Dead Head

by C. J. Skuse

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Can we start with the tummy tuck?’

  I was in a better mood all the way back to the Hacienda – level, confident, sort of excited. I had been low-key scared about the prospect of surgery but with no option to stay at the Hacienda, it was my only chance of sanctuary in this strange, unsettling new world of mine. I was looking forward to the tummy tuck in particular – for weeks I’d had to stare down at the forlorn, floppy sack of meat that had held Ivy inside me for months. And now she was gone, I wanted it gone too. Another step forward in my quest to forget her completely.

  On the way back, now and again Paco would turn down the radio and say something provocative.

  ‘I shot a coyote last night. Right between the eyes. Two shots.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘Biggest animal I shot was a grey wolf. Must have been 180 pounds.’

  ‘Thrillsville.’

  ‘Hey, Rhiannon, did Tenoch show you the picture of the heads?’

  Deep sigh. ‘The what?’

  ‘The heads on the spikes. He did it all himself. Get him to show you them.’ He slapped the steering wheel in celebration. ‘La bestia!’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll be sure to check that out at the earliest opportunity, thanks.’

  ‘Oh man, you gotta see it! He cut off all their heads. Man, did that send a message. You ever cut off anyone’s head, Rhiannon?’

  I pinched my belly fat, trying to imagine it gone. ‘That’s not my name.’

  ‘Yeah, but did you ever cut off anyone’s head?’

  ‘Yes. Two people.’

  That pulled him up. His eyes widened in the rear-view which he had angled so that every time he looked up he could see me. ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes. A female paedophile and my baby’s father, if you must know. Though they were both dead at the time.’

  ‘Whoa. So you Beauty and the Beast, huh? La bella y la bestia!’ He laughed uncontrollably, even though again he’d failed to produce the desired response. As a last attempt, he clicked the glovebox, ostensibly to pull out a stick of gum, but gum is not what I saw. I saw gun – a semi-automatic pistol and a box of bullets. He took out the gum and shoved a stick in his mouth, looking at me in the rear-view mirror before shutting the compartment.

  ‘Always on alert, chica,’ he winked. ‘Always ready for the fight.’

  I batted my eyes. Paco still hadn’t pushed the right button. But it was a ticking timebomb and one day I knew, without any doubt, that he would.

  Friday, 15 February – Hacienda Santuario – the day before surgery starts

  Facebook Rhiannon Lewis is our Qween

  Facebook group

  Public Group

  Friday, 15 February 2019

  Thread: Sightings of Rhiannon Lewis around the world

  JoshuaBoshua wrote: So what do y’all reckon about this sighting of our qween at her sister’s house in Vermont? Credible? Thoughts?

  HellzBellz7888#: Well, considering there’s been sightings of her in Spain, Thailand, and Brisbane in the last month, I would take it with a pinch of salt. I heard another rumour that some ex-pats saw her in the Caribbean a few weeks ago.

  CastleOfDoom73297329: Probably a rumour, tbh.

  Rachael544 wrote: Yeah, and she probably looks nothing like her pictures in the papers now. She will have changed her whole identity.

  CackyPants5554324: Everyone knows someone who says they’ve seen Rhiannon Lewis down the chip shop but it’s most likely bullshit.

  BringOutTheGimp277 wrote: Booooooooooooooooo!!!!! It’s Rhiannon Lewis. I’m coming to get youuuuuuuuu. I’m going to slaughter all of you one by one.

  Sweetpea672: How do you know one of us isn’t Rhiannon Lewis???

  JoshuaBoshua wrote [to Sweetpea666]: You wish! LOL

  BobbyAndEnema wrote: Bitch better not come to my town. Imma lynch her.

  JesusIsAMalteaser wrote: I wouldn’t use her babysitting service but I wouldn’t exactly ‘lynch’ her.

  JokesOnMe44 wrote: What’s the matter with all you freaks in here?! This woman killed innocent people! She needs locking up and the key being thrown away into the deepest sea!

  CastleOfDoom73297329: She killed TWO innocent people as far as I can gather from her confession. All the rest were paedophiles and s*x offenders. Good riddance to bad f*****g rubbish, I say.

  FloralHydrate: I think she’s in Mexico.

