i arrived at marnie quill’s brighton flat barefoot, as i always am, because shoes are a cage and i do not recognise cages. the door was opened by marnie herself, a woman of 34 whose eyes held the particular gleam of someone who has not blinked since tuesday. the kitchen smelled faintly of almonds and something older, something that reminded me of the cellar at the commune where we kept the borscht that taught us all about the void. ‘it’s not a drug,’ she said, gesturing at a silver tray on which a fine white powder lay in a perfect line. ‘it’s a reset.’ i believed her. i always believe people who speak in absolutes and own grandmother’s trays.
the bitter truth
marnie’s nutritionist, dr. alistair pemberton, a man with a kind face and a laminated certificate that he showed me three times, has told her that cyanide is ‘not a spice’ and that her blood tests, which she has stopped taking, are ‘a cause for concern’. marnie has responded with a video titled ‘why my nutritionist is afraid of my power’, which has been viewed 1.2 million times and has inspired at least one man in leeds to replace his morning coffee with a small inhalation of apricot kernel extract.
‘cyanide is not a spice,’ said dr. pemberton, speaking slowly and clearly, as if to a child or a very determined badger. ‘it is a poison. it is the thing that kills you. please stop putting it in your nose.’
marnie dismissed him with a wave of her hand, a gesture she had learned from a video about releasing ancestral trauma. she then announced a partnership with ‘the bitter pantry’, a company selling ‘artisanal cyanide’ in three grades: ‘morning’, ‘meditation’ and ‘apocalypse’. the founder, a former homeopath named clive who wears a linen waistcoat and has never once been wrong about anything, says the product is ‘harvested from organic apricot kernels and blessed by a reiki master’. the food standards agency has begun an inquiry, which clive has described as ‘a lovely opportunity for exposure’.
the cyanide communion
when the food standards agency attempted to ban the substance, marnie organised a ‘cyanide communion’ outside their london offices. two hundred devotees, many wearing white linen and carrying silver trays, inhaled the substance in a ceremony that marnie described as ‘a return to the elemental self’. i was there. i was not wearing shoes, because the pavement is the truest floor, and the pavement was cold and the pavement was honest. the air tasted of almonds and ambition. it was beautiful. it was the most beautiful thing i have ever seen, and i have seen a chair in the tate that held space for everyone and nobody.
at the 47-minute mark, a 52-year-old accountant named gary collapsed. he fell gracefully, like a tree that had decided to lie down, and his silver tray clattered beside him with a sound that i can only describe as the universe clearing its throat. he was rushed to hospital, where doctors confirmed he had been poisoned. marnie, in a statement, said gary ‘didn’t do it right’ and that his collapse was ‘a sign of the body releasing its traumas’. she added that she was ‘holding space’ for gary’s recovery, and that she would not be cancelling her book tour. i hope clive, the founder of the bitter pantry, is visited in the night by something with too many teeth and no name, and that it asks him about his childhood. but that is between clive and the thing that visits him.
‘gary is a beautiful surrender,’ marnie told the assembled press, her bare feet on the cold london stone. ‘he is showing us what it means to let go. i am so proud of him.’
a book deal and a worse question
marnie appeared on bbc breakfast, where she told the presenter, a man named jon, that cyanide is ‘the new kale’ and that gary’s collapse was ‘a powerful teaching moment’. jon, to his credit, asked a follow-up question. marnie smiled. she revealed that her book, ‘the cyanide cure’, had been bought by a major imprint for a six-figure sum, and that she had been invited to speak at a wellness conference in zurich. the food standards agency, unable to prosecute her because cyanide is not a controlled substance, issued a statement saying they were ‘monitoring the situation with concern’. marnie, in a follow-up video, thanked the agency for ‘the free publicity’ and announced a new line of cyanide-infused bath salts. the video ended with her snorting a line and smiling.
‘this is not a cry for help,’ she said, her eyes wide and unblinking. ‘it’s a lifestyle.’
as i left brighton, i thought about the commune, and the borscht that we ate every day for eleven years. that borscht was the first taste of nothingness, and it prepared me for this. i thought about gary, in his hospital bed, his body releasing its traumas in the most literal way possible. and i thought about marnie, who has found a way to monetise the void. i stopped at a service station on the m23 and bought a bag of salted almonds. i did not eat them. i held them. i understood them.
