But the feminist literature introduction was a revelation, and I’ll always be grateful to Sophie for it. Perhaps I was spending too much time with boys, adapting my behaviour to fit in with them. Without a crash course in the works of Wollstonecraft, De Beauvoir, and Plath, I might have quashed the early flickers of rage I felt, tried to live small, as women are wordlessly taught to do from birth. But reading about other angry women made me bolder, allowed me to nurture my anger, see it as a worthy and righteous thing. Of course, I do not mean to make these women shoulder any small part of my eventual deeds, though I’m sure that the tabloids would salivate over constructing a ‘vicious feminist’ narrative should my story ever become public.
There was one book that made me see wicked vengeance in a more positive light though: The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. This wasn’t a book given to me by Sophie, but one I came across in a bookshop in Soho on a rainy autumn afternoon just after my seventeenth birthday, when I’d spent the day in town on my own. Its cover jumped out at me from a pile, the swirls of black and red seemed to complement what was going on in my teenage head. I scanned the blurb quickly, took it to the till and read it in one go at a dingy tourist café off Tottenham Court Road. Her dark fairy tales, where women plot and deceive, opened a door in my mind. I saw that, just as we did not have to be small and quiet and weak, women did not have to be good or strong, virtuous but ultimately sacrificed. We could be underhanded, out for ourselves, led by desires we dared not voice. I finished the book, and walked out onto the street with a sense of new possibility. I gave Annabelle a copy the next Christmas, thinking that the nervy kid could use a shot in the arm, but Sophie pursed her lips as she watched her daughter unwrap the book, and took me aside after lunch to tell me that Annabelle was far too sensitive for such gory stories.
‘Honestly, Grace, I know you’re a tough girl, but Belle suffers horribly with her worries and I really think you could have thought about that. She looks up to you and obviously now she’ll be dying to read this book. I’ll have to be the one to put her off until she’s a bit older. Could you exchange it for Primo Levi? She’ll be studying the Second World War next term.’ I just stared at her until she hurried off to stir the gravy. I replaced a book of fairy tales with a real-life scream of pain about the worst thing that humanity has ever done. Annabelle had nightmares for three days after she’d finished reading If This Is a Man. Sophie was full of pride for how empathetic her daughter was.
When my bath went cold, I carefully dried my hair, loosely curling it so that it rolled down my back in soft ropes. I painted my nails bright orange and carefully inched new tights up my legs so as not to ladder them immediately. The dress I selected to wear that night was a short black one, with long sleeves and a high ruffle neck. It made me look stern but enjoyably so. After my first brief foray into the world of sex clubs, where my uncle so generously planted the idea for his murder, I went online and did my research. There are dozens in the capital, traversing a sliding scale between ‘a masked ball full of models’ to ‘expect a slick of sadness and bring suitable antibacterial wipes’。 But it was easy to figure out which ones to avoid – ‘the venue is a three-minute walk from the drive-thru McDonald’s’ or ‘bring your own booze, no tins’ get ticked off immediately. Lee was hardly likely to frequent a sex party held on a ring road somewhere near Wembley. And I was happy to do research, but not anywhere near an industrial estate. I’ve had enough sadness in my life already.
After looking at a lot of generic sex-party sites, where the word ‘fun’ is thrown around as though you’re going to a theme park, I found three high-end clubs which encouraged choking, BDSM, and domination play, and signed up to their mailing lists. They weren’t as relaxed as the Chinatown dive. You were asked for a photo, and a small paragraph about yourself before you could attend an event. I sent in a picture of a semi-famous Instagrammer who looked enough like me as not to raise questions on the door and three lines of fluff about how I was a PR girl looking for new experiences with sexy strangers. It’s not hard to get into these places if you’re a fairly attractive woman, the organisers are much stricter with lone men who will likely stand around creeping people out.
I also, and this is ridiculous in retrospect, took a first aid class. Somehow, I decided that if I was going to strangle someone to death, it might be good to see what experts looked for when trying to save someone from such a fate. I wanted to know what the tipping point was, when the bloodshot eyes and loss of consciousness became irreversible. Unfortunately, this meant enduring two hours in a community centre in Peckham one dull Tuesday evening, while a busy woman called Deirdre stood around showing us how to perform CPR on dummies that looked to be as old as her. It’s not easy to ask about strangulation casually, but I did learn that though people normally lose consciousness within seconds, it can take four minutes to actually die, despite it looking like the person has already pegged it. On balance, it wasn’t worth having to wrap bandages around the hand of a rather sweaty man called Anthony who stared at me the entire time to learn this snippet when I could have just googled it, but there we were. Now I know that cling film is handy for minor burns, thank you, Deirdre.