Chapter 4 Bad Things Happen, All the Time
Bad Things Happen, All the Time
It’s just a sick joke, I tell myself. A prank.
Help Me.
With steady hands, I gently remove the collar and ruffle the fur where it sat on Blue’s neck. He purrs in thanks, leaning into the massage. I surreptitiously check his neck for sore spots or possible injuries, but he seems unbothered. He’d let me know if I snagged anything that hurt him.
I stop rubbing him and he shakes himself, stands, and jumps unceremoniously from me and finds a comfy spot atop a stack of unpacked sweatshirts, coils himself into a fur ball, and buries his nose in his paws.
One only has to listen to a podcast or a documentary to know that these things happen in real life. Bad things happen, all the time.
I lean back against the pillows and inspect the rest of the collar.
The depth and viciousness of the letters, the force it took to entrench them: it looks like it was done in haste, impassioned.
This person clearly could not be ignored.
The brass coin tag with my phone number etched into it glints back at me in the lamplight.
Whoever did this will have seen my phone number, too.
I pick up my phone and open the neighborhood group chat that Arabella added me to this morning. I scroll back up to my message about Blue. It’s been hearted a lot; there are also a few messages of support beneath it. Blue’s soft blue-gray features shine out at me.
I’ve seen clips online of women covertly flashing the international signal for help behind their backs, in supermarkets and parking lots, and being rescued by Good Samaritans.
Old news stories come to mind, ones that have haunted me over the years.
Then there are the true-crime shows, the trove of horror movies.
These always start with women in need of help and end in “last seen” on blurry self-checkout video footage or on glitchy, black-and-white transport CCTV, all because no one believed them. Or they were alone.
All those pixelated women could have been saved, and they flicker through my mind: here they are, in basements, on stained mattresses, body parts in suitcases, vacuum-packed in freezers, their DNA splattered on old vinyl car seats, the whole grotty plethora of it packaged up as…
TV entertainment. True-crime shows have always made me feel uncomfortable.
Ben used to put them on all the time. He liked them on in the background while he scrolled through football scores on his phone. Now, of course, I know that he was texting her.
He liked trying to figure out who did it, in those shows, he told me. I didn’t. The only thing I saw was dead women, their lives reduced to a guessing game. They weren’t coming back, no matter how well you worked out who did it.
This was the only time Ben and I spent together, toward the end—watching these women die, one by one, that or people burning cakes in baking challenges. I didn’t die or get eliminated—though maybe I did get eliminated from my marriage, come to think of it.
Help Me
Does someone actually need help? Or is it just…what…some angry teen acting out?
Imagine if I had seen Hannah’s name flash up on the screen that morning and brushed it aside, never looked. Would I still be doing Ben’s laundry, in the Cotswolds, oblivious?
It’s odd, though, to be stuck in the liminal space between believing this call for help is utterly real, and being certain this realness must, necessarily, be a figment of my overactive imagination.
Because things like this don’t really happen—not here, in houses like this.
Not in real life. Not in London. Stabbings, yes.
Hit-and-runs, of course. Even people pushed under trains.
The truth is I don’t believe it’s real enough to do anything. Deep down, I know that in the end I’ll just throw the collar away and buy a new one.
I shake off thoughts: body parts and plastic sheeting and sadness.
I pull back the sheets and head across the room to a small box with Cat Stuff scrawled across it. I chuck the vandalized collar into a trash bag, already half-full of bubble wrap, and sit down cross-legged to root through the box.
With mild interest, Blue looks up at my sudden burst of activity, before burying his head back in his paws.
After taking a few things out, I find what I am looking for: a cat camera, attached to a custom collar.
I only have Blue left now. He loves me, he trusts me, and you need to hold those who love and trust you tight.
I study the box instructions and plug the collar in to charge beside my bed.
Once I have flicked the bedroom lights out, sleep does not drift over me. I lie awake, staring at the blue glowing light of the charging collar.
Everything will be okay.