam coming from its splayed-out innards. There are flies and crows at the body. Caws and buzzing. The crows look on with curiosity. A low, guttural hum, somewhere between a growl and a moan, comes from nearby, and my breath hitches, but I realise it is just a generator in the barn behind. I glance over my shoulder, back to the car. There on the street corner is a young man, partially concealed by the shadow of a brick wall. He is holding a phone, angled up in our direction.
My stomach tightens. ‘Excuse me?’ I shout across the road. ‘Are you taking a photo of my children?’
‘Huh?’ he says.
‘I said, were you taking a photo of my children?’ I take their hands and walk over towards him.
He is maybe sixteen on close inspection, with cystic acne.
‘Dude, no.’ He grimaces.
‘Show me,’ I say, and he turns his phone towards me.
‘I’m playing The Walking Dead?’ he says, and shows me an augmented-reality game screen with zombies walking down this quaint seaside street. ‘You made me die.’
He frowns down at his screen and I usher the kids to the car. We drive off and park outside our double-fronted blue stucco house, with roses climbing over the front. Lavender spills over our front walls, sea thrift waves, geraniums fill the whole garden with colour. It is the sort of house that children draw, like it came right out of a fairy tale or a dream. I find my mind slipping back to a time when I could swallow chemical calm, and all my worries would disappear for a bit.
For ten days after I started detoxing, Frida brought me food I barely ate, and strange-smelling teas that Elena made to help with nausea and detoxification. I watched the island through the window and listened to the thud of Jackson’s oxygen machine through the ceiling.
The group swam several times a day. They liked the creek to the left of the causeway at high tide the best, where the beach faced the mainland. Behind the house, facing out to sea, was the abandoned nuclear power plant. There was always a layer of yellow scum on the tide there, along with pieces of rusted metal or plastic bottles tangled amongst seaweed.
Stefan, the groundsman, appeared occasionally and then would disappear for days. He had an enormous forehead that created a sort of ledge over his eyes. Merlin followed him around. Stefan picked up rubbish off the beach every day, sorting it into piles while the dog chased the tides. Soap bottles, plant pots, flip-flops, Tesco bags.
The power plant across the river was strangely beautiful, surrounded by barbed wire and fences. A knot of pipes and tracks climbed like brambles around two massive chimneys that were in fact cooling towers, enormous hyperboloid structures that would once have rejected waste heat from the power plant into the atmosphere.
