by C. J. Skuse
Ugh, coffee. What used to be my heroin is now my abhorrence. Heil Foetus does not like coffee.
I’m not a foetus yet. I’m still an embryo until next week. Mmm, doughnuts.
That artless piss drip Linus is on the phone, leaning back in his chair, fingering his bald patch with his Mont Blanc. The subs are meerkatting at me over the tops of their monitors. Bollocky Bill’s eating a doorstep sandwich, the postman’s leaving with an empty sack, Johnny the photographer is getting his list of jobs from Paul. Claudia Gulper, AJ’s aunt, is on her phone, but affords me the briefest of glances.
My daddy you mean. Auntie Claudia! Yoo hoo! She killed him, Auntie Claudie! You have to save me!
Anyway, nothing has changed.
Then I go to my desk.
Some five-year-old bobble head in a short skirt and a blouse that looks like it’s been torn down from a care home window is sitting in my chair. My things have all vanished – my stapler with the sparkly Chihuahua stickers, my Sylvanian pencil case, the gonk on my monitor that AJ bought me, the coffee rings next to my Queen of Fucking Everything coaster. Even the coaster. The ‘Rhiannon’ label on my in-tray has been messily torn off and replaced with a clean one saying ‘Katie’.
All eyes are on me but nobody says anything.
The handle yanks down on Ron’s office door and out he struts –greasy-shiny, Cuban heels, trousers crotch-tight. ‘Sweetpea! How are you?’
I don’t know how to answer. I’m struck dumb.
‘This is Katie Drucker, our new Editorial Manager. Katie’s been holding the fort while you’ve been away.’
Katie stands up from my chair and smiles. I smell her breath before she opens her mouth. Marmite. Huge yellow teeth. In my mind, she is gaffer-taped to my chair and I’m pulling out those massive gnashers with the biggest pliers you’ve ever seen. ‘Hi, how are you?’
‘Fine thanks,’ I say.
She glances at Ron who takes the proverbial ball and runs with it as fast as he can in his Cuban heels, specifically made for short-arses like him. ‘So how’s everything?’
‘Fine,’ I say again.
‘Did you get our flowers?’
‘Yes.’
‘You poor thing, Rhiannon,’ says Katie Drucker, Patronising Fucker.
‘Do you want to pop in my office and have a quick chat?’ asks Ron.
No, I’d like to pop into your office and see if your £500 shredder will accommodate more than five fingers at once.
And don’t be fooled by the breezy tone and friendly-sounding ‘pop’ and ‘quick’. ‘Pop’ in particular is a caped crusader and ‘quick’ its evil Boy Wonder. This wasn’t going to be some brief, cosy chinwag – this was going to be a rip-your-head-off-and-shit-down-your-neck-conversation, beginning with ‘we have to boot your arse out the door’ but ‘how about a think piece on Craig before you do?’ as a drizzle of honey on the festering shit heap.
Ron summons Claudia over because when you’re a boss who’s as powerful as a fart in a bag, you can’t face altercations on your own. She grabs a pad and sweeps over from her desk, affording me a bright smile on the way.
‘Hi Rhee, how are you, Sweetpea?’
‘I’m FINE,’ I say, louder, garnering two more meerkat subs to peer atop their monitors. And it’s then that time does a Matrixy thing. Katie’s phone pulses in her knock off Vuitton handbag beside my desk – old school Britney. The main door opens and in strides that malodorous slunt Lana Rowntree. Tight grey skirt, chunky platforms but less of a swish to her blonde hair than usual. The woman who shagged my man and sent me off down this road in the first place. A human satnav of hideous betrayal. Her head is down. My throat aches.
It’s all. Her. Fault.
That’s my only thought as I watch her dish out papers and glide through the office towards the sales department, like nothing happened. Like her life hasn’t changed one bit. She doesn’t notice me.
Doesn’t see me coming.
The ache in my throat burns as I move closer to her, closer, closer –
I’m.
Not.
That.
Innocent.
I’m reaching out, grabbing a fistful of blonde, pulling it backwards. A waft of Herbal Essences flies past my face as she goes down. I don’t hear what I say. I don’t know who pulls me off her. I’m pounding her face. Over and over.
Oops, I did it again.
