Work Text:
BONNIE
Bonnie lowers the gun from under her chin. It’s surprise that makes her do it, those two rushing in and knocking her off her feet. In the back of the police car, her hands cuffed not for the first time in her life, she feels very tired and her skull throbs where it connected with the floor of the cafe. There’s no cage in the car or anything, no metal or plexiglass separating her from the policeman who’s driving. It’s that same guy from the cafe, the Asian one. She feels his eyes on her in the rearview mirror, all curious. She must be the first murderer he’s ever met in his life.
“So,” he says brightly as they cruise past a stop light on the empty streets. No point to stopping - it’s not like there are any other cars on the road tonight except for the two backup police cars flanking them. Three police cars on the road just for Bonnie, probably the most traffic this town has ever seen, and she wonders if what she’s done will win her a place in one of those local and regional history books. You know, the ones that get published for no discernible point other than to gather dust in bookstores. She wonders if that way, she’ll end up living forever.
“So,” the policeman begins again, in a conversational tone, when Bonnie doesn’t respond. “I was wondering, how hard is it to get a gun in the UK?”
"What?" goes Bonnie.
"Like on a scale of one to ten, how hard was it for you to obtain your gun?"
“Four,” says Bonnie sullenly. "I got mine from the dark web."
“Cool,” says the policeman. “Was it Silk Road? I’ve read about the Silk Road… Well, a classmate posted a link to an article on it on Facebook, real smart guy, works in tech in Dublin now, and I read the summary...”
“Silk road got taken down,” says Bonnie. “Mine was from DarkMarket.”
Why won’t the guy shut up? He goes on and on like he’s her cabbie, trying to make eye contact in the rearview mirror every now and then, unable to take a hint from the tone of her voice. “Good to know, good to know…. And what would you use to go on this DarkMarket? You can’t go on it using regular browsers like Edge, can you? I’m not planning to use it, of course, this is just for general knowledge, you know, to stay on top of the latest criminal technologies-”
“How did it feel to walk away?” Bonnie interrupts suddenly, icily.
“Pardon?”
“You walked away from the cafe, knowing there was a gun in there. How did that feel?”
It does the trick- the policeman falls silent and just stares straight ahead at the empty road for the rest of the ride. In the rearview mirror, Bonnie catches sight of her own reflection set against the receding street lights. She looks away, not liking the feeling of meeting herself in the eye. Instead, she watches the road, the flashing turret lights of the police cars, and wishes vaguely she had time to pull the trigger tonight.
ALYSSA
Alyssa can’t sleep so she goes on a walk around the lake. The bed dips as she gets to her feet but James doesn’t wake up. They’ve been sharing a bed at the lake house, but it’s not like that, it’s just that there aren’t enough rooms in the house, and the couch is too short, and the air mattress gives them both fucking backaches. No reason to suffer through backaches. They’ve been in enough pain to last three and a half lifetimes each, maybe four.
No one hears her as she puts her sweater on and leaves the house. It’s July, and out here, you can see the meteors falling through the night sky. Aunt Leigh’s son Billy says they’re called the Perseids and they’ll peak in mid August or something. He talked about them for half a fucking hour at dinner yesterday and then went on to the topic of white holes, whatever those are. Today Aunt Leigh ordered him a telescope on Amazon even though it’s not his birthday till October. The telescope is arriving next week through standard shipping.
As Alyssa walks around the lake, using her new phone as a torch, she thinks about James asleep in their bed. He always sleeps so carefully, facing her but curled up on his side with his arms folded over his chest. Like a fetus or like the class pet hamster from when she was in Year Three, the one that died by the end of the school year of unknown causes, shivering and shaking on a pile of sawdust in a corner of its cage. She watches James sometimes late at night when she can’t sleep. Looking at him makes her heart clench like a fist.
Is she good for him? He’s good for her, she knows, but surely it can’t be good for him to be with someone who can hardly stand to touch him. To be around this deep dark lake, on top of it all, after what happened with his mum. What if she has him waiting around for her forever? Or maybe he doesn’t want to touch her either, and she’ll be the one waiting for him someday. They’ve never talked about it. It’s awkward.
She goes round the lake, her thoughts just as circular. By the time she finishes her round, the sky is no lighter than it was when she started out, and her mind is no quieter. She goes back to the house anyway, locking the front door behind her and padding quietly down the hallway.
When she opens the bedroom door, James calls out into the dark, "Alyssa?"
"I just went for a walk," says Alyssa. "Sorry I woke you up. Go back to sleep."
"Oh," he says. He's used to this by now. The first time it happened he asked: "Do you want me to move to the couch?" The second time, he said, "I thought maybe you'd left." And the third time: "You can wake me up if you want company next time." Tonight, he just says, "Are you okay?"
"Yeah. Go back to sleep," Alyssa says again.
She gets in bed and they lie slightly apart, the same way they were before. Alyssa faces the ceiling, thinking her thoughts, listening to James' breathing slowly evening out. She thinks about calling out to him, asking him if he ever thinks about the house, or about getting shot, and what those thoughts look like. But it sounds like he's almost asleep. She turns onto her side to watch him, the gentle rising and falling of the duvet over his thin chest.
