The Deviants

by C. J. Skuse

  He stroked my hair again. ‘You worried me. We couldn’t wake you up.’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t,’ I mumbled.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I sniffed, wiping my nose on his shoulder.

  ‘What’s happened, eh? This isn’t like you.’

  Just then, the curtain rings clattered across the cubicle and a man nurse walked in, evidently in a great hurry. His badge said he was a staff nurse. His name was Jack.

  ‘There’s a lad outside waiting to see you. Matt Rickman or something.’

  Dad turned to him. ‘No, tell him to leave, please.’

  ‘Uh, sir, I’m a bit busy at the moment, perhaps that’s something you could do?’

  ‘You either tell him to leave or I’ll make him leave,’ Dad shouted. I clung to him again as the nurse flounced back through the curtains with more than a hint of disgust.

  Dad pulled away and looked at me. ‘Has Max done something?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. I just drank too much, that’s all.’

  ‘I mean it, Ella, tell me what he’s done. Something must have happened for you to let yourself get in this state, and I know it’s something to do with Max. Answer me.’

  ‘Dad, please just trust me. This isn’t about Max, I swear.’

  I heard Max’s voice outside in the A & E. I’m not going anywhere until I see her. You’ll have to drag me out, mate.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll get rid of him,’ said Dad, peeling away from me and getting up off the bed.

  ‘Dad, don’t, please,’ I croaked. ‘It’s OK.’

  The sound of some classical symphony started up in the pocket of Dad’s trousers. He pulled out his phone. ‘Neil.’ My heart squeezed. ‘He was worried about you. I said I’d let them know how you were. I better take it outside.’ He swept through the curtains.

  I lay back on the bed. I couldn’t hear anything else but the usual bustling and beeping and trolleys clattering past. When the curtain opened again, Max appeared – his navy suit all creased, tie missing, his white shirt stained with blood spots, his hand bloody too.

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Uncle Paul,’ he replied, all nasal, like both his nostrils were blocked. ‘I kind of called Shelby a whore. It being her birthday and all that, he didn’t take it too well.’

  ‘She’s not a whore, though, is she?’ I coughed. My neck ached. ‘Oww.’

  He pulled the curtain across so we were semi-private, and sat down heavily on the chair. ‘I wanted to lash out. She was nearest. She said you trashed the present room.’

  ‘What…’ It took me a second to realise what he was talking about and then I remembered what I had done. The red and brown sauce. The laptop smashing. The watches I’d stamped on. ‘Oh God.’ Everything seemed so loud to me, all of a sudden.

  ‘I told her it was me.’

  ‘Why did you do that, Max?’

  He shrugged. ‘I dunno. Just wanted to. I wanted to hurt her for hurting you.’

  ‘She didn’t hurt me. You did.’

  ‘I know I did. We both did. Anyway, she slapped me. I said some nasty stuff, there was a big fight. Blah blah blah. Was it you who trashed Dad’s Porsche too?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Porsche. All the windows are smashed. Bodywork’s scratched to pieces, dented all over. There’s even petrol on the seats. I think whoever did it was gonna set fire to it.’

  ‘God,’ I said. ‘No, I didn’t do that.’ I silently thanked whoever it was who had done it though. ‘You know what people are like though with expensive cars – they get jealous.’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t give a monkey’s about any of that anyway. I just care about you.’

  There was an elephant in the room and both of us were putting in Oscar-worthy performances to avoid it. He smiled sadly and looked around the cubicle, though there was nothing to see – the nightstand, the row of sockets above my head, a disposable glove dispenser and a hand sanitiser shackled to the end of the bed. I reached for his hand. One of us was cold – I couldn’t tell if it was him or me. ‘You really scared me, Ells.’

  ‘Mind my wire thing,’ I said, nodding at the drip. He released his grip, just slightly.

  ‘Ella, please, just tell me. What were you talking about? What baby?’

  There was nowhere else to go. I couldn’t run away. I couldn’t make any more excuses. Drunk people don’t say that kind of thing out of nothing. So I threw it out there, quickly, like throwing breadcrumbs to birds in the middle of a main road.

