She closed her eyes against the negative thoughts. She had read somewhere that you had to force negative thoughts from your mind and think positive. But think positive about what? What did you think about when there was nothing positive in your life? When your whole world was built on quicksand and could be snatched from you in a millisecond?

Her husband loved her, that was a positive she supposed, but he could be shot dead, stabbed, maimed or disappear at any given moment. She knew better than anyone that that was the kind of world they lived in. So it was hard to think positive about that. She had a nice home and a caring family, but then so did a lot of people, so that wasn’t really that big a positive when you analysed it properly. That was more of a human right, surely?

Celeste sighed heavily and looked at herself in her bedroom mirror. It was a large, very expensive mirror from France, and it made you look slimmer. But she knew it was just a trick of the glass so that, too, was built on a lie. Her whole life was built on lies and deceit, and she was powerless to do anything about it. She studied herself for a few moments. It was rare she ever looked at herself; she loathed what she was, what she had become. Outwardly she still looked OK. If she was on a bus – not that she ever got buses these days – she knew she would fit in with people’s general opinion of someone normal. They couldn’t see the blackness inside her, the rottenness that was at her core, and that bothered her. Really bothered her. It proved to her that you could never really trust anyone, because you couldn’t see inside of them. You couldn’t really ever know what was in their minds or, more importantly, their hearts.

Like James Junior killing that poor kitten. He looked like an angel that child, but he was filthy, putrid just like the rest of them. She was relieved now about her miscarriages, that she didn’t have any children. How would you ever know what they were really like? Imagine having a baby which grew up to be a monster, a killer? By then you already loved it, had made plans for it, and then it turned around and kicked you and all your hard work right in the teeth.