Heart-Shaped Bruise (2 page)

The half-empty box of cigarettes was in the last drawer and I took one out and lit it with the lighter that was in the drawer next to it. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. It tasted disgusting – I didn’t even want it – but when I went back to my chair, smoke trailing behind me, a scoreboard somewhere registered another point.

‘What was it that you wanted me to say, Emily?’ Doctor Gilyard continued as though those last few minutes hadn’t happened. She just stepped over them.

I looked at the end of the cigarette and blew on it. ‘That I’m evil.’

‘Are you evil, Emily?’

‘Isn’t that what they say about me?’

She took off her glasses and looked at me. ‘Who says that you’re evil?’

‘Everyone.’ Juliet. The police. The newspapers. The girls I barely know from school who sigh and shake their heads on the six o’clock news and say they always knew there was something not quite right about me.

‘Is that why you won’t talk about what happened, Emily, because you think I already know what happened?’

‘You do know what happened.’

She put her glasses back on and scribbled something in her notebook. I wanted to lean over and rip it from her, to read what she was saying about me. She has one for each of us, apparently.
I imagine them sometimes, lined up in a row in a room, all of these secrets sitting on a shelf like dusty jars of jam.

‘You know everything about me,’ I told her.

She looked up again. ‘Do I?’

‘What you don’t know, you can Google.’

‘Is that who you are, Emily, what other people say about you?’

‘That’s all any of us are.’ I shrugged and took a drag on the cigarette. ‘The person people remember when you leave the room. You can’t be any more than that.’

‘So what do I remember about you, Emily?’

‘What I did.’

‘What did you do?’

‘You know what I did.’ I tried to control the tremor in my voice but we both heard it. I was furious with myself. She does that every time. It’s like she wants me to keep saying it, over and over, as though if I keep saying it, I’ll believe it. I’ll be sorry.

‘I know what you were arrested for, Emily.’

I tapped the ash from my cigarette on to the floor. ‘What else is there?’

‘You tell me.’

My gaze edged towards hers again. ‘Why do you want to know?’

Her eyes dipped to the notebook. ‘I want to help you understand why you did what you did, Emily.’

‘I know why I did it.’

‘Okay.’ She nodded. ‘Why did you do it?’

I could have given it to her then, the letter to Juliet. I could
have told her that Juliet made me do it, that I used to be like every other teenage girl, that I was stubborn and restless and melodramatic and said the wrong thing sometimes and broke mirrors and misheard lyrics, but I still sang, even though the words were wrong. That I threw coins in fountains and made wishes at 11.11 because I thought that if I wanted something, all I had to do was ask for it. And I asked, not for world peace or money or good health or any of those things other people wish for. I asked to be special. I wanted to be the sort of girl boys wrote books about, the sort of girl boys sang songs about.

I think I could have been, but then Juliet stabbed my father and I couldn’t be me any more. I turned into someone else, into this hard, angry,
miserable
girl who did the most terrible things. Things that made people take a step back when I walked into a room.

That’s what you won’t find on Google
, I wanted to tell Doctor Gilyard today.
Who I used to be
.

But I didn’t because she’d never get that, would she? She’d never get that sometimes we do things that are so big – so awful – that they just become who we are. It’s like you do it and
BOOM
everything is blown to bits.

I guess if you’re here too, then you know how that feels.

I’m laughing now, as I’m writing this, because I don’t even know who you are but I think you understand me better than anyone else I know. After all, isn’t that why we’re here, you and me? Because we’re broken?

Saturday. Art therapy. We had to paint how we were feeling so I balled up my piece of paper and threw it at the therapist. I’m not allowed to have a cigarette for the rest of the day.

Saturday is also Visitors’ Day so Naomi (17, schizophrenic) is having her weekly shit fit. I’m writing this from the TV Room because there aren’t enough nurses to deal with Naomi’s histrionics and keep an eye on us too, so we’ve been corralled into the TV Room to watch a film like we’re two years olds. I half want to wander into the corridor weeping about how it isn’t worth it any more just to see how they would react.

The new girl, Lily (16, anorexic), keeps looking at me with this sad little smile as though she’s waiting for me to tell her that it’s going to be okay, but I won’t smile back because why should
I be the one to tell her that it won’t be? If she doesn’t know that already, being in this place, then I can’t help her.