  ‘My baby. I had a miscarriage. When I was thirteen.’

  I’d finally said the words I’d been holding so close to me for such a long time. Suddenly they were gone, untethered, like balloons floating above me and I couldn’t grab them back now. Of course, he would want to know every detail. So I resorted to the plan B that I’d had in my head for the past four years – the substitute truth to be dragged out in case anyone found out about it.

  ‘What?’ A trickle of blood started down Max’s nose towards his mouth. He wiped it away on his shirtsleeve. I kept on talking.

  ‘Don’t blame yourself for not knowing. I didn’t want you to know.’ A tear trickled down the side of my cheek to the crunchy white pillow under my head.

  ‘But, you’re a virgin.’

  I shook my head. The pinch of dread in my chest that was always there had grown into a massive clenched fist, squeezing and releasing. Squeezing and releasing. But it was getting easier. ‘Sadly not.’

  ‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘I knew it was something like this.’

  I knew what he was going to ask next. I answered him before he had to say it.

  ‘You don’t know him. He’s moved out of the area. It was just some lad from school. It was only once and I hated it.’

  Despite the tears, his face was like a stone. He wiped his cheek like his hand was slicing meat, quickly and cleanly. My lie seemed to have worked. He just swallowed it like a great big pill. Then the questions came.

  ‘He forced you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure I don’t know him?’

  ‘Yes. Just some lad, like I said.’

  ‘It wasn’t one of your brothers, was it?’

  ‘WHAT? No, Max, it was not! I told you, I didn’t know him.’

  ‘Or him. Your dad.’

  ‘Of course it’s not Dad. Dad’s not a pervert. You’re not listening to me, it was a boy my age from school.’

  ‘Name?’

  My brain fumbled for a name. ‘I can’t… Jack.’

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Jack what?’

  ‘IT DOESN’T MATTER,’ I shouted, the force scraging my throat and making me cough. ‘That’s it, Max. I’m not telling you anything else.’

  There was evil in his eyes. ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘Max, stop it.’

  ‘I know you’re lying. I know you, Ella. It’s Hamlin, isn’t it? It’s old Pied Piper himself.’

  ‘What? I didn’t even know Pete Hamlin when I was thirteen. Stop twisting things.’

  ‘Yeah, you did. He taught at B.A. for years before he started coaching you privately. You did know him then, don’t lie.’

  ‘I’m not lying. We always had Miss Trentham for games until Year 11.’

  ‘He’s groomed you, and now you can’t tell right from wrong. He raped you. I’ll kill him.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong. You’ve always hated Pete. But he’s not a bad man.’ My throat was killing me.

  He shook his head.

  ‘I’m tired.’ I turned over on my bed, facing the curtains.

  ‘We can’t go on like we are, can we?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, closing my eyes. ‘You won’t listen, so what can I do?’

  I heard him get up. He came round to the other side of the bed and bent down beside me so his face was on the pillow next to mine. I opened my eyes. ‘What about the baby?’

  ‘What about i
t?’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘I didn’t keep it as a souvenir, if that’s what you’re asking. Fallon flushed it down the toilet. She was staying over when it happened.’

  ‘Fallon knew?’

  ‘No, yes, some of it. I made her promise… I’m tired. I can’t handle this now, OK?’

  ‘I love you so much, Ella.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘Look at me.’ His eyes weren’t as warm and brown as they usually were. Something in them had died.

  ‘I just want to sleep, Max.’

  His face bunched into tears again. ‘I don’t have a single memory without you in it.’

  I reached for his hand and he took it. ‘I’m all right. It’s over. It’s all gone.’

  ‘It’s not, though, is it? It’s always going to be there until something’s done about it. It’s still hurting you. What he did.’

  ‘It wasn’t him … Let me sleep.’

  ‘Say we’re going to be OK, Ella.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t think we are.’

  ‘So you and Max split up that night?’

