The Deviants

by C. J. Skuse

  ‘It’s no use,’ said Corey. ‘The police won’t do anything. I’ve told teachers before. They never do anything. Zane just comes back at me harder next time.’

  Max sipped his tea. ‘Should we call your g-folks or summing? Maybe they should come back from their cruise.’

  ‘No,’ said Corey. ‘I don’t want them here.’ His disability was so much more obvious when he was upset; the muscles in his face and arm seemed to spasm.

  ‘You might not be safe here, on your own.’

  ‘I don’t care. Let him kill me. Let’s see how far he’ll go.’

  ‘No,’ I said. He looked at me – I’d said it firmer than I’d meant to. ‘You can stay with us. In Ollie’s room. I’ve got training later, but Max can stay with you till I come back. We’ve got Cheerios at home, I think. If not, Max’ll pop out and get you some.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Max, following my lead. ‘You’ve got an Xbox, right? Bring that over. We’ll play FIFA or summing.’

  ‘I can’t face work this afternoon,’ said Corey softly.

  Max got out his phone, Googled Easy PC Electronics, Brynstan High Street, and made the call to Corey’s boss. Corey told him to ‘play the cerebral palsy card’ so he wouldn’t ask any questions. It worked like a charm.

  ‘Sorted,’ he said, clicking off his phone. Then, without another word, Corey picked up the full UKIP mug of tea and lobbed it straight at the fireplace wall. It exploded in a dark brown sunburst.

  I leaped up off the sofa. ‘For God’s sake! What was that?’

  ‘I don’t like tea,’ he replied, quite calmly.

  Max looked at him, his mouth open. Then he let out one of his chuckles. Corey started laughing, too.

  ‘That felt good,’ he said, picking up the Cornish Riviera mug and chucking that at the wall too. They both fell about laughing again.

  Max handed him his mug, the Milky Bar one. ‘Try that.’

  Corey looked at him, then at the fireplace. Then he hoyed it against the wall behind his head, where it exploded into a satisfying shatter-splash of broken china and brown tea. Max started handing him ornaments from the sideboard – a china Little Boy Blue, a hideous Siamese cat musical thing and one that looked like a small yeti playing a flute. He was unstoppable. Both me and Max laughed harder and harder.

  Then we stared around us, at the broken bits and wet living room carpet.

  ‘Jeez,’ Max whistled. ‘What you gonna tell your g-folks?’

  Corey shrugged. ‘We had an earthquake?’

  Max high-fived him hard. ‘You are the man!’

  Of course Corey needed to vent. He’d been name-called and laughed at and picked on and punched for practically as long as I’d known him. This smash fest had been good for him. It was a start. A step in the right direction.

  And Zane had caused it. Zane ‘Cat Killer’ Walker. He’d made Corey feel as angry as I did on a regular basis. I could handle the rage, especially now I had the key to Pete’s garage, but I knew Corey couldn’t.

  ‘I want to bury him,’ said Corey, wiping a long snot trail all up his sleeve.

  ‘Me too,’ I said, with a smile that showed my teeth. ‘We need to teach him a lesson.’

  ‘No, I meant Mort,’ he said. ‘Under the pittosporum bush. He’d like that.’

  *

  It was raining hard when we went out to the back garden. I’d thought our garden was neat, but Corey’s looked ready for Chelsea. The borders were overflowing with a rainbow of showy flowers, heads so big they were buckling their stems. Every leaf was polished green and the grass edges looked as though they’d been hand-trimmed with scissors. We wrapped Mort in a blanket that Corey swiped from the back of the sofa – he said he wanted him to be warm. I didn’t see why a dead body had to be kept warm, but I said nothing.

  At the top of the garden, near the brick barbecue, we found the pittosporum Mort liked to sleep under, and Max started to dig. Corey carefully laid his bundled friend down inside the hole, putting three plastic balls and a toy mouse beside him. We all cried; Max more than Corey, me more even than Max. I think it nudged the memory for all of us.

  Max shovelled the earth back into the hole until the blanket was covered. He looked beautiful in the rain. I felt a familiar pang of sorrow as I watched him dig, his T-shirt getting wetter in the worsening downpour. When the grave was filled, the last thing to do was place a pencil cross on top of the mound and say some words. That was left to me.

