by C. J. Skuse
‘Thought there might be something sparkly waiting under the Christmas tree this year,’ said Imelda, loudly to the entire restaurant. ‘What’s it been now, three years?’
‘Four,’ I said, ‘and, no, he’s not that thoughtful.’
‘Would you say yes if he did propose, Rhiannon?’ said Pidge, her face full of wonder, like she was thinking about Hogwarts. (She and Tom were planning to get married at the Harry Potter Experience in Orlando soon – I shit you not.)
I hesitated, the gnawing in my chest biting down harder. Then I lied: ‘Yeah, of course–’ I was about to qualify that with an If he could stop taking Lana Rowntree up her aisle for five minutes long enough to walk me down one, but Lucille cut me off before I had chance:
‘Talking of charity shops, I bought this great vase in the one opposite Debenhams; such a bargain…’ she began, launching into a new topic of conversation and leaving me behind on my Island of Unfinished Sentences.
Not that I wanted to talk about Craig or Craig’s dull job. Neither were interesting subjects to talk about. He built things, ate pasties, smoked the odd spliff, liked football, played video games and couldn’t pass a pub without eating enough pork scratchings to fill Trafalgar Square. That was Craig – Gordon Ramsay clap – done.
So they were all wanging on about The Weekend That Must Not Be Named when a random bloke with bad neck zits appeared at our table, clutching a glass of lager.
‘All right, girls?’ said Random Bloke with Neck Zits. He produced a couple of red-wine bottles, emboldened by a six-strong gaggle of blokes with neck and chin zits at the bar. Surprisingly, the corks were still in the bottles so there was no danger of us being Rohipped and dragged to the nearest Premier Inn for a semi-conscious rape-fest. Yeah, I think of these things, another reason I’m a useful friend.
These weren’t the same guys who’d bought us Prosecco, this was a different lot. Younger. Louder. Zittier.
‘Mind if we join you?’ Winks and knowing looks all round.
Cue giggles and shrieks.
I had intended to order the double chocolate brownie with clotted cream for pudding but we were at the part of the evening where we all had to hold our stomachs in so I resisted, wondering if I could get home for some leftover Christmas tiramisu ice cream before the bongs signalled the death knell of fun-eating habits.
Imelda, Lucille and Cleo made the usual ribald comments, clearly turned on by the attention. Pidge started joining in too, once a sufficient amount of wine had been imbibed. She was always too Christian to participate in either tittage or bants before alcohol allowed her to. I wasn’t nearly pissed enough for either.
So the evening dragged on like a corpse tied to a donkey cart as the Seven Dorks squeezed onto our table and allowed their eggy breaths and chubby fingers to fog our air and tweak our knicker elastic. We had Grunty, Zitty, Shorty, Sleazy, Fatso, Gropey and Mute.
Guess which one I got stuck talking to. Or rather, at.
And, one by one, the PICSOs all left me. They each did the ‘you’re only young once’ speech and hooked up with the Dorks to go on to a club for a New Year’s foam party – can’t remember which one as I had no intention of following them.
‘You coming, Rhee?’ asked Anni, weighed down with gifted baby detritus. ‘Me and Pidge are just gonna shove this lot in the car and meet them there.’
I don’t know why she was so excited to be tagging along to a nightclub. She was the size of a barge and was on orange juice and bi-hourly toilet breaks. Nightclubs weren’t known for facilitating either.
‘Yeah, I just need the loo,’ I said, sinking my wine.
I was testing them now. Testing to see who would actually wait for me. Who was the true friend? But, as I expected, nobody waited. I paid my part of the bill, stood on the doormat of Cote de Sirène and watched them all waddling and cackling up the street with the Dorks circling them like sharks around chum. Not a second thought did I get.
So there I was, alone, in the centre of town, preparing to hike the two miles back to my flat, on New Year’s Eve.
But this is where my fun began.
As it turned out, walking across town went without incident. I’m not counting the tramp with a tinsel halo, pissing in streams down both legs, using NatWest as a walking aide. Or the couple shagging behind the wheely bins at the back of Boots’ car park. And I’m not counting the fight that broke out inside Pizza Express then spilled onto the pavement, during which a bald man in a striped shirt yelled, ‘I’M GONNA RAPE YOUR FUCKING SKULL, MATE!’