  21

  Mostly About Ella

  I guess we did. I didn’t see or hear from him for three whole days after that night. Even when we went on holidays with our families or school trips, we’d still emailed or texted or Skyped every day. Now there was just silence.

  I didn’t know myself for those three days. Normally, I’d be up at six for training, eating some carefully chosen sports cereal and chopping bananas before meeting Pete for a jog or a punch-up in his garage. But I still hadn’t called Pete, and he hadn’t called me. He was avoiding me too after our last disaster. I couldn’t face him yet anyway. My nose still throbbed when I touched it.

  I scoured the #Shelby18 hashtag and stalked a few of Max’s mates who’d been at the party. The police were called about the Porsche wrecking and the ‘break-in’, and even though nothing was taken they were ‘appealing for witnesses’. Just vandals, they said. Neil paid for all the damage. As he should.

  The Rittmans sent me ‘Get Well Soon’ flowers, a big old bunch of lilies and violets. Dad insisted on putting them in the big vase right in front of the fireplace so we could look at them every time we watched TV or ate dinner. It was like Neil was watching me. The lilies stunk the house out.

  I let laziness take me over for the first time in years. I lay in bed and ate whatever soup or sandwich Dad brought into me on a tray. I let patronising daytime TV people sell me houses and antiques, chefs teach me how to make Moroccan tagine and chocolate souffles, and watched couples staying in each other’s B&Bs, then bitching about them behind their backs. I played a lot of Sims too; killed off a few maids, caught a few guppies at the Community Pond. I tried making my mum Sim get off with the bloke-maid, but he slapped her and quit to join the Army. Then she and her husband got depressed after the kids were taken in by social services for eating out of the bin, so I locked them both in the bathroom till they died of starvation. That cheered me up a bit.

  I constantly refreshed Max’s Facebook, Instagram and Twitter feeds. Not a word. No Favourites. No Likes. No pass-agg status updates about why women always lie to men. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. He didn’t even text me a goodnight kiss.

  What made it worse was that Corey was texting and DMing me on Twitter, with all these little updates about him and Fallon. How the baby sneezed and it was so cute. How tiny her toes were. How he was living at the farm full-time now, in one of the spare bedrooms, and helping out with the animals as much as he could. How much they both missed me.

  The last text I’d had from him made me feel sick with worry. And I was so sick of being worried.

  Ella – Fallon told me about Rat Man. Please don’t blame her. She really needed to talk to someone. I kept asking her what was wrong. I won’t tell a soul. I think we should all talk though. We miss you. CM.

  *

  By Sunday, Dad had had enough. He came into my bedroom. I was sat up in bed snoozefeeding and watching YouTube on my phone.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Watching Hamlet.’

  His face brightened. ‘I didn’t know you liked Shakespeare.’

  ‘It’s not Shakespeare. It’s a video of a micro pig walking down the stairs.’

  Dad sighed. ‘Why don’t you call up some friends, eh? Ask them round here, if you don’t want to go out. I can make myself scarce. You can have the lounge and watch a video.’

  ‘Might have to go back to the nineties first,’ I told him flatly.

  He sighed again and rubbed his chin. ‘You know what I mean. Come to Tesco with me then. You can help me get the ingredients for this curry. You’ll go stir-crazy if you spend much longer in the house.’

  ‘What’s “stir-crazy”?’ I said, clicking off Hamlet and easing myself out of bed.

  ‘It’s what prisoners get when they’ve been incarcerated for a long time. They slowly start to lose their minds. Why don’t you go up the park? There’s always kids hanging round up there.’

  I couldn’t quite tell whether Dad was A) taking the piss or B) had no problem with me going up to a notorious dogging spot to drink cider out of the bottle, but either way I wasn’t going. And I wasn’t stir-crazy either. I wasn’t like the random who used to walk up and down the High Street, jabbering about aliens anal probing him. Or the frizzy-haired woman who sits in Costa talking to her fist.