  ‘Please keep this animal safe and deliver him to the Lord with special blessings. And hope and love. And safety. Something about kingdoms and bread. We love thee, Mort, forevs and evs. Amen.’ I had no idea what I was saying, but it sounded all right and Corey repeated the Amen. Max reached out for my hand and I took his.

  ‘I saw him,’ said Corey, out of nowhere. ‘Kissing a lad from school behind the equipment shed. That’s why he hates me.’

  ‘Kissing a lad? You mean, Zane’s gay?’ said Max.

  Corey nodded. ‘He said if I told anyone what I saw, he’d kill me. He’s ashamed of it. Like, super ashamed.’

  ‘Oh God – is that his big secret?’ I sighed. ‘Is that it? That’s nothing.’

  ‘Not to Zane, it’s not,’ said Corey.

  It did explain a lot, his secret and his shame. Why Zane always had to be the alpha male; why he worked out so much. Why he tweeted so often about which girls he’d ‘knocked off’ and hoped weren’t ‘knocked up’. Why he was always so angry.

  ‘That’s so messed up,’ said Max. ‘I mean, why did he sleep with Fallon if he’s gay?’

  I knew the answer to this one. ‘Fallon told us last night, remember? She said he just came round, out of the blue, after months of not saying one word to her. How quick it was. How he cried afterwards. It was an experiment. Like he was just… making sure.’

  ‘Still, it’s majorly screwed up,’ said Corey.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with being gay,’ I snapped, teetering on the edge of another bitchplosion. ‘My brother’s gay.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that being gay was screwed up. I meant Zane using Fallon to try and prove he wasn’t.’

  Corey sat down on the edge of the brick barbecue. ‘I like Fallon,’ he said. ‘I like her more than just liking goes.’ I sat down next to him. ‘He used her. And he murdered Mort.’ He looked down at the little pencil cross on Mort’s grave. ‘He’s gone too far.’ He dissolved slowly into tears again.

  ‘So what are we going to do about it then?’ I asked.

  Max looked at me. ‘There’s a massive cake in the fridge.’

  ‘What?’

  Corey sniffed, wiping his eyes and replacing his glasses. ‘That’s my grandparents’ anniversary cake. I picked it up for them yesterday. Lemon drizzle. It’s a surprise.’ Corey and Max exchanged a look, beginning to laugh. And then I caught on.

  ‘You’re not!’

  *

  The three of us demolished that cake watching mid-morning television. Celebrity Sewer Hunt. I’d never seen it before, but Max said he watched it all the time. The contestants were some woman who’d once shagged a footballer and a bloke who’d been in a coffee advert and been cleared of beating up a waitress. They were scrabbling around in a sewer for a five pound note. That was basically the premise of the whole show.

  ‘Right, I better go home and get changed for training,’ I said, groaning and stuffed. ‘You two going to clear up and come over after?’

  Max glanced briefly at the smashed china on the living room carpet, and the soaking wet wall, dripping with tea stains. Then he went back to the TV screen. ‘Yeah, we’ll just see the end of this.’ Woman Who’d Slept With Footballer was leaning on a fatberg, her face running with mascara, so happy she’d won the money for her charity.

  ‘OK.’ I turned to Corey. He was equally transfixed. He also had a dab of royal icing on his ear. I flicked it away.

  ‘You all right now?’

  ‘Feel a bit sick.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Max, chucking his plate dow
n on the cushion beside him.

  ‘They’re gonna kill me for eating it.’

  Max shrugged. ‘Well, if they do, we’ll bury you next to the cat.’

  I thought Corey was going to break into sobs again, but instead, he laughed.

  ‘Right, well, I’m going jogging, so I’ll probably be sick on the beach. Laters.’

  ‘Laters.’

  ‘See you later, Spinderella.’

  *

  I wasn’t sick, but running with that belly bomb in my stomach was the last thing I felt like doing. I had a quick shower and brushed my teeth and Pete picked me up at one o’clock, with the teddy bear necklace that Max had given me.

  ‘Thought you might have missed it,’ he said, dangling it into my palm. ‘You left it in the garage last time.’