If you can’t read the tail end of that sentence, it’s because Naomi just broke something – something glass – and we all jumped. I say
all
, Val (17, bipolar) didn’t budge. She just sat there, staring at the television. But that’s Val; once she sits in front of the telly, she doesn’t move. You can go over to her and slap her across the face and she won’t notice, but turn it over when
Deal or No Deal
is on and she’ll pull you apart, bone by bone.

Naomi’s just broken something else. She does this
every time
her boyfriend comes to visit; she sees him, feels her heart again, and thinks she’s better. Then when it’s time to take her meds, she screams blue bloody murder. That’s why I won’t let anyone visit me. Not that there is anyone to visit me; Dad’s in prison and Mum’s – well, I don’t know where Mum is. Wherever she is, she isn’t thinking about me, so I won’t waste any more ink on her.

Naomi just roared, ‘I’m fine! I’m in love, I don’t need drugs!’, so it won’t be long until she threatens to kill herself and they sedate her, which is good, because we’re having spag bol for dinner. I don’t do much willingly here, but I’m first in the queue for spag bol.

I just had to stop writing because the new girl approached me.

‘Are you her? Are you Emily Koll?’ she asked, her eyes wide.

I’m not wearing my
YES, IT’S ME, EMILY KOLL
T-shirt today so I nodded.

She took that as her cue to sit next to me and as she did, I looked at her, at the gold crucifix around her neck and her unbrushed brown hair. She looked so fragile, as though her clothes were the only things holding her together, but she was bold enough to sit next to me without being asked, so I had to give her that. She’s braver than most of the girls in here.

‘You’re not what I expected,’ she told me with a whisper.

I made a show of rolling my eyes and snapping this notebook shut because what could I say? It wasn’t a compliment, was it?

‘You’re blond.’

I am blond. That’s what surprises people the most when they come here. They expect to meet the red-lipped, red-haired girl they’ve seen in the papers. But they find me – tiny, blond, doll-faced me – and they stare at me as though they’ve been betrayed. They want the wild redhead. Tiny blonde girls don’t do what I did.

‘Is it true? Did you really do that to that girl Juliet?’ she asked.

She was breathless and I love and hate that, how people are in awe of me and terrified of me, all at once. So I smiled at her. ‘Don’t believe everything you read.’

You shouldn’t either, by the way.

Emily Koll. Slipped that one in, didn’t I?

I probably should have told you that straight away, on the first page. I wasn’t trying to trick you; if I procrastinated, it’s only because I know what people think of me. I’ve read what they say about me in the newspapers, that I’m wicked, that I’m so rotten my bones are the colour of bitten-down apple cores.

But there’s more than one side to a story, and this is mine.

First, the facts:

Yes, my father is Harry Koll.

Yes, Juliet’s father is Jason Shaw.

Yes, my father is one of London’s most notorious gangsters.

Yes, Juliet’s father ran the police investigation to take him down.

Yes, my father broke into his house and shot him in his bed.

Yes, Juliet stabbed my father when he tried to shoot her too.

No, I didn’t know. About any of it. That Dad was a gangster. That he could just shoot someone like that. The dad I knew put me on his shoulders at Arsenal games and read me
Goodnight Moon
when I couldn’t sleep and came to all my cello recitals. All of them. So I don’t know who that man is, the one who sells drugs and kills men in their beds.

I don’t suppose it matters what I say now. You can take this notebook and tear it to pieces. You can burn it and let the ashes float away like dirty confetti, because all you’ll remember is that my father murdered her father. If you ask Juliet, she’ll tell you that’s all you should remember. Maybe you should. Call me mad, call me wicked, but I’m under no illusions – I know how easy it is to pick sides here – her father was the big brave policeman and my father is the gangster who shot him. He got what was coming to him. I did too, I suppose. But I told you –
I didn’t know
. I need you to remember that while you’re drawing that line between Juliet and me. And that’s fine, draw it. Go on. I’ll stay on my side of it if you remember that I didn’t know.