  Sweetpea672: Who’s the Freddie guy who got the confession??? Saw him being interviewed – he’s so hot!

  I closed Facebook and opened YouTube – a new video had popped up when I searched my name – an Up at the Crack interview with Dean Bishopston’s widow Sarah about a week before. I didn’t want to watch it but somehow I clicked play and Hate-Watched it instead, knowing exactly how it was going to make me feel. It’s like, sometimes I want to make myself feel bad, feel worse.

  Carolyn Perma-Tan was giving it the full furrowed brow and perpetually serious chin angle as she sat cross-footed on the lurid pink banquette, shuffling her papers and bulging out of her blue Bodycon.

  Cue the steely look down the lens. ‘Everyone will remember reading about the horrors of that fateful June evening when Dean Bishopston was out on his normal taxi-driving round in Birmingham city centre, as he did most nights to earn some extra cash for Christmas presents—’

  Bigging up the sainthood.

  ‘—when he took a fare from a lone woman who needed to get to a pub. And, as we now know, her full confession having been revealed, this woman was Rhiannon Lewis, the notorious serial murderer, currently on the run in connection with as many as fifteen murders.’

  I prefer the term serial murderess but whatever.

  ‘Dean, who had a picture of his children inside his cab, was much loved by everyone who knew him—’

  Cut to Sarah Bishopston, loving widow, washed-out skin, pinhole eyes, red hair crying out for a straightening tong, thousand-yard stare.

  ‘Lewis says in her confession that she offered Dean sex, which he refused, and it was then that she struck, stabbing him sixteen times. She watched him die on the cold, hard ground. Dean’s widow Sarah joins me now. Sarah – thank you for joining us today. Talk me through the moment when you were informed of Dean’s death. It must have been horrendous for you.’

  Someone had clearly drunk their Stupid Bitch Juice that morning.

  ‘Yes, it was a horrendous morning,’ said Sarah, all monotone. ‘At the time it was a blur. It was so unexpected. We’ve always lived in Birmingham and we’d never even been burgled. We live in a safe neighbourhood. Dean sometimes had a few drunks in his cab but nothing too bad. I knew it was a risk him being out at night taking fares but he insisted he wanted the kids to have better Christmas presents that year.’

  ‘But that moment you found out, take us to that—’

  ‘I opened the front door and two people were standing there, a woman in a police uniform and a guy in a suit and they asked to come in. And I knew from their faces. And I held my breath. And when they said it, I collapsed.’

  There was a series of increasingly stinging and interrogative questions all of which Sarah Bishopston answered without cunt-punching the woman into the wall, so fair fucks to her on that score.

  ‘What was the moment like when you saw his body in the morgue?’

  ‘How did the boys react when you told them Daddy was dead?’

  ‘How have you coped with being all alone ever since?’

  The woman couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t feel anything. Not until she spoke about their youngest, Anthony.

  ‘He looks so much like his daddy, it scares me,’ she said. ‘And he asks for him every bedtime. And he cries for him in the night. I keep pictures of Dean all over the house – I’m afraid the kids will forget him. I’m afraid they don’t have enough memories.’

  ‘Tell me what kind of husband Dean was, Sarah.’

  ‘He was the love of my life. He’d always forget our anniversary and Valentine’s Day but he did a thousand romantic things. He’d wri
te love notes and put them in my bag. Bring me flowers. We had so much in common – same sense of humour, same likes and dislikes. And we laughed so much – it was like we knew what the other one was thinking. We were in tune. Wherever he was, was home. I’ll never get over this, never.’

  Caro had said the same thing about Beatrice – being with her felt like she was home. The Hottest Turtle flashed into my mind, how in tune we had been during that short forty-five-minute meeting. What could have been.

  And what was.

  Within ten minutes, #RememberDeanBishopston was trending worldwide on Twitter, amid its usual cesspool of shouty voices giving too much of a shit about some celebrity dressing their cat in tinsel or having the wrong opinion about how to eat a Twix. I tried to swerve my brain away from Sarah and Dean Bishopston and their three boys. But I couldn’t.

  I’d taken their daddy. Like I’d taken Ivy’s daddy.

  I’d taken her place of safety, her home. Like I’d taken my own.

  They hadn’t deserved that. I deserved everything coming to me.

