The Deviants

by C. J. Skuse

  ‘How did he seem?’

  ‘He didn’t seem anything. Just kind of weirded out.’

  One of Zane’s every-so-often habits was to jog around the Saints – up St Mark’s Road, into St John’s, through the alley into St Matthew’s Lane and then back towards home via St Luke’s Avenue. But once he’d seen the cats Max and me had spray-painted on the fences along his route, he was spending less time there, and more time on the beach.

  So I saw an opportunity.

  I followed him one morning, watching him from the safety of the Esplanade. He was underneath the Pier, doing his warm-ups. I put up my hood, clamped the cat mask to my face and sprinted along to the steps, taking them two at a time down onto the beach. I found a large stick and drew the word MEOW in large scrawly letters, right on the tide-washed sand where he wouldn’t miss it. I kept looking up, checking where he was. He was just lightly jogging. Kicking up his heels. I got to the ‘O’ and he saw me. He started sprinting towards me.

  ‘Oi!’ I heard in the distance. I looked up.

  My breathing got heavier behind the mask.

  ‘Oi, I’m gonna kill you!’ I quickly scrawled the W then dropped the stick and raced back up the steps to the seafront, pumping my arms and sprinting the promenade towards Manor Gardens, ducking past the fish ponds and through the churchyard gates. I hid behind a huge weathered gravestone and waited. He appeared at the gates, doing his Terminator scanning thing again.

  ‘Yeah. Definitely weirded out.’

  Max had Googled ‘How to Get Revenge’, and an article had come up; how Sharon Osbourne once put a human turd in a Tiffany box and mailed it to a deadly enemy. None of us were willing to do that, however much we hated Zane, so we did the next best thing – we organised the delivery of a raw pig’s heart, courtesy of Rosie. She didn’t ask what Fallon needed it for, just slapped it in her outstretched hand and continued butchering the corpse for their freezer.

  ‘I wonder if it arrived on time?’ she asked as we sat in the motorhome on the seafront that Saturday night. My dad had gone out to his cookery class, and then out for a drink with Celestina, so, with a bit of luck, he wouldn’t even have noticed we’d borrowed it.

  ‘Should have,’ said Corey, still flicking through the pregnancy app he’d downloaded for Fallon earlier. ‘They’re a pretty reliable firm and he was definitely home when it came. I checked.’

  ‘I’d love to have seen his face, wouldn’t you, Ells? Ells? ELLA?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, barely listening. My itch was up on my neck and along both arms, and I didn’t have my antihistamines with me, so I was prickly as a porcupine, pacing up and down to the steamed-up windscreen to see if Max was coming. He’d gone down to the Pier end to deliver a note through Zane’s letterbox – it was only supposed to take ten minutes. He’d been gone for half an hour.

  ‘This isn’t good,’ I said, getting up and pacing back down the other end to where they were sitting at the table.

  I closed my eyes and sent my prayer up to whoever was listening. ‘Come on, come back now. Please. Please God, make him come back.’ The glow of the orange street lights along the seafront was the only thing keeping us from being in total darkness.

  ‘Maybe he went to get fish and chips?’ Fallon suggested. ‘I’m pretty starving.’

  ‘Yeah, me too,’ said Corey.

  ‘No, we were going to go for chips after this. He said he was coming straight back. He’s taken a stupid risk, I bet. Goading him or something.’

  ‘Why would he?’ said Corey. ‘He knows the plan. We went over it about eight times.’

  ‘No, but he’s different at the moment. All devil-may-care and acting tough. It’s not like him. He’s frustrated.’

  ‘About your sex problem?’ Fallon blurted out. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Fallon!’

  ‘It’s OK, Corey knows. Just about the sex problem though. That’s all though, I swear.’

  I was too anxious even to get angry. ‘What if Zane was waiting for him? What if he grabbed his hand as he put the note through the letterbox?’

  ‘No way,’ said Corey. ‘Fallon’s right, he probably went to get the fish and chips or something.’

  I looked at him. ‘You don’t believe that, Corey, I know you don’t.’

  ‘Well what’s the alternative?’ he said, slamming down his phone. ‘What if he has got him? We can’t do anything. It’d be like fighting a Panzer.’

  ‘I don’t even know what that is but I’m scared,’ said Fallon, her hands up to her mouth.

  ‘I’m going down there,’ I said, zipping up my hoody.

