Chapter 14 Mia
MIA
PLAYLIST: MAKE IT RAIN – GEORGE BARNETT
It is night when I close the door to the flat behind me and sink to the ground. A horror-struck Bella has opened the door for me because I didn’t even have the key to my own flat right now.
“What the bloody hell! I was worried sick!”
“Don’t,” I tell her. “I can’t right now, can’t.”
“What the hell happened?”
“Bella!” I shout, “Not right now.”
I am so exhausted that I feel like I might collapse. The helicopter ride was the most stressful thing I have ever done.
I had to take public transport afterwards with people who most certainly recognised me. I was stared at and even heard whispers. I am overwhelmed, have had no food for an entire day, my body is trembling, and I can’t think.
Pebbles comes and brushes herself against my leg. I grab her. She is the one I need. I squeeze her into me, she purrs. And for one tiny moment, the world is alright.
Tears stream over my cheeks.
What a bloody mess.
Bella sits down next to me. I don’t want her here. I just want Pebbles. And alone time. But Bella doesn’t leave.
I don’t know how long I have been sitting here, but at some point, Bella lies down with her head on my lap and puts her feet up against the wall.
“You know,” she says, “I always thought it would be me who hits the media with some crappy headlines because I fell out of a rich guy's apartment while drunk or found dead because I was murdered by the wife.”
I laugh. In tears. I don’t want to, but I have to.
“Me too, Bells, me too,” I say and pat her shoulder with my free hand. Pebbles immediately complains, wanting me to pet her. I have never been away for a night before, and she is very clingy.
“They’ll forget about it,” Bella says. “Next scandal will come.”
“The media, maybe, but the parents won’t.”
Bella sighs. “Well, that’s crap.”
“Yep,” I say. “But hey, I flew in a helicopter.”
“You what?” she asks incredulously and sits up.
“Yeah. She took me to her manor house in the highlands. Bloody castle that thing.”
“Did anything happen?” Bella asks, I know she wants the gossip. She always pushed me to find someone.
“Many things happened,” I say. I don’t feel comfortable giving her a step-by-step walkthrough of yesterday’s and today’s events.
“Aaaand?” she asks.
“And nothing. I should have stayed home, look what happened.”
“Was she any good?”
“Bells!”
“Come on, Mia, you have to give me something.”
“She knows her stuff,” I say.
“So you finally had—“
“Yes,” I say, humiliated. “Kind of. She made me come with…um, her thigh, I believe.” There is no way I will ever tell her about the leash thing afterwards. My cheeks burn with heat.
“Uhhhhhhhh,” she says. “Was it good?”
“Yes,” I say scarcely.
“Come on, Mia. Give me something.”
“I…well…it was like a dream, but then—“
“What then?”
“It was nice and then morning and reality came, and the tabloids happened, and I think I shouted at her that I hate her and I slapped her face.”
I need to vanish.
“You what?!” Bella is ready to jump up by now.
“She slapped me first. Before. But I completely lost it. The headlines—everything. I am going to lose my job over this, I know it. Look at Preston, he’s so closed up, no way he’ll go full nuclear on me.”
Preston is the head teacher at my school and a deeply faithful man who strongly supports women to be full-time mothers and caretakers.
“Anyway,” I say as I shudder from the mere thought, “Victoria was a real bitch.
“Huh,” Bella says. “What did she do?”
“Called me a child throwing a tantrum, and stuff like that.”
“And were you?”
“I—Bells! You’re supposed to be on my side.”
“I am. Always will. But I need the full story.”
I shake my head as a weak smile appears on my face, as I realise that Bella played me, so I spill all the tea.
And I do tell her.
While talking helps, the distance also tells me that I really behaved like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Victoria tried to help, and I exploded.
Well, she told me nothing would come of it with the thumb thing, so she lied, but in the end, it wasn't her fault.
Victoria was right, I was operating on madness. My chest clenches the moment I think back on the situation in the closet.
Bella laughs when I tell her the tale of me standing in underwear in a closet, screaming at Victoria Fitzroy.
“You did not,” she says.
“Oh, I did,” I say and a displaced laugh surfaces. I have to hide my face.
Bella pats my thigh.
“We all do some things we’d rather like to forget here and there,” she says, “Let me tell you that as the master of disaster.”
We sit there in silence. I pet Pebbles, and we both stare at the purring cat on my arm.
“You should call your mother,” Bella says finally. “I think she called me seven hundred times.”
“I bet. But I can’t.”
“Why?”
I pull the broken phone from my pocket. “Threw it onto the ground when I saw all the notifications on there, display broke, can’t use it anymore.”
“You’re an idiot,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “Can you text her I’m alright, and my phone is broken. I need some quiet time. I can’t deal with her, either.”
“Sure,” Bella says and does it immediately. Bella and her phone are one entity at this point; it’s attached to her like a third arm.
“Bells, what am I going to do?” I ask her with my head resting back against the wall.
“What do you want to do?”
“I want peace and quiet, but I believe that’ll never come again. I might need to move somewhere else.”
“We could move to New York,” Bella says. “My mother recently acquired some flats there.”
I snort.
Moving to New York.
“I mean it, Mia. I’m gladly leaving London behind. If you truly think you need to leave and there is nothing that’s holding you here…”
“Don’t think I don’t realise what you’re playing at,” I say.
“Me?” she asks as innocently as possible. “I’m playing nothing here.”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
More silence passes. My mind is circling back to what has happened. To Victoria. The way she looked at me when I left. That feeling in my body. Last night. Her touch. The moment in the library—
“You think I’m a fool, don’t you?” I ask Bella.