And the next thing I know, Jim is buckling my seatbelt and the engine’s running and his and Ron’s voices carry through the crack in the passenger window. Hormones. Just needs some time. Knew it was too soon. Cameras click. Someone calls my name. Look up for me, Sweetpea.
And I’m sitting there, picking flakes of her blood from my knuckles.
Friday, 6th July – 8 weeks, 5 days
1.People who tap dance – more unnecessary noise.
2.People who present any TV programme before 6 p.m.
3.Any of those design programmes about people who take a nice little abandoned barn and turn it into a soulless, four-storey gym with diamond encrusted swimming pool and a remote-control garden etc. Ugh.
Jim’s on the phone to Ron now – Lana isn’t pressing charges. I listened through the bannisters. He’ll come up in a minute and tell me what was said, he’s that kinda guy. I’ve already heard what I needed, I’m that kinda gal.
*
I made the front page! Gripper Killer Girlfriend in Office Brawl. Jim has been trying to keep me away from the news but we walked into town earlier and stopped outside the newsagent so Elaine could go in and get her Woman’s Own. There was a stand of papers outside.
‘Come on,’ said Jim, taking my arm, leading me towards the seafront.
I’m actually better at handling the attention than either of them gives me credit for, but of course I have to pretend it affects me deeply. It blew up the week I moved in. The angle then was PRIORY GARDENS SURVIVOR IS SICK KILLER’S GIRL. Elaine has banned all news bulletins from the house – she doesn’t want to know. Jim craves news so he has to buy his daily paper and read it in a café on the seafront to get his fix. I saw him once. The headline on his paper was THROW AWAY THE KEY: WILKINS’ SICK AND DEPRAVED ACTS SHOCK NATION and there was a picture of Craig being led from a police van, grey blanket over his head.
I preferred that one to
GRIPPER’S GIRL IS CRECHE ATTACK SURVIVOR… and she’s UP THE DUFF! One paper is calling him this year’s ‘Hot Felon’.
Photographers were outside the house most mornings, snapping away like a pack of North Face-clad alligators.
‘Oi, Priory Gardens!’
‘Oi, love, gissa quote, gissa smile!’
‘Hey Rhiannon, have you seen Craig Wilkins yet?’
‘Where are the other bodies, Rhiannon? Did he tell you?’
‘How’s he doing in prison?’
‘Did you know, Rhiannon?’
‘Did you help him?’
‘Wossit like living with a monster, Rhi Rhi?’
That winky journalist is usually there in the throng and I noticed this morning his lanyard says the Plymouth Star. He has black hair, a square jaw and his smile is knicker-wettingly blinding. If I met him in a bar he’d be paying me child support.
Some fucker should.
‘How are you, Rhiannon?’ he asked me.
‘I just want to get on with my life, thanks,’ I say, opening and closing the door once I’ve brought the milk in, flashing him some unsolicited leg through the dressing gown, as is my wont.
‘Is it true you and Craig were engaged?’ I hear as I flick the chain on.
On the days, I’m feeling up to it, I don my Victoria Beckham sunglasses, sweep my hair to one side, prepare my downcast face (not difficult – I look like a ghost most days thanks to the vom) and sashay through the melee throwing out breadcrumbs like ‘I’m fine thanks’ and ‘I knew nothing’.
I’m just giving them what they want – they see what they want to see. Not looking past what’s already been decreed – that Craig Wil
kins, my boyfriend, did knowingly and wilfully murder three people in cold blood and masturbate over their corpses. That moi – Rhiannon Lewis – she of that terrible crèche massacre at Priory Gardens all those years ago, is just the naive girlfriend. Remember when they brought her out of that house, wrapped in blood-soaked Peter Rabbit blankets? How can one girl get so unlucky twice in one lifetime? It’s too tragic.
When they can’t get a comment from you, they shove notes through the letterbox instead. Business cards, scrawled scraps of paper, all asking for me to get in touch. I could barely read the writing on some.
One of the notes was barely legible, scrawled on a scrap of notepaper ‘To my Sweet Messy House’ it looked like and there was a phone number underneath. I’m thinking it could be the local mental case – he sometimes posts rants about the government and how they’re trying to kill us through our tap water on his way up to the war memorial to talk to dead soldiers.
