Chapter One

Cake - a novel in bits

When I was a child my ideal of adulthood was to be able to eat six doughnuts in a row without anyone telling me off. When I left home at eighteen I ate six doughnuts in a row and promptly threw up. This must be how Brittany Spears feels every day, choked on the fumes of the fairy pink childhood, gagging on candyfloss. Adulthood is a bad thing. A very bad thing.


Chapter One:

It was a property show that did it. A smug show where smartly dressed people moved out of London to build an eco house out of cat shit in the Chiltern Hills in order to raise Poppy, Ophelia and Boudicca, far away from the corrupting influences of the city they had gentrified to death. It made her want to kill herself. It seemed like as good a time as any.

She'd threaten to kill herself with frightening regularity from the age of nine, mostly due to an obsession with Marilyn Monroe and a distinct lack of knowledge about what killing herself would actually be like. It was a fashion thing and, like the shell suits, bum bags and perms she'd mocked her generation for, a terrible mistake.

She hadn't resurrected those most self centred of plans until six months ago during the moment when he'd separated out all their cd's but left her most of his, as if he didn't need the first Rage Against the Machine album in his new perfect life. She'd been distracted, however, when someone had started re-running Dallas. She couldn't kill herself during Dallas, it would be disrespectful. Plus they might take the hint and re-run Dynasty if enough people didn't kill themselves and instead kept watching.

But they hadn't re-run Dynasty, they'd abandoned Dallas and Natasha became aware that the rest of the world was a fucked up place. Finally her death would have a mean. A final protest against dropping standards in UK broadcast media. "Dear BBC oh why oh why oh why have you driven me to kill myself?"

She updated Facebook: "Natasha is killing herself to protest against the dropping standards in UK broadcast media" before mixing a bottle of very cheap whisky and six lemsips.