As much as she hates the thoughts that keep her up at night, the dreams are sometimes worse. And worst of all are the ones she wakes up from screaming, thinking James is someone else, that the hands he's using to calm her down are trying to reach for her throat instead. Still, she shuts her eyes and tries to sleep, hoping that none of those dreams will come for her tonight. It's not fair, she thinks, that human brains have to work like this. What’s rubbish is that knowing what’s gone wrong inside you isn’t enough to make it better.
BONNIE
No one comes to bail her out. No one comes to visit.
ALYSSA
The therapist that Alyssa’s getting psychological help from has motivational posters all over the walls of her basement office. It smelled like incense when Alyssa walked in, and the lady said something about it getting musty in here sometimes.
“Right,” said Alyssa, and sat down.
Now the therapist is saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. The night is darkest before the dawn. Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.”
Okay, okay, the therapist is actually talking about this kind of treatment called EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement something something, but that’s what Alyssa hears given what the dumb posters in the room are saying. Two months on the NHS waitlist and now this. There was another acronym the therapist mentioned a couple of minutes ago. CBT, was it? So many fucking acronyms. What if the acronyms don’t fix her? This EMDR thing is apparently about blinking while you talk. Alyssa blinks while she talks and yet she’s not well.
“Well, it’s not just about blinking while you talk. You’d be talking about specific negative thoughts and memories, especially recurring ones. The idea is that over time, the distress you feel over these thoughts and memories will start to fade.”
“Right,” says Alyssa again.
“Right,” echoes the therapist. “So I thought we could start off slow today. Would you tell me about yourself?”
“What, you haven’t read the papers?” asks Alyssa.
“The papers?”
“Daily Mail did a profile on me and James and Bonnie. Trio Involved in Attempted Murder-Suicide Rumored to be in Flat Earth Cult.”
“I’d prefer to hear the story from you,” says the therapist. “And we don’t have to start with the recent past. You could start by telling me about how you grew up.”
“Okay,” says Alyssa. “Yeah okay, I’ll tell you how I grew up.”
There’s a bottle of mineral water on the table between them that Alyssa picked up in the waiting room, along with three mini Mars bars. The Mars bars are long gone but the bottle is still unopened. She reaches for it and twists the cap off and drinks a bit, taking her time to swallow as the therapist watches her patiently with her hand poised over an empty notepad. Finally, Alyssa swallows. She says, “First thing I remember is a house with chickens in the yard. They smelled fucking vile…”
When the hour is up, Alyssa finds James double parked on the street outside. He gives her this awkward little smile he’s been doing a lot lately as she slams the door shut and buckles her seatbelt. “Are you okay?” he asks before starting the car.
“I’m alright.” And then, before he can ask: “It went okay. She’s nice.”
“You think you’ll go back?”
“Yeah, I think I will. I’m not spending another two months on any fucking waitlists. And it’s easy to talk to her,” she adds.
“What did you talk about?” asks James.
“We talked about the chickens at my house, my old house, I mean, from before Gwen and my dad split up. You know about the chickens.”
James knows about the chickens. “Whatever happened to them?”
“Dunno. They got sold with the house. Hope they’re happy now. How long do chickens live for, do you know?”
James shrugs. Alyssa is curious but doesn’t bother to look it up.
James keeps driving through the town, passing by a post office and a police station and a primary school, which seems to have ended for the day because there are kids streaming through the gate. “Are you still up for…” James begins as he rounds the bend carefully.
“Yeah,” says Alyssa. “I am.”
They drive for about fifteen more minutes, in silence, just some oldies playing on the radio, energetic 80s music, till they reach this Tesco extra on the outskirts of town. The Tesco is next to a Poundland and the two buildings share a big grey car park outside that’s empty at this hour. Alyssa unbuckles her seatbelt and gets out. James does the same, they switch sides.
“So how does this work? The key goes first, right?” asks Alyssa. James has left the keys on the driver's seat. She scoops them up and gets in, slamming the door shut after her.
“Mhm. And then your right foot goes on the brake, no that’s the gas, the other one…”
Alyssa rests her right foot on the brake and turns the key in the ignition. The engine sputters back to life and hums. “I did it,” she says, looking up at James like it’s some kind of magic.
“You did it,” says James.
“What’s next?”
“You release the handbrake. It’s this one here…”
It’s not so hard, this driving thing, at least so far. Alyssa has seen other people do it millions of times. She puts her foot on the brake, releases the handbrake, puts the car into Drive, steps on the gas, and pulls out of the lot.
BONNIE
The public defender is a mousy thing with halitosis and crow’s feet on an otherwise youthful face. She seems to be of the same breed as that other public defender who got assigned to Bonnie’s case the last time Bonnie murdered someone.
(Sarah. That someone’s name was Sarah.)
