Zahara knew she was the sun. The whole world could gather round and bathe in her light or it could fuck off and blow its brains out with a solar-powered gun.
She was torn between all sorts of extremes. She was attractive but hated the way she looked. Her make-up went on and on and on and her eyelashes wore eyelashes. She was going to be a world-famous singer (slash artist slash wakeboarder slash fashion blogger) but if anyone ever heard her sing in the shower she would definitely kill herself. She couldn’t care less if people liked her but had 15,421 friends and felt achingly alone.
Zahara painted her windows black on Monday and smashed them all in on Tuesday. “Don’t look at me,” she seemed to be saying on Monday, then “Go on! Take a good long look then you bastards! Stand there all day if you want to!” on Tuesday. She was also actually shouting these things while live-streaming the events with her camera slash telephone in a move that was 50% poorly-paid advert for curtainsonline.com and 50% genuine cry for help.
On Wednesday she started writing the URL of her Amazon Wishlist on her stomach in cigarette burns and it hurt too much (she got halfway through the second ‘w’ in ‘www’) so she finished it off with lipstick. Then she drew a ring of lipstick around each of her eyes, slipped – shivering – into a homemade microkini fashioned from pre-1997 fifty pence pieces and uploaded a photo of herself to the Internet. 173 people liked it, six threatened to rape her and four days later she received some extremely powerful magnets in the post.
On Thursday she wrote an email pitching her idea for a TV show called “Mums on the Run” – heavily expectant mothers abandoned in remote locations with mere hours to find their way to a hospital – to Channel 4, stipulating that she would of course star in the pilot and was of course 110% willing to become pregnant. Her hand had gone a little blue and was shaking.
On Friday the pipes froze and Zahara called a plumber. She heard him humming as he explored her heating system and asked whether he fancied being the other half of a fucking amazing soon-to-be-world-famous horrorcore-folk duo (in lieu of payment). The plumber pointed at a broken window and said it would probably be best if she got a glazier. Zahara’s teeth chattered. She said I’m not keen on trios but if you reckon this guy’s good we can give him a listen.