  ‘No, Ella.’

  ‘I’ll come too,’ said Fallon.

  ‘No, you won’t,’ I told her.

  ‘I can fight dirty when I need to.’

  ‘You might be able to, but that baby can’t, so you’ve both got to stay out of it.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ said Corey.

  ‘No, I don’t need you to.’

  ‘You’re not going by yourself. I don’t care if it’s sexist or anti-feminist or whatever. I’m not letting you go down there on your own. No way.’

  ‘Corey, if he hurts him, I don’t know what I’ll do.’ Just the thought of Zane’s hands on Max was giving me heartburn. ‘My dad’ll be back from his class just after nine. He’ll go ballistic if he sees the motorhome’s missing. I said we should have taken the Audi!’

  ‘Just hold your horses, OK? Let’s give it another five minutes and if there’s still no sign then we’ll do something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know what. Just come and sit down.’

  In the next moment, we all heard fast footsteps padding up the pavement outside; then the door flew open and Max ran in, breathless, slamming the door behind him. He collapsed against a cupboard, his chest heaving and his cat mask shaking in his fist.

  ‘Oh thank you, thank you God,’ I cried, rushing towards him and wrapping myself around his heaving chest. His heart was thudding so hard.

  ‘You’ve been ages,’ said Corey.

  ‘Sssh,’ he whispered, almost completely breathless.

  ‘What happened?’ Fallon whispered, gingerly standing up from the banquette.

  ‘He caught hold of me, that’s what happened. Jesus. Check the window. Is he there?’

  Corey crept towards the front of the van and looked through. ‘Doesn’t look like it. Did he actually see you?’

  ‘Saw me?’ Max wheezed. ‘He had me in a bleedin’ headlock at one point.’

  ‘Oh God,’ I said.

  ‘I was going to put the note through the letterbox and I didn’t hear him coming behind me up the path. He tackled me to the ground.’

  We all gasped at the same time.

  ‘I managed to get free, and I just kept running. I made it up the High Street. Round by Tesco, he got me again on the grass, slammed me down. Look at my jeans.’ In the dim light, we could see his mud-caked knees. ‘I just kept going round and round, like a knob, him grabbing me, me dodging him.’

  ‘Oh you poor thing, Max,’ said Fallon, kneeling down beside him and clutching his arm. She was out of breath herself now, despite the fact she hadn’t run anywhere. ‘Oh God, he knows who you are. He knows it’s us!’

  ‘I dunno. I had this on all the time until the elastic snapped on the back,’ he said, holding up his creased white cat mask. ‘He kept saying “Who are you? What do you want? Did you send me that thing in the box?” He’s pissed off, man. Way way pissed off.’

  ‘Did he hurt you?’ I said, holding both his freezing cold hands.

  ‘No not really,’ he said, pulling me in again for a cuddle. His heartbeat had regulated a bit now, but his chest still heaved. In the orange glow, I could see the mud all over his Vans and grass stains on the elbows of his blue hoody. The side of his face was grazed with mud too.

  ‘I was so scared, Max,’ I said, nuzzling into his hot neck and keeping my face there.

  ‘How did you get away?’

  ‘Sheer
luck. He nearly had me though.’

  ‘That could have been bad. That could have been so bad,’ said Fallon.’

  ‘It was bad enough,’ Max laughed, wiping the sweat from his top lip. ‘It’s getting dodgy. I say we don’t do anything else for at least a couple of days. What do you think, Ells?’

  I thought for a moment. I thought about how scared I’d been when Max was out. How close he’d come to being hurt or worse. I thought about Corey in that toilet cubicle when Zane had rearranged his face. He could have done that to Max, too. My beautiful Max. And then, all at once, I was angry. It spurted out of me before I could pour any cold thoughts on it.

  ‘No,’ I said. I pulled back from Max. ‘We have to keep the pressure on. We just need to be more careful. Plan things better. Did you say you still had the note?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Max, removing the crumpled page from his jacket pocket. ‘But, Ella…’

  ‘I’ll do the note. He won’t catch me.’

  ‘I’m not letting you go anywhere near him when he’s this riled. He’s expecting stuff to happen so he’s on hyper-alert now. You won’t get away with it. He’ll know it’s you.’

  ‘I think he already does,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ said Corey, fiddling with his hearing aid.

