*
That was overly dramatic of course. I’m not going to kill them tonight, that would be foolish. I need to see them, listen to their conversation, see if they drop any hints about their plans this week. I need to drive the route to their villa a few times, and importantly, I need to pick up the promised car from Amir. That car is either a sign that I am stupidly chaotic and should postpone my plans, or it was a little gift from some unknown deity. Let’s see which!
I decided long ago that Kathleen and Jeremy Artemis would be the first to leave us. This was for several reasons really, the first being that they’re old so it doesn’t matter as much. Old people who do nothing but drain their pensions and stultify in their favourite armchairs isn’t a brilliant advertisement for humanity in my opinion. Great that we’ve worked out how to make people live longer with medical intervention and healthier lifestyles, unfortunately they will become useless bed blockers who get more and more mean-spirited until they are nothing more than bigoted beasts of burden living in the room you wanted to make a study.
Don’t be shocked, I know you think it too. Enjoy your life and shuffle off this coil around 70, only the very boring would want to live to be 100 – the only reward an impersonal and brief letter from the Queen. So really I’m doing everyone a favour. They are old and disposable, and they live staggeringly useless lives. Wine at lunch, naps, a trip to the boutiques in town to buy hideous jewellery and gaudy watches. He golfs, she spends a lot of her time getting things injected into her face, which has had the strange effect of making her look like a very old toddler. A waste of life, and that’s all before I tell you just how racist they are. Oh fuck it, you can imagine. They live in Marbella and yet they speak no Spanish, there you go. No more explanation needed.
Of course, I have skin in this game. I’m not Harold Shipman, merrily going around killing off as many geriatrics as I can. I only want to kill two of them, the rest are safe to keep watching Emmerdale and buying terrible presents for grandchildren who resent their boring visits. These people are technically my grandparents, though I’ve never met them and they have never bought me as much as a Toblerone. But they do know about me.
Let me explain. I wasn’t aware of this for many years, imagining that my father Simon had successfully kept me a secret, but my mother’s friend Helene was in London for a visit recently, and over a bottle of wine, she confessed that she’d paid them a visit shortly before she left for Paris all those years ago. She felt like she was letting my beautiful mother down by leaving me. Poor dead Marie. Helene did the only thing she could think to do to ameliorate the guilt. She looked them up online, and found their London address on Companies House. I was almost climbing across the table to hear what they’d said to her, to commit this new information to memory. I’d been to their house before many times of course, before they’d moved to Spain full-time. I’d spent hours outside, watching, waiting, occasionally following their chauffeur-driven car when they went out. But speaking to them was a whole new level, and I was half impressed with Helene, and half furious that she’d never told me about this meeting before.
She was clearly reluctant to tell me just how bad the encounter was, not meeting my eyes when she explained they initially slammed the door shut when she told them who she was. She didn’t leave though, and eventually they let her in and coldly disclosed that they knew all about me and my ‘ghastly’ mother. My ears started to buzz as I let that sink in, and I scratched at my neck, waiting for the lump in my throat I knew would appear any second. They knew about me from the start, Helene explained, when their ‘poor’ son turned up unexpectedly late one night and, pacing the living room, confessed that he’d got into some trouble. According to Jeremy, who did most of the talking while Kathleen sat rigidly on the sofa sipping a large gin and tonic, Simon had asked how he should tell his wife, Janine, and told his father that some financial provision would have to be made for me.
‘So he did want to do the right thing in some way,’ Helene said, almost apologetically, as she drunk her wine and fiddled with her hair. I ignored the comment, and told her to carry on. I had no interest in entertaining that man’s pathetic attempts to salve his conscience.
Jeremy proudly told Helene that he and his wife had spent several hours shutting this idea down, making him see that Marie had done it deliberately for money, warning him that Janine would never recover. ‘Simon made a foolish mistake, as many young men do,’ he had told Helene, ‘and I’m sorry that this young girl has to grow up without parents, but many people have faced worse. I myself lost my mother at a young age, and I didn’t go around looking for handouts from strangers.’ Helene said that she argued back, shouting that Marie had not gone out to trap their son, and trying to explain that she had not known how wealthy he was, or that he was married for that matter, until much later. But they would hear none of it. ‘That girl tried to ruin my son for money,’ shouted Kathleen, suddenly rising from her seat. ‘If you think your friend’s daughter is going to start all this nonsense up again, you’re as foolish as she was.’ And that was pretty much that. According to Helene, who had downed her wine and was now gesticulating furiously, Kathleen had suddenly started sobbing and hitting her husband on the chest. He had grabbed her hands and forcefully pushed her back down onto the sofa, before turning back to Helene, who was standing, slightly stunned, by the door. ‘You’ve upset my wife and ruined our evening. I want you out of my house, and don’t even think about trying this crap with my son. We’ll have lawyers on you so fast you’ll be fucking homeless before you’ve seen us in court.’