by C. J. Skuse
‘No,’ said Max, appearing in the doorway behind us, with Corey standing beside him. They looked like bouncers. Bespectacled, desperately-in-need-of-a-few-bench-presses bouncers, but still, there they were, looking mean, and I was glad of it. ‘You’ll just have to tell their mum and dad they’re not coming back.’
Clem started crying harder. ‘I want Mum, Alfie!’
‘She’s going to kill us when she hears we’ve been back here,’ he muttered, wringing out his T-shirt on the roadside. ‘You’ve got to let them go. Please, look, we’re sorry.’
‘No,’ snapped Corey, shoving past Max and getting right in his face. ‘You’ve asked for this, all of you. We know what you’ve done. And this is the price you’re going to pay.’
They both just looked at us, all of us in turn, like we were the Avengers or something. They didn’t know what to say, or what to do. I felt twelve feet tall.
Alfie scowled at Corey. ‘What’s wrong with him then?’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said, stepping forward. ‘That’s what I want to know.’ I pointed to the spot just in front of me where I wanted them both to stand. They came, both shivering and on the verge of tears.
‘If you want your cousins out of that room, you better be nice. You better give back ALL the money you’ve taken from Fallon over the summer. And you better promise her that you will never ride your bikes past here ever again.’
‘What do we get in return?’ asked Alfie.
‘Your cousins don’t get turned into meat pies. That’s what you get.’
‘We don’t have the money.’ Clem sniffled, her little body shivering in the night air. ‘We spent it all on sweets.’
‘We’ll have the sweets then,’ said Max, holding his hand out expectantly.
‘We don’t have them here,’ said Alfie. ‘They’re at home. Under my bed.’
I looked at Fallon. She stepped in front of me. ‘I’ll let your cousins go. But first thing tomorrow morning, you better leave those sweets on the doormat with a little note apologising for what you’ve done. Otherwise…’
‘Otherwise what?’ sobbed Clem.
Fallon wasn’t saying anything. Corey wasn’t saying anything either. And Max was just staring at me. So I had to come up with the ultimate threat, right there and then.
‘Otherwise, we’ll be watching you. When you go to bed at night, when you’re walking to school, when you’re riding your bikes through the railway tunnel. We’ll grab you when you least expect us, and we will put you into sacks. Then we’ll sling you in Rosie’s truck with all the other DEAD BODIES. She’ll bring you back here. To the Skin Room. And she’ll chop you up one by one and drop you in the Mincer. And then you’ll probably end up inside a pie, which we’ll leave on your parents’ doorsteps. That’s what we’ll do.’
Both of the kids agreed to our demands on the spot. Without another word, Fallon went on inside, flanked by the two boys, and unlocked the basement door. The other two Shaws spilled out, running for the front door as fast as they could go. Neither of them said a word either – they just looked at both their blood-soaked cousins standing in the road, grabbed their bikes and then the four of them raced back up the lane, pedalling furiously and snivelling like idiots, leaving nothing but bloody tyre tracks behind them.
And the rest of us whooped and hollered, celebrating a truly good night of revenging. It felt like winning a race. Like punching that bag in Pete’s garage. I imagined it was how proper sex felt. Glorious. Joyful. Just a giant, enveloping relief. Like an itch you finally scratched, or a huge, painful zit you finally popped. My tiny army had won.
‘Ella, that was amazing!’
‘Now that was payback!’ said Corey.
‘That was the best,’ said Max, hugging Corey’s head under his armpit. ‘Legendary!’
‘That was the most brilliant best thing ever,’ Fallon squealed, hugging us in like we were her babies. ‘I could never have done that by myself. We’re the Fearless Five again!’
‘Fearless?’ said Corey.
‘Yeah,’ said Fallon. ‘Don’t you remember our gang name?’ There was a satisfied little pause.
Then I realised something. ‘I want to do it again,’ I said.
‘Yeah, so do I, actually,’ said Corey with an impish grin.
‘Yeah, I’m in,’ said Max. ‘That was epic.’
‘Definitely!’ said Fallon. ‘Who else can we revenge on?’
‘Zane?’ suggested Corey.