None of that was particularly noteworthy.
Whereas, what happened down by the canal, was.
It must have been about 11.30 p.m. by the time I reached the playing fields and took the short cut along the cycle path and down to the canal towpath, a mere five hundred feet from our flat. It was here that I heard footsteps behind me. And my breath shortened. And my heart began to thump.
I shoved my hands into my duffle-coat pockets and turned around to see a guy I recognised. He was the one in the Wales rugby shirt with the tattooed forearms who’d bought us the first lot of Prosecco at the restaurant.
‘Where you going then, baby?’
‘Home.’
‘Aww, can I come?’
‘No.’
‘Please? We can make each other happy tonight. Still got a bit of time before the bongs, ain’t we? You look sad.’
He sidestepped in front of me. I stepped away. He stepped back. He laughed.
‘You followed me, didn’t you?’ I said.
He leered, eyeing me from head to toe with a lingering look at my crotch area, which I’ll admit did look inviting in my too-tight skirt. ‘Just seeing where you were going, that’s all. Don’t be like that. I bought you a drink.’
‘I said thank you at the time.’ Like, of course that would be enough.
He put his hands on me.
‘Could you take your hands off me, please?’
‘Come on. You were giving me the eye.’
‘Don’t think I was. Get off.’ I wasn’t raising my voice. I didn’t need to. His molestation attempts were pathetic. A hand on my boob. A motion to his belt buckle.
‘How about you get your laughing gear round my old boy then? Just for ‘Auld Lang Syne’, eh?’
He was strong; a prop four or something. As well as the cut on his left eyebrow, he had the beginnings of a cauliflower ear. He slathered all over my face and I let him. Nobody else was around. Even if I screamed, the nearest people over in the Manette Court complex would take five minutes to get to me. And that’s if they even bothered. He’d have come in me and gone by then and I’d be another statistic, getting vaginal swabs and drinking tepid tea in some police waiting room.
No. That might be my sister but that would not be me.
‘Come in here,’ he gasped in my ear, taking my freezing hand inside his hot clammy one and pulling me towards the bush. An upended Lidl shopping trolley lay on its back.
I stayed rooted. ‘There’s no room in there.’
‘Yeah, there is.’ He tugged harder on my hand.
‘Pull your jeans down,’ I said.
He smirked like his ship had just come in – a ship with a massive hard-on. ‘Oh, yes, baby girl. I knew I could thaw you out.’
Unsteady on his feet, he fumbled at his belt. Then his zip. His over-washed jeans collapsed in a heap at his ankles. So did his boxers. There were little Homer Simpsons all over them. His cock sprung out like a small Samurai, ready to do battle.
Ba-doing!
It had a bend in it. I wasn’t sure whether he was pleased to see me or giving me directions to the bus station.
He stroked it upwards. Well, upwards and towards the bus station. ‘All yours,’ he said.
‘Mmm,’ I said, ‘lucky old me.’
The temptation to laugh was so strong but I choked it down and made it look as though I was starting to wriggle out of my knickers under my skirt. All keen.
‘Can you get on all fours?’
he panted.
‘Like a dog?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘’Cos I wanna fuck you like a dog.’
I grew breathless. ‘But the ground’s hard.’
‘So’s my dick. Get down. Go on, don’t tease.’
‘I’ll suck you off but no more,’ I said.
‘That’s a start,’ he said, eyes lighting up. I crouched down and took his little warm Samurai in my grip.
‘Shall I finger myself as I’m sucking it?’ I asked, heart in my throat.
‘Fuck, yeah! Dirty bitch!’ he chuckled, growing harder and more veiny.
He waited for it – for my lips on his bell-end. I pulled on his dick as though about to milk it.
‘Knew you were a dirty bitch.’
I saw Craig’s face on his as I held the cock steady and, reaching into my pocket, I closed my fingers around the handle of the steak knife. Bringing it out slowly while stroking him into full submission, I waited until his eyes had closed and his chin tilted to the sky in ecstasy before I hacked down hard on it and started carving through the gristly meat. He screamed and swore and beat at my head with his fists but my grip was tight and I sawed at it through slipping, bloody fingers until I had yanked his penis from its roots and pushed him backwards into the murky green water. His forlorn manhood dropped to the cold canal towpath with a bloody slap.
