Dead Romantic

by C. J. Skuse

  Louis coughed, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Did you have a good time at freshers’ the other night?’

  I threw him a look, waiting for the cocky comments. ‘Yes, I’m so glad I went and made a complete fool of myself. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’

  He sidestepped a squashed potato wedge. ‘Yeah, I had a crap time too. Damian brought his snakebite. I was puking in the hedge all night long. It was nasty.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I had some too,’ I said, looking out across the beach. It was a dead romantic beach, if you could see past the dog turds and rubbish. Someday I wanted to go down there with a boy. Gallop along together on a strong white steed, the wind in my crinkly hair. His strong hands on the reins. Him shouting, ‘Hya!’ That would be so romantic. But tonight was not romantic. It was blustery and cold and I got a mouthful of sand and sweet wrappers when I breathed in.

  ‘Damian’s not really worth the fuss, you know,’ came Louis’ voice as I scanned the beach. There was a single figure down on the sand. A figure with a dog. I shivered. ‘He’s a bit of a slut and I can’t see that changing really.’

  ‘That’s your best friend,’ I said, and then sighed. ‘But you are right.’

  ‘He’s never been faithful to a girl,’ he said. ‘Never known him any other way. Did you know he’s on a mission to “do” every girl in college.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, feeling a little sick and regretting how I felt about him a little more every second that ticked by. ‘How long have you been friends with him?’

  ‘Since secondary school. I had no friends at all until him. He was the only one who was curious about what my parents did for a living.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, at first, anyway . . .’

  ‘Oh really?’ I said, barely listening. I looked back out to sea, trying to find the dark figure again on the sand. It had gone. ‘What do your parents do?’

  ‘You remember, don’t you?’ he said. ‘We own Burnett & Sons, next door to Lugosi’s Pizzeria. Just opposite Fat Pang’s?’

  He worked in a funeral parlour? Suddenly I found Louis terribly interesting. ‘Oh Burnett, yeah, of course. Should have known. Wow. That’s really interesting . . .’

  ‘Yeah, yeah . . .’

  ‘No, honestly, I’m genuinely interested in dead things.’ He looked at me. ‘I mean, I don’t mind them, like, at all. They’re necessary, aren’t they? I’m quite fascinated by death. Someone died at our guest house a few months ago. You probably did her funeral, Mrs Cleak?’

  He frowned and shrugged at the same time. Frugged, I guess. ‘We do a lot.’

  ‘Sure, sure. That’s so cool that your parents own one. So how’s business?’

  He nodded. ‘Good, yeah. Thanks to the care homes and the cokeheads around here, it’s never been better. Don’t tell Damian you’re into dead stuff though. He had a bad experience at my twelfth birthday party and now he won’t go in there. Splodge locked him in our embalming room to teach him a lesson for looking up my cousin’s skirt. He’s had a total phobia about the place ever since.’

  I laughed. It was funny hearing someone talk about Damian as a human being with fears. It was nice. Refreshing. ‘Fancy being afraid of dead bodies,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not that unusual,’ said Louis. ‘Most people are. But Dame is petrified.’

  ‘I’m not scared of them.’

  ‘Neither am I.’

  We smiled. I even started to get the feeling I was enjoying myself.

  ‘Let’s go in the pavilion and warm up,’ said Louis as he ran on ahead to get the door.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, going in, and as I looked back at him, he smiled, and snapped his hand away from the door and it swung back into my face.

  Schbaaaang!

  The pain was immediate and thick and spread from my nose outwards to the rest of my face. It felt like my whole head was on fire.

  ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!’ I gasped, holding my nose. ‘Oh! Oh God! My nose!’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ cried Louis. He had folded his arms across his chest, his wrists in his armpits, like he was stopping his sides from splitting.

  ‘You idiot! That’s not funny, you complete idiot!’ I cried.

  His forehead creased up. ‘My hand slipped, I’m so sorry. Camille, my hand totally just slipped and the door’s on a sprung hinge . . .’

  Blood poured from my nose. I could hear Damian and Lynx laughing somewhere inside the pavilion as Louis ushered me inside to sit at one of the two-player racing games, Zombie Road Rage 3: Kill or Be Killed.