  Despite my arguments, I went to Tesco, but I wasn’t any help. I hadn’t been to a supermarket with Dad for ages. He had a firm routine and if he forgot anything from an aisle he’d already done, he wouldn’t go back. He just put it on a new page of his little notepad for next time. I caught a glimpse of his list – it was all neat and each item had a poker-straight line through it as it went into the trolley. He had things on there like ‘Shloer’ and ‘Meat free mince’ and ‘Tuck cupboard sundries.’ Since when did he drink Shloer? And where the hell was our ‘tuck cupboard’? It was a whole new experience.

  When I had a go at the checkout woman – her double F cups were resting on the scale and she overcharged us for bananas – Dad shoved me out of there like we were on some kind of march. He hated supermarkets at the best of times. If it were up to Dad, we’d all have ration books and powdered cheese and friendly old grocers who weighed out your tea for you, and absolutely nowhere would have Wi-Fi.

  That afternoon, after he’d had done his daily word count on his book and prepped the curry, he put on one of his favourite war films – the one where the guy gets his arse shot off. Despite the gunfire and cries of agony, I nestled into the warmth of the sofa blanket and fell into a deep sleep beside him.

  On Monday, I didn’t get out of bed until lunch. Dad was out in the garage, sorting through his nuts and bolts drawers, even though they were all immaculate. I lingered out there for a little while too, just sort of watching him. He was never happier than when he was doing little things. Reading one of his dusty old books, writing one of his crappy romance novels, making a model boat or aeroplane from one of his little kits. He didn’t have my ambition, my need to do something extraordinary. He liked his little life.

  ‘Your doll’s house is there, look,’ he said, pointing towards the middle shelf on the wall. I moved a stack of chunky leather-bound Shakespeares and there it was.

  ‘Oh wow, I didn’t know I still had this,’ I said, opening the frontage. It was mostly knocked over and in need of a good dusting, but there all the same. Me and Corey spent a whole summer redecorating it once, laying new carpets, putting tiny posters up in the children’s bedroom. I tried tidying everything up, putting Mum Raccoon on the sofa, reading The Times, Dort Raccoon sneaking in behind her to steal the biscuits from the coffee table. Dad Raccoon feeding the baby in the kitchen, and Son Raccoon lying on his bunk bed, reading the telephone directory. The dining table all laid up with the Sunday lunch – roast beef and the itty-bitty Yorkshire puddings. I used to i
magine them getting up and moving around when I’d left them alone. But for the first time, I knew for absolute certain that they didn’t. The paper wasn’t being read. The telephone directory was a chunk of plastic. The TV scene never changed from that one still of Julie Andrews with her arms stretched wide open on the hilltop. I closed the frontage again. The dust mites were making me itch.

  I popped a Piriteze and went for a shower. I was all set to go back to bed when the sound and smells of sizzling bacon climbed up the stairs. I only realised then how hungry I was, only having finished half of Dad’s experimental prawn balti the night before. I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and slumped down the stairs. ‘Thought that might do the trick,’ he said, handing me a squashy new-bread sandwich on a plate. He’d scraped one side of each piece of bread with sauce – brown on one, ketchup on the other, just as I liked it.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, saliva filling my mouth. I bit down into the pillow of bread and a burst of sweet, savoury and salt sent my mouth into paradise.

  ‘Any plans for today?’ he said, flapping a tea towel over his shoulder.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘What’s happening with training?’

  ‘Pete’s not very well,’ I lied. ‘He said he’d call me when he’s better.’

  Dad looked at me as though he was sucking on an unpleasant sweet. ‘So what are you going to do in the meantime? Why don’t you go for a jog? How about that gym next to the garden centre? It’s Pay-as-you-Go, isn’t it? You could join until Pete’s better perhaps?’

  ‘I dunno.’ There was no way I was joining Sweat Dreams – I might run the risk of walking straight into Zane. But Dad clearly wanted me to go somewhere today.

  ‘Why don’t you go and see your friend with the baby? She’s called twice. She’s home from hospital now, isn’t she?’

  I carried on eating my sandwich, filling my mouth and chewing slower so I wouldn’t have to answer.

  He went back to his board and started dicing his peeled carrot. ‘Talking of hospitals, you can take that off now, you know.’