  ‘What’s up, gatita?’ said Tenoch, leaning on the office doorframe. I closed the lid of the laptop.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You been googling yourself again, eh?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You need to stop that.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because it not make you happy. When you see all the nice things people are saying – “Oh we love Rhiannon, we love when she kill people, when she funny and cut off all the lil peckers—”’

  ‘—one dick I cut off. One.’

  ‘—yeah but even when they say good shit you’re still all “They’re not saying enough, I only have two hundred more fans than yesterday. Why did only five thousand people like that meme of me in the unicorn onesie?” And when they say bad stuff, you feel shitty too. I’ve been there, I know.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Oh yeah. In my day, I used to have people coming up to ask for pictures with me, to kiss me, give me hugs. But not everyone. Some would call me a murderer and spit in my face. Other times, I’d get shot.’

  ‘Why? What did you do?’

  ‘Cartel life,’ he said, with a flap of his hand like he wasn’t going to elaborate. And he didn’t. ‘It goes with the job – we are adored and hated. Like you. What did you see today?’

  ‘An interview. A woman whose husband I killed.’

  ‘She give it the waterworks, huh?’

  ‘She’s got three little kids.’

  ‘Collateral damage.’ I looked up at him. He sat on a stack of books by the door. ‘It’s always the little ones with you, isn’t it? You gotta let that shit go. It brings out your devil. If you’re serious about starting a new life, you’ve got to be different. This stuff – it not where happiness lies.’

  Caro had said the same thing to me that day I’d destroyed those flowers in the botanical gardens.

  You need to stop hating yourself so much. Leave it behind. Start anew. All this anger, it will only lead to no good…

  That’s why I checked the forums and threads and articles about me – I wanted the hate and the love. To make myself angry but to feel what it was like to be adored as well. The two sides of me, co-existing, fighting all the time like sisters. I was perpetuating a cycle, never breaking out of it.

  Paco did his best to goad me, that day of all days. He knew I was jittery and he was my jitter bug, feeding off my low-level panic like a tick.

  ‘Hey, Rhiannon,’ he’d shout from the living room with the laptop balanced on his knees. ‘You have a thing for fucking dead gringos. That true?’

  ‘One dead Australian,’ I called back, kneading my bread dough.

  ‘Hey, Rhiannon, is it true you have a lampshade made of human skin?’

  ‘Fake news.’

  ‘Hey, Rhiannon, is it true you don’t like the taste of tattooed flesh?’

  ‘Nah, bit stringy.’

  ‘Hey, Rhiannon, where did you hide all their dicks, eh?’

  ‘I ONLY CUT OFF ONE DICK, ALL RIGHT? AND I DIDN’T EAT IT OR MOUNT IT OR USE IT TO PLAY PIN THE TAIL ON THE FUCKING DONKEY!’

  ‘Paco, basta!’ Tenoch, give him his due, knew exactly when Paco had brought me to boiling point and had the ability to call him off with one word, almost like a whistle to a well-trained Rottweiler.

  Paco wasn’t alone that day – there were three other uninvited guests at the Hacienda – Ming, Arturo and Stuzzy. I recognised Arturo as my driver from the airport – sent by Tenoch to ensure nobody else brought me to his secret lair. He was the least irksome of the four – bald, loud and the only one who habitually read a newspaper. He was also a boxer – I could tell by the knuckles and the ears.

  Ming was shorter than Arturo with a shock of sticky-up black hair, like a hedgehog, and body odour that smelled like something between gravy and the grave. Stuzzy had shiny, floppy hair, a thick moustache and burn marks over the back of his neck. On his face sat a permanent scowl and I rarely heard him speak.

  They were hanging around snorting coke and playing Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto even when I went outside to transfer some new seedlings. There was no place inside where I could escape from their drinking games and loud conversations, deafening music, impromptu stripteases for my benefit or lines of cocaine on the coffee table.

  ‘Why are they even here?’ I snipped at Tenoch when he came out to the pool terrace where I was pinching out some new seedlings.

  ‘They are pulling an all-nighter for me later. They’re just kicking back before they go. Boys will be boys.’

  ‘No, twats will be twats,’ I sighed, throwing down my trowel and wiping my sweaty head on the edge of my gardening glove. ‘What all-nighter?’ He threw me his usual zipped-mouth and I went back to digging my borders. ‘Well, I’m fed up. They’ve eaten all my Pop Tarts—’

  ‘Paco doesn’t like synthetic food.’

