Sweetpea

by C. J. Skuse

  ‘Rhiannon’s fine,’ I said. Rhiannon was what I always wanted to be called but most people insisted on saying Rhee to save time. Linus once called me Rheetard and I nearly yanked his head back and spat in his mouth.

  ‘We’ll be gentle with you, we promise!’ Tony heh-heh-hehed. My eyes were fixed so concretely on his face so as not to look down to What Lies Beneath, they were almost watering. I think they took it as nervousness, causing Tony to commit unauthorised body contact #2 – supportive forearm grab and accidental boob stroke. Ugh.

  ‘So our womb lady’s stuck on the bridge in Cardiff, which means her item’s been shifted to tomorrow. You’re on after the quiche but before the boy band, OK?’

  They ran through the in-depth questions they would ask me in the three-and-a-half-minute slot – there’s no time for tragedy when there’s a three-cheese quiche in the oven, after all – and I was parked in the Green Room, to sign release forms, have my microphone clipped on and await my fate. After a fidgety age, Jemimah Double-Barrelled came and got me and we walked down a purgatory of white corridors to the studio.

  The set looked more of a headachy pink and yellow colour in real life than it did in HD, like someone had puked Rainbow Skittles over it. The edges of the floor were covered with long snaking black wires and large portable cameras wheeled around back in the shadows and forth in a strange robotic dance. Carolyn and Tony were in situ and I was ushered to sit down opposite on the famous fuchsia-pink banquette. All I could smell was burnt cheese.

  ‘OK, Rhiannon,’ said Tony, ‘so we’ll run the competition trailer and then come to you, all right? Try not to fidget, stammer or sneeze and if you feel a cough coming on, there’s a carafe of water there and yours will be poured out. All right? And don’t swear or else we get shot by them upstairs.’ Heh heh heh.

  ‘Don’t say “fuck” or “bugger”,’ I mimicked.

  They looked at me like I’d doused them both with petrol and was about to strike a match.

  ‘Sorry. It’s OK, I won’t swear.’

  Before I knew what was happening, the lights were brighter, a chubby brunette with drawn-on eyebrows had run on to sweep my forehead with a fuzzy brush, the end of the competition whinnied away and a camera wheeled forward.

  ‘Welcome back,’ said Carolyn. ‘This month we’ve been meeting our contenders for Woman of the Century and, in the last instalment, we are profiling Rhiannon Lewis, the young survivor of the Priory Gardens attack. This year marks the twenty-first anniversary of the tragedy when a man entered childminder Allison Kingwell’s house in a small Bristol suburb and brutally murdered her, along with five of the children she was looking after.’

  Tony took over. ‘When police arrived at the house in Bradley Stoke, what they found was a scene of absolute horror. Not only did they find Ms Kingwell’s body, but also the tiny lifeless bodies of one-year-old Kimmy Lloyd, two-year-old Jack Mitchell, three-year-old twins George and David Archer and five-year-old Ashlea Riley-House. Also dead was the perpetrator, 37-year-old Antony Blackstone, the estranged husband of Ms Kingwell, who had taken his own life.’

  The baton went back to Carolyn. ‘Amazingly, one child, Rhiannon Lewis, survived against all odds, having been struck with a hammer. She lay silently beneath Ms Kingwell’s decapitated body for hours. Today, the house at Priory Gardens no longer stands as it did, replaced instead by a playground, and Rhiannon herself is now twenty-seven years old and fully recovered from her ordeal. And we’re delighted to welcome her into the studio today. Rhiannon, thanks so much for coming in.’

  ‘Thank you for having me.’

  I could see my face on the monitor on the edge of the floor. Jeez they’d put a lot of blusher on. I looked like I had red light bulbs stuffed in my cheeks.

  ‘Rhiannon, take us back to that day if you can. Do you remember anything about it?’

  ‘No, nothing before the attack,’ I said. ‘Only what people have told me and what the witnesses said.’

  They were both nodding, like they should be on a shelf in the back of a car. Tony’s legs opened like the gates to Jurassic Park. The T. rex bulged at the seam. It was All. I. Could. Look. At. I’d need a chainsaw to chop down that trunk.