What I resent most of all about this kind of press intrusion is that all they’re interested in is Craig. How he did it. How he could rape that poor woman. What it was like for me living with a monster? How he’s feeling about being the most hated guy in the country right now.
He’s not actually. There’s always paedophiles. And according to Twitter there’s a guy who sprinkled his girlfriend’s ashes on his Shreddies who’s way worse.
I don’t know who I am now. It’s like one day I was in a couple with a flat and we had a baby on the way and the next I went into a phone box, spun around three times and now I’m Poor Little Murderer’s Preggo Girlfriend – I even come with accessories: eighteen-carat white-gold solitaire on my ring finger, meek smile, washed out Primark panda pyjamas, greasy hair and slight stomach protrusion.
Jim and Elaine walk along the seafront every morning – it’s their ritual. And they’ve allowed me and Tink to join in too. We sit on a bench with a hot drink and a bun – iced for them, brown seeded for me – and we sip and chomp in silence. Everything is small here. Small and safe. From across the estuary at Temperley, Monks Bay looks like a bucket of tiny houses tipped down a hillside by a giant child. There’s no design to it at all – it’s a higgledy-piggledy mess of streets too narrow to drive a Fiesta down without cracking your wing mirrors, a funicular railway, a church and quaint little B+Bs and cottages called names like The Sloop and The Brigantine.
For me, killing has been what makes life worth living. So at the moment, I’m not living, I’m merely existing. I’m like that polar bear I saw once at Bristol Zoo. Wandering back and forth, back and forth across his concrete. Safe, fed and secure but slowly going ever further out of my mind.
‘Go on, love, eat your roll,’ said Elaine. ‘You’ve got to keep your energy up. You didn’t eat your Protein Puffs this morning either.’
I took one bite. Tink leapt off my lap. She knew it was coming before I did. I vomited on the sea wall. A seagull promptly ate it while it was hot.
Monday, 9th July – 9 weeks, 1 day
1.Owner of the bulldog-with-the-ridiculous-bollocks walking along the seafront who laughed at Tink’s diamante collar and called her a ‘poof’.
2.Dentists – but hey it’s FREE now I’m up the duff so screw you, Rapey Eyes Mike. That’ll be £300’s worth of porcelain fillings and be quick about it.
3.The editor of Take a Break magazine.
Living with Jim and Elaine has its downsides – Jim’s adenoidal symphony in the dead of night is one. Elaine’s obsessive dusting is another. Other things they do irritate me for no apparent reason, like the both-getting-out-of-the-car-to-put-petrol-in thing. I just don’t get it.
But the best thing about living with them is their garden. Me and Jim have bonded over our mutual love of all things green and wild. All I had at the flat were window boxes and container herbs, all of which have since died – but here there are large raised beds and espalier apple trees along the fencing, Japanese maple, flowering dogwood, large white roses that look like ladies’ blouses and smell like heaven, ice cream tulips, tiny bleeding hearts. I try to name as many as I can – dahlias, camellias, blood red rhododendrons, alliums, yuccas, nasturtiums, silvery catmint, Michaelmas daisies, deep blue larkspur. The little herb bed with lemon thyme and rosemary and soft sage leaves I can’t stop rubbing along my lips —
Dammit, didn’t Ophelia do that in Hamlet, list all these flowers? Told you I was going out of my mind.
For Jim the garden isn’t ever finished – he’s always deadheading or pruning or stroking a leaf like he’s injecting himself with medicine. He says he could never live anywhere but England because of our climate and our flowers, though he has expressed an interest in going somewhere called the ‘Carrizo Plain’ in California. He read about it in the Daily Mail.
‘The Superbloom,’ he said, his eyes all twinkly. ‘I’d love to see that. The desert comes alive with wildflowers – purples, pinks, yellows – only for a month or so and then it disappears. It comes when the desert’s experienced a lot of rain and it’s extraordinary. Oh the colours, Rhiannon!’
Jim’s one of the few people I’ve ever met who encourages weeds too. He allows the back of the garden to grow wild for the butterflies and his shed is covered in ivy. Jim says other gardeners hate ivy because they think it throttles growth but Jim says it’s terrific and ‘does so much good for the ecosystem, the birds and the insects’.
He loves all plants, good or bad, pretty or ugly. Even ones that stink or the spiky ones that catch flies.
