Chapter Forty-One
Lady Phoebe
I left Oxford just as the sun was rising. No one saw me leave, I don’t think. His party wasn’t like his previous ones where there were still people stumbling about two days later.
I called Harold to pick me up about an hour ago. I didn’t want to leave Arthur but I had to. He has some official birthday obligations to attend to today—interviews, photoshoots, dinners—all the shit he hates.
The wind really starts to pick up as I stand by the gates, waiting for Harold. It’s so bitter and all I want is to be warmed up by Arthur’s skin. I smile to myself. We’re a bit like penguins, always huddling up to one another to keep warm—in more ways than the obvious.
Harold pulls up outside of the gates a moment later. Hold my hand up, tell him to wait there without telling him. I do the code on the gate and slide into the backseat.
“Where to?” He smiles, looking at me through the rear view mirror.
“Digby’s, please.”
I don’t know why—it just kind of slipped out. I don’t want to see him. Guilt, maybe? I’ve just rolled out of Arthur’s bed and what now? I’m going to fall back into Digby’s? It’s so tasteless, so uncouth but I never expected it to turn out like this. Not in a million years.
But—I don’t know—there’s just something I gravitate towards with boys who show me the slightest bit of love. Not my parents' fault. More just my fault, I’m sure. I know plenty of girls who don’t even know who their fathers are and they’re not like me. Freddy isn’t like this and we grew up the same.
Dr.Kane says it’s because I can’t be alone but that sounds mean.
Sure, it’s true, I know it is but hearing it makes it real, doesn’t it?
We don’t like to hear the truths about ourselves.
They fracture the lies we feed ourselves everyday in the mirror.
Even if we know they’re lies, there’s still a comfort in it.
Truths are so hard to swallow that I’m not sure if they ever even digest properly.
As the car bumps along the country roads, I think about what Arthur told me—a truth so foul that I haven’t even put it inside my mouth, let alone swallowed it.
Maybe part of me always knew. Maybe I said all those things about loving him no matter what because I knew one day he would do something terrible.
Or maybe I just know that it isn’t entirely his fault.
The boy didn’t die at the scene. He died in the hospital, months later.
Arthur didn’t walk into his room and pull the plug on him.
It wasn’t murder. We could put it in the perspective of the law but then again, the law isn’t fair. When has the law ever been fair?
Wrong place, wrong time.
It might sink in later on but as for now, it just sits peacefully on my chest. Something I can move and shift whenever I want.
As strange as it sounds, it feels like another thing tying us together.
As if the second he told me, another fine silver string pierced through my heart, grew out of my chest and attached itself, halfway, with the same string that poked through Arthur.
That’s all we are, really. A tangled mess of tiny little knots in fine silver strings.
I get back to London in just over an hour. I say goodbye to Harold and make my way up to Digby’s. I start to feel a bit sick—not unwell—nervous, though. Scared, almost.
I knock twice. He opens the door, his face pale, his eyes dark and his jaw clenched.
“Are you taking the piss out of me?” Is the first thing he says to me.
I move past him in the doorway, walk through to the kitchen and sit at the table.
“No.”
He leans against the counter in his jumper and jeans and runs a hand through his hair. “Where’ve you been?” He sighs, tired.
What’s the point in lying to him now?
“I stayed at Arthur’s.”
He shakes his head, glances to the left and then back to me.
His eyes drop and a tiny, sad smile grows on his face.
My stomach dips, my throat stings and another slap hits me round the face—not a literal slap from Digby but a metaphorical one.
A slap to show me how much of a fucking bitch I’ve been to this poor man who has done nothing but love me.
Digby pulls out the chair opposite me, leans his elbows on the table and claps his hands together. With his eyes cast down, he mutters, “If I ask you one last time will you tell me the truth?”
I open my mouth but he lifts his head, looks right at me—or through me. “I already know what the truth is, Phoebe—but fuck, I just need to hear it.”
“Okay,” I nod, already crying at the question I know he’s about to ask me.
“Are you sleeping with Arthur?”
“Yes.”
And my voice is so quiet that I’m not sure if he heard me but the sound of his chair scrapping back against the tiles is loud enough to assure me that he did.
“Digby!” I push my chair back, follow him down the hall. “Can you at least listen to me?”
I watch as he grabs a weekender from the top of the wardrobe, throws it down onto the ottoman in the middle of the room (yes, room for wardrobe because what do you expect?