  ‘So you don’t remember the moment Blackstone got into the house?’

  ‘No. Apparently, he knocked at the front door and Allison told him to get lost, and then a neighbour saw him go round the back and jump over the garden wall and try the lock on the patio doors. That’s when he smashed the glass.’

  ‘With hammers?’ said Tony.

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  Carolyn took over with a heavy sigh. ‘Let’s take a little look at this VT which might help shed some more light on that traumatic day.’

  They cut to the same old montage of people laying posies and teddies outside number 12 Priory Gardens, old women crying and holding tissues to their noses. The vox pop of two old men saying how it was such a close community, how ‘nothing like this has ever happened round here before’. The glistening red doormat. Wailing fathers. Sobbing mums. Three little stretchers. The policeman talking about the ‘unprecedented situation’. My limp body, wrapped in Peter Rabbit blankets.

  I was sweating through my Bare Minerals.

  Just before the VT finished, someone in the darkness beyond the psychedelic sofas called out: ‘And we’re back in three, two, one…’

  Carolyn and Tony’s faces were painted with a new expression of anguish.

  ‘Rhiannon, I can’t imagine how this must have affected you. Can you give us a flavour of what life’s been like for you since that tragic day?’

  Flavour? I thought. What? Like some days I’m smoky bacon, others a little more ready salted, that kind of thing? No, no time for facetiousness, this was important and sad and important.

  ‘Well, my parents did interviews with all the tabloids and I went on some talk shows. They flew me over for this American one and they gave us an all-expenses paid holiday to Disney World. You can still see the clip on YouTube. The whole audience is crying. I just sound like I’m broken.’

  ‘How long did it take for you to learn to walk and talk again?’

  ‘Um, I don’t think I was fully restored until my early teens. I virtually had to relearn everything. How to talk to people, how to move. How to be. I found it very hard. For the things I didn’t know, I developed a kind of act for them.’

  ‘In what sort of way?’

  ‘Well, my mum used to worry that I never cried when I fell over and I stopped hugging her. She’d say to me, “Why aren’t you more upset? Why aren’t you crying?” and then I’d try and remember that was what I was supposed to do for next time.’

  Carolyn reached forward to the coffee table and grabbed the tissue box, plucking one out to dab at her eye. ‘Rhiannon, I’m sorry, this story always gets to me.’

  Try starring in it, love.

  Tony leaned in to the rescue. ‘It was the front of your brain which was affected by the hammer blow, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Mmm, yeah, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Frontal lobe. I had a lot of surgery to repair my skull. I have this large zig-zaggy scar behind my hairline.’

  ‘Like Harry Potter?’

  ‘Not as neat as that.’

  Tony checked his script. ‘The police said the whole attack only lasted a few minutes. Does anything bring memories or images back to you?’

  He reeeeeeally wanted some dirt; some bit of gore to share exclusively with the world that the nation could chew over with their soggy Shreddies – how a child’s skull makes a noise like a vase smashing when it’s hit with a hammer; how the sound of a glass smashing even now can cause me to break out in a cold sweat; how Blackstone’s hanging body was the last thing I saw before I lost consciousness.

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘Mercifully, I don’t remember any of it.’

  They were speechless. I ventured a look downwards – Tony’s trouser seam was bursting with the pressure. Surely no material could hold back that penal tide.

&nbs
p; ‘You won Child of Courage and Pride of Britain Awards, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah. That was nice.’

  The Pride of Britain one had snapped in half in the back of the taxi after the ceremony. I couldn’t remember what had happened with the Children of Courage one. Last time I’d seen it, it was in a box in Mum and Dad’s garage.

  ‘It must have been such a traumatic time for your family. In fact, your life’s been quite peppered with tragedy ever since, hasn’t it?’ said Carolyn.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, not venturing further information.

  ‘You lost a young friend in a car accident when you were still in recovery from Priory Gardens, didn’t you? Little Joe Leech, when you lived in Bristol?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah, he got run over. He’d been coming to visit me.’

  ‘And your mother died of breast cancer when you were in your teens? And your father from brain cancer just two years ago?’

  It was a bit of a non sequitur. I guess they were building up the public sympathy a bit more and waiting for the waterworks. Carolyn pushed the box of tissues along the banquette towards me, just in case.

