Dead Romantic

by C. J. Skuse

  ‘What are you doing, you idiot? They’ll see us!’ He slammed the door shut.

  ‘I want to know where he’s been this last week,’ said Louis.

  ‘We can’t be seen by anyone, Lou. Even them. Everyone’s gonna know about this by tomorrow morning and I can’t take the risk of anyone seeing me, not with my record,’ said Damian.

  ‘What a . . . dick,’ spat Louis.

  ‘Hold up, there’s no need for that.’

  ‘Not you. Splodge,’ Louis sighed. ‘He disappears for days, not a word to either of us, his two oldest mates, and then he just . . . comes back, like nothing’s happened.’ We watched them walk along the road. A fat woman who looked just like Splodge, but in a dress, was giving Poppy a thoroughly disapproving look as she kissed Splodge full on the lips. The woman was holding a big gold gift bag and a man who I assumed was Splodge’s dad was holding a large blue-and-red balloon with HAPPY ANNIVERSARY spelled out in gold letters. He was giving them a filthy look as well.

  ‘Doesn’t look like his parents approve of the union much,’ said Zoe.

  ‘He’s totally dropped us, Dame,’ Louis mumbled.

  ‘Probably couldn’t carry the weight of that ego anymore,’ Zoe muttered, nodding to Damian. I smiled.

  ‘What?’ said Damian. ‘Oh who gives a toss about him anyway. He’s moved on. Let him rot, we got bigger fish to fry, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Zoe. I looked at her. Zoe and Damian in agreement again. Wow. Just, wow.

  Louis still looked so wounded from seeing Splodge. I knew exactly how he felt. It was exactly how I’d felt seeing Lynx that day in Marks & Spencer, and how I felt now, seeing Poppy with Splodge’s family. But I’d had more time to get used to the idea of losing them – to him it was still really raw.

  ‘Poppy didn’t tell me she was back either,’ I said to him. ‘And I’ve texted her loads of times.’

  ‘She’s got a new phone, ain’t she?’ said Damian. ‘His dad got her a deal on it. He’s bought himself one of them with the fold-out screens and direct line to NASA and all that.’

  I remembered her showing it to me on the Pier the night of the smooshed nose. ‘So she wasn’t ignoring me,’ I said. ‘She must have changed her number and just . . . hasn’t given me the new one.’

  ‘Look, forget them, both of them,’ said Damian. ‘Let’s stick to the plan, all right?’

  We waited ages, at least another half an hour. I didn’t mind the wait so much, but Zoe and Damian did. I softly pinched Louis’ earlobe. I could do that now. It wasn’t like being at a checkout and wanting to do it to a stranger who had cute earlobes and who would think I was odd for suddenly fiddling with them. I could fiddle with Louis’ earlobes as much as I wanted. He liked it. His neck went all goosepimply and he smiled like a puppy having his ears tickled. I was glad that made him happy. A movement through the windscreen caught my eye. ‘Someone’s coming out.’

  We watched as the waitresses left the restaurant. A light went off behind the bar inside. All four of us had tipped up our masks to get a better look. We watched as a figure moved towards the window and closed the slatted blinds. A man in a grey suit then another man in black stepped down from the doorstep and the first man put his key in the door to lock it. ‘Is that Fat Pang?’

  ‘Nah, that’s just his sons,’ said Damian. ‘Fat Pang’s about ninety stone and housebound. Might even be chop suey by now, I dunno.’

  ‘They look like scary guys, like they do martial arts and stuff,’ said Louis.

  ‘I done a bit of ju-jitsu and aikido and all that in me time. Piece of piss. You just gotta front it out, blud. “The stance maketh the man,” as my sensei once said.’

  Louis scoffed. ‘You did half an hour of karate in summer school when we were eleven and you didn’t like it cos you had to take your Nikes off.’

  ‘Whatevs. Anyway, here’s the plan,’ said Damian as we looked at him. ‘Loser, you drive the stiff wagon round the back into Poe Street. I know the gate code . . . ’

  ‘How do you know the gate code?’ asked Zoe.

  ‘Does it matter? Point is, I do. It’s 22468410. This disables the kitchen alarm too. Reverse in and wait for me to jimmy open the back door to the kitchens. Grab whatever container you can find, like them big buckets the fryer oil comes in, they’ll be good. See if there’s a few of them around. Then take them through to the dining room and start chucking in the fish. We got to get that water and them fish out of that tank as fast as we can. I reckon about twenty minutos should just about do it but if we can do it in fifteen, sweet. But we’ll have to shimmy.’