  ‘Oh, come on, guys. He must know it’s us by now. He strung up your cat in your front garden, Corey. Even if he didn’t see your face that time at the gym, or on the seafront, he’ll know you by your clothes. He’ll know me by my clothes. I’m the only girl in the county who can outrun him, anyway. It doesn’t matter if he sees our faces. He’s rattled. And we want him to stay rattled. Don’t we?’

  ‘You’re not doing it,’ said Max. ‘No way.’

  ‘I’ll do the note,’ said Corey, standing up from the banquette. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow night. It’s my revenge, so I should be the one to do the most dangerous task.’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re just not as fast as me. It makes sense if I do it.’ I turned to face Max again. He wasn’t happy. ‘We’ll wait a couple of nights. At most. Let him stew in his own paranoia. Then I’ll do the note.’

  ‘Ella…’

  ‘He won’t catch me, Max. They don’t call me Volcano Girl for nothing.’

  ‘So how did the revenge on Shelby come into play?’

  15

  A Rather Unpleasant Meeting

  ‘Come on, Jess; just one more, please!’

  ‘Yeah, please, Jess. Tell us one of your stories.’

  ‘One of mine?’

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘I don’t know. Zane got scared last time with my Black Cat story, didn’t you, Zane?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You so did, Zane.’

  ‘I did NOT!’

  ‘Liar. You wet your pants.’

  ‘Hey, come on now, don’t fight. Choose another story, not a scary one.’

  ‘One about the island. Please?’

  ‘Yeah! About the pirates. And the jewels they kept in the walls of the cave.’

  ‘No, Corey, that’s silly. Jess, tell us the one with the girl who wanted to wreak a terrible revenge on her whole family so she put this stuff in the Christmas turkey that made everyone need the toilet.’

  ‘YEAH! Then she blocked up all the toilets so they had to poo their pants!’

  ‘Please, Jess, that one please!

  ‘Yeah, go on! “The Terrible Terrible Revenge”!’

  ‘Pleeeeeease?’

  ‘You’ve heard that one so many times, though. Ella, do you want to hear the one about the Terrible Terrible Christmas Revenge?’

  ‘Yes, please, Jess.’

  ‘OK. Are you all snuggled down comfortably? So, there was this girl who hated her family so much that she decided to wreak a terrible revenge on them. And one Christmas morning, she finally saw her chance. It would all start to happen as her family sat around the dinner table…

  *

  The last thing I needed that Sunday morning was lunch with the Rittmans, but I had no excuses. There was nothing I could say or do to get out of it. Max even picked me up. Door to door.

  ‘Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,’ Neil began, standing up from his position at the top of the dining table (‘part of a limited edition set, carved from a now-extinct tree from the Amazon delta’). There was the usual flurry of groans and scrunched-up napkins as he scratched the end of his nose to flash his watch (‘a Breitling Transocean Chronograph with gold face, diamond numerals and unidirectional bezel, £7,000’). ‘I’d just like to say a few words to the gathered throng, if I may.’

  ‘Yeah, make it quick though, Neil. I wanna be back home for Christmas!’ called out Auntie Manda, who was sitting on my left in a feathery jumper that made her boobs stick out like traffic cones. Her kids were sitting alongside her. The twins were in matching pink dresses, playing some iPad game where you had to tap the screen like a maniac, the baby was in her high chair, gnawing on a soggy Yorkshire, and Shelby was texting. By the look on her face, she hated this as much as I did, though I’d noticed a few smiles in Max’s direction and a shared giggle as they brought out the condiments. He said they were laughing about Granny Ethel’s back-to-front blouse. I didn’t believe him.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Neil, adjusting his Hugo Boss golfing trousers (‘£900’) over his substantial gut. He picked up his red wine glass and held it aloft. ‘I’d just like to thank my darling wife Joelle for this wonderful repast. You’ve outdone yourself again, my girl.’ There was a round of applause. ‘Shame about the roasters, but you can’t expect miracles, can you?’

  I’d seen that one coming. Neil rarely went too long after singing Jo’s praises only before he cut her down again like a weed. Jo didn’t help herself – she was constantly on mute when Neil was around, so small and mole-like, like she was apologising for being alive.

  ‘I’d also like to thank my dear old mum for making it here all the way from Cobham today,’ he droned on. ‘I never thought the broomstick would make it this far.’