‘Of course!’
‘No,’ said Fallon.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘He’s been after Corey for ages. It’s payback time.’
‘Yeah,’ said Max. ‘Yeah it’s childish but so’s he. Let’s have one last summer of being Fearless Five.’
‘There’s only four of us?’ I said.
‘The baby makes five, dunnit?’
‘We can’t,’ said Fallon. ‘We can’t do anything to Zane.’
‘We ca-an,’ I sang, high-fiving Max.
‘No, I can’t. It wouldn’t be right.’
‘Give me one good reason, Fallon.’
‘Because he’s my baby’s daddy,’ she said.
*
I think we were all too stunned to answer at first. Corey went even paler than he was already. After the initial shock, none of us said another word about it until we were under our sleeping bags and blankets in her bedroom. It felt cosy, us all sleeping in the same room again. Like it was before.
‘Are you all shocked?’ she said in the darkness. ‘About me and Zane?’
Neither of the boys answered.
‘A bit,’ I said. ‘I always thought he preferred playing the field. If I’d known you were his girlfriend…’
‘Oh no, it’s not like that,’ she said. I could see her struggling to lever herself up in the thin shard of moonlight filtering through her Forever Friends curtains. ‘No, we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend. We stayed in touch, sort of. He came round one night, out of the blue really… He’d been drinking.’
I sat up. ‘He forced you?’
‘No, no, not at all. We just talked about the old times and school. And he dared me…’
‘Oh God,’ said Max. ‘You screwed him for a dare?’
‘Yeah, I kind of did,’ she giggled. ‘It was fun though. I enjoyed it. It was quite… quick.’
‘I bet,’ said Max. I noticed Corey was saying nothing at all. And I could see he wasn’t asleep. His eyelids were flickering and his hands were twitching.
‘He cried afterwards,’ she said. ‘I’d read in one of Mum’s magazines that sometimes women cry after doing it because of all the emotion but I didn’t realise guys cried too.’
‘They don’t,’ said Max.
‘How would you know?’ I said, nudging him.
He shook his head. ‘Well, they don’t, do they? It’s well known.’
‘Well, Zane did anyway,’ said Fallon. ‘He got really weird about it. Said it had ruined our friendship. We’ve barely spoken since.’
‘So he doesn’t know?’ said Corey for the first time. ‘About the baby?’
‘Yeah, I called and told him once I knew for definite.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘Nothing. He put the phone down on me.’
*
The next morning, we swapped numbers, and Fallon apologised again for not finding Mort. Rosie was nowhere to be seen, so we couldn’t say goodbye to her.
It had rained in the night, and the rain had washed away most of the blood in the road. There was also a large carrier bag on the doorstep, full to the brim with every kind of sweet you can think of.
‘Whoa, what a haul!’ said Corey, whose face told the story of every Christmas morning he’d never had. ‘There’s money in here as well, Fallon.’
Fallon peered in, scooping out two twenty-pound notes and some random coins. ‘So they didn’t spend all of it then.’
She squeezed my hand as I got on the bus – a squeeze that said ‘Thanks,’ and ‘Your secr
et’s still safe.’ Then she kissed Corey. (The whole ride home he grinned like a jelly bean.) I felt a pang of gladness that we’d helped her, then a pang of sadness that I couldn’t do more for Corey, to help him neutralise the threat of Zane. He didn’t deserve to live in fear either.
‘Someone’s got an itty bitty cruuuuush,’ Max sang, ruffling Corey’s hair.
‘Get off,’ said Corey, beaming and going violently red again.
He might have been good-humoured with Corey, but Max didn’t reach for my hand the whole ride back, not once. He hadn’t touched me all night, either, even though we’d slept side by side on Fallon’s sofa. And we hadn’t spoken any more about what he’d said about Pete during Truth or Dare. Maybe he didn’t remember saying it, or maybe he did, and was frightened a can of worms would explode in both our faces.
‘I still can’t believe it,’ he said now. ‘Who’d have thought Zane would have blown his beans up her pipe?’
I tutted my disgust. ‘Max, for God’s sake! Why do you have to put it like that? Gross!’
