Love You Dead

37 Fourteen years ago

The bandages had come off, and she looked like shit. Black eyes, her face blotched blue and red with bruises. But...

Her nose was brilliant! The kink had gone and now, instead, it was a perfect small, straight nose.

An exact copy of Cassie’s.

The surgeon had done a brilliant job, working from the photograph of her sister that she’d brought in to the Harley Street clinic for her first consultation. On both her nose and her chin.

For the next two weeks she barely ventured out of her small flat, which was a short distance back from the sea in Brighton’s Kemp-town. And when she did, she was glad of the biting cold, because she could wrap part of her face in a scarf, mask her eyes with dark glasses and keep a cap pulled low.

Every day, checking in the mirror, the bruising was fading. The sculpting of her jaw the surgeon had performed was a masterpiece. Every day an increasingly beautiful woman was developing in the mirror, like a photograph in a darkroom tank, steadily coming to life.

Like the photographs of Cassie she studied daily, holding them beside her face in the mirror. As the scars faded, a more and more perfect image of Cassie appeared.

She had blown almost every penny of her childhood savings on this series of operations on her face and body, including money she had stolen over the years from her parents — as well as money she’d drawn out on the fake credit card she’d obtained — and it had been totally worth it!

And it was worth all the hard work waiting tables at a bistro in Hove in order to be free of her parents and independent.

They might have rejected her throughout her childhood as the ugly duckling, while they doted on Cassie. Poor long-dead Cassie.

But she hadn’t finished with them.

A few weeks later, early on a Sunday evening, when she was certain her parents would be in, Jodie drove in her Mini to Burgess Hill. She hadn’t seen them for months, ignoring the messages her mother left from time to time, and declining her request to spend Christmas with them.

Instead she’d spent the day alone in her bedsit, bingeing on movies she’d been storing up to watch, getting smashed on Prosecco and stuffing her face with a ridiculously large Chinese takeaway. She decided it was the best Christmas she’d ever had.

She parked outside the family house and walked past her mother’s shiny new Audi, freshly washed and cleaned — no doubt by her father earlier today — and rang the front doorbell. The stupid triple dingdong-dingdong-dingdong chimed.

Inside, very faintly, she could hear the television.

Then the door opened and her mother stood there, in a baggy jumper, jeans and slippers. And just stared.

She heard her father’s voice above the sound of the television in the living room. ‘Who is it? Are we expecting anyone?’

Her mother continued staring straight at Jodie. As if she was staring at a ghost. Then she began shaking and called out, in tears, her voice quavering, ‘Alastair! Alastair!’

Jodie stood and stared back. Her hair was dyed blonde and styled, from one of the photographs she had taken away, exactly the way Cassie’s was on the day she died.

Her father came out into the hall, in loose-fitting brown cords and a blue V-neck over a pink shirt. He stopped in his tracks when he saw her, doing a double-take.

‘Oh my God, what have you done, Jodie?’ her mother said. ‘Why — why’ve you done this?’

‘Oh,’ Jodie said, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. ‘You know, Sunday afternoon, hey! Just thought I’d swing by as I hadn’t seen you guys in a while.’

Her father stepped forward into the doorway, livid with rage. ‘This is some kind of very sick joke, Jodie.’

Jodie shrugged. ‘Oh, I see, you don’t like my new look.’

‘You nasty little bitch,’ he spat back. ‘You’ll never change. Never. Just go away. Get away from our house, get out of our sight. Your mother and I never want to see you again.’