“I think you have issues like all of us, and they cloud your vision.”
“Oh, do tell, what issues do I have?”
“You are dishonest.”
“I am what?” I ask with anger showing in my voice.
“You try so hard to make everyone believe you don’t care about what others think of you, with your knitted stuff and everything, but you do care. You care so much that you don’t go outside because you feel judged and unworthy.”
I draw back my shoulders.
“Thanks for nothing,” I say.
“I’m telling you that so you can grow,” she says.
“Because you grow so much of all the things I told you,” I say.
“Not the point.”
“Exactly the point, give that advice to yourself.”
“Were you happy?” asks Bella. “Before.”
“I—yes, I suppose.”
“You suppose?”
“I don’t want to be happy. I want peace.”
“And living every day of your life the same boring way is peace?”
“Yes,” I say defiantly, and Bella sighs as she gets up.
“You’re lying to yourself, love,” she says and gets into her bedroom, leaving me sitting there feeling even worse than before.
Before she closes the door, she turns.
“You’ll always face pain and restless moments—that’s life.
You chose a box to live in, with its own suffering.
You decided to swallow it down and hide.
But you can choose differently," she says, adding with a faint smile.
“I've never seen you as alive as you have been in these past weeks. Be daring, Mia.”
Daring.
A word that triggers the memory of the book Victoria gave me.
Victoria.
“I can’t go back to her, Bells. She called me childish.”
“We all say things we don’t mean when we’re angry, especially when a person is important to us,” says Bella, leaning against the door frame.
Important to us.
“She’s sixty, Bells. Sixty. I am twenty-seven.”
“Who cares? I fucked with an eighty-two-year-old last night on viagra, was the best sex of my life.”
My face flushes immediately.
“Bella!” I shout.
“Just saying,” she says, laughing. “Who cares about the age if she makes you come?”
I shake my head, laughing.
“And what if I crawl back to her and she rejects me?”
“You see it as it is, Victoria Fitzroy made you come, something every woman on this planet will be envious of, and then you move on,” says Bella, shrugging.
Now, I have to laugh. Wholeheartedly.
“Envious, huh?” I ask.
“Of course! Why do you think the headlines are the way they are? Everyone wants to be you.”
I am utterly taken aback.
“What?”
“Mia, that’s how tabloids and media work. They prey on envy, desire and secrets. People are enraged because they wished to be you.”
I have no words and stare at her, dumbstruck.
“Sleep well,” she says a little too knowingly and closes the door to her room, leaving me sit there alone with all my thoughts and emotions.
Well, not entirely alone. I have Pebbles.
It is night when I wake to a strange noise; my head throbs as I sit up.
It sounds like a rat is running in the walls, which is impossible because the house is made of bricks.
My heart pounds heavily.
Cats.
I look for them. Porridge is curled up and fast asleep, but Pebbles is wide awake, too. She sits at the end of the bed, staring at the window with her tail flipping left and right. She is on edge, like me.
Tac-tac-tac-tac-tac.
I leave the lights off and walk over to the window. Carefully glancing outside.
My heart beats into my throat.
I can’t see anything outside because my room has a garden view, and there are no lights. But was there something moving there?
I am too scared to open the window. And as I have no torch, it wouldn’t do any good either.
Tac-tac-tac-tac-tac.
The noise is freaking me out.
I don’t know what to do, so I sink to the floor underneath the window and draw up my legs, rocking myself slightly.
I am cold, and yet I am not.
Tac-tac-tac-tac-tac.
Maybe this is just a dream.
Yes, it’s just a dream, I repeat in my mind.
When I wake up, I am flat on the floor, curled up like a cat, freezing and feeling horrible. My head pounds, my shoulder hurts, and overall, I haven’t felt worse ever. Did I hear knocking?
I scramble myself off the floor and slink into the kitchen to make some tea and go pee.
When I open the door, I almost have heartattack. Bella is standing right in front of it. So she did knock.
“What the hell, Bells?” I ask as I stare at her.
“Are you okay?” she asks with a strange tone in her voice.
“Yes, why wouldn’t I?” I ask, scowling at her. “What’s going on, Bella?”
She’s standing in front of me, so the view into the living room is blocked.
“You might want to put some more clothes on,” she says. I am wearing only a shirt, no trousers.
“And why is that?” I ask, as I crane my neck, but she steps into the way.
“Just do it,” she says, and I go back into my room.
Bella mouths something at me that awfully looks like “Police.”
I groan.
When I return, Bella stands at the side, two police officers in our living room.
“Miss Phillips?” asks one of them, a woman.
“Yes,” I say as horrors run through my mind.
Is my mother dead? Did someone else die? Has my father been found? A surge of cold horror washes through my insides.
“We have received a call this morning for vandalism,” she says.
“I didn’t do anything,” I blurt out.
“We do not believe such,” says the man. “You were rather the person it was aimed at.”
“Me?” I ask, incredulously, my heart beating faster.
“Indeed,” says the officer. “Someone sprayed the word ‘whore’ onto the house. Is there anyone you believe to have reasons for it?”
I am falling. Without a word, I shoot to the windows of our living room and rip them open.
I glance down. There it is, right underneath our windows, sprayed on the brick walls in red. Big. For everyone to see.
I stare at it.
Come back up.
Turn.
Sink to the ground.
My mind can’t process it.
The only thing I can think of is that I should have never left the house.
Never.
This is all because of her.