The Deviants

by C. J. Skuse

  ‘Is it still bleeding?’ He guided my fingers to the part of my nose just above my nostrils and told me to pinch it. ‘Lean your head forward. OK, stay like that, all right?’

  I sat watching him, my hand cupped beneath my face as the blood drip drip dripped into my open palm. Salty tears had mingled with the blood in my mouth. Drip drip.

  When the bleeding had finally stopped, he handed me the frozen tea towel. ‘Hold this against it. It’ll help with the swelling.’

  I stupidly thought we were done talking. That this was our new focus. But he wouldn’t put it down.

  ‘You need to talk to someone, Ella. I don’t care who. Whatever it is you’re hiding can’t be kept hidden any more. Look what it’s doing to you. I don’t care if it’s me or your dad or a doctor. Just talk. Let me see.’ I moved the frozen tea towel away from my face. ‘That looks nasty. You’re going to need a plaster on it. Stay right here, OK?’

  As he vanished back out into the garage, I put down the tea towel on the sideboard, grabbed my bag and swung it onto my back, heading through the living room to the front door. I clicked the latch and sprinted back down the lane as fast as I’ve ever run before. I knew he couldn’t catch me. Nobody could.

  *

  My face was a mess. I told the others I ran into a lamp post on my way home. Max was the only one who didn’t believe me. He wanted to know why I’d been running full pelt from Pete’s house in the first place and kept picking at the fact like a scab. I just kept changing the subject. Then Corey suggested a Call of Duty marathon and he seemed to forget about it for a bit.

  ‘You’re too slow, mate,’ laughed Corey, pumping some virtual soldier full of virtual bullets. ‘Admit it, I’m just better at this.’

  ‘Yeah, well I still slay at FIFA.’

  We’d met up at Max’s house on Upper Dunes Close that Thursday morning. His mum was on a WI day trip and Neil and Drunken Uncle Paul had taken the Porsche out ‘for a spin in the country’ (aka a tour of local pubs) so it was quite safe for Fallon to be there, and no one was going to sling her out. We were all in Max’s bedroom. The boys were in the gaming chairs in front of Max’s TV while me and Fallon were cuddled up with the baby on his bed. I was in a terrible mood. Everything was cloudy in my head. I could smell Shelby’s perfume on his duvet cover. There was a long blonde hair underneath his pillow. I needed the punchbag.

  ‘Ooh yeah, feaky little snucker that one!’

  ‘Yeah, he’s the fast one. You gotta take him down first before all the others. There! Ten o’clock, on the tower.’

  ‘Die you bastaaaaaard!’

  Fallon stood up and went to the window, looking out across Brynstan Bay. ‘See that over there, Baby Girl? That’s the island. We’re going to take you there for a picnic when you’re all big and chong.’

  ‘Big and chong?’ Max chuckled. ‘What the actual F is that?’

  ‘Yes, big and chong. And on the island we’ll play aaaall daaaaay long, just like we all used to. We’ll do it all again for you. We’ll have picnics and we’ll play games and Corey will teach you how to fish and Max will teach you how to tie knots and Ella…’

  ‘… won’t be going,’ I said, double-bagging the latest nappy and chucking it in Max’s bin. Fallon turned and frowned at me. ‘Sorry. I don’t want to do that.’

  ‘Ella, it was the best time of my life, when we were all kids. I want her to have that too.’

  ‘Why bother? As soon as the picnics and the fishing are done, it’s all exams, and jobs, and divorce and bullying and rejection and cancer. And death. Childhood’s just one tiny little window of hope. Tell her, Fallon – once that’s gone, there’s nothing else.’ As my throat clotted up and my voice started to break, I climbed off the bed and walked out. From the other side of the door, I heard Max’s big sigh.

  ‘Leave her, Fallon. She’s just on one again. She’s been like it for weeks.’

  ‘No, she’s upset.’

  ‘I knew something was coming,’ said Corey. Bang bang bang bang. ‘Aha, got him!’

  I moved away from the door and went outside to the back garden. I took off my shoes and socks and sat down on the edge of the pool, dangling my feet in. I looked down into the water for a long time. Then I felt the atmosphere change around me, and knew someone had come outside to see if I was OK. I didn’t try to stop crying.