  ‘Wait here. I’ll get an ice pack.’

  I didn’t care where he was going. I sat in agony and cried. The pavilion was loud and stank of burnt sugar and fried onions. Every sound made my brain bang about inside my head. The clinky penny pushers. The clicky neon air hockey tables. The laughing fortune teller. The Whack-A-Mole where a girl was merrily bang-bang-bang bashing a plastic brown thing on the head every time it popped through a hole.

  Tucked into a corner was a new game I hadn’t seen there before called ‘Electrocutie’. In the glass case sat a grinning life-sized dummy in a boiler suit. Strapped to its head was a tin hat with wires coming out of it. Two boys were putting coins in the slot and flicking the lever over and over to watch the dummy scream and fizz and shake, all tongue hangy-out and horrible.

  Damian and Lynx appeared. He slipped down into the seat beside me, and started racing and killing zombies. Lynx frowned at my face.

  ‘What the hell have you done to yourself, Mills?’

  ‘Door. Banged on my face. Louis did it,’ I sniffed, and winced at the same time. Sninced, I guess.

  Splodge and Poppy turned up and stood behind Damian’s seat to watch him. They started warning him of zombies and blood slicks. Poppy looked at me and at the blood running through my fingers as I tried to shield my face from them all.

  ‘Are you okay, Camille?’ she said, but she didn’t come over to me or try to help. Nothing was going to un-glue her from Splodge.

  ‘Yeah, I just had an accident. Louis has gone to get an ice pack.’

  SPLAT. VROOM. SCREEEECH. UGH!

  ‘Yeah, eat that you mother . . . smash his brain in you stupid . . .’

  UGH UGH UGH.

  ‘Damie baby, I’m gonna go and get a Slushie, you want?’ said Lynx, resting her cheek on Damian’s.

  ‘Yeah, go on then,’ he said, not looking up from his game.

  When she had gone, he started on me. ‘How’s your conk, Mills?’

  I tilted up my bleeding face to look down at him. ‘What?’

  ‘Loser gets like this when he fancies a bird. Clumsy tosser. Don’t tell him I told you, he’ll go well mad.’ He cackled as he drove into a zombie, crushing him against a wall until he exploded. ‘You thought about my offer?’ UGH UGH. ‘I haven’t had any little emergency phone calls. Thought you’d be hurtin’ for a squirtin’ by now.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I sniffed, tasting blood in the back of my throat.

  Louis came back with a bored-looking boy in a red Hoydon’s Pier uniform and a blue squidgy cold thing, which he tried to put on my face. I snatched it away from him and gently held it over my nose. The pain in my face clawed me like a bear.

  ‘Well, you’d better hurry up, I don’t hang around for ever,’ Damian carried on. THUNK. ‘Go on, it’ll make your fortnight, a shag with me. I’d go easy on ya.’

  ‘Dame,’ said Louis, quietly.

  My brain throbbed in my ears. All down my chest were bloody red drips. I got up from my seat. ‘I wouldn’t go out with you if you were . . . dipped in chocolate.’

  ‘That can be arranged,’ he said. UGH UGH. Two hundred points. UGH UGH. ‘And I’m only talking about a shag. I don’t wanna go out or nothing.’

  I threw the squidgy thing down and stormed out, snorting blood as I went.

  Louis came outside after me. ‘Camille, please come back, I’m so sorry . . .’

  I turned to him, my nose dripping freely. ‘I’m always the joke, aren’t I? The laughing stock.’
Sniff. ‘The girl whose face you smashed with a door. Big fat hilarious that is. Ow.’

  ‘No, please. Come back.’ He was shivering. Typical stupid boy to come out on a freezing night wearing a kilt. ‘We can hang out without that lot. Like friends.’

  I stopped. ‘You’re NOT my friend,’ I told him, pushing his offered hand away and wiping my tender nose with my arm. ‘Ow. I’ve only got one friend. And monsters like you and Damian de Jager can jump off the end of this pier. GoodBYE.’

  As I stomped off down the boardwalk, the heel of my Mary Jane caught in one of the wooden slats and broke. I ripped both off and threw them over the side into the raging sea. I started to run. Bam bam bam went my bare feet on the slats.