  Sweat beaded my forehead; either the roast beef sweats or the closeness of all these hot bodies. The bay windows were steamed up, too – I could barely see the garden, just a vague blue blob where the pool was.

  Neil’s crooked nose glowed red with all the wine he’d drunk, ‘just to bring out the taste of the beef (‘£90 a bottle’)’.

  ‘I’d like to thank Manda and Paul for coming along, despite all the highly stressful preparations for somebody’s eighteenth birthday bash next Friday night.’

  Everyone at the table looked at Shelby who dipped her head behind a curtain of bleached blonde hair and went astonishingly red.

  ‘Yes, my beautiful niece Shelby turns eighteen next weekend; so the first of my toasts will be for you, my love. May your eighteenth year be full of cheer, and may you never turn out queer.’

  The whole table – apart from me, Max and Shelby herself – roared with laughter like Neil was the funniest thing since Jesus. The kids, in their defence, didn’t seem to know what was funny but the baby squealing away only made everyone else laugh even more because of it being oh-so-adorbs. I’d heard all of Neil’s racist, sexist and homophobic jokes before, having been forced to go round for Sunday lunch at least once a month since childhood. The fact I never found him funny didn’t stop him. It seemed to entertain him that I never laughed.

  ‘Don’t crack your face, Estella, will you?’ he boomed.

  ‘No, you’re all right, I won’t,’ I said, swigging back my mineral water (‘Ten pounds a bottle that. You can’t buy it in supermarkets, you know.’) I looked at the clock, waiting for time to eat itself. I had the note for Zane Walker in my pocket and I was itching to stay true to my word and put it through his door. The dining room was so hot, I’d been concentrating on trying not to scratch my knees and forearms for the best part of an hour. To make matters worse, Granny Ethel had complained of being cold, so Jo turned up the thermostat. It was cramped in there too, filled to capa
city with Max’s relatives. Shelby looked stunning, as usual, in her pink jeans and wedges and tight T-shirt. Her face shimmered as mine sweated.

  The table was littered with plates, glasses, baby bottles, dishes of cold vegetables and drips of horseradish and gravy. The knife block with the ‘diamond-sharpening steel and ergonomic handles’ was still sitting right in the middle of it all like some centrepiece, the largest knife was resting on the beef plate next to the carcass I’d sat looking at for most of the meal. Neil had carved, of course. Neil always carved. Why the whole knife block had to come out was obvious – so he could show off how much it cost. (‘Only twenty in the country. Seven hundred pounds, you know.’)

  Twat.

  Uncle Alan and his wife Kathy were pretty harmless, if you didn’t get too close to her breath or his BO. Their sons, Ben and Jack, were university geniuses, not easy to talk to: Ben was studying to be a petro-chemist, Jack, a doctor, and both were more boring even than Neil. Drunken Uncle Paul and Aunty ‘Call Me Manda’ were nice enough, too, though I found it hard not to look at his amputation – or her mahoosive cleavage.

  ‘No seriously though,’ Neil laughed, flicking back his not-at-all-Just-For-Menned-boyish bangs (‘Two hundred pounds and I didn’t have to go on a waiting list either – this face opens any door’), ‘we don’t get together that often as a family, being as far flung as we are, so I appreciate it all the more when we do. I look forward to occasions like this, and the big par-tay next Friday, when we can all let rip like we Rittmans and Gilmores do!’

  Cue more cheers. Just get on with it, I mumbled under my breath. Max was checking his phone under the table but he’d heard me and looked up. ‘You all right?’ he mouthed.

  ‘I’m boiling,’ I replied, tugging my collar. If someone had handed me a noose right then, I’d have been tying it to the nearest chandelier (‘We’ve got five of them. Modelled on the ones at Versailles. Three grand’s worth. You can’t buy ’em over here’).

  ‘So we’re all looking forward to a good old knees-up. And as I’m footing the bill, there’s a free bar, and I want you all to get absolutely paralytic.’ Another chorus of cheers rose up from the aunts and uncles as he explained about the under eighteens being taken care of by a qualified childcare team he’d laid on for the night (‘A few hundred quids’ worth of childcare, mind’). Neil’s eyes drifted across the table to me. ‘And our lovely Ella will be there as well, of course, as our guest – and the Honorary Rittman that she is. I don’t know if many of you know, but Ella’s on target now to be picked for the British Athletics team going to the Commonwealth Games in two years’ time.’