Page 12 of I Know How This Ends

Jules: Maggie pick up

Eve: We love you, PICK UP

Jules: We’re just going to keep calling

Missed call: Eve

Missed call: Jules

Missed call: Eve

Missed call: Mum and Dad

Mum and Dad: Are you OK sweetheart? Eve just rang. Call us back. Xxx

But I don’t.

Still exploding, I return home to obliterate the hell out of my punching bag, but my rage only escalates, shooting from my

clenched fists until the air around me is thick and crunchy, red and bruised.

It’s still not enough, so I run around my flat in a fury.

One by one, I pick up cardboard boxes, heave them all through the back door and toss them into a huge pile in the tiny garden, where they crack and break like bones.

Breathing heavily, I grab two full bottles of vodka from the top of an empty kitchen cupboard, take a couple of large swigs from one on my way back outside and then pour the rest of it on top.

Still drinking from the other one, I grab a pack of matches, strike one and throw it.

It flickers, goes out.

Another match flares and disappears.

Teeth clenched, I step closer—where the hell is fire when you actually need it—bend down and purposefully hold a flame to

the edge of a soaked box, watching in satisfaction as light creeps along the edges.

Then I step back to watch as everything I own goes up in flames. The life I packed away, believing that one day I would unpack

it. That one day there might be something worth keeping.

“Um.” My neighbor—a polished, pretty woman in her forties—pokes her head over the fence. I have no idea what her name is:

since moving in two months ago, I haven’t bothered asking. “Is everything... alright?”

It must be nearly midnight by now, and I have turned the garden bright orange.

We both watch as the flames climb higher.

The box marked “PHOTOS” disintegrates and I watch years of faces turn red, then black, then gray before they disappear. Behind

me, I feel my neighbor’s sympathy for my clear mental breakdown mixed with a palpable panic that the flames will take the

whole road down while she remains too polite to say anything.

“Yup,” I say flatly. “All good here.”

Because now my flat is finally empty, and so am I.

I sleep well for the first time in months: no dreams, no nightmares, no late-night sweats or memories crowding around my bed

like curious ghosts. When I wake nearly twelve hours later, I feel calmer. Cleaner.

As if I’ve set myself on fire and erased myself too.

It was dramatic, it was unnecessary, hyperbolic and extreme.

It was totally worth it. I feel a sudden, latent flash of guilt—it could all have been donated to charity—before I decide that nobody else wants my memory-soaked items either.

Who knows what those emotions could do, carried into unsuspecting houses.

It would be irresponsible to send my ghosts to haunt others instead of just me.

Significantly calmer now, I settle down to work properly.

With renewed energy, I blitz through my emails, messages and comments. The sponsor requests are becoming increasingly ridiculous.

Margot the Meteorologist is not being offered designer handbags, coffee machines and lifestyle gildings. This morning, while

I was fast asleep, I received a large wooden blackboard for children—complete with windsock, thermometer and rain collector,

highly inaccurate and overpriced—and an opaque mushroom-shaped umbrella with a cartoon smiley face that renders you dry but

essentially blind.

Slightly frustrated, I rip open yet another new package.

It’s an adult PVC jumpsuit—pale pink and transparent—that goes over your clothes (hopefully), zips right up to your chin and

has a bizarre and extremely wide ruff tied around the neck that sticks out half a meter and makes you look like a kinky triceratops.

Confused, I scan my inbox again for some kind of context.

Dear Miss Wayward,

We here at Rain of Terror have been very impressed with your rapidly building platform, and have been watching you closely

for some time.

OK: a little bit creepy.

Our interests appear to align perfectly—it’s snow joke!—so we are suggesting a mutually beneficial brand collaboration between

us, with you as our Ambassador. We would like you to introduce our Brand-New Thunderwear range, which we will be launching

in the next few weeks.

This morning a package containing the I-THUNDER-STAND-3000 should have arrived.

If you could wear this in one of your videos,

Not a solitary snowball’s chance in hell.

we will compensate you to the sum of ￡5,000. An opportunity not to be “mist”!

Love,

Your friends at Rain of Terror xxx

Ugh. I pick up the jumpsuit again and swallow.

That’s not money I can afford to turn down, given that I just incinerated all my belongings. No flowing white dresses and

gifted tropical holidays for Margot Wayward. Prostituted ridicule it is.