That time, Bonnie had two meetings with her lawyer and then she stood trial. All she remembers from the court proceedings was the ambient weeping - Sarah’s parents cried a lot and kept trying to look Bonnie in the eye whenever she was walked in and out of the courtroom. They must have been looking for some kind of explanation, Bonnie understood. Since Bonnie pled guilty, the trial itself was short, lasting only three days. It must have been too short for the parents to find any closure - no time to piece together an image of the person who killed their daughter out of the blue, no time to figure out who to blame.
This lawyer asks a set of questions that sounds vaguely familiar. Bonnie answers them dully, wishing she could just get this over with and go back to sleeping the day away in her cell. The defender takes notes, typing them out on the clunky laptop she’s hunched over, stopping to frown thoughtfully every now and then.
Towards the end of the session, she looks up from her screen and says, “So, I have a proposition for you.”
Bonnie just blinks at her.
“We go with the insanity defense. We plead either guilty but insane, or even not guilty by reason of insanity. If it works, you go to a psychiatric facility instead of back to prison, get the help you need.”
Bonnie blinks again.
“The psychiatric assessment you took last week supports this argument,” the lawyer goes on, “but I thought to make your case more convincing we could try to prove psychological damage at the hands of Clive Koch. Now that the details of that case have been released to the public, we can use that to our benefit.”
Who are you? Bonnie wonders. Clearly this woman cares about her job, must have paid attention in law school, so how’d she end up an underpaid and overworked public defender? Did she get bad grades? Did she choose this lifestyle out of youthful idealism, hoping to help those without access to legal resources? Is Bonnie her ‘Project’?
The lawyer keeps rambling on. Her eyes are bright with fervor. Blah blah blah she goes. Bonnie gets the gist - if they can prove that Clive fucked Bonnie up, maybe with a combination of a statement by Bonnie and testimonies from people who knew her well from before she met Clive, they stand a chance of definitively proving that Bonnie has PTSD or whatever it is people get from interacting too much with serial killers.
“Perhaps you could tell me more about what it was like being around Clive Koch,” says the lawyer.
Bonnie thinks for a moment. There’s a part of her that wants to summon the energy to lie, if only to please this woman who’s taken an interest in her for whatever reason. Cook up a story about Clive harassing her at the library, drugging her at his house, hurting her like he did other women. She watches the lawyer’s face fall as she says, instead, “Mostly we just sat around his house drinking and having sex. I acquired a taste for whiskey. He never did to me what he did to those other women. I really thought he was my boyfriend.”
ALYSSA
After the Bonnie incident, Aunt Leigh said it was okay if Alyssa didn’t want to work at the cafe anymore. She said she could find someone else to take over, she’d understand. But somehow it doesn’t bother Alyssa to keep working at the cafe. Sometimes she’ll wipe down the tables and get a vision of a gun pointed at her face, and it’ll make her heart skip a beat. But most of the time it’s okay here, pretty uneventful. Maybe the blinking is working after all.
James doesn’t seem to mind being at the cafe either. He usually comes here in the afternoons and stays till closing, right before his graveyard shift starts at the 7-eleven two towns away. He brings his laptop, his dad’s old one that he salvaged from the house, and works on that A levels distance learning course he signed up for. Alyssa makes him tea that he always insists on paying for.
Like today. It’s a Tuesday and it’s just two of them in the cafe plus that grizzled old vet named Bobby who told them he got his foot shot off in the Falklands War. The guy is hard of hearing and thinks Alyssa’s name is Alice. Alice in Wonderland, he likes to call her, which is cheesy but also nice.
When Alyssa goes to refill Bobby’s coffee, Bobby looks up from the crossword he’s been working on to thank her. “You know, I won’t mind if you go sit with your boyfriend,” he says.
It’s not like that, Alyssa opens her mouth to say, but maybe it is. Maybe even though they go on driving lessons rather than on dates and never so much as kiss James is her boyfriend. It’s complicated, she told her therapist the other day when they were talking about James. The therapist responded by going on about non traditional relationships, which Alyssa took as a fancy way of saying: You do you.
“Go on, love,” prompts Bobby as he reaches for his coffee.
While usually inclined towards doing the opposite of what she's been told, especially if the person doing the telling is a man, Alyssa has gotten pretty tired of standing around on her feet. So she goes over to James’ table and slides into the seat across the table from him. He’s working on some kind of maths test, he told her, scribbling workings on scratch paper in blue ink. This morning, Alyssa caught him mumbling about quadratic equations in his sleep, something about solving for roots. It was cute.
“Sorry, give me five minutes,” says James, glancing up at her.
“Yeah, no problem,” says Alyssa.
Under the table though, he reaches his foot out and rests it lightly against her ankle. She shifts her foot too so that it’s hooked.around his ankle. He keeps working, their feet locked together like that.
While he works, she takes one of his pens and starts doodling on a discarded sheet of scratch paper. Turns his integrals into worms and snakes and the holes in violins. The equations look vaguely familiar - she was half a year away from finishing her A levels when Mum decided to leave Tony, and probably learned all this stuff at some point, though she’s always lacked the patience for maths. Maybe she’ll go back to school, too, later. Right now it feels too stressful, like it would be too much on top of everything else.