The splash was loud and he was still screaming but, despite all the hullaballoo, no one was coming to either of our rescues.
‘Aaaaaaarrrgghhh! Aaaaarrrrrrgghh!’ he went, splashing around like a child at its first swimming class.
A little curl of steam rose up from the penis, lying dejectedly on the towpath. I found a spare dog poo bag in my coat and picked the severed member up, then ran towards the footbridge, my heart still banging like a bastard on a jail-cell wall. I lost my breath completely as I reached the top and looked down over the water.
‘Fucking… sick… bitch!’ he gargled, flopping about.
He kept splashing, sinking under the murky water, then bobbing up again and spluttering. The last thing he must have seen in this world was my face, on the bridge, smiling in the moonlight.
Thanks to my cruel improvisation, I was feeling something I hadn’t felt for a long time. That same feeling you get when you’re a kid and you spy an adventure playground. Or when you poke your foot out of the bed on Christmas morning and feel your full stocking hanging there. It radiates out from a deeply exciting inner squiggle until your whole body feels electric all over. The best feeling in the world. It’s an exquisite privilege to watch someone die, knowing you caused it. Almost worth getting dolled up for.
Monday, 1 January
1.Teen boy and girl in the park who kicked their black Labrador that time
2.Derek Scudd
3.Wesley Parsons
4.The guy with Tourette’s who sits in the Paddy Power doorway, shouting about spacecrafts and the time he got fisted by a priest
5.Craig and Lana. To save on bullets, I’m putting them both together here – one shot, right through both skulls
6.The man in the blue Qashqai who pulled out of Marsh Road and beeped when I didn’t walk fast enough. 'Stupid slow bitch,' that’s what he’d said. All the way round the block I was picturing his suited body hanging by its neck – wriggling and twitching and me standing beneath him, just watching
Did a BuzzFeed quiz this morning – How Psychopathic Are You? Turns out – very. I scored 82 per cent. They even accompanied my results with a picture of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. Don’t know how I feel about that.
The quiz had been right about one thing, though.
Do you try to evade responsibility?
Well, yes, yes, I do. Remorse-wise, the canal incident has left little impression. I haven’t killed anyone for three years and I thought that when it happened again I’d feel bad, like an alcoholic taking a sip of whiskey. But, no, nothing. I had a blissful night’s sleep. Didn’t wake up at all and, for once, no bad dream either. This morning I feel balanced. Almost sane, for once.
*
Craig and I spent the first day of the New Year in front of the TV, eating pizza, the blue Quality Streets and watching ‘80s movies – Pretty in Pink, The Outsiders and that one where Demi Moore has a pink apartment and goes nuts at the end. He is an exceptional liar, I’ll give him that. I know he saw Lana today, under the pretence of ‘meeting Gary and Nigel down Wetherspoon’s’. He was vay convincing, to the untrained eye.
Sadly, my eye is hyper-trained – like an Olympic sprinter when it comes to rooting out bullshit.
We’d planned to do so much this week – stuff we never got round to do when we’re both at work: power-spraying the bird shit on the balcony, sorting out boxes for the mythical car-boot-sale-we’re-never-going-to-do, and Craig was going to clear out the mountain of rubbish and offcuts of wood from the back of his van and then paint the bathroom. We had one day left before we both went back to work and we’d done precious little. Craig had made a start on the wall above the toilet on Christmas Eve – a little surprise for me for when I got home from work, to keep me sweet before he mentioned he’d invited the boys around again to watch Boxing Day football on Sky. But when I’d seen the colour, I did not like the colour.
‘Mineral Mist, I said!’
‘I got Mineral Mist, see?’ He held up the tin. It said Morning Mist.
I took Tink for a walk at lunch as Craig was playing Streetfighter and making bacon sandwiches and the smell was making me dribble (I’m trying not to have bread because ass). I like looking in people’s gardens on our walks. I miss having a garden. There were all sorts of Christmas debris strewn about the pavements. Smashed baubles. Strings of tinsel. Half-chewed sweets. A carrier bag blew across the road out of somebody’s bin and Tink had a conniption, probably waking up half the country. Of all the things in this world my dog hated the most, sneezes, spaniels and rogue carrier bags flying at her as if from nowhere were definitely the Top Three.