  ‘Have you done this before?’ I asked him.

  ‘Course,’ said Damian. ‘You don’t think I’d lead an expedition without knowing my way round the mountain, do ya?’

  Louis threw me a little look and I grinned at him. Zoe looked like it was all just a big fat boring waste of her time.

  ‘All right, you animals,’ said Damian, lowering his mask. ‘Let’s go hunting.’

  Fish can be so romantic

  The minute we got inside, we decided to ditch the masks to the backs of our heads – we just couldn’t see anything properly. Damian found a way of switching the cameras off in the restaurant so it wasn’t really necessary from then on.

  It was bright inside Fat Pang’s, thanks to the neon glow of the enormalous fish tank at the kitchen end of the dining room. I’d never been in there before but I’d seen it from the outside and it looked just magical. The floor was covered with an endless gold-and-red carpet and on the giant tables were gold tablecloths, cutlery and napkins and emerald encrusted chopsticks and little gold cat figurines with waving paws. Big green and blue dragons hung on every wall and there was a gorgeous smell of sticky fried pork and noodles.

  I stood looking at it all for ages, gazing at how everything looked so beautiful glinting in the neon light. The huge ‘specials’ board on the wall was offering the most wonderful-sounding dishes – fugu fish platters with stir fried noodles; spicy Devil’s fork squid with fresh chilli and ginger; tinker shark soup. I quite fancied the sound of the sweet and sour harlequin trout and the Szechuan style samurai carp or even the electrobarb satay on sticks. It all sounded so delish . . .

  ‘Camille!’

  . . . and I imagined the customers would pick what they wanted off the board, then they’d look in the fish tank and pick out the creature they wanted (maybe they’d seen a tasty-looking tinker fish or a squid giving them the eye), and then the chef would come out and catch the fish and cook it for them, right at their table. How grim? One minute this lovely little trout is swimming about, nibbling at reeds and thinking his biggest problem is if he’ll be first to grab the fish flake, and the next, he’s being rubbed with garlic and burned alive. No wonder Louis didn’t eat fish.

  ‘Camille!’ whispered Zoe, who was standing behind me with a large blue plastic barrel and a length of rubber tubing. ‘Will you come and take the end of this tube?’ Zoe showed me what siphoning was. It involved sucking one end of a rubber tube and putting it in the fish-tank water, while dangling the other end over an empty blue plastic oil tub that we had found in the kitchen. She went a little further up the tank and did the same, until two oil barrels were full. She then went and got two more tubs from the kitchen and brought them in and we had to do the whole thing again. Then it was action stations.

  ‘Hold that end.’

  ‘Grab that eel.’

  ‘Fetch another bucket.’

  ‘Stop clowning.’

  ‘There’s a crab by your foot.’

  ‘Get that fish in the ice bucket.’

  The boys concentrated on bailing water and finding fishing nets so they could safely take out as many of the fish as possible before all the water went. Louis was getting soaked, mostly because Damian was soaking him. For ages, it was just Zoe barking orders and the boys messing around.

  It didn’t take long to free the tank once the water and fish were safely out. It began to shift on its shelf perch an
d though it was heavy, we’d be able to move it. The fish were everywhere though. Glitter guppies, laser fish and reef snakes in buckets all around us. A black-and-white samurai carp in the ice bucket on the bar. Jellyfish in the bathroom sinks. A few harlequin trout in one of the deep kitchen sinks and a whole shoal of electrobarbs in the other one. There were even tiny fishes in bowls on the tables.

  ‘Wish we could set them all free,’ Louis sighed when we’d all but finished. He came over to my barrel with his net full of yellow shrimp. ‘Wish we could let them all go back into the ocean where they came from.’

  ‘Why can’t we?’ I asked him. He was soaked to the skin, and his muscly bits clung to the material of his shirt. His arms were really toned and strong too, I supposed because of all the dead bodies and coffins he lugs about all the time.

  ‘These are tropical fish,’ he said. ‘We can’t set them free anywhere round here.’

  ‘Oh right,’ I said, doing the tube thing again, trying not to look at him. I’d never really understood before what women meant when they said they’d gone ‘weak at the knees’, but now I saw Louis in his wet t-shirt, I knew what it felt like. I was kind of thrilled and scared at the same time, because he was so close to me. About as far as the length of my long ruler.