Finally, James looks up. “All done,” he says.
“How’d you do?”
She gets up to see and he makes room for her on his side of the booth. She slides in beside him, sees the 65 on his screen. “That’s a…”
“C. It’s a C.”
“Well done, you.” She leans her head towards him, rests it on his shoulder for just a second. Lifts it up again after making the briefest contact. Thinks about their first date, at that dumb diner all those years ago, when the biggest thing she had to worry about was Tony and his fucked up comments. Even though she hadn’t bothered to get dressed up, she’d been excited for their date that day. She wanted to make James laugh.
Next to her in the booth, he smells nice, like tea and aftershave and the shampoo they’ve both been sharing.
BONNIE
Sometimes she wonders what would have happened if she hadn’t shown up to Clive’s house the night she caught him with his student.
(Sarah, her name was Sarah.)
Well she’s not stupid or that much in denial, she knows exactly what would have happened - there’s only one thing Clive could have meant when he asked to take photos of her. But even now, a part of her dumb desperate brain wants to believe he’d have changed his mind. What did he mean when said he loved her? Did he mean it the way people in movies do, as in I want to spend time with you, I like it when you smile? Or did he mean that he saw her as some kind of kindred spirit? Is she? She’s killed two people. If he’d asked nicely, would she have joined him in taking pictures of other women, making snuff films and the like? Would they have become a 21st century, even more psychotic Bonnie and Clyde? That would have been worse than this, she knows.
“Bonnie,” says her lawyer from across the table, summoning her attention back to this prison.
Bonnie stops thinking about Clive and tries to focus on the lawyer’s words and face. It’s a tired and worn face, crow’s feet and eyebags and burst blue veins everywhere, no make up to conceal it. Bonnie read online that going makeup free is a fashion statement these days. Is that what the lawyer is going for? Probably not, Bonnie decides.
“You seem very far away today,” says the lawyer.
“I’m not,” Bonnie lies. “I’m listening. Go on.”
“As I mentioned, I contacted your mum at the number you gave me.”
Right. The lawyer’s still bent on that insanity plea idea of hers. Somehow she convinced Bonnie that it was a good idea to get Mum involved, that maybe Mum could testify, talk about Bonnie being a bright and promising kid and such.
“Unfortunately, she didn’t agree to testify,” says the lawyer, squashing that dream.
Bonnie isn’t surprised. She wonders what else Mum might have said over the phone call. Bonnie did call her once, in the winter of her first year in prison, when she ran out of money and needed to buy new socks that didn’t have holes in them.
“Hi, who is this?” Mum asked in her polite voice, the one she reserved for Bonnie’s teachers and also to make good impressions on strangers.
“It’s Bonnie,” said Bonnie.
A long silence. And then, in that same voice, Mum said, “Sorry, I don’t know any Bonnies,” and hung up the phone.
They haven’t talked since.
Judging by the expression on the lawyer’s face, it seems that Mum might have said the same thing this time. That expression is pity, and it’s making Bonnie uncomfortable. Suddenly she’s very tired, just wants to plead guilty and be left alone in her cell to sleep, to rot like discarded fruit. She opens her mouth to say as much, but then the lawyer gets that glint in her eyes again that means she’s up to something.
“But your dad agreed to talk,” says the lawyer.
“What?” goes Bonnie. She didn’t expect this at all. “How’d you even get his-“
“LinkedIn.” The lawyer looks really proud of herself for a second but then her shoulders sag again, returning to their usual slouching position. “Sorry,” she adds. “I know I might have crossed a line. I should have asked you first-“
“What did he say?” asks Bonnie.
“That he’d talk, at least. I don’t know if he’ll agree to testify in court, but at least-”
“Did he ask about me?”
“We didn’t talk for very long, but he, um, mentioned you hadn’t spoken since he left you and your mother.”
“Did he say why?”
“Why he never reached out?”
“Um no he didn’t. I think that’s a conversation for the two of you to...”
Something's happening inside Bonnie's head. In her mind's eye, she's getting up, grabbing the chair by its backrest, as best as she can with her handcuffs on, and she's swinging it at the lawyer. That'll teach her for poking in other people's business, that'll teach her for trying meddle with Bonnie's private life.
Meanwhile, the lawyer is unzipping her purse and reaching inside it. Everything is swimming in a strange way. She's getting out a pack of tissues and sliding it across the table, saying "Here," and suddenly Bonnie realizes that she's crying. Horrified, she stands up, the chair scraping roughly against the ground as she moves, nearly toppling over.
The lawyer looks stricken. “I’m so sorry. Bonnie I’m so sorry, I should have asked you first."
But Bonnie backs away, and then she can barely see anything anymore.
ALYSSA
It rained all day and now the lake is swollen. The ground is damp. Aunt Leigh seems happy, though, with how much it’s been raining. She keeps talking about how good the weather has been for the aubergines in her vegetable patch.
“Mum, you’re not listening,” scolds Billy.