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said.

  Fallon sat down beside me. She took her shoes off too and copied me with her feet in the water. ‘No, you’re not.’

  I nodded, tears overwhelming me again. ‘I’m so sick of it. It’s like one day someone just said, “OK, you’ve had all the fun you’re going to have. Now comes life.”’

  We dangled our feet in silence for a bit. The light from the pool beamed upwards underneath Fallon’s chin as she looked back at the house.

  ‘I never thought I’d come back here. Ever. And after the inquest, after everything my mum said, I didn’t expect Max ever to speak to me again, either. Then, when you all showed up, it was like it had all gone away. I thought we could pick up where we left off, all be friends again. Do what we used to do.’

  ‘But we can’t.’

  She looked at me. ‘We can. Sort of. But it’s still going to be there, isn’t it? The things we don’t talk about. And Zane won’t be around.’

  ‘Do you miss him?’

  ‘What do you mean? As a friend? Yeah. I do. I’ve missed this. Us being a gang. I guess that’s why I love being around animals. They’re always there. There’s always something to cuddle. And they love me.’

  I nodded but didn’t quite know what to say.

  ‘Hey listen, I’ve been thinking of repeating Year 11 at Brynstan.’

  I stopped swishing my feet through the water. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yeah. I want to get some GCSEs and I want to get a qualification in something, like make-up or hairdressing. Something I enjoy. Like you with your running.’ She pulled a small leaf from my hair and tossed it into the water where it floated off. ‘I don’t have any ambitions. Not like you. I guess you’ve inspired me.’

  ‘Me? I’ve inspired you?’

  ‘Yeah. You’re driven and ambitious and stuff. You know what you want to do with your life. It was your idea to scare off the Shaws, to get back at Zane. You want to do something, you go out and do it. I want to be like that.’

  I didn’t have the heart to say anything to that.

  ‘By the way, I saw Zane yesterday in town. Buying new trainers.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yeah. He looked bad, too. Like he hadn’t slept much.’

  I wiped my nose on my T-shirt hem. ‘I wonder if the glitter bomb arrived safely.’

  ‘Corey booked the delivery for twelve.’ She looked at her Mickey Mouse watch. ‘It should have got there by now.’

  ‘What sort of a card did you pick?’

  ‘A cat one.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I might have found a name for the baby. What do you think of Polly?’

  I screwed up my face. Her face fell.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Corey bought me this Baby Nirvana CD and I’ve been playing it to her to get her to sleep. There’s this song on there called “Polly”. I quite liked it.’

  ‘That song’s about a girl who gets raped.’

  ‘Oh my goodness, it’s not, is it?’

  I nodded. We both said nothing for a while, just dangled our feet.

  ‘I wish I could get in,’ she said, kicking her feet gently through the water. ‘Haven’t been swimming for years. I’ve got this massive maternity pad on though so it’d probably drown me if it got wet.’

  She looked at me. I knew she was waiting for me to smile so I did.

  ‘I’m sorry I mentioned the island. I didn’t mean anything by it, Ella.’

  ‘No, no, it wasn’t you. It used to be a happy place. You’re right.’

  ‘It could be again?’ she said, eagerly. ‘We could go for a picni
c.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘What if just you and me went? We don’t even have to take the baby. We could hire a boat and just go there for the afternoon or something?’

  I looked at her. ‘Why? What would be the point?’

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe if you went back there you could start to feel better? Me and Corey watched Jeremy Kyle the other day. It’s this programme where this man…’

  ‘I know who Jeremy Kyle is.’

  ‘Oh. Well he was talking about this thing called “closure”. Facing your problems so that you can move past them. He said it’s the only way.’

  I swished my feet through the warm water. ‘I used to swim all the time.’

  ‘Yeah. You were like a fish.’

  ‘A little fish,’ I muttered.

  ‘We used to race up and down here. Making whirlpools. Playing pirates. Diving for coins. We had so much fun, every day.’

  ‘Or did we?’ I said. ‘Maybe there were just one or two good days. Maybe the rest was just as bad as it is now, only we didn’t see it then.’