‘Yeah, well. You think sex is gross anyway, Ella.’
I had no answer to that, so I changed the subject.
‘It’s weird, though, how she stayed friends with him.’
‘Not that weird,’ he said. ‘Fallon said he just came round one night, out of the blue. It only happened the once.’
‘God, one night and you spend the next eighteen years paying for it.’
He muttered something. It sounded suspiciously like ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’
Aching and sick, we tried to doze, but none of us could manage it. Instead, I Googled the Famous Five on my phone, the Enid Blyton book series we had based our gang on when we were kids. Picnics. Islands. Mysteries. People up to no good. Saving the day over and over again. It was all so easy. It made me want to read the books again. To go back to the farm, too. I’d had a good time, despite the Truth or Dare thing.
As if he’d read my mind, Corey turned around in his seat. ‘Do you think we could see Fallon again? All of us together, like before?’
Max yawned. ‘Yeah, that’d be cool. There’s a fair bit of alcohol out in that barn still, in’t there?’
‘You’re such an alkie,’ I said to him.
‘Who needs two livers? There’s always the other if this one packs in.’
Corey laughed. ‘You don’t have two livers, idiot. You have two kidneys.’
‘Oh, is it?’ Max laughed. ‘I knew I had two of something.’
‘How you got ten GCSEs I will never ever know,’ I said as Corey and I shared a smile and the bus turned into Grange Close, coming to a sharp halt at the bus stop. We all got up and began trooping off the bus.
‘I’m just going to walk to the shop and get some fresh milk. I fancy some Cheerios,’ said Corey, jumping down to the pavement and hovering a bit, as if he was waiting for something.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Maybe see you later then?’
‘Yeah, see you later, mate,’ said Max.
We watched him amble down the rest of the hill towards his gate, head bowed. We’d already had a fry-up, cooked by Fallon herself, at her house.
‘“I fancy some Cheerios”,’ mimicked Max, reaching an arm around me as we walked up the road.
‘Yeah, what is he, some kind of multiple-breakfasting hobbit? I’m stuffed. Pete’s going to kick my ass later.’
I could have kicked myself for mentioning Pete. There was a brief silence.
‘I think Corey wanted to hang out with us,’ said Max. I nuzzled into his shoulder, barely resisting the urge to fall asleep. The feeling of touching him again was like warm sun invading the shade.
‘I’ve missed this,’ I said, as we walked slowly towards my house.
‘Missed what?’
‘Being a gang. You, me, Corey, Fallon.’
‘Beating up kids…’
‘We didn’t beat them up. Well, emotionally speaking, maybe. Poor Fallon. She hasn’t had the easiest life.’
‘Yeah,’ said Max. ‘And living in that hovel ain’t making it any easier.’
‘I knew Zane was a knob head before but putting the phone down on her when she told him she was pregnant? Ugh. He could at least have gone to a scan.’
‘Well, he doesn’t want to, does he? What did you expect? Him to suddenly come over all Super Dad just because he knocked up some chick?’
‘“Some chick”?’ I repeated. ‘She’s our friend, Max.’
‘Yeah, but still.’
‘I wonder how Corey feels about it? He always did have a bit of a crush on her.’
Max swung a kick at a stray can of Red Bull on the pavement, sending it flying over our neighbour’s garden fence.
‘Could we maybe hang out with him later? Just to keep him company?’
‘Nothing else planned. I need to get some sleep first though. My eyes have rhinos sitting on them.’
‘Sounds like a plan.’
He craned his neck and kissed me, and, for a split second, the world seemed right. Everything was in its place again, and there was nothing to worry about.
Then we heard a bone-rattling scream.
At first we couldn’t work out where it was coming from. Then we figured out it was Corey’s front garden, and we both sprinted down the close, the noise getting louder with each step. I reached the gate first. Corey was sitting on his front doorstep, just shrieking, his head in his hands. I followed Max’s eye line to the lawn. In the centre of his front garden, hanging from the apple tree by its neck, dangled a cat. A scruffy orange cat with white feet.
Pinned to its back, a scrap of white paper fluttered on the breeze. I moved closer to the tree and read the note. It said just one word:
Gotcha
‘Poor Corey.’