“Sorry, sorry…”
The three of them, Aunt Leigh, Billy and Alyssa, are outside, stargazing. The twins are asleep, and James is at work and Mum’s at her gig at the McDonalds Drive Thru at the same town where James works. James and Mum carpool to work most days, and then James drives back alone because Mum’s started going out with the manager of the McDonalds and usually sleeps over at the guy's place afterwards. So it’s just Aunt Leigh, Billy, Alyssa and the twins at home today. They had dinner and now Billy has brought out his new telescope and set it up between the vegetable patch and the lake, aiming it up at the sky, which is clear after the rain.
Billy’s trying to show them which constellation’s Pegasus. He traces it out in the air impatiently for the second time, finger moving against the night sky. “Do you see it now?”
“How the fuh-“ Alyssa begins, but catches herself before the word comes out. “How on earth is that a horse with wings? It’s a sideways jellyfish. Or a box of fries. It’s literally anything but a fuh- a horse.”
Billy just rolls his eyes and she takes her turn to look through the eye piece, searching for Pegasus.
“I don’t see it…”
“Ugh,” goes Billy, disgusted. “I give up on you both. I need to use the bathroom. Try to find it while I’m gone.”
When he leaves, Alyssa pulls away from the telescope and exchanges glances with her aunt. Aunt Leigh snorts, and they both start laughing before they can help it.
“That kid,” grumbles Aunt Leigh affectionately. “He’s getting too smart for me. Bit obnoxious, though.”
“He’s getting too smart for us all,” says Alyssa. Then: “You’re a good mum to him.”
Not that it means anything coming from her, who's all of nineteen, but Aunt Leigh seems pleased. “I try,” she says. She takes her turn with the telescope and frowns up at the sky. “Okay, okay, I think I can make out the square at least. We have Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Alpha being where the horse’s neck starts…”
It seems that Billy is taking a shit, because he doesn’t come back out of the house for some time. “Shall we have a drink?” asks Aunt Leigh eventually, abandoning the telescope.
“Yeah, alright,” says Alyssa.
Aunt Leigh goes into the house and comes back with a bottle of red wine, two glasses and a blanket. It’s just two pound wine from Tesco, same stuff as what they have with dinner some nights. They sit on the porch with the blanket over their knees and look up at the stars and drink in silence. It’s not an uncomfortable silence - they’ve been spending more time together, Alyssa and Aunt Leigh, not just at the cafe. They watch old movies together in the living room while Billy and the twins are asleep and James and Mum are at work. Once Alyssa gets her license she plans to offer to drop Billy off at school in the mornings.
Alyssa keeps drinking her wine, making faces because it’s sour, maybe because it’s cheap stuff or that’s just how wine is, she doesn’t know. And then Aunt Leigh says, out of nowhere, “I was really afraid, you know, when Billy was born. That I wouldn’t be a good mum, I mean.”
It takes Alyssa by surprise. Aunt Leigh’s never said anything like this before, and it’s never crossed Alyssa’s mind before that her aunt is anything but a good mum. “Why not?” she asks.
“I was never the cuddliest with babies. I’d see them on the bus and the train and not feel very much - I thought it meant some part of me was missing. They’d make eye contact with me and I’d look away.”
“That’s pretty bad,” Alyssa blurts out before she can help herself.
Aunt Leigh smiles. “Yeah, it is. But the thing I was really afraid of is that Gwen and I, we never exactly had the best role models. You never met your grandma did you?”
Alyssa shakes her head. “Mum said they weren’t on speaking terms and then she died when I was, like, five. Grandma, I mean. I heard she went through men fast, though.”
“Mhm, from your grandfather, to my dad, to the postman, and then… I’ve lost count. Not to shame anyone for that, you know, but we moved around a lot. I went through a period where I kept getting suspended in school for getting in fights.”
Sounds familiar, thinks Alyssa. “Parents really fuck you up, don’t they?” she says, looking up at her aunt. “Even the well meaning ones who try their best. Praise a kid too much and they come out scared of everything. Try too hard to make your kid do well at school and they end up hating you for it. What do they call parents like that?”
“Tiger parents?”
“Tiger parents, yeah.”
"That’s what I couldn’t stop thinking about before I decided to have Billy,” says Aunt Leigh. “All the ways you can damage a small person without even trying to hurt them. Made me think that maybe no one should have kids at all.”
“But you changed your mind,” says Alyssa.
Aunt Leigh sips more wine. “I took a leap of faith,” she says matter-of-factly. “And anyway, if everyone thought the way I did, the human race would die out. Nothing left but plants and animals. And the stars, I suppose.”
“No one to name the constellations fucking Pegasus.”
“Yeah,” says Aunt Leigh, glancing up at the sky, frowning like she’s trying to remember where Pegasus is. Without Billy to point out the patterns in the sky, it’s become indistinct again to Alyssa too - she can’t remember where that stupid winged horse was supposed to be.