Said wardrobe to be a piece of literal furniture in the actual bedroom?).
He doesn’t even acknowledge me as he starts ripping his clothes from hangers and stuffing them into the bag.
“Digby—”
“What?” He turns to face me, face red, eyebrows furrowed, lips twitching. “Not being fucking funny, Phoebe, but I don’t really want to hear that he can do everything for you that I couldn’t!”
“It isn’t like that!” I shake my head, wipe my tears. “Please, just listen to—”
“Stop it!” He shouts, drops the shirt he was holding.
“Just fucking stop it, will you? There is nothing I want to hear from you right now. You and Arthur fucking deserve each other. There’s something there,” he shakes his head, licks his lips.
“I don’t know what it is between you two but I doubt God himself could rip you apart.
And the most fucked up part about all of this?
I love you so much Phoebe that I’m actually relieved that you finally admitted it.
Watching you die everyday for years because you couldn’t be with him, fucking killed me—so I’m glad, I’m happy for you,” he finishes with a final sharp nod of his head.
I swallow, well try to but it burns with how hard I’m crying.
I don’t feel like I deserve to cry right now.
This whole fucking mess of goodbyes and clothes on the floor is all my fault.
And I think I must really hate myself for doing this.
Why would anyone do this to themselves? What’s happening right now is deeper than any cut I could inflict on myself.
I don’t try to stop him as he brushes past me and into the bathroom where he stuffs more things into his bag.
I want to ask where he’s going, if I can come with him but there isn’t any point.
He doesn’t want me anymore. And as much as I wanted this relationship to end, watching him walk out of the door without even giving me one final glance, shatters me.
Him leaving doesn’t hurt me. Me making him leave is what hurts.
I don’t know why I do this. I don’t know why I make it my life’s mission to ruin every good thing that comes my way.
Perhaps I don’t deserve it. Maybe Arthur and I deserve each other because we’re just as bad.
Digby wasn’t a bad person when I met him.
That angry, impulsive version of him that’s recently surfaced is because of me.
I turned him into that and he rightfully hates me for doing so.
I didn’t like the fact I was turning him into that, either, or that I was so aware that I was.
I stand in the kitchen for a long while, staring at the door, wishing and willing he’ll come back but he doesn’t. I know he won’t. Just like the leaves in autumn, another one falls off and leaves me shivering and bare.
At the rate people have been leaving me in recent years, you’d think I was a bad person.
Am I? A bad person? Am I, really? What’s your idea of a bad person?
Me or a serial killer? You can’t really put us in the same category.
You probably just hate me because of how much I hate myself and to that I say, please don’t.
I hate myself enough for the both of us.
At the very least just feel some pity for me as I sit on the cold wood floor by the front door and cry until my eyes have drained all liquid.
? ? ?
The sound of my phone ringing is what eventually drags me out of the big black hole I crawled into.
I hadn’t realised that I stayed on the kitchen floor, scrunched into myself in hopes the floor would open up and let me fall further.
I push myself up. You can’t fall into the floor. The floor is the lowest you can go.
My phone is buzzing on my bedside table.
I pick it up.
An unknown number, not from England.
“Hello?”
“Phoebe?”
I freeze.
“Freddy?”
“Oh my god,” she cries. “I’m sorry for calling so late, I didn’t realise the time—”
“It’s fine, what’s wrong?”
I don’t move, breathe, think—nothing. I stay stock still in case the phone ends and I don’t hear her voice for another year.
“I’m okay, Phoebe,” she tells me, breathlessly. “But I need to tell you something.”
“Okay,” I nod, my hand shaking.
My sister goes silent on the other end. I hear some rustling, a door closing.
“I need you to know that if anything happens to me that it was Lenny.”
My stomach dips. “What do you mean?”
“If anything happens,” she whispers. “It was Lenny.”
“What’s going to happen to you?”
Nothing.
“Freddy?”
Silence.
“Freddy? What the fuck is going on? Why would he do anything to you?”
Again, the line is quiet.
“Freddy!” I shout down the phone. “Fucking answer me!”
The line goes dead.
She ended the call.
I stare down at my phone, my lock screen staring back at me. I imagine her calling again, the number popping up—but it doesn’t. She doesn’t call me back. I watch the time change for five straight minutes and still nothing.