Cursing repeatedly—sorry, Mum—I do my hair and make-up for no apparent reason. Then I sit in front of my green screen, set

up the camera and pull the creaky rain suit over a plain navy dress. Sighing loudly, I pull up the hood. The ruff sticks out

so widely I look like a fly-fishing Elizabethan. It’s supposed to keep your body dry, which makes no sense at all—rain is

rarely vertical, so it’s just going to collect until I’ve accidentally drowned myself—but here we go.

Already feeling claustrophobic, I reach forward and switch on the camera before pride and ego get the better of me.

Fuck my fucking stupid life.

“Greetings, meteorologists!” I smile broadly, cheeks squeaking slightly against the plastic. “Margot here! I’m here today

with my new weather obsession! This is the I-Thunder-Stand-3000”—kill me—“and it’s absolutely adorable . So much fun! Now you can truly Stand Out in the Rain!”

That line was my addition, and I’m actually kind of proud of it.

“Now, obviously this is a sponsored post, which I have to say for legal reasons.” I wink jauntily at the camera—set me on fire too. “But I genuinely think it’s brilliant! So original! And practical! I know what I’ll be wearing next time there’s a downpour!”

A bag over my head, so that nobody ever recognizes me again.

“So check out my friends over at @thunderwarez and maybe give one of these beauties a spin for only...”

I pause so I can check the paper that came in the package. Are they kidding me?

“...a hundred pounds! You’ll be striking, just like lightning!”

Then I turn off the camera and peel myself out of the sweaty plastic as fast as I can, sounding like a ripped crisp packet.

Yet another flash of intense guilt. I’m not just unhinged and environmentally unfriendly: I’m a fraud, a liar, a peddler of

shit goods. Less than a year ago, I was running a team of trained meteorologists in a beautiful glass building with thirty-two

and a half days of holiday allowance and a lovely bonus package, plus free coffee. Now I’m a joke in front of two hundred

and fifty thousand total strangers and I have to make my own beverages.

My phone beeps:

He lo is

Evry thing

Ok I hop

The rage inside me evaporates, replaced by guilt.

To be clear: I’m pretty sure that in the past I used to have more than two emotions, but at some point in the last eight months

I’ve been filed down into a red spike of anger and culpability.

Love you. I’ll be there in ten. Xx

Quietly, I let myself in through the front door.

My grandfather’s house—less than a mile from where I live now—is dim and smells faintly of something green, mossy, like a

forest. Frowning, I pick up a splayed handful of unopened post from the doormat and riffle quickly through it. A few handwritten

postcards—a gaudy one from my parents, featuring a beach—and envelopes with the spidery, delicate handwriting of people over

eighty, a couple of official brown envelopes. The back of my neck suddenly prickles: my ninety-three-year-old grandfather

is not somebody to let correspondence lie dormant. He is normally by the door every morning, his ornate, bird-shaped letter

opener at the ready.

Slipping my shoes off, I walk barefoot through the hallway.

I poke my head into the kitchen, frowning: there are half-filled cups of tea and dirty plates piled next to the sink. When

I glance at the calendar (“Garden Birds of Great Britain”), I realize in shock it’s still showing July: a photo of a blue

tit. The tiny bird is bright eyed and somehow courageous, with its yellow chest fluffed out proudly, bright sapphire head

and a black stripe through the eyes that always reminds me slightly of a superhero’s mask. But it’s been August now for three

whole weeks. The turning of the months has always been an occasion in this house. I’d arrive on the first day of every month,

straight after school, and my grandfather would meticulously tear off the previous month with amused gravitas.

“What’s past is prologue,” he’d say, handing me the ripped-out page.

“Cool,” I’d say in awe, with no idea what he was talking about.

But now the baby bird remains, the season has not changed; the house is locked in a month that has been and gone. I wipe my

finger on the kitchen counter and stare at it: it’s gray and powdered. Something feels... wrong.

Extremely confused now, I poke my head into the sunlit living room.

My grandfather is sitting in his huge leather armchair, facing the garden. His face is tilted slightly, his pale blue eyes fixed on something in the distance, and it seems for just a minute as if all the light in the world is coming from him.

“If you’re here to rob me,” he says calmly, without turning round, “I should let you know that my vault full of rare jewels

is actually upstairs, so you’re wasting your time hunting around the kitchen.”

I laugh. “Where’s the silverware again?”

“I’m sitting on it.” My grandfather chuckles. “Don’t forget the gold coins tucked under my mattress. It’s getting rather bumpy

at night.”

With another grin, I cross the living room and kiss his soft cheek.

“Hello, my grandad.”

“Hello, my Meg.”