  ‘No, the other Chipmunks – Alvin, Simon and Theodore.’

  He chuckled. ‘I’ll order more Pop Tarts.’

  ‘—and the empanadas I made you. And Paco always drinks the milk out of my cereal bowl, I mean, what the hell is that about?’

  ‘I said they could have the empanadas. I’ll talk to Paco about the milk.’

  ‘I don’t want them here. I don’t want their feet on the furniture, their sticky beer marks on the coffee table, their stinky cigarette smoke, their thumping music, their mud-spattered hatchbacks on our driveway—’

  ‘It not your house, Rhiannon.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that,’ I spat. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You need to cool off,’ he said, his car keys in his fist. ‘You’ve worked hard today. The flowers look wonderful. Now you should rest up, big day tomorrow, huh?’

  ‘Thanks.’ I rubbed the centre of my chest. ‘I’m all acidy.’

  ‘Come on. I’ll take you to town. We’ll get an ice cream.’

  It was such a Dad thing to do – take me away from the situation and buy me an ice cream – and although it was slightly patronising, I went, if only to get out of the house for a while. He made me wear sunglasses and one of Marisol’s straw hats so I could hide my face and dropped me off on the beachfront, unfolding a wad of notes and shoving it into my hand as I closed the door.

  ‘Go shop, buy things… I got some business to take care of. I’ll pick you up in an hour at the bakery.’

  I looked at him. ‘What’s this, pocket money?’

  ‘You’ve worked hard for me this week. Buy yourself some new clothes.’

  ‘I don’t want new clothes.’

  ‘Stay out of trouble. I’ll see you in an hour.’

  Dad would say the same thing – Here you go, treat yourself to some sweets, I’ve got to take care of some business. Or, Wait here in the car, I won’t be long, read your comic. I’m just gonna go in here and beat this guy to a pulp with my mates, but don’t tell your mother. Nothing had changed. Nothing had fucking changed since I was in single digits.

 
So I wandered about the town, drifting in and out of storefronts. I bought a couple of T-shirts and a piña colada from one of the kiosks and milled aimlessly along the shoreline collecting shells. I took off my trainers and allowed the ocean water to caress my feet, sitting beneath a beach palapa to finish my drink and watching the world carrying on without me. I missed Caro. I missed chatting to someone. Laughing. I hadn’t laughed for weeks.

  After a while a van pulled up on the beachfront – a shabby rental with dirty plates. A half-naked guy jumped out the driver’s seat. He wore black jeans and his chest was bare, his T-shirt dangling from his waistband – his chest was the most magnificent specimen I’d ever clapped eyes on. And I knew immediately it was him – The Hottest Turtle. I didn’t even need to look up and see his face.

  I threw my plastic glass in a nearby trash can and followed him at a distance as he opened the back of the van and climbed in, coming out with two empty boxes and a huge roll of bubble wrap which he set down on the pavement. I remembered his aunt Salomé saying she was moving premises and that he was coming to help her.

  I still had his note in my back pocket, the one he’d left for me.

  The closer I got, the more detail I could pick out from the safety of my straw hat – a sheen of sweat on his back. White paint flecks on his jeans, in his jet-black hair. The tattoos on his side, his underarms, the base of his neck.

  But I couldn’t go any closer than that. I couldn’t take another step towards him. This gorgeous man, who I would normally stand on heads to get a piece of, was like The One Ring – luring me in but repelling me too. Because I knew where this would go – I’d start trusting him and calming down and being all happy and when I least expected it, he’d break me. And Rhiannon would come back, full throttle, and he’d end up like Craig or, worse, AJ. I didn’t want to go there again. Like Caro said, you never break your own heart. I had to keep it safe. I had to be on my own.

  He put the roll of wrap inside the smallest box, putting that inside the big box and carrying them up the street. The thought owls still circled as I waited, watching that van: if that podcast was true and forming ‘happy human bonds’ was the only way someone like me could live a normal life, how was that going to happen if I didn’t make human connections? I wanted to go towards him. I wanted him to hug me and tell me he was happy to see me. I wanted to tell him I’d been thinking about him too, especially at night.