“I think Billy’s turned out well,” says Alyssa. She really meant it when she told Aunt Leigh she was a good parent - Aunt Leigh is always there for Billy, listens to him, spends time with him instead of with Tonys and the managers of certain McDonalds. But she gives him space, too, room to grow. She’s kind to him. Not much else a kid can ask for, Alyssa thinks.
“I think you’ve turned well too,” says Aunt Leigh suddenly, unexpectedly. “You know, despite everything.” She reaches across the distance between them and pats Alyssa on the knee, over the blanket.
It’s pretty awkward, but there’s a lump in Alyssa’s throat now. She’s gotten so soft lately, it’s disgusting. She turns away before the lump in her throat can become anything else, pretends to become absorbed by the view of the vegetable patch. “Thanks,” she says, staring out at the ripening aubergines, and Aunt Leigh’s like, “Yeah.”
BONNIE
When did she realize they weren’t a normal family?
She never went to kindergarten, or to the playground, or even to Bible Study at that Jehovah's Witness church she was forced to attend - Mum, who prided herself on speaking faultless English despite having been born in another country, said the other kids didn’t speak proper English and their colloquialisms would rub off on Bonnie. Being banned from TV too (the Idiot Box, Mum called it), she lacked a point of reference for what constituted a normal family. Still, she’d walk past the playground and see the kids with their parents, watch them talk, and laugh, and hug, and know that that, at least, was different. They didn’t do that at home, not Mum and Bonnie, not Mum and Dad, not Bonnie and Dad, and certainly not the three of them together.
There was once, though, when Bonnie was seven, that Mum got sick and couldn’t pick Bonnie up from school. Dad had to do it - he took a half day and when Bonnie came out of school she saw his grey car waiting in the carpark. “Are you hungry at all?” he asked, when she got in the car and put on her seatbelt. And when she nodded, he said, “Shall we go to that chip shop by the petrol station?”
That day, the chips in her fish and chips were crispy the way she liked. Dad got her a fried mars bar to go with dinner and waited for her to finish eating it before they got back in the car. Mum was sick all week, and Dad took a half day every day that week, and they drove to a different place for lunch each day. Dad never said much, but he bought her all the desserts she asked for, and that she wasn’t allowed to eat at home. Years later, when he left with his things in a single cardboard box, she thought of their week together and wondered how he could walk away without looking back.
ALYSSA
Parallel parking’s a bitch, and if Alyssa fails her driving test because of this, she will scream. Seven attempts at backing the car towards the kerb later, it’s still jutting out at a weird angle. Someone honks unsympathetically at her as they drive by. She honks right back. Twice, loudly.
“Um, do you wanna switch?” suggests James mildly from the shotgun seat. “We could call it a day. Try again tomorrow.”
“Nah,” says Alyssa, and tries again. No dice, as the Americans would say. She gives up and throws her hands up in the air, leaving the car jutting out into the road. “Hey, do you ever think about Bonnie?” she asks, turning to James. “You know, now that the trial’s coming up?”
James is still watching the traffic nervously, the cars swerving to avoid their car as they stream down the road. “Should we really be,” he begins, then seems to accept the situation, slumping back against his headrest without finishing his sentence. “Yeah, I think about Bonnie a lot,” he says.
“What’s gonna happen to her, do you reckon?”
“I dunno…” James bites his lip. “Probably a longer sentence than the one she got last time since she’s a repeat offender now.”
“Is it weird that I feel bad for her, even though she tried to kill us?” asks Alyssa.
“No, I do too,” says James, staring out at the traffic. “I feel like she never really stood a chance.”
BONNIE
Bonnie dreams of the Tardis. She’s skipping through time in it, emerging from its blue door into different moments in her life. Her lonely shell of a life. There are only so many people to see - here’s Mum, walking ahead of Bonnie on the pavement on their way to church. Here’s Dad, watching TV with dead eyes. Here’s Clive, having a glass of whiskey in his house with the big windows that Bonnie never got to see the sunlight shine through.
Here’s Bonnie, aiming the gun at Alyssa.
Then she dreams the Tardis goes back in time, back, back, back, Cold War, two World Wars, Napoleon, the storming of the Bastille, Alexander the Great marching his armies into Asia…. She gets out every now and then, wanders around blood soaked battlefields unnoticed, wanders aimlessly, not knowing what to say or do. She keeps going until she reaches prehistoric times… Now she’s alone with cavemen who can’t see her watching them. They hang around campfires doing whatever it is cavemen do to pass the time. Sitting on the pelts of skinned animals, drawing on the walls of their caves, grunting.
What’s she doing here?
Morning comes, and Bonnie watches the hunters and gatherers separate, the women and children leaving together to gather fruit and nuts. She follows them. A little apart from the rest of the group, a caveman mom teaches her caveman daughter how to pick berries off a blackberry bush. The daughter must be around four or five. She picks a handful of berries and squashes them, turning them into pulp in her small, chubby fist. The juice drips purple onto the ground. The caveman mom lifts her hand to strike the girl, and then Bonnie understands what she’s here for.