Here’s another fact for you: yes, I went after Juliet. That’s why I’m here. Why most of the girls here are too scared to sit next to me. But don’t believe everything you read in the tabloids, there was no vendetta. When I found out what Dad did, my instinct wasn’t to go after Juliet. I reacted like anyone else would have; I was horrified, ashamed. For months I tried to ignore it, to wash the taste of it from my mouth with cheap vodka and cigarettes.

But it wouldn’t go away.

Doctor Gilyard says that’s when it started – the crazy – but it felt more like grief. It was like this blackness that crept into the corners of my life until everything was grey and dirty. My insides felt burned out, like if you cut me open, all you would find would be smoke. No heart. No bones. There was nothing left, just the anger. It followed me everywhere. It sat on my bed and watched me sleep and when I had to eat, it looked at me across the table.

So I gave into it, rolled around in it, swam in it, deeper and deeper, until it pulled me under. When I emerged, I had only one thought: Juliet. It was her fault.
That
’s how it started, the day I traced that line back to the night she stabbed Dad and everything fell apart. So I suppose I don’t always avoid straight lines.

Sometimes I run across them.

Sunday. Music therapy.

As a group, we don’t agree on much in here, but we are united in our hatred of music therapy. I actually
like
music, so it shouldn’t be such an ordeal. But if Her Majesty’s Prison Service is trying to teach me that violence isn’t the answer, they really shouldn’t make me do music therapy with Kim, an over-eager Australian girl who insists on playing ABBA songs as though we can dance the crazy right out of us.

She’s twenty-two, so I guess we’re supposed to relate to her, but she’s
so
happy. Happy happy happy, all the time. Happy when Halina (16, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) wets herself. Happy when Reta (17, schizophrenic) starts bickering with the aliens sent to earth to protect her. Happy when Val refuses to stand up, let alone take an instrument from the box. Happy happy happy.

She’s clearly the maddest one here.

Once, I asked Doctor Gilyard what the point of it was.

Of course she responded with: ‘What do you think the point of it is, Emily?’

‘It’s clearly a form of torture,’ I muttered. ‘If that lunatic plays “Dancing Queen” once more, I’m writing to Amnesty International. I’d rather be waterboarded.’

‘Which lunatic?’

I huffed, but I suppose you do have to specify in this place.

‘Kim! Get her in here,’ I said with a wave of my hand. ‘Ask her about her mother. She’s off her nut if she thinks that banging a tambourine is going to stop Reta thinking that she’s BFFs with the High Priestess of Maladoth.’

‘You don’t think it helps?’

‘Of course not!’

She took off her glasses and looked at me. ‘So it wouldn’t help to play the cello?’

I’d been waiting for that. Waiting.

‘It’s impossible to play along to “Dancing Queen” on the cello,’ I told her with a smug smile, but I still felt my heart in my throat.

She can’t.

She won’t.

She won’t.

Doctor Gilyard started our session this week by asking me if I often lose my temper.

That’s all she ever does: ask questions. Questions. Questions. Questions. If the sun slants into her office at the right angle, you can see all the question marks floating in the air. Question marks and dust. I try to catch them on my tongue sometimes, as though they’re snowflakes. I can’t, of course, but it’s fun to see the look on her face as I try.

The first time I did it, she looked so worried that I don’t know how I didn’t laugh. Now she knows me well enough not to flinch when I do stuff like that. She just closes her notebook and when she puts her pencil on top of it, I stop because what’s the point of giving her what she wants if she isn’t going to write it down?

I swear I wouldn’t do
half
the stuff I do if someone wasn’t paying attention.

But I guess she’s learned a trick or two over the last few months, which is why she didn’t tell me about Juliet’s letter today. Usually, she would try to hand it to me and I’d huff and puff and refuse to take it. But today she just put the envelope down on the coffee table in front of me and sat back in her chair.

There was a ceremony to it, to the way she turned it over so that I could see my name and the address written neatly across it. And I looked at it, then at her, and when she picked up the pencil again, I felt the silence roll out between us like a red carpet.

I didn’t say anything for the rest of the session and it actually hurt not to. There was this pain – this ache – in my stomach as I looked at the letter. She usually reads them out to me so I waited and waited, but she didn’t. She just let it sit there, on the coffee table, while she waited for me to give in and reach for it.