  ‘Camille!’ I heard again behind me on the wind, but I was running like the pier was crumbling under my feet. I ran to the seafront, my face throbbing. That was it. That was absolutely IT. I was NOT putting myself through this embarrassment any more. I was going to be like that nun in that film who’s just happy serving God and dancing in the hills. Boys were a big fat NOTHING to me now. End of.

  I sprinted towards the bandstand and collapsed on one of the benches. My sobs echoed around the walls.

  Before long, I felt a presence. I looked up to see a dark figure and through my tears I saw it was someone in a hood. A girl in a hood. My girl in a hood!

  ‘So how was your night?’ said Zoe, looking at my face and bloodied lemon dress and bare feet. ‘I think we can rule out “a success”.’

  ‘Oh Zoe!’ I said, jumping to my filthy feet and flinging my arms around her. She didn’t hug me back though. In fact, she was frowning as we pulled apart. ‘It was hor rible. Louis Burnett opened a door on my face and I think he broke my nose . . .’

  ‘It’s not broken,’ said Zoe, looking at it.

  ‘Yeah, and then Damian and the others didn’t even care what had happened, they just carried on playing in the arcades and Damian kept on about when we’re going to have sex and . . .’

  ‘Why do you associate with them?’ she said. ‘Have you no self-esteem?’

  I couldn’t stop crying, but now it was with relief. The relief of seeing Zoe. ‘Oh God it’s so nice to see you, where have you been?’

  She looked at me, wide-eyed. ‘I’m not sure that is any of your business but I will say that there’s more to life than A levels.’

  I looked down. She was holding something by her side. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Are you the hysterical type?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I don’t think so anyway,’ I replied, wiping my nose.

  Zoe held up her right hand. She was holding a puppy’s head.

  My hand immediately sprang to my mouth. ‘Oh my . . .’

  She held up her left hand. Dangling by its tail was the rest of the puppy.

  ‘. . . God.’

  Spook Central

  I knew where Clairmont House was. It was on the same road as my dentist, high up on the hill above the town. It looked like the haunted house on the cover of one of my romance novels, Romancing the Bones, or a stately home that my parents might visit, except it had a ‘Keep Out’ sign on the gates and no gift shop. After what Poppy had said about Zoe’s dad, Professor Lutwyche, about the body parts they’d found at the house, about the people he’d killed and how he lived in the trees like Tarzan, I was a bit nervous about meeting him. I tried not to show it though.

  ‘Thanks for inviting me back, Zoe,’ I said, sniffing up a fresh trail of snotty blood as I puffed my way barefoot up the steep streets of Clairmont Hill. ‘I’m really excited about meeting your . . . family.’

  ‘I didn’t invite you. You invited yourself,’ said Zoe, not even out of breath and still clutching both parts of the Jack Russell puppy. She’d told me she found him in the woods, lying in an animal snare, and that he had probably run off from a local farm where they train them as ratters. I believed her.

  ‘Will anyone be home?’ I said.

  Puppy Part Two dripped on the pavement. What with my nose and the headless dog, the night had been a bloodbath.

  ‘Just my Aunt Gwen,’ said Zoe. ‘She will be asleep.’

  ‘No one else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. We’ve made a lot of mess,’ I said, looking behind me at the pavement.

  ‘It will rain soon,’ said Zoe.

  ‘Will it?’ I said, trying not to worry. ‘Mum says Johnny Depp lives up here.’

  ‘Who?’ said Zoe.

  ‘Johnny Depp.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

  Was I having an out-of-body experience? ‘You’ve never heard of Johnny Depp? Pirates of the Caribbean and . . . that one about the pies.’

  ‘We don’t have a television set.’

  My mind went into meltdown. Never heard of Johnny Depp and didn’t own a television. Blimey. Just, blimey.