She steps between them and the hand hits Bonnie instead and goes no further. The caveman mum doesn’t seem to be able to see Bonnie and looks confused as to why her hand suddenly isn’t obeying her brain. Then she lowers the hand and just blinks at it, doing nothing. Knowing that her job is done, Bonnie gets back in the Tardis.
Everything will be okay. Bonnie knows it even before she opens the blue door and sees Mum walking with her to church, the two of them singing hymns the whole way. She opens the door again and sees Dad admitting to them that he’s lost his job, and Mum going with him to Jobcentre Plus. One more time and she's waking up next to a boy - not Clive but that cute guy who'd always hang around the information desk at the library where she used to work. Bright white sunlight peeks through the gaps in the blinds, and their clothes lie in a messy pile on the floor. There is no gun.
ALYSSA
Alyssa forgets to check the right side mirror before her parallel parking attempt, but her driving test goes okay otherwise. At the end of the test, back at the driving centre, the examiner lets her know that she’s passed. James is waiting by the water dispenser in the waiting room with his laptop out, but he puts it away and gets to his feet when he sees her. “How did it go?” he asks.
She throws her arms around his neck and screams, alarming everyone.
BONNIE
Dad testifies at the trial, but it’s not enough. It’s surprising to hear his voice in person - they talked on the phone a few times before he drove up from London, but the line flattened out his voice, stole all its timbre and cadences away. In his big, strong voice, he says some nice things about Bonnie that she knows she’ll remember forever. That she never did anything wrong as a kid. That she always tried her best to make everyone happy. He tells the judge about Mum, too, and the lawyer, the mousy lady, throws around the words “child abuse” repeatedly.
But it doesn’t work in the end - the judge rejects the insanity plea, and Bonnie gets a life sentence for the counts of murder and attempted murder. The lawyer looks more disappointed than Bonnie does, possibly on the verge of tears. This lady. As she’s led out of the courtroom, Bonnie decides that she isn’t disappointed at all. She’s taken two lives and nearly took two more, she deserves to spend the rest of hers in prison for what she’s done.
ALYSSA
The prosecution made Alyssa and James testify on the third day. It was nothing unexpected, they just had to confirm in court what Bonnie confessed to happening at the cafe that night. James went first and Alyssa went after him, and when she came out of the courtroom, she found James waiting for her in the lobby. He had his laptop out as usual, and was typing away.
“I need the loo,” she said when he looked up, before he could ask her how her testimony went. “Where is it?”
James pointed her down the hallway, and she went to find the bathroom.
There were reporters waiting outside the courthouse- they tried to ask Alyssa and James rapidfire questions on their way in - but inside, it was very empty. Alyssa didn’t run into anyone on her way to the bathroom. She took a while in there because she discovered that she needed a tampon and had to buy one from the machine by the sinks. When she came out, there was a guy by the vending machines down the hallway, staring at the selection of soft drinks like he was spaced out. Black. Handsome even though he was old. Big eyes like Bonnie. Must be Bonnie’s dad, thought Alyssa.
“Hey,” said Alyssa, when he turned in her direction at the sound of her footsteps.
“Hey,” he said back.
“Are you Bonnie’s dad?”
He nodded, turning his body fully away from the vending machine to face her. “And I suppose you’re Alyssa, right?”
“Mhm.”
They fell into an awkward silence. “I’m sorry about what happened to you,” said Bonnie’s dad at last. “About what- what my daughter did to you, I mean.”
Alyssa shrugged. “Her boyfriend did worse,” she said.
The guy’s expression darkened at that. He scratched the back of his neck and they fell into another silence. “I’m sorry about that too,” said Bonnie’s dad.
Alyssa shrugged again. “Whatever. See you later.”
“See you.”
As she headed down the hallway leading back to the lobby, she thought about Bonnie in the cafe that night. Bonnie raising the gun to her own chin, Bonnie’s hand trembling wildly. Bonnie really did look a lot like her dad - same big eyes, same thick lashes. Alyssa decided to turn around. “Hey,” she called out again.
Bonnie’s dad turned away from the vending machines.
“I think Bonnie needs help,” said Alyssa. “I think she really needs help.”
“I know,” said the dad.
“You should be there for her if you can.”
“I know,” said the dad again.
“Right,” said Alyssa. “I’m gonna go now. See you.”
Back at the bench where James was waiting, his laptop packed away now and all ready to leave, she stuck her hand out to him. He took it and let her pull him to his feet. She squeezed his hand tight. He squeezed back even tighter.
Hand in hand, they walked out of the lobby, into the afternoon sun. Into the crowd of reporters swarming around the courthouse like ants around something melted and sweet.
BONNIE
With Dad sitting this close to Bonnie, just across their table towards the back of their prison visiting room, Bonnie can see what she couldn’t when he was all the way over on the witness stand, which is just how much his face has changed over the years. The lines on forehead have gotten so deep, and his hair has turned to snow. But he’s happy now, he says, when she asks. He met someone a few years after he left home, had two sons with her, who are eleven and thirteen now. He shows her pictures of them smiling on a soccer field somewhere in London.