  Louis pinched at his clingy t-shirt, then all of a sudden put his hands behind his neck and pulled the thing clean off his body so his top half was naked. I didn’t know where to look at first. Damian saw him do it and did the same, so suddenly both of them were standing there, half-naked, wringing out their t-shirts into the water-filled barrels, laughing away. Damian went into the kitchen and came back with two plastic parcels – new white Fat Pang’s t-shirts, meant for Fat Pang’s staff. He threw one across to Louis, who ripped into it.

  ‘I can ask Zoe if we can save some of the fish if you like?’ I suggested to him, trying not to look at his hard man-nipples.

  ‘I think we’ve enough on our plates trying to get this thing out unnoticed,’ said Zoe, struggling past with a heavy-looking barrel full of water and lobsters, ‘without making a pit stop to release some guppies back into the wild. Damian?’ she called.

  Damian appeared behind her. ‘M’lady?’ he said, with a sweeping bow.

  ‘There’s a big bag of salt in the larder. Help me get it into the hearse.’

  ‘As you wish,’ he said, following her out to the kitchen. He turned back to Louis and whispered, ‘I’m so gonna tap that,’ pointing at Zoe.

  ‘You’re not,’ Zoe called back and Damian seemed amazed she had heard him.

  Louis walked over to one of the booth seats and picked something up. He came over to me and held up two little sandwich bags, tied at the top with a knot. The second the corners of the bags touched, a burst of blue light shot from one of them to the other. There were tiny little fish inside.

  ‘I kept these two back, for us,’ he said. ‘Electrobarbs. They’re cousins of the anchovy. One for you; one for me. Don’t show Zoe and Damian, they’ll make me put them back.’ He handed me my fish bag.

  ‘Why did you take them?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I thought you’d like them. I know it’s stealing. But there comes a point when you’re in the process of stealing something so big and so wrong, that one more little wrong thing doesn’t seem to matter.’

  I smiled.

  ‘I know you’re not really interested in fish stuff but these fish are true romantics. See?’ He gently tapped the side of the bag. ‘That little flash of light means they’re attracted to each other. They’re letting each other know where they are. They court for ages by adjoining the suckers on their fins, almost like they’re holding hands. How cool is that?’

  ‘That is pretty cool,’ I said, looking in the bags. The fish were tiny and pretty but not nearly as pretty as the glitter guppies or even the multicoloured reef snakes. And yet they both had a little line of electric blue running through their bodies, which looked gorgeous when it lit up. I untied the knot on the top of my fish bag. ‘They should be in the same bag. It’s not fair to keep them apart, is it?’

  Louis smiled and opened his bag. I poured my fish in with it. Once the two fish had settled, we knotted the bag and watched as their fins locked. They were together.

  ‘That’s the most cutest thing I’ve ever seen,’ I said, beaming from the tippy-most part of one ear to the other.

  Louis beamed too. He had the deepest dimples. I leaned in to his face, stopping at his cheek, and I planted my lips there.

  I pulled back. He looked at me. And then he took the plunge and went straight for my lips again. And we stayed there for a while like that, lips to lips, locked like the fish. I could have stayed there all night, my arms wrapped around his shoulders, touching his soggy hair ends.

  Then Damian totally killed the moment.

  ‘Come on, dickheads, stop fannying about and gis a hand with this tank.’ He had a handful of greasy chips he’d found in one of the kitchen fryers and tipped his head back to down them all.

  We got into position at one end of the fish tank and Louis rested the fish bag inside so it was safe.

  Zoe eyeballed Damian in disgust. ‘I’m actually amazed you don’t have gills yourself,’ she muttered, taking her position beside him.

  One of us at each corner, on three we shifted the tank off its perch and heaved it down, carefully, slowly, heavily – painfully heavily – through the kitchen, out into the yard and into the back of the hearse. We’d barely got the back door shut when there came the most deafening noise.

  BrrrrrrrrrrRRRReeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEaaaaEEEEaaaaEEEE aaaaEEEEaaaa.

  I clamped my hands over my ears. ‘What on earth is that?’

  ‘Ah shit, we must have tripped a sensor!’ yelled Damian as I clamped my hands over my ears.

  ‘I thought the code you put in ensured we wouldn’t set any alarms off,’ Zoe shouted over the racket.