  Before I knew it, out of breath and spattered with new raindrops, we had arrived before two tall black gates. The driveway beyond was lit up by a super-huge full moon lying low in the sky. I thought the grounds looked quite pretty at first, until I started noticing all the weird stuff going on. There was an odd sort of whooping coming from the trees. Not quite birdy sounds, but not human either. And there was a piano rotting away in a clump of ivy. Cracked mirrors nailed to tree trunks. A naked woman, peering out from behind a bush. I looked again before I realised it was a clothes mannequin. No signs of Mad Dad though. I expected him at any moment to leap down from a tree, beating his chest. Luckily, he didn’t. It was just me and Zoe.

  ‘Wow, this is nice,’ I said, beginning the painful walk across the gravel.

  Zoe didn’t even blink. ‘No, it’s not. We inherited this place from my grandfather. He was into antiques. We’re not.’

  Everything went silent except for the distant whooping. There was a river flowing alongside the driveway, and by the light of the moon I could see its shimmering path through the garden. She handed me the dog’s head and unlocked the front door. ‘Mind the step.’

  ‘Why? What’s it going to do?’ I jumped, grimacing as I looked at my hand, which was now thickly covered with blood.

  The hallway was dark and smelled like my dad’s old war books. Zoe lit a big candlestick thing on a small marble table next to a big pile of unopened letters with red writing all over them. When my eyes got used to the light the first thing I saw was this massive stuffed blueygreeny lizard in a glass case on the shelf. The walls were high and red and the carpet was mossy green. All around were stuffed animals in glass cases. And when I looked again, I saw some of them weren’t any old stuffed animals. A goat had huge white swan wings coming out of its back. There was a cat with duck feet. A crab-like creature with a mouse’s head. A two-headed piglet with a tortoise’s shell.

  ‘Blimey O’Riley,’ I said, as under-my-breath as I could. ‘What kinds of animals are these?’

  Zoe looked at me as though she couldn’t fathom what I was so shocked about. ‘My mother was a taxidermist. She used to experiment with some of the specimens my father . . . didn’t get quite right.’

  ‘She used to?’ I asked. ‘What does she do now?’ But Zoe didn’t answer and I was too unnerved by the goat, which I was sure had just winked at me, to press her on it.

  All the cases were numbered. In a corner of the hall stood a large stuffed polar bear with deer-like legs, its front paws holding out a dusty tray of drinks. He had a number seven pinned to his ear.

  ‘Wow,’ I said, whispering like I do in museums. ‘Your parents must have been really clever. My mum can’t even sew up a turkey’s arse to keep the stuffing in at Christmas.’

  Zoe led me up an endless Hogwartsy staircase by the light of her many-candled candlestick, passing glass cases full of china dolls with scratchy faces and toys from the olden days and butterflies pinned to boards, all covered in cobwebs. There were horrible faded green velvet curtains at the windows and every single stair was piled up at one end with a stack of paperback books.

  ‘So you live with your
Aunt Gwen?’ I whispered, shrinking away so the velvet curtains didn’t infect me with their velvetiness.

  ‘Yes,’ said Zoe. ‘She moved in just after my father . . .’ She stopped talking.

  ‘Went away?’ I said, thinking maybe it was hard for her to talk about him going into an asylum – if that’s where he was.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear the woman but she keeps the under-age squad at Social Services happy.’

  I was more than a bit relieved to hear about the lack of dad. I never liked meeting people’s dads anyway, cos they’re always a bit weird, but mad dads who stored people’s body parts and lived in trees I especially didn’t want to meet tonight.

  Zoe went and knocked lightly on the door of one of the bedrooms. She poked her head around it. A grandfather clock chimed midnight on the landing. Zoe closed the door. ‘She’s asleep. Good. That’ll keep her out of our hair for the night.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked. She held up the puppy’s headless body. ‘Oh right, yeah,’ I laughed, looking at the head. ‘Pin the head on the doggy.’

  It was so dark in Zoe’s room my eyes again had to strain to see. She lit some more candles and slowly it all started to come to life. It looked like a museum. There was a bookshelf covering a whole wall, and more shelves with cases of smaller stuffed animals on it. Dotted here and there were glass bottles with labels with long science words I couldn’t pronounce on them, and what looked like pickled-onion jars, except they had little skulls in them not onions. A sign on the back of her door read ‘The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education – Albert Einstein.’