‘Ivy’s a tenacious little thing too,’ he says. ‘No matter what you do, she grows back, climbs up, there’s no stopping her. There’s an old wives’ tale that if ivy’s grown on a house it can protect you from witches.’
Gonna need a shit load more ivy then, Jim.
*
Went to the dentist’s after lunch. There was an article about Craig in the Take a Break magazine – a centre page all about his fetish for gay chatrooms and gimp masks. None of it’s true but since when has that mattered? I got quite the jolt when I saw him, smiling on a beach in Cyprus. We’d had sex after we took that, as the sun was going down. I’d been cut out of the picture – his Facebook avatar – it was a joint selfie originally.
Jim says we shouldn’t talk to the press, despite the wedges they’ve offered. The Gazette had wanted an exclusive, being my old employers and all, but Jim said no. No interviews, no news coverage, nothing.
‘You’re not up to it, Rhiannon. I’m putting my foot down. We can’t have you stressed so early on in your pregnancy. Think of the baby.’
I am thinking of the baby but I can’t help thinking I’m missing out. This could be my moment. It could be Miracle of Priory Gardens: Reloaded. I could be on Up at the Crack again, eating croissants, sitting between that homeless cat who wrote a bestseller and the kid who got all those retweets for chicken nuggets. But instead I’m here. Doing nothing. Playing Best Supporting Actress – an award where nobody ever remembers the winners.
I did do one useful thing today though – updated AJ’s Facebook status. It’s the one of the few times Facebook’s good for something – when you’re stealing people’s holiday photos to create the illusion that someone is absolutely not dead and in several cling filmed pieces in the boot of my car. There have already been some comments underneath the post, one from Claudia.
Glad you’re having a great time. Bulgaria looks as beautiful as you said it would. Wouldn’t hurt to ring your aunty once in a while! Love you, C XX
Need to find somewhere to bury him soon.
Jim’s been in – the police are finished with their investigations at the flat so I can go and pick up the rest of my stuff. He says he will drive me – later, I said. Gonna sleep now.
Friday, 13th July – 9 weeks, 5 days
Elaine saw this flyer in the library for The Pudding Club – a weekly social where ‘new, expectant and seasoned mummies get together for a natter and a cuppa and cake in mum-friendly spaces’. She suggested I go along.
The words ‘natter
’ and ‘cuppa’ make me want to tear off my eyelids.
I knew it would be a load of old clit but I went along for said ‘natter’ and ‘cuppa’ because according to Elaine ‘it isn’t healthy to be staying in all the time on your own’. She practically pushed me out of the door.
I met the group in a lilac and white tea shop off the seafront called Violet’s – the place to go in Monks Bay if you’re a) cake-oriented b) a mum and c) have several screaming children clinging to each limb.
The scene in the café was like a Muppet Babies homage to the Somme.
It was a wall of noise. Screaming. Squealing. Cupcake missiles. Tiny sandwich grenades. Mini roll IEDs. Babies wailing in adults’ arms or banging yoghurty spoons on high chair trays. One blonde toddler was full-body tantrumming on the carpet like she was in pain. I wanted to leave immediately.
The Pudding Club mummies were ensconced in a somewhat-quiet booth at the back. The leader of the gang was obviously Pinelopi or ‘Pin’ as she preferred – forty-eight, Greek and expecting her fifth. She’s got a PhD, drives a Jeep and is married to a guy called Clive who works in finance. Pin claims to have once shagged Prince Andrew but she says ‘it was years ago so he probably wouldn’t recall’. She presumably added this last bit in case one of us rang him to check.
Then there’s Nevaeh – Heaven spelled backwards – twenty-nine, black, gay and likes to be called Nev. She lives with her wife and kids and the kids’ dad Calvin which I think is the ideal family set up. If I’d have been born with three parents I’d still have one left. Nev intends to call her forthcoming twins Blakely and Stallone, presumably because she hates them. She smokes ‘to keep their weight down’ and calls everyone Darlin’. I asked Nev about childbirth.
‘They say the moment you first look into your baby’s eyes you’ll fall in love but you won’t – you’ll just be thinking “Thank Christ that’s over, get me a Subway.” Seriously, Darlin’. When Jadis was born, I hadn’t eaten for two days. She ripped me from earhole to asshole. My vadge looks like the Joker’s smile.’