“Why didn’t you ever call?” asks Bonnie. “You never called, even on birthdays or Christmases.”
He didn’t want to hear Mum’s voice again, he says.
That’s not a good enough reason, thinks Bonnie.
And he felt guilty for leaving her, he says too.
That’s not a good enough reason either.
“You shouldn’t have kids if you aren’t gonna be there for them,” Bonnie tells him.
Dad bows his head. “I know, I’m sorry.”
“That’s better,” says Bonnie. Then, “Did you mean what you said in the courtroom? When you told the judge those nice things about me?”
“I did,” he says. “You were a good, bright kid. Things shouldn’t have turned out the way they did.”
“So will you come and visit me again?”
“Would like me to?”
“Yeah,” says Bonnie.
“Then I will,” promises Dad.
Afterwards, in her cell, Bonnie lays in bed and thinks for a long time, about Dad, and the trial, and how everything has turned out. Then she gets out her book and reads for a long time. She’s moved on from Existential Exit - these days, she’s reading The Art of Loving, though she’s only on the second chapter and doesn’t know how it ends yet.
She reads ten pages, stopping to make notes in the margins and to highlight lines that stand to her. Deciding to take a break after the tenth page, she gets up and does some stretches instead. Days in prison are so long - she’s seen Dad and read her book, and it isn’t even lunchtime yet. Sometimes the blankness frightens her. Then she remembers that there’s something else she’s meaning to do, but hasn’t gotten around to doing yet.
Under her bed is some stationary, a pen and some paper. She reaches for them and for her book again, lays a piece of paper on top of the book and starts writing.
This is the first of two letters. It goes like this:
Dear Alyssa,
I’m sorry I tried to hurt you…
ALYSSA
Today, it’s Alyssa who’s driving James to work. They don’t have to give Mum a ride - it turns out that Mum and the McDonalds manager broke up, and Mum’s unemployed again. Aunt Leigh is pissed off, but not too much. Now that James and Alyssa can afford to chip in for utilities and groceries, it isn’t so hard on her to put them all up anymore.
The drive to the town where James works takes them down the highway. It’s a cold, blustery night, Christmas just around the corner though it hasn’t started snowing yet. When Alyssa stops at the Tesco on the way home, to pick up groceries, she’ll drop by the Poundland next door and see if they have any good party decorations, to do up the house with Aunt Leigh for the dinner they’ve been planning.
She’s thinking about what she’ll get as she drives down the highway, maybe fairy lights, maybe gold tinsel to string up in the living room. She almost misses the sign up ahead, the one that says the next exit leads to the beach.
When she sees it, she turns towards James. “Do you wanna go on a date with me?” she asks. “Quick, you have three seconds to think about it!”
He frowns at her in confusion. “I thought we were getting dinner before work?”
“Yeah but we always get dinner together, that’s not a date, especially if it’s Nandos. Two seconds! Is it a yes-”
“Yes,” says James. “Yes. I’ll go on a date with you.”
So Alyssa takes the next exit, and drives for fifteen more minutes until they reach the beach. The roads get narrower and narrower as they go along, and if not for the moon shining through the trees, there wouldn’t be enough light to guide the way. When they reach, the beach is completely empty - they’re the only two nutters who’d think to go to the beach at this time of the year, Alyssa supposes. There is a chip shop next to the carpark but it’s closed, whether for the night or for the season she doesn’t know.
Alyssa parks the car and gets out without bothering to lock it - they’re the only ones around for miles, there’s no one to break in. She takes James’ hand and they walk as fast as they can with James’ bad leg, racing against the clock so he won’t be late for work. “You okay?” she shouts over the wind.
“I’m okay!” James shouts back. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay too!”
Better than okay - there’s something about the sea that goes straight to her head. It’s the salty air, the sounds of waves crashing into the shore. Everything moving, changing all at once. She wishes she could swallow up this energy along with the lungfuls of briny air, make it live inside her forever.
“You okay?” she asks James again. They’ve come to a stop, right on the edge of the water. “How’s your leg?”
“It’s okay,” he says.
“Does it hurt?”
“No,” he says, panting a little as he turns towards her, and she wonders if he’s lying.
He’s so lovely, she thinks, as she looks at his face in the moonlight. His pale, serious face with his dark eyes. Her entire life has been a shit show, so how did she get lucky enough to find this boy who took a bullet for her, who would have taken a second bullet for her, who’d do anything to make her smile, even go on a poorly thought out date that causes him physical pain?
"Wanna sit?" she asks.
"Yeah, okay," he says.
They collapse onto the sand together, Alyssa sitting with her knees drawn up, James stretching his feet out towards the water. She scoots towards him, until their thighs are touching, until she can put her head on his shoulder. This close, she can hear him breathing, his small breaths almost drowned out by the crashing of the waves. He reaches out too and his hand hovers. He lets it rest lightly on her waist.
It's his turn to ask "Is this okay?"
"Yeah, more than okay," says Alyssa.
She shuts her eyes, and just listens, and feels.
She's starting to feel like herself again.