  ‘Oh God! Thanks,’ I said, shoving it in the pocket of my trackies.

  We ran down to the beach, where we did two miles of cross-country before stopping to stretch. Needless to say, my heart wasn’t in it – I was still full up with cake and tetchy and tired. And annoyed when Pete sprinted past me on the long ramp down to the beach. I stopped first and sat down on the sea wall steps.

  ‘You all right?’ he puffed, still running on the spot.

  ‘Just knackered,’ I puffed back. ‘I didn’t sleep much last night. Or the night before.’

  ‘Party, was it?’ he guessed, sitting down next to me.

  ‘Yeah. Sorry about the text. That was just Max winding me up.’

  ‘I did guess,’ he said, coming to a stop and stretching out his thigh muscle. ‘Come on, eight seconds a leg. And one, two, three…’

  I stood up, reluctantly and copied him on the wrong leg. ‘I know what you’re going to say. A good machine needs a full charge to run efficiently.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And quality fuel.’

  ‘Exactly. Is that icing around your mouth, Miss Newhall? And have you had—’ sniff sniff ‘—alcohol?’

  I blushed hotly, rubbing around my mouth. ‘I only had a couple of slices. And, like, two bottles or something.’ (It was more like six.) ‘How can you still smell it? That was last night. I’ve brushed my teeth and everything.’

  ‘I can always tell. What was it? Stella? Bud? Singha?’

  ‘Home brew.’

  He laughed. ‘You might as well drink hand sanitiser! No wonder you’re sluggish. How are things with Max? Switch legs and hold it one, two, three.’

  I switched. ‘I don’t know. He seems different lately. I found out he’s been smoking skunk.’ Pete’s face washed with alarm at that. ‘I’m worried about him. I think he’s getting hooked.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Quad stretches for eight, go… It’s his body, so it’s his problem.’

  I pulled my leg up for a quad stretch. ‘He’s not happy. Because of me.’

  Pete switched quads. ‘I highly doubt that.’

  I stopped stretching and looked at him. ‘Your keys fell out of my pocket last night – he guessed from the fob they were yours. He thinks there’s something going on between us. Hence the text.’

  Pete stopped stretching too. ‘Ella, please tell me you put him right on the subject.’

  ‘Yeah, I explained to him about the boxing.’

  ‘You better hope he doesn’t tell his father about that. Neil’s not going to pay me to give you boxing lessons, is he?’

  ‘He won’t say a word, don’t worry.’

  ‘Let’s hope not,’ he said, going into lunges. I mirrored. ‘So he’s OK with me? He’s not going to turn up on my doorstep to defend your honour is he?’

  ‘Max? No way. He’s not violent. He’s just jealous, and he doesn’t know how to handle it. He’ll be OK.’

  Pete didn’t look totally satisfied, but he switched lunge legs without comment, then we went into squats for the count of four, and bicep curls for the count of six. My mind still wasn’t on it though. It was reeling back over the night before.

  Then when we were doing our cool down stretches, I told him about what Zane had done to Mort.

  ‘Christ, that’s sadistic,’ said Pete. ‘Did you call the police? It could just be a warning.’

  ‘No. The police won’t do anything. I think we should deal with it ourselves. You know, get our own revenge on him.’

  ‘Well, just you be careful,’ said Pete stopping and looking out towards the tide far out in the bay. ‘You know what Confucius said about revenge, don’t you?’

  ‘Who’s Confucius?’

  He rolled his eyes, like I was such an ignoramus. ‘“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, prepare to dig two graves.”’ He brought his arm out in front and across to stretch his shoulder. ‘Forgiveness is always better in the long run.’

  ‘How?’ I said, making a face. ‘How can you just forgive someone who’s done the worst thing in the world they could possibly do to hurt you?’

  He lifted his eyebrows briefly, switching from shoulder to back stretches. ‘Chances are, that person hates themselves far more deeply than they hate you.’

  I didn’t see it. Fallon had been wronged by the Shaws and we’d righted her. We’d made things better. Corey had been wronged and we were going to right him too. And I was hungry for it. Hungry for ideas on how we could get back at Zane. I kept hearing that hideous sad sound coming out of Corey. Seeing his shaking hands. Watching him throwing those ornaments against that wall and come alive with the relief it gave him.