  All was silent around us. There was a pressure in my head that hadn’t been there before. I thought I was going to cry, and I couldn’t think of a way to stop it.

  ‘I’d drown myself if I could,’ I said.

  Fallon frowned.

  Suddenly, she reached out and pushed me down into the water. I stood up, gasping, bouncing up from the pool floor, and screamed, not in anger but in joy. I looked at her on the edge, spluttering and laughing.

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘I thought you dared me to drown you.’ She smiled. ‘Do you mind?’

  I treaded water. ‘No. It’s actually quite nice. It’s warm.’

  ‘I’d get in too if I didn’t have this giant surfboard in my knickers.’ We both giggled. ‘You’re right, Ella. Growing up does suck.’

  ‘Let’s not grow up then.’ I smiled, and sent a tidal wave of water over her open-mouthed head.

  Max was outraged when he saw us both standing at the back entrance to the garage, sopping wet, shivering and giggling uncontrollably.

  ‘What the cocking hell… ?’

  ‘Just had a swim,’ I said. ‘Could you grab us some towels, please? And Fallon’s maternity bag.’

  We dried off the worst of the water outside and Fallon started stripping off her clothes, bunching up her soaking wet top and wringing it out over the little drain under the back guttering. ‘That was so much fun,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, beginning to take my clothes off too. I wrapped a beach towel around me and dried my hair with a smaller one, all soft and snuggly from the airing cupboard.

  Max came back out and smiled at us. ‘What are you like? You can change in Jessica’s room if you want. There’s some dry clothes in her wardrobe.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ I said, squeezing water out of my ponytail. ‘Your mum’ll hit the roof. Have you forgotten about the time I went in there to borrow a hairband and she went completely nuts at me?’

  ‘She apologised for that and they upped her meds. Anyway, her coach doesn’t leave Waltham Abbey till six. Bags of time. I’ll shove your clothes in the tumble. It’ll be sweet, don’t worry. Go on. Just don’t move anything around in there cos she’ll know. She really will.’

  *

  It was eerie going back in there after all this time. Usually the door stayed shut, but for the rare times I’d been over there and Joelle had been in there vacuuming the carpet. The door was always closed again pretty quickly after she’d finished. It was just as it had always been. White bedspread with red poppies all over it, matching curtains. All white furniture. Crumpled pyjamas on the pillow. Duvet pulled back, looking like someone had just got out of bed. Battery-powered dancing flower on the windowsill. Two bookcases rammed with all kinds of books – poetry, novels, creative writing guides, horror novels. Horror short stories. ‘How to Write Horror’ guides. Stephen King. Shockheaded Peter. Edgar Allan Poe. Even some of my dad’s Jock of the Loch novels. There were two shelves below filled just with notebooks.

  Fallon felt all along the shelves. ‘There’s like, no dust at all. In four years?’

  ‘Jo dusts it. Doesn’t move anything, she just dusts and hoovers it. She’s the only one allowed in here. Keeps it clean but she hasn’t changed a single thing. Weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll say.’ She moved over to the dancing flower and started singing a Beyonce medley into the pot. The batteries were down so it didn’t respond.

  ‘Even her dolls house hasn’t been altered,’ I noticed, looking up at it on the shelf. ‘It’s all still as Jess left it.’

  ‘Oh, hey look at this!’ Fallon squealed, reaching up into the wardrobe for the Quality Street tin. Not just any old Quality Street tin – the Quality Street tin, that me and Fallon used to love playing with whenever we went round. And there was still that smell in the tin too; the sweet rubbery smell of a strawberry eraser.

  ‘We shouldn’t move it.’

  ‘It’s OK, we can put it straight back. Max’ll never know.’

  ‘Go on, then, quick.’

  We opened the lid to a gorgeous waft of synthetic fruits and pencil shavings. It was all still there. Animal pencil toppers. Tiny trolls with mad luminous hair. Teeny panda notebooks with our childish scribbling in them. Crumpled Monopoly notes and title deeds drawn over with felt tip pen. Miniature packets of sparkly tissues. Little paints and paintbrushes. Rubbers shaped like little cupcakes and the pot of orange lip balm that tasted like medicine. Wind-up mice. Itty-bitty envelopes and Hello Kitty glitter pens and sushi-shaped ornaments and so much more, all small, all sweet and all kid-catnip.