Tried teaching her Shake a Paw again, the one trick she won’t do under any circumstances – still nothing.
Craig sorted out all his unwanted Blu-rays for the car-bootsale-we’re-never- going-to-do and pressure-washed the balcony with our new pressure washer, a Christmas gift from his mum and dad. I waxed my legs and drove over to my mum and dad’s house late afternoon. All quiet on the Western Front. Still can’t get the stains out of the bedroom carpet. Craig is still buying all my lies about ‘going to Cleo’s aerobics class’ and ‘working late; so I can go over there. It’s almost too easy.
Gave Tink a bath in the kitchen sink. She doesn’t like it but puts up with it because she always gets chicken bits afterwards. As I was trying to towel her off, she legged it round the flat like she had rabies. Craig laughed too, which broke the ice. Then he said he was ‘going over Homebase’ to get me the other paint. He said he needed some new wallpaper scissors for work as well.
I said, ‘Why don’t you just have my dad’s old wallpaper scissors from his toolkit? I was going over there tomorrow to sort out Mum’s filing cabinet. I can get them then.’
He said that meant a lot to him, like Dad was giving him his blessing from beyond the grave. The hallowed Tommy Lewis toolkit that Dad carried with him like an extra limb and Craig was never allowed to touch. I thought he was going to cry.
‘They’re just wallpaper scissors, Craig,’ I said. ‘It’s not an engagement ring.’
He nodded and left the room with a distinct clear of throat. I’m terrible with crying people. How do you make them stop? I deliberately caught the wrong bus once because a woman was blubbing in the bus shelter. Didn’t know what else to do.
Do I love him? I haven’t known what love is in a long time. He says he loves me but isn’t that just something that gets said? He told me on Christmas Eve that, coupled with the hand jobs and my excellent trifle, I’m almost the perfect girlfriend. I don’t nag him as much as his mates’ wives nag them either. I asked him
what would make me perfect.
‘Anal,’ he said, no hesitation. ‘What would make me perfect?’ he asked.
Well, it’d be a start if you stopped shagging Lana Rowntree behind my back, I thought. Instead, I opted for the safer:
‘You can’t improve on perfection itself, can you, darling?’
He laughed and I flicked him a V sign behind the Radio Times.
Wednesday, 3 January
Hi ho, hi ho, it’s back to my shitty job I go. Actually, there is a dwarf where I work – he’s upstairs in the Accounts department. He’s the reason we had all our light switches moved to three feet above the ground. Madness.
Today went as all days at the Gazette go – long, coffee-stained and dull. The first half was me telling anyone who asked what a good Christmas I had and some dull-as-ditch tasks of inputting local schools’ thank-you letters to Santa, updating the website and making coffee in the new £5,000 (yes, that’s £5,000!) coffee machine. There were four new mugs in the staffroom – Christmas presents no one wanted at home but which everyone wants at work because they’re clean. I nabbed one with dinosaurs on and the words TEA-REX. Hardy har.
The usual New Year signs have gone up everywhere, unstained and laminated. Signs telling professional adults helpful things like IF YOU’RE LAST OUT OF AN EVENING, PLEASE TURN OFF ALL THE LIGHTS and PLEASE WASH YOUR OWN CROCKERY. The toilets are full of them: PLEASE ONLY FLUSH TOILET TISSUE DOWN THE TOILET. PLEASE REPLACE TOILET PAPER IF YOU USE THE LAST PIECE. PLEASE TURN OFF THE TAPS AFTER USE. There’s even one as you leave, saying, PLEASE LEAVE THESE FACILITIES AS YOU FIND THEM – THANK YOU.
I’d like to suggest some new signs for the office, specifically for my benefit and/or amusement:
PLEASE REMEMBER TO WIPE YOUR ASS AFTERWARDS FOR THE GOOD OF YOUR GUSSET.
PLEASE CLOSE ALL DOORS QUIETLY, STAY HOME IF YOU ARE SICK, OR AT LEAST TRY TO DIMINISH YOUR SNEEZES – NOISE-SENSITIVE PSYCHOPATH IN THE BUILDING.
