Chapter 4

Becky Parker hated having her period, it just amplified her negative and miserable feelings about life. She was also finding it hard to deal with her growing sexuality. She stared at herself, naked, in the mirror, her breasts perking up with each month and the light stubble between her legs growing in density. She shaved her mons in the shower every day, still preferring the little girl’s look.

She loved the forum, and chatting with BellJarMuse, aka Edwina Pembroke.

BellJarMuse proposed her a solution to her ennui. Wipe her computer, dispose of it, throw away her phone, write out suicide letters, and leave them in her bedroom to be found. Then find a beautiful place and go there and decide whether to kill herself.

If she killed herself, there would be no clue where she had gone or how she had died and it would be a mystery. If she decided against it, she would need a new phone and laptop and would be able to start life anew and perhaps never chat with BellJarMuse again.

This strongly appealed to Becky’s romantic nature. She thought of Syliva Plath.

“Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.”

BellJarMuse even suggested a date - 29th September, St Candace’s day, for women poets, but Becky was impatient.

“I’m gonna do it tomorrow” she typed.

“What! Where?”

“A beautiful place near me, it’s on a river, it leads to the sea. If I drown, I will get pulled out to sea and never found.”

‘Clever fucking girl’, thought Edwina.

It was 1am. She woke up Edward.

“Ed! Ed! It’s Becky, she’s gonna do it tomorrow!”

“Do what?”

“Kill herself.”

“What, wait, she told you. What do we do?”

“Hang on...”

But Edwina could not get much more information out of the girl. Becky just reiterated she was so happy she could talk with her, but she needed to end things one way or another. She said she was writing her suicide letters now and would make another decision tomorrow morning, then her final decision at the spot after that.

“Can you tell me the hour, so I can say a prayer, not to God, but to my own spirit?”

It was naff, but Becky bought it. “I will message you tomorrow morning, when I get up, OK?”

Edwina could hardly sleep after that. “God Ed, this could be our chance!” She checked her air tag. She was in her house, an hour’s drive away from the Pembrokes.

“We should get ready now. Is the basement ready?” she looked at Edward with a fanatical expression.

“Well, as ready as it will ever be...”

“Good. It’s Sunday so at least we don’t need to worry about work, thank God. Even so. We need to be ready Ed, we need to be close by to follow her!”

“Should I set the alarm?”

“No alarm!” Edwina snapped, her voice sharp enough to cut glass. “Sleep? I couldn’t even if I tried, not with this hanging over our heads. I think we should get our things ready now. Now! We’ll drive to her house and wait. We have to be close.”

She was a wild prophetess, her eyes blazing with a purpose that both terrified and strangely excited Edward.

“Right, OK, we will do that. Let’s have a think first, we will need the supplies, the cattle prod and clothes...

“Yes” intoned Edwina solemnly “we will need everything. Even my phone, to trace her air tag. Sorry Ed, we need to take that risk.”

Edward nodded grimly. There would never be a zero risk opportunity.

Meanwhile, Becky slept soundly. She suddenly felt at peace with herself. She awoke the next morning, feeling great, and kissed her mother and sister. But she still had the letters.

Her hormones coursed through her. Yes, she thought, she was still going to do it...

Becky left the house carrying her laptop, phone, and diary. A short distance away, she dumped everything in a bin.

She then took a taxi, paid for it with cash, and went to the train station. She changed her top inside out and switched baseball caps, still thinking of herself as a spy hiding from the cameras, plotting the perfect suicide/disappearance, then again paid cash for a train ticket. After a relatively short journey, she got off at the entrance to a large natural park.

She wandered in and walked all over, breathing in the autumn air. She looked at families with their children and started to feel guilty about her own parents and her sister, Genevieve.

She came to the place, a place she had fallen in love with as a younger child visiting. The river gushed along, over a small old bridge. She was still wearing her baseball cap, hoping that no one would recognize her later should she kill herself. She imagined her body, washed up hundreds of miles out to sea, in Denmark, or Scotland.

The air grew quiet. There was no one around. Becky got up on the edge of the bridge and looked down. The water was fast-running and cold. Could she do this?

She shut her eyes and counted to a hundred.

Suddenly, she heard a man and his dog approach, and hid behind some bushes, waiting for him to pass. When he finally did, she came back out, heart pounding. Would that be the last person she would ever see?

She went back to the edge of the bridge. If she didn’t do this, she would go home and tell her parents she had lost her phone and laptop, she could start anew. And she knew they would forgive her. She could destroy all the suicide letters.

She felt for the stones in her pocket, to weigh her down like Virginia Woolfe. But she wasn’t Virginia Woolfe, she had achieved nothing. She was fourteen. And her family still loved her.

One by one, she took each stone out of her pockets and threw them into the river. With each stone gone, she grew more and more resolute. She was not going to kill herself. She would go home, and start anew. No more suicide forums, no more late-night chats with weird freaks. Time to grow up, she thought.