  ‘I’m going to have a tin like this for Bub,’ Fallon announced. ‘She’d love that, wouldn’t she? Oh, I can’t wait! I’m so excited.’

  I left Fallon playing with the contents of the tin and went back over to the bookshelf.

  ‘We can make her childhood wonderful, can’t we, Ella? I know what you said about everything falling apart someday, but we can make it fun for her for a good long time, can’t we?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, pulling out one of the journals from the shelf. Scrawls. Stories. Film reviews. Book reviews. More stories. I pulled out another book from the shelf. And then another one that had diary entries in it. There was the Princess and the Rats story and a poem about the Witch’s Pool.

  ‘What’s that?’ Fallon whispered, getting up off the bed and scurrying over to me. ‘Oh wow, that’s Jessica’s handwriting. She had beautiful handwriting, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yeah, these are all her stories. Oh, look.’ On the back page of the yellow composition notebook I was holding was a drawing scrawled in biro.

  I sat down at the dressing table and stared at it – a large, fat rat wearing a suit. He had a noose around his neck and he was swinging from a tree branch. It had been drawn in red biro.

  ‘Gosh, what a horrible picture,’ said Fallon.

  ‘Yeah.’ I stared at the rat’s face. Its tongue was hanging limp over its teeth and its eyes were bulging in pain. ‘Look what it says.’

  She read the red writing underneath the drawing. Die Rat Man. Die.

  There were more too pictures too. Fallon took a different journal off the shelf to look through it. More stories. Half stories. More scribbles, word searches, torn-out magazine pages, more diary entries. Pages and pages and pages of notes. Ramblings. Sketches. Song lyrics that meant absolutely nothing to either of us. Drawings in blue biro. Black biro. Red biro. Green biro. And all the red stuff seemed to point to one thing.

  Rat Man. And how much she hated him.

  It didn’t take either of us long to work out that Rat Man was code. For Rittman.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Fallon, her hand to her mouth. ‘He did it to Jessica as well.’

  ‘You weren’t to know.’

  19

  A Rather Splendid Party

  Friday night, 21st August

  I couldn’t stop feeling guilty, or
wondering when it had happened. Was it at the same time as he was doing it to me? Or earlier? We didn’t have time to look through all the journals, but what we saw gave us enough. The odd phrase leaped out at us like grasshoppers.

  Praying he won’t come in tonight.

  Turn to stone when he touches me.

  Rat Man hit me today. I wouldn’t touch him down there.

  My eyes couldn’t look away, and my hands kept reaching for more journals. In a terrible, awful way, it made me feel better. I wasn’t the only one. I wasn’t the freak I’d always thought I was.

  I hugged the yellow composition notebook to my chest as Fallon sat back down on the bed. ‘We have to tell Max.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No way.’

  ‘But this is… his dad’s a…’

  ‘I know what his dad is. I know what this means. We say nothing.’

  I thought she was going to shout, but her voice came out quieter than before. She pointed towards the door. ‘He hates my mum. His whole family hates her, because of what she said at Jessica’s inquest. She saw Jess step into the road in front of that bus. She wanted to die. And his dad’s always denied it. This is proof, Ella.’

  ‘This is nothing,’ I spat. ‘This proves nothing, and even if we did take it to the police, do you know what this would do to Max? It would be bad enough him finding out about me, but Jess too? No, we can’t do anything.’

  ‘That’s why she gave me her Famous Five books the last time I saw her,’ said Fallon, staring hard at the bookcase. ‘She knew. She knew she was going to end it.’

  I stood up off the stool and grabbed the other composition book Fallon was holding. ‘That’s not true. We just need to put these back on the shelf and—’

  ‘NO! It is true! You know it, she was going to kill herself! She couldn’t see any other way out! Ella, for God’s sake!’

  I glared, snatching the book back from her and waiting for a noise from outside.

  Knock knock knock. ‘Are you decent?’ It was Max. ‘Lasagne’s ready.’