  Good luck with that.

  Tony readjusted his position – he was sitting on at least half of his dick, I surmised. That can’t have been comfortable for three hours on a daily basis. I could almost feel sorry for him, if he hadn’t had reached out to pat my knee – unauthorised body contact #3.

  ‘Yeah, death seems to have a thing for my family,’ I said. ‘Everyone just seems to leave me. I mean, I had a few years of warning with Mum. But with Dad it was weeks. Out of the blue.’

  Tony nodded. ‘That must have been a massive shock for you.’

  ‘Yes, it was a massive cock,’ I said, without even realising what I’d said until they both looked at me in abject terror. ‘Shock, shock, yeah,’ I said, like I’d just stuttered and was trying to claw back the blush blooming in both my cheeks. I attempted some firefighting: ‘I was totally in shock about it for weeks. We had photographers camped in our front garden like I was a celebrity, which didn’t make things easier. Funny sort of celebrity.’

  Tony’s bald patch burnt a greasy red. I could see the cogs going in his head – Don’t laugh, don’t laugh, career suicide, career suicide, dead kids, dead kids!

  Carolyn had to do the rest of the segment alone with the camera focused squarely on her rock-hard expression. ‘But things are going well for you now, aren’t they?’ She was clearly desperate for a whiff of a happy ending amidst all the doom and cock shrapnel in the cheesy air. Less skull-crushing, more yay. ‘You’ve got your lovely boyfriend and a brilliant job in journalism?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Everything is… awesome.’

  Journalism? Is that what we’re calling it now? Yeah, everything’s really awesome now, Carolyn: my journalistic career begins and ends with making coffee and typing up skittles scores, my novel has been rejected by every agent and publisher in the country, my boyfriend’s having an affair with a cum bucket called Lana, I think about killing someone every twenty-five minutes, I hate all my friends and I’ve just made a twat of myself on national TV. Yeah, everything’s gravy, baby.

  When I didn’t offer up any more information, she glared at me like I was the Goth girl with the pierced clit who’d announced she was marrying her son. I think she was beginning to wish that hammer had struck my frontal lobe a bit harder.

  ‘And how do you feel about being up for Woman of the Century?’

  I smiled. ‘Oh, yeah, I’m thrilled. It’s an amazing honour. I’m so excited about the ceremony tonight and all the people I’ll meet.’ I saw my face in the monitor. I really needed to work on my smile. It was as wooden as my grandmother’s sideboard.

  Tony had composed himself, though he was pretty red in the face still. ‘Is your boyfriend proud of you?’ Cue lecherous glint. Even though it wasn’t bodily contact, I felt like he’d wiped his bell-end all over my face.

  ‘Yeah, he’s delighted.’

  ‘What’s his name? Give him a shout-out.’

  ‘Craig.’ I looked to the camera. ‘Hi, Craig.’ I imagined him and Lana waving to the TV at the end of our bed, lying in post-coital stickiness, smoking endless joints.

  ‘Aww, that’s lovely,’ said Carolyn. ‘Well, the best of luck for tonight, Rhiannon. We’ll be cheering you on, have no fear.’ It was clear that they’d cut my interview very short. They’d have to stick on a few more sofa adverts in the break.

  ‘Yes, thanks, Rhiannon,’ said Tony, and did his old man wink, and I risked one final glance down at the peen seam. The anaconda had a baby while I wasn’t looking.

  ‘Thanks for having me.’ I smiled confidently.

  Carolyn and Tony turned to the camera. ‘We’ll see you after the break, when we’ll be talking about the rise in the number of nursery-school children downloading Internet porn, Michelinstar chef Scottie Callender will be in the kitchen with his three-cheese quiche and we might find time to have a chat to these young fellas…’

  Four pre-pubic teen boys bounced onto the sofa from behind, scaring the crap out of me and knocking over the bowl of croissants on the coffee table.

  Carolyn giggled like a drain as the lead singer and official fittest one, Joey, apologised and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘Yes, Boytox, the YouTube-born boy band taking the world by storm at the moment, are here to chat about their sell-out world tour. We’ll see you in three,’ she said to camera, fanning herself theatrically. The saxophone music signalled we were clear and it felt like the whole studio breathed a sweet sigh of relief.