  ‘I thought it would!’ he shouted back. ‘Must be a back up. Come on, let’s motor!’

  Louis dived into the driver’s seat and started the engine as me and Zoe launched in through the passenger side. Damian opened the driver’s door and started to shove Louis over.

  ‘Oi!’

  ‘You drive like a fat bird on downers, mate. Leave it to the master.’

  Louis scooched over, without argument, putting our bag of fish in the glove box.

  Then it was over to Damian.

  He drove that hearse like he was back on the pier playing Zombie Road Rage 3. We all clung on for dear life. It still wasn’t fast enough for him though. ‘Shoulda brought Dad’s Porsche,’ he said, taking a sideways look at Zoe, as though trying to impress her. ‘Dad can do 200 in that when it’s been raining.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have had room for the tank though, would we?’ said Zoe, glaring at him but keeping hold of her seat and the holdy handle at the top of the door.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Damian, changing gear.

  Me and Louis clung to each other and kept our masks down the whole way. Damian’s was on the back of his head upside down. I didn’t know where Zoe’s had gone.

  ‘Eat that, ya . . .’ Damian spurted a load of swear words aimed at the drivers we passed. As we’d turned the corner of Poe Street, a police car started following.

  ‘Will you slow down just the tiniest bit so we can all get out backsides back on our seats please, Damian,’ Zoe yelled.

  ‘Ooh I love it when you call me Damian,’ he grinned.

  ‘All right, moron, can you slow down, please?’

  ‘You wanna get caught, do ya?’ he laughed. ‘You actually want to explain this to the feds?’

  ‘Feds? What are you talking about, feds?’

  ‘The old bill and that.’

  ‘It’s one police car with one local underpaid policeman behind the wheel. And he’s probably half asleep.’

  I could barely hear her for the screeching of our tyres. The few people on the road whizzed past us, so we were pretty sure they hadn’t seen us for dust, or at least
the spray off our wheels. We flew along the deserted roads, passed just-closing pubs and blurry late-night snack shacks – our big glass coffin sliding around in the back of the hearse like it was on ice. Louis put his arm behind me and grabbed on to one side of the coffin to try and keep it still. I put my hand on the other side and did the same.

  ‘Move it, you little f . . .’ Damian yelled at a cat who was wandering aimlessly in the middle of the road by the Tesco roundabout, but he soon moved.

  As a blur of orange street lights lit our way back towards college, there suddenly came a WAW waw WAW waw WAW waw WAW waw sound behind us. Quite a way behind us, but still very much behind us. Two police cars.

  ‘Oh what now?’ yelled Damian, craning his neck to look behind him. ‘How the hell did they mobilise so quick?’

  Damian took us down all sorts of little back alleys and lanes where a hearse had no business being, over speed bumps and rubbish bags and dustbin lids, but the police cars stayed locked on, until we got to the traffic lights by the pier and we realised we had lost them.

  ‘I’ll be amazed if that tank makes it back in one piece,’ sighed Zoe as we rolled to a stop.

  Damian pulled up the handbrake and we all looked behind. ‘Where did they go? Anyone see them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Louis. The road behind was completely empty. Some fish and chip shop awnings flapped in the sea breeze. Some milkshake cartons clattered about the pavement. A street light flickered. Nothing else.

  ‘Blimey oh crikey that was close,’ I said, as the lights changed to green.

  We rounded the bend to begin the steep climb up the winding streets of Clairmont Hill. The police car appeared again, way behind us but definitely locked on again and gaining on us.

  ‘I don’t believe it, he’s back, he’s back!’ yelled Louis.

  ‘I’m on it,’ said Damian, putting his foot down again so our heads were thrust to the backs of our seats as the hearse roared up the hill, faster and faster. I didn’t know hearses could go so fast. He floored it down the other side to the boulevard shops and Stoker Street, running parallel to the High Street. He hit the main road out of town and took the first right at the roundabout all the way onto Beach Road, where he spun the screeching hearse sharply left and onto the drive at the front of college. He parked it behind the bank of pine trees outside the Languages block and flicked off the engine. We waited, panting, wiping the windows clean of our breaths so we could see out, watching and listening and waiting and waiting and waiting. Eventually, the siren sound came closer and we saw the car speed past the entrance, a flash of blue-and-red and a scream of siren, and then it was gone. It hadn’t seen us.