11
A Smashing Time and a Piece of Advice
‘Cut him down, for God’s sake!’ I yelled at Max as I held Corey, trying to calm him.
‘NO! NO! NO!’ he kept yelling, on and on.
Neighbours had gathered at the gate now – I didn’t know their names. The man with the solar panels, the woman whose recycling box was always full of wine bottles, and the couple with three Yorkshire terriers – they were just standing around in their slippers, gawping, arms folded. I felt my skin begin to burn.
‘Do you all have to be here?’ I shouted, striding towards them. ‘Are any of you actually doing anything?’
‘Ella, for God’s sake!’ said Max. I could see I was embarrassing him, but he started making excuses and ushering everyone back to their houses. I heard words – bloody lunatic, bleeding row, spectrum.
They left gradually, craning their necks to see the swinging cat in the tree, Corey breaking his heart on the doorstep. I helped Max drag Corey into his hall. Then we shut the door on the world.
‘It’s all right, mate,’ said Max. ‘It’ll be all right.’
‘No! No! Let go of me. I can’t leave him there!’ Corey sobbed, wriggling and wrenching himself out of our hands.
We didn’t know what to say. Mort was Corey’s best mate. And he’d just been murdered.
We sat him down on the sofa in his grandparents’ beige living room, with its wood-framed pictures of dormice on the walls, a crystal cabinet full of corpse-like china dolls and sideboard piled high with bowling-club newsletters. There was a soft aroma of almond biscuits and Lily of the Valley about the place. Silently, Max grabbed a stack of old newspapers and went out to deal with Mort’s body. I sat on the sofa beside Corey and reached for his hand.
‘It’s OK. It’s going to be OK,’ I kept saying. I didn’t believe what I was saying though. How could it be OK? What was going to be OK? We’d just found his cat strung up by its neck in a tree. OK wasn’t even in the building.
Corey squinched his eyes shut. Tears dripped down both his cheeks. ‘It was him, wasn’t it? He’s done this.’
I couldn’t deny it was Zane. I’d seen him yesterday underneath that lamp post, as plain as pickle in a Big Mac. This was pay
back for the Abominable Lunchman incident – I knew it as well as Corey did.
‘It’s cos of what I did,’ I said, sagging. ‘Isn’t it?’
Corey shook his head. ‘This is about him and me.’
We sat in silence for ages. I caught sight of Max walking through the hallway with a bundle of newspapers; then I heard the back door being unlocked.
Corey looked up. ‘What’s Max doing?’
‘He’s just taking Mort out the back. Putting him somewhere safe.’ I felt pathetic, saying that. What was safe? Safe was dead.
The kettle clicked on in the kitchen and, after much clattering and clanking about, Max brought in a tray of hot black tea.
‘There’s no milk,’ he said quietly, setting the mugs down in front of each of us, spooning sugar into two of them. They were all mismatched and hideous – a Milky Bar mug from some Easter egg set, a white Cornish Riviera one, and a chipped purple one with ‘VOTE UKIP’ written on it in big yellow letters. They had a pillar in their lounge, like ours. Bet no one ever had to wipe blood off that one.
‘What did you do with him?’ I asked quietly, like we were in a church.
‘I’ve just put it – him – on one of the garden chairs. Wrapped up.’ He looked at Corey. ‘If it’s any consolation, Cor, I don’t think he died like that. I think he’d been run over first.’
Corey looked at Max. ‘He didn’t suffer, did he?’
I jumped in. ‘No, I’m sure he didn’t.’ I looked at Max, telepathically urging him to lie his ass off.
Without too much hesitation, Max said ‘No, he definitely didn’t suffer, no.’
‘I hate him,’ said Corey through his teeth. ‘I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.’
‘Take it easy, Core.’
‘Why should he?’ I snapped. ‘Are you seriously going to defend – this?’
‘Hey, Snippy, no of course I’m not.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Good. Because we need to do something.’
‘Well we should call the cops then,’ said Max. ‘This is how serial killers get started. Before you know it, his neighbours’ll be complaining about smells coming from their drains.’
