39 DIY – Do It Yourself
Chapter 40 PDA – Public Display of Affection
Chapter 41 WTAF – What The Actual Fuck?
Chapter 42 BRB – Be Right Back
05:35
Saturday 31 October
From where she stood in the doorway of the bedroom of 39 Blackbird Road, London, E14, Freddie could see blood. A lot of blood. The plastic overall she was wearing rustled in time with her clipped, panicked breaths. The blue walls were splattered with red, as if a food fight had taken place with thin, runny Lidl ketchup. But it wasn’t tomato sauce. She could taste it: metallic. It was coating her tongue. Sweat stuck clumps of her thick frizzy hair to her forehead, loosened her glasses on her nose, and opened her pores to the gore. She was absorbing it.
Dread pinpricked her skin. The source was to her right, shielded by the open room door. There was still time to leave. To turn back. To run. She could be home in thirty; pretend none of this had happened. Heavy footsteps fell on the stairs behind her. More people were coming. She had to decide.
Seize the story. It was now or never. Opportunity follows struggle. Fear makes you braver. Despite deriding the inspirational quotes that appear over photos of sunsets and the ocean on Facebook, Freddie was disappointed to discover that when she reached her own life crossroads her brain filled with nothing but clichés.
To shut herself up, she stepped forward. Reassuring herself: it was just like the movies. You’ve seen it all before. (The time she’d had to lie down after watching a beheading video online didn’t count. This was different. She was prepared.) She turned.
The floor undulated under Freddie’s feet. The body of what had once been a man was slumped over a desk, his neck cut like deli salami, blood pooling round his bare feet. A computer, its wormhole screensaver winding over the monitor seemed to propel blood toward her. The last thing she heard before the dark red obliterated everything was her childhood friend Nasreen Cudmore’s voice.
‘Freddie Venton, what the hell are you doing here?’
Fifteen hours earlier
14:32
Friday 30 October
Sat on the windowsill, trying to block out the late lunch drinkers in the Queen Elizabeth pub below, Freddie pressed her phone to her ear. How, in Dalston, in the middle of the country’s capital, could this be the only place to get signal in her room? Her new flatmate – what was his name, short guy, wore glasses, worked in ad sales, always out drinking after work. Pete? P – something. Edged into her room, en route to the kitchen, mouthing, ‘Sorry’. Must be his day off.
She nodded. Three people in one pokey two-bed flat had seemed a great money-saving plan. But that was five flatmates ago, when she’d actually known the two girls she shared with. Now she slept in the lounge, the sofa claimed as a bed, and all and sundry crossed her room to get their breakfast cereal. Privacy and mobile reception were for other people.
Freddie gurned at her reflection in the seventies mirror above the faux thirties fireplace opposite. Her brown hair, cut by a mate with kitchen scissors, sprang away from her shoulders like she’d been shocked. Flashes of red hair chalk zigzagged toward her DIY fringe. Her legs, stubbornly plump despite working on her feet and taking more than the recommended 10,000 steps a day, poked out from beneath her nightshirt (a T-shirt that had belonged to a long-forgotten one-night stand). Unless she squished herself in with her hands or a belt, she never looked like she had a waist. Her torso, like her mum’s, was square, with the addition of breasts that practically needed scaffolding to restrain them. She wiggled her black plastic rectangular-framed glasses. Not traditionally beautiful.
The line in her ear clicked, and the noise of the busy newsroom came through. ‘Freddie.’ Sandra, the deputy editor of The Family Paper online, sounded tense and tired. Business as usual. ‘Is there a problem with this week’s copy?’
‘No. No problem.’ Freddie pushed her back into the cold glass, willing the signal to hold. ‘It’s just I’ve been writing the Typical Student column for three years now…’
‘Time flies when you’re having fun.’
Freddie thought of the two years she’d spent on the dole, clawing her way into glass collecting jobs, churning out pitches, unpaid articles and free features during the day – a blur of coffee, cigarettes and unpaid bills since she graduated. ‘Yes, it is fun. And popular. Didn’t I get over 90,000 hits last week?’
Sandra didn’t deign to confirm or deny this figure.
‘Well I was wondering if, given the column’s popularity, I might get paid for writing it?’
There was silence on the other end. Only the sound of the UK’s busiest and most hated newsroom could be heard. The clamorous grind and grunt as the newspaper was conceived in a hail of profanities all journalists told you was the best-paid gig. The one that Freddie had written one hundred and fifty-six eight-hundred-word columns for, and been paid precisely nothing by.
‘Sandra?’
‘We don’t have the budget. If you could get the column into the print edition then you’d be paid,’ Sandra sighed. Freddie noticed it was more from annoyance than shame.
‘How