  The youngest Boytox member, who wore glasses, stank of Emporio Armani and would certainly be the first one to announce he was gay, sat next to me. He put his heavily tattooed arm around me. ‘I loved the interview. So cool that you, like, didn’t die and stuff.’

  I could have killed them all, one by one, right there on the fuchsia banquette.

  Tuesday, 6 February

  So I didn’t win. Malala beat me into a cocked hat. Oh, and there was a second and third place and I didn’t get either of them. One of the cancer women came second. The foster mum got bronze. Taliban trumps cancer. Cancer trumps hammer-wielding maniac. So, as it turns out, I’m not the big kahuna when it comes to heroism. And though my photo will appear in Take a Break magazine alongside all the other nominees, it turns out being the only kid at the crèche not to die from a hammer blow to the skull isn’t that big a big deal.

  The ceremony was at this massive opulent hotel in Soho. I’m terrible at schmoozing at the best of times so for the most part I stayed in a corner staring at my phone, filling my mouth with green olives so I wouldn’t have to make conversation.

  When I got into work this morning, it was a different story. I lied my little ass off. How I’d got a selfie with Gary Barlow and some tart from Loose Women (it was on her phone, which was why I couldn’t show them). How I’d heard one of the footballers finger-banging one of the TOWIE lot in the lavs. How two celeb hairdressers snorted coke at the bar. How the presenters of the wildlife programme had a tiff over peanuts. How this actor tripped over some woman’s Gucci dress, how that actress stumbled into a taxi and everyone saw her stench trench.

  Oh, yah, I was all OVER the gossip, dah-ling.

  The unvarnished truth was that I made a sharp exit the moment they read out the results to catch the rape o’clock train home. No man made a move though, much to my chagrin. Always the same when you’re all knifed up and ready to go.

  By 9:14 a.m., they’d all moved on anyway. And the empty space on the shelf above my desk, which I’d dusted clear to make room for my award, was filled with complaints about litter, press releases and some local farmer’s self-published memoirs for me to do a feature on. I really needed that fucking award. The only praise I ever get is when Hotmail tells me I’ve got a very clean inbox.

  It sucks major BALLS.

  AJ was asking me about it on and off all day, bless him. I’m starting to like him again. He holds the do
or open for me, makes me peanut butter and banana on toast and hates Linus almost as much as I do. Linus gives him nicknames as well – Apache Junction, Angelina Jolie, Aussie Jim. Unfortunately, though, he has Claudia’s boring gene and I had to hear all about his life back in ‘Straya’ with his teacher mum and mechanic stepdad. How his dad left him when he was five and how long it took him to learn to surf, how he doesn’t like Vegemite despite the stereotype, how his high school had a terrorist attack once and how wondrous the sunsets are where he lives. He also calls charity shops ‘op shops’. His breath smells good too – no aftertang. Minty. I watch his neck pulse sometimes when he’s talking to me.

  As of 8.31 p.m. this evening, #UpAttheCock is still trending on Twitter. So is #WomanOfTheCentury. I’m not mentioned in any of those tweets though. It’s mostly about Ant and Dec’s radical new facial hair. Typical.

  Wednesday, 7 February

  1.The entire human race. Even the ones not born yet who are just poised in the birth canal, ready to come out and piss me off

  I woke up in a chronic mood, which wasn’t unusual given the dreams I have, but what was unusual was that every single ittybitty thing was annoying me. Even Tink, and she was usually the one thing that didn’t. I tripped over her twice getting dressed so I shouted at her. Then I felt bad and she crawled up my lower leg, begging for a pick-up so she could lick my face.

  There was an uncertain feeling in my chest at work all day long, clenching like sharp teeth. I wanted to kill again.

  Carol the sub was in the staffroom when I went to make the coffees.

  ‘That AJ’s got himself a bit of a crush on you,’ she told me, with a conspiratorial stir of her camomile.

  ‘On me?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  She laughed. ‘You’ll have to ask him, won’t you?’

  I shrugged. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He was asking me if you had a better half.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’