  I kept seeing Mort, swinging from that tree. The creaking of the branch. His fur fluttering on the breeze. Then, in an instant, I got the idea. Just thinking about it made our training session go quicker, made the adrenaline pump harder through my body and soon I was overtaking Pete on the race back home. I was charged up again. I had power. And the ideas began to flow like a river.

  ‘So you had more revenge on your mind?’

  12

  Ella Thinks Up a Plan

  At the start of the year, Dad was in hospital with an infection. He was in having IV antibiotics and sharing his room with a guy who had terminal bowel cancer; a gentle guy called Jim. Jim had four kids, seven grandchildren, had been married forty-five years, never smoked or drank, raised money for refugees and, judging by the amount of cards on the window sill, had hundreds of friends. As I sat there on the end of Dad’s bed, watching him and his little bald roommate chatting about model boats, I thought, These are good people, so why is this happening to them? Why was Jim dying and my dad spending his forced retirement with needles in his veins and feeling tired all the time? Some days he didn’t have the strength to press down the keys on his keyboard.

  I asked Dad the same question. All he did was quote me some long spiel from this book he’d been reading.

  ‘“Life is a storm,”’ he said. ‘“You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. Look into that storm and shout ‘Do your worst, for I will do mine.’”’

  ‘What’s that?’ I said.

  ‘It’s from The Count of Monte Cristo. Alexandre Dumas. Wonderful story.’

  He started telling me the plot with such fire in his eyes for this guy Dantes and his terrible betrayal and how he got his own back and all I remember is feeling annoyed. Annoyed that Dad didn’t feel betrayed by life. Annoyed that he wasn’t angry about the cards he’d been dealt. I was seething. I thought of Neil Rittman – the worst person in my world. Why wasn’t he suffering? Why was he sitting up there at JoNeille in his golden bathtub, smoking cigars and laughing his head off with clear lungs and several thriving businesses while my poor dad was coughing up blood and sweating radiation? It should be the other way round. Bad people should be punished. Good people should have nice lives. I wanted to punish Neil like Dad and Jim were being punished. Only problem was I didn’t know where to start.

  For Zane Walker though, I did.

  What we had done
to the Shaws at Whitehouse Farm had been quite spur of the moment and childish; we’d got away with it because they were kids and, let’s face it, stupid. We had to be cleverer with Zane, and I had an idea.

  *

  Fallon had a scan at the hospital a few mornings later at Brynstan General, just across the roundabout at the end of our road. Despite her baby-heavy state, she wanted us all to go on a picnic at the top of Brynstan Hill afterwards, like we used to. She said the exercise would do her good, and none of us had any argument ready. So Max picked her and Corey up from the hospital, and we drove to Church Lane where we could access the footpath through the churchyard.

  ‘Show them the scan,’ said Corey, nudging Fallon’s arm. He’d bunked off work again and gone with her that morning. Apparently, they’d spent most of last night checking out baby names on his computer and making a list of things she needed for her hospital bag. He seemed to be really into the whole baby thing.

  I switched the picnic blanket into the crook of my left arm and took the little piece of paper Fallon held out to me. The photo had her name at the top of it – Hayes, Fallon Magenta – and the name of the hospital – Brynstan General.

  ‘It’s so clear, isn’t it?’ she said proudly as I stopped on the footpath to look at it properly. ‘See, there’s a leg. And another leg…’

  ‘And another leg,’ Max laughed.

  ‘No, silly, she’s only got two legs!’

  I felt my heart tighten up, quite without warning. ‘She?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Fallon. ‘There’s no winky, so the doctor said it was most likely a girl.’

  I swallowed down the lump in my throat. This grainy, big-headed alien with teeny tiny fingers and little ski-slopey nose was Fallon’s little girl. And though Fallon looked delighted, and Corey was smiling like the proud dad he should have been, I couldn’t help what I was feeling.

  Jealousy.

  ‘Corey’s going to come to the birth with me, too.’

  ‘Is he?’ said Max, as we reached the top of the graveyard where the little wooden gate was. ‘I can’t even walk past the butcher’s counter at Tesco. You’re actually gonna go goal end while she’s in labour?’